May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Who Rules America ?
A slightly skeptical view on the US political establishment and foreign policy
If Ronald Reagan was America's neo-Julius Caesar, his adopted son was the first George Bush (just as J.C. adopted Augustus).
And look what THAT progeny wrought. I fully expect that over the next century, no fewer than seven Bushes will have run or become president
(mimicking the Roman Caesarian line). Goodbye, American Republic.
Skepticism is a useful quality that some people naturally possess and other can develop, but it not a panacea. As such
any "Skeptical" or even "Slightly skeptical" paged by definition suffer from "confirmation bias". They postulate that only information
that does not correlate well with official position is worth presenting. The reality is more complex than that. There is
no grantee that such skeptical opinion is correct. And in retrospect many such opinion, which look highly plausible in the heat of the
day, look naive and unsubstantiated ten years after. Been there, saw that.
Also, while not so lucrative as shilling for government, adhering to anything that differ to government position is too simplistic
an approach. Especially in the long run, as historical forces in action at the particular moment are often unknown and not evident to
participants of the events.
Those considerations probably should be kept in mind when reading those pages. While skeptical opinion is an excellent tool for destroying
propaganda stereotypes it is your own task to integrate them into your new understanding of the situation. Sometime that requires integration
under some new paradigm, or rejection based on the new paradigm for particular historical situation. The problem with history
is that the real meaning of events often became clear only a centruty or so after they occure.
The central for this set of "slightly skeptical" Softpanorama pages is the idea that we live in neoliberal society and will
continue to live in it for some type despite the crisis it experiences now. Because there is no viable alternative on the horizon and
resurrection of New Deal capitalism is not possible as the countervailing forces that existed to keep financial oligarchy in check dissipated,
and part of them (top management of corporations) joined the former enemy.
PHOTO: DENIS CHARLET/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES Listen to this article 6 minutes 00:00 / 06:00 1x This is the year of the woke corporation, the year the chieftains of the most powerful companies got bored with making money and decided to remake America, principally by telling Americans how bigoted and backward they are. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. This is the year of the woke corporation, the year the chieftains of the most powerful companies got bored with making money and decided to remake America, principally by telling Americans how bigoted and backward they are. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP ( Apr 30, 2021 , www.wsj.com )
Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump in the 2016 US
presidential election during a closed session of Russia's national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked
Kremlin documents.
...
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined
them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.
Yaawwwnn ...
We know, without reading it, that the story is fake because its main author is Luke Harding. Harding also authored the story which
claimed that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manaford met Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. That story was
proven to be false but the Guardian , to its shame, still has it
up on its website .
The Guardian story claims that the 'leaked' nonsense paper was discussed in high level Kremlin meeting in January 2016.
It was then decided, it alleges, to support Trump. But in January 2016 there was no one, not even Donald Trump himself, who thought
that he would win the Republican primary or even the presidency. But the Kremlin is supposed to have discussed him at the highest
level well before anyone thought he could win?
Various people make interesting remarks about the new Guardian fakery:
I am seriously coming to the conclusion that Luke Harding is a Russian operative who has been put in place as part of a long
term dastardly plan to make British journalism appear ridiculous.
The next Luke Harding MI6 hoax.
Passing off forged Kremlin minutes saying things like "It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump's]
election to the post of US president."
Hilarious
theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦
The part of the media that feigns anger at misinformation is uncritically promoting a story today by Luke Harding that Russia
was blackmailing Trump -- the same Harding who has published many false stories, championed the Steele Dossier and claimed Trump
was long a Russian agent.
...
Now suddenly, Harding claims he obtained leaked, highly sensitive Kremlin documents that just so happen to prove all the lies
he's been peddling for years, that not even Mueller's huge team found. Because it advances liberals' interests, journalists are
uncritically spreading it.
...
I will once use this shabby behavior to against highlight 2 points:
1) The contempt and loss of trust people harbor for the corporate media is completely justified and well-earned.
2) These outlets are by far the most prolific and destructive disseminators of disinformation.
Even people who are typically inclined to promote all kinds of anti-Russian nonsense are cautious on this item.
This Guardian story is likely to make big waves. I would remain somewhat cautious for now, however. For a "leak" of this magnitude,
we need at least some details on the chain of custody. Also note the Guardian's own hedging ("papers appear to show") theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦
Also, just putting this out there, if the US had this and thought it was real, how likely is it that it would have survived
the waterfall of leaks of the past few years? And yet, here we are, with this as exclusive by the UK's Guardian, and conspicuously
not, say, WaPo or NYT.
Christopher Steele, the 'former' British intelligence officer who peddle the fake dossier about alleged Russian Trump kompromat
on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, worked and still works for Orbis Intelligence, a British private outlet run by 'former'
British spies.
They embarass us all with this sort of stupidity. And being British, of course, they double down on it.
" REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and
then fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say"
You just cannot get much more ludicrous than that.
@ 1 bemildred.... i knew it was a lie when i heard it on the cbc radio yesterday... if the cbc is running with it - it is an outright
made up lie... accept everything on the surface and never question anything!!! be a good citizen, lol...
The articles from The Guardian and all don't prove anything about Russia's plans. The cite the January 26 meeting of the Security
Council as Proof of Putin's plans. If I were in Putin's place, I would also have been happy with Trump's election and its likely
socioeconomic impact on the US society.
Harding strikes me as someone who's completely into the business of selling stories. He senses where the money is , looks at his
sales numbers and concludes he's doing great because that is how he measures things. No concept of 'truth' other than financial
success in the market of ideas. I suspect he makes a lot of money.
damn, i wish i had it in me to be a cult leader...i'd make a beeline to the guardian office and have an army of kool-aid drinking
simps at my disposal. when they aren't harrassing and firing women writers for calling out "female identifying" sex offenders
in dresses or stirring up imaginary "anti-semitism" they're peddling this delusional nonsense and LARPing as MI6 spooks. truly
in their own little world. i'll guess some LSD in the water cooler and a decent powerpoint presentation is all it would take to
be the limey jim jones.
The chunks of the supposed document that the Guardian included with its article really give it away. The text - supposedly from
an internal Kremlin communication - reads as no more or less than a chunk of English passed through Google Translate. Idiomatically,
it is chock full of awkwardness and simple ridiculous phrasings. There are even grammatical errors! "..во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ
его..." is simply incorrect. In Russian, the last two words are reversed in order.
It recalls the recent Putin's Palace story, with the "комната грÑзи".
It's just shameful how little pride the propagandists take in their work. I understand that they hold their audience in only
the lowest of regard (not without cause, to be fair), but it's not like there is any shortage of Russian-speakers in the west
they could go to for proofreading, if not copy writing.
"Of course, this is such a continuation of absolutely low-quality publications. Either the newspaper is trying to somehow increase
its popularity, or the newspaper continues such a frenzied Russophobic line. Of course, all this does not and cannot correspond
to the truth. This, in fact, is not true ... This is a continuation of the exercises on total demonization of Russia and Putin,
which The Guardian sometimes likes to do, or is it a desperate attempt to attract some new readers by publishing such tales,
"Peskov said.
"REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and then
fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say", Bemildred | Jul 15 2021 15:31 utc | 1
I TOLD you all that the FBI needed new script writers. Either that or they have so little imagination that they
have to use up all the scripts from a couple of years back, as they cannot afford new ones.
Doesn't matter - the MSNBC watchers will never accept this. I still try to punch through the armor of confirmation bias now and
then. My last jab was: "I think Russiagate is every bit as much evidence-free bullshit as Quanon!". No effect whatsoever. Willing
to agree with half of what I said - just like Fox watchers.
Unfortunately, I don't think my fellow citizens here in the heart of Pindostan will pay attention until things get bad enough
that they know actual hunger - and then they will serve the elites by fighting each other.
Sorry for the pessimism, the one positive thing I do think I can do is tend my vegetable garden!
"во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾", maybe awkward but semikosher, many examples can be found Googling it ---like during
stay of his vs. during his stay (e.g. kamchatka.mid.ru can be found to say: "ÑвÑÐ·Ð°Ð½Ð½Ñ‹Ñ Ñ Ð´ÐµÐ¹ÑтвиÑми и поÑтупками
пригÐ"ашаемого во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾ в РФ, в том чиÑÐ"е, в ÑÐ"учае депортации").
Jeez, it just gets worse-as soon as I saw the name Luke harding, I knew it was a pile of trash; really, who in the hell reads
this without a sense to vomit.
Well, there there is Orbis: "great reporting."
MI6 and prob cia has this clown on the payroll; I tried to watch the last 5 minutes of the video but could not get past the
first minute; the guy is absolutely repulsive and they continue to double down on this garbage.
I think you really nailed it; we see it every day, with this latest pail of s___, that these purveyors absolutely have no shame
or embarrassment, but believe their audience, the sheeple, are complete idiots or stupid. The question is who is stupid as this
level of stupidity cannot be fixed or underestimated.
I remember the scene in the movie "The Big Short" where Steve Carell
was saying, "they knew all along!".
Goldman Sachs, et al, had over-leveraged the housing mortgages and "they knew all along"
if and when it all crumbled the government would cover Wall Street's bad bets with taxpayer debt.
They knew all along it was bs but they did it anyway.
The MSM is a different arena but has the same arrogant attitude towards average joe citizen.
The MSM knows it is selling bs but they don't care.
What I see is they are counting on the "Reiteration Effect" (look it up, it is a real thing).
"Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad".
There have been a steady stream of "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories, and over time
the fact that these stories are one by one debunked does not matter. The "Reiteration Effect" is what matters.
"Say something a million times and it becomes true" is not a mere cynical phrase, it actually works - the "Reiteration Effect".
Keep putting out these "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories and over time people will accept the basic message
as true.
The MSM has known all along they were selling bs, but they don't care.
They definitely didn't know 2008 would happen. On the contrary: they thought they had discovered the elixir of immortality
for capitalism.
The USA was caught completely off-guard in September 2008. You have to search with a magnifying glass to find the ten people
who predicted the crisis would happen in its nature and more or less its timing - but even then, most of them were Marxists, i.e.
outside the commanding heights of the USG.
I like the idea of the makers of this thing deciding that it's a shoddy job which only Harding will take. Also Harding gets all
the attention but let's not forget the honourable mentions in this story: Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh.
I saved this from somewhere (?) years ago. Doesn't matter, you can read Paulson's coup document for yourself.
The WSJ link still works but you hit a pay wall. You can put the following url at
http://web.archive.org/
and read the original WSJ publication and Paulson's coup document dated Sept 20, 2008 at the WSJ.
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion,
and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
Did you catch that? Paulson went further. Not just the courts are cut out but "any adminstrative agency" as well.
Paulson also was giving to Himself the authority to APPROPRIATE any funds He wished.
"Any funds expended for actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses, shall be deemed
appropriated at the time of such expenditure."
HE could pass ANY legislation He wanted to:
"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities
of this Act."
The word "term" has a duel meaning. It also refers to TIME, as in length of a term.
Give powers to anyone and hire anyone He wished to:
"(1) appointing such employees as may be required to carry out the authorities in this Act and defining their duties;"
What miscellaneous authorities did G-d Paulson give Himself? Answer: Authority over the police and the military.
"In exercising the authorities granted in this Act, the Secretary shall take into consideration means for""
(1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and
"providing stability OR". That OR makes for confusion (intentional confusion). Stability is a word used often in the context
of economics but it is also used in the context of police action. Get it? He wants to create his own SS. See the very next
word: "protecting", as in "We Serve and Protect".
(2) protecting the taxpayer."
The last one is my favorite. Who is a *taxpayer*? Hmmm, is not everyone, even candy purchasing kids liable to pay tax? Corporations
are also taxpayers...
G-d Paulson covered all his bases.
Even the one about being G-d Forever:
"Sec. 9. Termination of Authority.
The authorities under this Act, with the exception of authorities granted in sections 2(b)(5), 5 and 7, shall terminate
two years from the date of enactment of this Act."
Paulson wants you to believe this terminates in two years. However, 2(b)(5) does NOT terminate and that one says he can
just place the crown back on His own head:
"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities
of this Act."
Cheers
A coup! A massive scandal that has been totally missed.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only
for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus
becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the
lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."-- Joseph Goebbels (Luke Harding's Father?)
I'm not normally a follower of this topic even though one of our sleazers, Downer, was involved but needing something to smile
at while in our CV lockdown I watched the link.
What an understatement! It's a hilarious 28m:51s train wreck interview with a complete dick. Thanks b for sharing it.
@Vk, I'm sorry to contradict you but if you pick up a copy of the Financial Times in 2008 before the crash, everyone was predicting
it. I checked recently, and sure enough, it was all over the paper.
By 2007, the financial elite already knew something would happen - but not a structural crisis. In fact, they predicted nothing:
the chain of bankruptcies started at the end of 2006; September 2008 was just the date it "leaked" to the "real economy".
Not every crisis is bad for capitalism. Cyclical crisis are natural and beneficial to capitalism. The crisis of 2008 was not
a cyclical crisis, but a structural one. They probably thought it was either a cyclical crisis (a la Dotcom crisis of 2000) or,
if something more serious, something the free market would easily be able to "self-regulate" out of.
Pennsylvania 's
top election official has decertified the voting system of rural Fulton County for future elections, saying
that an election assessment by a third party had violated the Keystone State's election code,
according to a release on Wednesday.
Acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf,
informed the Fulton County Board of Elections that she "did not arrive at this decision
lightly."
Wake Technology Services Inc. (Wake TSI), a software company based in West Chester,
Pennsylvania, had carried out an election assessment that involved its workers visiting Fulton
County in December 2020 and in early February.
The company in May released a report that concluded the election was "well-run" and did not
indicate any signs of fraud in Fulton County. However,
five "issues of note" were uncovered , three of which are related to Dominion Voting Systems ,
whose electronic voting system was used in the county for the 2020 election.
"While these may seem minor, the impact on an election can be huge," Wake TSI said of the
five issues. At the time, Dominion disputed the report's findings.
The Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement on Wednesday that
Wake TSI's access to the Fulton County's voting system "undermined the chain of custody
requirements and strict access limitations necessary to prevent both intentional and
inadvertent tampering with electronic voting systems."
It added that the "unauthorized access" prevents the vendor -- Dominion -- from "affirming
that the system continues to meet state and federal certification standards."
Fulton county officials had allowed Wake TSI to "access certain key components of its
certified system, including the county's election database, results files, and Windows systems
logs," and to "use a system imaging tool to take complete hard drive images of these computers
and other digital equipment," the department noted.
"These actions were taken in a manner that was not transparent," Degraffenreid said in her
letter to Fulton County officials on Tuesday. She said the access given to Wake TSI has
caused Fulton County's voting system to be "compromised," and that neither the county, state
officials, nor Dominion could now "verify that the impacted components of Fulton County's
leased voting system are safe to use in future elections."
"I have no other choice but to decertify the use of Fulton County's leased Dominion
Democracy Suite 5.5A voting system last used in the November 2020 election," Degraffenreid
wrote.
The Fulton County Board of Elections and Wake TSI did not immediately respond to requests
for comment.
The Pennsylvania Department of State previously said that a risk-limiting audit of the 2020
election has confirmed the state's election results.
The
Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported that Fulton County needed to pay $25,000 to lease new
equipment for its municipal elections in May, because Dominion refused to let the county use
the voting machines that Wake TSI had accessed. According to the outlet, Dominion told the
county that it violated its contract in letting a unaccredited and non-certified company
inspect the machines.
Wake TSI's assessment in Fulton County was "set" by Pennsylvania Sen. Doug Mastriano, a
Republican, according to a Dec. 31, 2020 document
signed by the company that was obtained and published by the Arizona Mirror and The Washington
Post. Wake TSI said in its report that Mastriano and Pennsylvania Sen. Judy Ward, also a
Republican, "were aware of our efforts."
The document also said that Wake TSI was "contracted to Defending the Republic," a nonprofit
founded by lawyer Sidney Powell, who has alleged that widespread fraud occurred in the 2020
election.
Mastriano earlier this month
issued letters to York, Tioga, and Philadelphia counties requesting that they voluntarily
submit information and materials by July 31, to enable what he calls a "forensic investigation"
of the 2020 and 2021 elections. He told The Epoch Times that he seeks for an investigation that
would be "a big deep dive, like we saw in Arizona, but even deeper."
Wake TSI was also involved in the election audit still underway in Arizona's Maricopa County
up until
its contract expired in May. The audit in Maricopa County was ordered by the Arizona state
Senate's Republican majority. Dominion machines in Maricopa County will also be
replaced .
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, said the machines were not tampered with
during the audit and questioned the Board of Supervisors' decision to get new machines.
"If their experts can't prove the machines have not been tampered with, then how does the
[Secretary of State's office] or County Elections certify the machines before every audit to
make sure the machines haven't been tampered with?" she asked in June.
Henry Kissinger has said, not unreasonably, that we are in "the foothills" of a cold war
with China. And Vladimir Putin, who nurses an unassuageable grudge about the way the Cold
War ended, seems uninterested in Russia reconciling itself to a role as a normal nation
without gratuitous resorts to mendacity. It is, therefore, well to notice how, day by day,
in all of the globe's time zones, civilized nations are, in word and deed, taking small but
cumulatively consequential measures that serve deterrence.
If arrogance were a deadly disease, George Will would be dead.
George Will has been an
ass clown since I first had the displeasure of watching him in the 1970s. Age has not brought
an ounce of wisdom. Nevertheless, this total lack of self reflection and ability to project
American sins on others is unfortunately not unique to our man George. It seems a habit
throughout the entire US political spectrum. The ability to view, for example, the invasion
of Iraq as perfectly normal behavior, while viewing any resistance to US/Israeli dominance as
beyond the pale is the character of the decaying American superpower. George Will is but one
manifestation of it. It was once infuriating. But now it's simply like listening to the
ravings of a schizophrenic. More pathetic than anything else.
What do you expect from George Swill? He is a pathetic, disoriented refugee from his home in
Victorian England, when barbarism never set for a single instant on the British Empire.
There's a way to get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the
mainstream news media. Just look at their propaganda and ask yourself, "Why do they want me
to believe this particular lie?" If you can figure that you, you will have the truth.
Well, you know, the white man's burden...
The funny thing is that they seriously consider themselves a "superior race", while behaving
like wild barbarians.
Such opinions/articles of "Western civilized people" cause only a condescending smile,
nothing more. So let's let George Will entertain us.
I find it pretty bizzarre how western media obsessively try to portray the Defender
incident as a some sort of "victory" for "civilized nations".
What exactly is the victory here? The fact that Russia only resorted to warning fire and
didn't blow up the ship?
Decades of propaganda masquerading as news has led most "educated" Americans into a Matrix
of false narratives. Should you dare mention election fraud or question the safety of COVID
vaccines in the presences of anyone who considers the NY Times and Wash Post as the "papers
of record", they will be happy to inform you that you are "captured" by false news. Dialogue
with these true believers has become almost impossible. We are the indispensable, civilized
nation, don't you understand basic facts?
My sister, who is truly a good-hearted person, unfortunately keeps CNN and MSNBC on most
of the day in her small apartment, and lives for The NY Times, which she pours over,
especially the weekend edition. She knows that Putin is evil and Russia is a bad place to
live, etc etc. I got rid of my TV ten years ago and started looking elsewhere for my
information. I live in a rural area of a Red state, she lives in Manhattan. We have to stick
to topics that revolve around museums, gardening, and food.
This is precisely the type of arrogance that has led to US leaving Afghanistan with their
pants down - having spent untold Trillions of dollars and having nothing to show for it. And
soon, leaving Iraq and Syria too. It reminds me of how the US left Vietnam and Cambodia.
The 'White' establishment in Washington and across the US military industrial complex, has
an air of superiority and always seem to feel that they can subjugate via throwing money at
people! This in effect turns everyone they deal with into Whores (yes, prostitutes). Its
fundamentally humiliating, and sews the seeds of corruption - both economic and moral. Then,
they are shocked that there's a back clash!
The Taliban succeeded not with arms - but by projecting a completely different narrative
of "Morality (i.e. non-corruption), honor, and even intermingled nationalism with their
narrative". They projected a story that suggested that new Afghan daughters would not turn
into Britney Spears or porn stars.
And, believe it or not, the Chinese see themselves as having been fundamentally humiliated
by the West and couch their efforts as a struggle for their civilization (its not ideological
or even economic) - they are fighting for honor and respect.
Western Civilization (and western elite) on the left and right are fundamentally
materialistic. They worship money, and simply don't understand it when others don't. When
they talk about superiority, they are basically saying the worship of money rules supreme.
You sort of become dignified in the west if you have a lot of wealth. They want to turn the
whole world into prostitutes. Policy and laws are driven by material considerations.
Now, I am not saying that spirituality or religion is good; and in fact, the Chinese are
not driven by religious zeal (they are, on the whole, non-religious). What I am saying is
that - no matter how its expressed - be it through religion, through culture, through
rhetoric, etc. - all this back clash is really a struggle for respect, 'honor' and thus a
push back to Western Arrogance, and the humiliation it has caused. The West simply doesn't
understand that there are societies - especially in the east, that value honor over other
things.
When Trump calls other people losers, he is basically saying he is richer, they are
poorer. In his mind, winning, is all about money. When people write articles about the
superiority of a civilization - they are implicitly putting other people down. That's not
just arrogant, its rude and disrespectful. Its basically like a teenager judging their
parents. How dare a newly formed nation (the US), judge or differentiate or even pretend to
be superior to the Chinese, Persians etc.?
Our foreign policy (and rhetoric) in the West has to completely change. We have to be
really careful, because, (honestly), it won't be very long before these other (inferior)
civilizations actually take over global leadership. Then how will we want to be treated?
Don't for a second think these folks can't build great gadgets that go to Mars! Oh, did China
just do that? Does Iran have a space program? Did they just make their own vaccines? Once
they start trading among themselves without using the USD greenback, we are finished.
Some notable recent achievements of 'civilised' nations include:
-Illegal invasion and bombing of multiple non-aggressor nations
-Overthrowing of democratically elected Governments
-Support of extremist and oppressive regimes
-Sponsoring of terrorism, including weapon sales to ISIS
-Corruption of once trusted institutions like the UN and OPCW
...when all she did was offer slight resistance to Western aggression? The key event was
the August 2013 false-flag
gas attack and massacre of hostages in Ghouta in Damascus.
What really angered the West was the Russian
fleet in the Mediterranean that prevented the NATO attack on Syria. (You will not find a
single word of this in Western media.) This is why Crimea needed to be captured by the West.
As revenge and deterrence against the Russian agression.
The standoff was first described by Israel Shamir in
October 2013:
"The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine
shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them -
the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and
supported by Chinese warships.
Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to
reach their destination."
A longer description was published by Australianvoice in
2015:
"So why didn't the US and France attack Syria? It seems obvious that the Russians and
Chinese simply explained that an attack on Syria by US and French forces would be met by a
Russian/Chinese attack on US and French warships. Obama wisely decided not to start WW III
in September 2013." Can Russia Block Regime Change In Syria Again?
In my own comments from 2013 I tried to understand the mission of the Russian fleet. This
is what I believed Putin's orders to the fleet were:
To sink any NATO ship involved in illegal aggression against Syria.
You have the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense.
I am sure NATO admirals understood the situation the same way. I am not sure of the
American leadership in Washington.
Insulting language aside, the narrative they are trying to create is that there is an
anti-Russia, anti-China trend developing and that those sitting on the fence would be wise to
join the bandwagon.
This will be particularly effective on the majority of folks who barely scan headlines and
skim articles. Falun Gong/CIA mouthpiece Epoch Times is on board with this, based on recent
headlines.
Wikipedia has a list of reliable
and unreliable sources . "Reliable" are those sources that are under the direct control
of the US regime. Any degree of independence from the regime makes the source "unreliable."
WaPo and NYT are at the top of the list of reliable sources.
This is the diametric opposite of how Wikispooks defines reliability.
Reliability of sources is directly proportional to their distance *from* power.
At A Closer Look on Syria (ACLOS) we only trust primary sources.
Makes me remember the cornerstone work from former Argentine president DF Sarmiento, who
dealt with "Civilization or Barbarism" in his book "Facundo". Of course, his position was the
"civilized" one.
Those "civilized" succeeded in creating a country submitted to the British rule, selling
cheap crops and getting expensive manufactures, with a privileged minority living lavishly
and a great majority, in misery.
Also, their "civilized" methods to impose their project was the bloody "Police War"
This article is fundamentally about propaganda and "soft power".
Soft power in foreign policy is usually defined when other countries defer to your
judgement without threat of punishment or promise of gain.
In other words, if other countries support your country without a "carrot or stick"
approach, you have soft power.
For years, the US simply assumed other "civilized" of the western world would dutifully
follow along in US footsteps due to unshakeable trust in America's moral authority. The
western media played a crucial role by suppressing news regarding any atrocities the western
powers committed and amplifying any perceived threats or aggressions from "enemies".
Now, with the age of the internet, western audiences can read news from all over the world
and that has been a catastrophe for western powers. We can now see real-time debunking of
propaganda.
In the past, the British would have easily passed off the recent destroyer provocation as
pure Russian aggression and could expect outrage from all western aligned countries. The EU
and US populations could have easily been whipped into a frenzy and DEMANDED reprisals
against Russia if not outright war. Something similar to a "Gulf of Tonkin" moment.
But, that did not happen. People all over the world now know NOTHING from the US or
British press is to be trusted. People also now know NATO routinely try to stir up trouble
and provoke Russia.
So, Americans and even British citizens displayed no widespread outrage because they
simply did not believe their own government's and compliant media's side of the story.
US and British "soft power" are long gone. No one trusts them. No one wants to follow them
into anymore disastrous wars of aggression.
Western media still do not understand this and cannot figure out why so many refuse
western vaccines or support the newest color revolutions.
They cast Germany as a victim or potential victim of foreign aggressors, as a peace-loving
nation forced to take up arms to protect its populace or defend European civilization
against Communism.
I remember a tv history program that had interviews with German soldiers.
I recall one who had seen/participated in going from village to village in the USSR
hanging local communist leaders. He said they had been taught that by doing this
they were "protecting civilization".
Arrogance is not a deadly disease or even a hindrance for mainstream presstitutes; it is a
job qualification, making them all the more manipulable and manipulative. And so, as with
Michael Gordon, Judith Miller, Brett Stephens and David Sanger (essentially all of them
pulling double duty for the apartheid state), people will die from their propaganda, but they
will advance.
Name a leader with moral courage and integrity among suzerainties (private plantations).
Nations without integrity and filled with Orcs (individuals without conscience), can't be
civilized. They're EVIL vassals of Saruman & Sauron, manipulated by Wormtongue.
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Henry Kissinger, in his interview with Chatham House stated, "the United States is in a
CRISIS of confidence... America has committed great moral wrongs." What are U$A's core
values?
According to a CFR member :
"How lucky I am that my mother studied with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and WH Auden and that
she passed on to me a command of language that permits me to "tell the story" of the world
economy in plain English. She would have been delighted that I managed to show that the evil
Gollum from Tolkien's tales lives above the doorway in the Oval Office, which he
certainly does. I saw him there myself. He may have found a new perch over at The Federal
Reserve Bank as well."
– Excerpt From, Signals: The Breakdown of the Social Contract and the Rise of
Geopolitics by Dr Philippa Malmgren
The Financial Empire has ran out of LUCK. "In God We Trust"
I thought moral superiority was the official position of NATO. The explicit intent is to
weaponize human rights and democracy . So it is not merely the mundane 'our group is better'
or the somewhat nostalgic western form of moral superiority, it's weaponized moral
superiority.
George Will looking good I tellya. Anybody know who does his embalming?
Doesn't Will's article reek of Nazi propaganda against the Russians as a mongrel Asiatic
uncivilized people? Of course to attack the Chinese as uncivilized? China uncivilized? 5,000
years of continuous culture? The Russians and Chinese must join up with civilization.
Unfortunately at least in the West race is only about skin color. It certainly wasn't the
case with the original Nazis. Will's piece is blatantly racist out of the tradition of
Nazism.
Oxford and the Ivy League. The training grounds for the Anglo American deep state and the
cheerleaders of the empire. Expect nothing more of these deeply under educated sudo
intellectuals.
Plenty of people who work for the MIC and in various policy circles/think tanks have
plenty "to show for it" where all these wars are concerned. Many billions of dollars were
siphoned upwards and outwards into the bank accounts and expensive homes of the managerial
and executive classes (even the hazard pay folks who actually went to the places "we" were
bombing) not just at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen, etc. but plenty of lesser known
"socioeconomically disadvantaged" Small Businesses (proper noun in this context) companies
who utilized the services of an army of consultants to glom onto the war machine. In most
cases of the larger firms, Wall Street handled the IPOs long ago, and these companies have
entire (much less profitable) divisions dedicated to state and local governments to
"diversify" their business portfolios in case the people finally get sick of war. But that
rarely happens in any real sense because the corporate establishment "legacy media" makes
sure that there's always an uncivilized country to bomb or threaten....and that means the
"defense" department needs loads of services, weapons, and process improvement consultants
all the time. War is a racket; always has been, always will be.
Unfortunately, it seems that truly large segments of the population in the developed
western countries and especially in the Anglo-sphere believe the propaganda emanating from
the imperial mouthpieces. The US citizenry is a case study in manipulating the public.
Indeed, the DNC liberals are effectively the vanguard of the pro-war movement, espouse
racist Rusophobia and conitnue Trump's hostility to China. The so-cslled conservatives follow
their own tradition of imperial mobilization behind the Washington regime: Chin,Latin
America, the very people who berated the 'Deep State' now paise its subversive activities
against the targeted left-wing governments.
As for the moribund left - it would be better described as leftovers - it is often taken
for a ride as long as the imperial messaging is promoted by the liberal media. The excuses
for imperialism are a constant for many of them (even as they call themselves
anti-imperialists) and the beleaguered voicesfor the truth are far and few. The latter often
face silencing campaigns not just from the establishment hacks, but from their own supposed
ideological comrades, who are, of course, in truth nothing of the sort.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality
the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality
the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.
Maybe 50% of the people here bother to vote, in IMPORTANT elections. Can be a lot less if
the election is not important. The only people still engaged politically here at all are the
people with good jobs. The American people have given up. And there are a lot of angry people
running around, with guns. Claiming the citizenry here support the government is imperial
propaganda. Why do you think they like mercenaries and proxies so much? And this is all in
great contrast to when I was young 50 years ago.
Looks like the most interesting publications are marked as unreliable and "fake news"
consortium of neoliberal MSM (often controlled by intelligence agencies) was labeled as reliable.
Below is small initial fragment that gives pretty good understanding on neoliberal bias of the
Wikipedia brass and Wikipedia controllers. .
112 Ukraine was deprecated following a 2019 RfC, which showed overwhelming consensus
for the deprecation of a slew of sources associated with Russian disinformation in Ukraine.
It was pointed out later in a 2020 RfC that 112 Ukraine had not been explicitly discussed
in that first discussion prior to its blacklisting request. Further discussion established
a rough consensus that the source is generally unreliable, but did not form a consensus for
deprecation or blacklisting. The prior blacklisting was reversed as out of process.
There is consensus that Ad Fontes Media and their Media Bias Chart should not be used
in article space in reference to sources' political leaning or reliability. Editors
consider it a self-published source and have questioned
its methodology.
Agence France-Presse is a news agency . There is consensus that
Agence France-Presse is generally reliable. Syndicated reports from Agence
France-Presse that are published in other sources are also considered generally
reliable.
Al Jazeera is considered a generally reliable news organization . Editors perceive
Al Jazeera
English (and Aljazeera.com ) to be more reliable than
Al Jazeera's Arabic-language news reporting. Some editors say that Al Jazeera, particularly
its Arabic-language media, is a partisan source with respect to the
Arab–Israeli
conflict . Al Jazeera's news blogs should be handled with
the corresponding policy.
There is consensus that AlterNet is generally unreliable. Editors consider AlterNet a
partisan
source , and its statements should be attributed . AlterNet's syndicated content
should be evaluated by the reliability of its original publisher, and the citation should
preferably point to the original publisher.
User reviews on Amazon are anonymous, self-published , and unverifiable,
and should not be used at all. Amazon is a reliable source for basic information about a
work (such as release date, ISBN, etc.), although it is unnecessary to cite Amazon when the
work itself may serve as a source for that information (e.g., authors' names and ISBNs).
Future release dates may be unreliable.
There is consensus that The American Conservative is a usable source for
attributed
opinions . As TAC is published by the American Ideas Institute, an advocacy
organization, TAC is considered biased or opinionated .
There is consensus that An Phoblacht is generally unreliable for news reporting,
as it is a publication of Sinn Féin . Under the conditions of
WP:ABOUTSELF , An Phoblacht
is usable for attributed statements from Sinn
Féin and some editors believe that the publication may also be used for attributed
statements from the Provisional Irish
Republican Army (IRA).
The 2019 RfC established no consensus on the reliability of Anadolu Agency.
Well-established news outlets are normally considered reliable for statements of fact.
However, Anadolu Agency is frequently described as a mouthpiece of the Turkish government
that engages in propaganda, owing to its state-run status. See also:
Anadolu Agency (controversial topics, international politics) .
In the 2019 RfC, editors generally agreed that Anadolu Agency is generally unreliable
for topics that are controversial or related to international politics. See also:
Anadolu Agency (general topics) .
Ancestry.com is a genealogy site that hosts a database of
primary
source documents including marriage and census records. Some of these sources may be
usable under WP:BLPPRIMARY , but secondary
sources, where available, are usually preferred. Ancestry.com also hosts user-generated content , which is
unreliable.
Answers.com (previously known as WikiAnswers) is a Q&A site that incorporates user-generated content . In
the past, Answers.com republished excerpts and summaries of tertiary sources , including
D&B Hoovers
, Gale , and
HighBeam
Research . Citations of republished content on Answers.com should point to the original
source, with a note that the source was accessed "via Answers.com". Answers.com also
previously served as a Wikipedia mirror ; using republished
Wikipedia content is considered circular sourcing .
There is consensus that ADL is a generally reliable source, including for topics
related to hate groups and extremism in the U.S. There is no consensus that ADL must be
attributed in all cases, but there is consensus that the labelling of organisations and
individuals by the ADL (particularly as antisemitic) should be attributed. Some editors
consider the ADL's opinion pieces not reliable, and that they should only be used with
attribution. Some editors consider the ADL a biased source for Israel/Palestine related
topics that should be used with caution, if at all.
A number of international papers
report today on the Israeli hacking company NSO which sells snooping software to various
regimes. The software is then used to hijack the phones of regime enemies, political
competition or obnoxious journalists. All of that was already well known but the story has
new legs as several hundreds of people who were spied on can now be named.
The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in
countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been
clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely
unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.
The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many
of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones
shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on
the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a
human rights group, had access to the list and shared it with the news organizations, which
did further research and analysis. Amnesty's Security Lab did the forensic analyses on the
smartphones.
The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than
1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four
continents.
Who might have made such a list and who would give it to Amnesty and Forbidden
Stories?
NSO is one of the Israeli companies that is used to monetize the work of the Israel's
military intelligence unit 8200. 'Former' members of 8200 move to NSO to produce spy tools
which are then sold to foreign governments. The license price is $7 to 8 million per 50
phones to be snooped at. It is a shady but lucrative business for the company and for the
state of Israel.
NSO denies the allegations that its software is used for harmful proposes with
a lot of bullshittery :
The report by Forbidden Stories is full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories
that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources. It seems like
the "unidentified sources" have supplied information that has no factual basis and are far
from reality.
After checking their claims, we firmly deny the false allegations made in their report.
Their sources have supplied them with information which has no factual basis, as evident by
the lack of supporting documentation for many of their claims. In fact, these allegations
are so outrageous and far from reality, that NSO is considering a defamation lawsuit.
The reports make, for example, the claim that the Indian government under Prime Minister
Narendra Modi has used the NSO software to spy on the
leader of the opposition party Rahul Gandhi.
How could NSO deny that allegation? It can't.
Further down in the NSO's statement the company
contradicts itself on the issues:
How do you explain the
suspiciously-timed, and simultaneous, Five Eyes denunciation of China for alleged hacking of
Microsoft? Is it a way of deflecting too much wrath on Israel? Or, is b wrong and the China
story serves as real distraction.
thanks b.. it is an interesting development which seems to pit the usa against israel... i am
having a hard time appreciating this... maybe... interesting conundrum snowden paints himself
into... @ 1 prof... there are plenty of distractions to go around.. hard to know...
In our day-and-age, all "Spectacular Stories" serve as distractions, although some are
genuine scoops illuminating criminal behavior involving state actors. Ultimately, this scoop
provides much more leverage for Putin's ongoing insistence that an International Treaty
dealing with all things Cyber including Cyber-crime be convened ASAP.
"Who has an interest in shutting NSO down or to at least make its business more
difficult?
The competition I'd say. And the only real one in that field is the National Security Agency
of the United States."
There is at least one other possibility.
The leak could be from a highly sophisticated state actor that needs to "blind" US and
especially Israeli intelligence services temporarily.
That could very easily be China, Russia or even Iran. Some of their assets could be on the
list.
Exposing the service weakens, or possibly destroys, it until another workaround is
found.
China might do this to push customers towards some of their cellphones that are supposedly
immune to this.
Russia and Iran might need to blind Mossad, NSA and CIA or upcoming operations in Syria,
Iraq and possibly Afghanistan.
Weird to have the US burn an Israeli spy operation (I'd be surprised if they didn't build
back doors into their own software) in such a public manner.
The only reason I can think of for the US to shut NSO down is if they refused to share
information they had gathered with the NSA and so they were put out of business.
Snowden didn't have a problem with the NSA et al spying on foreign adversaries. He had a
problem when the NSA was spying illegally on US citizens.
The 'West' could be using it as a weapon to rein in Israel, which it sees as getting more
and more out of control. Netanyahu might be gone but the policies that he represents will not
just disappear.
The mass media didn't like Israel's destruction of the building in Gaza where the
Associated Press had its offices. How are the media supposed to publish reports from places
where they don't have anywhere to work?
Western governments are exasperated that Israel doesn't even pretend to have any respect
for international law and human rights. Nobody in power in the West cares about those things
either, and they really want to support Israel, but doing that is a lot harder when Israel
makes it so obvious that it is a colonial aggressor.
As the Guardian reported yesterday, "The Israeli minister of defence closely regulates
NSO, granting individual export licences before its surveillance technology can be sold to a
new country."
The attack on NSO looks like a message to the Israeli state.
I think you are very wrong in your assessment that this is about business and getting rid
of the competition. Information isn`t about money. It is about power.
The people at MoA might not have noticed it because of ideological bias but Netanyahu and
Biden (and before him Obama) were quite hostile towards each other. To a degree they were
almost waging a kind of undercover cold war against each other (culminating in United Nations
Security Council Resolution 2334).
In this context I don`t believe the "former" Israelis spies at NSO are just Isrealis. They
are a specific kind of Israelis. Namely extreme-right Israelis/Likud loyalists. Netanyahu
created his own private unit 8200 - outside of the Israeli state. The profit that NSO made
were just the "former" spies regular payment.
The USA - with the consent and probably active assistance of the new Israeli government -
took Netanyahus private intelligence service down.
The US has found out that the NSO spyware can be used BY the "other regimes" against US
leaders. Or at least against US assets.
The Israelis would sell their wares to anyone with a buck (or shekel, as the buck is
getting rather uncertain as a money).
IE. Saudi buys a section of numbers and then decides to track and eliminate "opposants".
BUT if there are CIA personnel implanted with a good cover story, then OOOPS, "another one
bites the dust".
What laws exist in your nation to prevent illegal snooping?
How about profiling by the digital companies? Nations need to pass laws making it a
CRIMINAL offense to conduct snooping or hacking without a warrant. What happened to Apple's
claims about its devices' superior security and privacy?
Let's see what sanctions or criminal ACTIONS are taken against NSO, its executives and
other companies. Is any of the information captured by NSO shared with Israel &/or Five
Eyes? Are their financial accounts frozen? Let's see how they're treated compared to
Huawei.
Are Dark web sites linked to the REvil ransomware gang operating? Shutdown all illegal
snooping and cyber crimes entities.
A rule or law isn't just and fair if it doesn't applies to everyone, and they can't be
applied at the whims of powerful. Laws and rules applied unequally have no credibility and
legitimacy.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
– Martin Luther King Jr.
"A rule or law isn't just and fair if it doesn't applies to everyone, and they can't be
applied at the whims of powerful. Laws and rules applied unequally have no credibility and
legitimacy."
Max, are you sure you have got your feet on this planet earth? If there is one factor that
is common to his era, is that "Justice" is no longer blindfolded, but is looking out for the
best interests of "friends".
Can you name a few countries where your ideal is the norm?
*****
PS. Don't bother, as I won't reply, I'm off to bed to dream of a perfect world. Much easier,
and I can do it lying down.
Another possible scenario is that the NSO has been poaching people and/or techniques from US
intel agencies for use in its for-profit schemes.
That is one thing which is guaranteed to get a negative reaction - regardless of who is doing
it and which party is in power.
We do know that NSO has been very active on the exploit buying dark webs since their
inception...
The above article also notes that NSO was acquired by Francisco Partners in 2010...
Thus maybe all this is purely a capability play: The US is falling behind and so wants to
bring in house, more capability. One way is to squeeze an existing successful player so that
they have to cooperate/sell out...
All I can be sure of, is that none of the present foofaraw has anything to do with the
truth.
"In fact, these allegations are so outrageous and far from reality, that NSO is
considering a defamation lawsuit."
Ya..Right. That's not remotely gonna happen!
The NSO 'Group" would have to provide a substantial amount of their very sensitive
'operational' & 'proprietary' internal documents - which would most certainly be
requested in discovery - to any of the possible defendants should NSO be stupid/arrogant
enough to actually file a formal suit of "defamation" in a any US court.
Talk about a "defamation" legal case that would get shut down faster than Mueller's show
indictment of 13 'Russian' agents and their related businesses that were reportedly part of
the now infamous "Guccifer 2.0" "Hack"
When these "Russian" hackers simply countered by producing a surprise Washington based
legal team that publically agreed to call Mueller's bluff and have the all of the 'indicted'
defendants actually appear in court, they immediately "requested" - via the discovery process
- all relevant documents that the Mueller team purportedly had that confirmed that their was
any actual or attempted (hacking) criminality.
VIA POLITICO:
The 13 people charged in the high-profile indictment in February are considered unlikely to
ever appear in a U.S. court. The three businesses accused of facilitating the alleged
Russian troll farm operation -- the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management, and
Concord Catering -- were also expected to simply ignore the American criminal proceedings.
Last month, however, a pair of Washington-area lawyers suddenly surfaced in the case,
notifying the court that they represent Concord Management. POLITICO reported at the time
that the move appeared to be a bid to force Mueller's team to turn over relevant evidence
to the Russian firm and perhaps even to bait prosecutors into an embarrassing dismissal in
order to avoid disclosing sensitive information.
The NSO Group is never going to even considering this "defamation" route, but their
threatening legal bluster is pure... Hutzpa!
In a world in which this can be done, the worst of governments will do it, and in the worst
ways.
The US and other governments have promoted this. Their own intelligence services use it.
They actively oppose efforts to block it, as happened with private encryption ideas.
We can't both make it possible and prevent the bad guys from doing it.
We have deliberately made it possible, and opposed serious efforts to protect private life
against it. Now we are surprised?
@ Stonebird (#17), you missed the pun in those words. Maybe you're sleeping while reading.
The Financial Empire and its lackeys want a "rules-based international order" and
China-Russia... want a "rule of international laws". Both are meaningless and worthless as
they're applied unequally. I am awake and in sync with REALITY. Just playing with these two
ideas. We have the law of the jungle. However, Orcs (individuals without conscience –
dark souls) are worse than animals in greed, deceits and killing.
"The Black Speech of Mordor need to be heard in every corner of the world!"
Interesting story but I agree that the hype is overblown because nothing much will change
even if this NSO outfit has a harder time flogging its spyware to all and sundry.
The NSA, CIA, MI5/6, Mossad and the 5 Lies spies will continue spying on friend and foe
alike and tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google will likewise continue their
unethical surveillance practices and will keep passing on private citizen's data to
government spy agencies. So it goes.
For a dissident Snowden is a lightweight. His beef wasn't, as b points out, with the NSA
itself, he just didn't like them spying on Americans within the USA. He had no problem spying
on people in other countries as long as the proper 'rules' were followed. That, almost by
definition, makes him a limited hangout.
The AI report notes that this software was abandoned in 2018 for cloud implementations to
help hide responsibility;
Having Amazon AWS dump services naming NSO probably has no effect at all, as NSO will just
use other names;
" However, Orcs (individuals without conscience – dark souls) are worse than animals
in greed, deceits and killing."
Non-human animals operate on a genetically programmed autopilot and are not responsible
for their actions.
Humans are partially engineered by genetics but unlike the "lower" animals they have the
power to choose which actions they will take and they are therefore responsible for their
choices.
A bear or a mountain lion will attack a human when it is injured or when protecting its
young, but one can't blame these animals for exercising their survival instincts.
Human beings are the only mammal, indeed the only animal, that is capable of evil, i.e.
deliberately choosing to harm or kill other humans for profit or personal gain.
On this subject, I suggest barflies read the excellent post on the previous MoA Week in
Review thread by:
Posted by: Debsisdead | Jul 19 2021 1:36 utc | 71
My reply @167 and Uncle T's further comment.
The book on this criminal conduct is called 'Murdoch's Pirates.' The detestable Amazon
have it at 'unavailable' however it is available at Australian bookseller Booktopia.
How do you explain the suspiciously-timed, and simultaneous, Five Eyes denunciation of
China for alleged hacking of Microsoft? Is it a way of deflecting too much wrath on Israel?
Or, is b wrong and the China story serves as real distraction.
Posted by: Prof | Jul 19 2021 18:09 utc | 1
If the US navy were to purchase leaky boats would it not be absurd for it to then blame
Russia or China for the influx of water?
If the US government, and US industry, purchase software full of holes is it not equally
absurd for them to blame a foreign entity for any resulting leaks?
In answering these questions it is worthwhile to remember that US government entities
support the insertion of backdoors in US commercial software. Such backdoors can be
identified and exploited by 3rd parties.
If this somewhat limp-wristed takedown of NSO did not have the support of apartheid Israel's
intelligence services, the graun would not be pushing the story.
It is that simple, the guardian is run by rabid zionists such as Jonathon Freedland deputy
editor, who retains editorial control from the second seat rather than #1 simply because the
zionist board wanted to stroke the fishwrap's woke credentials by having a female editor.
Foreign news and england news all have many zionist journos.
Now even the sports desk features stories by a bloke called Jacob Steinberg 'n sport is not
generally an interest of jews.
Also if NSO a corporation born to advance particular media interests were in fact a tool of
apartheid israel's intelligence establishment, it is unlikely that it would have tried to
sue the graun back in 2019.
None of that precludes Mossad plants working at NSO, in fact the move against it would
suggest that zionist intelligence has wrung the organisation dry.
This 'takedown' suggests to me that these services will continue, but not for everyone as
before. ME governments will never again gain full access, no matter how friendly they may
claim to be. All future contracts with whatever entity follows will only proceed if permitted
by FukUSi.
div> Since the software is licensed by the number of phones it's installed
on, NSO must have a means of determining the device ID/phone number of each phone (You wouldn't
trust some shady third-world regime to be honest, would you?
Since the software is licensed by the number of phones it's installed on, NSO must have a
means of determining the device ID/phone number of each phone (You wouldn't trust some shady
third-world regime to be honest, would you?
The Israeli connection just read an account on AC by Rod Dreher and so far, writers
are downplaying the connection to Israel. If it was a Chinese or Russian company we would be
blaming Putin.
We blame Putin for every criminal in Russia but I don't see anyone blaming Israel for a
product they they authorized for export. Wow.
It does take two to tango, so I do understand talking about the clients who bought the
product but if they have the export version of the spyware the it's obvious that Israel has
the super-duper lethal version but that's okay. No biggie. But Iran having any weapons to
defend their own country is a scandal.
US taxpayers subsidize the Israeli military industry. The zionists then developed tools which
they use against palestinians and their adversaries. The same technologies are later sold at
a profit to various United states security agencies. A wonderful self licking ice cream cone
of christian zionism, so much winning... Paying up the wazoo for our own eslavement. Last I
checked, the chosen one's were never held accountable for their role prior to 911 operations.
The Amerikastani Con-serve-ative manages to write a whole article about this without
mentioning the name of the "country" that created and exported this software.
This same Amerikastani Con-serve-ative pretends to champion free speech but doesn't permit
the slightest criticism of this same "nation", the racist fascist apartheid zionist settler
colony in Occupied Palestine. In fact the very mention of the word "zionist" will get your
comment removed.
I'm of the school of thought that Snowden is still an active CIA asset used to assist in
discrediting government agencies, such as the NSA, to allow private corporations to take
their place in data collection and dissemination. Alphabet, and it's AI/quantum computers
should not be ignored in this particular scenario
Human beings with conscience are INNER directed. Those without strong conscience (Orcs)
are OUTER directed and thereby easily captured, corrupted and controlled. Human beings with
great conscience (soul/spirit), strong mind and healthy body are PARAGONS.
Orcs were once elves. They got programmed by the dark forces of Saruman & Sauron
(Sin). Sauron's EYE is for intimidation. Seeing it sends fear into the hearts of people and
sucks away their courage. "When did we let evil become stronger than us?" Communicate
reality, truth and expose power freely!
There is still light to defeat the darkness. May your light light others
🕯🕯🕯
Ultimately, this scoop provides much more leverage for Putin's ongoing insistence that an
International Treaty dealing with all things Cyber including Cyber-crime be convened ASAP.
Israel and the UK will never sign such a protocol. The USA? only if it is worthless.
Mar man #4
The leak could be from a highly sophisticated state actor that needs to "blind" US and
especially Israeli intelligence services temporarily.
That could very easily be China, Russia or even Iran. Some of their assets could be on
the list.
"Snowden's opinion on this is kind of strange". Snowden's task, almost a decade ago now,
was to facilitate the passage of CISPA. Greenwald was the PR guy. Remember Obama saying we
need to have a conversation about privacy versus security? Well, Snowden and Greewald helped
him to have the conversation on his terms. And the media giants will be forever grateful.
Greenwald even got his own website. So no, nothing strange about what Snowden said. It was in
his script. Was, is and always will be an asset.
In a broader context:
"In a corporatist system of government, where there is no separation between corporate power
and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. The actual government as it
actually exists is censoring the speech not just of its own people, but people around the
world. If US law had placed as much emphasis on the separation of corporation and state as it
had on the separation of church and state, the country would be unrecognizably different from
what we see today."
"It's A Private Company So It's Not Censorship"
Sanctions? Sanctions, did anybody mention sanctions for those carrying out Cyber attacks?
(Particularly ones that target "Freedom of speech" and Journalists.)
Apple is also zionist controlled, so not surprising that NSO had all internal details to
hack their iPhones, via tribal leakers or approved connections. So is Amazon, so their cloud
service for NSO continues under other cover.
Those in danger should not use Apple or Amazon-based or other zionist-controlled products
or services. A catalog of those might help.
I don't buy it. It doesn't sound plausible to me as presented.
One possibility is that it is a camouflaged operation to take down non-attributably spy
software that has fallen into the wrong hands, and thereby contrary to US interests. For
example, the new Myanmar government is sure to be using the software to observe the
US-sponsored miscreants from the Aung San Su Kyi regime who are bombing schools, hospitals
and government offices, and to seek out wanted criminals in hiding. The NSO take-down could
be an operation to take those licences out of operation. In that scenario those NSO customers
who are not anti-US might get support to continue operations as usual. As another example it
could also be used as a warning to the Saudis not to get too close to the Russians and
Chinese or ditch the US dollar, and not to accommodate to Iran.
Or maybe NSO just had the wrong political connections in the USA.
Whatever it may seem on the surface, that is what it surely is not.
div> I certainly can't compete on tech savvy as I have none, but doesn't
this perhaps line up with the summit decision between Putin and Biden to cooperate in terms of
policing cybercrime? Maybe that's too obvious, but I don't see that Snowden is contradicting
his own positions in that case. And of course, b, you are correct that the main culprit on
these matters is the US. Throwing the spotlight elsewhere however, doesn't mean it can't circle
around. Spotlights have a way of doing that.
I certainly can't compete on tech savvy as I have none, but doesn't this perhaps line up with
the summit decision between Putin and Biden to cooperate in terms of policing cybercrime?
Maybe that's too obvious, but I don't see that Snowden is contradicting his own positions in
that case. And of course, b, you are correct that the main culprit on these matters is the
US. Throwing the spotlight elsewhere however, doesn't mean it can't circle around. Spotlights
have a way of doing that.
The interesting backdrop to all this is that Israel has a *huge* presence in all things
associated with cybersecurity and have for years. The IDF's Talpiot plan no doubt enviously
eyed the NSA tapping into everyone's internet/cellphone traffic and wanted a piece of the
action. The financial intelligence alone would make it hugely valuable, not to mention
blackmail opportunities and the means to exercise political control.
I wonder if the Intel's Haifa design bureau was behind the infamous "management engine"
installed on *every* Intel chip since 2008 (to, of course, "make administration easier")?
The discover of this "feature" precipitated a huge scandal not too many years back if you
recall...
This "feature" gave anyone who could access it the ability to snoop or change the code
running on the main CPU... anyone want to guess whether the Mossad knows how to get to
it?
@Simplicius | Jul 20 2021 15:15 utc | 57
"I wonder if the Intel's Haifa design bureau was behind the infamous "management engine"
installed on *every* Intel chip since 2008 (to, of course, "make administration easier")?"
I remember 30 years ago there was controversy over the NSA requiring hardware backdoors in
all phones. At the time, it was called the "Clipper chip". Reportedly, the program failed and
was never adopted. Apparently, as this article exposed, that is false and something like it
is installed in all phones and possibly computers manufactured for sale in the western
world.
Supposedly, the real story behind Huawei sanctions and kidnapping of their executive, is
Huawei phones have no NSA backdoor since the Chinese flatly refuse to cooperate with NSA.
Turns out the Microsoft hacking accusation against China wasn't a distraction against the
NSO scandal, but a capitalist reaction against the CPC's growing containment of their own big
tech capitalists:
For people who don't know: this Kara Swisher is clearly an USG asset (or behaves exactly
like one). Every column she writes is an unashamed apology to all the USG policies on big
tech and on all decisions of American big tech.
@ vk (#59), Your conclusion about Kara Swisher is good one. However, cast the net wider to
understand the NETWORK that she represents and find additional media
Orcs. Most likely she is an asset of the Global Financial Syndicate, acting as a
gatekeeper/porter/lobbyist in the technology arena. Her mentor Walter Mossberg was an asset
too? It is easy to identify Orcs!
Work Experience: WSJ, The Washington Post, New York Times, ... Who did she sell Recode to?
Who are financiers of Vox Media?
Education: Georgetown, Columbia University (many assets come from here)
While the theory from m at #13 about it being a personal tiff between Biden and Netanyahu has
some appeal I tend to believe it is more complex than that.
While Dems could accumulate some grudges against Netanyahu, they can be pretty thick
skinned on that. On the other hand, if Netanyahu used his budget to dig the dirt against his
opponents like Bennet, with NSO as the took, the grudge against NSO could be very strong on
the side of the current government of Israel. Internal strife between Likudniks is intense.
And the mantle of the ruler of Israel comes with perks, like the ability to plant stories in
WP and NYT.
The Government said the reform was needed as the existing acts, with the last update in
1989, are no longer enough to fight the "discernible and very real threat posed by state
threats".
The Home Office said it does "not consider that there is necessarily a distinction in
severity between espionage and the most serious unauthorised disclosures, in the same way
that there was in 1989".
[More at the link.]
If it was Russia or Iran that was selling such spyware, would FUKUS react with measures
against the press or with sanctions and efforts to protect the press?
On the other hand, if Netanyahu used his budget to dig the dirt against his opponents like
Bennet, with NSO as the took, the grudge against NSO could be very strong on the side of the
current government of Israel. Internal strife between Likudniks is intense. And the mantle of
the ruler of Israel comes with perks, like the ability to plant stories in WP and NYT.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Jul 20 2021 19:05 utc | 64
@64 Piotr Berman
This goes much deeper than just personal animosity.
For several years now there had been some kind of cultural war waging in Israel with the
populist leader - Netanyahu - on the one side and and most of the Israeli establishment - the
Mossad, the generals and the High Court - against him. The generals eventually acted by
founding their own party (with the former TV presenter Lapid at it`s head) and deposed
Netanyahu.
This cultural war in Israel is not only very similar to the cultural war in the USA. The
two countries are so intervened with one another that both conflicts have kind of merged.
"This cultural war in Israel is not only very similar to the cultural war in the USA.
The two countries are so intervened with one another that both conflicts have kind of
merged."
Posted by: m | Jul 21 2021 9:41 utc | 67
Yes, not unrelated to the purge Biden seems to be planning here. Bibi made a big mistake
getting so cozy with Trump. I would wager Trump is going to be in the crosshairs too. And
that is likely to be divisive, in both places.
"... Two world wars were fought to keep Germany down. The stated purpose of NATO is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. ..."
"... IMO US didn't cause NS2 friction because it thinks it benefits Russia, but exactly because it benefits Germany too much. ..."
"... You know, NATO, "Keep the Germans down..." and all that. US must not permit it's vassals to become too economically stronger than their master. They want to drag everyone they can down with them (and in shitter US goes) so they can still be king of the hill (or ad least shitter bottom). ..."
"... The most important point to know is that US hegemony in Europe is predicated on fear and hostility between Germany and Russia. ..."
"... There are many limitations to European strategic autonomy -- and the EU embodies those limits in many ways -- but the case of NS2 demonstrates an independent streak in German strategy. It amounts to a zero sum loss for Washington. ..."
"... Lebanon does illustrate the incredible reach of the Empire. A leverage so long that every door leads to self immolation. Your mention of the current spyware scandal is right on point. These are instruments of absolute power. ..."
"... While Trump is certainly no representative of humanity, it just as certainly doesn't look like his rise was in the playbook of the dominant faction of the oligarchy. Trump really seems to fit the mould of a Bonapartist, though recast in the context of contemporary America. This would indicate that the imperial oligarchy is in crisis, which itself could lead to fractures in the empire, and among the empire's vassals in particular. ..."
The sanctions war the U.S. waged against Germany and Russia over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline
has ended with a total U.S. defeat.
The U.S. attempts to block the pipeline were part of the massive anti-Russia campaign waged
over the last five years. But it was always based on a misunderstanding. The pipeline is not to
Russia's advantage but important for Germany. As I described Nord Stream 2 in a
previous piece :
It is not Russia which needs the pipeline. It can
sell its gas to China for just as much as it makes by selling gas to Europe.
...
It is Germany, the EU's economic powerhouse, that needs the pipeline and the gas flowing
through it. Thanks to Chancellor Merkel's misguided energy policy - she put an end to nuclear
power in German after a tsunami in Japan destroyed three badly placed reactors - Germany
urgently needs the gas to keep its already high electricity prices from rising further.
That the new pipeline will bypass old ones which run through the Ukraine is likewise to
the benefit of Germany, not Russia. The pipeline infrastructure in the Ukraine is old and
near to disrepair. The Ukraine has no money to renew it. Politically it is under U.S.
influence. It could use its control over the energy flow to the EU for blackmail. (It already
tried
once.) The new pipeline, laid at the bottom of the Baltic sea, requires no payment for
crossing Ukrainian land and is safe from potential malign influence.
Maybe Chancellor Merkel on her recent visit to Washington DC finally managed to explain that
to the Biden administration. More likely though she simply told the U.S. to f*** off. Whatever
- the result is in. As the Wall Street Journal
reports today:
The U.S. and Germany have reached an agreement allowing completion of the Nord Stream 2
natural gas pipeline, officials from both countries say.
Under the four-point agreement, Germany and the U.S. would invest $50 million in Ukrainian
green-tech infrastructure, encompassing renewable energy and related industries. Germany also
would support energy talks in the Three Seas Initiative, a Central European diplomatic
forum.
Berlin and Washington as well would try to ensure that Ukraine continues to receive
roughly $3 billion in annual transit fees that Russia pays under its current agreement with
Kyiv, which runs through 2024. Officials didn't explain how to ensure that Russia continues
to make the payments.
The U.S. also would retain the prerogative of levying future pipeline sanctions in the
case of actions deemed to represent Russian energy coercion, officials in Washington
said.
So Germany will spend some chump change to buy up, together with the U.S, a few Ukrainian
companies that are involved in solar or wind mill stuff. It will 'support' some irrelevant
talks by maybe paying for the coffee. It also promises to try something that it has no way to
succeed in.
That's all just a fig leave. The U.S. really gave up without receiving anything for itself
or for its client regime in the Ukraine.
The Ukraine lobby in Congress will be very unhappy with that deal. The Biden administration
hopes to avoid an uproar over it. Yesterday Politico reported that the Biden
administration preemptively had told the Ukraine
to stop talking about the issue :
In the midst of tense negotiations with Berlin over a controversial Russia-to-Germany
pipeline, the Biden administration is asking a friendly country to stay quiet about its
vociferous opposition. And Ukraine is not happy.
U.S. officials have signaled that they've given up on stopping the project, known as the
Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and are now scrambling to contain the damage by striking a grand
bargain with Germany.
At the same time, administration officials have quietly urged their Ukrainian counterparts
to withhold criticism of a forthcoming agreement with Germany involving the pipeline,
according to four people with knowledge of the conversations.
The U.S. officials have indicated that going public with opposition to the forthcoming
agreement could damage the Washington-Kyiv bilateral relationship , those sources said. The
officials have also urged the Ukrainians not to discuss the U.S. and Germany's potential
plans with Congress.
If Trump had done the above Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would have called for another
impeachment.
The Ukrainian President Zelensky is furious over the deal and about being told to shut up.
But there is little he can do but to accept the booby price the Biden administration offered
him:
U.S. officials' pressure on Ukrainian officials to withhold criticism of whatever final deal
the Americans and the Germans reach will face significant resistance.
A source close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Kyiv's position is that
U.S. sanctions could still stop completion of the project, if only the Biden administration
had the will to use them at the construction and certification stages. That person said Kyiv
remains staunchly opposed to the project.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration gave Zelensky a date for a meeting at the White House
with the president later this summer , according to a senior administration official.
Nord Stream 2 is to 96% ready. Its testing will start in August or September and by the
years end it will hopefully deliver gas to western Europe.
Talks about building Nord Stream 3 are likely to start soon.
Posted by b on July 21, 2021 at 17:13 UTC | Permalink
Did Merkel also get Biden to promise that neither he nor any of his clients (AQ, ISIS, etc.
etc. etc.) would perpetrate any "unfortunate incidents" or "disruptions" on NS 2?
And would any such promises be worth the breath that uttered them?
But it was always based on a misunderstanding. The pipeline is not to Russia's advantage
but important for Germany
I'm afraid it is you who doesn't understand. Two world wars were fought to keep Germany down. The stated purpose of NATO is to keep the
Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.
They weren't trying to block NS2 to keep Russia out but to keep Germany down,
I beg to differ. IMO US didn't cause NS2 friction because it thinks it benefits Russia, but
exactly because it benefits Germany too much.
You know, NATO, "Keep the Germans down..." and all that. US must not permit it's vassals
to become too economically stronger than their master. They want to drag everyone they can
down with them (and in shitter US goes) so they can still be king of the hill (or ad least
shitter bottom).
That is why there is also pressure for all western countries to adopt insane immigration,
LGBT, austerity policies and what not. What a better way to destroy all these countries, both
economically and culturally, or adleast make them far more worse than US, it is only way US
can again become "powerhouse", like after WW2.
Does this represent a fracturing of the EU? or maybe a change in direction?
What b is pointing out about how if it were Trump....only means that the bullying approach
by empire didn't work and now we are seeing face saving bullying and backpedaling like crazy
in some areas.
I roll my eyes at this ongoing belief that Trump represented humanity instead of all or
some faction of the elite....as a demigod it seems.
the "facts" as you state them are not quite right.
1. China is ruthless. They waited until the last possible second to sign a deal with Iran,
thus ensuring they are getting the best possible price for Iran's oil, basically robbing Iran
blind. The poor Iran didn't have a choice but to agree. Even today, Putin will NOT say how
much China is paying for gas on Siberia pipeline and a lot of people think China is robbing
Russia blind on the deal. A second Siberia line without a NS2 will put Russia is very bad
negotiation position and China in very good one, giving them the advantage to ask for any
price of Russia and get it.
2. Merkel is leaving anyway in September and thw Green party that will be taking over HATES
RUssia with passion. The NS2 is far from done deal, it needs to be insured. Plus it will fall
under the EU 3rd energy package making sure Germany doesn't use it 100% . The NS2 will never
be 100 usable, the Green party will see to that. AT best it will be only 50% usage.
And so on and so on.
Funny how in today's world, we all have different facts. My facts are different than YOUR
facts. My facts are just as relevant as your facts.
What is more, the most dangerous potential alliance, from the perspective of the United
States, was considered to be an alliance between Russia and Germany. This would be an
alliance of German technology and capital with Russian natural and human resources.
The article explains a lot, more than just Germany or Russia.
They weren't trying to block NS2 to keep Russia out but to keep Germany down...
Germany would be 'down' no matter how much financial power it accumulates - i.e regardless
of NS2. The imperial garrison at Rammstein AFB will make sure of that. What the Americans fear is the symbolic meaning of NS2 in terms of geopolitical influence
for Russia. The loss of maneuverability against Russia that results from a key vassal not
being able to move in complete obedience to Uncle Sam's wishes.
The pipeline construction battle has been won, not the energy flow war.
The Financial Empire is most likely resorting to some CHARADE to find an excuse to later
stop the gas flow through Nord Stream 2. Empire's bullying was clearly exposed through
sanctions and it LOST the battle of stopping the pipeline construction. So it moves to the
next battle to find an excuse to stop the gas flow. Empire's evil intent is visible in these
words, "the U.S. also would retain the prerogative of levying future pipeline sanctions in
the case of actions deemed to represent Russian energy coercion, officials in Washington
said."
The Financial Empire has worked hard over the last century to prevent Germany from allying
herself with Russia. It wants to control energy flowing in Eurasia and its pricing. The war
will be only won when the Financial Empire is defeated and its global pillars of power
DISMANTLED.
"The 'heartland' was an area centered in Eurasia, which would be so situated and catered
to by resources and manpower as to render it an unconquerable fortress and a fearsome power;
and the 'crescent' was a virtual semi-arc encompassing an array of islands – America,
Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan – which, as 'Sea Powers,' watched over the
Eurasian landmass to detect and eventually thwart any tendency towards a consolidation of
power on the heartland."
Has the Financial Empire stopped interfering in other regions?
"US, Germany Threaten Retaliatory Action Against Russia in Draft Nord Stream 2 Accord -
Report...."
"As the US and Germany have reportedly reached a deal on the Nord Stream 2 project,
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing the obtained draft text of the agreement, that it
would threaten sanctions and other measures if Russia tried to use energy as a 'weapon'
against Ukraine , though it did not specify what actions could provoke the
countermeasures.
"According to the report, in such a case, Germany will take unspecified national
action , a decision that may represent a concession from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who
had previously refused to take independent action against Moscow over the gas pipeline that
will run from Russia to Germany." [My Emphasis]
The article continues:
"On Tuesday, Ned Price, a spokesman for the US State Department, told reporters that he
did not have final details of an agreement to announce, but that 'the Germans have put
forward useful proposals, and we have been able to make progress on steps to achieve that
shared goal, that shared goal being to ensure that Russia cannot weaponize energy
."
" The US was hoping for explicit language that would commit Germany to shut down gas
delivery through Nord Stream 2 if Russia attempted to exert undue influence on Ukraine .
Germany, on the other hand, has long rejected such a move, stating that such a threat would
only serve to politicize a project that Merkel stresses is solely commercial in nature." [My
Emphasis]
The overall motive appears to be this:
"The accord would also commit Germany to use its influence to prolong Ukraine's gas
transit arrangement with Russia beyond 2024, possibly for up to ten years . Those talks
would begin no later than September 1, according to the news outlet." [My Emphasis]
So, here we have the Outlaw US Empire meddling in the internal affairs of three
nations--Germany, Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine cannot afford Russian gas as it has no rubles
to pay for it. Thus if Ukraine has no money to buy, then why should Gazprom be obliged to
give it away freely? What about other European customers who rely on gas piped through
Ukraine; are they going to see what they pay for get stolen by Ukraine? And what happens when
the pipelines breakdown from lack of maintenance since Ukraine's broke thanks to the Outlaw
Us Empire's coup that razed its economy? Shouldn't the Empire and its NATO vassals who
invaded Ukraine via their coup be forced to pay for such maintenance? And just who
"weaponized" this entire situation in the first place?
From my understanding, NS 2 was mutually beneficial for Germany and Russia.
As noted, Germany desperately needs energy and relying on the outrageously priced and
unreliable US LNG was not a viable option.
Russia benefits also.
1.No more high transit fees Russia pays Ukraine. I imagine some of that was finding its way
into US pockets after 2014.
2.Ukraine supposedly helped itself to plenty of stolen gas from the pipeline. That will
stop.
3.Ukraine was occasionally shutting down the pipeline for political reasons until Russia paid
the ransom. Not anymore.
So, Russia and Germany were both highly motivated to finish the pipeline ASAP.
Germany would be 'down' no matter how much financial power it accumulates - i.e regardless
of NS2.
The imperial garrison at Rammstein AFB will make sure of that.
Putin not too long ago (can't find the article now) said he was prepared to help Europe
gain its independence should they wish to do so, Rammstein or no Rammstein.
What the Americans fear is the symbolic meaning of NS2 in terms of geopolitical influence
for Russia. The loss of maneuverability against Russia that results from a key vassal not
being able to move in complete obedience to Uncle Sam's wishes.
What they fear should this deal go ahead is a Germany/Russia/China Axis that would control
the world island and thus the world.
I was convinced that the US of Assholery had lost its infantile anti-NS2 'battle' in
September 2020, after watching an episode of DW Conflict Zone in which Sarah Kelly
interviewed Niels Annen, Germany's Deputy FM. Annen came to the interview armed to the teeth
with embarrassing facts about US hypocrisy including, but not limited to, the fact that USA,
itself, buys vast quantities of petroleum products from Russia each year.
The interview is Google-able and, apart from pure entertainment value, Sarah is much
easier on the eye than Tim Sebastian...
1. China is ruthless. They waited until the last possible second to sign a deal with Iran, thus ensuring they are
getting the best possible price for Iran's oil, basically robbing Iran blind.
Hmmm... I seem to remember Iran shafting China on the south Pars gas field when it looked like the JCPOA was looking
likely...
If this memory of mine was correct (it may not be) then you really can't blame China for a little commercial payback.
In any case it was shown as soon as JCPOA Mk.1 was passed Iran RAN, not walked, to smooch up to the west for business, not
China, not Russia. So if its just business for Iran then its just business for China.
In our eagerness to expose the empire's shortcomings in a quick 'gotcha!' moment we
shouldn't rush head first into false premises. To suggest Dear Uncle Sam is concerned with
anything other than his own navel is naive. He's the man with the plan. He knows that down
the road, Oceania's eastern border won't run along the Dnieper but right off the shore of
Airstrip One.
As has been mentioned before, the NN2 pipeline gives Germany leverage over Russia ,
not the other way around.
US => Germany => Russia.
Which is now plan b for the US. If then they can use their leverage over Germany to
steer it in any direction it wants to vs. Russia.
This will probably be followed by "targeted" sanctions on specific Politicians, Bankers
and Heads of industry. They only need to propose such sanctions individually for them
to have an effect. Using Pegasus for inside information to Blackmail those it wants to.
*****
Example of a sanctions racket :
Similar to the potential sanctions on any Lebanese Politian or Group Leaders if they get Oil
from Iran, Russia or China. The Lebanese population be damned.
"Apparently US Treasury has informed the government of Lebanon, that if any Oil
products from Iran make it into Lebanon, in any way; the government of Lebanon and all its
members will be sanctioned. This includes the Central Bankers"
Just in case you didn't understand how the crisis in the country is manufactured.
Pegasus again:
"leaks on the targets of Israeli spy program Pegasus, show hundreds in
Lebanon including the elected leadership of every party, every media outlet, & every
security agency, have been targeted by clients in 10 countries; all belonging to the
Imperialist camp.
But it is very easy to guess by looking at who are the external imperialist forces
active in Lebanon. USA/UK/France/Turkey/Germany/Canada/Israel/Qatar; that's eight. Plus Saudi
Arabia." *******
PS. Lebanon; This comes as a response to Sayyed Nasrallah stating in his last speech
that if the State in Lebanon is not able to provide fuel, he will bring it at the expense of
Hizbullah from Iran, dock it in the port of Beirut, and dared anyone to stop it from reaching
the people.
*****
Germany will only be the latest victim as the Mafia-US "protection" racket is ramped
up.
Both b and the many commenters raise excellent points. Yes, the US wants to hurt both Russia
and Germany. And yes the US *definitely* fears close cooperation between Moscow and Berlin.
But the main take home lesson is that the US failed despite enormous efforts to block NS2.
Russo-German cooperation is inevitable and the world will be better for it.
>>a lot of people think China is robbing Russia blind on the deal
Why would be Russia building Power of Siberia 2 and 3 to China then? Or selling LNG too?
You don't have much knowledge on the topic, the way it looks. A giant gas plant was built
near the border with China, the second biggest gas plant in the world, because the gas for
China is rich in rare elements, thus turning Russia in of the the biggest producers of
strategic helium, not to mention extracting many other rare elements. China gets gas that has
been cleaned of anything valuable from it, with the exception of the gas itself.
>>merkel is leaving anyway in September and thw Green party that will be taking
over
The latest polls show clear lead for CDU/CSU. And it looks like its too late.
>>the NS2 will never be 100 usable, tthe Green party will see to that. AT best it
will be only 50% usage.
Do you even follow what has been going on? Germany is free not to buy russian gas, that
is, to be left without gas if this is what it wants.
Do you see how nat gas prices exploded in Europe recently? Do you know why is that?
Because Russia refuses to sell additional volumes via Ukraine's network. It is a message to
finish the issues with NS 2 pipeline faster and then everything will be fine, there will be
plenty of space for new gas volumes, and the gas price will drop.
It is the UNSC resolutions of 2006, 2007 and 2010 which have laid the backbone for the
incremental diplomatic, economic and material warfare against Iran. Without them, there would
be no narrative framing Iran as an outlaw nor justification for crippling sanctions. That
Iran should even be subjected to the JCPOA is in itself an objective injustice.
Each of these resolutions could easily have been blocked by the two permanent members of
the UNSC we go to much lengths on this forum to depict as selfless adversaries of the Empire.
All they had to do was raise a finger and say niet. In other words, by their actions, these
two members placed Iran in a very disadvantageous trading position.
So, did they profit from this position of strength?
"According to the draft deal, obtained by Bloomberg, Washington and Berlin would
threaten sanctions and other retaliation if Russia 'tries to use energy as a weapon against
Ukraine', with Germany being obligated to take unspecified actions in the event of Russian
'misbehaviour' . [My Emphasis]
The article then turns to the interview:
"Professor Glenn Diesen of the University of South-Eastern Norway has explained what is
behind the US-Germany row is." [That last "is" appears to be a typo]
I suggest barflies pay close attention to Dr. Diesen who's the author of an outstanding
book on the geoeconomics of Russia and China, Russia's Geoeconomic Strategy for a Greater
Eurasia . I judge the following Q&A to be most relevant:
"Sputnik: The Biden administration waived sanctions on the firm behind the gas project,
Nord Stream 2 AG, and its chief executive, Matthias Warnig. At the same time, Secretary of
State Antony Blinken stated in June that the pipeline project was a Russian tool for the
coercion of Europe and signaled that the US has leverage against it. What's behind
Washington's mixed signals with regard to the project? How could they throw sand in Nord
Stream 2's gears, in your opinion - or are Blinken's threats empty?
"Glenn Diesen: The mixed signals demonstrate that the completion of Nord Stream 2 was a
defeat for the US. Biden confirmed that he waived sanctions because the project was near
complete. Sanctions could not stop the project [link at original], rather they would merely
continue to worsen relations with Berlin and Moscow. The best approach for Washington at this
point is to recognise that Nord Stream 2 is a done deal, and instead Washington will direct
its focus towards limiting the geo-economics consequences of the pipeline by obtaining
commitments from Berlin such as preserving Ukraine's role as a transit state [Link at
original].
"The US therefore waives sanctions against Nord Stream 2, yet threatens new sanctions if
Berlin fails to accept US conditions and limitations on Nord Stream 2. Blinken's threats
are loaded with 'strategic ambiguity', which could be aimed to conceal that they are merely
empty threats . However, strategic ambiguity is also conducive to prevent Berlin from
calculating the "costs" and possible remedies to US threats. Furthermore, ambiguity can be
ideal in terms of how to respond as it is not a good look to continuously threaten allies."
[Emphasis original]
The professor's closing remarks are also very important regarding Merkel's successor.
Where I disagree is with the notion that the Outlaw US Empire has geoeconomic leverage over
the EU--military yes, but the Empire is just as uncompetitive versus the EU as it is versus
China.
So, did they profit from this position of strength?
Of course they did, let's be real. China and Russia are not going to be the all benevolent saviors of the world, they never
were, never will.
They will always serve their interests first and foremost. Sometimes, they do get suckered
into UNSC resolutions like those you spoke of. Sometimes, there're backroom horse trading
that we're not privy to and little countries are just chips on the table...
The best we can hope for is that they can behave with more integrity than currently shown
by the incumbent anglospheric bloc in their re-ascendancy.
Either we ditch the UNSC system or everybody get nukes, because i can't see the current
UNSC members willing ditch their own, ever.
Lysander is correct.
The most important point to know is that US hegemony in Europe is predicated on fear and
hostility between Germany and Russia.
Types of interdependence between Germany and Russia, eg. NRG security, are a direct threat
to US dominance over Europe as a whole.
There are many limitations to European strategic autonomy -- and the EU embodies those
limits in many ways -- but the case of NS2 demonstrates an independent streak in German
strategy. It amounts to a zero sum loss for Washington.
Way too much confusion over what Nord Stream 2 really means.
1) Russian gas transiting Ukraine had already fallen from 150 bcm to the high 90s/low 100s
before Nord Stream 2 goes online.
Even after NS2 goes online, a significant amount of Russian gas will still transit via
Ukraine.
2) Energy demand generally increases over time, not decreases. Russian gas exports aren't
increasing in a straight line, but keep in mind that there are significant new competitors
now and in the process coming online. These include Azerbaijan as well as the ongoing
pipeline struggle through the Black Sea/Turkey/Eastern Med.
I never believed there was any chance of NS2 not completing; the only question was
when.
Lebanon does illustrate the incredible reach of the Empire. A leverage so long that every
door leads to self immolation. Your mention of the current spyware scandal is right on point.
These are instruments of absolute power.
What we need now is a worldwide Me Too movement to denounce this leverage. Taking that
first step would require a lot of courage for any blackmailed individual, but the one little
breach could lead to a flood of world citizens just about fed up with the Empire's shit.
It pains me that I do not remember exactly who it was, but one of the more erudite posters
here mentioned some time ago that Trump seemed more like a Bonapartist figure than a fascist
or a typical and simple representative of a faction in the oligarchy. While Trump is
certainly no representative of humanity, it just as certainly doesn't look like his rise was
in the playbook of the dominant faction of the oligarchy. Trump really seems to fit the mould
of a Bonapartist, though recast in the context of contemporary America. This would indicate
that the imperial oligarchy is in crisis, which itself could lead to fractures in the empire,
and among the empire's vassals in particular.
It is unwise to downplay the significance of Trump coming to power in 2016, regardless of
what feelings one may have about the individual himself. The conditions that led to the rise
of Trump not only persist, but have intensified. Those conditions cannot be resolved by mass
media gaslighting and social media censorship, which actually seems to be having an effect
more like holding the emergency relief valve on a boiler closed; it quiets an annoying sound,
but causes the underlying issue to grow more severe.
Basically, further splits in the EU are inevitable. It is the timing of those splits that
is difficult to predict, but the accuracy of that prediction hinges upon the accuracy of our
assessment of events occurring now. Interestingly, Trump is still part of these unfolding
events.
Fracturing NATO and the West hmmm ... If Germany gains any independence from U.S.
coercion they are 'fracturing Europe'. Bad Germany.
Germany must forever remain a vassal state of the U.S. by allowing the U.S. to use another
vassal state to control their energy supply. And who says we don't believe in freedom. Neocons are such vile creatures. Always twisting words but remember, whenever they say
something, the exact opposite is true.
One issue underlying this fiasco is I believe that the neocons / Atlantic Council were 100%
certain that Russia did not have the expertise to lay pipelines at the required depths, and
once Allseas was facing sanctions, the project would never be completed.
I believe that the exact pricing formula for Power of Siberia is confidential, but this
much is known:
"The price of Russian gas supplies to China increased in the second quarter of 2021 for
the first time since deliveries started via the Power of Siberia pipeline in 2019, but daily
delivery volumes fell in April, Interfax reported on Sunday.
Russian gas giant Gazprom GAZP.MM has said it supplied China with 3.84 billion cubic
metres of gas via the Power of Siberia pipeline in its first year of operation.
Citing Chinese customs data, Interfax said the price of gas increased to $148 per thousand
cubic metres, rising from $121 in the first quarter, and reversing a downward trend."
Also, Victoria Nuland informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today about Biden's
cave to Russia. That must have been brutal for her. Regardless, nice to see a rare display of
sanity from s US administration.
The primary and only objective of the US Foreign policy vis-a-vis Europe since WW2 has
been to prevent Russia and Germany (now read the German run EU project) coupling up, that's
it, nothing else matters on Europe.
The completion of N-2 presents a serious blow tho this aim, the new pipeline is a must for
Germany, it must get finished, without it Germany's supply of energy would have been almost
fully controlled by the Americans who have either direct or indirect authority over every
major source of hydrocarbons except for Venezuela and Russia, the latter only partly, the
Ukrainian pipeline is fully in their sphere of influence.
Energy fuels everything from private dwellings to major corporations, it's together with
labour and technology the most important ingredient in every economy. To lose control of it
would have been a catastrophe for Germany, in particular if one takes into account the secret
treaty between Germany and the Allies (read the US) from 1949.
"On 23 May 1949, the Western Allies ratified a new German constitution, known as the
"Basic Law" or Grundgesetz.
However, two days prior, a secret state treaty - Geheimer Staatsvertrag - was also signed to
grant complete Allied
control over education and all licensed media, press, radio, television and publishing houses
until the year 2099.
This was confirmed by Major-General Gerd-Helmut Komossa, former head of German Military
Intelligence in his
book, "Die Deutsche Karte" or The German Card".
What's interesting about Power of Siberia-1 is that the gas is being stripped -- refined at
the newly completed Amur Gas Plant -- of its components prior to being piped into China. I
don't know if Germany's petrochemical industry will be deprived in similar manner with
NS2.
CD Waller @36--
Nothing in the energy production realm is carbon neutral. ROSATOM has mastered the fuel
cycle which means most if not all toxic waste will now be burned for energy. New reactors do
NOT use water as coolant. Clearly you need to update what you know about nuclear power.
The Russian 'victory' is very narrow and mostly consists of the patience and determination to
follow-thru while consistently being derided/attacked by Western media, pundits, and
politicians:
Since Russia/Gasprom owns NS2 100% (paying for half the construction cost outright and
financing the rest), there was never much need to stop construction, only to stop/limit
consumption. The 'trick' was to find a way to accomplish US/NATO goals that would not make
German leaders look like puppets.
Biden's approach looks good compared to Trump's heavy-handed approach. As they are BOTH
spokesman of the Empire's Deep State, we can surmise that this is merely good cop / bad cop
theatrics.
This USA-GERMAN agreement makes Germany appear to voluntarily support EU/NATO -
a good thing(tm) that most Germans will accept without question. But behind the scenes,
it's unlikely that there was ever any real choice, just a mutual desire to fashion a
'smart' policy that didn't undermine German political leaders.
Germany can now be pressured to support USA-Ukraine belligerence - if they don't they
will be portrayed as not living up to their obligations to US/NATO/EU/Ukraine as enshrined
in this agreement.
If Russia retaliates against German purchase reductions in any way they will be labeled
as a politically-driven, unreliable supplier. That will 'invite' sanctions and spark
efforts to force EU/Germany to eliminate all Russia goods from their markets.
Russia and China are likely to be increasingly linked in Western media/propaganda.
Deficiencies of one or the other will apply to BOTH.
The next few winters in EU will be very interesting.
Jackrabbit @41 incorrectly says Russia owns NS2 100% It's owned by Nord Stream 2 AG, and
here's its
website listing its financial investors, while its shareholders/owners are global. The
company is located in Zug, Switzerland. Here we are told who the financial companies
are :
"In April 2017, Nord Stream 2 AG signed the financing agreements for the Nord Stream 2 gas
pipeline project with ENGIE, OMV, Royal Dutch Shell, Uniper, and Wintershall. These five
European energy companies will provide long-term financing for 50 per cent of the total cost
of the project."
As with the first string, Russia doesn't own it 100% nor did it finance it completely;
rather, its stake was @50% It appears both Nord Streams will be managed from the same
location in Zug. I hope the company produces a similar sort of book to record its
accomplishment as it did for the first string pair, which can be found and downloaded here
.
Who is paying for it: Russia's energy giant Gazprom is the sole shareholder of the
Nord Stream 2 AG , the company in charge of implementing the €9.5 billion ($11.1
billion) project. Gazprom is also covering half of the cost. The rest, however, is being
financed by five western companies: ENGIE, OMV, Royal Dutch Shell, Uniper and
Wintershall.
Emphasis is mine.
<> <> <> <> <>
Nord Stream 2 AG is a German company that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Russia's
Gazprom. The German subsidiary has borrowed half of the construction cost but is 100% owner
of the NS2 project.
From karlof1's link to Nord Stream 2 AG's Shareholder and Financial Investors page makes it
clear that NordStream 2 AG is a subsidiary of Gazprom international projects LLC, which is,
in turn, a subsidiary of Gazprom. Under "Shareholder" there is only one company listed:
Gasprom.
PS I was mistaken: Nord Stream 2 AG is a Swiss company, not a German one.
"4. Germany can now be pressured to support USA-Ukraine belligerence - if they don't they
will be portrayed as not living up to their obligations to US/NATO/EU/Ukraine as enshrined in
this agreement.
If Russia retaliates against German purchase reductions in any way they will be labeled as
a politically-driven, unreliable supplier. That will 'invite' sanctions and spark efforts to
force EU/Germany to eliminate all Russia goods from their markets."
Germany has been portrayed as not living up to its NATO obligations one way or another
since about 1985, and with respect to NS 2, since 2018. They do not seem fazed - maybe a
Green win would change that. If the USA-Ukraine get (more) belligerent, Germany might be less
likely to insist on Ukraine gas transit after 2024.
The Russian government owns a majority of Gazprom. As majority owner they can be said to
control the company and with that control comes an inescapable political dimension.
For the purposes of this discussion: the Russian government has biggest stake in the
financial success of Nord Stream 2. That "success" depends on gas sold, not simply the
completion of NS2 construction.
So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don't be
surprised if bad things start happening.
I received another "Our Terms Have Changed" email from a Big Tech quasi-monopoly, and for a
change I actually read this one. It was a revelation on multiple fronts. I'm reprinting it here
for your reading pleasure:
We wanted to let you know that we recently updated our Conditions of Use.
What hasn't changed:
Your use constitutes your agreement to our Conditions of Use.
We own all the content you create on our platform, devices and networks, and are free to
monetize it by any means we choose.
We own all the data we collect on you, your devices, purchases, social networks, views,
associations, beliefs and illicit viewing, your location data, who you are in proximity to,
and whatever data the networked devices in your home, vehicles and workplaces collect.
We have the unrestricted right to ban you and all your content, shadow-ban you and all
your content, i.e., generate the illusion that your content is freely, publicly available,
and erase your digital presence entirely such that you cease to exist except as a corporeal
body.
What has changed:
If we detect you have positive views on anti-trust enforcement, we may report you as a
"person of interest / potential domestic extremist" to the National Security Agency and other
federal agencies.
Rather than respond to all disputes algorithmically, we have established a Star Chamber of
our most biased, fanatical employees to adjudicate customer/user disputes in which the
customer/user refuses to accept the algorithmic mediation.
If a customer/user attempts to contact any enforcement agency regarding our algorithmic
mediation or Star Chamber adjudication, we reserve the unrestricted rights to:
a. Prepare voodoo dolls representing the user and stick pins into the doll while
chanting curses.
b. Hack the targeted user's accounts and blame it on Russian or Ukrainian hackers.
c. Rendition the user to a corrupt kleptocracy in which we retain undue influence, i.e.,
the United States.
Left unsaid, of course, is the potential for "accidents" to happen to anyone publicly
promoting anti-trust enforcement of Big Tech quasi-monopolies. Once totalitarianism has been
privatized , there are no rules that can't be ignored or broken by those behind the curtain .
So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don't be surprised
if bad things start happening.
Editor's note: this is satire. If I disappear, then you'll know who has no sense of irony or
humor.
On a previous thread, two readers linked to a transcript in Russian of VVP's interview on
NBC. A full English transcript is now available on katehon.com. Apologies if this is old
news.
Money is the most important fuel in the world economy today. Those who monopolize money
production become de facto OWNERS that control & steal human labor, resources, profits
... in perpetuity. Any nation not speaking out against monetary imperialism, hegemony &
dominance, is COMPLICIT in its crimes.
"Americans have a choice. Either continue to quarrel over trivialities or wake up, really
wake up, to the reality being planned and do something about it.
The future is shaped by investment choices. Not by naughty speech, not even by elections,
but by investment choices. For the people to regain power, they must reassert their command
over how and for what purposes capital is invested. And if private capital balks, it must be
socialized. This is the only revolution – and it is also the only conservatism, the
only way to conserve DECENT human life. It is what real politics is about."
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. Tolkien
India's decision to ban Mastercard from issuing new debit and credit cards in the country
could be a win for the government's own payment systems -- and that's not all good news.
On July 14, the Reserve Bank of
India (RBI) said US-based Mastercard had not complied with
data storage rules from 2018 (pdf) that require foreign card networks to store Indian
payments data within the country so the regulator can have "unfettered supervisory access." The
ban on Mastercard will come into effect on July 22. RBI's move will not impact existing
customers of Mastercard.
Most banks in India provide
four types of debit and credit cards : Visa, Mastercard, Maestro (a part of the Mastercard
enterprise), and RuPay. Of these, only RuPay is Indian, and until its launch in 2012, the
sector was dominated by foreign players.
With one of these four out of the picture, for now, experts believe, RuPay could be the one
player to see exceptional gains. This is particularly because of the Narendra Modi government's
tough stance against foreign card companies in recent years.
" The dependence on foreign brands will be consciously reduced as the government seems
focussed on making homegrown one successful. This probably a nudge for the banks to seriously
consider the homegrown names," said Mumbai-based independent market analyst Ambareesh
Baliga.
Mastercard, RuPay, and UPI
The ban on Mastercard, the world's second-largest payments processor, comes after India's
central bank, in May, barred American Express and Diners Club International from issuing new
cards
due to similar violations .
Walmart Brings Automation To Regional Distribution Centers BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY,
JUL 18, 2021 - 09:00 PM
The progressive press had a field day with "woke" Walmart highly
publicized February decision to hikes wages for 425,000 workers to an average above $15 an
hour. We doubt the obvious follow up - the ongoing stealthy replacement of many of its minimum
wage workers with machines - will get the same amount of airtime.
As Chain Store
Age reports , Walmart is applying artificial intelligence to the palletizing of products in
its regional distribution centers. I.e., it is replacing thousands of workers with robots.
Since 2017, the discount giant has worked with Symbotic to optimize an automated technology
solution to sort, store, retrieve and pack freight onto pallets in its Brooksville, Fla.,
distribution center. Under Walmart's existing system, product arrives at one of its RDCs and is
either cross-docked or warehoused, while being moved or stored manually. When it's time for the
product to go to a store, a 53-foot trailer is manually packed for transit. After the truck
arrives at a store, associates unload it manually and place the items in the appropriate
places.
Leveraging the Symbiotic solution, a complex algorithm determines how to store cases like
puzzle pieces using high-speed mobile robots that operate with a precision that speeds the
intake process and increases the accuracy of freight being stored for future orders. By using
dense modular storage, the solution also expands building capacity.
In addition, by using palletizing robotics to organize and optimize freight, the Symbiotic
solution creates custom store- and aisle-ready pallets.
Why is Walmart doing this? Simple: According to CSA, "Walmart expects to save time, limit
out-of-stocks and increasing the speed of stocking and unloading." More importantly, the
company hopes to further cut expenses and remove even more unskilled labor from its supply
chain.
This solution follows tests of similar automated warehouse solutions at a Walmart
consolidation center in Colton, Calif., and perishable grocery distribution center in Shafter,
Calif.
Walmart plans to implement this technology in 25 of its 42 RDCs.
"Though very few Walmart customers will ever see into our warehouses, they'll still be able
to witness an industry-leading change, each time they find a product on shelves," said Joe
Metzger, executive VP of supply chain operations at Walmart U.S. "There may be no way to solve
all the complexities of a global supply chain, but we plan to keep changing the game as we use
technology to transform the way we work and lead our business into the future."
Controversial author Michael Wolff (of
dubious Trump White House 'tell-all' and
earpiece malarkey fame) was trotted out on CNN Sunday, where he proceeded (was allowed) to
excoriate "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter for doing a "terrible job" and being "full of
sanctimony."
"You become part of, one of the parts of the problem of the media. You know, you come on
here, and you have a monopoly on truth - you know, you know exactly how things are supposed to
be done. You know, you are why one of the reasons people can't stand the media, I'm sorry."
said Wolff.
... ... ...
Were Wolff's comments truly off-the-cuff? Or as one Zero Hedge reader suggested, could CNN
be resorting to a "very strategic capitulation" in order to "turn over a new leaf" and regain
credibility amid dismal ratings and all-time low trust in the media?
Controversial author Michael Wolff (of
dubious Trump White House 'tell-all' and
earpiece malarkey fame) was trotted out on CNN Sunday, where he proceeded (was allowed) to
excoriate "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter for doing a "terrible job" and being "full of
sanctimony."
"You become part of, one of the parts of the problem of the media. You know, you come on
here, and you have a monopoly on truth - you know, you know exactly how things are supposed to
be done. You know, you are why one of the reasons people can't stand the media, I'm sorry."
said Wolff.
... ... ...
Were Wolff's comments truly off-the-cuff? Or as one Zero Hedge reader suggested, could CNN
be resorting to a "very strategic capitulation" in order to "turn over a new leaf" and regain
credibility amid dismal ratings and all-time low trust in the media?
Walmart Brings Automation To Regional Distribution Centers BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY,
JUL 18, 2021 - 09:00 PM
The progressive press had a field day with "woke" Walmart highly
publicized February decision to hikes wages for 425,000 workers to an average above $15 an
hour. We doubt the obvious follow up - the ongoing stealthy replacement of many of its minimum
wage workers with machines - will get the same amount of airtime.
As Chain Store
Age reports , Walmart is applying artificial intelligence to the palletizing of products in
its regional distribution centers. I.e., it is replacing thousands of workers with robots.
Since 2017, the discount giant has worked with Symbotic to optimize an automated technology
solution to sort, store, retrieve and pack freight onto pallets in its Brooksville, Fla.,
distribution center. Under Walmart's existing system, product arrives at one of its RDCs and is
either cross-docked or warehoused, while being moved or stored manually. When it's time for the
product to go to a store, a 53-foot trailer is manually packed for transit. After the truck
arrives at a store, associates unload it manually and place the items in the appropriate
places.
Leveraging the Symbiotic solution, a complex algorithm determines how to store cases like
puzzle pieces using high-speed mobile robots that operate with a precision that speeds the
intake process and increases the accuracy of freight being stored for future orders. By using
dense modular storage, the solution also expands building capacity.
In addition, by using palletizing robotics to organize and optimize freight, the Symbiotic
solution creates custom store- and aisle-ready pallets.
Why is Walmart doing this? Simple: According to CSA, "Walmart expects to save time, limit
out-of-stocks and increasing the speed of stocking and unloading." More importantly, the
company hopes to further cut expenses and remove even more unskilled labor from its supply
chain.
This solution follows tests of similar automated warehouse solutions at a Walmart
consolidation center in Colton, Calif., and perishable grocery distribution center in Shafter,
Calif.
Walmart plans to implement this technology in 25 of its 42 RDCs.
"Though very few Walmart customers will ever see into our warehouses, they'll still be able
to witness an industry-leading change, each time they find a product on shelves," said Joe
Metzger, executive VP of supply chain operations at Walmart U.S. "There may be no way to solve
all the complexities of a global supply chain, but we plan to keep changing the game as we use
technology to transform the way we work and lead our business into the future."
India's decision to ban Mastercard from issuing new debit and credit cards in the country
could be a win for the government's own payment systems -- and that's not all good news.
On July 14, the Reserve Bank of
India (RBI) said US-based Mastercard had not complied with
data storage rules from 2018 (pdf) that require foreign card networks to store Indian
payments data within the country so the regulator can have "unfettered supervisory access." The
ban on Mastercard will come into effect on July 22. RBI's move will not impact existing
customers of Mastercard.
Most banks in India provide
four types of debit and credit cards : Visa, Mastercard, Maestro (a part of the Mastercard
enterprise), and RuPay. Of these, only RuPay is Indian, and until its launch in 2012, the
sector was dominated by foreign players.
With one of these four out of the picture, for now, experts believe, RuPay could be the one
player to see exceptional gains. This is particularly because of the Narendra Modi government's
tough stance against foreign card companies in recent years.
" The dependence on foreign brands will be consciously reduced as the government seems
focussed on making homegrown one successful. This probably a nudge for the banks to seriously
consider the homegrown names," said Mumbai-based independent market analyst Ambareesh
Baliga.
Mastercard, RuPay, and UPI
The ban on Mastercard, the world's second-largest payments processor, comes after India's
central bank, in May, barred American Express and Diners Club International from issuing new
cards
due to similar violations .
A smartphone is a spying device from which one also can make phone calls. After Prism is
should be clear to anybody that goverments intercepts your email messages and record your phone
calls just because they can.
"..reporters identified more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries. They included
several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists,
189 journalists and more than 600 politicians and government officials – including several
heads of state and prime ministers." -- and all those idiots use plain vanilla Anroid or IOS.
Nice. They probably have no money to buy a basic phone for $14 or so. That does not save from
wiretapping but at least saves from such malware.
Southfront reports that an Israeli company's spyware was used in attempted and successful
hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, government officials and human rights
activists around the world, according to an investigation by 17 media organizations, published
on July 18th.
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.472.0_en.html#goog_621104237 12 Retailers
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Target UP NEXT Boeing Finds Flaws in 787 Dreamliners, Cuts Delivery Target Big Tech, Earnings,
Meme Stock Momentum – On TheStreet Monday Target, Walgreens close early due to thefts in
California stores Rose McGowan supports Britney Spears' over conservatorship Rose McGowan is
"brutally angry" about Britney Spears' conservatorship How To Check if You're Actually Getting
a Good Deal on Prime Day
One of the organizations, The Washington Post, said the Pegasus spyware licensed by
Israel-based NSO Group also was used to target phones belonging to two women close to Jamal
Khashoggi, a Post columnist murdered at a Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018.
One of them was his fiancee, and she and the other woman were targeted both before and after
his death.
The Guardian, another of the media outlets, said the investigation suggested "widespread and
continuing abuse" of NSO's hacking software , described as malware that infects smartphones to
enable the extraction of messages, photos and emails; record calls; and secretly activate
microphones.
The investigation highlights widespread and continuing abuse of NSO's hacking spyware called
'Pegasus' which the company confirms is only intended for use against terrorist groups, drug
and human traffickers, and criminals.
Pegasus is a very advanced malware that infects iOS and Android devices to allow operators
of the spyware to copy messages, photos, calls and other data, including secretly activate
microphones and cameras.
Based on the investigation, the leak contains a list of 50,000 phone numbers that have been
identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.
The list includes many close family members of one country's ruler, suggesting he might have
instructed the country's intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of tracking and
spying on their own relatives.
anti-bolshevik 8 hours ago (Edited)
Two articles from Motherboard Vice:
Is Israel EXEMPT from the ' rules-based order ' that Biden / Blinken / Yellen constantly
affirm?
Any incoming Sanctions? Any Treasury asset-seziures?
Motherboard uncovered more evidence that NSO Group ran hacking infrastructure in
the United States.
A former NSO employee provided Motherboard with the IP address of a server setup to
infect phones with NSO's Pegasus hacking tool. Motherboard granted the source anonymity
to protect them from retaliation from the company.
The licensor of software is not the user of the software. An Israeli company developed
it and may have used it.
In weapons terms, an Israeli company was the arms developer.
However, there are the licensees and users of the software. The factions and individuals
who actually used this weapon of war and political coercion.
In weapons terms, there are others, like the US and other country intelligence
communities who will be the ones who pulled the trigger.
The "trigger pullers include the Bolshevik Democrat party and the Biden campaign, which
used it to control citizens through intelligence gathering (remember Judge Roberts?) and
extract political donations from corporations and rich individuals. Don't forget the
Globalist GOP RINOs and Tech monopolists, who have used this weapon to control and subvert
anyone that they need to subjugate.
Bye bye Apple, Xiomi and Google Android. You just lost your market of brainwashed sheep
for new mobile phones. Even the unwashed Joe Six-Packs of this world now know they are
being manipulated with the phones that are so expensive.
MASTER OF UNIVERSE 11 hours ago
I've spent many years studying Experimental Psychology & Personality Theory and can
honestly state that malware can't determine appropriate behavioural signals intelligence
enough to act responsibly, or judiciously.
Algos are dependent upon Behavioural Science & human analytics. They are crude tools
that employ hit & miss techniques that hardly ever work accurately.
Israeli intelligence tries to look state of the art, but they are just as dimwitted as
the CIA.
WorkingClassMan 10 hours ago
They might be dimwitted and hamfisted but like an elephant with a lobotomy they can
still do a lot of damage flailing around. Worst part about it is them not caring about the
consequences.
NAV 10 hours ago remove link
It's amazing how the "dimwits" control the entire apparatus of the most powerful Empire
in the world and the entire world media.
2banana 12 hours ago (Edited)
It's not just some politicians and journalists.
It's everyone.
Your phone spys on you in every possible way.
Pegasus is a very advanced malware that infects iOS and Android devices to allow
operators of the spyware to copy messages, photos, calls and other data, including
secretly activate microphones and cameras.
gregga777 12 hours ago (Edited)
It's been widely for at least a decade that carrying a smart phone is really like wiring
oneself up for 24/7/365 audio and/or video surveillance. They only have themselves to blame
if they've been spied upon by the world's so-called secret intelligence agencies.
[Ed. The next time in a crowded public space, turn on Wi-Fi and count the number of
unlocked phones under the "Other Networks" menu.]
truth or go home 12 hours ago
If you have no phone, and no facebook, then you are likely immune from prosecution. My
neighbor the Fed agent told me 10 years ago that these two sources are 90% of every
investigation. That number has only gone up. They track you with it, they find out your
contacts with it. They find out your secrets with it. Just try to get either of those
things anonymously. You can't.
philipat 11 hours ago remove link
Land of the Free....
Ura Bonehead PREMIUM 7 hours ago
'truth or go home', 'having no Facebook' doesn't help you as FB secures the same
information via data-sharing arrangements with any number of apps you may download, that
came on your phone, or are embedded deep on your phone. Just a fact.
Steeley 4 hours ago
A friend that lives in Pahrump, NV reports that every time he crosses into California a
smart phone Covid Health Tracking App activates and he starts getting notifications. Can't
turn it off or find where it resides. When he crosses back into Nevada it stops.
E5 10 hours ago
"After checking their claims, we firmly deny the false allegations made in their
report,"
Really? So if 99 claims are true and one false? Never did they say there was truth to
the accusation that they hacked phones.
If you are going to commit a crime I suppose you want to "issue a statement" that you
didn't. I guess we have to ask them 2 more times: then it is a rule that you must tell all.
No minion can resist the same question three times.
zzmop 9 hours ago (Edited)
Keyword -'Israeli', Not Russian, Israeli, Not 'Russian hackers', Israeli hackers
eatapeach 9 hours ago
This is old news. Congresswoman Jane Harman was all for spying/eavesdropping until she
got busted selling her power to Israel, LOL.
consistentliving PREMIUM 7 hours ago
Not USA fake paper pushers but Mexican journalists deserve mention here
Revealed: murdered journalist's number selected by Mexican NSO client
Israel doesn't respect human rights!. Israel has been killing defenseless people in
Palestine for more than 50 years. The sad thing is that US support these genocidal sick
sycophats.
wizteknet 10 hours ago
Where's a list of infected software?
vova_3.2018 9 hours ago (Edited)
Where's a list of infected software?
If they take yr phone under control they'd have access to everything & then they can
use the info against you or anybody else in the info. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuBuyv6kUKI
Israeli spy-wear "Candiru" works a little bet different than Pegasus but is also used to
hack & track journalists and activists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWEJS0f6P6k
The magic number of "6 million" will be the Get out of Jail Card once again.
And, these idiots keep preaching about the great risk China poses...
Steeley 4 hours ago
Embedded in the OS...
Kugelhagel 12 hours ago (Edited)
Is that article an attempt to get some sympathy for "politicians", "journalists" and
"activists"? Try again.
HippieHaulers 11 hours ago
Exactly. Don't forget Kashogi was CIA. And they're using another asset (Snowden) to roll
this out. This story stinks.
WhiteCulture 7 hours ago (Edited)
I installed Nice Systems onto 600 desk tops in 2003 at 3 separate call centers, a call
monitoring and a PC, mainframe CICS, or email, screen scrape capability. When the call
audio was recorded we also captured whatever was on the screen. No doubt the government has
been doing this on our phones and all personal computers for over a decade.
TheInformed 7 hours ago
Your example shows that people are dumb, it's not evidence of some grand 'government
backdoor' conspiracy. Don't conflate the two.
two hoots 10 hours ago (Edited)
Forget the petty herd/individual surveillance, this is a "super power" tool for
investment opportunities, negotiation advantage, strategic decisions, military/covert
decisions, etc. you can be sure that the most improved (undisclosed) versions are in use in
the usual suspect country. Likely spying on the spy's that bought the software from them.
These are those steps beyond Nietzsche's amoral supra-man.
Globalist Overlord 12 hours ago
Whitney Webb was writing about this in 2018.
Snowden: Israeli Spyware Used By Governments to Pursue Journalists Targeted for
Assassination
If Pegasus is used against Human Traffic-ers, then why didnt they get Jeffrey Epstein
earlier?
Occams_Razor_Trader 11 hours ago
Why 'get' people when you can 'use' these people ........................?
RasinResin 11 hours ago
I use to be in IT and worked in association with Radcom. Now you may ask who is that?
They are the Israeli company that is truly behind all monitoring and spying of your phones
in America
"Reuters' spokesman Dave Moran said, "Journalists must be allowed to report the news
in the public interest without fear of harassment or harm, wherever they are. We are
aware of the report and are looking into the matter."
I love the sanctimonious clutching of pearls, wringing of hands, and bleating from the
purveyors of CCP propaganda, woketardness, and globalism whenever the velvet hand that
feeds them punishes them with a throat punch instead.
donebydoug 11 hours ago
Journalists can't be spies, right? That would never happen.
Watt Supremacist 12 hours ago
Yes but do the people working for Reuters know all that?
nowhereman 11 hours ago
Just look at the signature on your paycheck.
Grumbleduke 11 hours ago
they're in the news business - of course they don't!
You know the adage "when your livelihood depends on not knowing" or something....
Enraged 10 hours ago
Listening in on calls is a distraction story by the propaganda media.
The real story is the blackmailing of politicians, judges, corporate executives, etc.
for many years by the intelligence agencies with tapes of them with underage girls and
boys. This was included in the Maxwell/Esptein story.
These people are compromised, which is the reason for the strange decisions they make,
as they support the globalist elite.
There is no reason to spy on journalists, as they are part of the intelligence agency
operations.
Max21c 10 hours ago (Edited)
There is no reason to spy on journalists, as they are part of the intelligence agency
operations.
True the press are either spies or puppets and vassals of Big Brother and the secret
police. They're all mostly agents of the Ministry of Truth. But sometimes they get the
weather report right.
Wayoutwilly 12 hours ago remove link
Bet they have sh!t on Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett too.
Brushy 11 hours ago
Wait a minute, you mean the tracking spy device that you carry around and put all of
your personal information on is actually tracking and spying on you?!!
Dis-obey 10 hours ago remove link
They have data on everyone but not enough eyes to look at everyone all the time. So when
you get flagged then they can open all the data on your device to investigate
u.
ay_arrow
Yog Soggoth 10 hours ago
Khashoggi was not a journalist. While interesting, this is not the story of the
year.
Lawn.Dart 10 hours ago
Almost every intellegence agent is a writer of some kind.
Max21c 10 hours ago
NOS is just one company out of many. They have the willing complicity of the security
services of other countries including the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOJ, in the USA and similar per
UK. Secret police use these special contractors to help them engage in crimes and criminal
activities and it does not matter whether the secret police use a foreign or domestic
secret police agency or contractor as they're all in on it together. It's just a criminal
underworld of secret police, secret police bureaus & agencies, and "intelligence"
agencies. They're all crooked. They're all crooks and criminals and thieves that rob and
persecute innocent civilians just like the Bolsheviks, Nazis, Gestapo, Waffen SS, Viet
Kong, Khmer Rouge, Red Guards, ISIS, Stasi, KGB, etc. It's all the same or similar secret
police, police state tactics, state security apparatus abuses of power, absolute power
& its abuses, and spy agencies and intelligence agencies... and those that go along
with it and collaborate. It's all just criminal enterprises and crime agencies.
So you can solve the 10,000 open murder investigations in Chicago with this. That's how
its being used right...
Bostwick9 10 hours ago
"We are deeply troubled to learn that two AP journalists, along with journalists from
many news organizations, are among those who may have been targeted by Pegasus spyware,"
said Director of AP Media Relations Lauren Easton.
OMG . Not journalists !!!!!!!!!!
Guess NSO is a "buy", then.
NAV 11 hours ago remove link
To believe that the Israelis will not use the information that they have is absurd.
Here's one example:
The American Anti-Defamation League under Abe Foxman long made it a practice for decades
to tail all Congressmen – liberal or conservative -- as was brought out in
allegations in the San Francisco trial of its head operative Roy Bullock on charges of
buying blackmail information from members of the San Francisco Police Department as
reported by the San Francisco Examiner. Bullock had collected information and provided it
to the ADL as a secretly-paid independent contractor for more than 32 years.
Can it be that there's a connection between data of this kind and the unbelievable
unification of almost every congressman behind every Israeli position?
Of course, the San Francisco Examiner no longer is in existence. But Israeli trolls
continue to gather like wasps upon meat to destroy any information that might reveal their
nefarious purposes.
In 1993 the FBI interviewed
40-year undercover ADL operative Roy Bullock , who had improperly obtained social
security numbers and drivers licenses from San Francisco Police Department officer Tom
Gerard. Gerard and Bullock infiltrated and obtained information on California
Pro-Palestinian and anti-Apartheid groups as paid agents of both the ADL and South
African intelligence services. The ADL paid tens of thousands in damages over the
incident and promised not to collect confidential information in the future.
SARC '
novictim 8 hours ago
What do you want to bet that Orange Hitler and associates along with MAGA Republicans,
their attorneys, friendly patriot reporters, etc, have had their phones widely hacked going
all the way back to 2016?
Because when you are a "progressive" in power, anyone who wants to unseat you is a
terrorist threat and you can do just about anything you want to them because you are saving
the world.
Sarrazin 8 hours ago
unseat you is a terrorist threat and you can do just about anything you want to them
because you are saving the world.
Funny, it's the same formula US foreign policy applies to all it's victims nations
around the world. Fighting terrorists in the name of saving the world.
LEEPERMAX 9 hours ago (Edited)
💥BOOM !!!
In 2020 alone, Facebook and Amazon spent more money on
lobbyists than did Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing -- major players
in the defense-industrial complex !!!
Let that sink in.
OldNewB 11 hours ago
"Journalists must be allowed to report the news in the public interest without fear of
harassment or harm, wherever they are."
This hasn't happened in ages. What the large majority of MSM operatives (so called
"journalists" ) convey to the public is propaganda and agenda driven misinformation and
disinformation.
SummerSausage PREMIUM 12 hours ago
Obama spying on Trump and Fox reporters - meh.
Same Obama intelligence services spying on WaPo & leftist reporters - FASCIST
Mute Button 11 hours ago
We're supposed to be outraged even though Trump & co. know they're being "spied"
on.
Its just a game of the uniparty.
Ivy Mike 8 hours ago
Yawn. Smart phones have swiss cheese security. Who knew.
If you have a secret that you really don't want people to know, don't put in on a device
that ever touches the internet. Don't talk about important stuff on a phone call. Any mob
boss from the 70's could tell you that.
MeLurkLongtime 5 hours ago
I would add if you have Alexa, don't converse on any sensitive topics in front of her,
either.
_0000_ 9 hours ago remove link
" Pegasus is a very advanced malware that infects iOS and Android devices to allow
operators of the spyware to copy messages, photos, calls and other data, including
secretly activate microphones and cameras."
This is a non-story. Lots of smoke, lots of brew-ha-ha.
Why is THIS a jaw dropping story now when the NSA/CIA have been doing this to ALL iOS
and Android devices years ago? RE: CALEA , signed into law in 1996 by Bill Clinton.
Just more misdirection... meant to distract from something else. What?
Rectify77 PREMIUM 10 hours ago
Isn't it odd that Iran, Russia and China are not on the map? Who are the Israelis
playing?
NAV 10 hours ago
Isn't is amazing that Russia is giving asylum to Edward Snowden who will be arrested and
inflicted with only God knows what if captured by the USA?
Market Pulse 13 hours ago
And we are surprised, why??? Everyone's phones are spied upon with all the data
collected. All part and parcel of the NWO and the "Information Age". How else are they
going to get all that information to control everything. And just think, once upon a time,
there were no cell phones and the people were fine. They also were happier and much more
free. Hint - ditch the phone!
dog breath 4 hours ago
Hello? This stuff has been going on for two decades. Bill Binney, former NSA, been
talking about this since after 911. Five eyes is a way over going around internal rules.
Every country does this. Russia, China, EU, USA, Australia, etc. are all spying on their
own citizens. This world is turning into a corrupt crap pile and I'm waiting for the Lord
to come.
My fellow whites...Israel is our greatest ally. We must daily remind ourselves of the 6
million **** who died at the hands of our fellow whites! And those 6 Isreali subs full of
innocent sailors that were torpedoed to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea by the USS
Liberty! Israel is a tiny nation of 9 million honest and industrious people that needs our
support like never before. The mere $3.3 BILLION dollars we send them every year for
military aid is a fine start as it keeps them safe from the millions of stone age
Palestinian terrorists on their doorstep. Think of the thousands of incendiary kites our
tax dollars have stopped from landing on Israeli soil! But, my fellow whites, military aid
does not go nearly far enough. There are literally thousands of elderly Israeli women on
the verge of starvation who will perish without our help. We must therefore open our
pockets as well as the coffers of our churches across this great nation and shower the tiny
nation of Israel with all the blessings our forefathers and God has bestowed upon us. As
our Israeli friends are truly God's Chosen people, we all know they certainly deserve it
and we will be rewarded many times over for our generosity.
UnicornTears 12 hours ago
/s
Ronaldo PREMIUM 12 hours ago (Edited)
Sounds like software that is very beneficial. It backs up all your important files,
manages your contacts list, and keeps track of your calendar. All without any bother to
you! /s
StaySunny3000 12 hours ago
Israel again. Are we surprised? They've got global communications cornered both
literally and figuratively.
DEMIZEN 2 hours ago remove link
meanwhile the cnn news:
Ben & Jerry's will stop selling ice cream in Palestinian territories
Imagine realizing that you didn't do your research and take it...then learn the
truth.
Timmay 1 hour ago
It's the subscription model.....
bigjim 58 minutes ago
MicroSoft Vaccine365
MoonWatcher 35 minutes ago
Just imagine all the mental gymnastics they are doing to convince themselves that their
persuasion was medically based. And not a lie being driven by mainstream media, especially
if they took the shots out of social pressure and coercion. Hilarious.
Musum 1 hour ago
I heard that if you take Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and J&J in that order. And
then in reverse order. And then a booster shot in random order, the effectiveness jumps
from 64% to 65%.
"For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional
media, according to data from Edelman's annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios.
Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%."
CNN, especially, among the worst of the worst, is in a
tailspin .
Update (2130ET): Tucker Carlson responded to today's 'unmasking' - namely an Axios report
which accuses him of trying to set up an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"I'm an American citizen, I can interview whoever I want - and plan to," said the Fox News
host.
Presented without further comment, along with Carlson's sit-down with journalist Glenn
Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden revelations about domestic spying and other illicit
activities conducted by the US government.
Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a bombshell broadcast that an NSA
whistleblower had approached him with evidence that the National Security Agency
has been spying on his communications , with the intent to leak his emails to the press and
'take this show off the air.'
Today, Carlson told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo that the emails have in fact been leaked
to journalists - at least one of whom has contacted him for what we presume is an upcoming
article on their contents.
"I was in Washington for a funeral last week and ran into someone I know well, who said '
I have a message for you ,' and then proceeded to repeat back to me details from emails and
texts that I sent, and had told no one else about. So it was verified. And the person said
'the NSA has this,' and that was proven by the person reading back the contents of the email,
'and they're going to use it against you.'
To be blunt with you, it was something I would have never said in public if it was wrong,
or illegal, or immoral. They don't actually have anything on me, but they do have my emails.
So I knew they were spying on me, and again, to be totally blunt with you - as a defensive
move, I thought 'I better say this out loud.'"
"Then, yesterday, I learned that - and this is going to come out soon - that the NSA
leaked the contents of my email to journalists in an effort to discredit me. I know, because
I got a call from one of them who said 'this is what your email was about.'
So, it is not in any way a figment of my imagination. It's confirmed. It's true. They
aren't allowed to spy on American citizens - they are. I think more ominously, they're using
the information they gather to put leverage and to threaten opposition journalists, people
who criticize the Biden administration. It's happening to me right now..."
" This is the stuff of banana republics and third-world countries ," replied Bartiromo.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is the front-runner so far for 2021's bad timing prize. The
Justice Department last month rushed out a lawsuit claiming that Georgia's new election law
violates Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act only days before the Supreme Court laid down
standards that make the lawsuit a nearly certain loser.
Justice knew the likely timing of the Court's ruling in Brnovich v. DNC, so a fair guess is
that Mr. Garland succumbed to White House and progressive pressure to make a political
statement to support Democratic efforts in Congress to federalize state election laws in
H.R.1.
Bad call. Now federal judges hearing the case will have to contend with Justice Samuel
Alito's five principles in Brnovich as they assess the Georgia statute.
It won't be easy to find legal fault under those principles. Mere voting inconvenience can't
be considered disqualifying, since all voting imposes some inconvenience. Any specific voting
provision, such as the number of drop boxes, must also be considered in the overall context of
a state's voting rules. Georgia's rules are generally lenient and don't especially burden the
ability of minorities to vote.
Perhaps Justice can find a federal judge somewhere to rule against Georgia, but such a
ruling is unlikely to survive on appeal to higher courts. The legal and political result of the
lawsuit is therefore likely to vindicate Georgia Republicans during the 2022 election season or
leading up to 2024, depending on how the lawsuits proceed. Mr. Garland would be wise to drop
the suit in light of Brnovich, lest his term at Justice be marred by the continuation of this
patently political lawsuit.
Given what we have seen of Mr. Garland thus far in his questionable legal performance as AG,
it is looking like the Republicans were prescient in blocking his appointment to the Supreme
Court.
David Schmidt
Politics will always supersede good judgment.
DON WILLINGHAM
Yep, apparently its a burden for some of the libs to put a stamp on an ballot and mail it it
(I'm going one step beyond the extraordinary burden of getting off your behind to go to a
local polling location).
paul grunder
Looks like Coca Cola and Major L. baseball made a mistake. do you think they will have second
thoughts about leaving GA.? I know I now love Pepsi and don't watch baseball much at all
anymore. You can bet someone in each organization is saying, how do we save face over this.
p's wife
Brien Akers
None of this matters. Not lawsuits, not SCOTUS rulings, not State election laws, not lower
court rulings. None of it matters. Why? Because the Democrats know that they cannot win
without cheating as surely as they know the sun is going to rise tomorrow. That means they
will simply ignore all the laws and do they same thing in 2024 that they did in 2020. Ask
yourself this: Who's going to stop them? Question number two: Who will reverse the election
results?
DON WILLINGHAM
Tell us what citizen cannot vote in the next election? (no, felons don't count). Its not
hard to vote. Besides, where were all the whiners 4 years ago, 8 years, 20 years ago if GA's
laws were so restrictive. This is such nonsense.
Greg Elsden
I say keep going, Garland. Your party is known for epic fails (eg Russian Delusion and two
impeachments).
Steven S
The chances of DoJ voluntarily dismissing its lawsuit against Georgia's
more-lax-and-liberal-than-Delaware's voting regulations are somewhere between slim and none.
And Slim has left town.
Litigation of this kind takes years to wind its way through the lower courts and to reach
SCOTUS. By then, the Supreme Court could be packed with Justices of the same mindset as the
dissenters in Brnovich.
Only the "Jim Crow" Filibuster stands in the way of court packing.
David Alan
Another reminder that we dodged a bullet by not sending Merrick Garland through to
SCOTUS.
Robert Bridges
Amen to that. He isn't a moderate after all...
Jim Walsh
Democrats need the issue so that they can continue to use minorities, who they truly think
are too stupid to vote. It is insulting and stupid,
James Stock
Garland is really just a bureaucrat with a law degree. Deep down, he doesn't believe is this
ridiculous lawsuit. He made a deal with the devil by working for an incompetent president.
But wait: wasn't this recent rise in wages in real terms being propagandized as a new boom
for the working class in the USA by the MSM until some days ago?
Why there is so much social pressure if the idea of "herd immunity" became a fiasco after
emergence of Delta variant, which like South African variant can infect vaccinated people and
thus can spread in vaccinated population (although not as quickly as in unvaccinated population).
What government medical bureaucrats like Fauci are hiding ?
I am retired in the US so I only see some of the working world through others eyes. What I
am seeing more of is pressure to take the vaccine in US even though the infection numbers are
going down in most states.
I have shared before that I have a cousin, my age, that got one of the mRNA vaccines and
now has some sort of blood cancer. I believe this is related to the mRNA vaccines and that
more cases like my cousin will occur and eventually it will effect an "important" someone who
the MSM can't suppress the connection to the vaccines and the flood gates of related cases
like my cousin will open....can you imagine what the blowback will be??.....the jaded in me
says they are planning on that blowback to keep the chaos/fear/manipulation level
high.....its all China's fault/snark
What is the final straw that will bring the barbarian shit show to a halt? Inquiring minds
want to know. What will finally break through the brainwashing?
There is also technological imperialism. As long as key technologies (for example CPU
production) are controlled by the USA the project of power via sanctions is possible and viable.
But the USA demined this regime due to the greed of neoliberal elite which offshored a lot of
production to China and Taiwan.
Is your nation sovereign (independent) or a suzerainty (controlled)? Who wants to make us
all, whether we be nations or individuals, ENSLAVED? Name a democracy that isn't a
suzerainty.
Today slavery is less about people owning other people, instead, it is about exploiting
and controlling them. The Financial Empire wants to build a global empire by capturing
various regions, privatizing their assets and controlling them using financial mechanisms.
Its CONTROL elements are:
-- MEDIA -> Mind. Control individual's & society's information and RICHNESS of
thinking. The media enables matrix & servitude.
-- MARKETS -> Money. Control individual's REACH of influence & impact by
controlling their money supply and its value. Majority (90+%) of money is created by private
banks controlled by the Global Financial Syndicate. This enables it to consolidate assets
with its kleptocrats and power with its elites (financial, political, bureaucrats,
business,...).
-- MIS (Military Intelligence Service) -> Might. If the individual/society/elites wants
to be independent and have marshaled enough resources to build a good RESISTANCE then they're
constrained or eliminated by intelligence agencies, coup masters or use of force.
However, the foundation of this Financial Empire is based on lies, myths, deceits, frauds,
... What is its Achilles' Heel?
"It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery. These
may, perhaps, succeed at first, and limp along on hope for awhile with a flourishing
appearance. But time betrays their weakness, and they eventually fall into ruin of their own
designs."
– Demosthenes
But it shows the fundamental contradictions of global capitalism: on the one hand, the
internationalization of division of labor as an aspect of technological advancement; on the
other hand, divisions and rivalries between states and the monopolistic ambitions of
technological leaders, which act against cooperation, mutual gain and ultimately human and
social development for all.
This is why capitalism has to be overthrown and eradicated. It is anti-development for the
poor. And its fundamental dynamics of geopolitical division pave the way for world war.
Piotr Berman@54 advocates compromising with imperialism. Sadly, imperialism doesn't return
the favor. The operation of the imperialist world system inevitably leads to economic crises,
which cannot be resolved by a good policy, because it's the system that is crazy. The system
makes the people running it go nuts, not the overlords being crazy that cause things to go
nuts. World economic crises, including the inability to cope with world systemic threats like
climate change, inevitably afflict the poor worse. Reforms will not take away this disparity
in effect. Most of all, of course, war, threats of war, fears of war, arms races,
interventions, economic sieges are indispensable to the normal function of the imperialist
world system.
You can't win a rigged game. Telling people they should play anyhow because it's the only
game in town, makes no sense.
When the end of the road comes into view, it's too late. Insisting on mile markers till
the catastrophe is not wisdom.
I admit to some amusement over the suspension of the female American sprinter Sha'Carri
Richardson by WADA. Imagine if she were Russian. WADA has waged a political war against
Russian Olympians ruling against the entire national team most of whom never used performance
enhancing drugs according to independent testing. And now the expected cries of racism
against a blood test for a banned drug. Sort of ironic I suppose, but watched a clips of
several African American sports pundits and they all agreed that rules are rules and must be
followed. It has been mostly white pundits who have virtue signaled that her suspension must
be lifted due to racism.
As
Peter Hitchens noted recently "the most bitterly funny story of the week is that a defector
from North Korea thinks that even her homeland is 'not as nuts' as the indoctrination now
forced on Western students."
One of Yeonmi Park's initial shocks upon starting classes at Colombia University was to be
met with a frown after revealing to a staff member that she enjoyed reading Jane Austen. "Did
you know," Ms. Park was sternly admonished, "that those writers had a colonial mind-set? They
were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you."
But after encountering the new requirement for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, Yeonmi
concluded: "Even North Korea is not this nuts North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this
crazy." Devastatingly honest, but not exactly a compliment to what once might have been the
land of her dreams.
Sadly, Hitchens reports that her previous experience served Yeonmi well to adapt to her new
situation: "She came to fear that making a fuss would affect her grades and her degree.
Eventually, she learned to keep quiet, as people do when they try to live under intolerant
regimes, and let the drivel wash over her."
Eastern European readers will unfailingly understand what it is that Hitchens meant to
say.
And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and
Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a
voice-recognition algorithm.
An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic
legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to
technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and
contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring
workers -- at least at the wages that employers are used to paying -- is providing new momentum
for automation.
Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a
post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some
economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power,
particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.
"Once a job is automated, it's pretty hard to turn back," said Casey Warman, an economist at
Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic .
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving
to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for
waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut
their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in
the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of
leverage , leading to higher pay
, more generous benefits and other perks.
Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those
gains. A
working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that
pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United
States but around the world.
"Six months ago, all these workers were essential," said Marc Perrone, president of the
United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. "Everyone was calling
them heroes. Now, they're trying to figure out how to get rid of them."
Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic
shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult -- so
much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back
behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while
in high school.
"We really felt like there has to be another solution," she said.
So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition
systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant's technology
began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales's drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by
an automated voice designed to understand their orders -- including modifications and special
requests -- suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the
kitchen and the cashier.
The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the
system to her three other restaurants.
"We'll look back and say why didn't we do this sooner," she said.
The push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels,
retailers ,
manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a
survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of
businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of
technology.
Some economists see the increased investment as encouraging. For much of the past two
decades, the U.S. economy has struggled with weak productivity growth, leaving workers and
stockholders to compete over their share of the income -- a game that workers tended to lose.
Automation may harm specific workers, but if it makes the economy more productive, that could
be good for workers as a whole, said Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the consulting
firm.
She cited the example of a client in manufacturing who had been pushing his company for
years to embrace augmented-reality technology in its factories. The pandemic finally helped him
win the battle: With air travel off limits, the technology was the only way to bring in an
expert to help troubleshoot issues at a remote plant.
"For the first time, we're seeing that these technologies are both increasing productivity,
lowering cost, but they're also increasing flexibility," she said. "We're starting to see real
momentum building, which is great news for the world, frankly."
Other economists are less sanguine. Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor
without adding much to overall productivity.
In a
recent working paper , Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that "a significant
portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by
automation" -- and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic.
"If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we
would have had a very different trajectory for inequality," Professor Acemoglu said.
Ms. Gonzales, the Checkers franchisee, isn't looking to cut jobs. She said she would hire 30
people if she could find them. And she has raised hourly pay to about $10 for entry-level
workers, from about $9 before the pandemic. Technology, she said, is easing pressure on workers
and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed.
"Our approach is, this is an assistant for you," she said. "This allows our employee to
really focus" on customers.
Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an
hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that
she would lose sales -- and automation allows her to take another course.
Rob Carpenter, Valyant's chief executive, noted that at most restaurants, taking
drive-through orders is only part of an employee's responsibilities. Automating that task
doesn't eliminate a job; it makes the job more manageable.
"We're not talking about automating an entire position," he said. "It's just one task within
the restaurant, and it's gnarly, one of the least desirable tasks."
But technology doesn't have to take over all aspects of a job to leave workers worse off. If
automation allows a restaurant that used to require 10 employees a shift to operate with eight
or nine, that will mean fewer jobs in the long run. And even in the short term, the technology
could erode workers' bargaining power.
"Often you displace enough of the tasks in an occupation and suddenly that occupation is no
more," Professor Acemoglu said. "It might kick me out of a job, or if I keep my job I'll get
lower wages."
At some businesses, automation is already affecting the number and type of jobs available.
Meltwich, a restaurant chain that started in Canada and is expanding into the United States,
has embraced a range of technologies to cut back on labor costs. Its grills no longer require
someone to flip burgers -- they grill both sides at once, and need little more than the press
of a button.
"You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier," said
Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. "It certainly widens the scope of who you can have
behind that grill."
With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to
the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a
shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.
Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could
significantly change workers' prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said
technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it
hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.
"If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?" Professor Warman said.
Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he
added.
The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people
without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have
reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and
check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a
375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery
customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.
Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop
& Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to
better serve customers -- and that it was a competitive necessity.
"Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and
partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers," she
said. "Stop & Shop needs to do the same."
In 2011, Patrice Thomas took a part-time job in the deli at a Stop & Shop in Norwich,
Conn. A decade later, he manages the store's prepared foods department, earning around $40,000
a year.
Mr. Thomas, 32, said that he wasn't concerned about being replaced by a robot anytime soon,
and that he welcomed technologies making him more productive -- like more powerful ovens for
rotisserie chickens and blast chillers that quickly cool items that must be stored cold.
But he worries about other technologies -- like automated meat slicers -- that seem to
enable grocers to rely on less experienced, lower-paid workers and make it harder to build a
career in the industry.
"The business model we seem to be following is we're pushing toward automation and we're not
investing equally in the worker," he said. "Today it's, 'We want to get these robots in here to
replace you because we feel like you're overpaid and we can get this kid in there and all he
has to do is push this button.'"
As of July 2, 2021 out of 4456 total deaths attributed to vaccination (of them 1890 after
vaccination with Pfizer), it looks like there were at least 36 death of people aged less then 30
years after vaccination with Pfizer vaccine (out of 61 total). Around 136 millions were fully
vaccinated,.
Other sources list higher figure (6113)
CDC- 6,113 DEAD Following COVID-19 Injections ("Besides the 6,113 deaths reported, there are
5,172 permanent disabilities, 6,435 life threatening events, and 51,558 emergency room visits."
)so my method of extracting those data from VAERS database might be wrong or not all death are
reported to VAERS.
Another 5 young people were crippled but survived (67 total).
Each year, more than 165 million Americans get the flu shot. There were 85 reported
deaths following influenza vaccination in 2017; 119 deaths in 2018; and 203 deaths in
2019
Between mid-December 2020 and April 23, 2021, at which point between 95 million and 100
million Americans had received their COVID-19 shots, there were 3,544 reported deaths
following COVID vaccination, or about 30 per day
In just four months, the COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all available
vaccines combined from mid-1997 until the end of 2013 -- a period of 15.5 years
As of April 23, 2021, VAERS had also received 12,618 reports of serious adverse events.
In total, 118,902 adverse event reports had been filed
In the European Union, the EudraVigilance system had as of April 17, 2021, received
330,218 injury reports after vaccination with one of the four available COVID vaccines,
including 7,766 deaths
In a May 5, 2021, Fox News report, Tucker Carlson asked the question no one is really
allowed to ask: "How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccine?"
1
Then there's not selling Syria the latest S#00 system to help keep Israel out of Syrian
skies. That tells me he's using Syria for personal / State gain and that is where he's wrong.
That's what makes him just another politician.
I totally get it, there are things that are puzzling to those of us in the audience,
watching the moves from afar.
An advanced S-300 or S-400 system could paint every F-16 as it took off from Israel. This
would be a red line for Israel and would bring in Uncle Shmuel.
Syria (and by extension Russia) has been allowing Israel to overfly her territory and bomb
Hezbollah installations.
It's puzzling – why would you allow a foreign power to bomb your territory, especially
if you have S-300's. The answer must be that Syria and Russia are holding back on purpose for
reasons only known to them. I can speculate, in that they don't want to give away military
capability unless the war goes hot.
Think about the situation now, as opposed to the 90's. Russia's military has been
modernized; Military physical fitness is up by 30% (better nutrition?); Foreign exchange is in
good shape; the economy is modernizing; food production is up – so Russia is no longer
food insecure; oil can be extracted at prices that Saudi cannot compete with; the Artic route
is opening up; national economy is more diversified thanks to the western sanctions; Yamal LNG
will be fueling Asia; Nordstream will be fueling Europe.
Russia under Putin stewardship has been doing more than just good given the disaster of
Yeltsin period. That's said. Russia now is just a one-man-Putin show. It's not the "Russian
system of governance."
So, the question is what would happen after Putin?
Given the fact that several "oligarchies" are pulling their strings around Putin,
another-Yeltsin is waiting at the gate of Kremlin is very likely. I hope I am wrong for the
Russians' best interests!
You need to drink a lot of "woke coke" and wearing exclusively "woke Nike" to digest those
recommendations without laughing.
History repeats, first as tragedy, second as farce. White Guard rebels during Russian civil
War called Bolsheviks "Tovatitcshi"(Comrades) as they prohibited to say Sir to the officers.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I
choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make
words mean so many different things."
As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just
broken one of the cardinal rules of his "
Politics and the English Language ," but not his final injunction to "break any of these
rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous") of politicised mind-bending. The sort of
language we are permitted to use circumscribes the thinking that we shall be allowed to engage
in. The assault on language is, therefore, an integral component of the unrelenting warfare
being waged for the conquest and control of the mind. Word elimination and reassignment of
meaning, as Orwell also presciently noted, are essential elements of the campaign to reformat
the mind and eventually to subjugate it.
A breath-taking example of how this process works was recently unveiled by the thoroughly
brain-washed students of the once prestigious Brandeis University who, this time without
prompting from their faculty elders and betters, voted to ban from their campus such odious
words and phrases as "picnic" and "you guys," for being "oppressive". "Picnic" is prohibited
because it allegedly evokes the lynching of Blacks.
The precocious young intellectuals took pains to produce an entire list of objectionable
words and phrases, shocking award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates who tweeted in
bewilderment: "What sort of punishment is doled out for a faculty member who utters the word
'picnic' at Brandeis? Or the phrase [also proscribed – S.K.] 'trigger warning'? Loss of
tenure, public flogging, self-flagellation?"
Oppressive Language
Possible Alternatives
Explanation
Killing it
Great job!
If someone is doing well, we
don't need to equate that to
Awesome!
murder!
Take a shot at
Give it a go
These expressions needlessly use
imagery of hurting someone or
Take a stab at
Try
something.
Trigger warning
Content note
The word "trigger" has
connections to guns for many
Drop-in
people; we can give the same
head's up using language less
connected to violence.
Rule of thumb
General rule
This expression comes from an
old British law allowing men to
beat their wives with sticks no
wider than their thumb.
Pknk
Outdoor eating
Tlie term picnic is often
associated with lynchings of
Black people in the United
States, during which white
spectators were said to have
watched while eating, referring
to them as picnics or other terms
involving racial slurs against
Black people.
Go off tlte reservation
Disagree with tlie group, defect
This phrase has a harmful
from the group
history rooted in the violent
removal of indigenous people
from their land and the Itorrible
consequences for someone that
left the reservation.
_arrow
Not Your Father's ZH 8 hours ago (Edited)
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and
to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. " ― George Orwell
The constant reconstruction of language is a highly effective tool when employed against
weak minds... as most folks have only a loose association with the words in their
heads...
As meanings of words are changed the ideas associated with those words change...
consequently a society can be transformed into a different society without ever answering a
single argument...
1748 (in Chesterfield's "Letters"), but the thing itself apparently was rare before c.
1800 as an English institution [OED]; it originally meant "a fashionable social affair (not
necessarily out of doors) in which every partaker contributed something to the general
table;" from French piquenique (1690s), perhaps a reduplication of piquer "to pick, peck,"
from Old French (see pike
(n.1)), or the second element may be nique "worthless thing," from a Germanic source.
As in many other riming names, the elements are used without precision, but the lit.
sense is appar. 'a picking or nibbling of bits,' a snatch, snack .... [Century
Dictionary]
The word also turns up 18c. in German, Danish, Swedish. Later "pleasure party the
members of which carry provisions with them on an excursion, as to some place in the
country." Figurative sense of "something easy" is from 1886. Picnic basket is by 1857.
Picnic table is by 1858, originally a folding table used for outdoor dining.
Meanwhile the top Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Indian etc. schools concentrating on STEM
are laughing their asses off.
John Grady 6 hours ago
Activism is now a career path so to differentiate yourself as an activist you have to
have an angle so you look busy. Endless bickering about minutia makes it look like they're
doing something.
Little wonder that here and there sanity nostalgia is gripping the Western world, at least
those isolated portions of it that are not internalising the sinister "new normal." But it is
seemingly to no avail. All commanding positions are firmly in the hands of lunatics, who are
determined to turn a once great and exemplary civilisation into an asylum.
As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just
broken one of the cardinal rules of his "
Politics and the English Language ," but not his final injunction to "break any of these
rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous") of politicised mind-bending. The sort of
language we are permitted to use circumscribes the thinking that we shall be allowed to engage
in. The assault on language is, therefore, an integral component of the unrelenting warfare
being waged for the conquest and control of the mind. Word elimination and reassignment of
meaning, as Orwell also presciently noted, are essential elements of the campaign to reformat
the mind and eventually to subjugate it.
A breath-taking example of how this process works was recently unveiled by the thoroughly
brain-washed students of the once prestigious Brandeis University who, this time without
prompting from their faculty elders and betters, voted to ban from their campus such odious
words and phrases as "picnic" and "you guys," for being "oppressive". "Picnic" is prohibited
because it allegedly evokes the lynching of Blacks.
The precocious young intellectuals took pains to produce an entire list of objectionable
words and phrases, shocking award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates who tweeted in
bewilderment: "What sort of punishment is doled out for a faculty member who utters the word
'picnic' at Brandeis? Or the phrase [also proscribed – S.K.] 'trigger warning'? Loss of
tenure, public flogging, self-flagellation?"
All three punishments will probably be applied to reactionary professors who go afoul of the
list's rigorous linguistic requirements.
Not to be outdone by the progressive kids on the East Coast, avant-garde
California legislators have passed a law to remove the pronoun "he" from state legal texts.
The momentous reform was initiated by California's new attorney general, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan,
who after looking up the job requirements made the shocking discovery that the law assumed that
the attorney general would be a man.
Upon review, it turned out that the state code and other legal documents were enabling
unacceptable concepts by using pronouns "he," "him" and "his" when referring to the attorney
general and other state-wide elected officials. Appalled, Ms. Bauer-Kahan denounced these
linguistic lapses for not representing "where California is and where California is going." She
inarguably was right on that score at least, which has perhaps also something to do with the
massive exodus of California residents to less complicated parts of the country.
When lawmakers of a state which is rapidly turning into a North American Calcutta have no
concerns more pressing than to revise the use of pronouns in official documents, that sends a
clear message where that state is going, exactly as the smart and thoroughly up-to-date woman
said.
But as a Pakistani
immigrant father in Seattle, state of Washington, discovered to his chagrin, the linguistic
clowning can have very serious personal and political consequences. After checking in his
16-year-old autistic son for treatment in what he thought was a medical facility, Ahmed was
shocked to receive a telephone call where a social worker explained to him that the child he
had originally entrusted to the medical authorities as a son was actually transgender and must
henceforth, under legal penalty of removal, be referred to and treated as a "daughter."
Coming from a traditional society still governed by tyrannical precepts of common sense and
not accustomed to the ways of the asylum where in search of a better life he and his family
inadvertently ended up, the father (a title that like mother, now officially "number one
parent," is also
on the way out ) was able to conceive his tragic predicament only by weaving a complex
conspiracy theory:
"They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to
absolutely want to push us in that direction. We had calls with counsellors and therapists in
the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender, because
that's the only way he's going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state."
Since in the equally looney state of Washington the age when minors can request a
gender-change surgery without parental consent is 13, the Pakistani parents saw clearly the
writing on the wall and, bless them, they came up with a clever stratagem to outwit their
callous ideological tormentors. Ahmed "assured Seattle Children's Hospital that he would take
his son to a gender clinic and commence his son's transition. Instead, he collected his son,
quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington."
Perhaps feeling the heat from the linguistic Gestapo even in his celebrity kitchen, iconic
chef Jamie Oliver has come on board. Absurdly, Jamie vowed
fealty to the ascendant normal by dropping the term "Kaffir lime leaves" from his recipes ,
in fear that the alleged "historically racist slur" would offend South Africans. No evidence at
all has been furnished or demanded of complaints from South Africa in that regard. But it
speaks volumes that someone of Jamie's influence and visibility should nevertheless deem it
prudent to anticipate such criticism even though, should it have materialised, it of course
would not originate from South Africa but from white Western political correctness
commissars.
Jamie is now busy, but not just cooking. He is going over his previously published recipes
in order to expunge all offensive references to kefir leaves. Orwell aficionados will recall
this precious passage from 1984 : "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed,
every date has been altered." And now every recipe as well. The dystopia fits, does it not, to
a tee even something as seemingly trivial as a cooking show?
But it is not just recipes. Children's fairy tales are also fair game for 1984 revision.
Hollywood actress Natalie Portman ( Star Wars , The Professional , Thor ), inspired
apparently by the new cultural normal, has taken it upon herself not to write, but to re-write,
several classic fairy tales to make them "gender-neutral," so "children can defy gender
stereotypes." Predictably, pronouns were again a major target:
"I found myself changing the pronouns in many of their books because so many of them had
overwhelmingly male characters, disproportionate to reality," quoth Natalie as she put her
linguistic scalpel to such old favourites as The Tortoise and the Hare , Country Mouse and
City Mouse and The Three Little Pigs .
Need we go on, or does the sharp reader already get the general drift? How about
State University of New York student Owen Stevens , who was suspended and censured for
pointing out on his Instagram the ascertainable biological fact that "A man is a man, a woman
is a woman. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man." (Owen was snitched on by fellow
students, readers from the former Eastern bloc will be amused to learn.) Or the Nebraska
university basketball coach who was suspended for using in a motivational speech the
mysteriously offensive word "plantation"? Or the hip $57,000-a-year NYC school that
banned students from saying "mom" and "dad" , from asking where classmates went on vacation
or wishing anyone "Merry Christmas" or even "Happy Holidays"? Or
female university student Lisa Keogh in Scotland who said in class "women have vaginas"
(who would be better informed than she on that subject?) and are "not as strong as men", who is
facing disciplinary action by the university after fellow classmates complained about her
"offensive and discriminatory" comments? Or
Spanish politician Francisco José Contreras whose Twitter account was blocked as a
warning for 12 hours after he tweeted what some would regard as the self-evident truth that
"men cannot get pregnant" because they have "no uterus or eggs"?
As
Peter Hitchens noted recently "the most bitterly funny story of the week is that a defector
from North Korea thinks that even her homeland is 'not as nuts' as the indoctrination now
forced on Western students."
One of Yeonmi Park's initial shocks upon starting classes at Colombia University was to be
met with a frown after revealing to a staff member that she enjoyed reading Jane Austen. "Did
you know," Ms. Park was sternly admonished, "that those writers had a colonial mind-set? They
were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you."
But after encountering the new requirement for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, Yeonmi
concluded: "Even North Korea is not this nuts North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this
crazy." Devastatingly honest, but not exactly a compliment to what once might have been the
land of her dreams.
Sadly, Hitchens reports that her previous experience served Yeonmi well to adapt to her new
situation: "She came to fear that making a fuss would affect her grades and her degree.
Eventually, she learned to keep quiet, as people do when they try to live under intolerant
regimes, and let the drivel wash over her."
Eastern European readers will unfailingly understand what it is that Hitchens meant to
say.
ay_arrow
Plus Size Model 9 hours ago
No worries! We're talking about two different things. You explicitly mentioned meanings
of words in your initial post. Now you're also alluding to what a psyop officer would
describe as manipulating the cognitive environment of a target group. Cognitive
manipulation is a much larger toolbox and involves things like perception management,
information management, memory retrieval, what old timers refer to as symbol manipulation,
etc.
In psychological warfare literature, symbols are somewhat of a mental bookmark. You can
really mess people up by altering the bookmarks slightly or changing around the files they
reference in a prolonged campaign.
The Nazi swastika is probably the most successful symbol manipulation campaign ever. It
means different things to different people and these meanings have evolved substantially
over time. Each new generation and is indoctrinated with different presentations of the
swastika. The wide latitude of interpretation and extreme views associated with it have
consistently created huge social flash points over the past 90 years.
Lorenz Feedback 9 hours ago
I think somethings are being overlooked on this point, Semantic prosody concerns itself
with the way unusual combinations of words can create intertextual 'resonance' and can
suggest speaker/writer attitude and opinion. Consider the difference with using very
powerful versus utterly compelling when presenting an argument. Some words shape narratives
better than others and trigger a response well known to advertisers and propagandists...and
help shape public opinion.
Yes... changing the context of words has a huge impact...
ie the word white is now seen in the context of numerous pejoratives...
Cautiously Pessimistic 10 hours ago
I fit in here in America less and less with each passing year. I feel like a stranger in
my own country at times. I am sure that is by design.
Max Power 9 hours ago
On the other hand, as soon as people encounter real problems like hunger, bankruptcy, or
homelessness, all this ivy league brainwashing evaporates in an instance. Just a stupid
game played by wealthy white libtards believing in fairytales.
"... The US seems to be especially vulnerable to issues caused by lack of precarity as it has such a poor welfare system, previously relying on infinite growth to smooth things over or a, now failing, religious faith to keep things in order; prolonged economic and political success that has led to a sense of entitlement and self-belief in the American way, a history of putting personal liberty above all else, which embraces competition rather than co-operation; and a world beating phobia of death well beyond when reproductive age has passed. ..."
"... The gig economy, middle class collapse, MAGA, BLM (and the police actions that prompted its rise), cancel culture, (un)reality TV's attraction, FOMO, the increase in low level strife, self-harming, on-line pornography addiction, the Oxycodone/Fentanyl epidemic etc. are all manifestations and/or causes of that precarity. Civil wars and major revolts (and almost any that succeed in their aims) tend to happen only when there is intra elite infighting rather than uprisings from below. The most likely catalyst for that at the moment is Trump, which may be a good sign given his ineffectualness, ineptitude and general repulsive lack of charisma; anyone even a bit more like a real human being could cause serious ructions. ..."
I have been reading "˜A More Contested World: Global Trends 2040' by The National
Intelligence Council; slowly as there's a lot in it but also a lot missing. No mention of
specific resource limits, no discussion of GM just general "˜technology' concerns
concentrating on AI and of course, god forbid any mention of overpopulation. It is very
US-centric "" in the good scenarios the world gets to a better place only through US leadership
"" and humanist focused with no consideration of the rights of the earth in general, only the
perpetuation of our civilisation and to that end all future scenarios are some variant of
technology led, growth obsessed, centralised BAU (maybe not with full globalism but still based
around hegemonic power structures at some level). It's a view from mainstream economists and
politicians carrying all the normal drawbacks that those words imply: i.e. bad things happen
when the world doesn't do as it's told to do by us, and if you don't agree with us about what
constitutes "˜bad' then you're wrong about that too.
The rising wealth gap and other inequality issues are a common theme in these global risk
studies. However, theories in some recent studies have proposed that it is not inequality
itself that is the problem so much as a prolonged sense of precarity (a new word to me and,
apparently, to MS spellchecker, but it is essentially identical to precariousness) of the
non-elites that accompanies it.
This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, as parents desire a stable and resource
abundant household in which their children can be expected to reach a reproductive age. This
might be expected to come more from the female side, as they are tied to their offspring more
than males, who are free to spread their sperm and move on. I have read reorts, possibly
anecdotal only, that it will invariably be the woman that will be the party insisting on buying
the largest house that can be attained, whether affordable or not. I'm all for gender equality
and women's rights but some things are innate and equal-rights do not mean equal hormones,
ambitions, impulses and behaviors.
From this viewpoint therefore, solving the wealth inequality issue is actually anathema to
population reduction. For example the already low birth rate in Italy had a further step down
caused by the increased precarity due to the economic impact of Covid-19, the government has
responded by offering direct incentives for having children. The apparent short term aims are
in direct opposition to the what is best long term, this is called a dilemma rather than a
problem.
The US seems to be especially vulnerable to issues caused by lack of precarity as it has
such a poor welfare system, previously relying on infinite growth to smooth things over or a,
now failing, religious faith to keep things in order; prolonged economic and political success
that has led to a sense of entitlement and self-belief in the American way, a history of
putting personal liberty above all else, which embraces competition rather than co-operation;
and a world beating phobia of death well beyond when reproductive age has passed.
The neologism for the growing proportion of people affected by precarity is the precariat.
The always readable Tim Watkins has a new post that touches on some of theses issues, with a
particular eye on the possibility (or not) of significant inflationary issues ( The
Everything Death Spiral ).
The gig economy, middle class collapse, MAGA, BLM (and the police actions that prompted
its rise), cancel culture, (un)reality TV's attraction, FOMO, the increase in low level strife,
self-harming, on-line pornography addiction, the Oxycodone/Fentanyl epidemic etc. are all
manifestations and/or causes of that precarity. Civil wars and major revolts (and almost any
that succeed in their aims) tend to happen only when there is intra elite infighting rather
than uprisings from below. The most likely catalyst for that at the moment is Trump, which may
be a good sign given his ineffectualness, ineptitude and general repulsive lack of charisma;
anyone even a bit more like a real human being could cause serious ructions.
Great post George thank you. It is quite evident for the astute observer that western
democracy has over the years turned more and more into an amalgam of kleptocracy, oligarchy and
plutocracy.
How many countries have colonial Europe and U.S foreign policy destroyed in the name of
"democracy" and "freedom" ?
I've lost count.
Plato famously is said to have said:
"If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live
under the rule of fools."
In Platos book the republic, Socrates despises democracy as one of the worst forms of
government. His criticism those many years ago still resonates till this day (in my
opinion).
WIthout invoking logic, I feel the world is in uncharted waters and heading towards a
precipice which no one will see coming.
You have a typo, I believe you mean oxycontin (oxycodone) epidemic. HICKORY IGNORED HOLE
IN HEAD IGNORED 06/27/2021
at 1:12 pm
Hicks , not being based in USA ,my view maybe incorrect . The US is undergoing an
identity crisis . Where in the world did we have this gender crisis , male "" female heck can't
people see between their thighs ? Red-Blue . White Supremacy vs BLM . North vs South . Growing
up in the 70's US entrepreneurship was my inspiration . My hero's were Ford, Sloan , Edison etc
and what do we have today, Musk ? What changed that a society where work was an ethic has
transformed into a system where everyone is looking for an opportunity to suck at the teat of
the government . Amazing transformation for someone who has a reference point . Now I am going
into the stupid zone . What changed was the net surplus energy available per capita to the US
citizen . Once that flipped it was downhill all the way . I reserve the right to be incorrect
in my assessment .
Regarding the off-topic finish, I don't think most people realize how fragile is the glue
holding the US together.
Fragmentation along tribal lines is the biggest theme in American culture.
If a minority collection of tribes succeeds in the attempts to reverse election results, even
more than the Electoral College already does, the country will undergo a major restructuring
(polite description) with no guarantees on a recognizable outcome.
For years, we have been
discussing the decline of journalism values with the rise of open bias in the media. Now, a
newly released report from
the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford has found something that would have
been unthinkable just a few years ago. The United States ranked dead last in media trust among
49 countries with just 29% saying that they trusted the media.
The are "apparatchiks" and that means that Rogan unfortunatly is closer to the truth then one
might suspect. "Ideological warriors" so to speak if we reuse Soviet term for such
creatures.
Stetler isn't the only CIA script reader there's thousands of those cockroaches, they're on
every 'news' channel in this country. Stetler looks like a pedo, he's a fat idiot he proves
that every time he opens his candyass mouth.
play_arrow 170 play_arrow
TerminalDebt
6 hours ago
I stopped at fat idiot, no proof needed
play_arrow 35 play_arrow
NoDebt
6 hours ago
They're not real humans.
I think Rogan might be closer to the truth than he realizes on that one.
So even in 1971 corporate American understood usefulness of critical race theory and "black
bolshevism" for their needs. Otherwise Bell would never get a tenure in Harvard -- the bastion of
neoliberalism and corporatism.
As the theory is a typical pseudoscience in the best style of Academician Lysenko, it is
natural that " Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents
than from the theorists themselves."
The idea that "struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed."
remiinds me Eduard Bernstein's "movement toward goal is everything; goal is nothing" see
Eduard Bernstein's
Revisionist Critique of Marxist Theory and Practice Bernstein was a member of the German
Social Democratic party which was a particularly strong and important member of the Second
International conference. Bernstein's thoughts are encapsulated in his book, Evolutionary
Socialism, published in 1899.
Notable quotes:
"... ...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. ..."
"... The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis." ..."
"... Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action must be taken." ..."
"... To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?" ..."
In their book "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction," Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list
several of its core premises, including the view that "racism is ordinary, not aberrational,"
and that it "serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group,"
that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to
the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile
cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times's 1619 Project and
bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an
Antiracist." Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other
institutions.
...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than
from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly
aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: "Faces at the Bottom
of the Well," the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather
of critical race theory.
Bell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today's controversies. In
"Faces," he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic
sense of "the permanence of racism" -- the book's subtitle. Bell's thought has been an
important influence on some of today's most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi
Coates and Michelle Alexander.
Derrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to
work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left
the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid
compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell's work: Can
traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans,
or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the
law?
In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As
he writes in "Faces," "When I agreed to become Harvard's first black faculty member I did so on
the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be
the pioneer, the trailblazer." But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell
to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law
School.
... ... ...
The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality,
wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late,
esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress
since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that
Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his
claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis."
In the conclusion to "Faces," Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is
worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the French existentialist Albert Camus,
who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an
absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action
must be taken."
To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic
magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their
racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their
hard-won victim status?"
... ... ...
These experiences inform "Faces at the Bottom of the Well," which is made up of nine fables,
some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean,
with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a
system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks -- a kind of
cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.
"In effect, those that have joined the Liberal US Empire, have forfeited their sovereign
rights on foreign and domestic policies to those of the United State. You can see it all over
Europe but also among Muslim countries as well as in East Asia."
In fact, there is NOTHING "liberal" about the U$ empire, and it's conduct with the rest of
the world.
"... De Garay explained that after receiving the second coronavirus vaccine dose, her daughter started developing severe abdominal and chest pains. Maddie described the severity of the pain to her mother as "it feels like my heart is being ripped out through my neck." ..."
"... The Ohio mother added her daughter experienced additional symptoms that included gastroparesis, nausea, vomiting, erratic blood pressure, heart rate, and memory loss. "She still cannot digest food. She has a tube to get her nutrition," De Garay said to Carlson. "She also couldn't walk at one point, then she could I don't understand why and [physicians] are not looking into why...now she's back in a wheelchair and she can't hold her neck up. Her neck pulls back." ..."
"... De Garay said she had joined a Facebook support group to help people cope with the unexpected events happening from the coronavirus vaccine trial, and she said it was shut down. "It's just not right," she said. ..."
"... Sen. Ron Johnson , R-Wis., has sent letters to the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna seeking answers about adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine following a June 28 press conference with affected individuals. The conference in Milwaukee included stories from five people, including De Garay ..."
"... The Wisconsin senator noted that some adverse reactions were detailed in Pfizer's and Moderna's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency use authorization (EUA) memorandums following early clinical trials ..."
"... Those reactions included nervous system disorders and musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders for the Pfizer EUA memo. The Moderna EUA memo included reactions such as nervous system disorders, vascular disorders and musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders, according to Johnson's letter. ..."
"... You missed the whole point! The issue is that the government is not acknowledging and and not reporting these side effects of the vaccine. Instead they are lying about the safety. If you are young, you are much more likely to get sick and injured by the vaccine than COVID. ..."
"... anyone under 25 should not get the vaccine because the percentages are about the same or worse having a negative impact from the vaccine versus the actual virus. ..."
"... With the Covid19 mortality rate among the children why even vaccinate? As a Chemist / Biochemist I learned that there is always unintended consequences. ..."
"... Vaccines may have long term effects that are not known today. ..."
"... The CDC's generic guidelines for getting a vaccine for any reason are very restrictive, first being, the disease you're getting vaccinated against has to pose a real, immediate danger. CV-19 poses virtually no danger whatsoever to kids under 14. Of all the deaths of children 14 and under in the last 18 months only .8% of them had a case of CV-19. That's 367 deaths out of over 46,000. (Data from CDC website) Forcing them to take an experimental vaccine that they absolutely don't need is criminal. As a parent, allowing your child to take the vaccine without spending a few hours doing some research is criminally negligent. This is like some terribly warped Kafka novel but it's real. ..."
Mother Stephanie De Garay joins 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' to discuss how her 12-year-old
daughter volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial and is now in a wheelchair.
An Ohio mother is speaking out
about her 12-year-old daughter suffering extreme reactions and nearly dying after volunteering
for the Pfizer coronavirus
vaccine trial.
Stephanie De Garay told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Thursday
that after reaching out to multiple physicians they claimed her daughter, Maddie De Garay,
couldn't have become gravely ill from the vaccine.
"The only diagnosis we've gotten for her is that it's conversion disorder or functional
neurologic symptom disorder, and they are blaming it on anxiety," De Garay told Tucker Carlson.
"Ironically, she did not have anxiety before the vaccine."
De Garay explained that after receiving the second coronavirus vaccine dose, her daughter
started developing severe abdominal and chest pains. Maddie described the severity of the pain
to her mother as "it feels like my heart is being ripped out through my neck."
The Ohio mother added her daughter experienced additional symptoms that included
gastroparesis, nausea, vomiting, erratic blood pressure, heart rate, and memory loss. "She still cannot digest food. She has a tube to get her nutrition," De Garay said to
Carlson. "She also couldn't walk at one point, then she could I don't understand why and
[physicians] are not looking into why...now she's back in a wheelchair and she can't hold her
neck up. Her neck pulls back."
Carlson asked whether any officials from the Biden administration or representatives from
Pfizer company have reached out to the family. "No, they have not," she answered.
"The response with the person that's leading the vaccine trial has been atrocious," she
said. "We wanted to know what symptoms were reported and we couldn't even get an answer on
that. It was just that 'we report to Pfizer and they report to the FDA.' That's all we
got."
After her heartbreaking experience, the Ohio mother said she's still "pro-vaccine, but also
pro-informed consent." De Garay mentioned she's speaking out because she feels like everyone
should be fully aware of this tragic incident and added the situation is being "pushed down and
hidden."
De Garay said she had joined a Facebook support group to help people cope with the
unexpected events happening from the coronavirus vaccine trial, and she said it was shut
down. "It's just not right," she said.
"They need to do research and figure out why this happened, especially to people in the
trial. I thought that was the point of it," De Garay concluded. "They need to come up with
something that's going to treat these people early because all they're going to do is keep
getting worse."
Sen. Ron
Johnson , R-Wis., has sent letters to the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna seeking answers
about adverse reactions to the COVID-19vaccine
following a June 28 press conference with affected individuals. The conference in Milwaukee
included stories from five people, including De Garay.
The Wisconsin senator noted that some adverse reactions were detailed in Pfizer's and
Moderna's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency use authorization (EUA) memorandums
following early clinical trials.
Those reactions included nervous system disorders and musculoskeletal and connective tissue
disorders for the Pfizer EUA memo. The Moderna EUA memo included reactions such as nervous
system disorders, vascular disorders and musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders,
according to Johnson's letter.
Pfizer and Moderna did not immediately respond to inquiries from Fox News about Johnson's
letters.
J jeff5150357 6 hours ago
My daughter had the same thing happen to
her after getting a flu vaccine 9 years ago. Within days of getting it, she went from being as
healthy as an ox to years of awful, unexplained illness. The short version is they concluded
that she had a severe adverse reaction to the vaccine, but from the delivery chemicals, not the
flu content itself. Formaldehyde was the likely major cause. Now she is getting ready to begin
college and is being required to get the Covid vaccine by her university and the NCAA for
athletics. It is causing her, my wife and I horrible anxiety and we feel like we are being
railroaded into something that could be very dangerous for her. Any discussion or concern
expressed on social media is immediately blocked. I know from years of working in the research
grants office at Yale University that the big pharma industry is powerful and will go to great
lengths to control the narrative. What I don't understand is why mainstream media and social
media are so willing to help them these days!
jeff5150357 4 hours ago
While the college experience is great for a young adult. I would look at getting a degree
online. Her future earnings will be based on her merit, not where she went to school. If
someone was telling me what to do with my personal health, and I was uncomfortable with their
prescription, I would follow my instincts.
LoraJane92649 jeff5150357 5
hours ago
If her flu vax is well documented she should be able to get a waiver. Hopefully you
have an able bodied family physician or medical team to advocate on your behalf.
G gunvald 7 hours ago
You know when you take it that there can be adverse
reactions. So, in that sense, you are informed. Any one of us could be the odd person. That
said, I have a problem with any child getting these vaccines, especially when most people
recover from the disease. It's one thing for me as an elderly person to make the decision to
take it as covid affects the elderly person more and I wanted to avoid that ventilator. Most of
my life has been lived and that's how I evaluated it. This will always come down to putting it
in God's hands.
TheTruthAsItIs gunvald 6 hours ago
You missed the whole point! The
issue is that the government is not acknowledging and and not reporting these side effects of the
vaccine. Instead they are lying about the safety. If you are young, you are much more likely to
get sick and injured by the vaccine than COVID.
D DontDestoryUSA
gunvald 4 hours ago
It's not being informed when you are forced to take a vaccination that they
clearly had trouble with past vaccination sounds like a lawsuit for the university is on the
horizon. With a big pay day
Tony5SFG 7 hours ago
"Ohio
mother said she's still "pro-vaccine, but also pro-informed consent." " And as a pediatrician
for over 40 yrs (retired now) and a 10 year member of my medical school's Institutional Review
Board (which had to approve all human research), THAT is a problem I have been bringing up As
far as requiring all young people, such as entering or in college, to get the vaccine Children
are a protected class and the informed consent for research on them is much more strenuous than
for adults And, requiring young people to take these new vaccines is the equivalent of doing
research on them. The issue of myocarditis is quite troubling. And while it has been seen in
natural infections, I have not yet seen an adequate risk - benefit evaluation regarding risking
natural infection versus vaccination And people say that the myocarditis is not severe, no one
can be sure of the long term effects of a young person getting it. The vaccines that we give
children have been used for decades and the risks/benefits have been well established
D DallasAmEmail Tony5SFG 6 hours ago
A friends daughter who just went through internship as
Physicians assistant based on the percentages in age groups believes anyone under 25 should not
get the vaccine because the percentages are about the same or worse having a negative impact
from the vaccine versus the actual virus. Yes, older age groups the percent having negative
impact from the virus is much greater than the vaccine, so yes older age groups should get the
vaccine. What really is bothersome is when Youtube removes Dr. Robert Malone video who helped
create the mrna vaccine express concern that normal testing has not happened and be cautious
about taking it, especially for the young.
marinesfather601 Tony5SFG 5
hours ago
With the Covid19 mortality rate among the children why even vaccinate? As a Chemist /
Biochemist I learned that there is always unintended consequences.
Hilltopper9 7 hours ago
Vaccines may have long term effects that are not known
today. The same could be said of all the chemicals we apply to our body daily through shampoos,
hair dyes, body lotions, and suntan lotions. Life's a gamble. It's up to each individual to
make the best decisions possible given the facts available.
A akbushrat
Hilltopper9 6 hours ago
The CDC's generic guidelines for getting a vaccine for any reason are
very restrictive, first being, the disease you're getting vaccinated against has to pose a
real, immediate danger. CV-19 poses virtually no danger whatsoever to kids under 14. Of all the
deaths of children 14 and under in the last 18 months only .8% of them had a case of CV-19.
That's 367 deaths out of over 46,000. (Data from CDC website) Forcing them to take an
experimental vaccine that they absolutely don't need is criminal. As a parent, allowing your
child to take the vaccine without spending a few hours doing some research is criminally
negligent. This is like some terribly warped Kafka novel but it's real.
F
Fauxguy930 Hilltopper9 5 hours ago
☢️ N-butyl-N-(4-hydroxybutyl)nitrosamine is a
nitrosamine that has butyl and 4-hydroxybutyl substituents. In mice, it causes high-grade,
invasive cancers in the urinary bladder, but not in any other tissues. It has a role as a
carcinogenic agent. Ingredient in all shots. How did a carcinogen get FDA approved, oh it was
an emergency.
R RussellRika 6 hours ago
I have a
twelve year old, and not a chance I'd allow her to volunteer for any vaccine trial, and
especially not this one. She very much wanted to get a vaccine, until she started reading about
some of the adverse reactions. Sorry, but I'm a child, the benefit does not outweigh the risk.
MrEd50 6 hours ago
I took the vaccine because I'm 60 years old and work with special ed kids. My 18 year old child
refuses to take it and I support him on this. COVID shouldn't be an issue for most of us.
The problem is that many people face long term unemployment without substantial emergency funds, which further complicates
already difficult situation.
Notable quotes:
"... More than 2K adults to were interviewed to try and ascertain how long they could survive without income. It turns out that approximately 72.4MM employed Americans - 28.4% of the population - believe they wouldn't be able to last for more than a month without a payday. ..."
Imagine you lost your job tomorrow. How long would you be able to sustain your current
lifestyle? A week? A month? A year?
As we await Friday's labor market update, Finder has just published the results of a recent
survey attempting to gauge the financial stability of the average American in the post-pandemic
era.
More than 2K adults to were interviewed to try and ascertain how long they could survive
without income. It turns out that approximately 72.4MM employed Americans - 28.4% of the
population - believe they wouldn't be able to last for more than a month without a payday.
Another 24% said they expected to be able to live comfortably between two months and six
months. That means an estimated 133.6MM working Americans (52.3% of the population) can live
off their savings for six months or less before going broke.
On the other end of the spectrum, roughly 8.7MM employed Americans (or 3.4% of the
population) say they don't need to rely on a rainy day fund since they have employment
insurance which will compensate them should they lose their job.
Amusingly, men appear to be less effective savers than women. Some 32.4MM women (26.7% of
American women) say their savings would stretch at most a month, compared to 40MM men (29.9% of
American men) who admit to the same. Of those people, 9.7MM women (8% of American women) say
their savings wouldn't even stretch a week, compared to 15.5MM men (11.6% of American men) who
admit to the same.
A majority of employed Americans over the age of 18 say their savings would last six months
at most. About 70.7MM men (52.8% of American men) and 62.8MM women (51.8% of American women)
fear they'd be in dire straits within six months of losing their livelihood.
Unsurprisingly, younger people tend to have less of a savings buffer - but the gap between
the generations isn't as wide as it probably should be.
While increasing one's income is perhaps the best route to building a more robust nest egg,
Finder offered some suggestions for people looking to maximize their savings.
1. Create a budget and stick to it
Look at your monthly income against all of your monthly expenses. Add to them expenses you
pay once or twice a year to avoid a surprise when they creep up. After you know where your
money is going, you can allot specific amounts to different categories and effectively track
your spending.
Putin
Signs Law Forcing Foreign Social Media Giants To Open Russian Offices (reuters.com) 47
Posted by msmash on Thursday July 01, 2021 @12:45PM from the how-about-that dept. President
Vladimir Putin has signed a law that
obliges foreign social media giants to open offices in Russia , a document published by the
government on Thursday showed, the latest move by Moscow to exert greater control over Big
Tech. From a report: The Russian authorities are keen to strengthen their control of the
internet and to reduce their dependence on foreign companies and countries. In particular, they
have objected in the past to political opponents of the Kremlin using foreign social media
platforms to organise what they say are illegal protests and to publicise politically-tinged
investigations into alleged corruption. Moscow has fined firms for failing to delete content it
says is illegal, slowing down the speed of Twitter as punishment, and on Wednesday opened a new
case against Alphabet subsidiary Google for breaching personal data legislation. by
Vlijmen Fileer ( 120268 ) on
Thursday July 01, 2021 @12:47PM ( #61540686 )
Other countries do the same. But somehow get less media attention for it
Authorities doe not telling truth: people who already have COVID do not need to be
vaccinated. Also if Delta varient can infect vaccineted in conserable quantities how any resobale
person can maintain this goal of "herg immunity". How it can be achieved if a vaccinated person
can be infected and thus spread the disease both amoung vaccinated cohort and among the
unvaccinated cohort. The fact the vaccinated people are infected with Delta changes the game and
here Senator Paul is wrong.
Pushing vaccination on chidren in such curcumstances changes nothing is became a very
questionable move both from scientific an from ethical perspective.
America's favourite Chinese lab funding coronavirus doomonger doctor Anthony Fauci announced
Tuesday that there are now two Americas, a vaccinated America and an unvaccinated America.
As Senator Rand Paul noted
earlier this week , there is a boat load of misinformation on the matter coming from a
government that is indiscriminately pushing vaccinations:
There are now two Americas. One that's retarded. And one that wants Fauci on a
lamppost.
liberty2 1 hour ago (Edited)
Note that the officials said there's no such thing as "herd immunity" last year. Now
this year they keep saying that we can reach "herd immunity" if we are 70% vaxxed! Terms
are used if it fits their narrative.
Ride_the_kali_yuga 3 hours ago (Edited)
In the Covidian Cult, there is true believers in one side and heretics on the other
side. Vaxxed and unvaxxed.
Divide and rule strategy, as always. Do not undurestimate the ratio of retarded people
among the population, it has been growing like a cancer for decades. It amazes me how
perfectly coordinated those MSM Covidian propaganda events appears worldwide.
In here France, 2 days ago, most MSM have all simultaneously gone full berserk (without
any reason) blaming the reluctant ones. One of them on TV said something like : "if it was
me, i will use police to drag those who refuse these "vaccines" from their home and force
it on them"
This was priceless, this little man has morbid obesity. We now officialy all live on the
twilight zone on steroids. Land whales dictate how people should consider their own health.
This ride seems to never end.
We now have officialy entered the dehumanization phase of the unvaxxed. The sanitary
gulag is not far from here.
NIRP-BTFD 1 hour ago
There are 2 Americas. The 0.01% (the rulers that own everything) and the serfs.
DemandSider 1 hour ago
Exactly, parasite and host. Fauci would be the former, obviously.
"Recent research shows the vaxxinated group had a 18 point lower IQ score then the
unvaxxinated group and a 128 point higher gullibility score."
Fact Checked : True ✔️
Cirdan PREMIUM 9 hours ago
Wow! I didn't know they had a gullibility score!
bidennotmyprez99 9 hours ago remove link
Sure that's true but in my circle, it's all the super intellectual types who are getting
"vaxxed". You know, the ones who read the Guardian in the UK or the NYT in the US and sneer
at we deplorables. They pride themselves on being free and critical thinkers. Yet, they are
the ones getting the jab. Incredible. The other group I see all aroujnd me getting jabbed
are the fundamental christians: the ones who vowed never to bow to Caesar. Yeah, right.
They've been warning all their lives about the Mark of the Beast and fall at the first
hurdle. In contrast, all the ordinary working class Joes I know see it for the nasty
******** that it is.
No-Go zone 6 hours ago
The ordinary working class still has a common sense.
Smiddywesson 11 hours ago
There are two types of people today, those who still listen to media and authority
figures that are proven liars, and those who remember and are immune to further lies FROM
PROVEN LIARS. Faucci and company are proven liars, he can't tell me the time of day with
any credibility at all.
Gunston_Nutbush_Hall 7 hours ago (Edited)
h/t ZH Johnny Walker http://whale.to/vaccines.html
"If this is preventive medicine, I'll take my chances with disease." ~ Mendelsohn M.D
Dis-obey 8 hours ago
The Delta strain is weak sauce. With a mortality rate of 0.1% it's the same as H1N1.
H1N1 has been with Humanity since at least 1918 and human immunology has coped to deal with
it. Don't be fooled.
BendGuyhere 11 hours ago
1)The "case" number is pure JUNK SCIENCE. Meaningless. It is PCR cycles jacked up until
it gives a "positive". This is for people (Idiots) who get their 'science' from the
National Enquirer.
2) Corona viruses are NOTORIOUS for constantly rapidly mutating, like the Common
Cold.
3) ALL pathogenic viruses, to the extent that there even is a pathogenic covid virus
anymore, attenuate over time. That is they become LESS pathogenic and the human immune
system becomes more and more competent at recognizing and neutralizing viruses within the
same family.
4) Well "What about India?" What ABOUT India? Outside of the MSM, which has mutated into
a vast labyrinth of lies geared towards social control, we have no way of verifying what
actually happened in India.
BugMan 5 hours ago
The microorganism must be identified in all individuals affected by the disease, but not
in healthy individuals.
The microorganism can be isolated from the diseased individual and grown in culture.
When introduced into a healthy individual , the cultured microorganism should cause
disease.
The microorganism must then be re-isolated from the experimental host , and found to be
identical to the original microorganism.
I'm struck by the fact that the news media constantly push the so-called Covid-19
"vaccines." Have the news media become pharmaceutical company sales reps ?
Every day, I see news articles proclaiming that the Covid-19 "vaccines" are effective
against the variants. They cite new studies even though such studies take a lot more time
to conduct than has been alloted for concrete conclusions.
Overall, the pimping of the Covid shots by reporters is suspect at best. These so-called
journalists never mention treatments, only vaccines.
Bill of Rights 7 hours ago (Edited)
When was the last time the MEDIA was actually just that the Media? 1960s perhaps..
What you are subjected to now, or for the better term, Choose to watch now is trash
where 99% of it is made up and false.
Conductor "Corn Pop" Angelo 8 hours ago
Following a citizen's petition, a Lisbon court was forced to provide verified COVID-19
mortality data, reports AndreDias.net
.
According to the ruling , the number of
verified COVID-19 deaths from January 2020 to April 2021 is only 152, not about 17,000 as
claimed by government
ministries.
All the "others" died for various reasons, although their PCR test was positive.
"We live in a fraud of unprecedented dimensions," wrote Dias.
Not a pandemic but a manufactured DemPanic. These snarling rabid far-left-wing dogs will
seize and shake any opportunity they can get to further their RESET utopian agendas,
including population reductions and striking down capitalism. So close to their goals now,
they are gone wild in their attacks and without any reservations whatsoever.
Fear for this little Republic. Its time is almost up.
Kugelhagel 11 hours ago
It's like a priest in stone age: if harvest was low because weather was bad a priest
said "gimme all your sheet and I'll talk to the gods" . When that doesn't work he says "of
course it not worked, you not gave me enough! gimme more!" ... and some day it worked and
weather was good and the priest was celebrated.
Same here ... Snakeoil sellers.
Bill Maher slammed Big Tech on Friday's episode of his show, "Real Time with Bill Maher,"
criticizing Facebook and Google for censoring content discussing the COVID-19 lab-leak
theory.
"I find this outrageous. Facebook banned any post for four months about COVID coming from a
lab," said Maher, adding "Now, even the Biden administration is looking into it."
incharge1976 PREMIUM 1 hour ago (Edited)
Google and the like are not search engines, video sites, or social media sites. They are
propaganda machines
The First Rule 42 minutes ago (Edited)
Yeah, Yandex.com is head and shoulders
above the rest when it comes to getting around pretty much any US based web search
censorship.
It will show you the things Google is trying to hide.
Too may crazies among adjunct professors were discovered recently in the ocntext of Woke
ideology and Critical race theory. This is another one. What is interesting is the she is a
female.
[A person the claims to be] University of Ottawa adjunct professor and Canadian Lawyer Naomi
Sayers took to Twitter recently to endorse sex work for "young people," calling it "the best
thing" they can do early in their careers.
"unpopular opinion: the best thing young people can do early in their careers is do #SexWork
on the side because your early career prospects will be unstable, unpredictable, low pay,
likely contract work and very much exploitative," Sayers wrote on Twitter Sunday.
... ... ...
Campus Reform reached out to Exodus Cry
, a non-profit organization committed to fighting back against sex work and human trafficking.
Director of Intervention Helen Taylor replied calling Sayers' comments "deeply
irresponsible."
"For Professor Sayers to flippantly encourage young vulnerable students to engage in such a
harmful industry is deeply irresponsible and extremely offensive to survivors who are working
hard to heal and recover from the damage prostitution inflicted on their lives," Taylor
wrote
"The sex industry is a system of violence and gender inequality. It is not a 'job like any
other.' It puts girls at higher risk daily of rape, theft and murder. It causes long-term PTSD
comparable to torture victims"¦ We believe education leaders ought to be protecting
young women, and empowering them to aim high, not echoing pimp's advertisements for the sex
trade."
UPDATE: Sayers' publicist contacted Campus Reform after publication and insisted Sayers has
no relation with the University of Ottawa as a professor.
When Campus Reform reached out to Sayers for an interview, she replied, "my policy is not to
answer questions from media in which the answer can be found on google [sic] , which tweets are
searchable on google now (aka do their research)".
Research conducted by Campus Reform found that in Sayers LinkedIn profile, she currently touts herself as
"adjunct professor" at the university.
This is a fiasco for Fauci "herd immunity" campaign. It means that vaccinated people can
become infected and spread the virus much like unvaccinated people.
Cases of the Delta variant of coronavirus have almost doubled in a week
with 73 people now confirmed to have died after testing positive for the variant, 26 of whom
had had both vaccine doses.
Public Health England (PHE) said that as of Monday, the UK has seen 75,953 confirmed cases
of the Delta variant first identified in India, up 33,630 - or 79% - from the previous
week.
While just 26 people died more than two weeks after their second COVID-19 vaccine dose from
the Delta variant, more than 30.6 million in the UK have had both jabs, according to the
latest
government figures .
PHE said a total of 806 people in England have been admitted to hospital with the Delta
variant as of 14 June, a rise of 423 on the previous week.
"Objective judgement is our jugement about the people we do not like ;-)"
In view of the fact that Delta (Indian) variant can infect vaccinated with the first
generation of vaccines people Fauci statement "when you get vaccinated, you not only protect your
own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the
spread of the virus throughout the community." i obviously wrong.
Delta Covid-19 Variant Can Infect Vaccinated People
Those who don't get their news from mainstream media have been aware of Anthony Fauci's
connection to "gain of function" research for months. Now, mainstream media is picking it up so
the White House is scrambling.
For months, there wasn't a day that went by when Dr. Anthony Fauci wasn't doing multiple
interviews spreading fear of Covid-19, demanding people take the various "vaccines," and
changing his talking points from moment to moment on a slew of healthcare-related issues. We
saw a clear change last week when the White House's chief doc seemed to fly under the radar for
the first time since Joe Biden took office.
It all comes down to "gain of function" research that is almost certainly the cause of the
Wuhan Flu. Developed in the Wuhan Virology Lab, Covid-19 either escaped or was intentionally
released. While many in academia still hold onto the notion that the pandemic was started by
bats, they do so simply because it hasn't -- and likely cannot -- be completely ruled out as
long as the Chinese Communist Party has a say in the matter. But many are now accepting the
likelihood that it came from the Wuhan Virology Lab as a result of "gain of function"
research.
We also now know that Fauci has been a
huge proponent of this research and he participated
in funding it at the Wuhan Virology Lab.
More evidence is emerging every day despite the bad doctor's protestations. And when I say
"we also now know," that's to say more mainstream media watchers know. Those who turn to
alternative media have known about Fauci's involvement with the Wuhan Virology Lab for a
while.
They've been trying to cover their tracks. A bombshell revelation from The
National Pulse yesterday showed they realized this was going to be a problem long before
Rand Paul
or Tucker Carlson started
calling Fauci out.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology scrubbed the U.S. National Institutes of Health as one
of its research partners from its website in early 2021. The revelation comes despite Dr.
Anthony Fauci insisting no relationship existed between the institutions.
Archived versions of the Wuhan lab's site also reveal a research update – "
Will SARS Come Back? " – appearing to describe gain-of-function research being
conducted at the institute by entities funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
On March 21st, 2021, the lab's website listed six U.S.-based research partners:
University of Alabama, University of North Texas, EcoHealth Alliance, Harvard University, The
National Institutes of Health (NIH), the United States, and the National Wildlife
Federation.
One day later, the page was revised to contain just two research
partners – EcoHealth Alliance and the University of Alabama. By March 23rd,
EcoHealth Alliance was the sole partner
remaining .
The Wuhan Institute of Virology's decision to wipe the NIH from its website came amidst
heightened
scrutiny that the lab was the source of COVID-19 – and that U.S. taxpayer dollars
from the NIH may have funded the research. The unearthing of the lab's attempted coverup also
follows a heated
exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Fauci, who attempted to distance his organization
from the Wuhan lab.
Beyond establishing a working relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan Institue of
Virology, now-deleted posts
from the site also detail studies bearing the hallmarks of gain-of-function research
conducted with the Wuhan-based lab. Fauci, however, asserted to Senator Paul that "the NIH
has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of
Virology."
There is still a tremendous gap between those who know the truth about Fauci and those who
still think he's just a smart little guy who tells Joe Biden what to do when it comes to Covid.
As we've documented multiple times in the past, there seems to be a cult of personality
surrounding Fauci, or as many have called it, Faucism. He is practically worshipped as a savior
by millions who believe everything he says even if he contradicts something he had said in the
past.
Today, he was interviewed on CBS News during "Face the Nation." It was a softball interview,
as always, and at no point was "gain of function" research discussed. Instead, John Dickerson
tried to sound smart and Fauci gave him kudos in an odd back-and-forth promoting vaccines.
JOHN DICKERSON : So, if- if a person is deciding whether or not to get vaccinated, they
have to keep in mind whether it's going to keep them healthy. But based on these new
findings, it would suggest they also have an opportunity, if vaccinated, to knock off or
block their ability to transmit it to other people. So, does it increase the public health
good of getting the vaccination or make that clearer based on these new findings?
DR. FAUCI : And you know, JOHN, you said it very well. I could have said it better.
It's absolutely the case. And that's the reason why we say when you get vaccinated, you not
only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community
health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. And in other words,
you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus
is not going to go anywhere. And that's when you get a point that you have a markedly
diminished rate of infection in the community. And that's exactly the reason, and you said it
very well, of why we encourage people and want people to get vaccinated. The more people you
get vaccinated, the safer the entire community is.
JOHN DICKERSON : And do you think now that this guidance has come out on relaxing the
mass mandates if you've been vaccinated, that people who might have been hesitant before will
start to get vaccinated in greater numbers?
DR. FAUCI : You know, I hope so, JOHN. The underlying reason for the CDC doing this was
just based on the evolution of the science that I mentioned a moment ago. But if, in fact,
this serves as an incentive for people to get vaccinated, all the better. I hope it does,
actually.
Don't let the presence of this interview fool you. It was almost certainly scheduled before
the "gain of function" research discussion hit the mainstream. But as Revolver News reported
today, we should start seeing less and less of Fauci going forward.
What happened to the almighty Dr. Fauci? Last week he was on TV telling all of us that life
wouldn't get back to normal for at least another year or so, and this week he's pretty much
gone. So what happened?
Well, a lot, actually. The biggest turn for Fauci involves 3 little words: Gain of Function.
It was this past week when the "gain of function" dots were publicly connected to the good
doctor. This is nothing new for those of us on the right. Here on Revolver, we've covered
Fauci's gain of function research extensively and the evidence against him is very damning.
A couple of months ago Fox News Host Steve Hilton blew the lid off of Fauci's macabre
obsession (and funding) of research involving the manipulation of highly contagious viruses.
Hilton laid the groundwork, but it was Senator Rand Paul who called out Fauci and his ghoulish
research face to face during a Senate hearing.
But even more notable, is that the CDC just updated their guidelines on mask-wearing and
essentially ended the pandemic -- a pandemic that Fauci has been the proud face of for over a
year now -- and when that announcement hit, he was nowhere to be found. And his absence didn't
go unnoticed.
Yes indeed, you'd think that Fauci would have been front and center to discuss the CDC's new
guidelines the moment the news hit. The "Golden Boy" taking yet another victory lap. After all,
Fauci never misses a moment in the spotlight. But he was not hitting the airwaves with the
typical fanfare.
It is still very possible that Fauci can make a resurgence. His fan-base is up there with
Meghan Markle and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, though even more devoted than the divas'. Unlike
other useful idiots, the White House will not be able to detach easily from Fauci, nor do they
want to. At this point, they're telling him to lay low and avoid any interviews in which they
do not have complete control over the "journalist" involved. John Dickerson has been a Democrat
Party pawn for decades.
Behind the scenes, they're already planning on ditching him. It will be done with all the
pomp one would expect for one of their heroes and will be used to mark the end of the
"emergency" in the United States. He'll still be promoting vaccines and will try to stay in his
precious limelight, but Democrats are ready to move on and open up the country. It has just
been too politically suicidal to persist with their lockdown mentality.
The key to seeing Fauci's narcissistic reign end is for patriots to continue to hammer him
on his involvement with developing Covid-19. His beloved "gain of function research" needs to
be explained to any who will listen. Then, maybe, Fauci will go away.
"... He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and "sustainability" have come to take their place. ..."
"... "Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone." ..."
"... Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were -- and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says. Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis, Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people." ..."
"... The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself." ..."
"... Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of Salesforce , John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever -- are its "cardinals." ..."
"... He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges" America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else." ..."
"... The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides. ..."
"... Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity -- including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement, Coca-Cola apologized for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.") ..."
"... Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250 sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives." (Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and "we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.") ..."
"... Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute. ..."
"... Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds. ..."
"... Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent. These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more. ..."
"... One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human characteristic. There are more. ..."
A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every
inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth
grade. He's joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General
Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with
him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back -- a very Indian
filial act.
"I was probably the only person my age who'd heard of Antonin Scalia, " Mr. Ramaswamy, 35,
says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would
often rage on the way home from class about "some Scalia opinion." Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that
this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he
switched to being conservative at Harvard in "an act of rebellion" against the politics he
found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences --
the drug-development company that made him rich -- and write "Woke, Inc," a book that takes a
scathing look at "corporate America's social-justice scam." (It will be published in
August.)
Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie "Spotlight," which tells the story of how reporters
at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the
early 2000s. "My goal in 'Woke, Inc.' is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of
Wokeism." He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral
vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we
derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and
"sustainability" have come to take their place.
"Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the
blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a
cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is
getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone."
Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic
and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were --
and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says.
Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis,
Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad
guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people."
The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the
left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought,
'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and
minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in
Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials,
birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr.
Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself."
Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, as the "patron saint of wokeism" for his relentless propagation of "stakeholder
capitalism" -- the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited
liability is that they "must do social good on the side."
Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its
archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of
Salesforce , John
Donahoe of Nike and
Alan Jope of Unilever
-- are its "cardinals."
Mr. Ramaswamy says that "unlike the investigative 'Spotlight' team at the Boston Globe, I'm
a whistleblower, not a journalist. But the church analogy holds strong." He paraphrases a line
in the movie: "It takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a village to abuse one. In
the case of my book, the child I'm concerned about is American democracy."
In league with the woke left, corporate America "uses force" as a substitute for open
deliberation and debate, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "There's the sustainability accounting standards
board of BlackRock, which effectively demands that in order to win an investment from
BlackRock, the largest asset-manager in the world, you must abide by the standards of that
board."
Was the board put in place by the owners of the trillions of dollars of capital that Mr.
Fink manages? Of course not, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "And yet he's actually using his seat of
corporate power to sidestep debate about questions like environmentalism or diversity on
boards."
The irrepressible Mr. Ramaswamy presses on with another example. Goldman Sachs , he says with obvious relish,
"is a very Davos-fitting example." At the 2020 World Economic Forum, Goldman Sachs CEO David
Solomon "issued an edict from the mountaintops of Davos." Mr. Solomon announced his company
would refuse to take a company public if its board wasn't sufficiently diverse. "So Goldman
gets to define what counts as 'diverse,' " Mr. Ramaswamy says. "No doubt, they're referring to
skin-deep, genetically inherited attributes."
He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political
debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges"
America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a
one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted
by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our
uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate
silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites
gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else."
The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over
the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the
woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look
the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This
arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides.
The rest of corporate America appears to be following suit. "There's a Big Pharma version,
too," Mr. Ramaswamy says. "Big Pharma had an epiphany in dealing with the left." It couldn't
beat them, so it joined them. "Rather than win the debate on drug pricing, they decided to just
change the subject instead. Who needs to win a debate if you can just avoid having it?" So we
see "big-time pharma CEOs musing about topics like racial justice and environmentalism, and
writing multibillion-dollar checks to fight climate change, while taking price hikes that
they'd previously paused when the public was angry about drug pricing."
Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements
about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is
to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity --
including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement,
Coca-Cola apologized
for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company
training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.")
Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's
history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250
sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the
while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives."
(Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and
"we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions
that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.")
... ... ...
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
Rod Drake 53 minutes ago
Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No
surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume
that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds.
In addition, I have been
saying for some time discrimination based on political belief desperately needs to be
included as a prohibited basis. Where are the Republicans, while the greatest civil rights
violation of our time is going on right under their noses?
Terry Overbey 1 hour ago
I love reading stories about people who are willing to take on the woke political class. For
most people, even if they strongly disagree, their only option is to bite their tongue and go
along. People aren't stupid. If you buck the system, you don't get promoted, you don't get
good grades, you don't get into elite schools, you don't get the government job.
Thank you Mr Ramaswany.
James Ransom 1 hour ago
Well. If nothing else, he just sold me a book. I think we should say that "Wokeism" tries to
"Act Like" a religion, not that it is one. Because of this fakery, we do not need to give it
"freedom" in the sense that we have "Freedom of Religion."
These misguided Americans perhaps need to be exposed to a real religion. Christianity and
Buddhism would be good choices; I don't know about Hinduism, but my point is that "Wokeism"
is more like a mental disorder. We should feel sorry for its victims, offer them treatment,
but not let them run anything.
marc goodman 1 hour ago
Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent
being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent.
These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more.
One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to
unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises
elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth
uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human
characteristic. There are more.
Humans need to believe in something greater than themselves. We fulfill this need with
religion, and historically, the "greater something" has been a transcendent being. Wokeism
fulfills this need for its adherents but without a transcendent being. Ultimately, Wokeism
will fail as a religion because it can't nourish the soul like the belief in a transcendent
being does.
Grodney Ross 2 hours ago (Edited)
Judgement will be passed in November of 2022. I don't see this as a Democrat vs Republican
issue. I think it's a matter of who is paying attention vs. those who are not. We live in a
society where, generally, the most strident voices are on the left, along with the most
judgmental voices. When the "wokeless" engage in a manner that conflicts with views of the
woke, they are attacked, be you from the left or the right, so you keep your mouth shut and go
about your day.
I believe that this coming election will give voice to those who are fatigued and fed up
with the progressive lefts venom and vitriol. If not, we will survive, but without a meaningful
first amendment,14th amendment, or 2nd amendment.
Barbara Helton 2 hours ago (Edited)
Being woke, when practiced by the wealthy and influential, can be extremely similar to
bullying.
Sounds like a great book for Tucker to recommend to that Army Chief of Staff!
Notable quotes:
"... I call it ROLE -- The Racism Of Low Expectations. This phenomenon has done ten times more to damage Black lives than can be attributed to CRT or institutionalized racism. ..."
"... A subset of ROLE is MVT. This is Manufactured Victimhood Theory. This comes about from influential Black "leaders" who, instead of teaching Blacks the truth about how to live good lives (work hard, develop skills, etc.), they told them to apply as their life strategy "say you are a victim." ..."
Recently the Joint Chiefs of Staff remarked that the US military should teach CTR to our
military essentially because they shoild teach all theories.
That doesn't make sense to me but I would like to put another theory into the public
sphere. I call it ROLE -- The Racism Of Low Expectations. This phenomenon has done ten times
more to damage Black lives than can be attributed to CRT or institutionalized racism.
A subset of ROLE is MVT. This is Manufactured Victimhood Theory. This comes about from
influential Black "leaders" who, instead of teaching Blacks the truth about how to live good
lives (work hard, develop skills, etc.), they told them to apply as their life strategy "say
you are a victim."
I am hoping that ROLE and MVT will become part of all aspects of American life -- all
levels of education, the military, businesses, the media, etc.
If the goal really is to improve Black lives, ROLE and MVT should be the rage over the
next few years.
Tom F
John Callahan 4 hours ago
Corporate America 'makes money critiquing itself.' The rest of us pay the price in
diminished freedom.
Wokeism is fascism dressed up in new clothes- the censorship, demonization of
groups and individuals and the physical violence against people and property remain the same.
Corporate America has one overriding interest- making money. Paying the left (and yes,
fascism is of the left) through critiquing itself and token monetary donations is a get out
of jail free card for Corporate America.
"Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily
subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it."
- Thomas Sowell
Dom Fried 4 hours ago
It will end the same. Almost, because there will be nobody to stop it.
Ed Baron 3 hours ago
Very well said, John. Fascism is a fundamental element or subset of Leftist or Marxist
thought. It demands conformity of the individual to the new "woke" state and it punishes any
who dissent. It's not incidental that American Leftists, including FDR, loved Mussolini prior
to WWII. That bromance has been washed clean, and attributed instead to the Right. Such a
typical transference technique used by Marxist.
Alex Guiness
I interpret your supposition 'White male global warming', as meaning White Males are
particularly flatulent hence are producing Green House Gases with their diets of greasy meats
(some on sticks), carnival funnel cakes, corn dogs, Philly cheese-steaks, Popeyes fried
chicken, all washed down with Bud Light. Would it kill them to have a salad now and then? How
can their spouses stand to be around them unless they are also consuming the same foods.
Imagine what it must be like at a sermon in a Lutheran Church, the whitest church of all.
They leave the doors open else a spark could set the whole place ablaze.
carol Perry
Thanks for today's chuckle Alex.
Alex Guiness
read my smurfs comment. i just posted it
Lynn Silton
Mr. Ramaswamy is right in every way! I don't belong to the Woke Church. I'll never join.
America is an inspirational country as is all it's written declarations. We, the people rule.
No religion can overrule it. We will not allow religious 'honor killings.' They are murder
here. We will not allow Wokism here it is the murder of our hopes and dreams which belong to
everybody regardless of appearance. I don't even know how appearance (of all things) became a
religion. The whole thing is so sick, people of all shades are speaking out and we will put
this crazy idea down. Here, we marry across all appearances. New people are often different
in appearance than parents. Woke will die of that alone. That's why we have an immigration
'problem' . People love our constitution and Declaration of Independence. People love that
they rule here, not the government. That's our creed and promise. Help protect it!!
"... It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself." ..."
"... Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of Salesforce , John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever -- are its "cardinals." ..."
It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of
the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion,
appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact
of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a
bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for
adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing
itself."
Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, as the "patron saint of wokeism" for his relentless propagation of "stakeholder
capitalism" -- the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited
liability is that they "must do social good on the side."
Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of
BlackRock , are "its
archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of
Salesforce , John
Donahoe of Nike and
Alan Jope of Unilever
-- are its "cardinals."
That Leftist "wokeism" is the brainchild of a religious cult should've been obvious decades
ago. The purely religious belief in anthropogenic global warming, for example, which closely
mimics the spiritual rituals of ancient cultures by worshiping nature over man. The hierarchy
of color and gender as fetishes through which human relative value can be determined also
mimics the hierarchy of priests or shamans in other religions. Thus, a fairly vapid group
like BLM is exalted based purely on the melanin content of their skin, even though their
claims are ridiculously flawed (They "care" about the lives of 90 or so armed felons killed
by police, but call the 7,000+ black people killed by Blacks a "distraction"). Like many
religions that plagued humanity throughout history, they will torment and punish all
"deniers." Four years of the Trump Presidency made this clear. He faced the Grand Inquisition
because he refused to kneel.
Johnson &
Johnson has agreed to pay $230 million to the state of New York to resolve an opioid
lawsuit slated to go to trial Tuesday, as negotiations intensify with the company and three
drug distributors to clinch a
$26 billion settlement of thousands of other lawsuits blaming the pharmaceutical industry
for the opioid crisis.
Johnson & Johnson's New York deal removes it from a coming trial on Long Island but not
from the rest of the cases it faces nationwide, including a continuing trial in California. The
New York settlement includes an additional $33 million in attorney fees and costs and calls for
the drugmaker to no longer sell opioids nationwide, something Johnson & Johnson said it
already stopped doing.
States have been trying to re-create with the opioid litigation what they accomplished with
tobacco companies in the 1990s, when $206 billion in settlements flowed into state coffers.
More than 3,000 counties, cities and other local governments have also pursued lawsuits over
the opioid crisis,
complicating talks that have dragged on since late 2019 and that have been slowed down by
the Covid-19 pandemic.
VAERS data: "5,888 deaths", "19,597 hospitalizations", "43,891 urgent care", "58,800
office visits", "1,459 anaphylaxis", "1,737 Bell's palsy", "2,190 heart attacks" and "652
miscarriages". CDC says data is "unreliable". You choose who to believe.
WarrenLiz 16 hours ago
Over 15,472 dead from Jab in 27 EU countries, about half of Europe's 50 countries.
The EudraVigilance database reports that through June 19, 2021 there are 15,472 deaths
and 1,509,266 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19
shots:
The answer to Carlson's question is because.. it's a money grabbing death cult!.
Natural immun system is destroyed... just wait till next flu season or the next virus
they relase and see what death numbers we see!
racing_flowers 17 hours ago
Isn't it curious that the 3 big pharma Corps (think Vacc pushers) and the big 2 MSM
Corps are BOTH controlled by Blackrock Partners Hedge Fund...
Nona Yobiznes 18 hours ago remove link
Them going after the children makes me deeply suspicious. Nobody under 50, unless
they're made of blubber, dies from this. In 2020, there was practically zero excess death
for people younger than 70 years old in Sweden. These are their official statistics. For
the vast majority of people it's basically a flu you get for a couple days and you're over
it. What the **** is all this about? If the vaccine is only really good for preventing
hospitalizations, and doesn't stop you from spreading or from catching variants, what in
the hell are we giving kids vaccines when they are more likely to die from the regular flu?
It's freaky, and it stinks.
Having been caught delivering some fact-base 'science' that does not
jibe with the establishment's message that all kids should be jabbed immediately, The WHO has
rapidly 'adjusted' its science-based recommendations for whether children should get
vaccinated... or not...
Gone is the big headline - "Children should not be vaccinated for the moment."
The new guidance is as follows: (emphasis ours... in case you are confused by their
guidance)
Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults, so unless they
are part of a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them
than older people, those with chronic health conditions and health workers.
More evidence is needed on the use of the different COVID-19 vaccines in children to be
able to make general recommendations on vaccinating children against COVID-19.
WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has concluded that the Pfizer/BionTech
vaccine is suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above. Children aged between 12 and
15 who are at high risk may be offered this vaccine alongside other priority groups for
vaccination.
Vaccine trials for children are ongoing and WHO will update its recommendations when the
evidence or epidemiological situation warrants a change in policy.
So to clarify... children aren't really at risk of this virus so no hurry on the jab... more
evidence is needed on its usefulness in kids... oh but the Pfizer vax is suitable?
So is there evidence or not? Is the vaccine worthwhile for kids? If you have to ask, you
aren't following the science.
Color us not entirely surprised at this farce... but one thing we are sure of, this will
simply be dismissed as a coincidence and WHO had planned on adjusting its guidance the whole
time (it was just waiting to get caught in a disagreement with Fauci and friends).
* * *
As The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity's Adam Dick noted yesterday, in
America, national, state, and local governments are pulling out all the stops to advance giving
experimental coronavirus shots to children down to the age of 12.
Up next, babies and children up to age 11.
The shots are "safe and effective," the propagandists proclaim.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has a different approach. The WHO says do not
vaccinate children, at least not yet.
At its website, the WHO offers this advice regarding giving experimental coronavirus
vaccines, some of which are not even vaccines under the normal meaning of the term, to
children:
Children should not be vaccinated for the moment. There is not yet enough evidence on the
use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be
vaccinated against COVID-19.
Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults.
However, children should continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.
Choose accordingly.
Kugelhagel 18 hours ago
Conspiracy theorist = heretic ... they couldn't use that word anymore, because everyone
would understand that this is about silencing the truth.
Ride_the_kali_yuga 17 hours ago
Nice analogy.
JimmyJones 17 hours ago remove link
Yep, women with their periods messed up, their babies allergic to their breast milk,
young people with heart inflammation, people having partial paralyzed limbs. I know there's
more.
We don't even know what 6-12 months has in-store or 1-2 years.
Alice-the-dog 13 hours ago
I'm always on the look out for new conspiracy theories, because my old ones all turned
out to be accurate.
It was a brilliant psyop by the CIA to invent the term to cover up the murder of JFK.
But if one takes a cursory look at it, how is a conspiracy ever to be exposed without a
theory that there is one? If every time someone proposes a theory regarding this or that
possible conspiracy, they are swept into the kook dust bin, how will any conspiracy ever be
exposed? Hence they aren't, unless iron clad evidence of their existence is encompassed by
the theory.
WarrenLiz 15 hours ago
Over 15,472 dead from Jab in 27 EU countries, about half of Europe's 50 countries.
The EudraVigilance database reports that through June 19, 2021 there are 15,472 deaths
and 1,509,266 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19
shots:
...Too many people are stuck in normalcy bias and are too trusting of the modern elite
class. You don't have to look back very far to see the unspeakable atrocities powerful
people are willing and able to commit.
Ride_the_kali_yuga 17 hours ago (Edited) remove link
My guess was depopulation due to lower EROIE on petroleum. Deathcross of the fossil
energy (oil) available was near to us, maybe we already are behind peak oil. Eolians, solar
panels and EV are an energical leftist joke and will never be an alternative to nuclear/
charchoal power plants and thermic motors.
I was thinking about it for quite some time. Why all this Covidian Cult was necessary
for? What does it produce? Lockdowns was a main response worldwide.
Was it usefull? absolutely not. No more planes in the sky, economic slowdown, a lot less
of enegy used . I guess this sanitary madness was all about cheap energy we can get from
oil. The human population exploded due to the industrial revolution, the machines, their
capacities and -in fine- oil made it possible. If you do not have enough cheap oil and the
EROIE is way to high, then the industrial technology we live in can no longer be.
The Covidian Cult produced what an energy crisis would have made...
The_Dude 16 hours ago
Evil is narcissism run amok...
Rose Marie PREMIUM 15 hours ago
Intelligence without wisdom. Always looking at what, how, when, where, but no interest
in asking why. Running thought processes without examining the meaning.
uncle_duke 18 hours ago remove link
An age of unlimited information, and a population too dumb and lazy to do anything with
it. Reality has become Pythonian.
DAVOS-19 14 hours ago
Not so fast. Remember, they lie, probably also about history.
Now Voyager 14 hours ago
What happens when you stop natural selection and substitute unnatural selection.
Ride_the_kali_yuga 13 hours ago
Yeah, the gene pool is over crowded with genetics defects. See diabetics, i mean
"genetical" ones since a young age. Insuline was a great discovery, it saves a lot of
people at some point. Then without the natural selection they had kids of their own and has
a consequence they spread their genetic defect in the gene pool. Sometimes great inventions
make unintended results.
Diseases are a way for nature to get rid of the olders and the weak. It is not moral,
there is no justice in this, this is just the way nature works. Human tried damn hard to
break nature's law, the thing is, there is consequences playing god.
Wokism is an attempt on financial elite to distract and divide and distruct people from the
crisi of neoliberalism in the USA. This is a pretty dirty game.
There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective
mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020.
Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it
illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one's own concrete prejudices onto
others in order to alleviate or mask them.
So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter's self-described Marxist co-founder turns
out to be a corporate grifter?
Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS
for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.
Is it the case that the more Cullors professes Marxist ideology and damns toxic whiteness,
so all the more she feels at home living in a $1.4 million Topanga Canyon home, in an almost
exclusively ritzy white neighborhood?
Consider outspoken liberal icon Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). He's one of the
Senate's most woke. Yet Whitehouse turns out to be a mostly unapologetic member of a de facto
all-white prestigious "beach club" of elites in Newport, Rhode Island. Is Whitehouse committed
in the abstract to rooting out white privilege so he can concretely relax amid it with fellow
bluebloods?
Barack and Michelle Obama occasionally venture out of either their multimillion-dollar
Washington, D.C. mansion or their Martha's Vineyard estate to lecture the country on its
systemic racism. They express worry over the dangers that apparently white people pose to the
very safety of their own daughters.
Does such sermonizing square the circle that the Obamas have no desire to return to their
Chicago home""a city where nearly 700 African-American males were murdered in 2020, the vast
majority by other black men? So far, Chicago in 2021 is on a trajectory to suffer over 30
percent more murder victims than last year.
Joe Biden about every two weeks lectures America on its racism. And he unleashed the
bureaucracies of the federal government to root out mythical white supremacist
conspiracies.
Does Medieval penance explain Biden's fixation on systemic racism? After all, when he
condemns anonymous white racists, does his outrage mitigate his son Hunter's habitual use of
the N-word and anti-Asian riffs?
No Washington politico has compiled a longer record of racialist put downs than Joe Biden.
So apparently, the more Biden hunts for a white racist under every bed, the less necessary it
becomes to look in the mirror or at least to beg his son Hunter to knock off his racist
slurs.
The second catalyst of wokeism is the distraction it provides from scary problems that
threaten the very existence of American civilization. While the country consumes itself in
demanding more than 12 percent representation of black actors in television commercials, it is
nearing $30 trillion in national debt. Eventually, the astounding red ink will require
recessionary belt-tightening, more inflationary money printing, or both.
The woke Biden Administration cannot stop 2 million immigrants this year from crossing
illegally and with exemption into the United States. Almost all are in need of free American
health care, housing, food, and legal subsidies. Violent crime is spiking at an astonishing
rate. Yet few dare say why that is""or how to stop it.
America also cannot face the likely truth that Chinese researchers engineered a
gain-of-function virus""with oversight from the Communist Chinese military, and subsidies from
Drs. Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak.
So instead of offering real solutions to these crises, we war with each other whether the
deceased children's book author Dr. Seuss or the plastic toy Mr. Potato Head was racist or
otherwise exclusionary.
When our elites are clueless about national debt, inflation, illegal immigration, crime,
soaring gas prices, and a global pandemic, they reassure themselves that at least they can
cancel out Father JunÃpero Serra or knock down another statue of Robert E. Lee.
Finally, the hysterias of wokism are being channeled for profit""if they do not already
reflect the reality of many of our most woke being the richest among us.
One reason why Oprah Winfrey, Meghan Markle, and LeBron James hype charges of white racism
is that their oppression reminds America that one can become rich as Croesus yet remain
sympathetic victims.
For next-generation grifters, like Ibram Xolani Kendi (a.k.a. Ibram Henry Rogers) and Robin
DiAngelo, to claim that America was, is, and always will be racist, means more than just
speaking gigs and book sales.
The solutions for the pseudo-crises they invent are mass reeducation of self-confessional
whites""with lucrative consulting fees for both, and tens of thousands of others.
America is systematically being conned by those who disguise their hypocrisy, who manipulate
the guilt-ridden, who have no interest in solving America's most dangerous problems, and who
get or stay richer by hyping an America in need of massive rebooting - and with it their own
careerist remedies.
There's a growing cottage industry at the nexus of consumer research and government
surveillance.
In a report published Friday, the Wall Street Journal explored the world of Premise Data
Corp., an innocently-named firm that uses a network of users, many in the developing world, who
complete basic tasks for small commissions. Assignments can range from snapping photos of
competitors' stores, to counting the number of ATMs in a given area, to reporting on the price
of consumer goods on the shelf.
Roughly half of the firm's clients are private businesses seeking "commercial information"
(mostly reporting on competitors' operations), both the US government and foreign governments
have hired the firm to do more advanced reconnaissance work while gauging public opinion.
According to
WSJ , Premise is one of a growing number of companies that are straddling "the divide
between consumer services and government surveillance and rely on the proliferation of mobile
phones as a way to turn billions of devices into sensors that gather open-source information
useful to government security services."
Premise's CEO even hinted that the company had been tapped by foreign governments to help
with setting policy about how to deal with "vaccine hesitancy".
"Data gained from our contributors helped inform government policy makers on how to best
deal with vaccine hesitancy, susceptibility to foreign interference and misinformation in
elections, as well as the location and nature of gang activity in Honduras," Premise Chief
Executive Officer Maury Blackman said. The company declined to name its clients, citing
confidentiality.
Premise launched in 2013 as a tool meant to gather data for use in international development
work by governments and non-governmental organizations. In recent years, it has also forged
ties to the American national-security establishment and highlighted its capability to serve as
a surveillance tool, according to documents and interviews with former employees. As of 2019,
the company's marketing materials said it has 600K contributors operating in 43 countries,
including global hot spots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
Federal records show Premise has received at least $5MM in payouts from the government since
2017 on military projects -- including from contracts with the Air Force and the Army and as a
subcontractor to other defense entities. The company's key utility was, again, gathering
information: It would use civilian users in Afghanistan and elsewhere to map out "key social
structures such as mosques, banks and internet cafes; and covertly monitoring cell-tower and
Wi-Fi signals in a 100-square kilometer area."
In a presentation prepared last year for the Combined Joint Special Operations Task
Force-Aghanistan, Premise shared some details about its global operation which showed that it's
mostly active outside the US.
It also showed how its "users" stationed around Kabul helped it collect data that are
valuable to the US and Afghan military.
As the WSJ explained, data from Wi-Fi networks, cell towers and mobile devices could be
valuable to the military for "situational awareness, target tracking and other intelligence
purposes."
There is also tracking potential in having a distributed network of phones acting as
sensors, and knowing the signal strength of nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points can be
useful when trying to jam communications during military operations.
Users of Premise's data-collection app typically aren't told for whom they are truly
working. This is all laid out in its privacy policy, of course. The app currently assigns about
five "tasks" per day to its active users in Afghanistan.
When
WSJ caught up with Afghani users of the app, they were told that the users were typically
paid about 25 cents per task (about 20 Afghani). And that lately, some of the tasks had struck
him as "potentially concerning." Premises claims that none of its users have ever been harmed
while completing tasks.
In this way, many of the app's users are effectively being used as unwitting spies for the
military.
But it's just one more thing to look out for. Next time you're traveling abroad and you see
somebody taking a photo of a mosque or a bank, just remember, it might be part of an officially
sanctioned intelligence operation.
Update (0815ET) : British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he was "very sorry" after
pictures of him kissing and embracing his top aide, a friend hired last year, were splashed on
the front page of the Sun newspaper. However, he has said he will not resign .
As
Summit News' Paul Joseph Watson detailed earlier, yet another architect of the UK's
lockdown has been caught violating it as photos revealed Health Secretary Matt Hancock
passionately kissing his mistress at a time when Brits were being told they shouldn't even
shake hands.
In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in
how mentally caged he had me that he'd start overtly telling me what he is and what he was
doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so
submitted to his will by that point that I'd gaslight myself into reframing those statements in
a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me "I am going to rape you," and then he
did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I'd run perception management on
it for him.
The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I
became, the more open he'd be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of
exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to
others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate
it.
I was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he
made an observation we've discussed here
previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly
has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public
perception.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jU58mrEpPvU
"If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will
find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate
the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population," Greenwald
said .
"They used to try to do it secretly. They don't even do it secretly anymore. They don't
need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James
Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news
organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American
population."
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled " The CIA and the Media " reporting
that the CIA had
covertly infiltrated America's most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who
it considered assets in a program known as
Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to
report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the
agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too
brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like
The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news
pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor ,
and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence
agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets
now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper,
Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha
Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash,
Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known
CIA assets like NBC's Ken Dilanian, as are
CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like
Tucker Carlson.
They're just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they're showing off.
And that's just the media. We also see this flaunting behavior exhibited in the US
government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a propaganda operation geared at
sabotaging foreign governments not aligned with the US which according to its own founding
officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The late author and
commentator William Blum
makes this clear :
[I]n 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic
institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the
"nongovernmental"" part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny
of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial
statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO
(Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad
that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a
GO.
"We should not have to do this kind of work covertly," said Carl Gershman in 1986, while
he was president of the Endowment. "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the
world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60's, and that's why it has
been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that's why the endowment
was created."
And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991:
"A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
We see NED's fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power
alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Russia to
Hong
Kong to Xinjiang to the
imperial propaganda operation known as Bellingcat.
Hell, intelligence insiders are just openly running for office now. In an article titled "
The CIA
Democrats in the 2020 elections ", World Socialist Website documented the many veterans of
the US intelligence cartel who ran in elections across America in 2018 and 2020:
"In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence
operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination
in 50 congressional seats" nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting
Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these
candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018
election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously
Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of
Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably
an equally significant scale."
So they're just getting more and more brazen the more confident they feel about how
propaganda-addled and submissive the population has become. They're laying more and more of
their cards on the table. Soon the CIA will just be openly selling narcotics door to door like
Girl Scout cookies.
Or maybe not. I said my ex got more and more overt about his abuses in the later years of
our relationship because those were the later years. I did eventually expand my own
consciousness of my own inner workings enough to clear the fears and unexamined beliefs I had
that he was using as hooks to manipulate me. Maybe, as humanity's consciousness continues to
expand , the same will happen for the people and their abusive relationship with the
CIA.
* * *
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The voting measure has inflamed Republicans, who accused Democrats of engaging in
demagoguery.
"This bill is brazen," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), ticking off a list of provisions in
the Democratic bill that he called damaging, including one that would shrink the Federal
Election Commission to five from six members, which he said would enable the president to turn
the agency into a weapon against political rivals. Mr. Cruz accused Democrats of "deliberately
inflaming racial tensions" by attacking policies like requiring voter identification that
Republicans say are designed to protect the integrity of the vote.
... ... ...
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), the sponsor of the Senate bill, a version of which
cleared the House in March , told CNN on Monday that there are ways to advance voting
legislation that would involve changing the filibuster, which requires three-fifths of the
Senate, or currently 60 members, to end debates and vote on most legislation.
"Fifty members getting into a room and deciding how we go forward will be kind of another
stage of how we proceed," Mr. Merkley said later on a call with activists.
The pressure-cooker environment in which the debate lands was highlighted by nascent
campaigns inside and outside the Capitol. Republicans are calling attention to a provision in
the Democrats' bill that would allow signatures in lieu of voter identification cards, saying
such a policy could be abused and would weaken trust in the validity of elections. A Monmouth
University poll released Monday found that 80% of Americans support requiring voters to show
photo identification to cast ballots.
Meanwhile, the progressive group Just Democracy is running ads aimed at Ms. Sinema,
suggesting that she is weak on voting policy because she hasn't come out in support of ending
the filibuster to make voting legislation possible.
Ms. Sinema is up for re-election in 2024. Her state is currently roiled by
an audit of votes cast in 2020 in Maricopa County, which Mr. Biden won, and is defending
some of its voting rules at the Supreme Court.
Ending the filibuster may get Democrats everything that the want for another 18 months. But
they will not be able to keep the legislation that they have passed.
As soon as control of both chambers and the White House passes to the other party, they
very quickly will repeal each and every bit of legislation that had been passed by the
Democrats.
At that point, Republicans will be able to pass absolutely everything that they want,
probably for 18 months.
By ending the filibuster we will get national laws that change with every change of
administration.
Aren't we better off, keeping the filibuster, so that nothing is ever accomplished by
either party? Deadlock.
Deadlock pleases politicians and the primary voters in their party, but it frustrates the
80% of Americans who are moderates. They want Congress to act to deal with the country's
problems. But deadlock it will be.
"The Trump""Deep State clash is a showdown between a presidency that is far too powerful
versus federal agencies that have become fiefdoms with immunity for almost any and all abuses,"
I wrote in an FFF article a year ago.
Since then, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by fewer than 50,000 votes in a handful of
swing states that determined the Electoral College result. There were numerous issues that
could drive that relatively small number of votes. But machinations by the Deep State probably
cost Trump far more votes than it took to seal his loss.
... ... ...
The first three years of Trump's presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he had
colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. The FBI launched its investigation on the
basis of ludicrous allegations from a dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton presidential
campaign. FBI officials deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign. A
FISA warrant is the nuclear bomb of searches, authorizing the FBI "to conduct simultaneous
telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target's
home, workplace and vehicles," as well as "physical searches of the target's residence, office,
vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails," as a FISA court decision noted. The FISA
court is extremely deferential, approving 99 percent of all search warrant requests.
Leaks from federal officials spurred media hysteria that put Trump on the defensive even
before he took his oath of office in January 2017. A 2018 Inspector General (IG) report
revealed that one FBI agent labeled Trump supporters as "retarded" and declared, "I'm with her"
(Clinton). Another FBI employee texted that "Trump's supporters are all poor to middle class,
uneducated, lazy POS." One FBI lawyer texted that he was "devastated" by Trump's election and
declared, "Viva la Resistance!" and "I never really liked the Republic anyway." The same person
became the "primary FBI attorney assigned to [the Russian election-interference] investigation
beginning in early 2017," the IG noted.
FBI chief James Comey leaked official memos to friendly reporters, thereby spurring the
appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump. A 2019 Inspector General
report noted that top FBI officials told the IG that they were "shocked," "stunned," and
"surprised' that Comey would leak the contents of one of the memos to a reporter. The IG
concluded, "The unauthorized disclosure of this information" information that Comey knew only
by virtue of his position as FBI Director" violated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement
and the FBI's Prepublication Review Policy." The IG concluded that by using sensitive
information "to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for
the over 35,000 current FBI employees" and the many thousands more former FBI employees" who
similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information." The IG report warned that
"the civil liberties of every individual who may fall within the scope of the FBI's
investigative authorities depend on FBI's ability to protect sensitive information from
unauthorized disclosure."
But the only penalty that Comey suffered was to collect multimillion-dollar advances for his
book deals.
The Steele dossier
In December 2019, another Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made "fundamental
errors" to justify surveilling the Trump campaign. The FBI refrained from launching a FISA
warrant request until it came into possession of a dossier from Christopher Steele, a former
British intelligence agent. The Steele dossier played "a central and essential role in the
decision by FBI [Office of General Counsel] to support the request for FISA surveillance
targeting Carter Page, as well as the FBI's ultimate decision to seek the FISA order," the IG
report concluded. The FBI "drew almost entirely" from the Steele dossier to prove a
"well-developed conspiracy" between Russians and the Trump campaign. The IG found that FBI
agents were "unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter
Page" in the Steele dossier but the FBI relied on Steele's allegations regardless.
The FBI withheld from the FISA court key details that obliterated the dossier's credibility,
including a warning from a top Justice Department official that "Steele may have been hired by
someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC [Democratic National
Committee]." The CIA disdained the Steele dossier as "an internet rumor," one FBI official told
IG investigators.
Many if not most of the damning details involving Russiagate have still not been disclosed.
But the occasional disclosures are doing nothing to burnish the credibility of the key players.
On January 12, 2017, Comey attested to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the
Steele dossier used to hound the Trump campaign had been "verified." But on the same day, he
emailed the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, "We are not able to sufficiently
corroborate the reporting." That email was revealed this past February, thanks to a multi-year
fight for disclosure by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
If the FBI's deceit and political biases had been exposed in real time, there would have
been far less national outrage when Trump fired Comey. Instead, that firing was quickly
followed by the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Russian
charges. In April 2019, Mueller admitted there was no evidence of collusion. Conniving by FBI
officials and the veil of secrecy that hid their abuses had roiled national politics for
years.
Not one FBI official has spent a single day in jail for the abuses. In January, former FBI
assistant general counsel Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced after he admitted falsifying key
evidence used to secure the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. A federal prosecutor
declared that the "resulting harm is immeasurable" from Clinesmith's action. But a federal
judge believed that a wrist slap was sufficient punishment" 400 hours of community service and
12 months of probation.
The Deep State defeated Trump in part because the president appointed agency chiefs who were
more devoted to secrecy than to truth. Bureaucratic barricades were reinforced by judges who
repeatedly defied common sense to perpetuate iron curtains around federal
agencies.
Syria
Trump's failure to extract the United States from the Syrian civil war was one of his
biggest foreign policy pratfalls. Each time he sought to exit that quagmire, the Washington
establishment and Deep State agencies pushed back.
When Trump tried to end CIA assistance to Syrian terrorist groups in July 2017, a Washington
Post article portrayed his reversal in apocalyptic terms. Trump responded with an angry tweet:
"The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful
payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad." That disclosure spurred a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request by the New York Times for CIA records on payments to Syrian rebel groups. The
CIA denied the request and the case ended up in court.
CIA officer Antoinette Shiner warned the court that forcing the CIA to admit that it
possessed any records of aiding Syrian rebels would "confirm the existence and the focus of
sensitive Agency activity that is by definition kept hidden to protect U.S. government policy
objectives." Of course, "kept hidden" doesn't apply to the CIA when it was engaged in "not for
attribution" bragging to reporters. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius proudly cited an
estimate from a "knowledgeable official" that "CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded
100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years."
Federal judges, unlike Syrian civilians slaughtered by U.S.-funded terrorist groups, had the
luxury of pretending the program didn't exist. In a decision last July, the federal appeals
court of the Second Circuit stressed that affidavits from CIA officials are "accorded a
presumption of good faith" and stressed "the appropriate deference owed" to the CIA. The judges
omitted quoting former CIA chief Mike Pompeo's description of his agency's modus operandi: "We
lied, we cheated, we stole. It's like we had entire training courses."
Since Trump's tweet did not specifically state that the program he was seeking to terminate
actually existed, the judges entitled the CIA to pretend it was still top secret. The judges
concluded with another kowtow, stressing that they were "mindful of the requisite deference
courts traditionally owe to the executive in the area of classification." Judge Robert Katzmann
dissented, declaring that the court's decision put its "imprimatur to a fiction of deniability
that no reasonable person would regard as plausible."
On February 9, another federal appeals court shot down a FOIA request from BuzzFeed
journalist Jason Leopold who had sought the same records on the basis of Trump's tweet. But the
federal appeals court for the District of Columbia unanimously blocked Leopold's request: "Did
President Trump's tweet officially acknowledge the existence of a program? Perhaps. Or perhaps
not. And therein lies a problem." The judges proffered no evidence that Trump had tweeted about
a program that didn't exist. The judges reached into an "Alice in Wonderland" bag of legal
tricks and plucked out this pretext: "Even if the President's tweet revealed some program, it
did not reveal the existence of Agency records about that alleged program." Since Trump failed
to specify the exact room number where the records were located at CIA headquarters, the judges
entitled the CIA to pretend the records didn't exist.
Only a federal judge could shovel that kind of hokum. Well, also members of Congress and
editorial writers, but that's a story for another month.
* * *
In his final months in office, Trump repeatedly promised massive declassification which
never came.
Was the president stymied by persons he had unwisely appointed, such as CIA chief Gina
Haspel and FBI chief Christopher Wray? Or was that simply another series of empty Twitter
eruptions that Trump failed to follow up? Instead, his legacy is another grim reminder of how
government secrecy can determine political history.
Have Deep State federal agencies become a Godzilla with the prerogative to undermine
elections? Unfortunately, there's no chance that federal judges would permit disclosure of the
answer to that question.
Former CIA and NSA boss Michael Hayden proudly proclaimed,
""Espionage is not just compatible with democracy; it's essential for democracy."
And how can we know if the Deep State's espionage is actually pro-democracy or subversive of
democracy? Again, don't expect judges to permit any truths to escape on that score.
Secrecy is the ultimate entitlement program for the Deep State. The federal government is
creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The more documents bureaucrats classify,
the more lies politicians and government officials can tell. Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson
warned in 2019, "If people don't have the facts, democracy doesn't work."
Actually, it is working very well for the FBI, CIA, and other Deep State agencies.
capsrule 8 minutes ago
Not much of a clash. Trump had his *** handed to him because he was a moron who
handicapped himself by filling his cabinet with horrible people that sabotaged him and his
agenda at every turn - including his incompetent son in law and daughter. Not once did he
go on offense. He was reduced to pathetic Twitter rantings begging DOJ to "Do
something!"
No_Pretzel_Logic 16 minutes ago
The USA is a captured nation and has been for quite awhile.
Little is as it seems to be. Good luck...
Wise Limit 18 minutes ago (Edited)
Donald Trump was a jester. A reality TV actor to give the masses the appearance they got
what they wanted while they pacified conservatives and spent four years to plan and
strategize the next steps in the infiltration, takeover and destruction of the country.
Voting is a sham.
... ... ...
Wise Limit 11 minutes ago (Edited) remove link
Remember all those promises from Trump and the GOP if they "just got the majority" in
2016?
1. Dreamers will be gone.
2. Obamacare will be gone.
3. Hillary will be gone.
4. Mexico will pay for the wall.
Politicians are the greatest actors. Politics is done. Time to fight for secession of
Southern conservative states.
No_Pretzel_Logic 12 minutes ago remove link
It seems that there is merit to what you say but, I cannot square all the overblown
attempts to nail him and to impeach him on bogus grounds. Then to try again a second
time.
The Dems and Deep Staters (incl media) could have just kept-up the usual partisan
fighting, sniping, etc.
Trump was obviously a true threat to many. I'll bet Ric Grenell and John Radcliffe
acquired ALOT of valuable info about important people.
Wise Limit 5 minutes ago (Edited)
This is all that needs to be squared right here. This was after the election, after the
"she would be in jail" rhetoric.
I got played too. I just didn't figure it out until 2018 when I saw Trump and the GOP
lied again, the Democrats took the House and suddenly "Q" appeared to distract the masses
from the fact they didn't fulfill any of their promises.
Gospel According To Me 6 minutes ago (Edited)
The Deep State is a threat to our very existence as a mostly peaceful oligarchy. They
will stop at NOTHING to destroy anyone who attempts to stop them. Trump could never defeat
them alone and everyone he hired was quickly cotrrupted by those Deep State actors. They
became close allies with our own communists and the CCP. These sick individuals probably
had a role in the plandemic and were happy to see all the business failures, etc, as a path
to keeping power. If Trump wins in 2024 he must get rid of thousands of government SES
employees in every agency or they will destroy his presidency again.
Unfortunatley, the best hope to turn things around is complete economic collapse, which
is likley. The leftists will continue to buy votes, but when the cities burn it won't be
enough. Trump's team better understand it takes money to fight the globalists and a real
dirty campaign like the Dems run. No holds barred...tell Americans what a s***hole the
leftists have made America into. Wide open borders with millions pouring across and jobs
drying up. Rampant crime and soaring inflation.
Allow legal voters only with ID! It will work! Pray for a leader to get us out of this
perverse woke mess.
zod 6 minutes ago
trump was the most entertaining, in a long line of the same, 'illusion of choice' we've
always had.
2pac 12 minutes ago
Don't worry - Durham investigation should be done any day now.
The USA health care system is failing for many due to a number of reasons including
outrageous premiums and piss-poor care with HMOs and basically a corporatized system. People
are numbers, not patients anymore.
The roads are crumbling.
Crime in every major city is literally out of control, from LA to NYC, from ****cago to
Houston. Homicides and violent assaults (by joggers) out of control.
USPS notified me today that 4 packages I mailed out will be delayed because of both
equipment and labor problems.
What next? More blackouts or failed internet? Droughts?
Jim in MN 15 hours ago remove link
Under Obama US life expectancy actually decreased for consecutive years, something that's
never supposed to happen in a 'developed economy'. Of course Trump fixed it, and now the
globalist scum are fixing us....permanently.
Once again, with feeling: None of the 'control measures' does anything. End it all now.
They just want us all in their databases anyway. They don't care about death tolls, or even
vaccines. It's not about that.
The vaccine passports in the UK already link to your entire medical history, biometric,
genetic and ethnic data, criminal history, vehicle registration and employer data.
All they need is your bank account and internet/social media.
Then it's just................................CHINA.
And THAT is what they want, and what they are doing.
Money quote: " Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and
pretty well any of the other bluecheck day camps for aspiring establishment shills."
Late Stage Globalism Is A Tale of
Narratives vs Networks
Over the past few weeks in my weekly
#AxisOfEasy newsletter I've been covering how Big Tech and the corporate media tried,
unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on the Wuhan Lab origin narrative. At one point I half-joked
"I'll shut up about this when it's safe to talk about Ivermectin" . This week, I did end up
writing a piece about Ivermectin, namely how doctors can't even mention it in their videos or
podcast appearances without being penalized by social media platforms.
Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who has studied bats (from which COVID-19
purportedly originated) was recently on
Triggernometry , the UK based podcast that my company, easyDNS , has been sponsoring since mid-2020. It turns out that
neither Weinstein nor Triggernometry can say the word "Ivermectin" in their shows. If they do
they'll get an automatic takedown by YouTube and a strike on Facebook for violating community
standards.
Matt Taibbi recently posed the question " Why has
"˜Ivermectin' become a dirty word? " He cites Dr. Pierre Kory in his testimony to a
US Senate Committee hearing on medical responses to COVID-19 in December 2020. Kory was
referring to an existing medicine that was already FDA approved that he was describing as a
"wonder drug" in treating COVID-19, that drug was Ivermectin.
This Senate testimony was televised and viewed by approximately 8 million people. YouTube
removed the video of this exchange. They later suspended the account of the United States
senator who invited Dr. Kory to speak. (Kory also appeared on Brett Weinstein's show and they
took down that as well).
Associated Press for their part "fact
checked" the senate testimony, and because, in their words "there is no evidence that
Ivermectin is a "˜miracle drug' against COVID", they labeled it as false:
CLAIM: The antiparasitic drug ivermectin "has a miraculous effectiveness that obliterates"
the transmission of COVID-19 and will prevent people from getting sick.
AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. There's no evidence ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective
treatment against COVID-19.
... ... ...
But I'm looking beyond that, outside of network TV. The hottest news outlets are fast
becoming independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald , self-publishing via their Substack.
That's mainly email.
Joe Rogan has a larger audience than Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon combined. So too does Steve
Bannon, btw. The few times I've been on his
Warroom I was astounded at the reach of his audience. According to company sources he's
doing between 2.5 and 3.5 million downloads per day. The last people I would ever expect to be
tuning into Bannon are telling me "I saw you on Warroom". (It's mind-blowing).
Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and pretty well any
of the other bluecheck day camps for aspiring establishment shills.
It's because of independent, renegade journalists and people writing outside of major
outlets that these stories are starting go mainstream despite the best efforts of Big Tech,
enforcing whatever canon the corporate press deems to be truth, or the establishment anointed
"fact checkers" who try to step in whenever something looks to gain traction:
The Wuhan lab origin was suspected for over a year (and the Fauci emails prove it).
Zerohedge was on it almost immediately and
got deplatformed for their troubles. It was finally pushed over the line in a
Medium post by Nicholas Wade over a year later.
Ivermectin may be next round and it looks like if it gets anywhere it will be thanks to
people like Matt Taibbi and Bret Weinstein.
What is the common thread here? It's the power of decentralized networks and open source
protocols vs narrative control that is promulgated from global governments, amplified by the
corporate media, and enforced by technocratic platforms.
... ... ...
It may seem like the censorship is absolute and that the narrative and the spin is
overwhelming. But take solace that it only appears that way because the facade is breaking.
As more people realize that the centralized technocratic system is failing, those who's
privilege and position are premised on it have to double down, triple down. They have to burn
the boats.
They're fully committed now and because they have no other choice they have to overstep and
overreach. Too much, too soon. Too late.
Back in the mid-1990s when irony was still a thing, British TV had a popular celebrity
gameshow called
Shooting Stars hosted by comedians Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. It was filled with
slapstick, surreal, anarchic humor, and while it appeared to stick to standard gameshow
conventions, everything was actually arbitrary: rules could be made up or ignored as and when
Vic and Bob felt like it
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of
time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that
glorifies it."
- Frédéric Bastiat, French economist
If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that
the taxpayer always gets ripped off.
With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke
around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.
Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we're getting swindled,
cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and
fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a
profit at taxpayer expense.
The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian
regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless
surveillance of Americans' private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT
team raids of Americans' homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments
meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies
domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip
searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that
collect and disseminate data on Americans' private transactions; and militarized agencies with
stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the
agencies under their command -- Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice,
Treasury, etc. -- have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable
pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.
By the time you factor in the financial blowback from the COVID-19 pandemic with its
politicized mandates, lockdowns, and payouts, it becomes quickly apparent that we are now ruled
by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly
unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.
As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program,
follow the money trail.
When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being
surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other
than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them,
and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American
police state.
Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.
On the roads : Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by
issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and
red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of
corruption,
collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting
drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit
sharing by imposing a vehicle
miles-traveled tax , which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.
In the schools: The security industrial complex with its tracking, spying, and
identification
devices has set its sights on the schools as " a vast, rich market " -- a $20 billion market, no
less -- just waiting to be conquered. In fact, the public schools have become a microcosm of
the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of
surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners,
as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies.
Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and
weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools -- at great
taxpayer expense and personal profit -- into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are
school truancy
laws , which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the
schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school
districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for
"unauthorized" absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making
the schools any safer.
In the endless wars abroad : Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the
government's endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police
forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and
incompetent government officials, America's expanding military empire is bleeding the country
dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour . Future wars and
military exercises waged around the globe are expected to
push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053 . Talk about fiscally irresponsible:
the U.S. government is spending money it doesn't have on a military empire it can't afford.
War spending is bankrupting America.
In the form of militarized police : The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands
out six-figure
grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a
veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault
weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has,
according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, "
paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams ." The end result? An explosive
growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency
on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within
police forces that they are at war -- and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000
SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover,
government-funded
military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.
In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture : Under the guise of fighting the war on
drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions
of dollars' worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they "suspect" may be
connected to criminal activity. Then -- and here's the kicker -- whether or not any crime is
actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen's property, often
divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police are actually
being
trained in seminars on how to seize the "goodies" that are on police departments' wish
lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to "pay for
sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car."
By the security industrial complex : We're being spied on by a domestic army of government
snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of "precrime," this government of
Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading
everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you
communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used
against you eventually, at a time and place of the government's choosing. This far-reaching
surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for
an
omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government -- the Surveillance State -- that
came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn't even
touch on the government's bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying
and tracking the American people from birth to death.
By a government addicted to power: It's a given that you can always count on the
government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the
citizenry's inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized
one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war
on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes,
school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate
responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the
police state's hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state
powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing
programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., "we the people" may
well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers
to protect us from ourselves.
These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the
name of the national good -- against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our
freedoms -- by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with
megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the
reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And,
as always, it's we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken
for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.
This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.
Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives.
Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority
of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few
Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called
representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and
uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in
the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers,
drones, and cell phone tracking technology.
All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those
are your tax dollars at work.
It's your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls,
your text messages, and your movements. It's your money that allows out-of-control police
officers to burst into innocent people's homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side
of the road. And it's your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted
for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to
speak their truth to their elected officials.
Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it's a
police officer arresting someone for filming them in public, or a child being kicked out of
school for attending a virtual class while playing with a toy gun, remember that it is your tax
dollars that are paying for these injustices.
There was a time in our history when our forebears said "enough is enough" and stopped
paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground
and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance,
and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people.
Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.
Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we've let
bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to
such an extent that we're back where we started.
Once again, we've got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.
Once again, we've got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which
demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.
And once again, we've got to decide whether we'll keep marching or break stride and make a
turn toward freedom.
But what if we didn't just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government's
outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn't just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection
bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we
did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we
refuse to support?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People , if the government and its emissaries can just
take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can't
claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of
time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that
glorifies it."
- Frédéric Bastiat, French economist
If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that
the taxpayer always gets ripped off.
Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and
keeping them there." Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by
inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to
"boost profits" at taxpayer expense .
The US is not capitalist. There are no "capitalist powers." There are only managerial
states. Read Orwell who, yes, was a socialist.
The US was overtaken by ex-Trotskyites in the form of Neocons, eg. Irving Kristol. They
redefined the US from a nation-state into an ideological state, as the Soviet Union had been.
But we do not have any particular ideology here; the ideology is always changing.
The US empire does not serve the interests of the American people, you'll agree. But it's
not as simple as "capitalism." These ideological battles are theatre. They are not the real
battles. They are pretend religions, like sports teams, which motivate and justify war for
two different elites.
Read James Burnham, another ex-Trotskyite, on Machiavellians and, separately, on the
managerial state. However, Burnham became something akin to a Neocon; so, certainly, don't
come to the same conclusions as he did.
The US is not capitalist. There are no "capitalist powers." There are only managerial
states. Read Orwell who, yes, was a socialist.
Posted by: Weaver | Jun 22 2021 19:35 utc | 15
This is a rather strange interpretation. The power of the managers stems fro the power of
large active shareholders, while the majority of shares may be passively owned by middle
class in the form of retirement savings. As it was explained: "Contrary to popular beliefs,
there are no bulls and bears on Wall Street, but sheep and wolves. And the money is not made
by the bah bah crowd", followed by the distinction between "smart money" and the rest of
investors. The financial games that we discussed in the case of Boeing may seem stupid in
terms of "maximizing long term stock value", but excellent for providing gains for active
investors who got artificial run-up in stock prices followed by selling to the "bah bah
crowd".
Weaver "China seems to have defined "communism" as a rejection of democracy."
What is democracy? In the west, it has become apparent that whoever controls the media
controls democracy. We elect rulers. We do not get any say in formulating many laws as in
each new law being put to a referendum. China voted with its feet during the revolution. Many
culture elect or otherwise have local leaders who everyone in the community knows and the
community leaders decide on or elect who has positions at the next level of governance and so
forth. In that way, China is very democratic beginning at the grass roots level.
The Chinese government have done a huge amount in bringing millions of people out of poverty,
creating better living conditions for its people. When there is constantly and increase in
prosperity at all levels, even if some prosper more than others, the people have an
optimistic outlook.
Democracy at a national level where voters do not personal know the candidate requires
accurate information to enable an informed vote. In that way, democracy in the west is non
existent - it is an illusion but the sheeple cling to it.
Compared to the so called west, China government is very much of the people for the
people.
@ Peter AU1 (# 23), name a democracy that isn't a suzerainty. We don't elect rulers. We
elect puppets that have been selected by the rulers. Who owns the media? Who creates majority
of money in your nation?
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. Tolkien
"Democracy" is a temporary phase of history which allows the Global Financial Syndicate to
take control from the earlier generation of dominant power players: the monarchies.
Long ago and far away, a group of very clever paleo-banksters figured out a way to stop
those annoying periodic slave revolts... eventually it came to be known as "the two party
system" (democracy/Republic) and it's working like a charm...Rulers make the slaves fight
each other.
World Financiers & Banksters ENSLAVEMENT plan using democracy:
– Create a REVOLUTION & steal a region
– Create a Private CENTRAL BANK (First Bank of the USA, BoE-1694)
– Fund & control new rich individuals (Kleptocrats)
– Fund & control political PARTIES & MEDIA
– Nationalize the central bank (the Fed, BoE-1946)
Enslave & control people by DOMINANCE over economic & political powers & call
it a DEMOCRACY. An interesting FRACTAL emerges when one analysis the formation of
democracies.
What we have is "representative" democracies designed by the economically powerful solely
for their interests and in this sense would always be functioning anti-democratically. In a
money democracy (where the fundamental element of influence is the unit of money), the
political and legal system is influenced and shaped by systems of power to protect and
enhance those systems of power.
"There are none so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The
truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They
feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
– Goethe
Your understanding of democracy and the prevalent Chinese understanding of democracy are
divergent.
It is true that all of the political decisions in China are made by the communists; the
CPC. But do note that the CPC has almost 100 million members . These are not simply
voters like political parties have in the US, who just align themselves with a party
and vote for it every couple years. These 100 million members of the CPC are actual
decision-makers.
Of course, that is a lot of work and responsibility and not everyone in China wants to
commit that much of their life to politics. With that said, how much of your life do
you commit to politics? Does your biennial vote actually carry any weight, and do you take
full responsibility for the consequences of it? Of course not on both points.
Those Chinese people who choose to do so live democracy. You, on the other hand,
just play a shallow democracy game that is little more than a reality TV show like
Survivor . Does Trump get voted off the island? Clinton? Sanders? That is your choice.
Does America slaughter some more dark skinned people in the Global South? Do the banks get
bailed out with your wealth? These things you get no say in.
Communists don't oppose democracy. They oppose the crappy reality TV "The Democracy
Show!™" sham that westerners love to hate.
I look on it as somewhat of a mixed group. Fellow travelers do the same thing but for
different reasons. Finance, anglo supremacy ect. Amongst the vassal states in same cases
straight out corruption as in selling their service es to the highest bidder, amongst the
five-eyes, the elite in particular, in the current events of trying to bring down Russia and
China, continued anglo dominance of the world is a very big driver. The anglosphere has been
a dominant force in the world for close to 500 years and many are truly afraid of this
ending. The cant envisage a world that is dominated by cultures other than anglo or
anglo/europe.
Robin, "the Imperial Pottery Barn rule" is an extremely good analogy. I'm going to have a
hard time citing you if I ever use that. I've also seen US foreign policy described as
"rubblization," with regard to Syria especially.
I wonder who is still buying this brown high-fructose corn syrup carbonated water. Only
people completely obvious to their health do so. Boycotting Coca-cola is probably the easiest and
healthiest boycott possible. From commnets: " Woka Cola can kiss my ***. "
In a letter dated June 11, the
American Civil Rights Project (ACRP) noted that on Jan. 28, the general counsel of Coca-Cola
demanded law firms seeking to keep the company as a client must commit that at least 30 percent
of billed time would be from "diverse attorneys," and at least half of that time would be from
black attorneys.
The ACRP, speaking on behalf of "a set of concerned Coca-Cola Company shareholders,"
demanded that the soft drink company either "publicly retract the discriminatory
outside-counsel policies" or otherwise "provide access to the corporate records related to the
decision of Coca-Cola's officers and directors to adopt and retain those illegal policies."
Coca-Cola's race-specific contracting policy , according to the ACRP, has exposed the
corporation and its shareholders to "material risk of liability" for potentially violating
anti-discrimination laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits
employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
The letter further alleged that all of Coca-Cola's decision makers knew, or should have
known, that the policy was potentially illegal. It said those who were not so aware of the
legal risks either have failed their responsibility or "relied on the inexcusably flawed advice
of counsel."
... ... ...
Coca-Cola, one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, came under fire in
February, when its employees were allegedly instructed to be "less white" as part of a
"Confronting Racism" training course featuring interviews with sociologist Robin DiAngelo, the
author of a 2018 book called "White Fragility."
"In the U.S. and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are
inherently superior because they are white," reads one of the slides, allegedly sent from an
"internal whistleblower" and posted on Twitter by YouTube commentator Karlyn Borysenko. The
post went viral.
1 hour ago remove link
Coca Cola is brown high-fructose corn syrup carbonated water that makes one fat through
empty calories. It's perhaps the easiest and healthiest boycott possible. Do it, white man...
do it. play_arrow 51 play_arrow
Ghost of SilverIsMoney 59 minutes ago
I got off my sugary soda addiction 6years ago by switching to Seltzers.
They still have the soda bite without any garbage attached.
TacoNasty 50 minutes ago
I unfortunately got addicted to diet soda because my parents gave it to me since I was a
young toddler.
Coke's anti-White racism finally got me to quit.
I feel so much healthier... especially, my sleep is so much better!
ted41776 1 hour ago
yelp, a publicly traded company, has a category named "black-owned businesses" that they
regularly promote
discrimination laws?
crickets
overbet 1 hour ago
I regret that I already dont drink that **** so I cant boycott it any further. Avoiding
anything processed got me from a flabby 250lb desk jockey to a lean 190lb heavy lifting gym
rat after a few years.
Automatic Choke PREMIUM 49 minutes ago
you can short the stock.
TacoNasty 50 minutes ago
Good job!!! Props to you. I dropped from 220 to 180 during quarantine due to watching my
diet much more closely and lifting.
MaskTard 53 minutes ago
Woka Cola can kiss my ***. All Coke products in this household were poured down the
drain long ago.
sleepyhollow 51 minutes ago
Same here. Stopped drinking Coke, buying woke products and watching woke sports such as
the NFL, NBA, etc.
Virgil Krenshaw PREMIUM 31 minutes ago (Edited)
Sue. Them. Silly. Go on the offensive against wokeness. It's discrimination. It's
race-based harassment. And it's against the law. Document any HR sessions that are woke.
Build evidence of a pattern of behavior. Then go for the throat.
Very interesting to see shareholders threatening to sue. Courts recognize management's
fiduciary duty to shareholders, but overwhelmingly defer to executives' "business judgment"
on what's best for a company. But these woketards are now so obviously undermining company
value that I think courts will probably intervene.
How could A&E ever justify its decision to cancel "Cops," AKA the source of half its
revenue, as a sound business judgment that would add shareholder value?
William Dorritt 44 minutes ago
The following list presents notable Coca-Cola subsidiaries, brands and products:
Coca-Cola (Coke)
Diet Coke
Coca-Cola Zero
Sprite
Fanta
Dasani
Ciel
Smartwater
Minute Maid
Simply Orange
Del Valle
Powerade
Vitaminwater
Odwalla
Fuze Beverage
Honest Tea
Chimesickle007 17 minutes ago
Thank god none of them are on my shopping list
tyberious 52 minutes ago (Edited)
Started out as a poison, got rid of Cocaine and added an even more addictive and far
deadlier substance, GMO high fructose corn syrup with a healthy dose of glyphosate!
Lt. Shicekopf 42 minutes ago
I do not drink Coke, watch the NFL, use Gillette products, I eschew Starbucks, shun the
airlines, avoid the NBA like the plague...and I feel much better about myself.
Automatic Choke PREMIUM 59 minutes ago
Stop "woke"
dump Coke.
MoneyMonkey 50 minutes ago
Incidence of diabetes (aka "the sugars") is highest amongst jogger Americans, so it
seems fair they get to be scum sucking lawyers for a company slowly killing their own
kind.
Southern_Boy 9 minutes ago (Edited)
Drank Coke daily (3 to 6 cans or bottles) for almost 60 years. They've lost my business
thanks to this "Woke Business". As I understood it, they hired an activist lawyer who
basically has cost them billions in sales.
What is the fastest way to create lots of DEBT (money)? Wars, civil war, technological
waves, credit bubbles (speculative, housing,...), infrastructures...
What is the real purpose of war? To capture & control more areas for EXPLOITATION? War
is the fastest way to create lots of debt for all parties.
"the real value of a conflict, the true value, is in the debt it creates. You control the
debt, you control everything."
Money Power = Land x Lives x Loans
Putting Afghanistan in further debt, enables it to be exploited... What are its revenue
sources? Who pays for its security and infrastructure? Will NATO leave by September?
Who wants to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt?
Those Uyghur jihadists stuck in Idlib province in Syria and in refugee camps in Turkey are
bound to get a warm welcome from the Taliban when Ankara finally ships them off to Kabul as
part of this proposed "security force" to protect the airport so the CIA can continue to ship
out its heroin.
The US MSM is ablaze with "Taliban against Afghan forces" headlines, conveniently forgetting
that the Taliban are Afghan forces too, in fact they preceded the current "Afghan forces" in
government until the US intervention.
So why do their guys always beat our guys? Because their guys fight for their country and our
guys fight for us.
@ ToivoS, why did the U$A withdraw from Vietnam? There was conscription in the U$A, thereby
the rich were at risk. Also, the U$A was being constrained by money creation due to the gold
standard. Both of these issues have been addressed.
Name a nation that the U$A has WITHDRAWN its military after occupying it, other than
Vietnam. Aren't we still in Germany, Japan, South Korea, ...?
It ain't over 'til it's over.
How much DEBT has the Afghanistan conflict created so far? In trillions? Who got that
money?
@ CJC #10
re: . . . Turkey to retain control of airport after NATO withdraws
It's more than NATO.
The US-Taliban agreement:
The United States is committed to withdraw from Afghanistan all military forces of the United
States, its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel,
private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel within
fourteen (14) months following announcement of this agreement. . .
here
@ Max
re: . . . why did the U$A withdraw from Vietnam?
The US had no choice because the conscription-based US Army was broken, with troops refusing
to obey orders and fragging their superiors etc. . .So Washington pulled out the troops and
ended the draft.
The US "experts" who are crying about a possible, or inevitable, return to Talban
government haven't read the agreement.
The US-Taliban Agreement of Feb 29, 2020 called for all foreign forces to leave Afghanistan
by May 2021, and recognized that the outcome would be a return to a Taliban government. For
example one agreement condition, II-5:: "The Taliban will not provide visas, passports,
travel permits, or other legal documents to those who pose a threat to the security of the
United States and its allies to enter Afghanistan." . .
here
re: Why is the US in Afghanistan?
Decades ago Washington had its own "Silk Road" strategy, to move into the -Stans in Central
Asia after the uSSR breakup. There was a large interest in Kazakhstan up north, as well as
the other -Stands including Afghanistan. It was of course a road to nowhere but as we know
the creeps in Washington ain't too bright. There were no seaports to accommodate this road,
for one thing. There were some other considerations, like an energy pipeline, but it was all
just going nowhere until 9-11 came along, giving the US to do what it does worst, employ its
military.
@ Abe 32
re: This simplistic "views" are as inaccurate as insulting.
You need to get out more.
. . .from Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam
During its long withdrawal from South Vietnam, the U.S. military experienced a serious
crisis in morale. Chronic indiscipline, illegal drug use, and racial militancy all
contributed to trouble within the ranks. But most chilling of all was the advent of a new
phenomenon: large numbers of young enlisted men turning their weapons on their superiors.
The practice was known as "fragging," a reference to the fragmentation hand grenades often
used in these assaults. . . here
Glad to hear that Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan is not letting the US use Pakistan
as a base for its continued machinations, in spite of heavy US pressure, and that Pakistan as
a whole was saying #AbsolutelyNot. Kudos Pakistan.
According to M. K. Bhadrakumar:
"Washington is now considering the hiring of Pentagon contractors (mercenaries) to secure
Kabul airport. But that will be a hugely controversial step with grave consequences, as
apparent from Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's brusque rejection of the very idea of
American military presence on Pakistani soil in relation to the Afghan situation."
MKB also places all this into the context of "the US' grand project to create rings of
instability in [Russia and China's] adjacent regions -- Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Hong
Kong, Myanmar, Afghanistan."
You forget the ISIS group that magically appeared in Afghanistan a few years ago. The same
group that immediately attacked the Taliban, forcing the Taliban to dedicate its best forces
to countering the threat instead of fighting the puppet child sex slaver Quisling warlord
regime. What's more likely than continuing the occupation in the name of "fighting ISIS"?
Just like Iraq was reinvaded and reoccupied in the name of "fighting ISIS" and continues to
be occupied to this day?
This "fairly good" relationship is mainly done in spite to China and to gain another pawn
on the SCS theatre.
It's being wined and dined by the school jock after China gave him the finger like a
back-up shag. But Vietnam knows the score, it works for them for now and it would be stupid
not to play along as long as it is aligned to its interests.
A large number of its businesses exporting to the west are, you guessed it, are founded
and operated by the Chinese for the lower wages and to skirt quotas, tariffs etc.
Vietnam is still a communist state, how is this fact not lost in the face of full spectrum
demonisation of China for being communists in the minds of the 5 eyes populace is a most
interesting question indeed.
It's as moronic as "China is authoritarian!" but Saudi Arabia is A-OK!
Today democracy and human rights are just fig leaves of the hegemony, war cry for the
[colonization of] expendables.
"... ...the prerogative to define extremism includes the power to attempt to banish certain ideas from acceptable discourse. The report warns that "narratives of fraud in the recent general election"¦ will almost certainly spur some [Domestic Violent Extremists] to try to engage in violence this year." ..."
"... If accusations of 2020 electoral shenanigans are formally labeled as extremist threats, that could result in far more repression (aided by Facebook and Twitter) of dissenting voices. ..."
...the prerogative to define extremism includes the power to attempt to banish certain ideas
from acceptable discourse. The report warns that "narratives of fraud in the recent general
election"¦ will almost certainly spur some [Domestic Violent Extremists] to try to
engage in violence this year."
If accusations of 2020 electoral shenanigans are formally labeled as extremist threats, that
could result in far more repression (aided by Facebook and Twitter) of dissenting voices.
How will this work out any better than the concerted campaign by the media and Big Tech last
fall to suppress all information about Hunter Biden's laptop before the election?
The Biden administration is revving up for a war against an enemy which the feds have chosen
to never explicitly define . According to a March report by Biden's Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, "domestic violent extremists" include individuals who "take overt steps
to violently resist or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government in support of their
belief that the U.S. government is purposely exceeding its Constitutional authority." But that
was the same belief that many Biden voters had regarding the Trump administration. Does the
definition of extremism depend solely on which party captured the White House?
The report notes that the "Department of Defense is reviewing and updating its definition of
prohibited extremist activities among uniformed military personnel." Bishop Garrison, the chief
of the Pentagon's new Countering Extremism Working Group, is Exhibit A for the follies of
extremist crackdowns on extremism. In a series of 2019 tweets, Garrison, a former aide to
Hillary Clinton,
denounced all Trump supporters as "racists." Garrison's working group will "specifically
define what constitutes extremist behavior" for American soldiers. If Garrison purges Trump
supporters from the military, the Pentagon would be unable to conquer the island of Grenada.
Biden policymakers also intend to create an "anti-radicalization" program for individuals
departing the military service. This initiative will likely produce plenty of leaks and
embarrassing disclosures in the coming months and years.
The Biden report is spooked by the existence of militia groups and flirts with the fantasy
of outlawing them across the land. The report promises to explore "how to make better use of
laws that already exist in all fifty states prohibiting certain private "˜militia'
activity, including"¦state statutes prohibiting groups of people from organizing as
private military units without the authorization of the state government, and state statutes
that criminalize certain paramilitary activity." Most of the private militia groups are guilty
of nothing more than bluster and braggadocio. Besides, many of them are already overstocked
with government informants who are counting on Uncle Sam for regular paychecks.
As part of its anti-extremism arsenal, DHS is financing programs for "enhancing media
literacy and critical thinking skills" and helping internet users avoid "vulnerability
to"¦harmful content deliberately disseminated by malicious actors online." Do the feds
have inside information about another Hunter Biden laptop turning up, or what? The Biden
administration intends to bolster Americans' defenses against extremism by developing
"interactive online resources such as skills-enhancing online games." If the games are as
stupefying as this report, nobody will play them.
The Biden report stresses that federal law enforcement agencies "play a critical role in
responding to reports of criminal and otherwise concerning activity." "Otherwise concerning
activity"? This is the same standard that turned prior anti-terrorist efforts into
laughingstocks.
Fusion Centers are not mentioned in the Biden report but they are a federal-state-local law
enforcement partnership launched after 9/11 to vacuum up reports of suspicious activity.
Seventy Fusion Centers rely on the same standard"""
If you see something, say something """that a senior administration official invoked in a
background call on Monday for the new Biden initiative. The Los Angeles Police Department
encouraged citizens to snitch on "individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended
periods while buses and trains come and go," "individuals who carry on long conversations on
pay or cellular telephones," and "joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of
time." The Kentucky Office of Homeland Security recommended the reporting of "people avoiding
eye contact," "people in places they don't belong," or homes or apartments that have numerous
visitors "arriving and leaving at unusual hours," PBS's Frontline reported. Colorado's Fusion
Center "produced a fear-mongering public service announcement asking the public to report
innocuous behaviors such as photography, note-taking, drawing and collecting money for charity
as "˜warning signs' of terrorism," the ACLU complained.
Various other Fusion Centers have attached warning labels to gun-rights activists,
anti-immigration zealots, and individuals and groups "rejecting federal authority in favor of
state or local authority." A 2012 Homeland Security report stated that being "reverent of
individual liberty" is one of the traits of potential right-wing terrorists. The Constitution
Project concluded in a 2012 report that DHS Fusion Centers "pose serious risks to civil
liberties, including rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial and
religious equality, privacy, and the right to be free from unnecessary government intrusion."
Fusion Centers continue to be bankrolled by DHS despite their dismal record.
The Biden report promises that the FBI and DHS will soon be releasing "a new edition of the
Federal Government's Mobilization Indicators booklet that will include for the first time
potential indicators of domestic terrorism""related mobilization." Will this latest publication
be as boneheaded as the similar 2014 report by the National Counterterrorism Center entitled
"Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts"?
As the Intercept
summarized , that report "suggests that police, social workers and educators rate
individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as "˜Expressions of
Hopelessness, Futility,' "¦ and "˜Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality,
Religion, Ethnicity)' "¦ to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning
to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist
ideologies." The report recommended judging families by their level of "Parent-Child Bonding"
and rating localities on the basis in part of the "presence of ideologues or recruiters."
Former FBI agent Mike German commented, "The idea that the federal government would encourage
local police, teachers, medical, and social-service employees to rate the communities,
individuals, and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on
its face."
The Biden administration presumes that bloating the definition of extremists is the surest
way to achieve domestic tranquility. In this area, as in so many others, Biden's team learned
nothing from the follies of the Obama administration. No one in D.C. apparently recalls that
President Obama perennially denounced extremism and summoned the United Nations in 2014 to join
his "campaign against extremism." Under Obama, the National Security Agency
presumed that "someone searching the Web for suspicious stuff" was a suspected extremist
who forfeited all constitutional rights to privacy. Obama's Transportation Security
Administration relied on
ludicrous terrorist profiles that targeted American travelers who were yawning, hand
wringing, gazing down, swallowing suspiciously, sweating, or making "excessive complaints about
the [TSA] screening process."
Will the Biden crackdown on extremists end as ignominiously as Nixon's crackdown almost 50
years earlier? Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston explained
that the FBI's COINTELPRO program continually stretched its target list "from the kid with a
bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the
bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line." At some
point, surveillance became more intent on spurring fear than on gathering information. FBI
agents were
encouraged to conduct interviews with anti-war protesters to "enhance the paranoia endemic
in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind
every mailbox," as a 1970 FBI memo noted. Is the Biden castigation campaign an attempt to make
its opponents fear that the feds are tracking their every email and website click?
Biden's new terrorism policy has evoked plenty of cheers from his Fourth Estate lapdogs. But
a
Washington Post article fretted that the administration's report did not endorse enacting
"new legal authority to successfully hunt down, prosecute, and imprison homegrown extremists."
Does the D.C. media elite want to see every anti-Biden scoffer in the land put behind bars?
This is typical of the switcheroo that politicians and the media play with the terms
"terrorists" and "extremists." Regardless of paranoia inside the Beltway, MAGA hats are not as
dangerous as pipe bombs.
The Biden report concludes that "enhancing faith in American democracy" requires "finding
ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories." Bu t permitting
politicians to blacklist any ideas they disapprove won't "restore faith in democracy."
Extremism has always been a flag of political convenience, and the Biden team, the FBI, and
their media allies will fan fears to sanctify any and every government crackdown. But what if
government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?
In reality big tech is the part of neoliberal elite that control the politics and politician
(the USA politics and politicians were privatized during Reagan and nothing changed since that
period). They also has strong ties with intelligence community often emerging from some some
intelligence agency plan and DAPRA or CIA funds. So it is strange to be suprozed that they will
always take the side of the government -- they control the goverment...
The Democrats in Congress want comprehensive regulation of social media which will
ultimately allow regime regulators to decide what is and what is not "disinformation." This has
become very clear as Congress has held a series of Congressional hearings designed to pressure
tech leaders into doing even more to silence critics of the regime and its preferred
center-left narratives.
Back in February, for instance, Glen Greenwald reported:
For the third time in
less than five months , the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies
to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more
content from their platforms.
House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert
control over the content on these online platforms. "Industry self-regulation has failed,"
they said, and therefore "we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media
companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation." In other words, they
intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content
they do and do not allow to be published.
Greenwald is probably right. The end game here is likely to create a permanent "partnership"
between big tech in which government regulators will ultimately decide just how much these
platforms will deplatform user and delete content that run afoul of the regime's messaging.
It might strike many readers as odd that this should even be necessary. It's already become
quite clear that Big Social Media is hardly an enemy of mainstream proregime forces in
Washington. Quite the opposite.
Jack Dorsey, for instance, is exactly the sort of partisan regime apparatchik one expects
out of today's Silicon Valley. For example, during October of last year ,
Twitter locked down the account of the New York Post , because the Post reported a story on
Hunter Biden that threatened to hurt Biden's chances for election.
Over 90 percent of political donation money coming out of Facebook and Twitter goes to
Democrats.
Yet, it's important to keep in mind that this isn't going to be enough to convince
politicians to pack up and decide to leave social media companies alone. The regime is unlikely
to be satisfied with anything other than full state control of social media through permanent
regulatory bodies that can ultimately bring the industry to heel. Regardless of the ideological
leanings of the industry players involved, they're likely to see the writing on the wall. As
with any regime where the regulators and legislators hold immense power -- as is the case in
Washington today -- the regime will generally be able to win the "cooperation" of industry
leaders who will end up taking a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" position.
Silicon
Valley Is Ideologically Allied with the Regime. But That's Not Enough.
It's been abundantly clear for at least a decade that ideologically speaking, Silicon Valley
is as
politically mainstream as it gets. The old early-2000s notion that Silicon Valley harbors
secret libertarian, antiestablishment leanings has been disproven dozens of times over.
Moreover, Washington has a long history of co-opting tech "geniuses" to serve the whims of
the regime. Even back in 2013 Julian Assange already saw the "ever closer union" between
government agents and Silicon Valley. Assange saw how federal agencies were hiring Silicon
Valley workers as "consultants" and saw where the "partnership" was headed. He concluded "The
advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most
people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism."
But even if Silicon Valley is packed full of stooges for the NSA --
as appears to be the case -- this still doesn't mean that Silicon Valley firms are willing
to happily hand over their property to the federal government. After all, Silicon Valley CEOs,
managers, and stockholders are all still at least partly in it for the money. All else being
equal, they prefer profit to loss, and they want freedom to make decisions free of regulatory
control. They probably don't care about freedom in the abstract, but they care about it for
themselves.
The Threat of Regulation Creates Support for the Regime
On the other hand, once federal policymakers and regulators start making threats, the game
changes entirely. All of a sudden, it makes a lot of sense to pursue "friendly" relations with
the state as a matter of self-preservation. If Washington has the ability to destroy your
business -- and if it has become impossible to "fly under the radar" -- then it makes a lot of
sense to make Washington your friend.
Under these circumstances, there's little to be gained from blanket opposition to federal
regulation, and a lot to be gained from embracing regulation while merely working to ensure
that regulation benefits you and your friends.
Big Business versus Small Business
So, it should never surprise us when big business ultimately ends up siding with the regime.
It would be folly not to, especially if one has the means to hire lobbyists, attorneys, and PR
consultants which can help Big Business negotiate effectively with regulators. Needless to say,
the outcomes of these negotiations are likely to end up helping the big players at the expense
of smaller ones who aren't even present at the negotiating table.
For small firms that have little hope of influencing federal policy, it still makes sense to
simply oppose federal activism altogether and hope for the best. But if your firm manages to
get a seat "at the table" it's best to seize the opportunity. To quote an old saying among
lobbyists: "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."
But let us not forget that even when private firms can bring immense amounts of resources to
bear for purposes of influencing public policy and negotiating with bureaucrats: the regime
itself ultimately holds the advantage. No private firm in the world has the resources to ignore
or veto the wishes of the regime's army of regulatory, prosecutors, and tax collectors. No
private firm enjoys anything approaching the coercive monopoly power of the state.
But this doesn't mean those firms can't share in this power. And that's very often what
happens. Faced with a "join us or be destroyed" ultimatum from federal regulators or lawmakers,
most private firms choose the "join us" option. Of course, many smaller firms aren't even
offered the choice.
Tillyoudrop 9 minutes ago (Edited)
Wwwwrong.
BIG BUSINESS is the Regime, they own this fxxxing place, and they control you by the
balls.
AriusArmenian 3 minutes ago remove link
All the major social media companies in the US were funded and controlled by the CIA
from startup.
There is not a future end-game - it has been the CIA's agenda from the beginning.
The CIA along with Watt Street and the MIC owns and controls the US from top to bottom -
and they intend for the lumpen white people to fall on their swords. This is all to the
interests of the rich and powerful button pushers. I pity the young people like idiots so
easily used by the elites.
freedommusic 10 minutes ago
Well when DARPA, the DOD, CIA, et al, created your company what choice do you have?
What did you think this company is YOURS Mr Z?
We created LifeLog with The Peoples money, handed it
over to you so there is plausible deniability, and are now weaponizing this data against
the very people who have funded it.
Welcome to the MO of monolithic government.
bunnyswanson 1 minute ago
Big Business is the regime. Unfair competition is the name of their game. Monopolizing
their industry is their goal. Oversight committees should have stopped them but simple men
who define themselves by what they own sell out eagerly.
Back in the day of newspapers, the Bolsheviks had PRAVDA ( which laughingly means TRUTH
)
thoughtbubble 3 minutes ago
Democrats have Twitter (which not ironically means TWITS).
AriusArmenian 3 minutes ago remove link
All the major social media companies in the US were funded and controlled by the CIA
from startup.
There is not a future end-game - it has been the CIA's agenda from the beginning.
The CIA along with Watt Street and the MIC owns and controls the US from top to bottom -
and they intend for the lumpen white people to fall on their swords. This is all to the
interests of the rich and powerful button pushers. I pity the young people like idiots so
easily used by the elites.
Of course you've heard the name " George Soros ," often invoked as a sort of folk demon on the
American and international right, it's likely that you have some vague notion of why you think
he's a bad guy, or maybe you think the whole thing is a bunch of hype.
However, if you're a freedom lover, there's nothing "hype" about the influence that George
Soros has around the world attacking your freedom. Indeed, you probably vastly underestimate
the influence that he has on politics.
From the perspective of someone who values life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
there is no more dangerous man today than George Soros. This is not hyperbole, it is the simple
truth. While we don't plan to paint a picture of a man standing behind the scenes, rubbing his
hands together and cackling as he plays puppet master over each and every attack on freedom
around the world, Soros acts as a strawman and a caricature of what is actually going on in the
world.
George Soros, his
money , and his NGOs
are bankrolling and influencing public policy and opinion from the local level all the way up
to the national level. Entire nations have been made to bow to the Soros agenda, but perhaps
more importantly for our purposes, key local officials in government are increasingly wholly
owned subsidiaries of the Soros machine.
American political culture focuses almost entirely on Presidential elections, with
Congressional and gubernatorial races getting much less attention from the general public. When
it comes to local politics, unless you live in a large city, chances are good that you don't
know much about city politics. For example: Who is your local district attorney or county
prosecutor?
Most people have no idea. It's a low-key office, generally staffed by someone looking to do
public service, not advance their career. There is little glamor, low pay, and lots of
thankless work to be done at this level, which means that for the most part, this is not where
social climbers begin their careers.
That being said, these elected officials have enormous amounts of power because they decide
who gets prosecuted, who doesn't, and what charges are levied against them. If your DA decides
that the local band of looters are actually peaceful protesters, they won't ever see the inside
of a courtroom. Similarly, if the local DA isn't a fan of the right to self-defense, one must
consider this when choosing whether or not to pull your firearm if a mob of them shows up on
your lawn.
Part of this is just the very nature of bureaucracy, the plainer term for what people mean
when they talk about "the deep state." The government rests on men doing things, chief among
these are what Vladimir Lenin called "special bodies of armed men"
: cops, courts, and jails. According to Lenin, this is the very essence of the state.
Libertarians will sympathize with this definition of the state. At its core, the state is a man
with a gun who will throw you in a cage or kill you if you fail to comply. Everything else is
just window dressing.
The local prosecutor is a chokepoint in the special bodies of armed men. The attorney
general isn't euphemistically called "top cop" for no reason and in his own way, the local
prosecutor is also a "top cop," albeit with a much smaller jurisdiction. This also means that
he has more direct control over the individuals in his district, as the attorney general deals
more in broad brushstrokes.
Who is your local DA? George Soros knows. He might very well be his paymaster.The campaigns
for local DAs and the like aren't shy about stoking racial resentment and animosity. The
Democratic Party's playbook hasn't changed much since the days of Jim Crow, it's just that it
has found new ways to make political hay out of sowing racial divisions among Americans. One
Soros-produced ad for Noah Phillips campaign for District Attorney of Sacramento County,
focuses almost exclusively on a black
boy in a hoodie .
It is of course unrealistic to expect that even highly bureaucratic roles are entirely
apolitical, however, the Soros DAs have ratcheted up the partisanship, not just in the race,
but in the actual execution of the office. As of September 2020, there were
31 Soros-backed DAs in the United States . That might not sound like a lot, but it includes
the DAs of Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, and St.
Louis. All told, tens of millions of Americans are now victims of the Soros racket in the form
of their local top prosecutor.
Some examples of the Soros machine at work in America's DA offices include:
After the last round of rioting, looting, and arson in St. Louis, Circuit Attorney Kim
Gardner dismissed charges against all 36 people arrested. She's on the take from Soros for
$307,000 . This is also the prosecutor who filed charges against the McCloskeys.
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon got over $2 million
from the Soros operation , he ended cash bail and is no longer prosecuting the crimes
of trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, prostitution, or driving without a
license.
Kim Foxx is the Illinois State's Attorney and has received
$807,000 from Soros. She also declined to prosecute rioters, saying "The question it
comes down to is, is it a good use of our time and resources? No, it's not." Foxx likewise
declined to prosecute hate crime hoaxer, Jussie Smollett.
Philly District Attorney Larry Krasner has received
$1.7 million from Soros. He won't be prosecuting rioters, looters, and arsonists.
Krasner was very open about the ideology driving his permitting chaos in the city:
"Prosecution alone will achieve nothing close to justice -- not when power imbalances and
lack of accountability make it possible for government actors including police or
prosecutors to regularly take life or liberty unjustly and face no criminal or career
penalty."
Krasner is worth calling out for special attention because he filed 75 cases against the
police and has represented both Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter. At his victory
party, supporters chanted, "F*** the police! F*** the police!" He generally declines to
call himself a "prosecutor," instead labelling himself a "public defender with power."
The results in Philadelphia are stunning as charges are dropped in 60 percent of all
shooting cases – though we suspect your odds of being a conservative self-defense
case and having your charges waived are rather slim. Shootings in Philadelphia were up 57
percent year over year from 2019 to 2020.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who's working off
$620,000 in Soros money, proclaims that "[t]he criminal justice system isn't just
massive and brutal, it's also racist." He doesn't prosecute crimes such as solicitation,
public camping, or public urination, which has certainly
transformed San Francisco into a paradise on earth . Homicide rates have increased,
burglary cases have increased by 42 percent, motor vehicle theft increased by 31 percent,
and arson rates increased by 45 percent. He was formerly an advisor to Hugo Chavez and his
parents were members of the Weather
Underground , a far-left terrorist organization who directly participated in the
robbery of an armored car. His victory party included obscene anti-police chants.
DA Mike Schmidt of Portland, who's received
$230,000 in Soros money, also declined to prosecute rioters who burned the city for
months while besieging a federal building. He openly sympathized with the rioters saying
that they "represent the instinctive reactions of people who have been gassed repeatedly,
who have been struck with kinetic projectile weapons."
If the Soros machine can capture a District Attorney's office in San Francisco, which is
extremely expensive, there is little preventing them from capturing prosecutorial powers in
Omaha, Annapolis, or Colorado Springs – or indeed your hamlet.
The Soros Machine
and Racial Unrest
Much like the Democrat Party he supports, George Soros is not the slightest bit afraid to go
into the mud of the politics of racial resentment. The Open Society Foundations are the primary
mechanism for Soros delivering money to political activists in the United States and around the
world. In 2020, The Open Society Foundations unveiled plans to spend
$220 million on "efforts to achieve racial equality in America."
To show you the relative priority that the Soros machine places on "racial equality" as
opposed to electoral politics, the Soros machine only spent
$28 million on the Democrat Party in 2020 .
When Soros says "racial equality," he means something very different from what you or the
average American means when they say it. What Soros deems "racial equality" might more
accurately be called "racial revenge," though the left prefers to use the term "racial equity."
We will dive more into the ideology motivating Soros later, but our article on
the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism is also an excellent resource on the deep
philosophy of the Soros machine.
What Are the Open Society Foundations?
It's important to know how the Soros machine operates so that you can learn to look for it.
The Open Society Foundations is the main umbrella under which Soros distributes money. It
includes a number of organizations, most of which you've probably never heard of and most of
which feature very innocuous, even bland-sounding, names. The think tank used to generate the
ideology is New America, formerly known as the New America Foundation, the name of which is
much more direct about what it intends to create.
So what is an "Open Society?" Well it's based on a phrase used by Karl Popper , a
somewhat obscure 20th Century thinker known best for his " paradox of tolerance ," which
essentially says that liberals should stop tolerating diversity of opinion when it begins to
threaten liberalism.
Where does the Soros operation put its money in America in order to transform the country
into an "open society?" It aims to abolishing
the police and invest $1.5 million into the Community Resource Hub for Safety &
Responsibility, another one of these blandly named organizations working to undo the American
way of life. Additionally, his money has been
linked to the urban unrest in Ferguson in 2014 . In total he spent
$33 million fomenting chaos in the formerly safe suburb of St. Louis.
Of course, no rogue's gallery of the radical left would be complete without mentioning Black
Lives Matter (BLM), another one of these vaguely innocuous-sounding organizations that Soros
spends his money on. And boy howdy, did he spend money on BLM - George Soros spent
$33 million on BLM alone .
What Is the Philosophy of the Open Society
Foundations?
We've seen the modus operandi of the Soros machine, but what is the ideology that motivates
it?
Soros' umbrella organization is The Open Society Foundations. The phrase "open society" is
one of those things that sounds so unassailable that no one could be against it. After all, are
you for a closed society?
This is the framing trick used by the left since time immemorial. Something vague and
innocuous sounding is picked as a name which means something very, very different to those in
the know. So what is an "open society" to Soros and his retinue?
It is a concept developed by Karl Popper, Soros' intellectual hero. Popper was not a
Cultural Marxist, in fact he was highly critical of Marxism. However, there is so much overlap
in terms of end results that it becomes a distinction without a difference.
Karl Popper didn't invent the concept of the open society, despite his association with the
term and his development of the idea – that dubious honor falls to a Frenchman by the
name of Henri Bergson. However, we can credit most of what the open society is understood as
today as springing from the mind of Karl Popper.
There are some key takeaways about what an open society actually is. First, the open society
is an atomized society. People are to be seen not as part of any kind of social organism, but
rather as radically separate individuals. The individual is not an essential building block of
society, it is the end to itself. Social norms and traditions are seen as necessarily
oppressive.
The open society is hostile to the notion of natural law and instead puts man-made laws,
properly called "legislation," over and above a more natural law flowing from a set of first
principles, most notably God. Again, like Cultural Marxism, it seeks to "dethrone God" from
society, replacing it with a cult of human judgment.
Popper also believed in a culture of constant critique, this is a point of overlap with
Cultural Marxism; and humanitarianism, which is a loaded word designed to sound innocuous, but
which actually means something far more specific than "being nice to people."
Perhaps most frighteningly, the "open society" is just that – open. That is, entirely
without any sort of privacy. While the notion of a "right to privacy" as interpreted by United
States courts as a justification is troubling in practice, far more troubling is Popper's
conception of a society where every facet of a person's life is in the public sphere,
irregardless of their consent.
Free speech and free elections were seen as a necessity for such a society, however, Popper
and the Open Society Foundations had different interpretations for this. Free speech does not
apply to opponents of the open society unless they are critiquing society from the left –
the only way to complain about Comrade Stalin is to say how much better we would all be if
there were but two of him. Similarly, free elections means that of the kind we had in 2020
– one with absolutely no safeguards against abuse and taking place behind closed doors
under the supervision of ideologically motivated "monitors" with rampant fraud.
It's not just in America, it's a worldwide phenomenon.
George Soros: King of the Color
Revolution
George Soros' primary weapon for changing countries to be more pliable to his desires is the
"color revolution." You've probably heard of revolutions occurring, generally in post-Soviet
states, but also elsewhere. They have names like the Yellow Revolution (the Philippines), the
Rose Revolution (Republic of Georgia), the Orange Revolution (Ukraine), and the Saffron
Revolution (Myanmar).
There are some common themes to a color revolution which are worth noting for those wishing
to prevent such a thing from happening in their own country. A disputed election where there is
widespread cheating on the part of the "opposition" candidate generally kicks things off. The
"opposition" is controlled by the Soros machine and friendly to NATO or other Atlantacist
political organizations. There are then street rallies where violent operatives hide in crowds
of otherwise peaceful protesters.
The government then responds and there is outcry from "humanitarian" organizations that the
government has dealt sternly with what are effectively terrorists using human shields. There
are generally operatives within the command structure who are sympathetic to Soros and his
allies in Western governments.
There have been mixed success with color revolutions. They fail more often than they
succeed. But they do succeed, especially where one defines success not so much as overthrowing
the existing government, but forcing it to accept radical concessions that dramatically remake
the political culture in the country. Color revolutions have resulted in what was effectively
regime change in the Republic of Georgia ( twice ), Ukraine , the Arab World , and Belarus .
George Soros is deeply embedded in color revolutions around the world through the auspices
of his Open Society Foundations NGO. The playbook should look somewhat familiar to most
Americans after the summer riots of 2019 and 2020, as well as the aftermath of the
2020 elections .
It's important to remember that George Soros is not a god. He is simply a man with a lot of
money. Thus, we should be cautious in attempting to attribute each and every action on the far
left to him, particularly in the view that he is some kind of micromanaging puppet master who
is involved in the trenches of making policy or street activism. He is not.
He is a real-world supervillain and he is able to direct the law, constitutional, and
political culture of entire nations using his money and his vision for what society ought to
look like. He is able to get away with it thanks to general ignorance of just how effective he
is and a coordinated effort by the media to smear anyone who calls him out as a dangerous
fanatic.
It is George Soros, however, who is the dangerous fanatic. He is gunning for you, your
property, your children, and ultimately your way of life.
play_arrow
7thGenMO 4 hours ago
It is a bit of a red herring to focus only on Soros when he is part of a network - our
friends of intelligence that:
- Gun down American sailors in lifeboats after firebombing their ship.
- Infiltrate the financial and, accordingly, the political systems.
- Steal military technology.
- Sell poor American kids as sex slaves.
- Etc., etc., etc.
gregga777 5 hours ago
George Soros, aka Gyorge Schwartz, was a Nazi collaborator and assisted the SS in
confiscating wealth from Hungarian ****. The Holtzman Amendment prohibits anyone who
participated in Nazi persecution from living in the United States. Why is George Soros even
allowed in the US not to mention being allowed to live here? Does that Law only apply to
Gentiles and not to ****?
Lordflin 5 hours ago
When later asked how he felt about that part of his life... he said that aiding his Nazi
stepfather to plunder his own people... made him feel powerful...
RedCharles 17 minutes ago
Compare Soro's moral position with Einstein's take on Gandhi's moral position.
Operation Paperclip brought the best of Nazi middle management and scientists to the US
and Canada. Wernher Braun for example.
Canada's Deputy PM is the descendant of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist.
gregga777 5 hours ago (Edited)
NASA hero SS-Sturmbannführer Werner von Braun was an unindicted Nazi war criminal.
He was responsible for deaths amongst slave laborers, probably numbering in the thousands,
at the Mittelwert Dora V-2 assembly plant. But, 95-year old retired factory worker
Friedrich Karl Burger was recently deported back to Germany because in 1945 he had served a
few weeks as an 18-year old concentration camp guard. The 2010 Holtzman Amendment prohibits
anyone who participated in Nazi persecution from living in the United States.
Fluff The Cat 5 hours ago
Millions of illegals get away with violating our sovereignty, yet the state will throw
the book at the average Joe citizen for a misdemeanor. People like Soros and Gates are
untouchable for a reason. It's not just because they have so much money but rather because
they fill roles which help facilitate radical transformations to our detriment.
Gold Bug XXX 5 hours ago remove link
Thankfully, the 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft that exposes Soros' Sabbatean
Frankist origins is still online. Anyone who wants to know the real story about Soros and
the wealthy patron family behind him needs to read Rabbi Marvin Antelman's 2 book series:
Eliminate The Opiate available on Amazon. Antelman was the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Rabbinic Court of America from 1974 to 2004 and he exposes both who and what is behind
Soros and his agenda. Literally, this is THE book every American needs to read now.
This is the group behind Fabian Socialism, the group exposed by George Orwell (Eric
Blair) in his book 1984, as well as in Animal Farm. This is the philosophy of of modern
progressive Democrats in the USA and the liberal Labour party in Britain. This is the group
behind the Rhodes Trust, that created the Rhodes Scholarships, the London School of
Economics (Soros is a grad) and the Royal Institute of International Affairs who created
the CFR branch in the USA. Why do you think we have so many Rhodes Scholars and graduates
of the London School of Economics in the Obama and Biden administrations and leading the
far left?
Soros has sponsored everything evil from NAMBLA to BLM. He (and Bloomberg) funded the
anarchy and nationwide explosion in violent crime that we are seeing in every Blue City
where they installed their radical, Marxist prosecutors and DAs like Gascon in LA, Larry
Krasner in Philly, Kim Gardner in St. Louis, and Kim Foxx in Chicago - all cities where
prosecutors are emptying the jails, not prosecuting crime, and letting chaos reign supreme
so they can Federalize the Police (Soros' primary agenda) giving the federal government
more political power. This will extend the corruption we already see in our Intel Agencies,
the DOJ, all the Courts, and especially in the rogue FBI which is now a purely NKVD,
Brownshirt SA, STASI political police force focused inward on political dissidents and no
longer a legitimate law enforcement agency.
America had better wake up and wake up now, because with the purge of conservatives,
Christians and patriots from the military led by MIC Ratheon board member, the bitter
affirmative action general known as Lloyd Austin and the bat ****e crazy radical Marxist
Bishop Garrison, if we lose the police and the military - we will relive the Bolshevik
Revolution... the round ups, the torture the gulags and the death.
And then just like Solzhenitsyn warned, we'll burn in the camps wondering what would
have been if only we had resisted...
Rogan took exception with Stelter being incensed that more people were watching shows on
YouTube than watching his show, according to Fox News .
"They didn't even understand the way they were describing it. They were describing it as if
they're entitled to viewers," Rogan ranted.
"They were saying, "˜There are shows on YouTube right now that get more views than
this show.' This is because the market has spoken and your show's f***in terrible . Well, Brian
Stelter's show keeps slipping and slipping and slipping in the ratings."
"How about Brian Stelter talking to the press secretary, "˜What are we doing wrong?
What are we doing wrong?' Like, hey motherf---er, you're supposed to be a journalist ," Rogan
said. "They're obviously being told a certain amount of what to do. And maybe he'd be an
interesting guy if he had his own f---in podcast that you can rely on his own personality and
be himself. I don't know. I can't imagine doing that gig."
"He's the worst," Rogan guest and progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski said. Stelter has
"outright [called] for censorship under the guise of combatting the spread of conspiracy
theories."
They "use that for f---ing everything," Kulinski said.
Rogan then turned his ire to Don Lemon's show: "So is Don Lemon's. It's the same thing.
Everyone knows they're not real. They're not real humans."
"And they wonder why they get no views," Kulinski concluded.
Recall,
this week we noted that Stelter, who just last week groveled at the feet of White House
Press Secretary Jen Psaki - asking how the media can better cover President Biden - has failed
to attract at least one million viewers for 11 straight weeks , and averaged just 752,000 on
Sunday, his smallest audience of the year.
If contemporary American liberalism has any High Priests, foremost among them would have to
be Jon Stewart. Arguably, he's the functional equivalent of a supreme pontiff. So much of
contemporary American liberalism hinges on aesthetic presentation" the ever-present need to
convey that you and your peers "get it"" and Stewart pioneered the perfect public sensibility
tailored to this ambition. For years, cultural liberals' sense of savviness and ironic
detachment, coupled with an underlying pretension to earnestness, was cultivated and affirmed
by Stewart. His method of communicating political information on The Daily Show became the
dominant style not just of mainstream corporate comedy, but of left-liberal politics as a
whole. Everyone from establishment Democrats to cynical online leftists speaks of Stewart with
worshipful reverence.
Stewart is also very smart. Like any good leader of a religious order, he knows on occasion
he must chide his fellow clergymen for their doctrinal blindspots, tactical blunders, or
personal indiscretions . He knows how to gently but firmly advise parishioners when they've
gone astray, or gone too far. He also mostly kept his head down throughout the Trump
presidency" declining to weigh in on every fleeting micro-scandal" which was a wise decision,
so as to not get himself too brain-melted by the endless frenzy of that period. He didn't even
join Twitter until this past January.
Stewart recognizes when to "read the room" and direct a course correction in the prevailing
sentiments of popular liberalism when its dogmas have become too untenable to continue. Who
else was going to do it, Joe Biden? Nowhere near enough funny-guy sway. It takes the cultural
prestige of a leader like Stewart to truly make a difference. And when he decides it's time for
one of those gentle-but-firm course corrections, liberals listen intently" because liberalism
is underrated for its ability to adapt and self-correct, at least in the arena of public
presentation. This is best accomplished by reframing its past failures as a big joke, and
there's no one better positioned to do so than Stewart.
Accordingly, the rapid transformation of the lab leak theory from shameful racist trope into
cool-kid conventional wisdom need not occasion any recriminations or blame" just more
self-deprecating laughter. Never mind that during all the Zoom banter Stewart presumably
participated in over the past 15 months, the theory was either scornfully dismissed or ignored.
That's all in the past; Trump is gone. Eventually Stewart got it.
But he wasn't imparted with this knowledge by some divine revelation. A campaign of Twitter
sleuths and Medium posts is what punctured a false consensus. Stewart merely consecrated the
shift within a certain strand of the cultural mainstream, thereby granting license to liberals
who need permission from their entertainment idols before they form opinions about
anything.
This volatility within liberalism is often fodder for mockery. It can make adherents look
and sound incoherent. But malleability is part of liberalism's strength; after all,
conservatives are always complaining that liberals control most every institution. To what do
they attribute this...?
It's why the big "face-off" this week between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, desperately
hyped by the flagging corporate news industry, could result in Putin lavishing Biden with
praise for his statesmanship and sterling moral character, and no Democratic elected official
taking issue. Memories of how similar
diplomatic niceties were portrayed vis-a-vis the previous President simply vanish. Stephen
Colbert didn't sneer at the "collusive" implications. The last five years of spy-thriller hype
can just wash away, with the snap of a finger.
It's why Ashli Babbitt "" an unarmed protester shot dead at point-blank range by an agent of
the state" was presumed worthy of summary execution by the nation's liberal class, even as they
make other questionable police killings the guiding impetus of their entire political program.
Babbitt had bad ideas, she was deluded by YouTube misinformation, she was a de facto white
supremacist, whatever. She might've even been trespassing at the time the bullet was pumped
into her throat. The public still doesn't have the name of her assailant" this information has
been concealed by the relevant police agency . But Jon Stewart wouldn't go near that one...
yet. Promoting a certain interpretation of January 6 still has a utility for liberals that
clinging to lab leak denialism no longer does.
So much of it all is a facade" but facades can overlay the accrual of real power . Stewart
just has enough self-awareness to poke his head through the facade every now and then, when the
conditions are safe, and help right the ship.
The National Security Agency ( NSA ) has agreed to release records on the FBI 's improper spying on thousands of
Americans , the secretive agency disclosed in a recent letter.
The agreement may signal a rift between the NSA and the FBI, according to attorney Ty
Clevenger.
Clevenger last year filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on behalf of The
Transparency Project, a Texas nonprofit, seeking information on the FBI's improper searches of
intelligence databases for information on 16,000 Americans.
The searches violated rules governing how to use the U.S. government's foreign intelligence
information trove, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama nominee who currently presides
over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, wrote in a
2019 memorandum and order that was declassified last year.
The FBI insisted that the queries for all 16,000 people "were reasonably likely to return
foreign-intelligence information or evidence of a crime because [redacted]," Boasberg wrote.
But the judge found that position "unsupportable," apart from searches on just seven of the
people.
Still, Boasberg allowed the data collection to continue, prompting Elizabeth Goitein,
co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice,
to
lament that court's decision on the data collection program, authorized by Section 702 of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), "is even more inexplicable given that the
opinion was issued shortly after the government reported submitting FISA applications riddled
with errors and omissions in the Carter Page investigation."
After the judge's order was made public, Clevenger filed FOIA requests for information on
the improper searches with both the FBI and the NSA.
The FBI rejected the request .
In a February letter ( pdf ), an
official told Clevenger that the letter he wrote "does not contain enough descriptive
information to permit a search of our records."
The NSA initially declined the request as well, but later granted an appeal of the decision
, Linda Kiyosaki, an NSA official, said in a letter ( pdf )
this month.
"You had requested all documents, records, and other tangible evidence reflecting the
improper surveillance of 16,000 individuals described in a 6 December, 2019, FISC Opinion,"
Kiyosaki wrote.
Clevenger believes the NSA's new position signals a rift between the two agencies,
potentially because the FBI
has repeatedly
abused rules
governing searches of the intelligence databases while the NSA has largely not.
"There's been a battle between them, for example, Mike Rogers tried to shut off FBI access
to the NSA database back in 2016," Clevenger told The Epoch Times, referring to how Adm. Mike
Rogers, the former NSA director,
cut out FBI agents from using the databases in 2016 .
"And so there's been some history of the NSA trying to limit the FBI's access because they
know that the FBI is misusing the data intercepts," he added.
The NSA and FBI did not respond to requests for comment.
It seems that the wokesters who claim that they are "anti-racists" still can't tolerate the
memory of a man who defeated history's most murderous racist. The Thursday defacing of a statue
in Canada is the latest effort to cancel Hitler's implacable foe.
A Downtown statue of Sir Winston Churchill has been vandalized after someone dumped red paint
all across the replica of the former British prime minister...
Churchill, who served as prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955, is
seen as a national hero for his leadership during the Second World War but held many views
that would be deemed racist.
Perhaps the 20th century's greatest adversary of communist and fascist dictatorships,
Churchill has of course been found wanting by today's dictators of political fashion. This
week's vandalism follows several such instances over the last year involving a U.K. statue of
Churchill in London's Parliament Square. In Canada, Mr. Labine reports:
Elisebeth Checkel, the president of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Edmonton, said this
is the first instance of the statue being vandalized that she's heard of and was disappointed
to see it happen.
She said Churchill has a complicated legacy and believes it is important to look at him in a
balanced way.
"If we look at any historical figure, we will find the same thing," Checkel said. "If we look
at almost any person from the 1880s, we would find their views were if not repugnant to us
nowadays, we would find they were disagreeable for sure. If you look at Churchill's later
actions and life as he grew, as we all hope to do, his views did change. The balance should
be celebrated because without Churchill we would not even have the right to protest in this
country."
Licia Corbella
writes in the Calgary Herald that this week's vandalism of the statue is "another act of
woke totalitarianism." She adds:
Mark Milke, president of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Calgary, says it's chilling to
contemplate what the world would be like now had Churchill not been there.
"Imagine if Churchill hadn't been there and the United Kingdom either did a peace treaty with
Hitler or fell during an invasion," said Milke...
"Nazi Germany would have controlled much of Europe... with the Soviet Union controlling the
other half and Imperial Japan raping Asia. Canada and the U.S. would have been pretty much
alone in the world..."
"Churchill is not a Civil War general from the South fighting to protect slavery. He's not
Joseph Stalin or Chairman Mao or Adolf Hitler," continued Milke.
No he's not. In fact Churchill was a stalwart opponent of the ideologies promoted by all
three of the 20th century's most infamous mass murderers. "For the historically illiterate who
like to throw paint on statues," Ms. Corbella notes the bloody legacy of Churchill's enemies
and adds:
What never seems to get mentioned is these statues are works of art. This destruction is not
unlike the Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. These woke folk are
Talibanesque.
As for Churchill, Ms. Corbella asks: "If we allow his legacy to be torn down, whose, pray
tell, can stand?"
Fortunately Ms. Corbella is not standing alone. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney tweets :
People should continue to debate Churchill's complex legacy & record, but vandalizing
public property like this is shameful.
No member of the greatest generation can meet the standards of contemporary wokeness. But we
should still honour those who secured our peace and freedom.
Canadian Parliament member Pierre Poilievre adds :
Don't schools teach history anymore?
Now the woke warriors attack the statue of Winston Churchill--the greatest anti-fascist of
all time. He beat Hitler and Mussolini for crying out loud.
Do these vandals wish he had lost?
Coincidentally it was on this day 81 years ago when Churchill addressed the British House of
Commons after the German army had overrun France. Said
Churchill:
I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival
of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of
our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be
turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If
we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward
into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United
States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new
Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British
Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their
finest hour."
If wokesterism could last for a thousand years, would it ever result in a great
civilization?
Last week Bill Maher of HBO's "Real Time" did a commentary on something he believes deeply
destructive. Maher, who has described his politics as liberal, libertarian, progressive and
practical, is a longtime and occasionally brave foe of wokeness in its extreme manifestations.
He zeroed in on one aspect that fuels a lot of grievance, and that is the uninformed sense that
America has largely been impervious to improvement.
Mr. Maher called this "progressophobia," a term coined by the cognitive psychologist Steven
Pinker. Mr. Maher defines it as "a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them
incapable of recognizing progress. It's like situational blindness, only what you can't see is
that your dorm in 2021 is better than the South before the Civil War."
His audience laughed uncertainly. You could tell they didn't want to get caught laughing at
the wrong thing and weren't certain what the wrong thing was. Normally they're asked to laugh
at right-wing idiocy, which is never in short supply.
"If you think that America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could
vote, you have progressophobia," Mr. Maher said. Look at the changes America has made on
disputed issues like gay marriage and marijuana legislation. "Even something like bullying. It
still happens, but being outwardly cruel to people who are different is no longer acceptable.
That's progress. Acknowledging progress isn't saying, 'We're done,' or, 'We don't need more.'
And being gloomier doesn't mean you're a better person."
He was asking for perspective, a hard thing to do when you're a comic because a comic's
tools are exaggeration, satire and sarcasm. But Mr. Maher maintained earnestness.
"In 1958," he said, "only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Now Gallup
doesn't even bother asking. But the last time they did, in 2013, 87% approved. An overwhelming
majority of Americans now say they want to live in a multiracial neighborhood. That is a
sea change from when I was a kid." Mr. Maher was born in 1956.
He barreled on: "In a country that's 14% black, 18% of the incoming class at Harvard is
black. And since 2017, white students are not even a majority in our public colleges. Employees
of color make up 47% of Microsoft , 50% of Target, 55% of the Gap, as
companies become desperate to look like their TV commercials."
"The 'Friends' reunion we just had looked weird, because if you even suggested a show today
about six people all of whom were straight and white, the network would laugh you out of the
room and then cancel you on Twitter . And yet there is a recurrent theme
on the far left that things have never been worse."
The comedian Kevin Hart had recently told the New York Times , "You're witnessing white
power and white privilege at an all-time high." Mr. Maher: "This is one of the big problems
with wokeness, that what you say doesn't have to make sense or jibe with the facts, or ever be
challenged, lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism."
He added: "Saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous.
Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than when the KKK rode
unchecked and Jim Crow unchallenged?" He acknowledged that "racism is unfortunately still with
us," and its "legacy of injustice" lingers. "I understand best I can how racism singes a
person's soul so much they might see it everywhere. But seeing clearly is necessary for
actually fixing problems, and clearly racism is no longer everywhere. It's not in my home, and
it's probably not in yours if I read my audience right, and I think I do. For most of the
country the most unhip thing you could ever be today is a racist."
You know leftist overreach is extreme when Bill Maher and Jon Stewart are calling out its
absurdities. Maher's bit is interesting--if you watch the video you'll see that he hasn't
totally wandered off the reservation of the left, but he is objectively looking around and
recognizing that all of this progressive indoctrination is causing problems.
Jon Stewart's rant brilliantly illustrated the folly of the Never Trumpers who have
allowed their disdain for the Orange Man to cloud their view of reality. He was 12 months too
late to point it out, but at least he got there eventually.
Chris Breidenbaugh
Marxist and Fascist tyrants have always required a boogey man. The Bolsheviks had the
bourgeoisie. Nazi Germany had the Jews, Castro, Chavez and the North Koreans have the US.
Today's US marxists have racism. An undeniable, invisible scourge that must be irradiated, no
matter how irrelevant it is in modern society. But it will never and can never be irradiated.
How will BLM rally the troops if there is no racism? Who will pay for Al Sharpton and Jesse
Jackson's limos if racism were "gone"? For todays US marxists, the goal is not to end racism.
It's to enact marxist policies to control the masses. Racism is just a tool; a means to an
end. You can see a direct correlation to the rise of marxist policies and the prevalence of
anti-racism fervor. When racism no longer serves it purpose for these marxists, it will be
kicked to the curb. They'll find a new boogey man and start the whole process over.
Patricia Barnes
Cultural elites (i.e. Hollywood, publishers) for decades have pushed the narrative that all
whites are one grandfather removed from a cruel Southern plantation owner wielding a bull
whip over a sniveling black slave on his knees. All to sell movie tickets and books.
RICHARD SANDOR
Patrica : Yes, I have learned quite a bit about this inter-racial part of America History
from watching " Finding Your Roots ." Quite an insight into how complicated slavery was
because even some African Americans owned slaves . The cultural divisions between the North
and South were huge . And finding a solution to this cultural divide was terribly difficult.
mrs
r fortin
To quote the racist Maxine Waters, we have to "push-back" against rewarding and giving more
power to the racist woke mob or we will become more divided than ever!
BRIAN MOORE
Maher's point will gain no traction on the left. Without "you're a racist", they would have
to produce cogent arguments, and they cannot.
SEAN ESSIG
"progressophobia," a term coined by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Mr. Maher
defines it as "a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of
recognizing progress.
Absolute genius!
Gary Blakely
In the past we only had two genders, now we have 72 genders. That's progressive.
In the past we had 3,446 black hangings in the US, now we have had 40,000 black people
murdered in Chicago alone. That's progressive.
I could go on. Please feel free to enhance this list.
The Free Beacon reports that U.S. intelligence officials haven't come to a conclusion about
whether or not the students being investigated were spies, but RedState is told that whether or
not one wants to use the term "spy," those students were sent back to the United States with
specific information-gathering directives with the purpose of helping Beijing understand the US
government's response to the pandemic at a much deeper level than they could through
publicly-available documents. Those students (spies) were charged with reporting back on public
policy changes, economic response and damage, impacts on the healthcare system
(equipment/hospital bed shortages, etc), supply chain impacts (including how long it took
things like semiconductors from China to reach the United States), civil unrest, and more.
In addition, Dong has provided DIA with the following information:
Early pathogenic studies of the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2
Models of predicted COVID-19 spread and damage to the US and the world
Financial records detailing which exact organizations and governments funded the research
on SARS-CoV-2 and other biological warfare research
Names of US citizens who provide intel to China
Names of Chinese spies working in the US or attending US universities
Financial records showing US businessmen and public officials who've received money from
the Chinese government
Details of meetings US government officials had (perhaps unwittingly) with Chinese spies
and members of Russia's SVR
How the Chinese government gained access to a CIA communications system, leading to the
death of dozens of Chinese people who were working with the CIA
Dong also has provided DIA with copies of the contents of the hard drive on Hunter Biden's
laptop, showing the information the Chinese government has about Hunter's pornography problem
and about his (and Joe's) business dealings with Chinese entities. Some of the files on Dong
has provided shine a light on just how it was that the sale of Henniges Automotive (and their
stealth technology) to Chinese military manufacturer AVIC Auto was approved.
Again, according to sources, Dong told DIA debriefers that at least a third of Chinese
students attending US universities are PLA assets or part of the Thousand Talents Plan and that
many of the students are here under pseudonyms. One reason for using pseudonyms is that many of
these students are the children of high-ranking military and party leaders.
As we initially reported, DIA has high confidence in the veracity of Dong's claims. The fact
that since our original report, which was pooh-poohed by Langley apologists, the New York Times
published a rare interview with Dr. Shi Zhengli (the WIV "Bat Woman"), ABC News has started an
"investigation" into COVID-19 origins, and now the actual name of the defector has been
published in an anti-Trump, CIA-friendly blog, demonstrates what sources told RedState today:
"This defector has the rest of the intelligence community and the LEO community scared
sh**less."
The Free Beacon reports that U.S. intelligence officials haven't come to a conclusion about
whether or not the students being investigated were spies, but RedState is told that whether or
not one wants to use the term "spy," those students were sent back to the United States with
specific information-gathering directives with the purpose of helping Beijing understand the US
government's response to the pandemic at a much deeper level than they could through
publicly-available documents. Those students (spies) were charged with reporting back on public
policy changes, economic response and damage, impacts on the healthcare system
(equipment/hospital bed shortages, etc), supply chain impacts (including how long it took
things like semiconductors from China to reach the United States), civil unrest, and more.
In addition, Dong has provided DIA with the following information:
Early pathogenic studies of the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2
Models of predicted COVID-19 spread and damage to the US and the world
Financial records detailing which exact organizations and governments funded the research
on SARS-CoV-2 and other biological warfare research
Names of US citizens who provide intel to China
Names of Chinese spies working in the US or attending US universities
Financial records showing US businessmen and public officials who've received money from
the Chinese government
Details of meetings US government officials had (perhaps unwittingly) with Chinese spies
and members of Russia's SVR
How the Chinese government gained access to a CIA communications system, leading to the
death of dozens of Chinese people who were working with the CIA
Dong also has provided DIA with copies of the contents of the hard drive on Hunter Biden's
laptop, showing the information the Chinese government has about Hunter's pornography problem
and about his (and Joe's) business dealings with Chinese entities. Some of the files on Dong
has provided shine a light on just how it was that the sale of Henniges Automotive (and their
stealth technology) to Chinese military manufacturer AVIC Auto was approved.
Again, according to sources, Dong told DIA debriefers that at least a third of Chinese
students attending US universities are PLA assets or part of the Thousand Talents Plan and that
many of the students are here under pseudonyms. One reason for using pseudonyms is that many of
these students are the children of high-ranking military and party leaders.
As we initially reported, DIA has high confidence in the veracity of Dong's claims. The fact
that since our original report, which was pooh-poohed by Langley apologists, the New York Times
published a rare interview with Dr. Shi Zhengli (the WIV "Bat Woman"), ABC News has started an
"investigation" into COVID-19 origins, and now the actual name of the defector has been
published in an anti-Trump, CIA-friendly blog, demonstrates what sources told RedState today:
"This defector has the rest of the intelligence community and the LEO community scared
sh**less."
lay_arrow
Chief Joesph 2 hours ago
This story is totally unbelievable. First of all, the DIA is the wrong agency to turn
over information to, since it only analyze stuff that has military implications, (which of
course bioagents would be of an interest to them), but they never make any releases of
information available to the public. So, it's very doubtful the author would have gotten
any information directly from them. They are literally more secretive than the CIA. And,
the business of who had F/J visas and who went to American schools is totally irrelevant to
DIA too, which also makes this report suspicious about it's authenticity. This is simply
not the way military intelligence works.
Rudolph 1 hour ago (Edited)
Reads like a fiction. Mass number of spies in US gov't even CIA FBI must not be told of
Dong's defection ?
AmadausVoltaire 1 hour ago
Yeah, my tolerance for Hopium is so high that this story barely took the edge off...
Drowsapp123 3 minutes ago
Oh so now the Deep State is going to give me the straight story!
Wow they must have gotten jeeeeeeesus.
Never mind our military wants to go after China. This information will be totally
unbiased. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Someone tell the block heads in the military that we're not going to win when all the
parts to our war machine come from China. Seriously. This. Is. Dumb.
It was Fauci who had this crap going on in labs of Fort Detrick. When it was made
illegal here the research effort was shipped to Wuhan. There it was funded by Fauci / USSA.
China is being used as a patsy. Did China put on Event 201 where they did an exercise of a
corona pandemic in Sept 2019?? NO. It's the Davos Crowd. The Banking Cartel. Never forget
it or we'll have yet ANOTHER world war where your sons / daughters die for them. WW1 / WW2
were fought to make the world safe for the Banking Cartel and allow them to loot the
world.
pro·le·tar·i·at 35 minutes ago
Names of US citizens who provide intel to China
Dr. Anthony Fauci
bombdog PREMIUM 34 minutes ago
Financial records showing US businessmen and public officials who've received money
from the Chinese government
Joe Biden
Huginn 33 minutes ago
Swallwell
Captain Carrot 28 minutes ago
Don't forget Sheldon Adelson (Trumpy's Boss)...!
Johnny Walker 2 hours ago
US has bio weapons labs in 25 countries.
"They kept tampering with the virus for a few years, trying to make it more infectious
and more deadly. After gain-of-function research was forbidden by the US government in
2014, it was promptly offshored to Wuhan lab. The research was quietly continued with US
grants coming (partly) from the notorious Dr Fauci via the equally notorious Peter Daszak
and his EcoHealth Alliance, the beneficiary of
$39 million grant from the Pentagon . The Pentagon is a great humanitarian organization
known for its love of mankind, right? "
4.5% (inflated) infection rate and 99.7% (deflated) survival rate is not any kind of
weapon. Perhaps the research was leading to it, but covid was not any kind of obviously
effective weapon. Dont believe the neocon jibberish. The weapon was the a test of the
ability to manipulate the media and politicians to create panic and fear and submission.
Obviously totally effective.
Gotta try and keep us distracted from the tribe going on a real-estate shopping spree
via BlackRock while small hat AG Garland calls "white supremacy" the greatest terrorist
threat.
"Look over there!! It's CHINA!!!"
BaNNeD oN THe RuN 1 hour ago
Models of predicted COVID-19 spread and damage to the US and the world
So what, they obtained a copy of the Event 201 document from the Johns Hopkins Center
for Health Security.
Still it was pleasant to read a speculative propaganda piece not written by Epoch Times,
well done.
Sid Finch 32 minutes ago
This feels like more theatre to keep narrative alive. If the CDC or anyone proved a
virus exists, it would be good start. Their own PCR manuals concede that it hasn't. Anyone
can read them. It's more about creating panic to get more to want the magic mystery potion
injection. I see 4 healthy British Airways pilots died this week, and fllying does increase
clotting risks.
seems the public has become bored with the china/wuhan/bats/commies narrative, so we
needs to spice it up. facts or no facts, doesn't matter. it's all about the
clicks...........
so, umm......until some real news organizations update us on this world-shattering
story, ima take it with lott's wife.
VladLenin 2 hours ago
This sounds like BS. Someone here called it... Steele...
He approached the DIA after being in the US for 2 weeks? As a counter-intel guy, he
should know DIA HUMINT is for sh!t. They're the JV team. The only reason he might go to
them is if they had already pitched him (and maybe the Chinese found out).
So in a world of compartmentalization, this guy knows everything about everything.
Even being a high level guy, we all know executive types are incapable of doing stuff for
themselves. So, in between budget meetings and picking the new picture of Mao for the
lobby, he was downloading data to a thumb drive?
If I had to guess, this guy probably did defected. But his exploits are an amalgamation
of many potential intel sources. Pin some sh!t on him so he won't re-defect.
C urious it was to
read that the Russian judiciary ruled last Wednesday that Alexei Navalny's political
network is an extremist movement. Its members should be grateful that the courts recognized it
as a movement, given Navalny's nationwide support has never exceeded 3 percent or so, but on
paper they are now liable to arrest and prosecution and, if convicted of one or another charge,
could be fined or imprisoned.
There have been no arrests, so far as has been reported. But think of all those chances
Western intel agencies and their clerks in the press may now have to lionize a new cohort of
oppositionists as Navalny's heroic followers. Let us not forget, a kooky poseur journalist
named Oleg Kashin had the nerve to call Navalny "Russia's true leader" in a recent
New York Timesopinion piece.
There is no limit to the silliness in all matters Russian, it seems. At least not at the
Times .
I say "curious" because, in the ordinary conduct of statecraft as we have had it for the
past seven decades, the Moscow's court's ruling, exactly a week prior to President Joe Biden's
first summit with President Vladimir Putin, would have to be counted obtuse. Wouldn't minding
one's manners -- especially given that the Navalny network's significance resides solely in the
minds and news pages of Western propagandists -- be the wise course?
I don't think so. I have no clue as to the independence or otherwise of the Russian
judiciary, but it is unthinkable the Russian leader did not know in advance of what the courts
were about to determine. I think Russia was indeed minding its manners -- a different and
altogether more honorable set of manners than American pols and diplomats have exhibited lo
these many decades.
In a sensible read, the court ruling was a calculated gesture in response to Biden's
commitment,
announced during a Memorial Day speech, to confront Putin in Geneva on June 16 with the
question of human rights in the Russian Federation. "We will not stand by and let him abuse
those rights," saith the man from Scranton.
We will not stand by, Moscow replied in so many words, as you grandstand at Russia's
expense. Recall in this connection, Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, has lately made
it a habit to note
that Moscow is monitoring human rights in the U.S. since the Jan. 6 protests at the Capitol.
"We have no taboo topics," Lavrov said in evident response to Biden's speech. "We will discuss
whatever we think is necessary."
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left, and President Vladimir Putin meeting with
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, 2017. (President of Russia)
It would be very wrong to take this matter as a passing spat as the Russian and American
presidents find their feet with one another. In my view, the court judgment last week and
Lavrov's remarks on human rights as a two-way street make the Geneva encounter far more
important than it may have otherwise turned out to be.
Five Principles
To understand this, we must go back and back and back some more until we reach the early
1950s, when newly independent India and newly socialist China were working out how two very
large neighbors ought best to conduct their relations. It was while negotiating a bilateral
agreement on this question in 1953 that Zhou Enlai, Mao's cultured, subtle, farsighted premier,
first articulated his Five Principles, the ethical code by which the People's Republic would
conduct its relations with all nations.
These were incorporated into the Sino–Indian Agreement of 1954 and have been
justifiably well-known since. Note that four of the five have to do with respectful conduct and
parity:
– Mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty;
– Mutual nonaggression;
– Noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations;
– Equality and mutual benefit among nations;
– Peaceful coexistence.
A year after New Delhi and Beijing signed their accord, Zhou's principles were reiterated at
the historically monumental conference of nonaligned nations Sukarno hosted at an Indonesian
hill station called Bandung. When the Non–Aligned Movement was formally constituted six
years after that, the Five Principles effectively became the non–West's statement -- of
aspiration, of intent -- to the West: This is what we have to offer the postcolonial world, the
NAM said in so many words. This is our contribution to a new and peaceable world order. This is
how we will manage our relations with others.
The Grand Mosque of Bandung, Indonesia, with its twin minarets, adjacent to the city square
in Asia-Afrika Street, 2008. (Prayudi Setiadharma, Wikimedia Commons)
The United States never had any time for the NAM. As readers of a certain age will recall,
it dismissed the movement, with-us-or-against-us style, as a badly dressed bunch of
crypto–Communists or Soviet dupes. The decades since are an easy lesson in why Washington
took this utterly awful position: It has not once, not in any given year, observed even one of
Zhou's principles. It has always, in any given year, abused all five.
Vladimir Putin
One may admire or detest Vladimir Putin, but he is undeniably possessed of an excellent
grasp of history, as many of his speeches attest. I doubt he thinks very specifically about the
NAM or Zhou's principles, but, without naming them, these are what he will have on the table
when he meets Joe Biden.
This is the meaning of the oddly timed court judgment against Navalny's apparatus and the
message Lavrov conveyed in response to Biden's Memorial Day speech: Internal affairs are to be
resolved internally.
Geneva will mark the start of a long and welcome process. Its importance will lie in its
formalization of a stance Russia -- and China, too -- have adopted since those two
catastrophically stupid mistakes Biden and Secretary of State Blinken made last March, when
Biden called Putin a murderer and tin-eared Blinken hollowly lectured the Chinese about human
rights and democracy.
President Joe Biden in Oval Office, April 27. (White House, Adam Schultz)
Beijing and Moscow have ever since stiffened their backs toward the U.S., giving as good as
they get on all the questions with which Washington customarily browbeats others.
If we have begun a process, where will it lead? In my read to an excellent place, where
nations mind the better set of manners noted above -- Zhou Enlai's manners, let us say.
Before this century is out, and very possibly before the midway mark, Zhou's Five Principles
stand to become the norm in international relations. Zhou's true topic was parity between West
and non–West. This will be achieved, and strange it is that the opening months of the
Biden administration have opened us to this salutary prospect. The U.S. will otherwise lead us
all into an egregiously messy period of history, and I do not think rising powers -- Russia,
China, India, others -- will find this acceptable.
One other matter must be clarified as Geneva approaches.
I do not know the merits of the case against Navalny or, since last week, the ruling against
his followers. But I have always found it curious that The New York Times and the other
major dailies recite as rote that Navalny and his people consider the two charges of
embezzlement (and the two convictions) that put him in jail in the first place to be "trumped
up" or "politically motivated." Why doesn't the Times ' Moscow bureau do the gumshoe
work and inform readers whether or not this is so?
True, Times ' Moscow correspondents are among the worst in my lifetime, but this kind
of kabuki requires one to consider carefully whether the charges are indeed legitimate.
My read: The legal case against Navalny probably holds water, and the American press uses the
power of omission to avoid acknowledging this.
Pitiful, if this is the case.
The larger point here: We must learn to put all such questions aside in contexts such as we
have now in U.S.–Russia relations. Anyone who has ever been in a Marxist reading group
knows the importance of distinguishing between primary and secondary contradictions. Let us not
forget the essential lesson, no matter anyone's political stripe.
What is the primary contradiction here? It is Washington's refusal to observe the principles
of noninterference and sovereignty, and it is vital far, far beyond bilateral relations that
Russia defends these. The Navalny case and the associated matter of human rights are, plainly
and simply, a secondary contradiction -- and one it is imperative to leave to Russians to
resolve.
Geneva in June, a rather nice place to be. Let us see if Biden and Putin mind their manners
-- and whose manners these turn out to be.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International
Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is
Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century . Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those
of Consortium News .
After four years of Russia, Russia, Russia is our mortal enemy and has compromised the
former US President to our great national peril, don't you think it is wonderful Biden brought
a thaw to those very same hostilities he and his party spent the last four years trying to
foment? ( /s)
Boy, was this unexpected and fun. Jon Stewart, former star of the Daily Show (back when it
was funny), hooked up Monday night with his old protege, Stephen Colbert. When Stewart was
running the Daily Show, he had a liberal bent but he would also take on liberal hypocrisy. That
bit of integrity was on display again last night (today is Tuesday) when the insufferable
Stephen Colbert asked his old boss what he thought about the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is the
exchange:
"I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped
ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science ," Stewart
said after Colbert asked how he was feeling about the scientific response to COVID-19.
"Do you mean perhaps there's a chance that this was created in a lab?" asked Colbert,
adding "There's an investigation."
" A chance? " shot back Stewart – kicking the door open.
" Oh my god, there's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we
do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease
is the same name as the lab. That's just a little too weird, don't you think? And then they
asked those scientists – they're like 'how did this so wait a minute, you work at the
Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab. How did this happen?' and they're like ' mmmm – a
pangolin kissed a turtle? ' and you're like 'no the name of your lab! If you look at the
name! Can I let me see your business card. Show me your business card. Oh – I work at
the coronavirus lab in Wuhan. Oh, cause there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan. How did that
happen? '
'Maybe a bat flew into the Cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili. And now
we all have Coronavirus."
Stewart landed one final joke as Colbert desperately tried to control the situation;
"HOLD IT, HOLD IT! What about this, what about this listen to this! 'OH MY GOD, there's
been an outbreak of chocolately goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think
happened?'
'Oh I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean?'
" Or it's the fucking chocolate factory ! Maybe that's it!" Stewart screamed.
Boy oh boy. Liberal land did not like that. Click
here to enjoy the tsunami of liberal hysteria in the aftermath of getting punched in the
nut sack by truth.
John Stewart always stroke me as an old-school 'New-Deal' type liberal who had a nuanced
view of the world. Ironically, when Dubya was in office Stewart was always there to criticize
and poke fun at him and the Republicans so he was pretty much their enemy no.1 in the media,
but this time around it is the batshit crazy progressives that are foaming on their mouths for
seeing him apply the same stuff he used to unleash against the Republicans. The Colbert's
interview actually sums up the insanity of the progressives nicely.
My hats off to John Stewart for standing up to non-sense when he sees it. James
says: June 17,
2021 at 9:48 am
Krystal & Saager were on Joe Rogan yesterday and the three of them watched the clip
together – quite approvingly.
Not everyone on the left is an idiot or a sellout. These three people, and Jon Stewart, have
great integrity and intelligence. Krystal & Saager are living proof that the left and the
right can work together to take on the establishment.
I see many commenters referring to President Putin as Vlad. For the last time, the
shortening of Vladimir is not Vlad, it's Volodya. Vlad is short for Vladislav. Just because
American idiots journalists didn't bother to do a little research doesn't mean you couldn't
either.
I see many commenters referring to President Putin as Vlad. For the last time, the
shortening of Vladimir is not Vlad, it's Volodya. Vlad is short for Vladislav.
...
Posted by: Andrew Ho | Jun 17 2021 0:55 utc | 74
You're forgetting that this is an English Language conversations among Speakers of
English. Their most common method of shortening a person's name is by omitting the surplus
syllables from the end of a long name.
In English, if the short version of a person's name bears no resemblance to the name itself,
then it's a Nickname.
It's not disrespectful to talk ABOUT someone using a conventional shortening of their
name. It would only be disrespectful if one used it when speaking TO the individual without
first asking how he/she prefers to be addressed. And that's a universal precaution.
Queen Elizabeth is nicknamed "Liz" by the irreverent and "BoJo" is widely recognized for
Boris. Somehow I have a vague notion Merkel has been dubbed "Tante," but this may be the
onset of dementia. ("Lilibet" has been revived for a great-granddaughter, but that was more a
WWII thing for Elizabeth II.) Before Macron was elected I off-handedly referred to him as
"monster," but that really provoked one of the regulars at another blog, Crooked Timber. (Our
host may be pleased to know they are allergic to MoA?)
Nicknames may be both expressions of affection and of scorn.
Comments for this article are pretty instructive about the particular strata of US population
mindset right now. Reminds the mood of dissidents in the USSR.
Tucker Carlson dropped several bombshells on his show Tuesday night, chief among them was
from a Revolver News report that the FBI was likely involved in organizing the Jan. 6 Capitol
'insurrection,' and were similarly involved in the kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor
Gretchin Whitmer .
" Why are there so many factual matters that we don't understand about that day? " asked
Carlson.
" Why is the Biden administration preventing us from knowing? Why is the administration
still hiding more than 10,000 hours of surveillance tape from the US capitol on January 6th?
What could possibly be the reason for that - even as they call for more openness... they could
release those tapes today, but they're not. Why?"
Carlson notes that
Revolver News has dissected court filings surrounding the Capitol riot, suggests that
unindicted co-conspirators in the case are likely to have been federal operatives.
We at Revolver News have noticed a pattern from our now months-long investigation into 1/6
-- and in particular from our meticulous study of the charging documents related to those
indicted. In many cases the unindicted co-conspirators appear to be much more aggressive and
egregious participants in the very so-called "conspiracy" serving as the basis for charging
those indicted.
The question immediately arises as to why this is the case, and forces us to consider
whether certain individuals are being protected from indictment because they were involved in
1/6 as undercover operatives or confidential informants for a federal agency.
Key segment from Tucker:
"We know that the government is hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers that
were present at the Capitol on January 6th, not just the one that killed Ashli Babbitt.
According to the government's own court filing, those law enforcement officers participated
in the riot - sometimes in violent ways . We know that because without fail, the government
has thrown the book at most people who were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6. There was a
nationwide dragnet to find them - and many are still in solitary confinement tonight. But s
trangely, some of the key people who participated on Jan. 6 have not been charged ."
Look at the documents , the government calls those people 'unindicted co-conspirators.'
What does that mean? Well it means that in potentially every case they were FBI operatives
... in the Capitol, on January 6th."
"For example, one of those unindicted co-conspirators is someone government documents
identify only as "person two." According to those documents, person two stayed in the same
hotel room as a man called Thomas Caldwell - an 'insurrectionist.' A man alleged to be a
member of the group "The Oathkeepers." Person two also "stormed the barricades" at the
Capitol on January 6th alongside Thomas Caldwell. The government's indictments further
indicate that Caldwell - who by the way is a 65-year-old man... was led to believe there
would be a "quick reaction force" also participating on January 6th. That quick reaction
force Caldwell was told, would be led by someone called "Person 3," who had a hotel room and
an accomplice with them . But wait. Here's the interesting thing. Person 2 and person 3 were
organizers of the riot . The government knows who they are, but the government has not
charged them. Why is that? You know why. They were almost certainly working for the FBI. So
FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6th according to
government documents. And those two are not alone. In all, Revolver news reported there are
"upwards of 20 unindicted co-conspirators in the Oath Keeper indictments, all playing various
roles in the conspiracy, who have not been charged for virtually the exact same activities
and in some cases much, much more severe activities - as those named alongside them in the
indictments."
Revolver , meanwhile, has important questions about January 6th
In the year leading up to 1/6 and during 1/6 itself, to what extent were the three primary militia groups (the Oath Keepers,
the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters) that the FBI , DOJ , Pentagon and
network news have labeled most
responsible for planning and executing a Capitol attack on 1/6 infiltrated by agencies of the
federal government, or informants of said agencies?
Exactly how many federal undercover agents or confidential informants were present at the
Capitol or in the Capitol during the infamous "siege" and what roles did they play (merely
passive informants or active instigators)?
Finally, of all of the unindicted co-conspirators referenced in the charging documents of
those indicted for crimes on 1/6, how many worked as a confidential informant or as an
undercover operative for the federal government (FBI, Army Counterintelligence, etc.)?
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has demanded an explanation from FBI Director Christopher Wray:
We recommend you read the entire
Revolver piece, which includes the fact that at least five individuals involved int he
"Whitmer Kidnapping Plot" were undercover agents and federal informants .
_Rorschach 7 hours ago
Just remember folks
a Klan meeting is always 33 FBI agents
and 2 ACTUAL white supremacists
Dragonlord 7 hours ago
No CIA? I am disappointed.
_Rorschach 7 hours ago (Edited)
Glowies are never at the meetings
theyre busy planting bombs for the false flag afterwards
Misesmissesme 6 hours ago
90% of "terrorists" would never commit acts of terror if the US Guv wasn't coercing them
to commit said acts. The wrong people are in jail.
Wonder who in government started the ball rolling on 9/11 before it got away from
them?
Sedaeng PREMIUM 6 hours ago
it never got away from them! They directed through and afterwards... Patriot act just
'happened' to be on standby just in case? ha!
Not Your Father's ZH 6 hours ago (Edited)
Amid this chronic Machiavellian conniving, here are creatures who know how to act
right:
"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from
people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the
banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry
and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the
banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river." ~ Will
Durant, "The Story of Civilization"
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a
monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss , the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich
Nietzsche
"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow.
There is no humor in Heaven." ― Mark Twain
thomas sewell 6 hours ago
everything in the USA is bull sheet. its all polluted with mind fook.
the last 1+ year has gone beyond any psycho drama i could ever imagine.
krda 5 hours ago
Didn't Brennan issue the 9/11 hijackers' visas?
zedwork 1 hour ago
Yes, but no planes. That would have been way too risky when you can just add them into
the live feed later using CGI.
Bob Lidd 1 hour ago
You mean like what happen in the 1993 WTC bombing.....??
How there hasn't been a day of reckoning yet is beyond me.
SexyJulian 6 hours ago
And stacks of bricks.
E5 5 hours ago
The FBI does not have the right to commit a crime. They chose to run an operation they
should disavow all agents involved and they know it. Arrest them.
With Wray out there spreading fear about the Great White Supremacy Threat, you can bet
the FBI is working overtime to make something newsworthy happen. Remember folks: 3
"militia" = 2 FBI informants + 1 patsy
Until the JFK murder/coup is brought to light, you can bet it's all hoax, including
Trump being an 'outsider'. He's not. He did everything Israel told him to do.
GhostOLaz 3 hours ago
America's perception of the FBI comes from TV "programs", not history or reality.
Joiningupthedots 1 hour ago
"Why is the administration still hiding more than 10,000 hours of surveillance tape from
the US capitol on January 6th?"
For the same reason the UK government wont release the Skripal Tapes from Salisbury,
UK.......LMAO.
Its an inside job........OBVIOUSLY!
Faeriedust 2 hours ago
So. Incidents are being staged and then used as excuses for more draconian State
security powers. How is this different from the behavior of known historical groups such as
the SS and the KGB? How can this be interpreted except as the actions of a totalitarian
State?
Sizzurp PREMIUM 6 hours ago
Scary stuff. They manufacture their own crimes to suit their political narrative and
agenda. This is straight out of the Nazi playbook.
Garciathinksso 6 hours ago
this is SOP for FBI, long rich history of manufacturing crimes and low, mid and high
level corruption . Prior to that the BOI was even worse.
JaxPavan 7 hours ago remove link
The chickens coming home to roost.
This was a "color revolution" by us, against us. And, it was designed to fail. Like a
freakish side show.
Why? Let off political steam. Keep all the people in their respective aisle of the
democan and republicrat uniparty bus. Distract political attention away from the full
****** plandemic lockdowns. Keep the rest of the world agape for a few more years thinking
things will fall apart on their own, while their resources are extracted. . .
Jam 47 minutes ago
This scam getting some press now is better late than never, but not by much. Some of
these media types being all surprised by this must have lived pretty sheltered lives and
are lacking any street smarts. This set up was obvious since day one, this is the same
bunch that won't call out these crooks for rigged elections.
Oxygen Likes Carbon 48 minutes ago
It should be painfully clear that with the level of surveillance in 2021, nobody can
walk into high security governmental building, without being arrested. Let alone organize a
mass demonstration then go into Capitol Building during the day, while the politicians
being there, to take ... selfies.
... without some help, or coordination from some governmental services.
anti-bolshevik 7 hours ago (Edited)
Replace 'unindicted co-conspirators.' with Agent Provocateurs.
The entire chain-of-command that authorized / planned / executed / gave material support
to this Operation should be indicted and prosecuted.
In this course of its investigation, researchers at Fordham discovered that EVERY
SINGLE ONE of the 138 terrorist incidents recorded in the USA between 2001-2012 involved
FBI informants who played leading roles in planning out, supplying weapons, instructions
and even recruiting Islamic terrorists to carry out terrorist acts on U.S. soil.
Enraged 56 minutes ago
With FBI Director Comey, Assistant Director McCabe, and FBI agent/covert CIA agent
Strzok acting against President Trump, this should be considered treasonous, and hopefully
they will be prosecuted.
The question is who authorized the latest actions on January 6 since Comey, McCabe, and
Strzok were fired.
Conductor "Corn Pop" Angelo 38 minutes ago
I can think of two to start with. Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. Both refused
additional security even after being told that the latest intel suggested there was going
to be a protest at the capital building on Jan 6th. The two were offered National Guard
troops, in addition to Capital Police, to help out, but refused. IIRC, both the Senate and
House Sgt at Arms lost their jobs over this, too
Make it three, Mayor Bowser had the same intel and did nothing
Andro1345 7 hours ago
These are old tricks by the FBI. They have been just as bad as the CIA for years.
So many instances going back so far. They plan things, set it up, help to encourage and
supply sheep to do these things. If I had someone trying to encourage me to get on board
something similar my first guess would be a government operative, seriously.
WeNamedTheDogIndiana 1 hour ago
I attended protests after the election, and it was obvious to be that the rallies at our
state capitol were infiltrated by FBI/deep state stooges. A number of them were talking
civil war, and said it too boldly in my opinion, and then many of them were carrying AKs,
when that was not necessary.
The only rally that I attended that seemed uncorrupted was the first protest in DC a few
weeks after the election.
taketheredpill 7 hours ago
Don't be shocked if the FBI funded some of the trips, hotels etc.
And for sure the FBI operatives "wound up" the participants...
But you won't find out for 10 years.
Alfred 7 hours ago
Not just infiltrated.
The FBI actually creates the organizations they then infiltrate.
Someone goes on a good rant here or there, can expect to be befriended by someone of
like mind. Thereafter that someone undergoes radicalization and then organization via FBI
sting ops. They get funding, they get resources, they get ready, they get busted.
Ha! It's all shake-n-bake, baby!
ProudZion 6 hours ago
...The proud boys was led by a FBI agent....
Mad Muppet PREMIUM 1 hour ago
They're called Agents Provacateurs and it's nothing new. The Government always initiates
the violence they say they want to prevent.
Ms No PREMIUM 1 hour ago remove link
"Informants" is a very misleading title. They aren't out there ferretting info of people
up to no good. It's more an infiltration and steering game and always has been.
They are basically agents without the boundaries of law. Good front guys too. They will
keep them out of trouble and protect them if they can but if it gets too hot they are
expendable and even easily patsied. It's all actually actually technically illegal because
even when they do real informant work it's actually entrapment.
We used to be protected from these things and now you see the reason behind that.
Nothing is new it just has different names and since it's always avoided by media, some of
it doesn't even have proper names, at least for the public.
It's basically false flag color revolution operations.
QuiteShocking 6 hours ago (Edited) remove link
The USA's standing in the world is vastly diminished by the continue lies and
mischaracterizations of what happened on Jan 6th by the democrats. The police officer died
from a stroke and not from the rioters. The unarmed white woman was executed by capital
police and no one was held responsible. The democrats have continued to blatantly lie and
mislead on what really happened on Jan 6th for political gain...
Max21c 7 hours ago
We recommend you read the entire
Revolver piece, which includes the fact that at least five individuals involved int
he "Whitmer Kidnapping Plot" were undercover agents and federal informants .
People were already aware that the FBI kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor
Gretchen Whitmer was an FBI thing from the start and all throughout. Just as many if not
most of these things are as they involve the secret police creating the plots and then
unraveling the plots they've created and managed and orchestrated all along the way.
Angular Momentum 7 hours ago
The states need to outlaw entrapment in cases like that. The FBI moles need to be
punished as severely as the dupes.
junction 7 hours ago
The FBI and the CIA apparently fund the so-call White Supremacist organizations. Your
tax dollars at work. Meanwhile, total silence for a decade from the FBI as Jeffrey Epstein
ran a transnational white slavery operation out of his Manhattan mansion, aided by the
Israeli Mossad.
Max21c 7 hours ago
The intelligence community and secret police community were well aware of what was going
on with the Epstein operation. It's not just the US side either as the UK and Israelis were
aware of it also.
Uncle Sugar PREMIUM 7 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Trump is better than Xiden, but
He left Chris Wray running the FIB
He didn't prosecute Comey, Brennan, anyone
He pushed the "Vax"
He spent worse than a drunken sailor
Conclusion - He's not the answer
OldNewB 6 hours ago
He should have pardoned Snowden.
otschelnik 7 hours ago
Well looks like the DOJ is bringing back the Obummer spygate team. John P. Carlin who
was head of DOJ/National Security Division is now deputy AG. He let the FBI give 4 civilian
contractors access to the NSA database for 702 inquiries, which Admiral Rogers stopped.
Also back is Lisa Monoco who oversaw the FISA warrants for Carter Page, and now she's going
to be heading up Garland's domestic terror task force.
That's all very ominous.
Farmer Tink 4 hours ago
I didn't realize that Carlin was back. He tried to defend his actions in the annual
report to the FISA court but Adm. Mike Rogers, on whose watch the NSA found out what the
DOJ was doing, carried the day. I also didn't realize that Lisa Monaco was the one in
charge of those illegal Page warrants. It's just sickening that they are being rewarded.
Thanks for the info.
glenlloyd 2 hours ago (Edited)
With such a high percentage of those 'involved' in the "insurrection" (said loosely
here) and the so called Whitmer kidnapping being from FBI / CIA / other intelligence
agencies AND those same people end up apparently being in leadership roles in these groups
that are supposedly going to be doing the kidnapping and insurrecting, then it's really
hard not to come to the conclusion that the fault was with the FBI et al.
It just seems like the FBI et al were way more involved in this than they should have
been, if you're going to suggest that it was the others that are to blame. The tough pill
to swallow is the claim that it was the people the FBI et al infiltrated and coerced into
do these things, that are to blame.
Things really do stink with this.
newworldorder 5 hours ago
How are these actions are not "entrapment."
InfiniteIntellRules 5 hours ago
I will stop, just too many tales of FBI corruption. Last 1
Under COINTELPRO, FBI agents infiltrated political groups and spread rumors that loyal
members were the real infiltrators. They tried to get targets fired from their jobs, and
they tried to break up the targets' marriages. They published deliberately inflammatory
literature in the names of the organizations they wanted to discredit, and they drove
wedges between groups that might otherwise be allied. In Baltimore, the FBI's operatives in
the Black Panther Party were instructed to denounce Students for a Democratic Society as "a
cowardly, honky group" who wanted to exploit the Panthers by giving them all the violent,
dangerous "dirty work." The operation was apparently successful: In August 1969, just five
months after the initial instructions went out, the Baltimore FBI reported that the local
Panther branch had ordered its members not to associate with SDS members or attend any SDS
events.
EVERY MAJOR EVENT. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
heehaw2 6 hours ago
All happened under Trumps watch. He said he was going to lead the March to Capital
building, then totally disappeared.
MrNoItAll 7 hours ago
Got to hand it to them. Those Fed guys sure know how to stage a riot to get media
attention and shape public opinion. How else could they explain why all the guard troops
were needed in D C. When getting them there could have been the primary goal of this staged
event.
lightwork 7 hours ago
In the early 70's it seemed that a government informant/ mole was instrumental in the
activities of virtually every left wing group in the country. It became common knowledge
that whomever was most vocal and advocated the most activist positions was usually "that
guy". It was effective since paranoia caused most groups to disintegrate.
otschelnik 8 hours ago remove link
Probably more snitches than that.
Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell who is one of the lucky few released but still charged is a
former FBI contractor who had top secret security clearance according to his lawyer.
Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio who was arrested 2 days before the riot for vandalism (burning
a BLM banner), had been an informer to the FBI and law inforcement in Florida, according to
his lawyer.
They forgot Antifa and BLM in their list of groups.
State sponsored terrorist groups favored by Liberal Elites and their secret police are
generally omitted and immune.
heehaw2 6 hours ago
George Bush Senior, then head of CIA was in Dallas when JFK was assinated. Ol George
announced as President the New World order
QE49er 6 hours ago
Reichstag Fire style false flag.
Ruff_Roll 6 hours ago
It makes perfect sense that FBI or government supported operatives were acting as agents
provocateurs on 1/6, organizing and instigating the riot, and subsequently let off as
"unindicted co-conspirators." Pelosi was probably in on it, too.
TheySayIAmOkay 7 hours ago
This is the biggest "duh" ever. Of course the government is involved. Just like they
were in 9/11. Just like they were stealing the election. Just like they are in at least
some of these mass shootings (the FBI was warned about the Parkland shooter multiple
times). Just like they will be in the next big incident that massively strips rights from
the people.
The Deep State is real. And it is the upper echelons of the FBI, DHS, CIA, ATF, etc.
They are the shadow government that wags the tail. They can do whatever they want and
nobody can do anything about it. Do you think if Ted Cruz or Nancy Pelosi killed someone
they'd get away with it? No. They are figures. The limits of their power can be stripped
with a single, stupid, scandal. How about John Brennan? I have absolutely no doubt in my
mind he could. Because who will hold him accountable? Nobody in the CIA or FBI went down
for not listening to the FBI agent about the 20th hijacker. Mueller got PROMOTED! He's deep
state. Brennan was regional chief of the CIA in Riyadh leading up to 9/11. He got...
PROMOTED! Deep state.
3-fingered_chemist 7 hours ago
The fact the Capitol had essentially zero security the day all members were present to
tally the EC votes and people still think this wasn't faked?
Jim in MN 7 hours ago
Speaking as someone who actually attended the earlier 'Stop the Steal' rally in DC, I
said at the time that the Jan. 6th event didn't smell right and felt like a setup.
Recommended that folks stay away, expect trouble and stay frosty at that time.
Note that the FBI was/is also deeply involved in the BLM riots. AKA a criminal
conspiracy to destabilize US civil order. Of course a lot of mayors and police chiefs are
also involved in that criminal conspiracy.
The more you know.....
jammyjo 7 hours ago
FBI is making contact with unstable people, and do nothing but keep them on a list of
"assets" to be activated when needed.
Patmos 7 hours ago
Gives new meaning to false narrative. More than just spin, they actually create the
events themselves. Not quite a false flag, because nothing really happened.
Is anyone involved going to stand up and say no? Or have they all just decided to
reserve themselves to being corrupt little b!tches?
Feck Weed 7 hours ago
FBI is the US domestic secret police force for the Globalist Empire. Nationalism is the
enemy of the globalists...
The men on the street corners with "The End is Nigh" placards are beginning to
resemble Walter Kronkite in demeanor as well as credibility.
But then again Walter was one of the CIA's finest...
Nona Yobiznes 7 hours ago
I guess the crazy conspiracy theorists were right again.
benb 3 hours ago (Edited)
Dumb Hannity used to call the FBI "The Crown Jewel of Law Enforcement,."
C Rabbit PREMIUM 7 hours ago
Why has the FBI never released the surveillance videos from the Alfred P. Murrah
Buildings and the others around it from the morning of April 19, 1995. "It's still under
investigation."
Why have the videos from all around the Pentagon taken on the morning of 9/11 never been
released?
Why does the CIA refuse to release all of their files on the JFK assassination?
Why? Why? Why?
Muffdiver2269vIII 7 hours ago
Ahh, they are waiting for Durham to complete the reports?
wootendw PREMIUM 6 hours ago
"Congressman Matt Gaetz calls on FBI Director Christopher Wray to fully disclose the
role and involvement of FBI operatives during the January 6th Capitol riot."
That would be self-incrimination.
radical-extremist 7 hours ago (Edited)
FBI will never talk because that would be revealing "classified methods and
procedures".
Why of course they troll the boards looking for "extremists" to exploit. They befriend
them and groom them, until they eventually enable them to commit the crime itself.
Conspiracy to commit the crime isn't near as sexy as the real thing, let's put these people
away for life. If there's collateral damage now and then, so be it. "Justice" comes at a
cost. /s
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his
defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people
that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the
law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of
finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a
case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for
the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the
law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this
realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass,
or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest
danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes
personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or
governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious
to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
Reddit is one of the world's most influential news and social media platforms. The website
attracted
over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States' eighth most visited
site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much
larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites,
garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York
Times .
That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company's decision to
appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at
which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle
East foreign policy wonk at NATO's think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the
same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was
demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to
spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations
and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising.
Yet a Google search for "Jessica Ashooh Reddit" filtered between late 2016 and early 2017
(after she was appointed) elicits
zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable
appointment.
This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official -- all of which
raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the
national security state.
A hawk's talons on Syria
The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and
takes
funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military,
Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons
manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and
continues to be a who's who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark,
David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and
Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such,
the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security
state.
Ashooh's LinkedIn resume epitomizes the troubling relantionship between think tanks and big
tech
Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council's Middle East
Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This
is particularly noteworthy, given both these individuals' roles in the region. As Bill
Clinton's secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program,
denounced as "genocide" by the
successive United Nations diplomats charged with
carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes , Albright casually brushed
off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children,
stating "the price is worth it." Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior national security
advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions,
surely the greatest crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.
Ashooh appears to be as hawkish as her bosses. Her particular area of expertise is the war
in Syria, regarding which she has been among the most belligerent voices, constantly calling
for more American intervention to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In a 2015
interview with Al
Jazeera , she praised the U.K. government's decision to bomb the country, claiming that the
British public was "coming around" to the idea of war. A shocked interviewer asked "how will
the British airstrikes [on] Syria make the British public any safer?" Ashooh replied that it
was "generally a positive decision" because "it goes a long way in improving international
consensus on the way forward on Syria," although she lamented that there wouldn't be "much
improvement in the situation without ground troops." There will be "no political solution
without a military element," she predicted, essentially making the pitch for war.
Ashooh has also constantly praised and supported Syria's opposition forces. In 2016, she
said that she was
very happy that "fighters on the ground from a number of key factions" were uniting against the
"Assad regime." She condemned Russia for claiming these opposition forces were members of
terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam or ISIS, insisting that these were "moderate"
rebels.
Of course, the idea that there was still any measurable distance between "moderate" rebels
and outright militant jihadists by 2016 was
hard to maintain . Even The Washington Post by this time was
admitting as much, noting that so-called moderates were now so "intermingled" with al-Nusra
that it was difficult to tell them apart.
Nevertheless, the New Hampshire native took to the pages of The New York Times to
demand that the U.S. arm the opposition. Of course, it was already doing so, the CIA
spending
$1 billion per year fielding rebel mercenary armies in the conflict -- with one in every 15
dollars the agency
spent going to this endeavor. All of this Ashooh surely knew, yet she maintained that the
West must continue to "jack up the price" of Russia defending Assad. "As long as [Assad]
remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian government this conflict won't end,"
she said , laying out
her regime-change-or-bust position. Just weeks before unexpectedly taking over at Reddit,
Ashooh seemed to still be in full foreign-policy-hawk mode, condemning Obama in the pages of
The Washington Post for his apparent softness on Syria and
demanding that Trump "restore U.S. credibility" by "order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes
against the Assad regime."
Ashooh attends British Polo Day at Abu Dhabi's Ghantoot Racing and Polo Club. Photo | Ahlan
Dirty war, dirty warrior
Ashooh is actually even more involved in the Syrian conflict than one might realize from her
hawkish opinions alone. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
of the United Arab Emirates, in her own words , "[p]rovid[ing] senior decision
makers with policy analysis and strategic advice, with a particular focus on Syria."
At that time the UAE was using its enormous financial clout to arm and fund a myriad of
jihadist groups attempting to overthow the secular strongman Assad and establish some kind of
Islamic state. Far from a conspiracy theory, this comes straight from the horse's mouth, as
then-Vice President Joe Biden revealed in a Q&A session in 2014. The future president
frankly stated :
The Saudis, the Emiratis, what were they doing? They poured hundreds of millions of
dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad,
except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist
elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. "
Under pressure, he later apologized
for his loose lips.
MintPress News asked the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs to comment on precisely
what Ashooh's role was, but they failed to respond.
Ashooh is pictured during her time as a "consultant" in Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo |
Academyalumni
Ashooh herself appears to have been a relatively major player in the Syrian Civil War. In
her previously mentioned Washington Post
article , she notes that her boss was a former Emirati Air Force General and that she was
flown to Istanbul in 2013 to attend an emergency meeting with leaders of the Syrian opposition,
as well as ambassadors from unnamed Arab and Western states, in order to plan a response to a
reported chemical weapons attack and to help the U.S. "coordinate with the Syrian
opposition."
At the same time as she was advising the nation on Middle Eastern affairs, the UAE was
widely accused of flying ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders into Yemen to help them intensify the
Saudi-led onslaught on the impoverished nation and of smuggling
U.S.-made weaponry -- including small arms, TOW missiles and Oshkosh fighting vehicles -- to
the jihadist groups. While Ashooh's writing is careful to maintain a distinction between the
"moderate" rebels she supports and the fundamentalist radicals she does not, it certainly is
noteworthy that the entities she worked for consistently seem to end up in league with the most
regressive forces in the region. MintPress also reached out to Reddit for comment on why
they appointed Ashooh, given her past history, and on the wider phenomenon of government
penetration of social media. The company initially promised to issue a response to the inquiry
but has not followed through with it.
Regime change is on the table for more than just one Middle Eastern nation. In a 2017
paper for the
Center for the National Interest -- a think tank established by former Republican President
Richard Nixon and the "Godfather of Neoconservatism,"
Irving Kristol -- Ashooh explores the different options for forcing regime change in Iran,
but concludes that overthrowing the "odious regime" is an impossible task right now, and
criticizes the idea as a quixotic dream.
Nevertheless, she is far from an Iran dove. An Atlantic Council report
she co-wrote insists that "Iranian interference in the Arab world must be deterred," and that
"America's friends and partners must be reassured that the U.S. opposes Iranian hegemony and
will work with them to prevent it."
Ashooh's commitment to fighting against Middle Eastern dictatorships might seem more
principled if she did not appear so enamored of the least democratic one of them all. In 2016,
she accompanied Albright and Hadley to Saudi Arabia and praised the monarchy's dynamic
leadership on the economy and its nurturing of a new generation. "It was really really exciting
to see that level of energy and the level of government support for these young people who were
interested in shaping their own futures it was just wonderful," she
said . In an
article about her experience for business news website Market Watch , she waxed
lyrical about how forward-thinking the Saudi government is and how the country has become "a
hub for the dynamic and positive change that is swelling up throughout the region." Presumably,
this excludes Yemen, a nation they were bombing
relentlessly . In a 2020
interview , Ashooh revealed that her dream job would be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
One of her
earliest comments on her public Reddit page (made before she began working
there) is deflecting the Kingdom from criticism of its dreadful
treatment of women.
Ashooh's Reddit account, which doesn't identify her real identity, uses the moniker,
arabscarab
As part of the Atlantic Council, Ashooh was tasked with envisaging a new Middle East for the
21st century. Given her output
, it seems that she advocates for a transition towards a more privatized, free-market economic
setup, not completely unlike the shock therapy tried in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.
"We have to "encourage states to make the reforms that move economies from state-based to ones
that support entrepreneurship, because the age of state-based economies is over," she
said at a
talk at New York University in 2015, adding:
You've got to move to support entrepreneurship in the region and let people take advantage
of the natural industrial tendencies of people in the Middle East. My God, if you've ever
been to a Turkish bazaar or a market in Cairo you know that these countries are perfectly
capable of having functioning market economies. But the state has gotten in the way.
Ashooh's LinkedIn
profile also notes that in 2010, she worked as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning "on
a variety of strategic and economic development issues," but does not go into any more detail
about what those issues were. A further biography merely states that her
consultancy agency "provid[ed] strategic and management consulting services to the Ministry of
Planning of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq." Unsurprisingly, the
organization has links to the U.S. military; the agency's lead partner being a former Army
captain.
Think Tankie
Ashooh comes from a relatively prominent New Hampshire family of Lebanese descent, the most
notable of which is probably her uncle Richard . Richard Ashooh was Donald
Trump's Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration and a former executive at weapons
manufacturer BAE Systems. Unlike her uncle, Jessica appears to lean more Democratic, having
donated money to a number of local politicians, as well as to anti-Trump Republican groups
aimed at convincing them to vote blue, such as Right Side PAC and the now infamous Lincoln
Project. However, she also appears to have great respect for many Republicans, having written
her
doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush
administration. She also
stated that the person she would have most liked to have met was 41st President George Bush
Senior, describing him as possessing "incredible amounts of strategy, finesse and restraint."
Thus, her political views appear to be exactly in the center of the neoliberal "
blob " in Washington.
Ashooh also worked
for the right-wing think tank the CATO Institute and is a Term Member of the more
Democratic-aligned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR's term member program is
intended to, in its own words, "cultivate the next generation of foreign policy
leaders."
Surveillance Valley
How and why, then, did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the
halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an
anti-establishment reputation? Virtually everyone else in senior roles at Reddit has relevant
backgrounds in marketing or tech, having worked with comparable companies such as Yelp, Expedia
and Snapchat.
Tom Secker -- a journalist, podcaster and
researcher who runs SpyCulture.com ,
an online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry -- was deeply
skeptical. "That someone whose entire career has been in international relations and foreign
affairs is now the senior policy wonk at Reddit is simply bizarre. Given her ties to the CFR,
Atlantic Council and the like, it's downright suspicious," Secker told MintPress .
Underneath the surface, however, the Atlantic Council has been rapidly expanding its
influence and control over big social media companies. In 2018, it announced that it would be
partnering with Facebook to promote trustworthy sources and derank, demote and even delete low
quality or fake news, thus effectively curating what the platform's
2.85 billion worldwide users see in their news feeds. But the effect of recent algorithmic
changes has been to throttle alternative media traffic in favor of establishment sources such
as CNN , Fox News and The New York Times . Even such more mainstream
liberal sites as Mother Jones have seen their numbers crater. Facebook later
admitted that they were directly targeting Mother Jones because of its left-leaning
content, raising the question that if such a middle-of-the-road liberal outlet was being
penalized, wasn't the collapse in traffic to more radical publications surely deliberate? Given
the Atlantic Council's funding and the identities of those on its board , their control over
social media is tantamount to state censorship on a global level.
Earlier this year, Facebook also hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo to be its intelligence
chief, in another move that
dismayed free-speech advocates. In the past, Nimmo has identified a Welsh pensioner and an
internationally known Ukranian pianist as Russian bots, raising more questions about the
suitability of the Atlantic Council to be an arbiter of truth online.
The Facebook-Atlantic Council link mirrors that of Microsoft with
NewsGuard , a new piece of software purportedly trying to fight fake news by placing either
green shields or red warning logos, corresponding to an outlet's credibility, beside all links
in its browser, Microsoft Edge -- this credibility being decided entirely by NewsGuard itself.
Newsguard pushed Microsoft to install the software on all its products as standard. Again,
however, NewsGuard's system rated establishment websites like Fox News and CNN as
trustworthy but independent media as suspect. And again, a glance at its advisory board makes it clear that
this is a state operation. Those in key positions included George W. Bush's Secretary of
Homeland Security and former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden; ex-White House
Communications Director Don Baer; and former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
Worse still, NewsGuard is also linked to a PR agency
employed in whitewashing the Saudi
government's human-rights record and its role in the carnage in Yemen.
Twitter, too, has some extremely troubling links with state power. In 2019 Gordon MacMillan,
a senior Twitter executive responsible for the Middle East region, was
outed as an active duty officer in the British Army's 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to
online operations and psychological warfare. Far from causing a scandal, only one major U.S.
outlet even mentioned
the story, and the journalist in question resigned from the profession weeks later,
claiming the existence of a network of top-down state censors who quash stories that
threaten the power and prestige of the national security state. To this day, MacMillan remains
in his post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he
was hired.
Over the past few years, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have
announced the deletion of hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to sources in Russia,
Iran, China and other enemy states,
often on the recommendation of Western governments or state-sponsored intelligence
organizations. However, they never seem willing or able to find any manipulation of their
platforms by Western governments. Thus, the upshot of this has been to slowly dissuade critics
of Western foreign policy from using their services.
"The mainstream media-politik establishment has managed to get a hold over Twitter, Facebook
and Instagram -- shadow-banning and downrating posts considered 'Russian propaganda' or
whatever other excuse they use to marginalize perspectives and content outside of the
mainstream," Secker told MintPress . "Audiences for this sort of content are
increasingly pissed off and alienated by the major social media sites."
Increasingly, unwelcome political voices are either brushed off by centrist pundits as
repeating Russian talking points or smeared as being amplified by Kremlin-based bot farms. The
popularity of movements on the left like
Black Lives Matter or the Bernie
Sanders' campaign were written off as partially linked to Russia, while others
suggested that the January 6 insurrection in Washington was essentially a Russian
operation.
The irony is that many of the wildest accusations against Putin that have fed this climate
of suspicion began life in Atlantic Council documents. For example, the organization has
published a series
of studies that suggest that virtually every European political party challenging the
neoliberal status quo in some way -- from Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and Golden Dawn
in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain -- are secretly controlled by Russia, functioning as the
"Kremlin's Trojan Horses," in its words.
The Atlantic Council is also deeply intertwined with a U.K. government-funded organization
called the Integrity Initiative, something that purports to be a group defending democracy from
disinformation. However, in practice, it appears to be doing the opposite: planting
disinformation about politicians' supposed links to Russia in order to undermine them. The
Integrity Initiative is a government-backed cluster of journalists who operate in unison to
conduct propaganda blitzes on
unsuspecting publics. In 2018, it
launched a successful operation to prevent Colonel Pedro Baños being appointed
Spain's head of national security. Considering Baños too soft on Russia for the Atlantic
Council and other hawks' liking, the initiative sprung into action, creating a storm of protest
that led to another individual being chosen.
Reddit actually played a key role in a 2019 propaganda blitz against anti-war Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn. A few days before the U.K.'s general election, Corbyn promoted documents leaked
on the platform that showed that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was negotiating with
American companies, putting much of the country's National Health Service up for sale. With
just days to go before polls opened, it could have proved a game changer. Reddit quickly came
to Johnson's rescue, however,
asserting that the documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The story in
the pliant British press switched from "Boris Johnson is selling off the NHS" to "Corbyn
promotes Russian disinfo," thus greasing the skids for an easy victory for the hardline
anti-Russia Conservative Party, an outcome the hawks at the Atlantic Council were no doubt
relieved by, given Corbyn's open skepticism about war, empire and nuclear weapons. The veracity
of the documents was not challenged.
For a while
Founded in 2005, Reddit has grown to become one of the world's largest and most influential
websites. However, it began life as an anarchistic messageboard whose culture was profoundly
libertarian and anti-establishment. For years, the company's administrators took a near free
speech absolutist position. Aaron Swartz, Reddit's co-founder, was an open source hacktivist
and even attempted to download and publish the entirety of academic publisher Jstor's library.
When authorities got wind of what he was doing, they threatened him with 40 years in prison, an
action that caused him to take his own life in 2013.
Reddit's own position on free information and free speech was often so extreme it caused
huge controversy. The site became the internet's largest source of child pornography. It was
only after CNN began reporting on it to a nationwide audience that
things began to change. Other, grossly offensive communities like /r/BeatingWomen and
/r/CoonTown were also protected.
Nevertheless, the culture established by anarchistic tech bros remained for some years, with
the site resembling darker corners of the internet like 4Chan and 8Chan as much as more
family-friendly mainstream social media like Facebook.
Ashooh's arrival in 2017 coincided with a new era in the site's history. Gone were the days
of protecting communities that would bring in bad publicity. Her team quickly
brought in a new content policy and began to delete communities that violated it. Last
year, she oversaw the banning of over
2,000 communities in a single day, including /r/The_Donald, the main Donald Trump
subreddit, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, the most active left-wing community. These decisions have
helped the money flow in; since 2017 revenue has more than tripled .
However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these
technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era
of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between
nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and
gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and
challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been
swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication.
Ashooh's jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one
more point of reference on that chart.
One of them is only capable of having 2-3 sentence discussions and then needs to be
shuffled off out of the public eye.
toady 14 hours ago
It's amazing how he's managed to "fail up" for his entire life.
brown_hornet 14 hours ago
That's what [neoliberal] dems do.
RattieNomNom 18 hours ago
where is his cocaine-infused son? he could keep talks going
Stormtrooper 17 hours ago
This Summit will be a victory for Biden because it will be just a media show for the
American (or whatever we are now that we do not have a legitimate Federal government tying
the states into a Constitutional union) sheeples.
The Summit will be in one of the movie studios where the Biden "White House" exists.
Putin will be an actor and the whole episode will be structured to make Biden appear to
know where he is at.
Enjoy the show.
JohnnyCrypto 18 hours ago remove link
Is Obama going with them?
yerfej 18 hours ago
No, Rice and Jarrett will be there instead. Oblama will be busy ginning up race hatred
somewhere in some inner city shythole.
You are conveying information to me as to who said that. But where is evidence that this
was indeed done? I will tell you that this person has said that, that person has said this. But
where is the evidence? Where is proof? With -- when there is -- when there are charges --
without -- evidence, I can tell you, you can take your complaint to the International League of
Sexual Reform.
In his article Paul Robinson details how since the 16th century Russian imperialism had
been rooted in a specific Russian form of Christian messianism ("Third Rome") which in turn
has lead to imperial over-extension and internal break-down. But no more! Russia has learned
it`s lesson and is now a pragmatic country without exceptionalism and imperial ambitions.
In the lower half of the article RT links to another article with the headline: "Love thy
neighbor? Putin says religious values of 'mercy' & support for vulnerable underpin
Russian civilization through history "
Russia's peak was after the defeat of Napoleon's Grand Army at the start of the 1800s.
Britain and France then focused on it as the main European enemy (with Napoleon finally
defeated at Waterloo and Germany not yet unified) and destroyed its military during the
Crimean War (1853-1856). The Japanese administered the coup de grace with the Russo-Japanese
war (1904-1905) during which they destroyed the Russian fleet. The taking of Eastern Europe
after WW2 was a defensive maneuver by Stalin, as any detailed reading of the correspondence
and actions of the day would attest - for example, Stalin handed back Austria and allowed the
US/UK a free hand in Greece, Italy and Western Europe when many were ripe for
socialist/communist victories.
Russia is a weak shadow of the USSR and the Russian Empire, it has to accept the reality
of its situation. Unfortunately it will take much longer for the US to do so.
@fyi 30 Russia has nothing to gain from invading Ukraine. She refused to do so in 2014.
Putin was never happy about the Donbass insurrection, just could not get them crushed and
massacred because the Russion people would not have understood nor accepted that. Russia had
the opportunity to occupy if not all of Ukraine then at least Novorossija (all the east and
northeast from Charkov to Odessa oblast) three times at minimum since 2014. From a merely
military point of view they could do it anytime within a week, or faster. They had even
larger exercises than the latest transferring 300k servicemen with full equip from the far
east and central Siberia to the western part.
The political repercussions would be grave. NS2 would certainly the first victim. And for
which gain? Russia, instead of EU and (to some extent, US) had to foot the bill for that
bankrupt failed state. As to the popular uprising, even when real (or just PD), there was a
popular uprising against the Nazis in Donbass. NATO sides with Nazis, the Greens love them.
German Chancellor aspirant Annalena Baerboeck boasted before the Atlantic Council, that her
Grandpa in winter 1945 (together with his Hitler Wehrmacht and SS comrades) fought "for the
reunification of Europe" - against the evil Russkis.
The West is already fighting for and alongside with Nazis, also in those Baltic
shitholes.
Odessa is not likely to be attacked by Russia in spite of the city's past historical
associations with Russia. If everyone is expecting a Russia attack on Odessa then NATO
strategies in the Black Sea will be based on such an assumption. So Russian strategy must be
based on what everyone least expects the Russians to do.
If the Russians were so minded as to want to cut off Ukrainian access to the Black Sea,
they could do so by building up their naval forces at the Kerch Strait and near Sevastopol,
as
a show of force. If they were to target a city, not that they need to, that city would be
Mariupol on the Azov Sea.
I suspect most people in Odessa and Mikolayiv in SW Ukraine are by now so fed up with Kiev
that they would, if given an opportunity, switch their loyalties to Russia without the
Russians having to fire a shot.
Summits are good - if they are successful. But when they fail, potentially crashingly, they
can quickly lead to escalation. Biden is just as much in his fifties as his predecessor. This
generation is not capable of coming to terms with the current power situation. For them, the
usa is still the undisputed leading power. They act accordingly arrogantly. Geneva could
backfire - on all of humanity.
Sorry Aquadraht but my smartphone changed your name in my comment @ 38. I was too busy fixing
up other deliberate changes my smartphone was making to my comment to notice.
1.Putin has already won the hearts of humanity.
2.The purpose of computing accelerated algorithms have been useful tools of economics,
politics & psychopaths.
3.The favorite play of Joe is the dumb dementia card. Let's not forget the badass boss his
authentic meanness projects.
4. Narily consuming news, I have observed a financial front setup for the dollar demise in
Russia via some big fund there. Equally important is their positioning a system of trade that
excludes SWIFT. (I read it on this blog) What's the point of BIS killing Putin? Just out of
hate, spite, what? No. Hes got an elite euro pedigree. I expect a mean Joe in Switzerland
with all his marbles lined up. Putin won't quake, then what will the Pentagon play be?
Thanks b.
Expect nothing.
Biden is a cold war thug and a Russia hater. Being his age he will be running on his 20's
brain cells and memories and prejudices. He was the Obummer point man in Ukraine and Kurt
Volker with that belligerent mind set are likely music to Biden's ears. Biden just has to
reassert that the killers are back in charge after the tragi-comedy of Trump and the clown
cart. Biden has a mission to merely demonstrate the return of the magi
neo-cons.
Yes it will fail. It will be seen as pathetic at first and a week later as useless.
The USA has NEVER grasped the flower of peace and no world leader has offered that flower
so consistently as has Putin or lately Xi. And yet the USA shits on their hand of greeting.
This is a tragedy for all across this world as we witness the idiocy of squandered resources
on military might.
I do not expect the USA to clean house and sack the colony of warmongers occupying their
foreign policy advice team. I suspect the state is not in control of its destiny but rather
run by a self perpetuating mindset within the military/academia/media that glorifies itself,
ensures its succession, and then glorifies itself some more. An echo chamber of ego, fear and
loathing.
Passer by@44 I firmly believe that history books still need massive infusions of facts, but I
am not an adherent of Critical Race Theory, which substitutes moralizing for scientific
analysis, only to do a bad job with the morals (notably, the notion of collective hereditary
guilt plays a major part in much of it...and CRT is deliberately left vague so that the more
extreme positions can be reserved while more reasonable ones are defended in lieu.) And I
also believe that re-defining "democracy" as "social democracy" while ignoring how democracy
is class collaboration in pursuit of national conquest (or defense when things go badly.)
Pretending that the past democrats weren't is a way of flattering ourselves that we are so
enlightened we know better and will have true democracy as soon as we reform the bad people's
minds. It's opposing an imaginary ideal to a straw man reality in defense of illusions. The
fundamental motive I think is anti-communism, but that's my opinion I guess. The multipolar
world of 1900 wasn't unipolar because "white," that's hare-brained CRT crap in my judgment. I
don't agree with it.
But history books really need to concentrate on what happened without moralizing on
motives, which are always mixed. Children will grow up and figure that out eventually, except
for the religious ones who mentally consign others to hell.
Babylon 5 is a space war TV series, so if the argument is supposed to be that multipolar
is more peaceful, the logic escapes me. If the idea is that if "states" are equal, then it's
democratic strikes me as ideology. In the US, the idea that this or that state has rights
that ordinary people do not (variations on residual sovereignty usually,) has *never* been
essential to progress. The people having rights, majority rule, yes. But those things and
states' rights rarely even aligned. States' rights to maintain slavery or Jim Crow are the
primary examples. But I can't think of any real states' rights that work out to progress for
real people, as opposed to legal abstractions like a state. Consider the attitude of the
federal government to the states' right to decriminalize/legalize marijuana.
fyi 30
What you wrote about Ladakh and China vs. India is rubbish too (as always when you cluelessly
write about China). As MK Bhadrakumar detailed a while ago, it is not China who is the bully
in the Himalayas and Kashmir/Jammu. It is India who constantly changed the status quo by
occupations and annexions like in Sikkim, and with Nepalese territories too.This was the case
under the congress governments already to some extent, and radicalized with the Hindutva
fascists of Janata/RSS in power. It is them who build tens of military airfields and roads
around the LAC, deploying ten thousands of servicemen.
China is not interested in conflicts. It wants to guarantee the safety of the
Sichuan-Tibet-Xinjiang Highway which is crucial for the development of Western Chinese
provinces. It is the Janata regime who tries to menace and cut that connection.
China made a ton of modest and reasonable proposals, from Zhou Enlai's memorandum in 1954
on, to settle all border disputes and uncertainties in the Himalayas. And though China kicked
the Indian's butts miserably in 1961, they pulled back from Southeast Tibet, the area India
boasts as Arunachal Pradesh, British robbery prey from the Chinese empire.
The nationalist and fascist fools in Delhi have nothing real to win in the Himalayas. They
are fighting uphill, and face tremendous cost for their poor country. They continue
provocations though.
@ 46 spudski.. me either... everyone i know has one though.. oh well.. they will just have to
catch up with us!
@ 50 aquadraht... what you have to realize is fyi filters everything thru his religious
bigotry... once you figure that out - then it all becomes obvious why he concludes what he
does... it is all based on a narrow religiously intolerant position...
Very good, though I'm doubtful about the weapons worry. Isn't it the case that 1) both sides
still have significant ICBM and sub-based MRBMs? 2) Isn't it also the case that neither side
has reliable anti-ballistic missile defenses? Aren't we still very much living under a
Mutually Assured Destruction paradigm? So what if the Russians have hypersonic missiles? Are
they going to be able to saturate US missile launching systems? No.
I have a hard time believing we want war. To take on an enemy with the manpower and
productive capacity of China would be suicidal. If there is an alliance between Russia and
China and you throw in Russia's natural resources - doubly so. My take is that what we want
is an excuse to continue spending on defense - it's a business model - and Russia provides
the bogeyman.
Whatever Washington could throw at Russia, the residual Russian forces would penetrate
American defenses and wreak havoc on the American homeland.
You're being polite here.
Russia's nuclear arsenal would do much more than "wreak havoc on the American homeland":
it would reduce its entirety into a radioactive wasteland. There would be no
redneck-in-the-middle-of-Wyoming standing after such attack. The USA would become some kind
of cursed land where nothing grows for millennia.
Russian Government does not need to directly intervene then; a series of small incidents
could be caused during which the city of Odessa organizes a self-defense Unit called Rus
Protection Force and asks for help from Lugansk People's Republic.
The key consideration is to deny a legitimate beach head to the NATO forces.
In any case, I think the Russian Government is resigned to another decade or more of
confrontation with West; they already have concluded that the sanctions against the Russian
Federation will never be removed, that they would be ejected from SWIFT, and should invest
more in autarky lest they reprise the experience of Iran.
The US aircraft you were searching for is the F-15. The new version is the F-15EX which is
now in production after the Gulf states handily paid for the bulk of the R&D. Initially
it will replace the old F-15C/D single seat interceptors but in the longer term will also add
to or replace the F-15E multirole fighter/bomber. There is no overlap in functionality
between the F-15EX and the F-35.
Thank you for that rebuttal. Fyi, I sense the writer is a china russia basher lurking
behind a thin masquerade of faux shia sophistication and all intended to give shia a bad
name. Tacky.
There is a drink waiting for you at the bar of excommunicated souls ;)
In 1900 the world was more unipolar than any time in the last 3000 years. Anglo
colonialism was at a peak, Caucasians directly controlled Africa and South East Asia. white
Colonialism and genocide were everywhere. China was still crushed by European powers, Russia
was incredibly weak.
It takes a lot of word salad and spinning to say the world in 1900 was multi-polar.
Doesn't matter what you think if critical race theory...that has zero relevance here.
>>Babylon 5 is a space war TV series, so if the argument is supposed to be that
multipolar is more peaceful, the logic escapes me
Well, it was a film about different civilisations overcoming war and conflict - the whole
point about constructing the Babylon 5 space station was to avoid war and to find ways to
communicate with each other, no matter how different the various space species can be.
The multipoar space station was constructed after a disastrous Earth War against another
space civilisation, in order to fix conflicts in the Galaxy.
I really recommend you that Sci Fi series.
>>The multipolar world of 1900 wasn't unipolar because "white,"
Unless you are from another race, in which case you will see massive white dominance all
over around the world during those years.
>>Babylon 5 is a space war TV series, so if the argument is supposed to be that
multipolar is more peaceful, the logic escapes me
Well, it was a film about different civilisations overcoming war and conflict - the whole
point about constructing the Babylon 5 space station was to avoid war and to find ways to
communicate with each other, no matter how different the various space species can be.
The multipoar space station was constructed after a disastrous Earth War against another
space civilisation, in order to fix conflicts in the Galaxy.
I really recommend you that Sci Fi series.
>>The multipolar world of 1900 wasn't unipolar because "white,"
Unless you are from another race, in which case you will see massive white dominance all
over around the world during those years.
Yes, that seems like a fair assessment. In 1900 there was indeed not only rivalry between
european-american colonial powers, but also between European Colonial Powers and powerful
European countries who were at disadvantage for lack of colonies...Germany.
Here's what's goin' down. (According to my 95% WRONG predictions.) Nothing whatever of the
slightest importance will be discussed at the Putin/Biden 'summit'. No significant accords
will be established, and virtually nothing will occur. EXCEPT:
This will be a rollicking Royal Send-Up for the benefit of Joe Biden. Why? The logic is
dirt simple. Biden is always on the hairy edge of being removed from office for
incapacitation. Russia would then be dealing with the amateur and insanely aggressive Kamala
Harris. It's about sticking with the Devil You Know.
Therefor, Putin will provide the feeble Joe Biden with an all-in Royal Send-Up. Putin will
praise Biden to the heavens. He will even toss in some empty but hugely auspicious
'concession'. Which will be hailed by the indentured media as a Tremendous Victory.
All solely to keep the feeble Master of Bargain Basement Politics in 'charge'.
>>In 1900 the world was more unipolar than any time in the last 3000 years. Anglo
colonialism was at a peak, Caucasians directly controlled Africa and South East Asia. white
Colonialism and genocide were everywhere. China was still crushed by European powers, Russia
was incredibly weak.
It takes a lot of word salad and spinning to say the world in 1900 was multi-polar.
Doesn't matter what you think if critical race theory...that has zero relevance here.
In my previous comment @8 above, I concurred with b that a significant faction within the
Outlaw US Empire's elite governing aparat are delusional while other factions are very much
aware of the stark reality of the Empire's condition--particularly its domestic condition. A
shining example of this was published today by Global
Times , of which there are three total articles I hope barflies will read, although
they might have read the first two as I linked and commented about them when they were
published. Franz Gayl is a 64-year-old retired US Marine major who worked at the Pentagon as
an analyst and wrote two reality-based articles for publication by Global Times for
what are obvious reasons when read--the Outlaw US Empire has zero chance of winning a war
against China over Taiwan, and he advocated against such a stupid undertaking. But reality
just cannot be mentioned--the Narrative Must Hold at All Costs!!--as with the continuous
stream of lies about the state of the USA's economy that have been ongoing since Reagan and
his VooDoo Economics. For a self-declared Christian nation, it most certainly has
forgotten--buried very deeply--the admonition from Proverbs 16:18: Pride goeth before the
fall. And genuine patriots like Franz Gayl get crucified for trying to avert that fall. Just
like wanting to kill Assange for telling the truth--the Outlaw US Empire is facing the same
stark reality that Gorbachev and the USSR faced in the early 1980s. And guess what, Putin
just said that's exactly what the USA's facing today at the SPIEF to the heads of global
media:
" But problems keep piling up. And, at some point, they are no longer able to cope with
them. And the United States is now walking the Soviet Union's path, and its gait is confident
and steady." [My Emphasis]
At least Clueless Joe @11 sees through the bologna and gets it correct. I highly suggest
this op/ed . As Putin
told the global media heads, Russia is all about Russia and Russians, and is willing to
partner with other nations that can aid Russia in its development that's aimed at benefitting
all Russians . Defending genuine strategic interests is NOT Imperialism. the big
problem for the Outlaw US Empire is that since WW2's end it's seen the entire planet as its
strategic interest, which was the first post-war BigLie it told to itself and swallowed
whole.
NBC pushed regular neocon garbage, so it is not very interesting interview. We saw better
executed similar attempts to attack Putin in the past. The guy is really second rate: too pushy,
too opinioned to be a good interviewer. He really is not interested in Putin opinions, he need to
push the agenda of his handlers. He demonstrated zero respect as if Russia is a US vassal (it was
in 1990 under alcoholic Yeltsin) . In other words he is a regular Pressitute. This neocon pushed
the label killer on Putin, while this label is appropritate to any recent US presendent to much
greater measure. Just look at how many people were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in attempt to
achive "full spectrum Dominance" and enhance andcement global neoliberal empire. But some moments
when Putin destroyed neocon agenda are pretty educational.
Russian President Vladimir Putin this week sat down for an interview with a US media outlet
for the first time in nearly three years . NBC's Keir Simmons talked to Putin for about 90
minutes, and released a teaser segment Friday night.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation centered on the Russian leader's
perspective on American politics and his personal thoughts and comparison of Donald Trump and
Joe Biden. Putin called the former president "extraordinary" and "talented" while noting that
Biden is "radically different" and is a quintessential "career man" in politics .
https://www.youtube.com/embed/oh_obIUJ7HA
"Well even now, I believe that former U.S. president Mr. Trump is an extraordinary
individual, talented individual, otherwise he would not have become U.S. President," Putin told
Simmons.
" He is a colorful individual. You may like him or not. And, but he didn't come from the
US establishment, he had not been part of big time politics before , and some like it some
don't like it but that is a fact."
"...President Biden is a career man. He has spent virtually his entire adulthood in
politics," Putin said in part.
"That's a different kind of person, and it is my great hope that yes, there are some
advantages, some disadvantages, but there will not be any impulse-based movements, on behalf
of the sitting U.S. president."
Also interesting is Putin's response to the March George Stephanopoulos interview with Biden
wherein the US President dubbed Putin a "killer" with "no soul". Putin responded in this new
NBC clip:
"Over my tenure, I've gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds
of areas under all kinds of pretext, and reasons and of different caliber and fierceness and
none of it surprises me."
Putin called the "killer" label "Hollywood macho."
Putin also took aim at a recent
Washington Post report over Russia-Iranian military relations and the transfer of advanced
satellite systems. "It's just fake news," Putin dismissed. "At the very least, I don't know
anything about this kind of thing. Those who are speaking about it probably will maybe know
more about it. It's just nonsense, garbage."
activisor 2 hours ago
Funny how Putin has become leader of the free world! He and Lavrov are streets ahead
of the rest, and have massive support outside Russia based on their common sense approach
to world events. He will be hard to replace.
yerfej 2 hours ago
EVERYONE with common sense realize Putin is the ONLY current leader who gives a ****
about his country and people and is willing to cooperate with any country that isn't
wandering around the globe looking to tell everyone else what they can say or do or
think.
No_Pretzel_Logic 2 hours ago
How fascinating that you speak for "everyone" with common sense. That's quite a
skill.
Do tell us about the responses from people you've polled in the Scandinavian
countries, Poland, UK, France, etc.?
George Bush League 2 hours ago
You can start by not being such an pathetic condescending azzhole.
smellmyfingers 54 minutes ago
Putin, articulate, intelligent, answers without a teleprompter and without babbling or
stumbling.
Is he perfect? Obviously not nor is he a messiah. But I'd bet people have more
confidence in him out in front than the corruption and lies the USA and many other
western nations have that are completely compromised.
chunga 2 hours ago remove link
Dmitry Orlov has got some interesting translations from Putin at the thing in St.
Petersburg.
Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang
with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but
introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation.
Replay Unmute Duration 0:22 / Current Time 0:22
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Emmanuel Macron slapped in face during visit to town The G7 summit: What you need to know
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His Role NOW PLAYING
I did not know it then, but I've since learned from Michael Lewis's (mostly terrible) book
The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for
George W. Bush's White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of
influence "" serving an apocalyptic president" he was the driving force for a dramatic change
in U.S. policy during pandemics.
He literally unleashed hell.
That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying
that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put
Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in
the name of disease containment.
I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little
did I know, we were in for a wild ride"¦
The Man Who Lit the Match
Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument.
He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was
wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only
choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called
brutal. So on it went.
The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting
his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be?
The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people
(along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening.
There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya's voice. He saw the awesome thing
he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was
trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.
This is how it has been for the better part of the last 15 months, with social media and
YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns. It's been censorship from the
beginning.
For all the problems with Lewis's book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory
right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some
imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan" make a threat assessment, distribute
therapeutics, work toward a vaccine" he was furious.
"This is bulls**t," the president yelled.
"We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And
travel? And commerce?"
Hey, if the president wants a plan, he'll get a plan.
"We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat," Venkayya
reports having told colleagues.
"We were going to invent pandemic planning."
This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.
Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with the domestic equivalent
of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to
help. They were too smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown innovator
working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Cranks, Computers, and Cooties
His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical training, much less
knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was inspired by a science fair project that his
14-year-old daughter was working on.
She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school kids could space
themselves out more or even not be at school at all, they would stop making each other sick.
Glass ran with the idea and banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders,
travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.
Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any classic crank, this
convinced Glass even more. I asked myself, "Why didn't these epidemiologists figure it out?"
They didn't figure it out because they didn't have tools that were focused on the problem. They
had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to
stop them.
Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of experience in public
health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve everything! Well, he managed to convince some
people, including another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who became
Glass's apostle.
Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis's book: "If you got
everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn't let them talk to anyone, you
would not have any disease."
At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease" and human life as we know it too! As
preposterous and terrifying as this is "" a whole society not only in jail but solitary
confinement" it sums up the whole of Mecher's view of disease. It's also completely wrong.
Pathogens are part of our world; they are generated by human contact. We pass them onto each
other as the price for civilization, but we also evolved immune systems to deal with them.
That's 9th-grade biology, but Mecher didn't have a clue.
Fanatics Win the Day
Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over the decision to close
schools, even though it was known at that time that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost risk to people
under the age of 20? There was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any
serious way.
Didn't matter. Mecher's models" developed with Glass and others" kept spitting out a
conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I've read his memos
from this period" some of them still not public" and what you observe is not science but
ideological fanaticism in play.
Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, he was clearly not sleeping much.
Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. How did he get his way?
There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert acquiescence, and the baked-in
reality that school closures had been part of "pandemic planning" for the better part of 15
years. Essentially, the lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn out the opposition.
Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public health, and ideological fanaticism
prevailed.
Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently foiled, how our happy
lives were brutally crushed, will consume serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we
now have a first draft of history.
As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy people with a cause
prevailed over the humane rationality of multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of
vengeance will burn very hot.
The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so fragile as to allow insane
people to lay waste to all that humanity has worked so hard to build.
... Average hourly earnings for workers in leisure and hospitality rose to $18.09 in May,
the highest ever and up 5% from January alone, according to Labor Department data released on
Friday. Pay rose even faster for workers in non-manager roles, who saw earnings rise by 7.2%
from January, far outpacing any other sector.
That higher pay could be a sign that companies are lifting wages as they seek to draw people
back to work after more than a year at home. Some businesses are struggling to keep up with
higher demand as more consumers, now fully vaccinated, get back to flying, staying in hotels
and dining indoors. Job gains in leisure and hospitality this year have so far outpaced gains
in other sectors.
But it is too soon to know whether the boost will be enough to help speed up hiring at a
time when many workers are still facing other obstacles, including health concerns and having
to care for children and other relatives.
"The fact of the matter is, the pandemic is still going on," said Daniel Zhao, a senior
economist for Glassdoor. "The economy is running ahead of where we are from a public health
situation."
Some 2.5 million people said they were prevented from looking for work in May because of the
pandemic, according to the Labor Department.
... ... ...
Employment in leisure and hospitality is still in a deep hole when compared with pre-pandemic
levels. The industry added 292,000 jobs in May, with about two-thirds of that hiring happening
in restaurants and bars. But overall employment is still down 2.5 million jobs, or 15% from
pre-pandemic levels, more than any other industry.
... ... ...
Some people who previously worked at hotels or restaurants moved on to other types of jobs
during the pandemic, such as packaging goods at a warehouse, and it's too soon to know whether
they will switch back as more of the economy reopens, said Zhao.
...About half of states are putting an early end to a $300 federal supplement to weekly
unemployment benefits, winding them down as soon as June 12. The supplement expires nationwide
on Sept. 6.
(Reporting by Jonnelle Marte and Ann Saphir; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan
Oatis)
For these Fauci religious cultists, if the death rate from Covid is 0.074% but the death
rate from the "vaccine" is 0.073%, the "vaccine" will be a miraculous, smashing success.
China's Foreign Ministry blasted the resurgent interest in the Covid-19 lab-origin theory,
noting that the journalist behind a report about Wuhan scientists falling ill is the same one
who peddled lies that led to the Iraq War.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin took aim at Michael R. Gordon, a national
security correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and one of the authors of the report that
added fuel to speculation about Covid-19's lab origin.
"Not long ago, Michael R. Gordon, an American journalist, by quoting a so-called
"˜previously undisclosed US intelligence report,' hinted [at] a far-fetched connection
between the "˜three sick staff' at the Wuhan lab and the Covid-19 outbreak," Wang said
at a briefing on Friday.
"Nineteen years ago, it was this very reporter who concocted false information by citing
unsubstantiated sources about Iraq's "˜attempt to acquire nuclear weapons,' which
directly led to the Iraq War," he charged, referring to the 2003 US invasion.
The WSJ
piece , published on May 23, cites "a previously undisclosed US intelligence report" as
saying that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill in
November 2019 with symptoms "consistent" with Covid-19 as well as a seasonal flu.
The report got picked up by other mainstream media, which recently began shifting their
coverage on Covid-19's origins from outright dismissing theories that the virus was man-made
to admitting that a lab leak remains a possibility.
Furthermore, I wouldn't personally point to Gordon as the source for the "Wuhan Lab Leak
Hypothesis" "" I would point to the Jewish neocon Josh Rogin.
Rogin, like Gordon, spent years promoting various atrocity hoaxes in the Middle East and
pushing wars for Israel, and is the original source for the version of the "Wuhan Lab theory,"
that is currently circulating, writing a
Washington Post column promoting the hoax on April 14, 2020.
The point of course is that everywhere you look, there are neocons "" most of them Jewish ""
promoting this Wuhan Lab stuff. They are the absolute source of the claim "" they and a Falun
Gong Hong Kong CIA feminist woman, Li-Meng Yan.
She is claiming to be a "whistleblower," despite the fact that she in no way meets the
definition of that term. The term necessarily implies insider knowledge "" usually, a
whistleblower is an employee or former employee of the organization they are blowing the
whistle on.
Though none of the media promoting her says it outright, there is an implication that she
worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She did not. She worked at a university in Hong Kong
when she was funded by Steve Bannon to write a paper making the claim that the supposed
coronavirus is a Chinese bioweapon.
Bannon has recently been associated with Guo Wengui, a billionaire who was exiled from China
for fraud and various crimes. In June of last year, Bannon declared that Guo is now the real
ruler of China in a bizarre video on a boat.
While they were on the boat in front of the Statue of Liberty saying they were going to
"overthrow the government of China," they flew planes around with signs announcing their new
government.
No one understood what was going on, and even Fox News
reported on "confusion" regarding the banners and the livestream on the boat. The
livestream has since been deleted, and there is no news from the Federal State of New China.
But there is a Wikipedia page documenting this
incredibly strange event.
Guo also runs a fake news website (I use that term in the most literal sense) where he
published the Hunter Biden footjob videos.
The point is: this is a very weird operation, and it is absurd to take a person funded by
these people seriously, as Tucker Carlson shamefully has.
(I'm not attacking Tucker over this, he's overall great and is sometimes just really slow on
the uptake, unfortunately "" but it is shameful to get involved with a Hong Kong woman who was
literally given money by Steve Bannon and his "Federation of New China" group to write a fake
science paper.)
To pretend that she is a whistleblower, to pretend that political organizations funding
papers with a predetermined outcome is serious science, is non-serious behavior.
The first time I heard the Wuhan lab leak theory it was being promoted by neocon extremist
Tom Cotton. It was then promoted by neocon extremist Mike Pompeo, who was then in the process
of trying to start a war with China. Now, it is being promoted by the Jews of CNN.
There is no one involved in claiming that the supposed coronavirus came from a Chinese lab
who doesn't have vested interests in starting a war with the Chinese. This goes for all of
these Jews, as well as Steve Bannon, who has actually declared "overthrowing the government of
China" (his words) to be his goal.
It's very obvious to see how people who want a war with China would use this hoax, and it is
great that China is making the link to the Iraqi WMD hoax. It truly is the same thing.
The United States is a country with a lot of problems. None of those problems are the fault
of China. China is not promoting gay sex to children, they are not flooding us with millions of
brown people, they did not steal our election, they did not take all of our freedoms and
collapse the economy.
Our enemies are domestic and they are Jewish. Any attempt to fear-monger and attack China is
intended as a distraction from what is going on in this country, and intended to stoke a
war.
Furthermore, this "lab leak" nonsense is designed to get people to continue to believe in
this coronavirus hoax.
Though none of the media promoting her says it outright, there is an implication that
she worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She did not. She worked at a university in
Hong Kong when she was funded by Steve Bannon to write a paper making the claim that the
supposed coronavirus is a Chinese bioweapon.
Bannon has recently been associated with Guo Wengui, a billionaire who was exiled from
China for fraud and various crimes. In June of last year, Bannon declared that Guo is now
the real ruler of China in a bizarre video on a boat.
This style of presentation is updated "internet culture" gonzo that stands on the
shoulders of Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and in a sense Mark Twain.
That fact that today's Anglospheric system no longer has a place within itself for this
type of "dominant narrative-jamming" creativity, and to write like this means one has chosen
to become a hunted outcast, means this culture is in a death spiral. It's no longer a
self-renewing organism, but simply a collection of isolated biomass units used and thrown
away by the masters.
"Nineteen years ago, it was this very reporter who concocted false information by citing
unsubstantiated sources about Iraq's "˜attempt to acquire nuclear weapons,' which
directly led to the Iraq War," he charged, referring to the 2003 US invasion.
Either the neo-cons thought no one would notice or the noe-cons didn't notice
themselves.
I'm leaning towards the latter, especially with sloppy drunk Steve Bannon and a "Falun
Gong Hong Kong CIA feminist woman" in the mix. Is this really the best they can do?
These times we're living in are absolutely surreal. Not surprised though, we've been doing
this for a long time now. Alas, a great many of my fellow White Americans will fall for it
completely & be all in for a war with China. None of them ever even contemplating what
that would mean for us & the world. But, these are the same people who boast "we're
number one" when we rank at or near the bottom in positive stats for all developed nations,
beset with crippling societal ills. The same people who think we can vote ourselves out of
this mess & Trump will win in "˜24 & somehow save the day. The same people who
think our best days are ahead when our productivity base has been utterly gutted, our
infrastructure is collapsing & our ability to maintain it & the skill set needed to
sustain that productivity/infrastructure is slipping away. The same people who boast of "muh
freedoms" when their freedoms & their children's future is being pulled from right under
their feet. The same people who think we'll always be on top even when every example of
history shows that every empire in history has collapsed. We're racing toward a cliff but
they still think "god" is on their side & won't let it happen or we'll stay on top
because, well, "we're America"..
Utter denial & abject delusion seem to be a central aspect of our people..
" There is no one involved in claiming that the supposed coronavirus came from a Chinese
lab who doesn't have vested interests in starting a war with the Chinese. This goes for all
of these Jews, as well as Steve Bannon, who has actually declared "overthrowing the
government of China" (his words) to be his goal."
" History often repeats itself, first as a tragedy and second as a farce"
Karl Marx.
The tragedy of the WMD of Iraq follows many other tragedies that got young Americans to
spill their blood for the sake of special interests making a killing as war profiteers. The
farce of " China spread the Corona virus will the biggest tragedy to hit America if the
waning bald eagle tries to poke the rising dragon.
Andrew Anglin, is one of the few American journalists who stand boldly for the truth. Not
bad for someone labelled a Neo Nazi by Wikipedia.
"The problem of empires is that they think they are so powerful that they can afford
small inaccuracies and mistakes. "But problems keep piling up. And, at some point, they are
no longer able to cope with them. And the United States is now walking the Soviet Union's
path, and its gait is confident and steady."
The current consensus that Covid was likely a Wuhan lab leak was triggered by an article
by Nicholas Wade, a former science writer for the NY Times and an impeccably
establishmentarian journalist. Previous attempts by right wingers or maverick scientists to
advance this hypothesis were ignored or scorned by the establishment press. Wade could not be
so easily dismissed. His article, plus the release of emails by Fauci acknowledging the
possibility of a lab-created virus (which he publicly ridiculed) and the revelation that
Fauci had funded bat research at Wuhan, have changed the game entirely. My own suspicion is
that the Biden administration is preparing to throw Fauci under the bus and has signaled the
press that he is now fair game. He has served his purpose and can now be used as a scapegoat.
It is unlikely that the Wuhan release will ever be definitively proven. It is more important
to realize that this research is not restricted to Wuhan or China and that steps should be
taken to shut down all such research world-wide, including the USA, lest we have a succession
of these disasters.
The USA has been using bio-warfare for 200 years plus and can NEVER be trusted not to
carry on such research. It controls c.200 labs, worldwide, where research into pathogens and
vectors, particularly arthropods, and the collection of pathogens, is carried out. It used
biological agents in Korea in the early 50s, and against Cuba (African Swine Fever and
dengue) in the 70s, and God knows where else, and against its own people, most infamously the
Tuskegee syphilis abomination. And it is responsible for SARS CoV2, you can be sure.
The West has been trying to bring down China since they tried to turn them all into opium
addicts. Americans were complicit with the British in this and many of the so-called deep
state players made their money from the opium trade. Apparently the same families control the
present day drugs trade and the laundering of the profits from it; the so-called drug cartels
are mostly minor actors well below those who run the operation at the top. Members of the
cartels are often sacrificed but those at the top remain the same.
@Ber t we have is the Josh Hawley demand to declassify everything related to Covid from
day-1, and since he made that proposal, it has been crickets from everyone else, which is
again indicative that no one in the power elite has any incentive or goal to do more than
batter their usual targets.
All that said "" the best practices at this stage of overwhelming deception is to start
with what we can in fact establish and prove as actual plain fact, and proceed from there. If
you start from what you suspect or theorize, you will soon be enmeshed in fevered
propositions ("missiles hit the pentagon on 9/11") that crap all over the genuine facts and
do nothing but hand-craft a made-to-order, wild goose chase. This is very welcome by those
who want to control the entire denouement, to serve their own agenda.
"¦ many other tragedies that got young Americans to spill their blood for the
sake of special interests making a killing as war profiteers.
Agree the main thrust of your post, Joe.
It is also worth remembering that very many innocent souls in countries across the world
have been going about their daily lives when they were attacked, maimed and killed, their
houses destroyed, infrastructure wrecked etc by those same young Americans. Some countries at
this very hour are occupied and are being looted by the same.
Perhaps not a comfortable thought for Americans to add in as they see their country now
descending into certifiable lunacy.
But what goes around does have a habit of coming around, sooner or later.
@Anon t Ron Unz has been saying from the beginning. If you look at it geostrategically,
this is most plausible conclusion. They released the virus in China but those who created it
suffered a massive blowback and even worse China came out of it even stronger than ever
before. They were hoping China would crumble but instead got stronger while they weakened.
That's why they are fanning out a major Anti-China propaganda campaign to contain her now
openly with an overwhelming support of western citizens. This frenziness displayed by western
politicians is the reflection that China is on the verge an unstoppable economic powerhouse
within a few years and they need to put the brakes right now. It is an implicit admission of
desperation. The tussle between China and the US is going to dramatically intensify.
A country can't bring another country down by giving it "Most Favored Nation Trading
Status".
Then sending all it's major corporations there to make big deals.
And how has it served the United States where practically every item, pill in the US is
"Made in China"?
The American people were sold out decades ago in order for the 1% and their Congressional
lackeys to make major bucks. We were even working with them to create a deadly virus!
President Vladimir Putin said Russia doesn't want to stop using the dollar as he accused the
U.S. of exploiting the currency's dominance for sanctions and warned the policy may rebound on
Washington.
Russia has to adopt other payment methods because the U.S. "uses its national currency for
various kinds of sanctions," Putin said late Friday in St. Petersburg at a videoconference with
representatives of international media organizations. "We don't do this deliberately, we are
forced to do it."
Settlements in national currencies with other countries in areas such as defense sales and
reductions in foreign-exchange reserves held in dollars eventually will damage the U.S. as the
greenback's dominance declines, Putin said. "Why do U.S. political authorities do this? They're
sawing the branch on which they sit," he said.
Putin spoke a day after Russia announced it will eliminate the dollar from its oil fund to
reduce vulnerability to sanctions, a largely symbolic move as the switch in holdings will take
place within the central bank's reserves. Russia has tried with limited success to shift away
from the dollar for years amid international sanctions over Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea
and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, as well as for alleged cyber attacks, election
meddling and espionage operations.
The Russian leader's comments came ahead of his first summit meeting with U.S. President Joe
Biden in Geneva on June 16. While he praised Biden as one of the world's most experienced
leaders, Putin said he expects no breakthrough in relations with the U.S. at the talks.
And he offered a warning at Friday's meeting for the U.S., based on what he said was his own
experiences "as a former citizen of the former Soviet Union."
"The problem with empires is that they think they can afford small errors and mistakes,"
which gradually accumulate, Putin said. "There comes a time when they can no longer be dealt
with. And the U.S., with a confident step, a confident gait, a firm step, is walking straight
along the path of the Soviet Union."
Sanctions are the "gentlemanly" neo-imperial language of gunboat diplomacy, never better
expressed than the attempts of the British government in the early 1950s to discipline a newly
democratic Iran. First the British Labour Government, then a Conservative government under a
splenetic Churchill, tried to put a halt to the runaway popularity of Mohammed Mossadegh, prime
minister of Iran, and his policy to shut down the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and nationalize
Iran's own oil. The British sabotaged their own company, refused to distribute the oil, and did
everything else they could to impoverish Iran. This was only after the AIOC had refused to
budge from its insistence on taking practically all of the profits and to refrain from treating
Iranian oil workers as subhuman. Ironically, the British needed AIOC money to finance their own
program of industrial nationalization and the welfare state. As is so often the case, the
"sanctions" merely hardened anti-imperial sentiment, and were succeeded by a joint US-UK
directed regime-change coup d'etat
None of this need suggest a diminution in the importance of national sovereignty. Sovereign
nations should be free to trade with whomsoever they choose, to protect which domestic
industries they consider worthy of protection. That is their right. They also have the right to
enter into trade agreements with others for the purpose of regulating the conditions of trade
between them, provided that they enter into such agreements without duress, bribery or
punishment.
Questions of Definition
The Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) explains that sanctions have become one of the most
favored tools for governments to respond to foreign policy challenges. The term sanctions
can refer to travel bans, asset freezes, arms embargoes, capital restraints, foreign aid
reductions, and trade restrictions, and represent efforts to coerce, deter, punish, or shame
entities that are considered by those who wield them to endanger their interests. They are
generally viewed as a lower-cost, lower-risk course of action in calculations that balance
diplomacy against war. Yet sanctions can be just as devasting in terms of loss of human life.
They may be particularly attractive in the case of policy responses to foreign crises in which
national interest is considered less than vital, or where military action is not feasible.
Sanctions that blanket entire populations generally do most damage to poorer and more
vulnerable social strata, who lack the means to avoid or compensate for their consequences. The
USA has more than two dozen sanctions regimes. Some target specific countries such as Cuba and
Iran, others target specific categories of person or institution or even specific named
individuals. Sanctions have been used in efforts of counterterrorism, counter-narcotics,
nonproliferation, democracy and human rights promotion, conflict resolution, and cybersecurity.
They are frequently applied as a form of punishment or reprisal for behavior in which it is
alleged that the target has engaged and of which the applying entity disapproves.
In the case of the UN Security Council sanctions resolutions must pass the fifteen-member
council by a majority vote and without a veto from any of the five permanent members: the
United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The most common types of UN
sanctions, binding for all member states, are asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes.
The UN relies on member states for enforcement, with all the idiosyncrasies and abuses that
this entails. The council-imposed sanctions against Southern Rhodesia in 1966 were intended to
undermine Ian Smith's white supremacist regime and were followed in 1977 by another set of
comprehensive UN sanctions against apartheid South Africa. They have been applied more than
twenty times since 1990 against targeting parties to an intrastate conflict, as in Somalia,
Liberia, and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The European Union imposes sanctions as part of its Common Foreign and Security Policy. They
must receive unanimous consent from member states in the Council of the European Union, the
body that represents EU leaders. The EU has levied its sanctions more than thirty times.
Individual EU states may also impose harsher sanctions independently within their national
jurisdiction.
The USA resorts to economic and financial sanctions more than any other country. Presidents
may issue an executive order that declares a national emergency and invokes special powers to
regulate commerce for a period of one year, unless extended by the president or terminated by a
joint resolution of Congress. Most of the more than fifty states of emergency declared by
Congress remain in effect today. Congress may pass legislation imposing new sanctions or
modifying existing ones.
In 2019, the United States had comprehensive sanctions regimes on Cuba, North Korea, Iran,
Sudan, and Syria, as well as more than a dozen other programs targeting individuals and
entities (currently some 6,000). Existing U.S. sanctions programs are administered by the
Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), while other departments,
including State, Commerce, Homeland Security, and Justice, may also play an integral role. The
secretary of state can designate a group a foreign terrorist organization or label a country a
state sponsor of terrorism, both of which have sanctions implications. State and local
authorities may also contribute to enforcement efforts.
The practice of sanctions received a significant boost with the formation of the World Trade
Organization, which recognizes the legitimacy of sanctions as a response to the failure of
parties in a trade dispute to reach agreement on satisfactory compensation. A complainant may
ask the Dispute
Settlement Body for permission to impose trade sanctions against the respondent that has
failed to implement. The complainant's retaliatory response may not go beyond the level of the
harm caused by the respondent. The complainant should first seek to suspend obligations in the
same sector as that in which the violation or other nullification or impairment was found,
unless the complainant considers it impracticable or ineffective to remain within the same
sector The complainant is allowed countermeasures that are in effect and would in other
circumstances be inconsistent with the WTO Agreement. In other words, the result is that a
complainant responds to one trade barrier with another trade barrier, contrary to the
liberalization philosophy underlying the WTO. Such measures are nearly always harmful for both
the complainant and the target. Although such retaliation requires prior approval by the DSB 1,
the countermeasures are applied selectively by one Member against another. The suspension of
obligations is temporary and the DSB is obligated to maintain a review of the situation for as
long as there is no implementation. The suspension must be revoked once the Member concerned
has fully complied with the DSB's recommendations and rulings.
In a 2019 decision
the WTO allowed China to impose trade sanctions on $3.6 billion of American goods on the
grounds that the USA had not followed WTO rules in the way it imposed duties on what it
regarded as unfairly cheap Chinese goods. The ruling concluded a case that China brought
against the USA in 2013 that stemmed from levies placed on more than 40 Chinese goods. At issue
were subsidies that the USA accused China of providing to its companies so that they can sell
goods more cheaply overseas.
The case touched on some of the deep politics of neoliberalism for which the WTO is supreme
icon, and which make the very notion of sanctions problematic as evidenced in frequent
criticisms of the WTO . These are that free trade benefits developed countries more than
developing countries; that countries should trade without discrimination means a local firm is
not allowed to favor local contractors, giving an unfair advantage to multinational companies
and imposing costs for local firms; ; it is important that nations be allowed to assist in the
diversification of their economies and not be penalized for favoring emerging industries; free
trade is not equally sought across different industries "" notably, both the US and EU retain
high tariffs on agriculture, which hurts farmers in developing economies; principles of free
trade often ignore environmental considerations, considerations of labor equity and cultural
diversity.
After 9/11 "" still one of the least understood events in modern history "" and amidst the
subsequent US invasions of the sovereign countries of Afghanistan and Iraq, and
de-stabilization of many others (including Libya, Syria, Ukraine), the USA set about disrupting
what it deemed the financial infrastructure supporting terrorists and international criminals,
(but not including the USA itself). The Patriot Act awarded Treasury Department officials
far-reaching authority to freeze the assets and financial transactions of individuals and other
entities suspected of supporting terrorism, and broad powers to designate foreign jurisdictions
and financial institutions as "primary money laundering concerns." Treasury needs only a
reasonable suspicion""not necessarily any evidence""to target entities under these laws. The
centrality of New York and the dollar to the global financial system means these U.S. policies
are felt globally. Penalties for sanctions violations can be huge in terms of fines, loss of
business, and reputational damage. Sanctions regimes today increasingly impact not merely the
primary targeted countries or entities but also those who would do business with such countries
or entities.
Questions of Effectiveness
Sanctions have a poor track record, registering a modest 20-30 percent success rate at best,
according to one source, Emily Cashen, writing for World Finance in 2017. According to leading
empirical analyses, between 1915 and 2006, comprehensive sanctions were successful, at best,
just 30 percent of the time. The longer sanctions are in place, the less likely they are to be
effective, as the targeted state tends to adapt to its new economic circumstances instead of
changing its behavior.
Examples of "successful" applications of sanctions (always judged from the very partial
viewpoint of those who impose them) are said to include their role in persuading the Iranian
leadership to comply with limits to its uranium enrichment program. But if this was "success,"
why then did the USA break its agreement with Iran in 2018? And why was there an agreement in
the first place if Iran had never had nuclear weapons nor was likely to produce them on its own
account without serious provocation. Sanctions are also said to have pressured Gadaffi in
handing over the Lockerbie suspects for trial, renouncing the nation's weapons of mass
destruction and ending its support for terrorist activities. But then, if that was "success,"
why did NATO bomb Libya back to the stone age in 2011?
Sanctions that are effective in one setting may fail in another . Context is everything.
Sanctions programs with relatively limited objectives are generally more likely to succeed than
those with major political ambitions. Furthermore, sanctions may achieve their desired economic
effect but fail to change behavior. Only correlations, not causal relationships, can be
determined. The central question is one of comparative utility: Is the imposition of sanctions
better or worse than not imposing sanctions, from whose viewpoint, and why? Best practices are
said to combine punitive measures with positive inducements; set attainable goals; build
multilateral support; be credible and flexible: and give the target reason to believe that
sanctions will be increased or reduced based on its behavior.
In cases where the targeted country has other trading options unilateral measures have no
real impact or may be counterproductive. Sanctions against Russia over Ukraine may have simply
helped to push Russia closer to its eastern neighbors, notably China.
To bypass sanctions Russia has shifted its trade focus towards Asia. Asian non-cooperation with
the sanctions helps explain why Russia was expecting to grow its trade with China to $200bn by
2020. For several countries in western Europe, the sanctions had a double-edged sword.
Russia is the European Union's third largest commercial partner, and the EU, reciprocally, is
Russia's chief trade partner, accounting for almost 41 percent of the nation's trade prior to
the sanctions. In 2012, before the Ukrainian crisis began, the EU exported a record
€267.5bn ($285bn) of goods to Russia. Further, US sanctions against Russia
increasingly and patently had nothing to do with Ukraine and everything to do with US interest
in exploiting its imperial relationship with West European vassal states to grow its LNG
(liquefied natural gas) market in competition with Russia, and by doing everything possible to
obstruct "" and to coerce European nations into helping it obstruct "" Russia's Nord Stream 2
oil and gas pipeline that will bring cheap Russian oil to Europe without passing through
Ukraine. The very opposite of principles of globalization and free trade.
The USA can afford to be aggressive in sanctions policies largely because (for the time
being, and that time is getting shorter by the day) there is no alternative to the dollar and
because there is no single country export market quite as attractive (for now and even then,
one must wonder about China) as the USA. Sanctions that are effective in one setting may fail
in another. Context is everything. Sanctions programs with relatively limited objectives are
generally more likely to succeed than those with major political ambitions. Furthermore,
sanctions may achieve their desired economic effect but fail to change behavior. Only
correlations, not causal relationships, can be determined. The central question is one of
comparative utility: Is the imposition of sanctions better or worse than not imposing
sanctions, from whose viewpoint, and why? Best practices are said to combine punitive measures
with positive inducements; set attainable goals; build multilateral support; be credible and
flexible: and give the target reason to believe that sanctions will be increased or reduced
based on its behavior.
Sanctions and Human Misery
Since the early 1990s, the US, Europe and other developed economies have employed sanctions on
other nations more than 500 times , seeking to assert their influence on the global stage
without resorting to military interventions. Yet military interventions tend to happen in any
case suggesting that in some cases the sanctions are intended to "soften up" the target prior
to armed conflict).
The economic stranglehold of stringent sanctions on Iraq after the successful allied
invasion of 1991 caused widescale malnutrition and prolonged suffering, and a lack of medical
supplies and a shortage of clean water led to one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern
history. Sanctions all but completely cut off the oil trade. Iraq lost up to $130 billion in
oil revenues during the 1990s, causing intense poverty to many Iraqi civilians. Prior to the
embargo, Iraq had relied on imports for two thirds of its food supply. With this source
suddenly cut off, the price of basic commodities rose 1,000 percent between 1990 and 1995.
Infant mortality increased 150 percent, according to a report by Save the
Children, with researchers estimating that between 670,000 and 880,000 children under five
died because of the impoverished conditions caused by the sanctions. Then US Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright notoriously excused this horrendous slaughter as "worth the
price ." During the Gulf War, almost all of Iraq's essential infrastructure was bombed by a
US-led coalition, leaving the country without water treatment plants or sewage treatment
facilities, prompting extended outbreaks of cholera and typhoid.
Targeted sanctions can be equally devastating. The de facto
boycott on Congolese minerals, for example, has led to the loss of more than 750,000 jobs in
the nation's mining sector. The loss of income resulting from this mass redundancy has had
a severe impact on child health in the nation, with conservative estimates recording a 143
percent increase in infant mortality. Despite an international shift away from comprehensive
sanctions, this Congolese suffering indicates targeted measures are still not free from ethical
quandaries.
Application of sanctions became more popular at the end of the first cold war because
previously targeted nations could negotiate for relief with the oppositional superpower. In the
succeeding era of greater enthusiasm for sanctions it became clear that they could have dire
consequences for civilian populations, and this helps account for increased popularity of
targeted sanctions.
Sanctions of Spite: Syria and the Caesar Act
There are many current examples of the murderous horror of the impact of sanctions by
"civilized," usually western powers, especially when their targets are poorer countries such as
Venezuela and Syria. Not untypically, some of the behaviors that the imperialists seek to
change are themselves the consequence of past imperial aggression.
The secular regime of Bashar Assad in Syria has faced a ten-year existential threat from the
Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda affiliates, ISIS and other jihadist entities supported by an array
of global and regional actors including the USA, UK, and other NATO members, Israel, Jordan,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE. Whatever the regime's defects they are at the very
least comparable and in some cases dwarfed by those of many of Syria's opponents in the Arab
world.
The significance of genuine popular support for Assad , demonstrated in numerous polls, has
been marginalized by western mainstream media. The regime's survival, with air support from
Russia and ground support from Hezbollah and Iran, is extraordinary by any measure. Yet the USA
has continued to interfere in the affairs of Syria with a view to its continuing impoverishment
and destabilization by allowing Turkey to occupy large areas of the north west and populate
these with jihadist emigrees; funding Kurdish forces to secure Syria's oil resources on behalf
of the USA, and for maintaining prisons and camps for ISIS supporters, by maintaining its own
military bases; and permitting a constant succession of Israeli bombing attacks on what Israel
claims are Iranian-backed militia or Syrian Arab Army militia working in collaboration with
Iran; and approving further Israeli incursions into the Golan Heights.
Defeat of ISIS and recovery of non-Kurdish areas outside of Idlib by the Syrian Arab Army
(SAA) took place in conditions of considerable economic challenge, exacerbated by US-imposed
sanctions against both Syria and its neighbor Lebanon. This had a corrosive impact on relations
among top regime figures. Bashar al-Assad's billionaire first cousin and richest man in Syria,
Rami Makhlouf, complained in early 2020 of regime harassment and arrests of employees. Until
then, the Makhlouf family enjoyed exclusive access to business opportunities and monopolies on
hotels, tobacco, and communications, partly
camouflaged by a philanthropic empire that assisted many Syrians through the conflict .
Some $30 billion of the country's wealth, representing 20% of all deposits in Lebanese banks,
was trapped by Beirut's financial implosion, exacerbated by the unprecedented explosion ""
possibly accidental, possibly sabotage "" in the city's harbor area on August 4. Syrian
businessmen needed Beirut's banks to conduct business abroad, and to evade sanctions. A regime
crackdown on money transfer companies made matters worse by creating
a dollar shortage , depriving thousands of families who were dependent on foreign
remittances. Before the explosion, purchasing power of the Syrian pound was already worth 27
times less than before the start of the conflict.
Deteriorating economic conditions ravaged Syria's surviving pretensions to socialist
principle. In the first decade of Bashar's rule, there had been big gains in healthcare in
terms of available beds, hospitals, and nursing staff. But by now there were 50% fewer doctors,
30% fewer hospitals. Before the conflict, 90% of pharmaceutical needs were filled by Syrian
factories. By 2018 those factories which remained had trouble getting raw materials and
replacement parts for equipment because of sanctions. Before the conflict there was improved
land irrigation and food security. In 2011, abject poverty stood at less than one percent,
rising to 35 percent by 2015. The percentage of those facing food insecurity had fallen from
2.2% in 1999 to 1.1% in 2010. Now, 33% lacked food security. One third of homes were
damaged or destroyed, 380,000 killed and 11 million displaced since 2011.
Economic conditions were worsened by ever tightening economic sanctions and US enforcement
of the so-called Caesar Act from June 2020 (named after a faked human rights scandal in 2015).
The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act sanctioned the Syrian government, including President
Bashar al-Assad, for alleged war crimes. The purposes were to cripple Syria for the purposes of
regime change, while luring Russia further into the Syrian quagmire. The Act targeted 39
individuals and entities, including the president's wife, Asma. Anyone doing business with the
regime, no matter where, was potentially vulnerable to travel restrictions and financial
sanctions. The Caesar Act smeared the Syria Central Bank as a "˜money laundering'
institution and sought to render it impossible for Syrian companies to export and import from
Lebanon. It made it difficult or impossible for Syrians abroad to transfer money to family
members. The Act contributed to devaluation of the Syrian pound which tumbled from 650 Syrian
pounds to one US dollar in October 2019 to 2600 to the US dollar in summer 2020.
The Caesar Act (alongside legal initiatives in Europe designed to charge senior
administration officials with war crimes) were designed to stymie reconstruction, hit the
construction, electricity, and oil sectors, and cripple the Lebanese private companies that
would otherwise lead reconstruction efforts. Sanctions prevented non-U.S. aid organizations
from assisting reconstruction. An opposition leader predicted it would result in "
even greater levels of destitution, famine, and worsening criminality and predatory
behavior " and would precipitate regime change, migratory flight, excess deaths, and youth
deprivation. In a climate of regulatory confusion, sanctions often encourage over-compliance.
Prospects of reconstruction investment funds from Russian companies were
negatively impacted . Blumenthal ascribed responsibility for the Caesar sanctions
initiative to a "years-long lobbying campaign carried out by a network of regime-change
operatives working under cover of shadowy international NGOs and Syrian-American diaspora
groups." The country had already suffered severe US and EU economic sanctions. A 2016 UNESCO
report found that sanctions had brought an end to humanitarian aid because sanctions
regulations, licenses, and penalties made it so difficult and risky (Sterling 2020). In 2018,
United Nations Special Rapporteur, Idriss Jazairy, observed that sanctions impacted negatively
on
After 500,000 civilians returned to Aleppo following its liberation in 2016, US sanctions
and UN rules prohibited reconstruction. Returnees were allowed "shelter kits" with plastic but
rebuilding with glass and cement walls was not allowed because "˜reconstruction' was
prohibited.
In brazen acknowledgment of US support for the HTS terrorists of Idlib, the Caesar Act
exempted Idlib province, as well as the northeast areas controlled by US troops and the SDF. It
designated $50 million for "˜humanitarian aid' to these areas. Other US allies pumped in
hundreds of millions of dollars more in aid, further exacerbating pressure on the Syrian pound
and substantially increasing prices for all commodities in regime-controlled areas.
"best-designed sanctions can be self-defeating, strengthening the regimes they were designed
to hurt and punishing the societies they were supposed to protect."
They recalled the destruction of Iraq's middle class in the 1990s, when US sanctions killed
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis:
"Their effect was gendered, disproportionately punishing women and children. The notion that
sanctions work is a pitiless illusion." .
Several European nations (Italy, Poland, Austria, Greece, Hungary) indicating unease with
the continuing stagnation of US and EU sanctions policy, restored tacit contacts with Damascus.
While the EU was an important source of humanitarian aid for internally displaced people in
Syria and for displaced Syrians abroad, it continued to refrain from dealing directly with
Damascus
or from support for reconstruction efforts, on the grounds of continuing instability.
Conclusion
Under indubitably wise international leadership, acting within a framework of equitable
political power among nation states whose sovereignty is sacrosanct, then perhaps sanctions
policies might sometimes be strategically appropriate. These conditions clearly do not apply.
The increasing weaponization of sanctions is a powerful contribution to a crumbling world
order, one that invokes the grave danger of over-reaction by an aggrieved victim, in a context
of intense economic and military competition between rival nuclear powers.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and at
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is an expert on international media, news,
and propaganda. His writings can be accessed by subscription at Substack at https://oliverboydbarrett.substack.com.
A comprehensive roundup of the sanctions-based aggression being imposed on the world by
the bankster dominated west. I really don't think the majority of citizens have a clue what
is being done by their rulers, nor any idea of the sheer hatred being fostered by those
actions. The time for waking up is well overdue, the west has been sucked dry by those same
policies (especially the US) and the fall is imminent.
"The increasing weaponization of sanctions is a powerful contribution to a crumbling world
order, one that invokes the grave danger of over-reaction by an aggrieved victim, in a
context of intense economic and military competition between rival nuclear powers."
Fact: "War is the health of the state" [Randolph Bourne]- meaning, the "business" of
governments is always war- war on its citizens, war on other nations, it never ends.
Invade the world, invite the world. Economic cold war vs. 1/3 of the world's landmass and
population. Seemingly purposeful hollowing out of it's middle class, the abolition of
educational/societal standards to placate the demands of wokeness and the replacement of it's
historical population with an eclectic mix of third world strivers, corrupt east asians and
south american day laborers. Oh, and an increasingly debt centric economy.
The USA is obviously a very prudent country which focuses on it's own long term survival
first and foremost. I expect it to do quite well in the coming years.
My good friend in Canada says that it seems to be a "BioSecurity Fascist State" forming
also. And it's not against Cuba , it's against the populace of Canada. Worse than anything in
the US.
Sanctions strike hard at the very essence of positive international relationship ""
trade.
U.S. economic sanctions are insulting, provocative, corrosive and largely ineffective.
However, trade is hardly the essence of positive international relationship.
Britain traded massively with Germany right up until Britain attacked Germany in 1914.
Germany traded even more massively with the Soviet Union right up until Germany attacked the
Soviet Union in 1941. Were it not for Japanese trade with China, the Mukden Incident that, in
1931, opened the conflict that developed into World War II in Asia""well, it probably would
not have occurred. In short, the trade premise that underlies your article needs to be
revisited.
Sanctions is war. US wars are always cloaked behind our alleged love for democracy and
freedom, but alleged friends beginning with Saudi Arabia and impacting every country South of
our border, prove we are liars, interested only in preserving the best interests of our
wealthiest citizens.
The purpose of US foreign policy is to enhance the profits of global US Corporations
regardless what the consequences are to local targeted populations. The US has extraordinary
power over the EU, but the Russian pipeline is evidence that EU support is cracking.
Shame on the USA for failing to respect the national sovereignty of other nations big and
small. Our constitutional form of government is not a model example of the fruits of
democracy and freedom, as both are crippled by original design, for profit prisons and
schools, toll roads, and the moral hazards imposed by misguided religious fanatics who impose
their will on a disinterested public.
Winston Churchill was a great one for blockades. Churchill, the MoFker is responsible for
5 million deaths. During the 2nd World War he shipped grain from India to Britain and left
the Indians to starve. Five million Bengalis and east Indians died of starvation. Let's hope
when the tide turns all this is forgotten and forgiven.
The war against Japan was instigated by blocades.
The war against Iran is the next.
Syria policy has nothing to do with oil or Assad being a dictator. It is a continuation of
Israel's policies. The whole purpose of these wars is to establish an independent Kurdish
state so that the pressure on Israel could be reduced and states in the region could be
destabilized. While the US was busy trying to fight Israel's wars in ME, China has become a
strategic threat with no signs of slowing down the process of overtaking the US as the
dominant superpower of the world. Despite all the damage these policies have caused, even the
so-called conservatives in the US keep repeating nonsensical ideas like "Kurds deserve a
state." Not realizing that there is no such thing as "deserving a state" or that this just a
zionist project that offers nothing to the US.
Regarding China, sanctions should be used more not less, unless the US wants to be the
secondary power. However, they are not needed with other countries. In ME, the US should wash
its hands off Israel and let the most moral army of the world protect their own country. That
country is a huge liability and problem for the US, it offered the US nothing other than
selling American military secrets and earning 1.5 billion Muslims' disdain. To counter Russia
and Iran, the US should double down on cooperating with Turkey, increase investments and
military support so that Turks can be more active in Central Asia and Afghanistan as well.
This is the smartest and the most efficient way for the US to achieve its goals in Asia and
ME. Which would be slowing China's growth, Russia's creeping in the South, and Iranian
activity in Arab ME.
However, the US basically does the opposite of everything it should. Turning
neutral/unfriendly with Turkey is one of the dumbest things the US foreign service could do,
considering the fact that Turks are the historical enemies of all three of China, Russia, and
Iran, and they did exactly that? Why? For Israel whose feelings were hurt by Erdogan of
course. Currently, the US government is a hostage to vocal minorities and interest groups.
Therefore, its relative decline will not stop unless actual Americans with no double
allegiances step up and take back their government.
Canada is a pathetic American colony, selling their resources cheap in return for being
allowed to have a few crappy hockey teams and access to degenerate American entertainment.
The Brits tell them to murder white Germans, they do it. The Americans tell them to murder
Afghans, they do it...
The US government is a menace to all, including the US population. All US presidents are
war criminals, and sanctions are only one aspect of their endless criminality.
Sanctions are the modern day adaptation of siege warfare. It's essentially a
"˜starve them out' approach to foreign policy. Theoretically, one presumes, the goal is
to cause enough instability to harm the targeted regime. But I can't think of a single time
they have succeeded at anything but causing mass suffering to those at the bottom of the
power pyramid.
In the case of sanctions on Iraq and the subsequent corrupt Oil-For-Food Program, the
sanctions became a vehicle to transfer billions of dollars to oligarchs and their pet
politicians" as usual.
Hundreds of suspected members of criminal networks have been arrested by authorities around
the world after being duped into using an encrypted communications platform secretly run by the
FBI to hatch their plans for alleged crimes including drug smuggling and money laundering.
In the global sting operation dubbed "Operation Trojan Shield," an international coalition
of law-enforcement agencies led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation covertly monitored the
encrypted communications service Anom, which purported to offer a feature cherished in the
criminal underworld: total secrecy.
The sting was revealed this week in a series of news conferences by authorities in the U.S.,
Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Alleged members of international criminal organizations
adopted the platform as a means to communicate securely, unaware that authorities were covertly
monitoring 27 million messages from more than 12,000 users across more than 100 countries,
officials said.
The takedown involved more than 9,000 law-enforcement offices around the world that had
searched 700 locations in the previous 48 hours alone, U.S. and European officials said early
Tuesday. Police forces had in recent days carried out more than 800 arrests in 16 countries and
seized more than 8 tons of cocaine, 22 tons of cannabis and 2 tons of synthetic drugs, as well
as 250 firearms, 55 luxury vehicles and over $48 million in various currencies. More than 150
threats to human life were also disrupted, officials said.
In the U.S., the FBI charged 17 foreign nationals operating in places including Australia,
the Netherlands and Spain with distributing encrypted Anom communications devices, saying they
violated federal racketeering laws typically used to target organized-crime groups, officials
said. Eight of those individuals are in custody and nine remain at large, they said.
The global effort put any other companies offering such services on notice that
law-enforcement agencies world-wide consider developing and selling technology aimed at
defeating their ability to monitor and intercept communications to be unlawful""the latest
salvo in a debate unfolding globally about how to balance security and privacy on technology
platforms.
Authorities, who see encrypted platforms like Anom as providing a haven for illicit activity
beyond the reach of government monitoring, signaled that intelligence agencies and law
enforcement would aggressively seek to infiltrate platforms designed in such a way that they
can be used by terrorists and criminal gangs to evade detection.
"The immense and unprecedented success of Operation Trojan Shield should be a warning to
international criminal organizations""your criminal communications may not be secure; and you
can count on law enforcement world-wide working together to combat dangerous crime that crosses
international borders," said Suzanne Turner, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Diego
field office.
... ... ...
Trojan Shield grew from when the FBI developed a confidential human source involved in the
development of Anom and used that access to make, market and distribute the devices around the
world, according to an affidavit unsealed in U.S. federal court this week. The source, who had
been involved in selling other secure devices to criminal networks before trying to develop
Anom, agreed to cooperate with the bureau in order to reduce his or her own criminal exposure
and lessen a potential sentence, court documents say.
With the source's cooperation, the FBI and its law-enforcement partners secretly built into
Anom the ability to covertly intercept and decrypt messages. The FBI relied on the source's
relationships with criminal gangs in Australia to help distribute the first batch of devices,
with word of the service spreading organically after that, documents say.
Europol said Anom was used by more than 300 criminal groups in more than 100 countries,
including Italian organized crime, outlaw motorcycle gangs and international drug-trafficking
organizations. In court filings, the bureau detailed extensive conversations about narcotics
trafficking, cryptocurrency transactions, cash smuggling, corruption and other illicit activity
flowing through Anom's systems.
My good friend in Canada says that it seems to be a "BioSecurity Fascist State" forming
also. And it's not against Cuba , it's against the populace of Canada. Worse than anything in
the US. <
>
The problem with conspiracy theories (CIA invented term to whitewash CIA participation in
killing of JFK) that some of them in ten to twenty years no longer viewed as conspiracies. They
enter mainstream.
An online poll this week from Ipsos reported 15% of Americans agree that the government,
media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Not 15% of
Republicans or conservatives, but of Americans. That's a lot.
... ... ...
America is a lonely place. When you hold to a conspiracy theory, you join a community.
You're suddenly part of something. You have new friends you can talk to on the internet ...
... One of the enduring and revealing songs of America asks "Which side are you on / Which
side are you on? / You go to Harlan County / There is no neutral there / You'll either be a
union man / Or a thug for J.H. Blair."
... ... ...
Conspiracy believers don't believe what the mainstream media tell them. Why would they?
Newsrooms are undergoing their own revolution, with woke progressives vs. journalistic
traditionalists, advocacy versus old-school news values. It is ideological. "We are here to
shape and encourage a new reality." "No, we are here to find and report the news." It is
generational: The young have the upper hand and the Slack channel. The woke are winning.
...
When you think your country has grown completely bizarre...Think of what normal human beings
have been asked to absorb the past year. The whole country was shut down and everyone was told
to stay in the house. They closed the churches, and the churches agreed. There was no school
and everyone made believe""really, we all made believe!""screens were a replacement. A bunch of
13-year-old girls in the junior high decided they were boys and started getting shots, and no
adults helped them by saying, "Whoa, slow down, this is a major life decision and you're a
kid." The school board no longer argues about transgender bathrooms, they're on to transgender
boys wanting to play on the girls team. Big corporations now tell you what you should think
about local questions, and if this offends you, they don't care. There were riots and protests
last summer and local government seemed overwhelmed.
"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in
the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were
engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery
landscape...
In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program
funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and
consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot
servers grows around the country.
And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped
on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and
several others, in the next couple of weeks...
"Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way
they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing
the space with the delivery bots,"
said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...
Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are
placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a
computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and
in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot
will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to
allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in
30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at
Berkeley, where
at least one of its robots burst into flames . But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In
about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000
deliveries...
"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles
and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ
their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is
making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."
A video
shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog
on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer
having to tip human food-delivery workers.
We're talking about the COVID-19 injections, of course. They were always the end game;
that's why the COVID-19 "vaccine" propaganda is so relentless. It's everywhere. The syndicate
news channels, newspapers, websites, celebrities, professional sports figures etc. continuously
pimp the toxic injection message. They don't call them injections but "vaccines", of course,
even though by definition they are not vaccines and thus it's technically illegal to formally
classify them as such. Words matter, especially when it comes to the subject of our health, and
thus we refuse to use the word "vaccine" when referencing these gene therapy experiments.
Meanwhile, people are now literally virtue-signaling that they've either already received or
are intending to get these Big Pharma injections. Shockingly, parents are
subjecting their own children to these toxic treatments ; for a disease that for anyone
under the age of 70 and in reasonably good health has effectively a zero percent chance of
dying from. We'll wager many of your friends and family members are getting it.
Walmart Will Give 740,000 Employees a Free Smartphone (cbsnews.com) 37 Posted by
EditorDavid on Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:39PM from the company-lines dept. "Walmart will
give
740,000 employees free Samsung smartphones by the end of the year ," reports CBS News, "so
they can use a new app to manage schedules, the company announced Thursday." The phone, the
Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro, can also be used for personal use, and the company will provide free
cases and protection plans. The phone's retail price is currently $499... Up until now,
associates at Walmart stores used handheld devices they shared to communicate, but an initial
test with employee smartphones was received well and will now be expanded upon, Walmart
said...
The company promised that it would not have access to any employee's personal data and
can "use the smartphone as their own personal device if they want, with all the features and
privacy they're used to." The test will be expanded by the end of the year, Walmart
said.
Earlier this year, Walmart announced pay increases for nearly a third of its U.S.
workforce of 1.6 million. In February, digital and store workers saw their starting hourly
rates increase from $13 to $19 depending on their location and market.Hmmm
(
Score: 3 , Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:48PM (
#61460698 )
Probably will be used to clock them in and out when they enter and exit the premises, and track
their movements to ensure they are working and not lollygagging. Maybe even track bio info to
adjust health insurance prices.
If you think this is just a free gift done out of generosity, you're quite naive.
Reply to This ShareNo thank you (
Score: 3 ) by RitchCraft (
6454710 ) on Sunday June 06, 2021 @07:11PM ( #61460772 ) It
would be wise for Walmart employees to put that phone in a locker on premises before leaving.
Having your corporate overlord knowing everything you do outside of work is creepy ...
peeping Tom creepy. Wal-mart states they won't collect your data but we'll be reading a news
story within two years finding out they did just that. "We're sorry for data that was
collected. It was a configuration oversight on our part. We promise to do better moving
forward." yadda, yadda, yadda.
Reply to This ShareNot surprised... (
Score: 5 , Interesting) by Pollux ( 102520 ) < speter@@@tedata...net...eg > on Sunday June 06, 2021
@07:36PM ( #61460814 )
Journal
I was talking last week with someone who works customer service at a nearby Walmart.
She told me that people are either leaving or moving up the chain, and it's hard to keep new
employees retained. She had one who was in for three days, then just went AWOL and was never
heard from again.
I asked her what starting salary was. (The Walmart's in out-state MN.) She said
$11.50.
I guess Walmart can't help but behave this way. What they should be doing is raising
salaries. Instead, they choose to offer a "perk" of a "free" phone w/ a "free" phone plan. I
say "free", because no doubt the phone will be a data goldmine for corporate. How? Let me count
the ways.
1) Track employee movements within the store;
2) Determine quantity and length of employee breaks;
3) Track employee movements outside the store;
4) Track employee searches;
5) Track employee social media posts;
6) Monitor employee spending behaviors;
7) Mine employee messages;
And so on, and so forth...And any one of these data mining operations can be used to
punish employee misbehavior, hustle Walmart services (Moneygram springs to mind), not to
mention sell to interested 3rd parties. (With Walmart commanding the largest fleet of employees
in the United States, imagine how many other companies would be willing to pay for generalized
data on employee behavior. Better yet, image how much someone would be willing to pay to
advertise directly to 1.6 million people.)
The latest Novichok victims were exposed to the deadly agent as a result of a leak from a
nearby UK laboratory, authorities have confirmed.
Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess, 44, fell ill at a house in Amesbury on Saturday,
after being exposed to Novichok "" the same nerve agent that poisoned ex-Russian spy Sergei
Skirpal.
Rt.com reports: Two people,
this time a British couple in their 40s with no link to Russian intelligence, were affected by
a chemical substance on Saturday. Four days later, the UK's counter-terrorism chief said the
chemical that hit them was the same that sent former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and
his daughter, Yulia, into a coma in early March.
Back then, it took mere hours for the UK government to pin the blame on Moscow and unleash a
massive diplomatic offensive together with its allies. Moscow, still waiting for compelling
evidence to be produced, has been shut out of the investigation, and it has raised a number of
questions about the poisoning "" none of which have been answered.
Linking the two poisonings "is clearly a line of enquiry" for UK investigators, but the new
incident doesn't look likely to answer any of those concerns either.
The new victims, 45-year-old Charlie Rowley and his 44-year-old girlfriend Dawn Sturgess
were discovered in Amesbury, some 12 km (7 miles) north of Salisbury. Both scenes, though, are
located around Porton Down, which houses a secretive government chemical lab.
Porton Down has been a crucial part of the Skripal case investigation. It was there that the
chemical agent was identified as Novichok in both cases. Back in March, UK officials cited this
as proof that the substance came from Russia "" only to later be contradicted by the lab's
chief executive, who said they weren't really able to verify the agent's origins.
As for the location of the new scene relative to the old one, 12 km doesn't seem like an
improbably large distance. Plus, a friend of the victims said the couple had been to Salisbury
before they fell ill. The UK Home Secretary's working theory is that the exposure was
accidental, which begs the question: how would that be possible after four months and a massive
clean-up operation? Also, why were there only two random people in the whole 12km radius that
were affected?
Curious timing
Investigators say it's unclear if the supposed Novichok came from the same batch that
poisoned the Skripals in March. But, according to experts, the nerve agents of the Novichok
family lose their potency very quickly, which makes it unlikely that a trace powerful enough
had survived for four months to strike again at this particular moment.
And the moment is significant for two reasons "" two events key to Russia's international
image. One is the hugely successful FIFA World Cup, where the English team just secured a
quarter-final spot. British fans seem to be enjoying themselves in Russia, and berating British
politicians and media for their efforts to scare them away from the event.
The other is the preparations for a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russia's
Vladimir Putin. A date and a place for the meeting "" Helsinki, Finland, July 16 "" were set
just last week, and a possible rapprochement between the two rival superpowers seems to be
keeping British officials up at night.
Nobody died, again
One of the key questions asked back in March was: why did the Skripals survive if they were
indeed exposed to a military-grade nerve agent? While UK officials peddle Novichok as a deadly
nerve agent manufactured by the Soviets, claiming its recent use was the first chemical attack
in Europe since World War Two, it appears to have a surprisingly low lethality rate.
A friend of the couple described Rowley becoming increasingly ill over the course of the
day, before finally being taken to the hospital. There, the supposedly deadly Novichok gave
doctors enough time to treat the couple for a completely different diagnosis: the medics
initially believed that the couple had taken contaminated drugs (Rowley is a registered heroin
addict). Samples from the two were only sent to Porton Down on Monday, two days after they were
admitted.
Back in March, the Skripals were similarly discovered slipping in and out of consciousness
on a park bench. They were also treated for an opioid overdose at first, before the diagnosis
switched to nerve agent poisoning. Both ultimately survived and have now been discharged from
the hospital.
Analysts have repeatedly questioned the apparent low lethality of the supposed
"military-grade nerve agent." Russian officials, as well, have said that if such a deadly
substance had indeed been used, survival would be impossible.
British officials are still investigating the incident. However, this time "" now that
Novichok has been brought up "" they seem less inclined to point fingers, even as England fans
frolic in Russia and Theresa May's handling of Brexit continues to divide the public.
Google's critics have said for years that it should be treated like a public utility. On
Tuesday, Ohio's attorney general filed a lawsuit asking a judge to rule that the search company
is one.
The case adds to the legal woes confronting the Alphabet Inc. GOOG 0.68% subsidiary, which
also faces antitrust lawsuits from the Justice Department and a separate consortium of states
led by Colorado and Texas. The company is contending with cases in countries around the world
where its dominance as a search provider has sparked a push by regulators to corral its
power.
Amid the array of court challenges, Ohio said that it is the first state in the country to
bring a lawsuit seeking a court declaration that Google is a common carrier subject under state
law to government regulation. The lawsuit, which doesn't seek monetary damages, says that
Google has a duty to provide the same rights for advertisements and product placement for
competitors as it provides for its own services.
"When you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat
everyone the same and give everybody access," said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a
Republican.
A Google spokesman said that the remedies sought in the Ohio lawsuit would worsen the
company's search results and impair businesses' ability to connect directly with customers.
"Ohioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company," a
spokesman said. "This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we'll defend ourselves against it
in court."
The FBI and Australian Federal Police
ran an encrypted chat platform and intercepted secret messages between criminal gang
members from all over the world for more than three years. From a report: Named Operation
Ironside (AFP) / Trojan Shield (FBI, Interpol) on Monday, law enforcement agencies from
Australia, Europe, and the US conducted house searches and arrested thousands of suspects
across a wide spectrum of criminal groups, from biker gangs in Australia to drug cartels across
Asia and South America, and weapons and human traffickers in Europe.
In a press conference on Monday, Australian police said the sting operation got underway
in 2018 after the FBI successfully seized encrypted chat platform Phantom Secure. Knowing that
the criminal underworld would move to a new platform, US and Australian officials decided to
run their own service on top of Anom (also stylized as AN0M), an encrypted chat platform that
the FBI had secretly gained access to through an insider. Just like Phantom Secure, the new
service consisted of secure smartphones that were configured to run only the An0m app and
nothing else.
According to a commenter at SANS "Part of the decision to stop monitoring and making arrests
was a blog posting (since deleted) detailing the behavior of the ANoM app, this March, which
didn't correctly attribute the backdoor to the FBI."
Well, now the criminals can't trust any encryption. That means that it can slow them down
quite a bit for a while.
Meanwhile most of the ransom for the pipeline ransomware is also recovered, which likely
means that it's possible to track Bitcoin.
Governments may be slow, but they can be relentless in pursuing their targets if they really
want. Re:STFU! (
Score: 4 , Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @03:40PM (
#61466816 )
Anyone can track Bitcoin transactions from wallet to wallet. The paydirt is that the LEOs
know which wallets to watch and can follow the trail.
Tainted Bitcoins are a big thing, and even tumbled coins just mean more tainted coins that
currency exchanges will not accept. You might be able to find an individual to trade, and maybe
an escrow service so you can do a multisig transaction so the other party doesn't rob you blind
when trading to something like XMR to the ill-gotten gains.
It was a closed-source black-box proprietary encryption system.
As we've pointed out time and again: You can't trust it if you can't check it. Your security
is totally at the mercy of the system's authors and operators.
But crooks are apparently no smarter than Pointy Haired Bosses. (Thank goodness.)
The left love their saint Dr Fraud and he could do no wrong in their eyes.
And they see democrats as superheroes who try to save the world when the latter are only
good at stealing.
Meat Hammer 6 hours ago
That's all of this in a nutshell: liberals see themselves as enlightened, superior
beings, and conservatives as vermin who deserve extermination. And they wonder why we keep
buying guns.
Plus Size Model 18 minutes ago remove link
Both groups see themselves this way because they have been cognitively conditioned
accordingly. It's all part of the plan.
I can go into any liberal bookstore and pick up a stack of books on protesting, civil
action, making stickers, posters, organizing, setting up fundraisers, etc. I come to ZH and
alI I see are bots and the occasional poster complaining about how things are never going
to get better. Think long and hard about this!!!
I can't emphasize enough how much people should read up on information operations and
long term strategic psychological warfare. There are plenty of good books in the open
domain and the US military does not copyright their work.
On June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy had just won the California Democratic presidential primary,
when he was shot dead, five years after his brother. David Talbot has shown in his book
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , published in 2007 by Simon &
Schuster, that Robert had never believed in the conclusion of the Warren Commission Report, and
that, had he succeeded in becoming the next American president, he would have done his utmost
to set up a new investigation. Whether he would have been able to get to the bottom of it is
another matter. But it is a reasonable assumption that the forces that had killed John were the
same that killed Robert on his way to reclaim the White House. After all, as Laurence Leamer
writes in Sons of Camelot : "Bobby had been the president's alter ego and protector. . .
. He had loved his brother so intensely and served him so well that within the administration
it was hard to tell where one man ended and the other began."
[1] After 1963, Robert was still his brother's continuation. He was the heir and the
avenger.
That is why I have argued before -- and I repeat in
my new book -- that the ultimate key to the JFK whodunit is in RFK's assassination, which
has a very clear, unmistakable Israeli signature. RFK's assassination is a masterwork of false
flag operation, designed by a supremely intelligent, Machiavellian, and organized cabal, the
same that orchestrated one year earlier, with Johnson's complicity, the attempted false flag
attack on the USS Liberty (watch the new groundbreaking four-part documentary film
Sacrificing
Liberty ).
What is truly extraordinary, and demonstrates an unmatched expertise in the industry of
lies, is that the conspirators succeeded to get rid of Robert Kennedy while at the same time
blaming the assassination on their enemies -- the Palestinians -- and thereby giving themselves
both an alibi and a victim's role: through RFK, Israel was the target, they claim.
Sirhan Sirhan, the "virulent anti-Semite"
Just hours after Robert's assassination, the press informed the American people, not only of
the identity of the assassin, but also of his motive, and even of his detailed biography.
[2] Twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born in Jordan, and had moved to the
United States when his family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948. After the shooting, a
newspaper clipping was found in Sirhan's pocket, quoting Robert's following statement: "The
United States should without delay sell Israel the 50 Phantom jets she has so long been
promised." Handwritten notes by Sirhan found in a notebook at his home confirmed that his act
had been premeditated and motivated by his hatred of Israel.
That became the mainstream storyline from day one. Jerry Cohen of the Los Angeles
Times wrote a front page article, saying that Sirhan is "described by acquaintances as a
'virulent' anti-Israeli" (Cohen changed that into "virulent anti-Semite" in an article for the
Salt Lake Tribune ), and that: "Investigation and disclosures from persons who knew him
best revealed [him] as a young man with a supreme hatred for the state of Israel." Cohen infers
that "Senator Kennedy . . . became a personification of that hatred because of his recent
pro-Israeli statements." Cohen further revealed that, about three weeks before the shooting,
Sirhan wrote "a memo to himself" that said, "Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968,"
that is, Cohen notes, "the first anniversary of the six-day war in which Israel humiliated
three Arab neighbors, Egypt, Syria and Jordan."
[3]
After September 11, 2001, the tragedy of Robert's assassination was rewritten and installed
into the Neocon mythology of the "Clash of Civilizations" and the "War on Terror." A book
entitled The Forgotten Terrorist, by Mel Ayton (2007), purports to present "a wealth of
evidence about [Sirhan's] fanatical Palestinian nationalism," and to demonstrate that
"[Sirhan's] politically motivated act was a forerunner of present-day terrorism."
In 2008, on the occasion of the 40 th anniversary of Bobby's murder, Sasha
Issenberg of the Boston Globe recalled that the death of Robert Kennedy was "a first
taste of Mideast terror." He quotes Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz saying: "It was in some
ways the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn't
recognize it at the time."
[4] That Sirhan was from a Christian family was lost on Dershowitz.
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin took care to mention it
in TheForward , only to add that Islamic fanaticism ran in his veins anyway:
"But what he shared with his Muslim cousins -- the perpetrators of September 11 -- was a
visceral, irrational hatred of Israel. It drove him to murder a man whom some still believe
might have been the greatest hope of an earlier generation. . . . Sirhan hated Kennedy because
he had supported Israel."
And so, the Forward insists: "One cannot help but note the parallel between [Robert]
Kennedy's assassination and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In both tragic cases,
Arab fanaticism reared its ugly head on American soil, irrevocably changing the course of
events in this country."
[5] And the lesson: "In remembering Bobby Kennedy, let us remember not just what he lived
for, but also what he died for -- namely, the precious nature of the American-Israeli
relationship."
[6] In other words: let's propagate the narrative, for it is good for Israel.
On the fiftieth anniversary, the narrative was
well rehearsed : Robert got killed because he was "pro-Israel".
[7] Therefore his murder was a crime against Israel.
For anyone familiar with the history of the Kennedy clan, there is something odd in the
notion that the assassination of Robert Kennedy was a crime against Israel. Robert had not
been, in his brother's government, a pro-Israel Attorney General. He had infuriated Zionist
leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright and the Committee on
Foreign Relations, aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent",
which would had considerably hindered its efficiency.
[8]
In 1968, Robert Kennedy had not suddenly turned pro-Israel. He was simply trying to attract
Jewish votes, as everyone else. Robert's statement in an Oregon synagogue, mentioned in the May
27 Pasadena Independent Star-News article found in Sirhan's pocket, didn't exceed the
minimal requirements. Its author David Lawrence had, in another article entitled "Paradoxical
Bob," underlined how little credit should be given to such electoral promises: "Presidential
candidates are out to get votes and some of them do not realize their own inconsistencies."
[9] In fact, as Arthur Krock has noted, the supposed motive for RFK's murder is itself
paradoxical: "If this motive was his position that the United States was committed to preserve
Israel as a nation, his statement was made with more moderation than that of other important
political persons who said the same thing."
[10]
All things considered, there is no ground for believing that Robert Kennedy would have been,
as president of the U.S.A., particularly Israel-friendly.
Did Sirhan kill Robert Kennedy?
If we trust official statements and mainstream news, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is
an open-and-shut case. The identity of the killer suffers no discussion, since he was arrested
on the spot, with the smoking gun in his hand.
In reality, ballistic and forensic evidence shows that none of Sirhan's bullets hit Kennedy.
According to the autopsy report of Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi, Robert
Kennedy was hit by three bullets, while a fourth went through his coat. All these bullets were
shot from behind Kennedy: two of them under his right armpit, following an upward angle, and
the third, the fatal bullet, behind his right ear, at point blank range. Dr. Noguchi reaffirms
his conclusion in his memoirs, Coroner (1983) . Yet the sworn testimonies of
twelve witnesses established that Robert had never turned his back on Sirhan and that Sirhan
was five to six feet away from his target when he fired. Moreover, Sirhan was physically
overpowered by Karl Uecker after his second shot, and, although he continued pressing the
trigger mechanically, his revolver was not directed towards Kennedy anymore.
By tallying all the bullet impacts in the pantry, and those that wounded five people around
Kennedy, it has been estimated that at least twelve bullets were fired, while Sirhan's gun
carried only eight. On April 23, 2011, attorneys William Pepper and Laurie Dusek gathered all
this evidence and more in a 58-page file submitted to the Court of California, with a request
that Sirhan's case be reopened. They pointed out major irregularities in the 1968 trial,
notably that the serial number of Sirhan's pistol did not match the serial number of the pistol
by which were test fired the bullets compared with those extracted from Robert's brain.
[11] Pepper also provided a computer analysis of audio recordings during the shooting, made
by engineer Philip Van Praag in 2008, which confirms that two guns are heard.
[12] Paul Schrade, a Kennedy confidant who was behind Robert during the shooting and
received one of Sirhan's bullets, has long believed there was a second shooter. He
testified at Sirhan's 2016 parole hearing, and told him: "the evidence clearly shows that
you were not the gunman who shot Robert Kennedy."
[13] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his sister Kathleen have joined Schrade and
support the call for a reinvestigation of the assassination.
[14]
The presence of a second shooter was mentioned by several witnesses and reported on the same
day by a few news outlets. There are strong suspicions that Robert's real assassin was Thane
Eugene Cesar, a security guard hired by the Hotel Ambassador, property of Zionist businessman
Myer Schine. Cesar was stuck behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting, and some people saw
him draw his pistol. One of them, Don Schulman, positively saw him fire.
[15] Incredibly, Cesar's weapon was never examined, and he was never interrogated, even
though he did not conceal his hatred for the Kennedys.
[16]
Even if we assumed that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises
question: Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting, and of disorientation
just after. More importantly, Sirhan has always claimed that he has never had any recollection
of his act. Fifty years after the facts, he continues to declare: "I was told by my attorney
that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely
futile, [but] I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy." He also
claims to have no memory of "many things and incidents which took place in the weeks leading up
to the shooting."
[17] Some repetitive lines written of a notebook found in Sirhan's bedroom, which Sirhan
recognizes as his own handwriting but does not remember writing, are reminiscent of automatic
writing: there is a whole page of fifteen repetitions of "RFK must die, Robert F. Kennedy
must be assassinated, assassinated, assassinated, assassinated," suddenly turning to "I
have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of."
[18]
Psychiatric expertise, including lie-detector tests, has confirmed that Sirhan's amnesia is
not faked. Therefore, experts in hypnosis and mental manipulation believe that Sirhan has been
submitted to hypnotic programming. "It was obvious that he had been programmed to kill Robert
Kennedy and programmed to forget that he had been programmed," stated Dr. Robert Blair.
[19] In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and
trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded that Sirhan, whom
he classified among "high hypnotizables," acted involuntarily under the effect of hypnotic
suggestion: "His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with
conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive
control." During his sessions with Dr. Brown, Sirhan could remember having been accompanied by
an attractive woman, before suddenly finding himself at a shooting range with a weapon he did
not know. According to Brown's report, "Mr. Sirhan did not go with the intent to shoot Senator
Kennedy, but did respond to a specific hypnotic cue given to him by that woman to enter 'range
mode,' during which Mr. Sirhan automatically and involuntarily responded with a 'flashback'
that he was shooting at a firing range at circle targets." Later, attorney William Pepper found
an entry in the police file that showed that, just days before the assassination, Sirhan had
visited a firing range, accompanied by an unknown instructor.
[20]
Mossad, Mental control, and false-flag terrorism
We know that in the 1960s, American military agencies were experimenting on mental control.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, son of Hungarian Jews, directed the infamous CIA MKUltra project, which,
among other things, were to answer questions such as: "Can a person under hypnosis be forced to
commit murder?" according to a declassified document dated May 1951.
[21] As Larry Romanoff has pointed out , MKUltra was an
overwhelmingly Jewish enterprise, with people like Dr. John Gittinger, Harris Isbell, James
Keehner, Lauretta Bender, Albert Kligman, Eugene Saenger, Chester Southam, Robert V. Lashbrook,
Harold Abramson, Charles Geschickter, and Ray Treichler.
[22]
In his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted
Assassinations (2018), Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman has revealed that, in May 1968, the
month preceding Robert Kennedy's assassination, the Israeli Military Intelligence (AMAN) was
planning to assassinate Yasser Arafat by hypnotically programming a Palestinian. The idea was
proposed by a Navy psychologist named Binyamin Shalit, who claimed that, "if he was given a
Palestinian prisoner -- one of the thousands in Israeli jails -- with the right
characteristics, he could brainwash and hypnotize him into becoming a programmed killer. He
would then be sent across the Jordan, join the Fatah there, and, when the opportunity arose, do
away with Arafat." The proposal was approved. Shalit selected a 28-year-old Palestinian from
Bethlehem, whom he deemed easily suggestionnable. The operation failed, but it proves that, in
1968 precisely, Israel was practicing a method of assassination identical to the one used
against Robert Kennedy.
[23]
Moreover, manipulating Palestinians to make them commit crimes, or committing crimes and
blaming Palestinians for them, bears the signature of Israel. According to former Mossad agent,
Victor Ostrovsky, in 1991 elements of the Mossad were plotting an attempt on the life of
President George H. W. Bush. Bush had resisted an unprecedented pro-Israel lobbying campaign
that called for $10 billion to help Jews immigrate from the former Soviet Union to Israel,
complaining in a televised press conference on September 12 that "one thousand Jewish lobbyists
are on Capitol Hill against little old me."
[24] Worse, there was his policy of pressuring Israel to the negotiating table at the
Madrid Conference by freezing their loan guarantees. Israel had had enough of him. The plan was
to leak words to the Spanish police that terrorists were on their way, kill Bush and, in the
midst of the confusion, release three Palestinians captured earlier and kill them on the spot.
[25]
It is well known that Israel has a long history and a grand expertise in false flag
terrorism. A report of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), quoted by the
Washington
Times on September 10, 2001, described the Israeli Intelligence agency as: "Wildcard.
Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a
Palestinian/Arab act."
[26] That statement was made public on the day before 9/11.
The pattern dates from before the creation of the Jewish State, with the bombing of the King
David Hotel, headquarter of the British authorities in Jerusalem, in the morning of July 22,
1946. Six terrorists of the Irgun dressed as Arabs brought 225 kg of explosives hidden in milk
churns into the building. When a British officer became suspicious and gunshot ensued, the
Irgun members fled after igniting the explosives. The explosion killed 91 people, mostly
British, but also 15 Jews.
The strategy was repeated in Egypt during the summer of 1954, with Operation Susannah. The
goal was to compromise the British's withdrawal from the Suez Canal, demanded by Colonel Abdul
Gamal Nasser with support from President Eisenhower. Egyptian Jews trained in Israel bombed
several British targets, then put the blame on the Muslim Brotherhood. The accidental
detonation of an explosive device allowed the exposure of the conspiracy, which led to the
"Lavon Affair", from the name of the Defense Minister who was held responsible.
There are more of the same stories in Gordon Thomas's Gideon's Spies: the Secret History
of the Mossad (2009).
[27] By definition, false-flagged Arab terrorism is only exposed when it fails, and we
cannot know how many such operations have been set up by the Mossad. But from the revelations
of Ronen Bergman in Rise and Kill First, Sirhan sure looks like a typical made-in-Mossad
Palestinian patsy.
There are still, of course, unanswered questions, such as: How did Sirhan find himself in
the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel at midnight on June 6, 1968, with a pistol in his
pocket? Sirhan himself declared it was by accident, or by mistake, but then he doesn't remember
much of that evening. Another question is: Why did Kennedy, after finishing his speech, exit
the ballroom through the kitchen pantry, instead of walking through the crowd of his
supporters, as he usually did? To this question, there is an answer: according to a campaign
volunteer present at the scene and interviewed by Michael Piper, it was Frank Mankiewicz who
insisted that Robert go this way.
[28] Now, isn't it awkward that Mankiewicz had started his career in public relations "as
civil rights director for the western branch of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith," as
he mentions in his autobiography.
[29] (The ADL, remember, was founded in 1913 by the B'nai B'rith to defend the
convicted child rapist and murderer Leo Frank .)
[30] In 1991, Mankiewicz handled publicity for Oliver Stone's film JFK .
Bobby Kennedy was killed by a single shot to the back of his head. The shot was fired at a
range close enough to singe the hair on the back of his neck.
Sirhan was of course standing IN FRONT of Bobby, firing BLANKS. The reason for firing
those blanks was to cover up the sound of the OTHER gun.
The ONLY person who could have fired such a shot was one of the FBI "bodyguards".
Bobby was murdered because he had a good chance to be elected Prez o' US. And if Bobby
EVER became Prez, he would have re-opened the investigation of the murder of his brother,
JFK. So RFK was killed by the same people who killed JFK.
Although NO ONE talks about the "plane crash" that killed JFK, Jr., that was also an
assassination for the purpose of ensuring that NO ONE EVER made an honest investigation of
the murder of JFK, Sr.
My understanding is that Maheu was the conduit between the CIA and the Mafia
in at least the JFK assassination. Mafia includes both Italian and Jewish/Israeli groupings.
But the order and primary coverup was from the CIA (or acting former CIA). You don't usually
hear about military generals, but they had to be in on it too. LBJ was clearly not a
mastermind though must have been involved to a degree. Same with Hoover.
I was a college student in LA at the time of the RFK assassination,
not that it makes me an expert, but it made me aware then and concerned and
investigating ever since.
I have read all of Laurent Guyenot's works and most of it was powerfully eye opening,
especially about the history and "purpose" of the Old Testament Bible. I am grateful to him
for this work.
He seems to me on less solid ground when it comes to who can control things in the US.
m.k.ultra/cia/mossad cannot be separated. creating unwitting assassins is a major part of
why the program was created. sirhan sirhan's handler "the girl in the polka dot dress" was
seen by 25 witnesses but dismissed as a figment of the imagination of an overwrought campaign
worker who claimed she heard her say "we shot him, we shot him". the camel faced woman of the
joe/camel administration refused to allow sirhan sirhans parole even though bobby kennedy jr.
requested it. guess that handlers have to have to watch out for each other.
And he attacked the Israel A-bomb program and wanted to end the Federal Reserve, that
financial yeshiva. They were lining up to top him, then his brother.
I agree that it's a mystery he is still alive. Other than it would need someone in the DOJ
with the determination to see that he was carefully assassinated. You know there was a recent
attempt on his life, don't you? Right around the time Epstein died. As long as Barr was head
of DOJ I was extremely concerned about Sirhan.
Of course, originally they expected him to be executed and the California had the audacity
to eliminate the death penalty.
To understand Robert Kennedy's support for Israel, we have to enter the mental world of
post World War Two. Robert wanted Israel' s nuclear programme ended because the Cold War
required a bi polar between nuclear powers, US and USSR. A nuclear Israel would make Israel a
super power as has indeed happened. Otherwise Robert, a war vet, loved Israel as an epitome
of frontier America. Also Israel's social programme as contrasted with America's predatory
capitalism greatly appealed. Robert's visit to Israel and deprecation of the Arabs fitted
that era. The Arabs and Islam were not popular as backward peoples except for some Arabian
Nights nostalgia. I have read a book that Iranian agents were also involved in his
assassination. This was the era of the Shah who was covertly allied to Israel
I once read of a security expert who had been around during the 60's who believed RFK's
assassination was almost inevitable as RFK routinely disregarded security protocols regarding
his exposure to large crowds.
That others were involved is a given and the 'system' has protected them for decades,
just as it protected the assassins who killed JFK.
Since a president Robert would have been determined to get to who killed his brother, it
is practically a foregone conclusion they were both killed by the exact same crew.
Sirhan Sirhan wasn't a Muslim he was Christian Greek Orthodox variety. In 1948 When he was
4 years old armed Israeli troops cane to his family's 10 room house and gave them one hour to
pack up what they could carry and get out. His father was fired from his city of Jerusalem
water department job as soon as Zionists bribed blackmailed and threatened United Nations
delegates to declare Israel a nation.
The family went to live in a Greek Orthodox pilgrim hostel. 7 kids mostly boys youngest 4
how'd you like that. One of the boys was killed in a Zionist terrorist bombing at a crowded
rush hour intersection about a year before. The Church refugee program brought the Sirhan to
Pasadena Ca. They bought a house and settled in.
Having been kicked out of his home at age 4 by armed troops Sirhan was righteously
resentful of the Zionists. He grew more anti Zionist at Pasadena community college because of
pro Israel Jewish professors.
Kennedy ran in the California primary. He promised arms and support to Israel. So Sirhan
shot him.
Robert Kennedy was as anti White as his brothers. He lobbied for the 1965 and 1968
unlimited non White immigration and affirmative action bills. He marched at the head of MLK's
funeral, practically shoving the widow out of the way for photo opportunities. He also
massively supported the Hispanic cause and was one of the first anti White Democrats to lobby
for Hispanics to get affirmative action benefits. Although that didn't happen until 1970. By
the time JFK was elected, Robert was a hard core anti White.
He's dead. Sirhan Sirhan confessed to shooting Kennedy because of Kennedy's support for
Israel and the Israelis who stole his family's home.
If you're pro Israel and love the American politicians who give more to Israel than to the
American taxpayers, you would have lived Kennedy at the time.
If you're anti White and pro black and brown you should mourn Kennedy as an anti White,
pro black and brown pro black on White crime and pro affirmative action discrimination
against White Americans dead martyr.
If you are pro White and against affirmative action discrimination against White Americans
you are a misinformed ignoramus if you mourn Robert Kennedy.
If you are pro Palestinian and anti the Israeli property grabbers you are a misinformed
ignoramus if you mourn the pro Israel Kennedy.
All 3 Kennedy brothers were anti White. March 1961 less than 2 months after he became
President JFK issued executive order 10925 I believe it was mandating that all federal
agencies SHALL take affirmative action to hire blacks over Whites.
Ted lobbied for the 64 civil rights for all but Whites act, the 65 unlimited non White
immigration act. The 68 affirmative action act and every anti White law and judicial
appointment in his long career.
And Robert disdained Whites and slobbered over MLK Jesse Jackson Cesear Chavez and every
black and brown activist in existence. And he was a vociferous supporter of Israel and the
anti White Jewish organizations in America.
Someone shot him. Sirhan Sirhan claimed he shot Robert Kennedy. Robert was as much an
enemy of Whites and Palestinians as Johnson was.
Had Robert Kennedy become President he would have been as anti White as Nixon or
worse.
Sirhan Sirhan had an excellent motive; revenge. The Jews didn't. Robert Kennedy was a
puppet of jews both in domestic ( anti White) and foreign affairs.
Robert Kennedy was pro school de segregation and bussing , pro affirmative action, pro
Hispanic pro black soft on black crime and anti White.
Any White man who mourns the Kennedys is anti White negro lover and Zionist.
Israel does indeed have a history of unmasked false-flag operations: the Lavon Affair, the
attack on the Liberty, their proven awareness beforehand that the 9/11 attacks were going to
happen, where, and how.
So unless we're to assume they're invariably incompetent, it follows that there must also
have been false-flag operations that were never uncovered. Like, say, the assassination of
Robert Kennedy. But this is hardly proof that this was in fact what happened. It merely
demonstrates that it's not inconceivable.
Then there's Sirhan Sirhan himself. What was he like? Had he had similar episodes in the
past: committing violent acts and having no memory of them? Was he deranged in some way that
suggested such behavior was possible? We know, for example, that the young Adolf Hitler was
transported when he saw Wagner's Rienzi -- the story of a man who rises to become the
savior of his people. Obviously, this prefigured Hitler's later career. Was there anything in
Sirhan's life that prefigured an assassination attempt?
Was there other evidence that Sirhan was worked up about Kennedy and Israel? Surely there
should have been more than reading a clipping that Kennedy was for an arms sale. What was he
saying to people? What had he been reading? Was Sirhan even aware of who was running for
President?
If Israel was in fact behind the killing, how were they sure they would benefit? Was it,
in June, clear that if Kennedy lived, he would get the nomination and beat the Republican
nominee, and that if he did, that he would be dramatically worse for Israel than the apparent
alternatives at that point?
Sirhan doesn't remember anything (because of his hypnosis), therefore he is not
dangerous.
The Jews made a mistake by choosing a Christian Palestinian as their "typical
fanatical Muslim terrorist", but they hoped the gullible American public would not notice,
which of course was the case.
' On February 10, 2016, at his 15th parole hearing, he [Sirhan] was denied
parole again. One of Sirhan's shooting victims from that night, Paul Schrade, aged 91 at the
time of the hearing, testified in his support, stating his belief that a second shooter
killed Kennedy and that Sirhan was intended to be a distraction from the real gunman by an
unknown conspiracy '
Kennedy had been shot three times. One bullet was fired at a range of perhaps 1 inch (3
cm) and entered behind his right ear, dispersing fragments throughout his brain.[41] The
other two entered at the rear of his right armpit; one exited from his chest and the other
lodged in the back of his neck.[4
Wiki
Five other people were wounded by the "blanks" that SS fired after RFK had been shot.
Five other people were wounded: William Weisel of ABC News, Paul Schrade of the United
Automobile Workers union, Democratic Party activist Elizabeth Evans, Ira Goldstein of the
Continental News Service, and Kennedy campaign volunteer Irwin Stroll.[24]
@Triteleia Laxa g seems to point in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman's recent
book also includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being
wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young
Palestinian was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad
in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort
ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.
Had a sinister grouping discovered how to create hypnotised assassins a half a century ago,
there is no interest of theirs that they would not be able to achieve by now.
Yet the group you accuse has not even been able to deal with the Palestinians. In the
meantime, countless peace settlements, successful ethnic cleansings, large scale massacres, and
more, have taken place around the world, ignored and/or forgiven.
My impression is that you paint the Israelis/"deep state neocons"/Jews as Saturday morning
cartoon villains. They are all powerful, utterly ruthless, constantly scheming, and yet somehow
never achieve more than the most ordinary of their aims. This is too funny.
And that made them bold enough to pin 9/11 on a bunch of Islamic terrorists. The system is
superb; when discussing 9/11 in 2011 with one of my American cousins, he looked at me like I
had come from Mars when I asked him about the the third building (7) falling down without being
hit. His answer was " what building you are talking about". That got me curious and I
researched to find out if my cousin's reaction was a rarity and to my big surprise it turned
out that up to that date only 25% of the American public were aware of the fall of three
buildings all in all. Free US media indeed!
@Godfree Roberts After all, whatever else you might say of him, long-reigning Erdogan, is
the poster boy for leader hubris yet he's still there.
Though if you make too many powerful enemies eventually someone is going to take a shot.
Think of it as the coalition of the willing.
We all crave and grow comfortable with the coutours of what did and didn't happen as if was
ordained. Thus Kerry made fun of W. Bush for sitting in that elementary school classroom on
live TV as if, regardless of what he (W) and those protecting him knew, he was safe as a
kitten.
I've mentioned the Vincennes/Lockerbie as elucidating in terms of the functionality of the
resolve. With the US and Iran, the two indisputable moving parties, conspiring to make Libya
the dirty dog.
Richard Nixon, via Henry Kissinger, was very good for the Israelis. Would mystery votes in
Illinois and Texas happen for Bobby like they did for John? We will never know. Joe Kennedy was
a ruthless, power driven man, which is why the Kennedy mystique has always been both amusing
and a mystery. Perhaps Joe could have pulled another presidential election off for another
son.
According to campaign workers at the scene, RFK wanted to exit the ballroom through the
crowd, but his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz insisted that he leave through the pantry,
having arranged a midnight press briefing in a nearby room. Kennedy was told that he needed to
hold the briefing so that he could appear on the morning news the following day. Oddly,
Mankiewicz later denied having played this role, contradicting the accounts of Kennedy's staff.
As Guyenot points out, Mankiewicz was formerly a publicist for the Zionist ADL. Collins Piper,
by the way, goes off on a tangent suggesting that Iran somehow had a hand in the RFK
assassination.
Another loose end is of course the girl with the polka dot dress. Who was she? where did she
go? Here is one authors novel assessment: http://www.surfs-up.net/Downloads/RFK.pdf If
this writer is correct, the ADL also played a role in the silencing of the polka dot dress
girl.
@Triteleia Laxa ts. "Confused" was an oft repeated adjective to describe the victims state
of mind.
Vice made a documentary years ago that can easily be found on the internet, "worlds scariest
drug" was titled if memory serves me. Here's also some safety advice for travelers to Colombia,
proof of how common this is:
Now could someone be ordered to kill someone else while high on scopolamine? I have read of
no reports. But one thing is clear, a hypnotized like state – in which victims blindly
follow directions from strangers – can be induced chemically.
If you read the replies to this tweet, you can clearly see why Americans tolerate the
existence of billionaires: according to liberal ideology, the alternative would simply be too
much worse.
The whole legitimacy of capitalism to masses lies in the assumption it is a pure and
limitless meritocracy: you get monetarily rewarded in the exact proportion of your individual
qualities and hard work.
The moment you start to arrest and even execute billionaires for crimes related to the
economy (white collar crime), you're tacitly admitting the free market has a ceiling: you
cannot get indefinitely rich, therefore you're not entirely free. It may be a tall cage, but
it is still a cage - a precept that would kill the liberal concept of individual freedom.
That's why Westerners are completely ok with death penalties for crimes related to
individual defects (i.e. serial killers, rapists) or related to a violation of the game
(crimes against private property; robbery; rigging), but not with "white collar crimes" - no
matter how much more damaging white collar crimes are to society (e.g. only one middle
management guy got arrested in the aftermath of the crisis of 2008, and he got very little
time).
So, the problem isn't in the fact that Westerners don't recognize that extreme wealth
concentration is a problem, but that they think that this is a necessary evil, the price of
freedom. It's like the Egyptians servants building the pyramids for their dead pharaohs under
the fear the world will literally end if they don't.
"Stop indoctrinating our children. Stop teaching our children to hate the police. Stop
teaching our children that if they don't agree with the LGBT community that they're homophobic.
You have no idea each child's life," she said, adding "You don't know what their family
lifestyle consists of, you don't know the makeup of their life."
https://youtu.be/zxu3wdiXRF0
Ibrahim shut down school board members' objections several times - in between calling out
two teachers for posting their political beliefs online. When board members told her she wasn't
allowed to reference people by name, Ibrahim claimed those teachers called "for the death of a
former president," and that students who don't support Black Lives Matter should be "canceled
out."
"Why are we not allowed to say names? Why am I not allowed when they purposefully expose
themselves on social media, talking about calling for the death of a former president, or
saying that any child who doesn't believe in Black Lives Matter should be canceled out. Is this
what my tax dollars are paying for?" she asked.
"You're emotionally abusing our children and mentally abusing them," Ibrahim continued
RDinSC 1 hour ago
Never vote for anyone at any level of political office who does not openly and sincerely
oppose CRT and any and all woke indoctrination.
RedDog1 1 hour ago
I'm a super anti-racist. I'm especially against woke neo-racism.
BLOTTO 52 minutes ago (Edited)
Wait until she finds out that Drag Queen Roxy is reading 'The Hips on the DQ go swish
swish swish' to the kids at the local library.
Pooper Popper 1 hour ago
She Rocks!!!!!
Bang!!
high5mail 36 minutes ago
When I listen to this woman and look around me at all the fools who buy into the
"system" as it is, too scared to do what she is doing, it saddens me at the apathy and
cowardice of the general public which will sell their souls for protection on a non deadly
virus and take an unproved vaccine to virtue signal.
She is a modern day Joan of Arc. I would stand beside her in an instant. How many others
would do that or demand the same things she is demanding? Most are too busy trying to
figure out what gender they think they should be or trying on racist social agendas in the
"woke" category.
LONDON (Reuters) -The United States, Britain and other large, rich nations reached a
landmark deal on Saturday to squeeze more money out of multinational companies such as Amazon
and Google and reduce their incentive to shift profits to low-tax offshore havens.
Hundreds of billions of dollars could flow into the coffers of governments left
cash-strapped by the COVID-19 pandemic after the Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies agreed
to back a minimum global corporate tax rate of at least 15%.
Facebook said it expected it would have to pay more tax, in more countries, as a result of
the deal, which comes after eight years of talks that gained fresh impetus in recent months
after proposals from U.S. President Joe Biden's new administration.
"G7 finance ministers have reached a historic agreement to reform the global tax system to
make it fit for the global digital age," British finance minister Rishi Sunak said after
chairing a two-day meeting in London.
The meeting, hosted at an ornate 19th-century mansion near Buckingham Palace in central
London, was the first time finance ministers have met face-to-face since the start of the
pandemic.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the "significant, unprecedented commitment" would
end what she called a race to the bottom on global taxation.
German finance minister Olaf Scholz said the deal was "bad news for tax havens around the
world".
Yellen also saw the G7 meeting as marking a return to multilateralism under Biden and a
contrast to the approach of U.S. President Donald Trump, who alienated many U.S. allies.
"What I've seen during my time at this G7 is deep collaboration and a desire to coordinate
and address a much broader range of global problems," she said.
Ministers also agreed to move towards making companies declare their environmental impact in
a more standard way so investors can decided more easily whether to fund them, a key goal for
Britain.
... ... ...
Key details remain to be negotiated over the coming months. Saturday's agreement says only
"the largest and most profitable multinational enterprises" would be affected.
European countries had been concerned that this could exclude Amazon - which has lower
profit margins than most tech companies - but Yellen said she expected it would be
included.
How tax revenues will be split is not finalised either, and any deal will also need to pass
the U.S. Congress.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said he would push for a higher minimum tax, calling
15% "a starting point".
Some campaign groups also condemned what they saw as a lack of ambition. "They are setting
the bar so low that companies can just step over it," Oxfam's head of inequality policy, Max
Lawson, said.
But Irish finance minister Paschal Donohoe, whose country is potentially affected because of
its 12.5% tax rate, said any global deal also needed to take account of smaller nations.
The G7 includes the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and
Canada.
... Average hourly earnings for workers in leisure and hospitality rose to $18.09 in May,
the highest ever and up 5% from January alone, according to Labor Department data released on
Friday. Pay rose even faster for workers in non-manager roles, who saw earnings rise by 7.2%
from January, far outpacing any other sector.
That higher pay could be a sign that companies are lifting wages as they seek to draw people
back to work after more than a year at home. Some businesses are struggling to keep up with
higher demand as more consumers, now fully vaccinated, get back to flying, staying in hotels
and dining indoors. Job gains in leisure and hospitality this year have so far outpaced gains
in other sectors.
But it is too soon to know whether the boost will be enough to help speed up hiring at a
time when many workers are still facing other obstacles, including health concerns and having
to care for children and other relatives.
"The fact of the matter is, the pandemic is still going on," said Daniel Zhao, a senior
economist for Glassdoor. "The economy is running ahead of where we are from a public health
situation."
Some 2.5 million people said they were prevented from looking for work in May because of the
pandemic, according to the Labor Department.
... ... ...
Employment in leisure and hospitality is still in a deep hole when compared with pre-pandemic
levels. The industry added 292,000 jobs in May, with about two-thirds of that hiring happening
in restaurants and bars. But overall employment is still down 2.5 million jobs, or 15% from
pre-pandemic levels, more than any other industry.
... ... ...
Some people who previously worked at hotels or restaurants moved on to other types of jobs
during the pandemic, such as packaging goods at a warehouse, and it's too soon to know whether
they will switch back as more of the economy reopens, said Zhao.
...About half of states are putting an early end to a $300 federal supplement to weekly
unemployment benefits, winding them down as soon as June 12. The supplement expires nationwide
on Sept. 6.
(Reporting by Jonnelle Marte and Ann Saphir; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan
Oatis)
Walmart
Will Give 740,000 Employees a Free Smartphone (cbsnews.com) 37 Posted by EditorDavid on
Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:39PM from the company-lines dept. "Walmart will give
740,000 employees free Samsung smartphones by the end of the year ," reports CBS News, "so
they can use a new app to manage schedules, the company announced Thursday." The phone, the
Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro, can also be used for personal use, and the company will provide free
cases and protection plans. The phone's retail price is currently $499... Up until now,
associates at Walmart stores used handheld devices they shared to communicate, but an initial
test with employee smartphones was received well and will now be expanded upon, Walmart
said...
The company promised that it would not have access to any employee's personal data and
can "use the smartphone as their own personal device if they want, with all the features and
privacy they're used to." The test will be expanded by the end of the year, Walmart
said.
Earlier this year, Walmart announced pay increases for nearly a third of its U.S.
workforce of 1.6 million. In February, digital and store workers saw their starting hourly
rates increase from $13 to $19 depending on their location and market.Hmmm
(
Score: 3 , Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:48PM (
#61460698 )
Probably will be used to clock them in and out when they enter and exit the premises, and track
their movements to ensure they are working and not lollygagging. Maybe even track bio info to
adjust health insurance prices.
If you think this is just a free gift done out of generosity, you're quite naive.
Reply to This ShareNo thank you (
Score: 3 ) by RitchCraft (
6454710 ) on Sunday June 06, 2021 @07:11PM ( #61460772 ) It
would be wise for Walmart employees to put that phone in a locker on premises before leaving.
Having your corporate overlord knowing everything you do outside of work is creepy ...
peeping Tom creepy. Wal-mart states they won't collect your data but we'll be reading a news
story within two years finding out they did just that. "We're sorry for data that was
collected. It was a configuration oversight on our part. We promise to do better moving
forward." yadda, yadda, yadda.
Reply to This ShareNot surprised... (
Score: 5 , Interesting) by Pollux ( 102520 ) < speter@@@tedata...net...eg > on Sunday June 06, 2021
@07:36PM ( #61460814 )
Journal
I was talking last week with someone who works customer service at a nearby Walmart.
She told me that people are either leaving or moving up the chain, and it's hard to keep new
employees retained. She had one who was in for three days, then just went AWOL and was never
heard from again.
I asked her what starting salary was. (The Walmart's in out-state MN.) She said
$11.50.
I guess Walmart can't help but behave this way. What they should be doing is raising
salaries. Instead, they choose to offer a "perk" of a "free" phone w/ a "free" phone plan. I
say "free", because no doubt the phone will be a data goldmine for corporate. How? Let me count
the ways.
1) Track employee movements within the store;
2) Determine quantity and length of employee breaks;
3) Track employee movements outside the store;
4) Track employee searches;
5) Track employee social media posts;
6) Monitor employee spending behaviors;
7) Mine employee messages;
And so on, and so forth...And any one of these data mining operations can be used to
punish employee misbehavior, hustle Walmart services (Moneygram springs to mind), not to
mention sell to interested 3rd parties. (With Walmart commanding the largest fleet of employees
in the United States, imagine how many other companies would be willing to pay for generalized
data on employee behavior. Better yet, image how much someone would be willing to pay to
advertise directly to 1.6 million people.)
"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in
the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were
engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery
landscape...
In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program
funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and
consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot
servers grows around the country.
And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped
on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and
several others, in the next couple of weeks...
"Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way
they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing
the space with the delivery bots,"
said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...
Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are
placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a
computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and
in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot
will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to
allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in
30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at
Berkeley, where
at least one of its robots burst into flames . But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In
about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000
deliveries...
"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles
and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ
their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is
making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."
A video
shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog
on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer
having to tip human food-delivery workers.
The problem with conspiracy theories (CIA invented term to whitewash CIA participation in
killing of JFK) that some of them in ten to twenty years no longer viewed as conspiracies. They
enter mainstream.
An online poll this week from Ipsos reported 15% of Americans agree that the government,
media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Not 15% of
Republicans or conservatives, but of Americans. That's a lot.
... ... ...
America is a lonely place. When you hold to a conspiracy theory, you join a community.
You're suddenly part of something. You have new friends you can talk to on the internet ...
... One of the enduring and revealing songs of America asks "Which side are you on / Which
side are you on? / You go to Harlan County / There is no neutral there / You'll either be a
union man / Or a thug for J.H. Blair."
... ... ...
Conspiracy believers don't believe what the mainstream media tell them. Why would they?
Newsrooms are undergoing their own revolution, with woke progressives vs. journalistic
traditionalists, advocacy versus old-school news values. It is ideological. "We are here to
shape and encourage a new reality." "No, we are here to find and report the news." It is
generational: The young have the upper hand and the Slack channel. The woke are winning.
...
When you think your country has grown completely bizarre...Think of what normal human beings
have been asked to absorb the past year. The whole country was shut down and everyone was told
to stay in the house. They closed the churches, and the churches agreed. There was no school
and everyone made believe""really, we all made believe!""screens were a replacement. A bunch of
13-year-old girls in the junior high decided they were boys and started getting shots, and no
adults helped them by saying, "Whoa, slow down, this is a major life decision and you're a
kid." The school board no longer argues about transgender bathrooms, they're on to transgender
boys wanting to play on the girls team. Big corporations now tell you what you should think
about local questions, and if this offends you, they don't care. There were riots and protests
last summer and local government seemed overwhelmed.
Guess who has been overseeing this and making sure that it happens? Biden. Schumer.
Pelosi. McConnell, Feinstein and many others who have spent their entire life working
against we the people for their donors.
They stripped us of our jobs, wages, pursuit of
happiness and well being. They wrote away our health care through trade agreements and
imported foreign workers to keep our wages low. During Reagan people could work full time
in a grocery store and have a car, vacation home and great benefits from their employer.
Now both parents have to work full time and then some and still can't make ends meet.
They did that to us.
But they get to do insider trading, get great benefits that WE FCKING PAY FOR while they deny us the same thing.
And yet we've been returning them to
office time after time and they keep doing it. Duh! We can't vote our way out of the
current mess because the people who run the country don't get voted on. 23 Reply Share
Report Save
Well, don't forget the masters they serve (capitalists). Politicians aren't the root
of the problem. It's just important that we remember that they sure as fuck are
part of the problem and not the cure for it. 6 Reply Share Report Save
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 38 Reply Share Report Save View Entire Discussion (58
Comments) More posts from the WayOfTheBern community 2.3k Posted by u/_MyFeetSmell_ a self aware Russian Bot
6 days
ago
For much of his political career, President Biden was
a
custodian of the "neoliberal" order
. He was a fixture in a Washington establishment that promoted years of economic
globalization and, like political elites in many other countries, embraced the apparent virtues of free trade and fiscal
responsibility. Although he often appealed to blue-collar American values, Biden was a standard-bearer for a brand of
"third way" centrist politics that scoffed at class wars and allied itself to Wall Street. As vice president, he stood
behind a post-financial crisis recovery
that
critics argue was inadequate
and
boosted
wealthy and corporate interests
over those of the majority of Americans.
"It's going to create the strongest, most resilient,
innovative economy in the world. It's not a plan that tinkers
around the edges," Biden said of his proposed legislation on Wednesday. "It's a once-in-a-generation investment in America
unlike anything we've seen or done since we built the interstate highway system."
To be sure, Biden faces an uphill battle in Congress, with Republicans and even moderate Democrats wary of the ballooning
U.S. deficit and the possibility of growing inflationary pressures. But the sweep of his ambition is striking and could,
argued
left-leaning commentator Robert Kuttner
, mark a transformation of the Democrats from decades of being "a Wall Street
neoliberal party."
"Historians and politicians are already comparing the ambition with [Franklin D.] Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society program,"
Guardian
columnist Will Hutton
wrote enviously from across the pond. "In British terms, it's as though an incoming Labour
government pledged to spend £500bn over the next decade with a focus on left-behind Britain in all its manifestations --
real commitments to leveling up, racial equity, net zero and becoming a scientific superpower."
A flurry of recent reporting suggests Biden is
interested
in cloaking himself in the legacy
of great Democratic reformers,
including
that of FDR
, no matter
the
limitations of the analogy
.
But whatever his own personal views, his moves reflect a new political zeitgeist
in the West that was emerging during the chaotic years of the Trump presidency and took concrete shape amid the havoc and
ruin of the pandemic.
"Radical reforms -- reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades -- will need to be put on the table,"
noted
a Financial Times editorial last year
, which in and of itself was quite a statement given how much the well-heeled
readership base of the publication likely benefited from that previous policy direction. "Governments will have to accept a
more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to
make labour markets less insecure."
To help offset the deep cost of his infrastructure and jobs plans, Biden has proposed
significant
tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy
. Though this will
face
political resistance
from corporate lobbyists, it's an easier pitch now than it would have been when Biden became vice
president. The pandemic has illustrated the need for even the most laissez-faire of governments to bolster the social
safety net and abandon older fears over deficits and ingrained biases toward austerity.
"Simply put, America's economy over the past four decades has been far crueler and more unequal than either superrich
capitalists or affluent suburbanites need it to be,"
wrote
New York magazine's Eric Levitz
. "In truth, even a Western European-style welfare state (and the associated tax rates)
is not contrary to the enlightened material interests of the upper middle class; only the ultra-wealthy can be confident
that they will never have need for social insurance."
This is rhetoric echoed by the International Monetary Fund, an institution long seen as the embodiment of neoliberalism.
Ahead
of its annual meetings this week, it issued a report calling for advanced economies
to
use more aggressive taxation
to help redress the costs of the pandemic. That includes greater taxes on corporate profits,
inheritance, property and other measures that Republicans in Washington have routinely insisted would be damaging for the
national interest. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to set the tone for the meetings with a speech calling for
a
global minimum corporate tax rate
, which could disincentivize companies relocating offshore.
"Many countries could rely more on property and inheritance taxes,"
wrote
a trio of IMF economists
, arguing that narrowing inequality within societies was important for social cohesion. "Countries
could also raise tax progressivity as some governments have room to increase top marginal personal income tax rates, whereas
others could focus on eliminating loopholes in capital income taxation."
Biden's seeming abandonment of the legacy of neoliberalism may also extend to trade policy. It's unclear to what extent the
new administration may actually depart from the more protectionist course set by its nationalist predecessor. When asked
during a congressional hearing whether the goal of a trade agreement between two countries should be the elimination of
tariffs and trade barriers, Katherine Tai, the Biden-appointed U.S. trade representative, demurred.
"Maybe if you'd asked me this question five or 10 years ago, I would have been inclined to say yes,"
Tai
said
. But she said the experience of the last few years, including the emergency of the pandemic and the animus of the
Trump administration's trade wars, led her to believe "that our trade policies need to be nuanced, and need to take into
account all the lessons that we have learned, many of them very painful, from our most recent history."
"Everybody who was involved in business or government in the 1980s or 1990s has seen some of the promise of globalization come
through, but a lot of the harm has been unexpectedly broader, sharper, deeper," Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.)
told
the New York Times
earlier this year. "[Biden] believes we need to change direction on trade."
For now, Biden stands at the helm of a U.S. economy that is leading the Western world out of the pandemic.
"Amid steady
progress with coronavirus vaccinations, the U.S. economy is gathering so much steam that its gains will not stay at home,"
wrote
my colleague David Lynch
. "Demand for goods and services this year is expected to spill well beyond U.S. borders, making
the United States the largest single contributor to global growth for the first time since 2005, according to Oxford
Economics."
Thanks in large part to the stimulus bill, the United States will help add almost 1.5 percent to the global economy's growth
rate this year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By the end of next year, global output
is projected to be around $3 trillion larger than it would have been absent new U.S. spending.
"The fact that there is a significant stimulus in the U.S. will boost global GDP, will boost exports from the euro area,"
European Central Bank chief economist Philip Lane
told
CNBC last week
, adding that Biden's new spending "will be a significant engine for the world economy."
Vaccination rates are rising, but so are covid cases
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TheTrue2
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2 months ago
I wish we quit blowing our own horn regarding our contribution to Global GDP. The truth is that Japan
is also making a big contribution. The European are not far behind. This is a Global effort. To put
things into perspective, Global GDP is around 84,000 Billion dollars in 2020. One Trillion dollar is
1000 Billion dollars, so our contribution of 3000 billion dollars to the World Economy is only 3% most
of it is not our products and services is money that we are providing for loans through IMF, World
Bank and other financial institutions. The reality is that the long-term consequences of the crisis
will be severe. The pace of digitalization, automation and robotization is set to accelerate, further
depressing labor demand in the medium term. While productivity will experience some growth in economic
sectors embracing automation, average productivity growth will likely falter. Declining investments in
fixed capital, low average productivity growth and lower labor-force participation rates are expected
to weigh on potential output going forward. Global public debt has increased or will increase by 15%.
The money numbers are large, but the economic multipliers ratios and benefits to Labor will be less
than to Capital. Inequality still needs to be resolve. Is not only about the Benjamins.
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BillSamuel
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2 months ago
Well he's somewhere between neoliberal and progressive. His proposed corporate tax rate is exactly
halfway between the pre-Trump rate and the Trump rate. That's hardly progressive.
In international affairs, he remains a classic neo-liberal deeply committed to imperialism and the war
system, and backing foreign tyrants.
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A Real New Deal
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2 months ago
From his earliest days in politics as the Attorney General of Delaware, the former Senator For DuPont for
almost 40 years, and Vice President for 8 years, Joe Biden has always and forever been a lickspittle,
lackey, knave and varlet for what Mr. Tharoor calls the "neo-liberal world order" which actually calls
itself the One World/New World Order and which is crumbling rapidly everywhere after decades of
pillaging, plundering and polluting the planet by and for the super rich and their trans-national
corporations for their own evil profit. pleasure and amusement.
Now the little people are in open revolt worldwide from America to the Middle East to Britain to Italy to
Hong Kong to Brazil. The 0.01% and their plutocrats' puppets like Biden are becoming uneasy and some are
even running scared.
Joe Biden is trying to cover up all his previous crimes against humanity such as his Senate votes for the
Reagan and Bush tax cuts for the rich and big business, NAFTA, the WTO, most favored trade status for
China, repeal of Glass-Stegall, the ensuing trillions of dollars in taxpayer bail out money for Wall St.,
his support for the illegal wars of aggression under false pretenses in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc., etc.
and trying to tout himself as some kind of "secular savior" and a suddenly "transformed" Republican Lite
into a progressive. Only fools are falling for this mongrel dog trying to change his DNA.
Biden thinks that by throwing trillions of dollars in borrowed, fiat money on corporate welfare and
crumbs for the "little people" and proposing to raise taxes on big business and the rich he can "buy'
enough American votes to keep Congress in Democratic hands. lol. No Joe the people know what you are and
despite this they took you over Chump because of the pandemic and the bad economy. But already after a
few weeks in office your "popularity' is waning and your proposals are failing.
Biden will be a one term wonder POTUS and a total failure----if he lives that long.
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natecar
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2 months ago
"By the end of next year, global output is projected to be around $3 trillion larger than it would have
been absent new U.S. spending."
So we spend 4 Trillion on two stimulus bills and get 3 Trillion in economics benefits. That is exactly in
line with economics theory that government spending doesn't really have a multiplier effect. But it sure
does have a strong cost for future generations.
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A Real New Deal
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2 months ago
Joe Biden was always considered a straw man and a nattering nitwit as a U.S. Senator and Obama's
V.P. valet. His destructive actions since becoming POTUS simply further confirm his "peers" low
opinion and dismissal of him.
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ChuChuBelo
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I'm not convinced that the U.S. itself actually practiced neoliberalism. Huge deficits, government
subsidies of business, interest rate manipulation, trade protectionism, regulations that impede the free
market... I don't see how we ever really sought these policies.
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skyfall95
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Biden is no FDR. Not even close. FDR's top corporate profit rate was 40%. GOP+Dems later cut it to 35%;
Trump cut it to 21% in 2017. FDR's top personal income tax rate began at 63% (1933), rose to 94% (1944).
GOP+Dems cut it to 37%. Biden's proposals are nothing like FDR's.
Thank You. Both parties are equally responsible for these odious pro-corporate tax cutting policies,
the worst and most harmful occurring in my working lifetime between 1985 to current.
When you elect a bunch of corporate elitists who are more interested in their own wallets and cushy
government paid power jobs rather than doing what's best for the social, cultural and economic health of
their own taxpayers and voting citizens and allow their multinational corporate business donors to
dominate our policy making decisions that favor them, this is what we are left with. Explains the
massive hollowing out of our Education systems, health 'care' systems, safety net systems that keeps
the same sleazy people hoodwinking the serfs and the fiefs. They enjoy the drama of watching the little
people clawing at each others throats while they sit high above the fray. Dystopian isn't a far-off
description. Hope they're happy.
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Neoliberalism -- a.k.a "Reagan Democrats" have been a bane on America since their inception. I'm glad to
see the movement wane.
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Bandos WB
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(Edited)
Only took 40 years of failed policy (laffer curve/trickle down), dangerous levels of inequality and
economic anxiety (see Trumpists), to realize that massive spending targeted at the already wealthy does
not trickle down, that massive spending that benefits the wealthy does create economic bubbles and 40
years of flat wages.
We DO need to control inflation. However, we have been doing so by maintaining "the right" amount of
unemployment. In other words, we have been controlling inflation by ensuring human misery, lost wages,
livelihoods, increased mental health issue and crime. Oops.
It is time to control inflation by sucking money out of the economy from those who do not spend it; ie
the wealthy.
In short, spend to create broad based prosperity, get the unemployment rate to zero, and if there are
signs of inflation, raise taxes on incomes over 400k, estates, 2nd homes and the like.
Its that path or more demagogues and misery.
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Arthur J Montana
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When I was in college, my economic professors taught us the benefits of "free trade". It looks great on
paper.
I remember professors also teaching about the economic dislocation that occurs as other nation's with
better "efficiencies" start to replace industry in the U.S. The theory was that, while uncomfortable, the
economic dislocation associated with free trade would be transitory as displaced workers provide a pool
of labor for industry to re-direct to more modern industrial pursuits.
What the professors never taught (nor did they ever advocate) was that U.S. based companies would
intentionally flee the U.S. with technology transfers to other nations in exchange with low-paid,
non-union, labor pools; at the expense of the U.S. Labor Force. That was never taught or advocated by my
professors. That was the great Fleecing of America.
The professors also taught against double-standards in international trade with some nations subsidizing
their companies to achieve market dominance artificially; while the U.S. played it straight. In many
cases, that's exactly what happened to our steel industry; another Fleecing of America. Arguably,
Clinton's NAFTA (which I think was initiated during the H.W. Bush Administration) was the codification of
this Fleecing of America.
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And American workers have not forgotten NAFTA, which wrecked our entire domestic garment and textile industry.
Customers wouldn't have to train the algorithm on their own boxes because the robot was made
to recognize boxes of different sizes, textures and colors. For example, it can recognize both
shrink-wrapped cases and cardboard boxes.
... Stretch is part of a growing market of warehouse robots made by companies such as 6
River Systems Inc., owned by e-commerce technology company Shopify Inc., Locus Robotics Corp. and Fetch
Robotics Inc. "We're anticipating exponential growth (in the market) over the next five years,"
said Dwight Klappich, a supply chain research vice president and fellow at tech research firm
Gartner Inc.
As fast-food restaurants and small businesses struggle to find low-skilled workers to staff
their kitchens and cash registers, America's biggest fast-food franchise is seizing the
opportunity to field test a concept it has been working toward for some time: 10 McDonald's
restaurants in Chicago are testing automated drive-thru ordering using new artificial
intelligence software that converts voice orders for the computer.
McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said Wednesday during an appearance at Alliance Bernstein's
Strategic Decisions conference that the new voice-order technology is about 85% accurate and
can take 80% of drive-thru orders. The company obtained the technology during its 2019
acquisition of Apprente.
The introduction of automation and artificial intelligence into the industry will eventually
result in entire restaurants controlled without humans - that could happen as early as the end
of this decade. As for McDonald's, Kempczinski said the technology will likely take more than
one or two years to implement.
"Now there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants
across the US, with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect
permutations, weather -- and on and on and on, " he said.
McDonald's is also exploring automation of its kitchens, but that technology likely won't be
ready for another five years or so - even though it's capable of being introduced soooner.
McDonald's has also been looking into automating more of the kitchen, such as its fryers
and grills, Kempczinski said. He added, however, that that technology likely won't roll out
within the next five years, even though it's possible now.
"The level of investment that would be required, the cost of investment, we're nowhere
near to what the breakeven would need to be from the labor cost standpoint to make that a
good business decision for franchisees to do," Kempczinski said.
And because restaurant technology is moving so fast, Kempczinski said, McDonald's won't
always be able to drive innovation itself or even keep up. The company's current strategy is
to wait until there are opportunities that specifically work for it.
"If we do acquisitions, it will be for a short period of time, bring it in house,
jumpstart it, turbo it and then spin it back out and find a partner that will work and scale
it for us," he said.
On Friday, Americans will receive their first broad-based update on non-farm employment in
the US since last month's report, which missed expectations by a wide margin, sparking
discussion about whether all these "enhanced" monetary benefits from federal stimulus programs
have kept workers from returning to the labor market.
Michael Hudson appeared
again on Moderate Rebels in an examination of Biden's policy direction, some of
which are clearly a continuity from Trump and others Neoliberal Obaman. This observation and
the following discussion reveals the modus behind what was initially Trumpian:
"So if you look at the sanctions against Russia and China as a way to split Europe and
make Europe increasingly dependent on the United States, not only for gas, and energy, but
also for vaccines."
Hudson calls it "the intellectual property monopoly" which was a major point in the
rationale he produced for his Trade War with China. But as we've seen, the global reaction
isn't as it was during the previous era from 1970-2000:
"So what we're seeing is an intensification of economic warfare against almost all the
other countries in the world, hoping that somehow this will divide and conquer them,
instead of driving them all together ." [My Emphasis]
And what we're seeing is the latter occurring as the Outlaw US Empire's Soft Power rapidly
erodes. As with their initial program, the discussion is long and involved.
And since I've been absent, I should suggest reading Escobar's latest bit of
historical review , which I found quite profound and an interesting gap filler in the
historical narrative of Western Colonialism.
US Troops Die for World Domination, Not Freedom May 31, 2021 Save
On Memorial Day, Caitlin Johnstone says it's important to block the propaganda that helps
feed a steady supply of teenagers into the imperial war machine.
Airman placing U.S. flags at military graves, May 27. (Arlington National Cemetery,
Flickr)
V ice President Kamala Harris spent
the weekend under fire from Republicans, which of course means that Kamala Harris spent the
weekend being criticized for the most silly, vapid reason you could possibly criticize Kamala
Harris for.
Apparently the likely future president tweeted "Enjoy the long weekend,"
a reference to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, instead of gushing about fallen troops and
sacrifice.
That's it, that's the whole entire story. That silly, irrelevant offense by one of the
sleaziest
people in the single most corrupt and murderous government on earth is the whole entire
basis for histrionic headlines from conservative media outlets like this :
Harris, the born politician, was quick to course correct.
"Throughout our history our service men and women have risked everything to defend our
freedoms and our country," the veep tweeted . "As we prepare to honor
them on Memorial Day, we remember their service and their sacrifice."
Which is of course complete bullshit. It has been generations since any member of the U.S.
military could be said to have served or sacrificed defending America or its freedoms, and that
has been the case throughout almost the entirety of its history. If you are reading this it is
statistically unlikely that you are of an age where any U.S. military personnel died for any
other reason than corporate profit and global domination, and if you are it's almost certain
you weren't old enough to have had mature thoughts about it at the time.
Whenever you criticize the U.S. war machine online within earshot of anyone who's
sufficiently propagandized, you will invariably be lectured about the second World War and how
we'd all be speaking German or Japanese without the brave men who died for our freedom. This
makes my point for me: the fact that apologists for U.S. imperialism always need to reach all
the way back through history to the cusp of living memory to find even one single example of
the American military being used for purposes that weren't evil proves that it most certainly
is evil.
But this is one of the main reasons there are so very many movies and history documentaries
made about World War II: it's an opportunity to portray U.S. servicemen bravely fighting and
dying for a noble cause without having to bend the truth beyond recognition. The other major
reason is that focusing on the second World War allows members of the U.S. empire to escape
into a time when the Big Bad Guy on the world stage was someone else.
From the end of World War II to the fall of the U.S.S.R., the U.S. military was used to
smash the spread of communism and secure geostrategic interests toward the ultimate end of
engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union. After this was accomplished in 1991, U.S. foreign
policy officially shifted to preserving a unipolar world order by preventing the rise of any
other superpower which could rival its might.
"In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense
Department asserts that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era
will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or
the territory of the former Soviet Union.
A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for
weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states
that part of the American mission will be 'convincing potential competitors that they need
not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate
interests.'
The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose
position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter
any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy."
This is all U.S. troops have been fighting and dying for since the Berlin Wall came down.
Not "freedom", not "democracy" and certainly not the American people. Just continual
uncontested domination of this planet at all cost: domination of its resources, its trade
routes, its seas, its air, and its humans, no matter how many lives need to risked and snuffed
out in order to achieve it. The U.S. has
killed millions and
displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century in the reckless pursuit of
that goal.
And, as Smedley Butler spelled out 86 years ago in his still-relevant book War is a Racket , U.S.
military personnel have been dying for profit.
Nothing gets the gears of industry turning like war, and nothing better creates chaotic Wild
West environments of shock and confusion during which more wealth
and power can be grabbed. War profiteers pour immense resources into lobbying ,
think tanks and campaign donations to manipulate and bribe policy makers into making decisions
which promote war and military expansionism,
with astounding success . This is all entirely legal.
It's important to spread awareness that this is all U.S. troops have been dying for, because
the fairy tale that they fight for freedom and for their countrymen is a major propaganda
narrative used in military recruitment. While poverty plays a
significant role in driving up enlistments as predatory recruiters target poor and middle
class youth promising them a future in the nation with the worst income
inequality in the industrialized world, the fact that the aggressively propagandized
glorification of military "service" makes it a more esteemed career path than working at a
restaurant or a grocery store means people are more likely to enlist.
Without all that propaganda deceiving people into believing that military work is something
virtuous, military service would be the most shameful job anyone could possibly have; other
stigmatized jobs like sex work would be regarded as far more noble. You'd be less reluctant to
tell your extended family over Christmas that you're a janitor at a seedy massage parlor than
that you've enlisted in the U.S. military, because instead of congratulating and praising you,
your Uncle Murray would look at you and say, "So you're gonna be killing kids for crude
oil?"
And that's exactly how it should be. Continuing to uphold the lie that U.S. troops fight and
die for a good cause is helping to ensure a steady supply of teenagers to feed into the gears
of the imperial war machine. Stop feeding into the lie that the war machine is worth killing
and being killed for. Not out of disrespect for the dead, but out of reverence for the
living.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those
of Consortium News .
Em , June 1, 2021 at 09:52
Instead of annually memorializing those dead youth, who were, in one way or the other,
coerced to go off to foreign lands to kill or be killed, by other youth, in the name of a
piece of dead symbolic cloth, wouldn't it be a better idea to honor them, while alive in the
prime of living (the world over) by affording them the means to learn, leading by example, to
discover for themselves – how to think critically as to what the real options are,
collectively as well as individually, for survival and thriving.
CNfan , June 1, 2021 at 04:06
"Global domination" for the benefit of a predatory financial oligarchy.
Peter Loeb , June 1, 2021 at 09:11
Read William Hartung's "Prophets of War " to understand the dynamics.
Thank you all for speaking your truth in this dystopian human universe so apparently
lacking human reason and understanding. As is so wisely introduced and recognized herein, the
murderous depravity of the "Wolfwitz Doctrine" being and remaining the public policy
formulation of our national governance, both foreign and domestic, is a fact that every U.S.
citizen should consider and understand on this Memorial Day.
As Usual,
EA
Realist , May 31, 2021 at 17:27
Well stated, perfectly logical again on this subject as always, Caitlin. You out the
warmongers for their game to fleece the public and rape the world all so a handful of already
fat, lazyass but enormously wealthy and influential people can acquire, without the slightest
bit of shame, yet more, more and more of everything there is to be had. You and General
Butler.
Will this message get through, this time? Maybe the billionth time is the charm, eh? Can
the scales suddenly fall from the eyes of the 330 million Americans who will then demand an
immediate end to the madness? On the merits, it's the only conclusion that might realise any
actual justice for our country and the rest of the world upon whose throat it keeps a knee
firmly planted.
Sorry, nothing of the sort shall ever happen, not as long as the entire mercenary mass
media obeys its corporate ownership and speaks nothing but false narratives every minute of
every day. Not as long as the educational system is really nothing more than a propaganda
indoctrination experience for every child born in the glorious USA! Not as long as every
politician occupying any given office is just a bought and paid for tool of the Matrix with
great talents for convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 3, or 5, or whatever is convenient at
the time to benefit the ledgers of their plutocrat masters.
What better illustrates the reality of my last assertion than the occupancy of the White
House by Sleepy/Creepy Joe Biden who, through age alone, has been reduced to nothing more
than a sack of unresponsive meat firmly trussed up with ropes and pulleys that his handlers
pull this way or that to create an animatronic effect apparently perfectly convincing to the
majority of the American public? Or so they say, based upon some putative election
results.
Truly, thanks for the effort, Caitlin. I do appreciate that some have a grasp on the
truth. I look forward to its recapitulation by yourself and many others to no effect on every
Memorial Day in the USA. It would be unrealistic of me to say otherwise.
Rael Nidess, M.D. , May 31, 2021 at 12:54
Kudos for being one of a very few to mention the central driving ethic behind U.S. foreign
policy since the demise of the USSR: The Wolfowitz Doctrine. As central today as it was when
first published.
"... After Epstein's 2019 arrest, it emerged that Epstein had "directed" Bill Gates to donate $2 million to the MIT lab in 2014. Epstein also allegedly secured a $5 million donation from Leon Black for the lab. Ito was forced to resign his post as the lab's director shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest. ..."
"... Epstein appears to have become involved with Brockman as early as 1995, when he helped to finance and rescue a struggling book project that was managed by Brockman. ..."
"... According to former Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe, Bill Clinton had been the main focus of Epstein's sexual blackmail operation in the 1990s, a claim supported by Epstein victim testimony and Epstein's intimate involvement with individuals who were close to the former president at the time. ..."
"... Despite tensions arising from the Clinton administration's pursuit of Microsoft's monopoly in the late 1990s, the Gates and Clinton relationship had thawed by April 2000, when Gates attended the White House " Conference on the New Economy ." Attendees besides Gates included close Epstein associate Lynn Forester (now Lady de Rothschild) and then secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, who has also come under fire for his Epstein ties. ..."
"... Huffington Post ..."
"... Huffington Post ..."
"... Black was deeply tied to Epstein, even having Epstein manage his personal "philanthropic" foundation for several years, even after Epstein's first arrest. ..."
"... Indeed, 2013 was also the year that the Gates mansion systems engineer, Rick Allen Jones, began to be investigated by Seattle police for his child porn and child rape collection, which contained over six thousand images and videos. Despite the gravity of his crime, when Jones was arrested at the Gates mansion a year later, he was not jailed after his arrest but was merely ordered "to stay away from children," according to local media reports. From Melinda's perspective, this scandal, combined with Bill Gates's growing association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have posed a threat to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's reputation, well before Epstein's 2019 arrest. ..."
"... Evening Standard ..."
"... The likely reason for the continued cover-up of the true extent of Epstein's ties to Gates has much more to do with Gates's company Microsoft than with Bill Gates himself. While it is now permissible to report on ties that discredit Gates's personal reputation, the information that could tie his relationship with Epstein and the Maxwells to Microsoft has been omitted. ..."
"... If, as the Evening Standard ..."
"... This is hardly an isolated incident, as similar efforts have been made to cover up (or memory hole) the ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to other prominent Silicon Valley empires, such as those led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk . One key reason for this is that the Epstein network's blackmail operation involved not only sexual blackmail but electronic forms of blackmail ..."
"... That Isabel and Christine Maxwell were able to forge close business ties with Microsoft after having been part of the front company that played a central role in PROMIS-related espionage and after explicitly managing their subsequent companies with the admitted intention to "rebuild" their spy father's work and legacy, strongly points to the probability of at least some Microsoft products having been compromised in some fashion, likely through alliances with Maxwell-run tech companies. The lack of mainstream media concern over the documented ties of the Epstein network to other top Microsoft executives of the past, such as Nathan Myhrvold, Linda Stone, and Steven Sinofsky, makes it clear that, while it may be open season on the relationship between Bill Gates and Epstein, such is not the case for Microsoft and Epstein. ..."
"... The ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to Silicon Valley, not just to Microsoft, are part of a broader attempt to cover up the strong intelligence component in the origin of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies. Much effort has been invested in creating a public perception that these companies are strictly private entities despite their deep, long-standing ties to the intelligence agencies and militaries of the United States and Israel . The true breadth of the Epstein scandal will never be covered by mainstream media because so many news outlets are owned by these same Silicon Valley oligarchs or depend on Silicon Valley for online reader engagement. ..."
"... Perhaps the biggest reason why the military/intelligence origins and links to the current Silicon Valley oligarchy will never be honestly examined, however, is that those very entities are now working with breakneck speed to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which would make artificial intelligence, automation, mass electronic surveillance, and transhumanism central to human society. One of the architects of this "revolution," Klaus Schwab, said earlier this year that rebuilding and maintaining trust with the public was critical to that project. However, were the true nature of Silicon Valley, including its significant ties to serial child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and his network, to emerge, the public's trust would be significantly eroded, thus threatening what the global oligarchy views as a project critical to its survival ..."
"... What a menace these philanthropic organizations are to the ordinary and lowly. These billionaire creeps never stop plotting and figuring out even more ways to stomp on people and push their creepy agendas, which remain forever hidden. ..."
It further appears that Bill Gates, then head of Microsoft, made a personal investment in
CommTouch at the behest of Isabel Maxwell. In an October 2000
article published in the Guardian , Isabel "jokes about persuading Bill Gates to
make a personal investment" in CommTouch sometime during this period.
The Guardian article then oddly notes, regarding Isabel Maxwell and Bill Gates:
"In a faux southern belle accent, [Isabel] purrs: 'He's got to spend $375m a year to keep
his tax-free status, why not allow me to help him.' She explodes with laughter."
Given that individuals as wealthy as Gates cannot have "tax-free status" and that this
article was published soon after the creation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
Isabel's statements suggest that it was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which
manages the foundation's endowment assets, that made this sizable investment in CommTouch.
Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the odd way in which Isabel describes her dealings
with Gates ("purring," speaking in a fake Southern accent), describing her interactions with
him in a way not found in any of her numerous other interviews on a wide variety of topics.
This odd behavior may be related to Isabel's previous interactions with Gates and/or the
mysterious relationship between Gates and Epstein during this time.
Isabel Maxwell as
CommTouch President
After 2000, CommTouch's business and clout expanded rapidly, with Isabel Maxwell
subsequently crediting investments from Microsoft, led by Gates, and Paul Allen for the
company's good fortune and the success of its effort to enter the US market. Maxwell, as quoted
in the 2002 book Fastalliances , states that Microsoft viewed CommTouch as a key "distribution
network," adding that "Microsoft's investment in us put us on the map. It gave us instant
credibility, validated our technology and service in the marketplace." By this time,
Microsoft's ties to CommTouch had deepened with new partnerships, including
CommTouch's hosting of Microsoft Exchange .
Though Isabel Maxwell was able to secure lucrative investments and alliances for CommTouch
and saw its products integrated into key software and hardware components produced and sold by
Microsoft and other tech giants, she was unable to improve the company's dire financial
situation, with CommTouch netting a loss of
$4.4 million in 1998 and similar losses well into the 2000s, with net losses totalling $24 million in 2000 (just one
year after the sizable investments from Microsoft, Paul Allen and Gates). The losses continued
even after Isabel formally left the company and became president emeritus in 2001. By 2006, the
company was over $170 million in debt. Isabel Maxwell left her position at CommTouch in 2001
but for years retained a sizable amount of CommTouch stock valued at the time at around $9.5
million . Today, Isabel Maxwell is, among other things, a " technology pioneer " of the World
Economic Forum.
Another indication of a relationship between Epstein and Gates prior to 2001 is Epstein's
cozy ties with Nathan Myhrvold, who joined Microsoft in the 1980s and became the company's
first chief technology officer in 1996. At the time, Myhrvold was one of Gates's closest
advisers, if not the closest, and cowrote Gates's 1996 book, The Road Ahead , which
sought to explain how emerging technologies would impact life in the years and decades to
come.
In December of the same year that he became Microsoft's CTO, Myhrvold traveled on Epstein's
plane from Kentucky to New Jersey, and then again in January 1997 from New Jersey to Florida.
Other passengers accompanying Myhrvold on these flights included Alan Dershowitz and "GM,"
presumably Ghislaine Maxwell. It is worth keeping in mind that this is the same period when
Gates had a documented relationship with Ghislaine's sister Isabel.
In addition, in the 1990s, Myhrvold traveled with Epstein in Russia alongside Esther Dyson , a digital
technology consultant who has been called "the most influential woman
in all the computer world." She currently has close ties to Google as well as the DNA testing
company 23andme and is a member of and
agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum. Dyson later stated that the meeting with
Epstein had been planned by Myhrvold. The meeting appears to have taken place in 1998, based on
information posted on Dyson's social media accounts.
One photo features Dyson and Epstein, with a time stamp indicating April 28, 1998, posing
with Pavel Oleynikov, who appears to have been
an employee of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center. In that photo, they are standing in front of
the house of the late Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and dissident, who is
alleged to have had ties to US intelligence.
Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, were supporters of Zionist causes
.
The photos were taken in Sarov, where the Russian Federal Nuclear Center is based. That same
day, another photo was taken that
shows Epstein inside a classroom full of teens, apparently also in Sarov, given the time
stamp.
Another Dyson
image , one without a visible time stamp but with a caption stating the photo was taken "at
Microsoft Russia in Moscow" in April 1998, shows Nathan Myhrvold. Dyson's caption further
states, "This was the beginning of a three-week trip during which Nathan and a variety of
hangers-on (including a bodyguard) explored the state of post-Soviet science." Epstein appears
to be one of the "hangers-on," given the photographs, dates, and the described purpose of the
trip.
Myhrvold and Epstein apparently had more in common than an interest in Russian scientific
advances. When Myhrvold left Microsoft to cofound Intellectual Ventures,
Vanity Fair reported that he had received Epstein at the firm's office with "young
girls" in tow who appeared to be "Russian models." A source close to Myhrvold and cited by
Vanity Fair claimed that Myhrvold spoke openly about borrowing Epstein's jet and
staying at his homes in Florida and New York. Vanity Fair also noted that Myhrvold has
been accused of having sex with minors provided by Epstein by none other than Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz, who stands accused of the same crime and who had previously flown
with Myhrvold on Epstein's private plane.
In addition, a former colleague of Myhrvold's at Microsoft later developed her own ties to
Epstein. Linda Stone , who joined
Microsoft in 1993 and worked directly under Myhrvold, eventually became a Microsoft vice
president. She introduced Epstein to Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab after Epstein's first arrest.
"He has a tainted past, but Linda assures me that he's awesome," Ito later said in an email to
three MIT staffers. In Epstein's famous little black book, there are several phone numbers for
Stone, and her emergency contact is listed as Kelly Bovino, a former model and alleged Epstein
coconspirator. After Epstein's 2019 arrest, it emerged that Epstein
had "directed" Bill Gates to donate $2 million to the MIT lab in 2014. Epstein also
allegedly secured a $5 million donation from Leon Black for the lab. Ito was forced to resign
his post as the lab's director shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest.
Nathan Myhrvold , Linda Stone , Joi Ito, Esther Dyson , and Bill Gates were all members of the Edge
Foundation community (edge.org website), alongside several other Silicon Valley icons. Edge,
which is described as an exclusive organization of intellectuals " redefining who and what we are ," was created by John
Brockman, a self-described "cultural impresario" and noted literary agent. Brockman is best
known for his deep ties to the art world in the late 1960s, though lesser
known are his various "management consulting" gigs for the Pentagon and White House during
that same period. Edge, which
the Guardian once called "the world's smartest website," is an exclusive online
symposium affiliated with what Brockman calls "the Third Culture." Epstein appears to have
become involved with Brockman as early as 1995, when he helped to finance and rescue a
struggling book project that was managed by Brockman.
Edge, however, is more than just a website. For decades, it was also instrumental in
bringing together tech executives, scientists who were often Brockman's clients, and Wall
Street financiers through its Millionaires' Dinner, first held in 1985. In 1999, this event
rebranded as the Billionaires' Dinner, and Epstein became intimately involved in these affairs
and the Edge Foundation itself. Epstein was photographed attending several of the dinners as
was Sarah Kellen, Ghislaine Maxwell's chief "assistant" and coconspirator in the
Epstein/Maxwell-run sex trafficking and blackmail scheme.
Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft and
Jeffrey Epstein at the 2000 Edge Billionaires' Dinner Source: https://www.edge.org/igd/1200
From 2001 to 2017, Epstein
funded $638,000 out of a total of $857,000 raised by Edge. During this period, there were
several years when Epstein was Edge's only donor. Epstein stopped giving in 2015, which was
incidentally the same year that Edge decided to discontinue its annual Billionaires' Dinner
tradition. In addition, the only award Edge has ever given out, the $100,000 Edge of
Computation prize, was awarded in 2005 to Quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch -- it was
funded entirely by Epstein. A year before he began donating heavily to Edge, Epstein had
created the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation to "fund and support cutting edge science around the
world."
Since the Epstein scandal, regular attendees of the Billionaires' Dinner, sometimes called
the Edge annual dinner, have referred to the event as an "influence operation." If one follows
the money, it appears it was an influence operation largely benefitting one man, Jeffrey
Epstein, and his network. The evidence points toward Myhrvold and Gates as being very much a
part of that network, even before Epstein's involvement in Edge increased
significantly.
It is worth exploring the ties between the "philanthropic" endeavors of Bill Gates and Bill
Clinton in the early 2000s, particularly given Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's ties to the
Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative during that period. According to
former Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe, Bill Clinton
had been the main focus of Epstein's sexual blackmail operation in the 1990s,
a claim supported by Epstein victim testimony and Epstein's intimate involvement with
individuals who were close to the former president at the time.
Bill Gates at the White
House Conference on the New Economy in 2000, Source: LA Times
Despite tensions arising from the Clinton administration's pursuit of Microsoft's
monopoly in the late 1990s, the Gates and Clinton relationship had thawed by April 2000, when
Gates attended the White House " Conference on
the New Economy ." Attendees besides
Gates included close Epstein associate Lynn Forester (now Lady de Rothschild) and then
secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, who has also come under fire for his Epstein
ties. Another attendee was White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty, whose special
assistant Mark Middleton met with Epstein
at least three times at the Clinton White House. Middleton was fired after press reports
surfaced detailing his ties to illegal donations linked to foreign governments that had been
made to Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. Another participant in the conference was Janet
Yellen, Biden's current Secretary of the Treasury.
Gates spoke at a conference panel entitled "Closing the Global Divide: Health, Education and
Technology." He discussed how the mapping of the human genome would result in a new era of
technological breakthroughs and discussed the need to offer internet access to everyone to
close the digital divide and allow the "new" internet-based economy to take shape. At the time,
Gates was backing a
company , along with American Telecom billionaire Craig McCaw, that hoped to establish a
global internet service provider monopoly through a network of low-orbit satellites. That
company, Teledesic, shut down between 2002 and 2003 and is credited as being the
inspiration for Elon Musk's Starlink.
Bill Clinton and Bill Gates entered the world of philanthropy around the same time, with the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launching in 2000 and the Clinton Foundation, in 2001. Not
only that but Wired described the
two foundations as being "at the forefront of a new era in philanthropy, in which decisions --
often referred to as investments -- are made with the strategic precision demanded of business
and government, then painstakingly tracked to gauge their success."
Other media outlets, however, such as the Huffington
Post , challenged that these foundations engaged in "philanthropy" and asserted that
calling them such was causing "the rapid deconstruction of the accepted term." The
Huffington Post further noted that the Clinton Global Initiative (part of the Clinton
Foundation), the Gates Foundation, and a few similar organizations "all point in the direction
of blurring the boundaries between philanthropy, business and non-profits." It noted that this
model for "philanthropy" has been promoted by the World Economic Forum and the Milken
Institute. It is also worth noting that several of Epstein's own "philanthropic" vehicles were
also created just as this new era in philanthropy was beginning.
The Milken Institute was founded by
Michael Milken , the notorious Wall Street "junk bond king," who was indicted on 98 counts
of racketeering and securities fraud in 1989. He served little prison time and was ultimately
pardoned by Donald Trump. Milken committed his crimes while working alongside Leon Black
and Ron Perelman at Drexel
Burnham Lambert before its scandalous collapse. Black was deeply tied to Epstein, even
having Epstein manage his personal
"philanthropic" foundation for several years, even after Epstein's first arrest.
Perelman was a major Clinton donor whose 1995 fundraiser for the then president was attended by
Epstein and whose companies offered jobs to Webster Hubbell and Monica Lewinsky after their
respective scandals in the Clinton administration. Like Gates, Milken has transformed his
reputation for ruthlessness in the corporate world into one of a "prominent philanthropist."
Much of his "philanthropy" benefits the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlements in
occupied Palestine.
Years after creating their foundations, Gates and Clinton discussed how they have "long
bonded over their shared mission" of normalizing this new model of philanthropy. Gates
spoke to
Wired in 2013 about "their forays into developing regions" and "cites the close
partnerships between their organizations." In that interview, Gates revealed that he had met
Clinton before he had become president, stating, "I knew him before he was president, I knew
him when he was president, and I know him now that he's not president."
Also in that interview, Clinton stated that after he left the White House he sought to focus
on two specific things. The first is the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which he
stated exists "thanks largely to funding from the Gates Foundation," and the second is the
Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), "where I try to build a global network of people to do their
own thing."
The Clinton Health Access Initiative first received an $11
million donation from the Gates Foundation in 2009. Over the last twelve years, the Gates
Foundation has donated more than $497 million to CHAI. CHAI was initially founded in 2002 with
the mission of tackling HIV/AIDS globally through "strong government
relationships" and addressing "market inefficiencies." The Gates Foundation's significant
donations, however, began not long after CHAI's expansion
into malaria diagnostics and treatments. Notably, in 2011, Tachi Yamada, the former president
of the Gates Foundation's Global Health program, joined CHAI's board alongside Chelsea
Clinton.
Bill Gates and Bill Clinton at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in 2010
Regarding the CGI, Epstein's defense lawyers argued in
court in 2007 that Epstein had been "part of the original group that conceived of the
Clinton Global Initiative," which was first launched in 2005. Epstein's lawyers described the
CGI as a project "bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement
innovative solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges." The Gates Foundation
gave the CGI a total of $2.5 million between 2012 and 2013 in addition to its massive donations
to the CHAI and an additional $35 million to the Clinton Foundation itself. In addition to the
Gates Foundation donations, Gates's Microsoft has been intimately involved in other
"philanthropic" projects backed by Clinton.
In addition to these ties,
Hillary Clinton established a partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the Gates
Foundation in 2014 as part of the Clintons' No Ceilings initiative. That partnership sought to
"gather and analyze data about the status of women and girls' participation around the world"
and involved the two foundations working "with leading technology partners to collect these
data and compile them." Months before the partnership was announced, Gates and Epstein met for
dinner and discussed the Gates Foundation and philanthropy, according to the
New York Times . During Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful run for president in 2016,
both Bill and Melinda Gates were on her
short list as potential options for vice president.
In addition, Epstein attempted to become involved in the Gates Foundation directly, as seen
by his efforts to convince the Gates Foundation to partner with JP Morgan on
a multibillion-dollar "global health charitable fund" that would have resulted in hefty
fees paid out to Epstein, who was very involved with JP Morgan at the time. Though that fund
never materialized, Epstein and Gates did discuss Epstein becoming involved in Gates's
philanthropic efforts. Some of these contacts were not reported by the mainstream press until
after the Bill and Melinda Gates divorce announcement. Yet, as mentioned, it was known that
Epstein had "directed" Gates to donate to at least one organization -- $2 million in 2014 to
the MIT Media Lab.
Recent revelations about Gates and Epstein meetings that took place between 2013 and 2014
have further underscored the importance Epstein apparently held in the world of billionaire
"philanthropy," with Gates reportedly claiming that Epstein was
his "ticket" to winning a Nobel Prize.
Norwegian media, however, reported in October 2020 that Gates and Epstein had met the Nobel
Committee chair, which failed to make a splash in international media at the time. It is worth
asking if Epstein managed to arrange such meetings with other individuals who also coveted
Nobel Prizes and if any such individuals later received those prizes. If Epstein had such
connections, it is unlikely that he would use them only once in the case of Bill Gates, given
the vastness of his network, particularly in the tech and science worlds.
The year 2013 is also when Bill
and Melinda Gates together met with Epstein at his New York residence, after which Melinda
allegedly began asking her soon-to-be ex-husband to distance himself from Epstein. While the
stated reason for this, in the wake of the Gateses' divorce announcement, was that Melinda was
put off by Epstein's past and his persona, it could potentially be related to other concerns
about Melinda's reputation and that of the foundation that shares her name.
Indeed, 2013 was also the year that the Gates mansion systems engineer, Rick Allen
Jones, began to be investigated by Seattle police for his child porn and child rape collection,
which contained over six thousand images and videos. Despite the gravity of his crime, when
Jones was
arrested at the Gates mansion a year later, he was not jailed after his arrest but was
merely ordered "to stay away from children," according to local media reports. From Melinda's
perspective, this scandal, combined with Bill Gates's growing association with convicted
pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have posed a threat to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's
reputation, well before Epstein's 2019 arrest.
2013 was also the year that the Maxwells become involved in the Clinton Foundation. That
year, Ghislaine Maxwell's TerraMar Project, which officially supported UN Sustainable
Development Goals as they relate the world's oceans,
made a $1.25 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of an effort to
form a Sustainable Oceans Alliance. TerraMar shut down shortly after Epstein's 2019
arrest.
Isabel Maxwell and Al Seckel at the World Economic Forum's 2011 Annual Meeting
Notably, Ghislaine's TerraMar Project was in many ways the successor to Isabel Maxwell's
failed Blue World Alliance, which was also ostensibly focused on the world's oceans. Blue World
Alliance was set up by Isabel and her now deceased husband Al Seckel, who had hosted a
"scientific conference" on Epstein's island. The Blue World Alliance also went under the name
Globalsolver Foundation, and Xavier Malina, Christine Maxwell's son, was listed as
Globalsolver's liaison to the Clinton Foundation. He was previously an intern at the Clinton
Global Initiative.
Malina
later work ed in the Obama administration at the Office of White House Personnel. He now
works for Google. It is also worth noting that during this same period, Isabel Maxwell's son,
Alexander Djerassi ,
was chief of staff at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the Hillary Clinton–run State
Department.
While the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation intermingled, and the latter had ties
to Epstein and Maxwell, it also appears that Epstein had significant influence over two of the
most prominent science advisers to Bill Gates over the last fifteen years -- Melanie Walker and
Boris Nikolic.
A screenshot from a 2019 presentation Melanie Walker gave for Rockefeller
Foundation, where she is a fellow. Source: YouTube
Melanie Walker , now a celebrated neurosurgeon, met Jeffrey Epstein in 1992 soon after she
graduated from college, when he offered her a Victoria's Secret modelling job. Such offers were
often made by Epstein and his accomplices when recruiting women into his operation and it is
unclear if Walker ever actually worked as a model for the Leslie Wexner-owned company. She then
stayed at a New York apartment building associated with Epstein's trafficking operations during
visits to New York, but it is unclear how long she stayed there or at other Epstein-owned
properties. After she graduated from medical school in 1998, she became Epstein's science
adviser for at least a year. By 1999, she had grown so close to Prince Andrew that she
attended
a Windsor Castle birthday celebration hosted by the Queen along with Epstein and Ghislaine
Maxwell. During this period, Melanie appears on Epstein's flight logs under her birth name , Melanie
Starnes , though it looks like "Starves" on the flight logs.
The close relationship between Prince Andrew and Melanie Walker came under scrutiny after
Epstein's former housekeeper at the Zorro Ranch property, Deidre Stratton,
stated in an interview that Prince Andrew had been "given" a "beautiful young neurosurgeon"
while he stayed at Epstein's New Mexico property. Given that only one neurosurgeon was both
close to Prince Andrew and a part of Epstein's entourage at the time, it seems highly likely
that this woman "gifted" to Andrew was Melanie Walker. According to Stratton, Andrew "kept
company" with this woman for three days. The arrangement was set up by Epstein, who was not at
the property at the time. The exact timing of the stay is uncertain, but it likely took place
between 1999 and 2001.
"At the time, Jeffrey had this, she supposedly was a neurosurgeon, quite young, beautiful,
young and brilliant, and she stayed in the home with him At one point we had all these
different teas and you could pick the teas that you wanted and she asked me to find one that
would make Andrew more horny.
I'm guessing she understood her job was to entertain him because I guess, the fear, I
don't know; the fear would be that Andrew would say, "No I didn't really find her that
attractive." . . . He would tell Jeffrey that and then she would be on the ropes.
I'm guessing that, another theory is, that Jeffrey probably had her on retainer and she
knew what her job would be, should be, to make these people happy. . . . Sex was all they
thought about. I mean, I know for sure that Jeffrey would ideally like three massages a
day."
Sometime later, Walker moved to Seattle and began living with then Microsoft executive
Steven Sinofsky, who now serves as a
board partner at the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. Andreesen Horowitz notably
backs Carbyne911, the Israel intelligence-linked precrime start-up funded by Epstein and his
close associate, former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak, as well as another Israeli
intelligence-linked tech company led by Barak,
called Toka . Toka recently won contracts with the governments of Moldova, Nigeria, and
Ghana through the World Bank, where Melanie Walker is currently a director and a former special
adviser to its president. It is unclear when, how and under what circumstances Walker met
Sinofsky.
After moving to Seattle to be with Sinofsky and after a brief stint as a "practitioner in
the developing world" in China with the World Health Organization, Walker was hired as a senior
program officer by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006. Given that the main feature
of Walker's resume at the time was having been a science adviser to another wealthy
"philanthropist," Jeffrey Epstein, her hire by the Gates Foundation for this critical role
further underscores how Bill Gates, at the very least, not only knew who Epstein was but knew
enough about his scientific interests and investments to want to hire Walker. Walker went on to
become deputy director for Global Development as well as a deputy director of Special
Initiatives at the foundation. According to
the Rockefeller Foundation , where she is a fellow, Walker later advised Gates on issues
pertaining to neurotechnology and brain science for Gates's
secretive company bgC3 , which Gates
originally registered as a think tank under the name Carillon Holdings. According to
federal filings,
bgC3's focus areas were "scientific and technological services," "industrial analysis and
research," and "design and development of computer hardware and software."
During her time at the Gates Foundation, Walker introduced Boris Nikolic, Gates's science
adviser, to Epstein. Today, Melanie Walker is the cochair of the World Economic Forum's Global
Future Council on Neurotechnology and Brain Science, having previously been named a WEF Young
Global Leader. She also advises the World Health Organization, which is closely linked to Bill
Gates's "philanthropy."
At the WEF, Walker wrote an article in 2016 entitled "
Healthcare in 2030: Goodbye Hospital, Hello Home-spital ," in which she discusses how
wearable devices, brain-machine interfaces, and injectable/swallowable robotic "medicines" will
be the norm by 2030. Years before COVID-19 and the Great Reset–inspired efforts to change
health care in just this way, Walker wrote that while the dystopian scenario she was painting
"sounds crazy . . . most of these technologies are either almost ready for prime time, or in
development." Of course, a lot of those technologies took shape thanks to the patronage of her
former bosses, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates.
In the case of Boris Nikolic, after being introduced to Epstein through Walker, he
attended
a 2011 meeting with Gates and Epstein where he was photographed alongside James Staley,
then a senior JP Morgan executive, and Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and a
close Epstein associate. Nikolic was chief adviser for science and technology to Bill Gates at
the time, advising both the
Gates Foundation and bgC3. According to the mainstream narrative, this is supposed to be the
first time that Gates and Epstein had ever met. In addition, this may have been when Epstein
pitched the joint Gates Foundation–JP Morgan "global health charitable fund."
The 2011
meeting at Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan mansion attended by James E. Staley, Larry Summers,
Jeffery Epstein, Bill Gates and Boris Nikolic
In 2014, Nikolic " waxed
enthusiastic " about Epstein's supposed penchant for financial advice ahead of a public
offering for a gene-editing company that Nikolic had
a $42 million stake in . Notably, both Nikolic and Epstein were clients of the same group
of bankers at JP Morgan, with Bloomberg later reporting that Epstein regularly helped those
bankers attract wealthy new clients.
In 2016, Nikolic cofounded Biomatics capital, which invests in health-related
companies at "the convergence of genomics and digital data" that are "enabling the development
of superior therapeutics, diagnostics and delivery models." Nikolic founded Biomatics with
Julie Sunderland, formerly the director of the Gates Foundation's Strategic Investment
Fund.
At least three of the companies backed by Biomatics -- Qihan Biotech , eGenesis , and
Editas -- were cofounded by George Church, a Harvard geneticist with deep ties to Epstein
and also closely associated with the Edge Foundation. Biomatics investment in Qihan Biotech is
no longer listed on the
Biomatics website. Church's Qihan Biotech seeks to produce human tissues and organs inside pigs
for transplantation into humans, while eGenesis seeks to genetically modify pig organs for use
in humans. Editas produces CRISPR gene-editing "medicines" and is also backed by the Gates
Foundation as well as Google Ventures.
After Epstein's death in 2019, it was revealed that Nikolic had been named the "successor
executor" of Epstein's estate, further suggesting close ties to Epstein despite Nikolic's
claims to the contrary. After details of Epstein's will were made public, Nikolic did not sign
a form indicating his willingness to be executor and
did not ultimately serve in that role.
Despite the relatively abrupt shift in the mainstream media regarding what is acceptable to
discuss regarding the Jeffrey Epstein–Bill Gates relationship, many of these same media
outlets refuse to acknowledge much of the information contained in this investigative report.
This is particularly true in the case of the Evening Standard article and Bill Gates's
odd relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell's sister Isabel and CommTouch, the company Isabel
previously led.
The likely reason for the continued cover-up of the true extent of Epstein's ties to
Gates has much more to do with Gates's company Microsoft than with Bill Gates himself. While it
is now permissible to report on ties that discredit Gates's personal reputation, the
information that could tie his relationship with Epstein and the Maxwells to Microsoft has been
omitted.
If, as the Evening Standard reported, Epstein did make millions out of his
business ties with Gates prior to 2001 and if Gates's ties to Isabel Maxwell and the Israeli
espionage–linked company CommTouch were to become public knowledge, the result could
easily be a scandal on a par with the PROMIS software affair. Such a disclosure could be very
damaging for Microsoft and its partner the World
Economic Forum , as Microsoft has become a key player in the WEF's Fourth Industrial
Revolution initiatives that range from digital identity and vaccine passports to efforts to
replace human workers with artificial intelligence.
There are clearly powerful actors with a vested interest in keeping the Epstein-Gates
narrative squarely focused on 2011 and later -- not necessarily to protect Gates but more
likely to protect the company itself and other top Microsoft executives who appear to have been
compromised by Epstein and others in the same intelligence-linked network.
This is hardly an isolated incident, as similar efforts have been made to cover up (or
memory hole) the ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to other prominent Silicon Valley empires,
such as those led by
Jeff Bezos and
Elon Musk . One key reason for this is that the Epstein network's blackmail operation
involved not only sexual blackmail but electronic forms of blackmail , something used to
great effect by Robert Maxwell on behalf of Israeli intelligence as part of the PROMIS
operation. Given its nature, electronic forms of blackmail through illegal surveillance or
backdoored software can be used to compromise those in power with something to hide, but who
were uninclined to engage in the exploitation of minors, such as those abused by Epstein.
That Isabel and Christine Maxwell were able to forge close business ties with Microsoft
after having been part of the front company that played a central role in PROMIS-related
espionage and after explicitly managing their subsequent companies with the admitted intention
to "rebuild" their spy father's work and legacy, strongly points to the probability of at least
some Microsoft products having been compromised in some fashion, likely through alliances with
Maxwell-run tech companies. The lack of mainstream media concern over the documented ties of
the Epstein network to other top Microsoft executives of the past, such as Nathan Myhrvold,
Linda Stone, and Steven Sinofsky, makes it clear that, while it may be open season on the
relationship between Bill Gates and Epstein, such is not the case for Microsoft and
Epstein.
The ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to Silicon Valley, not just to Microsoft, are part
of a broader attempt to cover up the strong intelligence component in the origin of Silicon
Valley's most powerful companies. Much effort has been invested in creating a public perception
that these companies are strictly private entities despite their deep, long-standing ties to
the intelligence agencies and militaries of the United
States and
Israel . The true breadth of the Epstein scandal will never be covered by mainstream media
because so many news outlets are owned by these same Silicon Valley oligarchs or depend on
Silicon Valley for online reader engagement.
Perhaps the biggest reason why the military/intelligence origins and links to the
current Silicon Valley oligarchy will never be honestly examined, however, is that those very
entities are now working with breakneck speed to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
which would make artificial intelligence, automation, mass electronic surveillance, and
transhumanism central to human society. One of the architects of this "revolution," Klaus
Schwab, said earlier this year that rebuilding and maintaining trust with the public was
critical to that project. However, were the true nature of Silicon Valley, including its
significant ties to serial child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and his network, to
emerge, the public's trust would be significantly eroded, thus threatening what the global
oligarchy views as a project critical to its survival .
I'm always impressed with the vigorous detail and documentation in your articles. What
a menace these philanthropic organizations are to the ordinary and lowly. These billionaire
creeps never stop plotting and figuring out even more ways to stomp on people and push their
creepy agendas, which remain forever hidden.
If we take ZH commentariat opinions as a representative sample of the US conservatives
opinion, Fauci days are now numbered. And not only because he over 80.
Speaking to Laura Ingraham, Paul asserted that "The emails paint a disturbing picture, a
disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding
gain-of-function research. He knows it to this day, but hasn't admitted it."
The Senator also urged that Fauci's involvement has not been adequately investigated because
in the eyes of Democrats "he could do no wrong".
Paul pointed out that Fauci was denying that there was even any funding for gain of function
research at the Wuhan lab just a few weeks back, a claim which is totally contradicted by his
own emails in which he discusses it.
"In his e-mail, within the topic line, he says "˜acquire of perform research.' He was
admitting it to his non-public underlings seven to eight months in the past," Paul
emphasised.
The Senator also pointed to
the email from Dr. Peter Daszak , President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a group that
directly funded the Wuhan lab gain of function research, thanking Fauci for not giving credence
to the lab leak theory.
Ingraham asked Paul if Fauci could face felony culpability, to which the Senator replied "At
the very least, there is ethical culpability," and Fauci should be fired from his government
roles.
Earlier Paul had reacted to Amazon pulling Fauci's upcoming book from pre-sale:
In softball interviews with MSNBC and CNN Thursday, Fauci dismissed the notion that his
emails show any conflicts of interest, and claimed that it is in China's "best interest" to be
honest about the pandemic origins, adding that the US should not act "accusatory" toward the
communist state.
Roger Stone was given 9 years for lying to Congress. Fauci should be on the same
hook.
truth or go home 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Looks like Fauci is going the way of Gates, but he won't be arrested, because he is
doing the bidding of the overlords.
What could he be arrested for? Let's see: Misappropriation of government funds, lying to
a senator under oath, covering up a criminal operation, operating a conspiracy to deceive
the people of the United States.
Seems like Rand is willing to nail Fauci to the wall, but he is not willing to go after
the big kahuna - the entire hoax - the fake vaxxes, the fake lockdowns, the fake "cases",
the fake death count, the elimination of flu...
Lucky Guesst 10 hours ago
Fauci is owned by big pharma. All the major news channels have at least one big pharma
rat on the board. MSM continues to push the vaccines. They are all in bed together and need
busted up if not taken out.
SummerSausage PREMIUM 15 hours ago
2012- Fauci says weaponized virus research may produce a pandemic but it would be worth
it.
Jan 9, 2017 NIAD memo recommends lifting ban on funding weaponized virus research. Fauci
controls the funds.
Jan 4, 2017 - CIA/FBI/DNC - under Obama's direction are told, essentially, to get
Trump.
Obama is behind release of this virus, creating pandemic panic and lockdown to
facilitate stealing the 2020 election.
OBAMA must be investigated.
play_arrow
CheapBastard 10 hours ago
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak
it."
~ Anonymous
serotonindumptruck 17 hours ago remove link
Call me a pessimist, but I predict no accountability, no malfeasance, no criminal
charges will be filed against Fauci.
We've all witnessed similar criminal behavior being perpetrated by the wealthy elite
which result in no consequences.
Why should this be any different?
(((They))) now know that (((they))) can lie to us with impunity, and get away with
it.
alexcojones 16 hours ago
New Nuremberg Needed Now.
Fauci in the witness chair.
"So, Dr. Fauci, your decisions, your outright lies, led to thousands, perhaps millions
of unnecessary deaths."
Baric & Batwoman published their chimeric coronavirus with ACE2 receptor access in
2015. Funded by Fauci, of course.
Kevin 3 hours ago (Edited)
That document only shows that Gain Of Function research exists - not that the deaths,
falsely attributed to covid are due to the product of that research.
What self-respecting, lab-created, killer virus, supposedly so deadly that it warrants
the shutting down of the entire planet, is incapable of doing any more damage than the flu
does every year?
In the case of the UK, and according to its own official figures, it hasn't even been
able to do that compared to its history of seasonal flu.
So, 2020 was just a blip compared to the past and most of that blip in increased deaths
was due to the insane policies imposed rather than any lab-created Fluzilla. If you
subtract the deaths that occurred due to:
1. Kicking seniors out of hospital and dumping them into nursing homes where they died
because they no longer got the treatment they needed but where they could infect the other,
previously healthy residents.
2. The many tens of thousands of people who had life-saving surgeries and procedures
cancelled.
3. The huge increase in suicides.
..... I doubt there would even be that blip.
If those historically, insignificant 2020 death figures are due to a lab-created,
chimeric coronavirus then that's an epic fail of the scientists and an enormous waste of
money for their education and the G.o.F. research.
However, it has conned enough idiots into believing that there was a Fluzilla in 2020
and got them to beg for jabs that might be how a lab created, chimeric coronavirus with
ACE2 receptor access gets into their bodies and kills them.
The new con that it was a leaked GoF bio-weapon that caused the 2020 'pandemic' is just
a lie upon a lie.
But it will persuade many of the gullible and fence-sitters to get jabbed because they
will have accepted (subconsciously), that the Fluzilla must have existed last year and that
the only way to combat such a bio-weapon is to jab themselves with poison. Ironically, that
will create in their bodies what they fear most.
Befits 9 hours ago remove link
No, you are not thinking clearly. The Covid death numbers were clearly and horrifically
inflated
1) The CDC changed how death certificates were recorded. Co-morbidities ( cancer,
congestive heart failure, COPD for example) that co- morbidity was listed as cause of death
in part one of the death certificate for 2 decades until the CDC changed death
certificates. If that person had for example a flu At that time ( cough, stuffy nose etc)
it might be listed as a contributing factor ( part 2 of death certificate) person died of
co- morbidity but flu was a contributing factor. The CDC reversed these to make sure Covid
was the cause of death- but truth was people died with Covid not from Covid.
2) 95% of Covid listed deaths actually died of co- morbidities- with Covid not from
Covid. The CDC published that only 5% of " Covid " deaths had only Covid- the other 95% had
on average 4 co- morbidities. In other words their cause of death was co- morbidity not
Covid.
3) personal experience. I was a nurse. A close friend's brother had cancer for 7 years-
in and out of remission. He was " diagnosed with Covid via PCR, almost no symptoms but for
a slight cough and runny nose in March 2020. In April his cancer came back his liver shut
down and he was dead by May 2020. He died from liver cancer but his death was recorded as
Covid 19 simply because he had tested positive 60 days before on a Covid PCR test. This is
the fraud the CDC perpetrated.
4) Hospitals received greatly enhanced financial renumeration if a patient was "
diagnosed" with Covid. Compare hospital reimbursement ( Medicare) for a hospitalized Covid
patient v influenza patient - similar symptoms- on or off respirator. Bottom line the
medical system was financially rewarded for diagnosing " Covid" v influenza. Indeed the
hospital did not even have to confirm a " Covid diagnosis with the fraudulent PCR test to
diagnose Covid- just " symptom" based.
5) The PCR test can not diagnose any viral illness- simply by amplification cycles (30
plus) you can " find" Covid from a dead, partial RNA fragment. As Kary Mullis, Nobel prize
inventor of PCR testing said PCR testing is NOT a diagnostic tool. Hospitals and docs,
universities and public health departments, corporations, the CDC, FDA, used false PCR
testing to financially enrich themselves while destroying the lives and livelihoods of
millions inc careers of medical truth- tellers.
Fauci, the CDC, and the FDA knows all of this. Crimes v humanity trials must be
undertaken v every medical person- from Big Pharma, CDC, FDA, Doctor, nurse, hospital
administrator, public health official, corporate leader etc who used this Covid plandemic
for personal benefit or whom through their actions harmed another.
SoDamnMad 17 hours ago
Watch Tucker Carlson's expose on "Why they lied for so long" At 3:29 he goes into Peter
Danzak getting 27 "scientists" to write in the Lancet that the Covid virus didn't come from
the Wuhan Lab but rather from nature (with the HIV spliced into the genome). But he also
tells individuals at UNC NOT to sign the letter so that their gain-of-function research
isn't tied into this. His e-mail goes to Ralph Baric, Antoinette Baric, as well as Andre
Alison and Alexsei Chmura at EcoHealthAlliance who Fauci got the money to for funding GOF
Chinese research.
Fauci is 80. Why was he allowed to stay on so long?
He controls $32 billion in annual grants that all US scientists and researchers depend
on.
There's a whole lot more corruption to explore.
CatInTheHat 8 hours ago remove link
This whole thing feels CONTRIVED
Why does this even matter anymore?
China is NOT the problem here and focusing on CHINA DISTRACTS from a few things
here.
1 FORT DETRIK. A nefarious US BIOWEAPONS lab that Fraudci worked at for 20 years. FD
also works in conjunction with DARPA
2. Whenever it's WAPO or Buzzfeed (FFS!) who breaks a story related to the Rona, I am
convinced that the elite have called them up to DISTRACT the public from something more
important. Maybe that Fort Detrik was the source of the virus transferred to China via the
US MIC/CIA and the Wuhan military games in China in Nov of 2019. 2 weeks later the first
cases showed up at Wuhan.
3. This VACCINE has now killed over 5000 people and since the rollout for children
between 12-16, several hundred have now been hospitalized with MYOCARDITIS OR
PERICARDITIS.. In Israel a study conducted as the vax rolled out in YOUNG MEN, it was
revealed that one in 3,000 was suffering from MYOCARDITIS within 4 days of the jab.
MSM is now reporting on adolescents in several states hospitalized with INFLAMMATION.
... Which they blame on RONA. FUNNY how every one of those states have rolled out the jab
for CHILDREN
WE are being massively LIED too.
Also, Biden's press secretary PSAKI LIED when she said, today, that 63% of the
population has had the jab.
Wrong. Only 41% of the US population has had BOTH jabs. Anti gun Biden is now offering
guns in exchange for a vax in Virginia. And anti marijuana Biden offering MJ in AZ for
those who take the jab. Why the desperation?
For more perspective on the massive deaths piling up due to this jab, in 1976, when 50
people were killed after the Swine flu jab IT WAS PULLED FROM THE MARKET.
Many thousands who have not had the jab are reporting illness after being in close
contact with those who are vaxxed.
Lots and lots to DISTRACT from
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!
ableman28 10 hours ago
True story....one of my VC firms investments was approached by the defense department to
create a wearable lapel style detector for chemical and biological weapons that would work
in very low concentrations giving people time to put on their CBW gear. Our investee said
sure, we'll take a crack at it, but where are we going to get all the biological and
chemical agents to test it with. The DOD response was don't worry, we have everything
you'll need. And they did.
The US bio weapons program was supposedly terminated by Nixon in 1969. And our official
policy is that we don't research or stockpile such things. ********.
Armed Resistance 15 hours ago (Edited) remove link
This virus was engineered at Ft. Detrick. It's the same place that made the
military-grade Anthrax the deep state sent to Tom Daschle and others in government post
9/11 to gin up more fear.
This was a Fauci-coordinated deep state bio weapon they released in Wuhan to kick off
the scamdemic and the "great reset". Releasing it China gave some cover to the deep state
and the people there are under total control of the state. The rest is just filler. Always
about more control.....
BeePee 15 hours ago
The virus was not engineered at Ft. Detrick.
You are a CCP troll.
Sorry you have such a low pay grade job.
Armed Resistance 15 hours ago (Edited)
Anybody who Questions the deep state is a CCP troll? Look in the mirror. You're the one
running cover for these satanists! You rack up downvotes like Jordan did points! ZH'ers can
spot a troll a mile away son.
louie1 PREMIUM 14 hours ago (Edited)
The US way is to put the perpetrators in charge of the inuiry to control the outcome.
Dulles, Zellick, Fauci
Mighty Turban of Gooch 11 hours ago
Our government is corrupt. As long as the Democrats and the MSM have Fauci's back, he
has nothing to worry about no matter what he's done.
He's just a typical lying bureaucrat and lying to the public thru the media outlets, as
we have seen countless times now by countless government 'officials', is not a crime. Lying
under oath however is. But now days we see these guys get away with that too without
consequence.
So don't hold your breath. There is absolutely nothing that can take these guys out.
Even if they throw one of their own under the bus, the best you can ever hope for is a
resignation as criminal charges would never happen.
dustinthewind 16 hours ago (Edited)
"The CDC Foundation operates independently from CDC as a private , nonprofit 501(c)(3)
organization incorporated in the State of Georgia."
"Because CDC is a federal agency , all scientific findings resulting from CDC research
are available to the public and open to the broader scientific community for review."
"The Board of Directors of the CDC Foundation today named Judith A. Monroe, MD, FAAFP,
as the new president and CEO of the CDC Foundation . Monroe joins the CDC Foundation from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ), where she leads the agency's Office
for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support."
Gates is the largest private donor of the CDC and WHO. Gates is part of the World
Economic Forum who controls Fauci which using US taxpayers funds did gain of function
studies first in the US and caught moved to China where it was intentionally leaked to
blame the Chinese. John Kerry is also part of the WEF and is their man in Washington
calling the war mongering narrative against both China and Russia. Gates funded Imperial
College and Ferguson to write the code that was fake and used by many countries to justify
lockdowns. Gates is the largest ag landowner and wants to ban meat. Who just got hacked and
now it is blamed on Russia? Boris is destroying the UK and after a call from Gates gave 500
million pounds to vaccinate third world countries and lockdowns. Both fathers were tied to
Rockefeller Institute. Rand, connect the dots!
Fauci is under attack globally and has shown himself to be unreliable and should be
fired "" PERIOD! All the emails that have come out from an
FOIA request are interesting, and it shows he has information that was credible
concerning a leak from the lab in Wuhan. Let me make this PERFECTLY clear! This was NOT a
DELIBERATE leak by the Chinese government. If China wanted to really hurt the West, the
technology is there where a virus can be used as a delivery system, and as such, it can be
designed to attack specific genetic sequences meaning that it could target just Italian,
Greeks, English, Germans, or whoever.
COVID-19, based upon everything I see from our model and reliable sources, was created
in a lab and was DELIBERATELY unleashed to further this Great Reset. I BELIEVE someone from
this agenda bribed a lab technician to release it in the local community. China did NOT
benefit from this pandemic. The only ones who benefitted were the World Economic Forum
(WEF) consortium, which I know sold stocks and bonds ahead of the crash. They are also in
league with the World Health Organization (WHO), and the head of the WHO is a politician
and not even a doctor. That is like putting me in charge of surgery at a hospital. How can
Tedros Adhanom be in such a position with no background in the subject matter? Tedros appears at the World
Economic Forum and has participated in its agenda. The WHO should be compelled to turn over
ALL emails and communication ASAP. My bet is they pull a Hillary"¦Oh sorry. They
were hacked by Russians who destroyed everything.
The World Economic Forum is at the center of everything. When will someone investigate all
of these connections right down to creating the slogan, Build Back Better? Of course, they
will call this a conspiracy theory so they can avoid having to actually investigate
anything. My point is simple: produce the evidence and prove this is just a conspiracy
theory.
'John Kerry's Think Tank Calls for War With Russia Over Climate Change'
" America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent
national security threat it is."" John Kerry
Recently-appointed Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry has announced his
intention of dealing with the pressing issue of global warming as a national security
concern. "America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent
national security threat it is," the 76-year-old former Secretary of State wrote. "I am
proud to partner with the President-elect, our allies, and the young leaders of the climate
movement to take on this crisis." Kerry is a founding member of the Washington think tank,
the American Security Project (ASP) , whose board is a who's who of retired generals,
admirals and senators.
For the ASP, the primary objectives were:
A huge rebuilding of the United States' military bases,
Countering China in the Pacific,
Preparing for a war with Russia in the newly-melted Arctic.
The ASP recommends "prioritizing the measures that can protect readiness" of the
military to strike at any time, also warning that rising sea levels will hurt the combat
readiness of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Thus, a rebuilding of the U.S.' worldwide
network of military bases is in order.
Fort Detrik a US BIOWEAPONS lab working in tandem with the Wuhan lab. The US is the
leader in BIOWEAPONS research and has 100's of labs across the US and in other
countries.
FRAUDCI having worked at FD for 20 years.
MommickedDingbatter 12 hours ago
Without Nuremberg trials 2.0, this is all meaningless.
Nycmia37 16 hours ago remove link
Follow the science, lol. Just ask yourself who controls the science?? Big drug pharmas,
people is so stupid they believe in everything doctors tell them. The vast majority are on
the field to get rich and enjoy from the big bonuses and trips they get paid in order to
promote a drug. If they speak out they get called a conspiracy person. Nobody cant go
against this mafia because they have the total control, media, politicians, government. We
the people have to self educate about health and finance otherwise we will become zombies
like the majority of people.
SoDamnMad 7 hours ago remove link
Here are the 27 starting with Peter Daszak who signed THE LANCET letter saying ," We
stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not
have a natural origin. "
Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, New York
Charles Calisher, Colorado State University
Dennis Carroll, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, Texas
Fauci is protected at the very highest levels of the oligarchy. So regardless of these
revelations nothing serious will ever happen to him. At worst, he will step down and retire
to his villa in the south of France. Then the controlled MSM will refuse to mention him
again.
Clearing 17 hours ago
Gee, while you're at it, sue Fauci in his individual capacity. He doesn't get immunity
for lying. See below:
In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle that grants government
officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from civil suits unless
the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or
constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known". It is a form of
sovereign immunity less strict than absolute immunity that is intended to protect officials
who "make reasonable but mistaken judgments about open legal questions" extending to "all
[officials] but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law " Qualified
immunity applies only to government officials in civil litigation, and does not protect the
government itself from suits arising from officials' actions.
DemandSider 3 hours ago (Edited)
"PCR is separate from that, it's just a process that's used to make a whole lot of
something out of something. That's what it is. It doesn't tell you that you're sick and it
doesn't tell you that the thing you ended up with really was going to hurt you or anything
like that," Mullis said.
-Nobel Prize winning inventor of PCR being used as a "test" to perpetuate the scamdemic.
Mr. "small government" Rand Paul is only making it worse.
Almachius 2 hours ago
Never mind Fauci. White Supremacists are the greatest threat to America.
Obiden said so.
And Obiden is an honourable man.
Fiscal Reality 14 hours ago
Fauci doesn't give a crap what happens. He got his book deal payoff. He's praying to get
fired so he can cash in on his taxpayer funded pension and get a $10 million contract with
CNN.
2types PREMIUM 13 hours ago
Amazon pulled his book from presale so says the article. Probably in his best interest
to keep his mouth shut right now. Anything he says can and will be used against him. On
second thought.... maybe that's why water carrier Bezos suspended sales?
The murder of MilcÃades Contento marked the beginning of a nearly two-decade
extermination campaign
. From 1984-2002, at least 4,153 UP members - including
two presidential candidates, 14 parliamentarians, 15 mayors, nine mayoral candidates, three
members of the House of Representatives and three senators - were
murdered or disappeared , in what a Colombian court deemed was a "political genocide."
According to data presented to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the purge claimed more than 6,000 victims through
murders, disappearances, torture, forced displacement and other human rights violations. From
May 1984 to December 2002, not a month passed without a murder or disappearance of a UP member.
In the 2002 elections that brought Ãlvaro Uribe to power, the Patriotic Union had been
so thoroughly wiped out that it failed to meet the electoral threshold and the government
removed the party's legal status.
According to a recent investigation by renowned Colombian journalist Alberto Donadio, the
extermination of the Patriotic Union was devised by Betancourt's successor, President Virgilio
Barco Vargas, implementing a plan concocted by of one of the most decorated spies in Israeli
history, Rafael 'Rafi' Eitan.
The revelations underscore the pivotal relationship that has developed between Israel and
Colombia - the United States' respective top allies in the Middle East and Latin America. Both
countries are testing grounds for military weapons and strategies that have long been exported
around the world. Following the success of the U.S. government's Plan Colombia in debilitating
the FARC guerrilla movement, it has been hailed as an exportable counterinsurgency model to be
applied from
Mexico to Afghanistan .
Israel, for its part, maintains the world's largest repression- and weapons-testing
laboratories in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where it has a captive population of
several millions Palestinians.
Through the presence of Rafi Eitan in Colombia, the burgeoning alliance of junior
partners of the U.S. empire deepened. Despite a series of scandals, the Israel-Colombia
relationship has only grown stronger over the years. Under President Iván Duque,
the two countries have renewed ties and Israeli military personnel have trained their Colombian
counterparts in "counter-terrorism."
Yet the systematic murder of the UP remains one of the most extreme cases of political
violence in Latin America. The scale of killing is especially striking because, unlike many of
the bloodiest U.S.-backed regimes of the 1980s, Colombia never became a dictatorship. The
killing of the UP - known among its perpetrators as El Baile Rojo (The Red Dance) - took place in an ostensible
"democracy."
'All intelligence work is a partnership with crime'
Involved in Israeli espionage since the establishment of the state, Eitan is primarily
remembered for capturing the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. However, he also
played a central role in several of the Mossad's most unsavory operations. "All intelligence
work is a partnership with crime. Morals are put aside," Eitan once remarked .
In 1965, Eitan
advised Moroccan King Hassan II on how to abduct and murder the leftist politician Mehdi
Ben Barka.
During a 1983 Mossad mission in the United
States, he disguised himself as an assistant prosecutor in the Israeli Ministry of Justice and
met with the inventor of the PROMIS surveillance software. After a visit to the Department of
Justice, Eitan obtained
the software and had an Israeli working in Silicon Valley install a backdoor in the program.
Fellow Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, (father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the notorious child sex
trafficker and partner-in-crime of Jeffrey Epstein), sold the PROMIS technology to dozens of
countries around the world, including Colombia.
According to a declassified CIA damage
assessment , Eitan urged Pollard to obtain material on
"signals intelligence and dirt on Israeli political figures, any information that would
identify Israeli officials who were providing information to the United States, and any
information on U.S. intelligence operations targeted against Israel."
According to a court document
, Pollard refused some of Eitan's requests "because he suspected that Eitan would use such
studies for improper political blackmail."
The discovery of the spying operation landed Pollard in prison. U.S. federal prosecutors
named Eitan as one of four co-conspirators but declined to file charges. With Eitan at the
center of a national embarrassment, he returned to Israel, never to set foot again in the
U.S.
Nevertheless, Eitan's elite status ensured he landed in a comfortable position. In the
1970s, he had served as deputy to Ariel Sharon, then national security advisor to Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Sharon, then a general in the army, arranged for Eitan to be appointed
as president of Israel Chemicals, the largest state-owned company in the country. This new
position left Eitan with ample free time to leverage his experience in black ops into a
position as a clandestine national security adviser to Colombia's president, Virgilio Barco
Vargas. With the Patriotic Union beginning to coalesce into a formidable political party, Barco
looked for any way to stop them. And Eitan's lifetime of experience waging war against the
Palestinian peasant population made him the perfect man for the job.
Eitan goes to Colombia
In 1985, Colombian President Belisario Betancourt and the FARC rebels negotiated a peace
accord to end nearly three decades of armed conflict. The agreement formalized the creation of
the Patriotic Union and saw ex-guerrillas join with communists, trade unionists, communal
action boards and leftwing intellectuals to form a party that would integrate the FARC into the
electoral political system . As negotiations were underway, Patriotic Union members were being
killed. In May 1986, Liberal Party leader Virgilio Barco won the presidency. Shortly after he
took office, the pace of assassinations of UP members skyrocketed. A whopping 400 members were
assassinated in the first 14 months of his term.
According to an investigation
by Donadio, Barco secretly brought the veteran Mossad agent Rafi Eitan to Colombia on August 7,
1986, seeking advice on how to defeat the FARC. After an initial clandestine meeting in
Colombia's presidential palace, Eitan spent months touring the country with Colombian advisors,
secretly funded by the Colombian energy giant Ecopetrol.
During the second meeting, President Barco explained Eitan's recommendation to Secretary
General Germán Montoya and a figure from the high military command present. Eitan
even offered to preside over the killings himself in exchange for another honorarium, but the
military commander rejected his offer, insisting that an all-Colombian force carry it out.
When Donadio
contacted Villamizar and asked him about the contract with KPI, though not mentioning the
Mossad spy's name, Villamizar answered him with a question. "Rafi Eitan?"
While Eitan sought to keep his activities in Colombia discreet, a profile in the Israeli magazine Makor
Rishon revealed that he played a central role in the March 1989 purchase of 20 Israeli Kfir
fighter jets. Eitan
"organized a visit by top army brass from Colombia - a visit which was followed by the
Colombians ordering many things from the [Israeli] air force, and it brought Israel much
benefit - but he himself was not permitted to participate in the meeting."
Following the purchase, Colombia sent several pilots to Israel for
training. The jets were
flown in numerous operations against the FARC over three subsequent decades.
A retired military officer, Klein started a mercenary firm called Hod Hahanit (Spearhead) in
1984, drawing from the pools of former Israeli police and special operations units.
According to the bookAll Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized
Crime , the mercenary outfit struck its first deal amid the civil war in Lebanon, supplying
the notoriously brutal Christian Phalangist militias - the same force that massacred between
800 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps under direct Israeli military
supervision in September 1982.
In 1987, Klein landed in Colombia to meet with Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Yithzakh Shoshani
and Arik Afek, both of whom had established themselves years before with lucrative deals
selling military equipment in Colombia. Shoshani subsequently
became the main conduit between Klein and his Colombian customers.
In 1990, Afek's decomposing body was
found with multiple gunshot wounds in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport
after a pedestrian noticed the odor. He was reportedly being investigated by the CIA and was
wanted by Colombian authorities.
Klein told me in a telephone interview that he was working through the Israeli Ministry of
Defense and the state-owned weapons manufacturer, Israel Military Industries (IMI), which
had a contract with a Colombian data surveillance company obtained through Colombia's
Ministry of Defense. He said he was originally hired to provide security for the banana-growing
operations in the region of Uraba, where the American fruit company Chiquita had paid
millions of dollars to Colombian death squads.
Shoshani, he explained, worked for a company called AMKAN, which is a subsidiary of IMI. The
Colombian Federation of Cattlemen, long known for its ties to
paramilitaires, contacted Shoshani to have Eitan train a force to fight guerrillas.
With Shoshani guiding him, Klein returned to Israel in 1988 and met with top paramilitary
and military figures as well as wealthy businessmen. All of this, Klein assured me, was done
with the full knowledge of the Israeli government. "You can't do anything without permission
from the Ministry of Defense," he said.
Klein's statement upends the claim of then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who
told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Israeli Defense Ministry had denied Klein's
company a license and warned him to leave the country.
Death squad leader: 'I learned an infinity of themes in Israel'
Klein held three training sessions, each for around 30 people. Assisting him were three
trainers, all of whom were colonels in the Israeli army: Tzadaka Abraham, Teddy Melnik and
Amatzia Shuali.
Klein trained brothers Carlos and Fidel Castaño, the squad leaders who would
go on to form the notoriously violent United Self-Defense Forces, known in Spanish by its
acronym, AUC. Under the patronage of wealthy landowners, drug lords, ranchers, politicians and
the Colombian military, the AUC committed bloodcurdling massacres all over the country, even
using
chainsaws to murder and dismember peasants, all aimed at terrorizing communities into
fleeing from their land. The United Nations estimated in 2016 that the
AUC was responsible for 80% of the deaths in the conflict.
"I received instruction in urban strategies, how to protect oneself, how to kill someone or
what to do when someone is trying to kill you. ...We learned how to stop an armored car and
use fragmentation grenades to enter a target. We practiced with multiple grenade launchers,
and learned how to make accurate shots with RPG-7s, or shoot a cannon shell through a
window."
Castaño also "received lectures on how the world arms business operates,
and how to buy arms."
In addition to the military training he received, Castaño credits
his time in Israel with revolutionizing his entire worldview. During that period, the
soon-to-be mass-murderer became an ardent admirer of Zionism and became convinced it was
possible to stamp out the insurgency at home in Colombia:
"I admire the Jews for their bravery in confronting anti-Semitism, their strategy for
survival in the diaspora, the surety of their Zionism, their mysticism, their religion, and
above all for their nationalism... I learned an infinity of themes in Israel and [to] that
country I owe a part of my culture, my achievements both human and military, and while I
repeat myself, I did not learn only about military training in Israel.
"It was there that I became convinced that it was possible to defeat the guerrillas in
Colombia. I began to see how a people could defend itself from the whole world. I understood
how to get someone involved who had something to lose in a war, by making such a person the
enemy of my enemies. In fact, the idea of "autodefensa" [self-defense] weapons I copied from
the Israelis; every citizen of that country is a potential soldier."
Klein also trained
Jaime Eduardo Rueda Rocha, who in 1989 assassinated Liberal Party presidential candidate Luis
Carlos Galán, the overwhelming favorite to win the upcoming election. Not only
had Klein trained the killer, but the weapon Rueda used was part of a shipment Klein
orchestrated of 500 Israeli-manufactured machine guns from Miami to the Medellin drug cartel,
according to a 1989 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
report . (In 2016, Miguel Alfredo Maza Márquez, head of Colombia's then
Administrative Department of Security (DAS), was convicted of participation in the plot to
murder Galán and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He has since testified
that top-ranking members of the military plotted Galan's assassiation.)
As the revelations that a military reserve officer had been training death squads created
an international scandal, the Israeli government filed charges, convicting Klein of
illegally exporting weapons and military expertise.
In 2001, the Colombian government tried Klein in absentia, sentencing him to eleven years in
prison. In 2007, Klein was arrested in Moscow on a warrant issued by Interpol, and spent three
years in prison. Colombia sought his extradition, but in November 2010 the European Court of
Human Rights ruled that Colombia could not guarantee his physical safety. The Russian
government complied with the ECHR's ruling and released Klein, allowing him to return to
Israel. Colombia has since requested his extradition, but the Israeli government has
refused.
Klein's company, Hod Hahanit, remains active to this day.
A joint effort?
While Donadio's groundbreaking investigation has created a controversy in Colombia, it does
not answer whether Rafi Eitan and Yair Klein's simultaneous and respective operations advising
the government and death squads were a joint effort or merely coincidental. For his part, the
lawyer Ernesto Villamizar
told Donadio that Eitan and Klein had nothing to do with each other. Klein corroborated his
claim, saying that he was unaware of any of Eitan's activities in Colombia.
However, an AP article references an Israeli media report that Rafi Eitan (spelled Eytan in
the article) was in Colombia at the same time as Klein and left days before the gunman armed
and trained by Klein murdered presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán:
It [the media report] said Rafael Eytan, an Israeli counterterrorism expert, denied
suggestions that he was a consultant to Israeli companies operating in Colombia and said he
had cut all business ties to that country.
According to the report, Eytan confirmed he flew to Colombia a week ago for private
reasons.
Beyond the vague suggestion of that article, there is no evidence of a connection
between Eitan and Klein. In some ways, it is even more remarkable that two Israelis advising
Colombian government in mass-murder of its political opponents were operating independent from
and unbeknownst to each other.
Israel-Colombia relations cool
After the fallout of Israelis training Colombian paramilitaries, the relationship between
the two top U.S. allies cooled, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. But
as Plan Colombia was implemented, Israel and Colombia once again ramped up collaboration.
In December 2006, Colombia's Ministry of Defense hired another private Israeli security
company known as Global CST to "help the GOC [Government of Colombia] conduct a strategic
assessment of the internal conflict." Global CST is headed by Israel
Ziv , a career officer who, like Yair Klein, leveraged his military experience into a
profitable career advising and training despots around the world.
"General Ziv was a personal acquaintance of then-Minister of Defense Juan Manuel Santos,"
the cable notes. William Brownfield, then U.S. ambassador to Colombia commented that
"Ziv worked his way into the confidence of former Defense Minister Santos by promising a
cheaper version of USG [United States government] assistance without our strings attached."
Under Santos, Colombia sought to purchase Israel's Hermes-450, a drone under
development in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in wars against neighboring
Lebanon.
However, according to the diplomatic cable, Tel Aviv-Bogota relations again soured after it
emerged that Global CST interpreter and Argentine-born Israeli national Shai Killman "had made
copies of classified Colombian Defense Ministry documents in an unsuccessful attempt to sell
them to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia." These documents contained "high value
target (HVT) database information" - a reference to the FARC leadership the CIA assisted
the Colombian government in assassinating. The resulting fallout, combined with pressure from the U.S., compelled
Colombia to cancel the contract to buy Israeli drones.
Despite the strains in the decades-old relationship, the two countries have maintained
strong ties. In 2016, then-Israeli Ambassador to Colombia Marco Sermoneta boasted
that Colombia is the top recipient of Israeli aid.
The following year, as the extermination of social leaders and ex-combatants began, Israeli
military advisors visited Colombian military bases to give training courses in
"security."
President Ivan Duque, the handpicked successor of far-right former President Ãlvaro
Uribe, has worked assiduously to shore up Colombia's ties with Israel. In March 2020, he
appeared at the
American Israel Political Action Conference, boasting about his ties with Israel. Months later,
Duque and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the launch of the
Israel-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
Meanwhile, Duque has undermined and attacked the landmark 2016 peace accord at every turn,
while turning a blind eye to the mass-murder of demobilized FARC guerrillas, trade unionists,
human rights defenders, environmental activists and social leaders - a scenario eerily
reminiscent of the political genocide of the Patriotic Union. Rather than a veteran spy
advising the Colombian government, Israel now has an official presence. In January 2020,
Israeli military Brigadier General Dan Glodfus visited
a Colombian military base to reinforce ties between the two countries. Amid a spate of
massacres in September 2020, Israel
dispatched 10 instructors to train Colombian Special Forces in "counter-terrorism."
https://www.sott.net/embed/kUw7_O_qZzIdzTrYkN_8d5AFCeF
With the recent
assassination of Francisco Giacometto Gómez, an elder activist and founding
member of the Patriotic Union, it seems that the campaign against the UP and the current
slaughter are indistinguishable.
About the Author: Dan Cohen is the Washington DC correspondent for Behind The Headlines. He has produced
widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. He tweets
at @ DanCohen3000 .
"HUNTSVILLE: The Army's experimental Multi-Domain Task Force is a "game changer" that's
turned the tide in "at least 10 wargames," the commander of US Army Pacific says. "Plans are
already changing at the combatant command level because of this." The key: the unit cracked the
Anti-Access, Area Denial (A2/AD) conundrum, Russia and China's dense layered defenses of
long-range missiles, sensors, and networks to coordinate them. "Before, we couldn't penetrate
A2/AD. With it, we could," Gen. Robert Brown said of the task force's performance in "at least
10 exercises and wargames. With the Multi-Domain Task Force," he told me after his remarks to
the AUSA Global conference here, "we could impact their long-range systems and have a much
greater success against an adversary. If I go into any more, it'd be classified."
"In the future, Brown said here last week, "all formations will have to become multi-domain
or they'll be irrelevant, [but] it's going to be years before it can happen." The Army's goal
is modernize enough forces to wage multi-domain warfare against either China or Russia -- but
not both at once -- by 2028." (Breaking Defense)
Comment: I was intrigued when, in April, SecDef Austin announced he was sending two units
with about 500 personnel to Germany. The units are a multi-domain task force and a theater
fires command. Sounded like a mere symbolic move. But there's nothing symbolic about these
particular units. They are an early implementation of the Pentagon's new multi-domain
operations doctrine which focuses on theater level operations. That doesn't mean mass divisions
and corps. It means theater level employment of global assets across the entire spectrum of
conflict. It's still billed as a concept rather than a full blown doctrine, but it's getting
there and is already being implemented in the Pacific theater.
In an Army Chief of Staff paper, "Army Multi-Domain Transformation Ready to Win in
Competition and Conflict" dated 16 March 2021, the multi-domain task force (MDTF) is described
as "theater-level maneuver elements designed to synchronize precision effects and precision
fires in all domains against adversary anti-access/ area denial (A2/AD) networks in all
domains, enabling joint forces to execute their operational plan (OPLAN) directed roles." The
MDTF's purpose is during competition, to "gain and maintain contact with our adversaries to
support the rapid transition to crisis or conflict"; during a crisis, to "deter adversaries and
shape the environment by providing flexible response options to the combatant commander"; and
if conflict arises, to "neutralize adversary A2/AD networks to enable joint freedom of
action."
Russia has been modernizing their doctrine, force structure and equipment in earnest for at
least the last decade. Surely China has been moving in the same direction. It's about time we
do the same. It will be several years, at least, before this doctrine can be fully implemented
with the necessary force structure and equipment. In many ways, our military has atrophied
terribly due to two decades of brigade level, at best, counterinsurgency operations. However,
we should, and apparently are, implementing this new doctrine now with the minimal force
structure changes of the MDTF and the inclusion of EW within cyber. Our current equipment can
be employed more effectively especially if land, sea, air and space systems are better
integrated. It's an evolution, not a revolution.
A2/AD is just modern defense IMO – is it really necessary to have a doctrine that
demands superiority over Russia or China at – lets say – 200 km from their border?
And at which point do we just call this outright agressive posturing ? DougDiggler
says: June
3, 2021 at 1:42 pm
Is this more Pentagon wishful thinking, like their exercise that involved firing a still
nonexistent hypersonic from a B-52? I get the feeling that NATO's ID Pol army would not fare
well in attacking the military professionals of Russia, not even in these proposed multi-front
"crumbling" attacks. However, it is nice that they're finally getting around to studying
Operation Bagration. However I think the operational heirs to that offensive have probably
improved on it and have also spent much time considering being on the receiving end of such a
nightmare. They play chess while we play Nintendo. Christian J. Chuba says:
June
1, 2021 at 5:32 pm
Wow. We've been pushing our navy up Russia and China's nose today and doing the same with
NATO war games on land and air patrols. I hope this doesn't give us a false sense of confidence
to be outright reckless.
For some reason we have become obsessed with depriving the Russians control of their arctic
coastline. I'm not saying we are control freaks (actually we are control freaks) but I can
easily see a situation developing up their if we think we have some technology edge. That is
one place Russia wants to be secure and for some reason, if there is water, we must have our
navy just outside that 12 nautical mile limit.
What kills me is that we do this in the name of 'freedom of navigation' but that route is
going to be mostly transporting Chinese stuff to Europe and only because the Russians are
paying for the necessary ice breakers and rescue stations. In other words, we are waving our
wand over waters that are only navigable because of Russian investment.
Can the MIC make anything other than cost over-runs these days? d74 says:
June
1, 2021 at 11:38 pm
The answer is too easy: no.
Not only are the costs insane, but the functionality is insufficient. Simply put, it doesn't
work or seem unfit for fighting. Stacking technologies is a dream that does not stand up to
warfare realities. 'Keep it simple' seems out of reach.
I followed the adoption of the 120mm mortar by USMC. They started with a good weapon, with
confirmed potential. The end point was tactical paralysis.
This is (was) a very small issue, and an old one. It is significant. blue peacock
says: June
2, 2021 at 9:42 am
Washington would be easy to spot in a game of chess. It's the player with no plan beyond
an aggressive opening. That is no strategy at all. The failure to think several moves ahead
matters.
While I don't agree with everything many pundits including Chas Freeman say about our
behavior with respect to China, I do see the point that Chas makes in the quote above. Iraq and
Afghanistan are great examples. Our political and governmental leadership have no sense of
"smarts", all they've known for decades is bully behavior under both Democrats and Republicans,
especially towards those they perceive as weak, like our "invasion" of Grenada. How would we
actually perform against a serious military rival like China or Russia? What would be the
reporting at hysterical CNN, MSNBC and Fox when a few carrier strike elements are sunk? Would
they be shrieking to unleash nuclear-tipped ICBMs? How would a "mission accomplished" George
Bush/Dick Cheney type with all their hubristic swagger react? The continental US has not been
attacked like ever. What happens when Seattle, Los Angeles and even DC are under actual missile
fire? How would contemporary woke Americans who have no tolerance for "sacrifice" react?
Do we have the force that reflects good value for money considering that we spend more than
Russia & China combined on the military? What type of military do we actually have relative
to the tens of trillions of dollars spent over the last decade on the credit card? What are the
metrics to evaluate actual effectiveness of a military beyond graphics and tables on Powerpoint
slides?
What would an actual strategic plan to crush the CCP look like? IMO, it begins with insuring
no dependence on a Chinese supply chain. Would the Party of Davos even allow that?
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that
war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who
here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we
should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this
ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our
poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to
that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth
of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish
from the earth."
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address , November 19, 1863
Holman Jenkins aptly describes the journalists involved in the Steele affair as "lazy" (
"Two
Grifters and a Dossier," Business World, May 26). Of course, they are intellectually lazy
-- it's absurdly in their interest. When it comes to public figures, knowing less is a better
defense than actually doing their job. The 1964 Supreme Court case Sullivan v. New York
Times requiring "actual malice" has given the news business a perverse incentive. The less
journalists actually know about the veracity of a story, the more defensible their legal
position. Justice Clarence Thomas recently described the malice standard as "almost impossible"
to prove, and without a reporter unearthing counterfactual accounts, proving malice is properly
impossible. So reporters find a story they love with suspect, but well-placed, sourcing and run
it without corroboration.
The wholesale use of single, anonymous sourcing to print defamatory stories about public
figures is now commonplace. Rep. Adam Schiff and his staff continually leaked falsities about
the Russia investigation, and reporters dutifully printed every word of it. Let's overturn
Sullivan and watch how fast the 24-hour news cycle changes under the threat of the
plaintiffs bar.
"HUNTSVILLE: The Army's experimental Multi-Domain Task Force is a "game changer" that's
turned the tide in "at least 10 wargames," the commander of US Army Pacific says. "Plans are
already changing at the combatant command level because of this." The key: the unit cracked the
Anti-Access, Area Denial (A2/AD) conundrum, Russia and China's dense layered defenses of
long-range missiles, sensors, and networks to coordinate them. "Before, we couldn't penetrate
A2/AD. With it, we could," Gen. Robert Brown said of the task force's performance in "at least
10 exercises and wargames. With the Multi-Domain Task Force," he told me after his remarks to
the AUSA Global conference here, "we could impact their long-range systems and have a much
greater success against an adversary. If I go into any more, it'd be classified."
"In the future, Brown said here last week, "all formations will have to become multi-domain
or they'll be irrelevant, [but] it's going to be years before it can happen." The Army's goal
is modernize enough forces to wage multi-domain warfare against either China or Russia -- but
not both at once -- by 2028." (Breaking Defense)
Comment: I was intrigued when, in April, SecDef Austin announced he was sending two units
with about 500 personnel to Germany. The units are a multi-domain task force and a theater
fires command. Sounded like a mere symbolic move. But there's nothing symbolic about these
particular units. They are an early implementation of the Pentagon's new multi-domain
operations doctrine which focuses on theater level operations. That doesn't mean mass divisions
and corps. It means theater level employment of global assets across the entire spectrum of
conflict. It's still billed as a concept rather than a full blown doctrine, but it's getting
there and is already being implemented in the Pacific theater.
In an Army Chief of Staff paper, "Army Multi-Domain Transformation Ready to Win in
Competition and Conflict" dated 16 March 2021, the multi-domain task force (MDTF) is described
as "theater-level maneuver elements designed to synchronize precision effects and precision
fires in all domains against adversary anti-access/ area denial (A2/AD) networks in all
domains, enabling joint forces to execute their operational plan (OPLAN) directed roles." The
MDTF's purpose is during competition, to "gain and maintain contact with our adversaries to
support the rapid transition to crisis or conflict"; during a crisis, to "deter adversaries and
shape the environment by providing flexible response options to the combatant commander"; and
if conflict arises, to "neutralize adversary A2/AD networks to enable joint freedom of
action."
Russia has been modernizing their doctrine, force structure and equipment in earnest for at
least the last decade. Surely China has been moving in the same direction. It's about time we
do the same. It will be several years, at least, before this doctrine can be fully implemented
with the necessary force structure and equipment. In many ways, our military has atrophied
terribly due to two decades of brigade level, at best, counterinsurgency operations. However,
we should, and apparently are, implementing this new doctrine now with the minimal force
structure changes of the MDTF and the inclusion of EW within cyber. Our current equipment can
be employed more effectively especially if land, sea, air and space systems are better
integrated. It's an evolution, not a revolution.
A2/AD is just modern defense IMO – is it really necessary to have a doctrine that
demands superiority over Russia or China at – lets say – 200 km from their border?
And at which point do we just call this outright agressive posturing ? DougDiggler
says: June
3, 2021 at 1:42 pm
Is this more Pentagon wishful thinking, like their exercise that involved firing a still
nonexistent hypersonic from a B-52? I get the feeling that NATO's ID Pol army would not fare
well in attacking the military professionals of Russia, not even in these proposed multi-front
"crumbling" attacks. However, it is nice that they're finally getting around to studying
Operation Bagration. However I think the operational heirs to that offensive have probably
improved on it and have also spent much time considering being on the receiving end of such a
nightmare. They play chess while we play Nintendo. Christian J. Chuba says:
June
1, 2021 at 5:32 pm
Wow. We've been pushing our navy up Russia and China's nose today and doing the same with
NATO war games on land and air patrols. I hope this doesn't give us a false sense of confidence
to be outright reckless.
For some reason we have become obsessed with depriving the Russians control of their arctic
coastline. I'm not saying we are control freaks (actually we are control freaks) but I can
easily see a situation developing up their if we think we have some technology edge. That is
one place Russia wants to be secure and for some reason, if there is water, we must have our
navy just outside that 12 nautical mile limit.
What kills me is that we do this in the name of 'freedom of navigation' but that route is
going to be mostly transporting Chinese stuff to Europe and only because the Russians are
paying for the necessary ice breakers and rescue stations. In other words, we are waving our
wand over waters that are only navigable because of Russian investment.
Anyway, so they were able to develop a simulation? That's impressive.
Abridged version. See the original for full version.
Notable quotes:
"... In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new funding for gain-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more virulent or transmissible. But a footnote to the statement announcing the moratorium carved out an exception for cases deemed "urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security." ..."
"... the review process shrouded in secrecy. "The names of reviewers are not released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely secret," said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch, whose advocacy against gain-of-function research helped prompt the moratorium. ..."
"... In May 2014, five months before the moratorium on gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework. ..."
"... Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance. ..."
"... EcoHealth Alliance's practice of divvying up large government grants into smaller sub-grants for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway within the field of virology. The sums at stake allow it to "purchase a lot of omertà" from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. ..."
"... now the spin doctors come around pointing the finger at china. Sure, china may have done the experimentation and research, but where did the funding, research resources, training, and direction come from? ..."
"... The US banned bioweapon development (in the US) and moved it to China with Fraudci in charge so that they could do human experiments and make lots of money on GMO "vaccines" And now the US is trying to spin the story and put the blame on China ..."
As the NSC tracked these disparate clues, U.S. government virologists advising them flagged
one study first submitted in April 2020. Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of
Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army's medical research institute. Using the
gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized
lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward
from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the
mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The
NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through
humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?
In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new funding for
gain-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more
virulent or transmissible. But a footnote to the statement announcing the moratorium carved out
an exception for cases deemed "urgently necessary to protect the public health or national
security."
In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with a
review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and
Oversight). It put the onus for ensuring the safety of any such research on the federal
department or agency funding it. This left the review process shrouded in secrecy. "The names
of reviewers are not released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely
secret," said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch, whose advocacy against
gain-of-function research helped prompt the moratorium. (An NIH spokesperson told Vanity
Fair that "information about individual unfunded applications is not public to preserve
confidentiality and protect sensitive information, preliminary data, and intellectual
property.")
Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs
and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: "If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban
all of virology." He added, "Ever since the moratorium, everyone's gone wink-wink and just done
gain-of-function research anyway."
British-born Peter Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York
City–based nonprofit with the laudable goal of preventing the outbreak of emerging
diseases by safeguarding ecosystems. In May 2014, five months before the moratorium on
gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7
million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples,
building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were
able to jump to humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO
framework.
By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an
array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland
Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to 990 tax exemption
forms it filed with the New York State Attorney General's Charities Bureau. Shi Zhengli herself
listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae:
$665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At
least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance.
EcoHealth Alliance's practice of divvying up large government grants into smaller sub-grants
for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway within the field of virology. The
sums at stake allow it to "purchase a lot of omertà" from the labs it supports, said
Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance
spokesperson said on behalf of the organization and Daszak, "We have no comment.")
In July, the NIH attempted to backtrack. It reinstated the grant but suspended its research
activities until EcoHealth Alliance fulfilled seven conditions, some of which went beyond the
nonprofit's purview and seemed to stray into tinfoil-hat territory. They included: providing
information on the "apparent disappearance" of a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher, who
was rumored on social media to be patient zero, and explaining diminished cell phone traffic
and roadblocks around the WIV in October 2019.
Ebright likened Daszak's model of research -- bringing samples from a remote area to an
urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to
make them more virulent -- to "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match." Moreover, Ebright
believed that Daszak's research had failed in its stated purpose of predicting and preventing
pandemics through its global collaborations.
It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S.
Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet
statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific
unanimity.
Under the subject line, "No need for you to sign the "Statement" Ralph!!," he wrote to two
scientists, including UNC's Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the
gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: "you, me
and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't
work in a counterproductive way." Daszak added, "We'll then put it out in a way that doesn't
link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice."
Baric agreed, writing back, "Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact."
Baric did not sign the statement. In the end, Daszak did. At least six other signers had
either worked at, or had been funded by, EcoHealth Alliance. The statement ended with a
declaration of objectivity: "We declare no competing interests."
Daszak mobilized so quickly for a reason, said Jamie Metzl: "If zoonosis was the origin,
it was a validation of his life work . But if the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it
had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear
science." It could mire the field indefinitely in moratoriums and funding restrictions.
In a CNN interview on March 26, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under Trump, made a
candid admission: "I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of
this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped." Redfield added that he
believed the release was an accident, not an intentional act. In his view, nothing that
happened since his first calls with Dr. Gao changed a simple fact: The WIV needed to be ruled
out as a source, and it hadn't been.
After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from
strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists,
some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just "wither and die."
Peter Daszak was getting death threats too, some from QAnon conspirators.
Inside the U.S. government, meanwhile, the lab-leak hypothesis had survived the transition
from Trump to Biden. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House
Intelligence Committee that two "plausible theories" were being weighed: a lab accident or
natural emergence.
Even so, lab-leak talk was mostly confined to right-wing news outlets through April,
gleefully flogged by Tucker Carlson and studiously avoided by most of the mainstream media. In
Congress, the Energy and Commerce Committee's Republican minority had launched its own inquiry,
but there was little buy-in from Democrats and the NIH didn't provide responses to its lengthy
list of demands for information.
The ground began to shift on May 2, when Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times
science writer known in part for writing a controversial book about how genes shape the social
behavior of different races, published a lengthy
essay on Medium. In it, he analyzed the scientific clues both for and against a lab leak,
and excoriated the media for its failure to report on the dueling hypotheses. Wade devoted a
full section to the "furin cleavage site," a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2's genetic code
that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells.
Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the
world's most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin
cleavage site "was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus." Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate
and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy
theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the
prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.
Weedlord Bonerhitler, 1 hour ago
Gain of function research is weaponization. We are under attack by a biological weapon
designed in a laboratory to kill people. We are, in effect, at war.
KickIce, 1 hour ago, (Edited)
With who, Washington DC? FWIW, that would be my pick.
ted41776, 1 hour ago
Yes, except "we" moved this "research" to china many years ago to speed up the weaponization
of bioweapons. the original researchers came to the us from nazi Germany after WW2 (Project
Paperclip). it wasn't moving fast enough here because of that whole experimenting on humans
thing was looked down upon here in the US (at least in the past). so "we" hired china what "we"
couldn't do domestically on "our" own.
And now the spin doctors come around pointing the finger
at china. Sure, china may have done the experimentation and research, but where did the
funding, research resources, training, and direction come from?
gregga777, 1 hour ago
Gain of function research is weaponization
It's also insane. Hey, look at what we did! We made smallpox* in our gene sequencing
laboratory. Oops! It's release into the 'wild' was an unfortunate accident.
Anyone engaged in the research & development of making viruses or bacteria more lethal
or the resurrection of presumably extinct pathogens (e.g., smallpox*) are International War
Criminals. They should be arrested and placed on trial in a suitable jurisdiction. At the very
least they should be barred forever from working in any kind of even remotely related
laboratory research.
*The complete gene sequence of smallpox is apparently freely available over the
Internet.
is an example of GOF engineering that bat lady Shi Zhengli participated in, engineering
chimeras of SARS and SARS like coronaviruses and splicing with HIV to make it more
transmissible to humans.
Pax Romana, 1 hour ago
10 page article could have been condensed into one sentence: Fort Detrick -> Canadian Lab
-> Wuhan -> Spooks -> Election Fraud -> Vax -> State Control
ted41776, 1 hour ago
The US banned bioweapon development (in the US) and moved it to China with Fraudci in charge
so that they could do human experiments and make lots of money on GMO "vaccines" And now the US is trying to spin the story and put the blame on China
no, this covaids was MADE IN THE USA even if it was produced and manufactured in China under
US funding, direction, and supervision
brian91145, 1 hour ago
100% right that is the truth that everyone will know very soon
ted41776, 1 hour ago, (Edited)
not sure if it will make any difference
911: US training and funding bin laden for over a decade? WMDs, they got WMDs! pools of
molten metal caused by... kerosene (jet fuel)? building 7...
we gotta get that f||cker bin laden though
bammy arming cartels (fast and furious) and guns they got from him used to kill americans
(including cops and border patrol)? crickets
there is no election fraud, after seeing them spend 4 years trying to overthrow a president
who allegedly used fraud and russian collusion to get elected?
and on and on and on, the neverending 24/7 stream of lies and distortion
unfortunately, truth has become pretty worthless in this sick reality most people live
in
konputa, 1 hour ago
Designed in the US, manufactured in China. We've known this since early 2020.
CheapBastard, 1 hour ago
(((Vanity Fair))) has the same editorial weight that Teen Vogue has.
The article is meant to obfuscate the truth, not clarify it.
CheapBastard, 51 minutes ago, (Edited)
The author carefully avoids inconvenient but important truths including::
Fauci funded the Wuhan bioweapons lab thru NIH (proven by emails) Fauci lied repeatedly from
day#1 about the characteristics and origin of the deadly virus (also proven by emails) the
WHO lied repeatedly about the origin the involvement of Gates in this entire fiasco
S.Parker, · 1 hour ago
Fort Detrick, USA
Handful of Dust, · 4 minutes ago
· Bumbler-in-Chief Biden in the White House Backs 'Incredible' Dr. Anthony Fauci;
Refuses Comment on Explosive Emails Exposing the Lies & Deceit
Its a book! Damn Tylers it will take me days to read. · The Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 states:
"Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires,
retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon, or
knowingly assists a foreign state or any organization to do so, shall be fined under this title
or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both."
Weedlord Bonerhitler, 1 hour ago
Don't need a next leak. Just need time for the leaky vaccines to do their work. A
vaccine that doesn't stop transmission and merely reduces symptoms, is not a vaccine, but an
evolutionary pressure upon the virus.
This is Marek's disease, found in chickens. A few decades ago, it was fairly
benign, but then it was treated with a vaccine that merely reduced symptoms to a minimum
without stopping the virus. Now, after evolving over a few decades while butting heads with
that leaky vaccine, it's so deadly to chickens that any unvaccinated flocks tend to be wiped
out by it, making vaccinating every chicken on Earth a necessity.
This is our future. They want people completely dependent on their vaccines to
survive.
"... Through a collaboration with Danish intelligence, the United States has conducted targeted espionage against senior politicians and officials in Norway, Sweden, Germany and France. That was one of the conclusions in an explosive report made by four employees of the Danish intelligence service (FE), according to Danmarks Radio (DR). ..."
"... Last year, NRK reported that the Danish-American spy cooperation was aimed at targets in Norway, but it was then unknown who the surveillance was aimed at. The new information indicates that the extent of espionage against Norway was far greater than previously known. ..."
Through a collaboration with Danish intelligence, the United States has conducted targeted espionage against senior politicians
and officials in Norway, Sweden, Germany and France. That was one of the conclusions in an explosive report made by four employees
of the Danish intelligence service (FE), according to Danmarks Radio (DR).
NRK mentions the Danish public broadcaster's findings as part of an international collaboration with Danmarks Radio, SVT, NDR,
WDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Le Monde.
Over several months, DR has met nine people with access to classified information from the intelligence service. All information
in the case has been confirmed to DR by at least two, often several, independent sources.
Last year, NRK reported that the Danish-American spy cooperation was aimed at targets in Norway, but it was then unknown
who the surveillance was aimed at. The new information indicates that the extent of espionage against Norway was far greater than
previously known.
NRK and DR do not know which Norwegian politicians and officials have been subjected to targeted espionage, but as one of DR's
sources says:
- It would not have been interesting for an intelligence service to spy on municipal politicians.
Tesla completely transformed the automotive landscape when it introduced the Roadster, pioneering the mass-market electric car and
reinventing
the car as we know
. It sold the first widely-available EV, and it did it with a product that you could easily live with every
day. The company has done more to further the electric game than anyone else and deserves total credit for making EVs a part of the
discussion when it comes to the future of the automobile.
Tesla
has
changed the world. It's also doomed.
The last mainstream automaker to be launched from scratch in the United States was Saturn, a heavily subsidized child of the GM
family. Even with those deep pockets, it failed. History is littered with dead automotive brands. The list of deceased automakers is
also replete with visionary leaders who pioneered new tech and aimed to dominate the luxury market.
The automobile game is tough. The dirty secret is
that the big brands only make around 6% margin on every car they sell
This is all to say: we've been here before. Hudson, Tucker, DeLorean (
twice!
),
Packard, and more. The stories here are all different in their specifics, with some succumbing to shady government dealing, others
losing to price wars. While the immediate causes of their failures might be unique, the fact that they failed certainly is not.
The consumer automobile game is devilishly tough. The dirty secret of the car making world is that the big brands only make around
6% margin on every car they sell. That's a pathetic amount of profit when compared to other well-known brands like Nike, Apple, or
Disney. Shoes, upscale electronics, and entertainment (as well as scores of other industries) all offer double the profit margins,
faster production times, less regulation, and fewer unionized workforces. Building cars is dumb. Car companies make billions of
dollars in profits because they sell so many cars, not because each car is so profitable. And therein lies the rub for Tesla.
Why Tesla is doomed
The only way to be successful at car manufacturing is to do it at a very large scale. You have to sell hundreds of thousands, if not
millions of cars per year to be stable. In 2018,
Tesla
shifted a total of 245,240 cars
. The
Tesla
Model 3
also became the best-selling luxury automobile in United States; last year was fantastic for Tesla. It also took the
company to the very brink of imploding.
Scaling up production lines and capacity is the activity that is killing Tesla, but scaling up further is the only thing that can
save it. The company is at the low point of a "production valley" where becoming capable of building 300,000 cars has made them
wildly unprofitable, but the only way to get to profit is to build even more capacity to enable it to make 700,000 – 1,000,000 cars.
Tesla could potentially have, or raise, the billions needed to do this. It could, that is, if the company could concentrate on doing
one thing at a time.
Tesla's worst enemy is Elon Musk. The serial entrepreneur has an affliction that many serial entrepreneurs have: Shiny Thing
Syndrome. Mr. Musk loves to chase after new challenges and novel projects. Tesla is currently producing 3 different cars, wall
chargers, charging stations, electric semi-trucks, photovoltaic roofs, and spearheading autonomous technology. Throw in the odd
flamethrower
,
underground
tunnels
, and a new
insurance
product
(not to mention
Space
X
), and you see a leader not focused on doing the hard work of pushing his company through a crisis of scale, but a man obsessed
with moon-shots and new projects.
Scaling up production is the activity that is
killing Tesla, but scaling up further is the only thing that can save it
It should be noted that Musk has never operated any business at this scale before. Running a nimble online service such as Paypal is
a very different thing than running a multinational car manufacturer -- especially one that is exclusively pursuing new technologies.
Quite frankly, Musk is not qualified to be CEO of Tesla any longer, and the mismatch of his skills to the company's needs could not
be worse timed for Tesla.
In the next 12 months, practically all other major global auto manufacturers have plans to release their own electric cars. Tesla
ate their lunch last year when it became the best-selling luxury car, but at that time, it was the only EV game in town. More
worryingly, the most common Tesla owner complaints happen to be the areas that traditional car companies excel at:
Fit
and finish
,
service
infrastructure
, and execution on timelines. When Porsche announced its
Taycan
electric sedan
, its #1 source of reservations was from current Tesla owners. This is a surefire sign that the Tesla customer
base is eager to upgrade to something better.
China, the world's largest car market, and the savior of many global brands, cannot save Tesla. Indeed, the current trade war
between the U.S. and China is
hurting
Tesla more
than any other car company. The current price for a Tesla Model 3 in China is approximately $73,000, with roughly
$30,000 of that price being the result of China's import tariffs. In January, Elon Musk broke ground on a Gigafactory in China, and
the total investment in the project is expected to exceed $4 billion,
according
to Goldman Sachs
. That is an amount of money Tesla, quite frankly, doesn't have to spend. After a disastrous first quarter 2019,
the company quickly raised $2.35 billion in stock and debt. Even with this recent cash infusion, Musk told employees the company
would be
out
of cash in 10 months
if spending continued at current levels.
The end of Tesla
Tesla will not go bankrupt. It cannot go bankrupt. At the moment, the company is still well-placed to raise another funding round
and could likely even do as many as three more funding events before investors stop lining up. Failure for Tesla won't happen
tomorrow, but it is coming. More and more evangelists are changing their tunes as competition in EVs gets fiercer. Wall street is
losing patience with broken promises and erratic CEO behavior. And the everyday consumer is finding more electric car options that
tempt their dollar now that Tesla is not the only game in town. No, Tesla's end will not happen tomorrow, nor will it be a dramatic
collapse.
Telsa is too valuable a brand to disappear in a cloud of Chapter 11 smoke. Again, history bears this out. The vast majority of
automotive brands from years past were acquired or absorbed into larger brands, where some succeeded brilliantly (Dodge) and others
slowly morphed into something unrecognizable (Hudson). Arguably, the Tesla brand is the most valuable piece of Tesla's balance sheet
as other manufacturers have caught up with their hard technology (batteries, chargers), and are rapidly chasing down their soft
technology (
Autopilot
).
The Tesla brand is global in reach, and still viewed favorably overall by the public.
The endgame for Tesla is an acquisition. It is the way of the automotive jungle -- the circle of corporate life, as it were. The
unknowable part at the moment is exactly who will acquire Tesla, as the list is quite long. Another car company is the reflexive
bet, but Silicon Valley and Chinese auto manufacturers are all likely bidders as well. Apple
already
offered to buy Tesla
back in 2013 for more than the company is worth at the time of this story. The field of suitors is wide
open, and the eventual winner could well come as a surprise to the everyday public.
Regardless of who steps up to the plate, it will be very surprising if the transaction is labelled as an acquisition. No -- this will
be a "merger" or "partnership" to protect egos and that all-important Tesla brand (again, the most valuable asset on their books).
Any upcoming news of a partnership with a Toyota or a Mercedes should not be seen as a life preserver thrown out in good faith, but
a wholesale pirate sacking of the company. Musk will quietly slip away to chase his shiny things, popping in for product launches
and tweetstorms, but the adults will be put in charge and set a profitable course. What happens after that, no one can know.
Before the pitchforks come out, make no mistake: The world is a better place for Tesla having existed. Electric cars are no longer
made out of old Porsche 914s by a guy in a shed. We are moving toward an electric future, all thanks to underdog Tesla. The world,
and Americans especially, are enamored with an underdog story. But more often than not, the underdog loses. That's why they are
underdogs. In the best of worlds, Tesla can influence Mercedes or a Chinese company from the inside to really nail electric cars and
make them the most affordable option for consumers. I hope that comes to pass for all our sakes.
Believe it or not, the president says that human rights R us.
Hear that, BLM? Women? Asian Americans? Hispanics? homeless? heavily indebted students? .
. the list goes on.
Biden said so, May 30, 2021
"I had a long conversation -- for two hours -- recently with President Xi, making it clear
to him that we could do nothing but speak out for human rights around the world because
that's who we are. I'll be meeting with President Putin in a couple of weeks in Geneva,
making it clear that we will not -- we will not stand by and let him abuse those rights." . .
here
..reminds me of Aeschylus: "In war, truth is the first casualty."
"... The Black Liberation Movement has made millionaires out of their grifter leaders and enabled the left to remain in power in every city in which rioting occurred. Their local opposition has been cleansed or cowed into submission. The movement continues its success as seen by its adoption by corporations seeking to reduce the power and influence of middle class Americans and by politicians seeking to entrence their power electorally. ..."
The continuing hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter was displayed vividly over the past
weekend– BLM
declared solidarity with Hamas but said nothing about a slew of murders and shootings
targeting black
communities .
There were at least 11 mass shootings in the country over the weekend that combined left
at least 17 people dead and 35 more wounded, according to CNN reporting and an analysis of
data from Gun Violence Archive (GVA),
local media and police reports.
I found it curious that none of the reporting made any mention about the race of the victims
or the perpetrators. Left me wondering so I did some digging. It appears that the majority of
these mass shootings involved black Americans as perpetrators or victims.
At least 55 people were shot across Chicago over the weekend, 12 of them fatally,
including a 15-year-old boy who
was shot in the head on the front porch of a home in Lawndale, and three double
homicides.
These shootings took place in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Of course. Much political and social capital has been squandered in recent years, all in
an attempt to adumbrate the singular reality that the deeply engrained social pathologies
in the "black community" have more to do with their failure to thrive than white systemic
racism does. We, meaning white America, cannot help them with this no matter how much self
abnegation we indulge in. Black America needs to adopt standards of belief and behavior
that are socially, culturally, and economically functional and they need to teach their
children those values. I have seen this happen with a certain fragment of that demographic,
but it needs to happen more widely. This may be offensive to some readers, but there is
truth in it.
Reply
Do blacks themselves need to be uniquely empowered (and protected) to speak up against
black on black violence? What has prevented the peace-seeking black community members from
taking charge of their own neighborhoods.
What Reign of Terror are they living under that those of us outside these communities do
not understand.
Latino gangs terrorize latino communities as well. The violent tyranny of the few
against the decent lives of the many is very, very wrong and should not exist in our
country. But it is a daily reality in our rapidly devolving inner city neighborhoods.
Reply
These minority neighborhoods can't have it both ways:
They can't object to successful methods like stop and frisk and then complain
about crime. "Snitches get stiches" is another "cute" saying encouraging crime.
After a time trying to help people who won't help themselves and are often openly
hostile, the cops grow cynical and less proactive; can you blame them?
Because it's "racist" to criticize any form of minority behavior, there can not be an
honest discussion about solutions to this problem and the beat goes on.
People (including the self-hating, phony "guilty" white liberals, BTW) who can live in
segregated neighborhoods continue to live in segregated neighborhoods.
I used to live in CT – very liberal blue state – totally segregated; BLM
signs on the "right" lawns.
Reply
TV
Yes here in Mpls the same blue haired tattooed
Nose ring wokes make up a large majority of
The BLM protests. The obligatory signs festoon
Whole neighborhoods. Do they march or picket
The areas where the majority of the shootings occur
And whose victims are all black? Ha! Too dangerous.
The near North side aka Nomi has had continuous
Gunfire for near 1200 days. Now they have running
Gun battles with "Ak" type fully automatic weapons.
It's become a tragedy writ large. Not a virtue
Signal to be seen.
Reply
Yes, it's hard to believe that so many are taken in by the rhetoric of Black Lives
Matter when there's evidence on a near-daily basis of black-on-black violence and murder.
It's truly a crime that so-called leaders don't decry it and demand a call to action for it
to stop, a crime that there's so little public discourse about underclass blacks basically
exterminating each other with impunity. It's a taboo subject, and can't be broached without
accusations of racism. We only hear righteous outrage when a member of the black underclass
is killed by a cop.
Reply
Why does the charge of "racism" cause so many to immediately recoil and retreat? It is
just a word, yet it has risen to weaponized effectiveness.
What does this word trigger in so many people who will immediately back down and
retreat. Pretty powerful tool -until more don't blink and don't stand down at its mere
mention.
Always felt there was an implied threat of "black violence' that accompanied every one
of Obama's political moves. We need to cleanse that threat out of our own psyches or else
this nation will be held hostage by a mere word.
Reply
Isn't this an interesting bit of Democrat deja vu, including charges of rigged
voting machines in 2008 the GOP would use to prevent Obama from winning and thereby
triggering a Second Civil War -- "the streets will run with blood .if Obama loses
.."
Thanks to two great political pundits – Erica Jong and Jane Fonda. They did
capture the zeitgeist of the times however, and continue to do so. The threat of black
violence, if you don't do what we went.
Fast forward to 2020 – and the world yet again feared "the streets would run
with blood", but this if Trump won re-election and Democrat Biden did not win.
But this time it bloody well appears it was the Democrats who rigged the voting
processes. Yet again it appears it is the Democrats accusing the GOP of what they were
already doing themselves.
Reply
The Black Liberation Movement has made millionaires out of their grifter leaders and
enabled the left to remain in power in every city in which rioting occurred. Their local
opposition has been cleansed or cowed into submission. The movement continues its success
as seen by its adoption by corporations seeking to reduce the power and influence of middle
class Americans and by politicians seeking to entrence their power electorally.
Some people who were black were shot by others who were black? Quit saying that, you,
you, what's the word: racist!; as none of that has been proved in court. Did any of these
'leaders' care about all those shootings in the Sanctuary City of Chicago when President
Hope and Change was in charge? (2016)
Total shootings 4379 Shot and wounded 3664 Shot and killed: 715
Assailant race by percentage
Whoa: you're saying the left behaves hypocritically and is willing to take losses in
order to get what they want?
Such insight!
Ethnic hypocrisy is the ancient problem here, but this focus on contemporary black
antics obscures the issue and is simply another avoidance strategy.
The recent missile duel in the eastern Mediterranean has shown that white conservatives
are more willing to stand up for the safety of non- or dual-citizens overseas than they are
for safety of their own white constituents, whom they refuse even to name.
There is nothing wrong with Obama with his financial success to buy in predominantly
white Martha's Vineyard. The question that blacks should ask however is are those leaders
who use racism and race to gain political power doing much to alleviate the social and
economic issues they face?
There are many successful blacks in all walks of life. Why aren't they celebrated and
used as role models instead of someone like George Floyd?
Reply
When you first went on the "BLM website" you immediately were linked to ActBlue
– a fund-raising arm of the Democrat party. There was no independent or "private"
donation link for BLM. Calling BLM "private" in this case would be a stretch for me
after that initial experience with BLM.
So the bigger question is, why is the State Dept etc pushing an arm of the Democrat
Party fund-raising machine within government operations? Did BLM formally dissociate
completely with ActBlue?
Reply
Because the State Dept., like the rest of the Democrat party, has accelerated
faster and faster to the left.
They've been selling out America for decades and now, like the rest of the Democrat
party, the last mask has dropped.
Reply
Having grown up in Chicago and still living nearby I would say "predominantly black"
neighborhoods is a media fiction, part of the narrative to displace the blame onto others
than black. I assure you these are black neighborhoods, once white now ruined for
generations. I have sympathy for blacks, so much so that I suggest we organize to supply as
much ammo as possible to help them rid the hood of evil doers. Mostly 9mm, drop off crates
in front of playgrounds and street corners so they can be easily found.
Reply
Larry's point that BLM doesn't care about Black lives is graphically shown and described
by this Officer Tatum podcast (it's short) of local newscasts, not shown by national news,
of Black children murdered by Blacks.
"There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love
their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears , so to speak, producing a kind of
painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their
liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."
People keep expecting a drug that you "take." We have been taking this drug willingly, after
knowing all the risks, for the last ten years.
Executives at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP have voiced worries that workers who stay remote
could wind up as second-class corporate citizens, falling behind in
promotions and pay , so the company plans to track rates of advancement for office-based and
remote staff in an effort to make sure nobody lags behind.
Ford Motor Co. is
pushing ahead with digital efforts to help bring office workers back to its Dearborn, Mich.,
corporate headquarters, while eyeing a future where many of them continue to work from home,
company officials say.
For now, the auto maker is aiming for a gradual return of some employees to the sprawling
campus beginning in July, with "significantly reduced capacity" to retain social distancing, a
spokeswoman said.
Boston Dynamics, a robotics company known for its four-legged robot "dog," this week
announced a new product, a computer-vision enabled mobile warehouse robot named "Stretch."
Developed in response to growing demand for automation in warehouses, the robot can reach up
to 10 feet inside of a truck to pick up and unload boxes up to 50 pounds each. The robot has a
mobile base that can maneuver in any direction and navigate obstacles and ramps, as well as a
robotic arm and a gripper. The company estimates that there are more than 500 billion boxes
annually that get shipped around the world, and many of those are currently moved manually.
"It's a pretty arduous job, so the idea with Stretch is that it does the manual labor part
of that job," said Robert Playter, chief executive of the Waltham, Mass.-based company.
The pandemic has accelerated [automation of] e-commerce and logistics operations even more
over the past year, he said.
... ... ...
... the robot was made to recognize boxes of different sizes, textures and colors. For
example, it can recognize both shrink-wrapped cases and cardboard boxes.
Eventually, Stretch could move through an aisle of a warehouse, picking up different
products and placing them on a pallet, Mr. Playter said.
Biden backed down on Nordstream 2 and, at The Davos Crowd's insistence, he will back down on
the JCPOA.
Davos needs cheap energy into Europe. That's ultimately what the JCPOA was all about. The
basic framework for the deal is still there. While the U.S. will kick and scream a bit about
sanctions relief, Iran will be back into the oil market and make it possible for Europe to once
again invest in oil/gas projects in Iran.
Now
that Benjamin Netanyahu is no longer going to be leading Israel, the probability of
breakthrough is much much higher than last week. The Likudniks in Congress and the Senate just
lost their raison d'etre. The loss of face for Israel in Bibi's latest attempt to bludgeon Gaza
to retain power backfired completely.
U.S. policy towards Israel is shifting rapidly as the younger generations, Gen-X and
Millennials, simply don't have the same allegiance to Israel that the Baby Boomers and Silent
generations did. It is part of a geopolitical ethos which is outdated.
So, with some deal over Iran's nuclear capability in the near future, Europe will then get
gas pipelines from Iran through Turkey as well as gain better access to the North South
Transport Corridor which is now unofficially part of China's Belt and Road Initiative.
Russia, now that Nordstream 2 is nearly done, will not balk at this. In fact, they'll
welcome it. It forms the basis for a broader, sustainable peace arrangement in the Middle East.
What's lost is the Zionist program for Greater Israel and continued sowing dissent between
exhausted participants.
But the big geopolitical win for Davos, they think, is that by returning Iran to the oil
markets it will cut down on Russia's dominance there. That the only reason Russia is the price
setter in oil today, as the producer of the marginal barrel, is because of Trump taking Iranian
and Venezuelan oil off the market.
With these negotiations ongoing and likely to conclude soon I'm sure the thinking is that
this will help save Iranian moderates in the upcoming elections. But with Iran's Guardian
Council paving the way for Ebrahim Raeisi to win the election that is also very unlikely(
H/T to Pepe
Escobar's latest on this ) :
So Raeisi now seems to be nearly a done deal: a relatively faceless bureaucrat without the
profile of an IRGC hardliner, well known for his anti-corruption fight and care about the
poor and downtrodden. On foreign policy, the crucial fact is that he will arguably follow
crucial IRGC dictates.
Raeisi is already spinning that he "negotiated quietly" to secure the qualification of
more candidates, "to make the election scene more competitive and participatory". The problem
is no candidate has the power to sway the opaque decisions of the 12-member Guardian Council,
composed exclusively by clerics: only Ayatollah Khamenei.
I have no doubt that Iran is, as Escobar suggests, in post-JCPOA mode now and will walk away
from Geneva without a deal if need be, but Davos will cut the deal it needs to bring the oil
and gas into Europe while still blaming the U.S. for Iran's nuclear ambitions because they've
gotten what they actually wanted, Netanyahu out of power.
Seeing the tenor of these negotiations and the return of Obama to the White House, the
Saudis saw the writing on the wall immediately and began peace talks with Iran in Baghdad put
off for a year because of Trump's killing Soleimani.
The Saudis are fighting for their lives now as the Shia Crescent forms and China holds the
House of Saud's future in its hands.
Syria will be restored to the Arab League and all that 'peace' work by Trump will be undone
quickly. Because none of it was actually peaceful in its implementation. Netanyahu is gone,
Israel just got
defeated by Hamas and now the rest of the story can unfold, put on hold by four years of
Jared Kushner's idiocy and U.S. neoconservatives feeding Trump bad information about the
situation.
The Saker put together two lists in his latest article (linked above) which puts the entire
situation into perspective:
The Goals:
Bring down a strong secular Arab state along with its political structure, armed forces,
and security services.
Create total chaos and horror in Syria justifying the creation of a "security zone" by
Israel not only in the Golan but further north.
Trigger a civil war in Lebanon by unleashing the Takfiri crazies against Hezbollah.
Let the Takfiris and Hezbollah bleed each other to death, then create a "security zone,"
but this time in Lebanon.
Prevent the creation of a Shia axis Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon.
Break up Syria along ethnic and religious lines.
Create a Kurdistan which could then be used against Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
Make it possible for Israel to become the uncontested power broker in the Middle-East
and force the KSA, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and all others to have to go to Israel for any gas
or oil pipeline project.
Gradually isolate, threaten, subvert, and eventually attack Iran with a broad regional
coalition of forces.
Eliminate all centers of Shia power in the Middle-East.
The Outcomes:
The Syrian state has survived, and its armed and security forces are now far more
capable than they were before the war started (remember how they almost lost the war
initially? The Syrians bounced back while learning some very hard lessons. By all reports,
they improved tremendously, while at critical moments Iran and Hezbollah were literally
"plugging holes" in the Syrian frontlines and "extinguishing fires" on local flashpoints.
Now the Syrians are doing a very good job of liberating large chunks of their country,
including every single city in Syria).
Not only is Syria stronger, but the Iranians and Hezbollah are all over the country now,
which is driving the Israelis into a state of panic and rage.
Lebanon is rock solid; even the latest Saudi attempt to kidnap Hariri is backfiring.
(2021 update: in spite of the explosion in Beirut, Hezbollah is still in charge)
Syria will remain unitary, and Kurdistan is not happening. Millions of displaced
refugees are returning home.
Israel and the US look like total idiots and, even worse, as losers with no credibility
left.
The net result is everyone in the region who were aggressors are now suing for peace. This
is why I expect some kind of deal that returns Iran to the global economy. There's no way for
Germany's shiny new trade deal with China to work without this.
Trump's hard line against Iran was always a mistake, even if Iran's nuclear ambitions are
real. But with the Open Skies treaty now a dead letter the U.S. has real logistical problems in
the region and they only multiply if Erdogan in Turkey finally chooses a side and gives up his
Neo-Ottoman ambitions, now very likely.
But when it comes to economics, as always, Davos has this all backwards vis a vis oil. They
still think they can use the JCPOA to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia over oil. They
still think Putin only cares about oil and gas sales abroad. It's clear they don't listen to
him because the policy never seems to change.
So, to Davos, if they bring 2.5 to 3 million barrels per day from Iran back online and oil
prices drop, this forces Russia to back down militarily and diplomatically in Eastern Europe.
With a free-floated ruble the Russians don't care now that they are mostly self-sufficient in
food and raw material production.
None of that will come to pass. Putin is shifting the Russian economy away from oil and gas
with an announced ambitious domestic spending plan ahead of this fall's State Duma elections.
Lower or even stable prices will accelerate those plans as capital no longer finds its best
return in that sector.
This carrot to Iran and stick to Russia approach of Brussels/Davos is childish and it will
only get worse when the Greens come to power in Germany at the end of the year. Unless the
German elections end in a stalemate which is unforeseen, the CDU will grand coalition as the
junior partner to the Greens, just as Davos wants it.
Don't miss the significance of the policy bifurcation either when it comes to oil. The Biden
administration is trying to make energy as expensive as possible in the U.S. -- no Keystone
Pipeline, Whitmer trying to close down Enbridges's Line 5 from Canada into Michigan, etc. --
while Europe gets Nordstream 2 from Russia and new, cheap supplies from Iran.
This is what had Trump so hopping mad when he was President. This is part of why he hated
the JCPOA. Israel and the EastMed pipeline was what should have been the U.S. policy in his
mind.
Now, those dreams are dead and the sell out of the U.S. to Davos is in full swing.
Seriously, Biden/Obama are going to continue on this path of undermining U.S. energy production
until they are thrown out of office, either by the overwhelming shame of the election fraud
lawsuits which recall Senators from Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, the mid-term elections which
brings a more pro-Trump GOP to power or by military force. That last bit I put a very low
probability on.
Bottom line, for now global oil prices have likely peaked no matter what drivel comes out of
John Kerry's mouth.
The Brent/WTI spread will likely collapse and go negative for the first time in years as
Iran's full oil production comes online over the next two years while U.S. production falls.
We'll see rising oil prices in the U.S. while global supply rises, some of which China is
getting at a steep discount from who? Iran.
Meanwhile Russia continues to hold the EU to account on everything while unmasking the not
just the latest Bellingcat/MI6/State Dept. nonsense in Belarus surrounding the arrest of Roman
Petrosovich, but also filling the void diplomatically left by a confused and incompetent U.S.
policy in the Middle East.
If I'm the Bennett in Israel, the first phone call I make after taking office is to no one
other than Putin, who now holds the reins over Iran, Hezbollah and a very battle-hardened and
angry Syria who just re-elected Assad because he navigated the assault on the country with no
lack of geopolitical skill.
Because it is clear that Biden/Obama, on behalf of Davos , have left Israel out to twist in
the wind surrounded by those who wish it gone. We'll see if they get their wish. I think the
win here is clear and the days of U.S. adventurism in the Middle East are numbered.
The oil wars aren't over, by any stretch of the imagination, but the outcome of the main
battles have decisively shifted who determines what battles are fought next.
About time that fcking Project for the New American Century(aka Greater Israel from the
Nile to the Euphates) got derailed .
Fcking useless neocon sh its gutted and bankrupted the U.S. for their fcked up ziosh it
garbage.
Sheldon Adelson belongs in the Aus witz Mengele suite in hell. He was the biggest
cheerleader for the last 20 years of this hell on earth that was created in the middle
east.
Woodenman 2 hours ago remove link
Trump got it *** backwards , he should have defunded Israel and fast tracked Iran to be
a nuclear power, Iran is an oil producer, what does Israel do for us?
Would I care that Israel cannot sleep at night knowing Iran has the bomb, not at
all.
AGuy 37 minutes ago
" what does Israel do for us? "
Keeps the ME unstable so the US has the excuse to keep a lot of military resources in
the ME, in the name of being the worlds policemen. Plus the US needs to protect the Petro
dollar, but at this point I don't think that will matter soon considering the amount of
money printing & spending the US is doing at the momement.
wellwaddyaknow 2 hours ago (Edited)
Soleimani was very good at destroying ISIS trash.
And which countries backed ISIS?
JR Wirth 2 hours ago
NeoCon tears as the world attempts to move on from deranged foreign policy. Will the US
throw a fit and drag the world into war? Let's call Tel Aviv and find out.
Der Steppenwolf 2 hours ago remove link
Iran already sells huge amounts of oil to China and likely many others, there just isn't
going to be a significant increase in Iranian oil hitting the market as a result of any
deal. Moreover, this relatively small increase will occur over time. Even if Iran
eventually increases production the 2.5-3 million bpd the author cites, world consumption
in 2021 is forecast to increase about 6 million bpd over 2020. Considering these facts any
changes in Iranian oil production should do little to affect the overall
price.
lay_arrow
AGuy 42 minutes ago
" Iran has huge potential to increase production "
I doubt that very much. Iran has very old oil fields which have been producing since the
1920s. Global Oil production peaked in 2018 & is now in permanent decline. Iran could
increase NatGas production, but Oil production is in permanent decline.
Apollo 32 minutes ago
God, I hope half of the above comes true. Bibi needs to be court martialed and Israel
needs to go back into smaller and more peaceful version of itself (if that is even
possible) . USA can just bugger off home, and try to deal with transgendered army,
president's dementia and critical race theory nonsense first.
What the world needs is less wars, less central bankers screwing the game and less
stealing of other people's natural resources. Instead it just more plain old hard work,
honest trading and no bs diplomacy.
dead hobo 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link
Amazingly perfect analysis.
Israel will survive. I wish them well.
So many US wars are oil based. Lies abound to cover this up. Neocon Economics turns
every war opportunity into a profit center. No Profit = No War potential. Whenever you see
a Neocon pumping a war somewhere, you need to look for who will make scads of money from
it.
Trump isn't an angel. He's the guy who destroyed Establishment Republicanism. That begat
populism. I detested him working his book when he pumped QE and ZIRP. I considered it a
temporary price to pay to remove Establishment Republicans from the world. Yes, the US also
needed a good Front Door with a lock. He also did good there. Trump playing the Imperialism
Game clumsily worked in the favor of Peaceful Coexistence. Probably by mistake. Ok by me if
everyone else declares peace anyway.
The US economy can still outpower anyone even if it is forced to play fair.
This brings us to the Deep State. Who exactly are they?
Are they Neocons who want war profits by making it look like others are the war mongers?
Are they anti-peace as long as it doesn't start a full blown war - providing a profit can
be made from it by their oligarch bosses?
Or is the Deep State the Davos oriented oligarchs who wants the 99% to whistle while
they work to support uncountable billions of dollars flowing into the asset piles of the
1%?
Why did the Deep State allow the BLM / Antifa / Democrat cabal take over? Are they
stupid? Or did they think Covid-19 along with these freaks would work in their favor
somehow?
Is the Deep State only common ordinary Imperialism? Is it only oil, and natural gas and
who gets to control the markets? Ukraine has a lot of natural resources. Is that a
coincidence?
What is it about Peaceful Coexistence that makes them go crazy?
What does The Deep State really want?
AGuy 49 minutes ago
" The only difference will be the wars will be fought for lithium and other rare metals.
"
Unlikely Oil will remain the King for causing wars. electricification of transportation
is doomed to fail. First average Americans cannot afford EV. heck they are struggling with
cheaper ICE vehicles. Auto loan duration have ballooned & most Americans are rolling
over debt from their older vehicle when they buy a new one. Second the grid is struggling.
Most of the older power plants are getting replaced by NatGas fired plants & at some
point we are going to see NatGas prices shoot up. Much of the US grid was built in the
1930s & 1940s and will need trillions just to maintain it and replace equipment &
power lines operating beyond their expected operating lifetime.
The US economy is slowly collapsing: Mountains of debt, demographics, dumbed down
education, and worthless degrees for Millennials, failing infrastructure (ie I-40 bridge).
We are on borrowed time.
AJAX-2 1 hour ago remove link
The fly in the ointment is that the banksters desperately need higher oil prices to prop
up their derivative portfolios. As a result, they are at odds with the Davos Crowd and
their desire for cheap/plentiful oil for Europe. We shall see who prevails.
AGuy 1 hour ago
" The fly in the ointment is that the banksters desperately need higher oil prices to
prop up their derivative portfolios. "
Nope:
Higher oil prices leads to higher defaults, which is likely to trigger derivative
losses. Banker shady deals come under congressional\agency scrutiny usually ending with
billion dollar fines, and bad press. A lot of banks probably will get nationalized when the
next banking crisis happens & all those bankers will lose out on the financial scams
they play.
European Monarchist 46 minutes ago remove link
Currently:
The Syrian state has survived, and its armed and security forces are now far more
capable than they were before the war started (remember how they almost lost the war
initially? The Syrians bounced back while learning some very hard lessons. By all
reports, they improved tremendously, while at critical moments Iran and Hezbollah
were literally "plugging holes" in the Syrian frontlines and "extinguishing fires" on
local flashpoints. Now the Syrians are doing a very good job of liberating large
chunks of their country, including every single city in Syria).
Not only is Syria stronger, but the Iranians and Hezbollah are all over the
country now, which is driving the Israelis into a state of panic and rage.
Lebanon is rock solid; even the latest Saudi attempt to kidnap Hariri is
backfiring. (2021 update: in spite of the explosion in Beirut, Hezbollah is still in
charge)
Syria will remain unitary, and Kurdistan is not happening. Millions of displaced
refugees are returning home.
Israel and the US look like total idiots and, even worse, as losers with no
credibility left.
The net result is everyone in the region who were aggressors are now suing for peace.
This is why I expect some kind of deal that returns Iran to the global economy. There's
no way for Germany's shiny new trade deal with China to work without this.
ut218 2 hours ago remove link
Solarcycle 25 had a bad start. By 2028 people will realize we are in a period of global
cooling. oil prices will soar
Itinerant 18 minutes ago
There won't be major investments of European majors in Iran's oil industry.
For Iran, Western partners have proved too fickle
For Western corporations, the risk is too great for long term investment.
China will be reaping most of the investement opportunities.
2 play_arrow
Marrubio 1 hour ago
.... the NWO & Davos idiotards ,they have been trying since March for oil not to
exceed the $ 70 barrier and they are not succeeding. Week after week they try to lower the
price, frightening with the covid, the production of Iran or whatever, and the following
week the oil rises again. The only thing left for them is mass slaughter ... but now people
know that what is going to kill them is in the "vaccine". Of course they will be stupid
enough to do it; if they have shown anything it is that they are profoundly idiots. They
will not be successful in getting cheap oil, simply because PeakOil is running since 2018
and since then oil production decreases at 5% per year: -5% per year, I am telling to the
NWO deep idiotards.
European Monarchist 55 minutes ago (Edited)
Interesting, but it remains to be seen where this is going, short term and long.
Now
that Benjamin Netanyahu is no longer going to be leading Israel, the probability of
breakthrough is much much higher than last week. The Likudniks in Congress and the Senate
just lost their raison d'etre. The loss of face for Israel in Bibi's latest attempt to
bludgeon Gaza to retain power backfired completely.
U.S. policy towards Israel is shifting rapidly as the younger generations, Gen-X and
Millennials, simply don't have the same allegiance to Israel that the Baby Boomers and
Silent generations did. It is part of a geopolitical ethos which is outdated.
So, with some deal over Iran's nuclear capability in the near future, Europe will then
get gas pipelines from Iran through Turkey as well as gain better access to the North
South Transport Corridor which is now unofficially part of China's Belt and Road
Initiative.
Russia, now that Nordstream 2 is nearly done, will not balk at this. In fact, they'll
welcome it. It forms the basis for a broader, sustainable peace arrangement in the Middle
East. What's lost is the Zionist program for Greater Israel and continued sowing dissent
between exhausted participants.
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Einstein101 55 minutes ago remove link
Now the Syrians are doing a very good job of liberating large chunks of their
country, including every single city in Syria).
Really? Hell no! The Syrians and the mighty Russians and the Hezbollah for many months
now are not able to overcome lowly terrorists militia in northern Syria's Idlib. Plus,
the Israelis has been launching hundreds of airstrikes over Syria while the Russian made
Syrian anti air defense can do nothing about it.
The author is a very fuzzy way comes to the idea that neoliberalism is in essence a Trotskyism for the rich and that
neoliberals want to use strong state to enforce the type of markets they want from above. That included free movement of
capital goods and people across national borders. All this talk about "small government" is just a smoke screen for naive fools.
"... The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state. ..."
"... Here one is free to choose but only within a limited range of options left after responding to the global forces of the market. ..."
"... Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology, contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy. ..."
"... One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among many rather than the big Other of regulation as such. ..."
"... I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople. ..."
"... They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw in the aspirations of the decolonizing world. ..."
"... The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people, whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place. ..."
"... The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. ..."
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 16, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674979524
ISBN-13: 978-0674979529
From introduction
...The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of
those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying
congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after
the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state.
There is truth to both of these explanations. Both presuppose a kind of materialist explanation of history with which I have no
problem. In my book, though, I take another approach. What I found is that we could not understand the inner logic of something like
the WTO without considering the whole history of the twentieth century. What I also discovered is that some of the members of the
neoliberal movement from the 1930s onward, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, did not use either of the explanations
I just mentioned. They actually didn't say that economic growth excuses everything. One of the peculiar things about Hayek, in particular,
is that he didn't believe in using aggregates like GDP -- the very measurements that we need to even say what growth is.
What I found is that neoliberalism as a philosophy is less a doctrine of economics than a doctrine of ordering -- of creating
the institutions that provide for the reproduction of the totality [of financial elite control of the state]. At the core of the strain I describe is not the idea that we
can quantify, count, price, buy and sell every last aspect of human existence. Actually, here it gets quite mystical. The Austrian
and German School of neoliberals in particular believe in a kind of invisible world economy that cannot be captured in numbers
and figures but always escapes human comprehension.
After all, if you can see something, you can plan it. Because of the very limits to our knowledge, we have to default to ironclad
rules and not try to pursue something as radical as social justice, redistribution, or collective transformation. In a globalized
world, we must give ourselves over to the forces of the market, or the whole thing will stop working.
So this is quite a different version of neoliberal thought than the one we usually have, premised on the abstract of individual
liberty or the freedom to choose. Here one is free to choose but only within a limited range of options left after responding to
the global forces of the market.
One of the core arguments of my book is that we can only understand the internal coherence of neoliberalism if we see it as a
doctrine as concerned with the whole as the individual. Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology,
contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft
institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy.
To me, the metaphor of encasement makes much more sense than the usual idea of markets set free, liberated or unfettered. How
can it be that in an era of proliferating third party arbitration courts, international investment law, trade treaties and regulation
that we talk about "unfettered markets"? One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among
many rather than the big Other of regulation as such.
What I explore in Globalists is how we can think of the WTO as the latest in a long series of institutional fixes proposed
for the problem of emergent nationalism and what neoliberals see as the confusion between sovereignty -- ruling a country -- and
ownership -- owning the property within it.
I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations
by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to
nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople.
They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic
actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I
show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw
in the aspirations of the decolonizing world.
Perhaps the lasting image of globalization that the book leaves is that world capitalism has produced a doubled world -- a world
of imperium (the world of states) and a world of dominium (the world of property). The best way to understand neoliberal globalism
as a project is that it sees its task as the never-ending maintenance of this division. The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that
the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people,
whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place.
The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like
a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. The book acts
as a kind of field guide to these institutions and, in the process, hopefully recasts the 20th century that produced them.
This is a rather
interesting look at the political and economic ideas of a circle of important economists, including Hayek and von Mises, over
the course of the last century. He shows rather convincingly that conventional narratives concerning their idea are wrong. That
they didn't believe in a weak state, didn't believe in the laissez-faire capitalism or believe in the power of the market. That
they saw mass democracy as a threat to vested economic interests.
The core beliefs of these people was in a world where money, labor and products could flow across borders without any limit.
Their vision was to remove these subjects (tariffs, immigration and controls on the movement of money) from the control of the
democracy-based nation-state and instead vesting them in international organizations. International organizations which were by
their nature undemocratic and beyond the influence of democracy. That rather than rejecting government power, what they rejected
was national government power. They wanted weak national governments but at the same time strong undemocratic international organizations
which would gain the powers taken from the state.
The other thing that characterized many of these people was a rather general rejection of economics. While some of them are
(at least in theory) economists, they rejected the basic ideas of economic analysis and economic policy. The economy, to them,
was a mystical thing beyond any human understanding or ability to influence in a positive way. Their only real belief was in "bigness".
The larger the market for labor and goods, the more economically prosperous everyone would become. A unregulated "global" market
with specialization across borders and free migration of labor being the ultimate system.
The author shows how, over a period extending from the 1920s to the 1990s, these ideas evolved from marginal academic ideas
to being dominant ideas internationally. Ideas that are reflected today in the structure of the European Union, the WTO (World
Trade Organization) and the policies of most national governments. These ideas, which the author calls "neoliberalism", have today
become almost assumptions beyond challenge. And even more strangely, the dominating ideas of the political left in most of the
west.
The author makes the point, though in a weak way, that the "fathers" of neoliberalism saw themselves as "restoring" a lost
golden age. That golden age being (roughly) the age of the original industrial revolution (the second half of the 1800s). And
to the extent that they have been successful they have done that. But at the same time, they have brought back all the political
and economic questions of that era as well.
In reading it, I started to wonder about the differences between modern neoliberalism and the liberal political movement during
the industrial revolution. I really began to wonder about the actual motives of "reform" liberals in that era. Were they genuinely
interested in reforms during that era or were all the reforms just cynical politics designed to enhance business power at the
expense of other vested interests. Was, in particular, the liberal interest in political reform and franchise expansion a genuine
move toward political democracy or simply a temporary ploy to increase their political power. If one assumes that the true principles
of classic liberalism were always free trade, free migration of labor and removing the power to governments to impact business,
perhaps its collapse around the time of the first world war is easier to understand.
He also makes a good point about the EEC and the organizations that came before the EU. Those organizations were as much about
protecting trade between Europe and former European colonial possessions as they were anything to do with trade within Europe.
To me at least, the analysis of the author was rather original. In particular, he did an excellent job of showing how the ideas
of Hayek and von Mises have been distorted and misunderstood in the mainstream. He was able to show what their ideas were and
how they relate to contemporary problems of government and democracy.
But there are some strong negatives in the book. The author offers up a complete virtue signaling chapter to prove how the
neoliberals are racists. He brings up things, like the John Birch Society, that have nothing to do with the book. He unleashes
a whole lot of venom directed at American conservatives and republicans mostly set against a 1960s backdrop. He does all this
in a bad purpose: to claim that the Kennedy Administration was somehow a continuation of the new deal rather than a step toward
neoliberalism. His blindness and modern political partisanship extended backward into history does substantial damage to his argument
in the book. He also spends an inordinate amount of time on the political issues of South Africa which also adds nothing to the
argument of the book. His whole chapter on racism is an elaborate strawman all held together by Ropke. He also spends a large
amount of time grinding some sort of Ax with regard to the National Review and William F. Buckley.
He keeps resorting to the simple formula of finding something racist said or written by Ropke....and then inferring that anyone
who quoted or had anything to do with Ropke shared his ideas and was also a racist. The whole point of the exercise seems to be
to avoid any analysis of how the democratic party (and the political left) drifted over the decades from the politics of the New
Deal to neoliberal Clintonism.
Then after that, he diverts further off the path by spending many pages on the greatness of the "global south", the G77 and
the New International Economic Order (NIEO) promoted by the UN in the 1970s. And whatever many faults of neoliberalism, Quinn
Slobodian ends up standing for a worse set of ideas: International Price controls, economic "reparations", nationalization, international
trade subsidies and a five-year plan for the world (socialist style economic planning at a global level). In attaching himself
to these particular ideas, he kills his own book. The premise of the book and his argument was very strong at first. But by around
p. 220, its become a throwback political tract in favor of the garbage economic and political ideas of the so-called third world
circa 1974 complete with 70's style extensive quotations from "Senegalese jurists"
Once the political agenda comes out, he just can't help himself. He opens the conclusion to the book taking another cheap shot
for no clear reason at William F. Buckley. He spends alot of time on the Seattle anti-WTO protests from the 1990s. But he has
NOTHING to say about BIll Clinton or Tony Blair or EU expansion or Obama or even the 2008 economic crisis for that matter. Inexplicably
for a book written in 2018, the content of the book seems to end in the year 2000.
I'm giving it three stars for the first 150 pages which was decent work. The second half rates zero stars. Though it could
have been far better if he had written his history of neoliberalism in the context of the counter-narrative of Keynesian economics
and its decline. It would have been better yet if the author had the courage to talk about the transformation of the parties of
the left and their complicity in the rise of neoliberalism. The author also tends to waste lots of pages repeating himself or
worse telling you what he is going to say next. One would have expected a better standard of editing by the Harvard Press.
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Anybody interested in global trade, business, human rights or democracy today
should read this book.
The book follow the Austrians from the beginning in the Habsburgischer empire to the beginning rebellion against the WTO. However,
most importantly it follows the thinking and the thoughts behind the building of a global empire of capitalism with free trade,
capital and rights. All the way to the new "human right" to trade. It narrows down what neoliberal thought really consist of and
indirectly make a differentiation to the neoclassical economic tradition.
What I found most interesting is the turn from economics to law - and the conceptual distinctions between the genes, tradition,
reason, which are translated into a quest for a rational and reason based protection of dominium (the rule of property) against
the overreach of imperium (the rule of states/people). This distinction speaks directly to the issues that EU is currently facing.
"... From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world. The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated-the reign of brutal capitalism-intensified. Though Ayn Rand's popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation took a dive during the 1960s and '70s. Then after her death in 1982, during the neoliberal administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, her star rose once more. (See chapter 4 for a full discussion of the rise of neoliberalism.) ..."
"... During the global economic crisis of 2008 it seemed that the neoliberal order might collapse. It lived on, however, in zombie form as discredited political policies and financial practices were restored. ..."
"... We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social, and cultural transition - but we don't yet know which way we're headed. The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelical Christians pull strings. The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand. ..."
"... The current Trump administration is stuffed to the gills with Rand acolytes. Trump himself identifies with Fountainhead character Howard Roark; former secretary of state Rex Tillerson listed Adas Shrugged as his favorite book in a Scouting magazine feature; his replacement Mike Pompeo has been inspired by Rand since his youth. Ayn Rand's influence is ascendant across broad swaths of our dominant political culture - including among public figures who see her as a key to the Zeitgeist, without having read a worth of her writing.'' ..."
"... Rand biographer Jennifer Burns asserts simply that Ayn Rand's fiction is "the gateway drug" to right-wing politics in the United States - although her influence extends well beyond the right wing ..."
"... The resulting Randian sense of life might be called "optimistic cruelty." Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed. ..."
"... The Fountainhead and especially Atlas Shrugged fabricate history and romanticize violence and domination in ways that reflect, reshape, and reproduce narratives of European superiority' and American virtue. ..."
"... It is not an accident that the novels' fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes." ..."
"... Does the pervasive cruelty of today's ruling classes shock you? Or, at least give you pause from time to time? Are you surprised by the fact that our elected leaders seem to despise people who struggle, people whose lives are not cushioned and shaped by inherited wealth, people who must work hard at many jobs in order to scrape by? If these or any of a number of other questions about the social proclivities of our contemporary ruling class detain you for just two seconds, this is the book for you. ..."
"... As Duggan makes clear, Rand's influence is not just that she offered a programmatic for unregulated capitalism, but that she offered an emotional template for "optimistic cruelty" that has extended far beyond its libertarian confines. Mean Girl is a fun, worthwhile read! ..."
"... Her work circulated endlessly in those circles of the Goldwater-ite right. I have changed over many years, and my own life experiences have led me to reject the casual cruelty and vicious supremacist bent of Rand's beliefs. ..."
"... In fact, though her views are deeply-seated, Rand is, at heart, a confidence artist, appealing only to narrow self-interest at the expense of the well-being of whole societies. ..."
Mean Girls, which was based on interviews with high school girls conducted by Rosalind Wiseman for her 2002 book Queen Bees and
War/tubes, reflects the emotional atmosphere of the age of the Plastics (as the most popular girls at Actional North Shore High are
called), as well as the era of Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, whose motto is "Greed is Good."1 The culture of greed is the hallmark
of the neoliberal era, the period beginning in the 1970s when the protections of the U.S. and European welfare states, and the autonomy
of postcolonial states around the world, came under attack. Advocates of neoliberalism worked to reshape global capitalism by freeing
transnational corporations from restrictive forms of state regulation, stripping away government efforts to redistribute wealth and
provide public services, and emphasizing individual responsibility over social concern.
From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world. The political
climate Ayn Rand celebrated-the reign of brutal capitalism-intensified. Though Ayn Rand's popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation
took a dive during the 1960s and '70s. Then after her death in 1982, during the neoliberal administrations of Ronald Reagan in the
United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, her star rose once more. (See chapter 4 for a full discussion of the rise
of neoliberalism.)
During the global economic crisis of 2008 it seemed that the neoliberal order might collapse. It lived on, however, in zombie
form as discredited political policies and financial practices were restored. But neoliberal capitalism has always been contested,
and competing and conflicting political ideas and organizations proliferated and intensified after 2008 as well.
Protest politics blossomed on the left with Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and opposition to the Dakota Access oil pipeline
at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the United States, and with the Arab Spring, and other mobilizations around the world.
Anti-neoliberal electoral efforts, like the Bernie Sanders campaign for the U.S. presidency, generated excitement as well.
But protest and organizing also expanded on the political right, with reactionary populist, racial nationalist, and protofascist
gains in such countries as India, the Philippines, Russia, Hungary, and the United States rapidly proliferating. Between these far-right
formations on the one side and persistent zombie neoliberalism on the other, operating sometimes at odds and sometimes in cahoots,
the Season of Mean is truly upon us.
We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social, and cultural transition - but we don't yet know which
way we're headed. The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites
jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelical Christians pull strings. The unifying threads are meanness
and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand.
Rand's ideas are not the key to her influence. Her writing does support the corrosive capitalism at the heart of neoliberalism,
though few movers and shakers actually read any of her nonfiction. Her two blockbuster novels, 'The Fountainpen and Atlas Shrugged,
are at the heart of her incalculable impact. Many politicians and government officials going back decades have cited Rand as a formative
influence-particularly finance guru and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a member of Rand's inner circle,
and Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president most identified with the national embrace of neoliberal policies.
Major figures in business and finance are or have been Rand fans: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Steve Jobs (Apple),
John Mackey (Whole Foods), Mark Cuban (NBA), John Allison (BB&T Banking Corporation), Travis Kalanik (Uber), Jelf Bezos (Amazon),
ad infinitum.
There are also large clusters of enthusiasts for Rand's novels in the entertainment industry, from the 1940s to the present-from
Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Raquel Welch to Jerry Lewis, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, Sandra Bullock,
Sharon Stone, Ashley Judd, Eva Mendes, and many more.
The current Trump administration is stuffed to the gills with Rand acolytes. Trump himself identifies with Fountainhead character
Howard Roark; former secretary of state Rex Tillerson listed Adas Shrugged as his favorite book in a Scouting magazine feature; his
replacement Mike Pompeo has been inspired by Rand since his youth. Ayn Rand's influence is ascendant across broad swaths of our dominant
political culture - including among public figures who see her as a key to the Zeitgeist, without having read a worth of her writing.''
But beyond the famous or powerful fans, the novels have had a wide popular impact as bestsellers since publication. Along
with Rand's nonfiction, they form the core texts for a political/ philosophical movement: Objectivism. There are several U.S.- based
Objectivist organizations and innumerable clubs, reading groups, and social circles. A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and
the Book of the Month Club found that only the Bible had influenced readers more than Atlas Shrugged, while a 1998 Modern Library
poll listed The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as the two most revered novels in English.
Atlas Shrugged in particular skyrocketed in popularity in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. The U.S. Tea Party movement, founded
in 2009, featured numerous Ayn Rand-based signs and slogans, especially the opening line of Atlas Shrugged: "Who is John Galt?" Republican
pundit David Frum claimed that the Tea Party was reinventing the GOP as "the party of Ayn Rand." During 2009 as well, sales of Atlas
Shrugged tripled, and GQ_magazine called Rand the year's most influential author. A 2010 Zogby poll found that 29 percent of respondents
had read Atlas Shrugged, and half of those readers said it had affected their political and ethical thinking.
In 2018, a business school teacher writing in Forbes magazine recommended repeat readings: "Recent events - the bizarro circus
that is the 2016 election, the disintegration of Venezuela, and so on make me wonder if a lot of this could have been avoided bad
we taken Atlas Shrugged's message to heart. It is a book that is worth re-reading every few years."3
Rand biographer Jennifer Burns asserts simply that Ayn Rand's fiction is "the gateway drug" to right-wing politics in the
United States - although her influence extends well beyond the right wing.4
But how can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant
source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands
of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement. This sexiness extends beyond romance
to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called
her "sense of life." Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a "structure of feeling," Rand's sense of life combines the libido-infused
desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight.5
Lauren Berlant has called the structure of feeling, or emotional situation, of those who struggle for a good life under neoliberal
conditions "cruel optimism"-the complex of feelings necessary to keep plugging away hopefully despite setbacks and losses.'' Rand's
contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration
and glee that enliven Rand's novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life
might be called "optimistic cruelty." Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed.
Ayn Rand's optimistic cruelty appeals broadly and deeply through its circulation of familiar narratives: the story of "civilizational"
progress, die belief in American exceptionalism, and a commitment to capitalist freedom.
Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as
violent conquest. America is imagined as a clean slate for pure capitalist freedom, with no indigenous people, no slaves, no exploited
immigrants or workers in sight. The Fountainhead and especially Atlas Shrugged fabricate history and romanticize violence and
domination in ways that reflect, reshape, and reproduce narratives of European superiority' and American virtue.
Their logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on radicalized beauty and physical capacity - perceived ugliness or disability'
are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.
Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion
and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Ntation through the lens of industrial capitalism (see chapter 2). They solicit positive
identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels' fans, though gender mixed,
are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes."
Ayn Rand is a singular influence on American political thought, and this book brilliantly unfolds how Rand gave voice to the
ethos that shapes contemporary conservatism. Duggan -- whose equally insightful earlier book Twilight of Equality offered an analysis
of neoliberalism and showed how it is both a distortion and continuation of classical liberalism -- here extends the analysis
of American market mania by showing how an anti-welfare state ethos took root as a "structure of feeling" in American culture,
elevating the individual over the collective and promoting a culture of inequality as itself a moral virtue.
Although reviled by the right-wing press (she should wear this as a badge of honor), Duggan is the most astute guide one could
hope for through this devastating history of our recent past, and the book helps explain how we ended up where we are, where far-right,
racist nationalism colludes (paradoxically) with libertarianism, an ideology of extreme individualism and (unlikely bed fellows,
one might have thought) Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
This short, accessible book is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the contemporary United States.
Does the pervasive cruelty of today's ruling classes shock you? Or, at least give you pause from time to time? Are you
surprised by the fact that our elected leaders seem to despise people who struggle, people whose lives are not cushioned and shaped
by inherited wealth, people who must work hard at many jobs in order to scrape by? If these or any of a number of other questions
about the social proclivities of our contemporary ruling class detain you for just two seconds, this is the book for you.
Writing with wit, rigor, and vigor, Lisa Duggan explains how Ayn Rand, the "mean girl," has captured the minds and snatched
the bodies of so very many, and has rendered them immune to feelings of shared humanity with those whose fortunes are not as rosy
as their own. An indispensable work, a short read that leaves a long memory.
Mean Girl offers not only a biographical account of Rand (including the fact that she modeled one of her key heroes on a serial
killer), but describes Rand's influence on neoliberal thinking more generally.
As Duggan makes clear, Rand's influence is not just that she offered a programmatic for unregulated capitalism, but that
she offered an emotional template for "optimistic cruelty" that has extended far beyond its libertarian confines. Mean Girl is
a fun, worthwhile read!
Sister, June 3, 2019
Superb poitical and cultural exploration of Rand's influence
Lisa Duggan's concise but substantive look at the political and cultural influence of Ayn Rand is stunning. I feel like I've
been waiting most of a lifetime for a book that is as wonderfully readable as it is insightful. Many who write about Rand reduce
her to a caricature hero or demon without taking her, and the history and choices that produced her seriously as a subject of
cultural inquiry. I am one of those people who first encountered Rand's books - novels, but also some nonfiction and her play,
"The Night of January 16th," in which audience members were selected as jurors – as a teenager.
Under the thrall of some right-wing locals, I was so drawn to Rand's larger-than-life themes, the crude polarization of "individualism"
and "conformity," the admonition to selfishness as a moral virtue, her reductive dismissal of the public good as "collectivism."
Her work circulated endlessly in those circles of the Goldwater-ite right. I have changed over many years, and my own life
experiences have led me to reject the casual cruelty and vicious supremacist bent of Rand's beliefs.
But over those many years, the coterie of Rand true believers has kept the faith and expanded. One of the things I value about
Duggan's compelling account is her willingness to take seriously the far reach of Rand's indifference to human suffering even
as she strips away the veneer that suggests Rand's beliefs were deep.
In fact, though her views are deeply-seated, Rand is, at heart, a confidence artist, appealing only to narrow self-interest
at the expense of the well-being of whole societies.
I learned that the hard way, but I learned it. Now I am recommending Duggan's wise book to others who seek to understand today's
cultural and political moment in the United States and the rise of an ethic of indifference to anybody but the already affluent.
Duggan is comfortable with complexity; most Randian champions or detractors are not.
"... No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides. Even though it packs 400 pages of text (which might seem like a turnoff for non-academic readers), "How to Hide an Empire" is highly readable given Immerwhar's skills as a writer. Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the right amount of detail and scope. ..."
"... Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Not everything that happens in these locations and among these populations is directly connected to US expansionism, but a great deal is. ..."
"... This is exactly the kind of book that drives the "My country, right or wrong" crowd crazy. Yes, slavery and genocide and ghastly scientific experiments existed before Europeans colonized the Americas, but it's also fair and accurate to say that Europeans made those forms of destruction into a bloody artform. Nobody did mass slaughter better. ..."
I'm a professor at the University of California San Diego and I'm assigning
this for a graduate class.
No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides.
Even though it packs 400 pages of text (which might seem like a turnoff for non-academic readers), "How to Hide an Empire" is
highly readable given Immerwhar's skills as a writer. Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the
right amount of detail and scope.
I could not disagree more with the person who gave this book one star. Take it from me: I've taught hundreds of college students
who graduate among the best in their high school classes and they know close to nothing about the history of US settler colonialism,
overseas imperialism, or US interventionism around the world. If you give University of California college students a quiz on
where the US' overseas territories are, most who take it will fail (trust me, I've done it). And this is not their fault. Instead,
it's a product of the US education system that fails to give students a nuanced and geographically comprehensive understanding
of the oversized effect that their country has around our planet.
Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies
of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native
American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Not everything that happens in these locations
and among these populations is directly connected to US expansionism, but a great deal is.
A case in point is Puerto Rico's current fiscal and economic crisis. The island's political class share part of the blame for
Puerto Rico's present rut. A lot of it is also due to unnatural (i.e. "natural" but human-exacerbated) disasters such as Hurricane
María. However, there is no denying that the evolution of Puerto Rico's territorial status has generated a host of adverse economic
conditions that US states (including an island state such as Hawaii) do not have to contend with. An association with the US has
undoubtedly raised the floor of material conditions in these places, but it has also imposed an unjust glass ceiling that most
people around the US either do not know about or continue to ignore.
To add to those unfair economic limitations, there are political injustices regarding the lack of representation in Congress,
and in the case of Am. Samoa, their lack of US citizenship. The fact that the populations in the overseas territories can't make
up their mind about what status they prefer is: a) understandable given the way they have been mistreated by the US government,
and b) irrelevant because what really matters is what Congress decides to do with the US' far-flung colonies, and there is no
indication that Congress wants to either fully annex them or let them go because neither would be convenient to the 50 states
and the political parties that run them. Instead, the status quo of modern colonial indeterminacy is what works best for the most
potent political and economic groups in the US mainland. Would
This book is about much more than that though. It's also a history of how and why the United States got to control so much
of what happens around the world without creating additional formal colonies like the "territories" that exist in this legal limbo.
Part of its goal is to show how precisely how US imperialism has been made to be more cost-effective and also more invisible.
Read Immerwhar's book, and don't listen to the apologists of US imperialism which is still an active force that contradicts
the US' professed values and that needs to be actively dismantled. Their attempts at discrediting this important reflect a denialism
of the US' imperial realities that has endured throughout the history that this book summarizes.
"How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States" is a great starting point for making the US public aware of
the US' contradictions as an "empire of liberty" (a phrase once used by Thomas Jefferson to describe the US as it expanded westward
beyond the original 13 colonies). It is also a necessary update to other books on this topic that are already out there, and it
is likely to hold the reader's attention more given its crafty narrative prose and structure
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This is exactly the
kind of book that drives the "My country, right or wrong" crowd crazy. Yes, slavery and genocide and ghastly scientific experiments
existed before Europeans colonized the Americas, but it's also fair and accurate to say that Europeans made those forms of destruction
into a bloody artform. Nobody did mass slaughter better.
The author of this compelling book reveals a history unknown to many
readers, and does so with first-hand accounts and deep historical analyses. You might ask why we can't put such things behind
us. The simple answer: we've never fully grappled with these events before in an honest and open way. This book does the nation
a service by peering behind the curtain and facing the sobering truth of how we came to be what we are.
This is a stunning book, not to be missed. If you finished Sapiens with the feeling your world view had
greatly enlarged, you're likely to have the same experience of your view of the US from reading this engaging work. And like Sapiens,
it's an entirely enjoyable read, full of delightful surprises, future dinner party gems.
The further you get into the book the more interesting and unexpected it becomes. You'll look at the US in ways you likely
never considered before. This is not a 'political' book with an ax to grind or a single-party agenda. It's refreshingly insightful,
beautifully written, fun to read.
This is a gift I'll give to many a good friend, I've just started with my wife. I rarely write
reviews and have never met the author (now my only regret). 3 people found this helpful
This book is an absolutely powerhouse, a must-read, and should be a part of every student's curriculum in
this God forsaken country.
Strictly speaking, this brilliant read is focused on America's relationship with Empire. But like with nearly everything America,
one cannot discuss it without discussing race and injustice.
If you read this book, you will learn a lot of new things about subjects that you thought you knew everything about. You will
have your eyes opened. You will be exposed to the dark underbelly of racism, corruption, greed and exploitation that undergird
American ambition.
I don't know exactly what else to say other than to say you MUST READ THIS BOOK. This isn't a partisan statement -- it's not
like Democrats are any better than Republicans in this book.
This is one of the best books I've ever read, and I am a voracious reader. The content is A+. It never gets boring. It never
gets tedious. It never lingers on narratives. It's extremely well written. It is, in short, perfect. And as such, 10/10.
I heard an interview of Daniel Immerwahr on NPR news / WDET radio regarding this book.
I'm am quite conservative
and only listen to NPR news when it doesn't lean too far to the left.
However, the interview piqued my interest. I am so glad I
purchased this ebook. What a phenomenal and informative read!!! WOW!! It's a "I never knew that" kind of read. Certainly not anything
I was taught in school. This is thoughtful, well written and an easy read. Highly recommend!!
This is a very short book, almost an essay -- 136 pages. It was published in October 2004, four years before financial crisis of
2008, which put the first nail in the coffin of neoliberalism. It addresses the cultural politics of neo-liberalism ("the
Great Deception")
Notable quotes:
"... By now, we've all heard about the shocking redistribution of wealth that's occurred during the last thirty years, and particularly during the last decade. But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics. ..."
"... Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have functioned ..."
"... The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND Money--summarize her argument. ..."
"... Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination, privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade. ..."
"... Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes. ..."
"... "There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture wars are provisional--and fading...." ..."
"... For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues. ..."
"... Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. ..."
By now, we've all heard about the shocking redistribution of wealth that's occurred during the last thirty years, and
particularly during the last decade. But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics.
The Twilight of Equality? searches out these links through an analysis of the politics of the 1990s, the decade when
neoliberalism-free market economics-became gospel.
After a brilliant historical examination of how racial and gender inequities were woven into the very theoretical underpinnings
of the neoliberal model of the state, Duggan shows how these inequities play out today. In a series of political case studies,
Duggan reveals how neoliberal goals have been pursued, demonstrating that progressive arguments that separate identity politics and
economic policy, cultural politics and affairs of state, can only fail.
Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have
functioned but, more importantly, it shows a way to revitalize and unify progressive politics in the U.S. today.
Mona Cohen 5.0 out of 5 stars A Critique of Neoliberalism and the Divided Resistance to It July 3, 2006
Lisa Duggan is intensely interested in American politics, and has found political life in the United States to have been "such
a wild ride, offering moments of of dizzying hope along with long stretches of political depression." She is grateful for "many
ideas about political depression, and how to survive it," and she has written a excellent short book that helps make sense of
many widely divergent political trends.
Her book is well-summarized by its concluding paragraph, which I am breaking up into additional paragraphs for greater
clarity:
"Now at this moment of danger and opportunity, the progressive left is mobilizing against neoliberalism and possible new or
continuing wars.
"These mobilizations might become sites for factional struggles over the disciplining of troops, in the name of unity at a
time of crisis and necessity. But such efforts will fail; the troops will not be disciplined, and the disciplinarians will be
left to their bitterness.
"Or, we might find ways of think, speaking, writing and acting that are engaged and curious about "other people's" struggles
for social justice, that are respectfully affiliative and dialogic rather than pedagogical, that that look for the hopeful spots
to expand upon, and that revel in the pleasure of political life.
"For it is pleasure AND collective caretaking, love AND the egalitarian circulation of money--allied to clear and hard-headed
political analysis offered generously--that will create the space for a progressive politics that might both imagine and
create...something worth living for."
The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND
Money--summarize her argument.
She expected upon her high school graduation in 1972, she writes, that "active and expanding social movements seemed capable
of ameliorating conditions of injustice and inequality, poverty, war and imperialism....I had no idea I was not perched at a
great beginning, but rather at a denouement, as the possibilities for progressive social change encountered daunting historical
setbacks beginning in 1972...."
Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination,
privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities
while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade.
Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to
downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the
upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes.
Her belief is that all groups threatened by the neoliberal paradigm should unite against it, but such unity is threatened by
endless differences of perspectives. By minutely analyzing many of the differences, and expanding understanding of diverse
perspectives, she tries to remove them as obstacles towards people and organizations working together to achieve both unique and
common aims.
This is good book for those interested in the history and current significance of numerous progressive ideological arguments.
It is a good book for organizers of umbrella organizations and elected officials who work with diverse social movements. By
articulating points of difference, the author depersonalizes them and aids in overcoming them.
Those who are interested in electoral strategies, however, will be disappointed. The interrelationship between neoliberalism
as a governing ideology and neoliberalism as a political strategy is not discussed here. It is my view that greater and more
focused and inclusive political organizing has the potential to win over a good number of the those who see support of
neoliberalism's policy initiatives as a base-broadening tactic more than as a sacred cause.
"There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she
writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture
wars are provisional--and fading...."
Reading this book adds to one's understanding of labels, and political and intellectual distinctions. It has too much jargon
for my taste, but not so much as to be impenetrable. It is an excellent summarization and synthesis of the goals, ideologies, and
histories of numerous social movements, both famous and obscure.
Duggan
articulately connects social and economic issues to each other, arguing that neoliberal
politics have divided the two when in actuality, they cannot be separated from one another.
In the introduction, Duggan argues that politics have become neoliberal - while politics
operate under the guise of promoting social change or social stability, in reality, she argues,
politicians have failed to make the connection between economic and social/cultural issues. She
uses historical background to prove the claim that economic and social issues can be separated
from each other is false.
For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that
economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has
only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues.
After the introduction, Duggan focuses on a specific topic in each chapter: downsizing
democracy, the incredible shrinking public, equality, and love and money. In the first chapter
(downsizing democracy), she argues that through violent imperial assertion in the Middle East,
budget cuts in social services, and disillusionments in political divides, "capitalists could
actually bring down capitalism" (p. 2).
Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that
proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. Duggan provides historical background
that help the reader connect early nineteenth century U.S. legislation (regarding voting rights
and slavery) to perpetuated institutional prejudices.
So yes the bull market in news is over, finito, kaput. Not forever of course but for now.
Cable TV news ratings were mixed in
Q1, but down significantly in March as the election faded into the rearview mirror.
michael 3 hours ago What kind of business model succeeds when it basically dismisses half of
it's potential customers as villains, and only markets to the other half? The simple answer is
that the business only stands half a chance at surviving. The media was healthier when it was
much less partisan or at least appeared to be. Reply 18 1 1 reply Donald 8 hours ago People now
understand that the large majority of our media is just a propaganda machine for the Democratic
party. Now that the Dems control virtually every level of power at the national level
(Congress, presidency, 90% media, large corporations, and most unions) it's hard for the media
to whip up that frenzy of hate they achieved when Trump was in office. The outsider and rebel
(Trump) is gone and the ultimate lifetime politician (Biden) is securely in office. The iron
grip of lifetime politicians on the throat of America has been achieved. Reply 27 7 2 replies
Donald 7 hours ago The drop is because most of the media was obsessed with bringing down the
outsider (Trump). Now that an establishment man and a lifetime Democrat politician is in
control, order has been restored. People were interested in the Trump bashing articles and
reports the media generated. Now, the media cannot be outraged because their guys (Dems)
control every lever of National power. Now everything is sunshine and roses (not true of
course) which doesn't generate as much interest.
Lester 10 hours ago I laughed out loud when I read "less non-partisan". Thanks for that. Reply
23 4 2 replies Pop 10 hours ago The "Media" business model is easy, and ancient. From the days
of the Roman criers, to todays digital print. Same model for 2500 years. You twist and distort
reality to attract a targeted audience, then you blast them with advertisements from your
sponsors. The problem is there is just too much. So you have to distort and fabricate reality
more and more and more. Until you have the insane Pravda stuff we have today.
My ultra-Liberal boss announced this AM, almost with a sense of glee, that COVID cases in
our county allegedly went back up so we'd be forced to submit to once-a-week testing
again....except for those who are vaccinated. They don't have to be tested. Immediately, I
piped up that that seemed odd the vaccinated didn't require testing seeing as the CDC says
that they can still Harbor & pass on the virus. She got pissed & screamed at me, "I
don't make the rules!". To which I responded, "If you'll notice, I never said you did. I
simply stated that the CDC says the vaccinated can still pass the virus so the rule they
don't need testing is contradictory to the "science". Either the vaccine you all are pushing
works...or it doesn't. Time for "the science" to be consistent or it's all a bunch of
crap."
I think it's pretty safe to say I won't be getting a glowing performance review this year.
Too bad... they're so flipping short-staffed she can't possibly afford to fire me.
Looks like the USA neoliberal elite has serious credibility problems. Neoliberal MSM are no longer trusted by significant strata
of the US population. This looks like "Back int he USSR" situation to me.
Notable quotes:
"... There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience. ..."
"... Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare program. ..."
"... The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there. ..."
"... WHO team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus is 'Not Allowed' in secret Pentagon biolabs around the world ..."
"... More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon. ..."
"... They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally vaccines. Trust none of them. ..."
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
.
'Army germ lab shut down by CDC in 2019 had several 'serious' protocol violations that year
Select agents are defined by the CDC as "biological agents and toxins that have been determined to have the potential to pose
a severe threat to public health and safety, to animal and plant health, or to animal or plant products.'
That was their own SAR's variant which caused the 'vaping crisis' absent the s1 cleavege spike protein. Still killed people,
nothing like as infectious.
As every fan of the old Perry Mason show remembers, courtroom witnesses swear "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth."
There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful
presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary
by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding
certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience.
Two months ago I [Ron Unz] published a lengthy article summarizing much of the information from the first year of the outbreak
and focusing upon the heated debate regarding the origins of the virus. This compendium of crucial research has now received a
major addition, a 11,000 word analysis of the likely origins of Covid-19 by Nicholas Wade, a distinguished former science reporter
and editor, who had spent more than four decades at the New York Times, Science, and Nature , and the author of several excellent
books dealing with anthropology and evolutionary biology.
In the case of Covid-19, Wade demonstrates that once the political barriers have been removed and we are allowed to consider
the evidence objectively, our conclusions are transformed. The scientific case for the natural origins of the virus becomes pitifully
weak, thereby automatically elevating the competing lab-leak hypothesis, which had previously been denounced and stigmatized as
a so-called "conspiracy theory."
Having now twice read Wade's long article, I can say that I find nearly all of his scientific arguments quite compelling, and
I have almost no points of significant disagreement. Yet my overall conclusions are entirely different from his.
... ... ...
Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have
produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000
words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded
biowarfare program.
sarz 10 hours ago remove link
Ann Coulter says:
Wade claims to have no preference for one theory over another" he's just laying out the facts! But it's pretty clear that
he is coming down on the side of the lab theory.
He doesn't mention that 27 of the original 41 Chinese people who contracted COVID-19 had been to the Wuhan wet market, known
the world over for its delectable porcupine anus and snake innards. Several other carriers were family members of those infected
there. By contrast, no one from the Wuhan lab appears to have been infected.
She implies this is a weakness of Wade's laboratory hypothesis. But it's actually only so for the WUHAN laboratory hypothesis.
SoDamnMad 11 hours ago
Nothing more at Ft. Detrick than not have containment plans in place with a person assigned the responsibility. This goes on
all the time in the chemical industry where spill plans must be in place for every piece of equipment and an inspection by OSHA
or CDC catches these deficiencies. A higher level of concern at a facility like Ft. Detrick.
vova_3.2018 10 hours ago remove link
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean
why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are
had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there.
More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using
a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon.
vril PRO 11 hours ago
Faucism
boyplunger7777 12 hours ago
They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally
vaccines. Trust none of them.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
They lied about JFK
Uri Finberg 12 hours ago
No. They KILLED JFK. The Democrats rigged the election. The Globalists wanted JFK to beat Nixon. So they rigged the election
just like Trump vs. Biden.
JFK was going to be the rock star President like Obama. He was going to be the hip Hollywood President that would lead the
youth to destruction.
Then JFK wised up. When he found out they rigged the election and he didn't actually win he started thinking about it. He was
ready to take down the Deep State, Globalists, Secret Societies whatever you want to call it. He was ready to drain the swamp
so they killed him. They killed him, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. They didn't take out Trump because
they manipulated him to push the "vaccine" depopulation agenda instead. They used Trump until they could rig the next election.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
Yes, they killed JFK, but they also lied about JFK
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
And they're still lying . . . and many are still buying.
Suzy Q 11 hours ago (Edited)
They lied about Russia, Russia, Russia, weapons of mass destruction, throwing babies from incubators onto the cold, hard floor
in Kuwait, Bengazi, Epstein killing himself.
They lied about vaccines not causing autism, about HIV/AIDS, about the rainbow belonging to the gays.They lie about lying.
They cannot help themselves, it is their nature to lie.
EcoJoker PREMIUM 12 hours ago
I would bet it had more to do with JFK about to take the reigns on money printing. A week before he was to sign that EO, he
was shot.
keeper20 10 hours ago (Edited)
DOOD, research this:
Nixon was hired after answering a classified ad in the LA Times for auditions for the part of a politician to run for political
office. the man who bought the ad, held the interviews, and hired him was prescott walker bush. nixon was a lackey of the nazi
vril paperclip bunch.
Nimby 12 hours ago
People keep wondering when the next civil war/revolution/world war/whatever is going to start. It already has. First rule of
war: Know when you're in one.
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
All warfare is based on deception. ~ Sun Tzu
The first casualty of war is truth. ~ Aeschylus
. . . the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in
any country. ~ Herman Goering
Looks like the USA neoliberal elite has serious credibility problems. Neoliberal MSM are no longer trusted by significant strata
of the US population. This looks like "Back int he USSR" situation to me.
Notable quotes:
"... There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience. ..."
"... Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare program. ..."
"... The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there. ..."
"... WHO team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus is 'Not Allowed' in secret Pentagon biolabs around the world ..."
"... More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon. ..."
"... They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally vaccines. Trust none of them. ..."
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
.
'Army germ lab shut down by CDC in 2019 had several 'serious' protocol violations that year
Select agents are defined by the CDC as "biological agents and toxins that have been determined to have the potential to pose
a severe threat to public health and safety, to animal and plant health, or to animal or plant products.'
That was their own SAR's variant which caused the 'vaping crisis' absent the s1 cleavege spike protein. Still killed people,
nothing like as infectious.
As every fan of the old Perry Mason show remembers, courtroom witnesses swear "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth."
There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful
presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary
by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding
certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience.
Two months ago I [Ron Unz] published a lengthy article summarizing much of the information from the first year of the outbreak
and focusing upon the heated debate regarding the origins of the virus. This compendium of crucial research has now received a
major addition, a 11,000 word analysis of the likely origins of Covid-19 by Nicholas Wade, a distinguished former science reporter
and editor, who had spent more than four decades at the New York Times, Science, and Nature , and the author of several excellent
books dealing with anthropology and evolutionary biology.
In the case of Covid-19, Wade demonstrates that once the political barriers have been removed and we are allowed to consider
the evidence objectively, our conclusions are transformed. The scientific case for the natural origins of the virus becomes pitifully
weak, thereby automatically elevating the competing lab-leak hypothesis, which had previously been denounced and stigmatized as
a so-called "conspiracy theory."
Having now twice read Wade's long article, I can say that I find nearly all of his scientific arguments quite compelling, and
I have almost no points of significant disagreement. Yet my overall conclusions are entirely different from his.
... ... ...
Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have
produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000
words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded
biowarfare program.
sarz 10 hours ago remove link
Ann Coulter says:
Wade claims to have no preference for one theory over another" he's just laying out the facts! But it's pretty clear that
he is coming down on the side of the lab theory.
He doesn't mention that 27 of the original 41 Chinese people who contracted COVID-19 had been to the Wuhan wet market, known
the world over for its delectable porcupine anus and snake innards. Several other carriers were family members of those infected
there. By contrast, no one from the Wuhan lab appears to have been infected.
She implies this is a weakness of Wade's laboratory hypothesis. But it's actually only so for the WUHAN laboratory hypothesis.
SoDamnMad 11 hours ago
Nothing more at Ft. Detrick than not have containment plans in place with a person assigned the responsibility. This goes on
all the time in the chemical industry where spill plans must be in place for every piece of equipment and an inspection by OSHA
or CDC catches these deficiencies. A higher level of concern at a facility like Ft. Detrick.
vova_3.2018 10 hours ago remove link
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean
why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are
had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there.
More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using
a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon.
vril PRO 11 hours ago
Faucism
boyplunger7777 12 hours ago
They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally
vaccines. Trust none of them.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
They lied about JFK
Uri Finberg 12 hours ago
No. They KILLED JFK. The Democrats rigged the election. The Globalists wanted JFK to beat Nixon. So they rigged the election
just like Trump vs. Biden.
JFK was going to be the rock star President like Obama. He was going to be the hip Hollywood President that would lead the
youth to destruction.
Then JFK wised up. When he found out they rigged the election and he didn't actually win he started thinking about it. He was
ready to take down the Deep State, Globalists, Secret Societies whatever you want to call it. He was ready to drain the swamp
so they killed him. They killed him, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. They didn't take out Trump because
they manipulated him to push the "vaccine" depopulation agenda instead. They used Trump until they could rig the next election.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
Yes, they killed JFK, but they also lied about JFK
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
And they're still lying . . . and many are still buying.
Suzy Q 11 hours ago (Edited)
They lied about Russia, Russia, Russia, weapons of mass destruction, throwing babies from incubators onto the cold, hard floor
in Kuwait, Bengazi, Epstein killing himself.
They lied about vaccines not causing autism, about HIV/AIDS, about the rainbow belonging to the gays.They lie about lying.
They cannot help themselves, it is their nature to lie.
EcoJoker PREMIUM 12 hours ago
I would bet it had more to do with JFK about to take the reigns on money printing. A week before he was to sign that EO, he
was shot.
keeper20 10 hours ago (Edited)
DOOD, research this:
Nixon was hired after answering a classified ad in the LA Times for auditions for the part of a politician to run for political
office. the man who bought the ad, held the interviews, and hired him was prescott walker bush. nixon was a lackey of the nazi
vril paperclip bunch.
Nimby 12 hours ago
People keep wondering when the next civil war/revolution/world war/whatever is going to start. It already has. First rule of
war: Know when you're in one.
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
All warfare is based on deception. ~ Sun Tzu
The first casualty of war is truth. ~ Aeschylus
. . . the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in
any country. ~ Herman Goering
There are reasons to be skeptical. After decades of stonewalling on the issue, suddenly
American military chiefs appear to be giving credence to claims of UFOs invading Earth.
Several viral video clips purporting to show
extraordinary flying technology have been "confirmed" by the Pentagon as authentic. The
Pentagon move is unprecedented.
The videos of the Unidentified Flying Objects were taken by U.S. air force flight crews or
by naval surveillance and subsequently "leaked" to the public. The question is: were the
"leaks" authorized by Pentagon spooks to stoke the public imagination of visitors from space?
The Pentagon doesn't actually say what it believes the UFOs are, only that the videos are
"authentic".
A Senate intelligence committee is to receive a report
from the Department of Defense's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force next month.
That has also raised public interest in the possibility of alien life breaching our skies
equipped with physics-defying technology far superior to existing supersonic jets and
surveillance systems.
Several other questions come to mind that beg skepticism. Why does the phenomenon of UFOs or
UAP only seem to be associated with the American military? This goes back decades to the
speculation during the 1950s about aliens crashing at Roswell in New Mexico. Why is it that
only the American military seems privy to such strange encounters? Why not the Russian or
Chinese military which would have comparable detection technology to the Americans but they
don't seem to have made any public disclosures on alien encounters? Such a discrepancy is
implausible unless we believe that life-forms from lightyears away have a fixation solely on
the United States. That's intergalactic American "exceptionalism" for you!
Also, the alleged sightings of UFOs invariably are associated with U.S. military training
grounds or high-security areas.
Moreover, the released videos that have spurred renewed public interest in UFOs are always
suspiciously of poor quality, grainy and low resolution. Several researchers, such as Mick
West, have cogently debunked
the videos as optical illusions. That's not to say that the U.S. air force or naval personnel
were fabricating the images. They may genuinely believe that they were witnessing something
extraordinary. But as rational optics experts have pointed out there are mundane explanations
for seeming unusual aerial observations, such as drones or balloons drifting at high speed in
differential wind conditions, or by the crew mistaking a far-off aircraft dipping over the
horizon for an object they believe to be much closer.
The military people who take the videos in good – albeit misplaced – faith about
what they are witnessing are not the same as the military or intelligence people who see an
opportunity with the videos to exploit the public in a psychological operation.
Fomenting public anxieties, or even just curiosity, about aliens and super-technology is an
expedient way to exert control over the population. At a time when governing authorities are
being questioned by a distrustful public and when military-intelligence establishments are
viewed as having lost a sense of purpose, what better way to realign public respect by getting
them to fret over alien marauders from whom they need protection?
There is here a close analogy to the way foreign nations are portrayed as adversaries and
enemies in order to marshal public support or least deference to the governing establishment
and its military. We see this ploy played over and over again with regard to the U.S. and
Western demonization of Russia and China as somehow conveying a malign intent towards Western
societies. In other words, it's a case of Cold War and UFOs from the same ideological
launchpad, so to speak, in order to distract public attention from internal problems.
However, more worrying still is that there is a dangerous reinforcing crossover of the two
propaganda realms. The fueling of UFO speculation is feeding directly into
speculation that U.S. airspace is being invaded by high-tech weapons developed by Russia or
China.
U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon about whether the aerial "encounters"
are advanced weaponry from foreign enemies who are surveilling the American homeland at will.
Some U.S. air force aviators have recently expressed to the
media a feeling of helplessness in the face of seeming superior technology.
At a time of heightened animosity towards Russia and China and febrile talk among Pentagon
chiefs about the
possibility of all-out war, it is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is disturbingly easy
to imagine, how optical illusions about alien phenomena could trigger false alarms attributed
to Russian or Chinese military incursions.
The stoking of UFO controversy appears to be a classic psyops perpetrated by U.S. military
intelligence for the objective of population control. Its aim is to corral the citizenry under
the authority of the state and for them to accept the protector function of "our" military. The
big trouble is that the psyops with aliens are, in turn, risking the exacerbation of fears and
tensions with Russia and China.
With all the Pentagon-assisted chatter, it is more likely that an F-18 squadron could
mistake an errant weather balloon on the horizon for an alien spacecraft. And amid our new Cold
War tensions, it is but a small conceptual step to further imagine that the UFO is not from
outer space but rather is a Russian or Chinese hypersonic cruise missile heading towards the
U.S. mainland.
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. Tolkien
"Welcome to an Orwellian Brave New World!
Orwell's (1984) words were prescient. Huxley (Brave New World) was a school teacher of
Orwell's at Eton College. They both attended elite symposiums in the 1920s and 30s where all
of this was discussed in complete seriousness sort of like early versions of Bilderberger
meetings. So the accuracy of their books was no accident they actually KNEW what was being
planned. Huxley just emphasized the more SOCIALIST elements while Orwell emphasized the more
FASCIST elements they were both right, because both aspects were always part of the plan.
It's obvious that the Rulers always intended to use both approaches as part of their CONTROL
structure.
Looking at their personal lives and backgrounds, it appears that Orwell was trying to warn
us. Huxley was much more of a British upper crust blue blood. He seemed to be in agreement
with what the Rulers were planning, and along with his brother Julian he was actually helping
them. They both knew what was coming.
Were they used as textbooks by the Rulers? It's just that the general public aren't as
worried about controlling the masses as the Rulers' are."
"Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence -- those are the three pillars of
Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse."
– Aldous Huxley
Ouch, Huxley chops at the roots. This quote is profound. If you were to connect dots what
do you see?
One can't blame everything on Israel. Yes, it is part of five eyes, more like SIX
eyes.
Biden (JB) is building a coalition to challenge China. JB's administration wants to
neutralize Russia. Nord Stream 2 is an element of contention and by making a concession JB is
making Germany and Russia happy. Agree, that its completion will be a "huge geopolitical win
for Putin". Let's see when Nord Stream 2 becomes fully operational. Time will tell.
Russia's main focus is De-Dollarization, stability in Russia and in its neighborhood.
China's announcement about Bitcoin led to it dropping by 30%. What will China, Russia,
Turkey and Iran announcement about the U$A dollar do to its value and the market? When will
China become the #1 ECONOMY?
The US is now the largest provider of LNG, so there is relatively little more financial
advantage to be gained from a direct confrontation with Germany or Russia. Political maybe,
but the dedollarisation is starting to take hold. (Aside; even Israel depends on the strength
of the dollar to continue, like musical chairs, when the music stops there will be
precious few chairs left ). The Gas/Oil lobbies in the US who are behind the sanctions
may have some other trick up their sleeve, but the deflation of Zelensky in Ukraine, and the
opening up of a steal-fest of Ukrainian assets might compensate.
***
Note that the West has closed Syrian Embassies so as to stop Syrians voting for Assad. They
steal it's oil, and Syria is still next to Israel and doing relatively well in spite of
tanker bombings, and missiles. It is also possible that, as you say, there is a price for
non-interference in Israel itself.
Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory
in the state's public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as "based on false
history" and "teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other."
DeSantis made the remarks at a Friday press
conference in Pensacola, where he announced the
signing of a bill temporarily establishing several statewide tax-free periods on items like
storm supplies and back-to-school products.
"It's offensive to the taxpayer that they would be asked to fund critical race theory,
that they would be asked to fund teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other,"
DeSantis said.
Floridа Gov. Ron DeSantis is seen during a meeting at the governor's office in
Tallahassee, Fla., on April 1, 2021. (The Epoch Times)
In a
recent interview on NTD's "Focus Talk," Yiatin Chu, an Asian mother of two and co-chair of
the New York chapter of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), described
critical race theory as pushing the idea that disparate outcomes, such as academic competency
scores, can be reduced to a single variable""race.
Advocates of the theory, which she said is increasingly being taught at pre-college levels,
push the socialist notion of equality of outcome, and blame differences in outcomes on
entrenched privilege while dividing people into "oppressors" and their victims, the
"oppressed."
Republicans across the nation are trying to prevent the teaching of critical race theory in
classrooms.
Recently, South Dakota's Republican Gov. Kristi Noem took aim at both the "1619 Project" and
critical race theory and, like DeSantis, voiced opposition to their incorporation in school
curriculums.
"The 1619 Project relies upon the concept of Critical Race Theory to further divide
students based on the color of their skin," Noem wrote in a series of tweets
Friday.
"This is inappropriate and un-American. It has no place in South Dakota, and it certainly
has no place in South Dakota classrooms."
In this screenshot from the RNC's livestream of the 2020 Republican National Convention,
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem addresses the virtual convention on Aug. 26, 2020. (Courtesy of
the Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images)
The "1619 Project," inaugurated with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine,
attempts to cast the Atlantic slave trade as the dominant factor in the founding of America
instead of ideals such as individual liberty and natural rights. The initiative has been widely
panned by historians and political scientists, with some critics calling it a bid to rewrite
U.S. history through a left-wing lens.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, responded to the GOP criticism
of the project during an interview with MSNBC on May 3, saying the 1619 curriculum being
allowed in schools is a matter of free speech.
"This isn't a project about trying to teach children that our country is evil, but it is a
project trying to teach children the truth about what our country was based upon, and it's
only in really confronting that truth""slavery was foundational to the United States, we,
after the slavery, experienced 100 years of legalized discrimination against black
Americans," said Hannah-Jones.
"Mitch McConnell and others like him want for our children to get a propagandistic,
nationalistic understanding of history that is not about facts, but it is about how they
would want to pretend that our country is."
Proponents of critical race theory
have argued that it's needed to demonstrate what they say is "pervasive systemic racism"
and facilitate rooting it out.
Critics draw parallels between critical race theory and Marxism, arguing that the concept
advocates for the destruction of institutions, such as the Western justice system, free-market
economy, and orthodox religions, while demanding that they be replaced with institutions
compliant with the critical race theory ideology.
Sky News host Rowan Dean says proof of how the Biden administration "is being run behind the
scenes by hardcore neo-Marxists" is the administration's embrace of the Durban Declaration.
"She's done as a member of leadership. I don't understand what she's doing," one former
House GOP lawmaker told The Hill of Cheney's ongoing attacks on former President Trump. " It's
like political self-immolation. You can't cancel Trump from the Republican Party; all she's
done is cancel herself. "
Cheney has repeatedly attacked Trump for 'inciting' the Jan. 6 'insurrection' despite
telling supporters to protest peacefully and then go home following the breach of the
Capitol.
GOP leaders hope that purging Cheney from the leadership ranks will move Republicans
beyond their civil war over Trump" one that's raged publicly since the Jan. 6 attack on the
Capitol" and allow the party to unite behind a midterm campaign message that President Biden
and the Democrats are too liberal for the country. - The
Hill
"There are still a few members that are talking about things that happened in the past, not
really focused on what we need to do to move forward and win the majority back next year,"
according to Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the minority whip. "We're going to have to be unified
if we defeat the socialist agenda you're seeing in Washington."
A victory by Stefanik would mark a symbolic shift back towards Trump by leading Republicans
- as the former president remains highly engaged this election cycle and has threatened to
politically obliterate any remaining GOP opposition.
"By ousting her, what we're saying is: We are repudiating your repudiation of the Trump
policies and the Trump agenda and her attacks on the president," according to Rep. Andy Biggs
(R-AZ), adding " President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. And when she's out
there attacking him, she's attacking the leader of the Republican Party ."
Cheney has already survived one challenge to her leadership post, in February, after she
infuriated conservatives by voting to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol rampage on Jan.
6. With the backing of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), she easily kept
her seat as conference chair, 145 to 61 by secret ballot.
With McCarthy and Scalise fed up with Cheney and now backing Stefanik, the 36-year-old New
Yorker is expected to prevail in Wednesday's contest" a would-be victory for leaders who have
failed to unite the conference behind a post-Trump strategy in the early months of the Biden
administration. - The
Hill
... ... ...
Cheney isn't the only House Republican facing backlash for taking on Trump. Earlier in the
week, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of seven Republican senators who voted this year to
convict Trump, was booed and called a traitor at the Utah GOP state convention, where he
narrowly beat back an effort to censure him.
On Friday, the Ohio Republican Party Central Committee voted to censure Rep. Anthony
Gonzalez (R-Ohio), Cheney and the eight other House Republicans who backed Trump's
impeachment in January. The Ohio GOP also formally called for Gonzalez's resignation.
... ... ...
Catullus 51 minutes ago
I don't care if Trump runs again just as long as these gross establishment Republicans
are thrown out on their asses
JoeyChernenko PREMIUM 39 minutes ago (Edited)
Romney is a real traitorous worm. Did you hear him say Biden is a good man with good
intentions when the Utah crowd was booing his worthless hide? And we need to make sure the
Bush dynasty remains out of power.
Anath 51 minutes ago remove link
the cheney family is pure evil. that is all.
chinese.sniffles 52 minutes ago
Why Would Wyoming choose Chenney, after all that evil that **** brought upon America. If
there was no ****, Obama would never get elected.
chunga 47 minutes ago remove link
Cynics suspect primaries are also rigged.
Basecamp3 PREMIUM 50 minutes ago
Comstock is a traitor that never read the Navarro Report which goes into detail of
how the election was stolen. Also, ousting Cheney has zero risk. She is stupid, weak, and
her own constituents hate her.
overbet 50 minutes ago
which has caused some GOP leaders to fear alienating female Republican voters,
particularly educated suburbanites who will be key votes in the 2022 elections.
The female republicans I know are smarter than that. All of them
Grave Dancer 22 38 minutes ago remove link
Liz's sociopath dad **** got hundreds of thousands killed based on a total fraud lie of
a war. And Liz has a problem with Trump because he tweets some unfiltered stuff once in a
while? Freaking kidding me? ay_arrow
GhostOLaz 37 minutes ago
Don't blame Liz, she has a legacy of treason to protect, Daddy removed the only secular
anti Communist govt in the middle East which protected Christains and religious
minorities...
gaaasp 20 minutes ago (Edited)
Women could wear pants and not be burkahed up in Syria and Libya and Iraq before
Bush/Clinton/Obama/Trump sent troops.
chunga 49 minutes ago
I don't want to give up on the process but the GOP has a lot of work to do.
nmewn 39 minutes ago
The thing about "us" is, when we find them we jettison them. Cantor was another one. She
voted to impeach an outgoing President who's trial she knew would be held AFTER he was out
of office and again just an average American citizen holding no federal office at all.
She is either incompetent, stupid (or both) or a cancer the GOP can live with excised
from the body.
Make_Mine_A_Double 40 minutes ago
Peggy Noonan really came out the closet in this weekend's WSJ with editorial of Liz
Chaney against the House of Cowards.
They are 2 of the same. We've had these demsheviks in the ranks for decades. Noonan
takes it in the anoose at dem cocktail parties and is Team Mascot for the RINOs.
Tucker finally exposed that filth Luntz. McCathry is actually living with him in one of
his apartments - I assume it's not platonic in nature.
This is why Trump could never even the bottom of the swamp....g.d. RINOs need to purged
with the extreme prejudice.
the Mysterians 40 minutes ago
War pig.
in deditionem acceptos 48 minutes ago
Liz will survive the vote. Too much graff from the MIC to get her out. McCarthey could
of got her out in Feb if he wanted. Wonder what honey pot he's dipping into?
A Girl In Flyover Country 43 minutes ago
She won't survive the Wyoming voters, though.
Cogito_ergosum 52 minutes ago (Edited)
She is protecting her dad who was part of the inside gang that carried out the...
demolition of the twin towers on 911...
Flying Monkees 37 minutes ago (Edited)
BS. The tribe's fingerprints were all over 9/11 as documented in extensive detail by
Christopher Bollyn.
JoeyChernenko PREMIUM 53 minutes ago
Don't any of these evil families ever just fade into oblivion? Bush, Cheney, Clinton,
Obama, etc.
beavertails 50 minutes ago
Extending and pretending there are choices when there aren't any. The MIC got this. The
"Prez" is just show to sell ads and steal, I mean raise fiat from the gullible.
"... I can't wait to see the 1000 foot long cargo ships, the 80,000 pound carrying semi trailers, the 42 million pound trains and above all (sorry) the 400 passenger jet airliners run off of solar panels or wind generators. Especially the airliners using a windmill! (We used to have much of this. It was called "the Age of Sail"). ..."
I can't wait to see the 1000 foot long cargo ships, the 80,000 pound carrying semi
trailers, the 42 million pound trains and above all (sorry) the 400 passenger jet airliners
run off of solar panels or wind generators. Especially the airliners using a windmill! (We
used to have much of this. It was called "the Age of Sail").
In other words, we can have globalism with its demands for unlimited movement of goods and
people or we can have local economies, autarky and nativism. The globalists who claim to care
about carbon footprints are being disingenuous.
It should serve as a warning. 14 years ago, obscure corners of banking businesses became
hotbeds of regulatory arbitrage, speculation and leverage. The contagion of US subprime brought
the financial system to its knees. Now, after years of low or negative interest rates, equity
finance may have become a similar hotbed.
Money quite from comments: " more importantly it is devastating information about the dishonesty of our government. What have we
come to? What recourse is available?"
The man cast as a linchpin of debunked Trump-Russia collusion theories is breaking his silence to vigorously dispute the U.S.
government's effort to brand him a Russian spy and put him behind bars.
In an exclusive interview with RealClearInvestigations, Konstantin Kilimnik stated, "I have no relationship whatsoever to any
intelligence services, be they Russian or Ukrainian or American, or anyone else."
Konstantin Kilimnik: Decries the U.S. government's "senseless and false accusations." AP Photo
Kilimnik, a longtime employee of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, spoke out in response to an explosive
Treasury Department statement declaring that he
had "provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy" during the 2016 election.
That press release, which announced an array of sanctions on Russian nationals last month, also alleged that Kilimnik is a "known
Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf."
Treasury 's
claim came shortly after two other accusatory U.S. government statements about the dual Ukrainian-Russian national. In March,
a U.S. Intelligence Community
Assessment accused Kilimnik of being a "Russian influence agent" who meddled in the 2020 campaign to assist Trump's reelection.
A month earlier, an FBI
alert offered $250,000 for information leading to his arrest over a 2018 witness tampering charge in Manafort's shuttered Ukraine
lobbying case, which was unrelated to Russia, collusion, or any elections.
Treasury provided no evidence for its claims, which go beyond the findings of the two most extensive Russiagate investigations:
the 448-page report issued in 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the 966-page report issued in August 2020 by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence.
Treasury has declined all media requests for elaboration on how it reached conclusions that those probes did not. Two unidentified
officials
told NBC News that U.S. intelligence "has developed new information" about Kilimnik "that leads them to believe " (emphasis
added) that he passed on the polling data to Russia. But these sources "did not identify the source or type of intelligence that
had been developed," nor "when or how" it was received.
"Nobody has seen any evidence to support these claims about Kilimnik," a congressional source familiar with the House and Senate's
multiple Russia-related investigations told RCI.
Adam Schiff: Treated the Treasury claim about Kilimnik as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. "That's what most people would call collusion,"
he said. (Al Drago/Pool via AP)
Despite the absence of evidence, the Treasury press release's one-sentence claim about Kilimnik has been widely greeted as the
Trump-Russia smoking gun. Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC that Treasury's
assertion about Kilimnik proved that Russian intelligence was "involved in trying to help Trump win in that [2016] election. That's
what most people would call collusion."
Speaking to RCI in fluent English from his home in Moscow, Kilimnik, 51, described these U.S. government assertions as "senseless
and false accusations."
His comments are backed up by documents, some previously unreported, as well as by Rick Gates, a longtime Manafort associate and
key Mueller probe cooperating witness. (Gates pleaded guilty to making a false statement and to failing to register as a foreign
agent in connection to his lobbying work in Ukraine.) The evidence raises doubts about new efforts to revive the Trump-Kremlin collusion
narrative by casting Kilimnik as a central Russian figure.
"They needed a Russian to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," Kilimnik said.
Highlights from the interview and RCI's related reporting:
Kilimnik denies passing 2016 polling data to Russian intelligence, or any Russian for that matter. Instead, Kilimnik says
he shared publicly available, general information about the 2016 American presidential race to Ukrainian clients of Manafort's
in a bid to recover old debts and drum up new business. Gates told RCI that the Mueller team "cherry-picked" his testimony about
Kilimnik to spread a misleading, collusion-favorable narrative. The U.S. government has never publicly produced the polling data
at issue, nor any evidence that it was shared with Russia.
Despite his centrality to the Trump-Russia saga, Kilimnik says no U.S. government official has ever tried get in touch with
him. "I never had a single contact with [the] FBI or any government official," Kilimnik says.
Kilimnik shared documents that contradict the Special Counsel's effort to prove that he has Russian intelligence "ties." Photos
and video of his Russian passport and a U.S. visa in his name, shared with RCI , undermine the Mueller report's claim that Kilimnik
visited the United States on a Russian "diplomatic passport" in 1997. To judge from the images, he travelled on a civilian
passport and obtained a regular U.S. visa. The Mueller team has never produced the "diplomatic passport."
Kilimnik denies traveling to Spain to meet Manafort in 2017. If true, this would undercut the Mueller team's claim that Manafort
lied in denying such a meeting. That denial was used to help secure a 2019 court ruling that Manafort breached a cooperation agreement.
The Special Counsel never furnished evidence for the alleged Madrid encounter.
While the Treasury Department and Senate Intelligence Committee claim that Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer, no
U.S. security or intelligence agency has adopted this characterization.
Kilimnik has never been charged with anything related to espionage, Russia, collusion, or the 2016 election. Instead, the
Mueller team indicted Kilimnik on witness-tampering charges in a case pertaining to Manafort's lobbying work in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, t he FBI's $250,000 bounty for Kilimnik is larger than most rewards it offers for the capture of violent fugitives,
including those accused of child murder .
Reviving the Polling Data Conspiracy Theory
Kilminik has provided an inviting target for proponents of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. He was born in 1970 in Ukraine when
it was part of the Soviet Union, and later worked for Paul Manafort as a translator and aide there. This background makes him one
of the few people in the broad Trump 2016 campaign orbit to possess a Russian passport.
To this Mueller and others have added a series of ambiguous and disputed allegations to say that the FBI "assesses" him to "have
ties to Russian intelligence." This characterization, first made in a 2017 court filing, quickly transmogrified into a presumed fact
of the collusion narrative.
Rather than prosecute Manafort for any crime related to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, the Mueller team instead pursued
him on financial and lobbying charges involving his pre-Trump stint as a political consultant in Ukraine. In 2018, it accused Kilimnik
of seeking to pressure two "potential witnesses" by sending them text messages about Manafort's Ukraine lobbying work.
As the Russia probe came to a close without a single indictment related to a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy, the Mueller team used Kilimnik
to suggest collusion without formally alleging it.
In January 2019, the Mueller team accused Manafort of breaching their cooperation agreement by lying about his interactions with
his Russian employee. Topping the list were alleged false statements about
sharing election
polling data with Kilimnik in 2016.
Andrew Weissmann: Despite this lead Mueller prosecutor's suggestion otherwise, the Mueller report "did not identify evidence of a
connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," as the report itself stated. NYU Law
"This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here," lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann
told Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. "This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the
special counsel's office is investigating."
Weissmann's musings became collusion fodder. Media pundits and influential Democrats, namely Congressional intelligence leaders
Schiff and Mark Warner, speculated that Kilimnik shared Trump campaign polling data with Russian intelligence officers as they allegedly
worked to turn the election in Trump's favor. "This appears as the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion," Warner
told CNN . "Clearly, Manafort was trying to collude
with Russian agents."
But soon after, the Mueller team quietly undercut Weissmann's "larger view" and the conspiratorial innuendo that it had fueled.
One month after igniting the frenzy about the polling data, Weissmann submitted a
heavily
redacted court filing that
walked back some of his
claims. The following month, the Special Counsel's final report acknowledged that its musings and speculations about Kilimnik could
not be corroborated. The Mueller team not only "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data
and Russia's interference in the election," as the report stated, but also "could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have
given it to) did with it."
Rick Gates: Ex-Manafort aide says the Mueller team "cherry-picked" his testimony about Kilimnik to spread a misleading, collusion-favorable
narrative. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
"I have no idea who made up the lies about 'detailed' or 'sensitive' polling data, or why they did it," Kilimnik says. "They were
mostly quotes of the polls from the media, such as LA Times and others. They would be 'Clinton "" 43, Trump "" 42.' Never anything
more detailed. I never got even a page printed out with either polling data or any other info."
This public data was shared, Kilimnik says, with Ukrainian clients of Manafort's as part of both regular political chatter and
an effort to encourage future business. "I shared this info with a lot of our clients in Ukraine, who were closely following the
race and who were excited about Paul working for [Trump]," Kilimnik says.
If any government official did receive his polling data, Kilimnik adds, they were not Russian but rather from Ukraine or even
the United States. "I would share it with our political contacts in Ukraine, basically to keep their interest to Paul and our Ukrainian
business alive. Also I shared it with the U.S. and other embassies, basically offering the opinion that the election is not over."
Kilimnik's account is corroborated by Gates, the ex-Manafort associate and Trump campaign official whose testimony was used by
the Mueller team "" deceptively, he says "" to suggest a connection between the polling data and possible Trump-Russia collusion.
The Special Counsel's office "relied heavily on Mr. Gates for evidence" about the polling data, the
New York Times noted in
February 2019.
According to Gates, that reliance entailed significant creative license by Mueller's prosecutors, particularly Weissmann. Gates
says he told the Special Counsel's Office that the polling data was not sensitive information, but rather publicly available figures
taken from media outlets.
"I explained to them, over the course of many interviews, what the polling data was about, and why it was being shared," Gates
told RCI. "All that was exchanged was old, topline data from public polls and from some internal polls, but all dated, nothing in
real time. So for example, Trump 48, Clinton 46. It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. No documents were
ever shared or disclosed. And this is part of what Mueller left out of the report. They cherry-picked and built a narrative that
really was not true, because they had pre-determined the conclusion."
Happier times: Manafort and colleagues, with Kilimnik far left and the boss seated in white shirt, red tie. AP Photo
Asked why Manafort shared any polling data with clients in Ukraine, Kilimnik and Gates stressed the same reason: money. "The were
some outstanding debts, which we were working to get repaid, which never happened," Kilimnik says. "And there was also Paul's reputation.
He was very well known to a lot of people in Kiev, and he hoped [he] could generate some new business" by showcasing his work for
Trump's campaign.
"This was a way that Paul was using to let people in Ukraine know that he was doing very well in the United States running the
election of Donald Trump, and that he was trying to collect the remaining fees that he was owed," for prior work in Ukraine, Gates
says. "He was trying to position himself. This is not unlike any other political operative, Republican or Democrat, in politics.
They all do it."
The Mueller report itself quietly bolsters Gates' and Kilimnik's converging recollections. "Gates' account about polling data
is consistent [redacted]," it states, ""¦ with multiple emails that Kilimnik sent to U.S. associates and press contacts" in the summer
of 2016. "Those emails referenced 'internal polling,' described the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort's role in it, and assessed
Trump' s prospects for victory." The corresponding footnote cites eight emails from Kilimnik to these "U.S. associates and press
contacts." This indicates that the Mueller team obtained direct evidence of the polling data that was shared; how it was discussed;
and with whom it was shared.
Rather than highlight the Kilimnik emails that it obtained, and Gates' account that the polling data was shared for financial
reasons, the Mueller report mentioned this information only in passing and ultimately concluded that it "could not reliably determine
Manafort's purpose in sharing" the information.
Weissmann did not respond to a request for comment.
The Kilimnik Passport Kilimnik's passport from the time in question "" to judge from photos and a video he shared with RCI
"" was issued in the standard red ... Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations ... not in the green of the diplomatic corps.
Mueller cited a Kilimnik "diplomatic passport" as evidence of "ties to Russian intelligence." Government of Russia/Wikimedia
Although the Mueller report walked back Weissman's innuendo regarding polling data, its assertion that Kilimnik has "ties to Russian
intelligence" remains a foundation of the Russia collusion narrative.
Putting aside the fact that the government has never produced any evidence that Kilimnik communicated with Russian intelligence
or the Kremlin, RCI has obtained documents that undercut the government's basis for assuming those unspecified "ties."
In Mueller's own telling, Kilimnik's only direct link to the Russian government was his enrollment in a Soviet military academy
from 1987 to 1992, where he trained as a linguist. "It's a language school, similar to what you guys have in Fort Monterey," Kilimnik
said, referring to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, in Monterey, California. "It's a university that trains
military translators, mostly for the army, not for the intelligence services. Basically it was a military training, for five years,
focusing on English and Swedish. In normal circumstances, I would actually go and serve in the army, but because Soviet Union was
falling apart, I was able to get a job as the instructor of Swedish at the university. I never served in the real army. If teaching
Swedish counts as spying "" that will be very surprising."
To substantiate Kilimnik's alleged Russian intelligence "ties," the Mueller team wrote that Kilimnik "obtained a visa to travel
to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport in 1997." (Intelligence operatives often travel to foreign countries under
diplomatic cover.)
Kilimnik's U.S. visa shows an "R" for "regular." (The typo in his last name was corrected on a later visa.) Konstantin Kilimnik via
RealClearInvestigations
But Kilimnik's passport from that period "" to judge from the images he shared with RCI via a messaging app "" was issued in the
standard red color, not in the green color of the diplomatic corps. The document also contains a regular U.S. visa issued on October
28, 1997 "" the same date the Mueller report claims he traveled to the U.S. "with a Russian diplomatic passport." The U.S. visa to
Kilimnik is issued under the category of "R" "" which stands for Regular "" and "B1/B2," the designation for a temporary visa for
business and tourism.
The Mueller team's claim that he possessed and travelled on a diplomatic passport is "a blatant lie," Kilimnik told RCI. "I never
had a diplomatic passport in my life. It's one of many very sloppy things in the Muller report, which don't make sense."
The Mueller report cites Kilimnik's "travel to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport."
Mueller report, Page 133
Told of the Mueller report's apparent error concerning Kilimnik's passport, a Justice Department spokesperson declined comment.
Former Special Counsel Mueller and former lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond to emailed queries.
Ironically, at the time when Mueller team claims that he visited the U.S. on behalf of the Russian government, Kilimnik was in
fact working for the U.S. government at the U.S. Congress-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in Moscow. As RealClearInvestigations
has
previously reported , Kilimnik's 10-year IRI tenure is among several substantial Western government connections that have
been ignored in amid efforts to accuse him of ties to the Russian government. "I gave IRI my CV which clearly said which school I
graduated from, and gave my detailed background," Kilimnik recalls. "I never concealed anything."
Kilimnik: No Madrid Meeting With Manafort
When it comes to his travel history, Kilimnik says that the Special Counsel's Office made another significant error: falsely claiming
that he and Manafort held a meeting in Spain .
"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. Wikimedia
When Manafort denied that he and Kilimnik met in Madrid in 2017, the Mueller team accused him of lying and cited this as one of
several alleged breaches of their cooperation agreement. The Mueller report claims that the two met in the Spanish capital on Feb.
26, 2017, "where Kilimnik had flown from Moscow."
It also states that Manafort initially denied the Madrid meeting in his first two interviews with the Special Counsel's office,
but then relented "after being confronted with documentary evidence that Kilimnik was in Madrid at the same time as him."
But Kilimnik tells RCI that no such meeting occurred, and that he believes that Manafort was coerced into changing his story.
"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. The "documentary evidence" referenced in the Mueller report was, he speculates,
a flight booking that was ultimately cancelled. "I was thinking about going to Madrid, and I discussed it with Paul," he says. "But
it made no sense. And ultimately, it was too expensive. So I didn't go."
Had he actually visited Madrid, Kilimnik says, the Mueller team would have "easily found proof "" tickets, boarding passes, border
crossings "" all that stuff. It's not rocket science to get it. The European Union is a pretty disciplined place. There would be
at least be a record of me crossing the border somewhere in the EU."
Kilimnik told RCI that the last time he saw Manafort was one month before the alleged Madrid trip, around the time of Trump's
inauguration in Janaury 2017. "I did not attend any of the inauguration events myself," he recalls. "But I spent some time to meet
with Paul, and to catch up. That was our last meeting in-person, in Alexandria [Virginia]."
Asked why Manafort would have admitted to a Madrid meeting that did not in fact take place, Kilimnik said that his former boss
faced heavy pressure while locked up by the Mueller team, which included a long stint in solitary confinement. "I don't know why
he said that. I have difficulties to imagine Paul's psychological state when he was jailed. A guy who [had] a very high-level life.
Jail is a tough place. I still get the shudders to think what he had to go through."
The allegation that Manafort lied to the Mueller team proved consequential. In February 2019, U.S. District Judge Jackson
sided
with the Special Counsel and voided
Manafort's plea deal. No longer bound to give him a reduced sentence for cooperating, Jackson
nearly doubled Manafort's
prison term on top of his earlier conviction and excoriated him for telling "lies." President Trump pardoned in Manafort in December
2020.
Told that Kilimnik denies ever visiting Madrid, and asked whether the Special Counsel's office collected concrete evidence to
the contrary, both former Special Counsel Mueller and lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond. A Justice Department spokesperson
declined comment.
FBI Alert Contradicts Senate-Treasury Spy Claim
Over one year after Mueller closed up shop, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) unilaterally upgraded Kilimnik's
alleged Russian intelligence status. The panel's
August 2020 report
declared that Kilimnik, far from merely having "ties" to the GRU as Mueller had claimed, is in fact a full-fledged "Russian intelligence
officer."
The Senate made the leap despite offering no new public evidence to support its explosive "assessment", and even acknowledging
that its "power to investigate" "" as well as "its staffing, resources, and technical capabilities" -- ultimately "falls short of
the FBI's."
Richard Burr and Mark Warner, Republican chair and Democratic co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The FBI and Justice
Department do not endorse their panel's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer." AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The Senate also labelled Kilimnik a Russian spy despite simultaneously presenting new evidence that he was, in the Committee's
own words, a "valuable resource" for officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, with whom he was "in regular contact."
In September 2020,
RCI asked the FBI and Justice Department whether it shares the SSCI's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer."
A DOJ spokesperson replied that "the Mueller report speaks for itself," and advised that the public "defer" to how Kilimnik was characterized
in the Mueller report and the Special Counsel Office's indictments. This strongly suggested, RCI reported, that the FBI has not adopted
the SSCI's view that Kilimnik is a Russian spy.
The FBI's February "alert"
offering $250,000 for information leading to Kilimnik's arrest bolsters this reporting. It once again states that Kilimnik is "assessed
by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence" "" shunning the SSCI's spy language and reverting to Mueller's original, ambiguous
characterization.
The wording of the FBI alert underscores that while the Senate Intelligence Committee and Treasury Department have declared that
Kilimnik is a Russian spy, the nation's top law enforcement agency has never adopted that assessment. When Manafort's legal team
asked the Special Counsel's Office for any communication between Manafort and "Russian intelligence officials,"
they
were told that "there are no materials responsive to [those] requests." In unsealed notes from early 2017, Peter Strzok "" the
top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia investigation ""
wrote :
"We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials."
Asked whether the FBI has altered its characterization of Kilimnik in light of Treasury's claim that he is a "known Russian Intelligence
Services agent", an FBI spokesperson declined comment.
The FBI's alert was also remarkable for the size of the Kilimnik bounty, which is more than double the amount of most members
of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. While the bureau is offering $100,000 each for information regarding six alleged murderers,
and $200,000 for another, the FBI is offering $250,000 for help nabbing Kilimnik on a lone witness tampering charge in Manafort's
Ukraine lobbying case.
The Mueller team
accused Kilimnik of sending text messages to two individuals with whom Manafort had worked during his Ukraine lobbying days.
Kilimnik's aim, the Special Counsel's Office alleged, was to pressure the pair to attest that their prior work was focused on lobbying
officials in Europe, not in the United States. These individuals "" identified in court documents as "Person D1" and "Person D2"
"" were not active witnesses for the Mueller probe, but instead, according to the Special Counsel's Office, "potential witnesses."
The 13 Kilimnik messages to these "potential witnesses"
cited by Mueller include the following:
[Person D2], hi! How are you? Hope you are doing fine. ;))
My friend P [Manafort] is trying to reach [Person D1] to brief him on what's going on.
If you have a chance to mention this to [Person D1] - would be great.
Basically P wants to give him a quick summary that he says to everybody (which is true) that our friends never lobbied in the
U.S., and the purpose of the program was EU.
Hi. This is [Kilimnik]. My friend P is looking for ways to connect to you to pass you several messages. Can we arrange that.
Kilimnik says that he was not trying to tamper with anyone. "I do not understand how two messages to our old partners who helped
us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted
as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice,'" he says.
Whether or not Kilimnik sought to tamper with "potential witnesses" in Manafort's Ukraine lobbying case, the alleged 2018 infraction
has nothing to do with 2016 Trump-Russia collusion.
The FBI alert from February raises questions about the bombshell Treasury Department claims released two months later. If the
U.S. government stands by Treasury's claims about Kilimnik, why is he wanted only on a minor, non-Russia related witness-tampering
charge, and not for taking part in alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election? If Kilimnik indeed passed on "sensitive information
on polling and campaign strategy" to Russian intelligence while working as a spy, why has he not been indicted alongside the Russian
social media company charged by Mueller in February 2018, or the Russian intelligence officers charged by Mueller in July 2018?
To Kilimnik, the answer is found on that same Russian passport that Mueller mischaracterized. "It is clear to me that the indictment
of 2018 was pulled out of the thin air, simply to have a Russian face in the mix," he says. "I understand that they needed a Russian
to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," he says.
"The funny thing is that I'm not hiding. And I would have explained the same thing to the FBI or anyone who never reached out
to me. They don't because they don't want the truth."
From Russian Spy to "Influence Agent"
In Kilimnik's eyes, his utility as a Russian national for the Trump-Russia collusion narrative also explains his prominent inclusion
in the recent U.S. Intelligence
Community Assessment , released in March one month after the FBI alert for his arrest.
In yet another new iteration of how Kilimnik is described by the U.S. government, the ICA does not call him a Russian intelligence
officer, but instead a "Russian influence agent."
The ICA does not define the term "Russian influence agent," or explain how it reached that new assessment about Kilimnik. Nor
does it put forth any evidence for the alleged Russian influence activities ascribed to him .
The report alleges that Kilimnik was part of a "network of Ukraine-linked individuals "¦ connected to the Russian Federal Security
Service (FSB)" who "took steps throughout the [2020] election cycle to damage U.S. ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and
his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump's prospects for reelection."
Andriy Derkach: "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says of this Ukrainian lawmaker with reputed Kremlin ties. Petro Zhuravel/Wikimedia
As part of this alleged meddling network, the ICA asserts that Kilimnik tried to influence U.S. officials; helped produce a documentary
that aired on U.S. television in January 2020; and worked with Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker alleged to have Kremlin ties.
"Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent U.S. persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to U.S.
officials and audiences," the ICA states.
Kilimnik says the U.S. intelligence officials who wrote those words are using their anonymity and power to launder their false
narratives about him.
"I have no idea what they're talking about," he says. "I would really love to see at least one confirmation of the things they
allege. Pulling me into this report with zero evidence really shows that [U.S. intelligence] people high up do not give a damn about
the truth, facts, or anything."
As for Derkach, "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says. "I don't know why, or on what basis, they're making claims that
he has any relationship to me."
"I had zero meetings with anybody related to the Trump campaign. In fact, I have tried to do my best "" understanding how I've
gotten into this mess "" to stay as far as possible from any U.S. politics." If he had held such meetings, Kilimnik adds, "this should
be easy to prove."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.
No Effort to Contact Russiagate's Top Russian
Even though Kilimnik's name fills dozens of pages of the Mueller and Senate Intelligence reports after years of federal scrutiny
and he is the target of a $250,000 FBI reward, this seemingly critical Russiagate figure has never been contacted by a single U.S.
government official, to judge from the public record as well as Kilimnik's account.
The lack of contact is similar to the way FBI, Mueller, and Senate investigators treated other supposedly central Russiagate figures.
When Joseph Mifsud, whose conversations with George Papadopoulos triggered the FBI's Trump-Russia probe, visited the U.S. in early
2017, the FBI subjected him to
a light round of questioning and then let him leave the country. The Mueller team later claimed in its final report that Mifsud
had lied to FBI agents, yet inexplicably did not indict him. Despite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's central role in publishing
the stolen Democratic Party emails supposedly hacked and supplied by Russia, the
Mueller team never contacted him and the Senate Intelligence Committee
shunned an offer to interview him .
Kilimnik believes that this avoidance is deliberate. "The FBI and others could have had the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv or Moscow, or
have any of my numerous contacts in the U.S., reach out and start a conversation, if they wanted info," he says. "But they do not
really need it. All they is need is a scarecrow. And as one of the few people within reach of the Trump campaign who has a Russian
passport, they picked me."
"They never reached out to me," he adds. "I never had a single contact with FBI or any government official, basically since charges
were brought [on] Paul. Nobody ever tried to talk to me because they know the truth. They understood damn well that I will tell them
what I'm telling you."
Kilimnik says that he has had only minimal contact with Manafort since the former Trump campaign chairman was released to home
confinement in March 2020 and subsequently pardoned by Trump in late December. "We had one short contact after he got out of jail,
basically catching up about family and kids and everything," Kilimnik recalls. "I want to give him time to just basically get his
life back to normal. We have not spoken on the telephone."
After years in Ukraine working with Manafort, Kilimnik now lives full-time in Moscow with his wife and two children. "I have been
pretty open all my life, and have not been hiding from anyone," Kilimnik says. "I would have been happy to answer any questions from
the FBI, or whoever. But I refuse to be a toy in bizarre political games and have my life ruined more than it has been because of
the senseless and false accusations."
Despite being labeled a Russian spy who meddled in the 2016 election, Kilimnik has no plans to return to the U.S. and try to clear
his name. "I am not going to the U.S. on my own dime, with no visa in COVID times only to be crucified by the media, having zero
chance of justice," he says. "This is a sad continuation of a deeply wrong story. I thought it would be over with Trump gone and
the need to create lies about his 'ties to Russia.' But obviously, I was wrong."
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roc993 19 May, 2021 Did the Democrats and the media ever apologize for spending 2 years claiming the election was stolen by
Trump? The drumbeat was continuous - ratcheting up day by day - "Walls closing in" - right up to the point Mueller threw cold
water on the entire thing. Then they slinked away without another word. And no censorship of those entities and individuals by
FaceBook and Twitter? Fascinating. Reply 40 11 2 reply
N notenough 19 May, 2021 What are the odds that the FBI/Treasury Dept, CIA, etc are lying to the public about this whole mess
THEY created....100%. These are all political organizations, tasked with protecting the status quo, the status quo being the protection
of Empire. Reply 30 7 1 reply
A AJMG 19 May, 2021 "In his speech before a joint session of Congress last week, President Biden complained about "Russia's
interference in our elections," even though his intelligence czar had released a report the previous month formally dismissing
the idea Moscow had interfered in the 2020 election or the 2016 election." Reply 23 7 1 reply
D daniel155 19 May, 2021 No one, even those on the other side, believes there was Russian collusion though they will never
admit it. Hillary still says the Russia stole the election from her. I guess she uses that to cope with the fact that she blew
a very winnable election. Reply 28 7
A AJMG 19 May, 2021 Trump opposed Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline, & today we learn that Biden has accepted it. If Putin favored
Trump, it was a bad miscalculation since Trump was way more tough on Russia than any Democrat. Reply 36 6 1 reply
DH Derrick Hand 19 May, 2021 Hate to tell you guys but the Russia collusion discussion is over, no matter who is right. The
Media has succeeded in mudding the water and destroying any trust in finding the truth with respect to anything political, including
any election and that includes the coming one in 2022. This is like an argument at a table for four in a raucous high school cafeteria.
You should be more concerned where this total loss of trust is going to lead us and that is not a good place. Reply 16 6 3 reply
W Wisewerds 19 May, 2021 A wholly partisan, politically biased prosecutor lied and cherry-picked information to support a
pre-determined conclusion in an effort to savage an opponent and jail his supporters? I would put on my shocked face, but its
currently at the cleaners. Instead, I will just suggest that this is now standard operating procedure for our left-fascist oppressors.
Reply 21 4 1 reply
C Crutch 19 May, 2021 I can't wait for 2022 House win by Republicans. The first thing they should do is haul Adam Schiff in
under oath to discuss his every utterance, then expel him from the House. Reply 40 9 5 reply
A archon27 19 May, 2021 It not sedition if the democrats try to oust a legally elected president on a falsified premise...
because THEIR "evidence" was believable... This is literally the mantra of the left. Reply 27 6 3 reply
Mark H 19 May, 2021 If the wider media do not pick this up then the matter of Trump campaign's collusion with Russia can never
be cleared up, and will continue to serve the intention of the establishment. VAPOR 19 May, 2021 The media portrayed both Obama
and Biden as uninvolved. But now we know they both actively followed the investigation. According to former acting attorney general
Sally Yates, she was surprised that Obama knew about the investigation and knew more than she did at the time. Obama called upon
former FBI director James Comey to stay after a meeting to discuss the investigation. Comey had mentioned using the Logan Act
to charge Flynn, even though the unconstitutional law has never been used successfully in a prosecution since the country was
founded. Biden has repeatedly denied knowledge of the investigation. Just a day before the latest disclosure, George Stephanopoulos
asked Biden in an interview what he knew of the Flynn investigation. Biden was adamant that he knew nothing about "those moves"
and he called it a diversion. But that is not true if he took the relatively uncommon action for a vice president of demanding
the unmasking of Flynn information.
Justis 20 May, 2021 Thank you for your continued work. This is all hidden from Americans in this age of media coverage. But more
importantly it is devastating information about the dishonesty of our government. What have we come to? What recourse is available?
VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Carter Page Sues FBI, Comey, McCabe for Millions Nov 28, 2020" Former Trump campaign aide Carter Page filed
a $75 million lawsuit against the FBI and several former high-ranking bureau officials ... Reply 6 1 1 reply
V VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Just a reminder that Obama and his minions committed the greatest political crime in US history when
they weaponized government agencies to influence and discredit a presidential election and frame Trump. Reply 7 3 1 reply
V VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Obama needs to answer questions about his involvement with the Fake Russian Dossier and the weaponization
of government agencies to get Trump. He basically planted evidence and then said prosecute Trump by the book.
futbolfan 19 May, 2021 I respect all the dogged investigators who root out the truth of the crimes and corruption of our "justice
department", and FBI. I hope they keep up the good work. Personally I have no more faith in anything which was soaked in the hate
and insanity of the Obama thug regime...
Jerubbesheth xx 19 May, 2021 Give it up already. The Russia Trump Collusion was already disapproved by Mueller. Americans
are tired of the disinformation and propaganda. Bolshevik Schiff is a pathological liar. If anyone colluded with Russia it was
certainly Liberal Commie Democrat Clinton. The reason Bolshevik Schiff doesn't investigate Clinton? Schiff and Clinton are part
of the swamp. Clinton bought and paid for colluded with an ex-British Spy on a false dossier on Trump. Clinton was already in
Putin's pocket. Clinton approved the sale of Uranium one to the Russians, and then Clinton receives $145 Million from Russian
Oligarchs for her Corrupt Clinton Foundation. Mueller was FBI director at the time. So now who is colluding with the Russians.
I guess Clinton's colluding with the Russians is the good kind for the liberal commie Democrats, while the Liberal commie Democrats
deflect the bad colluding onto to Trump. Colluding is colluding anyway you cut it. Hillary's colluding wasn't disapproved. Reply
10 3 3 reply
C chuckstephens06 19 May, 2021 While the Special prosecutor office was capable of any transgression or corruption, one needs
to realize that it wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of corrupt lefty operative Judge, Amy Berman Jackson...
Jackson's non legal, political approach to decision making, has been the example that all corrupt lefty judges follow... Plus
her questionable relationship with Weissman outside of the Courtroom... Reply 6 2
K kochcomics 20 May, 2021 Lets see what we have here: 1)Kilimnik says he has no ties to the Russian government. OK. Do you
really believe that no one in the Putin's government has directly or indirectly debriefed him. Really? Do you think he would have
a choice in the matter? Do you know anything about Putin at all? Does he believe in democracy,. You clearly know little about
Trump. We've had Trump here for 40 years - from the NY Post page six to Howard Stern. Its a joke. Hey, he was proposing running
with Oprah as his VP in 2002. Then he tricked into the birther stuff. Lets check out the apologies from the Donald and the push
back from Republicans (apart from McCain) 2) There were enough sympathetic Russians around (Putin included) to raise concerns.
As the Donald himself made clear, he would have no problem with outside foreign help. The investigation took place. It was damning,
but not pretty clear that no . The collusion was possible but speculative, but as Jared himself said, the campaign was too chaotic
for any collusion to really get off the ground (though you are still stuck with Manafort as a conflicted party). But in Donald
world, everything is a bout big pronouncements... See more Reply 2 2
F futbolfan 19 May, 2021 For years, we on the right knew who had done what, and who should be arrested, Comey, Rosenstein,
Strzok, Mueller, etc. But I am not a lawyer, and I am not sure what crimes, exactly, these evil and sick creeps would be charged
with, if they ever were arrested. For me, the key question now is, if they WERE charged with whatever the appropriate offence
would be, what is the statute of limitations on those types of crimes? There is NO statue on treason, as far as I know. But what
about conspiracy? Obstruction of justice? Betrayal of oath of office? Sedition? The reason these questions are still alive is,
obviously there are people still patiently digging into the twisting trails of the conspirators, and eventually they may reel
in some live prospects for prosecution. Maybe even including "the big guy with black skin" Obama himself. Nothing would make me
happier than to see that African nightmare in handcuffs. Reply 4 4 2 reply
DC dana crow 20 May, 2021 Can't blame them for running with lies, innuendo and conspiracy theories when all Trump and Republicans
could ever muster in response was nuh-uh or let-mueller-finish-his-work. "Ties to [insert boogeyman]" is always a tell. It literally
means NOT the boogeyman. And since the "ties" are conveniently redacted, he probably ordered borscht from someone whose second
cousin gave a talk at a charity event hosted by a retired russian intel gofer. The election interference/russia collusion business
was always a cynical ploy to isolate Trump from his friends and bog down his administration. And it was wildly successful.
will.ganness 20 May, 2021 Who is calling the January 6th Protests the biggest threat the the country since the Civil war? The Democratic
Party, the MSM, The FBI.... Who produced and directed Russiagate? The same three!! If progressives think they should get on board
with Insurrectiongate, they should have more sense! VAPOR 19 May, 2021 The Fake Russian Dossier do it by the book Crossfire Hurricane
insurance policy to overturn a presidential election and frame Trump. Where is Professor Misfud and why won't Steele talk to Durham?
Call in Mary Jacoby and ask her what she discussed with Obama at the white house.
spinbag48 1 day ago Adam Schiff is a fool who told us he had the goods on Trump, but it turns out he is a liar. I do have
a question... The FBI spent 2 years and $35 million dollars investigating Trump only to find out they didn't have a case. But
when the pipeline got hacked Biden said the FBI told him that the Kremlin wasn't involved within a day of two. How is it they
got that good so quick? Same with the election within a couple of days they knew that the election was fair and square. Even though
I saw many people of TV say they saw corruption right in front of them. But the shooting of Andrew Brown took a month when they
had numerous videos that they couldn't release until the investigation was complete. I have lost all faith in the FBI, and the
press. They don't even pretend they are fair or truthful. Reply 1 1
CA Clear 4 All 19 May, 2021 The USIC and media has destroyed their own name. Nothing that the Russia collusion purveyors say
now has value on any topic. Russia didn't do that.
Justis 20 May, 2021 Why did Horowitz not discover this in his investigation? Was that investigation another coverup, finding just
enough to look authentic? Is he too, untrustworthy?
What wokeness does mandate for my son (who is studying biology) to be told in his class
that he is the carrier of "white guilt" even though his ancestors never interacted with
blacks, let alone blacks in the USA.
Obama's follow-up to "Dreams from My Father" will be "Sins of My Mother"
" [C]orporate "America" which is now flooding all its advertisements with the "correct"
races in total disregard to that race's real percentage of the population "
Yes, for corporate America, the U.S. demographic is composed mainly of young, beautiful,
smart looking "black folks" with a few flabby, pasty white dullards to heighten the
contrast.
"... If you find it useful that some counties are leaving Oregon and joining Idaho, or the conflict between the left and the right, democrats vs republicans, or whites vs blacks, or whites vs muslims, or vs lations is meaningful, you are simply doing the bidding of the masters, who thrive on pitting communites against each other, and are responsible for destroying the whole country. The easiest and the most fruitful way to bring about a real, benficial change to America would require bringing the American people, regardless of their color or creed together, to easily get rid of their overbearing masters. Regardless of what you claim to be, the fact that you embrace and advance the destructive strategy of pitting the American people agianst one another, and also spew so much hatred of Muslims, exposes your real agenda! ..."
"... The United States doesn't have "rulers" in as much as it has "owners". Consider ..."
One of the most promising movements, " Greater Idaho ," just won a huge
victory. Five counties
voted to leave Oregon and join Idaho. More counties in eastern Oregon may
join . Idaho Governor Brad Little admits creating a new state may be difficult but
says , "They're
looking at Idaho fondly because of our regulatory atmosphere, our values. That doesn't surprise
me one bit."
This should be just the beginning. Frederick County in western Virginia could join West
Virginia. West Virginia State Senator Charles Trump
supports the idea. It could also be a compromise to the DC statehood question. Northern
Virginia is a cancerous outgrowth of federal employees. Booting it
out of real Virginia and tying it to a DC state would mean greater self-government for both
regions.
... ... ...
Existing institutions can be the basis for reform and revolution. From the Parliament that
challenged the king in the English Civil War, the Continental Congress that made the American
Revolution, and the state legislatures that voted for secession, we see a clear pattern in the
way we Anglos operate. We are legalistic, even when it comes to revolution. We don't have the
French tradition of mass protests to topple governments. Our revolutions are according to
Robert's Rules of Order. Even the January 6 protesters who marched into the Capitol did so
because they thought they were saving democracy.
I can understand the frustrations and rage of certain folks.
If you're a worker on an oil rig, a truck driver, a policeman, or some such jobs, there's
bound to be moments when you're angry as hell. So, even though such people say crazy things
once a while, I can understand where they're coming from. They need to blow off steam.
But the professor class? These lowlife parasites sit on their asses and talk shi*. They
produce nothing and make a living by spreading nonsense. And yet, they act like they are
soooooooooo angry with the way of the world. If they really care about the world, why hide in
their academic enclaves?
Academia needs a cultural revolution, a real kind, not the bogus "˜woke' kind made up
of teachers' pets.
Hopefully we can reform into a nice looking North American Federation once this mess hits
a bloody climax of some sort or another. Greater Idaho sounds wildly fun. I still wish we
formed the States Cascadia and Arcadia, personally.
The empire WILL become weaker if it promotes incompetents to positions of high
responsibility and authority and enlists women into the armed forces. An empire cannot
sustain itself with sub standard soldiers, administrators, leaders and law makers. This woke
crap will destroy itself. Historians in the future will look back and say "what the hell were
they thinking?".
If the IQ of officer candidates drops below 110 (it's 120 on average currently for the
Marine Corps and has been declining for 40 years) then the positions will be left vacant.
Dumb people can't do the job.
Since Cromwell and even more so the overthrow of James 2 by the invader Dutch William 3
the Amsterdam Jew banker puppet Britain has been nothing more than a Jewish banking
headquarters.
If you find it useful that some counties are leaving Oregon and joining Idaho, or the
conflict between the left and the right, democrats vs republicans, or whites vs blacks, or
whites vs muslims, or vs lations is meaningful, you are simply doing the bidding of the
masters, who thrive on pitting communites against each other, and are responsible for
destroying the whole country. The easiest and the most fruitful way to bring about a real,
benficial change to America would require bringing the American people, regardless of their
color or creed together, to easily get rid of their overbearing masters. Regardless of what
you claim to be, the fact that you embrace and advance the destructive strategy of pitting
the American people agianst one another, and also spew so much hatred of Muslims, exposes
your real agenda!
Dear Mr. Hood, anything undertaken to change a nation's political organization will always
lead to violence. If there is one thing history shows, it is precisely that. If you are
trying to change Idaho's state borders, that qualifies as a drastic change in the US
political organization, if only because if successful, it would set an example that would
find many, many followers, as you are implying yourself.
What the US promotes and condones abroad (secession of Panama from Colombia in 1903,
occupation of Cyprus by Turkey in 1980, occupation of the Western Sahara by Morocco in 1976,
secession of Kosovo, creation of Southern Sudan, etc., etc.) it does not want to see at home.
Of course you are also aware that in the 1860s, Secession has been met with brutal
violence.
In this respect, it comes as a relief lo learn that the Deep State is busy trying to turn
the US Army and the CIA into open psychiatry wards.
Very interesting that video ad on the girl "raised by two moms." Poor thing: knowing only
two dykes (her father must certainly be Hans Brinker), all her life she has been yearning to
meet real men. Apparently, she did not find them in college, where the boys are being
terrorized by feminists and forced to become faggots. Thus only the army remains as a place
where one might still find a few real men, the kind that one sees so finely portrayed in the
Russian army ad.
(Come to think of it, that US army ad may also be an attempt at subversion of prevailing
policy!)
America is in danger, not because of some external threat, but because our rulers
are the Republic's greatest enemies.
The United States doesn't have "rulers" in as much as it has "owners". Consider
it private property to put things in proper perspective "" then! Stake your claim. Forget the
law(they own that too) and the idea of a republic "" owners don't like to share. The banking,
tax code, and debt have got you by the balls, and they'll always keep you thumbed under.
Clearly there is no coherence or logic to US foreign policy even from its own warped
viewpoint. If they really regard China as the number one adversary then they should be
courting Russia, that is, doing what the Nixon administration did with China to help contain
the USSR.
One can only surmise that it's the Zionist faction that is pushing for hostility towards
Russia because of Russia interfering with Israel's Mid-East plans, so the Zionist faction
with its regional interests is undermining the efforts of the deep state elements more
interested in world hegemony.
"Then, we basically gave permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait as a ploy to send
in our advanced army to knock him out and demonstrate our superiority to the world in
weaponry, which very much demoralized the Russians and put the fear of God into Islamic oil.
Then we created the Star Wars fiction. Russia to our surprise lost their nerve and
collapsed."
Can't really buy this silly Deep State propaganda from Mr S. The Berlin Wall collapsed in
November 1989. After this the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War was surely
inevitable. USMIC needed a new theatre of war in a hurry to keep itself in the style to which
it is accustomed. Gulf War I, beginning with the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in August 1990,
was clearly planned in advance in order to install US bases in the Middle East as the
"˜pivot' to use the currently popular term to this new theatre. This long term planning
all bore juicy malevolent fruit not long after with 911, Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror.
It's only now, with the Middle East petering out as the preferred theatre of operations that
the new pivot is under way with the beatup for a new cold war with China.
"our values" is continually repeated by US politicians and the MSM like a mantra.
when the US has no values left but anarchy, looting, and burning down hundreds of
cities.
And also war, bombing, killing, assassination of the indocent leaders, impoverishment of
the others, overthrow of the insubordinate governments ("Color revolutions").
Every picture tells a story = USA & China (lol)
Could have added Old Masked Joe and the Camel for further effect "¦
Anyway"
I had trouble believing this account by the mysterious Mr S, though it does make good
copy, perhaps more as entertainment. So skimmed after the first few mentions of the Deep
State, Mr S's professed Christianity and his concern for Afghans.
The "Deep State" is a more or less meaningless buzzword on a par with Alex "Medicine Man"
Jones and his "Illuminati" and it's getting as dated as that imho.
WHO are these people, Mr S ? Names, please.
We are to believe that a long-serving high echelon member in USG professes Christianity in
a Gangster Cartel, which is what USG is and the source of the gross immorality, murder,
looting, permanent war, occupations which is poisoning the world and has been such for a long
time, well over a century "¦
Russia, by contrast, is a Christian country.
And you are fighting it, Mr S, as well as continuing to serve gangsters "¦
Basically this article is just bullshit, sorry to be blunt.
Worse, it doesn't say anything new except that the zio's have sacrificed their old man
Kissinger as this USG "christian" indicates.
Kissinger sprinkles his talk with preemptive catch words such as "free markets",
"democracy", and as noted here "principles"...
His greatest coup was was the petrodollar which reigned for decades; free markets huh? His
petrodollar scheme is crumbling and the age of missiles is neutering the US's imperial
ambitions. He is wallowing about in outdated imperial nostalgia.
Conspiracy theory drivel. So called "Deep State" are American elites, who are not
unanimous about most points; it was R.M. Nixon- not Kissinger, not some imaginary Deep State
segment which even does not exist- who decided to completely change policy towards Communist
China. And there, Nixon showed that he was, despite his failings, a remarkable statesman.
@alwayswrite ion. Just in the last few months the SpaceX Crew Dragon has finally come
online and that is an excellent achievement""although Nasa is still buying seats on Soyuz,
just in case.
The Boeing Starliner spacecraft is flying with the Russian engines, although not yet with
live crew. Good thing there's a Russian "˜superstore' for space tech where you can do
one-stop shopping, eh?
I'm not going to get into the Chinese program, which also bought its entire manned space
program lock, stock and barrel from Russia. They also bought advanced Russian engines, but
unlike the US, they have been able to knock off their own versions [YF100], which now power
their big Long March 5 rocket.
Oh, and the Russians landed their first rover on Mars back in 1971, the first spacecraft
to land successfully on another planet.
There's an inherent contradiction I've never been able to understand.
On the one hand the Deep State wants the United States to be and continue to be the world
hegemon. Ergo the playing off of China against Russia, as well as other ploys undercutting
potential challengers.
On the other hand the Deep State was all in on the deindustrialization of America, the
great offshoring of whole industries and the jobs they provided. Offshoring has clearly
weakened America's position as world hegemon.
@GMC xt generation gets better yet and so on. It is not an instant process, but China is
very systematic and determined and they will get there sooner than people may think.
And finally a word about why it is important to have numbers in terms of hard science
intellectuals. It is like society in general""the bottom slice is going to be barely
competent; the majority in the middle are going to be average"¦and the top ten percent
are going to be the ones that actually do all of the work, in terms of advancing of the state
of the art. And from that top group, only a few INDIVIDUALS are really going to be
visionaries that have a chance at transforming the technology and solving the really big
problems.
Obviously if you have a larger pool to start with, you will have more of those key
achievers at the top.
It may have been in the self-interest of people in the MIC to continue Cold War
conditions, but a patriot would put the good of the Republic over his own self-interest. The
late Lt. Gen. William Odom, former Director of the National Security Agency, was such a man.
He was as close to the center of the American Deep State as anyone could be.
I know from Odom's writings that he shared at least many of the views of Mr. S. Odom
himself may be gone, but his opinions may survive in his aides, friends, and associates.
The tragedy of the ZUS deep state department is , that is controlled and populated with
zionists, as is the entire ZUS government and the deep state chain dogs aka the CIA, the FBI,
the NSA, all of the 17 chain dog departments are under zionist control,
@alwayswrite tinued to circle Mars and transmit images back to Earth for another eight
months.
Mars 3 Spacecraft
The cause of the failure may have been related to the extremely powerful martian dust
storm taking place at the time which may have induced a coronal discharge, damaging the
communications system. The dust storm would also explain the poor image lighting.
@SafeNow
eing expressed now about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Although it has churned out
hundreds of papers, nothing groundbreaking has ever come of it.
Quantum computing is also turning out to be a nothingburger, as some of us had predicted
long ago. But if the point is to sell the sizzle and not the steak, then all of these
"˜great' projects have been a wonderful "˜marketing' success, with untold millions
of trees having given their life for the glossy magazines that breathlessly trumpeted all of
this hullabaloo. Only to end up in the landfill.
So to get back to your question about US pharma "˜scientists', I would place them just
slightly above the municipal sanitation worker that will be emptying my bin tomorrow, in the
overall scheme of things. Maybe a better person to ask would be Bill Gates?
"... A draft report published online by the assembly's Committee on Foreign Affairs caused consternation in Russian media on Monday, after statements came to light that argued the bloc "should establish with the US a transatlantic alliance to defend democracy globally" and "deter Russia" from supposed aggression in Eastern Europe. ..."
A draft report published
online by the assembly's Committee on Foreign Affairs caused consternation in Russian media on Monday, after statements came
to light that argued the bloc "should establish with the US a transatlantic alliance to defend democracy globally" and "deter
Russia" from supposed aggression in Eastern Europe.
As part of its "vision" for future ties with Moscow, the paper concludes that the EU should put forward a number of incentives
designed to persuade Russians that a turn to the West would be beneficial, including visa liberalization and "free trade investment."
[...]
At the same time, the committee puts forward a number of extreme steps that it says the bloc should take. It insists that
Brussels "must be prepared not to recognize the parliament of Russia and to ask for Russia's suspension from international
organizations with parliamentary assemblies if the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia are recognized as fraudulent."
The success or failure of this operation will depend entirely on the Russian people. Will it fall for the Western European
honey trap once again?
After Putin is gone, bets are off. Also, the EU continues to suffer from refugee waves from Syria and Libya, and its economy
continues to deteriorate (recession confirmed for Q1 2021). The whole system is so exhausted that they don't talk about even of
the absorption of Moldova anymore (the Moldovan president had to bring that up to the Kremlin; good they remembered them).
This looks like Biden had some surge of sanity, but it's not: I read an article on Izvestia some days ago and it seems Russia
won the war for the Arctic and has expelled the USA from that sea. That, combined with the fact that Russia has been ramping up
investment on the sector, results in the fact that, soon enough, Russia will also have the infrastructure to deliver cheaper LNG
by ship to Europe, too.
That means the USA has given up on the NordStream II in order to hurt the Russian LNG investments. Yes, people, that's the
insanity of the situation: the USG is completely lost. It still has its ace in the hole, though: the Green Party is set to win
the next German general elections, and they're rabid Atlanticists. Like, this would cost Germany dearly and they wouldn't last
two years in government, but at least Russian gas to Europe through a non-Ukrainian route would be stopped.
Speaking of the Ukraine, this whole situation makes us reflect: it is patent at this point in time that the EU is a subsidiary
of NATO - it expands eastwards after those countries become NATO members. They're the "socioeconomic" version of NATO. This has
created a huge problem for the EU, though, because the Ukraine is a massive financial black hole to the American economy (through
the IMF) and the USA is pressuring the EU to make it a member quick, so that this black hole goes to European (i.e. German) hands.
The thing is Germany obviously doesn't want that, because it needs the Euro to keep at where it is or stronger (you can only enter
the EU by entering the EZ nowadays). The Ukraine is salivating to become an EZ member - that's the whole point of the Maidan coup
in the first place - so Ukraine entering the EU without entering the EZ is out of the table. The EU must've told the USA that
no, the Ukraine must first become a NATO member, then they'll make it an EZ-EU member. The Ukraine is the proverbial hot potato.
All of that coupled with the hard economic fact that, without the Russian gas transit exclusivity, you can't leverage Ukraine's
debt, because, after Maidan, all of the public goods and infrastructure were privatized to American capitalists. That means we
have the absurd situation where Germany has to give up cheaper gas for itself (which would be essential for its economic recovery)
in order to make the Ukraine happy so that it enters the EU, so that it becomes a financial black hole... to the German economy!
Germany has to pay the Ukraine for the privilege of having to pay it even more, for eternity.
The price of nation-building has become more and more expensive to the capitalist world. Turns out those Third World shitholes
have learned something after all those decades.
Taiwan is also suffering from a significant brain drain to the Mainland. They're trying to solve the problem by demonizing
those people by calling them "traitors".
More Hacks, More Baseless Accusations Against Russia
In January police in various countries took down the Emotet bot-network that was at that
time the basic platform for some 25% of all cybercrimes.
Based on hearsay Wikipedia and other had falsely attributed Emotet to Russian actors.
The real people behind it were actually
Ukrainians :
The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police
took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of
computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price
~$60,000/kg) and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.
Now the U.S. is accusing Russia of somehow having part in another cybercrime :
President Joe Biden said Monday that a Russia-based group was behind the ransomware attack
that forced the shutdown of the largest oil pipeline in the eastern United States.
The FBI identified the group behind the hack of Colonial Pipeline as DarkSide, a shadowy
operation that surfaced last year and attempts to lock up corporate computer systems and
force companies to pay to unfreeze them.
"So far there is no evidence ... from our intelligence people that Russia is involved,
although there is evidence that actors, ransomware is in Russia," Biden told reporters.
"They have some responsibility to deal with this," he said.
Three days after being forced to halt operations, Colonial said Monday it was moving
toward a partial reopening of its 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) of pipeline" the largest
fuel network between Texas and New York.
Biden however is badly informed. There is no evidence that DarkSide has anything to do with
Russia. It is, like Emotet, a commercial
'ransomware-as-a-service' criminal entity that wants to make money and does not care about
geopolitics.
Yes, a version of the DarkNet software does exclude itself from running on system with
specific
language settings :
The DarkSide malware is even built to conduct language checks on targets and to shut down if
it detects Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Romanian, and
other languages ...
That is a quite long list of east European languages and Russian is only one of it. Why the
authors of DarkNet do not want their software to run on machines with those language settings
is unknown. But why would a Russian actor protect machines with Ukrainian or Romanian language
settings? Both countries are hostile towards Russia. To claim that this somehow points to
Russian actors is therefore baseless.
The Kremlin has once again pointed out the importance of cooperation between Moscow and
Washington in tackling cyberthreats amid a cyber-attack on Colonial Pipeline, a US company.
"Russia has nothing to do with these hacker attacks, nor with the previous hacker attacks,"
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Preskov assured reporters on Tuesday.
"We categorically reject any accusation against us, and we can only regret that the US is
refusing to cooperate with us in any way to counter cyber-threats. We believe that such
cooperation - both international and bilateral - could indeed contribute to the common
struggle against this scourge [known as] cyber-crime," Peskov said.
The U.S. seems notoriously bad at attributing computer hacks. It claims that the recent
SolarWinds attack which intruded several government branches was also done by Russia. But that
attack
required deep insider knowledge and access to SolarWinds' computers
and processes :
The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a
manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg
immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But
none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.
The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider
knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more
likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that
Israel was behind it .
Indeed - the programmers of an Israeli company, recently bought up by SolarWinds, had all
the necessary access for such a hack. However the U.S. sanctioned Russia over the SolarWinds
hack without providing any evidence of its involvement.
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may
come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S.
systems. The U.S. should fear that day.
Posted by b on May 11, 2021 at 17:31 UTC |
Permalink
Thanks b. I don't think Russia is going to escalate destructive attacks any time soon.
There's no upside.
They might even be reluctant to reveal their capabilities in the Ukraine.
For the moment, mockery is the best remedy while they up their game.
@ b who ended with
"
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may
come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S.
systems.
"
How can you write such assertions that vary from the approach that both Russia and China
are taking?....strong defense but no offense.
Now if empire tried to hack into a Russian or Chinese system/network then appropriate
takedowns of malicious systems/networks would seem logical....and I expect they know
how...but will not do it on the basis of another avenue of empire lies and deceit.
You should have titled the post "Killing Two Birds With One Stone".
This pipeline is huge, running from Texas through the Southeast and all the way up to New
England. It's condition is beyond awful with multiple leaks along the route some of which
lose more than a million gallons per month and much more than can be determined since some of
the gasoline / jet fuel went into the aquifers. These faults have been well known for decades
and although some of the areas are heavily populated no remediation was done. The local
outcry recently caught the attention of the press when kids reported a gasoline smell along
the pipeline route to the police. The locals demanded the pipeline be closed for repairs and
sought answers from state officials and Federal authorities as to why this situation was
allowed. To blame the Russians for the closure of the pipeline which results in a surge in
prices and limited availability of gas for the summer is an absolute stroke of genius.
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/ncdeq-colonial-pipeline-spill-huntersville/275-70e16fb6-c945-4634-b933-3975d0573f2e
It is odd that certain elements of the us intelligence community, along with negative
factions within the us political establishment, continue to absolutely refuse to enter into
verifiable and mutually binding international agreements on cyber security with exactly the
nation states that they accuse (without evidence) of malicious activity in the same sphere,
while at the same time operating in this field in an openly declared hostile manner under the
secrecy deemed necessary for 'national security'.
> In a recent book, Luke Harding, an investigative reporter at The Guardian, described how Mr. Steele had dispatched his "collector"
to surreptitiously approach a real estate broker, Sergei Millian, who was a peripheral figure in the Trump/Russia saga. "Millian
spoke at length and privately to this person, believing him or her to be trustworthy "" a kindred soul," Mr. Harding wrote.
But the trouble for Mr. Harding, who is close to both Mr. Steele and Mr. Simpson, was that he wrote those lines before the
release of the F.B.I. interview of Mr. Danchenko.
In the interview, the collector said that he and Mr. Millian might have spoken briefly over the phone, but that the two
had never met.
Mr. Harding did not respond to requests for comment. <
Here are Ten Things We Have Learned During the Covid Coup.
1. Our political system is hopelessly corrupt. Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party
can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought.
2. Democracy is a sham. It has been a sham for a very long time. There will never be any real democracy when money and
power amount to the same thing.
3. The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation.
It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.
4. So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort. From whatever direction they claim to attack the system,
they are just pretending to do so, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even
useful to its agendas.
5. Any "dissident" voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake. The system does not hand
out free publicity to its actual enemies.
6. Most people in our society are cowards. They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been
loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial
loss.
7. The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system... ...and those journalists who work for
it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.
8. Police are not servants of the public... ...but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks
to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.
9. Scientists cannot be trusted. They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for
the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
10. Progress is a misleading illusion. The "progress" of increasing automation and industrialisation does not go hand
in hand with a progress in the quality of human life, but in fact will "progressively" reduce it to the point of complete extinction.
Irrelevant how much the Western peoples hate China. China is not Iran, Afghanistan, Russia or some other random Third World
country, it is above the pay grade of Western public opinion.
However, it is true China is not up to the level achieved by the Soviet Union. It still has a military disproportionately weak
compared to its economic might. That problem will still take some three or more decades to solve, but it is being worked on.
This headline by the NYT (in the upper right corner of the Home Page) reflects the West's frustration with Israel. In the first
part, they try to tell the reader that the Israeli are waging a war of equals, and not genociding, the Palestinians (and that
the USA has nothing to do with it). In the second part, it laments the bad timing by the Israelis, who interrupted their propaganda
warfare operation against China on the "Uighur genocide" campaign.
It urges Israel to clean the mess as quick as possible in order for the anti-China propaganda campaign to resume.
In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, the above statement is literal, as the USA has, so far, exported zero - I repeat, zero
(not rounding down) - vaccines so far.
Meanwhile, China has already exported 250 million doses and counting (last time I checked, a week ago) - more than the entire
Indian production (India had just exported some 60 million doses).
The inner contradictions of capitalism in plain sight.
On the one side, you have to give people money so they can keep themselves quarantined. On the other side, capitalism requires
people to keep working or to keep searching for work in order to pull down wages, thus increasing the rate of surplus value. That's
why conservatives are usually in favor of the Christian charity, that gives only food and shelter, but not cash, to the unemployed,
but not of wage raises and unemployment benefits - the fact that you're paid in cash and not in kind makes all the difference
in the world in the capitalist system.
Unemployment benefits only help capitalism is it is low enough just to keep one physically alive and in constant search for
jobs. That way, he/she incorporates the industrial reserve army, which brings wages down. The problem with the USA is that wages
were already so low before the pandemic that those USD 600.00 checks made 35% (!!) of its recently unemployed recipients richer
than when they were employed. Logically, those 35% don't want to go back to work, as their lives are objectively better now than
they were before the pandemic, and that's why the Republican congressmen and senators are pressuring Biden (as they pressured
Trump) to outright extinguish those checks.
P.S.: the top rated commentary in the article ("Great generations of Americans came here 100 years ago...") by the time I typed
this is hilarious, shows the delusion of the average American towards their own system almost perfectly. The other comments are
also very funny. The narrative that "there are a lot of jobs available, but no one is skilled enough/wants it" is used by the
capitalists every time there's an economic crisis, just search your favorite newspaper for the years of 1980-1982, 1975 etc. etc.
and you'll see the same bullshit being preached over and over again.
Talks about apartheid as the only possible synthesis between a Jewish theocratic state and a liberal bourgeois state, which
I mentioned in the past two threads about the subject.
As I said before, the system is unstable and is doomed to fail. Either Israel abandons its Zionist project and gives up the
idea of being an 100% Jewish state and thus becomes a liberal bourgeois state or it will continue to wither and degenerate until
it falls to a civil war.
It would've been the first if not for a providential last grasp effort by NASA, who used the resources it had and didn't have
to pull that off, by a few months.
The tendency, however is clear. NASA will soon cease to exist as we know it and essentially become the State façade of SpaceX.
The USA's space program will then be entirely dependent on the genius of Elon Musk.
--//--
Cuban vaccines (Abdala and Soberana 02) continue advancing on their trials:
If you had read and understood the Mars 3 link I provided you would have learned that it wasn't a rover either. Which the first
rover was has already been told. End of story.
Posted by: Norwegian | May 16 2021 18:37 utc | 37
Yes, but no. Mars 3 actually had a rover on board, PROP-M. To quote Wikipedia:
"The Mars 3 lander, a so called Passability Estimating Vehicle for Mars, was designed and manufactured in Mobile Vehicle Engineering
Institute by a team of approximately 150 engineers, led by Alexander Kemurdzhian. The vehicle had a small 'Mars rover' on board,
which was planned to move across the surface on skis while connected to the lander with a 15-meter umbilical cable. Two small
metal rods were used for autonomous obstacle avoidance, as radio signals from Earth would take too long to drive the rovers using
remote control. The rover carried a dynamic penetrometer and a gamma ray densitometer."
... although it seems it never was deployed because of the communication failure, so it cannot count as the first rover to
function on Mars.
Rep. Maxine Waters of California, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, joined
demonstrations this weekend in Minnesota. She told supporters that if the Chauvin trial
verdict goes the wrong way, "we've got to not only stay in the street but we've got to fight
for justice."
You may recall a president got pilloried a while ago for urging his supporters to "fight"
for their desired outcome. It was noted then that the term is a well-worn rhetorical phrase
that doesn't necessarily amount to a literal incitement to violence. But there can't be much
doubt about the import of what Ms. Waters said. She made her remarks in Brooklyn Center, a few
miles from the barricaded Minneapolis courthouse where the Chauvin trial is taking place and
the site of the killing last weekend of a black man by a police officer. The place has been
aflame for the past week in an orgy of rioting.
The Handler standard, or the Maxine maxim "the idea that we don't really need a trial to
know whether someone is guilty of a heinous crime" has always had its adherents. There have
surely been miscarriages of justice "acquittals of guilty people and convictions of innocent
ones" throughout history. The jury system is never perfect.
But what's frighteningly new about our current climate is that the rejection of apparently
unwelcome trial outcomes is now part of the dominant progressive critique of our longstanding
political and civic order. If U.S. institutions are the product of white-supremacist
exploitation "as is essentially the consensus of the people who run the government, most
corporations, and leading cultural institutions" then the judicial system itself is inherently
and systemically unjust. If the principle of equality before the law is to be supplanted by the
objective of "equity" in outcome, then only outcomes that serve the higher objective of
collective racial justice can be considered legitimate.
So trials that produce the "wrong" verdict are not just miscarriages of justice. They are an
indictment of the entire system.
The ascendancy of this new progressive radicalism adds a frightening element to the unease
the nation feels this week as the jury deliberates in Minneapolis. By all accounts the trial of
Mr. Chauvin has been rigorous, methodical and fair. The prosecution seemed to make a strong
case that Mr. Floyd died at least in part as a result of the officer's actions. The defense may
have sowed some doubts about whether Mr. Chavin's intent rose to the level of culpability
required of the most serious charges.
But under our new rules, the jury's verdict will be tolerated only if it goes the "right"
way.
This rejection of the legitimacy of the judicial process is rooted in the same neo-Marxist
ideology""a race- and identity-based interpretation of structuralism""that holds sway over the
minds of much of our ruling class.
To the old Marxists, the capitalists were the exploiters. In "The ABC of Communism,"
published in 1920, Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky used language
that sounds strikingly familiar today. They denounced the courts as instruments of "bourgeois
justice," which was "carried on under the guidance of laws passed in the interests of the
exploiting class," and recommended instead the establishment of "proletarian courts."
In one of the more savage ironies of history, some two decades later the authors themselves
were tried by such courts under Josef Stalin and sentenced to death.
Yet even Stalin thought some kind of judicial proceeding was necessary. Our modern
revolutionaries would dispense even with show trials.
E
Eli Hauser SUBSCRIBER 2 weeks ago (Edited)
Red Queen Rules. Sentence. Verdict. Accusation. Admission of Guilt.
Mark Robbins SUBSCRIBER 2 weeks ago
Liberals have no need for trials with an assumption of innocence. At all times, they KNOW
what is right.
Chris Madison SUBSCRIBER 2 weeks ago
We are living through a "throw the baby out with the bath" moment. Extremists are labeling
anything which doesn't go their way as "systemically racist." If there is no jurisprudence
and due process, no system of laws addressing a variety of crimes, but only the cry for
"justice now" without defining what justice looks like according to law, then anarchy has
taken the place of justice. Ms. Handler is entitled to her opinion. I am glad she is not in a
position of leadership. Congresswoman Maxine Waters likes to make statements which "stir the
pot," potentially raising the "rage level" across our nation. She should know better, but
doesn't. Our nation is on the cusp of a moment when we must intentionally decide who we are
legally, morally, and Constitutionally. Emotions are insufficient for this moment.
Christopher Jones SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
This essay would have tremendous weight if there was not a video of the murder. Absent that
it is stupefyingly ignorant. "The prosecution seemed to make a strong case that Mr. Floyd
died at least in part as a result of the officer's actions." Really, sir? A video literally
showing the officer kneeling on Mr. Floyd's neck until he passed out and later died. Are you
suggesting that he would have died on his own had the officer not done this?
You are attempting to seem reasonable with your pleas for due process, but you just come
across as obtuse. A video of a man murdering another man and your like, no I don't believe
it. There has to be another explanation.
Tad Story SUBSCRIBER 2 weeks ago
So your saying Mr. Floyd's use of a Highly addictive and equally deadly narcotic on top of
already severe heart condition to which your camera did not display played no role as to the
outcome? Considering the use of Fentanyl is 900 times more deadly than crack-cocaine I feel
it needed to be discussed and weighed, to which it was but the mob had their torches ready
and that carried as much or even more weight, Maxine made sure of that..
beryl silver SUBSCRIBER 2 weeks ago (Edited)
The article failed to mention the words protesters need "to get more confrontational" Maxine
Waters used.
Michael Lapolla SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
It has been obvious to us that the state of Minnesota offered Derek Chauvin as a sacrifice on
the altar of expediency. Witness the immediate and joyous victory laps by the state AG. It
just took a while and a show trial. It is obvious that the jury had no stomach for another
outcome. This is what you vote for - this is what you get.
And we have a Capitol police person murdering an unarmed trespasser, but our DOJ sees and
hears no evil and utters not a word.
What a national embarrassment. Go back to sleep Minnesota.
FRANK HERMAN SUBSCRIBER 2 weeks ago
He wasn't on his neck. Even the prosecution witness admitted, that when looked at from other
angles, that the cop was on his shoulder blade.
Tim Taylor SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
Something to think about in the current culture of policing:
Most dangerous jobs in U.S. 1. Logging 2. Aircraft pilots/flight engineers 3. Derrick
operators 4. Roofers 5. Garbage collectors 6. Iron workers. 7. Delivery drivers 8. Farmers.
9. Firefighting supervisors 10. Power linemen 11. Agricultural workers 12. Crossing guards
13. Crane operators 14. Construction helpers. 15. Landscaping supervisors 16. Highway
maintenance workers. 17. Cement masons 18. Small engine mechanics. 19. Supervisors of
mechanics 20. Heavy equipment mechanics. 21. Grounds maintenance workers 22. Police
Officers.
What Maxine does not seem to understand is that demonizing the police works against gun
control efforts.
The more that the citizenry believes the police cannot be trusted to protect them, the
more citizens will seek to protect themselves, including purchasing and carrying
firearms.
Kenneth Gimbel SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
Whew. I guess Minneapolis won't be torched tonight. Or, maybe, just a little bit to satisfy
the mob.
Verne Thibodeaux SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago (Edited)
There are a lot of "undocumented shoppers" who are very disappointed today.
Michael Havey SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
As I've been saying since the first day of the trial, only the dumbest, most gullible, least
informed Americans believed that Derek Chauvin was innocent.
DK Brand SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago (Edited)
All that without due process being applied? See, you are the problem when the vast majority
of people who saw the video were horrified and felt the officer was guilty of his death. But
we have a system of laws and due process protects everyone, even the seemingly obviously
guilty. There are people who are caught red handed every day who receive the same due
process. So stop crowing about your imaginary opponents and accept that our system has worked
as designed.
William Coburn SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago (Edited)
innocent
He did not need to be found innocent, just not guilty.
Nidge M SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago (Edited)
Talk about dark comedy ........
IF Chauvin is convicted the seemingly not very legally au fait Maxine Waters just handed
his team perfect grounds to appeal against any conviction.
The whole situation is peturbing at a frightening number of levels 'though.
What will US cities do if 10%, 20% even 70% their Cops quit?
What will they do even if they don't quit but 'work to the letter of the rules' and slow all
action to a crawl?
Its not too unthinkable given the record of violence the very large man Chauvin was
kneeling on in the course of the arrest.
And add to that the somewhat inept but from the video plausible Police woman now
incacerated for shooting instead of tasering another career criminal .......... Which from
this distance appears to be a based on political rather than legal considerations.
Would you be a cop?
Meanwhile politicians from both main US parties appear to be giving their blessing to
those who wish to userp the rule of law .......... That's viable is it?
Nidge M SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago (Edited)
No, Floyd was not resisting arrest actively & constantly for 9 minutes.
But
Floyd was a very large male with a record of extream violence, drug abuse and
unpredictability.
Its hardly novel for an aprehended person to fake placidity, then when their restrainers
relax to explode into extream violence.
I am not asserting what Chauvin did was right or wrong ........ But I do think its a
reaction which anyone who has had to deal with violent offenders would regard as a pretty
understandable reaction.
I also wonder might those who are so ready to jump on the bandwagon, grandstanding &
howling in condemnation precipitate something far beyond their expectations.
I wonder too what would happen if the majority of those so quick to condemn were handed
responsibility for doing the policing job people like Chauvin have to do.
How would you do it?
Lori Crossley SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
I don't think anyone wants policing like Chauvin did it. It led to the death of a man. There
were a lot of potential outcomes to this arrest. I would not blame any officer for being
overly cautious based on Floyd's arrest record - and yes, it does count.
But Chauvin was not alone in making this arrest. He had assistance which was not utilized.
Do people fake injury to get away from police officers? I am sure they do.
But there were 9 long minutes when that was not happening. There are thousands of police
officers who leave their homes each day to walk into potentially violent situations. And they
do their job and go home at night (with little thanks) and did not make the same choice
Chauvin did. His trial was fair and the verdict is in. The process worked for Chauvin - not
so much for Floyd.
Mark Allen SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
I grew up on the block where the police station is located, in an apartment often captured in
the footage of the rioting. And while it did make the local papers, the national news has
failed to report that the folks living in those apartments cannot sleep (due to the rioters)
and have to put wet towels over their windows to keep out the teargas (due to the police).
And the irony in this is that the overwhelming majority of those apartment dwellers are
working-poor, persons of color.
Let that sink in.
Scott Mote SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
For the regressives and BLMers, those apartment dwellers are just collateral damage. Maybe
BLM will move them into a BLM mansion.
John Smith SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
Great insights Mr. Baker.
Strange how video evidence clearly convicts the subject in the minds of leftists. They
appear to be able to assign motive and punishment based on their emotional appraisal. We have
a sitting California Congresswoman stating this on video tape.
Well, we are not to believe every video tape. Remember Jussie Smollett? They did the same
to the unnamed racists, who assaulted Mr. Smollett - according to his version of events. All
muscular non black males were guilty, until individually cleared. The usual leftists in
politics, media, and entertainment joined Jussie.
Unfortunately, Jussie's version of events was false. He hired two black men to "assault"
him, then put together his soap opera version of the script. Since both stories could not be
true, no one went to jail. This is what politicians with law degrees have contributed to our
Republic.
Yes, he still faces felony charges. But it is more than two years hence. Speedy trial?
Paul Stroud SUBSCRIBER 3 weeks ago
For all of most of our lives we've been able to rely on a civil society that recognized its'
faults, if even after a period of time, and took hard steps to correct them. This is now at
risk as acceptable "civil disobedience" becomes "violent disobedience". We can no longer look
at other parts of the world that are continually wrenched apart by violent, factional
conflict and destruction and think, "oh, at least it can't happen here". It is happening
here, and it is escalating. I hope I am wrong, but I fear for our children and grandchildren.
(nytimes.com)
371 Posted by msmash on Monday May 24, 2021 @04:00PM from the how-about-that dept. Florida
on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter
moderate
speech online , by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political
candidates in the state. From a report:
The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a direct response to Facebook's and Twitter's
bans of former President Donald J. Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring
candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms
in response to the contents of their stories. Mr. DeSantis said signing the bill meant that
Floridians would be "guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites."
"If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the
dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable," he said in a statement.
The bill is part of a broader push among conservative state legislatures to crack down on the
ability of tech companies to manage posts on their platforms. The political efforts took off
after Mr. Trump was barred after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Lawmakers around the
country have echoed Mr. Trump's accusations that the companies are biased against
conservative personalities and publications, even though those accounts often thrive online.
More than a hundred bills targeting the companies' moderation practices have been filed
nationwide this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the
bills have died, but a proposal is still being debated in Texas.
Probably it was not a false flag. First of all the state of IT security at Colonial Pipeline
was so dismal that it was strange that this did not happened before. And there might be
some truth that they try to exploit this hack to thier advantage as maintenance of the
pipeline is also is dismal shape.
Notable quotes:
"... "As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went." If you are right about the perpetrators, my guess would be that it went into the black-ops fund, two birds one stone. ..."
"... I have become so used to false flags, I am going to be shocked when a real intrusion happens! ..."
"... an in depth article researching solarwinds hack - looks like it was Israel, not a great leap to see that colonial was a false flag https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/01/investigative-reports/another-mega-group-spy-scandal-samanage-sabotage-and-the-solarwinds-hack/ ..."
"... Regarding the ownership of Colonial Pipeline: 'IFM Investors, which is owned by 27 Australian union- and employer-backed industry superannuation funds, owns a 16 per cent stake in Colonial Pipeline, which the infrastructure manager bought in 2007 for $US651 million.' ..."
"... 'The privately held Colonial Pipeline is valued at about $US8 billion, based upon the most recent sale of a 10 per cent stake to a unit of Royal Dutch Shell in 2019.' ..."
The Colonial Pipeline Co.,ransomware attack was a false flag. They wanted to blame Russian
hackers so they could derail Nordstream II
It is common knowledge that the only real hackers that are able of such sabotage is CIA
and Israeli. It's the same attack types they do to Iranian infrastructure on a regular
basis.
The Russians are not that stupid to do something they know will be blamed on them and is
of no political use to them. And could derail Nordstream2.
As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went. CEO is ultra corrupt. They
never ever invested in their infrastructure so when it went down they came up with a
profitable excuse. Just look at their financials/balance sheet over the years. No real
investment in updating and maintaining infrastructure. Great false flag. Corruption and
profiteering.
"As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went." If you are right
about the perpetrators, my guess would be that it went into the black-ops fund, two birds one
stone.
I'm not familiar with your handle - hello. IMO, it would be counterproductive for Russia
to initiate such a hack. What really affects and debilitates US oil and gas interests is low
prices, both at the pump and on the stock exchange. The hack helped jack up prices (which
were already being jacked-up despite demand still lagging behind supply) which only HELPS
those energy interests. It has long been known, the math isn't complicated, what level crude
must trade at for US domestic oil & gas operations to be profitable. Remember that just
as the pandemic was emerging Russia and Saudi Arabia once again sent the global crude market
into the depths of despair.
I do agree the hack can be interpreted in light of the desperation of US energy interests
to try to kill NS2. I have not yet read the recent articles discussing Biden's recent moves
in that regard. If these moves are a recognition that US LNG to Europe (and elsewhere) are
diametrically opposed to climate responsibility, I'd welcome those moves. As is usually the
case though, environmental responsibility is probably the least likely reason.
Regarding the ownership of Colonial Pipeline: 'IFM Investors, which is owned by 27
Australian union- and employer-backed industry superannuation funds, owns a 16 per cent stake
in Colonial Pipeline, which the infrastructure manager bought in 2007 for $US651
million.'
also
'The privately held Colonial Pipeline is valued at about $US8 billion, based upon the
most recent sale of a 10 per cent stake to a unit of Royal Dutch Shell in 2019.'
"... The Global Financial Syndicate will use all kind of distractions to mask the MONETARY power and divide the populace to continue its control & dominance through monetary imperialism. The world is a playground for "evil spirits." ..."
One need to understand the STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT correctly, clearly, and comprehensively
to live & light our world. What is your strategic construct of the national and
international control system?
The Global Financial Syndicate will use all kind of distractions to mask the MONETARY
power and divide the populace to continue its control & dominance through monetary
imperialism. The world is a playground for "evil spirits."
How does the Financial Empire increase its control & POWER over a region? It likes
turning each region into its suzerainty and an Animal Farm (Top-Down Control Structure -
Democracy/Republic/...) internally by controlling its money supply through the
central-private banking system.
Global Financial Empire's strategy:
– Capture LANDS
– Constitutionalize to control the suzerainty & LIVES
– Create LOANS through private creation of money by the private banking system
(Credit/Debt) & give preferential access-terms to kleptocrats (Kleptocrats/Finance --
> Business/Media -- > Politicians/Bureaucrats -- > people)
– Conserve control & power through Consumerism - lifestyles (Labor &
Leisure)
Monetary Power = Lands x Lives x Loans. The key CONTROL elements of the Financial Empire
within a suzerainty are:
– credit/debt - LOANS
– consumerism/desires - LIFESTYLE
– circuses/distractions. - LOST & trivial
When it comes to the international realm it seeks following freedoms:
– freedom of capital movement,
– freedom of trade,
– freedom to provide services, particularly financial
– freedom for warfare
The Global Financial Syndicate controls, finances and corrupts policies such as those in
the U$A administration by its financing the substitution of national leaders with employees
of the Financial Syndicate, such as Biden, Draghi, Yellen, Juncker, Macron,... Globalization
is meant to establish the global financial syndicate's rule everywhere, hierarchically from
top to bottom, in contrast to the democratic right of citizens to self-determination and the
responsibility of governments towards their citizens.
Who wants to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt?
"... My life story is very similar to yours -- blue collar upbringing, worked graveyard shift in factories during college, made it all the way to Wall Street --- and I completely agree with you. The Democratic Party might have been the party of the working-class families many years ago, but it's absolutely not that now. ..."
"... The most interesting aspect of party realignment in almost every country is the movement of the Anglo-Saxon elites to the parties of leftist authoritarianism, whether in the UK, US, or Canada. Since elites have always had “fluid” political values, one can only assume that they see tyranny as our destiny. ..."
I am a retired attorney but was reared in a blue collar home. I have not lost the values I
learned where my father returned home from work six days a week as a railroad brakeman.
Thanks to my pre-law curriculum I am well read in history and literature. My undergrad major
was history and my minor literature.
Having acquired a love for reading in college I have read both all my life but it has not
changed me from the son my father reared. I worked construction and general labor jobs to
help pay for college and law school and am very aware of how hard those jobs are and I have a
healthy respect for the men and women who provide us with the essential goods and services we
all need.
I therefore have no use for attitude of most on the left and some on the right who have no
respect for average working people and small business.
It seems many in Britain have the same outlook. My Dad was very proud I became a lawyer
but I am just as proud of the job he performed to give me that chance.
SUBSCRIBER 5 hours ago
I therefore have no use for attitude of most on the left and some on the right who have no
respect for average working people and small business. It seems many in Britain have the same
outlook.
My life story is very similar to yours -- blue collar upbringing, worked graveyard
shift in factories during college, made it all the way to Wall Street --- and I completely
agree with you. The Democratic Party might have been the party of the working-class families
many years ago, but it's absolutely not that now.
SUBSCRIBER 4 hours ago
Most democrat leaders are career politicians like Obama, Biden, Pelosi and Schumer. They
never had a real job and paid any taxes. They love raising taxes for big government and dole
out. Can’t wait for midterm election and take back the congress. R
SUBSCRIBER 14 hours ago
The most interesting aspect of party realignment in almost every country is the
movement of the Anglo-Saxon elites to the parties of leftist authoritarianism, whether in the
UK, US, or Canada. Since elites have always had “fluid” political values,
one can only assume that they see tyranny as our destiny.
How can one ignore all the noise in the media to focus on the crux of the situation,
implications, and the future outcomes?
One can only understand the impact of events better and envision the future by exploring
plausible scenarios and identifying signals which over time will enable one to size up the
probabilities of outcomes.
INTERNATIONAL -- MONETARY IMPERIALISM
Geopolitical relationships are frosty & flammable. All the narratives can be summed up
into a few SCENARIOS:
DECOUPLING. Two spheres of influence & supply chains. China & Russia led and
the Five Eyes led. Germany/EU?
WAR. The dollar empire launching a war against China &/or Russia. Iran?
The probabilities of these scenarios will be defined by the following SIGNALS:
NS2. Is Nord Stream 2 completed by September? If yes, a major geopolitical
victory for Russia. If the U$A can thwart this project then it still has the power and will
to shape Europe. If, on the other hand, Germany & Russia resists U$A's pressure and
complete the pipeline to operate, that would be an act of defiance unprecedented in postwar
history. This is the biggest clash between Russia and the United States since the end of
World War II. Let's see if European countries are less subservient to Washington.
De-DOLLARIZATION. China, Russia and other nations moving away from the US$ and trading
in their respective national currencies.
SANCTIONS. More sanctions from the dollar empire against China, Russia, Iran,
Germany... Counter sanctions, retaliations... impact on the global economy...
Any new scenarios & signals? What probabilities would one assign to various scenarios?
What will be the construct of scenarios and signals at the national level?
The Dollar Empire likes to initiate a conflict during Olympics when they are held in its
adversaries:
"... On one occasion, she said Sheldon Adelson , a Jewish American billionaire who supports Republicans and right-wing Israeli politicians, looked like "a naked mole rat." For this, the right branded Wilder an anti-Semite, even though she is Jewish. Now she's out of a job. ..."
"... But it would be a mistake to reduce either Wilder's firing or the persistence of Cuomo to a story about cancel culture. The phenomenon is obviously one-sided; the outrage, bogus. This is really a story about journalism and an industry that has abdicated its most basic responsibilities. ..."
"... The rules matter. They exist to protect the integrity of a news outlet and to protect the public from corruption. Instead, news outlets are failing consumers and journalists alike. They serve power rather than challenge it. The result is a weak press in a nation desperate for the truth. That's no way to serve the public. ..."
"... AP prohibits employees from openly expressing their opinions on political matters and other public issues. ..."
"... I think Don Lemon is just an actor that plays a journalist on TV. Also, where is the diversity they preach on this network? Where are the Latinx, the Asian hosts, the women? So much for following what you preach. ..."
Emily Wilder is a promising young journalist. After finishing a stint at the Arizona
Republic , the recent Stanford graduate began a job with the Associated Press on May 3
as a news associate. Wilder could have built a career at the storied wire service or, with the
experience she'd gained, leap to a major paper. Instead, the AP fired her two weeks in, days
after the Stanford College Republicans pointed a right-wing mob in Wilder's direction. Wilder,
it turns out, has political opinions: In college, she belonged to Students for Justice in
Palestine and to Jewish Voice for Peace, two groups that oppose the occupation of Palestinian
territory by Israeli forces. On one occasion, she said Sheldon
Adelson , a Jewish American billionaire who supports Republicans and right-wing Israeli
politicians, looked like "a naked mole rat." For this, the right branded Wilder an anti-Semite,
even though she is Jewish. Now she's out of a job.
Contrast Wilder's circumstances with those of
Chris Cuomo . The star CNN anchor will keep his job even though he has flouted basic
ethical standards that typically apply to other, less prominent journalists. Though CNN once
banned Cuomo from interviewing his governor brother, Andrew, it relaxed that when the pandemic
hit "and the Cuomo Brothers show soared to popularity," Margaret Sullivan
wrote at the Washington Post . That looked bad, CNN eventually conceded, and it
reinstated the ban. Behind the scenes, though, Cuomo's ethical violations continued. On
Thursday, the Post
reported that he had advised his brother on how to handle sexual harassment allegations
that threatened the elder Cuomo's popularity and career. Cuomo won't be punished, CNN said.
Nothing can stop the Cuomo Brothers show.
The Cuomos possess something Emily Wilder lacks: power. Outrage derailed Wilder's career
nearly as soon as it had begun. But real ethical violations can't kick Cuomo off the air. The
Wilder and Cuomo stories both impart something vital about cancel culture. "There's no question
I was just canceled," Wilder
told SFGate. Cuomo, meanwhile, reportedly used the phrase to discuss his brother's sexual
harassment problem. In practice, cancel culture cuts one way, against journalists like Wilder
or
Nikole Hannah-Jones , who was recently
denied tenure under pressure from conservatives
with links to the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, NC Policy Watch has
reported. Against a white, male network star or his brother the governor, cancel culture can
apparently do little.
But it would be a mistake to reduce either Wilder's firing or the persistence of Cuomo
to a story about cancel culture. The phenomenon is obviously one-sided; the outrage, bogus.
This is really a story about journalism and an industry that has abdicated its most basic
responsibilities. The Associated Press has claimed that Wilder violated its social-media
policies, though she says her bosses were unable to tell her how. In the absence of a
substantive reason to fire Wilder, another explanation presents itself: The AP capitulated to a
bad-faith political campaign. In doing so, it betrayed its very reason to exist. Wilder's
political opinions have no bearing on her ability to gather news. The AP showed it is not
impartial after all; it can be persuaded, if only from the right.
There is no evidence that Wilder is anything but what she appears to be, a talented and
committed young journalist. People don't always enter college knowing they want to be
journalists. Indeed, perhaps they shouldn't. Any definition of objectivity that requires a
journalist to pretend neutrality asks that person to lie. Journalists are not automatons. They
have opinions, and if they are not male or white or rich or straight, those opinions make them
vulnerable to the right-wing outrages that just cost Wilder her new job. The press has one
purpose, and that is to report news in the public's interest. It is not entertainment. It is
not propaganda. It is not public relations.
And that's why Chris Cuomo ought to be out of a job. CNN, too, has forgotten why it exists.
Cuomo's infractions impede his ability to cover the news. By keeping him employed, CNN says the
news does not matter and neither do the rules. CNN made a similar calculation in the past with
plagiarism, which typically ends careers "" unless a journalist happens to be Fareed Zakaria.
The current host of CNN's GPS , he is generally tasked with explaining various
foreign-policy matters to a popular audience and once lifted sections of a Jill Lepore column
for a column in Time . Though CNN briefly suspended
Zakaria in 2012 for the offense, the site Our Bad Media
uncovered further incidents in 2014. Yet Zakaria persists, with CNN's help. He still hosts
his show and will likely continue to do so unless another, bigger scandal somehow takes him
down. The network's motivations are not mysterious. It wants to keep its moneymakers and elite
influencers. To do this, it'll ignore the ethical standards that apply to everyone else. At the
same time, journalism's Emily Wilders will scrape for every bit of job security they can
find.
The rules matter. They exist to protect the integrity of a news outlet and to protect
the public from corruption. Instead, news outlets are failing consumers and journalists alike.
They serve power rather than challenge it. The result is a weak press in a nation desperate for
the truth. That's no way to serve the public.
JosephQua 11 HOURS AGO
"On one occasion, she said Sheldon Adelson, a Jewish American billionaire who supports
Republicans and right-wing Israeli politicians, looked like "a naked mole rat." For this, the
right branded Wilder an anti-Semite, even though she is Jewish. Now she's out of a job."
This is a lie.
Wilder wasn't fired for remarks she tweeted while a college student, she was fired for
tweets made in the 17 days she was employed by AP openly expressing her personal opinions on
the Israel-Palestinian conflict, in one of which she openly attacked the idea of objectivity
in journalism.
AP prohibits employees from openly expressing their opinions on political matters and
other public issues.
Wilder knows exactly what tweets git her in trouble and when she made them.
In my opinion, both Chris Cuomo and Wilder should be terminated.
hivequeen+ 17 HOURS AGO
The problem isn't that Chris Cuomo talked to his brother. The problem is that Chris Cuomo
talked to his brother AND his brother's advisors while they planned and developed a political
strategy to defend his brother against claims of sexual harassment. And you know that.
tanquerochicago 1 DAY AGO
CNN has lost all credibility as a "news organization". I can't watch any of it with a
straight face. They claim to believe in liberal views, preach the importance of diversity
(rightfully so), and claim to be a serious network but they've allowed the Cuomo clown hour
to continue.
I think Don Lemon is just an actor that plays a journalist on TV. Also, where is the
diversity they preach on this network? Where are the Latinx, the Asian hosts, the women? So
much for following what you preach.
And the Cuomos simply give Italians a bad name. They play into all of the awful
stereotypes that everyone should be fighting...the machismo, sexism, bravado....gross! Just
gross.
nibblybits 1 DAY AGO (Edited)
It's examples like Chris Cuomo not being even slapped on the wrist that gives oxygen to
accusations of the right that CNN is fake news and no better than Fox. They lose the moral
high ground against propaganda arms like Newsmax and OANN if Chris Cuomo is allowed to
perpetuate defenses of his own brother from his perch as anchor. (And let's not peddle in the
fiction that Chris is not reporting on his brother, when we know he has power in that
organization to direct coverage.)
His colleagues are furious. Jim Acosta has been wading out into pro-Trump mobs for years
trying to defend his job and his network, and Chris Cuomo just blew that up.
Embarrassing.
Worse are the partisan hypocrites on here defending Cuomo.
. . . which has caused some GOP leaders to fear alienating female Republican voters, particularly educated suburbanites
who will be key votes in the 2022 elections.
When I first met my wife, she told me women shouldn't have the right to vote. It was instant love.
A Girl In Flyover Country 59 minutes ago
[in case of Cheney] The war monger doesn't fall far from the tree.
Rise21 42 minutes ago remove link
Amazing how the liberal news outlets are now supporting a Cheney. But they know more war equals more rating
yochananmichael 51 seconds ago
its time for the republicans to rid itself of chicken hawk warmongers like Cheney.
He father disbanded there Iraqi Army which was supposed to provide security, causing an insurgency and 5000 dead American boys
and countless maimed.
vic and blood PREMIUM 4 minutes ago
Cheney's benefactors have erected massive billboards all over the state, 'thanking her for defending the Constitution.'
She has an incredible war chest, and sadly, money and advertising decides a lot of elections.
Looks like the chance to win a million bucks can give vaccination rates a real shot in the
arm.
Ohio saw its COVID-19 vaccination rate jump 45% between May 14-19 as compared to the
previous week, thanks in part to the state's Vax-A-Million lottery,
Gov. Mike DeWine told reporters on Wednesday . Last week, the state said it recorded a 28%
spike in vaccinations in the days following the lottery announcement.
Each week, adult Ohioans who have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose will enter a
random drawing to win a million dollars. And younger vaccinated Ohio residents between the ages
of 12 and 17 will be part of a weekly random drawing to get a four-year scholarship to an Ohio
public university, which will include tuition, room, board and books. There will be five
winners for each prize selected over the next five weeks.Wednesday night, the Ohio lottery
announced the first two winners: Abbigail Bugenske of Silverton, near Cincinnati, won $1
million, while Joseph Costello of Englewood, near Dayton, won the college scholarship. Each
Wednesday moving forward, another adult and another teen winner will be revealed at 7:29 p.m.
through June 23.
More than 2.7 million adults registered for the cash prizes, and more than 100,000 teens are
vying for the scholarships.
After Russiagate the credibility of CIA is below zero. So this looks like a part of
propaganda compaign against China.
"Yet somehow Tony Fauci didn't know this Can we really believe that? No, of course, we
can't," Carlson continued, adding "right around the time those Chinese researchers became the
world's first COVID patients, the government of Thailand contacted the CDC and Tony Fauci's
office to say its intelligence service had picked up 'biological anomalies' around the lab in
Wuhan. In other words, there had been a leak."
ay_arrow
AUS-AUD 8 hours ago (Edited)
If fauci funded the wuhan lab then the US funded the wuhan lab.
popeye 6 hours ago
There has been no new credible information released in the past two months pertaining to
the origin of SARS-Cov-2. US Intelligence is not a credible source (lying & deception
are the tradecraft of espionage). All I see is media narrative spin based on conjecture
that you can guarantee has political origins.
Yet Americans, who complain incessantly about the dishonesty of their media, credulously
swallow the narrative fed to them without analysis or critique. Stupid. You think you are
independent rebels, when you are in reality manipulated sheep, and oh so easily
manipulated.
Lets be clear - ZH is now a part of the narrative machine.
SurfingUSA 4 hours ago (Edited)
Can't make inferences????
The Wuhan lab is just the fall guy here.
The virus,
the lab (or Army games) release,
the election impact ...
ALL either Made in the (((USA))) or close to it.
Justin Timberbieber 8 hours ago
Yep, just the CCP. No western involvement whatsoever.
E5 8 hours ago
Until you trace the scientists back to UNC. Then you see that the actual virus they
accelerated came from the US.
Heimdall - Torwart von Assguard 6 hours ago
AND Canada
Ted K. 6 hours ago
The Winnipeg lab of the fully infiltrated Canada is indeed a piece of the puzzle.
Herdee 5 hours ago
And Ft. Detrick
RedNemesis 6 hours ago (Edited)
Okay. They accelerated and released a virus obtained from the US. So is the US
responsible for a country turning yellow cake uranium mined in Nevada into a nuclear
weapon?
truth or go home 5 hours ago
Yes, if the US gives them the recipe and then pays them to develop it.
And if the US did that to get around a law that makes it illegal to do makes it even
worse - which is exactly what happened.
SteveNYC 7 hours ago
I'm going with the "populism" route. Stopping populist governments in their tracks has
always proven reason enough for panic and overkill from TPTB:
- USA
- Brazil
- India
<< Primary targets.
Heimdall - Torwart von Assguard 6 hours ago
Poland
Hungary
Venezuela
Brazil
popeye 6 hours ago
Most Americans have never left their country, many have never left their state, and few
seem to have an education. You can't expect them to know much about anything outside the
US. Basically a flat earth mentality - "the world consists only of what I can see".
junction 8 hours ago
The only certainty is that all the major facts are lies.
Jolt 5 hours ago
You're on the right track, "junction", but be aware that the virus is just an ordinary
flu/corona virus that isn't deadly for the vast majority of humans. The real culprit, the
biggest tool for creating the worldwide "emergency" is the PCR test, which is 100%
fraudulent. This is by design, thanks to the pharmaceuticals.
williambanzai7 PREMIUM 8 hours ago remove link
No Tucker, if you just want to blame the whole thing on China you are missing the
punchline: Fauci
tion PREMIUM 8 hours ago (Edited) remove link
It's all an assortment of narratives and partial truths. Tucker points the finger at
China without mentioning how Fauci was funding Gain of Function work at the Wuhan lab. Here
is just one example of people from that lab using an HIV splice to increase
transmissibility of a pathogen to humans.
In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human
immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2
molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat. In addition to full-length S of SL-CoV and
SARS-CoV, a series of S chimeras was constructed by inserting different sequences of the
SARS-CoV S into the SL-CoV S backbone. Several important observations were made from this
study. First, the SL-CoV S was unable to use any of the three ACE2 molecules as its
receptor. Second, the SARS-CoV S failed to enter cells expressing the bat ACE2. Third,
the chimeric S covering the previously defined receptor-binding domain gained its ability
to enter cells via human ACE2, albeit with different efficiencies for different
constructs. Fourth, a minimal insert region (amino acids 310 to 518) was found to be
sufficient to convert the SL-CoV S from non-ACE2 binding to human ACE2 binding ,
indicating that the SL-CoV S is largely compatible with SARS-CoV S protein both in
structure and in function.
Journal of Virology, February 2008
And by the way let's not pretend that dear Donald aka President Kushner's FIL didn't
also know about Fauci's questionable involvement with unethical gain of function research
at this lab before appointing him and the PEPFAR mafia to head the Covid taskforce, putting
the foxes in charge of guarding the hen house so to speak.
TheAlmightyCorndawg 8 hours ago
Which is precisely why Tucker is Operation Mockingbird.
Billy the Poet 7 hours ago (Edited)
Then show me solid evidence that what you say is true. You do have film of Tucker
working with the CIA, right?
2+2 ≠ 5 8 hours ago remove link
Huh?
Tucker has NEVER "supported the election hoax".
In fact, Tucker is one of the very few on MSM to continually call for proper voting
audits of the 2020 election, and he repeatedly highlights the obvious fraud that took
place.
ay_arrow
GoodyGumdrops 8 hours ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Election fraud has been happening in the US
for decades.
The only thing new this time around is they decided to mock the American people openly,
so that they can never claim ignorance again about the corruption.
The plandemic is the real worldwide atrocity being played out right now before our
eyes.
asteroids 8 hours ago
The heads of the NIH and the CDC have been caught lying. Therefore both agencies have NO
credibility and have lost the trust of the people. ...
Flying Monkees 8 hours ago
Imagine being a total POS like Fauci who would destroy the freedom and liberties of his
fellow Americans just so he can line his own pockets...
Robert would have become president, and then reopen the investigation into his brother's
murder.
A generation later, JFK's son, John F. Kennedy, Jr, who was also undoubtedly heading
toward the presidency or at least high politics, died when his small plane suddenly
nose-dived into the ocean. The chain of potential justice has been successively cut off.
The Mossad fingerprints are all over Robert's death and also Oswald's. And the Israeli
connection is conspicuously absent from the decades of conspiracy investigations that seem to
have been deliberately led to the CIA - Michael Collins Piper being the notable exception who
linked to Israel.
Dimona was the principal reason, says Guyénot, and shows that Lyndon Johnson put
paid to all opposition to Dimona coming from the US.
~~
I am not a student of this affair, but I've never seen much made of the fact that JFK was
already embarked upon issuing US currency directly - the USA Note rather than the Federal
Reserve Note that we call dollars today. This was canceled under Johnson, of course.
Presidents don't get to issue greenbacks. We had already seen how that worked out for
Lincoln.
Not a student of this, as I say. But I tend to see the world's power pyramid with
debt-issuers at the top, and all the other factions on lower steps. So, Dimona, yes, the main
incentive for Israel, and all the lesser motivations that caused rejoicing in many other
groups - but the money control at the top, in my view, is the force that gives the nod to
these various factions and approves the hit.
No one has asked but the most fascinating suspect in Dealey Plaza that fateful day was
Lamar Hunt.
Yes, that Lamar Hunt. The Lamar Hunt Trophy is in honor of that very guy.
He was the son of H.L. Hunt the billionaire oilman who had his main offices in Dealey
Plaza. Lamar Hunt was in his thirties at the time (31) and flew to Mexico minutes after the
shooting (this is a matter of record).
Lamar was escorting two men around Dealey Plaza that day. One was arrested coming out of a
building, arrested because he was reported/fingered as suspicious, someone that didn't belong
there.
The guy said he was looking for a phone booth to call his mother. This was James Braden a
known mafia hit man (who, by the way, was in the vicinity of the hotel where RFK was
assassinated). Braden was detained and then released. The other person, that had arrived with
Braden, checked out of his hotel minutes after the assassination and was gone.
Skiming through the JFK chapter of Guyenot's book, 'From Yahweh to Zion' it is obviously a
number of compelling 'reasons' JFK and his brother were despised by the Zionists.
First was their father Joe Kennedy. Out with the Swiss Army Knife of words, again.
Dimona also figured large. This was also covered by Seymour Hirsh in, 'The Sampson
Option., Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.' Note, Hersh writes in the
introduction, he refused to travel to the Bandit State because of the wall to wall censorship
imposed on ALL journalists.
Importantly, JFK visited a Palestinian refugee camp in 1956 and 'expressed sympathy' for
the Palestinians. The Zionists worst fears were his proposals to have them registered a
Foreign Agents.
KFK also advocated UN resolution 194, The Right of Return.
Posted by: Paul | May 24 2021 6:01 utc | 118 - and others on the JFK thing
I think it was the detente he intended to enter into with the USSR in addition to a few
other things.
For one, he wasn't murdered in Dallas, TX for no reason. That was the city where big oil
co-joined with the newly powerful "intelligence" community of the Dulles and Bush families.
The depletion allowance was a big deal and JFK was one of, if not the, first to suggest he
might end it.
Then there was the Cuba situation.
Finally there was the infamous quote about rendering the CIA into a thousand shards and it
blowing into the wind or something of that nature.
He managed to piss off and threaten all the main powers that be, including those with very
high level mafia connections.
If anyone gets the chance to visit it, the museum in Dallas in the former book repository
on the fifth (?) floor of that building is quite worth a visit. I thought I'd be bored as
hell when my wife and her younger sister dragged me and the family there one Saturday
afternoon, but it ended up being fascinating. That said, if I were a left-leaning or
anti-corporate/oil president to this day I'd stay TF away from Dallas or Houston, TX save for
an airfield-only visit. Well, until Iran can create the capability to murder our
politicians/diplomats from the air with no repercussions (still, anyone heard from Ayatollah
Mike in the last 6 months? Asking for a friend).
Starter's reading list (a must list IMO for every American) for you in order to understand
the Kennedy assassination (no, Israel had nothing to do with it):
James W. Douglass - JFK and the Unspeakable
David Talbot - Devil's Chessboard
James DiEugenio - Destiny Betrayed/ The JFK Assassination
Mark Lane - Rush to Judgement
Peter Dale Scott - Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
For more literature go to Our
Hidden History which is a treasure trove of all things US Deep State politics from Heroin
Trade in the Golden Triangle to Vietnam to JFK, to Watergate, Iran-Contra etc...
Auditors for a 2020 election investigation being carried out in Windham, New Hampshire, are
saying that some of their latest findings are "large enough to account for discrepancies" in
the election results.
Auditors said they found "experimental confirmation that if the contest is undervoted, a
fold through a vote target can create a vote."
"Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in
some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes," Mark Lindeman,
part of the audit team,
told WMUR .
Harri Hursti, another auditor, said on Twitter that testing proved folded ballots were
misinterpreted by machines.
"Test decks proved that foldings across a vote targets is misinterpreted as additional
phantom votes or subtracts votes due to false overvotes," he wrote in a post.
Auditors finished the hand recount on May 21. The audit began
on May 11.
AccuVote didn't respond to a request for comment about the audit authorization by the Epoch
Times. The AccuVote machines' intellectual property are owned by Dominion Voting Systems.
Windham's four state representative seats were all won by Republicans on Election Night. The
presidential election was not an item for this audit.
Democrat candidate Kristi St. Laurent, who lost by a narrow margin of 24 votes, requested an
audit ( pdf ) claiming
that the machines were improperly programmed, and that double voting was involved.
As a result, New Hampshire's Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, signed a bill last month that gave authorization
for forensic analysis and a comprehensive recount of the 2020 election votes in Windham related
to optical scanning AccuVote machines.
An automatic recount was done, resulting in St. Laurent losing 99 more votes after a hand
recount. Meanwhile, four Republicans gained about 300 votes each.
The other three Democrats gained between 18 and 28 votes.
The audit team said that more issues could be involved besides folded ballots being
misinterpreted.
"The fold effect is large enough to account for discrepancies, but might not be all that's
going on," the team said on Twitter on May 22.
"75 folded ballots voted straight Republican. Only 48 votes recorded for them. Folds
generated overvotes. This is machine used on Election Day [for] most absentee ballots."
Another machine was found to have "an even more dramatic problem" by the auditors, who said
that only 28 percent of the votes for Republican candidates were counted.
"The work is not completed yet. While the folding seems to be a strong contributor it
clearly is not the only factor," Hursti said on Sunday.
"For example: We have observed vastly different error rates on two machines processing the
same ballots. Work continues."
One of the things that makes Wi-Fi work is its ability to break big chunks of
data into smaller chunks and combine smaller chunks into bigger chunks, depending on the needs of the network at any given
moment. These mundane network plumbing features, it turns out, have been harboring vulnerabilities that can be exploited to send
users to malicious websites or exploit or tamper with network-connected devices, newly published research shows.
In all, researcher Mathy Vanhoef found a dozen vulnerabilities, either in the
Wi-Fi specification or in the way the specification has been implemented in huge numbers of devices. Vanhoef has dubbed the
vulnerabilities
FragAttacks
,
short for fragmentation and aggregation attacks, because they all involve frame fragmentation or frame aggregation. Broadly
speaking, they allow people within radio range to inject frames of their choice into networks protected by WPA-based encryption.
Bad news
FURTHER READING
Serious flaw in WPA2 protocol lets attackers intercept passwords and much more
Assessing the impact of the vulnerabilities isn't straightforward. FragAttacks allow data to be injected into Wi-Fi traffic, but
they don't make it possible to exfiltrate anything out. That means FragAttacks can't be used to read passwords or other sensitive
information the way a previous Wi-Fi attack of Vanhoef, called
Krack
,
did. But it turns out that the vulnerabilities -- some that have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997 -- can be exploited to
inflict other kinds of damage, particularly if paired with other types of hacks.
"It's never good to have someone able to drop packets into your network or target your devices on the network," Mike Kershaw, a
Wi-Fi security expert and developer of the open source Kismet wireless sniffer and IDS, wrote in an email. "In some regards,
these are no worse than using an unencrypted access point at a coffee shop -- someone can do the same to you there, trivially -- but
because they can happen on networks you'd otherwise think are secure and might have configured as a trusted network, it's
certainly bad news."
He added: "Overall, I think they give someone who was already targeting an
attack against an individual or company a foothold they wouldn't have had before, which is definitely impactful, but probably
don't pose as huge a risk as drive-by attacks to the average person."
While the flaws were disclosed last week in an industry-wide effort nine months
in the making, it remains unclear in many cases which devices were vulnerable to which vulnerabilities and which vulnerabilities,
if any, have received security updates. It's almost a certainty that many Wi-Fi-enabled devices will never be fixed.
Rogue DNS injection
One of the most severe vulnerabilities in the FragAttacks suite resides in the
Wi-Fi specification itself. Tracked as CVE-2020-24588, the flaw can be exploited in a way that forces Wi-Fi devices to use a
rogue DNS server, which in turn can deliver users to malicious websites rather than the ones they intended. From there, hackers
can read and modify any unencrypted traffic. Rogue DNS servers also allow hackers to perform
DNS
rebinding attacks
, in which malicious websites manipulate a browser to attack other devices connected to the same network.
The rogue DNS server is introduced when an attacker injects an
ICMPv6
Router Advertisement
into Wi-Fi traffic. Routers typically issue these announcements so other devices on the network can
locate them. The injected advertisement instructs all devices to use a DNS specified by the attacker for lookups of both IPv6 and
IPv4 addresses.
In an email, Vanhoef explained, saying, "The IPv6 router advertisement is put
in the payload (i.e. data portion) of the TCP packet. This data is by default passed on to the application that created the TCP
connection. In the demo, that would be the browser, which is expecting an image. This means that by default, the client won't
process the IPv6 router advertisement but instead process the TCP payload as application data."
Vanhoef said that it's possible to perform the attack without user interaction
when the target's access point is vulnerable to
CVE-2021-26139
,
one of the 12 vulnerabilities that make up the FragAttacks package. The security flaw stems from a kernel flaw in NetBSD 7.1 that
causes Wi-Fi access points to forward
Extensible
Authentication Protocol (AP) over LAN
frames to other devices even when the sender has not yet authenticated to the AP.
It's safe to skip ahead, but for those curious about the specific software bug
and the reason the video demo uses a malicious image, Vanhoef explained:
To make the victim process the TCP payload (i.e. data portion) as a separate
packet, the aggregation design flaw in Wi-Fi is abused. That is, the attacker intercepts the malicious TCP packet at the Wi-Fi
layer and sets the "is aggregated" flag in the Wi-Fi header. As a result, the receiver will split the Wi-Fi frame into two
network packets. The first network packet contains part of the original TCP header and is discarded. The second packet
corresponds with the TCP payload, which we made sure will now correspond to the ICMPv6 packet, and as a result, the ICMPv6
router advertisement is now processed by the victim as a separate packet. So proximity to the victim is required to set the
"is aggregated" Wi-Fi flag so that the malicious TCP packet will be split into two by the receiver.
The design flaw is that an adversary can change/set the "is aggregated" flag
without the receiver noticing this. This flag should have been authenticated so that a receiver can detect if it has been
modified.
It's possible to perform the attack without user interaction when the
access point is vulnerable to CVE-2020-26139. Out of four tested home routers, two of them had this vulnerability. It seems
that most Linux-based routers are affected by this vulnerability. The research paper discusses in more detail how this
works -- essentially, instead of including the ICMPV6 router advertisement in a malicious TCP packet, it can then be included in
an unencrypted handshake message (which the AP will then forward to the client after which the adversary can again set the "is
aggregated" flag etc).
Punching a hole in
the firewall
Four of the 12 vulnerabilities that make up the FragAttacks are implementation
flaws, meaning they stem from bugs that software developers introduced when writing code based on the Wi-Fi specification. An
attacker can exploit them against access points to bypass a key security benefit they provide.
Besides allowing multiple devices to share a single Internet connection,
routers prevent incoming traffic from reaching connected devices unless the devices have requested it. This firewall works by
using network address translation, or NAT, which maps private IP addresses that the AP assigns each device on the local network
to a single IP address that the AP uses to send data over the Internet.
The result is that routers forward data to connected devices only when they
have previously requested it from a website, email server, or other machine on the Internet. When one of those machines tries to
send unsolicited data to a device behind the router, the router automatically discards it. This arrangement
isn't
perfect
, but it does provide a vital defense that protects billions of devices.
Vanhoef figured out how to exploit the four vulnerabilities in a way that
allows an attacker to, as he put it, "punch a hole through a router's firewall." With the ability to connect directly to devices
behind a firewall, an Internet attacker can then send them malicious code or commands.
In one demo in the video, Vanhoef exploits the vulnerabilities to control an
Internet-of-things device, specifically to remotely turn on and off a smart power socket. Normally, NAT would prevent a device
outside the network from interacting with the socket unless the socket had first initiated a connection. The implementation
exploits remove this barrier.
FURTHER READING
Microsoft practically begs Windows users to fix wormable BlueKeep flaw
In a separate demo, Vanhoef shows how the vulnerabilities allow a device on the Internet to initiate a connection with a computer
running Windows 7, an operating system that stopped receiving security updates years ago. The researcher used that ability to
gain complete control over the PC by sending it malicious code that exploited a
critical
vulnerability called BlueKeep
.
"That means that when an access point is
vulnerable, it becomes easy to attack clients!" Vanhoef wrote. "So we're abusing the Wi-Fi implementation flaws in an
access
point
as a first step in order to subsequently attack (outdated)
clients
."
Getting your fix
Despite Vanhoef spending nine months coordinating patches with more than a
dozen hardware and software makers, it's not easy to figure out which devices or software are vulnerable to which
vulnerabilities, and of those vulnerable products, which ones have received fixes.
This page
provides the status for products from several companies. A more comprehensive list of known advisories is
here
.
Other advisories are available individually from their respective vendors. The vulnerabilities to look for are:
Design flaws:
CVE-2020-24588
: aggregation attack (accepting non-SPP A-MSDU frames)
CVE-2020-24587
: mixed key attack (reassembling fragments encrypted under different keys)
CVE-2020-24586
: fragment cache attack (not clearing fragments from memory when (re)connecting to a network)
Implementation
vulnerabilities allowing the injection of plaintext frames:
CVE-2020-26145
: Accepting plaintext broadcast fragments as full frames (in an encrypted network)
CVE-2020-26144
: Accepting plaintext A-MSDU frames that start with an RFC1042 header with EtherType EAPOL (in an encrypted
network)
CVE-2020-26140
: Accepting plaintext data frames in a protected network
CVE-2020-26143
: Accepting fragmented plaintext data frames in a protected network
Other implementation
flaws:
CVE-2020-26139
: Forwarding EAPOL frames even though the sender is not yet authenticated (should only affect APs)
CVE-2020-26146
: Reassembling encrypted fragments with non-consecutive packet numbers
CVE-2020-26147
: Reassembling mixed encrypted/plaintext fragments
CVE-2020-26142
: Processing fragmented frames as full frames
CVE-2020-26141
: Not verifying the TKIP MIC of fragmented frames
The most effective way to mitigate the threat posed by FragAttacks is to
install all available updates that fix the vulnerabilities. Users will have to do this on each vulnerable computer, router, or
other Internet-of-things device. It's likely that a huge number of affected devices will never receive a patch.
The next-best mitigation is to ensure that websites are always using HTTPS
connections. That's because the encryption HTTPS provides greatly reduces the damage that can be done when a malicious DNS server
directs a victim to a fake website.
Sites that use HTTP Strict Transport Security will always use this protection,
but Vanhoef said that only about 20 percent of the web does this. Browser extensions like
HTTPS
everywhere
were already a good idea, and the mitigation they provide against FragAttacks makes them even more worthwhile.
As noted earlier, FragAttacks aren't likely to be exploited against the vast
majority of Wi-Fi users, since the exploits require a high degree of skill as well as proximity -- meaning within 100 feet to a
half-mile, depending on the equipment used -- to the target. The vulnerabilities pose a higher threat to networks used by high-value
targets such as retail chains, embassies, or corporate networks where security is key, and then most likely only in concert with
other exploits.
When updates become available, by all means install them, but unless you're in
this latter group, remember that drive-by downloads and other more mundane types of attacks will probably pose a bigger threat.
Promoted Comments
When I'm networking I always assume the network I'm connected to is completely compromised, so all my devices use these things
and are properly firewalled in which case these attacks are pretty much worthless.
While only new versions of Android support DoT out of the box on the system level, Google has recently added the support for
DoH to Chrome, so in case your device is running an older version of Android you might want to enable DoH in Chrome to feel
safe.
And as for Firefox it's had the support for DoH for years. I've gone as far as to set network.trr.mode to 2 in about:config to
be extra safe. 3 is even better:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver
178 posts | register
Pretty soon we are going to hear a variation of the Casablanca "gambling at Rick's"
line.
I'm shocked, shocked that there's gain-of-function research being done at the Wuhan lab.
Pretty soon we are going to hear a variation of the Casablanca "gambling at Rick's"
line.
I'm shocked, shocked that there's gain-of-function research being done at the Wuhan
lab.
Pretty soon we are going to hear a variation of the Casablanca "gambling at
Rick's" line.
I'm shocked, shocked that there's gain-of-function research being done at the Wuhan
lab.
France is was denying any discomfort with Zionism for 52 years. but since yesterday
effect of
Plate tectonics are perceptible.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of
"long-lasting apartheid" in Israel. The veteran politician [and high rank French official
for 40 years with solid connection to French weapons trade] made the remarks in an interview
with LCI TV NewsChannel, RTL radio and Le Figaro newspaper [ three major MSM]
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of "long-lasting
apartheid" in Israel in the event the Palestinians fail to obtain their own state. Le Drian is one of the first senior French officials to use the term "apartheid" in
reference to Israel , which has angrily denied any policy of racial discrimination.
The veteran politician made the remarks in an interview with RTL radio and Le Figaro
newspaper in reference to the clashes between Jews and Arabs that erupted in several
Israeli cities during the latest conflict.
The violence, which revealed simmering anger among Israeli Arabs over the crackdown on
Palestinians in Jerusalem, shattered years of peaceful coexistence within Israel. "It's the first time and it clearly shows that if in the future we had a solution other
than the two-state solution, we would have the ingredients of long-lasting apartheid,"
Le Drian said, using the word for the white supremacist oppression of blacks in South
Africa from 1948 to 1991.
Le Drian said the "risk of apartheid is high" if Israel continued to act "according to a
single-state logic" but also if it maintained the status quo.
"Even the status quo produces that," he said.
He added that the 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel had shown the need to revive the
moribund Middle East peace process. https://guardian.ng/news/france-sees-risk-of-apartheid-in-israel-paris-france/
"We have take one step at a time," he said, expressing satisfaction that US President Joe
Biden had reiterated support for creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Israel's latest offensive against Hamas killed 248 people in the Gaza Strip, including 66
children, and wounded over 1,900, the Hamas-run health ministry said.
Meanwhile, rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups into Israel killed 12 and wounded
around 357 others, Israeli police said.
@120 m - "Iron Dome system according to Israeli sources..."
The point is not the numbers taken from the sales brochure of the system. The point is,
what does the penetration of the fantasy shield do to the Israeli psyche?
Israel initiated the ceasefire, without conditions. After 11 days, it could take no
more.
Israel has failed to protect itself from the indigenous population that it was oppressing.
Palestine has won a victory that changes the game and changes the world.
The entire regional Resistance now knows that Palestine alone can hold the enemy in check.
And all the Palestinians everywhere are completely united with only the Resistance as their
leader.
Over at the Saker just now, a speech from Hezbollah acknowledges proudly that Palestine
itself is now the leading edge of the struggle to remove Israel from the Middle East, and
that Hezbollah yearns for the day when it joins side by side with the Palestinians to drive
the oppressor from the land.
Palestine as it says could keep up this barrage against Israel for six months - just
Palestine alone. And the damage from such a thing would not be measured in how few or how
many individual persons were killed by those rockets. The damage would be measured by the
scream of madness and defeat from the Zionist oppressor, thrown down by the indigenous
populace and cast out of the land in abject fear.
As barflies can see, There may be an undefined 'ceasefire' but the 100 year old ethnic
cleansing project in the rest of Palestine continues:
Israel's Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Land
(Compiled by Leslie Bravery, Palestine Human Rights Campaign, Auckland, New Zealand)
18 May 2021 {Main source of statistics: Palestinian Monitoring Group (PMG): http://www.nad.ps/ NB:The period covered by this
newsletter is taken from the PMG's 24-hour sitrep ending 8am the day after the above
date.}
We shall always do our best to verify the accuracy of all items in these IOP
newsletters/reports wherever possible [e.g. we often suspect that names of people and places
that we see in the PMG sitreps could be typos; also frequently the translation into English
seems rather odd ~ but as we do not speak Arabic, we have no alternative but to copy and
paste these names from the PMG sitreps!] – please forgive us for any errors or
omissions – Leslie and Marian.
206 projectiles
launched from Gaza
82 air strikes (157)
Very many
Israeli attacks
158 Israeli
ceasefire violations
21 raids including
home invasions
11 killed – 261 injured
Economic sabotage
43 taken prisoner
Night peace disruption
and/or home invasions
in 6 towns and villages
Home invasions: 09:20, Nazlet al-Sheikh Zaid - 09:20, al-Arqa - 04:00, Anabta - 03:30, Madama
- 03:30, Tel.
Peace disruption raids: 14:40, Beitunya - 16:05, Um Safa village - 03:20, Bir Zeit - dawn,
Bil'in - 17:40, Tura village - 18:55, Ya'bad - 19:45, Zububa - 06:30, Tubas - 18:05, Quffin -
04:00, Tulkarem - 20:00, Aqraba - 13:45, al-Azza UN refugee camp - 13:45, Aida UN refugee
camp - 18:10, al-Khadr - 18:10, Janata - 20:15, Tuqu - 03:00, al-Ubeidiya - dawn, Husan -
dawn, al-Ubeidiya.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until
07:00 the following day 206 projectiles were launched towards the Green Line from Northern
Gaza, Gaza City, Central Gaza and Khan Yunis.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until
07:00 the following day, 206 projectiles were launched towards the Green Line from Northern
Gaza, Gaza City, Central Gaza and Khan Yunis.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Northern Gaza – 53
projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza – 81 projectiles
launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Central Gaza – 17 projectiles
launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Khan Yunis – 38 projectiles
launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Khan Yunis – 17 projectiles
launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Gaza enclave – from 07:00 until 07:00 the
following day, Israeli warplanes carried out 82 air strikes, launching 157 missiles onto
Gaza. There were 7 killed, 50 injured, 35 homes destroyed and much damage caused.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Northern Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 21
air strikes – 35 missiles: 16 injured and 10 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 17 air
strikes – 27 missiles: 6 killed (including a child), 15 injured (including women and
children) and 7 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Central Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 14
air strikes – 20 missiles: 11injured and 6 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Khan Yunis – Israeli warplanes launched 13
air strikes – 46 missiles: 1 killed, 14 injured and 10 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Rafah – Israeli warplanes launched 17 air
strikes – 29 missiles. 3 injured and 2 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – Israeli attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until 07:00 the
following day, the Israeli Army and Navy pounded Central Gaza, Khan Yunis and Rafah.
Israeli Army attacks – 18 wounded: Jerusalem – Israeli Occupation forces opened
fire, with live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters on
protesters in Shuafat, al-Zaim, al-Jib, Beit Ijza, Qalandiya, near the villages of Qatanna
and al-Issawiya, as well as in Abu Dis, al-Eizariya and at the entrances to Hizma,
al-Sawahrah al-Sharqiya, Anata, the al-Ram road junction, Bab al-Amoud area and al-Wad Street
in Jerusalem Old City. 18 protesters were wounded.
Israeli Army attack: Jerusalem – 18:00, Israeli Occupation forces opened fire on
Palestinian motor vehicles in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood.
Israeli Army attacks – 3 killed – 72 wounded: Ramallah – Israeli forces in
or near al-Bireh, Sinjil, Aboud, Ni'lin, al-Mughayer, Deir Jarir, Kafr Malik, Nabi Salih, Ein
Qiniya, Ras Karkar, Kharbatha Bani Harith, Beit Sira, al-Jalazoun refugee camp, fired live
ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters,
killing 3 people, Muhammad Mahmoud Hamid (24), Adham Fayez Al-Kashef (20) and Islam Wael
Fahmy Barnat, and wounding 72. There were many tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 4 wounded: Jenin – Israeli troops, manning the Jalamah and
Dotan checkpoints and at the southern entrance to Silat al-Dahr, fired live ammunition,
rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 4
people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 7 wounded: Tulkarem – Israeli forces, manning the Einav
checkpoint and troops in Tulkarem, Quffin, Zit and at the entrance to Beit Lid, fired live
ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters,
wounding 7 and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 8 wounded: Qalqiliya – Israeli Occupation forces, at the
entrances to Azun, Hajjah, and Kafr Qaddum as well as near Jayus, Hablat and at the Eyal
crossing, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters
towards protesters, wounding 8 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 33 wounded: Nablus – Israeli Army positions, near the
Huwara checkpoint, the intersection of Osirin and Sarra villages and near the entrances to
Qusra, Beta, Jama'in, Naqoura, Deir Sharaf, Burin, Madama, Asirah al-Qibliya, Yutma,
al-Labban al-Sharqiya, Odla, al-Sawiyah and the village of Tal, fired live ammunition,
rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 33
people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks: Salfit – Israeli troops, near the entrances to Deir Istiya,
Qarawat Bani Hassan, al-Zawiya and the northern entrance to Salfit, fired live ammunition,
rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters. There were
several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 18 wounded: Bethlehem – Israeli forces, present at Bilal
Bin Rabah Mosque, the Aida refugee camp, northern entrance to Tuqu', western entrance to Beit
Fajar, Um Rakba area of al-Khadr and entrance to Husan, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated
bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 18 people and
causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 1 killed: Hebron – morning, Israeli Occupation forces,
positioned in the Old City, opened fire on and killed a resident: Islam Fayyad Zahida
(32).
Israeli Army attacks – 30 wounded: Hebron – the Israeli Army, positioned in the
Bab al-Zawiya area of Hebron and in the Old City, as well as near the entrances to Beit
Ummar, Bani Naim, Tarqumiya, Khurasa village, the al-Aroub refugee camp and on Halhul Bridge,
fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards
protesters, wounding 30 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Economic sabotage: Gaza -- the Israeli Navy continues to enforce an arbitrary fishing
limit.
Home invasion: Jenin – 09:20, Israeli Occupation forces raided the villages of Nazlet
al-Sheikh Zaid and al-Arqa, and invaded a house.
Home invasion – boy (aged 15) abducted : Tulkarem – 04:00, Israeli troops raided
Anabta and abducted 15-year-old Muhammad Salam Wajih Rasheed.
Home invasions: Nablus – 03:30, Israeli forces raided Madama and Tel villages and
invaded a number of homes.
Israeli police and settlers' mosque violation: 23:00, Israeli Occupation police invaded the
courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, filming the Mosque and its facilities.
Israeli Army – 7 wounded – rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas
canisters: Tubas – Israeli Occupation forces, manning the Tayasir checkpoint and in the
village of Atouf, fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards
protesters, wounding 7 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army – 5 wounded – rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas
canisters: Jericho – Israeli forces, at the northern and southern entrances to Jericho,
as well as outside the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp, fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades
and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 5 people and causing several tear gas
casualties.
Occupation settler violence: Jerusalem – 18:00, Israeli settlers stoned a family home,
on the outskirts of the village of Beit Ijza.
Occupation road casualties: Bethlehem – 16:40, an Israeli settler drove his motor
vehicle over and hospitalised a 19-year-old Abdullah Saqr Saad, near Khalet Iskarya.
Raid: Ramallah – 14:40, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled Beitunya.
Raid: Ramallah – 16:05, Israeli forces raided and patrolled Um Safa village.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Ramallah – 03:20, Israeli troops raided Bir Zeit, taking
prisoner one person.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Ramallah – dawn, the Israeli Army raided Bil'in village,
taking prisoner one person.
Raid: Jenin – 17:40, Israeli troops raided and patrolled Tura village.
Raid: Jenin – 18:55, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Ya'bad.
Raid: Jenin – 19:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled Zububa village.
Raid: Tubas – 06:30, Israeli forces raided and patrolled Tubas.
Raid: Tulkarem – 18:05, the Israeli Army raided and patrolled Quffin.
Raid: Tulkarem – 04:0 Israeli troops raided Tulkarem.
Raid: Nablus – 20:00, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Aqraba.
Raid – UN refugee camps: Bethlehem – 13:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and
patrolled the al-Azza and Aida UN refugee camps in Bethlehem.
Raid: Bethlehem – 18:10, Israeli forces raided and patrolled al-Khadr and Janata.
Raid – 2 abductions: Bethlehem – 20:15, Israeli troops raided Tuqu and abducted
two 16-year-old youths: Muhammad Khaled Nasrallah and Sind Talal Al-Amor.
Raid: Bethlehem – 03:00, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled al-Ubeidiya.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Bethlehem – dawn, the Israeli Army raided Husan village,
taking prisoner two people.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Bethlehem – dawn, Israeli Occupation forces raided
al-Ubeidiya, taking prisoner twopeople.
Restrictions of movement (14): 11:30, entrance to Turmusaya- 11:20, tightened procedures at
Huwara - 12:00, tightened procedures at Kifl Haris - 12:50, entrance to al-Zawiya -
11:25-12:30, al-Nashash road junction - 14:10, entrance to al-Walaja village - midnight,
entrance to Marah Mualla - 09:15, entrance to the Fahs area, south of Hebron - 18:45,
entrance to Sa'ir - Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing closed - al-Mantar-Karni crossing closed -
al-Shujaiyeh crossing (Nahal Oz) closed - Sufa crossing closed - al-Awda Port closed.
[NB: Times indicated in Bold Type contribute to the sleep deprivation suffered by Palestinian
children]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If any of our subscribers should like to reproduce complete, in full and unedited, these In
Occupied Palestine daily newsletters that would be very welcome!
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please let us know and if you have friends or
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...
@ Paul, "100 year old ethnic cleansing project in the rest of Palestine continues",
but Tectonic plates still moving, collapse of an edifice of complacency
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He previously edited The
Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
"It doesn't matter that Hamas is a repressive, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamist terrorist
organization that fires thousands of rockets indiscriminately at innocent civilians all
over the State of Israel...
[...]
It doesn't matter...
[...]
Again, it doesn't matter, because we are no longer avowedly seeking, even in principle, a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- the currently and foreseeably
insoluble Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And since we no longer avowedly aspire to be part
of the solution, we are increasingly perceived as part of the problem, as
rejectionists.
[...]
Israel still has plenty of friends, and plenty of support, including crucially in the US.
Three EU foreign ministers chose to make a solidarity visit to bombed Israeli homes at the
height of the conflict. But the ground is shifting dangerously.
Many of us, this writer emphatically included, regard a two-state solution as essential
if we are not to lose either our Jewish majority, or our democracy, or both, forever
entangled among millions of hostile Palestinians. Many of us, this writer emphatically
included, cannot currently see a safe route to such an accommodation.
For the last time, it doesn't matter. So long as Israel does not place itself firmly and
distinctly on the side of those seeking a viable framework for long-term peace and security
for ourselves and for the Palestinians, we will be regarded as blocking that framework. And
even when facing an enemy so patently cynical, amoral and intransigent as Hamas, militarily
strong Israel will be held responsible for the loss of life on both sides of the
conflict. We may keep on winning the battles, though they will get harder if fighting spreads to
and deepens on other fronts. But we will be gradually losing the war.
With the old rules a motorcycle fatality and a shooting victim were counted as covid
deaths.
With the new rules if a vaxxinated person has had a previous motor vehicle accident 20
years ago, but dies of covid now they will be counted as a car accident death or an unsolved
murder.
"... What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies. ..."
"... And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends. ..."
The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation
for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged
and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.
Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories
based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.
On April 16,
Washington
Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin
Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information."
Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."
Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government
uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend
himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might
be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.
We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such
as
James Comey and
Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.
Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to
an April 29
article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."
At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L.
Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump,
who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her
removed for their own reasons?"
I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear
is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign
Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion.
As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century
before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.
And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who,
Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in
Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice:
one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.
The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much
of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News –
were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that
he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe
Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.
Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one
has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me
a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor
Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly
had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.
A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort
associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI,
Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian
Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover
the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page
Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.
This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat
Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the
claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year
before the [2016] election."
Who needs proof when the government says it's so?
The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges
involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's
lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.
In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out
the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as
'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"
Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading
to the arrest of murder suspects.
The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting
to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a
second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news
outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.
"... What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies. ..."
"... And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends. ..."
The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation
for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged
and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.
Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories
based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.
On April 16,
Washington
Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin
Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information."
Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."
Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government
uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend
himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might
be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.
We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such
as
James Comey and
Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.
Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to
an April 29
article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."
At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L.
Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump,
who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her
removed for their own reasons?"
I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear
is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign
Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion.
As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century
before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.
And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who,
Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in
Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice:
one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.
The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much
of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News –
were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that
he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe
Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.
Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one
has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me
a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor
Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly
had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.
A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort
associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI,
Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian
Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover
the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page
Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.
This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat
Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the
claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year
before the [2016] election."
Who needs proof when the government says it's so?
The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges
involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's
lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.
In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out
the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as
'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"
Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading
to the arrest of murder suspects.
The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting
to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a
second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news
outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.
Vk @30
..why the necessity of populist POTUSes arose in the USA in the first place?
Perhaps it might be useful to examine the case of the first Western populist of the modern
era: Louis Napoleon. It's been a while since I read Marx's 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon' but the short (hopefully not too vulgar) version is that the French ruling class
was too divided (between different flavours of Royalist and Republicans, finance capitalists
and industrialists etc) for any faction to provide a coherent class project to move France
forward and either co-opt or repress the working people of France.
The workers were also divided and not yet ready to articulate a revolutionary project of
their own. With France caught between its imperialist rival Great Britain and an awakening
Germany, and the threat of revolution working to focus their minds, the French Ruling class
came up with a way out of the impass: a populist leader who could stand above the social
divisions and 'Make France Great Again'.
Bonaparte's nephew Louis Napoleon was by most accounts a mere grifter and stuffed-shirt,
but he had name recognition and the ambition to play the part. The gambit was wildly
successful in rolling back the gains the workers had made in 1848 and resulted in the 'second
empire' that reinvigorated French imperialism. Well, wildly successful until Louis went up
against against a rising power (Prussia/Germany) and the second empire folded like a house of
cards.
When Trump was first elected it seemed probable that we were dealing with another
'Bonapartist'. With the ruling class floundering after the 'GFC' of 2008-11 and the crisis of
US imperialism after the rise of China and defeat in Ukraine and Syria, some faction of the
ruling class was seeking to put the pieces back together under a new strongman. But in this
case the attempt was a resounding failure in unifing the ruling class.
The weakness of the US working class may be the key to understanding the failure of
Trumpism. While French workers of 1850 may have struggled to create a unified revolutionary
project of their own, they were organised and poliicised enough to provide the muscle in
removing the Monarchy in 1848 and were a constant threat to French ruling class power. The US
working class of 2016 was none of these things. Without the threat of revolution there was no
incentive for the dominant ruling class factions to devolve some of their power to a
strongman.
The ruling class attack on Trumpism seems to have consolidated the power of the dominant
factions of the ruling class under the Democratic party, while hopelessly dividing the
working class between those who support the strongman and those that tail after the ruling
class attacks on him. So while Trumpism has failed to create a reborn and unified US empire,
it has accomplished the next best thing: disorienting and demoralising the greatest threat to
that empire. Perhaps it will take a diastrous collision with a rising power to change that.
For France's second empire it was Germany and resulted in the Paris Commune. For the US,
China and ?
@ S.P. Korolev | May 18 2021 5:26 utc | 69 with the nice description of Trump's Populist
failing
Thanks for that...nicely done and, yes, the China/Russia axis is the challenge to the US
faced axis....I keep calling it a civilization war because that it the only result I see
meaning we have evolved from barbarism and haven't gone extinct trying...
Commenter vk is the MoA ideologue troll that should go create her own web site and stop
polluting this one, IMO, and that of others on an ongoing basis....see the latest Week in
Review Open Thread about Ivermectin for example.
vk is the main reason I scroll to the bottom of each comment to find the author before
reading
I think Trump is a man for the moment. He is not particularly intelligent. He is not
particulary honest. He is not a natural leader. He loves to play to the gallery.He can be
dominated.He is weak. He is disingenuous.He is rich. I don't think he can ever be called a
self made man. He was chosen to do the job by those more connected and powerful than him.
Remember you always get the leader that you deserve.
..Francisco José Contreras was banned from his account for 12 hours,
according to Fox News , for making the argument and backing it up by stating men have "no
uterus or eggs."
He was making the comments in response to an article about a transgender male who announced
that they had "given birth" to a baby girl and were now a father.
Trump represented a FACTION
of the establishment. Which one? He did their bidding and in the process alienated other
factions. The other factions worked together to get him replaced. There are factions within
neocons, neoliberals and establishment. It is a nuanced and complex structure, not
monolithic. It is misleading to state, "he publicly broke away from the American oligarchy's
class interests".
Trump's biggest MISTAKE was that he didn't build a good sounding board of advisors. He
surrounded himself with his family members and believed his orders will be implemented like a
corporate president. Jared Kushner is a Bilderberg. So Trump was connected to the global
syndicate and part of the swamp.
The unipolar order ended in 2014/15 and the multipolar order is establishing. The U$A or
NATO can't launch a foreign war like they did in Libya. Russia and China have warned the
Financial Empire and defined the redlines. This is the reason behind Trump not launching a
new major foreign war. Will Biden launch a new war? However, Trump did launch hybrid wars in
Venezuela, Bolivia, Belarus,... Trump didn't break from FOREIGN adventures.
During Trump's term:
– How many bombs were dropped?
– How much new DEBT was created?
– How much did the money supply increase by?
– What happened to the trade deficit?
"... "My bureaucracy in no way funded gain of function research at the Wuhan lab on a bat virus that came to be known as Covid19." ..."
"... You've been at the top of the public health heap for at least four decades. So what have YOU done to address this situation? If your answer is "Nothing." you should consider jumping off a tall building because YOU are a racist. ..."
"... When you've got nothing intelligent to say, declare something is racist! ..."
Bold statements like that require the proper attire!
SharkBit 2 hours ago
Oh please! Dr Fraudci virtue signalling. Total embarrasment.
nmewn 2 hours ago
Dr.StrangeElf: "My bureaucracy in no way funded gain of function research at the Wuhan lab
on a bat virus that came to be known as Covid19."
That infected millions of people of color. Oh. And America is raaayzist.
NotaSheep 2 hours ago
Racism? Really? Because of inadequate access to "public health"? Really?
Well gosh, Dr. F. You've been at the top of the public health heap for at least four
decades. So what have YOU done to address this situation? If your answer is "Nothing." you
should consider jumping off a tall building because YOU are a racist. The rest of us, not so
much.
FreeSpeech1A PREMIUM 2 hours ago
When you've got nothing intelligent to say, declare something is racist!
"... Asked about the issue, Biden began, "I believe we should go back to what existed when I came to the Senate 120 years ago" – a statement that supporters defended as a joke. He then noted that there were only 58 filibuster motions in 54 years, through 1971, but five times that many in 2020. He may have forgotten that all of last year's motions came from his party, which was then the Senate minority. ..."
WATCH: Biden adds fodder to dementia speculation as spirited response on filibuster reform degenerates into word salad
Leah Millis 170
President Joe Biden apparently had some crucial things to say about reforming
the Senate filibuster, the legislative speed bump against ruling-party dominance, but his descent into unintelligibility left his
plans a mystery.
Speaking on Thursday at his first formal press conference since taking office – having taken almost twice as long as any president
in 100 years to invite reporters to ask questions – 78-year-old Biden at times struggled to express his thoughts, particularly on
the filibuster. At issue was the longstanding Senate rule that makes it more difficult for the ruling party to force through partisan
legislation, which Democrats have called for eliminating now that they control the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Asked about the issue, Biden began, "I believe we should go back to what existed when I came to the Senate 120 years ago"
– a statement that supporters defended as a joke. He then noted that there were only 58 filibuster motions in 54 years, through 1971,
but five times that many in 2020. He may have forgotten that all of last year's motions came from his party, which was then the Senate
minority.
BIDEN: "I believe we should go back to a position of a filibuster that existed just when I came to the United States Senate
120 years ago." pic.twitter.com/7X7VKDkLcn
"Do you think he knows?" former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker asked on Twitter. "He's either cynical or incompetent."
Biden said he supports reform, such as requiring opposition senators to actually deliver marathon filibuster speeches to block
action on a bill, and spoke of his desire and ability to "get things done" in the Senate. But then the mental wheels appeared
to come off.
"The best way to get something done, if you hold near and dear to you that you uh, um like to be able to uh anyway," Biden
said. "I, we're going to get a lot done. And if we have to, if there's complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster,
then we'll have to go beyond what I'm talking about."
Biden drifted off similarly as other reporters came back to the topic. "Our preoccupation with the filibuster is totally legitimate,
but in the meantime, there's a lot we can do while we're talking about what we can do with the filibuster," he said.
After agreeing with a previous statement by former president Barack Obama that the filibuster is "a relic of the Jim Crow era,"
meaning it's racist, Biden was pressed on why he wouldn't therefore abolish it. After a long pause, Biden said, "Successful electoral
politics is the art of the possible. Let's figure out how we can get this done and move in the direction of significantly changing
the abuse of even the filibuster rule, first. It's been abused from the time it came into being by an extreme way in the last 20
years. Let's deal with the abuse first."
Apparently mystified by Biden's comments, the reporter asked if that meant he was moving closer to eliminating the filibuster.
"I answered your question," he replied.
The performance likely did little to inspire confidence at a time when Biden was perceived by many to be avoiding being put in
a position of having to speak off script. A Rasmussen Reports poll earlier this month found that 50% of Americans aren't confident
that Biden is physically and mentally fit to be president, and 52% were troubled that he hadn't held a press conference. It took
until day 65 of his administration to hold such an event.
It's finally dawning on people that we have been subjected to a UNIPARTY for the past
several decades. They are all in the same club, they only pretend to be for different
policies. Bush (either one) never closed the border or took significant, meaningful steps to
stop illegal immigration, to note just one uniparty position.
That's why most GOP members hate Trump. He's ruining their graft operation. They are ALL
getting rich off of throwing American under the bus with China. They don't want it to stop,
but Trump threw a wrench into the gears of their operation. That is why they are desperate to
keep him out of office. They even conspired on the Jan 6th operation along with the Covid
response measures to torpedo the economy.
There is a lot of house cleaning to be done on the GOP side of the aisle in 2022.
They have a lot of work to do. There is a suspicion among cynics like myself that GOP
bossmen conspired with DNC to rig 2020 for the opposition.
Moribund Mitch was congratulating Catatonic Joe while the election was still contested and
GA runoff polls were still open. Mike Pence folded up like a ten dollar suitcase.
SurfingUSA 7 hours ago remove link
"Suspicion" ????
Those facts are locked down. See the following GOP champions of Domino Ion Voting with
documented roles in getting the equipment and obstructing investigations:
Note Domino Ion election management is to an extent a front for the CCP.
chunga 7 hours ago
The recount thing in AZ is a stunt as far as I'm concerned. Nobody ever bothered to
question suitcase girl. It is inexplicable.
YuriTheClown 7 hours ago
Don't do the China thing. That is the Republican version of Russia! Russia! Russia!
While I am sure China spreads the cheese around we all know it's the Giewash Mob banking
cartel that is firmly in control. The Cartel can shut off Chinese Cheese in a heart beat when
desired. They just like using other people's money.
19331510 3 hours ago
Main street does not want perpetual wars, why do you think Trump was elected for a second
time?
Miniminer1 8 hours ago
CNN and the msm will keep putting her on TV like she's important and telling their few
viewers she might be president and will go after evil trump and thereby keeping the
brainwashing alive . Keep fighting for justice president trump!!!
No_Pretzel_Logic 7 hours ago
CIA News Network is 100% Deep State operated.
I can flip to that channel anytime of day and within 120 seconds I am pointing at the TV
and saying, "Liars!"
It is almost completely Pravda-programming and remains a real threat to this country. Same
with MSDNC.
YuriTheClown 7 hours ago
You watch TV????
aegis551 8 hours ago
Cheneys is a neocons and a globalist. Hopefully the good people of Wyoming can see that
and kick this POS to the curb.
Paul Bunyan 8 hours ago
Darth Cheney is not pleased the GOP has discredited his daughter. I am sure he and the
Bushes will be doing everything they can to keep Trump from running in '24.
SPACE-CADET 8 hours ago
Little Bush killed 10,000 americans and over 1 million Iraq.
He retired to Texas with a cushy pension.
Paul Bunyan 8 hours ago (Edited)
Never mind the pension. The Bushes are American royalty and British royals before it. His
mother Barbara is a Pierce, as in the former POTUS and NYC banking dynasty. Everyone knows
CIA asset George Sr. Then there is patriarch Prescott who was a Senator, a banker with the
Harrimans ( THE bank that funneled Nazi money through Wall Street) and a Scull and bonesman
(as was GHWB and GWB). Then there is Uncle Bert Walker, where both names Herbert and Walker
come from. This man traces both names back to British royalty, where both the Herberts and
Walkers ruled on the British courts for hundreds of years. So for pensions, these families
have power and wealth that can not be imagined.
YuriTheClown 7 hours ago
Nah. As per Eustace Mullins ( a national treasure his recordings )
Bushes served Harrimans
Harrimans served Rothschilds
Bushes are high functionaries
arby63 7 hours ago
They all hated Trump because he wasn't in the club. This scum Cheney is a name I've had to
endure for 40 years.
Thats why they hated Trump. He wasn't one of them.
In an interview with Fox News ' Bret Baier this week, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) denied that she
spread the
discredited CIA "Russian bounty" story. That CIA tale, claiming Russia was paying Taliban
fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was cooked up by the CIA and then published by The
New York Times on June 27 of last year, right as former President Trump announced
his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The Times story, citing anonymous
intelligence officials, was then continually invoked by pro-war Republicans and Democrats --
led by Cheney -- to justify their blocking of that troop withdrawal. The story was discredited
when the U.S. intelligence community admitted last month
that it had only "low to moderate confidence" that any of this even happened.
When Baier asked Cheney about her role in spreading this debunked CIA story, Cheney
blatantly lied to him, claiming "if you go back and look at what I said -- every single thing I
said : I said if those stories are true , we need to know why the President and Vice President
were not briefed on them." After Baier pressed her on the fact that she vested this story with
credibility, Cheney insisted a second time that she never endorsed the claim but merely spoke
conditionally, always using the "if these reports are true" formulation. Watch Cheney deny her
role in spreading that story.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fd6u_p0K9aE
Liz Cheney, as she so often does, blatantly lied. That she merely spoke of the Russian
bounty story in the conditional -- " every single thing I said: I said if those stories are
true" -- is completely and demonstrably false. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) , there are few if
any members of Congress who did more to spread this Russian bounty story as proven truth, all
in order to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In so doing, she borrowed from a pro-war
playbook pioneered by her dad, to whom she owes her career: the former Vice President
would leak CIA claims to The New York Times to justify war, then go on Meet the Press with
Tim Russert, as he did on September
8, 2002 , and cite those New York Times reports as though they were independent
confirmation of his views coming from that paper rather than from him:
MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has [Saddam] obtained that you believe would enhance his
nuclear development program? ..
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or
highly enriched uranium. And what we've seen recently that has raised our level of concern to
the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is
trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able
to enrich uranium to make the bombs.
MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There's a story in The New York Times this
morning this is -- I don't -- and I want to attribute The Times . I don't want to talk about,
obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has
been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring
through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge.
And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched
uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.
So having CIA stories leak to the press that fuel the pro-war case, then having pro-war
politicians cite those to justify their pro-war position, is a Cheney Family speciality.
On July 1, the House Armed Services Committee, of which Rep. Cheney is a member, debated
amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that authorized $740.5 billion
in military spending. One of Cheney's top priorities was to align with the Committee's pro-war
Democrats, funded by weapons manufacturers, to block Trump's plan to withdraw all U.S. troops
from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 and to withdraw roughly 1/3 of the 34,000 U.S. troops in
Germany.
To justify her opposition, Cheney -- contrary to what she repeatedly insisted to Baier --
cited the CIA's Russian bounty story without skepticism . In a joint statement with Rep. Mac
Thornberry (R-TX), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, that Cheney published
on her website on June 27 -- the same day that The New York Times published its first story
about the CIA tale -- Cheney pronounced herself "concerned about Russian activity in
Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces." There was nothing
conditional about the statement: they were preparing to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan
and cited this story as proof that "Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan."
After today's briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about
Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It
has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it
is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country
targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the
security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need.
An even more definitive use of this Russia bounty story came when Cheney held a press
conference to explain her opposition to Trump's plans to withdraw troops. In this statement,
she proclaimed that she "remains concerned about Russian activities in Afghanistan." She then
explicitly threatened Russia over the CIA's "bounty" story, warning them that "any targeting of
U.S. forces by Russians, by anyone else, will face a very swift and deadly response." She then
gloated about the U.S. bombing of Russia-linked troops in Syria in 2018 using what she called
"overwhelming and lethal force," and warned that this would happen again if they target U.S.
forces in Afghanistan:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_NUXZog_Vf0
Does this sound even remotely like what Cheney claimed to Baier? She denied having played a
key role in spreading the Russia bounty story because, as she put it, " every single thing I
said, I said: if those stories are true." She also told him that she never referred to that CIA
claim except by saying: "if these reports are true." That is false.
The issue is not merely that Cheney lied: that would hardly be news. It is that the entire
media narrative about Cheney's removal from her House leadership role is a fraud. Her attacks
on Trump and her party leadership were not confined to criticisms of the role played by the
former president in contesting the validity of the 2020 election outcome or inciting the
January 6 Capitol riot -- because Liz Cheney is such a stalwart defender of the need for truth
and adherence to the rule of law in politics.
Cheney played the key role in
forming an alliance with pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee to
repeatedly defeat the bipartisan anti-war minority [led by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard
(D-HI) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)] to prevent any meaningful changes promised by Trump during
the 2016 campaign to put an end to the U.S. posture of Endless War. As I
reported about the House Armed Services Committee hearing last July, the CIA tale was
repeatedly cited by Cheney and her allies to justify ongoing U.S. troop presence in
Afghanistan.
Cheney is motivated by power, not ethics. In 2016, Trump ran -- and won -- by explicitly
inveighing against the Bush/Cheney foreign policy of endless war, militarism and imperialism
that Liz Cheney, above all else, still vehemently supports. What she is attempting to do is
reclaim the Republican Party and deliver it back to the neocons and warmongers who dominated it
under her father's reign. She is waging an ideological battle, not an ethical one, for control
of the Republican Party.
That will be a debate for Republican voters to resolve. In the meantime, Liz Cheney cannot
be allowed to distance herself from the CIA's fairy tale about Russians in Afghanistan. Along
with pro-war Democrats, she used this conveniently leaked CIA story repeatedly to block troop
withdrawal from Afghanistan. And just as her father taught her to do -- by example if not
expressly -- she is now lying to distance herself from a pro-war CIA script that she, in fact,
explicitly promoted.
For those who have not seen it, I produced a one-hour video report last July on how and why
the House Armed Services Committee succeeded in enacting virtually every pro-war amendment they
considered and how this was accomplished through
an alliance between Liz Cheney and her neocon GOP allies on the one hand, and pro-war,
Raytheon-funded Democrats on the other:
Circular politics, who knew? Happens all the time. 'Leak' a story to a paper that for sure
will publish it, and quote that very same story to push whatever it is you, or more
precisely, your backers, want. Nobody wants war, why is the US spending almost $1T on
defense? Nobody else is spending that kind of money, the MIC is able to force down whatever
it wants on the compliant press, and gullible public
Demologos 7 hours ago
Liz Cheney is carrying daddy's water. This is why there should have been war crimes trials
for the fake wars promoted by the neocons for the benefit of the Wall Street/London/MIC
complex. If Daddy Darth had swung from a rope we wouldn't be dealing with the current
mess.
You can blame the fake news media for the lack of consequences. When they want to, they
can take a thimble full of bad behavior and turn it into an Olympic size pool of condemnation
and character assassination. They were given an Olympic size pool of outright lies and
corruption related to the illegal wars and didn't see anything that offended their sense of
human decency and justice. But a thug dies in the street and the fake news machine turns him
into the national martyr for systemic racism.
vic and blood PREMIUM 7 hours ago remove link
Look at how many RINOs are swamp creatures who establish residency in lower population
states, where campaign cash goes further.
**** Cheney was a swamp creature and fake Wyoming person, just like Liz Cheney.
Pernicious Gold Phallusy 7 hours ago
McCain did that in the 1970s. Abandoned his wheelchair-bound wife and his kids, then
married a rich drug addict in a new State.
pndr4495 7 hours ago
As I have repeated many times here on ZH, a politician is not seriously concerned about
representing the constituents. The politician is busy with reprenting his/her own interests,
especially the financial interest.
vic and blood PREMIUM 7 hours ago remove link
Liz Cheney is a perfect example of how little the neocons differ from the neolibs. They
are the same thing with different cynical marketing strategies.
HAL9000rev1 7 hours ago (Edited)
The roots of neocon philosophy is Trotskyism. Neocons are left/right agnostic, they latch
on to which ever political party in power.
perpetual war/perpetual revolution is thier stratagy
freedommusic 8 hours ago (Edited)
Language was invented so people can lie.
Politics was invented so people can make a career out of lying.
Paul Bunyan 8 hours ago remove link
Language was invented to communicate, but yes, people take advantage.
Pretty Like an Ugly Girl 7 hours ago
I confess that in 2001, and until about 2008, I was part of the crowd that bought the
whole ******* line. Then with Obama I fell for the ******** that it's better to vote for the
lesser of two evils.
Then I started watching the countless documentaries on 911 that show the official 911
report is a bigger concoction of horse**** than the Warren Report. Here's the definitive
documentary, for any searchers out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOnAn_PX6M
The thing about Cheney back in the day is that he seemed like the most credible/reasonable
man in government. I remember after he debated Joe Lieberman how everybody wished they were
both at the tops of their tickets.
Bottom line is we believe what aligns with what we want to believe, and they know it, and
they took down the towers knowing the majority of the US would be willing to go to war with
the entire world if need be.
Folks who think the covid scam or the stolen election was the beginning of the breakdown
haven't been paying attention. The people haven't been in control of their country for a
long, long time, if ever.
Ms No PREMIUM 7 hours ago
There are anti-human mimicks born, psychopaths, that literally have to study human
emotion, learn it and parrot it. That's why when one watches you, especially at first
encounter, it's so intense.
They are analyzing your every facial crease and body language trying to decode the human
and what it all means. When they lie they will sometimes pause to do this to see if it's
fully taking. They often can't tell if what they are saying is too absurd, they wait for you
to show them. They develop this skill over time.
What's even creepier, is that since they don't use empathy capacity and other human
tendencies, that brain capacity becomes devoted to their predatory nature, analyzing,
imitating and being phony. So they are damn near preternatural at it. They know your
weaknesses and needs immediately.
In addition to their dead, intense analyzing stare, they don't recognize that their stare
is too intense and that they often get too close. Like if this fatty had halitosis for
example, she would always just be at least a little too close to you. They don't understand
what it is about people that wants space They don't have that feeling either. When you squirm
and try to get away, they won't notice or care, unless they are doing it on purpose to
intimidate. They can also lie with ease, because they don't have any of those things that
makes people moral. They are simply annoyances to them. It pisses them off that they have to
pretend to care.
wellwaddyaknow 7 hours ago
So in other words, the CIA makes sht up, floats it out there in the direction of dumb
gullible compromised power hungry members of congress, and then wait to see who picks it up
and smells it.
In an Instagram post over the weekend, Cullors praised a National Public Radio report that "highlighted" the history of
racism in the US housing market.
"Thank you @npr for highlighting the history of racism inside of the housing market and why Black homeownership has always
been a way to disrupt white supremacy," she wrote, adding a link to the report, titled 'We Hold These Truths.'
4.0 out of 5 stars
The
roots of National Socialism in cultural criticism
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2019
Verified Purchase
Written originally in 1961 as part of venerable scholar Fritz Stern's doctoral thesis
The Politics of Cultural Despair is a classic study of the cultural criticism and irrational ideologies of three 19th and
early 20th century German writers that helped pave the way for the rise of the Third Reich and the triumph of national
socialism. The book traces the lives and works of the obscure German writers and scholars Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller to
illuminate how ideas conducive to national socialism, including antisemitism, extreme German nationalism (volk movement),
anti-liberalism, anti-intellectualism, the desire for an authoritarian Caesar or "Fuhrer", and the primacy of "the will",
became pervasive in 19th and early 20th century Germany.
All three authors relentlessly attacked liberal democracy, the enlightenment tradition, and the modern industrial society
that had separated the German people from their "spiritual" and "pure" connection with the Germany's ancestral forests and
countryside. They were, as Stern puts it, "Conservatives with nothing left to conserve". They viewed Germany's unification
and the advancement of liberal democracy and modernity as a disastrous development that divided Germany's people and
drained them of their spiritual essence. Their criticism also took on extreme antisemitism that egregiously blamed the
Jewish people and portrayed them as conspiratorial outsiders who promoted capitalism and diluted Germany's ethnic purity.
They also felt that traditional sources of authority, such as religion and the Bismarck nation state, were entirely
inadequate and stale in the age of Nietzsche. Seeing Germany in crisis, and with no traditional political or cultural
forces to turn to, all three authors became their own prophets of change. They expounded vague and irrational theories that
found salvation in nationalists myths and desired a return to a illusory past where the German people lived in unified
harmony and prosperity in their ancestral lands. The authors took on the delusional path from cultural critics to
Nihilistic prophets. Starting from somewhat credible attacks on Germany's political and cultural shortcomings and
transforming them into irrational and delusional political programs with little grasp on reality and dangerous support for
authoritarian policies. Tragically, their works enjoyed a consistent level of support among Germany's population and
influenced many philosophers and political theorists, such as Alfred Rosenberg, that would formulate the National Socialist
ideology. While none of the three were Nazis, all of them clearly proliferated ideas central to the National Socialist
program and advocated for a dangerous and authoritarian cultural regeneration.
Stern's work is classic in the sense that it represents the mid 20th century political and historical scholarly work that
focuses on the impact of political ideologies and political ideas. While this focus on "ideas" is far less emphasized today
in modern political science scholarship, the book reminds us that the rise of National Socialism and Fascism was far more
than a reaction to Germany's disastrous defeat in World War I and the impact of the Versailles Treaty. Instead, the ideas
of national socialism were deeply embedded in German society and represented a dangerous undercurrent acting against the
forces of democratic liberalism, industrialization, and the enlightenment. In advocating a "politics of cultural despair"
all three turned towards delusional, dangerous, and authoritarian solutions that could have only supported a political
program as appalling and devastating as national socialism. As Stern reminds us, "the politics of cultural despair" can
come from any region of the political spectrum where the most unwavering cultural critics can become "nihilistic" prophets
who desire not just cultural change, but cultural and political regeneration based on a mythic and nonexistent past or
promise a millenarian utopia . A statement that applies not only to Germany's lost 19th and 20th century conservatives, but
to idealistic leftist terrorist groups in the 60s and 70s, and Islamic and right wing terrorist groups today. In summary,
Stern reminds us not only that Fascism and National Socialism had deep roots in 19th and 20th century Germany, but also of
the dangers of irrational and delusional political programs that depart from reality.
However, like any good skeptic, one has to wonder how important the cultural and political critiques and ideas of Stern's
three authors really were. Modern political science has mostly moved beyond the focus on political ideas found in Stern's
work and without concrete quantitative data, it is close to impossible to determine the impact of their work. The book also
suffers from a narrow focus that makes it less approachable for the casual reader. Unlike other introductory works on
Fascism and National Socialism, Stern writes for an expert audience that is expected to be well versed in 19th and 20th
century German political, philosophical, and intellectual history. Readers less versed in these subjects may find the book
less enjoyable and insightful. Although this work has probably been superseded by more modern works, it remains a classic
in the field of intellectual and political history and represents classic political and cultural history at its best. I
also recommend George Mosse's 1964 work "The Crisis of the German Ideology" that covers very similar ground, as well as
Zeev Sternhell's "The Birth of Fascist Ideology" on the intellectual origins of Italian Fascism.
>
Paul de Lagarde was a biblical scholar and a master of oriental languages like Aramaic and Persian. He was also a rabid Jew
hater who openly called for extermination. He loathed classical Western liberalism, science, and capitalism. For him, these
were all spiritless abstractions. For Lagarde, Western liberalism, capitalism, science, and the Jews where the monstrous
embodiment of all he hated. He had a romantic notion of a mythical Germanic past, and he believed the Jews and the modern
society of the West were conspiring to pollute and corrupt this pure German spirit. He advocated a Great Leader, a "purge
the Jew" program, and a divinely inspired expansionist foreign policy to rekindle an authentic and noble Germanic way of
life.
Lagarde despised bourgeois 19th century German Christianity, and he called for a "new" German religion that would purge all
the Jewish elements of Christianity and become the unifying spiritual basis and justification for the new German state.
This new religion would fuse the squabbling German factions and sects into a unified people and nation with one single will
.... embodied in the form a "Great Leader."
Lagarde rejected the premise of general education, and instead, he proposed a totally new education system based on social
status and intellectual promise. This new, state-run authoritarian education system would mold the leaders of the new
German nation.
Julius Langbehn wrote a book that extolled the Dutch artist Rembrandt as an authentic "German man". If this sounds
confusing, well ... it is ..., but recall that many years later the Nazis attempted to use Rembrandt as a cultural symbol
to force a Dutch-German alliance after they occupied Holland during the war.
Like Lagarde, Langbehn hated the modern liberal society because of its mechanization, realism, bourgeois lifestyle, and
commercialism. Like Hitler, Langbehn was an "artist"; he was anti-scientific, anti-Western, and anti-rational. He
postulated a "cult of the young" (think Hitler Youth) and a "Hidden Emperor" (think Führer) who would emerge to unite the
German people. Again like Lagarde, Langbehn hated the U.S.A because it was the embodiment of all he despised. He warned
that Jews were destroying the German "Volk" by "worming" their way into German life. For Langbehn, modernity itself was the
ultimate cause of German decay, and the Jews were to blame for bringing this modernity to German society. For Langbehn, the
Jews were "democratically inclined; they have an affinity for the mob," and like Lagarde, Langbehn called for extermination
of the Jews.
I won't go on about Moeller van den Bruck, because it is similar to Lagarde and Langbehn. One important footnote: The
Nazi's got the term "The Third Reich" from one of Moeller's books.
In summary, we find a set of three German intellectual romantics who were alienated by modernism and who abhorred all that
was new. They suffered from "cultural despair." For these three, the "Jews" were the immediate agents of corrupting change,
and it was America that was the colossal embodiment of all they detested. For them, a pure and authentic German way of life
was lost due to the conspiracy and confluence of these horrible forces of modernism. All of the ills and fractiousness and
faithlessness of German society were attributable to Jews and liberal modernism (as exemplified by America).
These three sought to annihilate the bourgeois modern society they found themselves in and they sought to replace it with a
utopian dream. Their utopia was a unified and harmonious German people -- purged of Jews -- who would be orderly,
hierarchical, and authentic. This unified German nation would be led by a strong emperor who would perfectly embody the
unified will of the people. They sought a "New German religion", free of Jewish influence, that would provide a unifying
framework for this new society. They proposed state-controlled education and propaganda, leadership by a small elite,
annexation and conquest of middle Europe, and they called for the extermination of Jews.
In short - these three "culturally despairing" egg heads predicted much of the horror of the Nazis. All three were widely
read in German society at various points in time leading up to the rise of National Socialism.
We know that Hitler emphatically read Lagarde. For more on this, see "Hitler's Forgotten Library" in the May 2003 issue of
The Atlantic Monthly, by Timothy W. Ryback. On p.295, Stern shows how Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck influenced other
key Nazi ideologists like Alfred Rosenberg.
The book contains extensive footnotes and end notes, a large bibliography, and a good index. I have one gripe with the
book. There are several book titles, quotes, and passages that are in German without English translation. I could not work
them out with my meager German. I wish translations were provided. I also wish pictures or portraits of Lagarde, Langbehn,
and van den Bruck were provided.
Finally, I'd like to add that many of the themes we see having emerged from Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck are
similar to what is found the more recent work of the influential Islamic radical Sayyid Qutb. I strongly recommend the Paul
Berman book "Terror and Liberalism" for a very readable and enlightening treatment of Qutb.
There is a viral pneumonia. I doubt bacterial and viral are separated in the numbers.
Giant Meteor 3 hours ago remove link
On a bright note .. not a single person died from the flu! Its a miracle !
aztrader 1 hour ago
They made everything look like a COVID death. What are the real numbers with only COVID
involved and not diabetes, heart conditions, cancer and motorcycle accidents?
Pretty explosive set of interview arguing from artificial origin of COVID-19...
Includes C-span footage of confrontation of Ron Paul and Fauci as well very interesting
interview of Dr. Richard M. Fleming as well as pretty reveling interview of Dr. Peter Daszak - EcoHealth
Alliance who was financed mainly by the Department of Defense and serve as intermediary for
Wuhan labs financing from Fauci.
Dominion said in a statement to news outlets on Thursday that it would comply with the
audit, but Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired by the Arizona Senate to conduct it along with three
other companies, is not accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
" Releasing Dominion's intellectual property to an unaccredited, biased, and plainly
unreliable actor such as Cyber Ninjas would be reckless, causing irreparable damage to the
commercial interests of the company and the election security interests of the country ,"
Dominion said. "No company should be compelled to participate in such an irresponsible
act."
Cyber Ninjas did not respond to a request for comment.
Maricopa County officials previously said that they did not have passwords to access
administrative functions on Dominion Voting Systems machines that were used to scan ballots
during the election, according to the Senate's audit liaison, former Republican Secretary of
State Ken Bennett.
"They've told us that they don't have that second password, or that they've given us all the
passwords they have," Bennett told One America News at the site of the audit in Phoenix last
week.
Both routers or router images and access to election machines were part of the materials the
state Senate subpoenaed late last year. A judge in February ruled that the subpoenas were valid
and should be obeyed.
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican,
recently threatened to subpoena county officials if they didn't stop their noncompliance
with the subpoenas, but
backed off the threat in a letter on May 12.
Instead, she asked Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers, also a
Republican, to cooperate voluntarily by attending an upcoming meeting at the state Capitol to
go over the audit issues.
Fann said auditors have found discrepancies in the ballot count, including one batch that
was supposed to be 200 but only numbered 165. She also said the audit teams found an entire
database directory from an election machine had been deleted, and that the main database for
the election management system software was not located anywhere on the machine, suggesting
that the main database for all data related to the 2020 election had been removed.
Sellers on Thursday indicated he would not attend the meeting and disputed the
allegations.
Deleting files off the server "would be a crime -- and it is not true," he said.
"After reviewing the letter with County election and IT experts, I can say that the
allegations are false and ill-informed. Moreover, the claim that our employees deleted election
files and destroyed evidence is outrageous, completely baseless, and beneath the dignity of the
Arizona Senate," he added, calling for an immediate retraction of statements senators and their
liaison team made on social media and to the press.
The Board of Supervisors, which held a closed-door emergency meeting on Friday, plans on
holding a public meeting on Monday to address the matter.
Fann, an Arizona Senate Republican Caucus spokeswoman, and the liaison team did not
immediately respond to requests for comment.
Auditors, meanwhile, began packing up on Thursday evening because the audit will take a
break due to scheduling conflicts.
The audit has been taking place at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the state fairgrounds
in Phoenix. High school graduations are scheduled to take place at the building beginning May
15.
Hand counting stopped at 7 p.m. on Thursday and workers began collapsing tables and
preparing to move ballots to another location.
About 500,000 of the nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County in the 2020 election
have been counted in the audit, according to Bennett.
The Arizona Senate signed an extension to their original agreement that allows auditors to
store materials in the Wesley Bolin Building, which is also on the state fairgrounds, from May
12 to May 23.
The approximately 19,000-square foot building has a large open floor plan and two large
roll-up doors, according to the Arizona State Fair website.
"Due to temperatures during the summer months, this building is not recommended for use
between May through September," the site states.
Bennett told The Epoch Times in a previous interview that the materials will be secure and
that the site at which they'll be stored can be tracked online via 24-hour streaming, just like
the audit itself.
" There's no deadline for the audit ," Bennett said. " The goal is not speed; the goal is
accuracy and completeness. "
The audit teams can resume occupancy of the coliseum on May 23 and use it until June 30,
according to a copy of the extended agreement obtained
by The Epoch Times .
The original scope of work document from Cyber Ninjas said reviewing voter registration and
votes case would take approximately 20 days and that work would be conducted remotely. The vote
counting phase would take about 20 more days, it said, while the electronic voting system phase
would take some 35 days.
But all three of those phases could be carried out simultaneously, according to the firm. An
additional week was said to be required after completing everything else to finalize
reporting.
Wuhan
Where I keep a bio lab
Next to wet markets
That's how we do
But this time
Something just escaped
And I just wanted to
Just I thought you'd wanna know
Oops my bad
I swear I never meant for this
I never meant
Don't look at me that way
It was a Chinese mistake
Don't look at me that way
It was a Chinese mistake
An honest mistake
Sometimes
When I'm in the lab
I F up
And pathogens get away
Chinese flu
I swear I never meant for this
I never meant
Don't look at me that way
It was a Chinese mistake
Don't look at me that way
It was a Chinese mistake
An honest mistake
Don't look at me that way
It was a Chinese mistake
Don't look at me that way
It was a Chinese mistake
She would need to rewire her brain to have a thought that was not programmed into her... After her Russiagate adventures there are
some doubts that this is possible. But money do not smell.
Perhaps Maddow is just sad that there's no longer official justification to intimidate and harass those who choose not to wear
masks, something that leftists have enjoyed doing for the best part of a year.
The notion that people who don't wear masks are a "threat" is of course completely ludicrous since the COVID-19 virus particle
is 1,000 times smaller than the holes in the mask anyway.
After Texas ended its mask mandate, COVID cases dropped to a
record low and a similar pattern was observed in Florida and South Dakota.
Lordflin 46 minutes ago (Edited)
She would need to rewire her brain to have a thought that was not programmed into her...
What a mindless shill... first that singer... what's her name... and now this creature...
What is the effect ZH is going for here exactly...?
takeaction 36 minutes ago (Edited)
Rachel...Pelosi...Schumer...Swalwell.....Cuomo (Both of them) Lemon, Anderson, Fauci, AOC, Maxine, etc.
With or without a mask...
takeaction 18 minutes ago (Edited) remove link
All calm....Gorgeous weather.....78 today.
Hamilcar 28 minutes ago remove link
Branch Covidians like Madcow "Love F$#%ing Science".
And by "science" they mean believing whatever braindead politicians or left-wing corporate media make up as they go along without
any critical analysis and hysterically denouncing any evidence that contradicts the narrative as heresy.
It's going to be fun when all these people become the object of universal mockery they deserve. In a JUST world they would
be severely punished though.
Lordflin 24 minutes ago
I have always been impressed by the willingness of those who know virtually nothing of the sciences to believe almost anything
if it is told to them in the name of science...
signer1 9 minutes ago
To quote Mark Twain, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled".
Citxmech 18 seconds ago
Apparently, it's also easier to get people to believe illogical arguments by telling them it's "science" than it is to get
them to actually think critically about the stupid shlt they're being asked to believe.
toiler4fiat 26 minutes ago
Madcow, like [neo]liberalism, is a disease. You can't repair a damaged brain like you can't turn a pickle into a cucumber.
"Inside BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors' million-dollar real-estate buying binge.
Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors has gone on a real-estate buying binge in
recent years, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to
property records.":
How would Liz Cheney, Kristina Peterson (writer of this column) or anyone else ( including
William Barr) know whether Trump is correct or not.? The obfuscation created by governors,
legislatures and judges made the process inscrutable. I personally believe it more likely
than not that Trump is correct.
The repetitive use of the term of "baseless" does not make it so. No one can possibly ever
know. The Supreme Court had the opportunity to examine it. Justices Thomas and Alito were
correct, the court should have taken the Texas case. Cheney obviously hates Trump. That's
what motivates her -- not some higher cause.
How would Liz Cheney, Kristina Peterson (writer of this column) or anyone else ( including
William Barr) know whether Trump is correct or not.? The obfuscation created by governors,
legislatures and judges made the process inscrutable. I personally believe it more likely
than not that Trump is correct.
The repetitive use of the term of "baseless" does not make it so. No one can possibly
ever know. The Supreme Court had the opportunity to examine it. Justices Thomas and Alito
were correct, the court should have taken the Texas case. Cheney obviously hates Trump.
That's what motivates her -- not some higher cause.
How would Liz Cheney, Kristina Peterson (writer of this column) or anyone else (
including William Barr) know whether Trump is correct or not.? The obfuscation created
by governors, legislatures and judges made the process inscrutable. I personally
believe it more likely than not that Trump is correct.
The repetitive use of the term of "baseless" does not make it so. No one can
possibly ever know. The Supreme Court had the opportunity to examine it. Justices
Thomas and Alito were correct, the court should have taken the Texas case. Cheney
obviously hates Trump. That's what motivates her -- not some higher cause.
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Please name a democracy that isn't a SUZERAINTY.
"Democracy" is a temporary phase of history which allows the Global Financial Syndicate to
take control from the earlier generation of dominant power players: the monarchies. Most
democracies are a suzerainty externally and an Animal Farm internally.
World Financiers' ENSLAVEMENT plan using democracy:
– Create a REVOLUTION & steal a region
– Create a Private CENTRAL BANK (First Bank of the USA, BOE-1694)
– Fund & control new rich individuals (Kleptocrats)
– Fund & control political PARTIES & MEDIA
– Nationalize the central bank (the Fed, BOE-1946)
Enslave & control people by dominance over economic & political powers & call
it a democracy. An interesting FRACTAL emerges when one analysis the formation of
democracies.
This pattern of creating a private central bank and then nationalizing it, has been
repeated in the UK, U$A, New Zealand, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Estonia, Romania,
India, Argentina, El Salvador, Indonesia, Angola, Haiti...
Which countries Central Banks are still private?
"Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in
the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
– Reginald McKenna, former Chancellor of Exchequer, England
For any fairly recent US posters on this site, here is a hint to the wise.
There is a significant Russian presence on the WSJ comments. Basically our Russian
visitors dominate these comments - at a ratio perhaps of 8-1 - or even worse.
The best way to get your footing on this site is to understand that these Russians are
educated, fluent in English, knowledgeable about us, oftentimes quite funny ( sometimes not.
) And the Russians are seeking to pass as Americans.
In this capacity, the Russians will often be earnest & insightful. As well as say
horrible things about Republicans and about Democrats.
They are here to stoke division and conflict. They seek to amplify partisanship and
misinformation.
As soon as you understand these essential facts, you will find it quite easy to work the
thread.
For any fairly recent US posters on this site, here is a hint to the wise.
There is a significant Russian presence on the WSJ comments. Basically our Russian
visitors dominate these comments - at a ratio perhaps of 8-1 - or even worse.
The best way to get your footing on this site is to understand that these Russians are
educated, fluent in English, knowledgeable about us, oftentimes quite funny ( sometimes
not. ) And the Russians are seeking to pass as Americans.
In this capacity, the Russians will often be earnest & insightful. As well as say
horrible things about Republicans and about Democrats.
They are here to stoke division and conflict. They seek to amplify partisanship and
misinformation.
As soon as you understand these essential facts, you will find it quite easy to work the
thread.
Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret
U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan . The New York Times, The Guardian ,
and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America's intelligence
community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an
assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States
kept "protected " even from its allies.
The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional
journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times,
and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not
seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000
American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds
of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of
environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the "Arab Spring."
There was an attempt at a response -- companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal
shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a "denial of service" attack -- but
leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won
an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and
Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations
of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had
been caught lying to congress.
The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched
The Intercept in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden's archive of
leaked secrets, and its first story described how the
NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets.
A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, "We kill people based
on metadata."
Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in
exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid
contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a
wave of intelligence officers who've flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years,
including the FBI's Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief
Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA's John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned
Price, and many others.
Once again, Internet platforms, credit card companies
like Visa and MasterCard , and payment processors like PayPal are working to help track
down and/or block the activities of "extremists." This time, they're on the same side as the
onetime press allies of Wikileaks and Snowden, who began a course reversal after the election
of Donald Trump.
Those outlets first began steering attention away from intelligence abuses and toward
bugbears like Trumpism, misinformation, and Russian meddling, then entered into partnerships
with Langley-approved facsimiles of leak sites like Hamilton 68 ,
New Knowledge , and especially
Bellingcat , a kind of reverse Wikileaks devoted to exposing the misdeeds of regimes in
Russia, Syria, and Iran -- less so the United States and its allies. The CIA's former deputy
chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, Marc Polymeropolous, said of the group's work, "
I don't
want to be too dramatic, but we love this ."
After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and "domestic
extremists" stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an
all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to "smoke 'em out of their
holes." The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication,
which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online
network "that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves."
Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than
geographical "hidey holes." We've seen The Guardian warning about the
perils of podcasts , ProPublica arguing that Apple's lax speech
environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters
from The Verge and
Vice and
The New York Times listening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous
thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went
on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George
Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech about imploring the "authorities" to use the "Fire in a
Crowded Theater" argument to shut down Fox News.
Multiple outlets announced plans to track "extremists" in either open or implied cooperation
with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica , and Berkley Journalism's Investigative Reporting
Program used " high-precision digital forensics "
to uncover "evidence" about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the
"sedition hunters " at the Twitter activist group "Deep State Dogs" to help identify a
suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post
stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law
enforcement, but impatience
with the slowness of official procedure compared to "sleuthing communities":
The FBI wants
photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral , and has published images of more than 200 suspects.
But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by
without any signs of action ? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video,
hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence the FBI's bureaucracy isn't
necessarily designed to keep organized.
The Intercept already saw founding members Poitras and Greenwald depart, and shut down the
aforementioned Snowden archive to, in their words, "focus on other editorial priorities" --
parent company First Look Media soon after launched a partnership with "PassionFlix," whose
motto is, " Turning your favorite romance
novels into movies and series ." Last week, they announced a new project in tune with
current media trends:
Are there legitimate stories about people with racist or conspiratorial views who for
instance shouldn't be working in positions of authority, as cops or elected officials or
military officers? Sure, and there's a job for reporters in proving that out, especially if
there's a record of complaints or corruption to match. It gets a little weird if the
newsworthiness standard is "person with a job has abhorrent private opinions," but it's not
like it's impossible that a legit story could be found in something like the Gab archive,
especially if it involves a public figure.
But that depends on the media people involved having a coherent standard for outing
subjects, which hasn't always (or even often) been the case.
Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex
Jones "violent white supremacists" -- they're a lot of things, but "violent white
supremacists"? In the first piece about "extremists" on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have
found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man's attorney
later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction .
When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he "certainly wouldn't want to
accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists." When
asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he'd be naming public figures only, the sarcastic
answer this time was, "Of course I won't be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended
at all costs."
Greenwald left the organization among other things after an editor asked that he address the
"disinformation issue" in a piece about Hunter Biden's laptop, a reference to a claim made by
50 intelligence officers that the story had "the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation
campaign." He found it inappropriate then for a publication with The Intercept's history to be
pushing an intelligence narrative, and the Gab project struck him in a similar way.
"The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state
agencies is a short one," says Greenwald, "and with its statements about what they are doing
with this Gab archive, The Intercept and its trite liberal managers in New York have now taken
it."
we need to find a way to keep stories like this from being reported.
lovingly,
rachel maddow's wife
ted41776 1 hour ago remove link
they hate us for our freedumb
was anyone punished for that WMD lie that cause the death of hundreds of thousands of
Iraqi civilians and a few thousand US troops?
i mean it is a widely accepted fact now, isn't it? that it was a lie that caused a
genocide and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?
where are the nuremberg trials? UN? anyone?
crickets
Lt. Shicekopf 1 hour ago
Operation Mockingbird has paid immense dividends, one of the most successful programs
ever.
Maltheus 1 hour ago remove link
I dunno. What's the name of the program to infiltrate the schools? Gives Mockingbird a run
for its money.
fishpoem 32 minutes ago
Use the titles of any of the books written by members of the Frankfurt School. Start with
Marcuse. How such circular reasoning, boring prose, and patently bogus arguments became
mandatory reading material in every college in America is a puzzle future historians will
have to unravel.
Well, if the ruling Marxist Democrats allow historians to exist in the future...which they
probably won't. Truth, in that era, will be what "art" became in Hitler's Germany and
Stalin's Russia: cliched state-worship.
Most of the "reporters" for the big media cartel were always enemies of the American
people.
tedstr 57 minutes ago
News organizations have always been agents of the IC. Just as they are agents of Hollywood
and the biz news are agents of corporations. They no longer have the staffs to truely "do
news" so they rely on being spoon fed from their sources. they will never bite the hand.
Steve in Greensboro 1 hour ago remove link
Lee Smith on Bannon's Warroom 53 in December 2019.
Lee Smith: " Here's something that boggles me still that there are still people after what
we have seen and after I've documented in the book what the press has become what the WaPo
what the prestige brands of American journalism have become and nonetheless there are
Republicans only blocks from here who are more than happy to treat whether it's the WaPo,
NYT, CNN, MSNBC as though these are regular news networks still. Even after three years of
seeing them operate exactly like media operatives "
Steve Bannon: "You believe they are the opposition party media. Right?
Lee Smith: "It's not a media, it's a platform for intelligence operations. It's not media
at all. This is like the Arab press."
Joe Davola 1 hour ago
Maybe a curious investigative reporter might look into why "financial services" companies
jump right in whenever the deep state needs them.
NewMouldy 1 hour ago
Kabuki theatre..
College deans, professors, teachers were all bought and paid for decades ago by the deep
state. The very people that educate upcoming politicians, reporters and scientists.
This is how we got to where we are now.
US Banana Republic 6 minutes ago
When media "personalities" like Cuomo, Madcow, and Cooper make more than $10 million
dollars a year from corporate sponsors towing the corporate/government line then NOBODY want
to be a hard hitting investigative reporter. Everybody wants to be a corporate/government
boot licker.
As always, follow the money.
Isn't Life Gland 15 minutes ago
Ali Watkins is my favorite. "Worked" her way all the way up to the pinnacle gig at the New
York Crimes..on her back.
...Biden has demonstrated an ability to do only two things; give taxpayer money away and wear a mask. Perhaps the mask is appropriate
( See Jesse James.)
I thought the "crumbling infrastructure" was just an internet joke or a lobby thing
(American Society of Civil Engineers sounds like a the name of a DC lobby firm). Never
thought it was de facto happening in USA.
No doubt the US/UK deep state, now more than ever, are busy trying to sow conflict and
division in Eurasia, to divide-and-rule Mackinder's "World Island" and hence the world.
I'm not sure that it is global private finance that is the key. Although I used to.
Either we consider the Oligarchs (Bezos Zuckerberg) as the newest form of low life, or the
Banking cartels and billionares are even lower.
BUT - There is a third class of Global financiers. That is "Corporations" (as a class).
Corporations are immortal, and like a hydra, with many heads, have more arms than an "image
of a covid-virus" ( Octopussii are simply too limited, although they are a good example of
multi-brained resourceful animals ). They are also "persons" in front of the law, with
all the protections and privilges that offers. On other occasions they are simply above the
law (Twit-Facebook and free speech). The people running them are only occasionally
reprimanded, but the "corporation" itself is never touched. *1*
They pay, sometimes, a bit of taxes, have different laws and have lobbies working in their
favour. Can corrupt Politicians with the offer of directorships or whatever. They can even be
"foundations" and pay no tax at all. They deal across many different National laws, obey what
they will, and are extra terrritorial in scope. They can have a nominal "center", while
decisions are made elsewhere. They are in fact a new type of alien supra-being .
Of course, the "leaders" of Corporations are rich, but they can be replaced by others at the
wishes of "shareholders". Untouchable and unknown.
Very useful for storing wealth and speculating at the same time.
In spite of Musk and others taking all the limelight, it is the corporations that work in
the background that seem to be the real seat of power.
--- *1* One of the last real actions taken against Corporate power was the breaking up of
Rockefellers Standard Oil .
*****
*2* In the case of the "breakup" of either the US or the EU - would the corporations be
touched (eliminated), or hailed as saving civilisation?
Paul alleged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had used a middle-man to funnel
money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance - which worked with the lab on
bat coronavirus projects.
Paul specifically referenced so-called "gain-of-function" research which in this case has
been focused on how to make animal viruses more transmissible to humans - specifically bat
coronaviruses .
"Government scientists like yourself who favor gain of function research," Paul
began...
...only to have Fauci interject "I don't favor gain of function research in China," adding
"You are saying things that are not correct."
Paul pushed back - continuing:
"[Those who favor gain of function] say that COVID-19 mutations were random and not
designed by man."
"I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done," Fauci shot back, adding
that he's in favor of further investigation, but that the NIH had nothing to do with the
origins of COVID-19.
"We have not funded gain of function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of
Virology," he added.
"No matter how many times you say it, it didn't happen."
More from Sen. Paul via Twitter:
Senator Rand Paul @RandPaul ·
May 11, 2021 Dr Fauci dissembled or tried to hide his long time support for
'gain-of-function' research which creates super-viruses that jump from animals to humans.
ohm 4 hours ago (Edited) remove link
You can't sit on your thumbs and run year long investigations and background checks
while thousands are dying .
But that's just the point, thousands were not dying . Instead of seeking out opposing
viewpoints, he relied on the bogus Ferguson model that predicted 2 million deaths presented
by Fauci and Birx. Plenty of qualified opposing voices were out there - John Ionnides of
Stanford for instance. Trump needs to own up to his mistakes and vow not to repeat them.
nodhannum 3 hours ago
How many renminbi do they pay you comrade...as in be "han" or be gone. I've been to a
number of seminars given by Fauci back in his HIV days but he is a lying sob now. It's
getting hard for the fellow to cover hisw *** now even with the Maserati marxists in power
here.
"We are not prepared for a pandemic," Biden tweeted on Oct. 25, 2019, saying the country
needs leadership that "mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our
shores."
this_circus_is_no_fun 4 hours ago
At first Fauxi denied the allegation. Then, after Paul cornered him with facts, Fauxi said
something like "this is why we did that". So, he admitted that he did what he was denying
just a few seconds before . He is literally incapable of telling the truth. I guess he's not
called Fauxi for nothing.
adonisdemilo 5 hours ago
Fauci has known from day one what's going on and going wrong. He's up to his neck in it
and taking a good look at his body language under questions from Rand Paul, HE'S CONTINUING
TO LIE.
chinese.sniffles 5 hours ago
Dr. Fauci:
Have you or your team send or granted permission for work projects to Wuhan or China?
What were those projects?
Why did you send them?
Why did you not do these projects in the USA?
Were any of these projects illegal in the USA?
etc. simple line of questioning, let him perjure himself.
thezone 5 hours ago
Fauci (the politician) knew to not write a check out to the lab directly. It was great to
hear Dr Paul bring up EcoHealth. A shell company to facilitate.
surfer4444 5 hours ago
Exactly, blame it on the sub contractor....an old game and the elite are using it well
radical-extremist 5 hours ago remove link
Fauci knows full well the story in the Democrat State News media will be about how he was
ATTACKED by Rand Paul, and not about him lying under oath about funding the Wuhan Lab.
chiquita 5 hours ago
This information has been out for a while if you follow War Room, Steve Hilton, and some
other sources. Peter Navarro has been hammering at Fauci relentlessly for the last few months
and now the MSM is going after Navarro, trying to discredit him. Gee, I wonder why when it
looks like the truth about Fauci is falling apart.
What a mess_man 4 hours ago (Edited)
Tucker blew this wide open last night. Of course lots of us here knew all this many months
ago. Fauci is lying through his teeth here, and both he and Daszak are deep in the Chicom's
pockets. As Tucker said, in a functioning world there would be a criminal investigation.
Instead Biden and Co. kiss his *ss and make him our foremost authority on Covid and vaccines.
Clown world for sure.
Meatballs 3 hours ago (Edited)
Actually, Saagar beat Tucker to the punch. Either way, the unraveling has begun.
Don't let the bioweapon profiteer, Daszak, off the hook.
Both greedy psychopaths should hang for their crimes against humanity.
Furthermore, we have no business sharing infectious disease technology with China, even if
they could run a lab properly.
Itinerant 4 hours ago
This story is about 14 months old, though not for the MSM.
Actual documentation of the grants from the NIH via the Eco Alliance have been circulating
in the public domain for all that time. In it they exactly describe the gain-of-function
research that is being outsourced to China, the viruses involved, the methods, the type of
experiments, and the aims of the research ... exactly and technically.
There is no room for caveats, or 'allege' or interpretation or anything like that.
The evidence is rock hard and crystal clear.
toady 4 hours ago
Yet there are no prosecutions.
dogbert8 5 hours ago remove link
Finally, the unmasking (pun intended) of Fauci has started.
bsdetector 5 hours ago
Just listened to the questions and answers. Fauci qualifies his answers with information
that was not sought in the questions. His answers change the character of his denials... "we
did not fund GOF research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
OK Dr. Fauci, please identify the viruses that you did fund for GOF research at the
Institute.
Jack Mayorhaufer 5 hours ago
master gaslighters once they reach certain status and paygrade on the Hill
novictim 2 hours ago remove link
"I don't know how many times I can say it? We did not fund gain of function research to be
done in the Wuhan Institute of Virology ...(under his breath) because we funded Eco Health
Alliance/Peter Daszak which granted the research funding to do gain of function research in
the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
CleeTorres 2 hours ago
A simple internet search shows Fauci is lying about funding for this research. But he
knows the media won't do their jobs.
Onthebeach6 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Let me assist Dr Fauci with the truth.
Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan
Dr Christina Lin
April 2020
"A U.S. NIH-funded $3.7 million project was approved by Trump's Covid-19 advisor Dr.
Anthony Fauci in 2015, after the Obama White House imposed a ban on 'monster-germ' research.
In October 2014, the federal government declared a moratorium on gain-of-function research to
weaponize viruses related to influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). As a result, the research was outsourced to China's Wuhan
Institute of Virology, which is currently at the center of scrutiny for the Covid-19
pandemic."
Fauci looks very nervous . Perhaps why he has been so adamant about constantly moving the
goalposts? If you were guilty of something wouldn't you keep changing the focus and appear to
be very helpful and concerned?
Max21c 3 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Which people in & around the National Security Council, CIA, and Pentagon are involved
in this attempt to gain access, penetrate and spy on the PLA Biological Weapons/Warfare
programs via funding mechanisms route? Which people had contact with this institute and
programs and what if anything did the spy games produce?
When are they in Washington going to establish civilian rule over the US military and CIA
and National Security Council?
When are they going to knock off these silly spy games and spy world operations off and
stop this nonsense which produces zero positive results?
What did the gangsters on the Intelligence/Spy Committees in Congress know? What did the
gangsters atop the Pentagon, CIA, National Security Council know?
Which Washingtonian assholes are going to go to prison for this boomerang disaster?
How many other groups similar to "EcoHealth Alliance" operate as part of the US/UK
intelligence "community" and what other stupid stuff are the idiots mixed up in?
TheRapture 3 hours ago remove link
There is a great deal of evidence (NIH, State Dept grants to offshore USA bioweapons
research, Bat Lady was the protege of Dr. Ralph Baric at UNC who has been doing coronavirus
bioweapon research for more then twenty years, initial and simultaneous infections in Wuhan
at different locations suggesting an intentional release, etc., etc., etc.) And of course,
Trump had motive, opportunity and means to stage a false flag to destroy China's economy and
damage China's political relations with other countries.
It is likely the USA, no doubt using a CIA proxy, released SARS-CoV-2 in simultaneously in
multiple locations in Wuhan. The evidence is substantial. But most Americans can't bring
themselves to stare down that particular rabbit hole.
WorkingClassMan 3 hours ago
I'd rather an honest CCP commie ruling the roost than those traitors anyway.
"If I had but one bullet and were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the
traitor have it."
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries
sarret PREMIUM 3 hours ago
Fauci is such a liar, pulling school kid mentality out of a hat to answer serious
questions. Likely in his mind he knows it all to be true but since the correct name is
中国科学院武汉病毒研究所
then unless you say that name, or the exact name of the exact subsidiary that was funding or
was being funded, then it is not correct and therefore he can answer the question incorrectly
without calling himself a liar internally and without saying what the error was in the
question that led him to be able to this.
In all respects he just disregards the spirit of the question when he knows full well that
he is in the wrong, but denies it every single time based on some concocted fabrication in
his mind that the question is not precise enough to nail him to the cross.
Completely disingenuous, can't trust a word he says.
Fish Gone Bad 4 hours ago
Lawyer speak:
We have not funded gain of function research on this virus
They funded all kinds of gain of function on all kinds of permutations of the virus, just
not THIS virus.
radical-extremist 5 hours ago remove link
Fauci is also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of men in San Francisco by covering
up Bath Houses as the origin of the spread of AIDS...for Mayor Diane Feinstein's political
career. No one dares talk about this today.
the Mysterians 5 hours ago
"I did not have sex with that woman!"
Flying Monkees 5 hours ago (Edited)
What could possibly be the reason for gain-of-function research if not bio-warfare?
These evil, irresponsible, arrogant a-holes need to pay.
Posa 5 hours ago
The Eco-Alliance grant from Fauci's NIAID states
We will use S [ie the Spike Protein that makes the SC-2 virus highly infectious] protein
sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and
analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S
protein sequences predict spillover potential.
That has been interpreted as a commitment to Gain of Function research on the Spike
Protein which is the key to turning SARS into a virulently transmissible pathogen.
surfer4444 5 hours ago remove link
Exactly...im just baffled how this PoS can blatantly lie to a Senate committee and get
away with it...there is zero accountability in our government...end times
Posa 5 hours ago
Fauci can lie because his audience is a convention of lazy, cowardly , illiterate dunces.
If Rand Paul were serious he would have had the damn grant in front of him and read the same
quotes as I provided in this post. PAul would have held these hearings last year when his
Party controlled the Senate.
Posa 4 hours ago
NOTE: This post was censored by The Hill. Typical free speech in America.
George Bayou 5 hours ago
"11 labs in the US create these super-viruses in the US and one of them collaborated with
Wuhan Virology Inst -- Fauci has supported NIH funds for all these labs!"
Why is this a-hole still working?
notfeelinthebern 4 hours ago (Edited)
Yap, yap,. yap. Another dog and pony show and the show is painfully old. They parade
personage after personage before congress and ask lots of questions. The swamp rats in the
hot seat lie by omission and with sleight of hand answers and when done with the act walk
away with smug faces....The show must go on.
George Bayou 5 hours ago
Here's an interesting article on Dr. Baric and what he was doing, mutating virus using
serial passaging so that the virus are able to infect a completely different species:
Take, for instance, this paper from 1995:
"High Recombination and Mutation Rates in Mouse Hepatitis Viruses Suggest That
Coronaviruses May Be Potentially Important Emerging Viruses." It was written by Dr. Ralph
Baric and his bench scientist, Boyd Yount, at the University of North Carolina. Baric, a
gravelly voiced former swim champion, described in this early paper how his lab was able to
train a coronavirus, MHV, which causes hepatitis in mice, to jump species, so that it could
reliably infect BHK (baby-hamster kidney) cell cultures. They did it using serial
passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with
mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the
concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn't
do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their
world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages
through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an
unfamiliar rodent. A scourge of mice was transformed into a scourge of hamsters. And there
was more: "It is clear that MHV can rapidly alter its species specificity and infect rats
and primates," Baric said. "The resulting virus variants are associated with demyelinating
diseases in these alternative species." (A demyelinating disease is a disease that damages
nerve sheaths.) With steady prodding from laboratory science, along with some rhetorical
exaggeration, a lowly mouse ailment was morphed into an emergent threat that might
potentially cause nerve damage in primates.
GeneKelly 5 hours ago remove link
"We have not funded gain of function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of
Virology,"
Sociopaths can lie without registering on a detector by simply defining terms differently
in their cerebral cortex and then answering -- from their perspective truthfully -- "no"
because the question doesn't match their internal definition.
So Fauci wasn't funding "gain of function". He was actually funding "increasing the
virulence of pathogens" or "enhancing the pathogens' ability to infect different
species".
Rand and others will have to ask the question a hundred ways to force Fauci to spill the
beans.
DeeDeeTwo 1 hour ago remove link
Tucker finally called Fauci a "criminal" at least twice and said, "In any functioning
society Fauci would be investigated."
Txjac 5 hours ago
Fauci also owns the patents on the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines
Everybody All American 5 hours ago remove link
How is it that only one Congressman dare questions Dr. Fauci? One tough questioner. These
cowards all need to hang for the crimes they are allowing. If they think we are just going to
sit back and watch this man for much longer lead us they are sadly mistaken.
Downhill from here 5 hours ago
Being an MD, Paul has some credibility on the topic. At least educationally and by
training, Fauci and Paul are peers.. More than likely other R's are letting him take
point.
replaceme 5 hours ago (Edited)
I forgot, that's the same dr daszak that sent the letter to the lancet saying that covid
didn't come from Wuhan, and that he had no reason to falsely say this. THAT Dr daszak. Got
it.
"We [NIH/Fauci] did not fund gain of function research to be done in Wuhan." What the
weasel didn't say is that the NIH did in deed fund Dr Baric who was working in collaboration
with Wuhan with gain of function experiments on the SARS virus. Baric worked with Ft Dettrick
and Univ NC researchers who in turn were collaborating with Canada and Wuhan.
Fauci can parse words but he's a traitor and ought to be held responsible along with all
others involved with this.
scraping_by 5 hours ago (Edited) remove link
One amendment to the story --
Carlson was quoting a story by Nicholas Wade, former science editor to the NYT. Published
in Medium. So it's not just a talking head repeating newsroom copy, as in CNN.
zorrosgato 14 minutes ago remove link
Fauci is part of a flawed system and don't be fooled in believing he is part of any
solution. His endorsing of impractical mask mandates along with mandatory vaccinations of the
population, using unproven genetically engineered drugs is proof enough.
The phenomenon of "cancel culture" is a toxic one metastasizing into a woke revolution war
empowered by Big Tech and Big Business. Those unfamiliar with being canceled involve publicly
shaming others and boycotting celebrities and companies. However, the art of canceling has
progressed well beyond canceling public figures and is now used to garget average folks. The
result can be devastating for ordinary people who may face the consequences of losing their
jobs, losing friends and family, or having their social media accounts terminated.
Comedian Dave Chappelle partook in a video interview with Joe Rogan on "The Joe Rogan
Experience" podcast about cancel culture. He told Rogan that he recognizes the change people
are attempting to bring through activism and accountability for prominent folks but denounced
cancel culture:
"I'm very lucky to be able to see people who are great at things up close," Chappelle said.
"Even on this podcast ... it's one of the joys of my life getting to know these people and
knowing and seeing them be human."
Chappelle said, "I hope we all survive it," while referring to the cancel culture storm
gripping society. "That's why that cancel culture shit bothers me. I'm not even opposed to the
ideas behind some of these cancelations. I get it."
Rogan said, "the inclination, all of it, is to make the world a better place." He said
social media and public shaming have "gotten abused and misused by the wrong people and bad
actors, but at the end of the day, the thing they think they're trying to do is eliminate bad
aspects of our culture."
Last year, Chappelle criticized cancel culture, saying audiences have become "too brittle,"
adding that "everything you say upsets somebody."
Chappelle hasn't been the only well-known person to speak out against cancel culture, Curtis
Jackson, known as "50 Cent," recently said cancel culture is "
unfair " and "targeting straight men" who "don't have any organizations to back them
up."
Jackson said he wouldn't get canceled because "hip-hop culture loves things that are
damaged. It loves people who are already broken from experience."
A study by a top education think tank, Civitas,
found that free speech at the world's leading universities is being eroded at a rapid rate
due to "cancel culture."
Cancel culture may have had good intentions to hold people accountable for things they did
or say. Instead, it has backfired and produced a toxic environment that limits freedom of
speech and alienates anyone with opposing views. Society can't move forward if liberals cancel
anyone they don't like - there needs to be an open forum where all voices are heard.
History repeats and the repetition is coming with some minor variations.
Notable quotes:
"... "Corporate bond rates have been rising steadily since May. Yellen is not doing what Greenspan did in 2004." ..."
"... There isn't much of a difference between signaling tighter money to a market that is skeptical of Fed forecasts and actually tightening. ..."
"... While at 5.0 percent, the unemployment rate is not extraordinarily high, most other measures of the labor market are near recession levels. The percentage of the workforce that is involuntarily working part-time is near the highs reached following the 2001 recession. The average and median duration of unemployment spells are also near recession highs. And the percentage of workers who feel confident enough to quit their jobs without another job lined up remains near the low points reached in 2002. ..."
"... While wage growth has edged up somewhat in recent months by some measures, it is still well below a rate that is consistent with the Fed's inflation target. Hourly wages have risen at a 2.7 percent rate over the last year. If there is just 1.5 percent productivity growth, this would be consistent with a rate of inflation of 1.2 percent. ..."
"... One positive point in today's action is the Fed's commitment in its statement to allow future rate hikes to be guided by the data, rather than locking in a path towards "normalization" as was effectively done in 2004. ..."
Washington, D.C.- Dean Baker, economist and a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) issued the
following statement in response to the Federal Reserve's decision regarding interest rates:
"The Fed's decision to raise interest rates today is an unfortunate move in the wrong direction. In setting interest rate policy
the Fed must decide whether the economy is at risk of having too few or too many jobs, with the latter being determined by the
extent to which its current rate of job creation may lead to inflation. It is difficult to see how the evidence would lead the
Fed to conclude that the greater risk at the moment is too many jobs.
"While at 5.0 percent, the unemployment rate is not extraordinarily high, most other measures of the labor market are near
recession levels. The percentage of the workforce that is involuntarily working part-time is near the highs reached following
the 2001 recession. The average and median duration of unemployment spells are also near recession highs. And the percentage of
workers who feel confident enough to quit their jobs without another job lined up remains near the low points reached in 2002.
"If we look at employment rates rather than unemployment, the percentage of prime-age workers (ages 25-54) with jobs is still
down by almost three full percentage points from the pre-recession peak and by more than four full percentage points from the
peak hit in 2000. This does not look like a strong labor market.
"On the other side, there is virtually no basis for concerns about the risk of inflation in the current data. The most recent
data show that the core personal consumption expenditure deflator targeted by the Fed increased at just a 1.2 percent annual rate
over the last three months, down slightly from the 1.3 percent rate over the last year. This means that the Fed should be concerned
about being below its inflation target, not above it.
"While wage growth has edged up somewhat in recent months by some measures, it is still well below a rate that is consistent
with the Fed's inflation target. Hourly wages have risen at a 2.7 percent rate over the last year. If there is just 1.5 percent
productivity growth, this would be consistent with a rate of inflation of 1.2 percent.
"Furthermore, it is important to recognize that workers took a large hit to their wages in the downturn, with a shift of more
than four percentage points of national income from wages to profits. In principle, workers can restore their share of national
income (the equivalent of an 8 percent wage gain), but the Fed would have to be prepared to allow wage growth to substantially
outpace prices for a period of time. If the Fed acts to prevent workers from getting this bargaining power, it will effectively
lock in place this upward redistribution. Needless to say, workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution can expect
to see the biggest hit in this scenario.
"One positive point in today's action is the Fed's commitment in its statement to allow future rate hikes to be guided
by the data, rather than locking in a path towards "normalization" as was effectively done in 2004. If it is the case that
the economy is not strong enough to justify rate hikes, then the hike today may be the last one for some period of time. It will
be important for the Fed to carefully assess the data as it makes its decision on interest rates at future meetings.
"Recent economic data suggest that today's move was a mistake. Hopefully the Fed will not compound this mistake with more unwarranted
rate hikes in the future."
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to Peter K....
I like Dean Baker. Unlike the Fed, Dean Baker is a class warrior on the side of the wage class. He makes the point about the
path to normalization being critical that I have been discussing for quite a while. Let's hope this Fed knows better than Greenspan/Bernanke
in 2004-2006. THANKS!
likbez said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
Very true !
pgl said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
"Longer-term bond rates barely moved, showing that there was very little news." This interest rate rose from 4.45% to 5.46%
already. So the damage was already done:
"... This interest rate rose from 4.45% to 5.46% already..."
Exactly! Corporate bond rates have been rising steadily since May. Yellen is not doing what Greenspan did in 2004. Yellen's
Fed waited until the bond rate lifted off on its own (and maybe with some help from policy communications) before they raised
the FFR.
So far, there is no sign of their making a fatal error. They are not fighting class warfare for wage class either, but they
seem intent on not screwing the pooch in the way that Greenspan and Bernanke did. No double dip thank you and hold the nuts.
"... Why is healthy 24-year-old Jennifer Gates jumping the line to get the vaccination when older at-risk Americans can't get an appointment? You may not have inherited your father's genius as you claim, but you certainly have his sense of entitlement. ..."
Why is healthy 24-year-old Jennifer Gates jumping the line to get the vaccination when older at-risk Americans can't
get an appointment? You may not have inherited your father's genius as you claim, but you certainly have his sense of
entitlement.
Why do so many people who are fully
vaccinated care whether I have been vaccinated or not? They seem to think that vaccines only "work" if everyone is vaccinated.
I am getting vax shamed by my family
for not getting the vaccine yet, especially from my brother who is a surgeon. What's wrong with waiting until there is more data
if you're young and healthy with no underlying conditions?
A cyberattack that crippled the US fuel supply wasn't the work of Russia, President Joe
Biden said. Confusingly, Biden then said that Russia bears "some responsibility" for the
attack.
A ransomware attack on Friday shut down a gasoline and diesel pipeline running 5,500 miles
along the entire US East Coast. Operated by the Colonial Pipeline Company, the vital fuel
artery normally transits 100 million gallons per day from Texas all the way to New York. The
Biden administration responded by invoking emergency powers to enable truckers to transport
more fuel, as traders scrambled to import fuel by sea from Europe.
A ransomware attack on Friday shut down a gasoline and diesel pipeline running 5,500 miles
along the entire US East Coast. Operated by the Colonial Pipeline Company, the vital fuel
artery normally transits 100 million gallons per day from Texas all the way to New York. The
Biden administration responded by invoking emergency powers to enable truckers to transport
more fuel, as traders scrambled to import fuel by sea from Europe.
Addressing the attack on Monday, Biden initially threw cold water on the claims of Russian
involvement, instead blaming "transnational criminals."
"So far there's no evidence from our intelligence people that Russia is involved,"
Biden told reporters. However, he followed that statement by saying that the ransomware used
"is in Russia," and Russia therefore has "some responsibility to deal with
this."
Rumors of Russian involvement were stoked by several mainstream media outlets over the
weekend, after it emerged that 'DarkSide,' a criminal hacking organization believed by CNN's
anonymous sources to be based in "a Russian-speaking country," was responsible for the
attack. In a short statement on Monday, the FBI confirmed "that the DarkSide ransomware is
responsible for the compromise of the Colonial Pipeline networks."
Other media outlets took the opportunity to link the hackers to the Russian government,
"whether they work for the state or not," in the words of one cybersecurity consultant
to NBC.
Quantity never equal to quality " The agency defended itself, remarking that the ad campaign had been effective. "2020 was a
standout recruitment year for the CIA, despite the pandemic... Our 2021 incoming class is the third-largest in a decade," a spokesperson
told Fox News."
Journalist Kyle Becker tweeted that the CIA needed to "stay out" of domestic politics. "You're there to serve the U.S.
flag, not the rainbow flag," he wrote.
Kyle Becker @kylenabecker ·
May 8 You're there to serve the U.S.
flag, not the rainbow flag. I wonder how much of this is about inclusivity and how much is about redefining the CIA and leading
it away from its core mission of defending the U.S. from enemies abroad. The CIA needs to stay out of domestic politics.
Other users paraphrased the lanyard rainbow anecdote to note how "much better" they now felt about CIA airstrikes and other
unpalatable dealings around the world.
St. Antonios @LoneStarTexian "I love that, as a gay man, I too
can do my part in destabilizing black & brown countries, droning their women & children & spying on my fellow Americans..."
St. Antonios
■ @LoneStarTexian
Replying to @ING2Firebrand
"I noticed a rainbow on CIA Director Brennan's lanyard & felt so much better green lighting airstrikes on starving Yemeni citizens
&
Since its launch in 2019 as part of a broader recruitment strategy, the 'Humans of CIA' social media series has depicted real
agency officers sharing their "first-hand experiences" in the intelligence organization, a CIA spokesperson told the Guardian.
While the majority of the series has attracted little pushback, part of the backlash to the Latina officer video was directed
at the agency's perceived willingness
"to weaponize their power to target their political opponents: conservatives."
The agency defended itself, remarking that the ad campaign had been effective. "2020 was a standout recruitment year for the
CIA, despite the pandemic... Our 2021 incoming class is the third-largest in a decade," a spokesperson told Fox News.
"... As the world has become more complex, people have relied more and more on stereotypes and simplifications to help them interpret and filter events around them. Propaganda manipulates this desire for simplicity – handing people easy answers rather than winning them over with rational arguments. Society then rallies around these stereotypes and squashes dissents with 'herd mentality', an irrational set of psychological behaviors where individuals are swept along with a group, overriding their own rational assessments ..."
Below is a repeat of a Glenn Diesen quote from karlof1 comment # 57
" "As the world has become more complex, people have relied more and more on stereotypes and
simplifications to help them interpret and filter events around them. Propaganda manipulates
this desire for simplicity – handing people easy answers rather than winning them over
with rational arguments. Society then rallies around these stereotypes and squashes dissents
with 'herd mentality', an irrational set of psychological behaviors where individuals are
swept along with a group, overriding their own rational assessments." "
Think about the vaccine situation and what just happened to the medical profession in the
West....they got railroaded into agreeing that there was not an off the shelf "ivermectin" to
the virus and guaranteed future income to Big Pharma is more important.
Hey docs!!! Do no harm! Your complicity in this war crime against humanity is noted. What
are the responsible and humanistic actions to take now and why does the public not see
evidence that you are organizing to do them?
Until the reality of the CIA--to undermine peaceful relations and promote wars required
for Military Keynesianism--is taught in grade school, it will always find recruits. As with
the FBI, government sponsored propaganda was and remains required to manufacture the reasons
for their existence. Nations that promote an equitable polity have no need for a secret
police force, but do need some force to counter attempts from the outside to foment
destabilization. For example, today's Russia is freer than at any previous time in its
history as only extremist ideologies are banned while Communism--still deemed extremist by
the West--is relegated to a normal ideology with status as a normative political party.
Indeed, I'd argue that Russia remains the only genuine Liberal Western nation, which is a
reality Russophobes are unable to accept or even contemplate. The same also applies to the
concept of Communism thanks to the unwillingness to even attempt to understand Marx. And as
Western thought gets subsumed by Wokeness, the ideological divide between Neoliberal nations
and all others will continue to grow.
“A Top Biden Cybersecurity Aide Donated Over $500,000 to AIPAC as an NSA
Official†[David Corn,
Mother Jones (via the War Nerd )].
“Several other national security expertsâ€"who asked not to be
namedâ€"say that the foundation’s donations to AIPAC create, at
the least, an appearance problem for Anne Neuberger.†•
Apparently Neuberger
was too much not only for Corn, but for his handlers in the intelligence community, to stomach.
The whole piece is well worth a read. It’s all horrible.
Actually I think neoliberalism is on its last legs, admin of it is currently under going a
near psychotic episode of various degrees depending on how factions roll and the desire to
come out on top when the dust settles.
Covid really presented a situation which has removed so much ideological PR fog, for so
many people, that the GFC was just a bad patch or some nefarious plot by outside forces which
would snatch their dreams away.
Space.com reports: Because no one was certain how weightlessness would affect a pilot,
the spherical capsule had little in the way of onboard
controls ; the work was done either automatically or from the ground. If an emergency
arose, Gagarin was supposed to receive an override code that would allow him to take manual
control, but Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the Soviet space program, disregarded protocol
and gave the code to the pilot prior to the flight.
Over the course of 108 minutes, Vostok 1 traveled around the Earth once, reaching a
maximum height of 203 miles (327 kilometers). The spacecraft carried 10 days' worth of
provisions in case the engines failed and Gagarin was required to wait for the orbit to
naturally decay. But the supplies were unnecessary. Gagarin re-entered Earth's atmosphere,
managing to maintain consciousness as he experienced forces up to eight times the pull of
gravity during his descent.
The BBC remembers how on his return to earth, Gagarin parachuted into some farmland several
hundred miles from Moscow â€" "much to the surprise of a five-year-old girl who was
out in the fields planting potatoes."
The BBC also published a look at
Gagarin's global fame in the years that followed â€" and Phys.org notes that
even today, there are few people more
universally admired in Russia than Yuri Gagarin : His smiling face adorns murals across
the country. He stands, arms at his sides as if zooming into space, on a pedestal 42.5 metres
(140 feet) above the traffic flowing on Moscow's Leninsky Avenue. He is even a favourite
subject of tattoos... The anniversary of Gagarin's historic flight on April 12, 1961
â€" celebrated every year in Russia as Cosmonautics Day â€" sees Russians
of all ages lay flowers at monuments to his accomplishment across the country...
Gagarin, says historian Alexander Zheleznyakov, was a figure who helped fuel the
imagination. "He transformed us from a simple biological species to one that could imagine an
entire universe beyond Earth."
"... They have looted businesses, burned churches, assaulted police officers, attacked and harassed ordinary citizens eating in restaurants or going about their normal lives "and all with impunity." No FBI raids, no systematic arrests, no dissemination of "Wanted" images on social media. ..."
"... Now I turn to my second contrast: the recent FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani's home and office, while there has been no raid on the home or office of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo . Start with Giuliani: The ostensible justification for the raid was to look for evidence Giuliani violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. ..."
"... Moreover, Giuliani had for several months been offering the FBI clear evidence, corroborated by texts and emails, that Hunter Biden not only allegedly failed to register as a foreign agent, but also that he was allegedly involved in child pornography, money laundering, and an elaborate Biden family scheme to sell their political access in exchange for millions of dollars in personal gain. ..."
"... Giuliani seems warranted in concluding that the agency's conduct is a "clear example of a corrupt double standard": "One for high-level Democrats whose blatant crimes are ignored, such as Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden" and quite another for "Republicans who are prominent supporters and defender of President Trump." ..."
For a long time, the FBI
has stood as the admirable symbol of a police agency of government, implacably going after the bad guys and neutrally enforcing
the laws. This is the FBI of the movie "The Untouchables," in which special agent Eliot Ness leads his devoted crew of armed
agents in a heroic battle against the forces of organized crime.
Well, forget about the Untouchables. Today's FBI has quite obviously been
corrupted from the top. This is a process that seems to have begun under President Barack
Obama, endured during the Donald Trump years, and has now reached its unfortunate nadir under
President Joe Biden. It's time for conservatives and Republicans to start
thinking about getting rid of the FBI.
I want to highlight two sets of contrasting episodes that give us a window into how biased
and partisan this once-respected agency has now become.
Contrast the treatment the FBI has given to Jan. 6 activists with that it has afforded to
Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters.
The FBI has unrelentingly hunted down Jan. 6 protesters, in many cases confronting Trump
supporters who were merely in Washington at the time, or at the mall rally but not involved in
entering the Capitol. Those who have been arrested have been treated like domestic terrorists,
captured in raids involving drawn weapons, even though the charges against most of them amount
to little more than trespassing or entering a government facility without proper permission.
Nonviolent offenders have been given the same brutal treatment as violent ones. And to this day
the FBI promulgates images "a grandma here, a teenager there" asking
the public to help them track down still-at-large individuals who had something, anything, to
do with the events of Jan. 6.
Contrast this concentrated effort with the lackadaisical, even disinterested, approach of
the FBI to the Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists. Over a period of many months, those
activists have proven far more violent. They have killed a number of people, in contrast to the
Trump activists who killed nobody. (The only person killed on Jan. 6 was Ashli Babbitt, a Trump
supporter shot in the neck by a Capitol police officer.) They have looted businesses, burned
churches, assaulted police officers, attacked and harassed ordinary citizens eating in
restaurants or going about their normal lives "and all with impunity." No FBI raids, no systematic arrests, no dissemination of
"Wanted" images on
social media.
Now I turn to my second contrast: the recent FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani's
home and office, while there has been no raid on the home or office of New York Gov. Andrew
Cuomo . Start with Giuliani: The ostensible justification for the raid was to look for evidence
Giuliani violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Giuliani pointed out in a statement
released by his lawyer, however, that he offered to sit down with the FBI and the Biden
Department of Justice (DOJ) and show them to their satisfaction that there had been no
violation of law. Moreover, Giuliani had for several months been offering the FBI clear
evidence, corroborated by texts and emails, that Hunter Biden not only allegedly failed to
register as a foreign agent, but also that he was allegedly involved in child pornography,
money laundering, and an elaborate Biden family scheme to sell their political access in
exchange for millions of dollars in personal gain.
Both the FBI and the DOJ showed no interest in any of that. Consequently, Giuliani seems
warranted in concluding that the agency's conduct is a "clear example of a corrupt double standard": "One for high-level Democrats whose blatant crimes are ignored, such as
Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden" and quite another for "Republicans who are prominent supporters and defender of President
Trump."
Giuliani
further revealed that the FBI and DOJ had in late 2019 obtained access to his email
database without notifying him. This means that while Giuliani was advising his client Donald
Trump during the impeachment process""a relationship fully protected by attorney""client privilege""the FBI violated the law while supposedly
investigating Giuliani and Trump's possible violations of law.
Here, again, the FBI's extreme diligence in going after Giuliani can be
contrasted with the FBI's failure to act in the case of Gov. Cuomo. Cuomo is
currently involved in two separate scandals, one involving multiple women who have accused him
of sexual harassment, and another involving his direct involvement in a cover-up scheme to hide
the magnitude of nursing home deaths caused by his own policies.
According to the New York
Times , the Cuomo administration was far more culpable than previously known in
deliberately undercounting nursing home deaths over a period of five months.
Let's recall that these deaths need not have occurred. At the direction of
the Trump administration, the U.S. Navy dispatched a hospital ship Comfort to New York to
accept non-coronavirus patients and thus lessen the burden on New York hospitals.
Gov. Cuomo, however, turned the ship away to spite the Trump administration and instead
ordered New York nursing homes to accept the overflow of COVID-19 patients, helping the virus
to spread among vulnerable nursing home populations and thus causing thousands of unnecessary
deaths.
Then, when the Trump administration inquired about the nursing home data in New York, Cuomo
instructed his state health officials, including the health commissioner Howard Zucker, not to
release the true death toll to the federal government, state officials, or the general public.
Cuomo also suppressed a research paper that revealed the data and blocked two letters by
Zucker's department from being sent to state legislators.
While Giuliani's offense remains unclear, Cuomo is guilty of obvious
abuses of power ""actions that have not only put people in their graves but also
amounted, in a statistical sense, to "hiding the bodies." Again,
the FBI is nowhere to be found, and the reason for its absence appears to be that Cuomo is a
Democratic governor who seemingly enjoys immunity as far as today's FBI and
Biden's DOJ are concerned.
Enough is enough! When justice no longer involves the neutral or equal application of the
laws, it ceases to be justice. I realize, of course, that there will be no FBI reform under
Biden. Therefore, I strongly urge the Republican Party to make abolition of the
FBI""shutting down the agency and then reconstructing it from the ground
up""key provisions of its campaigns both in 2022 and 2024.
* * *
Dinesh D'Souza is an author, filmmaker, and daily host of the Dinesh
D'Souza podcast.
"... No, people get their belief systems (religious, political, economic, cultural) from their identity groups. **Then** (if called upon) they apply the intellect to rationalize the beliefs that they **already** hold. ..."
"... Rationalizing the Russiagate nonsense was seemingly inevitable with the 24/7 help of the MSM, and the continuous chirping of Democrat politicians. The intellect was not a lighthouse beacon that led intelligent Democrats through the fog of 24/7/52 issued propaganda, rather; the intellect was the tool that solidified vaporous forms into false-reality. ..."
My two cents. People are mimics. It is fascinating when you realize this.
People don't muse, contemplate and chew over the circumstances and issues in their environment and then resolve - "aha! I have
got it." That is not where people get their belief systems. For example, a million and more people didn't all independently study
the Bible and then realize that their interpretation was fully consistent with those of the Roman Catholics and therefore they
should go join the Catholic Church.
No, people get their belief systems (religious, political, economic, cultural) from their identity groups. **Then** (if
called upon) they apply the intellect to rationalize the beliefs that they **already** hold.
The epiphany came to me when I observed intelligent people falling for Russiagate. WTF !! I thought intelligent people
would get it. Russiagate would be a flash-in-the-pan that would disappear in a few days (or less!). Boy was I wrong. The intellect
does not rule, group identity does. Those that identified Democrat (generalizing here, of course) fell in step with the beliefs
common to Democrats, including Russiagate.
Rationalizing the Russiagate nonsense was seemingly inevitable with the 24/7 help of the MSM, and the continuous chirping
of Democrat politicians. The intellect was not a lighthouse beacon that led intelligent Democrats through the fog of 24/7/52 issued
propaganda, rather; the intellect was the tool that solidified vaporous forms into false-reality.
To find one's identity in groups is deeply human. People are dominated by their need to be group-accepted. It is unsurprising
that group acceptance and group identity produce what we call fashion - fashion in style, fashion in vocabulary, fashion in beliefs.
This applies to Wokism. People are mimics.
"... "If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.." ― Joseph Goebbels ..."
"... 'We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under' ― General Moshe Dayan ..."
I went lateral in researching today's b-post and in so doing came across a Goebbels quote:
"If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam
the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.."
― Joseph Goebbels
And I was sure that I had read something like that before:
'We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under'
― General Moshe Dayan
This one-to-one replay of Red Guards - Wikipedia but with quite
different sponsors ;-) "Hóng Wèibīng was a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized and guided by Chairman Mao
Zedong in 1966 through 1967, during the first phase of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Notable quotes:
"... there is an on-going effort to create fads/movements in which the public becomes caught-up and distracts the from reality. ..."
"... The more binary and controversial the better. Red/Blue. I used to be a big fan of sports but have the opinion it is a pointless waste of time and my life is better for that realization. ..."
"... Characteristics of the Woke: They always attack, especially with insults, like "paranoia nonsense". They never address the actual point made, instead they reinterpret the point to make it appear pure evil. Which allows them to attribute the worst possible motivations on the person they are attacking. Naturally they invent things the other person hadn't even mentioned, like climate change. ..."
"... Again the whole woke 'identity' culture that cancels dissent and promotes 'minorities' in positions of power is simply woke fascism. Just as military recruitment is about turning violent video games real for young men, so too is CIA recruitment about inviting the 'woke' for murder and mayhem in the name 'freedom' without which the woke could not wake. ..."
I think that there is an on-going effort to create fads/movements in which the public
becomes caught-up and distracts the from reality.
The more binary and controversial the
better. Red/Blue. I used to be a big fan of sports but have the opinion it is a pointless
waste of time and my life is better for that realization.
Additionally/tangentially, I feel there is a habit in the English language in particular
to create new words to describe things these words are not well define and generate a lot of
discussion and heat about things that nobody knows what they are actually talking about and
end up arguing the meaning of the words.
People who don't know the new words must try to catch
up or be left out of the discussion. I don't direct this at your discussion. I just wonder how
we might see things if we were constrained to a limited vocabulary - as I am as a programmer
of sorts.
Characteristics of the Woke: They always attack, especially with insults, like "paranoia
nonsense". They never address the actual point made, instead they reinterpret the point to
make it appear pure evil. Which allows them to attribute the worst possible motivations on
the person they are attacking. Naturally they invent things the other person hadn't even
mentioned, like climate change.
Again the whole woke 'identity' culture that cancels dissent and promotes 'minorities' in
positions of power is simply woke fascism. Just as military recruitment is about turning
violent video games real for young men, so too is CIA recruitment about inviting the 'woke'
for murder and mayhem in the name 'freedom' without which the woke could not wake.
I will believe that any of this is worth a shit when Snowden wades in with his
opinion...until then its just another distraction
The CIA is why we can't have "wokeism" about the right issue like global private/public
finance.....where is Occupy 2.0?
The current wokeism is like the pet rocks of old days.....would want folks to focus that
woke on the inherited class structure of the private property West, would we?
"... you make the best point: you have to have something seriously "wrong" with your mind to want a job with these spooks in the first place. you can't spell "sociopath" without "c-i-a". ..."
I asked Google (and thus Wikipedia) what cisgender means?
cisgender /sɪsˈdʒɛndə/ adjective
Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender
corresponds with their birth sex. "this new-found attention to the plight of black trans folks by primarily cisgender allies
is timely and necessary"
On the same page as the search result is a teaser headline:
"How An (the) Ad About Cisgender Backfired Spectacularly"
I've formed the opinion that the BIC (the Billionaires In Charge) want societies atomised
to reduce the likelihood of a revolution involving rope, and nooses. So guess how surprised
I'm not that the BIC's loyal servants/savants, the CIA, are attempting to popularise such
vacuous tosh as yet another addition to the LBGTQUERTY "landscape?"
you make the best point: you have to have something seriously "wrong" with your mind to
want a job with these spooks in the first place. you can't spell "sociopath" without
"c-i-a".
both the bold - and to a lesser extent the italics - are terms people use to sound
interesting when they're not. especially the tendency toward self-diagnosis that westerners
have; "i'm not dumb with no attention span ...i have " ADHD " or "i don't have
low self esteem or work-related anxiety based on the inner knowldge of how inept i am...i
have " imposter syndrome ".
the woke types tend to be this kind of malleable and empty vessel...which is what the
"company" wants.
Thanks for bringing this issue to the main page in a brief article, b. I linked to
this
article, "CIA & The Woke Totalitarian Generation" , on the Week in Review thread, but
it generated no additional comment despite its being one of several recent essays on the
issue of the contrived Wokeism "culture" that Alastair Crooke's written about on several
occasions over the past months and Pepe Escobar made the focus of his most recent essay.
Crooke argues that Wokeism is the peculiar and singular outcome of the American Malaise
prominently exposed by Christopher Lasch in his 1994 Revolt of the Elites , which
we've seen in the trenches as the war being waged against the State and citizenry by the
Neoliberal Rentier Class that was explained well in this Renegade Inc
interview from last year .
The Outlaw US Empire is clearly trying hard to get its
Neoliberal vassals to adopt the Woke insanity, which proves beyond doubt Putin's assertion
that the Liberalism of the West has died or worse evolved into something profane and
loathsome.
"... " 'Hate Inc.' is a book about the way the news media business has commoditized anger and division, eschewing traditional fact-based reporting and objectivity in favor of a new strategy based on telling audiences what they want to hear," Taibbi said. ..."
"Matt Taibbi's "˜Hate Inc.' Getting Turned Into Documentary by Vespucci (EXCLUSIVE)" [
Variety
].
"As a company that works closely with journalists
from around the world, we remain conscious of the evolution of media and audio-visual news,' said Vespucci co-founders Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcan.
"Hate Inc." expertly dissects the current state of the media
landscape, and through the lens of Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent," Matt asks of us, viewers, to
hold accountable our news providers.
The timing of the book couldn't be more
critical and a documentary as an extension of Matt's commentary feels only fitting.
" 'Hate Inc.'
is a book about the way the news media business has commoditized anger and division, eschewing
traditional fact-based reporting and objectivity in favor of a new strategy based on telling
audiences what they want to hear," Taibbi said.
"˜Because
much of this transformation took place in visual and auditory media, the subject easily lends
itself to a documentary "" in fact, even as I was writing the book, I was aware it
may be a story more easily told on screen.'"
"... In 20 years, the movie Office Space will seem to young people like watching a Western. ..."
"... Possibly--but like a good western. The themes and characters in the movie are universal and timeless. Nearly everyone has worked for Lumberg at one time or another. It may seem far-fetched to future generations that there were ever programmers in this country. ..."
"... Office buildings could all readily be re-purposed to grow weed. ..."
In 20 years, the movie Office Space will seem to young people like watching a Western.
Midas 21 minutes ago
Possibly--but like a good western. The themes and characters in the movie are universal
and timeless. Nearly everyone has worked for Lumberg at one time or another. It may seem
far-fetched to future generations that there were ever programmers in this country.
Kickaha 1 hour ago
Office buildings could all readily be re-purposed to grow weed.
I think CIA counter-intelligence now is in very unenviable position. This woman is a poster girl for recruitment by
foreign agencies. This level of narcissism and lack of introspection means that she can be easily manipulated and support "the right
cause"
Katie Halper and Esha Krishnaswamy roast the "brilliance intoxicator":
The CIA Gets Woke (8 min "" Katie Halper's YouTube channel,
May 4, 2021)
Notable quotes:
"... In a mind-blowing marketing video first published on March 25, but which had escaped widespread notice until recent days, the CIA enthusiastically endorsed several key tenets of what has now indisputably become a hegemonic left/liberal ideological and rhetorical construct: ..."
"... my existence is not a box-checking exercise ..."
"... She continues, "I used to struggle with imposter syndrome . But at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupy ." ..."
"... if the CIA wants to hire more such people I am all for it. Folks who can not leave their personal issues at the door typically muck up their workplace and create productivity problems. A less effective CIA will be a plus for the rest of the world. ..."
"... And for some levity, here's some much deserved satire on the CIA vid. https://twitter.com/blaireerskine/status/1389313897304399877?s=20 ..."
"... Like b suggests: never stop/prevent the enemy (which is what CIA is, for most people) from making a mistake. The sooner they replace their cadre with woke idiots the better for humanity and the chances of our survival. ..."
"... Over 50% of The Company's light lifting is subbed out to contractors, and most of the Langley smurfs are busy "analyzing" data, soooo desk jockey much? It would be fun to track where the diversity hires actually go ..."
"... Utter bullshit indeed. Listing all the boxes she checks and then adding "my existence is not a box-checking exercise" is comical in itself. Hopefully b is right and the CIA will be less effective for the inclusion of people like her. ..."
Michael Tracey writes
about a weird CIA video that is making the rounds (emphasis added):
In a mind-blowing marketing video first published on March 25, but which had escaped widespread notice until recent days, the
CIA enthusiastically endorsed several key tenets of what has now indisputably become a hegemonic left/liberal ideological and
rhetorical construct:
" I am a woman of color ," the video's
protagonist, an unnamed CIA officer, triumphantly proclaims. "I am a cisgender millennial who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety
disorder. I am intersectional , but my existence is not a box-checking exercise ."
She continues, "I used to struggle with imposter syndrome . But at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas
of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupy ."
I have to admit that I do not know what the words in bold are supposed to mean. (Nor does my Firefox spellchecker. It flags
them.)
I also do not understand the italicized phrases. To me they sounds like utter bullshit. But if the CIA wants to hire more such people I am all for it. Folks who can not leave their personal issues at the door typically
muck up their workplace and create productivity problems. A less effective CIA will be a plus for the rest of the world.
It would be interesting if 'em spooks started cancelling each other for some 10 yo tweets, or for not being transsexual, or
for the white supremacist mindset demonstrated by remembering the multiplication table.
Oh! You definitely should learn that NewSpeak. Yes, it's ridicelous, knowing this babble hasn't any intrinsic value. It is
,however, the current ruling ideology of the USA and by extension the broader West. It's like understanding the babble of some
obscure theoretician or the basic terminology of some remote religion. You can safely ignore all of this as nonsense - as long
as such people don't run a country!
Posted by: m | May 5 2021 14:13 u
Like b suggests: never stop/prevent the enemy (which is what CIA is, for most people) from making a mistake. The sooner they
replace their cadre with woke idiots the better for humanity and the chances of our survival.
Yeah this video took a nice beating on The Hedge....frikkin hilarious!
Over 50% of The Company's light lifting is subbed out to
contractors, and most of the Langley smurfs are busy "analyzing" data, soooo desk jockey much? It would be fun to track where
the diversity hires actually go, but hey I've got a garden to build!
Utter bullshit indeed. Listing all the boxes she checks and then adding "my existence is not a box-checking exercise" is comical
in itself. Hopefully b is right and the CIA will be less effective for the inclusion of people like her.
@b In your last sentence 'the' before CIA is superfluous, it appears you cut down a larger sentence incorrectly.
The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that
the
plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The
democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is
emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the
possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.
But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is
able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb
of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both
politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the
same.
So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences
for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist
oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?
Last month a very informative interview saw the
CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses
algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.
At the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Technology Governance Summit,
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told
Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment
videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important
areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative
sourcesâ€.
“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms
to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found
when it comes to music or humor or something funny,†Wojcicki said.
“But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we
really need to take a different approach.â€
Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a
category labeled “borderline content†which it algorithmically
de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are
interested in that topic:
“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources
that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera.
And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes
we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality
and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So
that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that
we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in
terms of handling all these different content types.â€
https://www.youtube.com/embed/r2ONsgx4Mxw
Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to
Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has
been grouped in the “borderline†category because his views and
new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that
overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a
thousand.
“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see
on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,â€
Kulinski says.
“People are coming here to escape that and you’re
gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and
Fox News.â€
It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the
oligarchic empire to the CEO of a
neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite
empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed
in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having
gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a
child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company
23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In
2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that
it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in
traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims , reporting that
“Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove
certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.†In
2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a
Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only
censors right wing content.
Then you’ve got Facebook, where
a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its
status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded
imperialist
narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor
and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if
its “fact checkers†like The Atlantic Council deem a page or
domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce
the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on
Facebook.â€
All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also
ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media
on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive
far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media
employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide.
Meanwhile left and antiwar voices,
including myself , have been complaining for years that Twitter
artificially throttles their follower count.
If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley
megacorporations , the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which
manufacture consent
for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These
tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.
* * *
My work is
entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around,
liking me on Facebook
, following my antics on Twitter , or
throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal . If you want to read more you can buy
my books . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,
has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else
I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. The best way to get
around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the
mailing list for at my website or
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get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I
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click here .
Several previous studies have examined the risks across generations of radiation exposure
from events such as this, but have yielded inconclusive results. In this study, the
investigators analyzed the genomes
of 130 children and parents from families where one or both parents were exposed to
radiation due to the Chernobyl accident, and where children were conceived afterward and born
between 1987 and 2002.
There was no increase in gene changes in reproductive cells of study participants, and
rates of new germline mutations were similar to those in the general population, according to a
team led by Meredith Yeager of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Rockville,
Md.
In the early days of the virus pandemic, things didn't look so hot for the field of plastic survey. Hospitals were overrun with
COVID-19 infections and banned all elective procedures, limiting plastic surgeries. But sometime after, when the economy reopened,
and hospitals allowed elective surgeries, demand for butt implants soared.
Bloomberg , citing data from the
American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), says there were broad declines for minimally invasive and surgical cosmetic procedures
during 2020. Botox and soft-tissue fillers remained popular with consumers.
But it was buttock augmentation, or butt implants were
a massive hit among consumers.
Cosmetic procedures for the implants last year were up 22%, from 970 to 1,179.
"...they are terrorists. They hate me. They hate my uniform. They don't care if I die
..."
We have been
discussing the termination of public employees and others for their postings on social
media or public displays. The latest case is out of New Jersey where former Hopewell Township
police officer Sara Erwin was fired recent over a June 2020 posting on Facebook in which she
referred to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters as "terrorists."
There remains an uncertain line of what political or social views are tolerated and what are
barred on social media. Indeed, Sgt.
Mandy Gray was suspended and demoted for simply liking the June 2020 post.
Gray was the first female officer hired in Hopewell Township and became the first female
sergeant in 2019, according to
NJ.com.
Erwin insists that she posted the statement after she and her colleagues were faced with
violent protests and family members who were traumatized by images on television of officers
being attacked. Erwin reportedly wrote i:
" Last night as I left for work I had my two kids crying for me not to go to work. I don't
think I've ever felt the way I did last night. And then I watched people I know and others I
care about going into harms way. I love my police family like my own. So when you share posts
and things on Facebook I'd really appreciate if you'd THINK before doing so. I've seen so
many black lives matter [sic] hashtags in these posts. Just to let you know -- they are
terrorists. They hate me. They hate my uniform. They don't care if I die. "
Hopewell
Township Mayor Julie Blake and the town's council made the decision to fire her in an
unanimous vote to accept the recommendations of a hearing officer.
As will come as little surprise to many on this blog, my default is in favor of free
speech.
My concern is the lack of a consistent rule. For example, would the town have fired Erwin if
she said the same thing about another group like the Proud Boys or the NRA?
I can understand the objection to the posting. BLM is a group committed to fighting police
abuse and regularly engages in protests. For an officer to express such bias against BLM can
exacerbate tensions in such protests. However, officers also have a right to be able to express
themselves . The balance of those interests should, at a minimum, have favored a reprimand
rather than a termination for Erwin. If not, the town should establish a clear standard as to
what public employees are allowed to express on political and social issues. This includes
whether certain groups can be criticized but not others.
The action taken by Hopewell Township raises more questions than answers on where this line
is drawn in terms of free speech.
ay_arrow
Billy the Poet 1 hour ago
I can understand the objection to the posting. BLM is a group committed to fighting police
abuse and regularly engages in protests. For an officer to express such bias against BLM can
exacerbate tensions in such protests. However, officers also have a right to be able to
express themselves. The balance of those interests should, at a minimum, have favored a
reprimand rather than a termination for Erwin. If not, the town should establish a clear
standard as to what public employees are allowed to express on political and social issues.
This includes whether certain groups can be criticized but not others.
Turley reminds us that rules must be followed consistently if they are to have validity
but I think the larger point is that there are no rules anymore. The former rule book is now
used exclusively as a bludgeon by entitled parties.
Global Times seems to have declared an Open Season today on the Outlaw US Empire
and its vassals/lackeys with a Broadside of articles that build on yestaerday's outstanding editorial
. First is this Infographic that asks six
pertinent questions based on FDR's Four Freedoms that are now at the core of Western Values
despite their being completely disregarded. Next we have Blinken making a fool of himself
again at the China-hosted virtual session of the UNSC for claiming to uphold the UN
Charter that the Outlaw US Empire's violated daily since 1945 and by attempting to smear
others for violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when the Empire isn't even a
party to that treaty, never having ratified it. But the stunner comes from an odd source,
The Guardian , which cited a new poll:
"Reported by the Guardian on Wednesday, another poll in Western countries shows that
the US is seen as more of a threat to democracy than Russia and China , with 44
percent of respondents in the 53 countries concerned that the US threatens democracy in their
country.
"'They show neither the US, nor the G7, can simply assume the mantle of defenders of
democracy,' the Guardian said." [My Emphasis]
It can't be said the Chinese don't have a sense of humor since this article and the graphic it's
based on certainly prove otherwise--it's a big dig at how far the mighty have fallen
comparing the current G-7 and additional lackeys with those nations that invaded China 120
years ago.
"China's exports to the US rose 49.3 percent while imports gained 53.3 percent, and the
trade surplus with the US was 653.89 billion yuan, an increase of 47 percent . [My
Emphasis]
It seems all the Anti-China rhetoric and Congressional hearings only serve to increase
that dependence. The reason why is simple: the Neoliberal System is designed to do just that,
and Biden along with Congress is doing nothing to reverse that basic problem.
Lavrov "stating facts" at the virtual UNSC meeting is also a blistering critique of the
Outlaw US Empire and its EU vassals. Here is the beginning of the meat portion of his speech
that continues for another ten paragraphs:
"The core tenets of international law enshrined in the UN Charter have withstood the test
of time. Russia calls on all states to unconditionally follow the purposes and principles of
the Charter as they chart their foreign policies, respecting the sovereign equality of
states, not interfering in their internal affairs, settling disputes by political and
diplomatic means, and renouncing the threat or use of force. This is especially important at
the current stage in the difficult process of forming an international multipolar system. At
a time when new centres of economic growth, financial and political influence are gaining
strength, it is necessary to preserve the internationally recognised legal basis for building
a stable balance of interests that meets the new realities.
"Unfortunately, not all of our partners are driven by the imperative to work in good faith
to promote comprehensive multilateral cooperation. Realising that it is impossible to impose
their unilateral or bloc priorities on other states within the framework of the UN, the
leading Western countries have tried to reverse the process of forming a polycentric world
and slow down the course of history.
"Toward this end, the concept of the rules-based order is advanced as a substitute for
international law. It should be noted that international law already is a body of rules, but
rules agreed at universal platforms and reflecting consensus or broad agreement. The West's
goal is to oppose the collective efforts of all members of the world community with other
rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else. We only
see harm in such actions that bypass the UN and seek to usurp the only decision-making
process that can claim global relevance."
I thought this one of his best arrows, although others were equally sharp and on
target:
"By the way, as soon as we suggest discussing the current state of democracy not just
within states but on the international stage with our Western colleagues, they lose interest
in the conversation."
And Lavrov's facts are not out of line with global opinion as revealed by the info
supplied @26 above.
This is starting to look really like staging of "Brave new world..." Today's society is
closer to Huxley's "Brave New World" than to Orwell's "1984". But there are clear elements of
both. If you will, the worst of both worlds has come true today.
In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four , Aldous
Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931), who was then living in California, wrote to
Orwell. Huxley had briefly taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.
Huxley generally praises Orwell's novel, which to many seemed very similar to Brave New
World in its dystopian view of a possible future. Huxley politely voices his opinion that his
own version of what might come to pass would be truer than Orwell's. Huxley observed that the
philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is sadism, whereas his own version is
more likely, that controlling an ignorant and unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less
wasteful by other means. Huxley's masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell's with
sadism and fear.
The most powerful quote In Huxley's letter to Orwell is this:
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant
conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs
and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting
people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Aldous Huxley.
Could Huxley have more prescient? What do we see around us?
Masses of people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal. The majority of advertisements
that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs, some of them miraculous but most of
them unnecessary. Then comes COVID, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the
Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China. The powers that be tragically deferred
to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping for just such an opportunity. Suddenly, there
was an opportunity to test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty
years. They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still highly experimental.
These jabs are not really vaccines at all, but a form of gene therapy . There
are potential
disastrous consequences down the road. Government experiments on the public are
nothing new .
Since there have been no actual, long-term trials, no one who contributed to this massive
drug experiment knows what the long-term consequences might be. There have been countless
adverse injuries and deaths already for which the government-funded vaccine producers will
suffer no liability. With each passing day, new side-effects have begun to appear: blood clots,
seizures, heart failure.
As new adverse reactions become known despite the censorship employed by most media outlets,
the more the Biden administration is pushing the vaccine, urging private corporations to make
it mandatory for all employees. Colleges are making them mandatory for all students returning
to campus.
The leftmedia are advocating the "shunning" of the unvaccinated. The self-appointed
virtue-signaling Democrats are furious at anyone and everyone who declines the jab. Why? If
they are protected, why do they care? That is the question. Same goes for the ridiculous mask
requirements . They protect no one but for those in operating rooms with their insides
exposed, yet even the vaccinated are supposed to wear them!
Months ago, herd immunity was near. Now Fauci and the CDC say it will never be achieved? Now
the Pfizer shot will necessitate yearly booster shots. Pfizer
expects to make $21B this year from its COVID vaccine! Anyone who thinks this isn't about
money is a fool. It is all about money, which is why Fauci, Gates, et al. were so determined to
convince the public that HCQ and ivermectin, both of which are effective, prophylactically and
as treatment, were not only useless, but dangerous. Both of those drugs are tried, true, and
inexpensive. Many of those thousands of N.Y. nursing home fatalities might have been prevented
with the use of one or both of those drugs. Those deaths are on the hands of Cuomo and his
like-minded tyrants drunk on power.
Months ago, Fauci, et al. agreed that children were at little or no risk of getting COVID,
of transmitting it, least of all dying from it. Now Fauci is demanding that all teens be
vaccinated by the end of the year! Why? They are no more in danger of contracting it now than
they were a year ago. Why are parents around this country not standing up to prevent their kids
from being guinea pigs in this monstrous medical experiment? And now they are " experimenting
" on infants. Needless to say, some have died. There is no reason on Earth for teens, children,
and infants to be vaccinated. Not one.
Huxley also wrote this:
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they
will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be
able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' -- this is the height
of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats ."
Perhaps this explains the left's hysterical impulse to force these untested shots on those
of us who have made the decision to go without it. If they've decided that it is the thing to
do, then all of us must submit to their whims. If we decide otherwise, it gives them the
righteous right to smear all of us whom they already deplore.
As C.J. Hopkins has
written , the left means to criminalize dissent. Those of us who are vaccine-resistant are
soon to be outcasts, deprived of jobs and entry into everyday businesses. This kind of
discrimination should remind everyone of ...oh, Germany three quarters of a century ago. Huxley
also wrote, "The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other
sets of people are human." That is precisely what the left is up to, what BLM is planning, what
Critical Race Theory is all about.
Tal Zaks, Moderna's chief medical officer, said these new vaccines are "hacking the
software of life." Vaccine-promoters claim he never said this, but he did. Bill Gates called
the vaccines " an operating
system " to the horror of those promoting it, a Kinsley gaffe. Whether it is or isn't
hardly matters at this point, but these statements by those behind the vaccines are a clue to
what they have in mind.
There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love
their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears , so to speak, producing a kind of
painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their
liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.
This is exactly what the left is working so hard to effect: a pharmacologically compromised
population happy to be taken care of by a massive state machine. And while millions of people
around the world have surrendered to the vaccine and mask hysteria, millions more, about 1.3
billion, want no part of this government vaccine mania.
In his letter to Orwell, Huxley ended with the quote cited above and again here because it
is so profound:
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant
conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs
and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting
people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Huxley nailed the left more than seventy years ago, perhaps because leftists have never
changed throughout the ages. 61,497 173
Fat Beaver 14 hours ago (Edited)
If i am to be treated as an outcast or an undesirable because i refuse the vax, i will
immediately become someone that has zero reverence for the law, and i can only imagine 10's
of millions will be right there with me.
strych10 14 hours ago
Welcome to the club.
We have coffee in the corner and occasional meetings at various bars.
Dr. Chihuahua-González 13 hours ago
I'm a doctor, you could contact me anytime and receive your injection.
Fat Beaver 13 hours ago (Edited)
I've gotta feeling the normie world you think you live in is about to change drastically
for the worse...
sparky139 PREMIUM 10 hours ago
You mean you'll sign papers that you injected us *wink *wink? And toss it away?
bothneither 2 hours ago
Oh geez how uncommon, another useless doctor with no Scruples who sold out to big Pharma.
Please have my Gates sponsored secret sauce.
Unknown 6 hours ago (Edited)
Both Huxley and Orwell are wrong. Neoliberalism (the use of once office for personal
gains) is by far the most powerful force that subjugates the inept population. Neoliberalism
demolished the mighty USSR, now destroying the USA, and will do the same to China. And this
poison dribbles from the top to bottom creating self-centered population that is unable to
unite, much less resist.
Deathrips 15 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Tylers.
You gonna cover Tucker Carlsons show earlier today on FOX news about vaxxx deaths? almost 4k
reported so far this year.
Is the population of india up in arms or is the MSM?
Nelbev 10 hours ago
Facebook just flagged/censored it, must sign into see vid, Tuck also failed to mention
mRNA and adenovirus vaxes were experimental and not FDA approved nor gone through stage III
trials. Beside deaths, have blood clot issues. Good he mentioned how naturally immune if get
covid and recovered, better than vaccine, but not covered for bogus passports. Me personally,
I would rather catch covid and get natural immunity than be vaccinated with an untested
experimental vaccine.
Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya; Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche; Dr. Ron Brown; Dr. Ryan Cole; Dr.
Richard Fleming; Dr. Simone Gold; Dr. Sunetra Gupta; Dr. Carl Heneghan; Dr. Martin Kulldorff;
Dr. Paul Marik; Dr. Peter McCullough; Dr. Joseph Mercola; Dr. Lee Merritt; Dr. Judy Mikovits;
Dr. Dennis Modry; Dr. Hooman Noorchashm; Dr. Harvey Risch; Dr. Sherri Tenpenny; Dr. Richard
Urso; Dr. Michael Yeadon;
Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya; Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche; Dr. Ron Brown; Dr. Ryan Cole; Dr.
Richard Fleming; Dr. Simone Gold; Dr. Sunetra Gupta; Dr. Carl Heneghan; Dr. Martin Kulldorff;
Dr. Paul Marik; Dr. Peter McCullough; Dr. Joseph Mercola; Dr. Lee Merritt; Dr. Judy Mikovits;
Dr. Dennis Modry; Dr. Hooman Noorchashm; Dr. Harvey Risch; Dr. Sherri Tenpenny; Dr. Richard
Urso; Dr. Michael Yeadon;
His making of the gamma and delta workforce was quite prescient. We are seeing it play out
now, we all know gammas and delta. There was a really good ABC tv movie made in 1980 Brave
New World. Excellent show, it shows the Alphas and names them Rothchild and so on. Shows what
these people specifically want to do to the world. I wonder if the ruling psychopaths
actually wait for science fiction authors to plan the future and then follow their
script.
Mineshaft Gap 10 hours ago
If Huxley were starting out today no major publisher would touch him.
They'd tell him Brave New World doesn't have a diverse enough of cast. Even the mostly
likable totalitarian guy named Mustapha turns out to be white! A white Mustapha. It's soooo
triggering. Also, what's wrong with a little electronic fun and drug taking, anyway? Lighten
up , Aldous.
Meanwhile his portrait of shrieking medieval Catholic nuns who think they're possessed in
The Devils of Loudun might remind the leftist editors too uncomfortably of their own recent
bleating performances at "White Fragility" struggle sessions.
Yves here. Mark Blyth is such a treat. How can you not be a fan of the man who coined "The
Hamptons are not a defensible position"? Even though he's not always right, he's so incisive
and has such a strong point of view that his occasional questionable notions serve as fodder
for thought. And I suspect he'll be proven correct on his topic today, the inflation bugaboo.
Yves here. Mark Blyth is such a treat. How can you not be a fan of the man who coined "The
Hamptons are not a defensible position"? Even though he's not always right, he's so incisive
and has such a strong point of view that his occasional questionable notions serve as fodder
for thought. And I suspect he'll be proven correct on his topic today, the inflation bugaboo.
Even though he's not always right, he's so incisive and has such a strong point of view that
his occasional questionable notions serve as fodder for thought. And I suspect he'll be proven
correct on his topic today, the inflation bugaboo. Even though he's not always right, he's so
incisive and has such a strong point of view that his occasional questionable notions serve as
fodder for thought. And I suspect he'll be proven correct on his topic today, the inflation
bugaboo. By Paul Jay.
... ... ...
Paul Jay
And is the idea that inflation is about to come roaring back one of the stupid
ideas that you're talking about? And is the idea that inflation is about to come roaring back
one of the stupid ideas that you're talking about?
Mark Blyth
I hope that it is, but I'm going to go with Larry on this one. He says it's
about one third chance that it's going to do this. I'd probably give it about one in ten, so
it's not impossible.
So, let's unpack why we're going to see this. Can you generate inflation? Yeah. I mean, dead
easy. Imagine your Turkey. Why not be a kind of Turkish pseudo dictator?
Why not fire the head of your central bank in an economy that's basically dependent on other
people valuing your assets and giving you money through capital flows? And then why don't you
fire the central bank head and put in charge your brother-in-law? I think it was his
brother-in-law. And then insist that low interest rates cure inflation. And then watch as the
value of your currency, the lira collapses, which means all the stuff you import is massively
expensive, which means that people will pay more, and the general level of all prices will go
up, which is an inflation. So, can you generate an inflation in the modern world? Sure, yeah.
Easy. Just be an idiot, right? Now, does this apply to the United States? No. That's where it
gets entirely different. So, a couple of things to think about (first). So, you mentioned that
huge number of 20 trillion dollars. Well, that's more or less about two thirds of what we threw
into the global economy after the global financial crisis, and inflation singularly failed to
show up. All those people in 2010 screaming about inflation and China dumping bonds and all
that. Totally wrong. Completely wrong. No central bank that's got a brass nameplate worth a
damn has managed to hit its inflation target of two percent in over a decade. All that would
imply that there is a huge amount of what we call "˜slack' in the economy. (Also) think
about the fact that we've had, since the 1990s, across the OECD, by any measure, full
employment. That is to say, most people who want a job can actually find one, and at the same
time, despite that, there has been almost no price pressure coming from wages, pushing on into
prices, to push up inflation. So rather than the so-called vertical Phillips curve, which most
of modern macro is based upon, whereby there's a kind of speed bump for the economy, and if the
government spends money, it can't push this curve out, all it can do is push it up in terms of
prices. What we seem to actually have is one whereby you can have a constant level of
inflation, which is very low, and any amount of unemployment you want from 2 percent to 12
percent, depending on where you look and in which time-period.
All of which suggests that at least for big developed, open, globalized economies, where
you've destroyed trade unions, busted up national product cartels, globally integrated your
markets, and added 600 million people to the global labor supply, you just can't generate
inflation very easily. Now, we're running, depending on how much actually passes, a two to five
trillion-dollar experiment on which theory of inflation is right. This one, or is it this one?
That's basically what we're doing just now. Larry's given it one in three that it's his one.
I'd give it one in ten his one's right. Now, if I may just go on just for a seconds longer.
This is where the politics of this gets interesting. Most people don't understand what
inflation is. You get all this stuff talked by economists and central bankers about inflation
and expectations and all that, but you go out and survey people and they have no idea what the
damn thing is. Think about the fact that most people talk about house price inflation.
There is no such thing as house price inflation. Inflation is a general rise in the level of
all prices. A sustained rise in the level of prices. The fact that house prices in Toronto have
gone up is because Canada stopped building public housing in the 1980s and turned it into an
asset class and let the 10 percent top earners buy it all and swap it with each other. That is
singularly not an inflation. So, what's going to happen coming out of Covid is there will be a
big pickup in spending, a pickup in employment. I think it's (going to be) less than people
expect because the people with the money are not going to go out and spend it because they have
all they want already. There are only so many Sub-Zero fridges you can buy. Meanwhile, the
bottom 60 percent of the income distribution are too busy paying back debt from the past year
to go on a spending spree, but there definitely will be a pickup. Now, does that mean that
there's going to be what we used to call bottlenecks? Yeah, because basically firms run down
inventory because they're in the middle of a bloody recession. Does it mean that there are
going to be supply chain problems? Yes, we see this with computer chips. So, what's going to
happen is that computer chips are going to go up in price.
So, lots of individual things are going to go up in price, and what's going to happen is
people are going to go "there's the inflation, there's that terrible inflation," and it's not.
It's just basically short-term factors that will dissipate after 18 months. That is my bet. For
Larry to be right what would have to be true?
That we would have to have the institutions, agreements, labor markets and product markets
of the 1970s. We don't.
... ... ...
So, I just don't actually see what the generator of inflation would be. We are not Turkey
dependent on capital imports for our survival with a currency that's falling off a cliff. That
is entirely different. That import mechanism, which is the way that most countries these days
get a bit of inflation. That simply doesn't apply in the U.S. So, with my money on it, if I had
to bet, it's one in 10 Larry's right, rather one in 3.
Paul Jay
The other point he raises, and we talked a little bit about this in a previous
interview, but let's revisit it, is that the size of the American debt, even if it isn't
inflationary at some point, creates some kind of crisis of confidence in the dollar being the
reserve currency of the world, and so this big infrastructure spending is a problem because of
that. That's part of, I believe, one of his arguments. The other point he raises, and we talked
a little bit about this in a previous interview, but let's revisit it, is that the size of the
American debt, even if it isn't inflationary at some point, creates some kind of crisis of
confidence in the dollar being the reserve currency of the world, and so this big
infrastructure spending is a problem because of that. That's part of, I believe, one of his
arguments.
Mark Blyth
The way political economists look at the financial plumbing, I think, is
different to the way that macro economists do. We see it rather differently. The first thing
is, what's your alternative to the dollar unless you're basically going to go all-in on gold or
bitcoin? And good luck with those. If we go into a crushing recession and our bond market
collapses, don't think that Europe's going to be a safe haven given that they've got half the
US growth rate. And we could talk about what Europe's got going on post-pandemic because it's
not that good. So what's your alternative (to the Dollar)? Buy yen? No, not really. You're
going to buy Chinese assets? Well, good luck, and given the way that their country is being run
at the moment, if you ever want to take your capital out. I'm not sure that's going to work for
you, even if you could. So you're kind of stuck with it. Mechanically there's another problem.
All of the countries that make surpluses in the world make surpluses because we run deficits.
One has to balance the other. So, when you're a Chinese firm selling to the United States,
which is probably an American firm in China with Chinese subcontractors selling to the United
States, what happens is they get paid in dollars. When they receive those dollars in China,
they don't let them into the domestic banking system. They sterilize them and they turn them
into the local currency, which is why China has all these (dollar) reserves. That's their
national savings. Would you like to burn your reserves in a giant pile? Well, one way to do
that would be to dump American debt, which would be equivalent to burning your national
savings. If you're a firm, what do you do? Well, you basically have to use dollars for your
invoicing. You have to use dollars for your purchasing, and you keep accumulating dollars,
which you hand back to your central bank, which then hands you the domestic currency. The
central bank then has a problem because it's got a liability " (foreign) cash rather than an
asset. So, what's the easiest asset to buy? Buy another 10-year Treasury bill, rinse and
repeat, rinse and repeat. So, if we were to actually have that type of crisis of confidence,
the people who would actually suffer would be the Germans and the Chinese, because their
export-driven models only makes sense in terms of the deficits that we run. Think of it as kind
of monetarily assured destruction because the plumbing works this way. I just don't see how you
can have that crisis of confidence because you've got nowhere else to take your confidence.
Paul Jay
If I understand it correctly, the majority of American government debt is held
by Americans, so it's actually really the wealth is still inside the United States. I saw a
number, this was done three or four years ago, maybe, but I think it was Brookings Institute,
that assets after liabilities in private hands in the United States is something like 98
trillion dollars. So I don't get where this crisis of confidence is going to come any time
soon. If I understand it correctly, the majority of American government debt is held by
Americans, so it's actually really the wealth is still inside the United States. I saw a
number, this was done three or four years ago, maybe, but I think it was Brookings Institute,
that assets after liabilities in private hands in the United States is something like 98
trillion dollars. So I don't get where this crisis of confidence is going to come any time
soon.
Mark Blyth
Basically, if your economy grows faster (than the rest of the world because
you are) the technological leader, your stock markets grows faster than the others. If you're
an international investor, you want access to that. (That ends) only if there were actual real
deep economic problems (for the US), like, for example, China invents fusion energy and gives
it free to the world. That would definitely screw up Texas. But short of that, it's hard to see
exactly what would be these game-changers that would result in this. And of course, this is
where the Bitcoin people come in. It's all about crypto, and nobody has any faith in the
dollar, and all this sort of stuff. Well, I don't see why we have faith in something (like that
instead . I think it was just last week. There wasn't much reporting on this, I don't know if
you caught this, but there were some twenty-nine-year-old dude ran a crypto exchange. I can't
remember where it was. Maybe somewhere like Turkey. But basically he had two billion in crypto
and he just walked off with the cash. You don't walk off with the Fed, but you could walk off
with a crypto exchange. So until those problems are basically sorted out, the notion that we
can all jump into a digital currency, which at the end of the day, to buy anything, you need to
turn back into a physical currency because you don't buy your coffee with crypto, we're back to
that (old) problem. How do you get out of the dollar? That structural feature is incredibly
important.
Paul Jay
So there's some critique of the Biden infrastructure plan and some of the
other stimulus, coming from the left, because, one, the left more or less agrees with what you
said about inflation, and the critique is that it's actually not big enough, and let me add to
that. I'm kind of a little bit surprised, maybe not anymore, but Wall Street on the whole, not
Larry Summers and a few others, but most of them actually seem quite in support of the Biden
plan. You don't hear a lot of screaming about inflation from Wall Street. Maybe from the
Republicans, but not from listening to Bloomberg Radio. So there's some critique of the Biden
infrastructure plan and some of the other stimulus, coming from the left, because, one, the
left more or less agrees with what you said about inflation, and the critique is that it's
actually not big enough, and let me add to that. I'm kind of a little bit surprised, maybe not
anymore, but Wall Street on the whole, not Larry Summers and a few others, but most of them
actually seem quite in support of the Biden plan. You don't hear a lot of screaming about
inflation from Wall Street. Maybe from the Republicans, but not from listening to Bloomberg
Radio.
Mark Blyth
You don't even hear a lot of screaming about corporate taxes, which is
fascinating, right? You'd think they'd be up in arms about this? I actually spoke to a business
audience recently about this, and I kind of did an informal survey and I said, "why are you
guys not up in arms about this?" And someone that was on the call said, "well, you know, the
Warren Buffet line about you find out who's swimming naked when the tide goes out? What if a
lot of firms that we think are great firms are just really good at tax optimization? What if
those profits are really just contingent on that? That would be really nice to know this
because then we could stop investing in them and invest in better stuff that actually does
things." You don't even hear a lot of screaming about corporate taxes, which is fascinating,
right? You'd think they'd be up in arms about this? I actually spoke to a business audience
recently about this, and I kind of did an informal survey and I said, "why are you guys not up
in arms about this?" And someone that was on the call said, "well, you know, the Warren Buffet
line about you find out who's swimming naked when the tide goes out? What if a lot of firms
that we think are great firms are just really good at tax optimization? What if those profits
are really just contingent on that? That would be really nice to know this because then we
could stop investing in them and invest in better stuff that actually does things."
Paul Jay
And pick up the pieces of what's left of them for a penny if they have to go
down. And pick up the pieces of what's left of them for a penny if they have to go down.
Mark Blyth
Absolutely. Just one thought that we'll circle back, to the left does not
think it's big enough, etc. Well, yes, of course they wouldn't, and this is one of those things
whereby you kind of have to check yourself. I give the inflation problem a one in ten. But what
I'm really dispassionately trying to do is to look at this as just a problem. My political
preferences lie on the side of "˜the state should do more.' They lie on the side of
"˜I think we should have higher real wages.' They lay on the side that says that
"˜populism is something that can be fixed if the bottom 60 percent actually had some kind
of growth.' So, therefore, I like programs that do that. Psychologically, I am predisposed
therefore to discount inflation. I'm totally discounting that because that's my priors and I'm
really deeply trying to check this. In this debate, it's always worth bearing in mind, no one's
doing that. The Republicans and the right are absolutely going to be hell bent on inflation,
not because they necessarily really believe in (inevitable) inflation, (but) because it's a
useful way to stop things happening. And then for the left to turn around and say, well, it
isn't big enough, (is because you might as well play double or quits because, you know, you've
got Biden and that's the best that's going to get. So there's a way in which when we really are
trying to figure out these things, we kind of have to check our partisan preferences because
they basically multiply the errors in our thinking, I think.
Paul Jay
Now, earlier you said that one of the main factors why inflation is
structurally low now, I don't know if you said exactly those words. Now, earlier you said that
one of the main factors why inflation is structurally low now, I don't know if you said exactly
those words.
Mark Blyth
I would say that yes. I would say that yes.
Paul Jay
Is the weakness of the unions, the weakness of workers in virtually all
countries, but particularly in the U.S., because it matters so much. That organizing of workers
is just, they're so unable to raise their wages over decades of essentially wages that barely
keep up with inflation and don't grow in any way, certainly not in any relationship to the way
productivity has grown. So we as progressives, well, we want workers to get better organized.
We want stronger unions. We want higher wages, but we want it without inflation. Is the
weakness of the unions, the weakness of workers in virtually all countries, but particularly in
the U.S., because it matters so much. That organizing of workers is just, they're so unable to
raise their wages over decades of essentially wages that barely keep up with inflation and
don't grow in any way, certainly not in any relationship to the way productivity has grown. So
we as progressives, well, we want workers to get better organized. We want stronger unions. We
want higher wages, but we want it without inflation.
Mark Blyth
And it's a question of how much room you have to do that. I mean,
essentially, if you quintuple the money supply, eventually prices will have to rise"¦but
that depends upon the velocity of money which has actually been collapsing. So maybe you'd have
to do it 10 times. There's interesting research out of London, which I saw a couple of weeks
ago, that basically says you really can't correlate inflation with increases in the money
supply. It's just not true. It's not the money that's doing it. It's the expectations. That
then begs the question, well, who's actually paying attention if we all don't really understand
what inflation is? So I tend to think of this as basically a kind of a physical process. It's
very easy to understand if your currency goes down by 50 percent and you're heavily dependent
on imports. You're import (prices) go up. All the prices in the shops are going to go up.
That's a mechanism that I can clearly identify that will generate rising prices. If you have
big unions, if you have kind of cartel-like vertically integrated firms that control the
national market, if you have COLA contracts. If you have labor able to do what we used to call
leapfrogging wage claims against other unions, if this is all institutionally and legally
protected, I can see how that generates inflation, that is a mechanism I can point to. That
doesn't exist just now. Let's unpack this for a minute. The sort of fundamental theoretical
assumption on this is based is some kind of "˜marginal productivity theory of wages.' In
a perfectly free market with free exchange, in which we don't live, what would happen is you
would hire me up to the point that my marginal product is basically paying off for you, and
once it produces zero profits, that's kind of where my wages end. I'm paid up to the point that
my marginal product is useful to the firm. This is not really a useful way of thinking about it
because if you're the employer and I'm the worker, and I walk up to you and say, hey, my
marginal productivity is seven, so how about you pay me seven bucks? You just say, shut up or
I'll fire you and get someone else. Now, the way that we used to deal with this was a kind of
"˜higher than your outside option,' on wages. The way we used to think about this was
"why would you pay somebody ten bucks at McDonald's?" Because then you might actually get them
to and flip the burgers because they're outside option is probably seven bucks, and if you pay
them seven bucks, they just won't show up. So we used to have to pay workers a bit more. So
that was, in a sense, (workers) claiming (a bit of the surplus) from productivity. But now what
we've done, Suresh Naidu the economist was talking about this the other day, is we have all
these technologies for surveilling workers (instead of paying them more). So now what we can do
is take that difference between seven and ten and just pocket it because we can actually pay
workers at your outside option, because I monitor everything you do, and if you don't do
exactly what I say I'll fire you, and get somebody else for seven bucks. So all the mechanisms
for the sharing of sharing productivity, unions, technology, now lies in the hands of
employers. It's all going against labor. So (as a result) we have this fiction that somehow
when the economy grows, our productivity goes up, and workers share in that. Again, what's the
mechanism? Once you take out unions and once you weaponize the ability of employers to extract
surplus through mechanisms like technology, franchising, all the rest of it, then it just tilts
the playing field so much that we just don't see any increase in wages. (Now) let's bring this
back to inflation. Unless you see systematic (and sustained) increases in the real wage that
increases costs for firms to the point that they need to push on prices, I just don't see the
mechanism for generating inflation. It just isn't there. And we've underpaid the bottom 60
percent of the U.S. labor market so long it would take a hell of a lot of wage inflation to get
there, with or without unions.
Paul Jay
Yeah, what's that number, that if the minimum wage was adjusted for inflation
and it was what the minimum wage was, what, 30 years ago, the minimum wage would be somewhere
between 25 and 30 bucks, and that wasn't causing raging inflation. Yeah, what's that number,
that if the minimum wage was adjusted for inflation and it was what the minimum wage was, what,
30 years ago, the minimum wage would be somewhere between 25 and 30 bucks, and that wasn't
causing raging inflation.
Mark Blyth
And there is that RAND study from November 2020 that was adeninely entitled, "˜Trends
in Income 1979 to 2020,' and they calculated, and I think this is the number, but even if I'm
off, the order of magnitude is there, that transfers, because of tax and regulatory changes,
from the 90th percentile of the distribution to the 10 percentile, totalled something in the
order of $34 trillion. That's how much was vacuumed up and practically nothing trickled down.
So when you consider that as a mechanism of extraction, why are worrying about inflation
(from wages)? The best story on inflation is actually Charles Goodhart's book that came out
last year. We got a long period of low inflation because of global supply chains, and because
of demographic trends. It's a combination of global supply chains, Chinese labor, and
demographics all coming together to basically push down labor costs, and that's why you get
this long period of deflation, which leads to rising profits and zero inflation. A perfectly
reasonable way of explaining it. And his point is that, well, that's coming to an end. The
demographics are shifting, or shrinking. We're going back to more closed economies. You're
going to create this inflation problem again. OK, what's the timeline on that? About 20
years? A few years ago, we were told we had 12 years to fix the climate problem or we're in
deep shit. If we have to face the climate problem versus single to double-digit inflation,
I'm left wondering what is the real problem here? And there is that RAND study from November
2020 that was adeninely entitled, "˜Trends in Income 1979 to 2020,' and they
calculated, and I think this is the number, but even if I'm off, the order of magnitude is
there, that transfers, because of tax and regulatory changes, from the 90th percentile of the
distribution to the 10 percentile, totalled something in the order of $34 trillion. That's
how much was vacuumed up and practically nothing trickled down. So when you consider that as
a mechanism of extraction, why are worrying about inflation (from wages)? The best story on
inflation is actually Charles Goodhart's book that came out last year. We got a long period
of low inflation because of global supply chains, and because of demographic trends. It's a
combination of global supply chains, Chinese labor, and demographics all coming together to
basically push down labor costs, and that's why you get this long period of deflation, which
leads to rising profits and zero inflation. A perfectly reasonable way of explaining it. And
his point is that, well, that's coming to an end. The demographics are shifting, or
shrinking. We're going back to more closed economies. You're going to create this inflation
problem again. OK, what's the timeline on that? About 20 years? A few years ago, we were told
we had 12 years to fix the climate problem or we're in deep shit. If we have to face the
climate problem versus single to double-digit inflation, I'm left wondering what is the real
problem here? The best story on inflation is actually Charles Goodhart's book that came out
last year. We got a long period of low inflation because of global supply chains, and because
of demographic trends. It's a combination of global supply chains, Chinese labor, and
demographics all coming together to basically push down labor costs, and that's why you get
this long period of deflation, which leads to rising profits and zero inflation. A perfectly
reasonable way of explaining it. And his point is that, well, that's coming to an end. The
demographics are shifting, or shrinking. We're going back to more closed economies. You're
going to create this inflation problem again. OK, what's the timeline on that? About 20
years? A few years ago, we were told we had 12 years to fix the climate problem or we're in
deep shit. If we have to face the climate problem versus single to double-digit inflation,
I'm left wondering what is the real problem here? The best story on inflation is actually
Charles Goodhart's book that came out last year. We got a long period of low inflation
because of global supply chains, and because of demographic trends. It's a combination of
global supply chains, Chinese labor, and demographics all coming together to basically push
down labor costs, and that's why you get this long period of deflation, which leads to rising
profits and zero inflation. A perfectly reasonable way of explaining it. And his point is
that, well, that's coming to an end. The demographics are shifting, or shrinking. We're going
back to more closed economies. You're going to create this inflation problem again. OK,
what's the timeline on that? About 20 years? A few years ago, we were told we had 12 years to
fix the climate problem or we're in deep shit. If we have to face the climate problem versus
single to double-digit inflation, I'm left wondering what is the real problem here? OK,
what's the timeline on that? About 20 years? A few years ago, we were told we had 12 years to
fix the climate problem or we're in deep shit. If we have to face the climate problem versus
single to double-digit inflation, I'm left wondering what is the real problem here? OK,
what's the timeline on that? About 20 years? A few years ago, we were told we had 12 years to
fix the climate problem or we're in deep shit. If we have to face the climate problem versus
single to double-digit inflation, I'm left wondering what is the real problem here? A few
years ago, we were told we had 12 years to fix the climate problem or we're in deep shit. If
we have to face the climate problem versus single to double-digit inflation, I'm left
wondering what is the real problem here? A few years ago, we were told we had 12 years to fix
the climate problem or we're in deep shit. If we have to face the climate problem versus
single to double-digit inflation, I'm left wondering what is the real problem here?
Great piece. He put to words something I've thought about but couldn't articulate: if
wages are stagnant, how could you possibly get broad based inflation?
There is no upward pressure on labor costs anywhere in the economy. The pressures are
all downward.
You would need government spending in the order of magnitudes to drive up wages. Or
release from a lot of debt, like student loan forgiveness or what have you.
I'm not sure you need wage growth to get inflation. As Blyth notes, most of the time
inflation is a currency or a monetary issue. In the 70s, it was initially an oil thing " and
oil flows through a lot of products " and then really went crazy only when Volker started
raising interest rates. I don't think there is an episode of "wage-push" inflation in
history. (The union cost-of-living clauses don't "cause" inflation, they only adjust for past
inflation. If unions can cause wage-push inflation, someone needs to explain how they did
this in the late 70s, when they were much less powerful and unemployment was substantially
higher, than in the 1950s.) One could argue that expansive fiscal policy might drive
inflation but, even then, the mechanism is through price increases, not wage increases. You
do need consumption but that can always come from the wealthy and further debt immiseration
of the rest of us.
Blythe is one of those guys who is *almost* correct. For example he declares that
expectations drive inflation. What about genuine shortages? The most recent U.S. big inflation
stemmed from OPEC withholding oil"a shortage we answered by increasing the price ($1.75/bbl in
1971 -> $42/bbl in 1982). In Germany, the hyperinflation was driven by the French invading
the Ruhr, something roughly like shutting down Ohio in the U.S. A shortage of goods resulted.
Inflation! In Zimbabwe, the Rhodesian (white) farmers left, and the natives who took over their
farms were not producing enough food. A shortage of food, requiring imports, resulted.
Inflation!
I guess you could say people in Zimbabwe "expected" food"¦but that's not standard
English.
JFYI, Blythe is not a fan of MMT. He calls it "annoying." Yep, that's his well-reasoned
argument about how to think about it.
As a *political* economist, he may have a point in saying MMT is a difficult political sell,
but otherwise, I'd say the guy is clueless about it.
Inflation isn't caused by the amount of money in the economy but by the amount of
*spending*.
Like the other commenter, I've wondered this too"if wages have been stagnant for a
generation, then how are we going to get inflation? By what mechanism? It seems like almost all
of the new money just adds a few zeros to the end of the bank account balances of the already
rich (or else disappears offshore).
Still, you just cannot people to understand this because of houses, health care and
education. One might even argue that inflated house and education prices are helping keep
inflation down. If more and more of our meager income is going to pay for these fixed
expenditures, then there's no money left over to pay increased prices for goods and services.
So there's no room to increase the prices of those things. As Michael Hudson would point out,
it's all sucked away for debt service, meaning a lot of the "money printing" is just
subsidizing Wall Street.
But if you pay attention to the internet, for years there have been conspiracy theories all
across the political spectrum that we were really in hyperinflation and the government just
secretly "cooked the books" and manipulated the statistics to convince us all it wasn't
happening. Of course, these conspiracy theories all pointed to the cost of housing, medicine
and education as "proof" of this theory (three things which, ironically, didn't go up
spectacularly during the Great Inflation of the 1970's). Or else they'd point to gas prices,
but that strategy lost it's potency after 2012. Or else they'd complain that their peanut
butter was secretly getting smaller, hiding the inflation (shrinkflation is real, or course,
but it's not a vast conspiracy to hide price increases from the public).
I'm convinced that this was the ground zero for the kind of anti-government conspiratorial
thinking that's taken over our politics today. These ideas was heavy promoted by libertarians
like Ron Paul starting in the nineties, helped by tracts like "The Creature from Jekyll
Island," which argued that the Fed itself was one big conspiracy. I've seen plenty of people
across the political spectrum"including on the far Left"take all of this stuff as gospel.
So if the government is secretly hiding inflation and the Fed itself is a grand conspiracy
to convince us that paper is money (rather than "real" money, aka gold), then is it that hard
to believe they're manipulating Covid statistics and plotting to control us all by forcing us
all to wear masks and get vaccinated? In my view, it all started with inflation paranoia.
Blyth explains why housing inflation isn't really a sign of hyperinflation. But the average
"man on the street" just doesn't get it. To Joe Sixpack, not counting some of the things he has
to pay for is cheating. So are "substitutions" like ground beef when steak gets too pricey, or
a Honda Civic for a Toyota Camry, for example. The complexity of counting inflation is totally
lost on them, making them vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking. Since Biden was elected, the
ZOMG HyPeRiNfLaTiOn!!&%! articles are ubiquitous.
Does anyone have a good way of explaining this to ordinary (i.e. non-economically literate)
people? I'd love to hear it! Thanks.
"There is no such thing as house price inflation. Inflation is a general rise in the level
of all prices. A sustained rise in the level of prices. The fact that house prices in Toronto
have gone up is because Canada stopped building public housing in the 1980s and turned it into
an asset class and let the 10 percent top earners buy it all and swap it with each other. That
is singularly not an inflation."
Maybe I am totally off but, I would say"¦. By your definition, inflation does not exist
in the economic terminology as inflation only exists if generally all prices go up and a
singularity of soaring house prices and education and healthcare do not constitute an inflation
because the number of things inflating do not meet some unknown number of items needed for a
general rise in all prices to create an inflation.
What I read you to say is that if Labor prices go up " that could lead to inflation " but if
house prices go up (as they have) that is not inflation.
Hypothetically " if labor prices do not go up and the "˜nessesities of living' prices go
up (Housing and Med) " would you not have an inflation in the cost of living? " I am convinced
that economists and market experts try to claim that the economy and markets are seperate and
distinct from humans as a science " and that Political science has nothing to do with what they
present. Yet, humans are the only species to have formed the markets and money we all
participate and, the only species, therefore, to have an exclusive asset ownership, indifferent
to any other species " IE " if you can't pay you can't play and have no say.
I submit that one or a few asset price increases that are combined with labor price stasis(the
actual money outlayed for those asset price increased products not moving up) " especially one
that is a basic to living (shelter) and not mobile (like money) is inflation " Land prices
going up will generally increase the prices of all products created thereon.
I think there's two things going on here. There's different inflation indicators, and asset
prices are by definition never a part of inflation
The main indicator of CPI has so many different things in it that the inflation of any one
item is going to have little effect on it. But you can look up BEA's detailed GDP deflator to
see inflation for more specific things like housing expenses (rent) or transportation.
So back to real estate/land: real estate and land are like the stock market. They aren't
subject to inflation. They are subject to appreciation. There is somewhat of a feedback effect
for sure though: Increased real estate prices can drive up inflation. Rent for sure gets driven
up, but also any other good that's built domestically if the owners of capital need to pay more
to rent their factories/farms etc.
As noted in the article though, capitalists can simply move their production overseas so
there's a limit to how much US land appreciation can filter into inflation. Its definitely
happening with rent as housing can't be outsourced. But rent is only one part of overall
inflation
The point he was making is that the price change in housing is the result of a policy
restructuring of the market: no new public housing and financial deregulation.
The price of food is similarly a response to policy changes: industry consolidation and
resulting price setting to juice financial profits.
The point is distinguishing between political forces and market forces. The former is
socially/politically determined while the latter has to do with material realities within a
more or less static market structure.
This is a distinction essential to making good policy but useless from a cost of living
perspective.
One could prevent crossover for awhile, but eventually certain policies are going to affect
certain markets. The policy of giving the rich money drives up asset prices, real estate is a
kind of asset, eventually rising real estate costs affect the market the proles enter when they
have to buy or rent real estate.
If state institutions tell them there is no inflation, the proles learn that the state
institutions lie because they know better from direct experience. Once that gap develops, it's
as with personal relationships: when trust is broken, it is very hard to replace. Once belief
in state institutions is lost, significant political effects ensue. Often they are rather
unpleasant.
Blyth pointed to the lack of systemic drivers of price increases, and how the traditional
ones have disappeared. I think one that he missed, that results in a disconnect with the
evidence of price increases across multiple sectors, is the neoliberal infestation.
Rent-sucking intermediaries have imposed themselves into growing swaths of the mechanisms of
survival, hollowed out productive capacity, and crapified artifacts to the extent that their
value is irredeemably reduced. This is a systemic cause for reduced buying power, i.e.
inflation, but it is not a result of monetary or fiscal policy, but political and ideological
power.
> . . . The fact that house prices in Toronto have gone up is because Canada
stopped building public housing in the 1980s and turned it into an asset class and let the 10
percent top earners buy it all and swap it with each other.
That is a total load of baloney. The eighties were a time when the Conservative government
came up with the foreign investor program and it was people from Hong Kong getting out before
the British hand over to China in 1997.
I was there, trying to save for a house and for every buck saved the houses went up twenty.
I finally pulled the plug in 89 when someone subdivided a one car garage from their house and
sold it for a small fortune. The stories of Hong Kongers coming up to people raking their yard
and offering cash well above supposed market rates and the homeowner dropping their rakes and
handing over the keys were legendary.
It's still that way except now they come from mainland China, CCP members laundering their
loot.
Any government that makes domestic labor compete with foreign richies for housing is
mendacious.
When a Canadian drug dealer "saves up" a million to buy a house and the RCMP get wind of it,
they lose the house. When a foreigner show up at the border with a million, it's all clean.
Many people who talk about avoiding inflation are speaking euphemistically about preventing
wage growth, and only that; dog whistles, clearly heard by the intended audience. Yet they are
rarely confronted directly on this point. Instead we hear that they don't understand what the
word inflation means, and Mark seems to be saying these euphamists (eupahmites?) needn't be so
concerned because wages will not go up anyway. If so, what we are talking about here is merely
helping workers stay afloat without making any fundamental changes. Well, both sides can agree
to that as usual. Guess I'm just worn out by this kind of thing.
The thing that I like about Mark Blyth is how he cuts to the chase and does not waffle. Must
be his upbringing in Scotland I would say. The revelation that the US minimum wage should be
about $25-30 is just mind-boggling in itself. But in that talk he unintentionally put a value
on how much is at stake in making a fairer economic system and it works out to be about $34
trillion. That is how much has been stolen by the upper percentile and why workers have gone
from having a job, car, family & annual vacation to crushing student debt, a job at an
Amazon fulfillment center and a second job being an Uber driver while living out of car.
That $25-30 wage was keeping up with inflation , if it were keeping up with
productivity it would be, IIRC, nearly twice that. It is interesting to see a dollar
figure put on the amount you can reap after a generation or two of growing a middle class, by
impoverishing it.
But now what we've done, Suresh Naidu the economist was talking about this the other day,
is we have all these technologies for surveilling workers (instead of paying them
more) . So now what we can do is take that difference between seven and ten and just
pocket it because we can actually pay workers at your outside option, because I monitor
everything you do, and if you don't do exactly what I say I'll fire you, and get somebody
else for seven bucks.
Praise be the STEM workers. Without them where would the criminal corporate class be?
Every time I listen to the news (without barfing) the story is, we need moar STEM workers,
and I ask myself, what do they do for a living?
If that kind of tidbit excites you:
Before going into economics, Alan Greenspan was a sax and clarinet player who played with the
likes of Stan Getz and Quincy Jones.
And Michael Hudson studied piano and conducting .
Do failed musicians gravitate to economics? Perhaps for the same reason as my bank manager, a
failed bass player (honors graduate from Classy Cdn U in double bass), they see the handwriting
on the wall. He told me his epiphany came when he and his band-mates were trying to make
cup-o-noodles with tap water in a room over the pub in Thunder Bay where they were playing.
The mental gymnastics to get to "everything needed to survive costs more but wages have not
gone up in decades so therefore its all transitory and inflation does not exist" must be
painful. How high does the price for cat food have to get before we stop eating?
Yes! "The Hamptons are not a defensible position" ranks right up there with "It is easier to
imagine the end of the world than the end of (neoliberal) capitalism" by Mark Fisher (and F.
Jameson?).
Very good, Mark. This leads to the next Q. How do we maintain aggregate demand? The rich
guys increasingly Hoover everything up and pay no taxes. So, there is no T. Is the only way to
get cash and avoid deflation deficit spending by the G? There is no I worth a damn. (X-M) is a
total drain on everything since it's all M in the US and no X. The deficits will have to go out
of sight in the future.
You say that there is no velocity of money. Is this because the more money pored into the
economy by the G, the more money the rich guys steal? So, there is a general collapse in C.
Maybe the work around for the rich guy theft is a $2,000 (sorry, $1,400) check every now and
then to the great unwashed. The poors can circulate it a couple of times before the rich guys
steal it. Seems like the macro-economists have a lot of "˜splainin' to do. Oh, right,
they are busy right now measuring the output gap.
I'd like to see Mark go into a discussion on the velocity of money. I remember the old timey
Keynesians lecturing about it, and that's all I remember. I'm guessing that it's related to the
marginal propensity to consume.
I may be getting a bit out over my skis, but the St. Louis Fed calculates the velocity of
money ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V ). It is
defined as
The velocity of money is the frequency at which one unit of currency is used to purchase
domestically- produced goods and services within a given time period. In other words, it is the
number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. If the velocity
of money is increasing, then more transactions are occurring between individuals in an
economy.
So as velocity slows, fewer transactions happen. Based on the linked chart, the peak
velocity was 2.2 in mid-1997. In Q1 2021, it was 1.12. By my understanding, although the money
supply continues to increase, the money isn't flowing through the economy in the way it was
over the last 30 years (or even 10 years ago).
It's beyond my level of understanding to say with any certainty as to why the slowdown in
velocity has occurred, but I speculate it's directly related to the ever-growing inequality in
the US economy and the ongoing rentier-ism that Dr. Hudson discusses. [simplistically, if Jeff
Bezos has $1.3 billion more on Monday than on Friday, that money will flow virtually nowhere.
If each of Amazon's employees equally shared that $1.3 billion (about $1,000 each), the
preponderance of the money would flow into the economy in short order].
I've always speculated that money velocity is one of the key indicators of the stagnant
economy since 2008. It certainly has coincided with the dramatic increase in wealth in the top
fraction (not the 1% but the 0.001%) of the US population.
What Blythe has laid out is not a tale about inflation or money, but a tale about power.
If money goes to the non-elite, you get inflation. If it goes to the elite, you don't get
inflation.
If you are a country with little control of your resources (not lack of resources, but control)
and/or loans (think IMF)/debt (think war reparations) that give people with little interest in
whether you live or die control over your countries' finances, you can be prone to inflation or
even hyperinflation.
Yeah, I figured out a long time ago that none of this is any "natural economic law" because
there is no such thing as "nature" in economics. Inflation is all about political decisions and
perceptions.
And I saw this on YouTube a couple of days ago"¦and I still can't think of anything
around me that hasn't gone up on price.
This is a good response to Summers. But I have a quibble and a concern.
My quibble is that he offers no theory of inflation except implicitly aggregate supply
exceeding aggregate demand and there is nothing but hand-waving regarding what he is referring
to that he feels has a one chance in ten of happening versus Summers one in three. A second
part of this quibble is: what does it mean for inflation to "come roaring back." I assume it
means more than just a short-term adjustment to a shot of government spending and gifting. I
believe if he thought this through he would have to conclude that without changes in the
current structure of the global economy there is no way for this to happen. That really is the
case he has made. With labor beaten down not only in the US but worldwide inflation will not
come roaring back, period. That is unless there is a chance either that a labor renewal is a
near-term possibility. I doubt he believes this. Or does he believe there is another way for
inflation to roar back? If so, what is that way, what is the theory behind it?
A more fundamental concern is the part where he relies on marginal productivity theory when
discussing employment and exploitation. Conceptually that far from Marx's fundamental
distinction between labor and labor power.
Hyperinflation doesn't seem to be possible in this age of digital money no matter how much
you conjure up because nobody notices the extreme amount of monies around all of the sudden as
the average joe isn't in the know.
Used houses are always appreciating in value, but none dare call it inflationary, more of a
desired outcome in income advancement if you own a domicile.
There were no shortages of anything in the aftermath of the GFC, and now for want of a
semiconductor, a car sale was lost. Everything got way too complex, and we'll be paying the
price for that.
I think the inflation to come won't be caused by a lack of faith in a given country's money,
but the products and services it enabled us to purchase.
""¦and now for want of a semiconductor, a car sale was lost"¦."
Sometimes car sales are lost because the price of cars has gone up (new and used)"¦just
don't call it inflation"¦
I'm going to let some more time pass, but stimulus or not, we went from all economic
problems being laid at the feet of Covid to now moving on to "shortages"
everywhere"¦
Just enought to make you go"¦hmmmm"¦.unti more time passes.
Used houses always appreciate " or is it that they appreciate due to a combination of
inflation in income over time and the dramatic decrease in interest rates over the last 20
years?
A very quick back of the envelope calc (literally " and all number are approximate):
In June 2000, median US income was $40,500; 30 yr mortgage rate was 8.25%. 28% of monthly
income = $945. That supports a mortgage (30 yr fixed, P&I only " no tax, insurance, etc) of
roughly $125,000.
In June 2005, median US income was $44,000; 30 yr mortgage rate was 5.5%. 28% of monthly
income = $1026. That supports a mortgage (30 yr fixed, P&I only " no tax, insurance, etc)
of roughly $180,000.
In June 2010, median US income was $49,500; 30 yr mortgage rate was 4.69%. 28% of monthly
income = $1155. That supports a mortgage (30 yr fixed, P&I only " no tax, insurance, etc)
of roughly $225,000.
In June 2015, median US income was $53,600; 30 yr mortgage rate was 4.00%. 28% of monthly
income = $1250. That supports a mortgage (30 yr fixed, P&I only " no tax, insurance, etc)
of roughly $260,000.
Finally, In June 2020, median US income was $63,000; 30 yr mortgage rate was 3.25%. 28% of
monthly income = $1470. That supports a mortgage (30 yr fixed, P&I only " no tax,
insurance, etc) of roughly $340,000.
And for fun, if you went to 40% of income in 2020 (payment only), a $2100 monthly payment
will cover nearly a $500,000 mortgage in 2020.
For the vast majority of home buyers, the price isn't the main consideration " it's how much
will it cost per month. So a small increase in median income (roughly 2% per year) combined
with dramatically lower interest rates can drive a HUGE increase in a mortgage " and ultimately
the price that can be paid for a house.
Can't say I really understand this sort of thing but saying rocketing house-prices is
"˜a singularity' rather than "˜house-price inflation' has to me echoes of the
Bourbon's "Bread too expensive? Let them eat cake." And Versailles wasn't a defensive position
either.
In my version of economics-for-the-under-tens you get inflation in two situations. First is
where enough folk have enough cash in their pockets for producers/manufacturers/retailers to
hike their prices without hitting their sales too much and secondly where there's a shortage of
stuff people want and/or need which leads to a bidding war. However I'd agree with Blyth that
neither condition exists now or seems likely to arise for a while, making a "˜spike' in
inflation unlikely.
I am a non-economist, and so my thoughts below may be wrong. However, here goes.
I would say we have had inflation. Roaring inflation. For the past 20 years of so.
Inflation in wages and ordinary costs of living? No, wages have been stagnant. Health care
has led the charge in cost of living increases, but most other living expense increases have
been low.
Inflation in asset prices? We have had massive inflation in the costs of residential housing
where I live.
20 years ago I could buy a 5 br, 3 bath home on a decent block in a good area close to
everything for $270,000 dollars. Sure it needed some renovation, but still"¦. Now to buy
that home it would cost me around $1,250,000. So that home has gone up in value by 500%. Man,
that is inflation.
As I understand it, asset inflation is not counted by governments in the GDP or CPI. It
appears that those who have most of the assets don't want this to be counted, by the very fact
that they control the politicians who control what is counted, and asset inflation isn't
counted in the economic data that the politicians rely upon to prove how prudent they are.
So if you want a day to day example of where all this free money is going, look at housing.
And also have a quick look at the insane increases in the worth of billionaires. They love all
this government spending which magically? seems to end up, via asset purchase and asset price
inflation, in their pockets.
Price is what one pays, value is what one gets. That house is roughly the same, so the value
has not changed, but the price has gone up by a factor of 5
Same with stawks. One share of Amazon stawk is $3,467.42 as of yesterday.
What is its value? If Bezos can work his tools ever harder, monitor them down to the
nanosecond and wring ever moar productivity out of them before throwing them in the tool
dumpster behind every Amazon warehouse, the value proposition is that someone else will believe
the stawk price should be even higher, at which point one can sell it at greater price for a
profit.
What is inflation? Good question. I'd say inflation is fear of monetary devaluation. Not
devaluation, just the fear of it. We'll never overcome this unease if we always deal in
numbers. Dollars, digits, whatever. We need to deal in commodities " let's call just about
everything we live with and use a "commodity". Including unpaid family help/care; and the more
obvious things like transportation. If we simply took a summary of all the necessary things we
need to live decent lives " but not translated into dollars because dollars have no sense " and
then provided these necessities via some government agency so that they were not "inflated" in
the process and thereby provided a stable society, then government could MMT this very easily.
Our current approach is so audaciously stupid it will never make sense let alone balance any
balance sheets. That's a feature, not a bug because it's the best way to steal a profit. The
best way to stop demand inflation or some fake scarcity or whatever is to provide the necessary
availability. That's where uncle Joe is gonna run headlong into a brick wall. He has spent his
entire life doing the exact opposite.
The figure for the upward transfer of wealth from the Rand Study was $50 trillion between
1975-2018. It was adjusted up by the authors from $47 trillion to bring it up to 2020
trends.
Now the interesting thing to me is this " look at the date of the publication in Time
magazine: Sept. 14, 2020, so right in the heart of campaign fever, and it never came up in the
debates, in the press"¦I didn't hear about it until Blyth made one of his appearances on
Jay's show with Rana Foroohar. Long after the election.
As long as 80% of Americans are head over heels in debt and 52% of 18-to-29-year-olds are
currently living with their parents, there never will be the wage inflation of the 1970s. A
majority of the people arrested for the Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble. The
elite blue zones in Washington State and Oregon that prospered from globalism are seeing a
spike in coronavirus cases. North American neoliberal governments have failed dismally. It is
intentional in order to exploit more wealth for the rich from the natural resources and
workers. If the mRNA vaccines do not control coronavirus variants, and a workable national
public health system is not implemented; succession and chaos will bring on Zimbabwe type
inflation.
There is a reason why Portland Oregon has been a center of unrest for the past year. The
Elite just do not want to see it. How can Janet Yellen deal with this? She can't. She is an
Insider. She was paid 7.2 million dollars in speaker and seminar fees in the last two years not
to.
@animalogic
respasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us ." is the translation presented in the
Revised Standard Version of the Bible. What is lost in translation is the fact that Jesus
came "to preach the gospel to the poor to preach the acceptable Year of the Lord": He came,
that is, to proclaim a Jubilee Year, a restoration of deror for debtors: He came to institute
a Clean Slate Amnesty (which is what Hebrew דְּרוֹר
connotes in this context).
It is quite possible to have balanced civilizations that lasts for thousands of years;
however it is impossible in the West, since the west is based on faulty assumptions about
reality.
I view the 2008 election as the major failing-to-turn-back-when-we-had-the-chance
point. Obama could have undone Bush's worst policies, but instead he cemented them into place
forever.
Our elites are both stupid and evil, but Bush is more stupid and Obama is more evil
.
I like to verify things myself and you can do so as well by reading the California
Department of Education Mathematics
Framework .
In its framework, the Department of Education seeks " Culturally responsive mathematics
education ."
Introduction Highlights
Active efforts in mathematics teaching are required in order to counter the cultural
forces that have led to and continue to perpetuate current inequities. Mathematics pathways
must open mathematics to all students, eliminating option-limiting tracking . [i.e. no
advance classes].
implementation of this framework and the standards, teachers must be mindful of other
considerations that are a high priority for California's education system including the
Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) which allow students to examine issues of
environmental and social justice .
Teaching for Equity Highlights
The evolution of mathematics in educational settings has resulted in dramatic inequities
for students of color, girls, and students from low income homes.
Teachers are encouraged to align instruction with the outcomes of the California ELD
Standards, which state that linguistically and culturally diverse English learners receive
instruction that values their home cultures.
Need to Broaden Perceptions of Mathematics
I did not go through all the chapters. Reason uncovered these gems.
The inequity of mathematics tracking in California can be undone through a coordinated
approach in grades 6–12 .
Middle-school students are best served in heterogeneous classes.
The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided.
To encourage truly equitable and engaging mathematics classrooms we need to broaden
perceptions of mathematics beyond methods and answers so that students come to view
mathematics as a connected, multi-dimensional subject that is about sense making and
reasoning, to which they can contribute and belong.
Sabotage the Best
Reason concludes, and I agree " If California adopts this framework, which is currently
under public review, the state will end up sabotaging its brightest students . The government
should let kids opt out of math if it's not for them. Don't let the false idea that there's no
such thing as a gifted student herald the end of advanced math entirely."
Instead, and in the name of "equity", the proposed framework aims to keep everyone learning
at the same dumbed down level for as long as possible.
The intention is clear. The California Board of Education intends to sabotage the best and
brightest, hoping to make everyone equal.
The public does not support these polices. Indeed, it is precisely this kind of talk that
nearly got Trump reelected.
Biden should speak out against such nonsense, but he won't. He is beholden to Teachers'
Unions and Boards of Education.
Care to complain? If so the California Department of Education posted these
ways.
Phone Number and Address
Phone: 916-319-0598
Instructional Quality Commission
1430 N Street, Room 3207
Sacramento, CA 95814
Fax: 916-319-0172
I keep happening on these mentions of manufacturing jobs succumbing to automation, and I
can't think of where these people are getting their information.
I work in manufacturing. Production manufacturing, in fact, involving hundreds, thousands,
tens of thousands of parts produced per week. Automation has come a long way, but it also
hasn't. A layman might marvel at the technologies while taking a tour of the factory, but
upon closer inspection, the returns are greatly diminished in the last two decades. Advances
have afforded greater precision, cheaper technologies, but the only reason China is a giant
of manufacturing is because labor is cheap. They automate less than Western factories, not
more, because humans cost next to nothing, but machines are expensive.
It's easy to become inured to the daily procession of flagrant falsehoods, tendentious
misrepresentations, deceitful exaggerations and narrative-driven editorial distortions from
many of the nation's leading media outlets. As opinion surveys suggest that most of these
organizations now rank in public trust a little below emailed pleas from deposed Nigerian
princes, it's easy to think the power they once wielded has been so diminished that they are
little more than a mildly diverting source of contemporary color in our lives.
"... Not a single resource on the Pfizer Executive team or Board of Directors has been injected with the Pfizer (experimental poison yet) vaccine yet. - C Weissman. Excuses allegedly provided offering the less fortunate an opportunity to go first. Don't laugh. True story. Some real humanitarians. ..."
Not a single resource on the Pfizer Executive team or Board of Directors has been injected
with the Pfizer (experimental poison yet) vaccine yet. - C Weissman. Excuses allegedly provided offering the less fortunate an opportunity to go first. Don't
laugh. True story. Some real humanitarians.
"... All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court. ..."
"... Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud! ..."
"... Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and someone wanting get off their lazy rear end ..."
The FBI continues to lawlessly use counterintelligence powers against American citizens...
The Deep State Referee just admitted that the FBI continues to commit uncounted violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act of 1978 (FISA).
If you
sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered
for the FBI "Citizens Academy" program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity.
But the latest FBI offenses, like almost all prior FBI violations, are not a real problem, according to James Boasberg, presiding
judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That court, among other purposes, is supposed to safeguard Americans'
constitutional right to privacy under FISA. FISA was originally enacted to create a narrow niche for foreign intelligence investigations
that could be conducted without a warrant from a regular federal court. But as time passed, FISA morphed into an uncontrolled yet
officially sanctioned privacy-trampling monster. FISA judges unleash the nuclear bomb of searches,
authorizing the FBI "to conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S.
person target's home, workplace and vehicles," as well as "physical searches of the target's residence, office, vehicles,
computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails."
In 2008, after the George W. Bush administration's pervasive illegal warrantless wiretaps were exposed, Congress responded by
enacting FISA amendments that formally entitled the National Security Agency to vacuum up mass amounts of emails and other communication,
a swath of which is provided to the FBI. In 2018, the FISA court
slammed the FBI for abusing that
database with warrantless searches that violated Americans' rights. In lieu of obeying FISA, the FBI created a new Office of Internal
Audit. Deja vu! Back in 2007, FBI agents were caught massively violating the Patriot Act by using National Security Letters to conduct
thousands of illegal searches on Americans' personal data. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.)
declared that
an Inspector General report on the abusive searches "confirms the American people's worst fears about the Patriot Act." FBI
chief Robert Mueller responded by creating a new
Office of Integrity and Compliance
as "another important step toward ensuring we fulfill our mission with an unswerving commitment to the rule of law."
Be still my beating heart!
The FBI's promise to repent after the 2018 report sufficed for the FISA court to permit the FBI to continue plowing through
the personal data it received from NSA. Monday's disclosure "a delayed release of a report by the court last November "revealed
that the FBI has conducted
warrantless searches of the data trove for "domestic terrorism," "public corruption and bribery," "health care fraud,"
and other targets "including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. As Spencer Ackerman
wrote
in the Daily Beast , "The FBI continues to perform warrantless searches through the NSA's most sensitive databases for routine
criminal investigations." That type of search "potentially jeopardizes an accused person's ability to have a fair trial since warrantlessly acquired information is supposed to be inadmissible. The FBI claimed to the court that none of the warrantlessly queried
material "˜was used in a criminal or civil proceeding,' but such usage at trial has happened before," Ackerman noted. Some illicit
FBI searches involve vast dragnets. As the
New York Times reported ,
an FBI agent in 2019 conducted a database search "using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them
had connections to an investigation."
In the report released Monday, Judge Boasberg lamented "apparent widespread violations" of the legal restrictions for FBI searches.
Regardless,
Boasberg kept the illicit search party going: "The Court is willing to again conclude that the . . . [FBI's] procedures meet
statutory and Fourth Amendment requirements." "Willing to again conclude" sounds better than "close enough for constitutional."
At this point, Americans know only the abuses that the FBI chose to disclose to FISA judges. We have no idea how many other perhaps
worse abuses may have occurred. For a hundred years, the FBI has buttressed its power by keeping a lid on its crimes. Unfortunately,
the FISA Court has become nothing but Deep State window dressing "a facade giving the illusion that government is under the law.
Consider Boasberg's recent ruling in the most brazen FISA abuse yet exposed. In December 2019, the Justice Department Inspector
General reported that the FBI made "fundamental
errors " and persistently deceived the FISA court to authorize surveilling a 2016 Trump presidential campaign official. The
I.G. report said the FBI "drew almost entirely" from the Steele dossier to prove a "well-developed conspiracy" between Russians
and the Trump campaign even though it was "unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page"
in that dossier, which was later debunked.
A former FBI assistant general counsel, Kevin Clinesmith, admitted to falsifying key evidence to secure the FISA warrant to spy
on the Trump campaign. As a Wall Street Journal
editorial noted , Clinesmith "changed an
email confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source to one that said the exact opposite, explicitly adding the words "˜not a source'
before he forwarded it." A federal prosecutor declared that the "resulting harm is immeasurable" from Clinesmith's action.
But at the sentencing hearing, Boasberg gushed with sympathy,
noting that Clinesmith
"went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane"¦ Mr. Clinesmith has lost his job in
government service"what has given his life much of its meaning." Scorning the federal prosecutor's recommendation for jail time, Boasberg gave Clinesmith a wrist
slap"400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.
The FBI FISA frauds profoundly disrupted American politics for years and the din of belatedly debunked accusations of Trump colluding
with Russia swayed plenty of votes in the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. But for the chief FISA judge, nothing
matters except the plight of an FBI employee who lost his job after gross misconduct. This is the stark baseline Americans should
remember when politicians, political appointees, and judges promise to protect them from future FBI abuses. The FISA court has been
craven, almost beyond ridicule, perennially. Perhaps Boasberg was simply codifying a prerogative the FISA court previously awarded
upon FBI officials. In 2005, after a deluge of false FBI claims in FISA warrants, FISA Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed
requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented. That never happened because it could have "slowed
such investigations drastically," the
Washington Post reported
. So, FBI agents continue to lie with impunity to the judges.
The FISA court has gone from pretending that FBI violations don't occur to pretending that violations don't matter. Practically
the only remaining task is for the FISA court to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy . But if a sweeping
new domestic terrorism law is passed, perhaps even that formal acknowledgement will be unnecessary. Beginning in 2006, the court
rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans
were "relevant" to a terrorism
investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling NSA data seizures later
denounced by a federal judge as "almost Orwellian." FISA could become a peril to far more Americans if Congress formally creates
a new domestic terrorism offense and a new category for expanding FISA searches.
The backlash from Democrats after the January 6 clash at the Capitol showcased the demand for federal crackdowns on extremists
who doubted Biden's election, disparaged federal prerogatives, or otherwise earned congressional ire. If a domestic terrorism law
is passed, the FBI will feel as little constrained by the details of the statute as it does about FISA's technicalities. Will FBI
agents conducting warrantless searches rely on
the same
harebrained standard the NSA used to target Americans: "someone searching the web for suspicious stuff"? Unfortunately, unless
an FBI whistleblower with the same courage as former NSA analyst Edward Snowden steps forward, we may never know the extent of FBI
abuses
ebworthen 39 minutes ago
"You want to harass a political opponent? Sure, we can do that...
JaxPavan 42 minutes ago
All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to
send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch
write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court.
Joe Bribem 32 minutes ago
It's almost like we did this to Trump. But it'll never come to light. Oops it did. Not that anything will happen to us because
we own the corrupt DOJ and FBI.
Obama's own personal private army.
You_Cant_Quit_Me 7 minutes ago
A lot of tips come in from overseas. For example, the US spies on citizens of another country and then sends that country tips,
in exchange that country does the same by spying on US citizens and sending the FBI tips. Then it starts, "we are just
following up on a tip"
wee-weed up 36 minutes ago (Edited)
Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud!
You_Cant_Quit_Me 37 minutes ago
Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and
someone wanting get off their lazy rear end
takeaction 58 minutes ago (Edited)
If you own a smart phone...everything you do is recorded...and logged.
"They" have been listening
to you for a long time if they want to.
If you own any smart device...they can listen and watch. They are monitoring what I am typing and this site. There really is no way to hide.
*** Please Note: Russia is not weak considering that it has the ability to nuke America in
to ashes within 30 minutes, or any other bunch of idiots that chooses to step over her red
lines. Okay the US has 350 million people compared to 150 million Russians, but the US is
irrevocably divided and Russia is fully united even the Muslim minority is united with the
State in Russia. A divided house can not stand no man can serve two masters. On top of that
the US has no moral values whereas Russia is a Christian country where marriage is between a
man and a woman, by State law. Biden can fly all the queer flags he likes but he still leads
a divided nation with a corrupt State comprised of dual passport holders, amoral materialists
and deluded mentally challenged idiots like Waters and Pelosi.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced in a statement on Monday that it was
creating a
new intelligence “center†focused on tracking so-called “ foreign malign influence, †reported Politico. This new
entity, known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, was mandated in the recent intelligence and defense budget authorization acts,
representing the reality that the impetus for its creation came from Congress, and not the intelligence community.
For example, the most recent
defense
expenditure authorization required that the ODNI establish a “ social media data analysis center †to coordinate and
track foreign social media influence operations by analyzing data voluntarily shared by US social media companies. Based upon this
analysis, the ODNI would report to Congress on a quarterly basis on trends in foreign influence and disinformation operations to
the public. As envisioned by Congress, the intelligence community would determine jointly with US social media companies which data
and metadata will be made available for analysis.
In short, the intelligence community, using data obtained from the social media accounts of American citizens, will report to
Congress how this data influences the political decision making of these same American citizens.
If this does not make the most ardent defender of the US Constitution ill, nothing will.
It is not as if the US intelligence community wasn’t trending in this direction on its own volition. The straw that broke the
camel’s back, so to speak, was the publication in March 2021 of an
intelligence community assessment
entitled ‘Foreign Threats to the US 2020 Presidential Election’. In this document, the US intelligence community assessed that
“ Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed
at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence
in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US .â€
But the most damning portion of this assessment came when it delved into the specific methodology employed by Russia to achieve
these nefarious aims. “ Throughout the election cycle â€, the assessment declared, “ Russia’s online influence actors
sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow’s long standing goals of undermining confidence
in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people. During the presidential primaries and
dating back to 2019, these actors backed candidates from both major US political parties that Moscow viewed as outsiders, while later
claiming that election fraud helped what they called ‘establishment’ candidates. Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence
actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and
accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud. â€
As an American citizen who is politically engaged, I read the intelligence community assessment with a combination of interest,
concern, and outrage. The notion of “ Russian online influence actors †affecting “US public perceptions of the candidatesâ€
is as intellectually vacuous as it is factually unsustainable. The stupidity encapsulated by such analysis can only be excused by
the fact that the intelligence community assessment is a document produced more for the benefit of domestic political consumption
than a genuine effort at identifying and quantifying legitimate threats to the US.
The assessment itself is short on hard data. However,
the House Intelligence
Committee has documented some 3,000 social media ads bought by Russian “troll farms†between 2015-2017, at a cost of some
$100,000. These ads were in addition to so-called “organic posts,†some 80,000 of which were published on US social media, free
of charge, by alleged Russian “bots†resulting in 126 million “views†by Americans. These ads were crude, unfocused, and simply
inane in terms of their content.
To put the alleged Russian influence campaign into perspective, one need only reflect on the fact that during his short bid for
the Democratic nomination,
Michael Bloomberg spent nearly $1 billion underwriting the single most sophisticated public relations campaign, including hundreds
of millions of targeted social media ads put together by the most brilliant political minds money could buy. All this money, time
and effort, however, could not change the reality that, to the American public, Michael Bloomberg was an unattractive candidate â€"
in the end his $1 billion bought him exactly two delegates.
The fact is, the political opinions of most American citizens are formed based upon a lifetime of exposure to issues that matter
for them the most, whether it be education, right-to-life, gun control, social justice, agriculture, energy, environment, law enforcement,
or any other of the multitude of sources of causation that impact the day-to-day existence of the American electorate.
Some of these beliefs are inherited, such as the working-class attachment to unions. Some are driven by current affairs, such
as the growing awareness of climate change. But all are derived from the life experience of each American, and the thought that these
deeply held beliefs could be bought, changed, or otherwise manipulated by social media posts published by foreign actors, malign
or otherwise, is deeply insulting to me, and should be to every other American as well.
The irony is that by creating an intelligence organization whose task it is to help prevent the political Balkanization of America
by analyzing the social media accounts of Americans who hold differing political beliefs than “the establishment†the newly minted
Foreign Malign Influence Center ostensibly serves, the resulting process will only cause the further political division of the United
States.
Some 74 million Americans voted for a candidate, Donald Trump, who has promulgated the very issues that the Democratic-controlled
Congress seeks to denigrate and suppress through the work of this new intelligence center. These ideas will not simply disappear
because the Democrats in Congress have empowered a “center†within the intelligence community whose sole function is to demonize
any political thought that does not conform with the powers that be.
As it is currently focused, the Foreign Malign Influence Center is the living, breathing embodiment of politicized intelligence,
two words which, when put together, represent the death knell for any intelligence organization. Worse, the work it will be doing,
when turned over to a Democratically controlled Congress desperate to undermine the political viability of those 74 million American
citizens, will only further fracture an already divided nation.
The Foreign Malign Influence Center was specifically mandated to examine the social media influence campaigns operated by Russia,
China, Iran, and North Korea. It is particularly telling that they were not directed to investigate the two largest foreign sources
of political influence in America today, namely the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Murdoch media empire. President
Putin could only dream about being able to buy congressional seats the way AIPAC does, or control what information becomes magnified
(and, by extension, suppressed) by the newspapers, television and radio enterprises owned by Rupert Murdoch.
These are the true villains when it comes to foreign corruption of American politics. These foreigners, however, have a seat at
the establishment table. Their malign influence will never be labeled as such, and they will never have to withstand the ignominy
of having their work scrutinized under the politicized microscope of an intelligence community that has allowed itself to be corrupted
by domestic American politics to the point that it no longer serves the American people as a whole, but only a select class of American
persons.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
Congozebilu 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
Foreign Malign Influence Center sounds like something out of a cartoon.
AwareAussie2 Congozebilu 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
The catch words "freedom", "democracy" and "terrorism" don't work any more, they need to now use different phrases to con us.
John Titor 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
The Foreign Malign Influence Center is just the latest in the Democrat Government Propaganda machine.
frankfalseflag 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
Does Scott Ritter actually expect Americans to wake up to the fact that they are getting more lies and propaganda than the Germans
got from their Reich Chancellery in the 30s and 40s?
These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is spilling over the world:
Dear Director of National Intelligence,
we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about
the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents.
We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China.
However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support
those judgments
Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide.
Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties
to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately
no soldier got hurt
by those rumors.
Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran
and China are doing these things.
They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries.
Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET.
We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. *
Sincerely
The Generals
---- PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up.
Look, The generals and the intelligence agencies haven't won a war for a long time. So now they will fight each other
. At least ONE of them will win this time ! Success.
Yes just finished listening to my dose of bullshit on ABC. The amazing thing is they
actually telling you it's bullshit if people listen closely. The number of new infections in
India. Hundreds of thousands. Deaths a few hundred. In a country where the normal annual death
rate is 9.6 Million and 26,000 people die EVERY DAY. It's like a joke. Like they testing our
stupidity. And you can't say; No we not falling for it because there is no longer anywhere to
say it! I feel like I have permanent road rage over this crap.
It's the tone and emotive words like crisis, and other exaggerated terms they use that
triggers fear. The viewer remembers the number of cases, not deaths because the number is
larger. But the cases are based on testing.
Leftists reacted with fury after Fox News host Tucker Carlson said people who wear masks
outside should be mocked and that parents who made their kids wear them were engaging in "child
abuse."
Carlson noted that masks were "purely a sign of political obedience like Kim Il-Sung pins in
Pyongyang" and that the only people who voluntarily wear masks outside are "zealots and
neurotics."
He then asserted that the tables should be turned on Biden voters who have been harassing
conservatives for almost a year for not wearing a mask in public.
"The rest of us should be snorting at them first, they're the aggressors – it's our
job to brush them back and restore the society we were born in," said Carlson.
"So the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not
hesitate. Ask politely but firmly, ' Would you please take off your mask? Science shows there
is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable, " he added.
"We should do that and we should keep doing it until wearing a mask outside is roughly as
socially accepted as lighting a Marlboro on an elevator."
The Fox News host went on to call mask wearing "repulsive" while asserting that forcing
children to wear masks outside should be illegal.
"Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from
your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately. Contact
Child Protective Services. Keep calling until someone arrives," Carlson said.
"What you're looking at is abuse, it's child abuse, and you are morally obligated to attempt
to prevent it," he added.
As expected, Carlson immediately began trending on Twitter, with hysterical leftists
hyperventilating over Tucker once again challenging their cult. Many called for the Fox News
host to be fired while others ludicrously described him as a "national security threat."
As we
highlighted yesterday , even Dr. Fauci now admits that the risk of vaccinated people
spreading COVID outside is "minuscule," and yet some health professionals are pushing for the
mask mandates to be made permanent.
The transmission of COVID-19 outdoors is almost non-existent, making mask mandates merely a
political tool of population control.
In a recent open letter to the German government and state premiers, five leading members of
the Association for Aerosol Research (GAeF) wrote, "The transmission of SARS-CoV-2 viruses
takes place indoors almost without exception. Transmission outdoors is extremely rare and never
leads to cluster infections as can be observed indoors."
Why the us government did not fund this type of mask for all is telling what the overall
strategy is.
Controlling you, your neighbor, and others that think for themselves.
Its not about the virus
Robert Neville 7 hours ago
Actually, M95 masks filter out 95% of particles over 4 microns in diameter in perfect
conditions. In the real world it is much less effective than that. Viruses are generally less
than one micron in size so they are ineffective for most viruses. Also, the masks are so hard
to breath through that some version have an exhale valve so they do nothing to protect others
if you are infected. Most masks don't protect your eyes. The only thing that works is a space
suit that is decontaminated before you remove it. The rest is virtue siganling.
Properly fitted n95's do protect against virus and the science proves it.
Dickweed Wang 10 hours ago (Edited)
This is an excerpt from the "Stanford Study" from November 2020 (that's been making the
rounds in the alternative media and conservative media space recently) about the uselessness
of masks in preventing "the virus":
A meta -analysis among health care workers found that compared to no masks, surgical
mask and N95 respirators were not effective against transmission of viral infections or
influenza-like illness based on six RCTs [28] . Using
separate analysis of 23 observational studies, this meta -analysis found no protective
effect of medical mask or N95 respirators against SARS virus [28] . A recent
systematic review of 39 studies including 33,867 participants in community settings
(self-report illness), found no difference between N95 respirators versus surgical masks
and surgical mask versus no masks in the risk for developing influenza or influenza-like
illness, suggesting their ineffectiveness of blocking viral transmissions in community
settings [29] .
It's predictable that the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork to "fact check" and
disparage the entire paper (do an internet search for 'Stanford Mask Paper' and you'll see
what I'm talking about). Their main criticism is 'that wasn't published by Stanford', while
they totally ignore the claims made in the paper. When you look at the people and
organizations doing the fact checking it really shows that the entire mask issue is a
political/control ploy. Here's the link to the entire paper if anyone is interested:
The NYT is simply a propaganda organ of the corporate oligarchy. Whenever the US does
something bad, it is always "alleged". When opponents of US hegemony are accused of doing
something bad, it is never "alleged" - for example, you won't read about the "alleged Douma
chemical attack" in the NYT.
Just a small point about English grammar: "alleged burglar", "alleged miracle" and
"alleged conspiracy" are all correct, because "alleged" is being used here as an adjective.
"Alleged antique vase", on the other hand, is incorrect because what is being alleged is not
that the object is a vase; what is being alleged is that the vase is antique. Because it is
being used to describe an adjective (antique), it is being used adverbially: therefore the
correct usage is "allegedly antique vase".
This reminds me of John Michael Greer's formulation: the "allegedly smart phone". I use it
all the time, to imply that intensive users of mobile devices may not be quite as intelligent
as is generally believed. Note that what is being is alleged is not that it's a phone, but
that it's smart!
NYT does use "alleged" correctly. In the land of truth, one need merely state one's
statement. In the land of lies, one must insert "alleged", so that others know the statement
is truth.
The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis recently held a panel discussion to discuss recent
research findings related to Covid-19.
The expert panel included four professors of medicine from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford
Universities, who are all PhDs and experts in a field of disease research. And that just
scratches the surface of their credentials relevant to being considered Covid-19 experts.
The panel spoke against forcing children and vaccinated people to wear masks, and said there
was no proof that lockdowns reduced the spread or death rates of Covid-19. They cited specific,
peer reviewed scholarly research on which they based their opinions.
But YouTube decided that these experts were spreading misinformation , and took down the
video, “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local
and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of
COVID-19.â€
This, of course, is an absurd statement, as the video itself proves there is no scientific
consensus.
Earlier this week, Gov. DeSantis reconvened the panel to discuss not just Covid, but also
the censorship of the scientific debate on Covid-19 best practices.
The panelists pointed out that the censorship of scientific debate is responsible for some
percentage of Covid deaths over the past year, as well as deaths from suicide, and untreated
medical issues.
That’s because the scientific community and public were not allowed to
discuss best practices in a free and open environment, which according to the scientific
method, leads closest to the truth.
Unsurprisingly, the rich have gotten richer, and their preferred asset classes are the most
protected by the tax code.
Just one of many first-order economic problems in the US. Wealth, once entrenched –
most particularly when it is unearned and inherited – will never be voluntarily
disgorged. The beneficiaries would rather give up democracy, give up the Rule of Law, rather
than see their privileged status compromised.
Why they dusted off those remnants from Bush and Obama neocon gangs?
When interventionists and national security deep state hawks need to prolong what's already
the longest war in in US history, who're they gonna call?...
"Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
they're worried about President Biden's plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, with
Rice suggesting the US may need to go back,"
Axios reports.
The pair's "expert" testimony was given over Zoom and appears to have been kept relatively
quiet, given it was a 'closed door' members only call, until Axios learned of it.
Rice of course infamously served as George Bush's National Security Advisor during the
initial invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, and crucially helped make the case for war to
the American public, later serving as Bush's Secretary of State through 2009.
Having helped start two failed wars, both of which have long remained deeply unpopular among
the American public, naturally Condi Rice as a pre-eminent neocon voice would be consulted as a
"stay the course" point of view . It's also deeply revealing that there's no foreign policy
space in terms of viewpoint whatsoever between Rice and Clinton - latter who pushed for the
US-NATO invasion of Libya and planned covert regime change in Syria against Assad.
Little is known about precisely what Hillary testified, but it's not difficult to imagine.
Here are a few key insights
via Axios :
"Condi Rice is like, 'You know, we’re probably gonna have to go
back,' " amid a potential surge in terrorism, the member said.
Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), the top Republican on the committee, told Axios: "With the
potential for an Islamic State, coupled with what they're going to do to our contractors in
Yemen and Afghanistan is, sadly, it's going to be tragic there and we all see it
coming."
Another member of the committee confirmed both Clinton and Rice raised concerns about
the potential fallout from a quick removal of all U.S. troops .
Both also expressed concerns about protecting U.S. diplomats on the ground following the
withdrawal and what the move will mean for the global war on terrorism.
One unnamed committee member told Axios further that "they both agreed we're going to need
to sustain a counterterrorism mission somehow outside of that country."
Well of course!...there always needs to be a war going on somehow and somewhere - otherwise
how would these warmongering ladies sleep at night?
"... We can’t leave anybody behind. We will all benefit, we will all be safer when everyone everywhere has equal access to the vaccine. ..."
"... “We must pursue equitable vaccine distribution, and in that, restore faith in our common humanity. This mission couldn’t be more critical.†..."
Generous and fair-minded Harry and Meghan have said: “ We
can’t leave anybody behind. We will all benefit, we will all be safer when
everyone everywhere has equal access to the vaccine.
“We must pursue equitable vaccine distribution, and in that, restore
faith in our common humanity. This mission couldn’t be more
critical.â€
I wonder how much Harry and Meghan will be paid for this promotion?
From comments: " Tucker is right on this one. If you wear a mask outside you truly are a
moron. You may as well add goggles and a butt plug." ... "Don't forget about those solo drivers
with masks on!", "Maskers are stupid scared virtue signalers"
As an anti-mask militant for quite a while now I've been going out of my way to ask people
with masks on outdoors why they're wearing one (I've really tried to be polite but it's
getting increasingly hard to do that). In literally hundreds of instances I haven't gotten a
straight answer yet. It's stunning that people are so gullible but it shows what the power of
propaganda really is. 99% of that is coming from teevee, which truly rots your brain.
Capt Tripps 10 hours ago remove link
They are signaling the submission to a tyrannical state. That submission makes us all less
free.
safelyG 10 hours ago
mister tucker is wrongeddy wrong wrong.
we must all wear multiple masks. indoors. outdoors. at work. at play. while we sleep.
while we bathe. while we eat. while we sing praises unto the most high.
and we must remain 8 feet apart, one from the other. at all times.
and report our whereabouts and our contacts and our body temperature. to the
authorities.
get your vacines!
lovingly,
bill n melinda
radical-extremist 10 hours ago
When Tucker Carlson says to tell people to take off their masks and call CPS on parents
who mask their children he's trolling the Left. And because the Left has no sense of humor or
irony or hypocrisy...they're of course OUTRAGED, which was his point.
Realism 10 hours ago remove link
I like it best when hiking outside, in 75 degree weather with a nice breeze, you see
people put up their mask as they walk by
Pure comedy, it's hard to understand the stupidity if you think you'll get any disease
much less Covid walking by someone
And importantly, would you really be hiking if you had Covid LOL
aztrader 10 hours ago
Mask wears see it as a badge of honor because they "care" about other people. In reality,
it's a badge of Stupidity and ignorance.
Prince Velveeta 10 hours ago (Edited) remove link
California is an open-air mental ward. I was just out there and the collective idiocy is
astounding. People jogging with masks on , exaggerating their breathing as they pass you in
some competitive virtue signaling event. I witnessed some idiot jogging up the hill past my
family member's house, with a bandana on his face, being sucked into his mouth as he's
gasping for air.....
I said: Okay, I get it, if you lend them the money, then they can pay. This is like a
Ponzi scheme: you lend the investors enough to pay the interest and keep current. That
was my introduction to how the balance of payments worked between the United States and the
third world and how political the whole credit problem was.
Free markets are only free for parasites and usurers to run their schemes. Lolbertarianism
is an ideology of our (((friends))), and I think its adherents are dupes. I no longer think
they are well meaning dupes either, they have a personality defect, where they lack
empathy.
Looks like an attempt to redirect anger against neolibel elite into racial antimosity does nto work well. A least for this UNZ commentariant.
They are not folled by woke nonsense.
In any case it looks like the USA is a divided country.
Never underestimate the insanity of Zionists, be they full Jews, half-Jews, or soulless Jew-wannabes like Joe "I am a Zionist"
Biden. We're in unprecedented territory -- an empire run by Zoglodytes. They'll run it into the ground sooner or later, but just
how quickly and at what cost to the humanity is anyone's guess.
Of course, none of it would be possible but for the Anglo-elites doing deals with ((bankers)) in search of post-Imperial easy-living.
In fact, that's probably what caused WW2.
Today, gangsters from every creed, race and religion want in on the Zionist action, and happily signal to their criminal lodestar
that they're "all in" with virtually unlimited aid, wars and diplomatic support in Congress for the Jewish state.
The New World Order. How do you like it, whitey? You just had to listen to the gold-plated promises of the Jew confidence man.
The streets will be paved with gold, right?
If you're white and in the armed forces/police, you're a moron.
The fact is Americans are nothing but the Jew's bitch, killing for them. There isn't one American, who's defended their country,
well, you'll have to go back to the war of independence for that. Every, serving member of the armed forces is a mercenary, paid
by the US taxpayer, to kill fire Israel as they establish greater Israel.
So STOP looking at your armed forces as heroes. They aren't, not one, single one! See them for what they are, braindead, brainwashed,
fighting machines, WHO DON'T FIGHT FOR YOU! And that's what's worrying. Throughout history every armed force has been turned against
its own nation and its just a matter of time with the US. THEY WILL use them against you, to push nationwide vaccination.
The armed forces, like the police, are your enemy and I strongly suggest that if you know anyone in them, or a friend whose
family members are in them, tell them to leave ASAP before they institute martial law. Remember, the armed forces don't serve
you, so leaving them is doing the people good while staying within is causing them harm.
I'm suspicious of Biden's planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. The troops will probably get reassigned to the Middle East or
the Polish Border. Trump's "withdrawal" from Syria just amounted to shipping those troops to Iraq.
The Biden administration is a revolutionary one. It is not American and doesn't pretend to be. Like Lenin's early revolutionary
Bolshevik government it is comprised of mostly Jews and racial/ethnic minorities who are antagonistic towards the majority population
and its history and traditions.
I believe that the Jews, radical blacks and others who are really in charge of the Biden administration have no plans to relinquish
power in 2024 even if they lose the election. Since the courts refused to provide a legal remedy for battleground states breaking
their own elections laws to massively increase Democrat mail-in ballots then they will just do it again unless Republicans can
win the gubernatorial elections in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But that might not be possible with mail-in ballot schemes
that were illegally put in place.
Will whites support a globalist regime that picks fights abroad and wars against them at home? The mood of the country is
comparable to East German during the 1980's. Resignation and apathy. The last election was a fraud, the media are liars, the courts
are political, privacy and free speech aren't being protected, and half the country declares it hates the other half.
Go ahead, try to conjure a false flag to rally Team America
There are no signs whites are about to repudiate the Evil Empire. Trace Adkins, Gerald McRaney are on tv advertisements imploring
whites to provide financial support to the fools who came back crippled from fighting in Israel's wars.
"Will Whites Support A Globalist American Empire That Picks Fights Abroad and Wars Against Them At Home?"
The answer is YES, they will.
Why?
Because they've been zombified by 150 years of corporate media whose only purpose is to use subliminal messages 24/7 to control
them. Worse of all, they pay monthly fees in order to be zombified!
Wait for the next false flag attack against the US "Interests" at home or abroad and you'll see how the zombies behave.
Elites, oligarchs, plutocrats, super-rich, whatever, but don't slime the Yankees.
And while I agree with much of this, don't forget that in the late 1960's the elites imported Mexicans to specifically replace
blacks. And then cried a river of tears at how blacks were mysteriously losing ground!!!!
Oh and also: nobody NEEDS cheap labor to run factories. History has shown that without cheap labor factories run perfectly
well. It's just that the elites need cheap labor to stay elite
The real enemy of the American working class and middle class all of them is neoliberalism ! Coupled with a two party plutocracy
that disenfranchises the same Americans who desperately need a more equitable society! Nothing to do with Russia or China we caused
it all by ourselves!
This is why there needs to be White Liberation from Jewish Supremacism. But Jewish Power tries to preempt this by making a
big stink about 'white supremacism'.
No more white support for Jewish supremacist tyranny over Palestinians and mass murder of Arabs/Muslims. If, after 2020, any
white person still harbors sentimentality about Jewish Power, he or she is cuck-roach. Useless and worthless.
Currently, an indebted, belligerent, imperialist U.S. is being propped up by naïve, well-meaning whites.
These "well-meaning whites" are the enemy. "Well-meaning whites" have always been the greatest enemy of Whites. A lot of people
here consider Jews to be our greatest enemies. But why are they here in such huge numbers and why are they in control? It started
with the Powdered-Wig Gang (a.k.a. the Founding Fathers) giving them citizenship on the basis of their shit "Enlightenment" ideology,
which held that religion was merely a private matter and of no importance. No country at the time gave Jews citizenship save Poland,
which had fallen under their sway and paid an exceedingly high price for it. Then France followed the American example when they
had their own powdered-wig revolution.
The tragedy of the US is that nearly every fair-skinned, non-Jewish individual who has any influence here is a "well-meaning
White". Generations of brainwashing have done that. Their latest bit of tomfoolery is the belief "Uncle Tim" Scott, a dim, charmless,
venal, ugly black mediocrity, will be their savior. By the way, the first time I laid eyes on Uncle Tim, I said myself, "They're
going to want to make that fellow president." That's no reason to brag, however, because "well-meaning whites" are nothing if
not predictable.
"Well-meaning whites" have no common sense and can't learn from experience. They could not conceive the idea "diversity" is
the problem. "Diversity" elected Joe Biden, through bloc-voting by non-Whites and by she-boons in black-dominated counties bringing
in suitcases of fake ballots, but guess what: as far as "well-meaning Whites" are concerned, "diversity" in the form of "Uncle
Tim" Scott is the solution.
What it comes down to is that if Whites want the White race to survive, then "well-meaning whites", who can accurately be called
"liberals", have to go. Whites cannot afford to be sentimental about "well-meaning whites".
@xyzxy the Zio-western imperialists decided ( ie "backed down") not to risk crossing them.
Incidentally JK I don't disagree with this position --
"Rather than feeling anger or shame at this national humiliation, instead I feel something like schadenfreude against them --
along with righteous indignation on behalf of the countless patriots used up and spat out by a System unworthy of their sacrifice."
But perhaps you could spare a few words & emotions for the poor bloody average Afghans who have died in their 100's of 1000's
in this vicious, stupid war.
A lack of sympathy for & indeed basic knowledge of, other peoples is part of the reason the US constantly gets stuck in these
ridiculous wars. (Had they the "leaders" we have now , the Vietnam War would probably have limped to a halt sometime in
the late 80's).
Hmm. Kirkpatrick doesn't seem to realize that 911 was sort of an official beginning to the elites domestic threat problem?
There was never a reason to enter Afghanistan because Afghanistan never attacked us and nor did Osama Bin Laden.
As long as ppl believe the official story there will always be a reason the American citizen can support for invading middle east
countries
Like the holocaust, it is a lynch pin lie that is the pre-requisite for all sorts claims and behaviors that without them would
otherwise not give validation
I doubt Russia has any regard for Turkey – it has a very long history of wars against them and knows just how treacherous they
are.
Russia alone is powerful enough to end life in USA
USA has lost Europe already- Merkel is aligning with China
Americans think Russian gas binds Germany rather than export markets like China and the fact EU needs semiconductors and Asia
is where they are produced
No one takes USA seriously any more it is peripheral as in 19th century. You forget Europeans cannot travel to US and frankly
fear to do so anyway
This cannot be said nearly enough. WASP culture is WASP elites hating all 'other' whites and pretending not to hate
a few non-WASP white groups when they (the WASPs) can use them against the whites they most hate or fear at the moment. WASPs
discard all groups they use as soon as they no longer need them to wage some type war against still other whites.
The Scotch-Irish are probably the best example of what WASPs think of even those who serve them most ruthlessly.
The mood of the country is comparable to East German during the 1980's. Resignation and apathy.
The last election was a fraud, the media are liars, the courts are political, privacy and free speech aren't being protected,
and half the country declares it hates the other half.
Go ahead, try to conjure a false flag to rally Team America.
It does look like resignation and apathy – which is sort of logical – given that all centers of power are in the hands of the
totalitarians (same as in the old East Germany).
The totalitarian Communist East German regime actually collapsed when it became caught up in the mass demonstrations of neighbouring
countries (Poland Feb. 1989 and Hungary the following month). The Communists didn't have the political will/ability to suppress
demonstrations on this scale and ceded power. Two points here are 1) that the public in each country overwhelmingly opposed the
government 2) each country was ethnically united (Poles in Poland, Hungarians in Hungary and Germans in East Germany) and viewed
their oppression as sourced externally (the Soviet Union).
The US looks different, since the population is split both politically and ethnically. So if anything is going to happen (unlikely)
then it's either a civil war, a military coup or a world war (nuclear) removing most major American cities + Israel.
@anonymouseperson c accountants uncovering the depths of Israel and its fifth column's theft of many tens of billions of our
war matériel and of our most guarded military secrets, which were then sold to China in concert with the Greenspan/Goldman Sachs
plan to transfer of our industrial intellectual assets and over 50,000 factories to China in preparation for a new order based
on joint Israeli-Chinese technocratic hegemony.
My point is that the uninterrupted, elaborate efforts at 9/11 concealment legally constitute, by themselves, sufficient proof
of the Pentagon's complicity and guilt in 9/11 and, therefore, make it an alien occupation force that serves Israel, its fifth
column, and no other. A war completing the "Bolsheviks" effective extermination of white Christian Russia at the same time as
exterminating white Christian America appears to be the objective of International Jewry, whom alone Joe Biden and his Pentagon
answer to.
When I was in the US Army, I never met anyone who signed up to 'fight for the Anglo-Zionist empire'. We were there for a variety
of reasons, no job, to get training, money for college, adventure or maybe running away from a crazy girlfriend. As the grandson
of immigrants, I was probably the most patriotic, the rest of the guys, not so much. Young men will always join the military,
whether the military oppresses its people or not. How many Irishmen served in the British military when they had few civil rights
back home? In the military, a young White man can learn a trade, learn military tactics, earn money for college and become a real
asset to his community. You can also get killed or maimed, but at 18 or 19, we didn't think about that.
Will Whites Support A Globalist American Empire That Picks Fights Abroad and Wars Against Them At Home?
If they are members of Congress, the military leadership, the police, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the MSM, or the leadership
of either political party the answer is clearly a resounding YES!!
I believe a large percentage of whites in America have a Stockholm syndrome of some kind going on. The title of the article
has rolled two very separate issues into one. As far as continuing to support wars abroad that aren't benefiting the average person
of whatever color is not an issue that can be specifically directed at Marxist oriented regimes such as that of Obama/Hillary
and now Sleepy Joe & Camel Toe. One can never forget the years of the faux conservative Bushlet regime. Whites as a group more
overtly support the military than do other racial groups (even though blacks and Hispanics make up a large percentage of our military).
They are very reluctant to criticize American foreign policy as unpatriotic and somehow react to military interventions as if
they were a sporting event.
Their concept of patriotism is very puerile. Many never ask the question of who benefits? (bankers, weapons manufacturers
and Zionists). As far as the war on whites is concerned, here is where the Stockholm syndrome comes more into play. Our people
have been psychologically beaten into submission by accepting whatever the Marxist intelligentsia throws at them.But there is
also a cultural flaw primarily among Northern European Protestant whites which consists of being perceived as NICE. Stop being
NICE, especially to people who wish you dead. Is this some sort of perversion of Christianity? Maybe. Rather than throwing the
whole Gospel message out the window, a recalibration of one's Christianity needs to happen as well. The churches have not been
our friend either.
Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic
Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the
information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no
meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Analysis: US
blinks first on Russia-Ukraine tensions
Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The
New York Times on the so-called
“Bountygate†story the outlet broke in June of last year
about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in
Afghanistan.
“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story
(originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence
officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,†Greenwald
tweeted .
“So media outlets - again - repeated CIA stories with no questioning:
congrats to all.â€
Indeed, NYT’s original
story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only
“officials,†yet this latest article speaks as though it had
been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the
lying, torturing , drug-running , warmongering Central
Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New
York Times
first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s
assessment,†with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no
mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA
was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.
The Daily Beast , which has itself uncritically published many articles
promoting the CIA “Bountygate†narrative, reports the
following:
It was a blockbuster
story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great
Game†in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central
Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry
from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the
White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.
But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had
“low to moderate†confidence in the story after all.
Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the
story is, at best, unproven â€" and possibly untrue.
So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of,
because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning.
They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.
In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories
to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy
agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!†and the
news media unquestioningly publish it.
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “ The CIA and the Media
†reporting that the CIA had
covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had
over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as
Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to
report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the
agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too
propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New
York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news
pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor ,
and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence
agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets
now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper,
Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha
Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash,
Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known
CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are
CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like
Tucker Carlson.
This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse.
Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the
CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even
any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if
people’s votes aren’t being cast with a clear
understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world, and if
their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government
they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most
powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to
the electorate whatsoever. It’s just an immense globe-spanning power
structure, doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in
disguise.
And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements
of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific
things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just
a glance at what the CIA was up to with the
Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.
There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government
agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil
things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by
mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is
comfortable, and for literally no other reason.
The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements
of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of
psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the
thoughts we think in our own heads.
May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.
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For several centuries, Europe served as the Ancient Greece to the American Rome -- the source of most of the most important
cultural inspirations, despite a certain underlying criticism of 'effeminacy' and 'dissolution.'
The 20th Century's Modernism and Postmodernism was similar to Rome's sometimes successful but more usually inferior attempts
to incorporate and ultimately replace the influence of Greek culture. Despite proclaiming a concrete Roman character, Rome was
often just a hodgepodge of various assimilated Mediterranean influences (a bland but somehow also nationalistic multiculturalism)
until Christianity gave its thinkers and artists a more or less focused and unified point of departure.
Which would indicate some of what the future holds for the European triumphs of the Renaissance to the 20th Century -- a weak
acknowledgment of its importance, with a handful of individuals remembered and very little in the way of context or continuity.
At best, there could be another Renaissance after the Dark Age that looms. But it doesn't look likely from here, as the Empire
is taking so much down with it as it falls.
As I
argued recently , the decline of soft neoliberalism in the US Democratic Party can be
explained largely in terms of generational replacement. What about hard neoliberalism and the
Republican Party?
After four years of the Trump Administration, and a few months of post-election madness, the
Republican Party has completed a transition that has been going on for decades. In the 1980s
and 1990s, the Republicans were a hard neoliberal party, spending most of their policy effort
on tax cuts and deregulation, and using white grievance politics to attract votes. Now the
situation is reversed. The Republicans are a white grievance party, whose targets include
'woke corporations', However, they still attempt to
attract support from corporations by advocating tax cuts. While any pretence of principled
aversion to regulation has been abandoned, crony capitalist exemptions from regulation are
still on offer if the price is right
The core claim of hard neoliberalism was that a free market economy with a modest
'safety net' could do a better job of delivering broad
prosperity than the welfare state built on the New Deal and Keynesian economics. The optimism
of this message, reflected in Reagan's 'Morning in America' turned into triumphalism with the end of the Cold War.
Hard neoliberals supported globalisation, and cheered on the idea that borderless capital
would bring governments under control, and put an end to budget deficits. In particular,
Republicans supported trade deals like NAFTA
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/09/history-lesson-more-republicans-than-democrats-supported-nafta/
The high point of hard neoliberalism was the 1994 Contract with America, the slogan under
which the Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time since 1952. The Contract
called for balanced budgets and reduced welfare spending for single-parent families, but also
proposed positive measures including an expanded child tax credit.
The commitment to balanced budgets was the first element of hard neoliberalism to be
ditched. Responding to the collapse of the dotcom boom, the Bush Administration introduced
large, and effectively permanent (fn: the most regressive elements were allowed to expire under
Obama) tax cuts. These cuts, along with massive expenditure on the 'forever wars' that began after the 2001 terror attacks, pushed the government budget
from the surplus that had been achieved under the Clinton Administration into permanent
deficit.
For a brief period, the 'Tea Party' revolt against the
Obama Administration appeared as a reversion to hard neoliberalism, with a non-partisan focus
on sound finance. In reality, the Tea Party was a mixture of Republican activists and grifters
who used its appeal to solicit donations, largely used to fund well-paid jobs for themselves.
Both groups have been prominent among the support base for
Donald Trump .
By the time the Republicans turned to Trump, grievance politics were already dominant. Trump
discarded long held beliefs about free trade and the need for government to stay out of
business. But even during Trump's Presidency, Congressional Republicans held
on to a few elements of the old mixture, such as corporate tax cuts and pro-corporate changes
to regulation. It is only in the aftermath of Trump's attempt to overturn
the 2020 election that the alliance between Republicans and big business has been broken.
On the one hand, corporations regularly run afoul of grievance politics, by taking
initiatives seen as 'woke'. On the other hand, the threat
posed to constitutional government by the Republican party is now so obvious as to arouse
corporate resistance. Corporations with a long-term view of their prospects correctly prefer to
risk higher tax rates than to operate in a Trumpist banana republic.
A puzzle remains. On the one hand, as we have seen, Trumpism is the culmination of trends
going back many decades. On the other hand, today's far right Republican
party is clearly different in kind from the party that nominated moderate globalist Mitt Romney
for the presidency in 2012
One useful metaphor for this process is that of a phase transition, such as from liquid to
gas, or dissolved solid to crystal) in physics and chemistry.
To develop the metaphor, think of the Eisenhower-era Republican party as a complicated
mixture of many dissolved ingredients, in which the dominant element was the business
establishment, and the Trump era party as a crystallised mass of plutocratic economics, racism
and all-round craziness. The development over the 60 years between the two has consisted of
keeping the mixture simmering, while adding more and more appeals to racial animus and magical
thinking (supply-side economics, climate denial, the Iraq war and so on). In this process
various elements of the original mix have boiled off or precipitated out and discarded as
dregs.
Boiling off is the process by which various groups (Blacks and Northeastern liberal
Republicans in C20, liberaltarians more recently) have left the Republican coalition in
response to its racism and know-nothingism. The dregs that have precipitated out are ideas that
were supposed to be important to Republicans (free trade, scientific truth, classical
liberalism, moral character and so on) that turned out not to matter at all.
Trump's arrival is the catalyst seed crystal that produces the phase
change. The final product of the reaction emerges in its crystallised form.
Eisenhower was president from 1953-1961. The Great Realignment
Republican'">Democrat happened in the 1930s under Roosevelt, and the Southern
Strategy that eventually switched the South from Democrat'">Republican and
laid out the current US political alignment happened either in 1964 with Goldwater or 1968
with Nixon, in either case after Eisenhower. I'm not sure how
reliable the date I have for the first half of this political realignment is (I admit I got
it from Wikipedia), but I'm pretty confident of the second half being
post-Eisenhower. As a result, I raise my eyebrows quite a bit when I hear about a transition
directly from an Eisenhower-era Republican Party to a Trump-era Republican Party. What about
the intervening Republican presidents?
In short, I actually agree with this being a direct transition, but I'd
argue that the 'œTrump-era' Republican Party starts with Nixon
and hasn't stopped since. They made a conscious decision, whose evidence
we can see in macro voting patterns and in their correspondence, to incorporate White
Grievance into their coalition. I'm unable to find a position on which the
Republican Party has changed on a coalition-building level since.
The OP is making the case for Free Markets being such a thing, and I think
it's the topic for which the strongest case can be made, but I
don't buy it. Republican administrations since Nixon have supported
cronyism, military adventures in support of their favored companies, suppression of specific
industries (e.g. solar), subsidizing others (e.g. fossil fuels and pharmaceuticals).
I'm not an economist, but I suspect that if we zoom in
we'd find more cases of Republican administrations intervening against
Free Markets than to protect them on the level of individual companies too.
When Republicans say Free Markets, they mean Deregulation and Low Taxes on the Rich,
both of which notably continued under Trump.
Romney, for comparison, would probably also have supported Deregulation and Low Taxes on
the Rich, but Eisenhower didn't.
Working in the Midwest and Idaho I think there is a large group of jumping voters. I
called the 2016 election for Trump after staying in multiple AirBnBs with people who voted
Obama twice and were voting for Trump. Same reason '" hope for change.
The past few years I was surrounded by Trump voters, some still good friends. They
aren't conspiracy dingbats. They also liked Yang. They radically dislike
the democrats corruption and warmongering. It's the religious who sign up
to fight those wars and their children coming home in body bags.
The real issue is no choice, nobody except liars, and politicians on the take.
Don't kid yourself, John. The current white house occupants are a
senile old warmonger whose drug addict son has him wrapped around his finger, and the one
primary candidate who resoundingly lost.
Those two, foisted on the nation by DNC oligarchs, nearly lost! They came within a hair
of losing to an uncouth, marginally literate clown. Ignore the electoral college. Look at the
margins in states that won.. this is no victory, no mandate, nor is it stable. This pack of
Same old drivelers in both parties is busy shoving the same garbage that created
Trump's victory.
If you think that the Republicans media machine is unhinged, read Matt Taibbi on
Russiagate's lies. How much more unhinged is it for the Democrats media
(Rachel Maddow and co) to attack and provoke a nuclear super power into creating new weapons
and reinstating MAD.
I think I'd want to go back further than Sashas. Researching an article
on Helen Keller a while back, I discovered to my surprise not only that Ms Keller was a Wob
(in the Debs/Wobbly intersect to be precise) but that she was funded by Andrew Carnegie '" and that the GOP of her day was, as well as a party of bankers and
strikebreakers, a party of East Coast pencil-necked liberals with fingers in every
progressive cause going (excepting the cause of labour, for obvious reasons).
All this was in the period prior to the US joining the Great War '" which is
what we historians refer to as a hell of a long time ago '" and the Dems have
also gone through a change or two in the same period. (Well, one big one.) Still, I wonder if
the story of the GOP could be told as a series of these transitions '" from
plutocrat/business/liberal to plutocrat/business/conservative to
plutocrat/business/conservative/racist to today's hard core
plutocrat/racist '" with the only constant being the presence of people with the
kind of money that can endow libraries around the world, or do
less useful things .
Wouldn't it be nice to wait and see if there has actually been an
end to hard neoliberalism (or, indeed, a leftward shift in the Democratic Party) before
making confident and information-free declarations about such matters? As far as I can make
out there is essentially no current plan to make any substantive changes in the U.S. economic
system arising out of the Democratic Party, and no sign of any substantive shift in the
Republican Party's positions.
It is always comforting to believe that such things are true. Liberals, however, have been
fooled before, over and over, by the Democratic Party. Naturally politicians attempt to say
some nice things, which are then fed back to the appropriate demographics by compliant media
houses which have their own agendas and which know that their audience know no
alternatives.
As Mr. Fenton put it:
Listen to what they did.
Don't listen to what they said.
What was written in blood
Has been set up in lead.
Lead tears the heart.
Lead tears the brain.
What was written in blood
Has been set up again.
The heart is a drum.
The drum has a snare.
The snare is in the blood.
The blood is in the air.
Listen to what they did.
Listen to what's to come.
Listen to the blood.
Listen to the drum.
I think that the real backbone of conservative parties is small business, more than big
corporations. It certainly is so here in Italy (where however we have a much larger share of
small business to big business relative to the USA), but I wonder if this is a common
phenomenon.
I think that the clash between big business and small business is a big part of the
apparent change in right wing parties.
JQ: 'œAfter four years of the Trump Administration, and a few months of post-election madness, the Republican Party has
completed a transition that has been going on for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Republicans were a hard neoliberal
party, spending most of their policy effort on tax cuts and deregulation. Now the situation is reversed.'
I suggest you read that snippet again (in isolation), and try to make sense of it. I
can't. What has been reversed? Is there a missing step in your argument?
'œTax cuts and deregulation' is a concise description of Trump
administration policies, and there is no indication whatsoever that the post-Trump GOP will
be any different. And the Culture War has been a staple of right wing politics in the US for
decades. So what do you mean by reversal?
John, have you read Before the Storm (2001) by Rick Perlstein? You may find it useful for
the Goldwater years.
I have also similar issues with the claim of Republicans being free marketeers. Yes,
obviously, they (used to) say that they are pro-market but they rarely walk the talk. E.g.:
Reagan increased the budget deficit; Trump-like concerns for the trade deficit (with Japan at
the time) and currency manipulation spurred the 1985 Plaza Accord; even when they are in
favor of lower taxes, they rarely care about how this may distort incentives (e.g. no sales
tax on goods purchased on Internet are a subsidy to Bezos), they just (claim that they) want
to starve the beast; Casey Mulligan advised Trump and according to him Trump is the greatest
deregulator ever; and 'œfreedom' is always a loaded term, e.g.
they are against immigration which is just the freedom of one factor of production (labor) to
freely move across countries. So, yeah, the libertarians who have (mainly in the past but
some also now) supported Republicans are hard neoliberals free marketeers but most Republican
rarely fit that description.
More general question (no need to answer, obviously, just for your thoughts): what is the
role of this intellectual history section in your book? It seems you are forced to make some
generalizations that some may object to, even though it is not clear to me how essential they
are to your main thesis.
Brian: 'œThe past few years I was surrounded by Trump voters, some
still good friends. They aren't conspiracy dingbats. They also liked
Yang. They radically dislike the democrats corruption and warmongering.
It's the religious who sign up to fight those wars and their children coming home in body bags.'
It's the religious right who loved them some o' dat
war. It's the religious right who loves corruption, especially in their
leaders.
Perhaps relevant to a couple of the above comments is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote
in 2016, when I was reading Perlstein's Before the Storm (which I
didn't finish):
One thing (among others) that comes through clearly in the first 50 pp. or so of the
book is the extent to which the emergent or reconstituting U.S. Right in the
'50s and early '60s found a key constituency in
family-owned and/or privately-held manufacturing and other businesses'¦
Indeed Perlstein opens the first chapter with a sketch of the political views and
trajectory of one such (hypothetical) businessman.
Here's one actual example of many: In '59, on the
eve of Khrushchev's visit to the U.S., we're told
that 'œMilwaukee's Allen-Bradley Company bought a full
page in the Wall Street Journal: 'To Khrushchev, 'œPeace and Friendship' means the total enslavement of all
nations, of all peoples, of all things, under the God-denying Communist conspiracy of which
he is the current Czar'¦. Don't let it happen
here!'' (p.52)
Pretty clearly only a family-run or closely-held business would have felt able to spring
for this kind of full-page ad in the WSJ '" a big publicly-traded company
presumably would not have done this sort of thing, even if some of its executives might
have shared the same views. (I use the word 'œpresumably'
because I'm not sure that this speculation is correct, but it seems
fairly logical.)
John: 'œFor a brief period, the 'Tea
Party' revolt against the Obama Administration appeared as a reversion to hard neoliberalism, with a non-partisan focus on
sound finance. '
No, they never did, except for people willing to believe. They didn't
have a single problem with abuses under Dubya.
JQ 25, I think I get your point but I wouldn't call this much of a
reversal. An interesting question is at what point Culture War became a (not yet
'the') defining feature of the GOP, and how that point
is related to the hard neoliberal turn.
Phil 6 describes the transition 'œfrom plutocrat/business/liberal to
plutocrat/business/conservative to plutocrat/business/conservative/racist to
today's hard core plutocrat/racist' (i. e. fascist I would
say).
Fwiw there also is an account that paints the pre-Reaganite GOP as more complex than that,
e. g. they weren't always strictly anti-labor ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/opinion/labor-unions-republicans.html
). It seems to me that one characteristic of the GOP of our time is the strict and in the US
context extremely unusual ideological homogeneity, which imho strengthens the case for
classifying that party as fascist.
35: 'œThe right wing of earlier times did worship at the altar of engineering and technology for its ability to deliver
shiny toys and things that go boom but that did not require either an understanding or respect for science as a methodology.'
You have to look no further than the Nazis. Their general outlook was anti-modernity,
anti-enlightenment, they condemned relativity as 'œJewish
science' and had quite some affinity with certain esoteric movements (and vice
versa), but they also had the engineering/technologiy-worshipping side. See also Italian
Futurism.
"... '˜An important limitation of Bruenig's analysis is that she treats 'capital' as a unitary force. There is a sharp division between global corporations, with a long-run interest in the preservation of the rule of law under a democratic government, and the crony capitalists, epitomized by Trump himself, for whom the object is to extract as much as possible from the US economy, as quickly as they can'. ..."
Capital is unfaithful. It can, and does, play all sides. Many of the courageous businesses that protested North Carolina's
2016 'bathroom bill,' for instance, also
donated to
political groups that helped fund the candidacies of the very politicians who passed the bill.
This is the nature of alliances of convenience. When the Western Allies joined Stalin to fight against Hitler they had no (or
at least few) illusions about him, and didn't rely on him to keep his word any longer than necessary, or to refrain from undermining
them in other quarters
It isn't possible to cooperate with capital on social matters while fighting them in other theaters; capital can fight you
in all theaters at once, all while enjoying public adulation for helping you, as well.
This simply isn't correct as the Biden Administration is showing. Despite co-operating with capital on social matters,. Biden
has proposed substantial increases in corporate tax rates and global action against corporate tax avoidance. In this context, it
is the position of capital that has been weakened by the toxicity of its usual allies, the Republicans.
Setting aside the fact that capital can in a single moment be both heroic and diabolical '" Amazon wants you to be able to
vote , but
it would prefer if you didn't
unionize
'" it is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy. Capital rallies
to the defense of democracy while aggressively quashing that very thing in the workplaces where its workers labor.
Again, this is what happens in an alliance of this kind. Fights over unionization go on, in parallel with an alliance over the
right to vote. Once again, it's the corporations who face the bigger problem here, with opportunistic Republicans pretending to
back the rights of the workers.
I have no idea what to do about this other than know it for what it is. If it were ever the case that knowledge was power,
it certainly isn't so anymore: Knowledge is more widely dispersed than ever; power remains notably concentrated. But knowledge
confers a certain dignity. It's worse to be powerless and unaware than to be powerless and perfectly clear on where you stand.
This is a counsel of despair, without any real basis. Bruenig gives no reason to suppose that the fight for democracy can't
be won, even if it requires alliances between groups with interests that are otherwise opposed. But if the Republicans can be held
at bay long enough to allow the passage of strong voting rights law, they will have to reform themselves or face permanent minority
status. Getting to that point (for example, by winning bigger majorities in both Houses of Congress in 2022, then scrapping the filibuster)
will be difficult, but not impossible
An important limitation of Bruenig's analysis is that she treats 'capital' as a unitary force. There is a sharp division
between global corporations, with a long-run interest in the preservation of the rule of law under a democratic government, and the
crony capitalists, epitomized by Trump himself, for whom the object is to extract as much as possible from the US economy, as quickly
as they can.
Someone with more expertise than me could interpret all this in terms of the 'fractions of capital' idea put forward by Poulantzas
and others in C20. A search on those terms produced
this piece in The Guardian , which covers some of those points.
'˜An important limitation of Bruenig's analysis is that she treats 'capital' as a unitary force. There is a sharp division
between global corporations, with a long-run interest in the preservation of the rule of law under a democratic government, and
the crony capitalists, epitomized by Trump himself, for whom the object is to extract as much as possible from the US economy,
as quickly as they can'.
I couldn't agree more as:
'˜An important limitation of any current analysis about the US Chaos is that outdated political labels are treated as a unitary
forces. There is a sharp division between so called '˜Elites' who are considered to be '˜Elites' because they have a lot
of dough, and '˜Elites' who are able to understand jokes about rich Idiots '"
(just joking!)
with a long-run interest in NOT preservation of the rule of law under a democratic government.
I think that Bruenig's basic problem is not so much despair, as the expectations of friendship and loyalty that we want to
give and receive. That may work fine in small groups, but fails utterly in larger political and economic situations. Corporations
exploit that as much as they can for the benefits of employee and customer loyalty, and hardly ever reciprocate, leading to a
lot of disappointment, resentment, and cynicism. I agree with John that there is a different strategy of alliances that's needed
for the latter, and it's a shame we don't educate students directly about it.
Major point: Crony capitalism and crony capitalists are hissable villains. Any clique can nominate whomever they wish as Snidely
Whiplash, but as an identifiable group, I believe the crony capitalists are even harder to identify than the aristocracy of labor.
They are in economic terms, unproductive capitalists. It's not clear how anyone who rejects the usefulness, or claims the impossibility,
of distinguishing unproductive labor from productive labor could accept this as a real category.
Minor point: The supposed alliance of convenience of the 'Allies' with 'Stalin' is not quite the point believed. The
supposed allies of Stalin delayed meaningful entry into the war, the second front. And the supposed allies of Stalin turned against
the war-ravaged USSR as quickly as possible, launching decades of hostility, including military actions, attempted subversion
and economic warfare. This example of 'alliance of convenience' means the corporations will rely on the small-d democrats to
fight the bulk of the war, then attack their convenient allies as soon as possible.
'There is a sharp division between global corporations, with a long-run interest in the preservation of the rule of
law under a democratic government, and the crony capitalists, epitomized by Trump himself, for whom the object is to
extract as much as possible from the US economy, as quickly as they can. '
Whoa. I happen to feel (and it seems fairly obvious to me) that it's exactly the opposite: domestic capital is interested
in long-term prosperity and stability, while global capital operates by invading, squeezing all juice, and moving on.
Bruenig would have liberals fight a war on all fronts, apparently, without any allies.
[Amazon] is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy.
Well, that may be because it is not in any sense a '˜democracy' . It is a corporation operating within the state
framework of a representative democracy.
Corporations are quite responsive to societal concerns the moment their bottom line is threatened . This is the
power that consumers have in a consumer-driven economy.
Certainly 'Capital' has deep and abiding shared interests with the Republican party; the GOP has long been their reliable
partner delivering the things they want, less taxes, regulation and free reign in international markets; trumpism threatens that,
because the essence of Trumpism is it's chaotic arbitrariness.
Witness the whole arc of the '˜banning' of TikTok because people using that platform humiliated Dear Leader. In the
end it amounted to'¦well, we still don't know what, exactly it has amounted to.
This kind of chaos isn't even beneficial to crony capitalists, because as we've seen time and time again in Russia'¦your
status as a '˜crony' is always precarious, subject to the whims and paranoia of the autocrat.
The
linked Guardian piece has the added appeal for you (I imagine) of using chemistry metaphors similar to the phase transition
ones you used here
.
On the broader topic of instrumental alliances, you are of course correct, at least if the desired end is achieved goals rather
than individual purity. Tom Lehrer's Folksong Army
may be a useful counter to Breunig's argument.
OP; 'When the Western Allies joined Stalin to fight against Hitler they had no (or at least few) illusions about him.`'
Umm. It seems fairly clear that Roosevelt said, at Yalta 'Stalin doesn't want anything but security for his country, and
I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wouldn't try to
annex anything and will work with for a world of democracy and peace.'
Now with Roosevelt, perhaps even more than with other politicians, there may be a gap between what he really thought and what
he wanted his listeners to believe he thought. All the same '¦
As for steven t Johnson @3:
'The supposed allies of Stalin delayed meaningful entry into the war, the second front.'
I would be interested to get an explanation as to why stj thinks that
a) the allied actions before the invasion of France (which is what all good Communists in Britain meant when they painted 'SECOND
FRONT NOW' on walls in 1942 or 1943) were not meaningful; and
b) how an invasion of France in 1942 or 1943 would have in fact have shortened the war, other than to Germany's advantage.
Oh? '"
I just would love to '" as aren't you the '˜Petrovna' who once wrote that Greedy Outsourcers are NOT '˜Greedy Outsourcers'?
'"
so how does square with your idea of:
'˜domestic capital is interested in long-term prosperity and stability, while outsourcers operate by invading, squeezing all
juice, and moving on'.
I'd say Ms. Bruenig is primarily just someone who needs to grow up and understand that the entire world isn't arrayed around
whatever she imagines democracy might be about. She appears as someone who thinks democracy is about waiting your turn in the
Starbucks line and tipping the minority barista because they've had to face struggles in life.
Score this as the latest in a line of '˜woke' media who sit and vilify Amazon by posting their views on Facebook, ignoring
that every few days a fresh box shows up with a swoosh on their doorstep.
This one uses the NEW YORK F-ing Times as her soapbox '" ironic, no? Last I looked they weren't exactly a not for profit,
indeed manufacturing fake concern, real concern, any concern for money is why they exist '" not exclusively, but if not for the
$$$ their impact would be equal to the same article in the East Overshoe Nebraska, Gazette.
Many might rail against Exxon and pals but when the tank is on E and its the only station on the highway I know of none that
pull over and walk instead of fill up.
Companies exist to fill particular needs '" their political, environmental and social impacts (all of which are important)
are by products of their primary mission and are managed as needed in proportion to the degree it impacts their objectives (which
heavily involve profit making but only rarely are exclusively focused on profit making).
As JQ notes, they will be an ally when it suits them or (or when it suits you) but they are tools to their own end, not a tool
to be wielded by others.
Bruenig has the right of it, of course '" Biden will help drive our civilization into the climate apocalypse as eagerly as
Trump did, and the end result will be the exact same levels of brutality and misery. Biden and Trump are two sides of the same
coin; salvation does not come from the 'Senator from MBNA.'
Sooner or later, Biden will get tired of pretending to be benevolent papa. He's already there on weed, police brutality,
and imperialism. It's just a matter of time.
Stephen@7 is preaching to the choir, thus briefly as possible: The USSR joining the UN; restraining the Italian and French
CPs; surrendering the Greek CP (well, to be fair, Tito was even more important to this, but still); withdrawal from Austria and
Iran; neutralization of Finland; the recognition of Israel; the offer of neutralization of Germany; limited aid (to put it mildly)
to the Chinese CP, etc. There are an estimated 20 million reasons why 'Stalin' played it that way. Nonetheless, Stephen's
Cold War triumphalism is still wrong.
And as to the alleged mysteries Stephen doesn't understand? The number of German divisions tied down in Italy was about,
if I remember correctly, was eight. Churchill may have coined a vivid phrase in 'the soft underbelly of Europe' but it was
BS meant to divert troops away from fighting Germans save to protect Egypt etc. The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis, not the Allies.
It's true that if the Allies had managed to join the Nazis in alliance with the Finns that the Soviet Union would almost certainly
have been defeated. No doubt Stephen regrets the lost opportunity. Or, along with David Brin, wishes the atomic bomb could have
been used in Europe to stop'¦Stalin?
The other question, as phrased suggests that a second front in France in 1942 or 1943 would have been advantageous to Germany.
I suggest this is simply nuts. Unless there's some assumption that a second front would have promoted the chances of a negotiated
peace between the Allies and the Nazis? But this I think is just wishful thinking.
Bruenig has the right of it, of course '" Biden will help drive our civilization into the climate apocalypse as eagerly
as Trump did, and the end result will be the exact same levels of brutality and misery. Biden and Trump are two sides of the
same coin; salvation does not come from the 'Senator from MBNA.'
Sooner or later, Biden will get tired of pretending to be benevolent papa. He's already there on weed, police brutality,
and imperialism. It's just a matter of time.
Elizabeth Bruenig says nothing whatever about Joe Biden (good or bad), so why are you trying to change the subject in this
way?
In the alleged real world, those liberals (whatever that now means) tempted to pick a side in the current ruling-class struggles
should remember what Mr. Carlin said: '˜They got a club, and you ain't in it.'
It seems to me that certain fractions of the left are just awful when it comes to tactical politics. Tactical alliances are
part of almost all successful politics. One doesn't have to always be friends to have common political goals under selective
circumstances.
@Stephen 7 Umm. It seems fairly clear that Roosevelt said, at Yalta 'Stalin doesn't want anything but security for his country, and
I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wouldn't try to
annex anything and will work with for a world of democracy and peace.'
Stalin did, for example, call the communist italian partigiani and told them NOT to attempt a communist takeover in Italy,
but instead to collaborate with other democratic forces.
This is because Stalin agreed at Yalta that Italy was to be under the western sphere of influence, and he didn't want stir too
much the situation.
What are the acions that Stalin did outside of the USSR that prove Roosvelt wrong?
That Stalin was a terrible tyrant inside the eastern block is obviously true but this is not what Rooselt was speaking about,
I think.
It seems to me that you (Stephen) are underplayng the poular support Stalin (and on the other side, various fascist movements)
had in many parts of Europe at the time, and therefore you don't see how Stalin's actions were, in fact, not all that aggressive
on the international scene.
I don't see any meaningful and substantive distinction between the phenomenon Bruenig purports to describe and as a consequence
what she is counseling (despite saying she isn't) and the We Should Improve Society Somewhat toon. It's a more or less perfect
distillation of nominally pro-labor anti-Democratic thinkythoughters who for the sake of purity preach no collective action or
cooperation beyond the right kind of trade unionism. Yet another entry in the prevailing Atomized Style.
Breunig is religious left. Religious types tend to be very deontological'"they care much more about right v. wrong than good
v. bad. Many readers of this blog might agree that capital is 'wrong.' (Not, you, Tim W.!) But since we are good consequentialists
here, we would also agree that this particular alliance with capital is 'good.'
Bruenig has a problem most of us don't: she wants abortion banned, and she wants to continue thinking this position is both
liberal and popular out in the public at large. It's pretty clear that corporate America at large isn't going to help get
her any closer to that.
Bruenig is typical of a school of thought that would like everyone to act on principal 100% of the time. Is it possible to
persuade someone to do the right thing even if they didn't already want to? Apparently that's even worse than if they can't
be persuaded by any means. Is it possible to persuade imperfect people to improve the world? That's not good enough. We should
live with the world's problems while continuing our search for perfect people.
When this goes along with treating 'capitalism' as both a totalizing force and something that can never be worked with,
it doesn't leave a lot of room for anything short of a kind of leftist Benedict Option, unless it's total war against even
quite mild manifestations.
MisterMr @17: thank you for a rational, though I think in several ways mistaken, reply.
I quoted Roosevelt's belief at Yalta that Stalin would 'not try to annex anything' and 'work for a world of democracy and
peace.' Even before Yalta, Stalin's behaviour in foreign policy (Nazi-Soviet pact, annexation of the Baltic states and eastern
Poland, Katyn) and domestic policy (Holodmor, the Great Terror) should have been enough to show that he had no interest refraining
from annexation, nor in democracy or peace.
You ask ' What are the actions that Stalin did outside of the USSR that prove Roosevelt wrong?' Well, apart from those above,
there were his postwar annexations of as much of Europe as he could manage, and his behaving there as (in your own words) ' a
terrible tyrant'.
You say I am 'underplaying the popular support Stalin '¦ had in many parts of Europe at the time'. I can't quite see
how that is relevant: I don't think he had much support in the parts of Europe he annexed. Among the French and Italian Communist
parties, yes, but I think those countries were much better off for not being annexed.
As for steven t johnson @12: I am entirely unable to understand how your intemperant rant relates to anything I wrote, or have
previously written. In other circumstances I would have concluded 'the man's clearly delusionary, ignore him' but you accuse
me of regretting an opportunity for the UK to ally with the Nazis and defeat the Soviet Union. or even of wishing for atomic warfare
in Europe. These are completely unjustifiable and seriously defamatory conclusions, such as I had not expected to find on CT.
What train of thought '" I can hardly say, of logic '" led you to them, I cannot say.
As far as I can follow your argument, it is that
1) Regarding the Allied contribution to defeating Germany before the Normandy invasion, 'The number of German divisions tied
down in Italy was about, if I remember correctly, was eight.' I don't have a history of the Italian campaign to hand, but the
Wikipedia article states that in May 1944 the German forces in italy numbered 439,224. Eight bloody big divisions, surely.
It also gives Axis losses in Italy, before the final surrender, as being about 530,000. And I don't know why, apart from sheer
ignorance, you regard the Allied contribution, pre-Normandy, as being restricted to the Italian campaign. Which, incidentally,
made the rather important Allied invasion of southern France possible.
2) Arguing that there were cases where Stalin did not invade and tyrannise his neighbours does not refute the obvious case
that there were many times when he did.
3) ' The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis.' In terms of the land battle in eastern Europe, of course that's true, apart
from the rather embarrassing period when they were trying to help the Nazis to defeat the Western democracies. Whether they could
have succeeded without help from the West is not at all obvious.
4) I await, without much hope, svj's explanation of why a cross-Channel invasion in 1942 or 1943 would have been other than
an extensive and complete catastrophe: Dieppe writ very large, Kasserine-sur-mer? If that had happened, I suspect that a negotiated
peace might have resulted. but I would regard that as fearful, not wishful thinking.
5) I wrote that Roosevelt was naive in believing that the concept of 'noblesse oblige' applied to Stalin, and that therefore
I am guilty of 'Cold War triumphalism'. Well, I lived through most of the Cold War, and could foresee four possible developments:
a) War in Europe becomes hot. I hope stj would agree that would have been a global catastrophe, even if the Soviet Union had in
some sense 'won'.
b) Cold war continues indefinitely, so that in 2021 we would still have the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact and NATO confronting
each other, with (a) on the cards, and eastern Europe under unwelcome Soviet domination.
c) Cold War in Europe ends with collapse of Western alliance under the influence of Communist-Neutralist-Defeatist elements, followed
by the installation of Soviet-type domination in Europe.
d) Cold War ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its domination under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
Personally, I am very glad that (d) happened. I suspect '" though I would be happy to have stj's own opinion '" that he would
much have preferred (c) or failing that (b).
Pre-emptive comment: no, of course I don't think that the effects of the collapse of Actually Existing Socialism have been always
desirable. A basic lesson from history is that solving one problem always leaves many other problems unsolved, and often gives
rise to new ones.
Unless someone wants to make the case that the US and UK governments should not have allied themselves with Stalin, I request
that we draw a halt to the discussion on that point.
The dictionary offers more than one spelling. You chose the one you preferred, I chose the one I preferred. I am more sensitive
on the subject of misspelling of names. For all I know, Bruening is in fact a correct spelling, it's just not the correct spelling
of Elizabeth Bruenig's surname.
There is an important difference between the advice '˜If you sup with the devil, you should have a long spoon' and the advice
'˜Never sup with the devil, no matter how long your spoon, even if the alternative is starvation'.
1) To the extent that corporations do this to ally themselves with the Democratic party's power, as opposed to conforming
to consumers' woke orthodox culture, what do they want in return?
2) Corporations in America are uniquely (in the rich world) able enforce correct speech and thought because of the unusually
big power they have over their employees. The answers I usually hear from democratic party supporters is a mix between rejoicing
in woke mccarthyism and 'lol, the first amendment doesn't apply to corporations, you dummy!'.
The point is: is this healthy and what are we going to do about it?
3) Related to (2), woke monopolies have crippled the right-wing social media infrastructure (after cultivating the fash-curious
information bubble for years) and are big enough to bully states into changing their election laws -for the better, this time.
Again, the point is 'is this healthy and what are we going to do about it'.
If the 'left''˜s reaction is 'be happy that Daddy beat up my enemy today', cool, but maybe it's not the best way to go
about it.
"... Don't deny W his agency. As I followed the horrors, from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria to Central America and elsewhere, the full list that was visible anyway, of the W regime, it sure seemed clear to me that W played the bumbling yuk very well. ..."
"... the dumb cluck thing was mostly an act. he was deliberately talking that way not only to paint himself as stupid, but also because those in power assume we must be spoken to as children (they've studied president speeches since JFK have decreased from high school level to 6th grade in complexity, word usage etc). ..."
"... In our kayfabe duoparty system, it also gave the "opposing" side the "W is a Chimp" talking point to harp on (dress rehearsal for the same stuff against tRUMP). ..."
"... Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, Con Son Island served the same purpose during the Vietnam War. When I was young I was proud to be an American Citizen, we had the Bill of Rights, the Military was controlled by Civilians and their oath was to defend the Constitution from "All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.". I have been horrified, ashamed and deeply saddened by what has happened in the US over the last half Century or so. ..."
"... I view the 2008 election as the major failing-to-turn-back-when-we-had-the-chance point. Obama could have undone Bush's worst policies, but instead he cemented them into place forever. ..."
"... Our elites are both stupid and evil, but Bush is more stupid and Obama is more evil ..."
"... you are 40 years off the mark-It was Reagan who's brand of avuncular fascism, celebrating stupidity as a virtue who paved the way. ..."
"... albrt: I agree with your take. Obama campaigned as an anti-war candidate (at least wrt Iraq). He then proceeded to "˜surge' into Afghanistan and added Libya, Syria, and Yemen, to the regime change mix. Never a thought given to prosecuting the war criminals: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Feith, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al; much less even consider a truth and reconciliation commission. ..."
"... Obama was equally complicit in this never ending horror show and, I am hopeful, history will hold him equally accountable. ..."
"... Is it not written that Margaret Thatcher's true legacy was Tony Blair? If that is true, then the true legacy of Dubya is Obama. ..."
"... As far as harm that George W. Bush did and launched (illegal/immoral wars, domestic surveillance, tax cuts for the wealthy"¦.) Bush should take the award. ..."
"... When Obama deliberately and with malice aforethought turned all the admitted (and in fact proudly self-avowed) war-criminals and criminals-against humanity loose, free and clear under "look forward not back", he routinised and permanentized the up-to-that-very-minute irregular and extra-constitutional novel methods of governance and practice which the Cheney-Bush Administration had pioneered. Obama deliberately made torture, aggressive war, etc. "legal" when America does it and "permanent" as long as America is strong enough to keep doing it. ..."
"... The Greatest Disappointment in History. No-one else comes close, in terms of the sheer numbers of people globally who he let down. The Bait and Switch King, The Great Betrayer. After the nightmare of Bush we got him and his "˜eloquence', pulling the wool over the dazzled sheeple's eyes while he entrenched the 1% and the neocon MI complex, his paymasters, and sponsors for his entry into the overclass. ..."
"... Lambert, you forgot this one" Biden presents Liberty Medal to George and Laura Bush Instead of a war crimes trial at the Hague, Biden gave him a (family bloging) medal! ..."
"... A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm ..."
"... It's really sickening to see George W being "rehabilitated" and made to look like some kind of a senior statesman, when he should be hauled off to the Hague to spend the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. For me, his election in 2000 was mostly the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. As a result, the U.S. has Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, in addition to all the other events mentioned, and don't forget he tried to privatize Social Security. ..."
"... and welfare "reform", the crime bill. Talk of privatizing SSI made commonplace acceptable. Repeal of Glass Steagall. They were going to do to healthcare what oBLAM succeeded at, 20 years before him but got sidelined by Lewinsky's blue dress stains. Clintoon is a criminal and so is his spouse, and he did his share of damage everywhere. people who think otherwise might be looking back with nostalgia on a simpler (pre 9.11) time. ..."
"... Jeff Wells wrote some interesting essays in the Bush years, though many of his connections were a bit too far out, even for me. He had some striking collateral evidence for his concept of High Weirdness in high places "" sex abuse, torture and magick figuring prominently, juxtaposed with political skulduggery, and financial crimes and misdemeanours. The Gannon/Guckert affair, the Franklin ring and Gary Caradori were the sort of thing that laced his quite penetrating analyses of events. Facts were jumping off points for speculations, but given our lack of facts his imaginings were a nourishment of sorts, though often very troubling indeed. ..."
"... People have been brain washed by the glossed over history of the US they are taught. It gives people a false belief of our past. The phrase American Exceptionalism comes to mind. It is a myth. The real history is out there but you have to search it out. From it's beginning continuing to today our government is responsible for bad behavior. ..."
"... We Americans have this thing called exceptionalism which among other things creates the idea that our government is more virtuous than others. ..."
"... We are not at Hitler/Stalin/Mao standards ""yet"" but who's to say that could never happen here? One of the bafflements of the 20th century was how a civilized people descended into the dark barbarism of Nazi Germany. ..."
"... Noam Chomsky observed some thirty years ago that if the Nuremberg standards were applied to all the post-war American Presidents, then all of them would hang. ..."
"... We have such a dismal record. Little George was the most audacious of all our criminal presidents, but he has plenty of company. My question is now, looking back, why was the USA incapable of organizing a peaceful world after WW2? I start there. 1945. ..."
Bush became President in the year 2000. That was "" let me break out my calculator "" 2021 "" 2000 = 21 years ago. It occurs to
me that our younger readers, born in 2000, or even 1990, may not know how genuinely horrid Bush was, as President.
I was blogging even back then, and I remember how horrid Bush was; certainly worse than Trump, at least for Trump's first three
years in office, until the Covid pandemic. To convey the full horror of the Bush years would not a series of posts, but a book. The
entire experience was wretched and shameful.
Of the many horrors of the Bush years, I will pick three. (I am omitting many, many others, including
Hurricane Katrina , the
Plame Affair
, Medicare Part D, the Cheney Energy Task Force
, that time
Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face ,
Bush's missing
Texas Air National Guard records , Bush gaslighting the 2004 Republican National Convention with terror alerts, and on and on
and on. And I didn't even get to 9/11, "
You've covered your ass ," WMDs, and
the AUMF. Sorry. It's exhausting.) I'm afraid my recounting of these incidents will be sketchy: I lived and blogged in them, and
the memories of the horror well up in such volume and detail that I lose control of the material. Not only that, there was an actual,
functioning blogosphere at that time, which did great work, but unfortunately most of that work has succumbed to link rot. And my
memory of events two decades ago is not as strong as it could be.
The White House Iraq Group
Here I will rely on excerpts from Colonel Sam Gardiner's (PDF) "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence,
Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II" (2003), whose introduction
has been saved from link rot by the
National Security Archive and
a full version
by the University of Leeds . I would bet, long forgotten even by many of those who blogged through those times. ("Gulf II" is
what we refer to as the "War in Iraq.") Quoting from the full version:
You will see in my analysis and comments that I do not accept the notion that the first casualty of war is truth. I think we
have to have a higher standard. In the most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies
to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.
Seems familiar. (Gardiner's report can be read as a brilliant media critique; it's really worth sitting down with a cup of coffee
and reading it all.)[2] More:
My research suggests there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf
II for the American and British people . I'll cover most in this report. At the end, I will also describe some stories that
seem as if they were part of the strategic influence campaign although the evidence is only circumstantial.
What becomes important is not each story taken individually. If that were the case, it would probably seem only more of the
same. If you were to look at them one at a time, you could conclude, "Okay we sort of knew that was happening." It is the pattern
that becomes important. It's the summary of everything. To use a phrase often heard during the war, it's the mosaic. Recognizing
I said I wouldn't exaggerate, it would not be an exaggeration to say the people of the United States and UK can find out more
about the contents of a can of soup they buy than the contents of the can of worms they bought with the 2003 war in the Gulf.
The White House was, naturally, at the center of the operation:
One way to view how the US Government was organized to do the strategic communications effort before, during and after the
war is to use the chart that was used by the Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations. The center is the White House
Office of Global Communications, the organization originally created by Karen Hughes as the Coalition Information Office. The
White House is at the center of the strategic communications process"¦.
Handy chart:
And:
Inside the White House there was an Iraq Group that did policy direction and then the Office of Global Communications itself.
Membership of the White House Iraq Group:
So, in 2020 Bush's write-in vote for President was Condi Rice, the [x] Black [x] woman who helped run a domestic disinformation
campaign for him in 2003, to sell the Iraq War to the American people. Isn't that"¦. sweet?
Of course, I was very naive at that point. I had come up as a Democrat, and my first real political engagement was the Clinton
impeachment. Back in 2003, I was amazed to discover that there was a White House operation that was planting fake stories in the
press "" and that I had been playing whackamole on them. At a higher level, I was disturbed that "Washington and London did not trust
the peoples of their democracies to come to right decisions." Now it all seems perfectly normal, which is sad.
Torture at Abu Ghraib
There are a lot of images of our torture prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. This one (
via ) is not the
most famous , but to me it is the most shocking:
What kind of country sets dogs on a naked prisoner? Well, my kind of country, apparently. (Later, I remember discussing
politics with somebody who came from a country that might be considered less governed by the rule of law than my own, and they said:
"Abu Ghraib. You have nothing to say." And they were right.)
For those who came in late, here's a snapshot (the detail of the story is in fact overwhelming, and I also have pity for the poor
shlubs the brass tossed into that hellhole[3].) From the Los Angeles Times, "
Few have faced consequences
for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq " (2015):
[A] 44-year-old Al Jazeera reporter named Salah Ejaili, said in a phone interview from Qatar that he was arrested in 2003 while
covering an explosion in the Iraqi province of Diyala. He was held at Abu Ghraib for 48 days after six days in another facility,
he said.
"Most of the pictures that came out in 2004, I saw that firsthand "" the human pyramid where men were stacked up naked on top
of each other, people pulled around on leashes," he said in the interview, with one of his attorneys translating. "I used to hear
loud screams during the torture sessions."
Ejaili says he was beaten, left naked and exposed to the elements for long periods, and left in solitary confinement, among
other acts.
"When people look at others who are naked, they feel like they're animals in a zoo, in addition to being termed as criminals
and as terrorists," he said. "That had a very strong psychological impact."
The plaintiffs also say they suffered electric shocks; deprivation of food, water and oxygen; sexual abuse; threats from dogs;
beatings; and sensory deprivation.
Taha Yaseen Arraq Rashid, a laborer, says he was sexually abused by a woman while he was cuffed and shackled, and also that
he was forced to watch a female prisoner's rape.
Ejaili said that his face was often covered during interrogations, making it difficult for him to identify those involved,
but that he was able to notice that many of the interrogators who entered the facility wore civilian clothing.
His attorneys, citing military investigations into abuses at Abu Ghraib and other evidence, say the contractors took control
of the prison and issued orders to uniformed military.
"Abu Ghraib was pretty chaotic," said Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought suits
against CACI and L-3 Services. "They were involved in a conspiracy with the military police to abuse our clients.""¦. Eleven U.S.
soldiers were convicted in military trials of crimes related to the humiliation and abuse of the prisoners.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers , and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If our legal system had the slightest shred of integrity, it would be obvious to the Courts, as it is to a six-old-child, that
what we laughingly call our "personal" computers and cellphones contain "paper," not in the tediously literal sense of a physical
material made from wood fibre, but in the sense of content . Bits and bytes are 20th Century paper, stored on silicon and
hard disk platters. Of course a warrant should be needed to read what's on my phone, ffs.
That Fourth Amendment common sense did not prevail is IMNSHO due in large part to Bush's program of warrantless surveillance,
put in place as part of the Global War on Terror. Here again, the complexity is overwhelming and took several years to unravel. I'm
afraid I have to quote Wikipedia on
this one :
A week after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which
inaugurated the "War on Terror". It later featured heavily in arguments over the NSA program.
Soon after the 9/11 attacks President Bush established the President's Surveillance Program. As part of the program, the Terrorist
Surveillance Program was established pursuant to an executive order that authorized the NSA to surveil certain telephone calls
without obtaining a warrant (see 50 U.S.C. § 1802 50 U.S.C. § 1809). The complete details of the executive order are not public,
but according to administration statements, the authorization covers communication originating overseas from or to a person suspected
of having links to terrorist organizations or their affiliates even when the other party to the call is within the US.
In October 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which granted the administration broad powers to fight terrorism. The Bush
administration used these powers to bypass the FISC and directed the NSA to spy directly on al-Qaeda via a new NSA electronic
surveillance program. Reports at the time indicate that an "apparently accidental" "glitch" resulted in the interception of communications
that were between two U.S. parties. This act was challenged by multiple groups, including Congress, as unconstitutional.
The precise scope of the program remains secret, but the NSA was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic
communications between the nation's largest telecommunication companies' major interconnected locations, encompassing phone conversations,
email, Internet activity, text messages and corporate private network traffic .
Of course, all this is perfectly normal today. So much for the Fourth Amendment, good job. (You will note that the telcos had
to be in on it; amusingly, the CEO of Qwest, the only telco that refused to participate, was charged and convicted of insider trading,
good job again.) The legal aspects of all this are insanely complex, but as you see from my introduction, they should be simple.
Conclusion
Here's a video of the Iraqi (now in Parliament) who threw shoes at Bush (who got off lightly, all things considered):
We should all be throwing shoes at Bush, seriously if not literally. We should not be accepting candy from him. We should not
be treating him as an elder statesman. Or a "partner in crime." We should not be admiring his paintings. Bush ran a bad, bad, bad
administration and we are living with the consequences of his badness today. Bush is a bad man. We are ruled by bad people. Tomorrow,
Obama!
NOTES
[1] Indeed.
[2] For example, I vividly remember playing whack-a-mole as a blogger with the following WMD stories: Drones, weapons labs, WMD
cluster bombs, Scuds, nuclear materials from Niger, aluminum tubes, and dirty bombs. They one and all fell apart on close inspection.
And they were only a small part of the operation, as Gardiner shows in detail.
[3] My personal speculation is that Dick Cheney had a direct feed from the Abu Ghraib torture chambers to the White House, and
watched the proceedings live. Some of the soldiers burned images of torture onto CDs as trophies, and the prison also had a server,
whose connectivity was very conveniently not revealed by the judge in a lawsuit I dimly remember being brought in Germany. So it
goes.
Does anyone believe that W, son of H. W. Bush, H. W. son of Senator Prescott Bush, would have been been pres without that familial
lineage and its important govt connections? The pity is W wasn't smart enough to grasp world politics and the US's importance
as an accepted fulcrum in same beyond his momentary wants. imo. Brent Scowcroft and others warned him off his vain pursuits. The
word "squander" come to mind, though I wish it did not.
See for example Kevin Phillips' book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
. ( Kevin Phillips is a great
modernist American historian, imo, who saw the rise of Nixon before anyone else.)
Don't deny W his agency. As I followed the horrors, from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria to Central America and elsewhere, the
full list that was visible anyway, of the W regime, it sure seemed clear to me that W played the bumbling yuk very well.
He did what he set out to do, no doubt with careful guidance from that sh!t of a father (magically turned into a laid-in-state
"statesman") and mother-of-string-of-pearls, and of course Cheney and the rest of the corpo-gov policy gang.
The Consent Manufacturers are whitewashing an evil man and his slicker but equally evil successor and his glamorous spouse.
Helluva job, Georgie! Full marks for kicking the world a long way down a dark road.
the dumb cluck thing was mostly an act. he was deliberately talking that way not only to paint himself as stupid, but also
because those in power assume we must be spoken to as children (they've studied president speeches since JFK have decreased from
high school level to 6th grade in complexity, word usage etc).
see Pelosi's daughter's film of his campaign trail. He's no Angel Merkel, but sly enough for politics in this country
and most third world corruptocracies.
In our kayfabe duoparty system, it also gave the "opposing" side the "W is a Chimp" talking point to harp on (dress rehearsal
for the same stuff against tRUMP).
Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, Con Son Island served the same purpose during the Vietnam War. When I was young I was proud
to be an American Citizen, we had the Bill of Rights, the Military was controlled by Civilians and their oath was to defend the
Constitution from "All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.". I have been horrified, ashamed and deeply saddened by what has happened
in the US over the last half Century or so.
And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
You actually "˜blogged' back when we had to use punch cards to program our PCs? How oh how did you clamber on up out of "the
Well" so many times a week? I am somewhat convinced that the Hollerith Cards Protocol was the origin of the Twitter 140 character
limit.
I also "lived through" the "˜Reign of "W""˜ and see it as a Time of Prophecy. Most of the things we are now staring down the
barrel of were effectuated then.
I may be foilly, (may be? who am I kidding,) but I view the 2000 election as a major turning point of American history.
I view the 2008 election as the major failing-to-turn-back-when-we-had-the-chance point. Obama could have undone Bush's worst
policies, but instead he cemented them into place forever.
Our elites are both stupid and evil, but Bush is more stupid and Obama is more evil.
All the pomp and circumstance surrounding the personage of the President serves to conceal the people behind the scenes who
vetted and groomed said president, and actively advise him while in office. It's in this way that a Jimmy Carter may be viewed
as a gentle soul so far as presidents go, but he was actually vetted by Brzezinski on behalf of the CFR goons. Once in office
he was then advised by Brzezinski and Volcker, among other assorted lunatics. And he gladly took their advice the entire time.
That's how he came to be president in the first place. And so it goes.
albrt: I agree with your take. Obama campaigned as an anti-war candidate (at least wrt Iraq). He then proceeded to "˜surge'
into Afghanistan and added Libya, Syria, and Yemen, to the regime change mix. Never a thought given to prosecuting the war criminals:
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Feith, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al; much less even consider a truth and reconciliation commission.
Obama was equally complicit in this never ending horror show and, I am hopeful, history will hold him equally accountable.
Could you explain your view that Obama and Trump are "worse than that" (Bush-Cheney).?
As far as harm that George W. Bush did and launched (illegal/immoral wars, domestic surveillance, tax cuts for the wealthy"¦.)
Bush should take the award.
Obama did push for military action in Libya, but at least held back from Syria.
The administrations after Bush "kicked the can down the road" but he initiated the events they simply continued. And Trump
did attempt to pull troops back from Bush initiated wars. How is Trump worse than Bush? What are your metrics?
I am just a commenter here, but I would say that . . .
When Obama deliberately and with malice aforethought turned all the admitted (and in fact proudly self-avowed) war-criminals
and criminals-against humanity loose, free and clear under "look forward not back", he routinised and permanentized the up-to-that-very-minute
irregular and extra-constitutional novel methods of governance and practice which the Cheney-Bush Administration had pioneered.
Obama deliberately made torture, aggressive war, etc. "legal" when America does it and "permanent" as long as America is strong
enough to keep doing it.
He did some other things like that which I don't have time to mention right now. Maybe others will beat me to it.
Most of all, by slickly conning or permitting to self-con numbers of people about "hope and change" to come from an Obama Administration,
he destroyed all hope of hope. He destroyed hope itself. Hope is not a "thing" any more in this country, thanks to Obama.
He may also have destroyed black politicians' dreams of becoming America's " Second Black President" for several decades to
come. Been there, done that. Never Again. But since I am not Black, that is not my problem. That is something Black America can
thank Obama for, if they decide to wake up to the fact of that reality.
Of course , if the Evil Countess Draculamala becomes President after Biden, then I guess I will be proven wrong about that
particular observation.
The Greatest Disappointment in History. No-one else comes close, in terms of the sheer numbers of people globally who he let
down. The Bait and Switch King, The Great Betrayer. After the nightmare of Bush we got him and his "˜eloquence', pulling the wool over the dazzled sheeple's eyes while he entrenched
the 1% and the neocon MI complex, his paymasters, and sponsors for his entry into the overclass.
Last, does any single person with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton, bear so much responsibility for the election of
Trump?
Remember that Obama voted in favor of FISAA, the bill that immunized Bush and his flunkies from prosecution for their felony
FISA violations, as a senator, not long before the presidential election. It was impossible to make myself vote for him after
that.
Thanks Lambert. I'd add that the intelligence being sent to the "White House Iraq Group" was being manufactured by the Office
of Special Plans (OSP) which was set up and run by Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. Following Feith's history and connections
alone is a fruitful endeavor for those so inclined.
Among other things, Feith co-authored, along with Richard Perle and David Wurmser, the A Clean Break: A New Strategy For
Securing the Realm paper prepared for the prime minister of a certain foreign country. This is back in 1996. Around the same
time the PNAC boys were formed by Kagan and Kristol and started selling the same policy prescriptions vis a vis Iraq to the pols
and public here.
Feith was also fired from the NSC back in the early 80's for passing classified information to some little country. Fast forward
to his OSP days and, lo and behold, his employee Larry Franklin is convicted of the same thing, along with Steve Rosen and Keith
Weissman of AIPAC.
This stuff has gone on forever. What amount of ventilation is needed to blow this kind of dung out of the Augean stables of
geopolitics? Not much chance of that anyway, given all the incentives and and interests"
Is it luck that Putin and Xi might be a little less monstrous?
It's really sickening to see George W being "rehabilitated" and made to look like some kind of a senior statesman, when he
should be hauled off to the Hague to spend the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. For me, his election in 2000 was mostly
the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. As a result, the U.S. has Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, in addition
to all the other events mentioned, and don't forget he tried to privatize Social Security.
His eight years as president, for me, was a horror show. What really bothers me is that he got away with all of it "" and now
he's hailed as an eminence gris. I can't help but think that his rehabilitation is to remind us all of how bad Orange Man was
"" Obama was just as bad because he cemented everything W did "" and more.
That is an assignment, which is a violation of our written site Policies. This applies to reader comments when you could easily
find the answer in less than 30 seconds on Google rather than being a jerk and challenging a reader (or even worse, me derivatively)
on bogus grounds.
> For me, [W's] election in 2000 was mostly the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country.
At this moment I'm writing it is still early days for this thread: there are only 24 comments. In these comments are named
many bad people. However, one name that does not (yet) appear is "˜Clinton'. W was a monster as president (and likely remains
a monster as a human being) but surely Billy Jeff needn't yield to him in his contempt for the rule of law.
Quite right, of course. My comment was specifically in regard to his disdain for and abuse of the rule, and rôle, of law in
the American polity, e.g., his perjury > disbarment. Sort of like the famous photograph of Nelson Rockefeller who, while serving
as VP, was captured giving the finger to a group of protestors; Clinton also oozed that kind of hubristic impunity.
Regarding Clinton, the damage he caused to his own country and the world was substantial. The destruction of Yugoslavia caused
considerable mayhem "" in addition to bombing and breaking apart a sovereign nation, it enabled "liberals" to feel good about
war again, and paved the way for the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.
And the damage done by NAFTA was enormous "" in terms of leading to deaths of despair in both the US and Mexico I suspect NAFTA
has a higher domestic "body count" than any of the subsequent forever wars.
and welfare "reform", the crime bill. Talk of privatizing SSI made commonplace acceptable. Repeal of Glass Steagall.
They were going to do to healthcare what oBLAM succeeded at, 20 years before him but got sidelined by Lewinsky's blue dress
stains. Clintoon is a criminal and so is his spouse, and he did his share of damage everywhere. people who think otherwise might be
looking back with nostalgia on a simpler (pre 9.11) time.
little known covered up crime from his ARK days is the selling of HIV tainted blood (taken from prisoners) to Canada, among
other things.
yet another who had credible rape allegations. which damages our image at home and abroad.
I read that for the very briefest time, somebody or other was selling Total Information Awareness memorabilia with the Total
Information Awareness symbol on it. I wish I had thought to buy a Total Information Awareness mug.
I imagine knockoffs and parodies exist, but I am not sure the real thing is findable any more.
After Dennis Rader, the Wichita serial killer, murdered someone, the cops always found his semen on the floor next to the mutilated
victim. He got sexual pleasure out of gruesome murder. This is how I always pictured Cheney's attitude toward torture. Well. I
tried not to actually picture it.
Talk about your target rich environment. Where do you even start? Where do you begin? A serial business failure, draft dodger,
military deserter, drunk driver "" and all that was before he became President. A man so incurious about the world "" just like
Trump "" that he never even owned a passport until he actually became President and who never knew that Islam (prior to the Iraq
invasion) , for example, was just not one religion but was divided into Sunni and Shia in the same way Christianity is divided
into "" mostly "" Protestant and Catholics. But to me he was always the "Frat Boy President". His family always protected him
from his many flaws and he never had to grow up like his father had to in WW2. Even as President he never grew into the job, again,
just like Trump.
Lambert gives a few good reminders but there were many others and these are just the top of my head. He cared little for the
US Constitution and called it nothing more than a goddamn scrap of paper. He officially made the US a torture nation, not only
by pretending that US laws did not apply in Guantanamo bay but also aboard US Navy ships for which laws definitely did apply.
As part of a movement to make America an oil-fueled hegemony for the 21st century, he invaded Iraq with the firm intention on
invading Iran next so that Washington would have a firm grip on the fuel pump of the world. As he said "" "America is addicted
to oil." He dropped the ball on 9/11 through over-obsessing on Iraq and in the immediate aftermath sent jets around the country
"" when all jets were grounded "" to fly Saudi royalty back to Saudi Arabia before the FBI could interrogate them about all their
knowledge of the attack. All this to hide his very deep connections with the Saudis.
I could go on for several more paragraphs but what would be the point? For the neocons he was a great fronts-man to be followed
by a even greater one. I sometimes think that if Biden was a "˜real' Republican, then he would have been a great vice-president
for Bush. And now the establishment and their trained seals in the media are trying to make him out as "America's Favourite Uncle"
or something so that when he dies, he will have the same sort of funeral as John McCain did. And I predict that tens of thousands
of veterans around the country will then raise their glasses to him "" and then pour the contents on the ground.
W's rehab continues in the UK MSM, not just the Independent. The worst offenders are probably the Grauniad and Channel 4, both
Blairite.
The rehab mirrored the rise of Trump. His lack of interest in war upset these preachy imperialists.
Using Michelle Obama to facilitate the rehab brought id pol into the equation and made it easier. It was remarkable how often
the above photo is used in the neo liberal and neo con media.
Thank you, Colonel. That foto is remarkable and I suspect that the origins for the idea for it may lay on the other side of
the pond as it seemed so familiar-
There is a blog called Rigorous Intuition 2.0. Many of its blogposts are about the Bush period and Bush related subjects and
events. ( Many others are not). The sections on 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina probably have the highest percent of Bush-related blogposts,
in case one is interested.
Jeff Wells wrote some interesting essays in the Bush years, though many of his connections were a bit too far out, even for
me. He had some striking collateral evidence for his concept of High Weirdness in high places "" sex abuse, torture and magick
figuring prominently, juxtaposed with political skulduggery, and financial crimes and misdemeanours. The Gannon/Guckert affair,
the Franklin ring and Gary Caradori were the sort of thing that laced his quite penetrating analyses of events. Facts were jumping
off points for speculations, but given our lack of facts his imaginings were a nourishment of sorts, though often very troubling
indeed.
Who needs to make shit up during those years?
The facts"¦the shit he actually did, was glossed over or simply forgotten.
If shit was made up about his sorry ass i didn't bother checking, Sir.
I just assumed it was true.
Bushies destroyed the country. If there's a country in 100 years they'll be paying for those years.
And then came obama and big Mike
People have been brain washed by the glossed over history of the US they are taught. It gives people a false belief of our
past. The phrase American Exceptionalism comes to mind. It is a myth. The real history is out there but you have to search it out. From
it's beginning continuing to today our government is responsible for bad behavior.
Some scholars like Noam Chomsky write about
our real history. Unfortunately most people don't read this material. They are content with our glossed over shining star version
of US history that unfortunately continues to be taught in our educational system , starting in elementary school continuing through
a 4 year college education. Our system of government is so corrupted , I don't believe it can be fixed.
Nixon was rehabbed so he could open China, Kissinger got to keep his mantle. W portrayed by Josh Brolin pretty good take. Nice
to see dunking on GW, but the cycle of rehabilitation is due. The question is can he do some good or is there too much mud on
his boots. Can't see W as a new Jimmy Carter. Glossing over history begins the moment it's made. Makes me miss LBJ
Between 1998 and 2000, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, about 1000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison were executed and buried
in mass graves.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison
How many Abu Ghraib prisoners did the US army execute?
Tell me again how many Iraqis were killed by the US Army because they were doing their own version of "Red Dawn"? And that
tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive if Saddam was simply left in place. Here is a video to watch
while you have a little think about it-
We Americans have this thing called exceptionalism which among other things creates the idea that our government is more virtuous
than others. It's a useful idea in that it calls us to be different and better than the average nation, and certainly different
and better than a cruel dictatorship. But it's also a dangerous idea because too many of us actually believe it to be true. Our
atrocities are different in kind, but the scale is the same.
We are not at Hitler/Stalin/Mao standards ""yet"" but who's to say
that could never happen here? One of the bafflements of the 20th century was how a civilized people descended into the dark barbarism
of Nazi Germany.
"(I am omitting many, many others, including Hurricane Katrina, the Plame Affair, Medicare Part D, the Cheney Energy Task Force,
that time Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face, Bush's missing Texas Air National Guard records, Bush gaslighting the 2004
Republican National Convention with terror alerts, and on and on and on. An I didn't even get to 9/11, "You've covered your ass,"
WMDs, and the AUMF. Sorry. It's exhausting.)"
Agree with all the criticism of Bush, Cheney, Obama. On a lighter note, my father-in-law is a high tech oil prospector in W
Texas, much of it in Midland, overlapping in time with W. Both members of the Petroleum Club (been there once, very stuffy) and
worked out at the same gym. Naturally, my wife asked if he had ever seen W naked. Her dad wouldn't answer, but did turn beet red.
We take this as confirmation.
Noam Chomsky observed some thirty years ago that if the Nuremberg standards were applied to all the post-war American Presidents,
then all of them would hang. Chomsky could not have imagined the future sequence of presidents from that point forward, but certainly
they did not break the chain of criminality. My point is that Bush is not unique in the type of crimes, just the enormity of them.
But I also believe he set new standards (lower) for shamelessness. Remember his smirk?
But also remember Obama joking about killing people.
Remember the comedy skit in which GWB "looked" for Iraq WMD's in the Oval office as part of the White House Correspondent's
dinner?
Anyone with any sense of decency would have refused to do this skit, but Bush apparently followed his handlers' advice to get
some laughs. That the USA was led by someone of such limited talent for 8 years speaks volumes. Years ago, a New York Times reader wrote that Hillary Clinton is a "well-connected mediocrity".
That comment may be true for ALL of the recent political candidates, from both parties, for a great many years.
LBJ was definitely not mediocre (civil rights/war on poverty), and would be viewed far more favorably, maybe as great, if he
had pulled out of Vietnam rather than escalating. Carter in his post presidency has much to recommend. Post presidency Bush is painting his portraits rather than having any retrospective regrets for the harm he did.
We have such a dismal record. Little George was the most audacious of all our criminal presidents, but he has plenty of company.
My question is now, looking back, why was the USA incapable of organizing a peaceful world after WW2? I start there. 1945. How
did our ideology become so inept? And everything I have read about our failures over the years is contrasted with what might have
been. We have operated under a system that could not function without extraction. There was always a sell-by date on the cover;
one that we tried to ignore. There's no doubt in my mind that it has finally failed completely. Ignominiously. But we have also
learned and come to admit certain realities. The most important one is that there can be no more war; civilization cannot survive
a modern war. So, ironically, our advanced warfare might well bring a peaceful world without world war. And our advances in science
(mostly militarily inspired) will help us now survive.
Lambert, thank you for this piece. I won't repeat what others have opined. I've had a real problem with Michelle Obama being
the rehabilitation cheerleader leader for Dubya. Imho, we lost all of our rights under the odious Patriot Act, which was pre-written.
Russ Feingold was the lone Senate holdout. And I recall Byrd's ire and rant at the tome they had no time to read, but he caved.
It went downhill from there. The links below, (apologies, I don't know how to fashion a hot link..) are about Bush's crimes and
Amnesty International's exhaustive investigation of them.
I don't have the citation anymore, and I've knocked myself out trying to find it. But there exists a UN human rights commission
memo suggesting (?) Obama to do a number of things: hold Bushco accountable for war crimes etc, as well as address what is termed
as "systematic racism" in incarceration (and more). I had printed it out a number of years ago and can't find it.)
I'm not buying that Bush fils is any elder statesman. He and his cronies used torture, extreme rendition, hired mercenaries and
completely destabilized the Middle East. We still don't have our rights back, and I'm betting the Patriot Act will never go away.
(Nor will data mining under the guise of "targeted advertising" and sold to..the military.) The NYT's link is how Obama elected
to rug sweep and just move ahead! I look forward to Lambert's take on the Obama administration..
Finally, someone has the courage to point out the obvious. An excellent article, well researched and nicely nuanced.
I'm disappointed with the remedy proposed, however. Throwing shoes is not enough; it's merely symbolic. The potential crimes
committed here, including lying us into war, the extent of torture committed, and practices that violate international military
norms and intelligence require a transparent and impartial investigation. One possible venue is the International Criminal Courts
in the Hague.
I've been told many times that sunlight can be an effective deterrent against disease.
Ditto. I am sure the CIA will be grinding the generals as we speak. Even the letter in
Politico could well be one of their strategies. I posted a piece in the open thread yesterday
from The HILL that was
pure propaganda.
USA is not alone in losing guerrilla warfare.
Watch for Biden announcing a 'shake up' of the military command in the next few
weeks/months.
The US military 2021 retreat from Kabul will result in a slaughter in the USA.
I see the Pentagon pulling the plug on the opium income for the CIA. Now THAT is the real
war. So the CIA now has to pay its mercenary army to defend the harvest and extraction. That
added cost to the CIA will not be taken lightly.
"... By Tom Engelhardt. Originally published at TomDispatch ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... I supported the rule of law and human rights, not to mention the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. ..."
"... In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways. ..."
"... “The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armaments†..."
"... “The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armaments†..."
"... “Large-scale armaments are inseparable from the expansion of the armed forces and the preparation of plans for a war of conquest. They also induce competitive rearmament of other countries.†..."
Yves here. Englehardt describes how US war-making has been a continuing exercise starting
with World War II. It’s important to recognize that before that, US military
budgets were modest both in national and global terms. But with manufacturing less specialized,
the US was able to turn a considerable amount of its productive capacity to armaments in fairly
short order.
A second point is as someone who was in Manhattan on 9/11, I did not experience the attacks
as war. I saw them as very impressive terrorism. However, I was appalled at how quickly
individuals in positions of authority pushed sentiment in that direction. The attack was on a
Tuesday (I had a blood draw and voted before I even realized Something Bad had happened). I was
appalled to see the saber-rattling in Bush’s speech at the National
Cathedral on Friday. On Sunday, I decided to go to the Unitarian Church around the corner. I
was shocked to hear more martial-speak. And because the church was packed, I had to sit in the
front on the floor, which meant I couldn’t duck out.
Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July
1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic
obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in
history up to that moment, given the sweet code names
“Little Boy†and “Fat Man.â€
I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed
since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro
Umezu
signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay,
officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day, but in a sense for
me, my whole generation, and this country, war never really ended.
The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in
distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was
“cold†(which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored
by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight), but war as a way of life never
really ended, not to this very moment.
In fact, as the decades went by, it would become the
“infrastructure†in which Americans increasingly invested their
tax dollars via aircraft
carriers , trillion-dollar jet fighters, drones armed
with Hellfire missiles, and the creation and maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons
around the globe, rather than roads, bridges, or
rail lines (no less the high-speed
version of the same) here at home. During those same years, the Pentagon budget would grab
an ever-larger percentage of
federal discretionary spending and the full-scale annual investment in what has come to be
known as the national security state would rise to a staggering $1.2
trillion or more.
In a sense, future V-J Days became inconceivable. There were no longer moments, even as wars
ended, when some version of peace might descend and America’s vast military
contingents could, as at the end of World War II, be significantly demobilized. The closest
equivalent was undoubtedly the moment when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Cold War
officially ended, and the Washington establishment declared itself globally triumphant. But of
course, the promised “peace dividend†would never be paid out as
the first Gulf War with Iraq occurred that very year and the serious downsizing of the U.S.
military (and the CIA) never happened.
Never-Ending War
Consider it typical that, when President Biden recently
announced the official ending of the nearly 20-year-old American conflict in Afghanistan
with the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from that country by 9/11/21, it would functionally
be paired with the news that the
Pentagon budget was about to rise yet again from its record heights in the Trump years.
“Only in America,†as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and
historian William Astore wrote recently,
“do wars end and war budgets go up.â€
Of course, even the ending of that never-ending Afghan War may prove exaggerated. In fact,
let’s consider Afghanistan apart from the rest of this
country’s war-making history for a moment. After all, if I had told you in
1978 that, of the 42 years to follow, the U.S. would be involved in war in a single country for
30 of them and asked you to identify it, I can guarantee that Afghanistan
wouldn’t have been your pick. And yet so it’s been. From
1979 to 1989, there was the
CIA-backed Islamist extremist war against the Soviet army there (to the tune of billions
and billions of dollars). And yet the obvious lesson the Russians learned from that adventure,
as their military limped home in defeat and the Soviet Union imploded not long after
â€" that Afghanistan is indeed the “graveyard of
empires†â€" clearly had no impact in Washington.
Or how do you explain the 19-plus years of warfare there that followed the 9/11 attacks,
themselves committed by a small Islamist outfit, al-Qaeda, born as an American ally in that
first Afghan War? Only recently, the invaluable Costs of War Project
estimated that America’s second Afghan War has cost this country almost
$2.3 trillion (not including the price of lifetime care for its vets) and has left at least
241,000 people dead, including 2,442 American service members. In 1978, after the disaster of
the Vietnam War, had I assured you that such a never-ending failure of a conflict was in our
future, you would undoubtedly have laughed in my face.
And yet, three decades later, the U.S. military high command still seems not faintly to have
grasped the lesson that we “taught†the Russians and then
experienced ourselves. As a result, according to recent reports, they have uniformly
opposed President Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from
that country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, it’s not even clear
that, by September 11, 2021, if the president’s proposal goes according to
plan, that war will have truly ended. After all, the same military commanders and intelligence
chiefs seem intent on organizing long-distance versions of that conflict or, as the New
York Timesput
it , are determined to “fight from afar†there. They are
evidently even considering
establishing new bases in neighboring lands to do so.
America’s
“forever wars†â€" once known as the Global War on
Terror and, when the administration of George W. Bush launched it, proudly aimed at 60 countries â€"
do seem to be slowly winding down. Unfortunately, other kinds of potential wars, especially new
cold wars with China and Russia (involving new kinds of
high-tech weaponry) only seem to be gearing up.
War in Our Time
In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began
winding down in 1973, the draft was
ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for
Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making,
but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military
was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.
In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be
incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of
them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would
functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force
and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as Nick Turse reported, they
would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries
around the planet, often involved in semi-secret conflicts “in the
shadows†that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.
Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the
streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of
active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life.
Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous
offered by citizens and corporations to “the troops.†But
that’s where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year
after endless year, remain remarkably
supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part
of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but â€"
despite, for instance, the militarization
of this country’s police and the way in which those wars came home
to the Capitol last January 6th â€" it remains a remarkably distant reality for most
Americans.
One explanation: though the U.S. has, as I’ve said, been functionally at
war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly â€" on
December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19
mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York’s World Trade
Center and the Pentagon.
And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let’s just
consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you’re of a certain age,
you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-1953), Vietnam (1954-1975)
â€" and don’t forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos
and Cambodia as well â€" that first Gulf War of 1991, and the disastrous second one,
the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that Global War on Terror that began
soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the
rest of the Greater Middle East, and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance,
the
first 12 American special-ops trainers
arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread
American anti-Islamist terror role (
now failing ) across much of that continent.
And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the
people in the countries involved) that we’ve now generally forgotten about,
the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about
President John F. Kennedy’s April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in
Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson’s sending of 22,000 U.S. troops to the
Dominican Republic in 1965 to “restore orderâ€; or President
Ronald Reagan’s version of “aggressive
self-defense†by U.S. Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked
in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them;
or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that
same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?
And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA’s
endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the U.S. military) to intervene in the
affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao
Zedong’s communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing
conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala
and Iran, among other places. There were an
estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for
instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas
and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few U.S. soldiers or CIA agents died in them.
No, these were hardly “wars,†as traditionally defined, not all
of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally
carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of
this country’s militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist
William Blum’s “
A Brief History of Interventions †makes all too clear.
Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you
up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped
home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that
moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so
unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on Planet Earth. That brief period might almost
have passed for “peace,†American-style, if the U.S. military
under President George H. W. Bush hadn’t, in fact, invaded Panama
(“Operation Just Causeâ€) as 1989 ended to get rid of its
autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians
(including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.
And then, of course, in January 1991 the First Gulf War began . It
would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and “onlyâ€
a few hundred deaths among the U.S.-led coalition of forces. Air strikes against Iraq would
follow in the years to come. And let’s not forget that even Europe
wasn’t exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the
U.S. Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing
campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.
And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when
something like 2
00,000 U.S. troops have regularly been stationed abroad and U.S. Special Operations forces
have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked
“terrorists†in nation after nation and American presidents
quite literally became assassins-in-chief . To this day,
what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called
an American “empire of bases†â€" a historically
unprecedented 800 or more of them â€"
across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come
from the country whose military budget
at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that’s 10!) countries
combined, including China and Russia.
A Timeline of Carnage
The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American Century have,
in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge
that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been “at
war†at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke
â€" well, something like the war on terror that also become a war of terror and a
spreader of terror movements in our world.
As journalist William Arkin recently argued , the U.S. has created a
permanent war state meant to facilitate “endless war.†As he
writes, at this very moment, our nation “is killing or bombing in perhaps 10
different countries,†possibly more, and there’s nothing
remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.
The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the U.S. were to begin
to dismantle its empire of bases,
repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this
country’s focus on permanent war, and forsake the Pentagon as our holy
church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all
of it stopped?
What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?
Here in Asia, many people think the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was an act of
flaying the dying horse, since Japan was staring at defeat even without the bombs. It was a
totally callous act of the USA to drop the bombs just to “test their
efficacyâ€.
Why then the bombs could not have dropped on Germany that was still waging war at that
time? Asians smirk and say one) the “collateral†damage of
radiation etc., to neighbours like France who were Allies and two) they were (and are)
‘whites’; unlike Japan and its neighbours.
I think that you have the dates mixed up. The war against Germany in Europe ended on May
7th and the testing of the first atom bomb was not until 16th July when the first bomb went
off at Alamogordo in New Mexico. The following month the two remaining atom bombs that the US
had were dropped on Japan. In short, the bombs arrived too late to use in Europe.
The bomb was built with Berlin being the first target, but because the war ended a year
sooner than what everyone thought it would and making the very first bombs took longer than
planned, it was used on Japan. It was probably used as a demonstration for the Soviets, but
considering that sixty-six other large Japanese cities had already been completely destroyed
by “conventional†firebombing, and in
Tokyo’s case, with greater casualties than either nuclear bombing, the
Bomb wasn’t really needed. The descriptions and the personal accounts of
the destruction of Tokyo (or Dresden and Hamburg) are (if that is even possible) worse than
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Honestly, just what new and excitingly horrific ways of killing people the atom bomb used
was not clearly understood. They generally thought of it as a bigger kaboom in a smaller
package. And honestly, being pre-cremated during an entire night with your family and
neighbors in the local bomb-shelter or dying after a few days, weeks, or even a month from
radiation poisoning, is not really a difference is it?
“FOR 20 years after Harry Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped on
Japan in August 1945, most American scholars and citizens subscribed to the original,
official version of the story: the President had acted to avert a horrendous invasion of
Japan that could have cost 200,000 to 500,000 American lives. Then a young political
economist named Gar Alperovitz published a book of ferocious revisionism,
“Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam†(1965). While
acknowledging the paucity of evidence available at the time, he argued that dropping the
atomic bomb “was not needed to end the war or to save livesâ€
but was Truman’s means of sending a chastening message to the Soviet
Union.â€
If we accept that at face value, then certainly the second bombing was unecessary. The
threat would have been enough. But the US had a second bomb design to
test…
Few things working here. The US needed Japan to surrender quickly before Stalin invaded
(which they asked him to do) so he couldn’t get his forces onto the island
where the Allies couldn’t stop him. Most Japanese feared Stalin and
preferred surrendering to the US but the Japanese government was trying to use talks with the
USSR to get better terms than unconditional surrender (little did they know Stalin was
licking his chops for more territory under his iron curtain).
The first bomb design (little man) was significantly less ambitious, it was so certain to
function they never tested it because a study had proven there was almost no chance it would
fail.
Fat boy was the scientific leap in technology needing to be demonstrated. Building little
man was mostly a matter of enriching Uranium vs Fat boy Plutonium enrichment harder and
detonation mechanism more complicated. However the end result was a bomb that could produce
significantly higher yields with smaller amounts of fissionable material where both the size
of the bomb could be significantly reduced and the yield of the device could be significantly
scaled up at the same time.
Fat boy demonstrated the USA could someday be putting nukes on V2 rockets recently
smuggled out of Germany. Even more important Fat boy is a precursor to the mechanism that
initiates the H bomb fusion devices that Edward Teller would soon be Dr Strangloving.
Even after Trinity Fat boy still had very high odds of failure. They feared looking like
fools if it failed and the USSR ended up with the Plutoniumt. As a result the US Air Force
dropped little man first because it was certain to work. After the 1st bomb dropped, the
Soviets declared war and began their invasion of Japan which forced
Truman’s hand to drop Fat boy too. Even after Fat Boy, war mongers in
Japan still refused to surrender where Emperor Hirohito finally overruled them and although
there was a military coupe attempted, it failed.
Thus ended the most bloody conflict in the history of human kind.
I’m not saying it isn’t true, but is there any
actual evidence that the bombs were dropped as “a message to the Soviet
Union†and not to speed the end of the war?
Also, who exactly wanted to send this “message� The US
generals were against it, I understand.
“What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and
came home?â€
a. All those families whose livelihood is based on waging war would have to find a new
job. These people will fight tooth and nail to avoid change
b. The resource grabs by the rich people behind the Oz-like curtain would fail. Their fate
would be that of the English aristocrats who have to rent out their castles in order to
maintain a roof over their head. These people will fight tooth and nail to avoid change
c. The general public would have a fire-hose of newly-available resources to direct toward
activities which benefit all the rest of the families outside A and B above
d. Fear-based leverage by the few over the many would be diminished. Attention would be
re-directed toward valid problems we all face
=====
There’s an interesting question which I see posed from time to time,
and often ask myself. It runs thus:
“Who decides who our “enemies†are, and
why they are “enemies�
This is a fundamental question which I believe very few of us can currently answer
accurately. Yet this question carries a $1.2T per year consequence. That’s
a lot of money to allocate toward something we know nothing about.
One time I asked an acquaintance â€" who spent a career at CIA â€"
that question. His reply was “Why, Congress decides who our enemies are,
and why. Congress then tells the CIA what to doâ€.
I wasn’t sure if he truly believed that. It’s quite
possible he did, of course, and I’m sure many of the people in group A
above surely do think they’re doing honorable and patriotic work.
Group B above â€" the people who are actually moving the chess pieces of
“the Great Game†â€" they are pretty clear on who
defines our “enemies†and why they are
“enemiesâ€. And they wisely don’t stand in
front of podiums and explain their actions. These people aren’t visible,
or explained, or known because it’s better for them not to be.
The way to combat manipulation by these predators is to:
a. Know them by their actions. Predators predate.
b. Don’t participate. In order for them to predate, they need minions.
Don’t be a minion. Instead…
c. Be the giver, the creator and the constructor of things that are of no use to
predators
It’s not the soldiers but the contractors who live in dumpy overpriced
holes like Northern Virginia.
As to your acquaintance, my godfather was in the CIA in the 60’s and a
bit into the 70’s, and he might not say Congress as much as the
President’s Chief of Staff as threat they choose what the President sees.
You have to remember it’s primarily an organization of boring paper
pushers looking to get promoted which requires political patronage. Imagine getting the
Canada desk. You’ll be at a dead end unless you paint it as a grave
threat. Then there is information overload and just the sheer size of the US. They would file
reports, he mentioned an incident in Africa in the wake of decolonization when y godfather
was stationed there that maybe warranted the President’s attention, but to
get information to the President’s CoS took so long, it was in the
President’s daily newspaper before the report could be handled. By then,
why care, given the size of the US? Who can get to the Chief of Staff? Congress, so everyone
else lobbies them. The CIA director is an appendage of the CoS.
When the President wants something, everyone jumps, but when the President
doesn’t care, everyone is jockeying get for patronage.
The war machine is sustained by plutocrats and their sociopathic flunkies in the national
security state. How this works is clearly depicted in “The
Devil’s Chessboard,†by David Talbot, a deeply depressing
chronicle of how Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles did the dirty work of US
corporations worldwide. The arrogance, impunity, and irresponsibility of these men
established the framework of our secret government, which remains intact to this day.
It would be pleasant to believe that this evil persists because of public ignorance, but
like the good Germans of the Nazi era, Americans accept that deception, torture, and murder
are routinely practiced on our behalf to maintain our high standard of living and to keep us
“safe.†The reverence for the operatives of the US national
security state is evident throughout our popular culture, and that is a damning judgment on
the American people.
Of course the core problems are stationed at the place hardest to get to: right between
our ears. This complicity disease runs deep and wide.
While I often succumb to that same despondency you mentioned, occasionally I interrupt the
doom tape to notice that there’s a lot of people who are paddling hard
toward a new ethos…like the posters here @ NC, for ex.
So today I’m going to indulge in a little happiness. Plant a tree. Do
something good, something durable, something hopeful.
Something that offers no real hope of rent extraction potential.
It was nice being accused of supporting the terrorists because I supported the rule of
law and human rights, not to mention the United States Constitution and the Bill of
Rights.
WTF do some people think that the Founders wanted an extremely small army, a large
organized militia, and passed the Bill of Rights? It was a reaction to what the British Army
did to them (using much of the same tactics as the current
“justice†system does today.) The ignorance and lack of
thinking is really annoying.
Much of what the British military did was not good. Even now some of it would not be
allowed in a court of law, but I do not recall them being nearly as violent, brutal, or
deadly in their tactics while enforcing the King’s Law as the current
regime or the local police are. That the milder British tactics caused a civil war with in a
decade, and that the people then had less to fear from an occupying army as we do from
“our†police is disturbing to think on.
But wars always come home, don’t they? Faux toughness on the supposed
baddies here with claims of treason and insurrections on protests and riots now that often
would hardly be in the news fifty years ago, so great was the protests and riots happening
then. The cry to use the same tactics that did not work overseas to be used here at home.
“To keep us safe.â€
There’s truth to this, but once the war was really on, British and
Tory/Loyalist brutality had decisive effects on public opinion, putting lots of people into
the Whig/Patriot camp. Tom Paine makes great efforts to publicize British sexual assaults,
looting, and general thugishness as they chase the Continental Army across New Jersey in
1776; the cruelty of backcountry British cavalry officers and Tory rangers in the Carolinas
was legendary as the war reaches its latter phases.
And there was brutality on the other side, too, especially for Loyalist elites who faced a
kind of “social death.†It was a war, after all, as well as a
social revolution. It wasn’t France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, but it was
rough, especially given the small population size.
Except as Engelhardt just pointed out, the national security state does not
“maintain our high standard of livingâ€.
It’s an immense net drain on our standard of living. The only Americans
made well-to-do or wealthy by it are those who are directly involved in supplying contract
goods and services to the system.
I don’t know if Americans “accept†it as
opposed to taking a dim view of being able to affect change.
The levers the average person has to change the behavior of the state is infinitesimal.
Add to that the scope of action and Overton window mediated by the hypernormalized press
ecosystem just means those in power get to act without restraint.
Hell, Obama literally said “We tortured some
folks†and the media and government barely shrugged. To my knowledge, no one went
to jail, no one was brought up in the Hague, and some of the same ghouls that perpetrated
such crimes got cushy commenter jobs in the media.
Right now, localities can’t even keep their police from regularly
killing citizens.
What does the average person do in the face of such things?
Hell, Obama literally said “We tortured some folks†and
the media and government barely shrugged. To my knowledge, no one went to jail, no one was
brought up in the Hague, and some of the same ghouls that perpetrated such crimes got cushy
commenter jobs in the media.
No one went to jail. Certainly no one went before the Hague. No bankers went to jail
either. Even during the nutty Reagan administration, people went to jail for financial
shenanigans. Some got long sentences. Hell, the Iran-Contra stuff was at least covered and
people were indicted, even if they all got pardoned. Not anymore. These shenanigans are the
norm and happen right out in the open. I’d imagine some of
it’s been given legal cover. It seems like it’s become
the expected behavior within these circles. To act otherwise â€" to attempt to be
honest, in other words â€" is seen as weak and is mocked as fiercely as a weaker
child on the playground might be.
It’s just a continuing regression. And as you note,
it’s an excellent career builder:
“Looking for a job in mainstream media? Research has shown that
reducing your sense of ethics and morality actually helps you get ahead.â€
Doubtless, Ms. Smith and Ms. Engelhardt have provided a key public service here. And I
speak as a veteran, decorated for service in the War Over Oil (a.k.a. the
“Persian Gulf Warâ€).
Between the vast economic inequality currently raging in our country, the social
stratification enabled by access to colleges and universities accepted as
“eliteâ€, the trashing of Constitutional protections (e.g. the
4th Amendment, now thoroughly eviscerated owing to the “PATRIOT
ACTâ€), and the rampaging rule by “intelligence
agencies†over foreign policy, I see no reason why any father should tell his
children that this is a country worth fighting and dying for. [Think: China] Of course, the
Empire â€" just as Rome did in its dying days â€" will be able to find
enough desperately poor who will take the king’s shilling and don the
uniform.
If anyone wishes to prove me wrong, let them work for a substantive
“peace dividend†for a 2-3 years. Then we can sit down and
talk; I’ll buy the ale.
In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began
winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a
“voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became
ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to
the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in
remarkable ways.
Because, imo,
Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the
streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of
active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American
life.
Despite having already ‘pledged’ at my Uncles
Invitation, with the Draft’s End, I had great hope my future would see the
great Peace Dividand rather than 9 more Opportunity Conflicts.
Little did that then 21 year old see the brilliance in that Pentagon Strategy.
I Now firmly support a No Exemption Draft for all post HS.
Military Service being only one, and a restricted one, of many counter-balancing options
available for Public Service for that cohort.
This article reminded me of one of the best Congressional Research Service reports that
I’ve read: Instances of Use of United States
Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020 . Despite being just a list of dates and locations with a
brief description, it comes in at around 50 pages, which I think is a testament to how
important foreign military engagement has been to the growth of the US even before 1945.
Between these foreign wars and the genocidal war against the indigenous people of the
continent I think it’s fair to say this country has been at war since its
founding.
Correct. Even the so called Louisiana Purchase was not really a purchase of land, but a
faux “option†to engage in land treaties with the native
Americans;.the US chose Indian Wars and relocation treaties that have been violated
repeatedly. (This territory is now known as the Red States.)
The rest of the land extending to the west coast was acquired through conquest with the
new nation of Mexico. I guess the only real honest acquisition would be
Seward’s Icebox.
>>I guess the only real honest acquisition would be Seward’s
Icebox.
Alaska has only been inhabited for a few tens of thousands of years. I would think that
the natives should have some say about who “owns†the land
even though the Russian Empire did say that they did. The reasons sometimes included the use
of guns. As for stealing Mexico’s territory, again that was, and in some
areas still is, inhabited by natives who somehow became under the
“governance†of New Spain or the country of Mexico despite not
being asked about it and often still a majority part of the population in many areas when
Mexico lost control.
Often, Europeans or Americans would show up somewhere, plant a flag, and say that they
claimed or owned the very inhabited land, sometimes with farms and even entire cities. Rather
arrogant, I would say.
I agree. Seward’s Icebox was not empty at time of sale. My
understanding is that Seward thought it was. So faraway, so cold; no one would be living
there, right?
As I’ve commented here many times, it was small pox not small bullets
that allowed the Old World to take the New. There were estimates of 20 million native
Americans living on the land now known as Mexico and the US. 90% were felled by Old World
disease before Custer lost his scalp to the northern Plains Indians. In a fair fight the
Indians would be enforcing the treaties.
It is amazing how the US continues to engage in war and still lose: Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Iraq. . .Ukraine?
For nearly a decade now every time I’ve read about the war in
Afghanistan I’ve thought about Tim Kreider’s mordant
2011 cartoon We
Could’ve Had The Moon, Instead We Get Afghanistan . Ten years later,
that $432 billion has ballooned to $2.3 trillion (and more) and every word he wrote still
stands. :-(
The author has retired from cartooning and now focuses on essay writing.
We are going to have to halt the production lines.
The warehouses are full of bombs already, there is no more room.
Biden to the rescue; he’s started dropping bombs already.
When you have a large defence industry, you need war.
The only purpose is to use up the output from the defence industry.
“The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment
or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on
armamentsâ€
“Large-scale armaments are inseparable from the expansion of the
armed forces and the preparation of plans for a war of conquest. They also induce competitive
rearmament of other countries.â€
These were the lessons they learnt from the 1930s.
So now, here we are. And how do we create a peaceful world? Refit the US military for a
sustainable world. It will prove to be very useful. We and other advanced nations still have
the advantage for prosperity but we should not abuse it. The whole idea back in 1945 was for
the world to prosper. So I’ll just suggest my usual hack: Get rid of the
profit motive. It’s pure mercantilism. And totally self defeating in a
world seeking sustainability for everyone.
The Manhattan Project was an enormously expensive enterprise with two components
â€" the development of a uranium bomb (Oak Ridge) and a plutonium bomb (Hanford,
WA).
If no bomb had been used, the project would have been considered a waste of time, and
there would have been a congressional investigation. If only one bomb had been used, half the
cost would have been considered a waste.
I’m not saying these were the only reasons for dropping the bombs. The
event was, as they say, “overdetermined.â€
Few people, apart from specialists, may have heard of the JCPOA Joint Commission.
That’s the group in charge of a Sisyphean task: the attempt to revive the
2015 Iran nuclear deal through a series of negotiations in Vienna.
The Iranian negotiating team was back in Vienna yesterday, led by Deputy Foreign Minister
Seyed Abbas Araghchi. Shadowplay starts with the fact the Iranians negotiate with the other
members of the P+1 â€" Russia, China, France, UK and Germany â€" but not
directly with the US.
That’s quite something: after all, it was the Trump administration that
blew up the JCPOA. There is an American delegation in Vienna, but they only talk with the
Europeans.
Shadowplay goes turbo when every Viennese coffee table knows about
Tehran’s red lines: either it’s back to the original
JCPOA as it was agreed in Vienna in 2015 and then ratified by the UN Security Council, or
nothing.
Araghchi, mild-mannered and polite, has had to go on the record once again to stress that
Tehran will leave if the talks veer towards “bullyingâ€, time
wasting or even a
step-by-step ballroom dance, which is time wasting under different terminology.
Neither flat out optimistic nor pessimistic, he remains, let’s say,
cautiously upbeat, at least in public: “We are not disappointed and we will
do our job. Our positions are very clear and firm. The sanctions must be lifted, verified and
then Iran must return to its commitments.â€
So, at least in the thesis, the debate is still on. Araghchi: “There are
two types of U.S. sanctions against Iran. First, categorized or so-called divisional sanctions,
such as oil, banking and insurance, shipping, petrochemical, building and automobile sanctions,
and second, sanctions against real and legal individuals.â€
“Second†is the key issue. There’s
absolutely no guarantee the US Congress will lift most or at least a significant part of these
sanctions.
Everyone in Washington knows it â€" and the American delegation knows it.
When the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, for instance, says that 60% or 70% has been agreed
upon, that’s code for lifting of divisional sanctions. When it comes to
“secondâ€, Araghchi has to be evasive: “There
are complex issues in this area that we are examiningâ€.
Now compare it with the assessment of informed Iranian insiders in Washington such as
nuclear policy expert
Seyed Hossein Mousavian : they’re more like pessimistic realists.
That takes into consideration the non-negotiable red lines established by Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Khamenei himself. Plus non-stop pressure by Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who are
all JCPOA-adverse.
But then there’s extra shadowplay. Israeli intel has already notified the
security cabinet that a deal most certainly will be reached in Vienna. After all, the narrative
of a successful deal is already being constructed as a foreign policy victory by the
Biden-Harris administration â€" or, as cynics prefer, Obama-Biden 3.0.
Meanwhile, Iranian diplomacy remains on overdrive. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is visiting
Qatar and Iraq, and has
already met with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim al Thani.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, virtually at the end of his term before the June
presidential elections, always goes back to the same point: no more US sanctions;
Iran’s verification; then Iran will return to its
“nuclear obligationsâ€.
The Foreign Ministry has even released a quite detailed fact sheet once again
stressing the need to remove “all sanctions imposed, re-imposed and
re-labeled since January 20, 2017â€.
The window of opportunity for a deal won’t last long. Hardliners in
Tehran couldn’t care less. At least 80% of Tehran members of Parliament are
now hardliners. The next President most certainly will be a hardliner. Team
Rouhani’s efforts have been branded a failure since the onset of
Trump’s “maximum pressure†campaign.
Hardliners are already in post-JCPOA mode.
That fateful Fateh
What none of the actors in the shadowplay can admit is that the revival of the JCPOA pales
compared to the real issue: the power of Iranian missiles.
In the original 2015 negotiations in Vienna â€" follow them in my Persian
Miniatures e-book â€" Obama-Biden 2.0 did everything in their power to include
missiles in the deal.
Every grain of sand in the Negev desert knows that Israel will go no holds barred to retain
its nuclear weapon primacy in the Middle East. Via a spectacular kabuki, the fact that Israel
is a nuclear power happens to remain “invisible†to most of
world public opinion.
While Khamenei has issued a fatwa clearly stating that producing, stockpiling and using
weapons of mass destruction â€" nuclear included â€" is haram (banned by
Islam), Israel’s leadership feels free to order stunts such as the sabotage
via Mossad of the (civilian) Iranian nuclear complex at Natanz.
The head of Iran’s Parliament Energy Committee, Fereydoun Abbasi Davani,
even accused Washington and London of being accomplices to the sabotage of Natanz, as they
arguably supplied intel to Tel Aviv.
Yet now a lone missile is literally exploding a great deal of the shadowplay.
On April 22, in the dead of night before dawn, a Syrian missile exploded only 30 km away
from the ultra-sensitive Israeli nuclear reactor of Dimona. The official â€" and
insistent â€" Israeli spin: this was an “errantâ€.
Well, not really.
Here â€" third video from the top
â€" is footage of the quite significant explosion. Also significantly, Tel Aviv
remained absolutely mum when it comes to offering a missile proof of ID. Was it an old Soviet
1967 SA-5? Or, rather more likely, a 2012 Iranian Fateh-110 short range surface-to-surface,
manufactured in Syria as the M-600 , and also possessed by Hezbollah?
A Fateh family tree can be seen in the attached chart. The inestimable Elijah Magnier has
posed some very
good questions about the Dimona near-hit. I complemented it with a quite enlightening
discussion with physicists, with input by a military intel expert.
The Fateh-110 operates as a classic ballistic missile, until the moment the warhead starts
maneuvering to evade ABM defenses. Precision is up to 10 meters, nominally 6 meters. So it hit
exactly where it was supposed to hit. Israel officially confirmed that the missile was not
intercepted â€" after a trajectory of roughly 266 km.
This opens a brand new can of worms. It implies that the performance of the much hyped and
recently
upgraded Iron Dome is far from stellar â€" and talk about an euphemism. The
Fateh flew so low that Iron Dome could not identify it.
The inevitable conclusion is this was a message/warning combo. From Damascus. With a
personal stamp from Bashar al-Assad, who had to clear such a sensitive missile launch. A
message/warning delivered via Iranian missile technology fully available to the Axis of
Resistance â€" proving that regional actors have serious stealth capability.
It’s crucial to remember that when Tehran dispatched a volley of
deliberately older Fateh-313 versions at the US base Ayn al-Assad in Iraq, as a response to the
assassination of Gen Soleimani in January 2020, the American radars went blank.
Iranian missile technology as top strategic deterrence. Now that’s the
shadowplay that turns Vienna into a sideshow.
Biden is privatising the war in Afghanistan. 18,000 private contractors will stay behind
to maintain a landing area for U.S. aircraft should the need arise. According to war monger
Lynn Cheney the "troops will never leave". The U.S. National Guard has been fighting
undeclared wars all over the ME for twenty years and legislation is being proposed at the
state level to end the abuse. I personally know one man who has done three tours in Iraq as a
National Guardsman.
I totally agree with your comments concerning the U.S. government here at home. It is
Bolshevism 2.0.
"... we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents. ..."
"... We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments ..."
"... Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide. ..."
"... You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress . ..."
"... Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors. ..."
"... Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things. ..."
"... They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries. ..."
"... Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET. ..."
"... We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. * ..."
These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is
spilling over the world:
Dear Director of National Intelligence,
we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are
increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our
opponents.
We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful
activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe
to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those
judgments
Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide.
Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China
and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately
no soldier got
hurt by those rumors.
Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They
want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things.
They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own
countries.
Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep
telling our that all of it is SECRET.
We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments.
*
Sincerely
The Generals
---- PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up.
The above may well have been a draft for the letter behind
this report :
America’s top spies say they are looking for ways to declassify and
release more intelligence about adversaries’ bad behavior, after a group
of four-star military commanders sent a rare and urgent plea asking for help in the
information war against Russia and China.
The internal memo from nine regional military commanders last year, which was reviewed by
POLITICO and not made public, implored spy agencies to provide more evidence to combat
"pernicious conduct."
Only by "waging the truth in the public domain against America’s 21st
century challengers†can Washington shore up support from American allies, they
said. But efforts to compete in the battle of ideas, they added, are hamstrung by overly
stringent secrecy practices.
“We request this help to better enable the US, and by extension its
allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to
supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," the commanders who oversee U.S. military
forces in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, as well as special operations troops, wrote to
then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire last January.
“Unfortunately, we continue to miss opportunities to clarify truth,
counter distortions, puncture false narratives, and influence events in time to make a
difference," they added.
The generals must have been seriously miffed to write such a letter. There have been a
number of published intelligence judgments where the NSA had expressed
low confidence in conclusions made mainly by the CIA. The NSA is part of the military.
Between two bureaucracies such an accusing letter or internal memo is the equivalent of a
declaration of war. It is doubtful that the intelligence folks would win that fight.
That gives some hope that the Office of the DNI and the agencies below it will now lessen
their production of nonsensical claims.
Posted by b on April 28, 2021 at 15:49 UTC | Permalink
Thanks for that b....is it rubber meets the road time?
I just read that the US is getting all its ambassadorial folk out of Afghanistan....maybe
somebody is believing May 1 is a firmer deadline than the Biden 9/11 myth.
The shit show is about to crash, IMO, but if it is in slow motion, this crazy could go on
for a while....what geo-political straw will break the camel's back?
Lewis Black, a pretty good US comedian, used to have a bit in the mid-2000's where he would
ask the W administration flacks why they didn't just make up evidence about the Iraq WMDs
after they "found out" that there were no weapons in the country. Black would tell them just
make it up; we're used to it. Just give us an excuse to believe in the BS for God's sake;
we'll do it!
I feel it's the same with our satrap nations around the world. At this time, is there
anyone who does not understand that US foreign policy is conducted for and by MICIMATT (look
it up)? So the generals have got nothing to worry about: keep pounding out that BS; there's a
willing, able, and ready corps of salesmen and women in the media who will make enough of the
public believe it for "democracy's" purposes.
General Mackenzie who testified before the US House Armed Services Committee said
Iran’s widespread use of drones means that the US is operating without
complete air superiority for the first time since the Korean War.
Iran has time and again stated that its military capabilities are merely defensive and are
designed to deter foreign threats.
General Flynn had been head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (military).
The CIA was out to get him. It took a while but they eventually hamstrung him good.
"Dear Generals, who haven't won a war in 75 years, so much for the DIA huh? We'd love to
share our intelligence with you, our evidence showing the overwhelming and egregious misdeeds
of our hateful, spiteful disgusting enemies, whose questioning of our Word should be met with
charges of treason, but to give you evidence on top of our own unquestionable and 100%
correct threat estimations, would compromise our Intelligence Gathering Methods which are of
the strictest security and would threaten the ongoing ability of this Agency to gather and
disseminate the unquestionable facts that without fear of contradiction we know is the truth.
In short, dear Generals - work on winning a war, any war, and don't meddle in places that
befuddle your ability to follow orders. Hooah! The CIA."
Intel Wars: DIA, CIA and Flynn’s Battle to Consolidate Spying
The Defense Department wants in on the spying game. But will the CIA block their
efforts?
The CIA essentially absorbed the Pentagon’s only military-wide spying
agency seven years ago [2006]
when the Defense HUMINT Service was dismantled -- and now, the Pentagon wants it back.
The CIA is quietly pushing the Armed Services committees along, hoping that
Flynn’s DCS will be remembered by history as a failed power
grab.
The CIA/FBI/17+ known/unknown agencies are clearly a security apparatus that's gone out of
control when even the USA's "nine regional [four-star general] military commanders" are out
of the loop and pleading to be better informed. Worryingly, though, they ask for "ammunition
in the ongoing war of narratives," which they apparently are ready to go right along
with.
Western news media, of course, has become but a compliant weaponized appendage of that
security apparatus, and democracy, which depends on informed voters, is nowhere in control of
any of this.
I do not see how this is possible. Every major event, from Vietnam, to JFK, to 9-11, and a
myriad of others, had US lies baked into the cake. If the US ceased to lie, it would cease to
function as America functions today. It would be incapable of empire.
The US establishment, from the President on down, is based on lies. They cannot survive on
truth.
b ended his post with: " lessen their production of nonsensical claims."
"Nonsensical" misses the mark. They are *agenda-driven* claims.
I don't believe the Generals care one whit whether the spineless jellyfish pols
in other countries see through our lies. The Generals want the Pentagon to
have more participation in shaping the agenda and it's attendant narrative.
The military used to be that part pf the US government apparatus ("deep state") that
emphasized the value and importance of allies the most.
IMHO what is happening here is that the generals sense the imcreasing cracks in the
US-centered alliance system. They attribute it to the work of the intelligence community,
which is certainly a contributing factor, but thr real cause is the relative decline in US
power and general unreliability due to political instability. The USA is less and less
attractive as a partner. When the generals ask another country for a favour as they had been
used to for decades they increasingly often get just questions and excuses in return.
Is this a sign of a struggle between the CIA and Pentagon as to who is the boss of foreign
and war policy? Anybody remember when CIA supported jihadists were fighting Pentagon
supported groups (were they jihadists?) in Syria. Seems like the Pentagon is the one deciding
on relations with the Syrian Kurds, and not the CIA. Flynn was actively helping the Damascus
with info about the CIA backed jihadists.
I would rather have the Pentagon win as they are not all that hot-to-trot for actual wars.
The CIA should just go back to running US media, law makers, corporation and ruining civil
liberties.
Isn't it safe to assume that *anything* the CIA says publicly, either through direct
channels or their co-opted corporate media, is false? Cue the Mike Pimpeo quote: "We lied, we
cheated, we stole..." and of course the entire history of that useless agency, lol.
Yves here. This article confirms my prejudices about the importance of avoiding those spying home assistants at all costs. And
it takes a bit of effort to try to thwart financial institutions’ efforts to use your voiceprint as an ID (I tell them they need
to note any recording as invalid because I have my assistants get through the phone trees for me, and if they try taking a voiceprint,
it won’t be of the right voice. That seems to put them on tilt).
But the notion of using voice patterns to guess at health issues or psychological profiles or product reactions sounds like 21st
century phrenology. Although a lot of consultants will rake in a lot of dough selling these unproven schemes.
By Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries, University of Pennsylvania. Originally published
at
The Conversation
You decide to call a store that sells some hiking boots you’re thinking of buying. As you dial in, the computer of an artificial
intelligence company hired by the store is activated. It retrieves its analysis of the speaking style you used when you phoned other
companies the software firm services. The computer has concluded you are “friendly and talkative.†Using predictive routing,
it connects you to a customer service agent who company research has identified as being especially good at getting friendly and
talkative customers to buy more expensive versions of the goods they’re considering.
This hypothetical situation may sound as if it’s from some distant future. But automated voice-guided marketing activities like
this are happening all the time
.
If you hear “This call is being recorded for training and quality control,†it isn’t just the customer service representative
they’re monitoring.
It can be you, too.
When conducting research for my forthcoming book, “
The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In
to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet ,†I went through over 1,000 trade magazine and news articles on the
companies connected to various forms of voice profiling. I examined hundreds of pages of U.S. and EU laws applying to biometric surveillance.
I analyzed dozens of patents. And because so much about this industry is evolving, I spoke to 43 people who are working to shape
it.
It soon became clear to me that we’re in the early stages of a voice-profiling revolution that companies see as integral to
the future of marketing.
Thanks to the public’s embrace of smart speakers, intelligent car displays and voice-responsive phones â€" along with the rise
of voice intelligence in call centers â€" marketers say they are on the verge of being able to use AI-assisted vocal analysis technology
to achieve unprecedented insights into shoppers’ identities and inclinations. In doing so, they believe they’ll be able to circumvent
the errors and fraud associated with traditional targeted advertising.
Not only can people be profiled by their speech patterns, but they can also be assessed by the sound of their voices â€" which,
according to
some researchers , is unique and can reveal their feelings, personalities and even their physical characteristics.
Flaws in Targeted Advertising
Top marketing executives I interviewed said that they expect their customer interactions to include voice profiling within a decade
or so.
Part of what attracts them to this new technology is a belief that the current digital system of creating unique customer profiles
â€" and then targeting them with personalized messages, offers and ads â€"
has major drawbacks .
A simmering worry among internet advertisers,
one that burst into the open during the 2010s
, is that customer data often isn’t up to date, profiles may be based on multiple users of a device, names can be confused
and people lie.
Advertisers are also uneasy about
ad blocking
and click fraud , which happens when
a site or app uses bots or low-paid workers to click on ads placed there so that the advertisers have to pay up.
These are all barriers to understanding individual shoppers.
Voice analysis, on the other hand, is seen as a solution that makes it nearly impossible for people to hide their feelings or
evade their identities.
Building Out the Infrastructure
Most of the activity in voice profiling is happening in customer support centers, which are largely out of the public eye.
But there are also
hundreds of millions of Amazon Echoes, Google Nests and other smart speakers out there. Smartphones also contain such technology.
All are listening and capturing people’s individual voices. They respond to your requests. But the assistants are also tied
to advanced machine learning and deep neural network programs
that analyze
what you say and how you say it
Amazon and Google â€" the leading purveyors of smart speakers outside China â€" appear to be doing little voice analysis on those
devices beyond recognizing and responding to individual owners. Perhaps they fear that pushing the technology too far will, at this
point, lead to bad publicity.
Nevertheless, the user agreements of Amazon and Google â€" as well as Pandora, Bank of America and other companies that people
access routinely via phone apps â€" give them the right to use their digital assistants
to understand you by the way you sound
. Amazon’s most public application of voice profiling so far is its Halo wristband,
which claims to know the emotions you’re conveying when you talk to relatives, friends and employers.
The patents from these tech companies offer a vision of what’s coming.
In one Amazon patent , a device with the Alexa
assistant picks up a woman’s speech irregularities that imply a cold through using “an analysis of pitch, pulse, voicing, jittering,
and/or harmonicity of a user’s voice, as determined from processing the voice data.†From that conclusion, Alexa asks if the
woman wants a recipe for chicken soup. When she says no, it offers to sell her cough drops with one-hour delivery.
An Amazon patent depicts a device picking up a woman’s cough â€" and then asking if she wants a recipe for chicken soup.
Google Patents
Another Amazon patent suggests an app to help a store
salesperson decipher a shopper’s voice to plumb unconscious reactions to products. The contention is that how people sound allegedly
does a better job indicating what people like than their words.
And one of Google’s proprietary inventions
involves tracking family members in real time using special microphones placed throughout a home. Based on the pitch of voice
signatures, Google circuitry infers gender and age information â€" for example, one adult male and one female child â€" and tags
them as separate individuals.
The company’s patent asserts that over time the system’s “household policy manager†will be able to compare life patterns,
such as when and how long family members eat meals, how long the children watch television, and when electronic game devices are
working â€" and then have the system suggest better eating schedules for the kids, or offer to control their TV viewing and game
playing.
Seductive Surveillance
In the West, the road to this advertising future starts with firms encouraging users to give them permission to gather voice data.
Firms gain customers’ permission by enticing them to buy inexpensive voice technologies.
When tech companies have further developed voice analysis software â€" and people have become increasingly reliant on voice devices
â€" I expect the companies to begin widespread profiling and marketing based on voice data. Hewing to the letter if not the spirit
of whatever privacy laws exist, the companies will, I expect, forge ahead into their new incarnations, even if most of their users
joined before this new business model existed.
This
classic bait and switch marked the rise of both Google and Facebook . Only when the numbers of people flocking to these sites
became large enough to attract high-paying advertisers did their business models solidify around selling ads personalized to what
Google and Facebook knew about their users.
Here’s the catch: It’s not clear how accurate voice profiling is, especially when it comes to emotions.
It is true,
according to Carnegie Mellon voice recognition scholar Rita Singh , that the activity of your vocal nerves is connected to your
emotional state. However, Singh told me that she worries that with the easy availability of machine-learning packages, people with
limited skills will be tempted to run shoddy analyses of people’s voices, leading to conclusions that are as dubious as the methods.
She also argues that inferences that link physiology to emotions and forms of stress may be culturally biased and prone to error.
That concern hasn’t deterred marketers, who typically use voice profiling to draw conclusions about individuals’ emotions, attitudes
and personalities.
While some of these advances promise to
make life easier , it’s not difficult to see how voice technology can be abused and exploited. What if voice profiling tells
a prospective employer that you’re a bad risk for a job that you covet or desperately need? What if it tells a bank that you’re
a bad risk for a loan? What if a restaurant decides it won’t take your reservation because you sound low class, or too demanding?
Consider, too, the discrimination that can take place
if voice profilers
follow some scientists’ claims that it is possible to use an individual’s vocalizations to tell the person’s height, weight,
race, gender and health.
People are already subjected to different offers and opportunities based on the personal information companies have collected.
Voice profiling adds an especially insidious means of labeling. Today, some states such as Illinois and Texas
require
companies to ask for permission before conducting analysis of vocal, facial or other biometric features.
But other states expect people to be aware of the information that’s collected about them from the privacy policies or terms
of service â€" which
means they rarely will . And the federal government hasn’t enacted a sweeping marketing surveillance law.
With the looming widespread adoption of voice analysis technology, it’s important for government leaders to adopt policies and
regulations that protect the personal information revealed by the sound of a person’s voice.
One proposal: While the use of voice
authentication â€" or using a person’s voice to prove their identity â€" could be allowed under certain carefully regulated
circumstances, all voice profiling should be prohibited in marketers’ interactions with individuals. This prohibition should also
apply to political campaigns and to government activities without a warrant.
That seems like the best way to ensure that the coming era of voice profiling is constrained before it becomes too integrated
into daily life and too pervasive to control.
Very interesting. However, I want Fidelity to use voice printing when I call for banking services. I was impressed when they
implemented the technology, and I’m happy they’re using it to identify and prevent bad actors.
Very interesting. However, I want Fidelity to use voice printing when I call for banking services. I was impressed when they
implemented the technology, and I’m happy they’re using it to identify and prevent bad actors.
I was thinking of trying to acquire one of those gadgets you see in the crime-oriented moving picture shows that alters the
voice to sound deep and harsh. Use it to answer any call from an unknown number. Have a little fun freaking them out (momentarily)
while preventing voice profiling. I wonder if there’s an app for that by now…the Kermit setting could be fun too.
Looks like there are smartphone apps that will change your voice on a phone call. That could be useful. I don’t know if any
of them work well.
Ofc that can only help when the listening device is on the other end of a phone call. Not much use when, for example, conversing
in person with someone who has a phone that’s listening all the time.
There is an effect, the Eventide Harmonizer, that is sometimes used to alter voices (Darth Vader’s voice in Star Wars for
example). It’s an expensive audio device mostly used in recording studios, but nowadays I’m sure there is some app that can
do similar things.
“Don’t get on the ship! That book? It’s a….cookbook!!†Thanks for that; it’s a classic I’ll never forget.
It seems we’ve got weirder stuff now. For whatever reason, those automatic answering programs do not understand me. I’ve
found if you get scrappy with them (such as Joseph K suggests babbling some nonsense) they throw up their robotic hands and they
get you to a person.
Someone once advised me to shut up through the whole menu thing and they get you to a human. But many companies are on to this.
Unfortunately. You may want to stick with insane babbling.
Yes, silence used to work. Now, sounding like a) a ferinner, b) an oldster without dentures c) someone with special needs,
or any other demographic AI can’t handle yet, means that regrettably the human of last resort is going to have to be tasked,
and paid. So far, mixing up “aeuieueooeiueoueuoiueuiahh!†with “aeuieuueiahh!†and ““uoiueuiahh!†etc works. So
far. Next may have to be Darth Vader voice.
Not so long ago, most people would be outraged if they discovered someone had planted eavesdropping devices in their home.
Now some tech. co’s have persuaded people to pay to “bug†themselves!
I have to (grudgingly) admit that’s an amazing bit of marketing/salesmanship.
A few times over recent years, I’d been prompted by computerized voices to speak slowly and answer prompts such as “What
is your destination?â€. Even simple prompts had me suspicious as in “Say yes to confirm or no if you would like something elseâ€.
In a previous life as an audio engineer, I knew they could analyze the wave form and deduce many things. So, I would gargle, yodel,
or sing falsetto my response. I have never put financial or personal information on line and wasn’t about to through audio.
At this point, I use a Harmon or cup mute to speak to institutions via the phone.
This sentence from the article gave me a laugh: “it’s important for government leaders to adopt policies and regulations
that protect the personal information…..â€. No, I think most of us are so enamoured by the new, shiny toys that we have lost
our way and have nowhere to turn. My latest bumper sticker idea: “Eschew Convenienceâ€.
The problem is, that the companies that have developed these voice-profiling and facial recognition are probably talking to
interested parties in the Department of Homeland Security, and it is probably matter of time before the TSA adopts facial recognition
and voice scanning as a requirement of flight boarding much like they did with bodyscanners.
I doubt any degree of protest or backlash would be able to change Washington’s mind.
> Amazon ’s most public application of voice profiling so far is its Halo wristband, which claims to know the emotions
you’re conveying when you talk to relatives, friends and employers.
The company assures customers it doesn’t use Halo data for its own purposes . But it’s clearly a proof of concept
â€" and a nod toward the future.
Amazon “spokespeople†are lying sacks of shit. Not one word they say has an iota of truth.
Know what else this portends? Moar power sucking data centers to store all the gibberish Amazon, Googlag and the rest of the
digital creeps collect. And because they use so much electricity they get it super cheap instead of being charged triple retail
to discourage the gargantuan waste. All to sell you moar garbage that you don’t need. What a waste of a STEM education. That’s
what so called “data scientists†signed up for?
I’m glad I have no children to suffer in the digital hellhole being built by these creeps.
Naturally I wonder if smart phones and their various apps don’t already do this, not to mention desk and lap tops; all of
which are equipped with mikes. And of course Ma Bell and Verizon and on and on get our voices all the time. What are the laws
that protect the user from those behemoths? Are what ever is left of privacy laws strong enough to dampen the enthusiasm of companies
like Google or Amazon who seem to consider laws like taxes; quaint vestiges of once upon a time nation states?
yes to this
they’ll do whatever they can’t be actively prevented from doing. If it’s illegal they call it data research then start lobbying
congress to write laws to accommodate what ever grift they can mine from the mountain of said data. No need for facial recognition,
the camera on your phone has given them a detailed three dimensional you, your location, your habits, and if you like brunettes.
I still think back to when the somehow I think it was the nsa revealed googles offshore data shenanigans and am sure google was
all “hey, we would have given you all that data! why did you tell everyone we’re collecting it! And now bezos is consulting
the pentagon. At this point I truly feel the only thing that could stop the path we’re on is a massive economic crash due to
an unexpected event, hurricanes, earthquake or a pandemic that kills lots more people than covid.
I’m racing to get a draft manuscript of The Economic Consequences of
the Pandemic , not helped by the fact that Biden keeps doing pretty much what I think he
should do. More of the fold. Comments greatly appreciated, as always.
Like Keynes’ Londoner in the aftermath of the Great War, we are emerging
from the pandemic into a world where the certitudes of the past have crumbled into dust.
Balanced budgets, free trade, credit ratings, financial markets, above all free markets; these
ideas have ceased to command any belief.
The failure of these ideas evident since the GFC and, in many respects, since the beginning
of the 21st century. It have sunk in gradually as the neoliberal political class formed in the
1980s and 1990s has passed from the scene, replaced by younger people whose experience of
financialised capitalism is almost entirely negative.
But it is only with the shock of the pandemic that the thinking of the past has completely
lost its grip on the great majority. The absence of any serious resistance to
Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure package reflects the fact that hardly
anyone seriously believes the old verities of balanced budgets and free markets
Yet the fundamental realities of economic life remain unchanged. We can collectively consume
or invest what we produce, nothing more and nothing less. And our productive capacity is
constrained by resources and technology, as it always has been. One way or another we need to
decide what goods and services will be produced and who will get to consume them.
What has changed is that the economic system we have used to allocate resources and
investments for the last forty years is no longer fit for purpose. Financial markets are not
repositories of wisdom and market discipline; rather they are, in Keynes words, gambling houses
where ‘enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of
speculation.’ And as Keynes said ‘When the capital
development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely
to be ill-done.’.
Unsurprisingly, the casino economy has delivered huge gains for a small number of winners,
and losses for everyone else, certainly when compared to the broadly shared gains of the mid
20th century. But contrary to the claims of trickle-down advocates, these massive rewards have
not generated increases in productivity. Profits are obtained, not by making a better product
at lower cost, but by securing and holding a monopoly position.
How should we respond? The answer must be a combination of past, present and future. First,
we need to look at the institutions of the 20th century Golden Age, and ask which can be
revived and refurbished to address our current problems. Second, we must consider what elements
of the neoliberal era are worth saving. Finally we must consider our future options in a world
unlike anything that has come before.
The first step must be to look back at the institutions of the postwar Golden Age. Not all
of these will turn out to be useful in our current situation, and some were inappropriate even
at the time they operated. Nevertheless, taken all in all, the mixed economy of the mid-20th
century worked much better than the system of financialised capitalism that prevailed in the
era of neoliberalism.
Most of the policy program announced by the Biden Administration can be understood as a
return to Golden Age policies wound back or abandoned in the neoliberal era. Examples include
explicit support for unions, investment in physical infrastructure, partial repeal of the 2017
tax cuts, and free community college.
Unions, progressive taxes, expanding education â€" the case for all of these is
as strong or stronger as it was in the aftermath of the Great Wars. Similarly, the need for
public investment in physical infrastructure, after years of neglect, is evident.
Biden’s measures so far are steps in the right direction, but much more
remains to be done.
The innovations of the neoliberal era have mostly been negative. But there have been some
positive developments. The movement towards racial and gender equality, which began in the
1960s continued, if slowly and with occasional reversals, through the neoliberal area. And some
more specifically neoliberal policy innovations such as the earned income credit and emissions
taxes have been value. Similarly, while most financial innovations have been harmful, there
have been exceptions such as the rise of venture capital.
Looking to the future, the shift from an industrial to an information economy requires
fundamentally new approaches to economics. We are still at the beginning of understanding what
is needed here; but it is already obvious that the combination of financialized capitalism and
Big Tech is not working out well as a solution.
GM and Google
The archetypal product of the 20th century industrial economy was the motor car, the
archetypal technology was the production line and the archetypal firm was General Motors. Each
car that rolled off GM’s production line embodied a set of physical and
labour inputs; steel for the body, parts supplied by a network of subcontractors, the work of a
large body of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Dealers and finance providers distributed the
cars to buyers, who then owned and uses the products. Our thinking about how an economy works
still reflects this model.
A 20th century firm like General Motors can easily be understood in terms of the economic
categories of mainstream classical and neoclassical economists, beginning with Adam Smith. The
whole apparatus of national accounting, reflected in concepts like GDP, was developed to deal
with such firms.
But consider a firm like Google. Google doesn’t produce a physical good1;
it doesn’t even generate the information that is at the core of its
business. Rather, it indexes the information generated by others, with or without their
permission, then allows users to search those indexes, with advertising attached.
Google
doesn’t fit at all comfortably into the categories of traditional economics.
Its output can’t be measured in quantitative terms, nor is there any obvious
price attached to it. This hasn’t stopped Google making massive profits, or
attaining a stratospheric market valuation. On the other hand, it is far from obvious that this
is the best way of making the information resources of the Internet available to everyone.
1 Except for a relatively modest business producing tablet computers that run
Google’s Chrome operating system.
“Its output can’t be measured in quantitative terms,
nor is there any obvious price attached to it.â€
This connects with this:
“The whole apparatus of national accounting, reflected in concepts like
GDP,â€
At which point we’ve a certain problem using measures like GDP to
discuss the success and or failure of neoliberalism or even financialised capitalism. Because
we’re already insisting that the archetypal firms of the neoliberal era
aren’t well measured by GDP.
So insistences that growth was faster back in that Golden Age and so on become a little
more difficult. So too insistences that living standards rose faster and all that.
We also end up with difficulties over something like this:
“Unsurprisingly, the casino economy has delivered huge gains for a
small number of winners, and losses for everyone else, certainly when compared to the broadly
shared gains of the mid 20th century. But contrary to the claims of trickle-down advocates,
these massive rewards have not generated increases in productivity. Profits are obtained, not
by making a better product at lower cost, but by securing and holding a monopoly
position.â€
OK, Facebook, monopoly and all that. But increases in productivity? WhatsApp. You can talk
to 1 billion people for free. OK, people might not say very much but still.
There’s nothing of this in GDP â€" there’s
no fee nor even advertising. Last time I asked Facebook about this they said
“couple of hundred engineers†work on this. So,
we’ve the costs of a couple of hundred engineers â€" $100
million including stock awards and office space? â€" in the national accounts.
We’ve no corresponding output. This is a reduction in productivity.
But we’ve 1 billion people getting telecoms for free and this is a
reduction in productivity?
Precisely because you’re saying that GDP doesn;t measure all this new
economy stuff well it becomes very difficult to insist that this new economy stuff hasn;t
worked well if the measure is going to be GDP…..
That’s a problem with posting extracts. I’m well
aware of these points and will deal with them. No time to respond in detail now, as I need to
submit ASAP.
J-D 05.01.21 at 11:15 pm (no link)
Its output can’t be measured in quantitative terms, nor is there any
obvious price attached to it.
So from this point of view Google’s product is already priced in the
price of the stuff that is sold after being advertised through Google (directly or
indirectly).
The people who pay money to Google are the advertisers. What they are paying Google for is
advertising space. So Google’s product is advertising space. They create
advertising space and sell it. Advertising space generally has a price. It is the price paid
by advertisers to whomever it is that provides the advertisers with the advertising space.
That’s not something new. It works for Google the same way it works, for
example, for commercial free-to-air television and radio broadcasters. Their viewers and
listeners are not the people who pay them for their product (just as Google users are not the
people who pay Google); the advertisers are the people who pay them, and they pay them for
the use of the advertising space which they have produced.
likbez 05.02.21 at 3:45 am (no link)
@J-D 05.01.21 at 11:15 pm (5)
So Google’s product is advertising space.
No only. Google was/is an integral part of PRISM. So mass surveillance is probably another
major product and like Facebook it has several “facesâ€. With
one is being a government sponsored surveillance company with Gmail and Android as the major
franchises.
Any site that have Google advertisement can be considered as monitored by Google as Google
essentially replicates Web logs via its advertising inserts. In this sense Google is an
essential part of NSA.
They now try to diversify and get some foothold in the cloud but that’s
also fit surveillance company profile.
All is all the old question “Is Google evil?†is an
interesting one. IMHO it needs to be split into several companies.
"... All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court. ..."
"... Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud! ..."
"... Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and someone wanting get off their lazy rear end ..."
The FBI continues to lawlessly use counterintelligence powers against American citizens...
The Deep State Referee just admitted that the FBI continues to commit uncounted violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act of 1978 (FISA).
If you
sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered
for the FBI "Citizens Academy" program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity.
But the latest FBI offenses, like almost all prior FBI violations, are not a real problem, according to James Boasberg, presiding
judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That court, among other purposes, is supposed to safeguard Americans'
constitutional right to privacy under FISA. FISA was originally enacted to create a narrow niche for foreign intelligence investigations
that could be conducted without a warrant from a regular federal court. But as time passed, FISA morphed into an uncontrolled yet
officially sanctioned privacy-trampling monster. FISA judges unleash the nuclear bomb of searches,
authorizing the FBI "to conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S.
person target's home, workplace and vehicles," as well as "physical searches of the target's residence, office, vehicles,
computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails."
In 2008, after the George W. Bush administration's pervasive illegal warrantless wiretaps were exposed, Congress responded by
enacting FISA amendments that formally entitled the National Security Agency to vacuum up mass amounts of emails and other communication,
a swath of which is provided to the FBI. In 2018, the FISA court
slammed the FBI for abusing that
database with warrantless searches that violated Americans' rights. In lieu of obeying FISA, the FBI created a new Office of Internal
Audit. Deja vu! Back in 2007, FBI agents were caught massively violating the Patriot Act by using National Security Letters to conduct
thousands of illegal searches on Americans' personal data. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.)
declared that
an Inspector General report on the abusive searches "confirms the American people's worst fears about the Patriot Act." FBI
chief Robert Mueller responded by creating a new
Office of Integrity and Compliance
as "another important step toward ensuring we fulfill our mission with an unswerving commitment to the rule of law."
Be still my beating heart!
The FBI's promise to repent after the 2018 report sufficed for the FISA court to permit the FBI to continue plowing through
the personal data it received from NSA. Monday's disclosure "a delayed release of a report by the court last November "revealed
that the FBI has conducted
warrantless searches of the data trove for "domestic terrorism," "public corruption and bribery," "health care fraud,"
and other targets "including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. As Spencer Ackerman
wrote
in the Daily Beast , "The FBI continues to perform warrantless searches through the NSA's most sensitive databases for routine
criminal investigations." That type of search "potentially jeopardizes an accused person's ability to have a fair trial since warrantlessly acquired information is supposed to be inadmissible. The FBI claimed to the court that none of the warrantlessly queried
material "˜was used in a criminal or civil proceeding,' but such usage at trial has happened before," Ackerman noted. Some illicit
FBI searches involve vast dragnets. As the
New York Times reported ,
an FBI agent in 2019 conducted a database search "using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them
had connections to an investigation."
In the report released Monday, Judge Boasberg lamented "apparent widespread violations" of the legal restrictions for FBI searches.
Regardless,
Boasberg kept the illicit search party going: "The Court is willing to again conclude that the . . . [FBI's] procedures meet
statutory and Fourth Amendment requirements." "Willing to again conclude" sounds better than "close enough for constitutional."
At this point, Americans know only the abuses that the FBI chose to disclose to FISA judges. We have no idea how many other perhaps
worse abuses may have occurred. For a hundred years, the FBI has buttressed its power by keeping a lid on its crimes. Unfortunately,
the FISA Court has become nothing but Deep State window dressing "a facade giving the illusion that government is under the law.
Consider Boasberg's recent ruling in the most brazen FISA abuse yet exposed. In December 2019, the Justice Department Inspector
General reported that the FBI made "fundamental
errors " and persistently deceived the FISA court to authorize surveilling a 2016 Trump presidential campaign official. The
I.G. report said the FBI "drew almost entirely" from the Steele dossier to prove a "well-developed conspiracy" between Russians
and the Trump campaign even though it was "unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page"
in that dossier, which was later debunked.
A former FBI assistant general counsel, Kevin Clinesmith, admitted to falsifying key evidence to secure the FISA warrant to spy
on the Trump campaign. As a Wall Street Journal
editorial noted , Clinesmith "changed an
email confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source to one that said the exact opposite, explicitly adding the words "˜not a source'
before he forwarded it." A federal prosecutor declared that the "resulting harm is immeasurable" from Clinesmith's action.
But at the sentencing hearing, Boasberg gushed with sympathy,
noting that Clinesmith
"went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane"¦ Mr. Clinesmith has lost his job in
government service"what has given his life much of its meaning." Scorning the federal prosecutor's recommendation for jail time, Boasberg gave Clinesmith a wrist
slap"400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.
The FBI FISA frauds profoundly disrupted American politics for years and the din of belatedly debunked accusations of Trump colluding
with Russia swayed plenty of votes in the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. But for the chief FISA judge, nothing
matters except the plight of an FBI employee who lost his job after gross misconduct. This is the stark baseline Americans should
remember when politicians, political appointees, and judges promise to protect them from future FBI abuses. The FISA court has been
craven, almost beyond ridicule, perennially. Perhaps Boasberg was simply codifying a prerogative the FISA court previously awarded
upon FBI officials. In 2005, after a deluge of false FBI claims in FISA warrants, FISA Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed
requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented. That never happened because it could have "slowed
such investigations drastically," the
Washington Post reported
. So, FBI agents continue to lie with impunity to the judges.
The FISA court has gone from pretending that FBI violations don't occur to pretending that violations don't matter. Practically
the only remaining task is for the FISA court to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy . But if a sweeping
new domestic terrorism law is passed, perhaps even that formal acknowledgement will be unnecessary. Beginning in 2006, the court
rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans
were "relevant" to a terrorism
investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling NSA data seizures later
denounced by a federal judge as "almost Orwellian." FISA could become a peril to far more Americans if Congress formally creates
a new domestic terrorism offense and a new category for expanding FISA searches.
The backlash from Democrats after the January 6 clash at the Capitol showcased the demand for federal crackdowns on extremists
who doubted Biden's election, disparaged federal prerogatives, or otherwise earned congressional ire. If a domestic terrorism law
is passed, the FBI will feel as little constrained by the details of the statute as it does about FISA's technicalities. Will FBI
agents conducting warrantless searches rely on
the same
harebrained standard the NSA used to target Americans: "someone searching the web for suspicious stuff"? Unfortunately, unless
an FBI whistleblower with the same courage as former NSA analyst Edward Snowden steps forward, we may never know the extent of FBI
abuses
ebworthen 39 minutes ago
"You want to harass a political opponent? Sure, we can do that...
JaxPavan 42 minutes ago
All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to
send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch
write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court.
Joe Bribem 32 minutes ago
It's almost like we did this to Trump. But it'll never come to light. Oops it did. Not that anything will happen to us because
we own the corrupt DOJ and FBI.
Obama's own personal private army.
You_Cant_Quit_Me 7 minutes ago
A lot of tips come in from overseas. For example, the US spies on citizens of another country and then sends that country tips,
in exchange that country does the same by spying on US citizens and sending the FBI tips. Then it starts, "we are just
following up on a tip"
wee-weed up 36 minutes ago (Edited)
Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud!
You_Cant_Quit_Me 37 minutes ago
Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and
someone wanting get off their lazy rear end
takeaction 58 minutes ago (Edited)
If you own a smart phone...everything you do is recorded...and logged.
"They" have been listening
to you for a long time if they want to.
If you own any smart device...they can listen and watch. They are monitoring what I am typing and this site. There really is no way to hide.
"Nearly half a millennium ago Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince described three
options for how a conquering power might treat states that it defeated in war but that 'have
been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom: the first is to ruin them, the
next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws,
drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to
you....'
"U.S. strategists have preferred Machiavelli's third option: To leave the defeated
adversary nominally independent but to rule via client oligarchies."
Michael then succinctly spells out the current crisis and its roots:
"The U.S.-China confrontation is not simply a national rivalry, but a conflict of economic
and social systems. The reason why today's world is being plunged into an economic and
near-military Cold War 2.0 is to be found in the prospect of socialist control of what
Western economies since classical antiquity have treated as privately owned rent-yielding
assets: money and banking (along with the rules governing debt and foreclosure), land and
natural resources, and infrastructure monopolies .
"This contrast in whether money and credit, land and natural monopolies will be privatized
and duly concentrated in the hands of a rentier oligarchy or used to promote general
prosperity and growth has basically become one of finance capitalism and socialism. Yet in
its broadest terms this conflict existed already 2500 years ago in the contrast between Near
Eastern kingship and the Greek and Roman oligarchies. These oligarchies, ostensibly
democratic in superficial political form and sanctimonious ideology, fought against the
concept of kingship. The source of that opposition was that royal power – or that of
domestic 'tyrants' – might sponsor what Greek and Roman democratic reformers were
advocating: cancellation of debts to save populations from being reduced to debt bondage and
dependency (and ultimately to serfdom), and redistribution of lands to prevent its ownership
from becoming polarized and concentrated in the hands of creditors and-landlords .
"From today's U.S. vantage point, that polarization is the basic dynamic of today's
U.S.-sponsored neoliberalism. China and Russia are existential threats to the global
expansion of financialized rentier wealth. Today's Cold War 2.0 aims to deter China and
potentially other counties from socializing their financial systems, land and natural
resources, and keeping infrastructure utilities public to prevent their being monopolized in
private hands to siphon off economic rents at the expense of productive investment in
economic growth ." [My Emphasis]
This is Hudson's best, tersest, explanation of the current crisis, that in reality has
existed for a great many centuries. He then narrows to a few crucial specifics:
"Financialized industrial capital wants a strong state to serve itself, but not to serve
labor, consumers, the environment or long-term social progress at the cost of eroding profits
and rents.
"U.S. attempts to globalize this neoliberal policy are driving China to resist Western
financialization. Its success provides other countries with an object lesson of why to avoid
financialization and rent-seeking that adds to the economy's overhead and hence its cost of
living and doing business.
"China also is providing an object lesson in how to protect its economy and that of its
allies from foreign sanctions and related destabilization. Its most basic response has
been to prevent an independent domestic or foreign-backed oligarchy from emerging . That
has been one first and foremost by maintaining government control of finance and credit,
property and land tenure policy in government hands with a long-term plan in mind." [My
Emphasis]
That is precisely why China's governing political method is so heavily distorted and
demonized, and why all attempts to emulate it are viciously attacked--Iran, Cuba and
Venezuela being prominent examples. The ongoing situation's very fluid, but the upper hand is
clearly held by China and the emerging Eurasian Bloc. An example of China's lead is its
successful initiation of its space station project to be
completed and fully operational next year while Biden has given the reigns of the Outlaw US
Empire's space project to Kamala Harris who is completely unqualified to lead such an
endeavor.
Joe Biden took the riskiest step of his presidency with a call for higher taxes on the
wealthy to fund a massive investment in the nation's social safety net, betting he could sell
the American public on sweeping change following a pandemic that exacerbated economic and
social divides.
Biden devoted his first address to a joint session of Congress to a call for a "a
once-in-a-generation investment in our families," prescribing trillions of dollars in new
spending for infrastructure, child care, paid leave, community college tuition, and a bevy of
subsidies for working class families.
And in a full-throated confrontation of Wall Street, Biden said the nation's wealthiest
taxpayers and companies should foot the bill. He declared investors "didn't build this country"
and said the wealthy had lined their pockets during the pandemic without paying their fair
share.
"I stand here tonight before you in a new and vital hour of life and democracy of our
nation," Biden said.
The speech was delivered to a House chamber where heightened security and social distancing
measures underscored the disease and division still confronting the nation. It amounted to an
audacious gamble that Biden can harness public support not only for trillions of dollars in new
federal programs for lower- and middle-income Americans, but the biggest tax hikes in
decades.
But his ambitions rest on a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, where the defections
of only a single moderate or two would mean failure.
Biden painted the deadly course of the virus as embodying and exaggerating the inequalities
that have broadened in recent decades, with working class Americans shouldering economic and
health insecurity while the wealthiest flourished. At risk is not only his vision for
rebuilding the economy, but the razor-thin advantage his party holds in Congress ahead of the
2022 midterm elections, when Republicans are well positioned to retake the majority at least in
the House.
"Doing nothing is not an option," the president implored.
Unattainable Wealth
Biden's effort was in many ways a break from the cautious center-left triangulation that has
defined Democratic presidential politics since the Reagan Revolution. His calculation is that
voters battered by the virus just a decade after a painful recession are no longer as concerned
about deficit spending or retaining low tax rates for a tier of wealth that seems increasingly
unattainable.
And Biden used one of the biggest bully pulpits he's provided to offer a presidential
validation of the growing influence of the progressive left, pitching at least US$3.8 trillion
in new spending, sweeping new changes to the health care system, and substantial gun control
measures.
Biden's own tendencies are more conciliatory, and he's likely to ultimately jettison some of
the more ambitious proposals as he seeks to navigate legislation through Capitol Hill --
particularly with moderate Democrats already expressing skepticism about new taxes and
spending. He took pains to caveat his broadsides against the nation's wealthiest, saying he was
"not out to punish anyone" and, in a line improvised from the prepared text, acknowledged the
"good guys and women on Wall Street."
But he left little room for critics within his party to argue he lacked ambition, and his
presidential legacy will now be defined by his ability to deliver a once-in-a-generation suite
of new government investments, services, and programs.
The forum for Biden's call for structural economic change itself seemed designed to
underscore the unprecedented moment. Because of coronavirus precautions, only about 200
lawmakers were invited to attend the speech in person, and some of the Senate's most powerful
moderates -- including West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Utah Republican Mitt Romney --
were relegated to seats in the upper balcony.
The president's tone and tenor suggested that even if ordinary Americans weren't in the
room, he felt emboldened by polls that suggest his proposals are popular – and that he
himself has been buoyed by a largely successful vaccine campaign that's administered more than
315 million shots and a stimulus program that provided more than 160 million checks to
taxpayers.
The president's approval rating is at 57 per cent, according to a Gallup poll released
Friday, matching his post-inauguration high. And seven in 10 Americans favored Biden's initial
US$1.9 trillion stimulus bill, with only around a third of those surveyed by the Pew Research
Center earlier this month saying it spent too much.
His new US$1.8 trillion families plan and the US$2.25 trillion infrastructure proposal
– which he christened a "blue-collar blueprint to build America" -- directly targeted two
key constituencies: suburban moms and the White working class of the Rust Belt.
The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index erased its losses as of 12:00 p.m. in Hong Kong, as traders
who were betting on a bigger spending plan from Biden cut back on currency risk positions.
Treasury futures were little changed and U.S. equity futures maintained their gains.B
Pandemic Disparities
There's reason for Biden to direct his appeal to those he said "feel left behind and
forgotten."
The pandemic ushered in not only disproportionate health outcomes -- a recent study by Ball
State University showed a higher death rate among counties with higher poverty levels -- but
deepened disparate economic trends.
While the richest 1 per cent in the U.S. saw their wealth increase by US$4 trillion, the
bottom half of Americans shared just a US$471 billion increase. Female participation in the
labor force has slipped to 57 per cent -- the lowest level since 1988 – and a half
million more women exited the workforce than men during a crisis that saw 10 million jobs
disappear.
White House advisers have made no secret about the opening they see.
Chief of Staff Ron Klain has spent recent weeks promoting stories that bluntly describe
Biden's plans to hike taxes on the wealthy in a flurry of social media posts.
Economic adviser Brian Deese declined to publicly address any element of Biden's families
plan ahead of its rollout Wednesday – except a provision to hike capital gains taxes on
Americans making over US$1 million a year. And political adviser Anita Dunn on Tuesday penned a
memo to "interested parties" pointing to recent Fox News polling that showed 56 per cent of
respondents backed paying for infrastructure through increased taxes on corporations and 63 per
cent supported raising income taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
"We need to make the case, but the American people seem very supportive of the idea that
when it comes to longstanding challenges in this country, we need to come together and make the
investments we need in order to address them," said White House economic adviser David
Kamin.
Congressional Difficulties
Still, the success of Biden's effort will hinge on parlaying that popular support into votes
in a narrowly divided Congress, where Republicans remain loathe to offer any assistance and
without them, moderate Senate Democrats like Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema and Manchin can scuttle
any piece of legislation single-handedly.
Both have already voiced skepticism about Biden's proposed tax increases, leaving open the
question of how the White House's proposals can proceed. And Republicans looked to fan that
uncertainty, painting the president's vision as excessive and ineffective.
"Our best future won't come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams," Senator Tim Scott,
a South Carolina Republican, said in the GOP rebuttal to Biden's address. "It will come from
you -- the American people."
Biden, for his part, said that big investments in jobs and infrastructure "have often had
bipartisan support" and looked to win skeptics by adopting rhetoric more familiar to
Republicans and painting his plans as essential to winning a global battle for the future.
"We have to prove democracy still works," the president said. "That our government still
works -- and can deliver for the people."
--With assistance from Jennifer Epstein and Tan Hwee Ann.
Wealthiest Americans get US$195 billion richer in Biden's first 100 days
Simon Hunt and Ben Steverman , Bloomberg News
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.453.0_en.html#goog_1563483815 Getting
Biden's capital gains tax through congress is slim to none: Federated Hermes' Orlando
Biden tax plans have roadblocks but will trigger a big sell-off i...
Joe Biden's election has done little to slow the inexorable surge of wealth among U.S.
billionaires.
In the president's first 100 days in office, against a drumbeat of calls for the rich to pay
more in taxes, the 100 wealthiest Americans added a combined US$195 billion to their fortunes,
according to a Bloomberg analysis.
The most recent gains have been fueled by the continued rise of the stock market since Biden
was sworn in Jan. 20, along with the vaccination program's fast rollout and a US$1.9 trillion
government stimulus package. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones indexes have both climbed more than
10 per cent during that time.
Attempts such as Biden's to refloat the economy can boost incomes and wealth at the very
top, said Mike Savage, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics.
"We've seen that paradox since the 2008 financial crash with quantitative easing, which has
mostly benefited people with assets, inflating their value significantly,'' Savage said.
The richest 100 made a further US$267 billion between the 2020 election and Biden's
inauguration, amounting to a total gain of US$461 billion since Nov. 4. From Donald Trump's
2017 inauguration to last fall's election, those billionaires got about US$860 billion
richer.
The combined fortunes of the richest 100 Americans have reached US$2.9 trillion, greater
than the combined US$2.5 trillion wealth of the bottom 50 per cent of the U.S. population,
according to data from the Federal Reserve.
The rise has been driven by an explosion of wealth among a handful of ultra-billionaires.
The 10 wealthiest Americans have added US$255 billion since election day, bringing their
combined net worth to US$1.2 trillion.
The biggest driver of this wealth surge has been tech companies like Amazon.com Inc.,
Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, bolstered by increased online and stay-at-home
activity during the coronavirus pandemic. The FANG stocks index has climbed 94 per cent in the
past 12 months compared with the 45 per cent advance of the S&P 500.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, has gotten US$11.7 billion richer this
year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, adding to about US$120 billion of wealth
gains during the Trump presidency. Mark Zuckerberg's net worth rose US$8.1 billion yesterday
alone on the strength of Facebook's first-quarter results.
Google's Larry Page has added US$26.6 billion this year after the California-based company
posted record profit last year, while the wealth of Tesla Inc.'s Elon Musk has grown US$5.1
billion since January.
Finance billionaires such as Warren Buffett and Blackstone Group Inc.'s Stephen Schwarzman
have also been major beneficiaries of stock market rises.
In his first 100 days, Biden has moved quickly to propose sharp tax hikes for the rich and
programs to funnel trillions of dollars to middle- and lower-class Americans in the form of new
infrastructure, social spending and stimulus checks. He laid out those policies in his first
address to Congress on Wednesday.
"Sometimes I have arguments with my friends in the Democratic Party," Biden said. "I think
you should be able to become a billionaire or a millionaire. But pay your fair share."
Under his "American Families Plan" announced Wednesday, the top rate of personal income tax
would increase to 39.6 per cent for the highest 1 per cent of earners from the current 37 per
cent, while the capital gains rate would be raised to the same level for those earning above
US$1 million, wiping out the discrepancy between income and capital gains tax rates that has
benefitted many of the ultra-rich.
The wealthiest 1 per cent currently pay 40 per cent of all federal income taxes, according
to Internal Revenue Service data, an amount that doesn't include payroll taxes.
"When you ask the American people what they want, they want corporations and millionaires
and billionaires to pay higher taxes," said Erica Payne, founder of the Patriotic Millionaires,
a group of progressive high-net-worth individuals. "It is politically a winner, it is
economically the right thing to do and it is morally a no-brainer."
Corporate tax hike
The White House has also proposed a plan to hike corporate taxes to fund infrastructure
spending. In a surprise this month, Bezos issued a statement saying he supports the general
idea. "We look forward to Congress and the administration coming together to find the right,
balanced solution that maintains or enhances U.S. competitiveness," he said.
Conservatives say boosting spending by adding a greater burden on the wealthy can
backfire.
"Government investments are often sold to the public with the promise that they will improve
lives and improve the economy," Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, argued in
testimony before Congress this week. "In every case, the economic harm caused by the taxes
would swamp any of the benefits from the new spending, leaving taxpayers and the economy worse
off."
Despite the pandemic, Fed data show all groups gained wealth last year. The top 1 per cent
did best, however, adding US$4 trillion in 2020 and bringing their total net worth to almost
US$39 billion, more than the bottom 90 per cent of Americans combined. Personal incomes in the
U.S. jumped a record 21 per cent in March, surging after households received a third round of
relief checks.
In his speech to Congress, Biden emphasized his efforts to create good-paying jobs,
especially those that don't require a college degree. The increasing dominance of tech giants,
however, won't necessarily help middle-class Americans. As a proportion of their market
capitalization, most technology companies employ relatively few Americans compared with their
older listed peers, concentrating wealth in the hands of a select few.
"The whole retail distribution system is changing," said Robert Miller, professor of
economics and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. "Recent technology has been hollowing
out some parts of middle management, so you can see parts of the middle class slipping
away."
Tax loopholes
Democrats in Congress are pushing other plans to close loopholes and tax wealth. To claw
back gains made by America's richest during the pandemic, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a
Massachusetts Democrat, proposed an Ultra Millionaire tax, a new version of the wealth tax she
floated as a presidential candidate. Under her proposal, those with fortunes exceeding US$50
million would face a 2 per cent tax on their wealth, increasing to 3 per cent for those worth
more than US$1 billion. The plan is unlikely to become law, given opposition from Biden and
other Democrats.
Higher taxes aren't "going to have very much effect in the long term on redistributing
wealth," Carnegie Mellon's Miller said. "This focus on how we're going to get the money is a
bit misplaced – we should be thinking more about how we want to help the people that need
help."
PHOTO: DENIS CHARLET/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES Listen to this article 6 minutes 00:00 / 06:00 1x This is the year of the woke corporation, the year the chieftains of the most powerful companies got bored with making money and decided to remake America, principally by telling Americans how bigoted and backward they are. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. This is the year of the woke corporation, the year the chieftains of the most powerful companies got bored with making money and decided to remake America, principally by telling Americans how bigoted and backward they are. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. Major League Baseball shipped the All-Star Game out of Georgia when that state's elected representatives dared enact modest election-integrity measures. Big Tech silenced a sitting president, banned books it didn't like, and threatened to install itself as censor of the nation's speech. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. America's founders had a word for this state of affairs: aristocracy. We might call it oligarchy, rule of the wealthy and the few. The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That's why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. It's time America recovered the founders' political economy. We need a new era of trustbusting, an agenda to break up Big Tech and the other concentrations of woke capital that threaten to turn the U.S. into a corporate oligarchy. The aim should be simple: Give working Americans control again over their government and their society. In short, protect our democracy. NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
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We are living in an age of monopoly power. Since the 1990s, two-thirds of American industry has become more
concentrated. In 1995 the nation boasted 60 major pharmaceutical companies. By 2015 they had merged to form just
10. Big banks grow bigger while top airlines control ever larger shares of revenue. The credit-card market is now
effectively a duopoly, and online it's no better. Google and
Facebook
control
more than 60% of digital advertising.
Big-business consolidation strips Americans of economic opportunity. In today's corporate economy, small and new
businesses struggle. New-business formation is barely half what it was in the 1970s, and the pandemic has further
privileged the largest players at the expense of local and family enterprises. Concentrations of
market
power
also mean a smaller share of gross domestic product for labor, which leads to flat wages for workers. As
the market power of big U.S. corporations has increased, business investment has declined, meaning less spending
on innovation and less productivity growth.
Not surprisingly, corporate monopoly leads to political power. It has always been thus. The giant railroads of the
19th century tried to bully and buy entire legislatures, including the U.S. Congress. Today, Major League
Baseball -- exempt from antitrust laws -- and a cohort of megacorporations such as Delta and
Coca-Cola
are
trying to order about states on election integrity, while Google, Facebook and
Twitter
decide
which citizens may say what in the public square.
Nike
lectures
the nation on social justice while it is suspected of profiting from forced labor overseas, as the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China noted in its March 2020
report
.
Welcome to the woke economy, led by concentrated woke capital. Do as these companies say or face cancellation.
Americans weren't content to let monopolists run the country a century ago, and we shouldn't be today.
I propose three measures. First, break up Big Tech. The tech companies are the most powerful corporations in the
country and likely in American history. They control what Americans read and what they say, what Americans share
and what they buy. The Big Tech companies are the railroad monopolies, Standard Oil and the newspaper trust rolled
into one, and tech CEOs are our robber barons. Congress should enact new bars on industry consolidation that will
prevent the dominant tech platforms from simultaneously controlling separate industries and services. Google, for
example, shouldn't be able to own the world's dominant web-search platform and run the cloud. That's too much
power and it's bad for competition.
Second, cut the other megacorporations down to size. We can start by banning mergers and acquisitions for
corporations larger than $100 billion. No exceptions. There is no good reason for a corporation to buy its way to
the size of a small country. Vertical integration, in which one company buys up an entire supply chain -- think
Amazon
marrying
Whole Foods with its Prime shipping network -- should also receive antitrust scrutiny.
Third, give courts a new standard to evaluate anticompetitive conduct. For years, courts have asked whether an
alleged monopolist harms consumer welfare. In other words, does the business behavior in question drive up
consumer costs? That's a fine question, but trustbusting isn't about consumer prices alone. The tech companies
insist that most of their services are free, even as they extract monopoly rents in other ways, like taking
private consumer data without consent.
Trustbusting is about promoting robust competition. It's competition that helps workers, spurs innovation and
ultimately preserves the power of the ordinary citizen. Our founders understood that competition, not monopoly, is
a friend to liberty.
Republicans were once the party of trustbusters. They should be again. The left is increasingly willing to cheer
on the new monopolists -- so long as they push the left's agenda on cultural and other issues. In the face of this
new alliance between big government and big business, conservatives must recover the wisdom of the founders'
vision: liberty, not monopoly.
Mr. Hawley, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Missouri. He is
author
of
"The Tyranny of Big Tech," forthcoming May 4.
Anytime I hear the word "justice" it makes be wary. Justice has always been in the eye of the
beholder, but now there is only one justice - the woke justice. It is catching on like a fire
and there are few media outlets left to describe that it is anything but justice.
Anytime I hear the word "justice" it makes be wary. Justice has always been in the eye of
the beholder, but now there is only one justice - the woke justice. It is catching on like
a fire and there are few media outlets left to describe that it is anything but justice.
Of course they act like this, 'cause they are republics ruled by money and think they are
racially superior -- as opposed to those states that send vaccines almost for free to other
needy nations: Cuba, China and (in part) Russia.
It bugs me how even well-informed critics of North Atlanticist regimes and their foreign
policies write and talk of them as "western democracies". The "Founding Fathers" of the USA
feared nothing more than 'democracy' -- by which they thought of ancient Athens, or the
ancient republic of San Marino or some Swiss Cantons. What they wanted was a republic in the
mold of Ancient Rome, Venice, or like the Netherlands before Wilhelm of Orange, i.e. roled by
rich men's clubs and throuh inherited wealth, be that from land ownership, slave-holding or
from commercial gains and prate privatering -- plus of course exploiting colonies and
controlled marketing opium and its derivats (plus cocaine).
None of the present-day Atlanticist nations call themselves "democracies" in their name or
constitutions. Only Greece does -- and only because they don't have the romance word
"republic" in their language.
In observation of these linguistic and political facts, the governments of Central Europe
east of NATO: China, Viet-Nâm and Chosôn ("North Korea") all called themselves
"people's republics" -- as opposed the the states further west that were ruled by the elected
representatives of Capital and Big Banking.
"... Bernie Sanders in 2016, the self-described democratic socialist "showed little interest or knowledge about US-Russia relations and the attendant dangers of a new cold war." Instead, Sanders was ultimately content to mimic the juvenile and Manichean "democracies versus authoritarians" model of international relations. ..."
"... in the Obama era, as mediocre academics like Celeste Wallander were given positions on the National Security Council, and an ideologue like Michael McFaul was bizarrely appointed as ambassador. ..."
"... Under Biden – who caved to pressure from the foreign policy blob to not appoint Rojansky – the advisers who are in place or in line, including Jake Sullivan , Antony Blinken , Madeleine Albright/Hillary Clinton adviser Wendy Sherman, the German Marshall Fund's Karen Donfried , and State Department nominee Victoria Nuland represent more of the same dangerous ineptitude and strident thinking. Many of these advisers, like their predecessors, have little on-the-ground experience with contemporary Russia. ..."
"... Neoconservative ideologue Nuland, of course, is a slightly different case in that she has put her boots on the ground in the region. Unfortunately, that experience includes facilitating the dangerously divisive 2014 coup in Ukraine, without which Crimea would still be in Ukraine and the Donbass would be at peace. Competent officials would have warned Obama and Biden that the Maidan would lead to consequences like these. ..."
"... importantly, this 'perceived enemy' and its corresponding narrative sells... it enriches the military complexes, CIA etc. Even if it sounded unbelievable and outrageous, they will still be regurgitated and at best, given a new guised repackaging ..."
"... the author assumes that the mistakes made by advisors to Obama and others were because of incompetence, when in fact it should be seriously considered they were actually quite deliberate and planned ..."
"... the job was NOT to deliver facts to the public; the job was to tell the public how to think and what to believe; ie. anti-Russia propaganda. ..."
The rejection
of Matthew Rojansky's candidacy as a Russia adviser to Joe Biden represents an escalation, and
not a departure, from a pervasive bipartisan American pattern of dangerous ignorance about
Russia in the post-Soviet era.
It was reported last week that Joe Biden's government would not be hiring Rojansky, of the
Kennan Institute think tank, to help form policy towards Russia. Though the analyst is known as
a moderate realist regarding Russia issues – in other words, he is not a virulent
anti-Moscow ideologue – he was considered too controversial to be allowed a hearing
during White House deliberations on policy regarding the world's largest country.
Rojansky's sin? Unlike many of the current crop of foreign policy officials, he actually has
some expertise and experience on the subject.
While the scholar's fate may be a glaring and extreme
example of an anti-Russia mindset in Washington that is counterproductive, it represents
only a new low, and not a change from a pervasive bipartisan pattern in the post-Soviet
era.
Those who aspire to, or attain, the most powerful executive position in the United States
have shown a disturbingly willful ignorance of Russia. I learned from a former State Department
official that, in response to a renowned Russia expert attempting to brief presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016, the self-described democratic socialist "showed little
interest or knowledge about US-Russia relations and the attendant dangers of a new cold
war." Instead, Sanders was ultimately content
to mimic the juvenile and Manichean "democracies versus authoritarians" model of
international relations.
Similarly, an American business executive told me that, during a lunch with him and other
leaders of commerce at the US Embassy in Moscow in 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden showed
no interest in his interlocutors' suggestions that it was in the US' best interests to partner
with Russia after they offered social, economic, and strategic justifications for their
view.
Biden seemed to see the meeting as an opportunity to lecture on his position rather than to
learn or seek insight on Russia.
Moreover, once a US president is in power, the advisers that are appointed to counsel the
commander in chief about Russia have been less than impressive from the 1990s onward.
Condoleezza Rice served as an expert in the George Bush Senior administration and was
wrong about the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. During her stint as secretary of
state in the second term of the junior Bush administration, her Russian counterparts who spent
significant time with her made the observation
that Rice was "a Soviet expert, and not a Russia expert."
There was little improvement in the Obama era, as mediocre academics like Celeste Wallander were
given positions on the National Security Council, and an ideologue like Michael McFaul was
bizarrely appointed as ambassador.
According to investigative journalist Gareth Porter, advisers to Obama were so utterly
incompetent that those serving in the administration really didn't think Russia had the ability
or inclination to counter Washington's provocative actions in
Syria, and therefore they did not plan for that possibility. This incompetence was also
highlighted by Obama's public comments to the Economist in 2014, in which he claimed that
Russia didn't make anything, immigrants didn't go there, and male life expectancy was 60 years
– three claims that anyone with actual expertise on Russia should have easily known were
false.
In fact, at that point, Russia was the second most popular migration destination in the
world, after America itself, while average lifespans have been converging with those of the US
over the past decade. As for manufacturing, Obama said these words at a time when the US, for
instance, was totally reliant on Russian rockets for access to space, having retired its own
unreliable Space Shuttle fleet. If he had access to a competent adviser on the subject, would
he have made these mistakes?
Under Biden – who caved to pressure from the foreign policy blob to not appoint
Rojansky – the advisers who are in place or in line, including Jake Sullivan , Antony Blinken ,
Madeleine Albright/Hillary Clinton adviser Wendy Sherman, the German Marshall Fund's Karen
Donfried , and State
Department nominee Victoria Nuland represent more of the same dangerous
ineptitude and strident thinking. Many of these advisers, like their predecessors, have little
on-the-ground experience with contemporary Russia.
Neoconservative ideologue Nuland, of course, is a slightly different case in that she has
put her boots on the ground in the region. Unfortunately, that experience includes facilitating
the dangerously divisive 2014 coup in Ukraine, without which Crimea would still be in Ukraine
and the Donbass would be at peace. Competent officials would have warned Obama and Biden that
the Maidan would lead to consequences like these.
It takes a special kind of hubris for the US political class to keep thinking they can get
away with this level of sloppiness in understanding the world's other nuclear superpower
– a country so massive that it straddles two major continents and is the sixth largest
economy in terms of purchasing power parity – without serious consequences. At what point
will God's providence run out?
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
Natylie Baldwin is author of "The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia
Relations," available at Amazon. She blogs at http://natyliesbaldwin.com/ .
"Washington has a dangerous & destructive pattern of wilful ignorance on Russia in
post-Soviet era" It is not just wilful ignorance per se. Without a 'perceived enemy', the
narrative for Russia will fall apart. Ditto China, Iran, N Korea et al.
But importantly, this
'perceived enemy' and its corresponding narrative sells... it enriches the military
complexes, CIA etc. Even if it sounded unbelievable and outrageous, they will still be
regurgitated and at best, given a new guised repackaging, but with the antiquated contents
remaining intact.
dotmafia 6 hours ago 6 hours ago
Good article, but, the author assumes that the mistakes made by advisors to Obama and others
were because of incompetence, when in fact it should be seriously considered they were
actually quite deliberate and planned. In the example of Obama's remarks to The Economist,
the job was NOT to deliver facts to the public; the job was to tell the public how to think
and what to believe; ie. anti-Russia propaganda.
Levin High 8 hours ago 8 hours ago
It used to be said that you couldn't be fired for buying IBM, now days in the US you seem to
be hired for blaming Russia.
apothqowejh 9 hours ago 9 hours ago
The US State Department is packed with idiots, political appointees, ideologues and globalist
nut jobs. Their lack of anything remotely like competence is as astonishing as the CIA's full
on embrace of evil.
wowhead1977 4 hours ago 4 hours ago
The cabal in America always want to blame Russia. I'm a American citizen and have no problem
with Russia. These so called sanctions on other countries is a control tactic that most
Americans didn't vote for. This race baiting tactic is from The Fabian Society play book.
Wolf in sheep's clothing is the Fabian Society logo.
We must realize that our Party's most
powerful weapon is racial tension. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races,
that for centuries have been oppressed by the Whites, we can mold them to the program of the
Communist Party ... In America, we will aim for subtle victory. While enflaming the color
people minority against the Whites, we will instill in the Whites, a guilt complex for the
exploitation of the color people.
We will aid the color people to rise to prominence in every
walk of life, in the professions, and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this
prestige, the color people will be able to intermarry with the Whites, and begin a process
which will deliver America to our cause." ~ Israel Cohen - Fabian Society Founder
The social engineers at the World Economic Forum -- seizing on the opportunities presented
by mass fear over COVID-19 and the choking lockdowns on economies and societies worldwide --
have an authoritarian vision for the future of humanity, carefully choreographed from on high
at the top levels of the global power structure.
Unaccountable, unelected entities are hard at work constructing this brave new world through
a shadowy process they have ominously dubbed the " Great Reset ":
"The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and
reset our world."
A sea change, just now coming into clear focus, is afoot. Without grassroots pushback from a
united populist front, as the
former CDC director recently forecasted , "nothing is ever going back to normal" –
ever.
Addressing the globalist Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
group advocating "free trade" – a misleadingly labeled concept which means nothing more
than corporate profiteering across borders to capitalize on cheap labor and instantiating
dystopian
corporate sovereignty into law while bleeding the working classes in rich nations dry
– Canadian Prime Minister expounded on the ethos of the "Great Reset":
"This pandemic is truly a global challenge. And not just because every country in every
corner of the world has been affected: because there is no part of society, no industry, no
aspect of daily life that has not changed . This is our chance to build back societies that are
fairer and economics that are more resilient ."
All of which begs the questions:
Who decided on these changes?
What populations in the Western "democracies" were permitted to exercise popular will in
a vote on these changes?
For whose benefit are these "Great Reset" policies enacted?
"The most promising [Global Reset] ideas will be taken up within existing IMF and World Bank
processes as well as at the G7 and G20 Leader Summit This pandemic has provided an opportunity
for a reset . This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic
systems ."
The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the G7 and G20 are unelected,
non-representative international bodies run by and for the interests of the global elite at the
expense of the working classes in every country on Earth.
Debt slavery, slave wages, hollowed-out middle
classes in the US Rust Belt , corporate tyranny, environmental catastrophe, and destruction
of human rights are the rotten fruits of globalism.
Normal people have no seat at the table nor any voice in the decisions by these global
behemoths. At its core, the international regime is fundamentally anti-democratic and,
increasingly, anti-human.
-- -- -- -- -- -- –
The real agenda of the ruling class -- as it has been for decades since globalized trade and
politicization began in earnest -- is to further remove power from everyday people and place it
into the hands of distant corporations and internationalized bureaucracies:
"We have to do more. We have to diversify our supply chains. We need to deepen our
cooperation with different parts of the world we look for new iterations of multilateral
structures as people are looking at a transforming world."
At the current crossroads in American -- and indeed, global -- history, reform is no longer
a viable solution; on the contrary, reform is a fool's errand. World trade, and even more so
world government, is a death machine :
"Globalization now connotes economic dislocation, increasing inequality, unwanted
immigration, and a vehicle for the transmission of disease. The pandemic has emphasized the
dangers rather than the benefits of efficient linkages between markets, laying bare the dangers
of complex global supply chains where any node can become a 'choke point', and the risks of
overspecialization or the concentration of technological knowledge and/or production capacity
in a single country or region."
"Choke point" indeed. The task before us -- the only possible solution to the corporate,
technocratic, medicalized, authoritarian nightmare we are hurdling toward at breakneck speed --
is our own populist, ultra-localized rendition of the "Great Reset" or the "Great UpSet." Some
suggest that we are not uprising but rather "upwising" – arming ourselves with knowledge
to carry out a peaceful reinstatement of public power.
The DC Swamp – not to mention the lurking global behemoths like the United Nations
– is beyond reform. There is no salvation to be found in these institutions. Congress
members don't represent average people – how could they ? Average people don't make small
talk with them at Georgetown cocktail parties. Average people don't finance their campaigns.
Average people don't give them lucrative positions in the never-ending revolving lobbying door
after they conclude their terms.
We must insist, by our own means, on restoring control over our own communities. We must
work to rebuild intimate human bonds at levels below abstraction – ones in which we are
invested spiritually and financially:
"While local government is closest to voters, turnout in local elections is low; it is
highest in national elections . Despite the pivotal importance of local politics getting out
the vote is the toughest problem that party and labor leaders face."
The only way to reverse course is to decentralize. Decouple from the toxic corporate-state
ties that bind and enslave your local community. Reconnect with your neighbors. Shop locally
and, whenever possible, sell locally.
Flout immoral laws imposed by far-off authorities. Target and eliminate national and
international influence from bloated government and transnational corporations with no
allegiance to you, your family, or community. Their claims to authority are illegitimate,
non-representative, malevolent, and, increasingly, even genocidal.
Destroy what destroys; nourish what nourishes.
The time has come to #UNRIG not just our elections, but our entire economy and society to
restore control to the local level, with the people, the only place it has ever rightfully
belonged.
Robert David Steele, alt-right white male and former US spy as well as founder of the Open
Source Everything movement, has joined with Kevin Jenkins and others to launch ARISE USA! The
Resurrection Tour , that will visit all 50 US states from 15 May to 6 September and could
transform into a global movement, Arise.World.
In partnership with Sheriff Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs movement
that challenges federal and state abuse of power, as well as other icons of freedom, they are
building the definitive organic pro-human movement from the ground up – the only way to
build anything of value.
Join the tour as a Founding Citizen at BigBatUSA.org ; learn about election fraud and reform options at
UNRIG.net .
Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Contact him via
Armageddon Prose .
"... As has happened with epochal champions of generational transformation and change in U.S. history before her, Gabbard’s eclipse in Hawaii could lead to her comeback in a far more spectacular form. ..."
As has happened with epochal champions of generational transformation and change in U.S.
history before her, Gabbard’s eclipse in Hawaii could lead to her comeback
in a far more spectacular form.
Forget that old fraud Bernie Sanders; Tulsi Gabbard and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the
best hopes progressives in United States now have for saving and renewing Democratic values and
a functioning political system. And watch Senator Ted Cruz to eventually unify a resurgent
nationalist Right.
In my 2015 book “
Cycles of Change †I predicted both the nationalist insurgency of Donald Trump
in the Republican Party and the progressive one unexpectedly spearheaded by Senator Bernie
Sanders in the Democratic Party that lastingly transformed U.S. politics in the 2016 election
cycle.
The Big Lie (of Josef Goebbels) proportions that Russia influenced or decided the shock
outcome of the 2016 presidential election in reality was cooked up by defeated Democratic
candidate Hillary Clinton â€" a bungling loser of historic proportions
â€" on the very same night she was still reeling from her rejection at the Javits
Center in Brooklyn after the results came out.
Since then, the old Republicans and Democratic Establishments alike have since eagerly clung
to the Big Lie because it offers them an excuse to deny and ignore what really happened: The
American people for once fitfully rose to express their ringing rejection â€" on
both sides of the political divide â€" of the ruinous policies of free trade,
globalization and ludicrous pretensions to World Empire to which they had been subjected for
the previous 70 years.
However, President Donald Trump was ruthlessly opposed, undermined, betrayed, slandered and
blocked on his honorable and responsible foreign policy and national security goals to restrain
NATO improve relations with Russia and pull U.S. combat forces out of both Iraq and Afghanistan
over the following four years and by the time of the next national election in 2024, he will be
78 â€" as old as Joe Biden is now. Undoubtedly the efforts to destroy and discredit
Trump will continue unabated from now until then.
Trump should not yet be ruled out by any means but he has already played the role of being
the Prophetic Precursor of the new and coming Political Age, as I pointed, out in
“Cycles of Change,†my overview of more than 200 years of U.S.
political history, published in 2015.
That “prophetic†pioneering role wa splayed by General John
Fremont in 1856 for Abraham Lincoln four years later; by New York Governor Al Smith, the
“Happy Warrior†in 1928 for the epochal election victory of
Franklin D. Roosevelt four years later; and by Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 for the eventual
presidency and new political era of Ronald Reagan starting in 1980-81.
Who will be the coming leader of the conservative/nationalist Right in 21st century America?
The most likely candidate so far by far is Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who ran unsuccessfully
against Trump in 2016 before learning for himself the policies and priorities of the coming
Political Age.
On April 14, Cruz, renowned for having easily the most brilliant legal mind in the U.S.
Congress, eviscerated Kristen Clarke, President Biden’s nominee to head the
Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary
Committee.
On the Democrats’ side, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont
is now a twice-busted flush: Both in 2016 and 2020, the Democratic presidential nomination was
his for the asking: He in real terms decisively and humiliatingly exposed first Hillary Clinton
and then Joe Biden â€" both heirs of the worthless and despicable Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama administrations they served so energetically for so long.
However, on both occasions, Sanders froze up at the crucial moments of decision when the
nomination was twice stolen from him by vote manipulation (in 20216) and political chicanery
(in 2020) before his eyes. When it comes to the High Noon moment of any political showdown,
Sanders will always fold â€" just as he always has.
On the Democrats’ side, the contest for leadership superficial appears
more open, but two dynamic young women in reality easily lead the field.
Right now, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, †AOC†,
who was supporting herself as a bartender before she won the Democratic nomination for her
district and then the congressional election in shock outcomes in 2018, is by far in the lead.
This is not even primarily because of AOC’s passionate advocacy of a Green
New Deal, which indeed makes absolutely no industrial or economic or financial sense the closer
one looks at it: It is because she is genuinely charismatic, genuinely aggressive and fearless
in her public appearances.
The more that America’s progressives â€" admittedly an
exceptionally slow-witted lot â€" wake up to the fact that Bernie Sanders will never
lead them to real power or victory in anything, the higher AOC’s star
rises.
She is already, at only age 31, the real leader of the Progressive Caucus in the Democratic
Party and she is half a century younger than 81-year-old Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi only won her precious House majority in November 2018. Yet already, she is watching
it vanish before her eyes.
Worse for Pelosi is sure to come: It is perfectly feasible that even before next
year’s congressional midterm elections, a handful of congressional special
elections could throw control of the House to current Republican Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy, who loathes Pelosi and her ancient creaking clique of cronies with a never-burning
passion. Then, Pelosi’s fading clout will be totally gone and AOC with her
passion and a new generation of radicals riding the Winds of Change with her will take over
Democratic Party in Congress far earlier than any of the Old Fogeys on either side dreams.
AOC must therefore be seen as the frontrunner for the new age: But if she fails to measure
up and establish national credibility, the other most likely future presidential hopeful for
the Democrats is another forceful, beautiful and exceptionally intelligent young lady hardly
older than the New York congresswoman is: That is former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard from
Hawaii, who was effectively squeezed out from her own congressional seat on the idyllic Pacific
island by the machinations of the old Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi gang of rotting old
politicos.
However, as has happened with epochal champions of generational transformation and change in
U.S. history before her, Gabbard’s eclipse in Hawaii could lead to her
comeback in a far more spectacular form.
She may move to California â€" a vastly superior political base to her home in
Hawaii for national U.S. politics. Also, her outstanding military record, highly unusual for a
young rising female Democrat of the current generation and her mastery of defense and national
security issues potentially gives her a far more potent and impressive credibility across the
American continent than AOC.
For Ocasio-Cortez’s appeal is like a laser beam: It is undoubtedly
powerful but also quite narrow, centered on the East and West Coasts and to a far lesser
degree, the much smaller progressive enclaves in major metropolitan areas across the
country.
Gabbard by contrast has the potential to reach deep into the Heartland. She was carefully
kept out of most of the nationally televised political debates for the 2020 presidential
nomination by her own party’s leaders. They were terrified of her.
However, Gabbard was an absolute knockout in the debates when she got a word in edgewise.
And she proved effortlessly able especially to demolish then-Senator and now-Vice President
Kamala Harris. That could prove of priceless importance to the national credibility of the
Progressive movement if, as appears likely Harris succeeds Biden into the White House in 2024,
or even sooner.
However, Gabbard has also shown the potential to move dramatically from one extreme of the
political chessboard to the other, much like a bishop moved a diagonal right across the
board:
In January 2021, she launched her own podcast called “This is Tulsi
Gabbard†and she has appeared a number of times on the conservative-leaning Fox
News Channel since she left Congress, focusing her outspoken attacks on Pelosi and House
Judiciary Committee Chair and leading Pelosi crony Congressman Adam Schiff. It is not
inconceivable to see her as an eventual running mate for the nationalist right on a Republican
ticket led by Senator Ted Cruz in 2024 or 2028. (In 2028, she will still be only 47).
Cruz and AOC are truly powerful potent emerging forces on the Right and Left of U.S.
politics. Gabbard has the intriguing potential to completely transform the picture on either
side. Between them, they offer hope that the new forces awakened by Trump and Sanders may
triumph yet.
West of the Mississippi is where most cops kill Whites. The US does have a problem with
militarized police. They go to Israel to learn how to treat all of us like Palestinians.
Thats a fact jack.
Jurist_Naturalist_UA1 41 minutes ago
Yep, I knew we were in trouble when every cop shack started getting armored vehicles. In
washington state it's almost a sport for cops pulling over everyone who just left a bar.
Militarized to the hilt, jackin' around honest folks just trying to make it day to day. I've
never needed a cop, atleast not the version we have today. I need their pensions even
less.
moose21 5 hours ago
The idiot is the person believing that sh$t
Check your premise
Maher did know and was just playing and fooling the idiots and fools.
That does not make him an idiot. It makes him despicable , smart and evil
Omni Consumer Product 4 hours ago
Any professional comedian or pundit today doesn't write his own material.
Whether it's Colbert, Kimmel, Cuomo, Maher, et. al; they have an army of staff writers to
do that
Of course, the producer sets the overall tone - or "agenda" - and then the writers have to
come up with stuff to fit the narrative
dbtunr 11 hours ago
If you watched him the past 20 years, it's not new. He just hated Trump....for good
reason. His ideas were always "Politically Incorrect"
Southern_Boy 11 hours ago
I've never watched him and have no plans to do so in the future.
He and his program are a total waste of time.
consistentliving PREMIUM 10 hours ago
and people accuse the South of being close minded.
watch Fox sure, but you have to know the other side of the argument my parents taught
me
Maher is better than 99.99% of liberals and has some good ideas just as Trump did
Champie 10 hours ago
Not watching Bill Maher does NOT make someone a Fox viewer.
consistentliving PREMIUM 9 hours ago
point taken.
ohm 2 hours ago
The more you watch TV, the more stupid you become.
DonkeyKickin 9 hours ago remove link
Even when Maher has a broken clock moment he is still irritating. If he is better than
most liberals, they are in deep trouble.
Propaganda is a business, there are few distinctions.
dbtunr 10 hours ago (Edited)
I look forward to watching his program. I don't agree with many of his opinions, but you
can always learn something from one of his guests if you watch. You may not agree with what
that they say, but you can get a perspective on something to see WHY the other side thinks
that way. it's called "learning". I know this is a radical idea to the narrow minded ZH
crowd, but you should try it once in a while.
A federal politician travels to the scene of a controversial trial to threaten a riot if the
jury doesn’t deliver the “correct†verdict.
Rule of law is such an antiquated idea.
In front of God and country (and journalists with cameras) Rep. Maxine Waters â€"
from behind a face mask/face shield combo for COVID safety, of course â€"
declared:
“We’re looking for a guilty
verdict… If nothing does not happen [sic], then we know that we have got
to… stay in the streets…I hope we get a verdict that
says guilty, guilty… And if we don’t, we cannot go
away.â€
When asked what she thinks protesters should do, Waters explicitly told them to
“get more activeâ€:
"We’ve got to stay on the street. We get more active,
we’ve got to get more confrontational . We’ve got to make
sure that they know that we mean business.â€
The subtext, of course, is that previous protests were not confrontational or
“active†enough. What exactly would a “more
active†Minneapolis riot round #2 look like?
Maxine Waters, incidentally, theoretically represents LA â€" quite a long drive
from Minneapolis or, for that matter, Washington, D.C. Waters most likely flew in on a
chartered jet, though, and left the driving to the proletariat.
The judge in the case, Peter Cahill,
replied to Chauvin’s lawyers’ motion that he declare
a mistrial due to Maxine Waters’ threatening rhetoric on the streets of
Minneapolis:
“I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially
in a manner that’s disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial
branch and our function… I’m aware the Congresswoman
Waters was talking specifically about this trial… if (representatives) want
to give their opinions, they should do so in a manner that is consistent with their oath to the
Constitution to respect the co-equal branch of government… Their failure to
do so, I think, is abhorrent .â€
This is practical proof that the trustees of the fictitious democracy fantasy we are all
forced to accept don’t believe in the legal process or rule of law
â€" as if Americans required more evidence of their Congressional
representatives’ failings, over and over and over.
Outside of rule of law, the federal government and the corporations that functionally own it
treat the American citizenry to a host of abuses:
Warrant-free mass surveillance
Endless foreign wars with no legal declaration of war
‘In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a
speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State.â€
Imagine, for a moment, the mental process of a juror in the Floyd case, a resident of
Minneapolis â€" the same city in which Maxine Waters threatened mass violence if the
jury you belong to fails to render a “guilty†verdict. Perhaps
you live in one of the same neighborhoods that was essentially leveled in the riots of June
2020.
Maybe, for some masochistic reason, you enjoyed shopping at your local Target before
“protesters†pillaged it and you couldn’t
buy waffle batter and Korean electronics or whatever.
Or, maybe you really liked the guys at the local AutoZone who helped you out with sourcing
car parts â€" the ones who don’t have a job anymore because they
don’t have a building to work in
after protestors torched it .
Yes, you have been instructed not to view news surrounding the trial as all jurors are. But
now, after coming home from a long day at court, Waters’ tirade is all over
your social media as you scroll through your newsfeed.
How could it not be? A sitting member of Congress not only sanctioned but encouraged riots
in the same case that you, again, are charged with rendering an impartial verdict in.
Even if you wanted to ignore Waters’ threats to remain in good faith as a
juror and try your best to deliver justice, you couldn’t. Humans, however
Stoic, are not robots.
What are you going to do? Is impartiality possible in such circumstances when
it’s your own city, maybe even your own neighborhood, on the chopping block
at the whim of a faceless, nameless mob?
Or are you going to bow to the pressure and give the mob the verdict it wants â€"
and hope and pray that’s enough to satisfy them and prevent more lootings
and burnings (though that’s certainly no guarantee).
If Waters believed in rule of law, a basic Constitutional function of the government, why
would she not let the process finish?
In the weeks leading up to her calls for riots on the streets in the event of an acquittal,
every legal analyst worth his or her salt predicted a guilty verdict on all counts.
So, why would you disrupt the process days before the guilty verdict demanded by the mob,
tainting the jury pool potentially and, as a result, nullifying the entire court proceedings
and mandating a retrial?
“Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may
result in this whole trial being overturned.â€
Of course she gave cause for appeal, by any rational standard or analysis. A sitting member
of Congress traveling to the scene of active protests to fan the flames of rage and threaten
riots on camera that almost literally everyone â€" including the jurors in the case
â€" have seen.
This is not a mere case of Congressional misconduct â€" those happen every day.
This is the instantiation of mob rule as a substitute for law. Justice is now dispensed at the
whim of popular opinion, which is not gauged by any scientific means like polling but rather
through raw expression of power on the streets.
Where this ends is anyone’s guess, but it’s not likely
to be anywhere decent. Some more multinational corporations that worship at the altar of
neoliberalism might get their Minneapolis stores torched along with rule of law, at least, and
no one will mourn the loss.
Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Contact him via
his portfolio or on
LinkedIn
.
You can help protect us from BIG TECH DE-PLATFORMING by joining our email list.
This is the single biggest way to ensure we can't be silenced for speaking out against
censorship, and the elite/ cabal's plans for a "Great Reset"-- their New World Order meant to
render you impoverished and powerless.
This stupid woman is doing nothing but foment increased racial tension and disgust for
black culture. Black leadership of the likes of Sharpton, Jackson and this evil brain dead
congresswoman is disgraceful and self serving. Their idiotic messages are never about
self-reliance, living by acceptable moral standards, abiding by the law, valuing education,
valuing family, treating others with respect, etc.........but rather always hate filled,
victimhood mentality, and that someone else is responsible for keeping you down. Why on earth
are these self serving pieces of shyte leaders not seen for who they are (race baiting,
hustlers with no real agenda for improving race relations) by their black constituents?
Bioweapon 6 hours ago remove link
Why isn't she arrested for inciting violence? You know it's all aimed at White people and
their businesses and homes of which the remain the vast majority across the state.
left blank 8 hours ago (Edited)
maxine waters refuses to live in Compton neighborhood she represents.
just like the others' in a long list of California politicians who take orders from the
annual bohemian grove meeting of corporations , who then use taxpayer funded govt agencies to
impose their list of 25 rules - to overthrow and topple the usa
In China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao and his extreme leftists sought to
grab power and keep their opposition and public in a state of confusion by extremist
political sloganeering, creating constant chaos, and attacking tradition and rule of law.
They do it without fear of retribution because they cover themselves in sanctimony and
victimhood.
Waters isn’t very smart, but she knows what she’s
doing here.
optimator 6 hours ago (Edited)
a dedicated ruthless 10% of the population that means business is usually enough to grab
control of the government. Russia 1918, American Revolution, etc.
PRAGUE, April 25. /TASS/. The evidence that some "Russian agents" were present at the ammo
depot in the village of Vrbetice was not mentioned in the reports of the Czech
Republic’s Security Information Service, Czech President Milos Zeman said
in his emergency televised address in connection with the 2014 incident on Sunday.
"I can state that the report of the Security Information Service says and I underline this
- that there is neither proof nor evidence [of eyewitnesses] that these two agents [the
Russians who were accused of involvement in the incident - TASS] were at the [ammo depot] in
Vrbetice. When the premises of the second depot were examined right before the explosion
there, no explosive device was found there," Zeman said in his address broadcast by Prima and
CNN Prima News TV channels.
The president stressed that the suspicion about the alleged role of two foreign agents in
the 2014 ammo depot explosions in Vrbetice came to the surface over the past weeks. "The
Security Information Service had never before mentioned the incident in Vrbetice over the
past six years," he noted.
…
In the Russian-language version of the same story Zeman also talks about the possibility
that the explosives were not properly handled:
…
Zeman also said that careless handling of ammunition is being considered as the cause of the
explosions and the possible involvement of foreign intelligence services is being considered.
"We are working with two versions - that the explosions [in Vrbetica] occurred as a result of
careless handling of ammunition, and the second version - that agents of foreign special
services are to blame for this," Zeman said.
…
Zeman also provided an indirect hint as to who might have coordinated the scandal on the
Czech side and on whose orders:
PRAGUE, April 25. / TASS /. Czech President Milos Zeman questioned the effectiveness of the
American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in connection with incorrect information, on the
basis of which the United States made an erroneous decision on a military operation against
Iraq.
"The CIA is the intelligence agency that informed the US government that there are weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq. And this [CIA allegation] was not only not confirmed, but was
[completely] refuted," Zeman said Sunday in an interview with Prima and CNN. Prima NEWS . -
The consequences [of this step by the CIA] were terrible - thousands of lives, enormous
material damage, and so on. Is this how a high-quality intelligence service works? "
The head of state made such a statement, answering the question whether he intends to
confer the rank of general on the head of the Security and Information Service -
counterintelligence of the Czech Republic - Michal Koudelka, who was recently awarded the CIA
medal in the United States . Zeman said that he would consider the possibility of his
promotion next year and only if the version of the Czech special services about the
involvement of foreign agents in the explosions at the ammunition depot in the village of
Vrbetice in 2014 is confirmed.
Earlier Zakharova noted that the local authorities didn’t even know who
operated the ammo depot:
…
“Seven years have passed. Did the trial take place? There was no court.
Two people died ... Here is the answer to your question, including - who is the beneficiary
of all this marasmic parade. There was an investigation, there was an investigation - nothing
came of it, " RIA Novosti quotes Zakharova.
…
She said that "the local authorities did not know that since 2006 the ammunition depot has
not been used by the army, and the Ministry of Defense is renting out the warehouse premises
to private arms companies."
Zakharova added that "the huge amount of weapons that were in the warehouses for eight
years were without any control from the authorities."
…
"... The danger is that Gressel, and other 'political scientists' like him, may once take up government positions and use their learned illusions to handle the next crisis. Stuck in the idea that Russia will retreat if only 'deterred' enough they will lean to measures that are outright hostile to Russia and may have indeed very tragic consequences. ..."
Some two month ago we discussed how the
U.S. focus on narratives will let it collide with reality . It is certainly not only the
U.S. government that creates narratives, comes to believe in them, and then fails when it is
confronted with reality. Carried by think tanks and media the narrative mold has grown
throughout the wider 'western' world.
On the danger of this development the above piece quoted Alastair Crooke who wrote
:
They lose the ability to stand apart, and see themselves â€" as others see
them. They become so enraptured by the virtue of their version of the world, that they lose
all ability to empathise or accept others’ truths. They cannot hear the
signals. The point here, is that in that talking past (and not listening) to other states,
the latters’ motives and intentions will be mis-construed â€"
sometimes tragically so.
Over the last weeks we passed through a crisis that easily could have had a tragic
ending.
Since February the Ukraine built up a force to retake the renegade Donbas region in
east-Ukraine by military force. After waiting several week to see the situation more clearly
Russia started to assemble a counterforce backed up by statements that were sufficiently
strong to deter the Ukraine from continuing its plans. The danger of a Ukrainian assault has
now receded.
Today the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu gave orders for the troops to return to their bases.
Much of the equipment though will stay on training grounds near Ukraine until the regular
fall maneuvers later this year take place. That minimizes transport costs and gives a little
time advantage should someone in the Ukraine again have silly ideas.
Russia has clearly won this round.
But that is not how it looks when seen from the 'western' narrative. In that version the
Ukrainian plans and its assembling of heavy weapons and troops near the Donbas border never
happened. The narrative says that the whole incident started as a 'Russian aggression' when
Russia very publicly showed its potential force.
Only a few
analysts on the 'western' side have rejected that narrative and stuck to reality. Dmitri
Trenin of Carnegie's Moscow Center is one who got it right :
In February, Zelensky ordered troops (as part of the rotation process) and heavy weapons
(as a show of force) to go near to the conflict zone in Donbas. He did not venture out as
far as Poroshenko, who dispatched small Ukrainian naval vessels through the
Russian-controlled waters near the Kerch Strait in late 2018, but it was enough to get him
noticed in Moscow.
The fact of the matter is that even if Ukraine cannot seriously hope to win the war in
Donbas, it can successfully provoke Russia into action.
This, in turn, would produce a knee-jerk reaction from Ukraine’s
Western supporters and further aggravate Moscow’s relations,
particularly with Europe. One way or another, the fate of Nord Stream II will directly
affect Ukraine’s interests. Being seen as a victim of Russian aggression
and presenting itself as a frontline state checking Russia’s further
advance toward Europe is a major asset of Kyiv’s foreign policy.
Russia intentionally over reacted to Kiev's opening move. It demonstrated its overkill
capability and made it clear to Zelensky's western sponsors that any further provocations
would have extremely harsh consequences. As Putin
said yesterday :
Those behind provocations that threaten the core interests of our security will regret what
they have done in a way they have not regretted anything for a long time.
Zelensky's plan did not work out. While he did get verbal statements of support from Biden
and NATO everyone knew that those were empty promises. But for people who have fallen for the
false narrative the situation looks different. Consider this reaction to Shoigu's
return-to-barracks order today from a member of the European Council On Foreign Relations (a
U.S. lobby shop in Europe):
I have to congratulate (Flag of United States) @JoeBiden to deterence success and crisis
management. The right warnings were sent to Moscow, the right intelligence to Ukraine.
(Flag of Russia) could not extort concessions, could not provoke. Let's see w. these forces
aren't just redeployed to (Flag of Belarus).
Indeed Biden's order last week to
pull back two war ships that were supposed to go into the Black Sea to support Ukraine
was really great deterrence. But that was not a warning to Moscow. It did not deter Russia
from doing anything. But it did end Zelensky's illusions of U.S. support.
But for Gressel, who like others is stuck to the 'western' narrative, the sense is
different. He really seems to believe that the U.S. deterred Russia from some nefarious plans
which it never had. He ignores that Russia reacted to a Ukrainian provocation in a way that,
in the end, has made NATO and the U.S. look weak.
The danger is that Gressel, and other 'political scientists' like him, may once take
up government positions and use their learned illusions to handle the next crisis. Stuck in
the idea that Russia will retreat if only 'deterred' enough they will lean to measures that
are outright hostile to Russia and may have indeed very tragic consequences. To repeat
Crooke's warning
:
The point here, is that in that talking past (and not listening) to other states, the
latters’ motives and intentions will be mis-construed â€"
sometimes tragically so.
Posted by b on April 22, 2021 at 17:25 UTC |
Permalink
The Russians have only partly gone. Heavy weapons will remain in place which can be
reactivated easily. (Particularly in Crimea). However the Russian "Threat" to Zelnsky is
still there. Logically he should now have more difficulty in stirring up the EU and US for
cash and weapons as the "obvious and visble" threat is diminished. I don't think his troops
can stay indefinitely where they are. How can he continue to pay for all his new mercenaries,
new arms?
So how is the MSM going to react? They have a lot of "journalists" around there, waiting
for something to happen.
One obvious factor is that the supply lines of both are within their own countries
(Ukraine for Ukrainians, and Russia for the Russians). Those that have the longest supply
lines are NATO, the UK and US.
An earlier ploy (Attempted violent assassination of Lukashenko and most of the Belarusian
parliament), with Georgia and other close by countries getting involved too, is now unlikely.
BUT the US is desperate to cut the Russian-Chinese access to Europe by any means. What's
next? Plan ....F?
The Western narrative was also very clearly visible in the latest printed "Der Spiegel"
16/2021 (News magazine in Germany). They had a 4 page article about Ukraine with the title
"On the edge of war". They reported at length about russian troops near the border.
Explicitely they wrote about sabre rattling from russia and generally gave the impression
that all action is solely on the russian side and must be seen negatively or with grave
concerns.
But they failed completely to mention Ukrainian troop movements, bellicose rhetoric or even
the Zelensky's decrete 117/2021 from march 23rd with the translated title "Strategy of
de-occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous
Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol".
b... thanks.. yes - narrative and controlling the narrative is what so much of this is
about.... people in the west are not told of ukraines role in any of this or how they are
encouraged by the west... instead what they are told is how russia is building up along the
ukraine border.... in other words only one side of the story is told, and not both..nor is
the timing of all of it shared either... people are literally given a script or narrative
tailor made for brainwashing.. and indeed it works on most...
for an example of this today - i was listening to cbc radio - national news show ''the
currenct''.. the host matt galloway discusses the situation with Mark MacKinnon, senior
international correspondent for the Globe and Mail; Nina Khrushcheva, professor of
international affairs at the New School in New York; and Michael Bociurkiw, global affairs
analyst, formerly with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
I am not so sure that this is over. The Belarus coup was intended to be around May 9.
Zelensky has called up the reserves who ever they might be. He just floated the idea of
banning Russia from the SWIFT so that it is on everyone's mind when Ukraine claims they were
attacked. The NS2 will likely be initially complete in May. The USS Cook and Roosevelt are
waiting for the British boats and will likely enter together. They have not yet given notice
that I have seen. Two frigates are transiting the Suez to join their fellow yanks. I see a
perfect storm yet coming. Shoigu is bright and knows that it looks good to announce the
return to barracks, but he has access to my data plus a ton more. He knows that the situation
is still fluid and volatile.
... But for Gressel, who like others is stuck to the 'western' narrative, the sense is
different. He really seems to believe that the U.S. deterred Russia from some nefarious plans
which it never had. He ignores that Russia reacted to a Ukrainian provocation in a way that,
in the end, has made NATO and the U.S. look weak.
This delusion reminded me of a retort, from an astute observer, to a dopey remark made by
Bush II soon after the start if the Iraq Fake War. Bush said "We're gonna turn EyeRack into
fly-paper for ter'rists! To which the observer responded...
"If Iraq was fly-paper then the only bug that got stuck to it was Bush."
I'm one of the most ardent proponents of the "imbecilization of the West" hypothesis, but
this is clearly a diplomatic style face-saving plausible deniability exit by the West.
The West knows time is not on its side in the Ukrainian issue, and its puppet president
threw a Hail Mary. Russia correctly didn't swallow the bait, and the West fell back as it
knew it would have to, since this was a long shot.
NS-2 is now getting finished, and the Ukraine will consolidate itself more than ever as a
black hole of American resources. The West, however, has one last ace in the hole: the German
Green Party, which is well positioned to form the next government after the December national
elections. The NS-2 certainly won't be finished by then, if the American diplomacy is to do
its job properly, and the Greens will have all the tools at hand to implode the project, thus
giving the Ukraine some more years to ride on American finance by its gas leverage (over
which all its sovereign T-bonds rest at this point).
The key to Ukrainian success is in Germany, not in Russia.
One advantage that Ukraine has in military terms is the number of people who willingly and
enthusiastically want to join the army for the sake of de-occupation (interesting why they
invented a replacement of "liberation" that has at least two equivalents with Slavic roots,
perhaps they do not like their current occupations). The best proof is that through their
democratically elected representatives they voted for a huge increase of punishments for
avoiding conscription.
The other proof is that, temporarily at least, Ukrainians abolished the system of rotation
in which units were staying on the fortified lines literally dying of boredom and related
risk (alcohol poisoning, explosions of stills making moonshine, drug overdoses, suicide,
stepping over their own mines, to mention a few), instead the troops to be rotated stayed in
place and the other units joined them nearby.
However, Russian conscripts without the advantage of Ukrainian enthusiasm have better
weapons. Modernizing Ukrainian military is a tall order. The budget barely supports the
troops without modernization, the domestic industry in its better years relied to selling
parts to Russia and buying other parts, remnants of industrial integration of Soviet times.
Supplying them with NATO weapons would require huge gifts that (a) could be unpopular in the
West (b) raise risk of getting the best toys of NATO to Russian in exchange for non-toxic
alcohol, fresh Afghan heroin etc. Did I mention mind-killing military service? And with not
so best toys, like missile boats that are about to be de-commissioned, say, in Canada, they
do not really change the strategic balance.
Thus Zelensky had to be saved from his own rhetoric and gestures -- the aforementioned
change in "rotation". Kiev authorities have a good practice in "never mind". For example,
they utilize fascist radicals to intimidate opposition, but they are what I call "pet
cobras", biting the hand that feeds them is what is programmed into their reptilian minds
that do not have circuits for "friends" and "gratitude". And because of some grievances they
trashed the Presidential place of work, insulting graffiti, broken windows, a broken and
burned door, so three ringleaders got arrested, Parliament spent a few hours being appalled
(after thinking for a week what to say), and now one ringleader was let free, with the
remainder probably joining him soon (one at the time, I think). See folks: nothing
happened.
It is possible that Napoleonic rhetoric and gestures were planned to get a "street cred"
with those hoodlums, or that they were discreetly encouraged by an embassy (some people think
that UK is the leader here, USA having mental problems and distractions). Or some
combination.
Our problem here in the U$A is still the same as always. Mr. Z's announcement on 3/24
about his nation's intentions to take back the Crimea, were NEVER mentioned on our MSM. It's
always Russian aggression, or China's aggression. It's NEVER our fault.
Being seen as a victim of Russian aggression and presenting itself as a frontline state
checking Russia’s further advance toward Europe is a major asset
of Kyiv’s foreign policy.
Wait...what?
I think B takes the "administration" too literally -
We know they are lying, they know they are lying, everyone knows they are lying but they are
creating a virtual world in which their behavior is rational and justified. I am not sure why
exactly such an artificial construct is seen as helpful. I suppose you could blame it on the
voting public in the democratic west but we all realize by this point that the west is in no
way democratic in a literal, functional sense - they less than do not give a damn what the
little people think in fact they could well do with a lot fewer of them and really without
the need of actual vote counting.
Possibly to their dog at night under the covers and after many martinis to help them
forget what they are, they admit something like their best attempt at the truth.
The militias with their supposed morale â€" These are the grandkids and great
grandkids of WWII collaborators. Middle class and hipsters. In a country where there
basically is no middle class. Ukraine’s economy is at African level. Only
source of funds for anything is the US embassy. There is no agenda but the agenda of 1945.
Any from the 2014 crop who had anything on the ball whatsoever is now my neighbor. What is
left in Uke is the dregs. Hipsters do not hang around in failed states.
Entire political landscape is now centered on US Embassy. Oligarchs might have some input
still, their wealth is out of country and so are they most of time.
Pure political vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. CIA and their hired actors will fill the
stage, journalists will report their antics. They are playing to an empty house. Ukraine
could exist in same zone as Libya or Iraq for a long time. In end nothing fills the vacuum
but Russian Federation.
The Russian military's policy is not to use conscripts on the front lines, that role is
far too important to trust to what are partially trained soldiers, they are used in support
functions. The frontline is manned by professional soldiers.
Zelenski has got $300M of 'stuff' out of Congress this week so that was a result for
him.
Russia might be pulling back but the Ukrainians haven't got the message. My understanding
is there are 50,000 Ukrainian army and 20,000 Ukrainian security forces normally in the
Donbass on the frontlines against 30,000 or so NAF. This crisis came when another 30,000
troops plus heavy weapons were moved into the area. Two days ago OSCE reported that two
artillery battalions of self propelled 122mm and 152 guns have been moved up to the front.
Then apparently earlier this week, two battalions of the Azov were moved up from Mariupol
(their normal area) to the front lines facing Donetsk City. Most of these 20,000 security
forces would be your Nazi wannabe's with the Azov unit being the largest. For those of you
not watching in 2014/5 Azov are the evil bastards that make the Red Army in WW2 Germany look
like angels.
So Kiev is still building an overpowering strike force with a probable objective of a
thrust through the center to the Russian border, splitting the two 'rebel' states. Both US
and UK and no doubt other advisors are on site. The Global Hawk is sucking up data overhead
most days. There is NATO pride on the line here planning and directing. We await a false
flag.
I think b is being a bit too optimistic. Somehow they have to stop NS2, in many ways their
futures depend on transit gas and, as before, they won't care how many have to die to save
their skins and wallets.
President Putin consulted with Minster of Defense Shoigu and asks if the troops can be
scaled back from the lines of contact without significantly reducing tactical capability.
Shoigu runs the numbers and delivers the answer that Putin was looking for.
Putin is offering an olive branch to Zelensky knowing full well his military can roll over
the eastern and southern borders of Ukraine with impunity.
Does Zelensky do the same? No, instead he calls up reserve boys to make himself look
tough.
A Russian proverb that is most appropriate in this case is this:
Ð"урнаÌÑ
гоÐ"оваÌ
ногаÌм
покоÌÑ Ð½Ðµ
даÑ'Ñ‚. Translation: The stupid head doesn't leave
feet in rest or in other words, no rest for the wicked.
"... Bioâ€" Israel Shamir is a writer on international affairs, a radical political thinker, and a Biblical and Judaic scholar. His comments on current affairs are published on The Unz Review , and on his own sites www.israelshamir.net and www.israelshamir.com . His books Galilee Flowers , Cabbala of Power , Masters of Discourse are available on the Amazon… Shamir was a dissident in the USSR and in Israel where he called for full rights for the Palestinians. He is also a global dissident who calls for the dismantling the New World Order and the American Empire ..."
"... Churchill’s observation about the USA cannot be more apt, “The US will do the right thing, after it has done all others.†Hopefully, that is before nuclear Armageddon is unleashed upon us. ..."
Question 1â€" For the last 4 years, Democrat leaders have blamed Russia
for allegedly meddling in the 2016 elections. Now the Democratsâ€" who control all
three branches of government â€" have the power to reset US foreign policy and take
a more hostile approach to Moscow. But will they?
At present, there are roughly 40,000 US-NATO troops massed along the Russian border
conducting military exercises while scores of Russian tanks, artillery and an estimated 85,000
Russian troops are now located about 25 miles from Ukraine’s eastern border.
Both armies are on hair-trigger alert and prepared for any sudden provocation. If the Ukrainian
Army invades the Russian-speaking region of Ukraine (Donbas), Moscow will likely respond.
So, will there be a conflagration in the Ukraine this spring and, if so, how will Putin
respond? Will he limit the scope of his campaign to the Donbas or push onward to Kiev?
Israel Shamirâ€" If the Russian army crosses the Ukrainian border, it
won’t stop in the Donbas. The war will be brief and the Ukraine will be
split into pieces. But will it happen?
Russia’s totem animal, the Bear, is a strong and peaceful animal that is
not easily aroused, but once provoked, it is unstoppable. Russian rulers have typically fit
this image. They weren’t adventurous, but level-headed and prudent.
Putin, who is the quintessential Russian ruler, is risk-averse. He won’t
start a war he never wanted to begin with, but he will act decisively if he needs to do so.
Consider 2014, after the Ukrainian coup: the lawful Ukrainian president Mr Yanukovich ran to
Russia and asked Putin to help him regain power. At that time, the Ukrainian army was weak and
Russia could have easily retaken the country without facing any significant resistance. But,
surprisingly, Putin did not give the order to take Kiev.
Putin is unpredictable. He ordered the seizure of Crimea despite the counsel of his
advisors. It was an unexpected move, and it worked like a charm. He also pummeled Georgia in
2008 after Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia. This was another surprise move that succeeded
better than anyone could have imagined. If the Ukrainians try to retake Donbas, the Russian
army will beat them badly and continue on to Kiev. The presence of NATO’s
troops will not deter Putin.
As for the Democrats, they can push Kiev to attack, but they will end up losing the Ukraine
in the process. If the point is to poison relations between Russia and Europe, they can try to
do so, but if they think the Russo-Ukrainian war is going to drag on,
they’re mistaken. And if they think Putin won’t defend
the Donbas, they’ve made a serious miscalculation.
Biden’s recent phone call to Putin suggests that the administration has
decided not to launch a war after all. The unconfirmed report of two US ships turning away from
the Black Sea fits this assessment. However, we cannot be sure about this since the Kremlin
refused to agree to Biden’s offer for a meeting. The
Kremlin’s response was a frosty “We shall study the
proposalâ€. Russians feel that the summit proposal might be a trick aimed at buying
time to strengthen their position. Bottom line: We cannot know certain how things will play out
in the future.
Question 2â€" I have a hard time understanding what the Biden
administration hopes to gain by provoking a war in the Ukraine. Seizing the Donbas will force
the government to impose a costly, long-term military occupation that will be ferociously
resisted by Russian-speaking people who live in the area. How does that benefit Washington?
I don’t think it does. I think the real objective is to provoke Putin
into overreacting, thus, proving that Russia poses a threat to all of Europe. The only way
Washington can persuade its EU allies that they should not engage in critical business
transactions (like Nordstream) with Moscow, is if they can prove that Russia is an
“external threat†to their collective security.
Do you agree with this or do you think Washington has something to gain by launching a war
in the Ukraine?
Israel Shamirâ€" What do you mean by
‘overreacting’? Putin is not threatening to nuke
Washington or take over Brussels or storm Warsaw? But to solve the problem of Ukraine on such
occasion would be entirely reasonable .
When the regime in Kiev began to prepare for war a few months ago, they thought it would be
a repeat of 2015, where they attack Donbas, the Donbas suffers losses, and then the Russian
army steps in to prevent their defeat. They saw it as a limited war with a good chance of
regaining Donbas. But Moscow has indicated that they will respond to any unprovoked aggression
using their full strength, thereby crushing the Ukrainian state. In other words, the Russian
army won’t stop at the Donbas but will proceed to the western borders of the
Ukraine until the entire country is liberated.
Is that ‘overreacting’?
Definitely not. The people of Ukraine would be saved from the nationalist, anti-Russian
regime, and the people of Russia would be saved from a NATO base on their western flank.
Hopefully the EU will understand this. As for the US, the Russians have already made up their
minds; the United States is an enemy. There has been a tectonic shift in Russia, and that shift
is the result of Russia’s weariness with the United
States’ proxy assaults.
The US would like to see the Donbas reintegrated into the Ukrainian state because then
they’d be praised as a ‘mighty defender of an East
European country against Russia’. But then Russia would have permanent
low-level war on its border. Either way, Russia’s relations with Europe
would be poisoned and the EU would probably end up buying expensive liquefied gas from the US
rather than instead the much cheaper Russian gas.
Russia’s decision to launch a full-blown attack on the Ukraine has made
the whole plan irrelevant. Putin will not allow it to happen.
The Ukrainians are flexible folks. At present, they submit to anti-Russian
nationalist narrative, but if the Russian army were to come, the Ukrainians would quickly
remember that they were co-founders of the USSR, brothers to Russians, and they would shake off
the nightmarish nationalist rule. The Ukrainians are wonderful people, but they easily adapt to
new rulers, be they the German Wehrmacht, the Polish landlords, the Petlyura Nationalists, or
the Communists. They would adapt to a partnership with Russia, too. Similarly, the Russians
would embrace the Ukrainians as they did in 1920 and in 1945.
Question 3â€" The Russian army would have little problem capturing the
Capitol, but holding on to Kiev might be a different matter altogether.
Let’s say, Russian troops are deployed to Kiev to maintain the peace while a
provisional government is established in the run-up to free elections. What would the US
response be? What would NATO’s response be? How would this maneuver be
portrayed in the western media? Would it be portrayed as a
“liberation†or an “occupation by a ruthless
imperial power� Would this help or hurt Moscow’s relations with
its partners around the world and particularly Germany where Nordstream is still under
construction?
And wouldn’t this scenario prompt the US Intel agencies to arm, train and
fund disparate groups of far-right extremists who would carry out a protracted insurgency
against Russian troops in Kiev? How is that in Russia’s interest? Why would
Putin put himself in the same situation the US put itself in Afghanistan, where a poorly-armed,
ragtag militia has made governance impossible forcing the US to pack-up and leave 20 years
later. Is that what Putin wants?
Israel Shamirâ€"The comparison with Afghanistan is absurd. The Ukraine
is a part of Russia that became independent the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. Ukrainians
are Russians of a sort. They have the same religion, the same language, the same culture, and
the same history. Yes, the CIA did try to arm the Ukrainian insurgency after WWII, but with
little success. You could compare a takeover of Kiev with a takeover of Atlanta by Sherman.
Ukrainian independence and separation probably cannot be reversed right away, but instead of
one big unwieldy state, Ukraine can be transformed into a few coherent independent units.
Western Ukraine is likely to join Poland as an independent or semi-independent state. East and
South Ukraine could become semi-independent under Russian umbrella, or join Russian Federation.
And historical Ukraine around Poltava could try and go its own way. I think the Ukrainians
would be happy to reunite with their mother state, or at least to become friendly with Moscow.
There will be no need to deploy Russian troops in Kiev or elsewhere. There are enough
Ukrainians to govern and control the situation and to deal with remaining extreme
nationalists.
What would the US and NATO response be? How would this maneuver be portrayed in the western
media? Probably the same as their response to Crimea takeover. They will be angry, unhappy,
furious. The problem is they already are. They’ve already imposed sanctions
on Russia and reinstalled the Iron Curtain. They’ve already done everything
short of a military confrontation. Russia is so annoyed by it all, that she is beyond caring
about another bout of sanctions.
I am certain that Russia won’t start a war in the Ukraine, but if Kiev
does, the Russian army will topple the regime just like the US toppled regimes in Afghanistan,
Iraq and many other states. And, any attempt to establish US or NATO military bases in Ukraine
will undoubtedly be seen as casus belli.
Russians think that a big war is unavoidable, so it’s probably better
to have the Ukraine under Moscow’s control before that war breaks out. The
US is an enemy; that is the feeling in Russia. If the US wants to change that perception, it
should act fast .
Question 4â€" Is Washington genuinely interested in the Ukraine or is it
just a staging-ground for its war on Russia??
Israel Shamirâ€" Washington would like to initiate a low-intensity war between
Ukraine and Russia, a long-lasting war that would drain Russian resources and kill Russian
troops; a war that would divert Russia’s attention from other hotspots, like
in Syria or Libya . This is the way in which the US is laying the groundwork for an even
bigger confrontation with Russia in the future.
Putin has accepted the breakup of the USSR. He’s not trying to
reconstruct the Soviet empire nor is he particularly interested in the Ukraine. Twice he
allowed Russia’s enemies to carry Ukraine away: in 2004 and in 2014. He has
showed that he’d prefer to have as little to do with Ukraine as possible.
Being a lawyer by education, Putin has a legal mind. He thought that Minsk Treaties were good
enough a solution for all concerned. (The Minsk Treaty would
“federalize†the Ukraine) He didn’t expect
that Kiev would just ignore the treaties, but that’s what happened. Now
he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s not keen
on annexing any part of Ukraine, but he might be forced to do so sooner or later.
In the last few weeks, US-Russian relations have deteriorated significantly. Russia is
deeply offended by recent developments and will not go back to “business as
usualâ€. We have entered uncharted waters and there is no way to predict what
will happen next.
Question 5â€" No one in the United States benefits from a conflict with
Russia, in fact, a military confrontation with Moscow poses a serious and, perhaps, existential
threat to Russians and Americans alike. Still, the rush to war continues apace, mainly because
the US military â€"with all of its millions of troops and high-tech
weaponryâ€" is in the hands of a foreign policy establishment that is determined to
control the vast resources and growth-potential of Central Asia despite the casualties and
destruction that strategy will undoubtedly cause.
The biggest obstacle to this plan is Russia, which is why â€"since the collapse
of the Soviet Unionâ€" the US and NATO have made every effort to encircle Russia,
deploy missile sites to its borders, conduct hostile military exercises on its perimeter, and
arm and train Islamic extremists to fight in its provinces. (Chechnya) Now that Joe Biden has
been elected president, I would expect the hostilities towards Russia will rapidly intensify in
both Ukraine and Syria. Biden has already shown that he will do whatever he is told to do by
the foreign policy “Borgâ€, which means that war with Russia
might be unavoidable.
Do you agree or disagree with this analysis?
Israel Shamirâ€" There are forces that want to control and direct mankind.
These forces use the US as their enforcer. The Trump-related part of the US elites want the
US to be the main beneficiary of the process. The Biden-related part of the US elites is more
globally-oriented. Russia is ready to adjust to some of their demands (vaccination, climate) in
order to avoid a final showdown. On the other hand, we don’t completely know
what these global elites really want. And why the sense of urgency? Why the lack of concern for
the American people or the Russians or the Europeans? Perhaps Davos is the new center of power
and they are simply upset by Putin’s disobedience?
What we can say for certain is that imperialists always seek world hegemony. Independent
Russia presents a challenge to that plan. Perhaps, western elites think they can bring Russia
into full compliance by brinkmanship and threatening war? Perhaps, what
we’re seeing in the Ukraine is an attempt to browbeat Russia into obedience?
The danger is that they will push things too far and start a war they can neither manage or
contain.
Putin remembers the fate of Saddam and Gadhafi. He’s not going to
throw in the towel and back down. He’s not going to give up or give
in.
To my American readers I’d say that the US is very strong and the people
of the US can have a wonderful life even without world hegemony, in fact, hegemony is not in
their interests at all. What they should seek is a strong nationalist policy that cares for
the American people and avoids wasteful foreign wars.
Bioâ€" Israel Shamir is a writer on international affairs, a radical
political thinker, and a Biblical and Judaic scholar. His comments on current affairs are
published on The Unz Review , and on his own
sites www.israelshamir.net
and www.israelshamir.com . His books
Galilee Flowers , Cabbala of Power , Masters of Discourse are available on
the Amazon… Shamir was a dissident in the USSR and in Israel where he
called for full rights for the Palestinians. He is also a global dissident who calls for the
dismantling the New World Order and the American Empire
NATO forces near Ukraine are there for a showy training exercise. They
don’t have the ammunition or other supplies to fight for more than 48
hours. Moreover, the troops have no interest in an idiotic and suicidal war with Russia. Most
Ukrainian soldiers feel the same way. Ukraine is not part of NATO, and NATO Generals will do
nothing without approval from their own nation, which will not come. There is no Ukraine
crisis, this is just another game to boost military budgets.
Of all the forest folks, the one most zealous in protection of her cubs is Mama Bear. If
there are any adults pulling the strings in the Di$trict of Corruption; they should
understand that elementary bit of geopolitical logic.
Shamir could be correct in assuming that the Kamala’s Foote/Biden
regime, a selected rather than elected governmental administration, being comprised mostly of
poker players, did realize that Putin called their bluff when his foreign affairs and
military people let Washington know, and not in traditional diplomatic language, that those
two American destroyers dispatched to the Black Sea would be sailing in dangerous waters.
They promptly turned tail and headed back westwards. Almost literally, the Russian move was a
traditional shot across the bow.
Nevertheless, Putin’s Russia stands in the way of not only the
world’s greatest potential resource grab, but perhaps also they block
“The Great Resetâ€, signifiying the entire globalist New World
Order agenda as ordered by the West’s ruling Bank$ter crime clans. With
Russia now having developed the world’s most advanced military technology,
training and tactics and with a nonpareil civil defense organization and with China fast
becoming the planet’s most potent economic engine; the Cabal may feel
their horizon to seize full world control is rapidly narrowing. The next several months to
maybe three or four years could be make or break time for their overarching agenda of total
control.
So the wheel’s still in spin, as the 20th Century’s
great Jewish prophet, Bob Dylan sang it out some number of years ago. One of the more
positive aspects of Judaism is that they do produce some amazing prophets, rebels questioning
authority, the lot of them over multiples of centuries.
We are said by some meta-historical observers, to have entered the opening years of the
Age of Aquarius, a 2,600 year era of change, as of December 31, 2012. Perhaps that is another
reason why the Cabal seems to be going for broke in their encroachments on Russia, China,
Iran, Syria and even little Lebanon. The Age of Pisces, with its stolen version of
“Christianityâ€, is fast fading into a past created by Imperial
Rome. Younger people all across the globe are deserting organized religion and its many
dogmas.
Geopoliticallyâ€"militarilyâ€"astute observers tend to agree that
should the puppet regime in Kiev opt to march eastwards, they will get whupped upside the
head by an enraged (but not stupidly so) Mama Bear.
Personally, my own take is that should push come to shove, it is not likely that Russian
forces would attempt to take Kiev or the region around Poltava. Nor would they countenance
the certain headache of advancing on Uniate/Catholic/fascist-dominated Galicia. Their
stopline might actuate, say a hundred kilometers east of the Ukrainian capital. However,
their units might well envelop Odessa and the entire Black Sea coast all the way to the
Transnistria/Moldavia border.
Ukraine would be reduced to rump-state status but would be guaranteed independence and
protection by a Russia-Belorus consortium. The long Polish and then Austro-Hungarian
dominated Galicia would likely seek some form of federation status with Poland and Lithuania.
Chances are that the Kremlin would be happy with that outcome.
The Evil Empire and NATO will huff and puff. Diplomats will get shuffled around. Wiser
heads would consider the speed of the Russian advance and their combat efficiency and decide
to recoup their losses and do what they can to keep Europe in thrall. Time to work on Plan
B.
To my American readers I’d say that the US is very strong and the
people of the US can have a wonderful life even without world hegemony, in fact, hegemony
is not in their interests at all. What they should seek is a strong nationalist policy
that cares for the American people and avoids wasteful foreign wars.
The problem here, is that the American people are crushed and powerless, and in the grip
of something morphing into a Neo-Bolshevik style dictatorship. Similarly to the mid
1930’s this dictatorship wants world power â€" and from this
perspective Ukraine looks more like Spain 1936 (the first act of a much bigger show).
Biden’s recent phone call to Putin suggests that the administration
has decided not to launch a war after all. The unconfirmed report of two US ships turning
away from the Black Sea fits this assessment. However, we cannot be sure about this since
the Kremlin refused to agree to Biden’s offer for a meeting. The
Kremlin’s response was a frosty “We shall study the
proposalâ€. Russians feel that the summit proposal might be a trick aimed at
buying time to strengthen their position.
Except that the US ordered two British warships to go there instead.
TASS, April 18. Two British warships will sail for the Black Sea in May. According to
The Sunday Times, a source in the Royal Navy indicated that this gesture is intended to
show solidarity with Ukraine and NATO in the region against the background of the situation
at the Russian-Ukrainian border.
According to the newspaper, one Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and
an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will peel off from the Royal Navy’s
carrier task group in the Mediterranean and sail through the Bosphorus into the Black
Sea.
It is reported that the decision was made in order to support Ukraine after the US
cancelled its plans of sending two destroyers to the Black Sea in order to avoid further
escalation in the region and tensions with Russia. It is noted that in case of a threat on
the part of Russia, the UK is ready to send other military equipment to the region.
I would guess that the US Trotskyites plan to push the Ukrainians into a war and then
launch a massive international media barrage, “heroic Ukrainian
patriotsâ€, “Russian atrocitiesâ€,
“killer Putin†etc. sufficient to finish with Nord Stream 2
and scare France and Germany back into the US fold.
If this is right, then they’re not expecting Russia to retake the whole
of the Ukraine, and they’re not planning to start WW3.
However, Russia’s lowest risk strategy would probably still be to only
defend their existing positions making it difficult to claim a “Russian
invasionâ€. They’ve probably already lost Nord Stream (which is
really a German loss â€" and the Germans know what the ZioGlob are doing here).
This buys time, and given that the US is already on a fast downward slope, lets them keep
sliding.
The Ukrainians are flexible folks. At present, they submit to anti-Russian nationalist
narrative, but if the Russian army were to come, the Ukrainians would quickly remember that
they were co-founders of the USSR, brothers to Russians, and they would shake off the
nightmarish nationalist rule. The Ukrainians are wonderful people, but they easily adapt to
new rulers, be they the German Wehrmacht, the Polish landlords, the Petlyura Nationalists,
or the Communists. They would adapt to a partnership with Russia, too. Similarly, the
Russians would embrace the Ukrainians as they did in 1920 and in 1945.
Pure idealism.
Do not underestimate the extent to which the experience of independence, the anti-Russian
narrative, billions in remittances from migrant workers in Poland, the massive and entrenched
bribery system involving American politicians, and especially the
“annexation†of Crimea, have stoked nationalist sentiment in
every segment of Ukrainian society, short of those explicitly identifying as Russian.
I have seen Ukrainians from all over that country go as red in the face, and as fast, over
Crimea as Americans about “trans rightsâ€. It is fever-pitch
over there. We tend to look down on their small-nation complex, but at least
it’s about lebensraum and not some degenerate ideology. I assume Moscow
keeps that well in mind.
They may roll over in the end, but it will not be an embrace.
Things have changed a lot over the past 20 years. Governments and media have total control
over populations. For proof, just look at how stupid the population of countries like the UK
and Australia have become. They actually still believe that masks and lockdowns are a good
thing. They believe that they are personally threatened by a virus that hardly kills any
healthy person under the age of 70.
If the Russians get control of the centre of Kiev â€" with its mobile
telephony, TV, radio and websites â€" the game is up. It suffices to send an SMS
to all inhabitants of Kiev to say that they will be shot if they venture outdoors and that
will be the end of the matter. Gradually, shops, transport and businesses can reopen. The
police will have new orders and that will be it. There is no need for Russian troops to
patrol. There will be no ambushes by Nazis. The elite Jews who currently control the place
will panic.
There will be no repeat of Maidan. No one will be able to come by coach from Lvov to
create havoc. Most Nazis will try to pretend that they never had anything to do with it.
The personal links between all individuals is to be found in their mobile phone usage.
Anyone who spoke to Zelensky, Poroshenko etc in the last 12 months could be detained and
investigated. The same is true for their emails. Everyone uses Russian in Kiev. It would be a
cinch for the Russians to go through all the emails electronically.
Freeze all bank accounts and only allow a small withdrawal each week. Pull in all the
international transfers. Find out who has been siphoning money from the state and sending it
abroad. Arrest them.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Almost nothing we do these days is not permanently
recorded in different computer systems.
Arrest and put on trial all those involved in the atrocities in the Donbass over the past
7 years. 13,000 plus people died â€" most of them civilians. Justice must be
pursued. Hold a genuine investigation of the shootings at Maidan and the massacre in Odessa.
Those who tortured the police chief of Mariupol must be exposed and punished.
Good article- Thanks â€" Crimea didn’t need much pushing ,
in order to Vote to go back to Russia â€" they are an Autonomous Republic that
tried to go back in the 90s, but was foiled by Kyiv. Kiev made sure the Crimean Gov. was
always stacked with mafia leaders, and the monies for routine infrastructure, school,
hospital , gov. buildings, etc were pocketed.
Only the areas from Sevastopol to Yalta were kept up by Moscow itself. All the people saw
this â€" we are the size of Vermont.
Elephant in the room ? The Globalists â€" Monsanto/Bayer, Cargill, DuPont, Eli
Lili, and others that own a whole lot of Ukraine, esp. the breadbasket. Even the US Navy
guards the port near Odecca, where they export their grain etc. So, what this past skirmish
did was to move the security armies funding, from the Globalists to the US and EU taxpayer
â€" so to speak. Mr. Shamir touches on this when he speaks about the â€
Borgâ€. Globalist 5 Ukraine 0 .
The US is run by the children , grandchildren of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian
looters, the Babylonian Talmud Rabbi pet students, globalist stooges, and thousands of bought
off Americans that work for them. Call them what you wish â€" they are Illuminati,
Freemasons, Zionists, Bankers, Lawyers, Globalists, demented old men, opportunists
â€" many different classes. To most of us tho, they are the defined Enemy and
should be treated this way â€" mentally and physically.
Russians are totally different from todays Americans and that is what will keep Russia
alive. Putin’s personality, patience, and drive is a great example of this
. Shamir is spot on in his opinion of how laid back the Ukies are vs, the straight laced ,
serious Russians .
Churchill’s observation about the USA cannot be more apt,
“The US will do the right thing, after it has done all
others.†Hopefully, that is before nuclear Armageddon is unleashed upon
us.
The MIC would like nothing better than for the Russians to show they mean business.
Whatever it takes to justify even more outrageous military budgets in the future. The
American people will be required to sacrifice more and more because of the
“Russian threatâ€.
@Alfred
utin takes with neighboring peoples, even those Russia has just defeated, annexed, or
supported against some other nation, is characterized by conciliation. This
isn’t the 90’s; Ukraine, even the Donbas, is not
Chechnya.
I don’t believe Ukrainians could be pacified, in the event. Their
mentality has reached a level of blind hatred rivaled only by Jews for any whisper of dissent
from their worldview.
On the other hand, Washington is very much out for blood, as we all know. Whose blood
exactly is unclear, but the cost of retaining their Soros-funded Ukrainian honeypot,
obtaining Central Asian wealth and shoring up the dollar, or whatever the fuck they truly
want, would probably never be too high for others to pay.
Russia has 200,000 troops and heavy equipment on the border. The moment the first shot is
fired Ukie soldiers will be walking into a wall of lead and death. They know it so will the
Ukie gov.
In fact if they ever were crazy enough to launch such an attack they, the Ukie leadership
will almost certainly be signing their death warrants by triggering a military coup.
There’s not many humiliating military losses that don’t
end up in one for the instigators.
The US knows this so is trying a different type of escalation via Navalney hunger strike
and this absurd accusation on the Czech arms dump explosion 7 years ago
@Anonymous
finger and shriek about ‘Russian aggression’ in order
to pressure the Germans into cancelling Nordstream 2 and any other Russian supplied energy.
Of course if the Europeans weren’t run by (((banker))) stooges and if
they had any balls between them they would force the US to call the whole thing off and
pressure the Ukrainian fascists to honour the Minsk 2 agreement. Sadly we are just going to
have to prepare for the worst and hope it doesn’t go nuclear.
I see my own government (I am from the UK) has decided to send some sacrificial ships to
the Black sea (the US apparently doesn’t want to risk theirs) What else
can we expect when 2/3 of our parliament are in ‘Friends of
Israel’ groups?
Think of it like a game of geopolitical poker. About 30 years ago the US found itself with
most of the chips. Russia’s stack had dwindled to a dangerously low level.
China was husbanding its position. Now those other serious players have figured out how to
play to US weaknesses, goading him into high risk, low reward positions.
Like I’ve been saying, China won the post-Cold War quarter century,
hands down. It’s such a Sad Story, it’s been evident
for years there is no price too high to pay in terms of our national interest to cover up the
establishment’s malefactions.
In geopolitics, there’s a nasty tendency for strengths to morph into
weaknesses. That explains these two sober, informed observers â€" interviewer and
interviewee alike â€" struggling to delineate the method to the madness in US
strategy and tactics.
It’s a helluva thing to be the principal moving party in a play that
leaves the only question how big the gains will be for Russia and China, and in what ratio.
Make no mistake, it isn’t coincidental that China is very publicly
pressuring the US in the South China Sea at the moment. The land template has water
implications.
It’s impossible to overstate the deleterious effects of the
“Unipolar Moment†nonsense. Among the less consequential,
unless you want to understand geopolitical events, was that we didn’t have
to think to much about the geo-strategy of other powers. There’s been an
excuse made for all of them, so-called enemies and allies alike. Russia was down and out.
China just wanted to make a lot of washing machines. . . .
My essential point being â€" and we can file it as my suggesting you get ahead
of the curve â€" is that you cease ignoring the objectives of all of these powers.
They are not simply playing defense and, if you’re tempted to think that
they still are, then ask yourself whether that’s what you would do if you
sat in one of those big chairs with the US in such a piss poor condition?
Having succeeded with operation Get Rid Of Trump, as I predicted the payoffs have come
fast and furious. Though not fast enough for the most proactive foreign powers. I knew there
wasn’t much point in trying to figure out what the bargains were since
they would become obvious after they installed “Biden.â€
Beyond, that is, Nord Stream 2, the contours of which were visible in the Navalny
set-piece.
‘To my American readers I’d say that the US is very
strong and the people of the US can have a wonderful life even without world hegemony, in
fact, hegemony is not in their interests at all. What they should seek is a strong
nationalist policy that cares for the American people and avoids wasteful foreign
wars.’
Many Americans have recognized just that … we don’t
seem to be able to defeat our ‘Deep State’. Trump was
elected in large part because his goal was exactly that. He was defeated by the
‘Establishment’, ‘Deep
State’, whatever you want to call it.
I’ve often pointed out that the US does not need an Empire, and in fact
it is only of benefit to our oligarchs. The US does not even need trade. The US is a
continent, it has everything it needs. If anyone wants to talk about oil/energy I would point
out the existence of uranium. By the way, the same is true of Russia. It could exist
perfectly well if it were the only country in the World.
But, we cannot change human nature … there are always the greedy and
power-mad, and they are numerous … any doubts should have been removed by
one word … lockdown.
“He (Putin) didn’t expect that Kiev would just
ignore the treaties, but that’s what happened.â€
I do not think Putin is an idiot, but anyone who believed that the Ukranazis
wouldn’t ignore the Minsk accords, which they signed only as a desperate
attempt to stave off total defeat in 2015 (after being routed at the Battles of Donetsk
Airport and Debaltsevo) is an idiot. This is the first time I have ever heard anyone
suggesting that Putin (or anyone else) expected the Minsk Accord to succeed.
“Consider 2014, after the Ukrainian coup: the lawful Ukrainian
president Mr Yanukovich ran to Russia and asked Putin to help him regain power. At that
time, the Ukrainian army was weak and Russia could have easily retaken the country without
facing any significant resistance.â€
And by not doing so Putin faces a much more difficult job now than in 2014.
In 2014 the Ukranazi military was disintegrating, which is why Russia did not find any
resistance in liberating Crimea. The Ukrainian army basically ceased to exist. Many if not
most of the troops defected to Russia in Crimea. Supporters of
Yanukovych’s Party of the Unions would have openly welcomed a Russian
intervention against the Nazi coup regime. That is why the Ukranazi coup regime picked the
Nazis of Azov, Svoboda and Pravii Sektor to attack the at that time almost defenceless
Novorossiyan people (who remember had to loot weapons from museums, including still working
WWII tanks). Even later by the end of the year the Ukrainian army had to rely on Nazi
“cyborgs†to fight for it. A Russian intervention would still
have been a cakewalk.
Even during the period 2015 to 2019 while Ukranazistan was falling apart
socioeconomically, the military grew relatively cohesive, in the sense that it incorporated
Azov (thus making itself the Ukranazi army) and was no longer self destructing, but it had
still no modern anti tank weapons, no modern drones, and very importantly no NATOstani forces
in the country arming and training it openly (in reality acting as human shields). Now none
of those things are true. They have the Ottoman Bayraktars, the world’s
only combat proven drone, Javelin anti tank missiles, open arming and training and most
importantly open propaganda support from the NATOstanis to an extent not seen since 2014. It
is obvious that Russia does not believe that the Donbass armies can possibly hold off the
Ukranazis even long enough for Russia to transfer forces from further away in the Russian
interior. And from this point on the Ukranazis can only get militarily more powerful. Even if
we believed the oft repeated but as far as I can see unsupported assertion that 50% or more
of their army is comprised of conscripts too demoralised to fight, the Ukranazis are now
renting jihadi headchoppers from Sultan ErdoÄŸan, not the cannon fodder in
Azerbaijan, but Chechens, Daghestanis and Tatars who speak Russian, know the country, and are
a bit tougher than the average child beheading al Qaeda junior partner from Idlibistan. And
don’t forget that they will have the full benefit of NATOstani satellite
intelligence and propaganda and diplomatic support, apart from the NATOstani
“trainers†and “advisors†who
Putin will, if recent history is any guide, go to almost any length to avoid harming, even if
they kill Russians.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Russia would have had to take on the
economic burden of Ukranazistan in 2014. All Russia would have to do is invade, crush the
Ukranazi coup regime (more likely than not with the enthusiastic support of most of East
Ukraine people), reinstate Yanukovych, and withdraw immediately with a statement that if
there were any more Maidans Russia would be back and this time to stay. No occupation, no
economic burden, just a souped up equivalent of the 2008 Georgia punitive expedition. Instead
Putin’s “restraint†meant:
1. Russia got none of the benefits it would have had by invading: crushing Ukranazism,
massively deterring NATO, avoiding “friends†like India
peeling away, the running expenses of having to maintain troops at the border, to say nothing
of building the Kerch bridge and subsidising the Donbass.
2. It got all the negative effects of invading: sanctions (which turned out a blessing in
disguise, yes, but which should not have been necessary to make Russia’s
economy self reliant anyway), massively increased enmity from its opponents.
3. It got all the negatives of doing nothing: NATOstani planes in Ukranazi airspace, NATO
openly arming and training the Ukranazis, the Ukrainian population becoming more
homogeneously anti Russian.
And now if Russia invades it will have to take over the ruins because there is simply
nobody else. It’s far too late to reinstate Yanukovych and leave.
Meanwhile Putin is apparently planning to address the nation on the 21st. Speculation
includes declaration of hostilities against Ukranazistan and merger of Russia with Belarus.
I’ll wait and see.
She is really bold: "Hobson, who is Black, noted that White men made up about 70% of board seats in the U.S. but only 30% of the
population in pre-2020 data." This one step from trying to examine ethnic composition of Wall Street firms. Not good for Starbucks ;-)
More content below
Anne Riley Moffat
Wed, April 21, 2021, 8:50 PM
+0.40%
More content below
SBUX
(Bloomberg) -- American
companies eschewing diversity in the boardroom risk “committing corporate suicide,†Starbucks Corp.’s Mellody Hobson said,
about a month after taking over as board chair at the coffee giant.
“You can’t be a leading
company in the world and not have a diverse board or have a real agenda around diversity without at some point dying as an
organization,†Hobson said Wednesday evening at a virtual event sponsored by Bowdoin College. “Now it may take a while, but
I do think it will be inevitable.“
All the while, unfriendly moves towards Russia have also continued unabated. Some countries
have taken up an unseemly routine where they pick on Russia for any reason, most often, for
no reason at all. It is some kind of new sport of who shouts the loudest.
In this regard, we behave in an extremely restrained manner, I would even say, modestly,
and I am saying this without irony. Often, we prefer not to respond at all, not just to
unfriendly moves, but even to outright rudeness. We want to maintain good relations with
everyone who participates in the international dialogue. But we see what is happening in
real life. As I said, every now and then they are picking on Russia, for no reason. And of
course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis are running around them like Tabaqui ran around Shere
Khan â€" everything is like in Kipling's book â€" howling along in
order to make their sovereign happy . Kipling was a great writer.
I think VVP is missing a golden opportunity to appoint an unofficial 'freelance' Court
Jester, or 2 or 3. The Court Jester's role would be to answer every childish slur from the
West's Naughty & undisciplined Little Kiddies with an equally insulting and personal slur
against the West's Spokes-Children.
If the West wants to behave like the Louts and Riff-Raff that hang around outside the
Local Saloon in the Wild West, trying to start a fight, it would be fun to encourage them to
push the boundaries. Considering the cornucopia if Silly Stuff the West believes, or pretends
to believe, it shouldn't be difficult to goad them into crossing their own Red Lines.
The Court Jester could start by asking the West to explain, comprehensively, why it wants
to Save Alexi Navalny whilst torturing Julian Assange to death?
Something strange is occurring in the gutter of "liberal comedy"... After four years of constant attacks on anything 'Trumpian'
and constant ignorance of anything 'Left', one man has begun to realize that there is plenty of farce on both sides of the aisle
and virtue-signaling to your cocktail party co-conspirators just doesn't pay the bills anymore (
cough CNN cough ).
Last week, Comedian Bill Maher used his HBO show to highlight some awkward 'facts' and ask some uncomfortable questions about
media and politicians approach to COVID .
This week, he has taken aim at the heart of the problem - American Millennials and Gen Z and their total ignorance of history.
"In India, young people touch old people's feet to show reverence. In Japan, there's a national 'respect for the aged' day.
You know the reason why advertisers in this country love the 18-34 demographic... because it's the most gullible .
A third of people under 35 say they're in favor of abolishing the police ...not defunding, but doing away with a police force
altogether... which is less of a policy position and more of a leg tattoo.
36% of Millennials think it might be a good idea to try Communism... but much of the world did try it... I know most of Millennials
think that doesn't count because they weren't alive when it happened... but it did happen, and there are people around who remember
it. Pining for communism is like pining for BetaMax or MySpace.
So when you say 'you're old, you don't get it', get what? Abolish the police? ...and the Border Patrol? ... and Capitalism?
... and cancel Lincoln?
No, "I get it"... the problem isn't that I don't get what you're saying or that I'm old. The problem is that your ideas are
stupid .
If you say "let's eat in the bathroom and shit in the kitchen" , yeah, that's a new idea, but I wouldn't call it interior design.
You think someone 80 is hopeless because they can’t use an iPhone? Maybe the one who is hopeless is the one who can’t stop
using it .
You think I'm out of it because I'm not on Twitch? Well maybe I 'get Twitch' but I just think people watching other people
play video games is a waste of fucking time .
20% of Gen Z agree with the statement that "society would be better off if all property was owned by the public and managed
by the government" and another 29% say 'they don't know if that's a good idea'...
Here's who does know... anyone who wasn't born yesterday!"
Watch the full monologues here (timestamped to begin at 5:13)
Manthong 8 hours ago (Edited)
You know when Bill Maher is right...
I hate when that happens.
But if you listen to the whole piece, he is shilling for a fool who is wholly owned and he is wrapping truth around deception
and falsity... very crafty.
But that's what they do.
various2 5 hours ago
Billionaires do not allow their direct peasants millionaires to deviate from left-right allocation. If he utters a word of
nationalism, he would be canceled fast.
Billionaires destroy America, and need firmly control over common peasants.
Money printing billionaires bought out all big tech and big media as fast as they become public.
Only Trump was allowed to speak certain limited truths like “China - enemy globalist proxyâ€, “Russia is America’s only
ally on a planetâ€.
But that was an experiment in compromise that billionaires failed.
Macho Latte 4 hours ago (Edited)
Maher is part of the problem, not part of the solution. His salary depends on that. The only reason he has "changed" his tune
is because he got permission to do it or he was told to do it.
DemonRats: The EVIL that lives among us.
Max Hunter 3 hours ago
He didn't change his tune that much, if you watch the first 5 minutes he is drooling all over Biden and shilling the orangeman
bad mantra.
Interesting essay over at Turcopolier.com about the atomisation of US society by Identity
Politics, Selective Censorship and Political Correctness (aka self-censorship).
The United States of 2 Americas
Posted on April 25, 2021 by Steven J. Willett
The following article by Ret. Col. John Mills from The Epoch Times should be of
interest to readers of this site.
Commentary
If you haven't noticed, the United States is reorganizing itself into two Americas --
blue and red. Although there is a president of the United States, state governors are in many
ways now driving the national narrative in this new America. etc, etc.
Wodehouse, that most perfect of stylists, was not as lost in his imaginary world as
all that. I suppose his main sources for pastiche or parody were the Bible,
Shakespeare, American gangster idiom and such novelists as Ethel M Dell. That's where
he got his square jawed characters who went out to often unspecified parts of the
Empire and did often unspecified great things. Wodehouse rips them to pieces, as he
also shreds the English Blut und Boden Fascists of the pre-war years. I suppose I,
courtesy of old second-hand bookshops, must be one of the few who've read Ethel M Dell.
Often wonder what people who haven't make of Wodehouse.
Dickens is I think misrepresented in the article. His extraordinarily vivid
characters derive from his personal and first hand experience. He knew little of Empire
or had little contact with it, but knew enough to rip apart Mrs Jellyby's misdirected
do-goodery in Borioboola-Gha. I thought of Mrs Jellyby when President Biden's
philanthropic schemes for South Amrerica were being discussed on the Colonel's site
recently.
In fact the British Empire, for all the harm it did, is a transient affair not to be
confused with the great continental land empires. Disraeli got going with the "Queen
Empress" braggadocio in the late nineteenth century and barely twenty years later
Kipling was writing the prophetic obituary of that chapter of English history.
It's an accurate article as far as I know – the exploitation of the Indian
peasant, for example, was shocking in its ruthlessness. We get a more balanced account
of the Irish famine from modern Irish historians though in my view, for all Victoria's
munificant £5,000, the failure to get to grips with that famine was not only a
condemnation of the neo-liberals of that era. It removed for all time any prospect of
peaceful union between Ireland and England. Don't forget Dr Johnson's remark when Union
was being mooted many decades earlier. ""Do not make an union with us, Sir. We should
unite with you only to rob you. We should have robbed the Scotch, if they had had
anything of which we could have robbed them".
"... While the released documents portray the U.S. as having knowledge of the coup as opposed to intervening overtly or covertly, the aftermath shows U.S. involvement was considerable. ..."
While the released documents portray the U.S. as having knowledge of the coup as opposed
to intervening overtly or covertly, the aftermath shows U.S. involvement was
considerable.
Last March, on the 45 th anniversary of Argentina’s descent
into dictatorship, the National Security Archive posted a selection of
declassified documents revealing the U.S. knowledge of the military coup in the country in
1976. A month before the government of Isabel Peron was toppled by the military, the U.S. had
already informed the coup plotters that it would recognise the new government. Indications of a
possible coup in Argentina had reached the U.S. as early as 1975.
A declassified CIA document from February 1976 describes the imminence of the coup, to
the extent of mentioning military officers which would later become synonymous with torture,
killings and disappearances of coup opponents. Notably, the coup plotters, among them General
Jorge Rafael Videla, were already drawing up a list of individuals who would be subject to
arrest in the immediate aftermath of the coup.
One concern for the U.S. was its standing in international diplomacy with regard to the
Argentinian military dictatorship’s violence, which it pre-empted as a U.S.
State Department briefing to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shows. “An
Argentine military government would be almost certain to engage in human rights violations such
as to engender international criticism.â€
After the experience of Chile and U.S. involvement in the coup which heralded dictator
Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power, human rights violations became a key
factor. Kissinger had brushed off the U.S. Congress’s concerns, declaring a
policy that would turn a blind eye to the dictatorship’s atrocities.
“I think we should understand our policy-that however unpleasant they act,
this government is better for us than Allende was,†Kissinger had declared .
Months after expressing concern regarding the forthcoming human rights abuses as a result of
the dictatorship in Argentina, the U.S.
warned Pinochet about its dilemma in terms of justifying aid to a leadership which was
becoming notorious for its violence and disappearances of opponents. “We
have a practical problem to take into account, without bringing about pressures incompatible
with your dignity, and at the same time which does not lead to U.S. laws which will undermine
our relationship.â€
In the same declassified document from the Chile archives of 1976, Pinochet expresses his
concern over Orlando Letelier, a diplomat and ambassador to the U.S. during the era of Salvador
Allende and an influential figure among members of the U.S. Congress, stating that Letelier is
disseminating false information about Chile. Letelier was murdered by car bomb in Washington
that same year, by a CIA and National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent Michael
Townley.
However, the Argentinian coup plotters deepened their dialogue with the U.S. over how human
rights violations would be committed. Aware of perceptions regarding
Pinochet’s record, military officials approached the U.S. seeking ways to
minimise the attention which Pinochet was garnering in Chile, while at the same time making it
clear to U.S. officials to “some executions would probably be
necessary.â€
Assuming a non-involvement position was also deemed crucial by the U.S. To mellow any
possible fallout, the coup plotters were especially keen to point out that the military coup
would not follow in the steps of Pinochet. One declassified cable document detailing U.S.
concern over involvement spells out how the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert Hill planned to depart the
country prior to the coup, rather than cancel plans to see how the events pan out.
“The fact that I would be out of the country when the blow actually falls
would be, I believe, a fact in our favor indicating non- involvement of Embassy and
USG.†The main aim was to conceal evidence that the U.S. had prior knowledge of the
forthcoming coup in Argentina.
While the released documents portray the U.S. as having knowledge of the coup as opposed to
intervening overtly or covertly, the aftermath shows U.S. involvement was considerable. The
Chile experience, including the murder of a diplomat on U.S. soil, were clearly not deterrents
for U.S. policy in Latin America, as it extended further support for
Videla’s rule. The Videla dictatorship would eventually kill and disappear
over 30,000 Argentinians in seven years, aided by the U.S. which provided the aircraft
necessary for the death flights in the extermination operation known as Plan Condor.
These days evidence no longer has to be presented for a claim because the accusation is a
loyalty test for the Amerikastani Empire and vassal citizens. The more outlandish the claim
the more they have to rush to prove their loyalty so outlandish evidence free claims are far
from as insane as they seem to be. They have a very definite purpose.
I do not want to talk about Covid though I'm Indian and my former teacher died today of
it. I am convinced that discussions about it inevitably work to split the anti Imperialist
resistance.
"I am convinced that discussions about it inevitably work to split the anti Imperialist
resistance."
That is an interesting take - world view.
My view is that:
The world is essentially run by and for and as it pleases wealthy and influential persons
and organizations. They can do this because they have money and power and are thereby able to
control access to money and power. These persons and organizations are the owners and the
effect of their influence where it is somewhat constructive is neoliberalism and where it is
less constructive is destabilization (surely there is a better term).
Beneath them are the operatives which serve them and thereby climb the ladder of wealth
and influence. These are the politicians and beauracrats and media and the military. The
beauracrats are particularly problematic because they are unelected, unaccountable, operate
unmonitored and collaborate.
In this system, the only means for yourselves and family to survive is to serve the owners
- via the structures created to enrich the beauracrats.
When truth is marginalized, the fringe is the only place where it’s
to be found.
So it looks like Russia didn’t pay the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers
after all.
Last summer, the New York Times announced in a front-page
story that “American intelligence officials have concluded that a
Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants
killing coalition forces in Afghanistan â€" including targeting American
troops.â€
The article rang with certainty. “Some officials have theorized that the
Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American
military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian
mercenaries,†it said. The operation, it went on, appears to be
“the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military
intelligence agency, known widely as the GRU. … Western intelligence
officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the
Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and
assassination.â€
This was red meat for congressional Democrats eager to tar Trump with whatever brush was at
hand. Nancy Pelosi issued a call to arms, declaring: “Congress and the
country need answers now.†Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer adopted a tone of
mock disbelief: “Russia gives bounties to kill Americans and the
administration does nothing? Nothing? Donald Trump, you’re not being a very
strong president here as usual.†Joe Biden called the report
“horrifying†and said “there is no bottom to
the depth of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s depravity if
it’s true.â€
Except that it isn’t true now that we know that U.S. intelligence
agencies, according to the White House, view the report with only “low to
moderate confidence†â€" which, in layman’s language,
either means that it could be true â€" kind of, sort of, maybe â€" or
that it’s pure baloney. In any event, it’s hardly reason
to accus a sitting president of “a betrayal of every single American family
with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas,†as Biden did the day
after the story broke.
Charlie Savage, whose byline appears on a number of last summer’s pieces,
offered a series of mealy-mouthed excuses for how he and his fellow Times reporters managed to
get it so wrong. “Former intelligence officials … have
noted that it is rare in the murky world of intelligence to have courtroom levels of proof
beyond a reasonable doubt about what an adversary is covertly doing,†he said . He
described the original intelligence findings as “muddiedâ€
because a key figure in the alleged plot “had fled to Russia â€"
possibly while using a passport linked to a Russian spy agency.â€
So it isn’t the Times’s or the
CIA’s fault, you see â€" it’s merely a hazard
of the trade. But isn’t it’s curious how words like
“murky†and “muddied†never
cropped up last summer when the Times was busily egging Democrats on with stories
charging that the bounties had led to “at least one U.S. troop
death†or maybe even
three ? “Father of Slain Marine Finds Heartbreak Anew in Possible
Russian Bounty,†a Times
headline declared. “American officials intercepted electronic data
showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s
military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,†another
claimed .
All of which was nonsense, as is now clear. Yet not only has the Times failed to apologize
but White House spokesman Jen Psaki managed to spin the story last week so that
it’s still Moscow’s fault and “there
are [still] questions to be answered by the Russian government.â€
Although the corporate media dutifully echoed the Times, a few skeptics did get it right.
Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA official who now heads a group calling itself Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, called the
story “dubious†right off the bat. Scott Ritter, the ex-UN
weapons inspector who blew the cover off charges that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
was bristling with weapons of mass destruction, wrote that
“there is no corroboration, nothing that would allow this raw
‘intelligence’ to be turned into a product worthy of the
name.†Caitlin Johnstone, who covers U.S. politics from Australia yet still does a
better job of it than most stateside reporters,
denounced the entire affair as a “malignant psyop,†adding:
“It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the western
world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most
powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you
without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state
media.â€
Then there’s someone named Dan Lazare who had pointed
out a few obvious facts in Strategic Culture a few days after the supposed Times scoop came
out:
“But the report doesn’t even make sense. Not only have
the Taliban been at war with the United States since 2001, they’re winning.
So why should Russia pay them to do what they’ve been happily doing on their
own for close to two decades? Contrary to what the Times wants us to believe,
there’s no evidence that Russia backs the Taliban or wants the U.S. to leave
with its tail between its legs. Quite the opposite as a quick glance at a map will attest.
Given that Afghanistan abuts the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and
Kyrgyzstan and is less than a thousand miles from Chechnya, where Russia fought a brutal war
against Sunni Islamist separatists in 1999-2000, the last thing it wants is a Muslim
fundamentalist republic in the heart of Central Asia.â€
The fact that the New York doesn’t even consider†the broad
geopolitical backdrop, the article added, “makes its reporting seem all the
more dubious†â€" words that are as appropriate now as they were
then.
None of this matters, however, because Strategic Culture, it turns out, is
“controlled by Russian intelligence†and publishes
“fringe voices and conspiracy theories.†Yes,
that’s what the Times
says , and its source, as usual, is nothing more than unnamed U.S. government sources
whispering in its ear. But if Strategic Culture is so marginal, how is it that it got the story
right while the Times’s own conspiracy tales turned out to be false?
When truth is marginalized, the fringe is the only place where it’s to be
found.
B ack in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic
Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the
information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no
meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by
The New York Times on the so-called
Bountygate story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying
to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story
(originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence
officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,†Greenwald
tweeted .
“So media outlets â€" again â€" repeated CIA stories
with no questioning: congrats to all.â€
Indeed, the NYT’s
original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only
“officials,†yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its
readers of the story’s roots in the
lying, torturing , drug-running , warmongering Central
Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New
York Times
first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s
assessment,†with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no
mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting
that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.
The Daily Beast , which has itself uncritically published many articles
promoting the CIA “Bountygate†narrative, reports the
following:
“It was a blockbuster
story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great
Game†in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central
Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry
from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the
White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.
But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had
“low to moderate†confidence in the story after all.
Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the
story is, at best, unprovenâ€"and possibly untrue.â€
So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of,
because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning.
They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.
In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories
to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy
agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!†and the
news media unquestioningly publish it.
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “ The CIA and the Media
†reporting that the CIA had
covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had
over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as
Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to
report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the
agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too
propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The
New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news
pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Postis a CIA contractor ,
and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on U.S.
intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol.
Mass media outlets
now openly employ intelligence agency veterans such as John Brennan, James
Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall,
Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano,
Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known
CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are
CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like
Tucker Carlson.
This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse.
Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now
is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news
media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if
people’s votes are cast without a clear understanding of
what’s happening in their nation and their world. When their understanding
is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to
be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force
in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever.
It’s just an immense globe-spanning power structure, doing whatever it wants
to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in disguise.
And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements
of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific
things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just
a glance at what the CIA was up to with the
Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.
There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government
agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil
things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by
mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is
comfortable, and for literally no other reason.
The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements
of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of
psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the
thoughts we think in our own heads.
May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those
ofConsortium News.
Wiffle , April 22, 2021 at 17:36
Go to any platform and 98% of commentators’
“opinions†are exact duplicates of what the unholy intel/press
partnership has trained them to say.
Hot Dog , April 21, 2021 at 19:00
Douglas Adams, brilliant author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, invented the
Infinite Improbability Drive to cross vast intersteller distances in a mere nothingth of a
second without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. Following in his footsteps I
adopted the Infinite Improbability Filter, which I use to parse every statement from
governments. I recommend it. Afghans have to be paid by Russians to shoot the invaders and
occupiers of their country ?? Infinitely improbable. Saddam Hussein had nuclear bombs in
aluminum tubes that he could fly over US cities ?? ?? Infinitely improbable. A bunch of guys
in a cave can knock down a skyscraper in Manhattan ?? Infinitely improbable. Joe Biden will
put an end to war ?? ?? Infinitely improbable. The USA is spreading democracy in oil
producing nations ??? Infinitely improbable. Russia won the 2016 election ??? Infinitely
improbable. The CIA are the good guys ??? Infinitely improbable. Believe the corporate media
??? ??? Infinitely improbable. (hXXp://www.earthstar.co.uk/drive.htm). RIP Adams.
Rex Williams , April 21, 2021 at 18:52
“Drug-running�
Well done, Caitlin.First time I have seen any indication of that in the media and even I
have known about it for a decade. Not just drug-running, but the world control of heroin.
Australian soldiers filling in the role of protector of the crops in Afghanistan and also
killing innocent civilians, a matter now under investigation but proven already.
Thankfully, when you list the past members of that infamous group and the controlling role
they enjoy in today’s media, one should not forget the contributions made
by many ex-CIA personnel seen on the pages of Consortium News and what a valuable
contribution they have made to this publication. Many thanks to them.
I am sure that there will be many comments on this subject today.
Hot Dog, I could not agree more, but Hot Damn there is more so much more. Is it possible
that the revelations in this book I discuss might free Julian? The book proves miss use of
secrecy classifications that were used to cover up an act of executive action with extreme
prejudice
The pivotal events that allow the re-opening of the JFK murder case are exposed in Josiah
Thompson’s “LAST SECOND IN DALLASâ€.
Like I have stated already please don’t take my word for this. Read the
book thanks to the Zapruder film and the recordings taken that day of police radios being
still of a quality to allow top notch analysis of them, irrefutable evidence has been
verified. The story of facts have changed the nature of what we now know to be true. Facts
that are provided with their mathematical proof.
If you believe in science, especially science as pursued in this investigation by
individuals of exculpatory character and honesty you will learn the latest scientific
interpretations of the evidence analysis.
Something that, as it turn out cannot be said about the Ramsey Panel.
Thompson’s investigation has neutered the Warren Commission and other
various government attempts, see the House Select Committee effort and the Ramsey
Panel’s efforts to cover up the truth.
This results in exposing the lies the CIA committed to trying to cover up their
involvement. Lies ironically exposed by individuals investigating the murder, lies discovered
in part by the release of JFK documents in 2017. Why did CIA lie from day one, Nov.
22,1963?
DECLASSIFY, DECLASSIFY, DECLASSIFY, Jimm you got it, and the curtain has been pulled back
slightly if not more by this investigation.
Time for all to pressure CIA for the truth.
Thanks CN
PEACE
Anonymot , April 21, 2021 at 10:11
Yes, excellent about the media, but there’s a far greater importance
than that; the CIA IS, yes IS the American government. Certainly, it manages the public
through its controlling influence on the MSM, but its controlling interest in foreign affairs
has been followed by its creeping increasingly into the domestic field, also. It has been
fighting for supremacy over both the State Department and the FBI for years and won the
former hands down via the Bush and Obama years. Hillary at the State Department was the
CIA’s dream! The devastation that followed, from the burning of everything
from Libya to the Ukraine was their wildest wishes come true.
Trump ran on the idea that the intelligence agencies were too invasive and he battled with
them from the beginning, but the CIA knows where everyone’s skeletons are
hidden and Trump has a pile of them. What the CIA then did was point out to him that he had
little room to squiggle or they would put him in jeopardy. As a sop, they allowed him to
spend four years not hating Russia and instead, hating China, climate change, the EU, etc.
while he allowed them to dictate what the CIA wanted done domestically, pipelines, the
border, etc. That made them tower over the FBI.
Now that the CIA helped dump Trump with their media control, they are back in the saddle
with Biden, Russia, the CIA’s favorite target for WW III, is back on the
front burner with its usual hocus pocus stories about the Ukraine, Iran is heating up and so
is China.
But America is now the mosquito attacking the elephant and the CIA with all of its ignorance
and incompetence is back, leading the dance with their partners in the military and the
military industrial complex.
It will be great fun to go out with a bang.
Philip Reed , April 21, 2021 at 10:08
Whatever happened to Carl Bernstein? Where is that guy from Watergate and Mockingbird? Now
turned into a CNN shill.
Sad. Thanks Caitlin for reiterating what most of us know but always needs your persistent
clarification.
Just a short beef with your article. Why did you feel it necessary to include Tucker in your
list of CIA connected media personalities? Especially based on a link to an article that was
an obvious hit piece on Tucker. Tucker has morphed into one of the only MSM personalities who
attacks hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. He reports on subjects that none of the other
corporate media outlets won’t touch out of pure political felty to the
Democratic Party. He used to take sides years ago. No longer the case. He often has Glenn
Greenwald on in recent times and they are obviously simpatico with each other. Give Tucker a
break Caitlin. He’s the only one on MS corporate media who dares to
deviate from the “ chosen narrative “.
Stevie Boy , April 21, 2021 at 08:02
Unfortunately, this is also true of all the members of the ‘Five
Eyes’ sewer.
In the UK, MI6, MI5, GCHQ and the other related institutions infest the MSM. The BBC and the
Guardian being two obvious direct mouthpieces for the security services. And, the CIA run
their operations directly out of RAF bases (Eg. Anne Sacoolas and her husband).
During the World Wars, the security services maybe had a legitimate role in fighting obvious
enemies. However, now we are the enemy !
Can this sewer ever be drained ?
Donald Duck , April 21, 2021 at 06:19
A slow-burning coup has been emerging in the West since the 1990s.; it is now reaching its
full fruition. Political parties, the MSM, the military and spook organisations, state and
corporate bureaucracies, a trillionaire class, film and entertainment industries have
congealed into a massive technocratic centrist blob. Orthodox politics and ideology is now a
thing of the past. These now are the controlling force behind a quasi-religious narrative
that now seems unassailable. Where this is taking us in anybody’s guess.
Maybe into the eugenicist Brave New World or of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
dystopian novel ‘We’ first published in 1924.
Well we’d better wake up soon, or we are not going to wake up at
all.
Tumour: A ‘body’ can be 99 percent healthy yet one
cancerous cell can cause much damage growing into a tumour. Although it realizes that by
destroying the very body it feeds on it is also destroying itself yet that end does not
prevent its greed for reproduction. Most US citizens are well aware where the tumour lies and
its progress.
For those who have the interest I made a short video illustrating the thesis above regarding
the possibility that US is suffering a malignant tumour in three areas.The three areas are
the war machine, wall street, education. It can be found on YouTube. John Hagan.
Dave , April 20, 2021 at 21:17
Ms Johnstone is spot on, as usual. The CIA â€" aka the Christian Investment
Authority â€" is no longer needed. Of course, it never was needed, given that the
USA taxpayer funds more than fifteen other “intelligenceâ€
agencies, including State Dept. intelligence, the FBI, the various military intelligence
groups, etc. The CIA was from its beginning an extra-legal, law-breaking, and often illegal
operative group representing the filth, the sleaze of America’s corporate
and banking empires. If the CIA is defunded, don’t worry about its work
force. They will re-emerge in the media, the think-tanks, the corporate bureaucracies, the
military-industrial complex, and foreign government sinecures. Anyway, good riddance to bad
rubbish…at least an honest and responsible American can hope the CIA is
disbanded as soon as possible.
S.P. Korolev , April 22, 2021 at 04:17
Haven’t heard that acronym before, excellent! My favourite is
‘Capitalism’s Invisible
Army’…
“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these
people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in
the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between
them.†â€" Thomas Jefferson
The trial was pointless .
We knew the outcome . We knew
the threat. Convict Derek Chauvin of murder, or cities will burn . Jurors
surely knew they would be doxxed if they didn’t vote to convict; one
potential juror was
dismissed after he dared mention this fear.
There is a debate to be had about police conduct. I’m not going to back
the blue unconditionally after Charlottesville
, Ashli Babbit , and
the ruthless
manhunt for January 6 rioters. Derek Chauvin would have carried out the same orders against
us. However, what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd isn’t even close to
what happened to white
man Daniel Shaver , gunned down in a hotel hallway by a police officer who was later
acquitted and was paid for his mental suffering . This is about race, not police. I expect police will crack
down further on law-abiding
whites while ignoring black crime .
The howls for Derek Chauvin’s head were primal. I
haven’t heard such cries of triumph since O.J. Simpson was
acquitted .
Of course, Derek Chauvin was hardly a champion of white identity . In 2018, the
Twin Cities Pioneer Press gave a fawning profile to his then-wife, Hmong
refugee Kellie Chauvin. She called her husband a “gentlemanâ€
and “just a softie.†Less than two years later, just three days
after George
Floyd’s death , she divorced him. Her lawyer
told journalists about her “utmost sympathy†for
Floyd’s family.
What’s so striking about the Derek Chauvin case is that it could have
happened anywhere. Every police officer (or white person who lives in a black neighborhood)
knows about the sob stories, the wailing, the lying, and the sudden switch from threats to
begging and back again when blacks face cops. Floyd himself had
tried this soft-shoe routine when he was arrested in 2019. Derek Chauvin and his three
colleagues had probably seen far worse.
Whether a routine arrest like this becomes a cause depends on countless factors. If
the teenager Darnella Frazier had not
taken a video , nothing would have happened. Even with body cam footage, I suspect there
would have been no case. Without a simple image to rouse the simple masses, no one would have
cared.
The sanctification of George Floyd makes this even more surreal. The #MeToo movement took
down powerful men who had made inappropriate jokes or crude gestures decades ago, but a
criminal who spent his last moments on earth trying to rip-off shopkeepers and lying to police
has become a holy
figure , complete with literal claims of miracles. George Floyd’s life
and death were practically a caricature of what the crudest
“racist†would conjure out of a hateful imagination. A white man
with his record would have been treated exactly the
same , but because Floyd was black, journalists made him a saint. Most people let
others
build their reality . Post-white America has a new faith .
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, author of The Bible of Unspeakable Truths and The Joy
of Hate , said that even if Derek Chauvin wasn’t guilty of all charges,
he
thought the verdict was a good thing. “I want a verdict that keeps this
country from going up in flames,†he explained. That’s the
bravery of American conservatives for you. While the country didn’t
“go up in flames,†there were some troubling signs last night
that worse is to come.
The guilty verdict didn’t calm the streets. It didn’t
even calm the politicians. The President of the United States
said that “this can be a moment of significant change.â€
Kamala Harris , whose
parents are immigrants,
intones that this won’t “heal the pain that existed
for generations.†Barack and Michelle Obama
want “true justice,†which requires “that
we come to terms with the fact that Black Americans are treated differently, every
day.†(I don’t think they mean affirmative action.) Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez said the verdict
wasn’t justice and doesn’t want people to think the
system works. Empty-headed celebrities
demand that more be done.
Rep. Tlaib represents Detroit ,
where the already-ruined city saw a huge
increase in homicides and shootings in 2020, just another part of what was undoubtedly the
largest
single-year increase in the murder rate in American history. Almost all the added victims
were black. “The community†doesn’t seem to
care, so there’s no reason politicians should.
Let’s hear no wailing about “black lives.â€
The main victims of the crime wave are black, with victims including
children , partygoers , and funeral guests
. Voters who elect
progressive prosecutors don’t seem to care any more than the
“community†does. Do they prefer bloodshed to good police
work?
Vox
tells us BLM has led to a reduction in “police homicides†in
areas where there were protests. Of course, at least some of these homicides would have
been justified use of force. Yet the very same research Vox cites says that between 2014 and
2019, there were “somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than
would have been expected [absent protests]†in those places. Even if we accept the
unhinged premise that police suddenly stopped gunning down blacks for no reasons, the result of
BLM was thousands of dead blacks â€" and nice houses for the
movement’s co-founder .
Still, it’s not about blacks. It’s about us. Rudyard
Kipling, a poet who wouldn’t get far in our affirmative
action world , wrote :
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: â€"
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet
you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.â€
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
We paid the Dane-geld. We’ve shamefully paid it to people with far less
nobility and courage than the Vikings. The Minnesota protester screaming that riots worked is
right. They worked because they had media backing. If others ran the press, the Cannon
Hinnant case alone could have changed everything. Instead, most whites
haven’t heard of it, nor about the others of
our race butchered every
year .
Our loss of identity leaves us vulnerable to moral blackmail. Whites seem to be in a
permanent state of shellshock. White conservatives want to be left alone, with Tucker Carlson
saying
that what the nation needs “more than anything†is
“a moment to catch our national breath.†Really? Conservatives
know something is wrong, but don’t dare recognize the real problem.
Republicans who collaborate with this rotten system have
shut down even halting steps towards white
identity .
Meanwhile, over the last decade, white liberals have radically changed their views on race
and actively discriminate against
whites . It’s more correct to say that new views were
inserted into their brains through hysterical media coverage of police shootings. Those who
call themselves “very liberal†are hopelessly deluded. A
majority think that
police gun down over 1,000 unarmed black men a year â€" almost 100 times the actual
number.
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/5Bf07CnmFidD/
Statistics can’t compete with sob-stories, and stories give people
meaning. I believe many Americans get their moral purpose for life from them.
There are also specific benefits in keeping the system going. Activists and politicians
build careers. Blacks get a chance of hitting the “
ghetto lottery †(assumed they aren’t killed) and becoming
heroes. It’s a strong incentive to turn a petty scam into an epic showdown.
Journalists who want to lead a social revolution or just get clicks (or both) fall right in
line.
Even as this is written, there is a case in Columbus, Ohio that could be our next George
Floyd-style passion play. Officers arrived at a chaotic brawl and shot a black girl. Body cam
footage shows the girl trying to stab someone before she was shot. Nonetheless, the image the
Associated Press
uses for the story is a Black Lives Matter protest. It looks like yet another case of a
degenerate “community†causing chaos, attracting the police, and
causing a racial confrontation.
The police are going to lie. I’m so thankful that someone from the
family was actually on the scene,†[Aunt] Bryant said . . . .
“The police are going to lie. The police are going to cover up for
themselves. They don’t care. At this point, I feel like
they’re just out to kill Black people. They’re not here
to protect and serve. That isn’t happening. That’s been
over a long time ago. They’re not here to protect and serve.
They’re here to kill Black folks.
Like many other whites, I’m exhausted. Unlike Tucker Carlson , I don’t
think we need a chance to catch our breath or pursue change more slowly. We need radical
change.
Every confrontation between a white officer and a non-white criminal is a potential
riot . The process is corrupt
because judges, jurors, and politicians know that the mob has a veto over the verdict. The rule
of law is dead.
The answer is separation . Without it, this will never
stop.
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/2vb9uMyWhLuW/
The strange reality is that there is almost no difference now between being a notorious
white advocate or any white guy. Derek Chauvin went, in just one day, from a heartwarming
“softie†who married a Hmong refugee to the embodiment of white
supremacy. A few days ago, it was a
soldier who stopped a black guy from accosting women. He had to be chased from his home.
Tomorrow it could be you.
You could try to stop a crime. You could fight back against an assault. Maybe you just look
at someone the wrong way. Maybe you do nothing at all. But if you
donated $10 to a cause the media don’t like â€" or even if
you didn’t â€" you could be the mark for the next great hate
hoax.
I write this reluctantly. Many of us become white advocates kicking and screaming, afraid to
see the truth. We all get here through experience
, usually painful.
However, no matter how far you run, how earnestly you plead, what you say, or even whom you
marry, you will always be white to those with power. That means many despise you. At some
point, you must decide to stand or kneel, and a society that kneels before the memory of a
George Floyd is not one worth serving or saving.
Whites created this country. They sustain it. Without whites, there is no America. America
is an extension of Western Civilization, white civilization, on this continent. Whites
pay to support
people who hate, curse, and sometimes kill us. We gain nothing. They owe everything. What they
have, we gave them, through weakness, folly, and good
intensions .
We deserve reparations for trillions wasted in a 60-year effort to babysit a population that
pays us back with violence and hatred. Most importantly, we deserve liberation from this
albatross that prevents any kind of real national life. Almost any price would be worth paying
if we could be sovereign and free, something our ancestors took for granted.
All the quasi-theological abstractions about “privilege†and
“critical theory†melt away before one immutable truth: They
need us; we don’t need them. Until we have the will to say so, all of us
â€" including you â€" are just one “viralâ€
incident away from ruin.
Don’t know who Gregory Hood is but I do know after reading all of his
essays, that he is the most erudite writer on race issues. I find him fair and balanced
basically sticking to the relevant issue of what ever he is writing about.
“Almost any price would be worth paying if we could be sovereign and
free…â€
This essay is superb…but worryingly, only as far as it goes. What,
very specifically, is the separation plan, and what is the price that might have to be paid
and IS worth paying, and what is the price that is NOT worth paying? The action-plan cannot
be safely specified, because we have already come too far for one to safely specify it.
Already. And worse is to come.
Besides individual ramifications, there is this. In Trump vs. Hawaii, Justice Roberts
declined to overrule Korematsu (the Japanese-internment case). He wrote that Korematsu had
been “overruled by history.†Group internment remains the law
of the land.
And yes, I am too cowardly to speak-out. Again. I was an undergraduate at an elite
University exactly when (late 60s) and where this all started. I (and my friends, and
like-minded faculty members and administrators) were all too cowardly to speak out, and take
action, then. Too much to lose. I apologize to the younger generations.
American Renaissance is a joke. No mention of the (((real problem))) at all. Until we can
discuss and point to the (((instigators))) of our present day horror, we will achieve
nothing. The funny and ironic thing about all of this is, (((they))) will suffer as much as
any White at the hands of the Frankenstein’s monster they created. I guess
Whites can take some small comfort in those just desserts.
The U.S. had a good run while it lasted. My plan is to move on. Whites really should
consider leaving. Problem is when we establish a new area they will just come to move in on
us all over again.
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, author of The Bible of Unspeakable Truths and The Joy of
Hate, said that even if Derek Chauvin wasn’t guilty of all charges, he
thought the verdict was a good thing. “I want a verdict that keeps this
country from going up in flames,†he explained. That’s the
bravery of American conservatives for you.
This is how greed-driven “Jews†(Gutfeld is a partially
Hebrew, greed-driven Globalist and stooge for Conservatism Inc) have destroyed the neoconned
American right, and ultimately the nation. Having no soul or backbone, brushing it all under
the carpet in deference to the Golden Calf markets, Satanic Hebrews like Gutfeld will appease
the irrational mob all day long, and then just prior to collapse, invoke their
“Jewish†heritage and flee to Israel.
This us why they are known as Judenrats , and have always been.
And “liberal†Judenrats are even worse, but had
trouble penetrating the GOP until the ((neocons)) came along and sold it on easy-money
wars.
Anything for a buck, no matter how Satanic. Morality never enters into the equation.
They’re only destroying animal goyim nations, after all.
Whites don’t need blacks, browns or Jewish parasites.
The day we refuse to be intimidated and believe the lies is the day we get our countries
back.
Demand that Congress exercise their constitutional power over money creation.
National strike.
Something.
We need to turn this cancer around rather than waiting for the ship to hit the iceberg. That
will be the financial collapse lurking. It is the perfect opportunity for radical reform
including constitutional admendments. It will be a blessing in disguise: angry masses looking
for soneone to blame. Tptb will try to throw US to the angry masses but we throw them.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
y intractable endemic racial frictions in the USA are being systematically nurtured and
nourished by malign agents embedded in the American governmental and media frameworks.
The behaviour and loyalties of your Senator Maxine Waters makes this abundantly clear,
beyond any ambiguity or doubt.
So there is a cancer, for sure, eating away at the American Republic.
To extend the analogy, the danger with any cancer is permitting it to get past the point
of no return, after which the host cannot possibly recover and is inevitably consumed.
So you better find a cure soon, preferably something holistic which feeds the healthy
constituents and promotes healing at the same time as extinguishing the poisonous
infections.
Otherwise Team America may suffer a tragic and permanent demise.
Don’t forget that Jews own the media and the politicians. The culture
of vicitmhood, cancel culture, “wokeness,†race-baiting and
multi-racialism all either originate in the Jewish community or are strongly supported by
Jews. Jews brought down white, Christian Russia in 1917 and they are in the process of doing
that here. Jews hate us Christian whites and that fact is reflected in their media.
“All the quasi-theological abstractions about
“privilege†and “critical
theory†melt away before one immutable truth: They need us; we
don’t need them. Until we have the will to say so, all of
us…â€
Us who? White liberals don’t want you & don’t
need you & never will accept you, let alone agree any hare-brained scheme to
‘separate’ or have a racial homeland. And
they’re using Blacks to tell you that.
And until we have the will to say so, nothing will result from DOA dreams about a separate
state for “usâ€. A separate quasi-theological state abstraction
based on race will melt away in immutable reality as quickly as the communist belief in a
dictatorship of the proletariat abstraction. You have to make it here; there is no
“us†anymore. Get ready for 2022 or civil war as you will, but
there’s no escape to la-la land.
In the 1960 census, Minnesota was 98.8% white. In 1973, Time magazine ran an article on
the “Good Life in Minnesota.†It really was. We led the nation
in education. In 1960, there were 1,400 violent crimes in the State. Now, it is 13,000 to
14,000. What happened? We had mass migration from Chicago. Our Minnesota socialists offered
generous welfare benefits that attracted Chicago’s blacks and resettled
many refugees from failed countries, like Somalia, to the State. The State went from low
crime, highly educated, to much crime, much disorder, and a feeling we now live in a 3rd
world country. Today, we have armed soldiers with machine guns on the corners of the streets
in Minneapolis. You’d think the woke monsters that censure our news and
who form the Chauvin jury would awake from their idiocy, but instead, they censure the facts,
portray cops as the bad guys, portray drug abusing criminal degenerates like George Floyd as
saints.
It looks like blacks are now untouchable. This can only cause them to increase their
savage ways.
Realistically, wouldn’t it be better if every white person that wanted
to be armed could do so, and do so without a gov’t permission slip? The
reason we can’t pack a piece is because the gov’t says
the police will protect us. I know that’s a lie, do you?
Get rid of street cops like Chauvin because they are the ones that
aren’t there to protect us and end up in Floyd type situations. We should
be demanding our Constitutional rights to carry a weapon if we want to AND have the laws
changed so if we take out some POS there’s nothing to worry about.
Just think if a shop keepers in Portland put a shotgun round through their window through
the same hole made by the brick some antifa or blm POS threw. All the rioting and destruction
would have been cut off in seconds as these miscreants scatter. That’s the
only way to handle the low life trash that currently has immunity via a justice system that
is broken.
Eliminate street cops. Demand our Constitutional rights. Tell the gov’t
to change the laws that allow for deadly force when attacked by some miscreant.
No, Whites cannot police them, just like we cannot educate them. That’s
why the only acceptable solution is to expel them from White countries. Any other course of
action will mean the end of civilization because their presence is incompatible with
civilized life. Fuck them all and their cuckservative fans.
"It's quite stupid to jump in the middle of a highly controversial issue," he told
reporters.
The colorful language from the typically reserved Republican leader shows the dilemma ahead
for the party in the post-Trump era. Many Trump-styled lawmakers are bucking big business and
leaning more heavily into the populist, working-class themes championed by the former president
â€" even as they rely on deep-pocketed business donors to fuel their political
campaigns.
By wading into the debate, McConnell is situating himself in the emerging culture wars on
the opposite side of progressive groups that are pressuring business not to sit by silently on
voting rights, gun violence and other big issues before Congress.
This is sort of like how Chelsea Clinton is thumping for the removal of Tucker Carlson from
Twitter; she doesn't like the back talk, something captured succinctly in this response to her
effrontery:
'Mocking Clinton, journalist Glenn Greenwald simply wrote: "Please remove from the internet
any content that displeases or otherwise causes any discomfort for Chelsea Clinton."'
So, yeah, the same principle applies here. Screw these "whited sepulchres". How I conceive
of them is as follows; those who wish these sepulchres to be venerated take great pains that
they be thickly slathered with an oh so respectable, dissimulating coating of whitewash, but in
reality, as tombs, their genuine function is as repositories for corrupt, rotting meat.
BIDEN-PUTIN. At the US request, a phone call:
White
House take
,
Kremlin
take
. Biden talked tough (Ukraine, “cyber intrusions and election interferenceâ€), Putin mentioned Minsk agreement. No
mention of Navalniy; I guess he’s passed his best-before date. Biden proposed a face-to-face meeting in a third country; I can’t
believe that he will dare meet with Putin: look at his
carefully
scripted press conference
. Probably won’t happen any way after this “national emergency†stuff.
ARCTIC. CNN excitedly discovers “
huge
Russian military buildup in the Arctic
“; amusingly says “The Russian build-up has been matched by NATO and US troop and
equipment movements.†Nope: Russia is far, far ahead of all the others: other than nuclear submarines,
none
has anything to compare
.
SILENCE. Will be the sound that we
hear
in response to Lavrov’s call
for a treaty banning weapons in space. (Not presumably to include the many communications and
geo-locating satellites Russia and others already have up there. Bit of hypocrisy there: not weapons as such but necessary for
many.)
COVID. The EU’s vaccine rollout has been a
dud
and
many countries are trying to obtain the Russian vaccine. CNN, for once, covers the
issue
reasonably evenly
: reactions range from a welcome solution to the problem to those pesky Russians trying to divide us again.
A
German
news outlet says Washington is trying to pressure Berlin
and
Korybko
speculates
that the tension in Ukraine may be related. One watches, somewhat dumbfounded â€" more evidence of things falling
apart.
RUSSIA-TURKEY. I guess it’s time to teach Ankara another lesson: flights to Turkey have been
severely
restricted
. Because of COVID; nothing to do with Ankara’s fiddling around in Syria or Ukraine. They say. Russian tourism is
a big part of Turkey’s GDP. Moscow’s last
shutdown
brought results
.
UKRAINE/USA. Foreign interventions have
a
nasty habit of coming home
. “Far-right extremists see the war zone there as a laboratory where they can gain actual combat
experience to bring back home.â€
Department of State
@StateDept, United States government organization, @SecBlinken: Standing for people’s freedoms and dignity honors America’s
most sacred values. At our best, we stand for freedom and justice for all. Not just here at home, but around the world.
Standing for Freedom and Justice for All?
Setting the Scene for Global Destruction. Now It’s the Arctic, Brian Cloughley, April 13, 2021, Strategic Culture
The
scene-setting by Washington’s military-industrial complex and in the Pentagon’s sub-office in Brussels includes warnings
about a Russian “buildup†in the Arctic, as reported by CNN which quoted a Pentagon representative as saying “Russia is
refurbishing Soviet-era airfields and radar installations, constructing new ports and search-and-rescue centres, and
building up its fleet of nuclear and conventionally-powered icebreakers.†This activity is indeed taking place, and is
happening in Russian sovereign territory, which has nothing to do with the Pentagon or anyone else. It’s not in any way
similar to the U.S. military’s overseas “forward military presence†of some 200,000 troops in over 800 bases around the
world.
USA Today
states that Trump “opened additional bases in Afghanistan, Estonia, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Latvia,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, Niger, Norway, Palau, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Somalia, Syria and
Tunisiaâ€, which seems pretty impressive, but in reality-land is entirely counter-productive. And it seems that Uncle Joe
isn’t going to close down any of them.
“SANCTIONS IMPLICATIONS
As a result of today’s designations, all property and interests in property of these targets that are subject to
U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them.
Additionally, any entities 50 percent or more owned by one or more designated persons are also blocked. In addition,
financial institutions and other persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the sanctioned
entities and individuals may expose themselves to secondary sanctions or be subject to an enforcement actions.â€
All credit cards we use in “the Westâ€, presently, are issued are American institutions, basically. PayPal is American too.
Can’t be that difficult to order institutions, who are within US jurisdiction, to collect whatever James et al. tries to
give to whoever.
Technically all they needed to do is an algorithm that automatically collects everything going to a some person or
institution.
That wouldn’t be the first time US laws are meant to apply extraterritoriality. Maybe based on US law the money didn’t even
need to be returned to the sender? Extraterritorial forfeiture?
Putin promises 'asymmetrical' response to any threats made against Russia, promises those
provoking Moscow will come to regret it
Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a stern warning to anyone threatening the
national security of Russia, telling officials that those responsible will "regret their
actions like they have never regretted anything before."
IMHO NATO and D.C. need to pull their heads out of their arses, for mankind's sake.
The danger posed by the Deep State is that it wields immense power but is unelected and
unaccountable, Phil Giraldi writes.
As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media
that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and
the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The
recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that
includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other
inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of
journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is
capable to doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.
One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer
logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations
simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in
Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure
facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon
Virginia?
To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere,
the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the
conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop
being “one of them.†Well, that might be true in some cases but
the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,â€
and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from
intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will
explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the
dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure
that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.
Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep Stateâ€
actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an
organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet),
which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that
the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is
structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000
people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying),
analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like
terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees
have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is
apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very
small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.
To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency
is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood.
Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president,
secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own
political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which
foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101 st Airborne
are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.
Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the
politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most
particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression
with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those
officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum
pressure†to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent
language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now
appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden,
likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and
Georgia.
The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come
out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new
sheriff in town†and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence
agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was
largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin
forced them to leave the country.
So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI,
but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot
to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of
National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in
carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what
they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former
President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.
It is
now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan
created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against
genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the
meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a
claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the
narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.â€
Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the
United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including
information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in
2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the
“evidence†produced to support that claim is weak to
nonexistent.
I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence
resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were
part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the
country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American
Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New
York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in
the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services,
which they know nothing about, when they “retire.â€
The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields
immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in
secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part
of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep
State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify
its components and how it operates.
Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who
really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping
the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are
employed by the national security agencies. The Deep State conspirators
don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be
done to maintain their supremacy. That is the real danger. The Biden Administration will surely
demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful
than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself. And the real danger
comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with
consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.
Recent events in the world have given me great hope that we might finally emerge from the
century of permanent war. The Great Reset agenda seems to be losing steam and those in charge
of implementing it are losing conviction (with the exception, perhaps, of the very top echelon
in power). At the same time, the ranks of people who are opposed to it and are willing to take
a stand, appear to be swelling.
Since the very start of the great pandemic of 2020, something about the public health
response didn't feel right. It was clear from the measures that were enacted and from measures
that were not enacted that their purpose had little to do with public health. Instead, they
seemed to further a different agenda. Soon we learned that this was all connected to World
Economic Forum's hugely ambitious "Fourth Industrial Revolution" or the Great Reset. But the
agenda and the steps taken seemed rushed, panicked and frankly, hopeless.
Many of the solutions and technologies that would have to be rolled out and ready to use
turned out to be non-existent or only in conceptual stages of development. As months went on,
the events proved this impression correct as we saw the authorities muddle through, destroying
their own credibility in the process. In a very
recent interview, Dr. Rainer Fullmich sated as follows: "We have a whistleblower and she
told us that the original plan was to roll this out in 2050. But then those who are involved
with this got greedy and pulled things forward to 2030 and then to 2020 and that's why so many
mistakes are happening."
I do not believe that the people involved with this got greedy – I believe they
understand the fragility and imminent demise of the financial system which is their key
mechanism of control over all the levers of influence in society. The implosion of that system
would also jeopardize their position of power. So they rushed the Great Reset right off the
back of the 2020 pandemic to try to front-run the collapse and take an iron-fisted control of
things ahead of the unfolding crisis. From their various documents and white papers, it is also
evident that they had anticipated the public pushback.
Conjuring a big new war
As I wrote
last August , they have "surely planned diversions to misdirect our grievances One of the
greatest means of diversion are wars. We must therefore guard against believing that our
enemies are the Russians, the Chinese or whomever the logic of divide-and-rule would pit us
against." Over the last few weeks we've seen a sharp escalation of hostilities in Ukraine
between the Kiev government and the Donbas region. The situation became so tense that many
learned observers saw a military conflagration as inevitable. On 6th April, SouthFront.org
published an article, titled, " War Between
Russia and Ukraine is Inevitable. " Over the weekend I had the pleasure of listening to
Tom
Luongo's podcast with Alexander Mercouris – two among the most learned geopolitical
analysts. While Mercouris was more optimistic about the situation, Tom Luongo expected that the
war would break out.
If we judged by historical precedents, I would entirely agree with Luongo. However, I think
we are living in a different era today. In the run-up to the previous two world wars, leaders
of the key powers (Russia, France, Germany, etc.) were quite naive about the scheming of the
British diplomacy and intelligence services which led the way to both those wars. Wittingly and
unwittingly, they played along and sleepwalked into those conflicts (OK, Hitler didn't quite
'sleepwalk' into war but he had clearly badly misunderstood the British game and thought he
could sue for peace after only limited military engagements).
Today, it is clear that the leaders in Russia, China and certain other nations are
remarkably sophisticated, that their understanding of the great geopolitical chessboard is
crystal clear, and that they know exactly who their true enemies are. They have also understood
that giving their adversaries a war would mean giving them a lifeline. It seems to me that they
have made it an imperative priority not to give them that war.
Russia's build-up of an overwhelming military force on its border with Ukraine was therefore
not a preparation for war. To the contrary, it was a move to prevent one from erupting. As
Victor
David Hanson recently wrote , " Wars often arise from uncertainty. When strong countries
appear weak, truly weaker ones take risks they otherwise would not ." Thus for now, the Ukraine
tensions have abated - but had they faced a weak and indecisive Russia, the leadership in Kiev
and their Western backers might have made a very different gamble and today the war might
already have started. The cabal that's been dominating the western world for the past two
centuries is rapidly running out of time and out of options.
Their plans for the one world government are now in tatters and without a new world war, the
best they can hope to achieve is to carve out a geopolitical block and erect a new iron curtain
around it. The most likely candidate for that block is Western Europe consisting of the old
colonial powers and their satellites. However, even this consolation prize will not be viable.
As the Soviet experience has taught us, even with an iron fist and heavy-handed repression, the
edifice can sustain itself at best for a few decades. But as populations awaken, and awakening
they are, the sun will finally set on their system, probably for good.
The new world
dawning
What's left for the awakened masses to do is to build a better world on the ruins of the old
system. Here is what I wrote last March in an earlier blog post :
"We are witnessing the manifestations of old systems collapsing. And while some of those
manifestations appear fearsome, keep in mind Confucius ' counsel:
A seed grows with no sound. But a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise but
creation is quiet. This is the power of silence grow silently .
Destruction is all around us creating great noise, but you carry a seed that grows silently
within you. Things that emerge from seeds are worthy of our reverence. If we cultivate them
with attention and love, they can grow beautiful and majestic. Dostoevsky said that beauty
would save the world. That beauty is us – you and I – our children, our parents,
our friends, all of us. We can't see what all these seeds will become, but it should be easy to
believe – nature's creations are always so beautiful."
Just the other day while on a hike, I came across a scene that captured this idea
metaphorically:
As we know, the better the seeds are nourished, the more beautiful, more robust and more
fruitful they become. The most important nutrient we need to build a better tomorrow is
knowledge and today we have that nutrient in greater abundance than we have ever had before. It
is incumbent upon us to use it, digest it, learn and apply ourselves to create the best version
of the future that we can muster.
It may just be that this crisis we are living through is a precious gift and that we who are
privileged to witness humanity at this juncture are fortunate in ways we can't yet fully grasp.
We must embrace this and do our very best with it and pass it on to our children and their
children.
Speaking of "hygiene theater," think of all the billions of dollars of hand sanitizer that
has been sold to prevent people from contracting the virus on surfaces. Which the recent
study shows happens in only 1-in-10,000 cases!
Ah, "never mind" .... but the makers of hand-sanitizer are a thankin' you.
Give Me Some Truth 39 minutes ago
My wife is a high school teacher. It's surprising her elbow hasn't fallen off by now from
all the scrubbing she's done of classroom desks. I guess it was good exercise for her.
Demologos 15 minutes ago
Would have been better to repurpose the alcohol as vodka.
The Tsunami of COVID-19 Bullsh!t and disinformation has Fauci's face on it. Looks like
Anthony "surprise outbreak" Fauci took just 13 months to go full circle from no masks needed
outside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI to
everyone should wear two masks, to no mask needed outside. The man is a national
embarrassment...
Didn't this twat say just 2 months ago we should be wearing TWO masks?
Krink26 2 hours ago
Unfortunately yes. So wear three masks...
cpt. carptastic 1 hour ago remove link
Have you been outside of your basement lately? There are idiots driving in their car alone
wearing a mask. I see people riding their bikes with masks on, and people walking around my
block wearing a mask.
So yes, plenty of morons still listen to him.
LetThemEatRand 2 hours ago
And the smug Karens who confronted people for failing to wear masks outdoors will go along
without the slightest twinge of regret for having been wrong the whole time. And they will
still be the first to be vocal and certain of the correctness of their next baseless
Karanical instructions to the rest of us.
in4mayshun 1 hour ago
Dictionary Term
KAREN , noun (karanical, karanny, karenish): to direct exacerbation, frustration, or
criticism at a person or persons while in a heightened state of illogical virtue signaling
panic; the disphoria exhibited when victimizing ones self, while projecting unrealistic fears
onto otherwise innocent bystanders, often fueled by the leftard media. 2. a person who is
Gullible; will accept any and all propaganda delivered from "official" channels. 3. An
insult, often labeling a person who overreacts. 4. A form of entertainment for politically
right-leaning persons
beekeeper 2 hours ago remove link
The highest paid employee in the federal government is an idiot. That explains a lot.
Global Hunter 1 hour ago
All the brainwashed Karens in Canada will pretend they didn't see this as it doesn't fit
their agenda. The masks have become part of their identity.
Suzy Q 1 hour ago
Do Canadian Karens have face masks made to match their outfits like Fancy Nancy does?
The U.S. isn't driven by manufacturing like it once was. Services, which accounted for about
40% of GDP in the 1950s, now account for about 60% of it. Many of the effects of the
Covid-crisis were also unique, such as the way it hammered services like travel and restaurant
spending while touching manufacturing far more lightly.
That makes it easy to spin plausible stories where things go well or poorly. For example,
the work-from-home revolution the crisis helped spark might help businesses run more
efficiently, boosting productivity, raising potential GDP and allowing the economy to run
faster over the long run without overheating. Or,
the thicket of supply-chain problems the crisis caused , and difficulties scaling up
services to meet demand, could cause a more serious bout of inflation than most economists
expect. Other uncertainties abound, including how successful President Biden will be getting
his remaining spending and tax plans passed.
exactly what does the US gain by constantly smacking down russia? better jobs, higher
education, better health maybe? less debt/smaller deficits for US citizens?
why is it in the interest of the US to have open southern borders with tens of millions of
the poor, sick and stupid seeking to join the free **** army of entitled karens - and yet -
antagonize, vilify and belittle fellow white christians of russia?
the US is being invaded as we speak, its tax dollars are being siphoned off to pay for the
poor, sick and stupid flooding in.
it is not russia that is doing the invading.
it is economic migrants answering the siren call of the GOON squad and a criminal cabal
that is building a political base that cannot be defeated.
it is not russia that is bankrupting the US by forcing it to blow out spending beyond its
tax base to defend its citizens.
it is socialist policies like the "green new deal" and the response to a (yet to be
isolated) virus that are bankrupting the nation.
the enemy of the US is within and is ripping the country apart.
the enemy is socialism and the pursuit of the lowest common economic and educational
denominator by mentally challenged morons like the illlegal POTUS (POXONUS) and his illegal
immigrant VPOTUS (VPOXONUS).
looks so real 10 hours ago (Edited)
Colonize Russia and China the elites get off Scott free from persecution of international
crimes committed by them. Their rise is terrifying to the elites soon if not stopped will
impose international law on them, like going after the NazI's after WW2. They must feel the
noose tightening judging by the paranoid attacks. That said recent moves by the west looks
like they are ahead they are attacking on all fronts.
jusstpassinthru 9 hours ago (Edited)
Once again, it seems we're mistaking a corporation for a country. The United States
government and America are two totally different things. At present the US corporate
government is operating totally as a criminal organization.
cui bono? The corporation.
9 Corpus Juris Secundum, § 883
"The United States government is a foreign corporation with respect to a state." 19C.J.S.
Corporations § 883 citing In re Merriam's Estate, 36 N.Y. 505, 141 N.Y. 479(1894), and
affirmed in United States v. Perkins, 163 U.S. 625, 41 L.Ed. 287 (1896).
Putin remarked how to "attack Russia" has become "a sport, a new sport, who makes the
loudest statements." And then he went full Kipling: "Russia is attacked here and there for no
reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like Tabaqui
ran around Shere Khan [the tiger] – everything is like in Kipling's book – howling
along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer".
The – layered – metaphor is even more startling as it echoes the late 19th
century geopolitical Great Game between the British and Russian empires, of which Kipling was a
protagonist.
Once again Putin had to stress that "we really don't want to burn any bridges. But if
someone perceives our good intentions as indifference or weakness and intends to burn those
bridges completely or even blow them up, he should know that Russia's response will be
asymmetric, swift and harsh".
"Tensions skirting wartime levels"
Now compare all of the above with the
White House Executive Order (EO) declaring a "national emergency" to "deal with the Russian
threat".
This is directly connected to President Biden – actually the combo telling him what to
do, complete with earpiece and teleprompter – promising Ukraine's President Zelensky that
Washington would "take measures" to support Kiev's wishful thinking of retaking Donbass and
Crimea.
There are several eyebrow-raising issues with this EO. It denies, de facto, to any Russian
national the full rights to their US property. Any US resident may be accused of being a
Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. A sub-sub paragraph (C), detailing "actions
or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or
abroad", is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia's
positions in international affairs.
Purchases of Russian OFZ bonds have been sanctioned, as well as one of the companies
involved in the production of the Sputnik V vaccine. Yet the icing on this sanction cake may
well be that from now on all Russian citizens, including dual citizens, may be barred from
entering US territory except via a rare special authorization on top of the ordinary visa.
The Russian paper Vedomosti has noted that in such paranoid atmosphere the risks for large
companies such as Yandex or Kaspersky Lab are significantly increasing. Still, these sanctions
have not been met with surprise in Moscow. The worst is yet to come, according to Beltway
insiders: two packages of sanctions against Nord Stream 2 already approved by the US Department
of Justice.
The crucial point is that this EO de facto places anyone reporting on Russia's political
positions as potentially threatening "American democracy". As top political analyst Alastair
Crooke has remarked, this is a "procedure usually reserved for citizens of enemy states during
times of war". Crooke adds, "US hawks are upping the ante fiercely against Moscow. Tensions and
rhetoric are skirting wartime levels."
It's an open question whether Putin's State of the Nation will be seriously examined by the
toxic lunatic combo of neocons and humanitarian imperialists bent on simultaneously harassing
Russia and China.
But the fact is something extraordinary has already started to happen: a "de-escalation" of
sorts.
Even before Putin's address, Kiev, NATO and the Pentagon apparently got the message implicit
in Russia moving two armies, massive artillery batteries and airborne divisions to the borders
of Donbass and to Crimea – not to mention top naval assets moved from the Caspian to the
Black Sea. NATO could not even dream of matching that.
Facts on different grounds speak volumes. Both Paris and Berlin were terrified of a possible
Kiev clash directly against Russia, and lobbied furiously against it, bypassing the EU and
NATO.
Then someone – it might have been Jake Sullivan – must have whispered on Crash
Test Dummy's earpiece that you don't go around insulting the head of a nuclear state and expect
to keep your global "credibility". So after that by now famous "Biden" phone call to Putin came
the invitation to the climate change summit, in which any lofty promises are largely
rhetorical, as the Pentagon will continue to be the largest polluting entity on planet
Earth.
... ... ...
Whatever happens next, for all practical purposes Iron Curtain 2.0 is now on, and it simply
won't go away. There will be more sanctions. Everything was thrown at the Bear short of a hot
war. It will be immensely entertaining to watch how, and via which steps, Washington will
engage on a "de-escalation and diplomatic process" with Russia.
The Hegemon may always find a way to deploy a massive P.R. campaign and ultimately claim a
diplomatic success in "dissolving" the impasse. Well, that certainly beats a hot war.
Otherwise, lowly Jungle Book adventurers have been advised: try anything funny and be ready to
meet "asymmetric, swift and harsh".
Lordflin 10 hours ago
Very true...
Also true... Kipling was a great writer... loved him as a kid... Still remember Rikki
Tikki Tavi... who couldn't...
War is coming... and Putin will get dragged to the party kicking and screaming... but he
has no choice but to show up...
zoghead 16 hours ago
Amazing how calm and composed Putin is when he talks of the West. I admire him for this
phenomenal restraint. No one knows more than him, how the West (politicos and press) bandy
him personally and his country around for absoutely no reason. The Russians are peaceloving
folks, and just want to be left alone.
wootendw PREMIUM 16 hours ago
Putin remarked how to "attack Russia" has become "a sport, a new sport, who makes the
loudest statements." And then he went full Kipling: "Russia is attacked here and there for
no reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like
Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan [the tiger] – everything is like in Kipling's book
– howling along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer".
For those who haven't read The Jungle Book , Shere Khan is US - and the story doesn't end
well for him.
"... THIS is why the U.S. maintains a rotating cast of "evil" countries to demonize. Whether its Russia, China, the DPRK, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela, Americans will always find a way to externalize and blame the internal violence of their capitalist imperialist system on foreign foes. ..."
"... When will Americans get it through their head that the U.S. is NOT a "democracy" that needs to be "defended" because it was NEVER a democracy to begin with. The problem isn't other countries that you've been brainwashed to hate. It is YOUR capitalist imperialist system country. ..."
"... The definition of insanity is watching your colonial, capitalist, imperialist country time and time again inflict mass murder and violence both domestically and abroad and still thinking your country is a "democracy" that must be defended from "authoritarian" countries abroad. ..."
"The danger for American elites is not that the U.S. may become less able to accomplish geopolitical objectives. Rather, it is
that more Americans might begin to question the logic of U.S. global hegemony," writes
@RichardHanania :
THIS is why the U.S. maintains a rotating cast of "evil" countries to demonize. Whether its Russia, China, the DPRK, Iran,
Cuba, or Venezuela, Americans will always find a way to externalize and blame the internal violence of their capitalist imperialist
system on foreign foes.
When will Americans get it through their head that the U.S. is NOT a "democracy" that needs to be "defended" because it
was NEVER a democracy to begin with. The problem isn't other countries that you've been brainwashed to hate. It is YOUR capitalist
imperialist system country.
The definition of insanity is watching your colonial, capitalist, imperialist country time and time again inflict mass
murder and violence both domestically and abroad and still thinking your country is a "democracy" that must be defended from "authoritarian"
countries abroad.
"... "Pro-Kremlin" and "pro-China" are labels which have literally lost all meaning in face of an almost totally unified global response to Covid19, and yet, if Nick has his way, they will be used to destroy any semblance of alternative media in Western society ..."
"... At one point in his incoherent diatribe he even cites "conspiracy theorists" alleged "antisemitism" (without any evidence to back it up). A beautiful example of what Huey Long called "fascism coming in the name of anti-fascism". ..."
"... Nick doesn't care about that. He's just here to promote authoritarianism and chew gum, and he's all out of gum. He's a massive hypocrite. Nothing more needs to be said. ..."
Nick Cohen has an "
op ed on the same subject, urging action against free speech so that "Russian meddling"
doesn't persuade us all to break quarantine and rush outside like lunatics.
He spent the last four years comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin, and now he's arguing that
Facebook and YouTube should do some Stalinist censoring of their platforms in line with
government policy.
Has no one at Graun HQ even noticed that the Kremlin (as well as China) is actually in
lockstep with the West on the issue of covid19? Or does no whisper of reality percolate through
their glassy walls any more?
"Pro-Kremlin" and "pro-China" are labels which have literally lost all meaning in face
of an almost totally unified global response to Covid19, and yet, if Nick has his way, they
will be used to destroy any semblance of alternative media in Western society
His article's headline " Social media no longer tolerates toxic lies? Don't believe a word
of it ", makes the intent plain. He is returning to the theme that big tech companies have to
do their part to make sure Russians and "conspiracy theorists" don't harm our society.
But this time he is overtly demanding wrong-thinking people (specifically David Icke in this
instance) should be un-personed and barred from social media to "protect public health".
At one point in his incoherent diatribe he even cites "conspiracy theorists" alleged
"antisemitism" (without any evidence to back it up). A beautiful example of what Huey Long
called "fascism coming in the name of anti-fascism".
Nick doesn't care about that. He's just here to promote authoritarianism and chew gum,
and he's all out of gum. He's a massive hypocrite. Nothing more needs to be said.
"... "Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it," the British spook told the actress. ..."
"... To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. ..."
"... Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times ..."
"... "We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA," said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; "One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can‟t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are," she added. Salt ..."
"... The level of state involvement in Salt ..."
"... In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization "has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers -- studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors." Many of America's most familiar faces have visited the organization's headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise. ..."
"... "Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don't know it. And I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common," said "Batman" star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself. ..."
"... Democrat-aligned voters' opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA). ..."
With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in the democratic process is reaching new levels,
high enough that even Hollywood legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an
extraordinary interview in Time magazine, the star of "Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," sat down with
the former head of the UK's MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.
"Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic
institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should
organize to prevent it," the British spook told the actress.
Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. "We
are going to have two sharply different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable future. We mustn't be naïve.
We need to retain the capacity to defend ourselves," he told Jolie.
Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world's most notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves
from fake information.
To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and
the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself as a leading humanitarian,
even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time rubbing
shoulders with some of the world's worst human rights abuses.
At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in
the Bush administration, responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world's worst humanitarian and refugee crises
that continue to plague the planet to this day.
Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed
Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a
joint op-ed in The New
York Times with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and Myanmar. "Around the world, there
is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership," they
questionably
asserted, decrying America's "steady retreat over the past decade" that has, "dangerously eroded the rule of law," and condemned
the Trump administration's inaction in Syria that could have "deterred mass atrocities," and reduced the refugee crisis.
Salt
Jolie's collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian
has also worked closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point is the 2010 blockbuster Salt
, where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna Chapman
scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American
relations with Moscow, ending up at the point where some
have declared the beginning of a new Cold War.
" Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change, for most of the 2000s Hollywood had
no interest in evil Russians," Tom Secker, an investigative journalist with
SpyCulture.com told MintPress . "If you watch the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and
Dmitry Medvedev."
Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer
"We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA," said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing
but admiration for the organization; "One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can‟t imagine being put
in a dangerous situation, but they really are," she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical
advisor.
A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for
doing so. "In an effort to ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA," it reads. "For years the Agency has worked
with creative artists from across the entertainment industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors, producers,
screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect
Agency equities," it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, "to help prevent inappropriate negative depictions of
the Agency," in mass media.
Propaganda on an enormous scale
The level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford and Secker's book "
National Security
Cinema " details how, since 2005, documents they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely collaborated
in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes many of the largest film franchises, such as "Iron Man," "Transformers,"
"James Bond," and "Mission: Impossible," and hit TV shows like "The Biggest Loser," "Grey's Anatomy," "Master Chef" and "The Price
is Right."
In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions, such as the use of prohibitively expensive military
equipment, or technical direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the agencies to make sure the power,
prestige, and integrity of these organizations are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.
"The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of "Hulk" (2003), since the changes they
required were so extensive," Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress .
But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major,
secretive pressures that rewrite scripts -- and we find they're all on the side of the national security state. Systematically
scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual
assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated
culture."
Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national
security state, who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better propagandize both Americans and the global public.
However, serious antiwar content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so wholescale interference is usually
unnecessary.
In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization "has long had
a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood
movers and shakers -- studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors." Many of America's most familiar faces have visited
the organization's headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.
In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of Defense even
tweeted out during the Oscars how
proud it is to work so closely with Hollywood to further its own image.
Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show "Jack Ryan," for instance, has the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to
help overthrow tyrannical dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro). John Krasinski, who plays
Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also
described the CIA as amazingly
"apolitical." "They're always trying to do the right thing," he said of them, claiming they "care about the country in a bigger,
more idealistic way."
Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was
arrested
outside Venezuela's largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.
"Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don't know it. And I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover that this
was extremely common," said "Batman" star Ben Affleck in
2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.
https://cdn.iframe.ly/VKxIpdm?iframe=card-small&v=1&app=1 Propaganda works
The effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep state and make the American public more conducive
to supporting the tactics of the CIA and the military. One
academic study found that showing torture
scenes from the hit spy series "24" to liberal college students made them far more likely to support the use of it against anyone
deemed an enemy of the state.
Democrat-aligned voters' opinion of the FBI has been
steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of
the country supports the CIA).
Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party,
it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout
the world. While Jolie might present herself as a champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for destroying
those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.
Feature photo | Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie addresses a press conference at Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh,
Feb. 5, 2019. Photo | AP
"Brussels and D.C. started to suspect that Russia doesn't 'want' Ukraine. What Russia
wants is for this country to rot and implode without excrement from this implosion hitting
Russia. West's paying for the clean up of this clusterf**k is also in Russian plans for
Ukrainian Bantustan"
I hate to admit it, but it sounds like Putin's got a plan.
Volkodav 15 hours ago
"The Russians saddle their horses slowly but ride fast".
- Otto von Bismarck
Malkavian 13 hours ago
"God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America." - also
Otto von Bismarck
jusstpassinthru 10 hours ago (Edited)
"The division of the United States into two federations of equal force was decided long
before the civil war by the high financial power of Europe. These bankers were afraid that
the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economical
and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world. The
voice of the Rothschilds predominated. They foresaw the tremendous booty if they could
substitute two feeble democracies, indebted to the financiers, to the vigorous Republic,
confident and self-providing. Therefore they started their emissaries in order to exploit the
question of slavery and thus dig an abyss between the two parts of the Republic." -- Otto von
Bismarck, 1876
Somehow the US public school system left that part out.
" Time flies like an arrow ; fruit flies like a banana" Groucho Marx
Dragon HAwk 19 minutes ago remove link
Takes a long time to sort thru documents deciding which ones are useless and can be
released. come on man give the FBI a break they are on Our Side. /s
uhland62 9 hours ago
Maybe Ghislaine knows?
And why did the sketches of two 'wanted' in Madeleine McCann case resemble the Podesta
brothers?
novictim 10 hours ago
So the FBI determined that the assassin was Jeffrinovich Epsteinokova, who, according to
signal intelligence and bar chatter, subsequently hung himself, destroying all the evidence
with him.
Which was a real shame because they really wanted to get to the bottom of it.
uhland62 9 hours ago
Good idea, but -ovich is the ending for a make and -kova for a female. Nothing is
impossible these days, but it still reads bizarre, even though the direction is
excellent.
The FBI has produced 68
pages relating to a Democrat National Committee (DNC) worker who was shot dead in 2016 in
Washington, including an investigative summary that appears to suggest someone could have paid
for his death.
... The newly
released files show top Department of Justice officials met in 2018 and discussed Rich's
murder. They reviewed Rich's financial records and did not identify any unusual deposits or
withdrawals.
...One witness saw an individual walking away from the location where Rich was killed but
thought Rich was merely drunk so did not alert authorities . They realized something bad had
happened when they saw a bloodstain on the ground in the same place the following day, as well
as police tape surrounding the scene.
A person whose name was redacted took Rich's personal laptop to his house , according to one
of the newly released documents. The page also indicates that authorities were not aware if the
person deleted or changed anything on Rich's personal laptop.
The FBI came into possession of Rich's work laptop, the bureau
previously revealed .
On another page, it was said that "given [redacted] it is conceivable that an individual or
group would want to pay for his death."
"That doesn't sound like a random street robbery," Ty Clevenger, a lawyer, told The Epoch
Times.
... ... ...
The files were released this week in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Texas resident Brian
Huddleston, who Clevenger represents.
Huddleston sued the FBI after it told him it would take 8 to 10 months in June 2020 to
respond to his Freedom of Information Act request. Huddleston asked the FBI to produce all
data, documents, records, or communications that reference Seth Rich or his brother, Aaron
Rich.
A federal judge earlier this year ordered the FBI to produce documents concerning Rich by
April 23. The FBI identified 576 relevant documents but only produced 68 of them to
Huddleston.
The FBI has declined to speak about the lawsuit. Attorneys for Rich's parents did not
immediately respond to requests for comment.
The documents show that some reporting on Rich's death was wrong, such as an ABC News
report
that claimed the FBI was not involved in investigating the murder.
Clevenger said he found concerning how the government apparently does not know whether
anything was deleted from Rich's personal laptop.
The documents were largely redacted but the information that did get through "shows that
their whole narrative is falling apart," he added. "It's a step in the right direction."
The attorney plans to ask U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, an Obama nominee, to produce
unredacted copies for his perusal. The judge could rule that some redactions were improper.
Defendants could also face repercussions for not producing all of the documents they have
concerning Rich, including fines.
U.S. Attorney Andrea Parker, who is representing the FBI, told the judge in a court filing
this week that the bureau can only process 500 pages per month for each Freedom of Information
Act request. She asked the court to give the bureau additional time to produce all of the
relevant records.
Clevenger told the judge in a court filing this week that the private sector routinely
processes 500 pages or more per day and that the government should be afforded no more than two
weeks to produce the remaining 1,063 pages.
RiverRoad 1 hour ago
Was a reward offered for solving his murder? A robbery murder with a nice reward attached
in DC gets solved pretty quickly. Is it correct that his parents were given a million dollars
by the FBI to agree that questions re his murder are only conspiracy theory?
Buzz-Kill 11 hours ago (Edited)
WoW! The FBI does exist. Wonder when they're gonna get on the Hunter Biden investigation.
Waiting with anticipation! /s
Brazillionaire 2 hours ago
I think Chris has that scheduled for 2025 early/mid summer. But, then again, no reasonable
prosecutor...
Nelbev 12 hours ago
And PETER STRZOK was the FBI agent handling the investigation? Not an important detail to
mention in article, guess he was familiar with Seth case after his work burying the Clinton
investigation, and obvious match, best FBI agent to pick for the investigation.;
Art link https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20690299-fbi-documents-on-seth-rich
He seems to be everywhere doesn't he?
Hillary.....Seth....Trump.....and covering up for dems and attacking repubs 100% of the
time.
LetThemEatRand 12 hours ago
Crazy conspiracy theories for f's sake. It is totally common in a robbery not to take the
guy's wallet.
williambanzai7 PREMIUM 12 hours ago
They solve all the cases involving known terrorist suspects with connections to the FBI.
But everything else is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.
hackjealousy 12 hours ago
If only the attacker had dropped his passport at the scene.
LetThemEatRand 12 hours ago
"A person whose name was redacted took Rich's personal laptop to his house, according to
one of the newly released documents. The page also indicates that authorities were not aware
if the person deleted or changed anything on Rich's personal laptop."
Happens all the time. Wear your mask, take your jab, 9/11, WMDs.
r0mulus 11 hours ago
Yes- why exactly would anybody be handling Rich's personal laptop after he died? And why
would they need to have their name redacted?
Seth Rich's murder was a political assassination. Did John Podesta have Seth Rich
murdered?
Soloamber 12 hours ago
Are the Kennedy's gun shy ?
Podesta wanted an example .
DNC ordered hit .
Seasmoke 12 hours ago remove link
Lost all respect for the FBI.
Tinfoil Masker 12 hours ago
You mean like 58 years ago right?
r0mulus 11 hours ago
At this point, it's been at least 75 years since they deserved any respect. Probably
longer.
lwilland1012 11 hours ago
Durham? What the Hell is a John Durham?
Dr Phuckit 11 hours ago
Summed up in three words
Russia Russia Russia
Redactions don't protect the Innocent, they protect the Guilty.
And it's obvious some people at the FBI were deeply involved.
sbin 11 hours ago
Epoch times
Surprised they didn't blame China.
Almost as believable as Bellingcat Gatestone White helmets or CNN.
DNC scum had Seth Rich murdered.
messystateofaffairs 10 hours ago
FBI released? Thats for disinformation purposes not part of a search for truth.
uhland62 9 hours ago
I thought NSA saves every keystroke people make. So when Seth's keystrokes happened, there
was a computer glitch?
ClamJammer 7 hours ago
Right, but they only use that for evidence to lock up the likes of you and me, not to
expose the crimes they themselves commit. Despite being funded by the tax-payer, i dont think
a FOI request works there.
El Chapo Read 12 hours ago
About as truthful as the 9/11 Commission Report.
Spare me.
NightWriter 12 hours ago
Just like the 2020 Election verdict:
The Deep State finds the Deep State not guilty.
Mzhen 12 hours ago
The Rich murder was a subject of discussion for FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa
Page.
Gringo Viejo 10 hours ago
5 years after the fact. What's the FBI's motive in releasing this information at this
time?
... ... ...
Soloamber 10 hours ago
The FBI motive ...They were told to .
Kanzen Saimin 9 hours ago
It's a clever tactic used by professional liars. If you can distract people for long
enough they will forget about what happened in the first place.
... ... ...
uhland62 9 hours ago
Same thing happened in Australia. What made Australia has been privatized, deregulated,
and digitized. And now we are payment slaves to a handful of global billionaires.
But today we celebrate national militarism day, Anzac Day and we get softened up by the
politicians to accept a war against China.
Rich family representative, Brad Bauman, responding to the conspiracy theorists' claim
that the FBI was investigating the case said, " The FBI is not now and has never been a party
to this investigation. "
" The FBI has indirectly denied investigating the case , which Washington police consider
a robbery gone wrong."
" Snopes.com looked
into the matter and stated: "We were able to confirm the FBI is not investigating Rich's
murder "
Kanzen Saimin 9 hours ago
Wikipedia wasn't allowed to be referenced when I attended university years ago. The
co-founder disavows it now.
Half a decade later, they still can't find their own ***.
That's the way it will stay.
sbin 12 hours ago
Barr and Dunham are looking into it.
gcjohns1971 1 hour ago
Given the sordid, lawless, partisan, and seditious history of the FBI since its founding,
why should anyone suspect their actions here are benign?
ThanksIwillHaveAnother 3 hours ago
Seth Rich supported Bernie Sanders. He saw how Hillary and Dems piped in cheers for
Hillary and detuned the real cheers for Bernie. He saw how the powers behind the curtain
manipulated Hillary into being the nominee. He sent the files to WikiLeaks. Now ask
yourself...would someone want him killed???
Chief Joesph 3 hours ago remove link
Really can't help to think Hillary Clinton had a hand in Rich's murder. Afterall, Rich
knew about her financial affairs, along with the rest of the Democratic party, and was
passing it on to Wikileaks. It also stands to reason why the Democrats would like to see
Julian Assange murdered too. Needless to say, Assange will never see any prospects for Biden
to pardon him.
But what doesn't make sense is if this murder was at the hands of someone wanting to rob
Rich, then why didn't they take his computer along with his wallet? (Neither was taken). The
Police invented that story for public consumption.
Dragon Breath 3 hours ago (Edited)
We're certain that Director Wray at the FIB is burning the midnight oil trying to solve
Seth Rich's murder, Wiener's laptop crimes, Clinton's computer server crimes, and any day now
Hunter Biden's crimes with evidence on his laptop that he "lost" at the computer repair shop.
Wray and the FIB have it all under control...
It's all under control...
DayWear 3 hours ago
"the bureau can only process 500 pages per month"
that is so laughable I can't believe the fbi attorney even agreed to say it.
MaF 33 minutes ago
500/month = 25 pages/day = 3 pages/hr.
Sounds like only 1 govidiot is doing all the "work."
fleur de lis 2 hours ago remove link
As if the FBI would even dare issue parking tickets to the DNC psychopaths whom they know
very well to be the plotters.
The FBI ain't what it used to be.
Only listen to Comey for one minute.
The FBI is just a security guard agency for whomever has the biggest checks and best
benefits.
TheySayIAmOkay 3 hours ago
Smartest criminal in DC. No traffic cams. No store cams. No gunshots. No witnesses. He
even stole stuff that wasn't there.
Vandal 2 hours ago
Yep...and the American Gestapo(FBI) is complicit in the coverup. True Deepstate kind of
stuff.
Blurb 3 hours ago
Let's see here...
The FBI would have benefited from this guy getting killed, and they're the ones
investigating the murder...
The media reports that the FBI are not investigating, which turns out to be a lie.
The FBI somehow ends up with Seth Rich's laptop, even admitting that 'someone might have
deleted something'.
The FBI won't turn over documents, many of which had redacted content.
These are the people we got glimpses of from 2016 to 2020. Now, they are back in the
shadows.
I'll just leave this here, for anyone interested in a level of detail to this case that
most people aren't aware of.
tl;dr: The FBI may have provided the guns used to kill Rich. An FBI agent's car was broken
into the night of Rich's murder, and guns were stolen. Then the FBI ****** with the
timestamps of the event to make it look like it took place after the murder, when in fact, it
took place before.
Suzy Q 3 hours ago remove link
I remember that incident of the stolen guns. Very odd circumstances surrounding that
"theft" of FBI weapons.
TheRealBilboBaggins 4 hours ago
With all the obvious wrong-doing at the FBI, did any FBI agents come forward to denounce
it? Anyone? Anyone?
True Ferris Buehler moment looking for an FBI agent to testify against criminality.
Jung 5 hours ago
It was already a long while back when Julian Assange spoke about Rich and the so-called
Clinton email scandal: justice in the USA is worse than many a banana republic (more
sophisticated). Of course it was not Russia, it was proven to be no hack at all, but a
person, likely Seth Rich. At the end of time we'll know more.
US Banana Republic 4 hours ago
Guaranteed the Deep State (and that includes the FBI), the Clintons and the DNC all had
their fingers in it. But especially Hillary.
JOHNLGALT. 5 hours ago
Never mind. JOHN DURHAM is on the job. SARC.🆗
Fat Beaver 12 hours ago (Edited)
Never anything about the female fbi officer's duty weapon stolen off the front seat of her
suv 2 blocks away from the murder site 2 hours before the murder...she was apparently
shagging up with another agent and parked in his driveway and left the gun on the front seat
with passenger side window completely open...she reported it to police 2 hours before the
murder...this was found by a private investigator about a week after the murder and
published, never to be brought up again.
Nelbev 11 hours ago
It was a .40 caliber Glock and a rifle stolen out of the FBI vehicle, but no casings found
on ground at murder site, thus it is assumed that the murder weapon was a revolver (unless
someone picked up the casings).
Nelbev 11 hours ago remove link
Some informed person at the scene could have cleaned up, but doubt it. Rich was only
wounded at scene, not dead. As I remember there was funny business at the hospital too before
he died. I do not see reporting of the bullet's caliber.
JustSayNo 10 minutes ago
I don't need to read it. I won't believe a thing the FBI says and I also don't believe
that ANY US attorney actually does the job the American taxpayer pays them to do. I've got no
faith in any US attorney and the FBI has been a joke for longer ago than they shot that guys
wife and kid out west. FBI=coverup, period. And everyone knows it.
When I want to know what really happned to Seth Rich, the ZH comments section is actually
my best source
The federal bureaucracy, including the FBI, is now part of the democrat fascist regime in
TOTAL control in washington. Long ago these bureaucrats stopped working for the public and
began focusing on their own agenda where they don't have to answer to anyone. Reality is that
washington is a national Mafioso operation demanding extortion (protection) money from the
public, they serve themselves. The scary part is they don't just demand the protection money,
they demand everyone adhere to politically correct thoughts, speech, and actions, or you'll
be destroyed by the state.
Downhill from here 4 hours ago
What is the FBI's jurisdiction to conduct the investigation? He was not a state law
enforcement officer, he was not an interstate traveler, and was not a federal employee.
TheFederalistPapers 5 hours ago
The FBI is a brand and not a law enforcement agency.
rag_house 5 hours ago
Our government has a long history of having those that commit the crime then perform an
investigation on themselves. Wouldn't be surprised one bit if that is true here.
notfeelinthebern 12 hours ago remove link
All rats lead to Rome, is what they are not saying.
El Chapo Read 11 hours ago
All roads lead to Tel Aviv.
FIFY.
Dumpster Elite 23 minutes ago remove link
The FBI....they make the KGB look like a boy scout organization. Seriously...do you TRUST
the FBI, or do you view them as an enforcement tool of the Globalists.
DeeDeeTwo 25 minutes ago
Whew, it's a good thing Trump drained the swamp and declassified everything.
Totally_Disillusioned 26 minutes ago
The FBI has released their "findings" which we all know from previous "findings" released,
they are a mix of half-truth, manufactured evidence and outright lies. With our Federal law
enforcement, we will NEVER know the truth about matters they "investigate". Several quickly
come to mind such as Russiagate, Kennedy assassination, MLK assassination, explosion Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 9/11, Justice Anton Scalia's murder, Ruby Ridge, Dividian
Compound, as well as so many more to list.
PT 5 hours ago
Only five years late. Who knows what progress they might make in another five years?
fishpoem 16 minutes ago
A person whose name was redacted took Rich's personal laptop to his house If one follows
the bread crumbs through the forest, it will certainly lead straight to the Witch's
house.
Angelo Misterioso 19 minutes ago
Strange that not a single house on that street had any video or ring doorbell or stuff
like that...
The Ukraine Crisis Recedes - But A False Narrative Of It Leads To Bad Conclusions
Some two month ago we discussed how the
U.S. focus on narratives will let it collide with reality . It is certainly not only the
U.S. government that creates narratives, comes to believe in them, and then fails when it is
confronted with reality. Carried by think tanks and media the narrative mold has grown
throughout the wider 'western' world.
On the danger of this development the above piece quoted Alastair Crooke who wrote
:
[B]eing so invested, so immersed, in one particular 'reality', others' 'truths' then will
not – cannot – be heard. They do not stand out proud above the endless flat plain
of consensual discourse. They cannot penetrate the hardened shell of a prevailing narrative
bubble, or claim the attention of élites so invested in managing their
own version of reality .
The 'Big Weakness'? The élites come to believe their own narratives –
forgetting that the narrative was conceived as an illusion, one among others, created to
capture the imagination within their society (not others').
They lose the ability to stand apart, and see themselves – as others see them. They
become so enraptured by the virtue of their version of the world, that they lose all ability
to empathise or accept others' truths. They cannot hear the signals. The point here, is that
in that talking past (and not listening) to other states, the latters' motives and intentions
will be mis-construed – sometimes tragically so.
Over the last weeks we passed through a crisis that easily could have had a tragic
ending.
Since February the Ukraine built up a force to retake the renegade Donbas region in
east-Ukraine by military force. After waiting several week to see the situation more clearly
Russia started to assemble a counterforce backed up by statements that were sufficiently strong
to deter the Ukraine from continuing its plans. The danger of a Ukrainian assault has now
receded.
Today the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu gave orders for the troops to return to their bases.
Much of the equipment though will stay on training grounds near Ukraine until the regular fall
maneuvers later this year take place. That minimizes transport costs and gives a little time
advantage should someone in the Ukraine again have silly ideas.
Russia has clearly won this round.
But that is not how it looks when seen from the 'western' narrative. In that version the
Ukrainian plans and its assembling of heavy weapons and troops near the Donbas border never
happened. The narrative says that the whole incident started as a 'Russian aggression' when
Russia very publicly showed its potential force.
Only a few
analysts on the 'western' side have rejected that narrative and stuck to reality. Dmitri
Trenin of Carnegie's Moscow Center is one who got it right :
In February, Zelensky ordered troops (as part of the rotation process) and heavy weapons (as
a show of force) to go near to the conflict zone in Donbas. He did not venture out as far as
Poroshenko, who dispatched small Ukrainian naval vessels through the Russian-controlled
waters near the Kerch Strait in late 2018, but it was enough to get him noticed in Moscow.
The fact of the matter is that even if Ukraine cannot seriously hope to win the war in
Donbas, it can successfully provoke Russia into action. This, in turn, would produce a
knee-jerk reaction from Ukraine's Western supporters and further aggravate Moscow's
relations, particularly with Europe. One way or another, the fate of Nord Stream II will
directly affect Ukraine's interests. Being seen as a victim of Russian aggression and
presenting itself as a frontline state checking Russia's further advance toward Europe is a
major asset of Kyiv's foreign policy.
Russia intentionally over reacted to Kiev's opening move. It demonstrated its overkill
capability and made it clear to Zelensky's western sponsors that any further provocations would
have extremely harsh consequences.
Those behind provocations that threaten the core interests of our security will regret what
they have done in a way they have not regretted anything for a long time.
Zelensky's plan did not work out. While he did get verbal statements of support from Biden
and NATO everyone knew that those were empty promises.
But for people who have fallen for the false narrative the situation looks different.
Consider this reaction to Shoigu's return-to-barracks order today from a member of the
European Council On Foreign Relations (a U.S. lobby shop in Europe):
I have to congratulate (Flag of United States) @JoeBiden to deterence success and crisis
management. The right warnings were sent to Moscow, the right intelligence to Ukraine. (Flag
of Russia) could not extort concessions, could not provoke. Let's see w. these forces aren't
just redeployed to (Flag of Belarus).
Indeed Biden's order last week to
pull back two war ships that were supposed to go into the Black Sea to support Ukraine was
really great deterrence. But that was not a warning to Moscow. It did not deter Russia from
doing anything. But it did end Zelensky's illusions of U.S. support.
But for Gressel, who like others is stuck to the 'western' narrative, the sense is
different. He really seems to believe that the U.S. deterred Russia from some nefarious plans
which it never had. He ignores that Russia reacted to a Ukrainian provocation in a way that, in
the end, has made NATO and the U.S. look weak.
The danger is that Gressel, and other 'political scientists' like him, may once take up
government positions and use their learned illusions to handle the next crisis. Stuck in the
idea that Russia will retreat if only 'deterred' enough they will lean to measures that are
outright hostile to Russia and may have indeed very tragic consequences. To repeat Crooke's
warning
:
The point here, is that in that talking past (and not listening) to other states, the
latters' motives and intentions will be mis-construed – sometimes tragically so.
Posted by b on April 22, 2021 at 17:25 UTC |
Permalink
The Russians have only partly gone. Heavy weapons will remain in place which can be
reactivated easily. (Particularly in Crimea). However the Russian "Threat" to Zelnsky is
still there. Logically he should now have more difficulty in stirring up the EU and US for
cash and weapons as the "obvious and visble" threat is diminished. I don't think his troops
can stay indefinitely where they are. How can he continue to pay for all his new mercenaries,
new arms?
So how is the MSM going to react? They have a lot of "journalists" around there, waiting
for something to happen.
One obvious factor is that the supply lines of both are within their own countries
(Ukraine for Ukrainians, and Russia for the Russians). Those that have the longest supply
lines are NATO, the UK and US.
An earlier ploy (Attempted violent assasination of Lukashenko and most of the Belarussian
parliament), with Georgia and other close by countries getting involved too, is now unlikely.
BUT the US is desperate to cut the Russian-Chinese access to Europe by any means. What's
next? Plan ....F?
The Western narrative was also very clearly visible in the latest printed "Der Spiegel"
16/2021 (News magazine in Germany). They had a 4 page article about Ukraine with the title
"On the edge of war". They reported at length about russian troops near the border.
Explicitely they wrote about sabre rattling from russia and generally gave the impression
that all action is solely on the russian side and must be seen negatively or with grave
concerns.
But they failed completely to mention Ukrainian troop movements, bellicose rhetoric or even
the Zelensky's decrete 117/2021 from march 23rd with the translated title "Strategy of
de-occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous
Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol".
b... thanks.. yes - narrative and controlling the narrative is what so much of this is
about.... people in the west are not told of ukraines role in any of this or how they are
encouraged by the west... instead what they are told is how russia is building up along the
ukraine border.... in other words only one side of the story is told, and not both..nor is
the timing of all of it shared either... people are literally given a script or narrative
tailor made for brainwashing.. and indeed it works on most...
for an example of this today - i was listening to cbc radio - national news show ''the
currenct''.. the host matt galloway discusses the situation with Mark MacKinnon, senior
international correspondent for the Globe and Mail; Nina Khrushcheva, professor of
international affairs at the New School in New York; and Michael Bociurkiw, global affairs
analyst, formerly with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
I am not so sure that this is over. The Belarus coup was intended to be around May 9.
Zelensky has called up the reserves who ever they might be. He just floated the idea of
banning Russia from the SWIFT so that it is on everyone's mind when Ukraine claims they were
attacked. The NS2 will likely be initially complete in May. The USS Cook and Roosevelt are
waiting for the British boats and will likely enter together. They have not yet given notice
that I have seen. Two frigates are transiting the Suez to join their fellow yanks. I see a
perfect storm yet coming. Shoigu is bright and knows that it looks good to announce the
return to barracks, but he has access to my data plus a ton more. He knows that the situation
is still fluid and volatile.
... But for Gressel, who like others is stuck to the 'western' narrative, the sense is
different. He really seems to believe that the U.S. deterred Russia from some nefarious plans
which it never had. He ignores that Russia reacted to a Ukrainian provocation in a way that,
in the end, has made NATO and the U.S. look weak.
This delusion reminded me of a retort, from an astute observer, to a dopey remark made by
Bush II soon after the start if the Iraq Fake War. Bush said "We're gonna turn EyeRack into
fly-paper for ter'rists! To which the observer responded...
"If Iraq was fly-paper then the only bug that got stuck to it was Bush."
I'm one of the most ardent proponents of the "imbecilization of the West" hypothesis, but
this is clearly a diplomatic style face-saving plausible deniability exit by the West.
The West knows time is not on its side in the Ukrainian issue, and its puppet president
threw a Hail Mary. Russia correctly didn't swallow the bait, and the West fell back as it
knew it would have to, since this was a long shot.
NS-2 is now getting finished, and the Ukraine will consolidate itself more than ever as a
black hole of American resources. The West, however, has one last ace in the hole: the German
Green Party, which is well positioned to form the next government after the December national
elections. The NS-2 certainly won't be finished by then, if the American diplomacy is to do
its job properly, and the Greens will have all the tools at hand to implode the project, thus
giving the Ukraine some more years to ride on American finance by its gas leverage (over
which all its sovereign T-bonds rest at this point).
The key to Ukrainian success is in Germany, not in Russia.
Thank you b.
More and more interesting links for a great nightshift!
Every body must read in UNZ an interview of Israel Shamir (posted it in the afternoon)
Who cares their narrative? Dummkopft
On the decision level a lot of people know the facts.
And Putin and al. ability to build fact is impressive. A lot more than "1962 Cuba missile
crisis".
And Russia got good countermeasures with RT, VK...
One advantage that Ukraine has in military terms is the number of people who willingly and
enthusiastically want to join the army for the sake of de-occupation (interesting why they
invented a replacement of "liberation" that has at least two equivalents with Slavic roots,
perhaps they do not like their current occupations). The best proof is that through their
democratically elected representatives they voted for a huge increase of punishments for
avoiding conscription.
The other proof is that, temporarily at least, Ukrainians abolished the system of rotation
in which units were staying on the fortified lines literally dying of boredom and related
risk (alcohol poisoning, explosions of stills making moonshine, drug overdoses, suicide,
stepping over their own mines, to mention a few), instead the troops to be rotated stayed in
place and the other units joined them nearby.
However, Russian conscripts without the advantage of Ukrainian enthusiasm have better
weapons. Modernizing Ukrainian military is a tall order. The budget barely supports the
troops without modernization, the domestic industry in its better years relied to selling
parts to Russia and buying other parts, remnants of industrial integration of Soviet times.
Supplying them with NATO weapons would require huge gifts that (a) could be unpopular in the
West (b) raise risk of getting the best toys of NATO to Russian in exchange for non-toxic
alcohol, fresh Afghan heroin etc. Did I mention mind-killing military service? And with not
so best toys, like missile boats that are about to be de-commissioned, say, in Canada, they
do not really change the strategic balance.
Thus Zelensky had to be saved from his own rhetoric and gestures -- the aforementioned
change in "rotation". Kiev authorities have a good practice in "never mind". For example,
they utilize fascist radicals to intimidate opposition, but they are what I call "pet
cobras", biting the hand that feeds them is what is programmed into their reptilian minds
that do not have circuits for "friends" and "gratitude". And because of some grievances they
trashed the Presidential place of work, insulting graffiti, broken windows, a broken and
burned door, so three ringleaders got arrested, Parliament spent a few hours being appalled
(after thinking for a week what to say), and now one ringleader was let free, with the
remainder probably joining him soon (one at the time, I think). See folks: nothing
happened.
It is possible that Napoleonic rhetoric and gestures were planned to get a "street cred"
with those hoodlums, or that they were discreetly encouraged by an embassy (some people think
that UK is the leader here, USA having mental problems and distractions). Or some
combination.
Imagine a drunken red nosed music hall comedian having to be taken so seriously. It really
grates that the West has been reduced to this; a Spam headed sham, so pilled up he rattles,
as a President of the FSOA. This obvious, self professed clown, Zelensky as head of an SS
Totenkopf militia. A tiny appendage of Russia called Europe being a colony of a country based
on genocide and slavery, that is reputedly anti-colonial. and a parcel of rogues spanning
three continents and two oceans that gobble up lies like dung beetles on excrement lean back
on their laurels, ill gotten gains, genocide and lies, and feel themselves morally superior
to the victims, actual and future.
Our problem here in the U$A is still the same as always. Mr. Z's announcement on 3/24 about
his nation's intentions to take back the Crimea, were NEVER mentioned on our MSM. It's always
Russian aggression, or China's aggression. It's NEVER our fault.
listen from 22:48" for a good example of script writing and narrative control here... CBC The
Current for April 22, 2021
Posted by: james | Apr 22 2021 18:19 utc | 4
Do you care to take responsibility for our mental health? I did provide a summary of a
"narrative control" article once, I can do it once in few months, should we also have some
rotation here?
@ 14 piotr.... for your mental health i recommend unplugging from all western news outlets
especially with regard to topics like russia, china, venezuala, syria, ukraine and etc.
etc... free! no charge for you piotr! and okay - you're on next shift!
Just a couple of notes:
-The Greens, if they "win" will not win with a majority. That means they will need coalition
partners. Neither the CDU or the SPD is going to go along with their plan to stop NS2. The
Greens, in order to form a govt. will cave in on NS2 and probably other things.
-The Ukies are still fleeing the country to avoid going to the front. The Ukie brass says
as much. These are not soldiers. They are farm kids. At the 1st sign of serious war, they
will all head for the russians with hands in the air.
-V. Putin handled the western MSM narrative quite well, imo, when he said "Those behind
provocations that threaten the core interests of our security will regret what they have done
in a way they have not regretted anything for a long time." It can't be clearer than that.
And that tells me that the ussa is in the crosshairs. This may be the 1st time in history
that the oceans will offer no protection for the warmongers that have been at war for 222
years of 237 years of their existence
The comedian is still flaying about and now trying to play the SWIFT card (last week it
was nuclear weapons, before that it was...). Which, of course, the west will not honor
because it would cripple the west as much or more than RU. I would imagine he needs to change
his undershorts on an hourly basis these days. He is literally caught between a rock and a
hard spot. No more support from DE, FR, US, NATO, TR except good wishes. And demands from his
brain-dead Banderites are only growing more shrill. What's a poor comic to do?
The west is basically done with him and with the show of force by the russians they are
more done with him than before. For his sake, i hope his khazarian passport app has been
approved.
Another failed state compliments of the khazarians in DC.
And the beat goes on.
Being seen as a victim of Russian aggression and presenting itself as a frontline state
checking Russia's further advance toward Europe is a major asset of Kyiv's foreign
policy.
Wait...what?
I think B takes the "administration" too literally -
We know they are lying, they know they are lying, everyone knows they are lying but they are
creating a virtual world in which their behavior is rational and justified. I am not sure why
exactly such an artificial construct is seen as helpful. I suppose you could blame it on the
voting public in the democratic west but we all realize by this point that the west is in no
way democratic in a literal, functional sense - they less than do not give a damn what the
little people think in fact they could well do with a lot fewer of them and really without
the need of actual vote counting.
Possibly to their dog at night under the covers and after many martinis to help them
forget what they are, they admit something like their best attempt at the truth.
Eighthman @10 North Stream 2 will be the last mayor cooperation between Russia and Europe for
the next 10, 20 years. If you had to choose where to put your money, would you put it in a
gas pipeline to China (Power of Siberia) or a gas pipeline to Europe (North Stream2)?
Putin will be the last Russian president who looked west, to Europe; the next president
will look east, to Asia. It's where the money is.
The militias with their supposed morale -- These are the grandkids and great grandkids of
WWII collaborators. Middle class and hipsters. In a country where there basically is no
middle class. Ukraine's economy is at African level. Only source of funds for anything is the
US embassy. There is no agenda but the agenda of 1945. Any from the 2014 crop who had
anything on the ball whatsoever is now my neighbor. What is left in Uke is the dregs.
Hipsters do not hang around in failed states.
Entire political landscape is now centered on US Embassy. Oligarchs might have some input
still, their wealth is out of country and so are they most of time.
Pure political vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. CIA and their hired actors will fill the
stage, journalists will report their antics. They are playing to an empty house. Ukraine
could exist in same zone as Libya or Iraq for a long time. In end nothing fills the vacuum
but Russian Federation.
The Russian military's policy is not to use conscripts on the front lines, that role is
far too important to trust to what are partially trained soldiers, they are used in support
functions. The frontline is manned by professional soldiers.
Zelenski has got $300M of 'stuff' out of Congress this week so that was a result for
him.
Russia might be pulling back but the Ukrainians haven't got the message. My understanding
is there are 50,000 Ukrainian army and 20,000 Ukrainian security forces normally in the
Donbass on the frontlines against 30,000 or so NAF. This crisis came when another 30,000
troops plus heavy weapons were moved into the area. Two days ago OSCE reported that two
artillery battalions of self propelled 122mm and 152 guns have been moved up to the front.
Then apparently earlier this week, two battalions of the Azov were moved up from Mariupol
(their normal area) to the front lines facing Donetsk City. Most of these 20,000 security
forces would be your Nazi wannabe's with the Azov unit being the largest. For those of you
not watching in 2014/5 Azov are the evil bastards that make the Red Army in WW2 Germany look
like angels.
So Kiev is still building an overpowering strike force with a probable objective of a
thrust through the center to the Russian border, splitting the two 'rebel' states. Both US
and UK and no doubt other advisors are on site. The Global Hawk is sucking up data overhead
most days. There is NATO pride on the line here planning and directing. We await a false
flag.
I think b is being a bit too optimistic. Somehow they have to stop NS2, in many ways their
futures depend on transit gas and, as before, they won't care how many have to die to save
their skins and wallets.
@ vk | Apr 22 2021 19:14 utc | 7
I agree Once again Deutschland :
أم كل المعارك
"The Mother of all Battles"
Germany, the biggest Tabaqui, surrounded by many petty tabaquies...
But
Germany, playing the two side...
Germany, so stark and so weak...
Germany, "So jung und doch so alt"
How long can Germany resist the narrative?
How long before the end of the show?
Scroll up on that to the original Aslund post. He is talking about his friends getting
ready to flee to Western Ukraine (or further). Sounds likely enough. Maybe they know
something. And if it is just a routine panic in a failed state amongst a nervous elite, it
only repeats so many times before they all do get out of town.
LOL The greens will not win in Germany. Wait to September and tons of pedophilia scandals to
appear on the media about Robert Habeck, and they will be toast
There's no question that if and when push comes to shove, and the first hints of defeat waft
from the frontlines despite all attempts to spin it otherwise, the Ukrainian people will drop
any sense of unity, fold like a wet napkin, and demand peace. Only a small sector of the
population is highly motivated to fight or turn out the vote for bellicose policy against
Russia.
Do the Greens have vote in Bavaria, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Eastern Germany? I don't think
so. Greens are popular Baden-Württemberg due Kretschmann charisma. If they haven't vote
in Bavaria, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Eastern Germany , so they aren't going to win..
I'm seeing a lot of anglo and america media trying to boost these guys. But I have a bad
feeling that the child book writer Robert Habeck will get a 'Sebastian Edathy'
treatament.
1) Germany has a proportional representative system. You don't have to win it all to
compose the government. The Greens are going to compose the next government; Germany, as a
First World country, is socially stable enough so that we can already consider this a fait
accompli .
2) Laschet's choice as Merkel's successor
apparently backfired . The CSU-CDU will probably lose some 10% more on top of what
they're already projected to lose in these next general elections, mostly to the Greens.
I know how the German system works. Yet I am not seeing the Greens win or compose the next
government if they threaten to cancel NS2. The NS2 is not about the CDU/CSU but about the
German elite interest. No way they are going to give green light to the Greens. Speaking of
someone which city is on the border.
"One advantage that Ukraine has in military terms is the number of people who willingly
and enthusiastically want to join the army for the sake of de-occupation "
Not nearly as motivated as Russians who have dealt with Nazi Fascists once before. What
happened last time is seared into their heads.
Russia has closed the Kerch Strait.
It is reported that the two US destroyers which were to have transited the Bosphorus are
awaiting a pair of Britsh destroyers intended to join them with the flotilla of 4 ships to
enter the Black Sea.
What happens if the UK and US decide on a FONOP which involves a transit of the Kerch Strait
to make a port visit to Ukraine on the Sea of Azov?
Does Putin keep the Kerch closed?
If he stops the flotilla does this become "interference with international right of
navigation?"
Does this asserted interference then result in Ukraine attack? Or a combined NATO / Ukraine
action?
President Putin consulted with Minster of Defense Shoigu and asks if the troops can be scaled
back from the lines of contact without significantly reducing tactical capability. Shoigu
runs the numbers and delivers the answer that Putin was looking for.
Putin is offering an olive branch to Zelensky knowing full well his military can roll over
the eastern and southern borders of Ukraine with impunity.
Does Zelensky do the same? No, instead he calls up reserve boys to make himself look
tough.
A Russian proverb that is most appropriate in this case is this:
Дурна́я
голова́ нога́м
поко́я не даёт.
Translation: The stupid head doesn't leave feet in rest or in other words, no rest for the
wicked.
Sushi @32
How does Putin close the Kerch strait?
The same way as last time, park a largish ship or two in it.
FONOPS don't work so well as battering rams, and the straight is very narrow.
If all of this sound and fury is just to cancel North Stream 2, then it strikes me as a
demonstration of terrible impotence, using a lot of leverage to achieve a fairly small end.
Maybe it is exactly this. But I prefer Rostislav Ischenko's
outline of several actions in several neighboring theaters as a concerted attack on
Russia - with the objective of levering EU away from Russia. And the note here is that this
is not over yet, the game is still afoot.
This larger ploy seems like a far more desirable objective for the US, given the
expenditure of resources, rather than simply the NS2. But it still reeks of impotence, given
how decisively Russia has countered each move (of the ones that are visible - no telling
about the ones beneath the surface).
I have read somewhere, probably here, that if Germany were to cancel NS2 she would owe
Russian billions of dollars in penalties. This project is after all, a matter of contract.
And Germany must abide by its contracts if it is to remain in the business world. Or so it
seems to me. Is Germany going to flout contract obligations with Russia, which supplies it
with fuel for its industry and to stay warm in winter? It seems unlikely.
So, while the US acts to try to split Europe away from Russia, Germany is actually taking
the least divisive path if it finishes NS2. Because if it is forced to cancel, and then to
pay the billions in penalties, surely this causes a far greater split from the US and toward
Russia than otherwise? Simply a split that plays out over a longer time, but much more
finally.
If the US were capable of thinking all this through, it might understand how it pushes
away everything it attempts to grasp. But we have watched for years, with some gladness, to
see that this is exactly the fatal weakness of the US now. It simply doesn't understand
reality, and simply cannot learn from it. Which I guess is b's point. Agreed.
For whomever may be under any illusion whatsoever,
Please,
Do not decieve yourselves,
The truth and the fact of the matter is very readily apparent.
All one must do is look objectively upon the reality of the situation in an honest
manner.
Please do so.
Thank you.
The Sea of Azov is the shallowest sea in the world and has a maximum depth of 45 feet. An
Arleigh Burke destroyer has a draft of 30 feet. Even if somehow NATO ships entered the Sea of
Azov, there are not many places that they can go unless they are very small ships.
The situation around these unplanned military drills reminded me of 8 unplanned military
drills by Iran during the last few months of Mr. Trump's government.
A likely preemptive responses, in both cases, to planned acts of aggression, nullifying
them. Someone might have alerted them too.
b, thanks for this post and thanks for the link to the excellent Alister Crook SCF article. I
am sick of being told what to think and what opinions I should hold by the corporate and
public MSM.
Narrative control is even more pervasive these days and the disconnect with the actual
reality is more obvious.
How can the Anglo/Zionist captive nations talk about 'our values' while the grotesque
horror show and slow motion genocide continues in occupied Palestine?
How can the Anglo/Zionist captive nations politicians talk about 'free trade' and
'liberalised trade'
while enforcing illegal trade embargoes on sovereign nations?
We were told by President Nixon that trade with China was good. Now the BRI railroad is
portrayed as a 'threat' and 'controversial.' Ditto the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia
to Europe.
What is threatened is the cushioned pashas position to dictate hegemonic power throughout
the world.
Australia is among the worst offenders of this moronic groupthink as shown by
distinguished veteran correspondent Hamish McDonald:
During the Siege War against Iran, as well as during the hard times of the pandemic,
Germany established herself to be of no consequence in the political arena or in the
humanitarian one.
If Ukrainian government has indeed mobilized or otherwise has planned a war against
Russia, then her life expectancy in her current format or within her current borders will be
measured in years and not decades.
Russia will not tolerate an armed camp of enemy soldiers in Ukraine, she will be
neutralized as an independent actor shortly.
The 3 Westernmost oblasts might survive as a rump Ukraine but she is finished now.
Yes Fyi, it is shameful. What is not so well known is Australia and the US have a long
history of bullying New Zealand with loud megaphone diplomacy on cherished policy issues. One
example was when the Muldoon [NZ] government recognised the PLO as the legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people many decades ago. Muldoon told them to F off,
diplomatically, of course.
The NZ superannuation fund recently decided to divest from Israeli banks citing
'repetitional damage.' among other relevant things. Another win for BDS but ignored by the
MSM. How could they spin that together with the prevailing narrative? So they ignored it.
At least NZ has some self respect intact. In business it is a good idea to speak the
language of the buyer. I prefer NZ white wine and Australian red wine, particularly Barossa
Valley reds. Now Australia complains about coal fired power stations in China, forgetting it
is Australia selling the coal. NZ can sell the wine.
My guess is that the Russians will create the conditions whereby the US/UK flotilla will
be forced to get stuck in the shallow waters of the Azov Sea. Thus they will achieve their
objective without firing a shot. The Russians know the spots with shallow waters. US/UK not
so much.
I have known, during my life, one single individual from New Zealand. He was the only
English-speaker who could pronounce my name at first try. Very fine chap.
I do not know much about that country except that it is populated by serious Anglicans and
is currently being led by a real statesman, unlike so many other countries.
I wish that country well, they are trying to do the right thing where larger more powerful
countries, such as Germany, UK, or Italy, sold themselves for the proverbial 30 pieces of
silver.
Agreed, your proposition for an immediate fast rush to the Russian border to split the
region is just as likely as a stand down. I would never be trusting NATO or FUKUS.
I am actually an Australian living in New Zealand. Lucky me. The two countries used to
have a deal. Now that deal is observed by NZ but not observed by Australia. I tell some
Kiwis, sometimes young in cheek, 'I am an Australian refugee boat person, fleeing from an
oppressive government.'
As for the population, someone told me years ago ' it doesn't matter which party is in
power, the country is always governed by Scottish Presbyterians so it always has some money
put away'.
Most people can pick my Australian accent.
Race relations is far better in NZ than Australia. Australia is dysfunctional and utterly
corrupt at all three levels of government. My American friend says that is like America. He
moved to NZ. Both countries have rotten bureaucracy, perhaps a British hangover.
Posted by: Grieved | Apr 23 2021 1:48 utc | 37
(Germany will not walk away from NS 2)
Thanks for fleshing out the NS 2 'controversy' with additional "inconvenient truths". My
confidence that NS 2 will proceed as planned is based 90% on Sarah Kelly's 2020 DW Conflict
Zone interview with Niels Annen, Heiko Maas's 2IC. Annen pointed out to (deaf-in-one-ear,
can't-hear-with-the-other) Sarah that Germany's trade relationship with Russia is
"complicated" but works for both. By the end of the interview it looked as though he felt a
bit sorry for Sarah being stuck in the awkward position of being obliged to argue that black
is white.
I thought Zelensky was the Real Deal, a kind of Trump echo. But he ran into the same problem
as Trump - a painful collision with the reality that the President is just a figurehead with
very little Leadership autonomy, if any.
There's a new post-Trump 3-part BBC documentary series called Trump Takes On The World.
Last night, ABC.net.au broadcast the first 1-hour Episode. It begins with Theresa May's visit
to Trump's Washington. There's a formal meeting to discuss UK-US attitude to NATO. Before the
meeting gets into stride, someone in Team Trump mentions that Putin phoned the White House
and Team Trump is working out a schedule for the conversation to take place. Trump hits the
roof.
"What!!?? Are you telling me that Putin, the only man who can destroy the United States,
phoned the White House and you didn't tell me about it!!??"
Trump let's it slide, in deference to the presence of Ms May, but as the implications sink in
he can't leave it alone and delves deeper into this weird event, Ms May's presence
notwithstanding...
I think Zelensky ran into exactly the same problem - believing that the Prez is in charge
of something important but realising that's just theatrical window-dressing. 'Democratic'
window-dressing.
And with the Biden family having influence in Regime-changed Ukraine, it's probably safe to
assume that the same Swamp Creatures which keep POTUS in check also 'manage' Zelenski's
Presidential daydreams.
.. why ..artificial construct ... Passerby @ 18 < deep state reprograms what people
remember about events. planting
misinformation 30 year study
Reprogamming what you remember about an event is technology embedded deep in MSM propaganda.
Passerby goes on to say "we all realize ...the west is in no way democratic in a
literal,
functional sense - they .. do not give a damn what the little people think .. ..fewer of them
.." <=is desirable.
Not true, the west is ~2.6 billion people [+ .010 billion can understand what you posted],
but
<1,000,000 people are in the group you classify as the West. The governed masses are
victim to
Oligarch owned nation states. The nation states are 1) tools, Oligarch's use, to compete in
the
national and international markets (Article II), 2) each nation states includes a
political
system (basically a consumer complaint department) to control the behaviors of the
domestic
flocks and to keep the flocks distributed into their respective pastures.
Basically, the legislative and law making nation states are open air prisons that oversee
the
domestic masses, but in foreign affairs, the nation states are economic weapons used by
Oligarch
to engage in national and international profit making competition.
In other words,the only benefactors of the nation state system are the Oligarchs.
The 21st Century problem humans must resolve: "How to impose democratic principles,
human rights, and self-determination on the nation state system?"
It does not matter if we are talking East or West.
The nation state is the structure that confines the sheep so Oligarch can shear the wool.
A comment elsewhere alleged Lukashenko, of Belarus revealed how the world bank coerced
sovereign nations to engage Corona virus lock down and vaccine scenarios; the same comment
alleged Lukashenko fined the Soros foundation in Belarus 3.0 million for currency violations,
and that the foundation left Belarus?
I am not sure about those claims. Can anyone authenticate those facts or elaborate on them .
?
Biswapriya Purkayast: if the comment isn't the recent one you wrote in the "Kipling" Russia
thread it has probably been snagged by the link-checker and will appear later. It happens to
everyone once in a while, a good idea to write and save any comment in a text editor before
copying and posting it, unless it's short like this one :)
All this fuss around Crimea and Donbass was simply meant to distract attention from
Belarus. (Did the Americans inform Zelensky or did they just manipulate him?)
The destabilization, collapse, invasion of Belarus failed (When did the Russians
understand?), so the players disengage from this point of confrontation to find another one
(Where?).
A key aspect of propaganda is reversing the actual order of cause and effect to make the
enemy falsely look like the aggressor. We see this in the recent case of Ukraine. The western
pressitutes cynically ignored, and failed to report, the unprovoked Ukrainian military build
up on the border, to which the Russian build was a defensive reaction. So that now, as far as
the average western consumer of this propaganda is concerned, the Russian 'aggressor' 'bad
guys' have been forced to back down. All BS of course.
The anti-imperialist movement needs to establish popular online hubs that
aggregate/syndicate the writings of small blogs like this. It is beyond the abilities of any
single blogger to keep up with news events to counter imperialist lies in real time but
collectively they can do it if their work is made available at bigger hubs.
Searched for some info on that fine but that's an old story, the Soros Fund was fined and
expelled from Belarus in '97. But recently there was a debate about the influence in
education by the Soros foundations in the former soviet countries. Probably this has a lot to
do with the comments made by Putin in his address to the Federal Assembly, he remarked that
some history text books do not even mention the Stalingrad Battle while at the same time
enhancing the second front influence in WWII outcome. In other words, the foundations might
be out, there influence is not, money buys wills, and if anything else is missing in those
influence institutions money is not one of them.
UK was hoping to provoke an incident with its ships in Black Sea.
Russia has unilaterally withdrawn, leaving the British ships to cruise about at their
leisure. Pardon me, but might you have any Grey Poupon?
@43 Fyi
To my knowledge Germany has several times delivered medical equipment to Iran during the
ongoing pandemic. I`m not familiar with the details, though. Germany is also heavily involved
with COVAX which is one of the main sources of vaccines for Iran.
It bugs me how even well-informed critics of North Atlanticist regimes and their foreign
policies write and talk of them as "western demoracies". The "Founding Fathers" of the USA
feared nothing more than 'democracy' -- by which they thought of ancient Athens, or the
ancient republic of San Marino or some Swiss Cantons. What they wanted was a republic in the
mold of Ancient Rome, Venice, or like the Netherlands before Wilhelm of Orange, i.e. roled by
rich men's clubs and throuh inherited wealth, be that from land ownership, slave-holding or
from commercial gains and prate privatering -- plus of course exploiting colonies and
controlled marketing opium and its derivats (plus cocaine).
None of the present-day Atlanticist nations call themselves "demomracies" in their name or
constitutions. Only Greece does -- and only because they don't have the romance word
"republic" in their language.
In observation of these linguistic and political facts, the governments of Central Europe
east of Nato, China, Viet-Nâm and Chosôn ("North Korea") all called themselves
"people's republics" -- as opposed the the states further west that were ruled by the elected
representatives of Capital and Big Banking.
@7 vk
I don't know how you come to that conclusion:
he West, however, has one last ace in the hole: the German Green Party, which is well
positioned to form the next government after the December national elections. The NS-2
certainly won't be finished by then ..
In fact, the elections will take place Sep 26. The newly elected parliament will gather
fist time ("constituting") 3-4 weeks after that date, so end of October. After that,
coalition agreement has to be negotiated, usually taking 6 weeks or more (last time, it was
nearly 5 months). If the outcome is as the polls indicate at the moment, with the Greens as
the strongest faction, they will get the task to strike a coalition deal, negotioting
probably with CDU, and SPD plus FDP, for a couple of weeks. A new government, elected by the
Bundestag, is not to be expected before end of December.
Before anybody could act upon NS2, it will be 2022. If the project is not stopped at the
last kilometres, it will be finished by May, 2021. Once operational, the government does not
have much leverage to shut it down.
Yes, I can confirm reports of Australian racism against Indians, Iranians, Lebanese,
Chinese, and Greeks.
One person told me that she was reluctant to travel to the United States because she had
feared similar treatment there.
On the other hand, I know of a case of an abandoned Sikh mother & child (by her
husband) in New Zealand - the social services stepped right in and helped stabilize their
lives.
I think all of these evils start from the top.
The late General MacArthur tolerated racism and the African-Americans under his command
suffered.
Some other Flag Rank officers did not tolerate racism and that made a huge difference to
the experience of the African-American soldiers and sailors under their commands.
Addenda to Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Apr 23 2021 8:11 utc | 53
(BBC doco Trump takes On The World)
Episode 1 spans events from Ms May's Trump White House visit, to Helsinki and Trump's
'betrayal' of AmeriKKKa in his private meeting with Putin.
During the closing moments of the doco (minute 55 - no ads on ABC) a bloke who looks like
Mitch McConnell (R) Kentucky/Tel Aviv, says "That'll be the lar-yest time we ever have a
President meet a foreign leader in private."
Russia has not been idle as the US and allies have been pumping plane loads of weaponry to
the ukropa army, this 'training deployment' was an opportunity for Russia to check, train and
equip the Donbass militia. I would assume that an operation room is already setup, with
spetnaz remaining in place to monitor the lines.
Nato is stumped at both the heavy response and language used by Russia, they are a paper
tiger, and many of their members, would have opted out. The 'Belarus attempted coup' is
another Red line for Russia, thus VVP stressed that Russia has the resources to put a stop to
it.
The Czech hyenas have started walking-back(US State department word) accusations about the
2014 explosions https://www.rt.com/russia/521514-czech-blast-not-state-terrorism/
@B could you look into the issue of the Damona explosion, I believe a poster somewhere
mention a retaliatory attack by Iran on missile factories in Jerusalem, I also doubt it was a
stray AA missile.
All the open source evidence does indeed point to it being an S-200/SA-5 missile.
The Israeli Defense Minister Beni Gantz has officially acknowledged that the attempt to
shoot down the S-200PMT missile failed. Saying that 4 US and 6 Israeli Patriot SAMs & 2
Israeli SAMs "David Sling" missed the S-200 at 17 km.
So, not just IAF but US operated systems as well by the look of it.
This is now a huge problem for the US. At least when the Yeminis hit Saudi the US can
mutter about the quality of the Saudi AD crews but here, in Israel they will be skilled and
well trained crews from both countries i.e. the 'best'. This is very embarrassing for the US
MIC. Their SAMs couldn't even down a Soviet era errant SAM.
No doubt today many countries will be re-evaluating their Patriot AD systems. Indeed,
should existing customers be demanding their money back as the system is clearly shown to be
faulty (it has to be a fault, it can't possibly be a design error)? Turkey and India must be
feeling pleased.
I meant to say that for a while now the Syrian rules of engagement have changed and they are
now able to 'chase the launcher aircraft' home. Before that they were only targeting the
incoming munitions. Putin confirmed the change.
The radars attached to the Syrian S-300s, plus freestanding units, give them a very good
view of where the IAF aircraft are. Even better if they are plugged into the Russians
IAD.
In a way this was a very good warning shot. It did no real damage so no excuse for Israel
to seek revenge yet it must be giving the IAF second thoughts about their current attack
strategy.
I think along with Pres Putin address credit is also due to Lavrov's statement that Ukraine
would cease to exist....a real dose of blunt sober reality.
Here come the englanders turn Zelensky into David the Goliath killer. He will be all fired up
by the British Embassy squad. Black Sea battle next week.
Speaking of dangerous narratives... this is what scares the hell out of me...
"the plan which had been first described publicly in America's two most prestigious
international relations journals, as being a suitable replacement for "M.A.D.": "Nuclear
Primacy". That's the goal for America to blitz-nuclear attack Russia so quickly that Russia
won't have enough time to launch a retaliatory response."
... that there are people who are so deluded they actually believe a nuclear war can be
"won."
Biden's Western Hemisphere foreign policy is not much different from that of Obama's,
Wayne Madsen writes.
Like proverbial bad pennies, the neocon imperialists who plagued the Barack Obama
administration have turned up in force in Joe Biden's State Department. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken has given more than winks and nods to the dastardly duo of Victoria Nuland,
slated to become Blinken's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three
position at the State Department, and Samantha Power, nominated to become the Administrator of
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Nuland and Power both have problematic spouses who do not fail to offer their imperialistic
opinions regardless of the appearance of conflicts-of-interest. Nuland's husband is the
claptrappy neocon warmonger Robert Kagan, someone who has never failed to urge to prod the
United States into wars that only benefit Israel. Power's husband is the totally creepy Cass
Sunstein, who served as Obama's White House "information czar" and advocated government
infiltration of non-governmental organizations and news media outlets to wage psychological
warfare campaigns.
True to form, Blinken's State Department has already come to the aid of Venezuela's
right-wing self-appointed "opposition leader" Juan Guaido, whose actual constituency is found
in the wealthy gated communities of Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates in south Florida and not
in the barrios of Caracas or Maracaibo.
Blinken and his team of old school yanqui imperialists have also criticized the
constitutional and judicially-warranted detention of former interim president Jeanine
Áñez, who became president in 2019 after the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)
government of President Evo Morales was overthrown in a Central Intelligence Agency-inspired
and -directed military coup. The far-right forces backing Áñez were roundly
defeated in the October 2020 election that swept MAS and Morales's chosen presidential
candidate, Luis Arce, back into power. It seems that for Blinken and his ilk, a decisive
victory in an election only applies to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, not to Arce and MAS in
Bolivia.
It should be recalled that while Blinken was national security adviser to then-Vice
President Biden in the Obama administration, every sort of deception and trickery was used by
the CIA to depose Morales in Bolivia and President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In fact, the
Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, claimed its first Latin
American political victim when a CIA coup was launched against progressive President Manuel
Zelaya of Honduras. Today, Honduras is ruled by a right-wing kleptocratic narco-president, Juan
Orlando Hernández, whose brother, Tony Hernández, is currently serving life in
federal prison in the United States for drug trafficking. For the likes of Blinken, Power,
Nuland, and former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, who currently serves as
"domestic policy adviser" to Biden, suppression of progressive governments and support for
right-wing dictators and autocrats have always been the preferred foreign policy, particularly
for the Western Hemisphere. For example, while the Biden administration remains quiet on
right-wing regimes in Central America that are responsible for the outflow of thousands of
beleaguered Mayan Indians to the southern U.S. border with Mexico, it has announced that Trump
era sanctions on 24 Nicaraguan government officials, including President Daniel Ortega's wife
and Nicaragua's vice president, Rosario Murillo, as well as three of their sons –
Laureano, Rafael, and Juan Carlos – will continue.
Biden's Western Hemisphere foreign policy is not much different from that of Obama's. Biden
and Brazilian far-right, Adolf Hitler-loving, and Covid pandemic-denying President Jair
Bolsonaro are said to have struck a deal on environmental protection of the Amazon Basin ahead
of an April 22 global climate change virtual summit called by the White House. A coalition of
198 Brazilian NGOs, representing environmental, indigenous rights, and other groups, has
appealed to Biden not to engage in any rain forest protection agreement with the untrustworthy
Bolsonaro. The Brazilian president has repeatedly advocated the wholesale deforestation of the
Amazon region. Meanwhile, while Biden urges Americans to maintain Covid public health measures,
Bolsonaro continues to downplay the virus threat as Brazil's overall death count approaches
that of the United States.
Blinken's State Department has been relatively quiet on the Northern Triangle of Central
America fascist troika of Presidents Orlando of Honduras, Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala,
and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Instead of pressuring these fascistas to democratize and stop
their genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples of their nations, Biden told Mexican
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he would pump $4 billion into supposed
"assistance" to those countries to stop the flow of migrants. Biden is repeating the same old
American gambits of the past. Any U.S. assistance to kleptocratic countries like those of the
Northern Triangle has and will line the pockets of their corrupt leaders. Flush with U.S. aid
cash, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador will be sure to grant contracts to greedy Israeli
counter-insurgency contractors always at the ready to commit more human rights abuses against
the workers, students, and indigenous peoples of Central America.
Biden is also in no hurry to reverse the freeze imposed by Donald Trump on U.S.-Cuban
relations. Biden, whose policy toward Cuba represents a fossilized relic of the Cold War,
intends to maintain Trump's freeze on U.S. commercial, trade, and tourism relations with Cuba.
Biden's Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Jewish Cuban-American expatriate, is
expected to reach out to right-wing Cuban-Americans in south Florida in order to ensure
Democratic Party inroads in the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections. Therefore, even restoring the
status quo ante established by Barack Obama is off-the-table for Biden, Blinken, and Mayorkas.
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Cuban-American and
ethically-challenged Democrat Bob Menendez, has stated there will be no normalization of
pre-Trump relations with Cuba until his "regime change" whims are satisfied. Regurgitating
typical right-wing Cuban-American drivel, Mayorkas has proclaimed after he was announced as the
new Homeland Security Secretary, "I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the
protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for
themselves and their loved ones." The last part of that statement was directed toward the
solidly Republican bloc of moneyed Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Bolivian interests in
south Florida.
While Blinken hurls his neocon invectives at Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he
remains silent on the repeated foot-dragging by embattled and highly unpopular right-wing
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on implementing a new Constitution to replace that put into
place in 1973 by the fascist military dictator General Augusto Pinochet. The current Chilean
Constitution is courtesy of Richard Nixon's foreign policy "Svengali," the duplicitous Henry
Kissinger, an individual who obviously shares Blinken's taste for "realpolitik" adventurism on
a global scale.
While Blinken has weighed in on the domestic politics of Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and
Cuba, he has had no comment on the anti-constitutional moves by Colombian far-right
authoritarian President Ivan Duque, the front man for that nation's Medellin narcotics cartel.
It would also come as no surprise if Blinken, Nuland, and Power have quietly buttressed the
candidacy of right-wing banker, Guillermo Lasso, who is running against the progressive
socialist candidate Andrés Arauz, the protegé of former president Rafael Correa.
Blinken can be expected to question the results of the April 11 if Lasso cries fraud in the
event of an Arauz victory. Conversely, Blinken will remain silent if Lasso wins and Arauz cries
foul. That has always been the nature of U.S. Western Hemisphere policy, regardless of what
party controls the White House.
Yet after Floyd was cuffed and placed prone on the street, as he himself had requested, and
the officers had called for an ambulance owing to his obvious medical distress, the arrest went
haywire and Chauvin exposed himself to Manslaughter 2, at least, for no plausible or
justifiable reason.
That's because Floyd had been unarmed throughout the incident, was hand-cuffed and incapable
of flight or harming others and was surrounded by four armed officers. Accordingly, he was no
threat to them, nor anyone else, and he therefore presented no policing reason for the extended
knee-hold on the back of his neck -- especially after the surrounding crowd had warned the
police that Floyd was in self-evident dire distress.
So as we see it, Chauvin's conviction on second degree manslaughter does indeed comport with
the Minnesota statute, which reads as follows:
..by the person's culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk ,
and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another;
But here's also where the Woke/Progressive Left narrative goes even more haywire. Floyd's
death was due to an arrest which shouldn't have happened and bad police behavior that has
nothing to do with race .
As to the former point, what should have been on trial in this case was not "systemic
racism", but the Nanny State for grotesquely excessive use of force to enforce a petty
counterfeiting complaint that should not be police business in the first place. It's the job of
retail store owners to handle petty counterfeiters or people who unknowingly pass bad
greenbacks and to absorb the cost of self-protection just like they do in the case of refusing
charges on bad credit cards.
So there is zero reason why George Floyd should ever have been arrested.
As to bad police behavior, you do not have to look too hard to see that it's essentially
color-blind and that being non-black is no guarantee against the same unjust fate.
During the same five-year period in which 104 black lives were lost, a total of 127 unarmed
white lives were wasted by the police, as well. That included 32 white killings in 2015
followed by 22, 31, 23 and 19 in 2016 through 2019, respectively.
Overall, 302 unarmed citizens were killed by the police during those five years, with the
balance accounted for by 71 deaths among Hispanic and other victims. That is, the real issue is
illegal and excessive police violence, not racial victimization.
Indeed, the fact that 34% of these police killings involved black citizens compared to their
13% share of the population is not primarily a sign of racism among police forces, although it
is continuously construed to be.
It's actually evidence that the Nanny State, and especially the misbegotten War on Drugs, is
designed to unnecessarily ensnare a distinct demographic -- young, poor, often unemployed urban
citizens -- in confrontations with the cops, too many of which become fatal.
Alas, young black males are disproportionately represented among this particular
inharms'-way demographic, and that's the reason they are "disproportionately" represented in
the 302 cases cited above.
Stated differently, the Nanny State results in too many black victims of plain old
injustice, even if that is not necessarily the intent of the crusaders and zealots who have
launched the state into anti-liberty wars on drugs, vice and victimless iniquities and
peccadillos.
That is to say, statism in the sphere of law and order is every bit as dysfunctional as it
is in the realm of economics, yet neither conservatives nor progressives recognize it.
Conservatives want way too much law and police empowerment in the service of cultural norms
that are none of the state's damn business in the first place; and progressives confuse the
often brutal and unjust over-reach of law enforcement agencies as a manifestation of racism,
when it is actually just policing expectorations in behalf of inappropriate missions such as
the enforcement of drug laws.
Indeed, the main trouble in America today is not overt racism or even simmering racial
animosity. The real evil is the relentless aggrandizement of state power in the form of the
Nanny State -- a conflation of too many laws, crimes, cops, arrests and thereby opportunities
for frictions between the state and its citizenry and for abuse by the gendarmes vested with
legal use of violence.
In a word, some citizens sometimes can't breathe their last breath because in far too many
instances liberty can't breathe in today's unhinged Nanny State, either.
Among the most recent notorious cases, of course, are George Floyd's fatal arrest for
allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill; Eric Garner (NYC 2014), subdual for selling untaxed
cigarettes; Rayshard Brooks for falling asleep drunk in his car at a subsequently incinerated
Wendy's in Atlanta; and Breonna Taylor of Louisville for being awake in her own apartment at
1:30 AM when police barged in with guns blaring in a drug enforcement raid.
These are anecdotal cases, of course, but the big picture statistics tell the same story. In
the most recent year of complete data (2018), there were 9.3 million arrests in the US
excluding traffic enforcement charges of DUI. Yet among this massive number of arrests, those
involving serious crimes against persons and property accounted for just 521,000 or 5.6%. These
included:
Negligent murder and manslaughter: 11,970;
Rape: 25,205;
Armed robbery: 88,128;
Aggravated assault: 395,800;
That's it. That's the contribution to core public safety delivered by the 850,000 sworn law
enforcement officers in the USA -- about 0.6 arrests per year for serious crimes per law
enforcement officer.
As for what they were doing the rest of the time and the other 8,777,000 arrests that
occurred in 2018, we can say this: They clearly provided more occasion for conflict between
citizens and the gendarmes and for policing actions to go haywire, as in the George Floyd case,
than any additional increments of public safety.
After all, the single largest category of arrests in 2018 was for drug abuse violations,
which totaled 1,654,282.
In fact, while total arrests for all crimes in 2018 were no higher than they were in 1977
despite a 100 million/50% growth in the US population, and had actually dropped from a peak of
nearly 13 million in 2006, the opposite trend was extant in the case of the nation's
misbegotten War on Drugs arrests.
As shown by the chart below, drug arrests in 2018 were nearly at peak levels and were up by
more than 171% since 1977 -- the vast majority of which are made for drug possession generally,
and marijuana possession most often.
War on Drugs Arrests, 1980-2016
Not surprisingly, the next largest arrest category after drugs is one called "other
assaults" for which 1,063,535 arrests were made in 2018. Yet the FBI's own definitions raise
considerable doubts as to why these are even a proper matter for law enforcement by the
state:
Other assaults (simple) - Assaults and attempted assaults where no weapon was used or no
serious or aggravated injury resulted to the victim. Stalking, intimidation, coercion, and
hazing are included.
Then, of course, we have all the victimless and vice crimes, including the following number
of arrests:
Prostitution and commercialized vice: 31,147;
Sex offenses excluding rape and prostitution: 46,937;
Gambling: 3,323;
Liquor law offenses: 173,152;
Curfew and loitering law violations: 22,031;
Vagrancy: 23,546;
Public drunkenness: 328,772;
Disorderly conduct: 329,152;
Forgery and counterfeiting: 50,072;
Weapons carrying and possession: 168,403;
All other offenses: 3,231,700.
The latter huge number tells you all you need to know. The UCR lists 27 enumerated
categories of crime including all of those itemized above–plus the usual suspects like
fraud and embezzlement for which there were about 135,000 arrests in 2018. Yet when the whole
lists is exhausted, 32% of arrests occurred for crimes that are so minor even the FBI is
embarrassed to enumerate them!
So, yes, we do think there are way, way too many crimes and cops, and that decriminalizing
and de-funding law enforcement are the only route to reducing police violence.
But by the same token, the unwarranted and often mendacious racializing of police
malfeasance, which the George Floyd case has brought to a fever pitch, will only insure
retrogression. That is, it will unleash a blind rallying to the defense of law enforcement by
conservative Republicans, blue collar whites and the Foxified Right, thereby insuring a
continuing failure to attack and drastically curtail the Nanny State regime, which is the real
source of policing injustice.
Of course, don't expect Nancy Pelosi or Sleepy Joe to be any more enlightened on the matter
than Sean Hannity. These doddering old fools are now enthrall to the wokedom of the
progressive-Left; and, as Maxine Water's blatant performance as agent provocateur in
Minneapolis the night before the verdict makes clear, these people want the problem to fester
and metastasize, not be alleviated.
Indeed, it is probably not too far fetched to say that Congresswoman Waters' call for a
guilty verdict or else a new round of violent uprisings amounted to an insurance policy. Three
guilty verdicts could not trigger the latter, but a judicial appeal resulting in a mistrial
order surely would.
In other words, the Democratic Party has fallen into the grip of vicious leftist zealots and
power-hungry authoritarians. And the events of the last two days suggest that two dangerously
wrong-headed and ugly narratives -- -race-baiting and climate hysteria -- now stand at the
center of the Dem agenda because the party's two supreme leaders are too weak and too senile to
resist the mob.
So we'd say to the feverish punters of Wall Street, yes, embrace the putative Economic Boom
impending and buy the Greatest Financial Bubble in history, if you must.
But, really, if the events which culminated in Tuesday's triumph of mob justice do not scare
the living bejesus out of you, then, well, you probably deserve to suffer the thundering
financial gotterdammerung which is surely coming your way. 60,006 194 NEVER MISS THE NEWS
THAT MATT
Events of the last few days have made one thing crystal clear: The Democratic Party (and
therefore the nation) is being led by two doddering old fools who should be domiciled in a rest
home, not the Oval Office and the Speaker's Chamber.
How that baleful reality coexists with Wall Street's expectation of an awesome economic
future and stock prices which never stop rising to the sky is one of the great enigmas of our
times. Or maybe it's just because $10 trillion of fiscal and monetary "stimulus" in the past
year can turn the proverbial sow's ear into a silk purse. For a time.
By now, of course, we expect idiocy from Sleepy Joe, especially on the economic front.
Accordingly, at his virtual global summit he will be reading-out from the White House
teleprompter the demented agenda of the Climate Change Howlers. Therein he will promise to cut
greenhouse gases by 50% by the end of this decade, which calamity we can also promise would cut
America's debt-entombed economy to its knees.
That comes after Tuesday's White House contretemps when he first prayed for a guilty verdict
in the Chauvin trial even as the jury was sitting in its deliberations, and then, afterwards,
made the risible claim that this tragedy was the spawn of systemic racism.
In fact, Nanny State over-reach was the underlying cause of George Floyd's arrest and unjust
death -- just as it is the source of most of America's unfortunate violence between police and
unarmed citizens, back, white and otherwise.
In both cases, of course, we find Sleepy Joe fronting for the hideous core agenda -- race
baiting and climate hysteria -- of a Democratic Party which has lost its way and has been taken
over by a camarilla of woke zealots.
Indeed, if there were any doubt about the latter, Nancy Pelosi's truly venal deification of
George Floyd should remove it once and for all.
Yes, the man was a victim, but he was also a drug-addicted criminal lout and grifter, who
deserves no place of honor anywhere; and who's estranged family deserves sympathy and support,
but not a $27 million gift of blood money from a woke city council that takes Minneapolis one
step closer to its demise every time it meets.
"And thank God, the jury validated what we saw, what we saw," Pelosi said in front of the
U.S. Capitol Building as she delivered remarks with the Congressional Black Caucus. "So,
again, thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call
out to your mom. How heart-breaking was that? To call out to your mom, 'I can't breathe.' But
because of you – and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came
out for justice – your name will always be synonymous with justice."
For crying out loud. George Floyd didn't sacrifice himself in the cause of justice. He got
hopped up on a lethal dose of fentanyl and then foolishly resisted arrest when the original
officers on the scene attempted to place him in the backseat of a squad car.
That is to say, the entire narrative culminating in Nancy Pelosi's hideous idolization of
George Floyd has been blatantly wrong from the get go. This case is not about racial justice at
all, to say nothing of striking a blow against so called "white privilege".
For want of doubt, we need to repeat the facts. That's because they show that episodes like
the George Floyd case do not fit the stereotypes of either the BLM and its race-card playing
progressive/Dem allies or, for that matter, the Foxified Right's knee-jerk defense of the
nation's over-empowered, over-budgeted, over-militarized police.
Needless to say, the George Floyd case was not an aberration. During the recent past there
were 38 such police killings of unarmed black citizens in 2015, and then 19, 21, 17 and 9
during 2016 through 2019, respectively. That's 104 black lives lost to the ultimate abuse of
police powers.
Of course, the number should be zero police killings of unarmed citizens. There is no
conceivable excuse for heavily armed cops -- -usually working in pairs or groups -- to cause
the death of lone, unarmed civilians, regardless of race or anything else.
And in this case that was especially so, and not withstanding several mitigating
factors.
For instance, the Minneapolis police officers originally attempted to put George Floyd
safely in the back seat of a squad car after his arrest for the petty crime of attempting to
pass a counterfeit $20 bill, but he resisted them intensely for up to five minutes. That's
plain as day in the other videos -- those from the cops' body-cams.
The trial evidence from these body-cams also showed that during this struggle around the
squad car Floyd said he couldn't breath six times owing to a severe medical reaction to the
fatal level of fentanyl in his blood and the methamphetamines that he had ingested shortly
before the incident. These reactions were surely compounded by the man's "severe" and
"multifocal" arteriosclerotic heart disease and clinical history of hypertension, which the
Minneapolis medical examiner said was the underlying cause of his death.
Yet after Floyd was cuffed and placed prone on the street, as he himself had requested, and
the officers had called for an ambulance owing to his obvious medical distress, the arrest went
haywire and Chauvin exposed himself to Manslaughter 2, at least, for no plausible or
justifiable reason.
That's because Floyd had been unarmed throughout the incident, was hand-cuffed and incapable
of flight or harming others and was surrounded by four armed officers. Accordingly, he was no
threat to them, nor anyone else, and he therefore presented no policing reason for the extended
knee-hold on the back of his neck -- especially after the surrounding crowd had warned the
police that Floyd was in self-evident dire distress.
So as we see it, Chauvin's conviction on second degree manslaughter does indeed comport with
the Minnesota statute, which reads as follows:
..by the person's culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk ,
and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another;
But here's also where the Woke/Progressive Left narrative goes even more haywire. Floyd's
death was due to an arrest which shouldn't have happened and bad police behavior that has
nothing to do with race .
As to the former point, what should have been on trial in this case was not "systemic
racism", but the Nanny State for grotesquely excessive use of force to enforce a petty
counterfeiting complaint that should not be police business in the first place. It's the job of
retail store owners to handle petty counterfeiters or people who unknowingly pass bad
greenbacks and to absorb the cost of self-protection just like they do in the case of refusing
charges on bad credit cards.
So there is zero reason why George Floyd should ever have been arrested.
As to bad police behavior, you do not have to look too hard to see that it's essentially
color-blind and that being non-black is no guarantee against the same unjust fate.
During the same five-year period in which 104 black lives were lost, a total of 127 unarmed
white lives were wasted by the police, as well. That included 32 white killings in 2015
followed by 22, 31, 23 and 19 in 2016 through 2019, respectively.
Overall, 302 unarmed citizens were killed by the police during those five years, with the
balance accounted for by 71 deaths among Hispanic and other victims. That is, the real issue is
illegal and excessive police violence, not racial victimization.
Indeed, the fact that 34% of these police killings involved black citizens compared to their
13% share of the population is not primarily a sign of racism among police forces, although it
is continuously construed to be.
It's actually evidence that the Nanny State, and especially the misbegotten War on Drugs, is
designed to unnecessarily ensnare a distinct demographic -- young, poor, often unemployed urban
citizens -- in confrontations with the cops, too many of which become fatal.
Alas, young black males are disproportionately represented among this particular
inharms'-way demographic, and that's the reason they are "disproportionately" represented in
the 302 cases cited above.
Stated differently, the Nanny State results in too many black victims of plain old
injustice, even if that is not necessarily the intent of the crusaders and zealots who have
launched the state into anti-liberty wars on drugs, vice and victimless iniquities and
peccadillos.
That is to say, statism in the sphere of law and order is every bit as dysfunctional as it
is in the realm of economics, yet neither conservatives nor progressives recognize it.
Conservatives want way too much law and police empowerment in the service of cultural norms
that are none of the state's damn business in the first place; and progressives confuse the
often brutal and unjust over-reach of law enforcement agencies as a manifestation of racism,
when it is actually just policing expectorations in behalf of inappropriate missions such as
the enforcement of drug laws.
Indeed, the main trouble in America today is not overt racism or even simmering racial
animosity. The real evil is the relentless aggrandizement of state power in the form of the
Nanny State -- a conflation of too many laws, crimes, cops, arrests and thereby opportunities
for frictions between the state and its citizenry and for abuse by the gendarmes vested with
legal use of violence.
In a word, some citizens sometimes can't breathe their last breath because in far too many
instances liberty can't breathe in today's unhinged Nanny State, either.
Among the most recent notorious cases, of course, are George Floyd's fatal arrest for
allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill; Eric Garner (NYC 2014), subdual for selling untaxed
cigarettes; Rayshard Brooks for falling asleep drunk in his car at a subsequently incinerated
Wendy's in Atlanta; and Breonna Taylor of Louisville for being awake in her own apartment at
1:30 AM when police barged in with guns blaring in a drug enforcement raid.
These are anecdotal cases, of course, but the big picture statistics tell the same story. In
the most recent year of complete data (2018), there were 9.3 million arrests in the US
excluding traffic enforcement charges of DUI. Yet among this massive number of arrests, those
involving serious crimes against persons and property accounted for just 521,000 or 5.6%. These
included:
Negligent murder and manslaughter: 11,970;
Rape: 25,205;
Armed robbery: 88,128;
Aggravated assault: 395,800;
That's it. That's the contribution to core public safety delivered by the 850,000 sworn law
enforcement officers in the USA -- about 0.6 arrests per year for serious crimes per law
enforcement officer.
As for what they were doing the rest of the time and the other 8,777,000 arrests that
occurred in 2018, we can say this: They clearly provided more occasion for conflict between
citizens and the gendarmes and for policing actions to go haywire, as in the George Floyd case,
than any additional increments of public safety.
After all, the single largest category of arrests in 2018 was for drug abuse violations,
which totaled 1,654,282.
In fact, while total arrests for all crimes in 2018 were no higher than they were in 1977
despite a 100 million/50% growth in the US population, and had actually dropped from a peak of
nearly 13 million in 2006, the opposite trend was extant in the case of the nation's
misbegotten War on Drugs arrests.
As shown by the chart below, drug arrests in 2018 were nearly at peak levels and were up by
more than 171% since 1977 -- the vast majority of which are made for drug possession generally,
and marijuana possession most often.
War on Drugs Arrests, 1980-2016
Not surprisingly, the next largest arrest category after drugs is one called "other
assaults" for which 1,063,535 arrests were made in 2018. Yet the FBI's own definitions raise
considerable doubts as to why these are even a proper matter for law enforcement by the
state:
Other assaults (simple) - Assaults and attempted assaults where no weapon was used or no
serious or aggravated injury resulted to the victim. Stalking, intimidation, coercion, and
hazing are included.
Then, of course, we have all the victimless and vice crimes, including the following number
of arrests:
Prostitution and commercialized vice: 31,147;
Sex offenses excluding rape and prostitution: 46,937;
Gambling: 3,323;
Liquor law offenses: 173,152;
Curfew and loitering law violations: 22,031;
Vagrancy: 23,546;
Public drunkenness: 328,772;
Disorderly conduct: 329,152;
Forgery and counterfeiting: 50,072;
Weapons carrying and possession: 168,403;
All other offenses: 3,231,700.
The latter huge number tells you all you need to know. The UCR lists 27 enumerated
categories of crime including all of those itemized above–plus the usual suspects like
fraud and embezzlement for which there were about 135,000 arrests in 2018. Yet when the whole
lists is exhausted, 32% of arrests occurred for crimes that are so minor even the FBI is
embarrassed to enumerate them!
So, yes, we do think there are way, way too many crimes and cops, and that decriminalizing
and de-funding law enforcement are the only route to reducing police violence.
But by the same token, the unwarranted and often mendacious racializing of police
malfeasance, which the George Floyd case has brought to a fever pitch, will only insure
retrogression. That is, it will unleash a blind rallying to the defense of law enforcement by
conservative Republicans, blue collar whites and the Foxified Right, thereby insuring a
continuing failure to attack and drastically curtail the Nanny State regime, which is the real
source of policing injustice.
Of course, don't expect Nancy Pelosi or Sleepy Joe to be any more enlightened on the matter
than Sean Hannity. These doddering old fools are now enthrall to the wokedom of the
progressive-Left; and, as Maxine Water's blatant performance as agent provocateur in
Minneapolis the night before the verdict makes clear, these people want the problem to fester
and metastasize, not be alleviated.
Indeed, it is probably not too far fetched to say that Congresswoman Waters' call for a
guilty verdict or else a new round of violent uprisings amounted to an insurance policy. Three
guilty verdicts could not trigger the latter, but a judicial appeal resulting in a mistrial
order surely would.
In other words, the Democratic Party has fallen into the grip of vicious leftist zealots and
power-hungry authoritarians. And the events of the last two days suggest that two dangerously
wrong-headed and ugly narratives -- -race-baiting and climate hysteria -- now stand at the
center of the Dem agenda because the party's two supreme leaders are too weak and too senile to
resist the mob.
So we'd say to the feverish punters of Wall Street, yes, embrace the putative Economic Boom
impending and buy the Greatest Financial Bubble in history, if you must.
But, really, if the events which culminated in Tuesday's triumph of mob justice do not scare
the living bejesus out of you, then, well, you probably deserve to suffer the thundering
financial gotterdammerung which is surely coming your way. 60,006 194 NEVER MISS THE NEWS
THAT MATT
"... The élites come to believe their narrative – forgetting that it was conceived as an illusion created to capture the imagination within their society. ..."
"... Harvard Business School ..."
"... "Over the last two decades, I've observed the consequences of our surprising metamorphosis into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioural monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction – that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup, marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge." ..."
"... "This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows [and] which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century. Will the growing recognition of this other coup finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. " (Emphasis added). ..."
The élites come to believe their narrative – forgetting that it was
conceived as an illusion created to capture the imagination within their society.
Pat Buchanan is absolutely right – that when it comes to insurrections, history
depends on who writes
the narrative. Usually that falls to the oligarchic class; (should they ultimately prevail.)
Yet, I recall quite a few 'terrorists' who subsequently to were become widely-courted
'statesmen'. So the wheel of passing time turns – and turns about, again.
Of course, fixing a narrative – an unchallengeable reality, that is perceived to be
too secure, too highly invested to fail – does not mean it will not go unchallenged.
There is an old British expression that well describes its' colonial experience of (silent)
challenge to its then dominant 'narrative' (both in Ireland and India inter alia ). It
was known as 'dumb insolence'. That is, when the performance of individual acts of rebellion
are both too costly personally and pointless, that the silent, sourly expression of dumb
contempt for their 'overlords' says it all. It infuriated the British commanding class by its
daily reminder of their legitimacy deficit. Gandhi took it to the heights. And it his narrative
ultimately, that is the one better remembered in history.
With global Big Tech's control of narrative, however, we have entered into an entirely
different order of things, to those early British efforts at keeping down dissidence – as
Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff succinctly
notes :
"Over the last two decades, I've observed the consequences of our surprising
metamorphosis into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioural
monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction – that I have called surveillance
capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their
surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic
coup, marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power
that accrues to such knowledge."
Narrative control has now jumped the shark:
"This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows
[and] which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define
our social order in this century. Will the growing recognition of this other coup finally force
us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may
have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. " (Emphasis
added).
This clearly represents a quite different magnitude of 'control' – and when allied
with the West's counter-insurgency techniques of 'terrorist' narrative disruption, honed during
the 'Great War on Terrorism' – is a formidable tool for curbing dissent domestically, as
well as externally.
Yet it has a fundamental weakness.
Quite simply, that being so invested, so immersed, in one particular 'reality', others'
'truths' then will not – cannot – be heard. They do not stand out proud above the
endless flat plain of consensual discourse. They cannot penetrate the hardened shell of a
prevailing narrative bubble, or claim the attention of élites so invested in managing
their
own version of reality .
The 'Big Weakness'? The élites come to believe their own narratives –
forgetting that the narrative was conceived as an illusion, one among others, created to
capture the imagination within their society (not others').
They lose the ability to stand apart, and see themselves – as others see them. They
become so enraptured by the virtue of their version of the world, that they lose all ability to
empathise or accept others' truths. They cannot hear the signals. The point here, is that in
that talking past (and not listening) to other states, the latters' motives and intentions will
be mis-construed – sometimes tragically so.
Examples are legion, but the Biden Administration's perception that time was frozen –
from the moment of Obama's departure from office – and somehow defrosted on 20 January,
just in time for Biden to pick up on that earlier era (as if time was uninterrupted), marks one
example of a belief in one's own meme. Whilst the EU's unfeigned amazement – and anger
– at being described 'as an unreliable partner' by FM Lavrov in Moscow, is just another
example of how élites have become remote from the real world and captive to their own
self-perception.
"America is back" to lead, and 'to set the rules of the road' for the rest of the world, may
be intended to radiate U.S. strength, but rather, it suggests a tenuous grasp of the realities
facing the U.S.: America's relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant
well before Biden entered the White House – and, therefore, from before Trump's
(purposefully disruptive) term, too.
Why then is the U.S. so consistently in denial about this?
On the one hand, after seven decades of global primacy, there is inevitably a certain inertia
that would hinder any dominant power from registering and assimilating the significant changes
of the recent past. However, for the U.S., another factor helps explain its' 'tin ear': It is
the wider Establishment's fixation on preventing the 2020 presidential election from validating
the previous one's results. That really overrode all else. Nothing else mattered. The focus was
so all-consuming it obscured notice of the world changing – right there – outside
of their windows.
This is not unique to America. It is easy to understand why the EU was so blind-sided by FM
Lavrov's labelling of the EU as 'unreliable partner' (which it patently has been). As former
Greek FM, Yanis Varoufakis has written from his own experience of trying to get the EU to
listen to his detailed summaries and proposals in respect to his country's financial crisis:
'They (the Euro Group) just sat grim-faced, taking not one jot of notice: I might as well have
sung the Swedish national anthem, for all the attention they gave to my contributions',
Varoufakis later related. His experience was standard EU modus operandi. The EU does not do
'negotiation'. Supplicants, whether Greece or Britain, must accept EU values – and its
'club house-rules'.
The High Representative Borrell, arrived with his long list of complaints, culled from 27
states (some of which have a historical list of complaints against Russia). He read the
demands, and no doubt, expected Lavrov, like Varoufakis, to sit quietly, as he accepted the
reprimands – and the 'club rules' appropriate to any aspirant contemplating some sort of
working relationship with the worlds' 'biggest consumer market'. This is the EU culture.
And then, the following infamous press conference at which the EU was called 'unreliable'.
Anyone who has attended a EU decision-making making body, knows the protocol – but let a
former EU high official describe it: The
Council handles Chefsachen – the stuff of high politics, not low regulation
– in closed sessions. At these, van Middelaar can report, all 28 heads of government
(pre-Brexit) call each other by their first names, and may find themselves agreeing to
decisions they had never even imagined beforehand – before emerging together for a
beaming 'family photograph' in front of the cameras of the one thousand reporters assembled to
hear their tidings, whose presence makes 'failure impossible', since every summit (with just
one upsetting exception) ends with a message of common hope and resolve.
Lavrov, like some 'rough-diamond' distant family relative, didn't know to behave in polite
EU society; you don't call the EU names. Oh no!
Varoufakis
explains : "Unlike nation states that emerge as stabilisers of conflicts between social
classes and groups, the EU was created as a cartel with a remit to stabilise the profit margins
of the large, central European corporations. (It began life as the European Coal and Steel
Community). "Seen through this prism, the EU's stubborn faithfulness to failed practices begins
to make sense. Cartels are reasonably good at distributing monopoly profits between oligarchs,
but terrible at distributing losses". We also know that, unlike proper states, cartels will
resist any democratisation or outside input into their tight circle of decision-making.
This incident in Moscow might all be faintly amusing, except for the fact that it underlines
how Brussels' navel-gazing (in a separate way to that of Team Biden), produces a similar
result: It becomes out of touch with the world beyond. It 'listens', but does not hear. The
West's hostile strategy to Russia, as Pepe Escobar has observed in his
strategic analysis of Russia's position, is conditioned on the notion that Russia has nowhere
else to go – and therefore must feel pleased and honoured by the notion of the EU
condescending to push-out an 'octopus tentacle' towards Eurasia. Whereas, now, with the centre
of geo-economic gravity shifting to China and East Asia, it is realistically more a question of
whether the Greater Eurasian heartland, with its 2.2 billion population, feels it worthwhile to
extend its tentacle out towards the rule-bound EU.
This is no small matter: The EU having a hissy-fit over Lavrov's put-down of the EU in
Moscow is one thing. The potential however, for the U.S. to listen, but not hear, on Russia and
China, is quite another. Mis-hearing, mis-conceiving these two states, touches on matters of
war and peace.
...The view from Moscow is very different, fueled by a sense of grievance that the West is
determined to weaken Russia and stoke a pro-democracy "color" revolution to topple Putin. By
this reading, the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies have repeatedly
betrayed Russia, abandoning missile treaties and expanding ever closer to its borders, since
Putin became the first foreign leader to offer help to Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001
terrorist attacks in the U.S.
"The Kremlin feels in a fortress, under sustained pressure from the U.S. and the West in
general. With its aggressive actions, Russia is trying to deter the U.S., but Washington is
just responding with stronger measures," said Oksana Antonenko, a director at Control Risks in
London. "We are certainly at the most dangerous point since the Soviet Union collapsed."
... ... ...
On Wednesday, the day before Russia announced its troop withdrawal, Putin warned rival
nations not to cross Russia's "red line" in his annual state-of-the-nation speech, saying
pressure on his country had become "a new form of sport." But he also held out an olive branch
of talks on strategic security.
... ... ...
Prosecutors this month asked a Moscow court to declare Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation
and his campaign offices to be extremist organizations, which could subject staff and
volunteers to criminal prosecution and imprisonment. They accused them of plotting to stage a
"color" revolution in Russia on the instructions of unnamed foreign states.
A top Putin ally, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament,
described Navalny as a "tool of American policy" that allowed himself to be used for
interfering in Russia's domestic affairs.
... ... ...
In his call with Biden, Putin raised an alleged plot to stage a coup against Belarusian
President Alexander Lukashenko hatched in consultation with the U.S., according to the Kremlin.
Lukashenko, who's ruled Russia's neighbor and closest ally since 1994, has faced months of
pro-democracy opposition protests since disputed elections last August.
"The practice of organizing coups and planning political assassinations, including of top
officials, that's going too far," Putin said in his annual address. "They've overstepped all
boundaries."
In talks with Lukashenko in Moscow next day, Putin said Russia is tightening military and
security cooperation with Belarus.
... ... ...
Putin insisted in Wednesday's address that "we really don't want to burn bridges" with the
West, before adding that anyone who mistakes Russian intentions for weakness "must know that
Russia's response will be asymmetrical, swift and tough."
The enrollment of corporations in the scheme to vaccinate the population and to require such
vaccinations for social participation should not be considered in terms of the prerogatives of
private organizations but as part of the incursions of the state into private industry. What we
are witnessing, and should be resisting, is a merger into a corporate-government complex,
wherein government can bypass the legislative branch and enforce unpopular mandates by
colluding with corporations and other organizations to make "policy."
Perhaps the most egregious element of this corporate-state stranglehold on the population is
the participation of Big Digital and the mainstream media. Big Digital conglomerates eliminate
media outlets and voices that challenge the official covid narrative, including information
about lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations, although the official narrative has not only
changed willy-nilly but also has been proven factually wrong, as well as socially devastating.
Big Digital and the media serve both the state and Big Pharma by eliminating oppositional views
regarding the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, and by pushing fear-inducing propaganda about the
virus and its ever-proliferating variants.
As I have written in Google
Archipelago , Big Digital must be considered an agent of a leftist authoritarian state --
as a " governmentality " or state
apparatus functioning on behalf and as part of the state itself. "Governmentality" is a term
that should become well known in the coming days and weeks. I adopted the term from Michel
Foucault and have emended it to refer to corporations and other nonstate actors who actively
undertake state functions. These actors will be doing this in droves with vaccine passports,
which will vastly augment state power under a state-corporate alliance.
Similarly, other major corporations perform state-sanctioned roles by echoing and enforcing
state-approved ideologies, policies, and politics: indoctrinating employees, issuing woke
advertisements, policing the opinions of workers, firing dissidents, and soon demanding vaccine
passports from employees and customers.
The overall tendency, then, is toward corporate-state monopolization over all aspects of
life, with increasing control by approved principals over information and opinion, economic
production, and the political sphere. As the consolidation accelerates, the broad global state
will require the elimination of noncompliant, disaffected, and "untrustworthy" economic and
political actors. In the United States, with the elimination of political opposition, the
tendency is toward uniparty rule, and with it, the merging of the party and state into a
singular organ.
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PGR88 2 hours ago (Edited)
The only way the fascist deep state ends is with a currency collapse. That could be
effected immediately - arrest the members of the Federal Reserve. Without a printed, fiat
dollar, and the illusion that $30 Trillion in debt will repaid - the leftist, DC deep state
collapses immediately.
BDB 13 hours ago remove link
The US govt is a corporation.
We as a central banking nation have an economic and political monopoly that is trying
really hard to maintain fascist control.All the big multinationals are owned by the banksters
too.
Psyop covID19 and man's co2 emissions causes climate change are both lies pushing a
political agenda
" Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state
and corporate power." Benito Mussolini
HonorSeeker 11 hours ago (Edited)
Under Fascism, the government wrote the rules. Under our corporatist system, it's the
corporations. At least that's what I would say the difference is.
DesertEagle 9 hours ago
We're under the boot heel of billionaire oligarchs and big corporations that are their
handmaidens. They are toxic and will never take their boot off of our neck unless they are
forced to.
Several US banks have employed AI surveillance systems as a big-brother-type instrument to
analyze customer preferences, monitor workers, and even detect nefarious activities near/at
ATMs, according to a dozen banking and technology sources who spoke with
Reuters .
Sources said City National Bank of Florida, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Wells Fargo &
Co are conducting trials of AI surveillance systems which offers a rare view into what could
soon become standard for corporate America.
Bobby Dominguez, the chief information security officer at City National, told Reuters the
bank would begin to "leverage" facial recognition technology to identify customers at teller
machines and employees at branches. The trial will be conducted at 31 sites and include
high-tech software that could spot people on government watch lists.
In Ohio, JPMorgan is already conducting AI surveillance trials at a small number of
branches. Wells Fargo wouldn't discuss its use of AI technology to monitor customers and
employees.
The corporate world is quickly embracing the effectiveness and sophistication of these
systems after governments such as China, the UK, Germany, Japan, and the US have used AI
surveillance to track their citizens and non-nationals for years.
"We're never going to compromise our clients' privacy," Dominguez said. "We're getting off
to an early start on technology already used in other parts of the world and that is rapidly
coming to the American banking network."
As early as 2019, JPMorgan began evaluating the potential of AI surveillance systems to
analyze archived footage from Chase branches in New York and Ohio.
"Testing facial recognition to identify clients as they walk into a Chase bank, if they
consented to it, has been another possibility considered to enhance their experience," a
current employee involved in the project told Reuters.
Another source said a Midwestern credit union last year tested facial recognition for client
identification at four locations before terminating the program over cost concerns.
City National's Dominguez said the bank's branches use computer vision to detect suspicious
activity outside.
Given the current state of AI surveillance and the speed of development, top banks are
already testing these surveillance tools in various forms. Despite a potential backlash from
the public, an Orwellian dystopia via AI surveillance will be fully embraced by corporate
America in the coming years.
It was the virus pandemic that allowed the
surveillance state to expand across the government and corporations rapidly. We're being
tracked more than ever.
Comedian Ryan Long released a now viral video with Danny Polishchuk called "When Wokes and
Racists Actually Agree on Everything," poking fun at the nation's unfolding debates on
race.
The video depicts two friends, Brad and Chad, one "woke" and one "racist," agreeing on very
fundamental parts of their ideologies.
"Your racial identity is the most important thing. Everything should be looked at through
the lens of race," the men say before one of them jinxes another.
Whether it's about privilege, interracial dating, discrimination, segregation of cultures
and arts, appropriation, the two men appear to agree on pretty much everything.
"We both have a lot of opinions about people of color," one of the men quips while the other
nods in agreement.
The end of the video shows the "woke" character claiming that the only disagreement between
the two is that one believes "white people are the root of all evil." The two eventually
resolve the tension by agreeing that Jews should be the subject of their wrath.
"Technically I don't consider Jewish people white," the "woke" character says.
"Neither do I!" the "racist" character interrupts.
... ... ...
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University
where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
The Bidet Administration Goes Haywire 3 hours ago (Edited)
We are ruled by wicked, immoral and un-intellectual idiots who are getting far too high on
their own supply
I Write Code 2 hours ago
So Russia claims Donbas, China invades Taiwan, US annexes Greenland, Idaho claims half of
Oregon, and Mexico reclaims California. And Quebec just sits there and stews.
williambanzai7 PREMIUM 2 hours ago
And BLM claims Manhattan...
Jade_Dragon 1 hour ago
My 77 year old mom is as upset as anyone but is also still optimistic. I have other
reasons for spending May and possibly the summer in Mexico (if I get an English teaching job)
but I see little if any reason to come back if things are going well down there. America has
gone psycho. At the very least, I'm afraid the entire country will be run like California
before long
dead hobo 1 hour ago (Edited)
Agree. I'm old and set. My home is paid for and I've lived in it for over 20 years. It's
set up just like I want and a new place would have less going for it. Moving would be highly
disruptive, not to mention expensive.
Yet, I am still considering possibilities. Mexico cartels vs Democrat incited BLM mobs?
Hmm, which is better? Free states in the US offer alternatives. I live in Illinois, soon to
be a California level mess. Belize is English speaking.
The next 2 years or so will tell the tale.
2thelastman 1 hour ago
In two years you could easily see a wall built to keep people IN.
Anyway, somewhere that powerful leaders are not being seen and powerful --dare I say
revolutionary?-- forces are sweeping in, is football. The European Super League, so derided in
this Daily for the past two days, has crumbled . All six English clubs have pulled out, with
one or two even apologizing to "legacy" fans, and the vice-chair of Manchester United
resigning. Victory for the people's game! Victory for localism over globalism! Well, yes,
except it's far from certain the British government will now act as promised to deliver real
power back into fans' hands via partial ownership of the clubs they worship to stop this
happening again. Moreover, the pre-existing football structure we revert to includes an
expanded gilt-edged Champions League format, and a game that is still more about money than it
is about anything else.
So does this portend the end of Build Back Better globalism? Or the end of neoliberal
idiocy? Or the entrenchment of nasty neoliberalism as the savior from an even stupider version
of neoliberalism? Well, in markets, every time our system fails we swear we are changing it in
response – and then the same old faces do the same old things, but worse, under a new
badge.
The primary way this now happens of course is that central banks pretend that not only do
they not see the asset inflation they are deliberately stoking, they also don't see the
supply-side cost-push inflation . Instead, they talk about the wage inflation they can never
stoke alone – and which even fiscal policy in tandem can't either without people power
'football' policy. As we have just seen, this will also have to involve decoupling and
(peaceful) redrawing of economic borders around a local, national, or limited international
perimeter. On which note, the US push for a new liberal world fiscal order is reportedly
already in trouble ( no! ) because Amazon doesn't want to join the party: ' Taxation Dies in
Darkness ', it seems.
So to conclude my own epic here, which way are the powerful forces of history leading us?
And what are powerful leaders going to do to either resist or accelerate this momentum? It
seems odd for a global financial market with the attention span of a bowl of borscht to have to
consider, but that kind of Tolstoyan question is still one for the ages . Today particularly
so.
Lordflin 3 hours ago remove link
This is not idiocy...
It is desperation on the part of a group of ruthless, heartless psychopaths who are
currently gazing over the balconies in watchful fear... on the lookout for that far off glow
of midnight torches...
dead hobo 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link
I was going to say the same thing, only less tactfully.
The mass media depends on terrorist stories and the acts that make people want to read or
watch them. That's what they want to Build Back Better. Inciting riots and worse is good for
business.
Globalists only want control and power so they can make profit. They want low costs for
goods, labor, and open borders to facilitate both. Globalists only care about BLM and the
like if they affect customer traffic. Their logical end result of Globalism is feudalism for
the 99%.
Democrats crave endless power. Racial politics is their stock in trade. Playing groups
against each other while doling out benefits is what being a Democrat means. Establishment
Republicans are parasites, for the most part.
People of good conscience are terrified of ending on the wrong side of the mob or as a
means to sell newspapers or attract eyeballs by the media. This creates useless law
enforcement at the local and federal levels, a milquetoast Supreme Court, and general apathy
all around. Simply saying 'No' could be a career ending or even a life threatening act.
To make my point, there's no reason for any of this to end. Over 1/2 of the 99% are proven
dimwits. Life is undoubtedly too complicated for them so the above groups appear to be
leaders and / or saviors. Perhaps 30% of the population is smart enough to cope with everyday
life. They are the minority.
Hence, I suspect we are only at the start of the decline and it will not end. There simply
aren't enough people to want it to end. The vast majority are either controlled by self
interest or too stupid to cope otherwise.
To Hell In A Handbasket 3 hours ago (Edited) remove link
So does this portend the end of Build Back Better globalism? Or the end of neoliberal
idiocy? Or the entrenchment of nasty neoliberalism as the savior from an even stupider
version of neoliberalism? Well, in markets, every time our system fails we swear we are
changing it in response – and then the same old faces do the same old things, but
worse, under a new badge.
Only 2 nations are the driving forces behind this ideology (UK & USSA) the rest merely
follow, and toe the line. The European Super League, was a stark reminder to most of these
American owners, that not only are they outted as greedy b@st@rds, but their version of
franchise sports, where no relegation, or promotion can be achieved, is not a model we'd ever
swallow.
As for the future? It's all about deluding the average IQ western dunce, that we are
blessed with resources, and wealth, when in reality we don't have any resources of note, nor
a pot to pl$$ in, and somehow manipulate an outcome where we control finance, and the value
of money for another 270+ years, like we have in the last epoch.
The dunces have no f##king idea of the predicament we'll be in, when we lose the scam of
deciding the fake value of each respective countries currency. If they did, as we say in
England "They'd top themselves" Alas, 75% of ZH, are economic retards, so the reality hit
will be even greater when they realise our entire economic model, and illusion of wealth is
one of the greatest lies ever perpetrated. Just as bad a lie as the Holocaust death
numbers.
Sound of the Suburbs 1 hour ago (Edited)
Neoclassical economics.
It's a crock of ****, but we've rigged it in our favour so we like it.
The rentiers at the top of society had been identified by classical economists.
This wouldn't do at all; they needed a new economics to hide this, neoclassical
economics.
The early neoclassical economists hid the problems of rentier activity in the economy by
removing the difference between "earned" and "unearned" income and they conflated "land" with
"capital".
They took the focus off the cost of living that had been so important to the Classical
Economists as this is where rentier activity in the economy shows up.
It confuses making money and creating wealth so all rich people look good.
If you know what real wealth creation is, you will realise many at the top don't create
any wealth.
It was a complete disaster last time we used it, but it is rigged in our favour.
How do we get this crock of **** back into the mainstream again?
If you wrap it in a fluffy new ideology, no one will notice.
OK, we'll call it neoliberalism.
What about the economists?
Surely they will notice.
You'll be fine, they won't notice.
Stuck on Zero 3 hours ago
Well, in markets, every time our system fails we swear we are changing it in response
– and then the same old faces do the same old things, but worse, under a new
badge.
Could be stated more generally:
Well, in markets, every time our system fails we swear we are changing it in response
– and then the same old faces do the same old things, but worse, under a new badge.
eatthebanksters 38 minutes ago
Right now the most dangerous thing in our country is the Cancel Culture, being driven by
Big Media. Big Media needs to be brought to its knees, faced with two choices: 1. Provide
fair and unbiased true journalism, or 2. Elimination. The number of people driving cancel
culture are actually few in number. The real number of activist Antifa/BLM is relatively
small, however their violent actions reverberate far and wide. They too must be shut down.
Until this happens, our country will continue to divide. I am of the opinion that Democrats
WANT Maga people to revolt so Dems can call in the military and crush the rebellion once and
for all. As a country we are not in a good place right now.
Sound of the Suburbs 2 hours ago
Neoliberalism – Little more than ideological nonsense held together by pseudo
economics.
As Townhall.com's Spencer Brown details , Chauvin's lawyers pointed out that jurors were
not sequestered during the case and therefore may not be free from outside influence in the
form of news updates they may have inadvertently or purposefully seen along with ongoing
violence in the community surrounding the Chauvin trial and approaching verdict.
Among their concerns, Chauvin's defense team pointed to Waters and her appearance with
demonstrators in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, over the weekend.
Even though the judge denied the defense's motion for mistrial, he highlighted the damage
her rhetoric may have done, saying "Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal
that may result in this whole trial being overturned."
Five million people in this country die of natural causes every year. Some of them happened
to have Covid when they passed. You might just as well say they died of tooth decay.
With
rioting continuing in Brooklyn Center , Minn. and around the country, Rep. Maxine Waters,
D-CA, went to Minnesota and told the protesters that they "gotta stay on the street" and "
get more confrontational ." The statement is ironic since Waters is one of the House
members currently suing former President Donald Trump and others for inciting violence on
January 6th with his words on the Mall. Waters insists that Trump telling his supporters to go
to the Capitol to make their voice heard and "fight" for their votes was actual criminal
incitement. Conversely, Waters was speaking after multiple nights of rioting and looting and
telling protesters to stay on the streets and get even more confrontational. There was violence
after the remarks, including a shooting incident where two National Guard members were
injured.
... ... ...
After Waters remarks,
protesters confronted reporters in a tense scene. Also protesters descended upon the home
of the prosecutor responsible for the second degree manslaughter charge against the officer who
killed Daunte Wright. Also the
Minnesota National Guard was fired upon , injuring at least two Guardsman. That is not to
say that Water incited such actions but that the same claimed nexus could be raised in making
such an allegation as was done in the Trump impeachment.
Carl Jung once said that "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an
understanding of ourselves". That certainly seems to be the case with Waters and Trump. It is
also why Waters could prove the only witness that Trump needs to call to defeat her own
lawsuit.
Browder's grandfather is Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. Now
freely admitted that he held that post on the payroll of FBI and Office of Naval
Intelligence. Bill merely continues the family business of damaging Russia by any means
possible.
Interesting that the CNN producer on the Veritas video said that global
warming will be the next big fear-inducing corporate greenwashing campaign.
Would love to know where all these "narratives" are coordinated from and
by whom.
"... The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten close in terms of public political imagination, western political elites almost entirely in the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese heels, permanent state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour revolution technique and its social infrastructure development mechanism. ..."
I think Scott Ritter is engaging in an imaginative future if he thinks the 'hate russia'
team has no successors. The academy will be full of them just itching for an interns job with
a congresscritter.
Speaking of warmongers, where is Tony Blair these days? Could he be the USA useful idiot
egging Boris on to sail a warship or two to the Black Sea? He never met a war he didn't like,
did the 'hard man' act for Bush the fool, and has been traipsing about any warzone
pontificating for a fat fee and would be right at home being the bumper-upper for Boris. It
would all be hush hush as he is hated in UK.
In 2018 Boris appointed the previous UK ambassador to Turkey, Richard Moore, to the Chief
of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He was formerly the Director General, Political, at
the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Moore attended St George's College,
Weybridge. Batchelor's degree at Worcester College, Oxford. He then won a Kennedy Scholarship
to study at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University. In 2007, he attended the
Stanford Executive Programme.
Excellent article, B highlights that change won't come from the new administration BECAUSE
money flows to the congressional-industrial-military cabal only if the existing regime is in
power AND USA remains a 2 party system - one 'better' than China.
This principal was echoed in November 2020 by ex US Army Danny Sjursen
"...it's obvious that the Biden bunch has no desire to slow down, no less halt, the
"revolving door" that connects national security work in the government and jobs or
security consulting positions in the defense industry. The same goes for the think tanks
that the arms producers amply fund to justify the whole circus...
Or consider retired Marine Corps major general turned defense consultant Arnold Punaro
who recently said of Biden's coming tenure, "I think the industry will have, when it comes
to national security, a very positive view."
Given the evidence that business-as-usual will continue in the Biden years, perhaps it's
time to take that advice from Cornel West, absorb the truth about Biden's future national
security squad, and act accordingly. There's no top-down salvation on the agenda -- not
from Joe or his crew of consummate insiders. Pressure and change will flow from the
grassroots or it won't come at all."
Salvation can only COME FROM the good people of America
But the very voting system prevents other voices being heard. There is no proportional
representation, therefore no other views than the highly paid military-industrial
consultants, the merchants of violence.
The Tweedledum and Tweedledee American political system is ossified, inflexible,
suppressive.
A giant echo chamber.
Hello! Hello! anyone with a brain in there?
The echos bounce and fade. No reply.
American foreign policy is brain dead.
Until compulsory military service is Brought back to USA, all children of the highest
earning bracket straight to the front line, no soft touch deployments, no bone-spur
deferment.
Then, and only then, will foreign policy change under the US 2 party self-enrichment
system.
"...For four years, both "choices" were hammered by the Democrats into the supine brains
of the US masses. which has given rise to "automatic" and forceful unthinking
attitudes..."
This is not true, and pardon me for saying so because indeed there are elements of truth
in what you are saying. It is NOT the US masses that are grabbing guns and ammunition and
commiting mayhem on their fellow citizens. It is the gullible and the weak and the mentally
disturbed, who are present in any large and stressed society. They probably match the one
percenters at the top and cohorts in the ten percent - (just a guess on my part) but they are
NOT the 'masses'.
The masses have bucked the mainstream mantras of the past O-T and now B years. We don't
have power - power is as you say with the rich, with the party demagogues, with the leeches,
and as b points out, their rule is coming to an end but they still hold the reins of power.
Whether or not Biden saw, or Trump saw, or even Obama saw, that this is not the way it ought
to be - they have each been powerless to do anything about it in a meaningful way so far.
Don't give up. It's a long haul but here's where I agree with the TINA principle. There is
no alternative. We just have to keep on keeping on. The Dems will lose power in Congress come
next elections. There will be inroads made, and if Republicans get elected, so be it. A few
more will have better souls, and inch by inch the oldies will have to yield. It's gonna
happen. And, in answer to a post above:
What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with
alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor.
This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and
with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.
Thank you for that incisive statement. One only has to watch those 5 minute utoob by Steve
Pieczenic I posted to get a sense of the totality of USA dominance and imagined dominance and
the malign drivers of its reach. I know he is a blowhard but he was at the apex of the dirty
game. He is a rigid anticommunist, he talks as if Putin is one of their successes, he hates
Xi so he must be alarmed that they have been brought into anti empire unity.
The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten
close in terms of public political imagination, western political elites almost entirely in
the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese heels, permanent
state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour
revolution technique and its social infrastructure development mechanism.
Conventional weaponry has slipped their grasp. But that is matched by an alternative that
they won't hesitate to use.
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with
alignment with China and the tipping of the balance of world understanding in their favor.
This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic agenda, and
with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.
Thank you, that is the essence of diplomacy and the avoidance of conflict and even
war.
War must end. It is an ignorant reversal of human progress, it poisons minds and the earth
itself. Its legacy is one of tears and material loss. It give no one person of good will any
benefit. It slaughters the innocent!! children, women and men and our environment. It is the
game of ignorance asserting superiority over thought and imagination.
It is the daring imagination of betterment that motivates the development of OBOR and the
east to west transit corridor in Russia. It is imagination of betterment to build trade and
access to economy and elevation from poverty that is of the utmost benefit to us humans
sharing and caring for this beautiful planet.
If the west cast off its parasitic mentality toward the other and embraced the same daring
imagination for its people's betterment they might come close to the achievements we have
seen in Russia and China and elsewhere that the philosophy is paramount. There is always hope
and the chance that might come about.
Intensifying anti Russian policies will result in the same outcomes the USA achieved in
their anti Iranian policies.
EJ Magnier reports on the recent JCPOA members meeting:
"The Islamic Republic proved to be a shark with sharp teeth during its negotiation with the
signatories (Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany) of the nuclear deal in
Vienna, leaving few choices to the negotiators. Iran showed how complex and inflexible its
position is with the most powerful county in the world, forbidding the US envoy to join the
mediators in the same room because Donald Trump revoked its 2015 nuclear deal agreement.
Moreover, Iran used the Israeli sabotage actions against the Natanz nuclear facility as an
excuse to hit Israel, the US and all European negotiators who side with the Americans...
...Iran did not ask for a guarantee against another Trump-like decision – which
revoked the nuclear deal – in the future because its nuclear capability is the
guarantee. Iran is not asking for a guarantee from China and Russia, which are under US
sanctions. Iran exhausted its patience in 2018 when it waited for an entire year without
using its right to gradually withdraw from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
Iran then believed Europe might come forward and hold to its commitments even if the US
pulled back. That was not the case, and Tehran is now aware that Europe and the US have the
same objectives hidden behind different behaviours.
Today it is known that Iran is enriching uranium up to 60% and can reach 90% in several
months. This does not mean Iran is necessarily producing nuclear weapons, but it is enough
to cross the West's red lines. If the US sanctions are not lifted or partially lifted, if
the deal is revoked or other sanctions are imposed in the future, Iran will fall back into
its complete nuclear cycle without any warning."
round-color: rgb(222, 227, 233); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;">
Then, and only then, will foreign policy change under the US 2 party self-enrichment system.
"...For four years, both "choices" were hammered by the Democrats into the supine brains of the US masses. which has given rise to
"automatic" and forceful unthinking attitudes..."
This is not true, and pardon me for saying so because indeed there are elements of truth in what you are saying. It is NOT the US
masses that are grabbing guns and ammunition and commiting mayhem on their fellow citizens. It is the gullible and the weak and the
mentally disturbed, who are present in any large and stressed society. They probably match the one percenters at the top and cohorts
in the ten percent - (just a guess on my part) but they are NOT the 'masses'.
The masses have bucked the mainstream mantras of the past O-T and now B years. We don't have power - power is as you say with the
rich, with the party demagogues, with the leeches, and as b points out, their rule is coming to an end but they still hold the reins
of power. Whether or not Biden saw, or Trump saw, or even Obama saw, that this is not the way it ought to be - they have each been
powerless to do anything about it in a meaningful way so far.
Don't give up. It's a long haul but here's where I agree with the TINA principle. There is no alternative. We just have to keep on
keeping on. The Dems will lose power in Congress come next elections. There will be inroads made, and if Republicans get elected, so
be it. A few more will have better souls, and inch by inch the oldies will have to yield. It's gonna happen. And, in answer to a
post above:
What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far except brazen falsehood and enmity?
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the
balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic
agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.
Thank you for that incisive statement. One only has to watch those 5 minute utoob by Steve Pieczenic I posted to get a sense of the
totality of USA dominance and imagined dominance and the malign drivers of its reach. I know he is a blowhard but he was at the apex
of the dirty game. He is a rigid anticommunist, he talks as if Putin is one of their successes, he hates Xi so he must be alarmed
that they have been brought into anti empire unity.
The USA has striven to obtain full spectrum dominance and they appear to have gotten close in terms of public political
imagination, western political elites almost entirely in the 'hate russia' camp, useful idiots snapping at the Russian and Chinese
heels, permanent state of conflict awareness and uncertainty in the public mind, perfection of colour revolution technique and its
social infrastructure development mechanism.
Conventional weaponry has slipped their grasp. But that is matched by an alternative that they won't hesitate to use.
Putin and his cohorts have achieved the reinstatement of the Russian Federation with alignment with China and the tipping of the
balance of world understanding in their favor. This is a force mightier than the US and western allies neoliberal, oligarchic
agenda, and with patience and firm commitment it will prevail.
Thank you, that is the essence of diplomacy and the avoidance of conflict and even war.
War must end. It is an ignorant reversal of human progress, it poisons minds and the earth itself. Its legacy is one of tears and
material loss. It give no one person of good will any benefit. It slaughters the innocent!! children, women and men and our
environment. It is the game of ignorance asserting superiority over thought and imagination.
It is the daring imagination of betterment that motivates the development of OBOR and the east to west transit corridor in Russia.
It is imagination of betterment to build trade and access to economy and elevation from poverty that is of the utmost benefit to us
humans sharing and caring for this beautiful planet.
If the west cast off its parasitic mentality toward the other and embraced the same daring imagination for its people's betterment
they might come close to the achievements we have seen in Russia and China and elsewhere that the philosophy is paramount. There is
always hope and the chance that might come about.
Intensifying anti Russian policies will result in the same outcomes the USA achieved in their anti Iranian policies.
EJ Magnier reports on the recent JCPOA members meeting:
"The Islamic Republic proved to be a shark with sharp teeth during its negotiation with the signatories (Russia, China, France,
Great Britain and Germany) of the nuclear deal in Vienna, leaving few choices to the negotiators. Iran showed how complex and
inflexible its position is with the most powerful county in the world, forbidding the US envoy to join the mediators in the same
room because Donald Trump revoked its 2015 nuclear deal agreement. Moreover, Iran used the Israeli sabotage actions against the
Natanz nuclear facility as an excuse to hit Israel, the US and all European negotiators who side with the Americans...
...Iran did not ask for a guarantee against another Trump-like decision – which revoked the nuclear deal – in the future because
its nuclear capability is the guarantee. Iran is not asking for a guarantee from China and Russia, which are under US sanctions.
Iran exhausted its patience in 2018 when it waited for an entire year without using its right to gradually withdraw from the
JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Iran then believed Europe might come forward and hold to its commitments even if the
US pulled back. That was not the case, and Tehran is now aware that Europe and the US have the same objectives hidden behind
different behaviours.
Today it is known that Iran is enriching uranium up to 60% and can reach 90% in several months. This does not mean Iran is
necessarily producing nuclear weapons, but it is enough to cross the West's red lines. If the US sanctions are not lifted or
partially lifted, if the deal is revoked or other sanctions are imposed in the future, Iran will fall back into its complete
nuclear cycle without any warning."
sset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4689067">
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4689067
Tom , Apr 17 2021 22:07 utc |
40
Posted by: Bernard F. | Apr 17 2021 21:21 utc | 38
I suspect Sullivan and Blinken's next gig will be something like that. "We came here to
forget", but instead of the French Legion, it will be PMC Wagner.
Personally what I would do would be a Operation Bagration 2.0 at the slightest misstep by
Ukraine. There is may too much on the table here. Bio labs, nests of NATO rats, nuclear power
plants, NATO missiles on the Ukrainian and Belarus borders with Russia. Time to clear out the
rats including Lviv. After disinfecting this part of eastern Europe (again) of that other far
more dangerous virus, Nazism, life will be much more peaceful in that part of the world, and
likely by the domino effect (yes I actually said that!) to other places in the world plagued
by US exceptionalism.
... two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6
– its former spies – Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and
Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council – BellingCat, etc]. In
fact it's the vast majority with groundless and poor reasoning, these folks despise
everything left, Socialist and Communist. Too many years and too much wealth have pushed the
anti-Russia agenda. The new generation with social media lack comprehension what information
is published and with what political agenda.
Due to the 9/11 attacks on America. the US and UK gave new life and purpose to NATO. From
Afghanistan the expeditionary force was sent to Libya and Syria. The colour revolutions gave
blood to anti-Putin rhetoric. US politics of both parties tried to divide the EU into Old and
New Europe. The criminal acts of CIA torture, rendition and black sites made a number of
states accomplishes in war crimes. No issue a decade later with drone assassinations. Calling
out "Putin" as killer is ridiculous looking in the mirror how many tens and hundreds of
thousands have died on the battlefield at the hands of the UK/US and allies. And the sales of
arms, munitions and lethal weapons reach new heights in the Middle East and warring
parties.
OCCRP Report: The Pentagon Is Spending Up To $2.2 Billion on Soviet-Style Arms for Syrian
Rebels
The Czech Republic is responsible for arms and munitions delivery to Bulgarian arms
dealers working with Pentagon contracts. These ended up in the Ukraine, Syria, Libya and
Yemen. The bomb blast in Vrbetice most likely saved many (innocent) lives.
Some repentants
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in Op-Ed of Dec. 2017 - 'NATO should not have committed to
membership of Ukraine and Georgia'
In the recent past I have written about Legatum at a time Anne Applebaum found her employ
at the think tank. The red alert signs and alarm bells were up at the time and I gave some
background information. The first lady of Poland (almost) and her hubby former UK citizen and
CIA agent Radek Sikorski of Afghan and Angola fame.
Anne Applebaum's Confession
Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | The Guardian
– July 2020 |
We are to believe this cabal of humanity hating zealots will fade into the
background??
Because facts will matter???
Facts have never mattered. In this post-modern illusion our leaders call a reset, facts
actually have negative value...sorta like negative interest rates.
Expect insanity to multiply at the same rate as the money supply expands
Adam Curtis' new documentary series ("I Just Can't Get You out of my Head") deals (in
part) with the way the West's entire worldview sees everything in simplistic Manichean terms,
like Star Wars. The West is always good (even when they act immorally) and the baddies are
always lone rogues, like a spaghetti Western. WW2 shaped the West's entire thinking about its
role in the world: the Allies are on the side of decency and freedom while the enemy is
simply evil through and through, beyond redemption. A parade of baddies from Hitler to
Castro, Uncle Ho, Khomeini, Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad, Putin and Xi. Bond movies and Hollywood
write the scripts, the MSM pumps out the pulp. No one wants to hear that history is a tad
more complicated than bogeymen vs. Marvel superheroes, but then history does have a lovely
way of biting people on the ass...
Why Washington's Anti-Russian Policies Are Likely To IntensifyMina , Apr 19
2021 16:49 utc |
1
Thanks to a monoculture of anti-Russia hawks in U.S. policy institutions relations between
the U.S. and Russia are likely to further decline. But some hope might be seen at the
horizon.
Scott Ritter predicts the end of a
generation of anti-Russian influencers in Washington DC who depict Russia and is policies as
being run by just one man:
These "Putin whisperers" infiltrated every aspect of American culture and politics, their
writings achieving near-scripture-like reception in the pages of American newspapers and
political journals, and the authors of this intellectual dreck being offered prime seats at
the table of national security policymaking, either on the National Security Council, or as
a National Intelligence Officer.
...
These "Putin Whisperers" thrived during the administration of President Barack Obama, led
by the likes of Michael McFaul, and achieved near-critical mass during the Trump
administration, empowered by overly politicized claims of collusion with Russia by people
in the Trump circle. They continue to play an important role today, filling the airwaves
and pages with anti-Putin propaganda whose cumulative effect is to dumb down the American
public by demonizing Russia and its president to the point that any accusation will be
accepted at face value , regardless of the lack of corroborating evidence or the improbable
veracity of its claim; the recent scandal over allegations that
Russia paid the Taliban bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan serves as an apt
illustration of this phenomenon.
Unfortunately the constant demonization of Russia's president by the 'Putin-whisperers'
has already led to some
tragic consequences :
A children's author and parish councillor died after a neighbour with mental health issues
shot him in the face and stamped on his head, believing he worked for Vladimir Putin and
was to blame for the spread of Covid-19, an inquest heard.
But the danger of seeing everything caused by just one man is much greater. It explains
the
confused policies of the Biden administration which may lead towards war.
Biden is a prisoner of his own anti-Russian rhetoric, influenced in large part by the need
to be seen as responding to a domestic political prerogative founded on decades of Russia -
and Putin-bashing at the hands of the "Putin whisperers" and their ilk. It is one thing to
spout off as a candidate for president; it is an altogether different reality to be serving
as president, where words and actions have life-or-death consequences.
As the realities set in the people and their policies will have to change:
These are policies pushed and promoted by the "Putin whisperers." For the moment, their
will continues to prevail. But their days are numbered, as realpolitik pragmatists in the
White House, Pentagon and Intelligence Community are recognizing the reality that the days
of taking for granted US global hegemony are over, and that for the United States to remain
relevant, it must adapt to the reality of a multi-polar world, and Russia's rightful role
therein. This will not happen overnight, but it is in the process of happening. In
promoting and supporting Biden's latest round of sanctions, the "Putin whisperers" have
reached their high-water mark. From here on out, their influence will begin to ebb as the
national security demand for fact-based assessments outstrips the domestic political need
for fact-free propaganda.
I am not that optimistic. The Blob is resistant to change because those who are inside it
tend to bite away anyone with even a slightly different view.
Consider the case of Matthew Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is known as a middle-of-the-road expert of U.S.
and Soviet/Russian relations - not a hawk, but also not an appeaser.
Rojansky was supposed to chair the Russia desk in Biden's National Security Council. As
soon as that became know the 'Putin Whisperers' came out in force to fight the nomination.
Axios
led the charge :
Posted by b at 16:38
UTC |
Comments (54)
I am surprised that the Russians did not "leak" a few videos from the EU-sponsored refugee
camps in Greece. People becoming mad, violence, suicide attempts, it would be enough to close
for good the debate on Russian prisons.
1) Conflict is a career opportunity. Peace is a bad way to get the grants, bribe money,
and stature that the DC sociopaths want. No one whose career depends on conflict gets
promoted without conflict.
2) They believe (possibly correctly) that they can attack Russia indirectly, or directly via
proxy, and that Russia will only defend, rather than going on a counteroffensive.
3) Sociopaths have a psychological attachment to doing bad things. If a sociopath were given
a choice between scamming a client out of $1000 and earning that amount by selling a good
product, the sociopath would choose the former option every time, even if the profit and
effort were the same.
And, by the way, Washington (even american people) isn't the unique policy maker.
As James wrote
@ james | Apr 19 2021 4:19 utc | 62
[...]
russia leadership under putin and company have played their hand exceedingly well and have
not got sucked into playing the game the way the west has wanted them to[...]
I posted it in the morning
Putin, as a leader of a country with 180 millions citizens and a huge history (and the
wounds of USSR collapsus) must consider "Overton window". He done it very well.
As a "Commander in Chief", he must consider first, not to be defeated.
Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of
defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. #
To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating
the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
We must stay focuse have at some facts (not fake) news. As b. focused, Russia weaponized...a lot
Russian new weapons/military doctrine since 2010, even not Russian propaganda.
Sanity will never set in without a massive defeat for Amerikastani interests. The most
obvious two, which are not mutually exclusive, are Occupied Syria (including the Muhaysinic
Emirate of Idlibistan and the Kyrd zionistan) and Ukranazistan. Russia needs to move on both
immediately and Brook no further delay. What has Putinist regime "restraint " achieved so far
except brazen falsehood and enmity?
It is possible that Biden is acting tough with symbolic sanctions to divert the attention
from the reality that the Nord Stream 2 is well and soon alive. He also gets praise from the
anti-russia
elements in his government.
Yet Ritter is right in a way. The tit-for-tat that Russia has decided to start will escalate
to the point of a serious accident that may shake the USA. That Biden qualify Russia's
response to the sanctions as "escalatory" shows that he took note that Russia will not stop
retaliating. He is starting to worry that this path will lead to a paralysis of the
diplomatic exchange on several important issues and to violent consequences detrimental to
the USA and its allies.
Is Biden still mentally capable of an independent opinion?
There are complex historical reasons for Central and Eastern European countries to tilt
toward the US and become "anti-Russia," which is difficult for outsiders to comment on. It
is a pity that internal disintegration rather than coercion from the US had directly led to
the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation was one of the main promoters of
the disintegration, and the original agreement to replace the Soviet Union with the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was signed by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian
leaders who had destroyed the Soviet Union had no idea what would happen to their country
afterward.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has brought about geopolitical changes globally, and
the evaluation of the event is destined to vary from country to country and from time to
time. But it has become increasingly clear that Russia has been the biggest loser from that
collapse.
Many Russians once believed that when the Communist Party stepped down and the Soviet
Union collapsed, the US and the West would embrace Russia and respect them who had taken
the initiative to end the Cold War. The reality, however, is harsh. Moscow has received no
gratitude or kindness from the West. From the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, the US has
arrogantly treated Russia as a defeated country in the Cold War, engaging in all possible
moves to suppress Russia at will.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster for Russia. As the dominant
power in the Soviet Union, if it chose to support reforms to solve problems at the
beginning, Russia could pay a much smaller price than the geopolitical price it would pay
in the following 30 years. Back then, Moscow had a broad sphere of influence and powerful
control capability that it could act independently and defiantly against Washington. But it
has ceded those geopolitical resources, giving up its advantages.
The US' vicious attitude toward Russia offers a glimpse into the brutality of great
power competition and helps people see through Washington's geopolitical manipulation
measures. The US portrayed its Cold War with the Soviet Union as an ideological
confrontation to conceal its intention to dominate the world alone. Many people, including
Russians, believed that a political change of course would fundamentally change their
relationship with the US, and that Russia could thus integrate into the West and become a
dignified member of the Group of Eight.
However, if the foreign policy establishment learned nothing and suffered neither personal
nor professional consequences from the War on Iraq, what makes Ritter so sure that anything
will be different this time?
This attitude was not uncommon among others, such as the Eastern Europeans.
Before 1991, they were vassals of USSR, now they are vassals of vassals - a notch down the
pecking order.
In Iran, there have been several million people - largely inhabiting the Greater Tehran
area and rather influential - who shared an analogous attitude as the Russians did before
1991.
Fortunately for Iran, Judeo-Christians tried to destroy her by trying to destroy her
economy.
Now, that population, has no leg to stand on - they are discredited domestically as their
programme of productive engagement with the West turned out to be a fool's errand.
Russians, in 1991, did not expect USSR to break-up, they did not understand that USSR was
unified in the corpus of the Red Tsar - just like the Russian Empire was unified (like the
United Kingdom) in the person of the Emperor of Russia.
In an analogous manner, the "Secularist Liberals" in Iran, denizens of Tehran - should
they get to power, will preside over the disintegration of Iran, since she is unified in the
Shia Religion.
It is indeed necessary for the US to recognize the reality of a multi-polar world.
However, let us be accurate, the West is one and only one empire of the Five Eyes alliance
and not just the US.
Ultimately the question is this: Will the Western empire accept it has failed and will never
control the entire world or will it use the nuclear weapons it used twice to become a global
empire to ruin the world for anyone else?
Browder's grandfather is Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. Now
freely admitted that he held that post on the payroll of FBI and Office of Naval
Intelligence. Bill merely continues the family business of damaging Russia by any means
possible.
" The CIA/Establishment/Neocon/liberal doctrine of a unitary imperial superpower that must
assimilate all of creation into its usurious, profit making empire, or else, is challenged
seriously by few."
There is NOTHING "liberal" in how our latest empire persues it's prerogatives of global
corporate hegemony.
... two decades a coordinated anti-Russia propaganda originating from the U.K. [MI-6
– its former spies – Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society] and
Washington DC a nest of anti-Russia lobbyists [Atlantic Council – BellingCat, etc]. In
fact it's the vast majority with groundless and poor reasoning, these folks despise
everything left, Socialist and Communist. Too many years and too much wealth have pushed the
anti-Russia agenda. The new generation with social media lack comprehension what information
is published and with what political agenda.
Due to the 9/11 attacks on America. the US and UK gave new life and purpose to NATO. From
Afghanistan the expeditionary force was sent to Libya and Syria. The colour revolutions gave
blood to anti-Putin rhetoric. US politics of both parties tried to divide the EU into Old and
New Europe. The criminal acts of CIA torture, rendition and black sites made a number of
states accomplishes in war crimes. No issue a decade later with drone assassinations. Calling
out "Putin" as killer is ridiculous looking in the mirror how many tens and hundreds of
thousands have died on the battlefield at the hands of the UK/US and allies. And the sales of
arms, munitions and lethal weapons reach new heights in the Middle East and warring
parties.
OCCRP Report: The Pentagon Is Spending Up To $2.2 Billion on Soviet-Style Arms for Syrian
Rebels
The Czech Republic is responsible for arms and munitions delivery to Bulgarian arms
dealers working with Pentagon contracts. These ended up in the Ukraine, Syria, Libya and
Yemen. The bomb blast in Vrbetice most likely saved many (innocent) lives.
Some repentants
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in Op-Ed of Dec. 2017 - 'NATO should not have committed to
membership of Ukraine and Georgia'
In the recent past I have written about Legatum at a time Anne Applebaum found her employ
at the think tank. The red alert signs and alarm bells were up at the time and I gave some
background information. The first lady of Poland (almost) and her hubby former UK citizen and
CIA agent Radek Sikorski of Afghan and Angola fame.
Anne Applebaum's Confession
Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | The Guardian
– July 2020 |
We are to believe this cabal of humanity hating zealots will fade into the
background??
Because facts will matter???
Facts have never mattered. In this post-modern illusion our leaders call a reset, facts
actually have negative value...sorta like negative interest rates.
Expect insanity to multiply at the same rate as the money supply expands
Adam Curtis' new documentary series ("I Just Can't Get You out of my Head") deals (in
part) with the way the West's entire worldview sees everything in simplistic Manichean terms,
like Star Wars. The West is always good (even when they act immorally) and the baddies are
always lone rogues, like a spaghetti Western. WW2 shaped the West's entire thinking about its
role in the world: the Allies are on the side of decency and freedom while the enemy is
simply evil through and through, beyond redemption. A parade of baddies from Hitler to
Castro, Uncle Ho, Khomeini, Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad, Putin and Xi. Bond movies and Hollywood
write the scripts, the MSM pumps out the pulp. No one wants to hear that history is a tad
more complicated than bogeymen vs. Marvel superheroes, but then history does have a lovely
way of biting people on the ass...
No one fact check's the claims made by the intelligent agencies. Bernie was told the
Russians wanted him to win the election and he jump right in the laps of the liars. Trump
knew more before he was president than he did once he was elected. That is why General Flynn
was removed under false charges. He knew what was what. I remember the head of the CIA told
Trump that the Russian has killed ducks and poison children. Trump fell for the lie hook line
and casino
Now we have a president that has mental issues and already believes the Russian are dirty
What could go wrong?
Don't make simple things complicated the irony of starting this way for this post lol :D
(of course everything is complicated as well as simple, language betrays us all).
· The people of the Warsaw pact and then the Russians did what they did for
themselves and not for others, and they did it by themselves. It went well as long as the
people were in charge (ie. the initial actions) but the politicians then soon messed it up as
politicians anywhere are bound to do.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin didn't want or wish for disasters due to the results they got (and
maybe their tasks were impossible in their context). Clear mistakes were made and crimes
"allowed", far too much was rushed and ill thought out. The politicians had no way of being
prepared any more than they would be in the US right now.
· The US is out-competed, dysfunctional, and trapped in a cycle of excuses
in order to shoehorn their labyrinth of lies into their current reality. All people lie
despite this clear lesson as to why no one should, it is the lies one tells without realizing
they are lies that are the worst. This is much like the USSR was but easily even worse.
Will people in Europe and the US manage to duplicate the fall of the Warsaw pact and the
USSR? Right now it looks unlikely but remember or be aware that no one predicted the fall of
the Iron Curtain or the Politburo and most if not all outsiders in "the west" had trouble
believing it and understanding it when it happened or even now (and especially people
on both/all sides that are running on ideological biases as fuel).
(Our systems and models do not capture reality and can not, not even theoretically, a
different bigger discussion which boils down to the Shannon limit in the end (but I notice
thermodynamics is contentious among some so why would I invite that much work?)).
A repeat of history is not necessary nor automatic; the US isn't doing anything to stop
its own ongoing fall, at least not anything that I have noticed.
Because b is right.
(I really hope the CPC has a better grasp on this than that article vk posted hints at
because I want a stable prosperous China and that includes/demands the continuation of the
CPC and the way they have shaped and structured the Chinese system which is noticeable for
not taking the USSR approach that worked itself into a blind alley despite decades of
repeated attempts at reform (hell even Stalin tried)).
This was Bush racket. Invasion on false pretenses to establish a foothold
and get to former USSR republic. This move was initially a big success (and
Putin helped by using his influence on Northern Alliance) but later
backfire. In other words this was typical imperial policy.
I would guess 2 things, 1. He's hoping if he ends the war then none
of the terrorists that just snuck in won't attack. 2. He plans on
starting a war elsewhere.
"Obama may have gotten (U.S. soldiers) out wrong, but going in is,
to me, the biggest single mistake made in the history of our
country." -- Donald J. Trump
The policies of the Biden administration towards Russia and China are delusional. It
thinks that it can squeeze these countries but still successfully ask them for cooperation.
It believes that the U.S. position is stronger than it really is and that China and Russia
are much weaker than they are.
It is also full of projection. The U.S. accuses both countries of striving for empire, of
wanting to annex more land and of human rights violations. But is only the U.S. that has
expanding aspirations. Neither China nor Russia are interested in running an empire. They
have no interest in planting military bases all over the world. Though both have marginal
border conflicts they do not want to acquire more land. And while the U.S. bashes both
countries for alleged human rights issues it is starving whole populations (Yemen, Syria,
Venezuela) through violence and economic sanctions.
The U.S. power structures in the Pentagon and CIA use the false accusations against Russia
and China as pretense for cold military and hot economic wars against both countries. They
use color revolution schemes (Ukraine, Myanmar) to create U.S. controlled proxy forces near
their borders.
At the same time as it tries to press these countries the U.S. is seeking their
cooperation in selected fields. It falsely believes that it has some magical leverage.
Consider this exchange from yesterday's White House
press briefing about Biden asking for a summit with Putin while, at the same time,
implementing more sanctions against Russia:
Q What if [Putin] says "no," though? Wouldn't that indicate some weakness on the part of
the American administration here?
MS. PSAKI: Well, I think the President's view is that Russia is on the outside of the
global community in many respects, at this point in time. It's the G7, not the G8. They
have -- obviously, we've put sanctions in place in order to send a clear message that there
should be consequences for the actions; the Europeans have also done that.
What the President is offering is a bridge back. And so, certainly, he believes it's in
their interests to take him up on that offer.
The G7 are not the 'global community'. They have altogether some 500 million inhabitants
out of 7.9 billion strong global population. Neither China nor India are members of the G7
nor is any South American or African country. Moreover Russia has
rejected a Russian return into the G7/8 format:
"Russia is focused on other formats, apart from the G7," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
said in a brief statement ..
Russia has no interest in a summit which would only be used by the U.S. to further bash
Russia. Why should it give Biden that pleasure when there is nothing that Russia would gain
from it. Russia does not need a 'bridge back'. There will be no summit.
... ... ...
If Biden wants cooperation with Russia or China he needs to reign in the hawks and stop
his attacks on those countries. As he is not willing or capable of doing that any further
cooperation attempts will fall flat.
The U.S. has to learn that it is no longer the top dog. It can not work ceaselessly to
impact Russia's and China's military and economic security and still expect them to
cooperate. If it wants something it will first have to cease the attacks and to accept
multilateral relationships.
Posted by b on April 17, 2021 at 17:53 UTC |
Permalink
"It can not work ceaselessly to impact Russia's and China's military and economic security
and still expect them to cooperate"
You have to understand the USA. They're doing it against Europe on a daily basis, and it
actually works... Get them confused why it doesn't always work against others.
It's interesting what's happening right now (in the past hour or so).
First: Russian and Belorussian news about the arrest of leaders (or key participants) of
an attempted military coup in Belarus, planned by the US security services.
Then, 30 minutes later: the Czechs expel 18 Russian diplomats, accusing them of spying and
of connection to some explosion back in 2014.
I could've been skeptical about the details of the first story, but the second one seems
to confirm it. The second story appears to be an obvious attempt to squeeze the first one out
of the news. And who else could order the Czech government to do this with a 30 minute
notice?
Wouldn't Oceania rulers love to print more of their own currency to buy up all the paper
rights to industrial output without having to invest in the factories or anything else! They
love this kind of business model.
"The secret of success is to own nothing but control everything."
Because of what's at stake and how little I trust Oceania, I confess I no longer have an
opinion about global warming. Even if many of its scientists are *earnest*, who obtained,
processed, and stored the data before they started building models? Those institutions are
capable of anything.
"... The guy with the badge didn't kill Floyd, he committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of Fentanyl. The Autopsy showed he had a level of 11ng/ml and 3 ng/ml is a Lethal Level. I don't see how the Medical Examiner didn't rule cause of death was Fentanyl. ..."
Didn't the life of the 7 year old Chicago girl shot in the head while in line at a McDonalds
by a gang member "matter"?
Scott Manson CPA JD SUBSCRIBER 14 minutes ago
Unfortunately not
If she had been shot by a Caucasian cop than it would matter
Yes I am sure - is shot or Caucasian the offending word of the day
EDWARD HINES SUBSCRIBER 6 minutes ago
Exploitation value is all that "matters" to these people.
Chloe Kelley SUBSCRIBER 10 minutes ago
Will that gang member go to jail? Will hundreds of people try to justify the murder as just.
Was the little girl somewhere she shouldn't have been? Was she breaking the law? Was it past
curfew?
These are questions no one asks when a little girl gets shot. Its obvious that murder is
wrong. Her killer is caught and tried and goes to jail.
When I cop kills someone in cold blood in front of your eyes, you are still willing to and
actually search for reasons other than the obvious. It isn't the murder but the reaction to
it that people protest.
Scott Manson CPA JD SUBSCRIBER 5 minutes ago (Edited)
so its less new worthy and therefore better for a gang member to shoot a little girl than for
a felon to die while resisting arrest
Interesting way to view things
Andrew T SUBSCRIBER 16 minutes ago (Edited)
Get ready for more Democrat riots. Remember Maxine Waters' "get more confrontational" call to
protesters.
Jerome Ogden SUBSCRIBER 17 minutes ago
The daily threats and attacks on Chauvin defenders must be having a deep psychological impact
on the unsequestered jury.
A guilty verdict for even the least serious charge of manslaughter will surely trigger an
appeal of the decision not to allow a change of venue. And I believe it will have a good
chance of success. Here's why:
Jack Ruby's conviction by a Dallas jury in 1964 for killing Oswald was overturned on
appeal because Ruby's motion for a change of venue was denied. The appeals court judges
recognized that holding the trial in Dallas denied Ruby an impartial jury, because jurors
residing in that city would feel a unique duty to remove the stain that the Kennedy and
Oswald assassinations had left on their city. (google)
Jurors residing in Minneapolis are human. They cannot be impartial under constant mob
intimidation.
I'm betting the appeals court will grant Chauvin a new trial if found guity.
Anything less would mean our judicial system itself is bowing to mob rule.
RICHARD MARTIN SUBSCRIBER 21 minutes ago
"Beyond a reasonable doubt," is the legal bench mark, and it hasn't been met no matter how
frustrated you are about the restraint technique used the police in this instance. Mr.
Floyd's drug use was a contributing factor to his death whether Maxine Waters thinks so or
not.
A. James Tagg SUBSCRIBER 22 minutes ago
Watching politicians gas light minorities is so funny to watch, just wait to see the results
of the power vacuum created by the lack of a police presence in these communities. The
result..... one of the worst crime waves that is just gonna SHRED they're community for
years.
Scott Manson CPA JD SUBSCRIBER 16 minutes ago
crime in Minneapolis has been on the rise all year. At one point I remember an article in
which the MInneapolis police chief asked for assistance from other law enforcement agencies
because of all the retirements and lack of funding did not have enough cops to handle the
crime ridden city
Jerome Abernathy SUBSCRIBER 29 minutes ago
At the point Floyd lost consciousness, Chauvin's partner checked Floyd and said he couldn't
find a pulse, yet Chauvin stayed on his neck for over 3 minutes more. He knew Floyd was
unconscious, he knew he had no pulse, yet he stayed on his neck. He didn't administer aid, he
continued grind his neck into his neck. None of the other evidence matters for 2nd degree
murder.
Violet Liskey SUBSCRIBER 25 minutes ago
Sufficient in my mind for a second degree manslaughter conviction.
Mac Moore SUBSCRIBER 23 minutes ago
Abernathy writes, "At the point Floyd lost consciousness, Chauvin's partner checked Floyd and
said he couldn't find a pulse, yet Chauvin stayed on his neck for over 3 minutes more."
So, what? Are you looking for evidence to support your hate? How is that helpful? They
jury has all of the facts. The Prosecutors and Defense delivered excellent arguments and
supported them with facts. It seems all of your evidence is of only one perspective. The Jury
has both. I will await their decision, not yours.
Rick Krieger SUBSCRIBER 23 minutes ago
And the Floyd family will skip town with $27 million from the citizens of Minnesota.
Bruce Rado SUBSCRIBER 11 minutes ago
Thank Chauvin for that. The city settled because the bar for a civil award is only "the
preponderance of evidence," and anyone with two functioning eyes could see that Floyd's death
was "wrongful," and that Chauvin's actions were the proximate cause of Floyd's death.
Ellyn Oys SUBSCRIBER 2 minutes ago (Edited)
That is the fascinating part. I awaiting news as to how they spend it. Will they start with a
row of pink Cadillacs?
D REYNOLDS SUBSCRIBER 19 minutes ago
People who don't make a habit of getting high, committing crimes, then resisting arrest have
nothing to worry about.
John Bartlett SUBSCRIBER 9 minutes ago
Especially after ingesting a lethal dose of Fentanyl, Floyd's blood showed 11 ng/ml and
3ng/ml is considered a lethal level.
BRUCE MONTGOMERY SUBSCRIBER 32 minutes ago
Interesting final arguments by the prosecution which just wrapped up.
Next up, the Defense, then rebuttal by the State before the case concludes and jury begins
its deliberations.
The prosecution highlighted the pain suffered by Floyd under Chauvin's knee. Floyd
complained that he couldn't breath and about the pain in his stomach and neck.
According to the Mayo Clinic website, symptoms relating to an "enlarged heart," often
include shortness of breath and may also include chest pain, discomfort in other areas of the
upper body (one or both arms, neck, back, stomach and severe shortness of breath which may
indicate a heart attack), and fainting.
It is inexplicable, however, why Chauvin did not take his knee off Floyd when he had no
pulse. . .
EDWARD HINES SUBSCRIBER 44 minutes ago
National Guard in DC are playing video games on their phones.
As Minneapolis is largely unprotected, sacrificed for a political agenda.
Violet Liskey SUBSCRIBER 45 minutes ago
Bad closing prosecutor argument is going to justify a stronger reaction if the decision does
not go in the direction of the mob - we needed Steve to do a better job for all concerned
ted williams SUBSCRIBER 41 minutes ago
Which mob? The Jan 6 mob?? I'm confused
Kevin Burke SUBSCRIBER 37 minutes ago
The summer of love mob.
Richard Acuti SUBSCRIBER 52 minutes ago
The verdict and the sentence are irrelevant.
More rioting and violence will occur no matter the output of the trial.
This is a tragic tale of a lousy human being being killed by another lousy human being
with a badge. Neither of these guys are any good.
John Bartlett SUBSCRIBER 45 minutes ago
The guy with the badge didn't kill Floyd, he committed suicide by ingesting an overdose
of Fentanyl. The Autopsy showed he had a level of 11ng/ml and 3 ng/ml is a Lethal Level. I
don't see how the Medical Examiner didn't rule cause of death was Fentanyl.
John Bartlett SUBSCRIBER 9 minutes ago
The Medical Examiner is at fault for not listing Fentanyl as the cause of death, Floyd's
Autopsy showed he had 11 ng/ml and 3 is considered Lethal. An overdose of Fentanyl causes the
persons respiration to slow and even stop and that's what happened to Floyd.
Jerome Abernathy SUBSCRIBER 28 minutes ago
"This is a tragic tale of a lousy human being being killed by another lousy human being with
a badge."
Floyd was addicted to opioids like millions of other Americans. That didn't make him a
lousy human. But, I do question what type of person would accuse him of such.
Scott Manson CPA JD SUBSCRIBER 26 minutes ago
he was also a felon who was in the process of committing a crime -
does that qualify as a lousy human?
Maria Thompson SUBSCRIBER 20 minutes ago
... Conviction for first degree home-invasion robbery where he pointed a gun at a pregnant
woman's abdomen
the Media doesn't mention it much
EDWARD HINES SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Looting And burning Footlocker basketball shoe stores will make everything better.
paul grunder SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Maxine Waters was despicable in what she did by encouraging rioters. Then I also think Chris
Cuomo of CNN should be fired for basically saying, unless white children are shot there will
be no justice Why would anyone encourage the deaths of any children? We have a sicko nation.
p's wife
Albert Griffith SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
The prosecution's closing argument is way too long. He's playing to the cameras.
EDWARD HINES SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
He wants a CNN show when this is all over.
mitch wilkerson SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
how much pressure was the knee on his back? That's the 64 dollar question. I see not enough
to kill him but merely to restrain as he was high
Violet Liskey SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
I don't think there is any way to know - only the best guess of experts who may nor may not
be influenced by other factors
Keith Dowling SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
I wonder, did the defense point out that G. Floyd said he couldn't breath before he was put
on the ground? That seems to be proof that the restraining hold had nothing to do with his
breathing issues.
The other factor is, what impact did the crowd have on delaying the paramedics in
accessing and treating Mr. Floyd? They said they did a "load and scoot" due to the unruly
crowd.
Mac Moore SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Dowling writes, "I wonder, did the defense point out that G. Floyd said he couldn't breath
before he was put on the ground?"
Yes. The Defense has been excellent. Both desks, Defense / Prosecutors, presented their
positions very well. The Jury has a good balance of facts and arguments to work with. I don't
know how they will find, but my guess is that at least one or more jurors will not be able to
conclude murder / manslaughter by the police.
EDWARD HINES SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
A 7 year girl in Chicagoland was shot in the head yesterday by a gang member and killed.
She was not fighting with police or under the influence of fentanyl.
Was in line at a McDonalds.
No media coverage.
D REYNOLDS SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
I read about it on Fox News. Didn't see it mentioned on CNN however.
karen graham SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
It's on CNN.
Scott Manson CPA JD SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
so where are the "peaceful protests"
Thomas Fowler SUBSCRIBER 46 minutes ago
There won't be any because if a black is killed by another black, there's no political gain
to be had. This just proves that black lives don't matter unless a white (or maybe Asian) is
involved.
Gregory Weinman SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Based on the evidence I would acquit murder charges. Murder requires an intent the
prosecution has not proven. Involuntary manslaughter in Minnesota is called manslaughter in
the second degree. That seems the appropriate charge. Based on Officer Chauvin's negligence
in the death of Mr Floyd I would convict.
Representative Waters was filmed inciting riot if the jury acquits on murder. She did this in
Brooklyn Center MN, a city already in flames If Minneapolis erupts in riot will she face
sanction or dismissal? I wouldn't bet on it.
Jerome Feldman SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago (Edited)
Is anything going to be done to protect the anonymity of the jurors...as is done in mob
trials?
Not that anything can be done in this day and age. It is likely that the identity of each
juror is already public knowledge.
(Mrs. JF)
M Ruri SUBSCRIBER 47 minutes ago
That is a major issue as to an appeal of the verdict I believe.... because many selected
jurors did say they were worried about their safety in being selected.
John Harris SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Q: Why were those "9 minutes" necessary?
A: Because he had been successful in forcibly resisting arrest (involving the entire police
force available) during the earlier 20 minutes ... just BEFORE!
...... Summary: It's that SIMPLE!
Violet Liskey SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago (Edited)
I think Floyd passed out at 20:24-5 and was not resisting for the last 3 mins of the 9 mins.
And that is the best prosecutors case for at least second degree manslaughter.
Violet Liskey SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
So far prosecutor's closing argument has been disappointing - playing the jury -- by
misleading claims 9:24, 9:24, 9: 24 or superhumans do not exist in real life or (I know, not
the defense, what Chauvin knows) he knew, he knew, he knew, mock, mock, mock -- guess Steve
figures the jury has the intelligence of 8 year-olds and he is willing to yank their strings
.. although not saying he is wrong
Joseph Areeda SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
I can't help but think the reaction of the mob will hang over jury deliberations.
Imagine the press reaction if Trump had used language similar to Maxine Water's on Jan
5
We've got to stay on the street and we've got to get more active, we've got to get more
confrontational. We've got to make sure that they know that we mean business.
I pray Mr. Chauvin gets a fair verdict than depends on his actions and the law
not on expected mob reactions, but I don't see how that's possible.
Girish Kotwal SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Will police officer Derek Chauvin get proper justice from a jury that is being ferociously
intimidated to give a guilty verdict by an organized mob and filthy politicians like Maxine
Watters? It will be the responsibility of the judge and the justice department to assure that
the intimidation should have no influence on the verdict and the jury will be protected from
any repercussions of their verdict no matter what it is. Jury protection measures should be
in place until the mob calms down. I don't think that some of the organizations that were
rioting which are the poodles of the Dems are going to be rioting no matter what the decision
is because after the summer riots they got what they wanted which is the installation of
Biden in the white house. So now they have their puppy in the white house and he is doing
exactly what they want him to do.
The Dems have sowed the seeds of race wars and mass shootings that they cannot blame
Trump. Crime is a crime and deserves to be punished.
karen graham SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago (Edited)
Do you know who the jurors are? This is obviously a high profile case, but who do you think
is intimidating them?
And how did you get Trump into this?
D REYNOLDS SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Perhaps the mob gathering outside the courthouse?
Randall Digby SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
and a US Representative from the state of California that the moderators will not allow to be
named.
Alan Pronesti SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago (Edited)
A couple of years ago I watched a documentary on PBS on African American voters, and it said
that if Black participation rates in elections drops just a tiny % (don't remember the
number) Democrats would get killed in elections. If it wasn't for that we wouldn't know who
George Floyd is.
Once that changes the Democrats, Media, and Liberals will throw African Americans under
the bus.
This is not about race it's all about elections for Democrats.
Michael Dulaney SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
No. It was if the death of Floyd was caused only by the action of the police officer or if
there were other factors that, had they not existed, would not have resulted in death.
Floyd's body was full of drugs.
We will see if, in the United States today, Justice is Blind or Justice is now Mob
Rule.
Scott Manson CPA JD SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
Let the
"peaceful protests" begin
ALAN SEWELL SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
They already have. Somebody left a severed head of a porcine animal in the driveway of a
defense witness last night.
Scott Manson CPA JD SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
did it have an apple in its mouth?
Michael Dulaney SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Our democratic cousins.
Jason Miller SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
Chauvin was already convicted in the media before stepping into court. The majority of the
public also convicted him before knowing all of the facts. So I hope the jury is doing their
job, not judging him from a biased media perspective that has plagued our nation for years.
Either way, there will be riots, whether he's found guilty or not guilty.
Michael Dulaney SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Retail outlets need to board up before "shopping" begins when the verdict is read.
Michael Schmitt SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago (Edited)
Chicago stores (in all neighborhoods) started boarding up last week. Who wants to go shopping
in person any more? Between rioting, carjackings, personal attacks, homeless on every corner,
it's dangerous and not pleasant. Online shopping will take over. Retail, real estate and
insurance industries need to step up and call out this destruction.
K R HANINGTON SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
I would hope that everyone would be willing to accept the verdict of the jury, no
matter what the outcome.
This is foundational for our justice system and indeed for our country. People who have
not you been in the courtroom to hear all the testimony, to see all the evidence should
accept the Judgment of the jury. You don't have to be happy with it but you should accept it.
Outside agitators, such as Representative Maxine Waters, should be held in contempt.
Michael Dulaney SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Maxine Waters is calling for protests against the government. Don't know about Minneapolis,
but in Washington DC she called this an "insurrection".
Maybe she should be tried for treason.
Rachel Glyn SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
I'm not sure whether anybody can be unbiased enough to judge to what extent Chauvin, as
opposed to George Floyd's drug use and heart condition, caused Mr Floyd's death. Radical
supporters of BLM are convinced that Chauvin murdered Floyd and it was racially motivated.
Some on the Right discount any involvement from Chauvin and blame it all on Mr Floyd. Even if
I were on the jury to hear all the scientific evidence, I might not feel qualified to
decide.
I also am unsure whether any jurors can really make an unbiased decision. Even in a worst
case scenario, if Chauvin is racist and evil and deliberately cause Mr Floyd's death, the
jury should decide based on evidence and not mob threats. I'd like to know if the jurors have
heard outside news and if they fear for their own safety.
karen graham SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
Jurors are instructed not to listen to outside news. Juries tend to take their
responsibilities very seriously.
AM Losee SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
I think a lot of people are convinced this was murder. People were screaming at Chauvin to
get his knee off his neck. How much more blatant can it get?
Because you and other right wingers hate Floyd, you are making excuses for a bad cop, a
really bad cop, who already had 17 marks against his record, some for excessive
punishment.
The guy should have been thrown off the force.
Mac Moore SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Losee writes, "I think a lot of people are convinced this was murder."
That is the sad truth. When your lens is blinded by hate, one has difficulty seeing it any
other way.
Michael Dulaney SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
The broad generalization you make against "right wingers"...."hating Floyd" shows that racism
is indeed alive and well in your neck of the woods.
Bruce Anderson SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
AM - how do you know who hates Floyd?
you are a mind reader with a crystal ball?
what a dum statement.
no one heard of Floyd before and now they hate him ?
Charles McGill SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
yes AM and leftists are mind readers and not only that but are righteous, always correct, and
think all sheep should stand quietly and get fleeced.
Joseph Rosenberger SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
What a sad mess.
Mac Moore SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
The flame throwers, Obama, Sharpton, Jackson, James, BLM, and, their enablers in the MSM ....
have poisoned the waters of rational thought in America. They have far too many citizens
viewing this event through a racist lens that they created for political malfeasance to gain
power. It is sick.
Floyd was there as a culminations of hundreds, if not thousands, of bad choices of his own
making. The police were there as a request. If Floyd had chosen to comply with the police,
the outcome would have been completely different. How the police acted to gain submission is
in question, but it is political theatrics to call it murder.
For an acquittal, the defense must similarly convince all 12 jurors that the prosecution
failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But it takes only one juror to "hang" the
jury. That means that if 11 jurors want to vote to convict on at least one of the charges
against Chauvin, but one juror doesn't believe the government has met its burden of proof,
there won't be a verdict. Instead, there will be a mistrial, and although the government can
retry the case down the road, a hung jury involves delay and the risk that as the evidence
ages, the prosecution's case may become weaker.
OMG. I just watched 2 strong young black men have a conversation
without screaming RACISM. All they talked about was our freedoms and
our rights. I love watching Lawrence, he is a breath of fresh air in
the media. We need more people like these 2 men to keep the
conversation going about protecting everyone's rights.
It's sad that money was used to help people not for her to buy four
houses I don't understand I work in Brooklyn a lot of people would
need those donations. Sad 🥺
A foreign military bloc of nations is inching closer to Moscow, Vladimir Putin reacts in
kind, and somehow Russia is the aggressor. And learned Ph.D.'s scribble on, defying pure logic
from Washington's Think Tank Row. Here's the latest sensational proof that the world will
never, ever be at peace.
Dr. Mamuka Tsereteli and James Carafano have a new plan for defeating Russia for good. Now
get this, in America, we have institutions like The Heritage Foundation that fund supposed
research to perpetuate wars. No, really. The latest report of the foundation "Putin Threatens
Ukraine -- Here's the Danger and What US, Allies Should Do About It" is a blueprint for
continuing friction between west and east. Let's examine the three takeaways Heritage
Foundation puts forward.
According to Tsereteli and Carafano, Putin is about to attack Ukraine. These well-paid
foreign policy geniuses say a military buildup inside Russian territory, which was in response
to threats from Kyiv, proves beyond a doubt the dastardly Putin is about to overrun Russia's
neighbor. To quote the report, "Putin plans to use Russian forces in a full-blown military
engagement with that country [Ukraine]." Well, let's find out why Russia's president alerted
his military.
Didn't I just read how Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced that his country's
National Security and Defense Council had approved a strategy aimed at retaking Crimea and
reintegrating the strategically important peninsula? Yes, I am sure of it. Another Washington
think tank has already outlined something called the
Crimean Platform Initiative , another genius plan hatched in the bowels of CIA
headquarters, to make Crimea an expensive proposition for Russia.
This came into being the instant Joe Biden took the oath of office as president, and it's
only part of an overall strategy to engage Russia in a winner take all confrontation that many
experts say, is long overdue. And the has taken unilateral aggressive steps toward the Donbass
region and any pocket of the pro-Russia sentiment inside Ukraine. A statement by Russia's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova on this issue bears repeating
here:
"All efforts by Kyiv to reclaim Crimea are illegitimate and cannot be interpreted in any
other way but a threat of aggression against two Russian [federal] subjects. We reiterate
that we will consider the participation of any states or organizations in such activities,
including the Crimean Platform initiative, as a hostile act against Russia and direct
encroachment on its territorial integrity."
Now that we've established who the aggressor is, let's take a look at Tsereteli's and
Carafano's next brilliant takeaway point. The dynamic duo of war strategies says cosmetic
measures against Russia will not do! The "west" (meaning NATO), they say, needs a more clear
strategy. Which certainly means a massive arms buildup west of the Siverskyi Donets River. The
Zelensky government is being pushed from Washington to take even more drastic measures to force
Russia into a war stance. The editorial board of the Washington Post recently advised
Zelensky:
"Mr. Zelensky now has the opportunity to forge a partnership with Mr. Biden that could
decisively advance Ukraine's attempt to break free from Russia and join the democratic West.
He should seize on it."
So, now that we've shown who is doing the pushing here, let's turn to the final takeaway
from Heritage Foundation master strategists. Tsereteli and Carafano come right out and say
"countries left outside of NATO will remain targets of Russian aggression and manipulations."
So, the purpose of all this supposed spread of militaristic-based democracy is to expand NATO
to? I mean, seriously. Washington is not reaching out with the Peace Corps to shore up a
budding Eastern European democracy. The United States is kidnapping another former Soviet
republic on the way to the big score. My country has military bases in almost every country in
the world, has had more wars than the Mongols, and spends more on weapons than everybody else
combined – but Russia is being aggressive! Who believes this bullshit?
Let's be real here. First, please understand who is doing the "thinking" there in
Washington. Take James Carafano, the former Lt. Colonel who wrote speeches for the head of the
U.S. Army Chief of Staff. Carafano teaches at West Point, what the hell else can he advise, of
war with Russia does not come about? The man's life is about justifying war. Then there's
Mamuka Tsereteli, who's also the Founding Executive Director at the America-Georgia Business
Council. America-Georgia business, hmm? I wonder if there is an America-Ukraine business
council in the works soon? But, you can see where this new strategy from Heritage Foundation is
headed, can't you? Taking advice on foreign policy from these so-called experts is putting the
foxes in charge of the hen house. Only they're not as smart as foxes. They don't need to be.
The public is just that numbed and misinformed these days.
Is heavily involved in helping promote the EU's Three Seas Initiative (3SI), which is an
asymmetrical warfare economic platform to cut Russia off from the EU, and install the U.S. and
central European powers in her place in East Europe. This report from Mamuka Tsereteli at
Emerging Europe lays out the plan. To learn more about Tsereteli's role, readers should
research the so-called Frontier Europe Initiative, currently propagandizing for greater
Georgia-Ukraine strategies against Russia. Make no mistake, the narrative and strategies these
people are discussing are the precursors to including not only Ukraine in NATO but Georgia as
well. Retired Air Force General Phillip Breedlove and former CENTCOM Commander General Joseph
Votel are two of the "experts" helping to draft these strategies. And The Heritage Foundation
stands center stage of the move for NATO to force Putin and Russia into an inescapable
corner.
And there, is your true geopolitical Eurasia picture. The "west" will run on to Moscow,
start World War III, and then blame Putin for the holocaust.
retrocop 1 day ago
We protect other countries borders, but not our own. The Pentagon lists military personnel
in 514 "outposts" in 45 countries, and the DOD "acknowledges" personnel in more than 160
countries. Not bad for a nation that is essentially bankrupt.
TheABaum 23 hours ago
Did you mean entirely bankrupt?
The Count 20 hours ago (Edited)
Well, the border to Mexico is not really a border. It's just a never ending supply of
cheap labor.
Village-idiot 22 hours ago (Edited)
The Globalists really don't like Putin; they don't like anyone who fights them and
wins.
Putin already took their Russian central bank away from them.
He is also protecting the Russian culture, and is quickly turning Russia into the most
Christian country in the world (around 85% Christian so far).
Putin reputably hates paedophiles as much as Trump does.
They must destroy Putin before his ideas start to spread.
.
gro_dfd 21 hours ago (Edited)
From reading comments on ZH, Putin's ideas have already spread. His pro-capitalist,
anti-globalist, fiscally-conservative, nationalist, and culturally conservative views are
noticed. He has many admirers in the US.
jldpc 22 hours ago
It has been 209 years (1812) since Napoleon's complete defeat in Russia.
It has been 99 years (1917-1922) since the end of the Russian Revolution discarding
hundreds of years of Czarist rule, and the control/corruption of the elitist classes.
It has been 79 years (1942-1945) since the Germans were routed and destroyed by the
Russians.
Think the Russians are going to cave-in to Joe B. and his band of wishful thinkers?
Threatening the well armed, and very experienced Russians is a fool's game.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. – Alexander Pope
REDinFL 17 hours ago remove link
All of the angels are in heaven,
And few of the fools are dead.
-James Thurber, from "Further Fables for Our Time"
PatriotSurge 17 hours ago remove link
I guarantee neither PedoJoe, nor any of his advisors have ever heard of the folly of
attacking Russia. They don't read history.
Hell, most of them don't even read, clearly.
philbutler 11 hours ago
You are right. The only difference is, the Euromaidan put the Fourth Reich 250 miles from
Moscow. It's a helluva head start over where Hitler finished. Nukes will be the endgame on
this one I think.
@ pnyx -- It's not only that USians are unaware of much of what's happening in other
countries, it's the fact they are misinformed and misled about current events by propaganda.
This is also the case in Europe because their MSM also have been co-opted by the coordinated
Intelligence Apparatus (CIA - MI6 - FiveEyes) that controls the flow of information in the
U.S. MSM. We are witnessing censorship/control of Social Media, Search Engines, and formerly
independent websites as well.
This is an all-out effort of Class War. One aspect of this is to broadcast a hidden
personal message that if I feel oppressed, "it must be my own fault" because "success"
supposedly is within everyone's grasp (note the emphasis on celebrity 'culture').
Apologize will come flowing thru today..... You're out of your mind
if you think any of them will apologize for this cause they knew
what they were doing
i got to say i love how when Kayley isn't talking, she has that very
intense look on her face of listening and paying attention of what
others are saying that is so dang cute. Got to love the most beast
press secretary of all times! Im glad to see her on fox semi
regularly now.
Kaley is articulated and concise, on point, because what she says is
the product of her own intellect, not a script well studied (Psaki).
That the core of the difference in my opinion.
The politician most responsible for pitting ordinary men and women
against each other, ruining marriage among ordinary people, then
accusing someone else of "having no soul" is ironic.
It's the Orwellian narrative: "We have enemies overseas." Enemies
that aren't real enemies because we really don't actually want to
start a war with them but we need to put on a show to keep the
people distracted from looking at who are the real enemies inside
their own country.
...The current political class running the US loathes the average American, and it matters
not what side of the isle you sit on. They hate us. They also have their assets squirreled
away offshore. One question to ask is our demise something the international financial class
wants for their reset or one world?
One question to ask is our demise something the international financial class wants for
their reset or one world?
Posted by: Old and Grumpy | Apr 17 2021 22:25 utc | 44
I guess we should just see when there's large movement of patents and technologies
transfers to the next capital finance powerhouse. As it is right now i can see US financial
elite are doing everything it can to keep their monopolies and current order as is trying to
sabotage emerging China+Russia led new economic initiatives.
The US moneyed elites would like it very much at home where they don't have to fear forceful
government crackdown on themselves and having their wealth seized.
Just remind you that Venezuelan gold are swiped by it's local British government as soon as
they have the pretext. It can happen to them too in China and Russia where local prominent
houses already emplaced in position of power.
My guess is they got too used to game the Democratic process in the US that they do not
want it to come back functional anytime soon without minding too much of the long term
effects of dumbed down populaces.
The USA certainly seems to be in some sort of self-destructive spiral. The MSM has been
the key to holding things together through all the deceptions and false flags maintaining the
public belief that the establishment are somehow the good guys. This must be approaching an
end point soon as thousands of conservative Americans know they were cheated on in the
elections and with each new false flag another portion of the population become more
skeptical of the official line and less gullible regarding the lies disseminated by CNN BBC
etc.
As the Covid19 situation unfolds into an endless train-wreak, with the Vaccines not providing
a solution and non promotion of the real solutions by TPTB more and more people will become
skeptical that their governments are acting in their interests. (The real solution to Covid19
is the use of Ivermectin, protectively and at all stages of infection and a focus on
increasing Vitamin D levels throughout the population)
The attempts by the West to destabilise Russia and China in Ukraine and Xinjiang will
hopefully eventually add to the public disbelief of the official narrative.
The world should be extremely grateful for Vladimir Putin and his team for their
unflappable restraint. I know I am.
The confronting of Biden by Putin, with the US attempt to assassinate the President of
Belarus, a few days after Biden called Putin a killer, must go down in history as one of the
greatest ironies of all time. Will the greater public ever get to hear about it from our
overhyped news services. No!
This could be described as the "Banality of Evil". The MSM reporters just reporting the
official line with no real debate, while the world teeters at a few minutes in midnight on
the Nuclear Clock.
Russia and China need to up their game regarding the news media. Provide western audiences
with genuinely truth seeking interviewers of politicians and public figures and hold them to
account. Public debates between the opposing viewpoints so we are not just subject to the
official propaganda that is all the MSM gives us now. Maybe they would say, why should we
bother we have more important things to spend money on, and I would understand that.
Finally, MOA has my undying gratitude for providing what should be provided by the News
Media. Intelligent commentary and debate about world events as the old empire disintegrates
and other powers arise with a more truly humanitarian outlook...
Now that we've established who the aggressor is, let's take a look at Tsereteli's and
Carafano's next brilliant takeaway point. The dynamic duo of war strategies says cosmetic
measures against Russia will not do! The "west" (meaning NATO), they say, needs a more
clear strategy. Which certainly means a massive arms buildup west of the Siverskyi Donets
River. The Zelensky government is being pushed from Washington to take even more drastic
measures to force Russia into a war stance. The editorial board of the Washington Post
recently advised Zelensky:
"Mr. Zelensky now has the opportunity to forge a partnership with Mr. Biden that could
decisively advance Ukraine's attempt to break free from Russia and join the democratic
West. He should seize on it."
So, now that we've shown who is doing the pushing here, let's turn to the final takeaway
from Heritage Foundation master strategists. Tsereteli and Carafano come right out and say
"countries left outside of NATO will remain targets of Russian aggression and
manipulations." So, the purpose of all this supposed spread of militaristic-based democracy
is to expand NATO to? I mean, seriously. Washington is not reaching out with the Peace
Corps to shore up a budding Eastern European democracy. The United States is kidnapping
another former Soviet republic on the way to the big score. My country has military bases
in almost every country in the world, has had more wars than the Mongols, and spends more
on weapons than everybody else combined – but Russia is being aggressive!
"I'd like to know how Zelensky and the Kiev authorities are supposed to get out of
this situation without falling apart."
Well, if I were Zelensky I might imagine getting myself out of this mess by the
following steps:
1. Keep raising the ante. Scream about an imminent Russian invasion, keep your population
panicked (by concocting a list of "bomb shelters" in Kiev, for example). Keep actual violence
against the Donbass republics at just low enough a level to not be enough provocation for a
Russisn intervention, for now .
2. Keep acquiring missiles from NATO, and trainers in how to use them. Negotiate with
Sultan Erdoğan for headchopper mercenaries (especially Chechens and other Russian
speakers).
3. Arrange for NATO exercises in Ukranazistan this summer.
4. Under cover of those exercises, using the NATOstanis as human shields in fact, attack
the Donbass Republics, and only the Donbass Republics. Use the headchoppers as shock
troops to minimise own losses. Capture the Donetsk and Lugansk main urban areas, leave slices
right on the Russian border. Do not touch Crimea.
5. Present this as a huge victory, like Ilham Aliyev did in Nagorno Karabakh.
As I said, this would be my plan if I were Zelensky. Whether it would work depends on how
much "restraint " Putin is willing to give up on, and how much risk he's willing to take.
The present stand-off cannot last forever, so it is a question of time before something
falls apart.
Russia used the aggressive move by NATO/Ukraine to perform a judo-like move
The speed of execution of the manoeuvre also calls for admiration when NATO can't even
move an armoured division in Poland (inadequate road infrastructure)
But Evil is in the details. And as the greatest french dialogue writer: "Les conneries
c'est comme les impôts, on finit toujours par les payer."
[Bullshit is like taxes, you always end up paying them.]
"The British training program, Operation Orbital, has trained over 17,500 Ukrainian
service members since its inception in 2015. Last year British Defence Secretary Ben
Wallace confirmed that the training mission would be extended until 2023. It is explicitly
designed to transform the Ukrainian military in order to meet NATO standards: to be a NATO
proxy army on Russia's western border."
To which my own response was:
"I strongly agree with Igor Strelkov: war now is preferable for Russia than (inevitable)
war later. I also completely agree with him that the Ukranazi cancer should have been
eliminated in 2014, or, failing that, the Donbass armies should have been permitted by the
Putinist regime to liberate Slovyansk and Mariupol, or, even better, liberate Odessa and
advance to the Dneiper. If that had been done then, there would have been no problem now.
The Empire is trying to surround and castrate Russia. Russian interests are being hit
every day. Sanctions for ever, more and more.
Putin has to come up with something exceptionally crazy and unexpected. another level of
asymmetry. Russian stockpile is "officially" of about 6.400 nuclear heads of which 1600
operational, probably more than that. This Nuclear Capital should be "invested ". Putin
should convince Iran to change policy and accept donation or lease of 200-300 nuclear heads.
Siria,Venezuela and maybe Korea should be given a number of tactical nuclear weapons for self
defence. China,as well,with Russian help,should double the Nuclear Potential. A political
Earthquake would shake the Empire. Russia survival
is the Stake.
USA givesall its manufacturing to then moans about China carbon emissions. Chine is worlds
largest solar panel manufacturer, us moans about China carbon. USA blocks Nord Stream 2 gas
supply to Germany then moans about Russian carbon emissions. USA hasthe poorest house
insulation regulationa and moans about others carbon emissions.
China achieves major reafforestation targets and reclaims huge tracts of desert and USA
ignores it, continues to strip forests at home and everwhere else.
USA needs to build a bridge to its future and to common sense.
@ pnyx -- It's not only that USians are unaware of much of what's happening in other
countries, it's the fact they are misinformed and misled about current events by propaganda.
This is also the case in Europe because their MSM also have been co-opted by the coordinated
Intelligence Apparatus (CIA - MI6 - FiveEyes) that controls the flow of information in the
U.S. MSM. We are witnessing censorship/control of Social Media, Search Engines, and formerly
independent websites as well.
This is an all-out effort of Class War. One aspect of this is to broadcast a hidden
personal message that if I feel oppressed, "it must be my own fault" because "success"
supposedly is within everyone's grasp (note the emphasis on celebrity 'culture').
Russia has shown an astonishing amount of 'strategic patience' in the face of racism,
lies, insults, seizure of diplomatic property, obstruction of officials coming to the UN,
possibly a hand in the murder of their high rank military landing in Syria, perhaps the
downing of their choir, US silence of US radar data 'highly likely' showing Ukraine downing
the Malaysian aircraft, fabrications everywhere, and so very much more.
Well, the cup of patience runneth over.
"These steps represent just a fraction of the capabilities at our disposal. Unfortunately,
US statements threatening to introduce new forms of punishment show that Washington is not
willing to listen and does not appreciate the restraint that we have displayed despite the
tensions that have been purposefully fuelled since the presidency of Barack Obama.
Recall that after a large-scale expulsion of Russian diplomats in December 2016 and the
seizure of Russian diplomatic property in the US, we did not take any response measures for
seven months. We responded only when Russia was declared a US adversary legislatively in
August 2017.
In general, compared to the Russian diplomatic missions in the United States, the US
Embassy in Moscow operates in better conditions, enjoying a numerical advantage and
actively benefitting from the work of Russian citizens hired in-country. This form of
disparity frees up "titular" diplomats to interfere in our domestic affairs, which is one
of the main tenets of Washington's foreign policy doctrine.
...the reality is that we hear one thing from Washington but see something completely
different in practice... a proposed Russian-US summit. When this offer was made, it was
received positively and is now being considered in the context of concrete
developments. "/BLOCKQUOTE>
The last bit is deliberately ambiguous. Ha ha ha ha ha!
Posted by: Bernard F. | Apr 17 2021 21:21 utc | 38
I suspect Sullivan and Blinken's next gig will be something like that. "We came here to
forget", but instead of the French Legion, it will be PMC Wagner.
Personally what I would do would be a Operation Bagration 2.0 at the slightest misstep by
Ukraine. There is may too much on the table here. Bio labs, nests of NATO rats, nuclear power
plants, NATO missiles on the Ukrainian and Belarus borders with Russia. Time to clear out the
rats including Lviv. After disinfecting this part of eastern Europe (again) of that other far
more dangerous virus, Nazism, life will be much more peaceful in that part of the world, and
likely by the domino effect (yes I actually said that!) to other places in the world plagued
by US exceptionalism.
The U.S. has leveled sanctions on Russia over election interference and cyberattacks,
including barring U.S. financial institutions from buying new domestically issued Russian
government debt.
The Biden Administration went where Presidents Obama and Trump had not, barring U.S.
financial institutions from buying new domestically issued Russian sovereign bonds. The move
excluded the secondary market, though. Anyone can still trade the so-called OFZs already in
circulation. And it was matched by a substantial carrot: a dovish speech on Russia by Biden,
floating a potential summit with Putin this summer.
The market had feared worse, says Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at BCS Global Markets
in Moscow. The ruble is still down 4%, and stocks 3%, since Russia stoked tensions a month ago
by massing troops on Ukraine's border. That is despite buoyant oil prices that should benefit
Russia. "Everyone was discussing direct punishment of Russian companies or a cutoff from
SWIFT," he says, referring to the backbone for global financial transactions. "The actual
sanctions turned out to be relatively mild."
Global investors have been fleeing the OFZ market without any push from the White House.
Foreigners' share of outstanding bond holdings have fallen to 20% from about a third last
summer, notes Aaron Hurd, senior currency portfolio manager at State Street Global
Advisors.
Political risk still depresses the value of Russian assets by 15%, Tikhomirov
estimates. That is reasonable considering Biden's options for escalating sanctions, says
Daniel Fried, an Atlantic Council fellow who was the State Department's sanctions coordinator
under Obama. "He could move into the secondary debt market, restrict state-owned energy
companies' ability to raise capital, or go after the money hidden by Putin and his cronies," he
says. "It could get to be a pretty tight squeeze."
To close the political risk gap, Putin needs to at least restore calm with Ukraine, risking
domestic political face after a month of hyping the alleged threat from Russia's southern
neighbor. The coming week offers two opportunities for Putin to move toward Biden's proffered
stable relationship, Tikhomirov says. He could sound friendly in an annual state of the nation
address scheduled for April 21, and he could turn up (virtually) for the global climate summit
Biden has called on April 23-24.
These may be far overshadowed by Alexei Navalny, the
Russian opposition leader who is on hunger strike in a maximum-security prison outside
Moscow. Navalny-allied doctors said April 17 he could "die within days" without outside medical
intervention. Backing off from its merciless treatment of Navalny would also look like an
embarrassing climb-down from the Kremlin's point of view.
Hurd expects a stalemate where Russian assets could nudge higher as oil prices remain firm
and the Central Bank of Russia raises interest rates. Putin will make few concessions with his
party facing parliamentary elections in September, he predicts. Washington will be constrained
by the European Union's reluctance to stiffen anti-Russian measures. "The ruble could still go
higher from here, but we remain tentative over the next six months," he says.
Putin has essentially accomplished the goal he set after his 2014 invasions of Ukraine, a
self-sufficient Russia that can pursue its perceived security interests without worrying what
the rest of the world thinks, says Yong Zhu, portfolio manager for emerging markets debt at
DuPont Capital Management.
Government debt amounts to a mere 18% of gross domestic product, and in a pinch can be
serviced domestically. That keeps yields too low to pay for the country's geopolitical
turbulence, he concludes: 10-year Russian domestic bonds pay about 7% annually, compared with
9% for Brazil or South Africa. "Russia doesn't really need anything beside the iPhone," Zhu
quips.
Self-reliance has also spelled isolation from the capital and talent that could lift Russia
to its proper place in global innovation and growth. But Putin and his regime seem to like it
that way.
While I agree with 99% of your post, there is one point that I think needs to be keeping
in mind. While the populace of this particular manure-hole certainly has its equal share of
dumb creatures, the people running things cannot be so easily dismissed. The problem as I see
it is they have a great deal of a certain kind of intelligence, as someone said "smart, but
not wise". They are educated, but insane. The cream of the crop that has gone sour. In my
travels I would often ask people what they actually thought of "Americans". An Indonesian man
responded " soft, but cunning. You have to be careful around them."
If these cunning, insane, power hungry creatures were simply dumb and not truly evil, we
might be in less of a shit show (nod to psychohistorian) than we are.
After 20 years of regular interaction with Amerikastanis online and in real life, I have
realised that they live in a parallel universe in which Hollywood is the arbiter of truth.
They genuinely believe that anything they choose to imagine is the truth just because they
imagine it.
A couple of days ago when the Imperialist States admitted its "Russia Bounty" story was
concocted, the people who had shrieked to the skies about it last year had a chance to
apologise. Did they? They ignored it. It did not happen because they chose to believe it
didn't.
More than most companies today, Google understands that information is power. But how much
does Google know about you? Here, we'll unpack Google's privacy policy, so that you know what
data gets tracked, how Google uses your data, and how to manage your online privacy.
If you use a Google service or product (and you probably do), it's important to educate
yourself about how Google uses your data so you can make smart, informed decisions that keep
you in control of your privacy. Every step you take, every purchase you make -- Google could be
watching you.
The simple answer is yes: Google collects data about how you use its devices, apps, and
services. This ranges from your browsing behavior, Gmail and YouTube activity, location
history, Google searches, online purchases, and more. Basically, anything that's connected to
Google is likely used to collect data on your activity and preferences.
Many people have questions about Google collecting data and how it gathers information. In
particular, people worry about voice-activated products like Google Home and Google Assistant
being used to listen to more than just requests to buy toilet paper or play music in the living
room.
Nearly every company you interact with online uses web tracking technology to mine data about
your online habits and preferences to personalize your experiences and the content you see.
While the security
risks of smart home devices are real, Google using your home assistant to record your
private conversations isn't one of them. You might feel like you're being spied on, but the
reality is that Google sees only the information you have voluntarily entered or allowed them
to access .
It's tempting to cast Google as a villain in this scenario, but Google data collection isn't
unique. Nearly every company you interact with online uses web tracking technology to mine data
about your online habits and preferences to personalize your experiences and the content you
see. Still, it might surprise you how much data Google actually tracks and the less obvious
ways it keeps tabs on you.
Why does Google want my data?
You might be thinking, "Fine, Google knows a lot about me. But what does Google
do with my data?" According to Google, they use all this data to deliver better
services, make improvements, and customize your experience . In other words, all this
information helps Google make its services more useful for you.
Google uses data about your behavior and preferences to deliver better or more
personalized services.
Of course, there's a very thin line between useful and creepy -- and sometimes businesses
make the mistake of taking it too far by hoovering up excessive amounts of data. For many
companies, more data collection means more profit. Here are a few ways in which Google data
collection can impact your digital lifestyle.
Targeted advertising
With all the data Google gathers about you -- across all of its platforms, services,
products, and devices -- it can build a detailed advertising profile, including your gender,
age range, job industry, and interests. This helps them use targeted advertising to serve you
Google ads that align with your personal tastes.
Let's say you search for a place to rent skis. Afterward, you start seeing ads for related
products like ski jackets on other websites you visit around the web -- these are targeted ads
. If you want to see what Google thinks it knows about you, you can go to your Google account settings , click on Data &
personalization in the left navigation panel, and view your advertising profile.
Location
tracking
Where you go, Google goes. Whether you're looking for the quickest way to get to a meeting,
searching for a nearby cafe, or trying to find the closest bus stop, Google uses your location
to offer personalized suggestions that are more relevant to your situation. For instance, maybe
you'd like to see a movie after work. If you search Google for listings, you might see the
showtimes for movies playing at theaters close to your office.
Improving usability
The more data, the better the quality of the service. Google uses all the data it collects
to improve usability -- and your information alone can't do all the work. Google also analyzes
billions of other people's data across different apps to make its services more useful for
everyone.
For example, when you use Google Maps (or Waze -- yes, it's also part of the Google family),
your location is anonymously sent back to Google and combined with data from people around you
to create a picture of current traffic patterns. Have you ever been rerouted around an accident
or a traffic jam while driving? You can thank your data and all the data from the people
driving around you.
Tweaking algorithms
Google's search algorithms -- the rules that determine the results you see and the order
they're listed in -- are continually changing. In 2019, the company reported more than 3,500 improvements
to Google search -- that's an average of nearly 10 every day.
Google uses data about what people search for, what results are relevant, and the quality of
the content and sources to determine the results you see. And their engineers adjust and refine
Google's search algorithms to make searching on Google more useful ,
such as generating useful featured content snippets from relevant third-party websites to
provide quick answers to questions right at the top of the search results
page.
Trendspotting and analysis
Your search results also power Google Trends , a Google website that tracks and
analyzes the top search queries across services like Google Search, YouTube, and more. You can
see the most popular search terms from multiple countries and languages, helping you discover
the latest trends, topics, and stories across different regions and over different time
periods.
To be clear, no one outside of Google (and maybe even no one inside) truly knows how this
data is processed and used. But they don't hide what they collect and how they do
it. Google's privacy
policy is written clearly and easy to understand.
Hundreds of corporations, including Starbucks, Amazon, and Netflix, have signed a letter signaling their opposition to election
integrity efforts in numerous states, promising to oppose any related legislation they deem "discriminatory."
The effort, led by former American Express chief executive Kenneth Chenault and Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier, both of
whom recently
led
a
group of black business leaders urging corporations to take a stand against election integrity efforts, has corporations vowing
to stand against "any discriminatory legislation," representing what the
New
York Times
deemed
"the
broadest coalition yet to weigh in on the issue."
"We stand for democracy," the statement
reads
.
"A beautifully American idea, but a reality denied to many for much of this nation's history. As Americans, we know that in our
democracy we should not expect to agree on everything":
However, regardless of our political affiliations, we believe the very foundation of our electoral process rests upon the
ability of each of us to cast our ballots for the candidates of our choice. For American democracy to work for any of us, we
must ensure the right to vote for all of us. We all should feel a responsibility to defend the right to vote and to oppose any
discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity
to cast a ballot.
"Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy," the statement continues, calling on Americans to take a "nonpartisan stand for this
most basic and fundamental right of all Americans."
Signers include Bank of America, Amazon,
Estée
Lauder
, Eventbrite, General Motors, Netflix, Starbucks, Synchrony, Nordstrom, PayPal, Peloton, Pinterest, United Airlines,
Twitter, Under Armour, and more.
Some, such as Coca-Cola and Delta, which spoke out after Georgia passed its election integrity law, did not add their names to
the list, nor did Home Depot
, as the
Times
reported:
Coca-Cola and Delta, which condemned the Georgia law after it was passed, declined to add their names, according to people
familiar with the matter. Home Depot also declined, even though its co-founder Arthur Blank said in a call with other business
executives on Saturday that he supported voting rights. Another Home Depot co-founder, Ken Langone, is a vocal supporter of
Mr. Trump.
Coca-Cola and Delta declined to comment. Home Depot said in a statement on Tuesday that "the most appropriate approach for us
to take is to continue to underscore our belief that all elections should be accessible, fair and secure."
JPMorgan Chase also declined to sign the statement despite a personal request from senior Black business leaders to the
chief executive, Jamie Dimon, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Dimon has publicly declared that he supports
Black Lives Matter and made a statement on voting rights before many other companies, saying, "We believe voting must be
accessible and equitable."
"It should be clear that there is overwhelming support in corporate America for the principle of voting rights," Chenault said.
While the statement does not list specific state election efforts, it follows the debate over Georgia's recently signed election
integrity law, which the left has
inundated
with
misinformation, including the false claims it eliminates "Souls to the Polls," thereby suppressing minority votes. In reality,
the law expands ballot access in several ways, including by
increasing
the
mandatory days for early weekend voting.
"The nuts and bolts of [the law] are this, it makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat," Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R)
said
during
a March appearance on
Breitbart
News Daily
:
The biggest -- probably the top four things to me -- is it replaces a signature match with a voter ID on absentee ballots. It
secures ballot drop boxes around the clock It also requires poll workers to continue tabulating ballots until all votes are
counted and then it actually -- contrary to what the national media and those that are profiting off of this whole exercise of
not being truthful with people -- expands voting access, especially on the weekends.
A Rasmussen Reports survey
released
last
this week revealed a majority of likely voters, or 60 percent, believe it is more important to make sure there is no cheating in
elections rather than prioritizing making it "easier for everybody to vote." Additionally, a majority of likely voters, including
a majority of black voters,
reject
the
notion that voter ID laws are discriminatory against some voters.
Dementia Joe and his coterie of enablers have embarked on a foreign policy that is likely to result in a new war that will
endanger America and further a growing perception that the United States is weak and divided. There are three troublesome
flashpoints (Ukraine, China and Iran) that could explode at any time and catapult our nation into a costly, deadly military
confrontation. Topping the list is the Ukraine.
The corrupt dealings in Ukraine over the last four years by Joe and Hunter Biden leaves them completely compromised and
subject to coercion, even blackmail. With this as a backdrop the decade long effort by the United States to weaken Russia's
influence in eastern Ukraine has been revived with Biden's arrival in the White House.
Let me first introduce you to some essential facts:
Larry Johnson,
If the Ukraine blows so will Syria! Then the situation might transition from nemesis to tisis in short order. Here is a
strangely appropriate analysis with just one word blanked out.
In the
years ahead, _____________ will assuredly find itself in new international crises involving nations or groups that have
powerful leaders. In some cases, these leaders may have a special, dangerous mindset that is the result of a
"hubris-nemesis complex." This complex involves a combination of hubris (a pretension toward an arrogant form of
godliness) and nemesis (a vengeful desire to confront, defeat, humiliate, and punish an adversary, especially one that
can be accused of hubris). The combination has strange dynamics that may lead to destructive, high-risk behavior.
Attempts to deter, compel, or negotiate with a leader who has a hubris-nemesis complex can be ineffectual or even
disastrously counterproductive when those attempts are based on concepts better suited to dealing with more normal
leaders.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR461.pdf
We, too, pray for sanity.
Ishmael Zechariah
Reply
Larry, I unfortunately agree with your observations and conclusion.
I would add that in my opinion, the Russians are a lot more determined, as are the Chinese and Iranians, then the
generally self absorbed younger generations in the West. "Woke" culture has no answer to sunken warships, downed
aircraft and body bags. Do the SJWs want to die for LBGTIQ rights in Russia or another of their pet obsessions de jour?
I don't think so.
My concern for President Biden and America is that, if Ukraine attacks, unless President Putin succeeds in delivering a
very short, sharp and successful lesson to Ukraine there is not going to be a clear path forward to a negotiated
armistice. If that doesn't happen through bad luck, the fog of war, etc. Then I don't think Biden has the intelligence
to get us out of the mess.
If you add to that the possibility that Zelensky may demand American support "or else" when he starts to lose then we
are in very very dangerous territory. If I were the Chinese, I would just stand back and watch. Taiwanese independence
is a meaningless concept without American military backing and I'm sure the Taiwanese know it.
The wild card to me is what is Israel's attitude? Is it possible that they might be a moderating influence for a change?
Reply
Oh, yeah .!!!!!! The country that shoots women and children who get too close to the fence they have constructed in
PALESTINE on other people"s land will be the moderating party. Or maybe Mad Dog Bolton.
Try getting real, and come up with real world situations. Not some fantasy of killers acting like kittens. The
Russians seem more balanced in responding to such provocations than the U.S. & it's gang of follower- puppets. How
long would any of the these follower-puppets be able to go toe to toe with Russia in all-out-war situation. I'd bet
less than 24 hours, probably far less. Or as a Chinese General once asked: would you want to give up Los Angeles to
save Tiwan? The U.S. doesn't seem to have any sort of reliable anti-missile defence system. Would Ole Uncle Joe
really like to get into such pissing contest so early on in his term of presidency? Maybe I am wrong, but from what I
have seen so far, he just seems to be throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. In this game, if one
blunders, the walls vanish, an the lights go out.
Reply
Russia moves cannon boats and amphibious vessels from Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, but in reality these combatants are
perfect for operations in shallow waters and that means Azov Sea and Ukraine's South-Western flank. These ships can form
both a surface group capable of dispatching anything Ukraine may have on Azov Sea, plus form excellent tactical
amphibious group which can land a battalion or two of marines and support them with fire from the sea, both artillery
and MLRS. Of course, there are other forces Russia has there but it is a good way to give Caspian Flotilla a chance for
yet another combat deployment, after its missile ships spearheaded first salvos of 3M14 cruise missiles at ISIS targets
in Syria in 2015. Here are some of those ships:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Caspian_Corvette_Astrakhan_2.jpg
Russia has an overwhelming firepower in the Black Sea proper and whatever the US is sending there is primarily for ISR
purposes in case Ukies go bananas and decide to attack Donbass in death by cop scenario. The US will not interfere in
any meaningful way other than supplying Ukies with recon data.
Reply
It is bigger than Biden or even the Military Industrial Complex. The establishment foreign policy apparatus transcends
political parties and has a continuity that survives changes in administrations. It is obsessed with Russia. It opposed
not just communism but Russia itself so when the Berlin wall fell for it the Cold War never ended and it successfully
pursued the the break up and looting of the Russian Empire and the relentless eastward march of NATO. Putin pushed back
on this resulting in him being demonized by the orchestrated Western media. Trump for all his faults had at least a
halfway rational view of these matters but now the Borg is back and spoiling for a fight. I never cease to be amazed by
the stupidity of these people, their apparent lack of understanding of the importance of Ukraine and Sevastopol in
Russian history and their inability to read a map or know the basics of military operations to see the obvious
indefensibility of Ukraine's eastern border. The danger now is that Ukraine's leaders will overestimate the support they
think they have from the United States and start something they can't stop. This has the feel of 1914.
Reply
Or the Georgian/Russian of 2008 when Georgia attacked on Russian territory. President Bush was talking tough, saying
he would send aid to Georgia on warships. But the rules governing ships entering the Bosferus proscribed such stuff,
aND Bush ended doing nothing. The Russians quickly neutralized the Georgian forces and pushed deeper into Georgia
where they currently remain. The odiot who started the mess was forced out of Georgia & was afterwards appointed a
governor or some such in Ukraine. But I think that too went bad. Such is the level of governance in Ukraine.
Reply
The last 5 Ukros killed were killed by mines. The contact line has many zones where minefields are employed by both
sides. It appears some were killed in their own minefield according to local reports. Civilians in the LPR and DPR have
been killed by incoming fire, most recently a 5 year old boy. Of course OSCE is worthless except as a "bean counter";
who fired what and where is too much to record..
Reply
US defence attache with a group was up at the front yesterday as well as the comic.
Ukraine really has its back up against the wall financially. This year with big interest payments due and no way to get
the funds as the IMF seems to hit its limit on their 'we're never getting it back' budget. Their only steady source of
funds is ironically Russia with the gas transit fees guaranteed at $7B total over the next four years, much of which
will go to the EU and IMF as interest payments. After that the gas fees will drop to zero as the gas transits move to
TurkStream and NS2. With nothing to pay Russia, apart from the little mentioned oil transit fees, Russia may stop
shipping gas/coal/electricity for local consumption as well. At that point either Ukraine crashes or someone else has to
pick up the bill.
Although Kiev will lose dramatically there are very good reasons why Kiev would push the button. Will they ever again
have this PR opportunity to play the innocent victim?
Reply
Earlier this morning I saw a pic of Zelenskiy visiting the front, behind him was a makeshift field tent with a sign on
it, the sign is in Ukrainian but translates as "Vietnam". Is Biden serious about backing Zelenskiy, I guess we'll find
out soon enough.
Reply
wondering if anyone can point me to a fairly, anyway, reliable, (assuming one exists) 'war games scenario' document on
an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China. Intuitively, it would seem a difficult challenge, especially given China's
lack of any appreciable experience in seaborne invasion. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide, and my
apologies upfront LJ if you deem this offtopic.
Reply
Not meaning to be a smart-alec about it, but why assume that an invasion has to be "seaborne"?
In WW2 the Royal Navy had total control of the waters around Crete. So the Germans simply went over the top of them
and invaded the island from the air.
It was very definitely touch and go for a while until German paratroopers managed to capture an airfield, and from
that point it was all over.
No idea how well defended Taiwanese airfields are, but the PLA would only need to capture one and, again, the final
result will not be in doubt.
Reply
well, the quick answer to your question would be 'fine, alter my initial question to include war games scenarios
on airborne attacks on Taiwan. The glib answer might be, Taiwan is not Crete. And the Chinese PLA are not the
Wehrmacht. Who, by the time of the Crete attack had built up a record that included many successful airborne
attacks. I see no such history with the PLA. That, by no means rules it out. But, in any event, I can't imagine
the PLA would role the dice, SOLELY, on an airborne attack. They would have to have a seaborne plan of attack, in
case Plan A failed. So, in any event, I would be still be in search of that war games scenario.
Reply
Absent any new evidence, I am going to continue to assume that this is really about Nordstream II. The Biden Junta are
probably planning on having their Ukrainian cat's paw make a lunge at DNR/LNR, forcing the Russians to intervene
directly. Ukraine, of course, is not actually a full NATO member, so no Article 5 will be triggered. Instead, Washington
just self-righteously hollers 'Russian aggression!' and demands that Merkel immediately shut down Nordstream II -- the
Russian pipeline into Germany -- just before it's ready to go online.
And then, as a lush reward for their undying loyalty, the Germans get to import frack-gas and oil all the way from the
US at four or five times the market rate. Problem solved!
Reply
you are correct – the Ukraine state does not really want the return of the Donbass region let alone Crimea as it
would result in a complete change in the balance of power in the Ukraine with the Russian-speaking population being
able to form the government, as it had done pre 2014. They really want to push the Germans into stopping Nord Stream
2 by provoking Russia
Reply
Struggling to understand how a Ukraine with such supposedly strong ties to National Socialists of a century ago managed
to end up with a Jewish comedian as President.
Reply
Here's the viewpoint of Ukraine Army's snipers who are primarily composed of volunteer housewives. While to D.C. and
Moscow, it's part of their sphere of political chess, however to those on the front lines, it is survival and protection
of their loved ones.
Almost half a century ago, I took a course in the German language as a refresher during the summer session at my local
junior college. The woman who taught the course was a native Ukrainian. She told the class a little about her
background.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, she was in her mid- to late-teens. She had an intense dislike (hatred) of the
Russians and took a job working for the German military government of occupation as an interpreter. She said they had
welcomed the Germans as liberators from the oppression of the Soviet Communists.
Later, when the Red Army juggernaut was rolling west through Ukraine, she realized that it would not be good for her
long-term prospects to remain at home. She chose to move west with the retreating German army. Subsequent to the end of
the war in Europe, she rattled around for awhile in displaced person camps, and ultimately made her way to the United
States.
I have no reason to doubt the veracity of her story. This was my first introduction to the enmity between the Russians
and the Ukrainians.
Reply
Biden is a tin-hat emperor moving tin soldiers in his bathtub at play time. Surrounded by self-selected idiots who make
him dangerous as hell. This is what his "return to decency" looks like? May he be struck down deaf and dumb.
Reply
Two front war – Russia moving into Ukraine at the same time China moves on Taiwan. They put their wet fingers up to the
wind to see which way the Biden operation blows.
And they could not escape the conclusion this was the time to strike if there is any fortuitous time to strike. Biden
and his new team muddle deeply into reckless ineptitude. And Kamala Harris doesn't have anything to wear.
Reply
An odd thesis. The Russians are signally very, very strongly that they do not want the Ukraine to start a war by
attacking the rebels in Donbass.
They could not be more explicit if they sent a hypersonic cruise missile through Zelensky's office window with a sign
on it that reads "Don't start something you won't even live to regret".
They very clearly do not think that this is "the time to strike", nor even that they think there is a "fortuitous
time" for them to go to war with Ukraine.
If Ukraine strikes first then, sure, they'll strike back. But I fail to see how anyone can come to the conclusion
that the Russians are provoking this when it is very clearly the Ukies and their promoters in the White House who are
pushing these buttons.
Similarly with Taiwan.
The Chinese are not provoking this. They made their red lines clear to everyone as far back as Nixon's trip to China
i.e. if the USA sticks to a one-China-policy then the mainland will refrain from using force against Taiwan.
But the USA is not sticking to the one-China-policy. Recent US diplomatic moves look exactly like what it is:
maneuverings to prepare for when the Taipei government declares independence.
Which is crazy.
But in both cases the USA may well provoke a conflict and then dump their patsies like a discarded toy.
Which would be beyond crazy. It would be an outcome so loopy that there isn't even a word to describe it.
Reply
Thank you for setting it straight.. it seems pretty evident Russia does not want a war but is sure as hell ready
to finish this business if a war is pushed on to them and pushed on to them by the Americans. Ukraine has been
armed by the U.S , funded by the IMF, and cheered by NATO. They will not do a single thing without their owners
permission.
Reply
Back in December 2020 Putin had an expanded meeting with his Defense Ministry Board. In it he laid out several items and
agendas to be carried out by the Military Staff.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64684
March 24th saw Ukraine's Zelensky virtually declaring war against the Russian Federation. One can not rule out Zelensky
using the trade deals with Doha and use the direct flights between Kiev and Doha to smuggle in Jihad's from Syria and
Libya to fight in Donbas. Zelensky on March 3rd in a joint press conference with the European Council President in Kiev
stated that the retaking of Crimea from Russia was now Ukraine Official Policy.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/ukraine-redux-war-russophobia-and-pipelineistan/
Reply
Speaking of 'foreign policy', question is who will win out -- D.C. or Tel Aviv?
'The model' is headed to D.C. to try and convince our IC's head-cheeses that the Iran JCPOA isn't such a good deal, and
Tel Aviv is trying to get him an audience with his high-arsed the 'King', China Joe. If D.C. swallows 'the model's'
spiel, then they're bigger suckers than they already appear to be.
Assume this Mossad meeting will take place between Kackling Kamala who will be channeling Obama-Jarrett; or will it
be Stinking Liar Susan Rose channeling Obama-Jarrett? But the Big Guy will be out to lunch.
Reply
" voters still overwhelmingly support laws requiring that voters show identification before casting a ballot.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 75% of Likely U.S. Voters believe voters should be
required to show photo identification such as a driver's license before being allowed to vote. Only 21% are opposed to such a
requirement. (To see survey question wording,
click
here
.)
"Support for voter ID laws has actually
increased
since 2018
, when 67% said voters should be required to show photo identification such as a driver's license before being
allowed to vote.
Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans support voter ID requirements, as do 60% of Democrats and 77% of voters not affiliated
with either major party."
Comment: In Virginia it was not necessary to present identification at a polling place untl about 20 years ago. This was a relic
of an older time when most Virginia communities were quite small and it was expected that one or more people would recognize
acitizen at the polling station,
IMO the time has come when national ID cards would be a good thing. The trick would be to make it as tamper proof as possible. pl
I recently got a new driver's license, the kind that complies with airport security in order to be able to fly. And boy, my
county Department of Motor Vehicles office was absolutely TOUGH, real hard asses, when it came to the documentation required to
qualify for such a license. I had to go back THREE TIMES with various documents in order to satisfy them and meet their criteria
EXACTLY, with no exceptions. So did my husband. I would hope that any national ID, if ever mandated, would be obtained by
fulfilling similarly rigorous standards and conscientious processing. I bet it would set off leftists and libertarian-leaning
rightists BIG TIME though, for different reasons: leftists would want lax standards and libertarians would oppose the notion
per
se
.
In the United States, the use of force by police accounts for 0.05% of male deaths, and
0.003% of female deaths, and a low overall share.
The ratio correlates with age and race and is unequal across racial groups.
Police use of force is responsible for 1.6% of all deaths involving black men between the
ages of 20 and 24 years. At the same age range, police are responsible for 1.2% of American
Indian/Alaska Native male deaths, 0.5% of Asian/Pacific Islander male deaths, 1.2% of Latino
male deaths, and 0.5% of white male deaths.
18 replies on "Risk of Being Killed by Police
Varies by Your Ethnicity"
I read this article with high hopes. Sadly, my hopes were dashed by an intellectually
dishonest use of statistics.
The article opens by claiming blacks have about 2.5 times the risk of dying at the hands of
the police over their lifetimes as whites. It then quantifies this lifetime risk of dying from
police violence for blacks as 1 in 1000. It provides no context for understanding these
numbers.
Heart disease 1 in 6
Cancer 1 in 7
All preventable causes of death 1 in 24
Chronic lower respiratory disease 1 in 27
Suicide 1 in 88
Opioid overdose 1 in 92
Falls 1 in 106
Motor-vehicle crash 1 in 107
Gun assault 1 in 289
Pedestrian incident 1 in 543
Motorcyclist 1 in 899
Drowning 1 in 1,128
Apparently a black's lifetime risk of dying at the hands of the police is close to anyone's
risk from drowning, and about a tenth as great as dying in a motor vehicle crash. Very few
people obsess over those risks -- why the media frenzy about dying at the hands of the
police?
By far the most significant finding from the author's analysis is that far more men die at
the hands of the police than do women across all races. ("A women's lifetime risk of being
killed by police is about 20 times lower than men's risk.") The difference between male and
female outcomes is an order of magnitude greater than the largest difference in outcomes among
men of different races, or among women of different races.
It is intellectually dishonest to focus attention on racial disparities when obvious sexual
disparities dominate the statistics.
It also seems odd to discuss racial disparities in women's overall lifetime risk of dying
from police violence, when a black woman's risk is only about 1 in 20,000 in the first place.
For perspective, the National Safety Council reported that 1 in 2,535 people will die of
choking on food, and 1 in 8,248 will die from sunstroke. It seems that a back woman's chance of
dying at the hands of the police is much lower than the media suggests.
Unfortunately the author chose to show death rates per 100,000 from police encounters
without providing a contextual comparison with other causes of death. How do these death rates
compare to well-known public health problems like heart diseases, cancer, or opiate overdose
deaths for example?
The author's reported death rate from police violence of 3 per 100,000 among 20-year-old
blacks is lower than the overall rate of death from suicide, homicide, cancer, and heart
disease at the same age. Are the 3.5 deaths per 100,000 among 30-year-old blacks more
unusual?
As before, the death rate for everyone from suicide, homicide, cancer, and heart disease
greatly exceeds the death rate for blacks from police violence. Note that neither heart disease
nor cancer is usually considered a major public health threat to 20-30 year-olds of any
ethnicity. Note too that death rates from suicide at ages 20 and 30 surpass death rates from
heart disease and cancer, and are six times higher than the author's stated rate of death from
police violence. A rational concern about premature death should probably focus on suicide and
assaults rather than police violence.
The author's conclusion that "Various races and ages face a higher risk of death or injury
when confronted by police intervention" is simply not supported by the data presented. That
conclusion would require an analysis of death rates per 100,000 encounters with police, rather
than death rates per 100,000 people.
Sadly, the author left out any estimate of how many police encounters occur over a lifetime
within each segment studied, and how many of those encounters do NOT end in death. This
information is crucial for calculating how frequently an encounter with police officers ends in
death. If, for example, one group has ten times as many lifetime encounters with the police, it
would be reasonable to expect ten times as many deaths in that group. This may well be the
situation with men versus women. If the high encounter group had more or less than ten times as
many deaths, that would be cause for investigation into possible discrimination.
Obviously if certain ethnic groups have more encounters with the police than others, that
difference should be a matter for concern and further investigation. It might be a consequence
of some form of racial inequality. However, it helps no one to simply assume that differences
in death rates per 100,000 are evidence of racial injustice.
If racial discrimination in policing exists, it seems likely to show up in the frequency or
number of lifetime encounters with the police. But even knowing numbers of encounters is not
enough to evaluate possible discrimination because the nature of a police encounter influences
how much force is likely to be used by the police. For example, someone robbing a gas station
or store with a gun seems far more likely to face police violence than a shoplifter. Someone
drunk or high on drugs seems more likely to face police violence than a sober person. It seems
reasonable to ask whether factors that increase risk during police encounters occur more
frequently in certain ethnic groups, and if so why.
The author's observation about the lower rates of death among Asians and Pacific Islanders
is important and warrants serious study. Do people of this ethnicity have fewer encounters with
the police? If so, why? Are the encounters of a different kind than black encounters with the
police? Do Asians behave differently than blacks when encountering the police? What actual
factors lead to the seemingly different results across ethnicities?
Answering these questions with "structural racism" or a something similar provides no
actionable way to help improve results for any ethnicity. Calling police violence a health
problem also does nothing to improve outcomes.
The author seems to have assumed from the beginning that policing is the problem. As a
result he completely ignored at least two important questions:
1. Why do most encounters with the police across all ethnicities NOT end in death?
2. Are there behaviors in these many non-deadly encounters that can be taught to people and
police to reduce the chance of police violence?
It seems worth reflecting on these questions and seeking answers to them.
As a final note, it took me less than five minutes to find data to put this author's
statistics in context. I can only wonder why the author did not take the time to do the
same.
Well yeah, "demos" are running all this having robbed any meaning from that traditional
labor/common man viewpoint (think FDR) thus in full cahoots with the global cabal which is
gates and all the other devils, which must be stopped. Too long to list, here is astonishing
summary big food/pharma/chemical/oil/$
"Why was all of this allowed to happen in the first place?"
The apparent change in stance is unlikely a ruse because a ruse presumes that Russia would
take the bait.
The change is unlikely due to a miscalculation on Ukraine's part because Ukraine was well
aware of the strength of the juggernaut just to the east before Ukraine sent men and materiel
that way.
The change is unlikely due to a miscalculation on Washington's part because a likely
drubbing of Ukraine with Washington sitting on the sidelines would result in a loss of
prestige vis a vis Russia and China.
I'd suggest the change -- if there really is such a change -- is more likely the result of
Germany, and maybe France, exerting simultaneous pressure on Washington and Kiev, coupled
with leading sectors of the bureaucracy in both Washington and Kiev agreeing with Merkel
(Washington for its own reasons and Kiev because of Washington's instructions) that a war
does not advance their interests.
Washington is in a position similar to that of Britain prior to the Suez Crisis: one loss
away from losing its preeminence on the world stage. Losing that position over a conflict
involving, essentially, a gas pipeline to Germany is not worth the risk.
It's likely that Washington's apparent stance is symptomatic of significant discord
between the Neocons and the less belligerent of the foreign policy establishment. It appears
that the Neocons may have lost this round. One can expect the schism to continue to play out
over the coming years
vk@29 writes "[My comment@24] is nonsense: if Ukraine takes back the Donbas basin, it will
have full control over Crimea. The option of
'trading' the Donbas for Crimea doesn't exist."
It's hard to know how seriously this is meant. Luhansk and Donetsk are not *the* Donbas.
Kharkiv is culturally and economically as much Donbas, for a start. And Odessa is a major
center of Russian population, too, even if not part of the Donbas. At any rate, insofar as
the "Donbas" is essential to control Crimea, though, it is Kherson and Zaporizhye provinces
that control the water supply. And it is Mariupol's port that contests the Sea of Azov.
That's the part of Donbas that vk implies to be essential for full control of Crimea. But if
Mariupol is essential for full control, then Putin neither has full control now, nor does he
want it, because it is apparently Putin who pressured the rebels into leaving Mariupol in
Ukrainian hands. By the criteria vk uses here, Putin doesn't have full control of Crimea now.
This could be understood to show that in the long run Luhansk/Donetsk are untenable too,
trapped in a race to collapse with Kyiv. And it would show too that Putin needs a genuine
peace in Crimea, needs to do something, because in the long run, time is not on his/Russia's
side. The thing is of course, is that either vk doesn't mean what is actually written, or vk
won't draw the conclusions vk's own premises require.
Ukraine's leadership doesn't care about their civilians and soldiers. US and NATO
leadership care even less for them. In the current context actions speak far louder than
words.
Even the dimmest and most senile leaders can figure out some of the following:
• Russia is not bluffing. Bluffing is not their style.
• Neither the US nor NATO will put boots on the ground of Donbass or Crimea.
• Against Russia the US surface ships in the Black Sea are floating targets, as they are
anywhere else in the world.
• There won't be a Minsk3 agreement.
• Nord Stream 2 will be completed no matter what. For the respect, Russia doesn't need
the revenue so much.
If in fact Ukraine backs down, it will be a Biden continuation of Trump's off-repeated
stunt of walking to the edge and then backing off. You can't expect innovation from senile
players.
Crimea needs water badly with summer coming on.
Any Ukrainian or Russian advance cannot happen across bogs and mud. Wait until the rain
stops, or sink.
I saw somewhere that Zelensky actually thought of opening the canal sometime ago but was
"stopped". It was never made clear WHO ordered him not to, or who ordered him to start an
anti-Russian drive, or.....etc.
b's post undelines that the previous lines of cultural/liguistic division have not gone
away, and have probably hardened. The Nasty brigade are actually in lands that probably do
not appreciate them being there. (ie, the Russian speaking areas under Ukie control are
probably not overjoyed to become "permanent collateral damage")
*
Anyone else notice the large movement of Chinese ships in the South China Sea?
Doubled trouble for the Empire? They hardly get the time to concentrate on claiming "rights
of passage" through Indian territoral waters, or in the Black sea, or in the Artic, without
someone stirring the pot. Whatever next?
A diversion or just taking advantage of the limited scope of the attention span of whoever
is in command in the US ?
@vk "And that's the objective truth: if the Ukraine conquers the DPR and LPR, it will
essentially cut off Crimea from Russia."
How so? It doesn't seem to me that a hypothetical merger of DPR, LPR, and Ukraine would
have any effect on Crimea.
In fact, if DPR and LPR join according to the Minsk2 conditions, it could help, as they
would (theoretically) become a significant political factor on the national level. Which is
why Kiev is not interested in a peaceful unification.
And even a military conquest (which is what you're talking about) would create problems
for Kiev, as disenfranchising (or expelling) most of the population there might be somewhat
problematic.
"One should therefore consider that the sudden call for a renewed ceasefire might be a
ruse." --our host
Precisely. The US prefers to start its conflicts with a sucker punch, but that is only
possible if the target is unprepared and looking the other way. Russia only needs to let its
guard down and look away for a moment for the empire to take advantage of it. Notice how the
ukrops are not moving their attack forces back? They will attack while the US ships are in
the Black Sea to monitor the fighting and provide direction.
Donbass does not have strategic depth. The plan is to hit the republics with a suicide
bum-rush. America doesn't care how many of the ukrop aggressors are exterminated in the
attack so long as some units survive to take up positions in the city centers. The empire's
strategists figure that with a sudden enough and massive enough assault, and given at least
some element of surprise, this can be accomplished overnight. The ukrop cannon fodder will be
given orders to not bother securing any areas they overrun and instead continue to charge
forward.
Suicidal? Absolutely, because any Novorossiya troops that are overrun will regroup behind
the ukrop aggressors and pull back, cutting off the units that penetrated into the cities.
That's when those advance ukrop units will go all "Shock & Awe™" on the
urban civilians to draw the Novorossiya units away from their established positions and
demoralize them.
So long as the Russians are not caught with their pants down they should be able to easily
repel the ukrop assault. If they are thinking this through clearly then the Novorossiya
troops, with the Russians at their backs, should push for the Dniper in order to acquire that
much needed strategic depth. At the same time the Black Sea should be completely cleared of
any hostile vessels, and obviously that means the American ships.
I disagree about DNR and LNR are of importance for Russia to keep hold on Crimea. Crimea
secession was prior to the insurrection in eastern Ukraine, they tried to copy Crimean
secession (even held referenda in 2014) To the frustration of DNR/LNR activists as well as
many russian nationalists, the russian government has rejected all pleas to incorporate the
breakaway regions or Ukraine into Russia. On contrary, it has repeatedly tried to broker a
compromise, and the Minsk accords are part of. Putin even ostensibly bound his hands by
forcing a Duma decree in 2015, revoking the "Medvedyev doctrine" from 2008 Georgian conflict
which authorized use of force when ethnic Russians were threatened, Anyway, the russian
government could not abandon the insurgency in Donbas without risking to be toppled by
nationalists.
One should keep this in mind: Russia does not want the ethnically russian parts of Ukraine
which would comprise of most of it. It was not Russia who escalated the inner ukrainian
divide. And militarily, LNR and DNR are in no way helpful for Crimea. Normal relations
between the RF and Ukraine would be in Russia's interest, would belp both countries. But that
is what the West prevents at any cost, to the last Ukrainian. Only the dumb ukronazis don't
realize that.
@53 vk Ukraine will never get back DNR and LNR by military means, but, if at all, only via
a compromise alongside the Minsk accords. And if you speak to realistic Ukrainians (there are
not few, even in the nazi infested galicia and volyn), they all realize that Crimea is gone,
and that it always only grudgingly agreed to be an autonomous republic inside Ukraine until
2014.
Its not just the Fortuna laying pipe now, the Akadamik Cherskiy has been on the job for
about 10 day and she can lay pipe faster. According to the plans submitted to the Danes, in
whose waters they are laying, Fortuna is expected to finish in May whilst the AC has
permission until September but is expected to finish early.
As to the USN ships (Black sea regular USS Ross passed Gib inbound Med today) are not due in
until the start of next week and will leave early May. What their role, apart from being a
gesture of support for Ukraine, is is not clear. An obvious job of one, if not both, could be
to be tied up at a berth in Odessa harbour as a poison pill to try to make sure that Russia
does not attack that part of the coast. Were there to be an attack of course.
Seems to be a big mistake by the US to me. I can understand what they are trying to do
but, given the option above, if they stay at sea it will be a clear statement that they don't
want to get that involved. I'm sure it is not their intention to be so open in showing their
true objective.
Another possible reason for a delay until May is that the Orthodox Church celebrates its
Eater Sunday on the 2nd May.
William R Henry 52
There is no need to go to the Dneiper to gain sufficient strategic depth, not only would
that be a political nightmare but just stopping at the oblast borders should be sufficient.
Included in that would be Mariupol, the only Ukrainian port on the Sea of Azov. That would
make Donbass economically viable.
No need to clear the Black Sea, Russia totally dominates over, on and under it.
Wouldnt this be the second time that Zelinski used thread of conflict to help himself in
election?
It seems an important point. Why would B over look it, I wonder.
Declaring war and then declaring peace. I guess one cannot chose ones neighbors.
I thought Russia stood to benefit from war. They should keep pressure on Zelinski -
training, preparations and support of Donbass. Seems Russia is very measured with
assistance.
b. :
"It seems that order has come from Washington to stand down - at least for now."
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Bloomberg:
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to return to Brussels next week for more meetings
with NATO and European officials, according to people familiar with the matter, as the U.S.
grows increasingly concerned about Russian troop movements near Ukraine.
The meetings will take up most of the week,[...]
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will be in Brussels at the same time, for a meeting with
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
"Frank muses that just as the postman always rings a second time to make sure people
receive their mail, fate has made sure that he and Cora have both finally paid the price for
their crime.
"Schöne Wochenende". Next week will be interesting as last 3 were.
Maybe I missed it but there were elections in Ukraine last Sunday and
"The new Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the Ukraine, elected on Sunday, will have an
overwhelming national mandate to negotiate peace terms to end the five-year civil
war.
You misssed it....
Those elections were in 2019....
Zelenski has been compromised since then... most notably via loss of his plutocrat
mentor...
The CIA/NSA/RightSector are firmly in charge, because Zelenski did not use his mandate to
throttle them.
The best he could have done, was to invite Russia in for the purpose of "stabilizing"
ukraine.
Western nations chided Russia for failing to turn up at talks in Vienna on Saturday aimed
at defusing tension over Ukraine, where a Russian troop buildup close to the border between
the two countries has sparked fears of renewed conflict.
MOSCOW, February 5. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a press conference
Friday following talks with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy
Josep Borrell.
"Therefore, we organize our life coming from the premise that the EU is not a reliable
partner, at least at this stage,"
"I hope that the strategic review which is coming will finally pay attention to vital
interests of the European Union in its closest vicinity " Lavrov stressed.
"I hope that today's talks will help us reach a more constructive trajectory. We are
ready for it."
@b - "...why was all of this allowed to happen in the first place?"
J Swift offered a good clue in his
comment in the previous thread:
"the Nuland crowd have played right into Russia's hands, because the Ukraine is definitely
a place where Russia has escalation dominance. I suspect that when some of those famous
military channels began chatting, the Russians were not so friendly, and made it clear that
an offensive by the Ukies would not only free Russia's hand toward the Nazis and provide a
perfect excuse to rid the East and South of them, but that Russia would be specifically
targeting US/NATO "advisers," command centers, resupply aircraft or any aircraft entering
Ukrainian airspace, and would be just waiting for any US ship in the Black Sea to do
something remotely involving it in the conflict, such that it would be on the bottom in
minutes."
We know from Pepe Escobar's latest article ,
presenting highlights from the recent important interview with Nikolai Patrushev (Secretary
of the RF Security Council), that Patrushev, a very dangerous and serious man, enjoys
undiminished communications with Washington, including a March phone discussion with Jake
Sullivan, White House security advisor. If his interview is anything to go by, his candid
discussions with US leadership could have scared them totally awake.
Once again, it could well be that the neocons talked up a blazing firestorm that the
generals and security professionals ultimately had to pour water on.
Patrick Armstrong in his
latest article gives us ample evidence that Victoria Nuland, back in power and riding
high, is also vastly ignorant and imperceptive, incapable of learning or reflection, and
mediocre in her intelligence. The neocons, as Armstrong points out, have always failed. And
they have led the US down a path of loss.
If in fact this Ukraine adventure is over for the moment (if in fact it ever was real in
the first place), then it bears total resemblance to every other neocon stupid idea, that
goes as far down the path to ruin as it can, sometimes being stopped by wiser heads,
sometimes simply charging over the edge, into the abyss.
If Russia gets to choose, one assumes Russia would prefer no military activity in Ukraine.
And if Russia is forced into military action, one also assumes as best guess that Russia will
reshape the map to a better end for all. It could just be that Russia managed to communicate
this to the US, and that the US managed to hear.
@74 Yes but that doesn't really address b's question. Why was this allowed to happen in
the first place? We know all about Nuland and her cookies and encouragement from Washington.
But why was the Minsk agreement broken? Why do the Ukies keep lobbing shells into
Donbass?
Those troops are bored. I'm sticking with my vodka theory.
Just to clarify: Russia has already officially stated (many years ago) that it doesn't
want any other piece of the Ukraine (i.e. any other piece beyond Crimea). It wants the
Ukraine to survive in the form of a federalized State with the DPR and LPR enjoying high
levels of autonomy (a la Spain).
Ukraine is not profitable to Russia. It would drain its coffers were it to have to conquer
and absorb it entirely.
Time is in Russia's favor: let the Ukraine continue to serve as a financial black hole to
the IMF. Let the Western Ukrainians continue to emigrate en masse to Poland and then to the
rest of the EU and the UK. Russia has already received some 1 million Eastern Ukrainian;
those are probably the more well-educated, more productive Ukrainians, and they gave it some
relief from its chronic negative population problem - all of that without having to advance
one inch over continental Ukraine.
Germany vetoed any more provocations by the US or nato against the Donbass/Crimea that
would clearly call in massive Russian support. Crimea is now part of the Russian Federation;
an end of that part of the story - and there are several hundred thousand people in the
Donbass that now have Russian passports. Russia won't stand for any of it. No matter how much
the dumb Ukrainians or the lackey Poles or their US/nato masters huff and puff and
bellow.....
it is also not in the slightest German interests for a war to break out right in the
middle of Europe that might escalate into a nuclear confrontation, nor is it in their
national interest to lose the Nord Stream 2 project... at all.
I don't know about France's position in all this but either France or Germany could/would
exercise veto over any nato troops/intervention in the Ukraine.
time to return to the Minsk agreements. in spite of the incredible stupidity of the US
foreign policy Establishment and those jackass war-mongers Blinken, Nuland and Austin et.
al.
Do you really expect the Amerikastani Empire's puppet Ukranazi coup regime to say "we will
attack"? Instead it will attack and then claim Russia attacked it. Just like Hitler's
Gleiwitz radio station false flag attack that started WWII.
Zelensky in Istanbul. Erdogan to refuse to recognize Crimea as Russian territory..
Saw a tweet today saying something along the lines of Russia preventing flights to Turkey
this summer for "Covid" reasons, read between the lines..
Time is in Russia's favor: let the Ukraine continue to serve as a financial black hole to
the IMF. Let the Western Ukrainians continue to emigrate en masse to Poland and then to the
rest of the EU and the UK. Russia has already received some 1 million Eastern Ukrainian;
those are probably the more well-educated, more productive Ukrainians, ...
Posted by: vk | Apr 11 2021 1:20 utc | 77
This is rather sketchily related to reality.
1. Ukraine is not a "black hole for the IMF". They got a smallish credit, and now they are
being denied extensions on rather preposterous grounds, and Ukraine is charged for the unused
credit line. Contrary to Nulands boasting, the West keeps Ukraine on a leash with a rather
skimpy budget.
2. There is no clear distinction between migration patterns. The one time I was in Russia,
the tourist guide on a one-day bus trip was from Rivne -- in Poland in years 1918-39. And as
Polish medical workers go to Spain etc., Ukrainian once fill the vacant positions, and they
may come from any place. Ditto with the "quality of workers". Poland has more of seasonal
jobs in picking crops (while Poles do it further West) than Russia, Russia perennially seeks
workers ready to accept extra pay in less than benign climes. The closest to truth is
scooping engineers and highly qualified workers from factories that before worked for Russian
market, including military, replaced with Russian factories and, when needed, Ukrainian
know-how. That is pretty much accomplished -- predominantly from the Eastern Ukraine. As a
result, the remaining workforce is so-so from east to west.
It's been made clear that a Ukrainian attack on the D & L republics would be met with
a direct Russian intervention into the conflict and likely would result in the loss of the
whole of the disputed oblasts to the separatist republics. Russia has no intention of
eliminating Ukraine or occupying Kyiv, but that kind of defeat in the east would spell the
end of what political stability remains in Ukraine and likely lead to a new Maidan against
Zelensky and possibly further secessions. That's the real downside of this for Russia.
Ukraine is threatening to immolate itself as a form of brinksmanship.
Failing that death wish, only if Moscow somehow agrees to stay out of the war does this
have the remotest possibility of achieving what the Kyiv government needs. Otherwise it will
not attack.
@ Lozion | Apr 11 2021 2:18 utc | 81 with the link about the Ukraine/Turkey meeting
today..thanks
Interesting position by Erdogan and I would think it would effect Turkey's purchase of
Russian defense equipment but who knows where the complexity balance resides in the ME.
Lots of tinder just waiting for a spark to point the blame at for world conflagration. I
will believe this situation is cooling when I read about the US ships turning around and not
going into the Black Sea.
Erdoğan has several goals in Ukraine. Show Russia that he is strong and important for
Russia as he has influence on Ukraine. Show the USA that he is an active participant of NATo.
Sell his military drones to whoever wants them as well as other turkish products.
He appears as a king maker and gets business and approval from russia,the EU and the Usa to
avoid a war. A very successful move needed to rehabilitate Erdoğan seriously in trouble
with both the usa and the EU...
The western press is portraying the events of the past few weeks as representing an
unmotivated unilateral Russian troop buildup.
Canada's Globe and Mail yet again deliberately deceives its readers with omission-plagued
reporting which the author must know is wrong. This includes describing the Minsk agreements
as "the Kremlin's version of how to make peace" which are being utilized in an "enforcement
operation" featuring a "coercive use of force" meant to "induce Kyiv, Berlin and Paris" to
accept "Moscow's terms." Awful reporting by any objective measure.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ukrainian-commander-sees-parallels-with-2014-as-russian-military-build/
Meanwhile, a Heritage Foundation flunky describes "spontaneous" Russian deployments
designed to "keep Ukraine out of organizations such as the EU or NATO".
Russia should be opposed because: "Modern Ukraine represents the idea in Europe that each
country has the sovereign ability to determine its own path, to decide with whom it has
relations, and how and by whom it is governed." https://www.arabnews.com/node/1840341
Both reporters make the same observation in opening paragraphs, supporting the notion that
these pieces are derived from a distributed script or collection of talking points:
1) "For weeks, Russian social media accounts have been flooded with videos showing long
convoys of tanks, troop trucks and artillery pieces "
2) "Dozens of videos in social media posts show hundreds of Russian tanks and armored
vehicles pouring into the region."
I have a feeling, it's only a feeling right now, that the looted black hole that's
Ukranazistan after 7 years of "freedom " is such a drain that the EUNATO gangsters behind the
Maidan would love to palm the ruins off to Russia. "Here, you broke it, you own it."
"
MOSCOW, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Russia does not seek a war with Ukraine but is concerned for the
Russian-speaking population in the country's eastern Donbass region, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov said Sunday.
"No one is going to move towards a war, and no one at all accepts any possibility of such
a war," Peskov told a Russian TV program.
"Russia has never been a party to this conflict (between Kiev and insurgents in Donbass).
But Russia has always said that it will not remain indifferent to the fate of Russian
speakers who live in the southeast of Ukraine," he added.
According to the spokesman, Kiev refuses to fulfill its responsibilities under the Minsk
agreements on a Donbass settlement, with government forces intensifying "provocative actions"
in the region.
Russia, Germany and France are "bewildered" by Kiev's recent claims that the Minsk
agreements are useless, Peskov said, adding that there are no alternatives to the pacts for a
peaceful settlement of the conflict.
Political advisers of the Russian, German, French and Ukrainian leaders are working
towards holding a summit on eastern Ukraine, he said.
"
but I do see this situation more as having put the Maidan-coalition on the back-foot and
having to disentangle themselves, rather than a carefully pre-planned and coordinated
operation.
Thank you and I humourously appreciated your allusions to the asylum that has captured
Ukraine. The Maidan Murder Coalition has discovered its karma that was always lying in wait.
These villainous rsoles will seriously collapse under the weight of it all, particularly the
sniper trick shooters on the Maidan crowds.
I loved this line: "Everyone can recall a wide-spread (spread most likely by some overly
zealous, but not very literate, Russian "patriots") rumor about DDG-75 USS Donald Cook having
her electronics "burned" by a couple of intrepid Russian Su-24s in April of 2014, who
allegedly forced this American ship to fast return to Constanta, where, allegedly some of her
crew expressed a desire to abandon the ship. NYT and other US media, not without
justification, called those rumors to be Russian "propaganda". They have a point."
Which seems as good a moment as any to plug my new product (!!). Since that picture of
Col. Brittany visiting Donbass in uniform of 72th mechanized division with a prominent skull
badge reminded me so of the sketch 'Are we the Baddies' it is time to market my new velcro
badges with rainbows and BLM logos. Stick them anywhere to show you're part of the right
camp! If you shoulder badges may offend leftist softies, just stick these badges on top of
them for the perfect photo op! HTS already ordered a large batch. Now 20% off and buy two get
one free!
Turkey wants to build on its successes in Nagorno Karabach to sell its weapon systems to
Ukraine. Whether they also explicitly wish the conflict to explode is less clear.
Erdogan needs money, cash. The same seems to be true of most if not all Western
politicians. But some, like Erdogan and Bibi, need lots of money.
Putin on the other hand, does not need cash. He has a healthy fiat currency at his
disposal and sells a lot of food, oil, lumber, weapons etc. internationally.
I don't think Ukraine is going to be a good source of cash for Erdogan, or Bibi. They need
a lot of cash too.
So there is a massive build-up on both sides in Ukraine? ( The following comment was
provoked by info from a tweet that the Ukrainians have "found" a secret plan by the Kremlin
for a union with Donbas .. unconfirmed )
What if......?
... The Russians and the Dondbas/Luhansk actually DO declare a union with Russia? There is no
"need" for the Russians to physically "invade" the area. They can just sit there and wait for
the Ukrainians to do something. Then IF Zelensky decides, it is he who has to "start"
the conflict. As a plan it is the perfect reversal of the usual Russian "aggression".
Zelensky's bluff called?
A "union" is just another way of saying "it is ours EVEN IF the title is nominally someone
elses, stuff you".
The massive forces on the "frontlines" are there to remind the Ukes and their backers what
"might" happen, IF they "invade" Donbas/Luhansk. What can they do about it? Make rude noises
in the background?
The US, Israel and Turkey are all examples of one country simply "taking over" parts of
another country - without any legality whatsoever. US in NE Syria, Turkey with it's advance
of 32km all along a new frontline, with a wall between itself and Syria. Israel with the
Golan. None of them have the slightest legal reason to be there. (Chinese claim the
Spratleys, which is a legal fig-leaf).
Lateral thinking by Putin? Would he even need a legal fig-leaf?
It is an interesting idea, and I would not want to say it will not happen, but it seems
un-Putin-like to me based on past performance. He's been very comfortable with frozen
conflicts in the past. And I think he probably still wants Ukraine as a buffer, friendly but
not Russia, and to keep it whole minus Crimea.
This way he would still "keep" Ukraine on a tether, and avoid being accused of
aggression.
OK, it may go that way but the silence (from Putin) and the refusal of the Russians to
give more than vague reasons for their actions, does mean that the west's MSM have nothing to
froth at the mouth about- Let Zelensky stew in his own juice.
As well as the regular Army and volunteers, He is going to end up with seven thousand
ex-jihadists employees, multiple "mercenaries" from the US and the other parts of the world,
orders for Drones, arms etc. BUT he is losing $3 billion revenue from gas (the transit of
which has been "slowing down") since the 1st April. I don't know what he has contracted to
supply to those futher along the pipeline. Plus the debts to the WB and IMF.
So how long can he keep up the expense of having a standing army of 105'000 or more at the
ready?
The Russians can wait them out. If they just don't "talk" or give any PR leeway to the
west, then with the attention span of the goldfish in the EU and US citizens, it will drop
once again from view. (20 seconds for a goldfish otherwise they would get bored going round
and round in a bowl ?)
Diesen in his book, Russia's Geoeconomic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia , provides
the rationale for the Outlaw US Empire's actions in Ukraine, that are actually aimed at NATO
members, which it fears will be enticed by Russia and fracture the alliance:
"This susceptibility to outside sabotage of regional unity [NATO] can be mitigated by
centralizing power by, for example, instigating more overt military tensions to strengthen
alliance unity." [Pg. 22]
This also serves to provide additional energy to the Russophobic Narrative and the
unfounded rationale for anti-Russian sanctions. The Empire must at all costs continue NATO's
viability for that ensures the Empire's geoeconomic and geopolitical control of the EU. The
same is true in East Asia where the anti-China narrative must be continued to keep Japan and
South Korea under the Empire's thumb, although South Korea is slowly slipping away.
Time is in Russia's favor: let the Ukraine continue to serve as a financial black hole to
the IMF. Let the Western Ukrainians continue to emigrate en masse to Poland and then to the
rest of the EU and the UK. Russia has already received some 1 million Eastern Ukrainian;
those are probably the more well-educated, more productive Ukrainians, ...
Posted by: vk | Apr 11 2021 1:20 utc | 77
This is rather sketchily related to reality.
1. Ukraine is not a "black hole for the IMF". They got a smallish credit, and now they are
being denied extensions on rather preposterous grounds, and Ukraine is charged for the unused
credit line. Contrary to Nulands boasting, the West keeps Ukraine on a leash with a rather
skimpy budget.
2. There is no clear distinction between migration patterns. The one time I was in Russia,
the tourist guide on a one-day bus trip was from Rivne -- in Poland in years 1918-39. And as
Polish medical workers go to Spain etc., Ukrainian once fill the vacant positions, and they
may come from any place. Ditto with the "quality of workers". Poland has more of seasonal
jobs in picking crops (while Poles do it further West) than Russia, Russia perennially seeks
workers ready to accept extra pay in less than benign climes. The closest to truth is
scooping engineers and highly qualified workers from factories that before worked for Russian
market, including military, replaced with Russian factories and, when needed, Ukrainian
know-how. That is pretty much accomplished -- predominantly from the Eastern Ukraine. As a
result, the remaining workforce is so-so from east to west.
Interesting interview. Apparently, Yuri Andropov had a contingency plan on the event of
the disintegration of the USSR - and yes, it included the partition of the Ukraine into two
("east bank Ukraine" and "west bank Ukraine" - probably West of the Dnieper, East of the
Dnieper). It's in Russian, so maybe inconsistencies with automatic translation may exist:
The interview is with Russian neoliberal banker (of the circle of Yeltsin and Gaidar, St.
Petersburg intelligentsia) Viktor Loshak, from "Alfa-Bank group" (machine translation). He
was a working under Shatalin in the 1980s, so he's allegedly an eye witness (primary source)
of the alleged plans.
He also claims that the St. Petersburg neoliberals never intended to end the Union, and
that what really happened in the 1990s wasn't intended. Smells like revisionism to me, but
ok, the St. Petersburg circle was never known for their intellectual prowess, so it's
possible.
--//--
@ Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Apr 10 2021 21:07 utc | 51
It has in the sense that the Ukraine wants to restore its entire territory, not just some
part of it. There is no scenario where, it being able to reconquer LPR-DPR, it would leave
Crimea with Russia.
High profile attorney means possible troubles for Dominion and its lobbyists. such layers ten
not leave a single stone unturned, which is not in Dominion best interest. Emails will definitely
be subpoenaed and judging from the behaviour of one Dominion executive they were not too
careful.
I kel the joke "Are their lawyers also going to argue that no reasonable person would believe
Fox news?"
Fox News has hired two high-profile defense attorneys to combat a $1.6 billion lawsuit filed
against it by voting technology company Dominion.
The media outlet disclosed in a court filing that it had Charles Babcock and Scott Keller
for its defense. Fox News confirmed the hirings to The Hill.
... ... ...
Fox News Media told The Hill after Dominion filed its suit that it is "proud of our 2020
election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will
vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court."
And yet discovery will be very interesting, and Fox News is now pitted against Dominion,
and their best way to defend themselves is to show that the criticisms were legitimate...
Fox can now subpoena anything relevant from Dominion, and Dominion has to comply or be
criminally prosecuted...
There is not much to discover with Dominion. It mainly functions like a windows 10
computer. so it is hackable. It is very easy to install fraudulent software on these
machines
See Harryi Hursti KILL CHAIN: THE CYBERWAR ON AMERICA'S ELECTIONS and look at his
affidavit See "Investigators for Attorney DePernoReportedly Discover Modem Chips Embedded in
Michigan Voting System Computer Motherboards" via today on theGatewayPundit
When testifying before the MI legislature, the Dominion CEO recommended that a full
forensic audit be ordered if voters suspect that these machines were connected to the
internet.
On Dec 1 election officials deleted the electronic voting data in violation of state
la
Sidney Powell lit a fuse. She woke the Republicans and others who want election integrity,
so the Democrats won't be able to steal any more. At least not with the same tactics
Lou Dobbs might have gotten confused once. I believe he said that an affidavit that
criticized Smartmatic had instead criticized Dominion. However, there are so many problems
with Dominion, I would consider it to be an immaterial mistake. After all these machines
appear to be unusable:
[Vote counting machines] "presents serious system security vulnerability and
operational issues that may place plaintiffs and other voters at risk of
deprivation of their fundamental right to cast an effective vote that is
accurately counted," U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg wrote in a Oct 2020
Electionic vote counting machines were banned in France, Ireland and the in
the Netherlands via Gateway Pundit because they were unreliable.
The Gateway pundit could be sued if they make false statements.
via Twitter:
Elections Canada @ElectionsCan_E
· Nov 16
Elections Canada does not use Dominion Voting Systems. We use paper ballots counted by
hand in front of scrutineers and have never used voting machines or electronic tabulators to
count votes in our
100-year history. #CdnPoli
It is very easy to install fraudulent software on these machines See Harryi Hursti on
seeKILL CHAIN: THE CYBERWAR ON AMERICA'S
ELECTIONS and look at his affidavit
The actual claim is here (400+ pages):
www DOT documentcloud DOT org/documents/20527880-dominion-v-fox-news-complaint
These lawyers have their work cut out for them. As explained in the claim, Dominion
contacted Fox multiple times after the first accusations. They provided Fox with independent
assessments and other evidence that their systems were sound. Fox ignored it, never mentioned
this and continued presenting that Dominion systems were fraudulent (and stated that as a
fact, not as an opinion).
Once again, FOX News will likely claim that they are an entertainment network, not a
news agency ... and therefore they should not be expected to propagate facts on their
broadcasts.
Dominion fights as its image was damaged and it has deep pockets. But how valid are their
claim is for the court to decide. In no way they are as clean as they pretend. Their connection
Dem party operatives is probably provable beyond reasonable doubt. The whole story with Dominion
replacing Diebold on this business is murky to the extreme.
Roger Parloff · Contributor Tue, April
13, 2021, 5:06 AM · 22 min read
... "Instantly," said Steven
Bellovin , a professor of computer science at Columbia University with almost 40 years of
experience in computer networking and security. That's how long it took him to realize, he said
in an interview, that a certain purported spreadsheet that I showed him was "not just fake, but
a badly generated fake by someone who didn't know what they were doing."
The spreadsheet, together with an animated film that was said to illustrate its data, formed
the crux of a nearly two-hour "docu-movie," called "Absolute Proof," which aired at least 13
times last February on the One America News Network. The movie, presented in a news magazine
format, was hosted, co-produced, and relentlessly flacked by Mike Lindell, the irrepressible
CEO of MyPillow, Inc. It purported to furnish absolute proof that the 2020 presidential
election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump in an international cyberattack exploiting
vulnerabilities in voting-machine software that had been intentionally designed to rig
elections.
Dominion Voting Systems, which makes voting technology, filed a $1.3 billion defamation suit
against Lindell and his company in late February -- the third of four massive cases it has
filed since the election -- in part because of "Absolute Proof," which referenced Dominion more
than 40 times. (An in-depth analysis of Dominion's suits over bogus election-fraud claims, as
well as one brought by a rival voting-device company, Smartmatic, is provided in an earlier
story I wrote
here .)
I have just finished reading a couple of weighty tomes with similar themes: Dark Money by Jane
Mayer is about how some nominally right-wing libertarian sociopaths, (i.e. the Kochs and their
coterie) seek to control American politics through various 'charitable' think tanks and stealth
infiltration of top ranked universities; and
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, which is about how some nominally
left-wing(ish) libertarian whiz kid sociopaths seek to control the whole world through social
media.
My main take away is that libertarian ideology is just shorthand for narcissistic
entitlement and psychopathic greed.
...Some Republicans the past few years have talked of breaking from the two-party system and
starting a third. But that's not the way to go. Better to strengthen the system that for more
than a century and a half has seen us through a lot of mess. In its rough way the two-party
system, even without meaning to, functions as a unifying force: At the end of the day, for all
our differences and arguments, you have to decide if you were a constituency of Team A or Team
B. The parties, in their rough and inadequate way, had to be alive to your interests. Things
proceeded with a sense, an air, of majority rule. With a third party you can win the presidency
with 34%. That won't help national unity. And this being America, once we have a third party
we'll have a fourth and a fifth, and everything will be chaos, with a loss of any feeling of
general consensus.
Two parties are better for the country, and better for the Democrats. A strong Republican
party keeps them on their toes. As Oscar Hammerstein once said, liberals need conservatives to
hold them back and conservatives need liberals to pull them forward. One side should stop the
other when it goes too far, or boost it when it fails to move. Hammerstein was a cockeyed
optimist, but this isn't a bad time for that.
... ... ...
...I left the Republican Party at some point in the 2000s. I didn't like a lot of what I was
seeing. I began to say, honestly, that I was a political conservative but not a Republican.
Readers could see it in my work, and I heard from them a lot. I reregistered to vote in a
Republican primary in New York City, and have kept it that way, maybe for reasons of
orneriness.
But I've done a lot of mourning over it the past 15 years, shed literal tears over the GOP.
There were a lot of break points. Iraq was one: If that wasn't the country club at work, what
was? People to whom nothing much bad had ever happened, so they expected good fortune to follow
their decisions. Immigration was another, with the elite decision makers of the party not
caring at all how the unprotected see and experience life. It was a total detachment from their
concerns accompanied by a claim of higher compassion. Sarah Palin was another. I felt her
choice as a vice presidential candidate degraded a good insight, that an ability to do the show
business of politics is important -- FDR, JFK and Reagan knew that -- but you can't let
politics degrade into only showbiz; you need the ability to think seriously about
issues. It is wrong to reduce politics to a subset of entertainment. There were more.
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P
Patrick Jan SUBSCRIBER 12 minutes ago
Conservatives dominate the state governments and federal judiciary, and Republicans hold 50%
of the Senate and 49% of the House. Despite his many flaws, Trump lost the presidential
election by a mere 43,000 votes spread across 3 states. The GOP is hardly "shattered". On the
contrary, the country hasn't been this evenly divided in a long time.
Trump's populist conservative platform and fighting energy have made net gains for the
GOP. Trump's checkered personal life and lack of self-discipline have had the opposite
effect. So let's find a leader who maintains the Trump platform without the Trump
self-sabotage. How about Ron DeSantis?
Joan Lardin SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
My late father used to say:
"oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive."
All Republicans have to do to rehabilitate themselves and people's faith in
their party is speak truth about the Big Lie.
The truth will set them free.
But they can't or won't do it. They are held in the thrall of a six time bankrupt, lying
NY City conman. They are consummate cowards and panderers.
Jesse G SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
The "Big Lie" is being perpetrated by the Biden Administration and Democrats right in front
of your face. Lying about the border, lying about jobs, lying about infrastructure, lying
about voting laws. Everything's a lie. I'm curious what your father would think about this
new level of deception.
Gregory Caswell SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
Money, Media Hacks and Socialist Union Educators have succeeded, over the years, and more
completely recently, to brainwash our youth, and our ever more naive, less thoughtful, more
fearful, overly occupied, and wee witted population, into believing they would far better
off, under a Socialist Dictatorship than a Democratic Republic! I do believe that will change
over the next four years, when the new 'woke" will have thoughtfully awakened from the
nightmare that is growing daily, through lies and disinformation from our Left-Wing Pelosian
Politician's and the Administration, bolstered by our Majority Media Outlet Hacks, each and
every day! We are, and appear to be to other Nations, quite naive in our Foreign affairs! We
have more illegals gaining entrance and more citizen jobless than ever, and the Government
handouts will of necessity cease, with many opportunities having failed, and employment and
pay less than before! They are greasing the slope, and making it much steeper!
The column is extremely week and fragments are republished here for the sole purpose to
critique/
I think Dean Baker is very superficial here. Dominion is a corporation business model of
which is based on lobbying Congress and states. It is definitely closely connected to the
Democratic Party apparatchiks. This is a very questionable model. So now it tried to present
being White Knight defending itself again absurd claims like Hugo Chaves claim. This does not
change the nature of their business. In reality this is two dirty persons struggling in a mud
peat.
Also the key question remains unanswered: are Dominion machines do any good to the USA voting
system? If yes, then defending itself makes some positive sense. If not, why bother?
...Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela who has been dead for eight years, figures
prominently in many of the stories. Nonetheless, many Fox News viewers believe them.
For a voting machine manufacturer, the claim that your machines are rigged is pretty much a
textbook definition of a damaging statement. Therefore, Dominion should have a pretty solid
case.
Sullivan doesn't dispute any of this, instead, she points out that libel or defamation suits
can also be used against news outlets doing serious reporting. She highlights the case of
Reveal, a nonprofit news outfit that is dedicated to investigative reporting. Reveal was nearly
forced out of business due to the cost of defending itself against a charity that it exposed as
being run by a cult. Sullivan's takeaway is that defamation lawsuits can be used as a weapon
against legitimate news organizations doing serious reporting.
Sullivan is right on this point, but wrong in understanding the implications. Every
civil course of action can be abused by those with money to harm people without substantial
resources. There are tens of thousands of frivolous tort cases filed every year, but would
anyone argue that we should deny people the right to sue a contractor that mistakenly sets
their customer's house on fire? The same applies to suits for breach of contract. If I pay
someone $10,000 in advance to paint my house and they don't do it, should I not be able to sue
to get my money back?
... ... ...
The reality is that our legal system can be abused by the powerful to harm those with
less power. That is the result of the enormous disparities of income and power in this country,
and the inadequate shields against abuse in the legal system...
By
Jeff Horwitz
and
Keach Hagey
Updated April 11, 2021 11:41 am ET
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Google for years operated a secret program that used data from past bids in the company's digital advertising exchange to
allegedly give its own ad-buying system an advantage over competitors, according to court documents filed in a Texas antitrust
lawsuit.
The program, known as "Project Bernanke," wasn't disclosed to publishers who sold ads through Google's ad-buying systems. It
generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the company annually, the documents show. In its lawsuit, Texas alleges
that the project gave Google, a unit of
Alphabet
Inc.,
GOOG
0.90%
an
unfair competitive advantage over rivals.
Google's Ad Machine
Online ads are typically sold in auctions that happen in an instant, when a user's webpage is loading. Google
dominates at virtually every step of the process. In an antitrust lawsuit, Texas alleges that Google's secret
"Project Bernanke" allowed the company to use knowledge it gained running its ad exchange to unfairly compete against
rivals. Here's how the digital advertising machine works:
THE SELL SIDE: PUBLISHERS
AD SPACE
FOR SALE
When a
user
visits
a large online
publisher's
website
or app, the publisher uses an
ad
server
to sell ad space on its pages.
The publisher also gives the exchange information about the reader -- their age, income, browsing history and
interests, for example.
In this example, the publisher uses Google's DoubleClick for Publishers, the leading ad-serving tool.
The tool puts the publisher's ad space up for sale on
exchanges
,
marketplaces where transactions happen in real-time between sellers (
publishers
)
and buyers (
advertisers
).
REAL-TIME
AUCTION HOUSES
Google has the largest such marketplace, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, or AdX.
THE BUY SIDE: ADVERTISERS
An advertiser, representing its clients' products, uses sophisticated buying tools to purchase ads.
In this example, an advertiser uses Google's buying tool, DV360, the industry leader.
The advertiser can specify the types of audiences it wants to target -- such as location, gender or age of
user -- and the price of their offer.
To get its ad in front of the user, the advertiser places bids in the auction marketplace -- the highest bidder
wins.
Once a match is made on the exchange, an ad pops up on users' screens.
The documents filed this week were part of Google's initial response to
the
Texas-led antitrust lawsuit
, which was filed in December and accused the search company of running a digital-ad monopoly
that harmed both ad-industry competitors and publishers. This week's filing, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, wasn't
properly redacted when uploaded to the court's public docket. A federal judge let Google refile it under seal.
Some of the unredacted contents of the document were earlier disclosed by MLex, an antitrust-focused news outlet.
The document sheds further light on the state's case against Google, along with the search company's defense.
Much of the lawsuit involves the interplay of Google's roles as both the operator of a major ad exchange -- which Google likens
to the New York Stock Exchange in marketing documents -- and a representative of buyers and sellers on the exchange. Google also
acts as an ad buyer in its own right, selling ads on its own properties such as search and YouTube through these same systems.
Texas alleges that Google used its access to data from publishers' ad servers -- where more than 90% of large publishers use
Google to sell their digital ad space -- to guide advertisers toward the price they would have to bid to secure an ad placement.
Google's use of bidding information, Texas alleges, amounted to insider trading in digital-ad markets. Because Google had
exclusive information about what other ad buyers were willing to pay, the state says, it could unfairly compete against rival
ad-buying tools and pay publishers less on
its
winning bids for ad inventory
.
The unredacted documents show that Texas claims Project Bernanke is a critical part of that effort.
How tech giants are both cooperating while competing in hardware, software and technology services
Google acknowledged the existence of Project Bernanke in its response and said in the filing that "the details of Project
Bernanke's operations are not disclosed to publishers."
Google denied in the documents that there was anything inappropriate about using the exclusive information it possessed to
inform bids, calling it "comparable to data maintained by other buying tools."
Peter Schottenfels, a Google spokesman, said the complaint "misrepresents many aspects of our ad tech business. We look
forward to making our case in court." He referred the Journal to an analysis conducted by a U.K. regulator that concluded that
Google didn't appear to have had an advantage.
The Texas attorney general's office didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Google's outsize role in the digital-ad market is both controversial and at times murky.
In some instances, "we're on both the buy side and the sell side," Google Chief Economist Hal Varian said at a 2019 antitrust
conference held by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Asked how the company managed those roles, Mr. Varian
said the topic was "too detailed for the audience, and me."
bshirley1968 3 minutes ago
bshirley1968 3 minutes ago
"Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg cares so much about the environment that he
decided to ride a bicycle to work at least the last two blocks.
He was caught unloading a bicycle from a black SUV a short distance from the White House
so he could finish his ride to the cabinet meeting on bike. Such a great photo
opportunity.
Security followed in the SUV.
Perfect example of everything coming out of DC. Everything is a narrative supported by some
kabuki theater.
The Jewish Anti-defamation league is after Tucker Carlson. That's as bad as it gets. They
have more money than God.
Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt "Tucker must go"...."white supremacist
tenet that the white race is in danger by a rising tide of non-whites" that is "anti-Semitic,
racist and toxic."
"" Lord, if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in
people. Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better."
I wonder if this sick woman has any idea, how many good people trapped in the violence of
hoods...could feel exactly the same way about blacks?
Justifiably...
Liesel 24 minutes ago
Dear God, please help me to stop spending money on Amazon and doing Google searches...
Liesel 27 minutes ago (Edited)
If we refuse to spend money at all these businesses that are "woke", there would literally
be no place left to shop. It's really getting that bad. However, please remember the powers
that be want people divided and hating each other. In their eyes, people who are united are
the most dangerous them.
Darth-Budice 34 minutes ago
Been 7 years since I stepped foot into a Target.
If they think 13% of the population + the soy-infused can support them...
I have a different take on this. The US should move to take back Cuba. Let Russia have
Ukraine, we take back Cuba. After Cuba take back Venezuela. Then Russia and China have no
ports in the Americas. Much bigger win for the US.
permanent victim 1 hour ago
Take back?
libfrog88 56 minutes ago
That is the usual word for Americans for stealing.
NATO commissars chase Ukrainian conscripts into RU artillery and machinegun fire until
they lose control over their units, which immediately flee the battlefield (as usual).
If V.V. Putin feels merciful, there's no Buratino rocket barrages on troop concentration
points, as happened during Ilovaisk debacle.
Now, hopefully NATO will puff up and use their vaunted Israeli drones during the attack,
so RU can study the remains.
You never, ever attack entrenched, prepared and boresighted Russians in tank country, without
air superiority, because if you do you get Kursk.
In the best case.
In worst, and most probable case, NATO will get another Saur Mogila disaster.
@Zarathustra urriculum. The Russians must stop protecting the Jews who control the
narrative everywhere. Jews must no longer control more than 10% of the media. They are only
1-2% of the population.
Like the Jews, Galician Ukrainians are always victims. What they did to the Poles during
the German occupation is forgotten.
The zionists are in control in the Ukraine and if they start a war with Russia the Ukraine
is going to be destroyed, Russia has warned Ukraine over and over but being the typical
zionists that they are, they will accept nothing but destruction and bloodshed as long as it
is someone elses blood and destruction.
The zionists have destroyed Iraq and Syria and Libya and Yemen and America.
@alwayswrite ous Regions/Republics had the legal right to secede from the given SSR they
were attached to. Furthermore, once USSR dissolved, any legal basis for a given (former) SSR
to have sway on the given Autonomous Soviet Republic ended.
@Miro23 Germans are surely going to become tired of all this CIA/Neo-con BS.
Merkel and Macron know just what the US is playing at. If the Ukraine does get the deserved
thrashing, that it is literally begging for, then of course there will be German and French
knee jerk condemnations along with the ritual imposition of token sanctions. However this
dangerous episode, will likely harden the resolve of both countries to escape the grip of the
flailing hegemon, which is now in its death throes. So perhaps in the slightly longer term, the
whole episode will backfire on the US and big time at that.
Russia might feel that war in Ukraine is inevitable and perhaps it would be better now,
rather than later.
@Levtraro ganovich, henchman to Stalin, but with an agenda of his own, had his troops and
secret-police agents seize essentially ALL the food stocks from perhaps 2 million peasant
families, resulting in death by starvation for multi-millions.
Thirdly, the heaviest battles in the Second World War were mostly fought in Ukraine. Again,
the death totals of the civilian population were huge. The land was ravaged. Essentially the
entire population were deeply traumatized.
Consequently one should not wonder that to the average Russian Ukrainians appear to be dazed
and dumbed-down. So next time you see your Russian friends, kindly remind them that their
brethren to the south and west should be regarded and treated with considerable compassion.
Good comment. Basically what I have been saying since Maidan. I understand why it has not
happened but the time has definitely come. I think the demarcation would be Odessa, Kherson,
Mykolaev and then north along the Dnipro including Khortiskia and up to East Sumy. I know it
sounds warmongerish but I hope this happens. Get this shit over with. There is so much
happening in this country that discriminates against ethnic Russians more each day.
No, it isn't; it's worse. The Ukrainian army suffers huge non-combat losses every day:
accidents from drinking or narcotics, desertion, suicides. Their commanders are incompetent and
super-dumb as well as first-rate scumbags.
They well remember the Russian reconquest after the revolution and Holodomor.
That they do not remember, for that never happened, at least, not as described. What they do
remember, however, are the caldrons in 2014-2015 and their horrendous losses.
"They well remember the Russian reconquest after the revolution and Holodomor. Ukraine will
not be easily swallowed again."
Ummmmm . it would appear that the grandchildren of the architects of the Holodomor are the
ones currently in power in Ukraine. Pretty amazing level of cucking and submission if you ask
me.
@Levtraro vernment of Ukraine and that the current regime is nothing more than a puppet
state which does NOT represent the best interests of the Ukrainian people and particularly of
those particularly Russian speaking folks in Crimea and the Donbass region.
The illegitimate regime in Kiev is almost entirely Khazarian Talmudist dominated and in
cahoots with the fascistic Uniates in Galicia. That group should be entirely divorced from any
future Ukrainian state as their history has a long involvement with Western Roman Catholic
cultures and consequently is an alien entity within the body politick of Ukraine, Belarus or
Russia. Let them go their own way and not infect their neighbors to the south and east with
their culturally indigestible attitudes.
Turkey Confirms 2 US Warships To Enter Black Sea As Ukraine Posturing Grows
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, APR 09, 2021 - 10:29 AM
Turkey's foreign ministry on Friday confirmed
that it's granted permission for US warships to use the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits to enter the Black Sea at a moment
tensions with Russia over Ukraine are spiraling higher with tit-for-tat threats. Given it revealed the initial notification
was two weeks ago, a pair of American warships are
expected imminently to enter the
Black Sea
.
The foreign ministry
said
in a statement
while referencing the treaty that regulates passage through the straits: "A notice was sent to us 15 days
ago via diplomatic channels that two U.S. warships would pass to the Black Sea in line with the Montreux Convention.
The
ships will remain in the Black Sea until May 4.
"
Typically the US gives 14-days notice prior
to sending warships into the Black Sea, according to the long established treaty with Turkey regarding use of the Bosporus to
enter the waters.
And Reuters notes the significance of the
timing
as follows
: "The United States has informed Turkey that two of its warships will pass through Turkish straits to be
deployed in the Black Sea until May 4, Ankara said on Friday, as Russia has bulked up its military forces on Ukraine's eastern
border."
Late Thursday an unnamed US defense official
had told CNN the warships would be deployed
"in the next few weeks in
a
show of support for Ukraine
,"
and further the deployment would "send a specific message to Moscow that the US is
closely watching," according to the
report
.
Importantly, all of this comes just days
after Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky personally urged NATO to
immediately
expand its Black Sea presence.
He had said in a phone call with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg,
"Such
a permanent presence
should be a
powerful
deterrent to Russia
, which continues the large-scale militarization of the region and hinders merchant
shipping," the
president's
press service
indicated in a readout.
Zelensky had also traveled to the site of frontline renewed fighting in the Donbas region on Thursday in a show of support to
Ukrainian national forces who are clashing with Russia-backed separatists.
While American vessels have long operated in the Black Sea, even semi-regularly conducting drills there, this time the US
ships are being sent there
specifically as a "warning" to Moscow
.
But Russia's Defense Ministry on Thursday announced naval maneuvers of its own,
confirming
that it's
moving more than 10 navy vessels from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea
in
order to conduct naval exercises.
With the rival naval build-up on the Kremlin and Ukraine's doorstep, and with the mutual amassing of troops on either side of
the border...
what could go wrong?
Bdubs
49 minutes ago
And Trump
was the bloodthirsty war monger?
Is there
ANYTHING the left disparages the right for that is not a psychological projection?
These f-ers
need therapy.
Misesmissesme
1 hour ago
(Edited)
Man, we're doing everything we can to turn Ukraine into Poland circa 1939.
Maybe we can find an Archduke to assassinate so we can turn the clock all the way back to 1914.
USAllDay
1 hour ago
remove
link
Joe
sent his kid to Ukraine to blow lines. He'll send yours to blow up.
GreatCaesar'sGhost
1 hour ago
No nato troops will ever set foot in Ukraine. They're trying to pressure Russia into doing something
so they can force the Germans to stop nordstream. The Ukrainians can't win here and they're being used.
Not good.
BeePee
1 hour ago
There
were NATO advisors in Ukraine. Even that should be stopped.
Selling arms to Ukraine, most likely will continue. That's what companies do.
GreatCaesar'sGhost
58 minutes ago
The
Ukrainians are being pushed to make a move against Donbass and even Crimea. It is a poor country buying
expensive weapons, doesn't end well.
I don't know what weed you're smoking but it has really scrambled your brains. The ability
to show up on the parade grounds and go around the world showing fancy overpriced toys does
not equate to fighting ability. The US hasn't faced a real army in a conventional war since
Vietnam. The US is great at fighting banana republics, but if facing a real military like
Russia (who believe me have all the drones that the US has and the ability to neutralize
those of the enemy) would run for their safe spaces and hide.
It is difficult to find a black cat in the empty dark room, but neoliberal MSM jump over
their head screaming Cat! Evil Russian cat!
Notable quotes:
"... Looking for something in wikipedia, I discover that in 1961, the first manned spaceflight was..."a propaganda victory". There's no hope! ..."
"... I think Russians have weaponized word 'weaponized' because presence in headlines represents most useful mechanism to map current extent of Mockingbird 2 operations. ..."
"... It was an interesting demonstration of the circularity of belief mechanisms at work when people adopted ideas like: "Putin did not really intervene in our elections, he was much more devious. He made us think he did intervene and that way caused us to undermine ourselves! That is how devilish he is and we were even more right than we thought about that!" ..."
"... It is beyond question that such a "system" is overly hysterical, to say the least ..."
With the US/UK press in full Russia hysteria mode, right now, it's time for a thread on
things the Anglo-American media has accused Moscow of "weaponising."
We shall start with Charlie Sheen.
Yes. Really. Not a joke.
Take a bow, @ak_mack & @ForeignPolicy
Bryan MacDonald's thread is a good opportunity to update our list of all the issues, ideas
and things Russia has weaponized.
Even while the list below now includes 111 entries - like robotic cockroaches, postmodernism
and 14.legged squids - it is likely far from being complete.
Some people, crazed extremists no doubt, might regard all that as a way of softening up
public opinion for conflict. Reading through the list, it seems more like the ravings of
paranoid schizophrenics then it does journalists.
This demonizing of Russia is an attempt to portray it as a threat: there is certainly a clash
of interests between Russia and the West. But the confrontation being pursued will not lead
to the conclusion NATO predicts. Failure to heed the warnings of history is leading us to the
nuclear apocalypse. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Even for Reuters their center headline, photo and subtext are over the top.
They no longer make any effort to disguise political opinion as facts
(their sheeple readers won't catch on).
As of this writing the headline is: Half of Republicans believe false accounts of Capitol riot: Reuters/Ipsos poll
and the subtext is: Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump
and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event
that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have
listened.
He tread water wearing a blissful smile as the organism approached him (14 armed
killer squid). Obviously the "vampire Squid" Goldman Sachs has been submersively trying to
disrupt Russia.
Why would the CIA be so interested in the ability of North Korea to modify weather? Most
probably because the CIA's efforts to pull off a repeat of the flooding in North Korea in
1994-1995 failed and they want to know why.
Aside: Research the CIA's "Operation Popeye" in 1967 Vietnam if you are doubtful of
how evil and crazy the CIA is.
Most likely the party involved in foiling the CIA's plot to flood North Korea again and
trigger another famine was China and not Russia. Not only does China have extensive
experience with cloud seeding, but they are in the proper location to accomplish the task.
Cloud seeding is how the Chinese provided clear weather over Beijing for the Olympics in
2008... they seeded air masses farther upwind to make it rain there and dry out the air
heading to Beijing. If the air heading towards North Korea (relatively consistent west to
east flow there) has already been seeded and much of the moisture in it already precipitated
out, then when the CIA's spook planes seed it nearer to the Korean peninsula it will be too
dry to squeeze much more rain out of. The CIA would be cockblocked and frustrated and they
will naturally want to know why their attempts at genocide failed.
Our Mission
At Collateral Global, we believe that there is an urgent need to study the consequences of
public health measures implemented in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, including the
second and third-order effects.
Through commitment to the enduring principles of scientific inquiry, we aim to provide
scholarship and research, building an evidence-based understanding of mitigation measures
that is both accessible and actionable.
How long until the above site is compromised or McCarthyism-smeared?
Maybe these count. I looked for variations of weaponize in title. These were stories I
remember reading and did quick search to retrieve something about them. Great list.
I am deeply troubled that you conveniently neglected to include another fearsome Russian
Super-Dooper Weapon: the children's cartoon Masha and the Bear .
It's obvious that Masha and the Bear is a nefarious Russian plot to steal the precious
bodily fluids of our children!
We must be constantly vigilant. The CIA, FBI, MI6, NSA, and Homeland Security must be
notified about the Masha Threat. YouTube must censor Masha. And blue check-marked Twitter
police must condemn anyone who watches Masha.
This one didn't have the word 'weaponize', close though: "opening a new front in its spy
battles".
accusing the Kremlin of opening a new front in its spy battles with the West amid the
worldwide competition to contain the pandemic.
...
American intelligence officials said the Russians were aiming to steal research to
develop their own vaccine more quickly, not to sabotage other countries' efforts. There was
likely little immediate damage to global public health, cybersecurity experts said.
Russia's weaponized Zersetzung
...
And although economic sanctions might hurt Russia's economy, they won't easily heal the
divisions that weaponized decomposition has deepened in America. Putin's assault on the
national soul is working.
The U.S. media is weaponizing ignorance.
The more one absorbs their reporting, the more the brain is reduced to mush.
I can only manage a few hundred works and I become irritated and disoriented.
My hat is off to people who can somehow look at that stuff and remain sane.
Or are they...hmmm...
A major mistake in interpreting the massive parallelism of all these claims is to assume a
form of central coordination.
In fact the parallellism is spontaneous once the target has a bad reputation. Centrally
organized propaganda can tune the reputation of the target but even that is not essential and
it can happen organically. Once the reputation is set however the process has its own
momentum. There is a bit more to it than merely the reputation of the target because the
positive reputation of those who attack the target also plays. In fact you have to work with
a large network of trust relations to get a good picture.
Glenn Greenwald recently linked to an article of Erik Weinstein on Russell Conjugation , how
the same events get an entirely different emotional content depending on the reporter. In the
long list of links above everyone is using the same spectacles for looking at events, but
also for filtering what is relevant , meaningful and worthy of attention.
This is why the NYTimes is still an interesting paper once you know how to read it. But few
people can use it that way.
The Russians, along with the Chinese, have apparently weaponized the protests of British
citizens against overreaching Police legislation.
"The disruption being caused through "Kill the Bill" protests in UK is an effort by the
Sino-Russian alliance to destroy trust and confidence in political and institutional systems,
in a bid to leave society demoralised and feeling powerless against events." https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/china-russia-use-social-media-fuel-protests-uk
div> Surely Harry and Megan must have been weaponized by that dreadful
Putin! Stands to reason. Doesn't it?
We need to keep in mind one thing: That which The West accuses Russia of, they are actually
committing themselves.
Nearly all of the 'weaponisations' that we are reading about above, The West is actually
DOING. The hypocracy is incredible. But we need to look at this hypocrisy, because in all
instances the propaganda is being directed at YOU! You / Us / Me in The West. We are the
target of this propaganda. In many instances it is MILITARY ORGANISTIONS that are targeting
civilians with lies and misinformation. WE are being attacked by military organisations.
I think enough is enough on The West. It's disgraceful that military organisations are
allowed to target civilians with BLATANT propaganda. It's time to fight back.
Howdy people. I think Russians have weaponized word 'weaponized' because presence in
headlines represents most useful mechanism to map current extent of Mockingbird 2
operations.
classical psychological projection by the weaponized narrative enablers of the worst Empire
in all human history, as we stand at 90 Seconds to Midnight on the very precipice of nuclear
war and ecological catastrophe, and the engine of the Armageddon Express starts to go off the
cliff....
I have two parakeets that I have been trying to weaponize for the better part of a month. But
it appears to be totally hopeless. If Mr. Putin happens to read this blog for some
weaponistic purpose, would you please offer me some of your invaluable advice? Please?
I think weaponized sheep is the winner, with incompetence a close second.
Jen, can you please tell me where one can watch the skating? Or perhaps, well we would call
them re-runs in the ancient history days - perhaps utoobs?
I see tantalizing hints on RT, but no real films.
The russian skaters (from what I saw last year) are truly amazing. Thanks.
If the system used by restaurants and cafes in HK is similar to what we have in Australia,
then they are required at least to provide a method by which their customers can be contacted
and advised if someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 has also visited the eateries
within 14 days of the customers having visited the establishments. That way those customers
can know if they need to isolate and limit their contacts with others.
The contact tracing is also supposed to help government authorities know how quickly the
disease is or is not spreading so they only have to lockdown certain neighbourhoods or areas
where there may be a cluster developing, instead of locking down an entire city or a state or
even a whole country.
Also you need to be careful reading Al Jazeera articles: Al Jazeera is definitely not a
fan of Russia or China.
"... And among those chafing at the government's response, like restaurant owners and their
customers, a form of grassroots resistance was forged.
Instead of asking their customers to scan the health department's QR code and transmit
their location, some owners have designed an alternative code that feeds into a Googleform
which will be erased every 31 days, the period for which businesses are required by
authorities to retain the data ..."
That action by the restaurant owners is not exactly grassroots resistance if the
authorities have already approved the Googleform and the erasures.
Around ten years ago, I called this "Dog Putin ate my homework syndrome". It is not only
propaganda against an economic, political and even soul competitor (last resort of real
Christianity is Russia), it is not even just a projection ("killer Putin", as Putin himself
explained). Its primary purpose is to tell you why you are living worse than 20 years ago,
why your children will live even worse than you now if they remain in this lost cause of
deeply corrupt and rotten so called countries. It is an excuse for everything that is wrong -
it is all because Putin and Xi weaponised it.
When I see such things in alt media, since I do not consume the swill from the main
sewerage media, I get that sinking feeling that I live in a wrong place, a place without a
future.
I do not care who the "authorities" denigrate, Russia, China, they are even to me. I only
wish they would do something to reduce the problems of our own societies instead of always
blaming someone else. Because as long as the rulers and their sewerage media sycophants keep
pointing fingers at Russia and China nothing will change for the better here where I am.
Any propaganda works if the people know they will never suffer the consequences of war.
The idea, all the way from Saddam Hussein, that we can influence the USA public to stop
their govt waging war on us, is misplaced.
I used to believe it too. I dont believe anymore. I dont believe the USA govt needs to
strain themselves to get the citizens behind them to put up blockades/sanctions or launch
cruise missiles.
Some still think this or that event will be used to "sanction russia", "attack iran"
etc.
(The "more sanctions coming" part is weird. As though Russia today prospers at the
pleasure of the West)
The only thing that stops an attack on Iran is hard cold realities of thousands of dead US
Marines and destitution at home once the oil terminals are blown up. Same vs Russia.
Still bloggers write stuff to try to convince the Anerican public.
Only thing that convinces any person/society is the consequences for actions.
But mark my words: West was beaten on 2020-01-08. Payment soon to Russia for going along
with the c19. Iran got some of its payment with that 25yr agreement.
It's still "One Country / Two Systems" in China / Hongkong as far as I can tell. If
Googleforms are not available in Hongkong, maybe you need to tell
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
"Because as long as the rulers and their sewerage media sycophants keep pointing fingers at
Russia and China nothing will change for the better here where I am."
Posted by: Kiza | Apr 6 2021 1:18 utc | 51
Absolutely Kiza, damn shame, but expect no change, and no disappointment will arise. The
new feudalism has arrived.
The take away ending quote
"
For the EU, the Chinese entry into global politics is more problematic. It was trying to
leverage its own 'strategic autonomy' by erecting European values as the gateway to inclusion
into its market and trade partnership. China effectively is telling the world to reject any
such hegemonic imposition of alien values and rights.
The EU is stranded in the midst. Unlike the U.S., it is precluded from printing the money
with which to resurrect its virus-blighted economy. It desperately needs trade and
investment. Its biggest trading partner, and its tech well-spring, however, has just told the
EU (as the U.S.), to give up on its moralising discourse. At the same time, Europe's
'security partner' has just demanded the opposite – that the EU strengthens it. What's
to be done? Sit back, and watch (with fingers crossed that no one does something extremely
stupid).
"
Trying to wade through the muck that passes as news today IS a fools errand.
Long time reader of MOA, followed Paveway long ago.
B, keep this site alive and let me know how to contribute.
It was an interesting demonstration of the circularity of belief mechanisms at work when
people adopted ideas like: "Putin did not really intervene in our elections, he was much more
devious. He made us think he did intervene and that way caused us to undermine ourselves!
That is how devilish he is and we were even more right than we thought about that!"
I recently read an article which stuck with me on a Flemish 'eminence grise' (Jan
Balliauw)on Russia which commented on
the European turnabout over the Sputnik vaccine(in dutch) : yes we misjudged the Russian
vaccine but it is the fault of the Russians and the bastards are cheering now! And he goes on
to the main theme by emphasizing the Russians can't be trusted.
It is beyond question that such a "system" is overly hysterical, to say the least
. Show me the proof that there is a need to cancel democracy and human rights for something
that does not affect 99.9% if anyone at all. And if you do, why not lock everybody in because
of traffic accidents, violent crime or actual diseases such as malaria, dengue fever or
whatever.
I question the motives for what is going on: that is to say: I do not accept that people's
health is the driving factor behind this. Show me the proof that what is claimed is actually
happening and if so also show me the proof that the intrusive technology is actually
meaningful. In my view this is conditioning the people to accept personal surveillance on a
level that goes far beyond 1984, and it is infinitely more scary than "covid".
How Russia Amerika+France+UK+++ weaponized "the Great Syrian Democratic
Revolution"
How much longer can people still insist that there is a Syrian revolution, when the most
powerful group is not only friendly to the West, but an "asset"?
In Australia, the minimum that restaurants, cafes, other dining establishments, other
private retail establishments and places where large numbers of people might gather can do is
provide a way in which customers and patrons can be notified that they may have come in
contact with someone who has COVID-19 or who has tested positive for COVID-19. But most of
these places cannot compel people to leave their contact details (usually mobile phone
numbers) with them.
In cases where places do compel people to leave their mobile phone details for the
purposes of contact tracing, people have the option of going somewhere else that does not
insist on their leaving their contact details behind.
The system used in Hong Kong dining places appears to be
similar to the system used in Australia: by law, these establishments must provide
methods by which people can be contacted if they become sites of infection. They either
encourage people to download a contact-tracing app or ask people to write their details down
on paper forms. Customers have the option also of not going out at all and eating at home,
which is difficult to do in a culture where dining out in public with friends and family is
expected and where most people live in small apartments so they prefer to entertain others by
taking them out to restaurants and cafes.
Some restaurants and cafes in HK have also refused to take people's contact details and
have opted to serve takeaway meals only.
Theoretically this system would reduce the need for blanket lockdowns of an entire city or
a larger administrative unit such as a state or province, or even country. In Sydney, the NSW
government used contact tracing to determine that a cluster of COVID-19 cases was limited
mainly to the northeast side of the metropolitan area and this part of Sydney was subjected
to lockdown. Traffic access to the area (population: about 250,000) was blocked by police.
The lockdown lasted about 21 days and included New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. During this
period people living in the affected area couldn't leave it but were allowed to leave their
homes for exercise, essential shopping and getting takeaway meals within the area.
The issue that Al Jazeera brings up is an issue of compulsion and creeping authoritarian
rule (based on stereotypes about China and the Chinese government) but it uses a poor example
to demonstrate what it wants its readers to believe. It turns out that the HK govt is not
forcing all dining establishments to use its contact-tracing app but is giving them a choice.
Al Jazeera should have done better research.
Show me the proof that there is a need to cancel democracy and human rights for
something that does not affect 99.9% ...
Jen is not advocating for canceling democracy and human rights. And the pandemic
affects us all. Everyone is capable of getting sick and passing it on to others.
Democracies have responded to the pandemic with measures that many people find onerous and
many lies have been spread by some of these people such as: 1)"masks don't work" (they do
work but they protect others, not the mask-wearer) ; 2) "only old people die" (even teens
have died); and 3) that the pandemic is a hoax (it's not just the flu!).
Your "... does not affect 99.9% if anyone at all" is just regurgitating
nonsense.
Many more-authoritarian countries have actually been more successful in fighting the
pandemic. They haven't had to have the long "lockdowns" (a misnomer that exaggerates) that
Western democracies have imposed. Among the things that they have done (as temporary
emergency measures) is: rigorous contact-tracing, and quarantining the sick and suspected
sick.
I would also note that the hypocrisy is astounding:
People that DEMAND a return to normalcy also argue against the actions that could have
returned us to normal much sooner than waiting for experimental vaccines;
Libertarians that don't complain much about laws like speed limits and the prohibition
against yelling "fire!" in a crowed theater are DEMANDING an end to pandemic measures that
curtail their liberty;
Republicans that are pushing for voting ID and accept a police state are DEMANDING that
the economy be "opened up".
I should add, for the benefit of readers that don't know me, that my criticism of those
who are critical of pandemic measures doesn't mean that I'm not skeptical of many things
about this pandemic such as:
USA/Empire desire to stoke hate for China;
Big Pharma - government ties;
mRNA tech which has been funded by US Mil for use in biowarfare;
the immense propaganda spawned by the the above and the sheeple's acceptance of
same.
The only thing that holds America or the "democratic" West together is an increasingly rabid
hatred of Russia and China.
The Western-controlled Free Press and its unhinged accusations against Russia is matched
by its equally unhinged torrent of Yellow Peril propaganda against China, as evidenced
below:
Simply put, the collective West--led by the America and the Anglosphere--resembles a
civilization of paranoid schizophrenics, whose delusional ravings will drive them towards
world war--total war.
Needless to say, things will not end well for them.
This guy is nothing but a f * c king crook and a gangster. They just paid a fine of a
BILLION dollars for manipulating the Gold Market. And they even give time for this shyster to
even speak?
jamesblazen62 10 hours ago remove link
Dimon is in greed's grasp and he can't escape. He's had 2 brushes with death (cancer and
emergency heart surgery). You'd think a billionaire with more money than he can ever need or
want has something better to do in his life than conniving for more money and playing big
corporate games of manipulation and deceit.
Evil-Edward-Hyde 50 minutes ago
J P Morgan is a crime Syndicate.
They constantly Break the Laws.
No Problem for Them,
They Just Pay The Fines.
Their secret is they make much much more money on the scam did they have to pay in
fines.
FiscalBatman 1 hour ago remove link
It's amazing how out of touch these guys are. They just don't get it. Dimon will be
swaying back and forth with the rest of them at this rate
The Competent Man 8 hours ago remove link
This is NOT a boom.
When was the last time houses went for above asking price, ever, with 20 million out of
work?
All of this 'boom' is nothing but asset inflation.
And also by the level of degeneration of the US neoliberal elite. Healthy elite would never
resort to "Wokism" in the attempt to crush populism and deflect anger directed on banksters, tech
moguls and politicians
Political populism, a common lament for Dimon, was also criticized.
" Americans know that something has gone terribly wrong, and they blame this country's
leadership: the elite, the powerful, the decision makers - in government, in business and in
civic society," he wrote.
"This is completely appropriate, for who else should take the blame?"
That fuels populism on the right and left, he said.
"But populism is not policy, and we cannot let it drive another round of poor planning and
bad leadership that will simply make our country's situation worse."
The lengthy letter touched on many perennial policy bugbears like the need for "proper
immigration policies" - ie making it easier for tech companies and others to hire skilled labor
from abroad - while the CEO also wrote that " affordable housing remains out of reach for too
many Americans."
At one point, Dimon offered a defense of the dollar's status as the world's reserve
currency, arguing that the Chinese yuan isn't "fully convertible" like its American
counterpart, and warned of the possibility of capital controls and prohibitions against assets
like gold and cyptocurrency.
But the CEO was very candid about China...
"China's leaders believe America is in decline... The Chinese see an America that is
losing ground in technology, infrastructure and education – a nation torn and crippled
. . . and a country unable to coordinate government policies (fiscal, monetary, industrial,
regulatory) in any coherent way to accomplish national goals."
"Unfortunately," Dimon writes, "there is a lot of truth to this."
Warning of the real risks of stagflation, the banker warned
"...the United States could be perceived as a place that is inhospitable to capitalism and
capitalists," and he advised readers to think about "currency diversification, country
diversification, and asset class diversification."
And
as SovereignMan's Simon Black notes , Dimon then lists goes on to provide a wide-ranging
laundry list of problems that have been building for years in the United States– "I'll
give some examples, but if I tried to address them all this letter would become a book."
Dimon cites "a litigation and regulatory system that is costly, crippling small
businesses with red tape and bureaucracy ".
" terrible infrastructure planning and investment"
"huge waste and inefficiency at both the federal and state levels"
a lack of "effective immigration policies"
"we fail to properly fund pension obligations "
" income equality has gotten worse"
"social safety nets [are] poorly designed"
" 30% of Americans don't have enough savings to deal with unexpected expenses that total
as little as $400"
"Veterans [hospitals] . . . are broken"
"Almost all institutions – governments, schools, media and businesses – have
lost credibility in the eyes of the public. And perhaps for good reason: Many of our
problems have been around for a long time and are not aging well."
"Politics is increasingly divisive, and government is increasingly dysfunctional "
He also rails against the education and healthcare systems, saying:
"Our education and health issues come together in this alarming statistic: Seventy percent
of today's youth (ages 17-24) are not eligible for military service , essentially due to a
lack of proper education (basic reading and writing skills) or health issues (commonly
obesity or diabetes)."
Dimon goes on to explain that all of these problems "may explain why, over the last 10
years, the U.S. economy has grown cumulatively only about 18%. "
"Some think that this sounds satisfactory, but it must be put into context: In prior sharp
downturns (1974, 1982 and 1990), economic growth was 40% over the ensuing 10 years."
The country ultimately needs to "move beyond our differences and self-interest and act for
the greater good," Dimon said. "The good news is that this is fixable."
Of course, a strong economic rebound is good for JP Morgan, and waxing about the threat
posed by Big Tech could help the CEO push for less regulation even under a Democratic
Administration. Is Dimon once again just talking his book?
"Our education and health issues come together in this alarming statistic: Seventy percent
of today's youth (ages 17-24) are not eligible for military service , essentially due to a
lack of proper education (basic reading and writing skills) or health issues (commonly
obesity or diabetes)."
When you have no standards, SJW everyone is equal, then you have ****ty results.
5G-Powered Nanobots 3 hours ago
Good. Lets cut "defense" by 25% a year for the next 10 years
Clockwork Orange is complete, unbelievable nonsense. Our current leaders would not have
cured Alex, they would have appointed him an Ambassadorship to Syria or made him Vice
President, perhaps even given him a shot at Prime Minister or President one day.
Yes, but on condition that the 'Alexes' play the game. Deep State is full of sociopaths but
they spent their years in elite schools, not stealing cars and invading homes. Go to school,
get your degree, and then you can invade entire nations and kill many more people. Turk 152 says:
April 2, 2021 at 9:33
pm GMT • 4.8 days ago ↑ @Priss Factor
I suppose it is pretty tough these days to be a mass murderer on a global scale without
Harvard or Yale on your resume. In the old days, Truman was able to drop 2 atomic bombs and
firebomb Dresden with merely a degree from Spalding's Commercial College.
Other that that this ilist is just another sign of the crisi of neoliberlaism in the USA
and elsewhere. That why neoliberal elite badly needs a scapegoat to avoid the possibility to
be hanging from lampposts. The high level of hate toward neoliberal elite( parcially
redirected by "woke" movement toward whites ) and the loss of legitimacy is not
undeniable.
...Bryan MacDonald's thread is a good opportunity to update our list of all the issues,
ideas and things Russia has weaponized.
Even while the list below now includes 111 entries - like robotic cockroaches,
postmodernism and 14-legged squids - it is likely far from being complete:
I am deeply troubled that you conveniently neglected to include another fearsome Russian
Super-Dooper Weapon: the children's cartoon Masha and the Bear .
It's obvious that Masha and the Bear is a nefarious Russian plot to steal the precious
bodily fluids of our children!
We must be constantly vigilant. The CIA, FBI, MI6, NSA, and Homeland Security must be
notified about the Masha Threat. YouTube must censor Masha. And blue check-marked Twitter
police must condemn anyone who watches Masha.
This one didn't have the word 'weaponize', close though: "opening a new front in its spy
battles".
accusing the Kremlin of opening a new front in its spy battles with the West amid the
worldwide competition to contain the pandemic.
...
American intelligence officials said the Russians were aiming to steal research to
develop their own vaccine more quickly, not to sabotage other countries' efforts. There was
likely little immediate damage to global public health, cybersecurity experts said.
The U.S. media is weaponizing ignorance. The more one absorbs their reporting, the more
the brain is reduced to mush.
I can only manage a few hundred works and I become irritated and disoriented. My hat is
off to people who can somehow look at that stuff and remain sane. Or are they...hmmm...
> Russia isn't going to invade Ukraine, much as their leaders and press seem to lose
sleep endlessly over it.
This is about blocking North Stream 2. Ukrainian government is a puppet in a bigger
geopolitical game and will do what they are told to do.
If they were ordered to invade Donbass Russia might intervene. I think Russia movement of
troupes was a pre-preemptive move to block a joint plan of the USA and some Eastern(Poland) and
Western European states to create a crisis and bury North Stream 2 by the attempt to retake the
territory by force (Georgian scenario).
While writing resolutions in which they essentially declare war on Russia (retaking Crimea
by force as a new Ukrainian government policy) Ukrainian government clearly understands that
any significant military move in Donbass might be the end of Ukraine as we know it. So they are
afraid to do anything without strong Western support, including military. That's why Biden
administration made a statement about the support of Ukrainian sovereignty and, at the same
time, probably pushing Ukrainians to make a move in Donbass.
There are two parts of Ukraine with different history and affiliations: Eastern Ukraine and
Western Ukraine.
The regime in Kiev represents Western Ukrainian nationalism and it is/was to a certain
degree resented in Eastern Ukraine (where manufacturing is concentrated) as provincial,
incompetent and corrupt. It is controlled by a handful of oligarchs -- a classic neoliberal
oligarchic republic so to speak.
That does not mean that Eastern Ukraine would welcome Russians now (after seven years of
anti-Russian propaganda by the government), but please do not write about things you have no
clue: in 2014 the situation was different with several uprisings against Provisional government
in Eastern Ukraine.
IMHO it was Putin's decision to limit Russia role that led to the current situation. As far
as I know the only large city which supported Provisional government in the East in 2014 was
Dnepropetrovsk ( the home town of oligarch Kolomoyskyi, and nationalistic politicians Kuchma
and Tymoshenko.)
IMHO Putin has the ability to occupy all Eastern Ukraine without a single shot and establish
separate "Eastern Ukrainian republic" government. But he decided not to do as the it would
result in crushing Western sanctions (which was Washington's policy from the very beginning
(google Nulangate); and that's why 2014 EuroMaidan putsch was organized and financed by the USA
with Poland, Germany and Sweden in supporting roles).
Add to this the necessary to feed pensioners (mentioned above) and the amount of money
necessary to resurrect the manufacturing which would compete with Russian's own. Which Russia
probably could not afford at the time.
REPLYHOLE IN HEAD IGNORED04/04/2021
at 4:44 am
> Russia isn't going to invade Ukraine, much as their leaders and press seem to lose
sleep endlessly over it.
This is about blocking North Stream 2. Ukrainian government is a puppet in a bigger
geopolitical game and will do what they are told to do.
If they were ordered to invade Donbass Russia might intervene. I think Russia movement of
troupes was a pre-preemptive move to block a joint plan of the USA and some Eastern(Poland) and
Western European states to create a crisis and bury North Stream 2 by the attempt to retake the
territory by force (Georgian scenario).
While writing resolutions in which they essentially declare war on Russia (retaking
Crimea by force as a new Ukrainian government policy) Ukrainian government clearly understands
that any significant military move in Donbass might be the end of Ukraine as we know it. So
they are afraid to do anything without strong Western support, including military. That's why
Biden administration made a statement about the support of Ukrainian sovereignty and, at the
same time, probably pushing Ukrainians to make a move in Donbass.
There are two parts of Ukraine with different history and affiliations: Eastern Ukraine
and Western Ukraine.
The regime in Kiev represents Western Ukrainian nationalism and it is/was to a certain
degree resented in Eastern Ukraine (where manufacturing is concentrated) as provincial,
incompetent and corrupt. It is controlled by a handful of oligarchs -- a classic neoliberal
oligarchic republic so to speak.
That does not mean that Eastern Ukraine would welcome Russians now (after seven years of
anti-Russian propaganda by the government), but please do not write about things you have no
clue: in 2014 the situation was different with several uprisings against Provisional government
in Eastern Ukraine.
IMHO it was Putin's decision to limit Russia role that led to the current situation. As
far as I know the only large city which supported Provisional government in the East in 2014
was Dnepropetrovsk ( the home town of oligarch Kolomoyskyi, and nationalistic politicians
Kuchma and Tymoshenko.)
IMHO Putin has the ability to occupy all Eastern Ukraine without a single shot and
establish separate "Eastern Ukrainian republic" government. But he decided not to do as the it
would result in crushing Western sanctions (which was Washington's policy from the very
beginning (google Nulangate); and that's why 2014 EuroMaidan putsch was organized and financed
by the USA with Poland, Germany and Sweden in supporting roles).
Add to this the necessary to feed pensioners (mentioned above) and the amount of money
necessary to resurrect the manufacturing which would compete with Russian's own. Which Russia
probably could not afford at the time.
REPLY HOLE IN HEAD IGNORED 04/04/2021
at 4:44 am
The globalists are behaving just like the Bolsheviks of old. It is down right scary to see
this happen in America. We lost the major cities 40 or 50 years ago and now the entire
country (except that 1 percent stealing all the money) is on the verge of going 3rd world
banana republic.
drjd 6 hours ago
If this was truly "communism", would 1% be stealing all the money? Why don't we just call
it what it really is: "globalist crony capitalism."
YuriTheClown 2 hours ago
The internationalists are behaving just like the Bolsheviks of old.
You must not know your history. High powered US bankers prop up the big Bolshevik names in
New York until it was time to loose them on Russia. Then they financed the whole
operation.
And who is financing the Bolsheviks in the USA now???
artless 1 hour ago remove link
The word you are looking for is fascism. This use of "crony this" and "crony that" along
with ANY use of the word capitalism-because their is nothing capitalist about any of this-
needs to stop. It is fascism. Not communism, not socialism...
It has been argued that the phrase Et tu, Brute can be interpreted as a curse or
warning. It is possible that Caesar adapted the words of a Greek sentence "You too, my son, will
have a taste of power", which to the Romans had long since become proverbial. It foreshadows
Brutus ' own
violent death, after Antony and Octavian decisively defeated the outnumbered armies of Brutus and
Cassius at the Battle
of Philippi in October 42. After the battle, Brutus committed suicide.
This is not only about IMF being a puppet of the USA. this is also clear reputation of
neoliberal ideology.
After this move any defender of neoliberal deregulation looks like joke.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it backs a U.S. proposal for a global minimum
corporate tax.
IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said that the fund has been calling for international
cooperation on tax policy "for a long time," adding that different corporate tax rates around
the world have fueled tax shifting and avoidance.
"That reduces the revenues that governments collect to do the needed social and economic
spending," Gopinath told Yahoo Finance Tuesday. "We're very much in support of having this kind
of global minimum corporate tax."
Gopinath's remarks are likely to add momentum to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's
efforts to start an international dialogue on a new framework. The European Commission on
Tuesday also said it supported
discussions , but said the ultimate rate should be deliberated through the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Yellen recently called on the 20 largest economies to work together to "stop the race to the
bottom" by setting a new minimum that would allow governments more stability in collecting tax
revenue. The Biden administration is targeting a 21% global minimum tax for U.S. multinational
corporations.
"It is important to work with other countries to end the pressures of tax competition and
corporate tax base erosion," Yellen said in a speech Monday.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Monday that she is working with G20 countries
to agree on a global corporate minimum tax rate and pledged that restoring U.S. multilateral
leadership would strengthen the global economy and advance U.S. interests.
In a speech ahead of her first International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings as
Treasury chief, Yellen signaled stronger U.S. engagement on issues from climate change to human
rights to tax base erosion.
A global minimum tax proposed by the Biden administration could help to end a "thirty-year
race to the bottom on corporate tax rates," Yellen told an online event hosted by the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs.
The proposal is a key pillar of President Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure spending
plan, which calls for an increase in the U.S. corporate tax rate to 28% while eliminating some
deductions associated with overseas profits.
Without a global minimum, the United States would again have higher rates than a number of
other major economies, tax experts say, while the U.S. proposal could help jump-start
negotiations for a tax deal among major economies.
World Bank President David Malpass said finance leaders from the Group of 20 major economies
on Wednesday would discuss global tax issues, including for digital services, adding that
international attitudes were shifting away from continual tax reductions.
"Taxes matter to development, and it's important that the world get it right," Malpass told
CNBC television.
Separately, a group of Democratic senators unveiled a legislative proposal to roll back
parts of former President Donald Trump's 2017 U.S. tax cuts.
Mexico's government said it reached a deal with union and business
leaders on a controversial bill to ban outsourcing in a move that seeks to close tax loopholes.
The group agreed during a meeting at the National Palace in Mexico City on Monday to forbid
the outsourcing of personnel to third-party firms, except for specialized work outside a
company's main economic activity, and to implement a new profit sharing model, the labor
ministry said in a
statement .
"... Do Mr. Biden and his people claim that the dogmatic and occasionally hysterical certitude of the woke is sufficient warrant to turn the country upside down? ..."
"... If the 2020 election meant anything, it confirmed the irreconcilable differences -- a standoff of the cobra and mongoose. The election certainly didn't give Mr. Biden marching orders from the American people to open the southern border to all comers, or to redesign the natural order of biology (in regard to gender identity and all the social arrangements that have flowed from the difference between the sexes since time immemorial), or to change the country in a hundred other ways, bundling it off on an expedition to the far left fringes of reality and grievance. What the new administration proposes may be less a transformation than a hijacking. Half the country doesn't want to be reinvented -- not on Mr. Biden's terms. ..."
"... He and his people have gone into business with a bogus, echo-chamber mandate: They manipulate a media illusion of unanimity, and presume to impose a moral narrative. The Bolsheviks, a tiny but ferociously focused minority, proceeded in this way in 1917. ..."
While Trump was rejected by electorate (Biden got 7 million votes more -- mainly in costal
states and large cities), Biden was elected only because of extention of mail-in voting and
because he was not Trump. Now people regret their choice, while main-in voting "irregularities"
deprive Biden administration of the legitimacy. Moreover due to Biden neocon foreign policy and
pandering to woke Bolsheviks, many people have "post-election remorse," But in two-party system
you can do nothing about it: the train already left the station.
Now the Biden administration, headed by a man a few years too old to be a boomer, entertains
ambitions to take a great leap forward. But wait. Does a transformation require a mandate? By
what mandate does the Biden administration undertake the work of irrevocably altering American
society? Do Mr. Biden and his people claim that the dogmatic and occasionally hysterical
certitude of the woke is sufficient warrant to turn the country upside down?
There was no mandate in the outcome of the last election. November 2020 merely confirmed
that the U.S. remains split precisely down the middle, 50-50, as it has been for more than 20
years, since the deadlock of Al Gore and George W. Bush and the hanging chads of Florida.
If the 2020 election meant anything, it confirmed the irreconcilable differences -- a
standoff of the cobra and mongoose. The election certainly didn't give Mr. Biden marching
orders from the American people to open the southern border to all comers, or to redesign the
natural order of biology (in regard to gender identity and all the social arrangements that
have flowed from the difference between the sexes since time immemorial), or to change the
country in a hundred other ways, bundling it off on an expedition to the far left fringes of
reality and grievance. What the new administration proposes may be less a transformation than a
hijacking. Half the country doesn't want to be reinvented -- not on Mr. Biden's terms.
He and his people have gone into business with a bogus, echo-chamber mandate: They
manipulate a media illusion of unanimity, and presume to impose a moral narrative. The
Bolsheviks, a tiny but ferociously focused minority, proceeded in this way in 1917.
... ... ...
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book
is "God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money."
Peter Von Nessi SUBSCRIBER 29 minutes ago "A man of his age --
fearing that he may amount to nothing more than the great Obama's onetime sidekick -- is apt to
react to the surprise of waking up in the White House by pandering to the flashiest ideas of
the young people and their hero Bernie Sanders. Mr. Biden can, for a moment, forestall death if
he veers way left and makes his mark, however chaotically."
I think the author gives too much credit to Biden and not his handlers. After all Pinocchio
was made of wood. When was the last time you saw a piece of wood think....about anything? SHOW
MORE REPLIES
N Neil Steinhoff SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago Joe did not know which state he was in, what office
he was running for and said 150 million Americans have died of Covid Here is an update from
Joe. "I have been in government for 180 years". "I wake up every morning, look at Jill, and say
'where the he- are we?'" on February 17, 2021. What could possibly go wrong? Greg Caldwell SUBSCRIBER 58 minutes ago (Edited) Mr. Ferrara: Many
people voted for Joe's ideas because he claimed to be more of a centrist while he was running
for office. I know of quite a few people who voted for Joe (1) because he wasn't Trump, and;
(2) he claimed he would govern from the middle-left.
Those people are now saying they didn't vote for anything he has done to the jobs, to
energy, nor do they buy his lies about Covid Relief (only 9% of over $1.9T actually went to
Covid); the Infrastructure bill (of which only 7% actually has anything to do with our
infrastructure); or, finally the repeated outright lies about the Georgian Voting Law. People
who voted for him are paying attention and many are not happy.
Like thumb_up Reply reply Share link Report
flag
M Melissa Firestone SUBSCRIBER 49 minutes ago Vote counting continued on and on in pivotal
states in 2020. That's why 2016 was so different than 2020. And in 2020, pivotal states were
decided by less than 21,000 votes - WI, AZ, and GA. And PA and MI were more competitive than
the polls showed going into election night. Votes continued to be counted days after the
election and as we know in some cases weeks. That's why this wasn't a mandate for Biden. It was
a rejection of Trump by the marginal voter - the ones who in tight elections determine
outcomes. The same was true for Trump when he won - Hillary was so hated by so many voting
blocks the Republicans could have run any of their potential nominees and would have won.
G George Nesterenko SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago Claiming the WH, and both chambers of Congress
is, in deed a mandate.
The only measure by which the election was 'close' was the electoral college. By the number
of.. you know... actual people... there was no, and is no contest. That's is also, indeed, a
mandate.
And as demographics shift, the mandate deepens. Which is why the GOP is so adamant against
preventing a DC or Puerto Rico statehood. An unpopular, shrinking minority is desperately
holding on to any iota of power. Not 'half the country', as Mr. Morrow repeats on several
occasions.
A national rebirth is desperately needed. Although I doubt it will happen under Biden, we
can at least get on our way.
Like thumb_up 2 Reply reply Share link Report
flag
W william marx SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago Mr. Nesterenko, even if President Biden won by several
million votes, which I am not disputing, the fact that former President trump drew over 80
million votes suggests that the country is divided. Add to that a 50/50 split in the Senate and
a slim Dem majority in in the House leads to a conclusion that there is no mandate. Until both
parties stop shoving things down the other party's throat, we will not move forward.
J Jerry Beukelman SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago So you voted for a man who has no idea where he is?
Good for you. Would you like to lay odds on when the next press conference will be? I'll take,
never. Joe is one and done, they won't risk putting him on stage again, it is too obvious he
isn't all there. Another year or two, the Biden family can make some more cash, Nancy gets her
way till the House turns. And Harris can step in. That will be fun. A woman who polled 7% in
her own state during the primary can take control. God help us.
J jim markey SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago Trump and the GOP claimed Trump received a mandate in
2016 even though he lost the popular vote by 3 million.
Biden beat Trump by 7 million popular votes and a 4.45% popular vote spread.
That's much more of a mandate than Trump had.
Like thumb_up 3 Reply reply Share link Report
flag
M Melissa Firestone SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago You didn't see vote counting continuing on and on
in pivotal states in 2016. In 2016 the election was decided very early and key States that
hadn't voted Republican in more than two decades voted for Trump. That's why 2016 was so
different than 2020. And the pivotal states were decided by less than 21,000 votes - WI, AZ,
and GA. And PA and MI were more competitive than the polls showed going into election night.
That's why this wasn't a mandate for Biden. It was a rejection of Trump by the marginal voter -
the ones who in tight elections determine outcomes. The same was true for Trump when he won -
Hillary was so hated by so many voting blocks the Republicans could have run any of the
nominees and he would have won. ike thumb_up 12 Reply reply
Share link Report flag
M Michael Wilson SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago Yet American voters chose them over a dictatorship
led by Trump. If you don't like the results of having a 0-3 lose, then come up with a candidate
and agenda Americans want. Like thumb_up 4 Reply reply Share
link Report flag Rob Joseph SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago "I won't insult your intelligence by
suggesting that you really believe what you just said". William F. Buckley
At no time was Trump even close to a dictator. Trump wanted to push power to the states.
Exactly how is that dictatorial? However, the current crop of dems want to centralize power to
the federal government, so exactly who is the totalitarian party?
M Mac Moore SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago Nedd writes, "Biden has an approval rating approaching
55 percent. Trump never got above 50%."
Now, that's funny. What was the polled question? Was it, "do you approve of men joining
women's sports and bathrooms?". Or, was it, "do you approve of thousands of migrant lives being
destroyed by an open border that puts them at risk and children in peril?" Or, 'do you approve
of re-education classes that mandate that one much denounce their whiteness or be banned from
Gov't employment?" or "do you approve of Biden killing thousands of good paying oil pipeline
jobs?" Like thumb_up 5 Reply reply Share link Report
flag Rob Joseph SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago The gallup poll is from March 1. Let's
see what the new poll numbers are now after his spending spree and botched immigration policy
(Oh I'm sorry, what immigration policy). I couldn't stand Trump, but biden makes him look like
a statesman. He will divide the country further until there is no more US.
L Linda Briscoe SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago The election of2020 was not a mandate of Democratic
policies. The mandate was to be shed of Donald J Trump. We accomplished that, I hope. Now the
challenge is to wrench control of the Democratic Party out of the hands of the radical few, and
back into the hands of the moderate many.
The idea of a Silent Majority may not be new, but I believe it is as relevant as it ever
was. Most people don't focus a lot of their time on politics. They're too busy just trying to
make a living, creating or nurturing a loving family, and trying to create a home they enjoy
and can be proud of. A living wage, a liveable home of their own, and a loving family; that's
the real American dream. Royal Martin SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago President Biden;
"Just imagine all those young voters coming across our southern border that I can impress
with open arms."
e thumb_up 9 Reply reply Share link Report
flag
J James Bruning SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago How are Biden and the progressive Democrats getting
away with this charade? True, the liberal press provides cover by not reporting or fairly
reporting the egregious blunders of the Biden administration, but that does not explain why
most American voters are viewing Biden as someone who is honest and deserving of trust. They
know he is an unaccomplished "geezer" so in the absence of a coordinated, unified "push back"
by Republicans one can assume they want a much different America Like thumb_up 8 Reply
reply Share link Report flag
M Melissa Firestone SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago How are the "getting away with" this??? We voted
them in...and the "news" media is NOT news anymore. It is another arm of the Democrat/Socialist
movement. Biden lied during the debates, but he wasn't shy about his true objectives - they
were posted right on his web site. Like thumb_up Reply reply
Share link Report flag
M Melissa Firestone SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago "What the new administration proposes may be
less a transformation than a hijacking. Half the country doesn't want to be reinvented -- not
on Mr. Biden's terms."
Couldn't have said it better myself. People are not liking what they are seeing with Biden
in office. Just today I had a conversation with a phlebotomist who put it in very easy to
understand terms. "They are just dictating what we can and can't do, what we can and can't buy,
that we have to take care of illegal citizens, while we have millions who are never going to
recover from the impacts of shutting down our economy - that's not a free country." She's 100%
correct yet clearly not an "expert," just a consumer. But she can see more nonsensical policy
implications coming. Specifically she mentioned unaffordable utility bills with going to 100%
green energy and that she didn't want to be "forced" to buy an electric car. I don't believe
she's alone in seeing what's coming with Dem control...and it isn't good
S Sherrill Schein SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago As bad and vacuous as Biden is, what will follow
him will be much worse, starting with Kamala Harris. Louis XIV, who preceded the French
Revolution and Biden both share the same argument to try to retain their thrones. "After me,
the deluge." ke thumb_up 3 Reply reply Share link
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M Michael Barbour SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago Biden is neither a moderate or a unifier and even
his Covid policies are mostly just an extension of what was started by the previous WH
administration. I didn't like Trump either, but Biden's actions and policies are hastening the
decline of the U.S.
M Michael OFarrell SUBSCRIBER 3 hours ago Biden, or whoever is actually in charge, is
giving this country away. It will the younger generation that will pay the price. Like
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M Mark A. Rosasco SUBSCRIBER 3 hours ago "A whole generation with a new explanation" ,
history definitely rhymes.
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, financial memory is usually about 20 years, then
lessons need to be re-leaned the hard way, either with financial euphoria or I would say with
tax polices that promote economic growth.
"... Do Mr. Biden and his people claim that the dogmatic and occasionally hysterical certitude of the woke is sufficient warrant to turn the country upside down? ..."
"... If the 2020 election meant anything, it confirmed the irreconcilable differences -- a standoff of the cobra and mongoose. The election certainly didn't give Mr. Biden marching orders from the American people to open the southern border to all comers, or to redesign the natural order of biology (in regard to gender identity and all the social arrangements that have flowed from the difference between the sexes since time immemorial), or to change the country in a hundred other ways, bundling it off on an expedition to the far left fringes of reality and grievance. What the new administration proposes may be less a transformation than a hijacking. Half the country doesn't want to be reinvented -- not on Mr. Biden's terms. ..."
"... He and his people have gone into business with a bogus, echo-chamber mandate: They manipulate a media illusion of unanimity, and presume to impose a moral narrative. The Bolsheviks, a tiny but ferociously focused minority, proceeded in this way in 1917. ..."
While Trump was rejected by electorate (Biden got 7 million votes more -- mainly in costal
states and large cities), Biden was elected only because of extention of mail-in voting and
because he was not Trump. Now people regret their choice, while main-in voting "irregularities"
deprive Biden administration of the legitimacy. Moreover due to Biden neocon foreign policy and
pandering to woke Bolsheviks, many people have "post-election remorse," But in two-party system
you can do nothing about it: the train already left the station.
Now the Biden administration, headed by a man a few years too old to be a boomer, entertains
ambitions to take a great leap forward. But wait. Does a transformation require a mandate? By
what mandate does the Biden administration undertake the work of irrevocably altering American
society? Do Mr. Biden and his people claim that the dogmatic and occasionally hysterical
certitude of the woke is sufficient warrant to turn the country upside down?
There was no mandate in the outcome of the last election. November 2020 merely confirmed
that the U.S. remains split precisely down the middle, 50-50, as it has been for more than 20
years, since the deadlock of Al Gore and George W. Bush and the hanging chads of Florida.
If the 2020 election meant anything, it confirmed the irreconcilable differences -- a
standoff of the cobra and mongoose. The election certainly didn't give Mr. Biden marching
orders from the American people to open the southern border to all comers, or to redesign the
natural order of biology (in regard to gender identity and all the social arrangements that
have flowed from the difference between the sexes since time immemorial), or to change the
country in a hundred other ways, bundling it off on an expedition to the far left fringes of
reality and grievance. What the new administration proposes may be less a transformation than a
hijacking. Half the country doesn't want to be reinvented -- not on Mr. Biden's terms.
He and his people have gone into business with a bogus, echo-chamber mandate: They
manipulate a media illusion of unanimity, and presume to impose a moral narrative. The
Bolsheviks, a tiny but ferociously focused minority, proceeded in this way in 1917.
... ... ...
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book
is "God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money."
Peter Von Nessi SUBSCRIBER 29 minutes ago "A man of his age --
fearing that he may amount to nothing more than the great Obama's onetime sidekick -- is apt to
react to the surprise of waking up in the White House by pandering to the flashiest ideas of
the young people and their hero Bernie Sanders. Mr. Biden can, for a moment, forestall death if
he veers way left and makes his mark, however chaotically."
I think the author gives too much credit to Biden and not his handlers. After all Pinocchio
was made of wood. When was the last time you saw a piece of wood think....about anything? SHOW
MORE REPLIES
N Neil Steinhoff SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago Joe did not know which state he was in, what office
he was running for and said 150 million Americans have died of Covid Here is an update from
Joe. "I have been in government for 180 years". "I wake up every morning, look at Jill, and say
'where the he- are we?'" on February 17, 2021. What could possibly go wrong? Greg Caldwell SUBSCRIBER 58 minutes ago (Edited) Mr. Ferrara: Many
people voted for Joe's ideas because he claimed to be more of a centrist while he was running
for office. I know of quite a few people who voted for Joe (1) because he wasn't Trump, and;
(2) he claimed he would govern from the middle-left.
Those people are now saying they didn't vote for anything he has done to the jobs, to
energy, nor do they buy his lies about Covid Relief (only 9% of over $1.9T actually went to
Covid); the Infrastructure bill (of which only 7% actually has anything to do with our
infrastructure); or, finally the repeated outright lies about the Georgian Voting Law. People
who voted for him are paying attention and many are not happy.
Like thumb_up Reply reply Share link Report
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M Melissa Firestone SUBSCRIBER 49 minutes ago Vote counting continued on and on in pivotal
states in 2020. That's why 2016 was so different than 2020. And in 2020, pivotal states were
decided by less than 21,000 votes - WI, AZ, and GA. And PA and MI were more competitive than
the polls showed going into election night. Votes continued to be counted days after the
election and as we know in some cases weeks. That's why this wasn't a mandate for Biden. It was
a rejection of Trump by the marginal voter - the ones who in tight elections determine
outcomes. The same was true for Trump when he won - Hillary was so hated by so many voting
blocks the Republicans could have run any of their potential nominees and would have won.
G George Nesterenko SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago Claiming the WH, and both chambers of Congress
is, in deed a mandate.
The only measure by which the election was 'close' was the electoral college. By the number
of.. you know... actual people... there was no, and is no contest. That's is also, indeed, a
mandate.
And as demographics shift, the mandate deepens. Which is why the GOP is so adamant against
preventing a DC or Puerto Rico statehood. An unpopular, shrinking minority is desperately
holding on to any iota of power. Not 'half the country', as Mr. Morrow repeats on several
occasions.
A national rebirth is desperately needed. Although I doubt it will happen under Biden, we
can at least get on our way.
"... It is unbelievable how much the media can lie. I don't even know what I should believe any more. ..."
"... Why does our mainstream media cheer on these politicians instead of denouncing them? The answer: They're working together. They stick to these elites. How can it be that our mainstream media is always demanding that German soldiers should be sent on new military adventures in foreign countries, even though the majority of the population is clearly against this? The answer Our alpha journalists are nothing more than the long arm of the NATO press office. We will also go into great detail to prove this in this book. How can it be that our mainstream media continues to celebrate mass immigration from all over the world as "enrichment," even though the majority of Germans would rather close the borders to certain migrants today rather than tomorrow? The answer Industry and the financial elite want it this way, because a massive influx of cheap labor serves their interests. ..."
"... if the citizens aren't in charge, then who is? Could it be a group of opinion makers, a group of the most important and influential heavyweights from industry, finance and politics who are pulling the strings behind the scenes and controlling our thinking through the mainstream media? ..."
The actress Hildegard Knef once said to me, "It is unbelievable how much the media can lie.
I don't even know what I should believe any more." We met in August 1997, at the Bremen-based
talk show Nach Neun (Three after Nine).** We drank a glass of wine after the show in a local
hotel. Indignantly, Hildegard Knef related the liberties journalists had taken in reporting
about her life. She said, "Only one thing is true about journalists: they are in the business
of lying."
A few months before that and nearly 5600 kilometers away from Bremen, I heard
something similar while I was on a trip in Ethiopia. This time I was talking with Karlheinz
B6hm, the actor who played Emperor Franz Joseph at Romy Schneider's side in the "Sissi" film
trilogy about Empress Elisabeth of Austria. I visited him in the highlands of Ethiopia.
Hildegard Knef and Karlheinz Bohm - two legends of the German cinema - no longer trust the
German media. This gave me a lot to think about. After all, 'Thou shalt not bear false
witness," was one of the highest moral commandments at one time. Alas, now we consider
journalists to be the greatest liars out there.
Udo Lindenberg, a German rock music legend,
didn't have the best opinion of the media cither. We had a chance to discuss this in a
television studio's gfreenroom. Likewise the journalist Peter Scholl-Latour, whom I met many
times in war zones around the world since the late 80s. He liked to paraphrase Hiram Johnson's
old adage saying, "The first thing that falls by the wayside in war is the truth."
When I was
younger, these comments by Hildegard Knef, Karlheinz Bohm, Udo Lindenberg and Peter
Scholl-Latour seemed like conspiracy theories to me. Are they really? Later on, I started to
hear things like this more frequently, for example, from my friend, Professor Wilhelm Hankel, a
man who always seemed like a father to me. He was the man who developed the German treasury
bills.
The Truth - A Journalist Exclusive?
How can it be that our mainstream media celebrate the European Union and the euro currency
as a project for the future, even though millions of people throughout Europe are critical of
the EU and the euro? Jean-Claude Juncker, longtime head of Luxembourg's government and the
current President of the European Commission, tells us how this works:
"We decide on something, put it out there and wait and see what happens. If no one
kicks up a fuss, no rioting in the streets, since most people haven no clue what's been
decided, we continue, step by step, until there is no turning back. "
Why does our mainstream media cheer on these politicians instead of denouncing them? The
answer: They're working together. They stick to these elites. How can it be that our mainstream
media is always demanding that German soldiers should be sent on new military adventures in
foreign countries, even though the majority of the population is clearly against this? The
answer Our alpha journalists are nothing more than the long arm of the NATO press office. We
will also go into great detail to prove this in this book. How can it be that our mainstream
media continues to celebrate mass immigration from all over the world as "enrichment," even
though the majority of Germans would rather close the borders to certain migrants today rather
than tomorrow? The answer Industry and the financial elite want it this way, because a massive
influx of cheap labor serves their interests.
This list of piercing questions could go on forever. However, the most important question
behind all of it is: Who is really governing Europe? It surely isn't the citizens of the EU,
because what's going on in Europe has little to do with democracy. It is more of an illusion of
democracy, a well-crafted illusion. Still, if the citizens aren't in charge, then who is?
Could it be a group of opinion makers, a group of the most important and influential
heavyweights from industry, finance and politics who are pulling the strings behind the scenes
and controlling our thinking through the mainstream media?
"... Back then, I didn't know how contemptuously intelligence agencies spoke about journalists. "You can get a journalist for less than a good whore, for a few hundred dollars a month." These are the words of a CIA agent, as quoted by the Washington Post editor Philip Graham. The agent was referring to the willingness and the price journalists would accept to spread CIA propaganda reports in their articles. ..."
"... I inevitably found out during my decades abroad, almost every foreign reporter with an American or British newspaper was also active for their national intelligence services. That's just something to keep in mind whenever you think you've got "neutral" reporting by the media in front of you. I remember when I got involved with the Federal Academy for Security Politics, with their close ties to intelligence agencies. This was encouraged by my employer. ..."
Looking back, I was a lobbyist. A lobbyist tries to, for example, influence public opinion
through mainstream media in favor of special interest groups. I did that.
Like for the German Foreign Intelligence Service. The FAZ expressly encouraged me to
strengthen my contact with the Western intelligence services and was delighted when I signed my
name to the pre-formulated reports, at least in outline, that I sometimes received from
them.
Like many of the reports I was fed by intelligence services, one of many examples I can
remember well was the expose, "European Companies Help Libya Build a Second Poison Gas Factory"
from March 16, 1993. Needless to say, the report caused a stir around the world.
However, I watched as two employees of the German Federal Intelligence Service (the German
CIA, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND), drafted it in a meeting room of the FAZ offices at
Hellerhofstrasse 2 in Frankfurt. In other words: They basically told me what to write,
paragraph for paragraph, right there in the FAZ editorial offices and then the article was
published. One of the duties of these two BND employees was writing reports for
large-circulation German newspapers. According to employee accounts, the BND fed reports to
many German newspapers at the time - with the knowledge of their publishing houses.
The Federal Intelligence Service even had a little front company with an office directly
above a shop on the Mainzer Landstrasse in Frankfurt, only two blocks away from the FAZ's main
office. In any case, they had classified materials there that came from the BND.
Once you became a "player" on the team that drafted such articles, this was followed by the
next level of "cooperation": You would be given stacks of secret documents that you could
evaluate at your leisure. I remember we brought in a steel filing cabinet just for all the
secret reports at the FAZ. (When I was visiting colleagues at a magazine in Hamburg, I saw that
they'd done the same thing in their editorial offices).
Back then, I didn't know how contemptuously intelligence agencies spoke about
journalists. "You can get a journalist for less than a good whore, for a few hundred dollars a
month." These are the words of a CIA agent, as quoted by the Washington Post editor Philip
Graham. The agent was referring to the willingness and the price journalists would accept to
spread CIA propaganda reports in their articles. Of course, this was also with the
approval of their employers, who knew about and encouraged all of this.
In Germany, the Federal Intelligence Service was the extended arm of the CIA, basically a
subsidiary. I was never offered money by the Federal Intelligence Service, but they never even
had to. I, like many of my German colleagues, found it thrilling to be a freelance writer for
an intelligence agency or to be allowed to work for them in any capacity at all.40
... ... ...
During the summer of 2005 when I was the "chief correspondent" of the glossy magazine Park
Avenue, I had a phone call with the Director of the CIA James Woolsey, which lasted more than
an hour. His wife is active in the transatlantic propaganda organization German Marshall Fund
(but we'll touch on this later). Sitting in my Hamburg office at Griiner + Jalir publishing, I
was amazed that I didn't lose the connection, because at the beginning of our conversation
Woolsey was sitting in his office in Virginia, then he was in a limousine and after that in a
helicopter. The connection was so good, it was as if he was sitting right next to me. We spoke
about industrial espionage. Woolsey wanted me to publish a report through Griiner + Jahr that
would give the impression that the USA doesn't carry out any industrial espionage in Germany
through their intelligence services. For me, the absurd thing about this conversation wasn't
its content, which was fortunately never printed. What I really found absurd was that after the
conversation, Griiner + Jahr sent the CIA henchman Woolsey's secretary in Virginia a bouquet of
flowers after the call, because someone at Griiner + Jahr wanted to keep the line to the CIA
open.
Moreover, don t forget that in addition to 6,000 salaried employees, the Federal
Intelligence Service has around 17,000 more "informal" employees. They have completely ordinary
day jobs, and would never openly admit that they also work for the Federal Intelligence
Service. It is the same all over the world. As I inevitably found out during my decades
abroad, almost every foreign reporter with an American or British newspaper was also active for
their national intelligence services. That's just something to keep in mind whenever you think
you've got "neutral" reporting by the media in front of you. I remember when I got involved
with the Federal Academy for Security Politics, with their close ties to intelligence agencies.
This was encouraged by my employer.
I also remember that in the late summer of 1993 I was given time off to accept a six-week
invitation from the transatlantic lobbying organization, the German Marshall Fund of the
United States. All of this surely affected my reporting. The German Marshall Fund sent me to
New York, and I did a night shift with police officers in the Bronx. I wrote an article for the
FAZ about this titled: "The toughest policemen in the world go through these doors." It was one
of many positive articles I wrote about the USA - discreetly organized by the German Marshall
Fund.
It may be hard to believe, but I was actually given a loaded firearm in New York. There's
even a photo of the New York City Police Department handing it to me. The reader didn't learn
anything about what was going on behind the scenes, behind this favorable reporting in the FAZ.
They also didn't find out about the discreet contacts I made during my stay in the US. These
included a
"... his original title Bought Journalists (Gekaufte Journalisten) was kinder and more modest than my more sensational Presstitutes -- but as he had a pithy sense of humor, ..."
"... There is no free speech protection for setting fire to a crowded theater! In my book ISIS IS U.S., in fury at the fakery of these warmongers, I castigate the mainstream media, the MSM, as the МММ: the Mass Murdering Media, as well as the Military-Monetary- Media complex. Notice how the media only point the finger at the military and industry, but mum's the word about the money masters and the media manipulators, they who control the nerve system of the zombie nation, military-industrial complex and all? ..."
"... Sharmine Narwani is right. These are media combatants, these are war criminals, the lowest circle of hell in the ranks of crimes. ..."
What Is Freedom of the Press? Can censorship be freedom of the press? Legal minds favoring the interests of capital may be quick
to claim that newspaper owners and editors have a freedom-of-speech right to print what they think is fit to print. They affirm a
right of censorship or advocacy, above the duty to hew the line of objective reporting. Business, but not government, they say, may
restrict press freedom.
However, this attitude confuses two very distinct classes of law, the Bill of Rights and civil contract law. The First Amendment
merely forbids the government from infringing on freedom of expression. Thus if communist and nationalist parties each wish to publish
their own books or newspapers, congenial to their respective viewpoints, the state should not intervene. Most newspapers, however,
claim to be independent, objective or non- partisan. Thus there is an implied contract to provide an information service to readers.
Advertising in the paper should be clearly labeled as such. Truly independent media are a public service entrusted with a fiduciary
duty, similar to civil servants. The power and influence of their office is under their care, it is not theirs personally. Thus arises
the temptation of corruption, of selling favors. For a large corporation, the financial value of a decision by an official or a newspaperman
may easily dwarf the salary of the poor fellow, who may sell himself for pennies on the dollar.
A paper that claims to be independent when it actually serves hidden interests is guilty of fraud. That of course comes under
another branch of law, the criminal code.
We hear much more about political corruption, but media corruption may actually be worse. Media reporters are our eyes and ears.
What if our senses didn't reflect what is happening around us, but instead some kind of fantasy, or even remote programming? (Which
sounds a lot like TV;-) If our eyes fooled us like that, we would be asleep and dreaming with eyes open, or disabled, hospitalized
for hallucinations. We could never be masters of our own affairs, without a reliable sensorium. So the media must serve the nation
just as our senses must faithfully serve each one of us. But they serve themselves. With the media we have, we are a zombie nation.
Of course, it's hard to be objective on topics like politics which are matters of opinion. That's what the op-ed page is for. The
problem is systematic bias, when money talks in the news pages.
As a freshman in college, I once volunteered to be a stringer on the college paper, and was sent out to interview some subjects
on a campus controversy. I didn't seem to be cut out for a hard hitting journalist either! The episode always reminds me of a Mulla
Nasrudin story.
Mulla was serving as judge in the village, holding court in his garden. The plaintiff came and pleaded his case so convincingly,
that the Mulla blurted out. By Allah, I think you are right! His assistant demurred, But Mullah, you haven't heard the other side
yet! So now the defendant entered his plea, with even greater vigor and eloquence. Once again, the Mulla was so impressed, he cried
out, By Jove, I believe you are right! And once again his clerk protested: But Mulla, they can't both be right! Oh my God, exclaimed
the Mulla, I guess you are right, too!
My junior high school journalism teacher never tired of telling us. Journalism is a business. In theory it's a public trust, but
money makes the world go round. We all have to please the boss to keep our job. We are all bought one way or another. As Ulfkotte
points out, there are thousands of journalists looking for a job, not the other way about. So his original title Bought Journalists
(Gekaufte Journalisten) was kinder and more modest than my more sensational Presstitutes -- but as he had a pithy sense of humor,
I think he would have liked it anyway. The "privished" edition title Journalists for Hire seems to downplay the matter a shade though.
It's perfectly normal to be hired as a journalist, isn't it?
Perhaps we have to escalate the term to investigative journalist, because a journo is just somebody who writes things down.
In an interview ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/10/14/journalists-are-prostitutes ), Ulfkotte tells about his first assignment,
during the Iran-Iraq war. The international press corps set out from Baghdad into the desert with extra jerry cans of gasoline --
to set alight some long-destroyed tanks for a film shoot. Innocent sensationalism perhaps? But a million people have died in Iraq,
Libya and Syria because the press didn't just report the news, didn't just lie about the news, but they invented and sold the events
that served as pretexts for wars. That is way out of line.
There is no free speech protection for setting fire to a crowded theater! In my book ISIS IS U.S., in fury at the fakery of these
warmongers, I castigate the mainstream media, the MSM, as the МММ: the Mass Murdering Media, as well as the Military-Monetary- Media
complex. Notice how the media only point the finger at the military and industry, but mum's the word about the money masters and
the media manipulators, they who control the nerve system of the zombie nation, military-industrial complex and all?
Political candidates
who tackle the media do so at their peril. Sharmine Narwani is right. These are media combatants, these are war criminals, the lowest
circle of hell in the ranks of crimes.
We have million-dollar penalties for accidental product liability, but the salesmen of genocide
get off scot-free!? 3,000 died on the spot on 9/11, followed by two decades of wars. The key suspect: Netanyahu crony Larry Silverstcin.
His reward: a S3 billion insurance payout - pure profit, as he was only leasing the Towers.
The MSM cover it up, and revile you as
a "conspiracy theorist" if you protest. "Presstitutes" is too light-hearted a word for them. The tragedy is that many social media
agitators for the destruction of Syria were fools, who thought they were being oh so cool.
Remember the Milgram experiment? 1 like
my book covers to be a depiction of the title, an allegory, which led to the most salacious cover art on "Presstitutes" I've ever
dealt with. "Bought Journalists" could have been a covey of journos in a shopping cart, picking up their perks. Light satire blending
to comedy, but this isn't really a funny story. Too many people, including the author, have given their lives.
One nice thing about this book is you get to know a real nice guy. I like Udo. Decent, intelligent, good sense of humor, conscientious,
level-headed. He tells how he fell into this because he was just out of college and needing a job. We all have our compromises and
our confessions to make. Ulfkotte relates the moment when it became too corrupt for him, when politicians offered him €5000 to use
his cover as a journalist to spy and dig up dirt on the private life of their rival. That was too low down and dirty, too criminal
for him, although it seemed to be expected and natural to them. Ulfkotte was the rarest of courageous whistleblowers.
... ... ...
English translation never moved forward." Another curiosity: during the nearly three years Journalists for Hire was "on sale"
but unavailable on Amazon, it garnered only five-star reviews, 24 of them, from customers who wanted to read the book. Then the day
this edition became available, that edition got a 1 -star troll review, virulently attacking the author as a "yellow journalist"
- which happens to mean "warmonger." Weird.
Of course, there could be some mundane explanations for the failure of the first, or rather zero edition. Business failure. Language
barrier. Death of the author -- for a small publisher, a proactive author promoting the book is a necessity. It was spooky, too,
that the only book Tayen Lane seemed to have published before was a non-starter about suicide...
And what if the author's death was a key part of the pattern of suppression? There we go full conspiracy. It's not that incredible,
though. Ulfkotte's last page here is a declaration of war: "This book is the first volume of an explosive three-part series." It's
been alleged that the CIA has a weapon that works by triggering a heart attack. And like the Mafia, their code of silence calls tor
punishing ex-colleagues who took the oath of secrecy and then turned against them, more than mere bystanders like Joe Blogger or
Johnny Publisher.
So I hope I'm lucky to publish this book. Hopefully it will get reviews in the alternative media, or interviews with our translator
or myself. This is the second time I've published a German bestseller. The first was Mathias Broeckers' Conspiracy Theories and Secrets
of 9/11. It didn't turn a profit, but was a very interesting treatment. In the first part of the book he shows that conspiracy -
in the broadest sense, grouping together against outsiders - is one of three basic principles of life and evolution. Darwinians normally
only talk about competition, but the second one is cooperation, and the hybrid of the two is conspiracy. Our body consists of a collective
of cells cooperating and conspiring together against competing organisms! Conspiracy is as common as the air we breathe. Even the
official story of 9/11 is a theory about a conspiracy of 19 hijackers, who weren't even on the passenger lists... Then there is the
conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories, that the CIA purposely turned the term into an epithet to cover up the JFK assassination.
Of course not everything is a conspiracy. You have to remain skeptical, keep your balance and common sense. We need the flexibility
to add new perspectives, and not try to reduce everything to one perspective. Our brains are perfectly capable of this, we just have
to use them. Don't believe what they tell you, if it doesn't stand to reason. On 9/11, three towers fell at free- fall speed, but
only two were hit by airplanes - which were 5,000 times lighter than the steel buildings anyway. Anyone can do the math. The perps
didn't even bother to make it plausible, having the media to cover it up.
When a huge revelation like 9/11 hits, like it did some of us back in 2002, when I published the first "truther" book in English,
it's a big shock. This can make people either deny the new information, or go overboard with it. Sometimes the shock of losing the
mainstream world view is so great that people switch to the reverse explanation for everything. Yet most of life is still banal or
benign. Major criminal political conspiracies like 9/11 require a lot of effort, and are used strategically.
Although 9/11 showed that these people arc capable of almost anything, that doesn't mean they can or will do everything. For instance,
I don't believe in chemtrails, because it doesn't make sense, and the contrails persist mostly on days when there are natural cirrus
clouds in the upper atmosphere. Manipulation is even more common than conspiracy. We all do it to get other people to do things.
Ulfkotte shows that mass media manipulation is business as usual. It is so prevalent that it starts to get into the realm of a matrix,
a wall-to-wall pseudo-reality. The spider army spins its web 24/7. Their thread is a mix of outrages and banalities, bread and circuses.
The formula is clear to see in the major German tabloid Bild. Its readers go for simplified and emotional narratives, like a cheap
novel with themes of love and hate: "The reader's attention is steered away from what's objective- ly important and diverted to what's
trivial." Yes, there IS a sucker bom every minute. We are still just creatures that go too much on impressions and emotions rather
than logic, and the media play on that with sensationalism and simplified images. Sure, our brain has amazing powers, but it can
only focus on one thing at a time. (Luckily, that's at least one more than machines, that have no awareness of anything.)
Simplification, love and hate, enemy images. Our bane as a nation is our bent for political correctness and demonization. We are
the heirs of the Puritans, who had a nasty habit of picking on little old ladies, demonizing them and then burning them at the stake.
Who were the real demons there? Or in the tragedies of Libya and Syria?? When a huge revelation like 9/11 hits, like it did some
of us back in 2002, when I published the first "truther" book in English, it's a big shock. This can make people either deny the
new information, or go overboard with it. Sometimes the shock of losing the mainstream world view is so great that people switch
to the reverse explanation for everything. Yet most of life is still banal or benign. Major criminal political conspiracies like
9/11 require a lot of effort, and are used strategically.
Although 9/11 showed that these people arc capable of almost anything, that doesn't mean they can or will do everything. For instance,
I don't believe in chemtrails, because it doesn't make sense, and the contrails persist mostly on days when there are natural cirrus
clouds in the upper atmosphere. Manipulation is even more common than conspiracy. We all do it to get other people to do things.
Ulfkotte shows that mass media manipulation is business as usual. It is so prevalent that it starts to get into the realm of a matrix,
a wall-to-wall pseudo-reality. The spider army spins its web 24/7. Their thread is a mix of outrages and banalities, bread and circuses.
The formula is clear to see in the major German tabloid Bild. Its readers go for simplified and emotional narratives, like a cheap
novel with themes of love and hate: "The reader's attention is steered away from what's objective- ly important and diverted to what's
trivial." Yes, there IS a sucker bom every minute. We are still just creatures that go too much on impressions and emotions rather
than logic, and the media play on that with sensationalism and simplified images. Sure, our brain has amazing powers, but it can
only focus on one thing at a time. (Luckily, that's at least one more than machines, that have no awareness of anything.)
Simplification, love and hate, enemy images. Our bane as a nation is our bent for political correctness and demonization. We are
the heirs of the Puritans, who had a nasty habit of picking on little old ladies, demonizing them and then burning them at the stake.
Who were the real demons there? Or in the tragedies of Libya and Syria?? We never learn. Hitler with us is as immortal as Satan,
constantly recycled as the evil icon dictator of the day, sometimes complete with moustache. This is how they demonize populism.
Ulfkotte asks, why should populism be unpopular? Lincoln expounded populism when he spoke of a government by and for and of the people.
Each time you spend a $5 greenback with his icon on it, you distribute a piece of populist propaganda! Trump is right to use the
term "witch hunt" against the puritanical attack dogs of impeachment. He wouldn't have needed to ask favors of foreign potentates
if the MSM, the mainstream media, were doing their job and investigating the Bidens. The pot calling the kettle black, because it
sees itself on the politically correct moral high ground. More important, without die color revolution launched by the MSM and the
Obama regime, Ukraine wouldn't have sunk into this cesspool of corruption. Even Trump won't say what die Bidens were really up to:
stirring up war in East Ukraine so they could get their hands on the oil shale fields of the Donbass, or that they are investors
in the illegal occupation of oil fields in the Golan Heights. Can't remember anyone ever fishing in more troubled waters. What about
the suspicions that the Clintons have murdered people, such as Seth Rich, those are just conspiracy theories and not to be investigated
either. Did the DNC kill this whistleblower and blame Putin instead for losing the election? The Mueller report won't say. But people
do get killed. Like JFK, RFK, MLK.
These are not minor matters they are getting away with behind the protective mask of the media which "covers" the news. Surveys
do reflect declining public faith in die mainstream media - except among Democrats. Tell people what they want to hear: a basic marketing
principle. You may have heard of Operation Mockingbird and how the CLA plays our domestic media like a Wurlitzer. Ulfkotte explains
how in Germany, CIA media operations started with the postwar occupation. It's part of the declared intention (most infamously but
not only by Winston Churchill) to destroy the German people, the German identity. Control of the global media is the firm foundation
of the Anglo-American-Zionist empire.
In his parting shot, "What should we do," Ulfkotte sees one simple ray of hope. "Everyone reading this book has the ultimate power
over the journalism I have described here. All we have to do is stop giving our money and our attention to these 'leading media.'
When enough of us stop buying the products offered by these media houses, when we no longer click on their Internet articles and
we switch off their television or radio programs - at some point, these journalists will have to start producing something of value
for their fellow citizens, or they're going to be out of a job. It's that simple." Instead, we can patronize sources like
https://eluxemagazine.com/magazine/honest-news-sites .
They note that, according to Business Insider, 90% of US media are owned by just six corporations, a similar
problem of lockstep media as in Germany. They recommend these "Honest News Sites Way Better Than Mainstream Media."
The Corbett Report
Moon of Alabama
The Anti-Media
Global Research
We Are Change
ProgressivePress.com,
Consortium News
StormCloudsGathering
Truth In Media
Media Roots
21st Century Wire
And The OffOuardian, which incidentally was one of the strongest voices for publishing this suppressed book.
"... The adjectives used in the FAZ to describe Putin had overwhelmingly negative connotations, including: threatening, rough, aggressive, confrontational, anti-westem, power-political, untruthful, cool, calculated, cynical, harsh, abrasive, non-substantive (arguments) and implausible (arguments). ..."
"... The words used to describe Obama had a completely different tone: committed, fanatically welcomed, enthusiastic, conciliatory, praised, hopeful and resolute ..."
"... The former FAZ Washington correspondent Matthias Rub wrote the adulation to US President Bush cited above shortly before the Iraq War began in 2003, in violation of international law. One year later he received the Arthur F. Bums Award for a different article. The Arthur F. Bums Award is presented by Germany's Foreign Minister. So, who selects the winners today? ..."
An interesting undergraduate thesis from Munich put together a list of the adjectives and
adverbs used in select articles about Obama (USA) and Putin (Russia) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung between 2000 and 2012.
The words selected were ones that implied a value judgement in their description of Obama or
Putin. The adjectives used in the FAZ to describe Putin had overwhelmingly negative
connotations, including: threatening, rough, aggressive, confrontational, anti-westem,
power-political, untruthful, cool, calculated, cynical, harsh, abrasive, non-substantive
(arguments) and implausible (arguments).
The words used to describe Obama had a completely different tone: committed, fanatically
welcomed, enthusiastic, conciliatory, praised, hopeful and resolute :' In plain language:
The reporting in the once renowned FAZ newspaper is definitely not neutral, independent,
unbiased nor objective these days. So where is this bias coming from? Does this style of
reporting possibly have anything to do with the closeness that the FAZ's writers have to
certain elites and powerful circles? In the following chapters, we won't only be considering
the FAZ when it comes to this question. We will also look into why the mainstream media doesn't
even want you to imply that they're close to the elite.
Chapter one, scene two: A few years ago, the reporter Thomas Leif painted a rather
conspiratorial picture in the ARD television documentary Strippenzieher und Hinterzimmer
(Puppet Masters and Back Rooms). In it, journalists, ministers and party officials appeared to
all be sitting in the same boat, isolated from the common folk and getting along like
gangbustcrs. Viewers got to see how politics is made in secret meetings behind the scenes. The
film was about a corrupt world of cozy connections.4 What was being shown, however, wasn't a
conspiracy theory.
The film was controversial, because die people being shown in it were the perpetrators. They
thought that this form of corruption was completely normal. The journalists portrayed in the
documentary took it as an affront when they were simply asked about these secret networks
operating in the background.
... ... ...
The manipulation of the readers has been noticeable at the FAZ for many years. Dr. Heinz
Loquai gave a famous speech in 2003 where he said the following about the FAZ:
We learn from the FAZ's Washington correspondents that, among other things, Bush
studies the bible every day, prays regularly and bases his actions on the question, "What
would Jesus do?" The president is a "paragon of modesty and close to his people." There may
be "an arrogant bone or two in Bush's body," but he is "a man of love." His "portion of
missionary fervor" is "softened by statesmanlike prudence," through "patient waiting," the
"natural political talent's decision" has been "expressed." Although Bush may know that he is
not an intellectual, he can rely on "his political instinct, his wisdom and his natural
wit."
So (...) lectured, we can continue to count on the judgement and objectivity of leading
German daily and weekly newspapers' America correspondents! Embedded with the allied troops,
embedded in the political-media network in Washington - what's the difference? 16
The former FAZ Washington correspondent Matthias Rub wrote the adulation to US President
Bush cited above shortly before the Iraq War began in 2003, in violation of international law.
One year later he received the Arthur F. Bums Award for a different article. The Arthur F. Bums
Award is presented by Germany's Foreign Minister. So, who selects the winners today? The
jury includes, for example, the journalists Sabine Christiansen and Stefan Kornclius
(Sflddeutsche Zeitung).17 Keep these names in the mind. We will come across them and their
interesting connections quite often.
" Reporters uncritically echo intel agencies' election claims. Did they learn nothing from
the Iraq war?" that a wrong question to ask. In reality presstitutes are controlled by their
pimps from intelligence agencies. Like was the case in the USSR he MSM has generally abandoned
journalism and became propaganda arm of the State Department and CIA if we are talking about
foreign policy. .
By no stretch of the imagination can NPR or NYT any longer be called a news organizations.
They are propaganda outlets. The book, "Legacy of Ashes," is a good place to start to learn
something about CIA. And
Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte describes how CIA controls
journalists.
Notable quotes:
"... Some of our guys told us stuff. We won’t tell you who or why you should trust them, and we won’t show you any evidence that backs them up. The intelligence community is making a bold appeal to its own authority — an authority of which journalists have good reason to be skeptical. ..."
"... Organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency have a history of propagating disinformation to media outlets. Their biases are obvious: They exist not to report the truth but to disrupt foreign adversaries and, at least in theory, to further American interests. Formally they answer to the president and are overseen by Congress, but they also protect their parochial interests like all bureaucracies. ..."
"... Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist, columnist and author of "The Stringer," a graphic novel forthcoming in April. ..."
Reporters uncritically echo intel agencies' election claims. Did they learn nothing from the
Iraq war?
If your mother says she loves you, check it out, goes an old reporter’s saying. What
if the intelligence community says so?
On March 15 the National Intelligence Council declassified an “intelligence community
assessment” titled “Foreign Threats to the 2020 Federal Election.” From a
journalistic standpoint, the section titled “sources of information” is of
interest. It says only that “we considered intelligence reporting and other information
made available to the Intelligence Community as of 31 December 2020.”
To put that in layman’s terms: Some of our guys told us stuff. We won’t tell
you who or why you should trust them, and we won’t show you any evidence that backs them
up. The intelligence community is making a bold appeal to its own authority — an
authority of which journalists have good reason to be skeptical.
Organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency have a history of propagating
disinformation to media outlets. Their biases are obvious: They exist not to report the truth
but to disrupt foreign adversaries and, at least in theory, to further American interests.
Formally they answer to the president and are overseen by Congress, but they also protect their
parochial interests like all bureaucracies. (Speaking of bias, I draw cartoons for Sputnik
News and frequently appear on their radio programs. I have many other clients as well. That may
affect how seriously you take this article.)
Yet many in the media greeted the report with utter credulity. NPR aired a story March 17
titled “Russia’s Efforts at Information Warfare Against the West
Continue”—not “Intelligence Agencies Claim . . .” Reporters Mary Louise
Kelly and Greg Myre framed the report’s election-interference claims as straightforward
fact, analyzed the political implications, and discussed what the U.S. might do to retaliate.
“But the bigger question, Mary Louise, is how can the U.S. stop these major breaches
being carried out by Russia?” Mr. Myre said.
The segment ignored the possibility that the report’s claims might be false or
mistaken. It failed to mention the lack of documented evidence and the anonymous sourcing. NPR
interviewed a single expert: Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel of the National Security
Agency, identified only as an “official,” who took the report at face value.
Other media outlets were careful to use proper journalistic form, such as “report
says” and “report alleges.” Yet they too presented unsourced allegations as
fact. CNN said the report “confirms what was largely assumed” and called it
“a wholesale repudiation of many false narratives that were pushed by right-wing news
outlets.” CNN didn’t address the questions of anonymous sourcing or
reliability.
While the New York Times allowed that “the declassified report did not explain how the
intelligence community had reached its conclusions,” it bent over backward to give the
benefit of the doubt to the intelligence community: “The officials said they had high
confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the
intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of
one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.”
In May 2004 the Times’s editors published a 1,200-word letter to readers apologizing
for their coverage of Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. “We
have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have
been,” they wrote. “In some cases, information that was controversial then, and
seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking
back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence
emerged—or failed to emerge.”
You’d think they’d have learned something from the mother of all
intelligence—and journalistic—failures.
Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist, columnist and author of "The Stringer," a graphic
novel forthcoming in April.
Appeared in the April 2, 2021, print edition.
Douglas Wolf
From the 50's on to the fall of the Soviet Union (which the "intelligence agencies
completely missed) the assessments of the Soviet military was WAY overexaggerated to justify
huge budgets for themselves and the military-industrial establishment. When the SU crumbled,
new boogie men had to found! Oh and they missed the plot that became 9-11. WMD's in Iraq
-nope. The list is long of the screwups and politically motivated reports. I say this as
someone who has a long friendship with a CIA officer
Bryan Smith
Asking the media if they have any ethics,, is like asking the executioner why he is an
hatchet man? Because the money is good!
Robert Bridges
50 Intelligence officers, including Brennan, said the Hunter Biden story was Russian
misinformation before the election. They were wrong. Of course, they, and you, won't
apologize to the American people for that blatant attempt to affect the election.
Michael Bomya
Mr. Rall reminds us of the WMD ploy that was the premise for the Iraq war, however he
misses entirely the more recent 2016 Russian collusion narrative. The alleged journalists are
simply extending their Russia story into a tome as thick as Tolstoy's "War and Peace". I
might take the recent intel report to mean that Russia spent $75K on faceyspacey ads in the
run up to the 2020 election, a 25% increase over their spending to install a sleeper agent,
Donald Trump, into the White House.
No Mr. Rall, there are many "news" articles that I stop reading halfway through due to
anonymous sources, a dearth of facts and its' alignment with a Dem narrative. I am not easily
morphed into a consumer of fiction, when I wish to read the news.
David Everson
As long as their agendas coincide they will cooperate. The rest of us are left to sort out
the epistemological sewage we live in.
Bill Schmaltz
"I'm from the government, I'm here to help you". (Be afraid)
"We're the FBI, we're here to pursue justice" (Not always)
"We're the intelligence community, you can trust us". (No, you can't)
Michael Kwedar
Sadly the question "Cui Bono" addresses a lot of what Mr. Rall declaims.
Richard Taylor
The author gives the "journalists" too much credit for being anything other than the
political hacks they are. The intelligence information coincides with their political views
and hence it is gospel. No need for any further review.
Richard Bolin
The issue of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was not a failure of the intelligence
community at large. That assessment was made by a rogue intelligence component that had the
White House's ear. I was a senior intelligence officer at the time and when I asked my staff
if they were still seeing evidence that Iraq still had a weapons of mass destruction program
the unanimous answer was no.
Marc Jones
Yet the Director of the CIA still went forward, declaring "Slam Dunk!" Was it not his
responsibility to vet the information he was passing on to ensure its accuracy, or was he one
of the rogues? Where do you want to start with these rogue operations and elements? The 1950s
in Latin America and Iran? The 1960s domestically? The 1970s in Asia? The 1980s and 1990s in
the Middle East and again in Latin America? The record is long, ugly and it has a cause.
There is a difference between gathering information and conducting clandestine foreign
intervention.
The former is necessary and relatively benign. The latter leads to embarrassing and
dangerous rogue operations. The United States has a military, Constitutionally established
and maintained for the purpose of conducting violence in the country's behalf. It was the
intent of the founders that would only happen after the members of Congress debated and
agreed there was a need to do so. We need to return to that standard.
Kenneth Wilson
The "journalists" cited all intend to propagate the Democratic Party narrative that it's
only "The Russians" who interfere in US presidential elections. You will not hear anything
about China's involvement from "the intelligence community" or these same journalists.
Also you can be sure that "the intelligence community" won't say publicly anything about
Dominion voting systems. One member of the intel community, former Trump cybersecurity chief
Chris Krebs (who had been fired by Trump) testified to the Senate Homeland security committee
that in no way were the voting machines connected to the Internet. Until Senator Ron Johnson
showed evidence that yes, the machines are in fact connected to the Internet. Thus the vote
counts can be manipulated from anywhere, including from servers abroad.
Madison Bagney
As Reagan famously said, "Trust but verify." Sadly advice that most Americans fail to
do.
ugghhhh the propaganda channel – thesaker – continues unabated
"Putin single-handedly "resurrected" Russia in an amazingly short time"
just LOL @ single-handedly
" Putin turned Russia into the strongest military power on the planet and he completely reshaped the Russian perception
of themselves and of Russia"
strongest? zvezda channel posting youtube videos doesn't make you the strongest military power
completely reshaped? so much that still all the young Russians want to emigrate
"the country which created the best vaccine on the planet "
the best vaccine? only 4% of Russians got vaccinated, that's 6 million out of 144 millions
so much about Russians trusting Putin, LOL
-- -- -
Andrei Raevsky, do you even re-read what BS you write?!
you aren't fooling anyone but a handful of braindead followers you got there on your blog
in the real world – no one gives a shyt about Putin
the West doesn't hate Putin, they just want to loot Russia or get a cut from the loot of Russia.
Russian oligarchs want to loot Russia for themselves without giving a cut/tribute to Western oligarchs.
Putin is a non-issue, a nobody, he just follows orders of the Russian oligarchs.
But there is a real hate @ Putin – that because he is a fake, only a carefully prepared media
image. And you Andrei Raevsky are part of that propaganda effort. Putin is no savior, Putin
is not working for the betterment of Russians or humanity as a whole. He is just a facade for
Russian oligarchs. And that is what we hate . And the more you and the likes of you push
that fake image of Putin, the more the pushback and hate from us.
So go on – continue.
I was a believer in Putin. Then I saw the light. Now I would have no quarrel putting a bullet in
Putin's head. Analyze this!
In truth, the West has a very long list of reasons for which to hate Putin and everything
Russian, but I believe that there is one reason which trumps them all: the western leaders
sincerely believed that they had defeated the USSR in the Cold War (even medals were
made to commemorate this event) and following the collapse of the former superpower and the
coming to power of a clueless, alcoholic puppet, the triumph of the West was total. At least in
appearance. The reality, as always, was much more complicated.
The causes and mechanisms of the collapse of the Soviet Union are not our topic today, so I
will just indicate that I believe that the USSR never "collapsed" but that it was deliberately
destroyed by the CPSU apparatus which decided to break up the country in order for the Party
and Nomenklatura to remain in power, not at the helm of the USSR, but at the helm of the
various ex-Soviet republics. Weak leaders and ideologies which nobody really believes in do not
inspire people to fight for their rulers. This is why the Russian monarchy collapsed, this is
why the masonic democracy of Kerenskii collapsed and this is why the Soviet Union collapsed
(this is also one of the most likely reasons for the final collapse of the US as a state).
Putin, who was not very well known in the West or, for that matter, in Russia, came to power
and immediately reversed Russia's course towards the abyss. First, he dealt with the two most
urgent threats, the oligarchs and the Wahabi insurrection in the Caucasus. Many Russians,
including myself, were absolutely amazed at the speed and determination of his actions. As a
result, Putin suddenly found himself one of the most popular leaders in Russian history.
Initially, the West went into a kind of shock, then through a process reminiscent of the
so-called " Kübler-Ross model " and,
finally, the West settled into a russophobic frenzy not seen since the Nazi regime in Germany
during WWII.
In this sequence, Russia committed two very different types of "crimes" (from the
AngloZionist point of view, of course):
The minor crime of doing what Russia actually did
and The much bigger crime of never asking the Empire for the permission to do so
The West likes to treat the rest of the planet like some kind of junior partner, with very
limited autonomy and almost no real agency (the best example is what the USA did to countries
like Poland or Bulgaria). If and when any such "junior" country wants to do something in its
foreign policy, it absolutely has to ask for permission from its AngloZionist Big Brother. Not
doing so is something akin to sedition and revolt. In the past, many countries were "punished"
for daring to have an opinion or, even more so, for daring to act on it.
It would not be inaccurate to summarize it all by saying that Putin flipped his finger to
the Empire and its leaders. That "crime of crimes" was what really triggered the current
anti-Russian hysteria. Soon, however, the (mostly clueless) leaders of the Empire ran into an
extremely frustrating problem: while the russophobic hysteria did get a lot of traction in the
West, in Russia it created a very powerful blowback because of a typical Putin "judo" move: far
from trying to suppress the anti-Russian propaganda of the West, the Kremlin used its power to
make it widely available (in Russian!) through the Russian media (I wrote about this in some
detail here and here ).
The direct result of this was two fold: first, the CIA/MI6 run "opposition" began to be
strongly associated with the russophobic enemies of Russia and, second, the Russian general
public further rallied around Putin and his unyielding stance. In other words, calling Putin a
dictator and, of course, a "new Hitler", the western PSYOPs gained some limited advantage in
the western public opinion, but totally shot itself in the leg with the Russian public.
I refer to this stage as the " phase one anti-Putin strategic PSYOP ". As for the
outcome of this PSYOP, I would not only say that it almost completely failed, but I think that
it had the exact opposite intended effect inside Russia.
A change of course was urgently needed.
The redirection of US PSYOPs against Putin and Russia
I have to admit that I have a very low opinion of the US intelligence community, including
its analysts. But even the rather dull US "Russia area specialist" eventually figured out that
telling the Russian public opinion that Putin was a "dictator" or a "killer of dissidents" or a
"chemical poisoner of exiles" resulted in a typically Russian mix of laughter and support for
the Kremlin. Something had to be done.
So some smart ass somewhere in some basement came up with the following idea: it makes no
sense to accuse Putin of things which make him popular at home, so let's come up with a new
list of accusations carefully tailored to the Russian public.
Let's call this a " phase two anti-Putin PSYOP operation ".
And this is how the "Putin is in cahoots with" thing began. Specifically, these accusations
were deployed by the US PSYOPs and those in its pay:
Putin is disarming Syria Putin will
sell out the Donbass Putin is a puppet of Israel and, specifically, Netanyahu Putin is a
corrupt traitor to the Russian national interests Putin is allowing Israel to bomb Syria (see
here )
Putin is selling the Siberian riches to China and/or Putin is subjugating Russia to China Putin
is corrupt, weak and even cowardly Putin was defeated by Erdogan in the Nagorno-Karabakh war
The above are the main talking points immediately endorsed and executed by the US strategic
PSYOPs against Russia.
Was it effective?
Yes, to some degree. For one thing, these "anti-Russian PSYOPS reloaded" were immediately
picked up by at least part of what one could call the "internal patriotic opposition" (much of
it very sincerely and without any awareness of being skillfully manipulated). Even more toxic
was the emergence of a rather loud neo-Communist (or, as Ruslan Ostashko often calls them
"emo-Marxist") movement (I personally refer to as a sixth
column ) which began an internal anti-Kremlin propaganda campaign centered on the
following themes:
"All is lost" (
всепропальщики
): that is thesis which says that nothing in Russia is right, everything is either wrong or
evil, the country is collapsing, so is its economy, its science, its military, etc. etc. etc.
This is just a garden variety of defeatism, nothing more. "Nothing was achieved since Putin
came to power": this is a weird one, since it takes an absolutely spectacular amount of mental
gymnastics to not see that Putin literally saved Russia from total destruction. This stance
also completely fails to explain why Putin is so hated by the Empire (if Putin did everything
wrong, like, say Eltsin did, he would be adored in the West, not hated!). All the elections in
Russia were stolen. Here the 5th (CIA/MI6 run) column and 6th column have to agree: according
to both of them, there is absolutely no way most Russians supported Putin for so many years and
there is no way they support him now. And nevermind the fact that the vast majority of polls
show that Putin was, and still is, the most popular political figure in Russia.
Finally, the big SNAFU with the pension reform definitely did not help Putin's ratings, so
he had to take action: he "softened" some of the worst provisions of this reform and,
eventually, he successfully sidelined some of the worst Atlantic Integrationists, including
Medvedev himself.
Sadly, some putatively pro-Russian websites, blogs and individuals showed their true face
when they jumped on the bandwagon of this 2nd strategic PSYOP campaign, probably with the hope
to either become more noticed, or get some funding, or both. Hence, all the nonsense about
Russia and Israel working together or Putin "selling out" we have seen so many times recently.
The worst thing here is that these websites, blogs and individuals have seriously misled and
distressed some of the best real friends of Russia in the West.
None of these guys ever address a very simple question: if Putin is such a sellout, and if
all is lost, why does the AngloZionist Empire hate Putin so much? In almost 1000 years of
warfare (spiritual, cultural, political, economic and military) against Russia, the leaders of
the West have always hated real Russian patriots and they have always loved the (alas, many)
traitors to Russia. And now, they hate Putin because he is such a terrible leader?
This makes absolutely no sense.
Conclusion: is a war inevitable now?
The US/NATO don't engage in strategic PYSOPs just because they like or dislike somebody. The
main purpose of such PSYOPs is to break the other side's will to resist . This was also
the main objective of both (phase one and phase two) anti-Putin PSYOPs. I am happy to report
that both phases of these PYSOPs failed. The danger here is that these failures have failed to
convince the leaders of the Empire of the need to urgently change course and accept the
"Russian reality", even if they don't like it.
Ever since "Biden" (the "collective Biden", of course, not the potted plant) Administration
(illegally) seized power, what we saw was a sharp escalation of anti-Russian statements. Hence,
the latest " uhu, he is a killer " -- this was no mistake by a senile mind, this was a
carefully prepared
declaration. Even worse, the Empire has not limited itself to just words, it also did some
important "body moves" to signal its determination to seek even further confrontation with
Russia:
There has been a lot of sabre-rattling coming from the West, mostly some rather
ill-advsied (or even outright stupid) military maneuvers near/along the Russian border. As I
have explained it a billion times, these maneuvers are self-defeating from a military point of
view (the closer to the Russian border, the more dangerous for the western military
force). Politically, however, they are extremely provocative and, therefore, dangerous. The
vast majority of Russian analysts do not believe that the US/NATO will openly attack Russia, if
only because that would be suicidal (the current military balance in Europe is strongly in
Russia's favor, even without using hypersonic weapons). What many of them now fear is that
"Biden" will unleash the Ukronazi forces against the Donbass, thereby "punishing" both the
Ukraine and Russia (the former for its role in the US presidential campaign). I tend to agree
with both of these statements.
At the end of the day, the AngloZionist Empire was always racist at its core, and that
empire is still racist : for its leaders, the Ukrainian people are just cannon fodder, an
irrelevant third rate nation with no agency which has outlived its utility (US analysts do
understand that the US plan for the Ukraine has ended in yet another spectacular faceplant such
delusional plans always end up with, even if they don't say so publicly). So why not launch
these people into a suicidal war against not only the LDNR but also Russia herself? Sure,
Russia will quickly and decisively win the military war, but politically it will be a PR
disaster for Russia as the "democratic West" will always blame Russia, even when she clearly
did not attack first (as was the case in 08.08.08, most recently).
I have already written about
the absolutely disastrous situation of the Ukraine three weeks ago so I won't repeat it
all here, I will just say that since that day things have gotten even much worse: suffice to
say that the Ukraine has moved a lot of heavy armor to the line of contact while the regime in
Kiev has now banned the import of Russian toilet paper (which tells you what the ruling gang
thinks of as important and much needed measures). While it is true that the Ukraine has become
a totally failed state since the Neo-Nazi coup, there is now a clear acceleration of the
collapse of not only the regime or state, but of the country as a whole. Ukraine is falling
apart so fast that one could start an entire website tracking only all this developing horror,
not day by day, but, hour by hour. Suffice to say that "Ze" has turned out to be even worse
than Poroshenko. The only thing Poroshenko did which "Ze" has not (yet!) is to start a war.
Other than that, the rest of what he did (by action or inaction) can only be qualified as "more
of the same, only worse".
Can a war be prevented?
I don't know. Putin gave the Ukronazis a very stern warning (" grave consequences for Ukraine's statehood as such ").
I don't believe for one second that anybody in power in Kiev gives a damn about the Ukraine or
the Ukrainian statehood, but they are smart enough to realize that a Russian counter-attack in
defense of the LDNR and, even more so, Crimea, might include precision "counter-leadership"
strikes with advanced missiles. The Ukronazi leaders would be well-advised to realize that they
all have a crosshair painted on their heads. They might also think about this: what happened to
every single Wahabi gang leader in Chechnya since the end of the 2nd Chechen war? (hint: they
were all found and executed). Will that be enough to stop them?
Maybe. Let's hope so.
But we must now keep in mind that for the foreseeable future there are only two options left
for the Ukraine: " a horrible ending or a horror without end " (Russian
expression).
The best scenario for the people of the Ukraine would be a (hopefully
relatively peaceful) breakup of the country
into manageable parts . The worst option would definitely be a full-scale war against
Russia.
Judging by the rhetoric coming out of Kiev these days, most Ukrainian politicians are firmly
behind option #2, especially since that is also the only option acceptable to their overseas
masters. The Ukrainians have also adopted a new military doctrine (they call it a "military
security strategy of Ukraine") which declares Russia the aggressor state and military adversary
of the Ukraine (see here for a machine translation of the official text).
This might be the reason why Merkel and Macron recently had a videoconference with Putin
("Ze" was not invited): Putin might be trying to convince Merkel and Macron that such a war
would be a disaster for Europe. In the meantime, Russia is rapidly reinforcing her forces along
the Ukrainian border, including in Crimea.
But all these measures can only deter a regime which has no agency. The outcome shall be
decided in Washington DC, not Kiev. I am afraid that the traditional sense of total impunity of
US political leaders will, once again, give them a sense of very little risk (for them
personally or for the USA) in triggering a war in the Ukraine. The latest news on the
US-Ukrainian front is the delivery by the USN of 350 tonnes of military equipment in Odessa.
Not enough to be militarily significant, but more than enough to further egg on the regime in
Kiev to an attack on the Donbass and/or Crimea.
In fact, I would not even put it past "Biden" to launch an attack on Iran while the world
watches the Ukraine and Russia go to war. After all, the other country whose geostrategic
position has been severely degraded since Russia moved her forces to Syria is Israel, the one
country which all US politicians will serve faithfully and irrespective of any costs (including
human costs for the USA). The Israelis have been demanding a war on Iran since at least 2007,
and it would be very naive to hope that they won't eventually get their way. Last, but not
least, there is the crisis which Blinken's condescending chutzpah triggered with China which,
so far, has resulted in an economic war only, but which might also escalate at any moment,
especially considering all the many recent anti-Chinese provocations by the US Navy.
Right now the weather in the eastern Ukraine is not conducive to offensive military
operations. The snow is still melting, creating very difficult and muddy road conditions
(called " rasputitsa " in Russian) which greatly inhibit the movement of forces and
troops. These conditions will, however, change with the warmer season coming, at which point
the Ukronazi forces will be ideally poised for an attack.
In other words, barring some major development, we might be only weeks away from a major
war.
We must not forget President Putin's outrageous opinion piece in the New York Times of
September 11th 2013: delivered at the same time as he had the impertinence to propose
the voluntary relinquishment of all chemical weapons by Syria -- thwarting the traditional
wholesale bombing campaign that the "Allies" were working up to. This was an unforgivable
affront to the USA -- and to Obama in particular; who had only just invoked his "red line".
It made him look ridiculous -- and a man in his position can't afford to look ridiculous.
This behaviour by Mr. Putin has never been forgotten or forgiven and it will be quite a
while before the New York Times prints another oped by him.
Russia was "back": in 2013 Russia stopped the planned US/NATO attack on Syria (the
pretext here was Syrian chemical weapons). In 2014 Russia gave her support to the
Novorussian uprising against the Ukronazi regime in Kiev and, in the same year, Russia also
used her military to make it possible for the local population to vote on a referendum to
join Russia. Finally, in 2015, Russia stunned the West with an extremely effective military
intervention in Syria.
Don't forget what Russia did the Georgia's American trained and supplied military in
2009.
This was an unforgivable affront to the USA -- and to Obama in particular; who had only
just invoked his "red line". It made him look ridiculous -- and a man in his position can't
afford to look ridiculous.
Excellent observation.
To deal with contemporary western elites is, to a great extent, to deal with Satan
himself. The devil- and presumably, his minions- does not mind confrontation or opposition
anywhere as much as he hates being the object of derision.
"The devil the prowde spirite cannot endure to be mocked." -- St. Thomas More
"why does the AngloZionist Empire hate Putin so much?"
I have an explanation, but that would tend to get me labelled a "sixth columnist".
It is obvious to anyone who does not believe that Putin is the Saviour Of Russia, but just
a neoliberal politician who is moderately better than Yeltsin, and whose real alternatives,
not Quislings like Navalny but real alternatives, are all far more nationalist and not
beholden to international capital than he is. Since the 90s are now over, and the attempt to
destroy Russia has failed, how does one ensure that the country does not become even stronger
and, crucially, more assertive?
One possible answer is interesting: keep demonising the man in power, *even though you
know that demonising him hardens support behind him*. Especially since it hardens support
behind him. As long as you keep attacking him, the Russian people support him more, making it
less likely for someone who would be more nationalist and less neoliberal to take charge.
I've come to think that the whole "Putin the Devil" thing is pushed so hard by the
corporate-communist-left (aside: I do struggle these days with what to call them) mostly as a
distraction. "Hey! Look over there! A BAD MAN!" (and pay no mind to what I'm doing over here,
flooding the country with replacements, thrashing the constitution, coming up with vaccine
passports and enabling a totalitarian technocracy).
In fact, it's a necessary hallmark of ALL totalitarian leftist regimes to have a huge
"outside enemy" who threatens the very existence of the state and is used to distract from
domestic troubles. Try to find a single totalitarian state without one.
So the U.S. has everything to gain and little to lose (Biden gov thinks anyways) by
goading Ukraine into "taking back Crimea." The U.S. is committed to fight that war down the
very last Ukrainian.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced this week that the country's National
Security and Defense Council had approved a strategy that is aimed at retaking Crimea and
reintegrating the strategically important peninsula.
Christopher Caldwell delivered what I thought was a good assessment of Putin in 2017, and
this excellent piece by The Saker complements and updates it for me. I think Putin is even
more reviled than ever by the U.S. Dems, because Putin = a national-sovereignty proponent =
Trump.
I play online chess -- speedy games, and so I have a lot of experience with players from
Russia and Ukraine. They tend to favor what chess players call "quiet moves." Is this a
manner of thought, a philosophy, that can be extrapolated to government? (U.S. players, by
contrast, tend to be more impetuous and impulsive in their chess style.)
The World Health Organization recently published its report on the
origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which has caused the Covid-19 pandemic. Most scientist agree
that the virus is of zoonotic origin and not a human construct or an accidental laboratory
escape. But the U.S. wants to put pressure on China and advised the Director General of the
WHO, Tedros Adhanom, to keep the focus on China potential culpability. He acted accordingly
when he
remarked on his agency's report:
Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this
requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist
experts, which I am ready to deploy.
The Governments of Australia, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia,
Lithuania, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United
States of America remain steadfast in our commitment to working with the World Health
Organization (WHO), international experts who have a vital mission, and the global
community to understand the origins of this pandemic in order to improve our collective
global health security and response. Together, we support a transparent and independent
analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence, of the origins of the
COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, we join in expressing shared concerns regarding the
recent WHO-convened study in China, while at the same time reinforcing the importance of
working together toward the development and use of a swift, effective, transparent,
science-based, and independent process for international evaluations of such outbreaks of
unknown origin in the future.
The most interesting with the above statement is the list of U.S. allied countries which
declined to support it,
Most core EU countries, especially France, Spain, Italy and Germany, are missing from it.
As is the Five-Eyes member New Zealand. India, a U.S. ally in the anti-Chinese Quad
initiative, also did not sign. This list of signatories of the Joint Statement is an
astonishingly meager result for a U.S. 'joint' initiative. It is unprecedented. It is a sign
that something has cracked and that the world will never be the same.
The first months of he Biden administration saw a rupture in the global system. First
Russia admonished the EU for its hypocritical criticism of internal Russian issues. Biden
followed up by calling Putin a 'killer'. Then the Chinese foreign minister told the Biden
administration
to shut the fuck up about internal Chinese issues. Soon thereafter Russia's and China's
foreign ministers met and agreed to deepen their alliance and to shun the U.S. dollar. Then
China's foreign minister went on a wider Middle East tour. There he reminded U.S. allies of
their
sovereignty :
Wang said that expected goals had been achieved with regard to a five-point initiative on
achieving security and stability in the Middle East, which was proposed during the visit.
"China supports countries in the region to stay impervious to external pressure and
interference, to independently explore development paths suited to its regional realities
," Wang said, adding that the countries should " break free from the shadows of big-power
geopolitical rivalry and resolve regional conflicts and differences as masters of the
region ."
Suffice to say, the China-Iran pact deeply is embedded within a new matrix Beijing hopes to
create with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Iran. The pact forms part of a new
narrative on regional security and stability.
Countries in Asia and further afield are closely watching the development of this
alternative international order, led by Moscow and Beijing. And they can also recognise the
signs of increasing US economic and political decline.
It is a new kind of Cold War, but not one based on ideology like the first incarnation.
It is a war for international legitimacy, a struggle for hearts and minds and money in the
very large part of the world not aligned to the US or NATO.
The US and its allies will continue to operate under their narrative, while Russia and
China will push their competing narrative. This was made crystal clear over these past few
dramatic days of major power diplomacy.
The global balance of power is shifting, and for many nations, the smart money might be
on Russia and China now.
The obvious U.S. countermove to the Russian-Chinese initiative is to unite its allies in a
new Cold War against Russia and China. But as the Joint Statement above shows most of those
allies do not want to follow that path. China is a too good customer to be shunned. Talk of
human rights in other countries might play well with the local electorate but what counts in
the end is the business.
Even some U.S. companies can see that the hostile path the Biden administration has
followed will only be to their detriment. Some are asking the Biden gang to
tone it down :
[Boeing] Chief Executive Dave Calhoun told an online business forum he believed a major
aircraft subsidy dispute with Europe could be resolved after 16 years of wrangling at the
World Trade Organization, but contrasted this with the outlook on China.
"I think politically (China) is more difficult for this administration and it was for
the last administration. But we still have to trade with our largest partner in the world:
China," he told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Aviation Summit.
Noting multiple disputes, he added: " I am hoping we can sort of separate intellectual
property, human rights and other things from trade and continue to encourage a free trade
environment between these two economic juggernauts. ... We cannot afford to be locked out
of that market. Our competitor will jump right in."
Before its 737 MAX debacle Boeing was the biggest U.S. exporter and China was its biggest
customer. The MAX has yet to be re-certified in China. If Washington keeps the hostile tone
against China Boeing will lose out and Europe's Airbus will make a killing.
Biden announced that "America is back" only to be told that it is no longer needed in the
oversized role that it played before. Should Washington not be able to accept that it can no
play 'unilateral' but will have to follow the real rules of international law we might be in
for some
interesting times :
Question: Finally, are you concerned that deteriorating international tensions could lead
to war?
Glenn Diesen: Yes, we should all be concerned. Tensions keep escalating and there are
increasing conflicts that could spark a major war. A war could break out over Syria,
Ukraine, the Black Sea, the Arctic, the South China Sea and other regions.
What makes all of these conflicts dangerous is that they are informed by a
winner-takes-all logic. Wishful thinking or active push towards a collapse of Russia,
China, the EU or the U.S. is also an indication of the winner-takes-all mentality. Under
these conditions, the large powers are more prepared to accept greater risks at a time when
the international system is transforming . The rhetoric of upholding liberal democratic
values also has clear zero-sum undertones as it implies that Russia and China must accept
the moral authority of the West and commit to unilateral concessions.
The rapidly shifting international distribution of power creates problems that can only
be resolved with real diplomacy. The great powers must recognize competing national
interests, followed by efforts to reach compromises and find common solutions.
Russia's president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly asked
for a summit of leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council:
Putin argued that the countries that created a new global order after World War II should
cooperate to solve today's problems.
"The founder countries of the United Nations, the five states that hold special
responsibility to save civilisation, can and must be an example," he said at the sombre
memorial ceremony.
The meeting would "play a great role in searching for collective answers to modern
challenges and threats," Putin said, adding that Russia was "ready for such a serious
conversation."
Such a summit would be a chance to work on a new global system that avoids unilateralism
and block mentality. As the U.S. is now learning that its allies are not willing to follow
its anti-China and anti-Russia policies it might be willing to negotiate over a new
international system.
But as long as Washington is unable to recognize its own decline a violent attempt to
solve the issue once and for all will become more likely.
Posted by b on April 1, 2021 at 17:52 UTC |
Permalink
Very thought provoking b, I wish time off brought me back firing on all cylinders like
this!
No doubt vk will chime in here better than I but it surely cannot be a matter of "if
America decides". There are historical forces at work in this financialized phase of late
capitalism that are not grasped by the US leadership, let alone factored into intelligent
policy debates. Biden is an arch-lobbyist for the vested interests which compel the US's
unilateral and interventionist foreign policy. I'm quite sure he is incapable of 'deciding'
anything (not just mentally but institutionally). But the underlying dynamic of
world-historical change is beyond him and his whole country. The die was cast long ago when
the Soviet Union fell and the US couldn't help themselves. Junkies for unilateralism since
1989, they will keep shooting up until they OD (Boeing notwithstanding...). I suspect they
will end up like the schizoid UK, psychologically unable to accept increasing and humiliating
losses of empire until it hits the bottom of the dustbin of History.
The Dems and Republicans are two heads of the same hydra, voting for one or the other is a
charade played on the American people and is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The US is
a state run for the benefit of the economic elite that owns the media and from which the
political elite is chosen/sponsored and which is aligned with the military elite. Presidents
will come and go, policy pretty much stays the same, its the same as CEOs of corporations -
if they don't follow profit maximization they will be booted out.
The US elites all went to the same schools (or military academy) where they were
inculcated with "American Exceptionalism" and the need for "America to be the Global
Policeman", ending up with mediocrities such as Blinken and Pompeo that thrash around as the
world moves to multipolarity and the US becomes just another important nation. It will take
at least decades for the US elite to get their heads around this, the British still haven't
as seen by their wasting of resources on showy projects such as the two useless aircraft
carriers (know as "targets" by submariners and missile batteries) to assuage its "size"
envy.
Voting for either imperialist party in the US will make little difference in policy toward
Ukraine or in most any foreign policy situation. Only the timing of a given aggression is
changed. I didn't vote at all in the last election because it is just obvious that we are
screwed now. The menagerie of imperialist monkeys in Biden's government is bound to do
something in the spirit of maximum hubris. It will require only one more chest-swelling act
of bellicose madness, something "kinetic" and terminally stupid.
Roger @28 said;"The Dems and Republicans are two heads of the same hydra, voting for one
or the other is a charade played on the American people and is irrelevant to the discussion
at hand. The US is a state run for the benefit of the economic elite that owns the media and
from which the political elite is chosen/sponsored and which is aligned with the military
elite. Presidents will come and go, policy pretty much stays the same, its the same as CEOs
of corporations - if they don't follow profit maximization they will be booted out."
Absolutely.
@ 22 should read the above, and check out Gazza @ 24, to see who has who surrounded...
Oh, and quit dreaming about Trump, liberal, him and Biden work for the same people..
Apparently it was "You pissed on my rug!". I guess if they update that book and article,
they'll include Trump characterizing Justin as "weak and dishonest" - which I would say,
based on his 7 years as PM, is blunt but accurate.
I think you're right that any US concessions are just a reprieve. That
non-agreement-capable thing. Freeland and Justin don't care, they're looking forward to
getting rich after leaving office, like the Clintons, Obama, etc. as a reward for their
service to plutocracy.
William Gruff @19, Hoarsewhisperer @16, agreed. That, it seems to me is the root of the
problem. Our politicians are for sale to the highest bidders. It's no longer democracy, but
full-fledged plutocracy with a veneer of "democracy" that's visibly cracked and flaking off
to anyone but the willfully blind.
solo @38, good point. Saudi Arabia also sided with China on Xinjiang:
Importantly, the Crown Prince said Saudi Arabia 'firmly supports China's legitimate
position on the issues related to Xinjiang and Hong Kong, opposes interfering in China's
internal affairs under any pretext, and rejects the attempt by certain parties to sow
dissension between China and the Islamic world.'
Plainly put, Saudi Arabia has undercut the current US campaign against China regarding
Xinjiang. It is a snub to the Biden administration.
One thing which separates Russia and China from Western 'thinking' is that the People's
Government in each country has rules in place to prevent Billionaires from buying/owning
politicians.
To be fair, the neocon's feel that way about everyone - they embrace the role of paranoid
imperialist because that's a relatively accessible way to get funded in the DC policy world.
The striking thing is the hubris - they're just going to fight everyone all at the same time
and it will somehow be okay in the end, no cost to them.
"To be fair, the neocon's feel that way about everyone"
Did you consider the article linked to @59?
Michael Hudson quote from the article, for your consideration.
(take it or leave it)
The Americans want war. The people that Biden has appointed have an emotional hatred of
Russia. I've spoken to government people who are close to the Democratic Party, and they've
told me that there's a pathological emotional desire for war with Russia, largely stemming
from the fact that the Tzars were anti-Semitic and there's still the hatred about their
ancestors: "Look what they did to my great-grandfather." And so they're willing to back the
Nazis, back the anti-Semites in Ukraine. They're willing to back today's anti-Semites all
over the world as long as they're getting back at this emotional focus on a kind of post
19th-century economy.
"...And this is because Zbig [Brezinski] is a Polish aristocrat with lost family estate on
outskirts of Lvov. Any fool knows emigre info is useless and emigre aristocrat most useless
of all."
Brezinski's keyboard was hacked before age 3; its output foreordained by unknown sources
he mis-owned as "self". A well-oiled robot producing brilliant compositions of high-quality,
effective communication promoting madness and contagious ruin of non-aristos.
Ghost Ship: That same Nazi scum that the OSS/CIA brought into the US after WW2 was also
involved in the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, and probably Malcolm X.
In the last several years the CIA and other intel agencies have cemented their control of
the US that is now a fascist rogue state that is marching the American people into a war with
peer powers. As usual the American people will believe US elites telling them the war is
started by a foreign power. Americans around me are blind as bats. And they think I'm dumb
for not taking experimental mRNA vaccines.
@ptb (63) "...they're just going to fight everyone all at the same time and it will
somehow be okay in the end, no cost to them."
Correct, there will be no personal physical cost to them, as in getting maimed or killed
in a war. But on the other side of the ledger, the profits that flow to the MIC are massive,
and many, if not most of the neocons are in some way connected to it, either by consultancy,
think-tank positions, corporate board positions, TV sinecures, etc. In other words, they are
cashing in big-time on their political views and policy recommendations.
@ptb (63) "...they're just going to fight everyone all at the same time and it will
somehow be okay in the end, no cost to them."
Correct, there will be no personal physical cost to them, as in getting maimed or killed
in a war. But on the other side of the ledger, the profits that flow to the MIC are massive,
and many, if not most of the neocons are in some way connected to it, either by consultancy,
think-tank positions, corporate board positions, TV sinecures, etc. In other words, they are
cashing in big-time on their political views and policy recommendations.
Military actions might be suicidal for Ukraine. But this exactly what the USA wants in order
to achieve its geopolitical objectives.
The danger for Ukraine in Georgia war scenario.
Notable quotes:
"... Yesterday (Ist April) the Russians stopped sending Gas via Ukraine. ..."
"... A hot war in eastern Ukraine/Crimea appears unlikely. Ukraine no doubt perceives that such a conflict means almost certain defeat. Military defeat would likely raise existential issues for Ukraine and its leadership, given the present adverse economic conditions. The Ukrainian leadership has very little to gain by waging a war and has much to lose. ..."
"... Assuming the truth of reports of a Russian military buildup along its relevant borders, such a buildup appears to be more of a warning to Kiev - and to the U.S. - not to make any rash moves. ..."
Cute /funny, but for me this points to the script that the "west" has laid out before
hand: Washington has dialed up an attack by Ukraine, has been concentrating ukrop forces
along the line of contact, and has kept its media muzzled, total media blackout, until the
Russians respond. Then let loose with the media to make it appear that the Russians are
threatening Ukraine. And per the 08/08/08 Georgia attack, if they push the button and attack
donbass, and the Russians respond, blame it on Russian aggression. Russia attacks!! Russian
aggression!! Who's to know it isn't so? They'll all be singing from the same hymn sheet. Not
like in '08 when the EU was still semi autonomous. If Washington doesn't order an attack,
then they can still point to Russia massing troops and score a propaganda victory as Russia
is intimidating poor Ukraine. Russian aggression!! And "sell" more weapons to Ukraine and
move more "advisors" in. The cost? Who cares? They'll just keep the printing press
rolling.
"Vyacheslav Nikonov: ...How dangerous is the situation in Ukraine in light of the ongoing
US arms deliveries, the decisions adopted in the Verkhovna Rada on Tuesday, and the
statements made by the Ukrainian military, who are openly speaking about a war? Where do we
stand on the Ukrainian front?
Sergey Lavrov: There is much speculation about the documents that the Rada passed and
that President Zelensky signed. To what extent does this reflect real politics? Is it
consistent with the objective of resolving President Zelensky's domestic problem of
declining ratings?
I'm not sure what this is: a bluff or concrete plans.
According to the information published in the media, the military, for the most part, is
aware of the damage that any action to unleash a hot conflict might bring.
I very much hope this will not be fomented by the politicians, who, in turn, will be
fomented by the US-led West. ...
Like President Vladimir Putin said not long ago; but these words are still relevant,
– those who try to unleash a new war in Donbass will destroy Ukraine. "
Yesterday (Ist April) the Russians stopped sending Gas via Ukraine.
The day before Zelensky "invited" NATO into Ukraine for military exercises. In the face of the amassing of Russian troops near Ukraine's borders, setting up joint
exercises involving Ukraine Army and Allied forces, including joint air patrols with NATO
aviation in Ukraine's airspace, will help stabilize the security situation in the region,
Mashovets has told his counterpart.
UNIAN:
https://www.unian.info/politics/donbas-kyiv-invites-nato-to-hold-joint-military-drills-11374195.html
(Disclaimer; I don't know much about this site)
(The day before that there was a top level meeting of NATO "to discuss the situation in
Ukraine, which might have provoked/told Zelnsky to do the former).
Talking of provocation; here is a "twit" showing a Polish, it looks like fishing vessel,
ramming a supply ship to NordStream II pipe layers. Gangster warfare? https://twitter.com/I30mki/status/1377821400325480451
Although b says that the "Russian threat" is overdone, this buildup is certainly part of
the problem as the US wants NATO in Ukraine. Therefore the more the threat is hyped the more
they can use it to "justify" changing the facts on the ground.
One side observation is that Biden is totally absent. This situation is being run by the
US High Command (Milley et al) and others who always want moar war for the cash it brings
in. The US Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Chairman of the JCS, and National
Security Advisor have all had phone calls with their Ukrainian counterparts over the past
three days, and General Milley spoke with General Gerasimov.
Ukraine - and the West's - main problem with Russia over the Donbass is that Russia is NOT
a party to the Minsk agreement. With both France and Germany, it is a guarantor.
The signatures on the Minsk document are that of Ukraine and the so-called republics.
Ukraine can create as many laws stating it is in an 'International armed conflict' with
Russia as it likes, it does not alter the fact that no such conflict exists, nor has it been
brought to the Security Council.
But the Minsk accord HAS been approved by the Security Council.
"On March 29, the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) adopted a draft of so-called
resolution on the situation in Donbass. It seems that there is noting new in such a
document, however, it puts at stake Kiev's obligation on implementation of the Minsk
Agreement...
Such a document is not the first to be adopted in Ukraine in the last years. However,
this draft has a specific feature. It is for the first time that Ukrainian Rada adopted the
draft statement, which says that the war in Eastern Ukraine is a Russian-Ukrainian armed
conflict.
Previously, the phrase "aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine" was used
in Kiev's official documents. Today, the war in Donbass was designated as an international
armed conflict, that is, war.
Such a definition has significant juridical impact. This statement completely blocks
Kiev's implementation of the Minsk Agreements. Paragraph 2 of the Package of Measures
clearly defines that the parties to the conflict are Kiev on the one hand, Donetsk People's
Republic and Lugansk People's Republic (LDPR) on the other.
Today the Ukrainian Parliament officially declared, at the highest level, that the
parties to the conflict are Ukraine and Russia.
The resolution ensures the immediate forwarding of the text of this statement to the
national governments and parliaments of foreign states, international organizations and
their parliamentary assemblies."
The propaganda may never change but that doesn't mean the events can't be different this
time. There's video of large amounts of heavy weapons heading to the border.
A few weeks ago the US sent 350 tonnes of armoured humvees etc to Odessa. Then On 23rd
March video shows Ukraine sending trainloads of tanks etc. On 24th March Kiev passed a decree
claiming a right to retake Crimea. It's always said so but this seemed to really ratchet up
the rhetoric as it virtually commits the government to trying to retake Crimea by force.
Several videos from 29th March show different Russian trains with scores of tanks etc
heading across the Kerch bridge to Crimea, and to the Donbas border. Plus other videos of
numerous helicopters & endlessly long lines of tanks & armoured vehicles on roads as
well.
This is a buildup not seen since the hit war days of 2014.
Meanwhile a NATO Fleet enters the Black Sea for exercises with Ukraine.
A hot war in eastern Ukraine/Crimea appears unlikely. Ukraine no doubt perceives that
such a conflict means almost certain defeat. Military defeat would likely raise existential
issues for Ukraine and its leadership, given the present adverse economic conditions. The
Ukrainian leadership has very little to gain by waging a war and has much to lose.
Assuming the truth of reports of a Russian military buildup along its relevant
borders, such a buildup appears to be more of a warning to Kiev - and to the U.S. - not to
make any rash moves.
True, there is a possibility of war. Hot heads in Kiev and Washington appear always to
want war. But insofar as Washington is concerned, its domestic agenda presently appears to
hold far greater sway than does a failing outpost on the periphery of Washington's
influence.
At this juncture, then, the possibility of a significant conflict seems low by
comparison.
You are completely ignoring the overall picture. The US wants to stop Nordstream 2 and
roping NATO into a war situation with NATO would make it almost impossible to continue.
Already physical provocation is being used against the pipe-laying ships (see Stonebird's
post (2))
Personally I blame all this shit on the Nazi scum moved to the United States by Washington
after World War 2 and "weaponised". Desperate to destroy Russia and no doubt keen to acquire
Lebensraum, these Hitler fanboys and their handlers in Washington are doing everything they
can to apply Hitler's racial beliefs to Russia and make them seem like others when Russians
are as European as Hungarians, the British and the Irish and certainly more European than
Americans, Canadians and Australians. This is to make war with Russia more acceptable among
Europeans. Perhaps the Hitler fanboys in Washington need to work to improve their understand
of the Napoleonic Wars and World War 2 .
As Field Marshall Montgomery (a decent but fallible and somewhat egotistical British general)
said in 1959:
Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow". Various people have
tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know
whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: "Do not go fighting with your land
armies in China". It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives.
A few years later he repeated his Rules of War and even claimed ownership for himself:
The United States has broken the second rule of war. That is: don't go fighting with your
land army on the mainland in Asia. Rule One is, don't march on Moscow. I developed those
two rules myself.
They are rules that the Hitler Fanboys and "Lost China" morons in Washington should have
tattooed on their foreheads along with a free prefrontal lobotomy.
BTW, who are the more civilised:
The use of the procedure increased dramatically from the early 1940s and into the 1950s; by
1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies had been performed in the United States and proportionally
more in the United Kingdom. The majority of lobotomies were performed on women; a 1951
study of American hospitals found nearly 60% of lobotomy patients were women; limited data
shows 74% of lobotomies in Ontario from 1948–1952 were performed on women. From the
1950s onward, lobotomy began to be abandoned, first in the Soviet Union and Europe.
.
The idea of "weaponized immigration" in the sense of bringing in immigrant hostile to their
source state and using them to overthrow their source state was applied by Washington and
largely publicized by Yasha Levine.
As some of us are superannuated, it is good to know the views of
younger generation . Top general of Ukraine addressed the deputies of Verkhovna Rada
(parliament), declared readiness of Ukrainian army to attack with the aim of "re-integrating
the temporarily not-under-control territories", but then he somberly added the perspective of
huge civilian casualties, and then started to described Russian forces currently to the
north, east and the south of Ukraine. That was taking some time, so Anna Kolesnik, at 26 one
of the youngest deputies of the ruling party, texted "We are listening to Khomchak. We need
to get out from this country."
Looks like Zelensky signed a document or Decree No. 117/2021 the other day, to recapture
the Donbas and Crimea which could also be seen as a declaration of war towards Russia, more
in the link below:
Look at the videos of massive troop build ups. Also the conscription in both the Donbas
republics & Ukraine Donetsk & Lugansk militia veterans of 2014/15 returning from
Russia to region.
To say nothing is going to happen this time seems wishful thinking.
Of course US and European concern about Russian military build-up along Russia's borders
with European nations serves a purpose: justifying even more NATO military build-up along the
other side of the Russian border which in turn generates profit for US, British and EU arms
corporations and their shareholders in the banking and finance industries (and politics as
well), and helps NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg to think he is important.
Several nations that have borders with Russia probably need the money that NATO soldiers
might spend (mostly on entertainment like watching pole-dancing performers) while stationed
on their territories. Latvia and Lithuania among others haven't done too well since joining
the EU with something like 18 - 20% of their people living in poverty and many families
dependent on remittances sent by their relatives working overseas. Instead of their resident
Russian-speaking population being a bridge between their economies and the Russian economy,
these countries prefer to deny their Russian-speaking minorities social welfare benefits and
the right to vote, unless they can speak and read their host nations' languages at
postgraduate level, and to harass them in various petty ways.
As for Ukraine, the Zelensky govt has its work cut out trying to get Crimea back so the US
military can take over the base at Sevastopol and turn the Black Sea into a US lake, and to
clear out the Donbass region of those pesky Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics and make
it secure for oil and natural gas exploration and exploitation. The Bidens depend on Zelensky
to get those oil and natural gas resources so they can get their cut.
Anna Kolesnik, cited by Piotr Berman @ 12 has it exactly. The emigres are already
arriving. Ukraine is and has been entirely a failed state. The Uke army is a joke. So they
have a new boatload of Humvees. Probably already sold. Humvees were going to stop T72 and up.
Right. High probability Ukraine simply vanishes, local residents invite stability and the
Russian army.
The normalcy bias expressed by host and commenters is extreme. Start believing in defeat.
Defeat is going to change your outlook.
"So what made the Russians suddenly move a massive invasion force toward Ukraine?
Well, it turns out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky essentially signed a
declaration of war against Russia on March 24th. The document that he signed is known as
Decree No. 117/2021, and you won't read anything about it in the corporate media.
I really had to dig to find Decree No. 117/2021, but eventually I found it. I took
several of the paragraphs at the beginning of the document and I ran them through Google
translate
In accordance with Article 107 of the Constitution of Ukraine, I decree:
1. To put into effect the decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine
of March 11, 2021 "On the Strategy of deoccupation and reintegration of the temporarily
occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol"
(attached).
2. To approve the Strategy of deoccupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied
territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (attached).
3. Control over the implementation of the decision of the National Security and Defense
Council of Ukraine, enacted by this Decree, shall be vested in the Secretary of the
National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.
4. This Decree shall enter into force on the day of its publication
.
President of Ukraine V.ZELENSKY
March 24, 2021
Basically, this decree makes it the official policy of the government of Ukraine to retake
Crimea from Russia. Of course the Russians will never hand over Crimea willingly because they
consider it to be Russian territory, and so Ukraine would have to take it by force."
That was more than a week ago. See how much Ukraine has done about it so far? That is as
much as they are able to do. Also quoted in #17 by imo, Mike Whitney/ZH "I really had to dig
to find Decree 117"... That would be because you have been trained to look away. That decree
was well reported, just not in the house organs of the idiots.
Martyanov has a new post up. Worth reading. He cites Michael Hudson on the overwhelming
influence Russian Jews have had on US policy. I would add Polish Jews. Zbig Brezinski gets
mentioned. Ever taken a look at his pamphlet, The Grand Chessboard? It has been required
reading for all students at Thomas Pickering School (State Department) for a generation.
Theme is Ukraine is center of universe. And this is because Zbig is a Polish aristocrat with
lost family estate on outskirts of Lvov. Any fool knows emigre info is useless and emigre
aristocrat most useless of all. Any in US policy establishment who should have known better
were blinded by Russophobia. (Just a note, spellcheck on this box changed my spelling to
'Lviv' multiple times before allowing old spelling. The thought control is total.)
The deployed Russian forces are not about overwhelming the Uke army. It is an occupation
force. They will be taking territory.
I don't see mention of Ukrainian build up and increased aggression on the border of Donbass.
That's why Russian troops are building up. They are posturing defensively. It's US-backed
Zelensky that is taking the aggressive position here.
77 millions that voted for Biden are not all "f....s". Everyone has some priorities,
imperfect choices etc.
That of course applies to countries, something that "responsible media" never considers,
but this is not a good role model for us.
Russia has to rely on her resources, so defending them from military and/or financial
takeover or even nuclear blackmail is a vital interest. While there are no perfect choices,
they try to choose the better ones. And not leaving people who speak Russian to repressions
and even massacres is another vital interest.
In the current situation, Russia clearly needs a deterrence for any possible blitzkrieg
type of plan by Ukraine. But pre-emption would not be the best choice.
In turn, Ukrainian government/elite has to bet on a patron and at least make some
appearance of diligently following what the patron wants. And for that, they need to
raise/maintain tensions with Russia (and China? hard is our fate now that we are
underlings).
I'm sure oldhippie means that if the Ukies are subservient enough to the US to actually
attack, this will almost certainly be reminiscent of Georgia (rather than just some cruise
missile strikes, as some had speculated). The buildup means Russia is prepared to sweep into
the Ukraine, and probably make a special point of killing as many Nazi battalions as
possible, along with any Ukie troops who don't surrender quickly enough. I don't see them
entering Kiev, just like they didn't try to take Tblisi, but I imagine they will try to take
most of the pro-Russian territory in the East and possibly even South, until Kiev begs for a
cease-fire (just like last time), but this time the conditions of cease fire will likely be
much more strongly enforced, and then I would imagine Russia will try to establish some
assemblage of peace-keeping troops from countries they can trust (maybe Shanghi Coalition?)
so that they can withdraw their troops as soon as possible, for political reasons. Not that
it will help, but then again, I think Russia sees they'll be damned if they do, damned if
they don't, so they might as well do it. But they damn sure don't want to take ownership of
the Ukraine, just like they didn't want to own Georgia.
The Dems and Republicans are two heads of the same hydra, voting for one or the other is a
charade played on the American people and is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The US is
a state run for the benefit of the economic elite that owns the media and from which the
political elite is chosen/sponsored and which is aligned with the military elite. Presidents
will come and go, policy pretty much stays the same, its the same as CEOs of corporations -
if they don't follow profit maximization they will be booted out.
The US elites all went to the same schools (or military academy) where they were
inculcated with "American Exceptionalism" and the need for "America to be the Global
Policeman", ending up with mediocrities such as Blinken and Pompeo that thrash around as the
world moves to multipolarity and the US becomes just another important nation. It will take
at least decades for the US elite to get their heads around this, the British still haven't
as seen by their wasting of resources on showy projects such as the two useless aircraft
carriers (know as "targets" by submariners and missile batteries) to assuage its "size"
envy.
Granted I am just an armchair observer but I have been watching since before the Maidan coup.
Something feels different this time, as if the positions of the players involved have changed
somehow. I realize that the multipolar world has been incubating for some time now and that
Russia, China et.al. have been waiting patiently for USA to collapse from exhaustion, but I
rather doubt that it will do so with a wimper. There may come a time when the RF armed forces
may opt to use a quick bone crushing response to say 'enough'. While this is never an great
option to have to take due to potential reprecussions, it can sometimes be better than being
slowly swallowed by the serpeant of Mission Creep.....
"Our rhetoric [over Donbass] is absolutely constructive," Peskov said in reply to a
question. "We do not indulge in wishful thinking. Regrettably, the realities along the
engagement line are rather frightening. Provocations by the Ukrainian armed forces do take
place. They are not casual. There have been many of them."
Ukraine's economy is collapsing. Even the IMF (USA) is getting tired of giving it free
money:
Prospects for Ukraine this year to receive even the second tranche of the IMF under the $ 5
billion credit line, which Kiev agreed with the Fund last June, remain vague. Although
according to the schedule, Ukraine should have already mastered the second and third
tranches for a total of $ 1.35 billion and is about to receive the fourth tranche in the
amount of $ 0.55 billion, in fact, the first June tranche of 2.1 billion is still the only
one.
Commenting on this situation on television, Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergei Marchenko
said this week: "The IMF does not give money, because, unfortunately, as a country, we have
crumpled up some obligations and must renew them."
[...]
So far, budget holes have been bridged by historically record borrowings in December
last year (over $ 6 billion) and an increase in interest rates on domestic borrowings this
year. But last year's reserves and domestic borrowing are insufficient either to cover the
$ 9 billion budget deficit or to service the external public debt, which will cost at least
$ 8.1 billion this year (excluding the cost of securing new loans).
The IMF, by the way, is not interested in getting its money back - they already knew the
black hole they were entering into when the coup happened in 2014 - but in social
engineering: the American Empire wants a brand new province:
According to the aforementioned Sergei Marchenko, the IMF puts forward five main conditions
for returning to consideration of the issue of allocating the second tranche of the loan.
First , the Fund requires the restoration of liability, including criminal
liability, for the declaration of false information by officials and other persons for whom
such is provided in the framework of anti-corruption procedures. This type of
responsibility was actually abolished by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU) in
October last year as part of the recognition of a number of provisions of the
anti-corruption law as unconstitutional. Although almost the entire so-called
anti-corruption infrastructure in a format imposed by the West contradicts the
Constitution, the judges are concerned about this problem mainly because of the
infringement of their rights. Since then, Zelenskiy has effectively blocked the work of the
KSU, making a number of decisions that clearly go beyond his constitutional powers. And
last December, the Verkhovna Radaeven restored responsibility for declaring inaccurate
data. But within the framework of the struggle for control over the anti-corruption
infrastructure, the "seven-embassy" (the ambassadors of the G7 countries) did not even
think that responsibility had been restored.
Secondly , we are talking about the restoration of the so-called independence of
the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), that is, the accountability of the body to
Western curators, their actual appointment and accountability of the head of NABU, etc. and
imply the legal consolidation of the full control of the West over the entire
anti-corruption infrastructure, which in its essence is a parallel structure of government
in the state. After amending the law on NABU and recognizing as unconstitutional the
appointment of Artem Sytnik, a protege of the West, by the head of NABU Zelenskiy never
dared to fire him. But even such a manifestation of loyalty to the "seven-embassy" seemed
not enough.
Thirdly , the Fund demands urgently to "reform" the High Council of Justice, that
is, to transfer the judicial branch of power under the control of the West - by analogy
with anti-corruption bodies. In this issue, Ukraine is showing the greatest resistance so
far. Moreover, it comes both from the judges themselves and from representatives of other
branches of government. For obvious reasons: the surrender of the judicial system will
destroy even the miserable remnants of sovereignty, and most importantly, it will carry
serious risks both for judges and for various top-level officials.
Fourth and fifth - issues of the gas market and the electricity market. In the
context of these markets, the Fund is interested in the abolition of tariffs [n.t. -
probably it means here "subsidies"] for the population with a corresponding increase in
prices. The Ukrainian, let's say, elites just do not care about the problems of the
population - that is why the refusal to regulate gas prices for the population last year
became one of the first fulfilled requirements of the IMF. However, when winter came, gas
prices skyrocketed and social protests broke out across the country , and gas price
regulation had to be urgently returned. Of course, only for a while - first until April,
now until May. But the Fund did not like this either: just the other day, the head of the
IMF office in Ukraine, Jost Lyngman, called a return to gas price control in an ineffective
way of subsidizing households. Exactly the same applies to electricity prices - the tariff
for the population was raised in winter, but the Fund wants the regulated tariff to
disappear altogether. The Ukrainian authorities are, of course, ready to meet the IMF
halfway on these issues. But so that social protests do not completely reset her
ratings.
The article also mentions that Ukraine effectively cannot borrow elsewhere in the "free
market" because its bonds are rated "junk" (this we already knew, since it's been so for some
years now) and that its "borrowing rates" (interest rates) are at 12% (bonds) and 6.5%
(central bank's). In other words, Ukraine will disappear as a sovereign country, one way
(outright loss of the Eastern regions, reduction to a impoverished para-Polish rump state) or
the other (become a proto-colony of the USA a la Puerto Rico). My guess is Zelensky is
calculating an all-out war to reconquer the richer eastern regions, followed by a triumphal
accession to NATO, to be the only way out for Ukraine as a nation-state.
If Ukraine attacks the eastern provinces, there will be a repeat of Georgia 2008. The Russian
counter will be ferocious.
But Ukraine is just a puppet for America, which will use, abuse and even lose Ukraine for
*other purposes*.
Those other purposes are fortifying European subordination to NATO, cancelling Nord Stream
2 and breaking any German and French rapprochement with Moscow. US hegemony is in fact
conditional on a climate of hostility between Europe and Russia in general, and between
Germany and Moscow in particular. Hence the need to provoke Germany to cancel NS2. The
Navalny operation didn't work, and the sanctions didn't work either. So it's on to Plan C,
which might sacrifice Ukraine for the greater project of US empire.
In the bigger picture, the strategy is to globalize NATO against China. This is the Biden
regime's specific strategy of provoking minor conflicts to fortify alliances and bloc
politics for taking on China and Russia. Ukraine is just disposable trash in this game.
That Merkel and Macron just met with Putin is further evidence of the unlikeliness of war.
Frau Merkel in particular has an interest in preventing a war because it is Germany who needs
the Nordstream pipeline (to Washington's displeasure); the Russians can just as easily sell
their natural gas to China if Nordstream falters. Thus the Germans are more likely to exert
pressure on Ukraine to forebear than they are to let Ukraine loose the dogs of war.
I agree with you, oldhippie @ 20. And thanks to b and other posters here who have kept us
well apprised of the events in Ukraine as the buildup commenced on the Ukrainian side,
supported by US munitions.
Actually, as far as I can understand it, if the Russians do enter Ukraine it will be at
the behest of the Ukrainians themselves, just as it was in Crimea. They will be as supportive
as possible of the Donbass, which is already back in the Russian Federation in every way
except the formal declaration.
But Russia wants the country of Ukraine to remain whole. That's a big ask, but it surely
must include all areas like Odessa in order to be viable as a member of the Federation. I
don't know if that is possible yet, but rule by force has existed for so long under such
duress there, that I do believe the entire civilian population would be happy to have this
happen. And in will come the Russian aid, pouring in on tanks if need be, to a population
weary of hardship.
Russia certainly doesn't want to be on a war footing with Ukraine, since it considers the
citizenry to be its own people historically speaking, as Putin has said many times. It will
not force the issue; it can be patient. But if its troops do enter, they will only do so if
they are welcome; and I think that welcome mat is fast being woven, as fast as Penelopes in
the Donbass can weave it. And as for the rest of Ukraine, plenty of Penelopes there as
well.
It may not be Ukraine will enter the Federation immediately - there will have to be talks
and so much restructuring politically speaking before that can happen. But if the hand of
Russia is still extended in friendship to places like the US, it most certainly would be to a
sane and peaceful Ukrainian government.
This time the buildup is very real. But NATO has no reason to be "concerned", as it is
they who have the initiative. Russia will only move in response to a Ukrainian attack on
Donbass. Ukraine will only attack after it gets approval or direct orders from
Washington.
Work on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is progressing fast. I estimate that pipelaying
may be finished by the end of May. To prevent it from happening, Ukraine has to attack in
April. Rumors claim that the planned date of the attack is April 15, 2021. The problem on the
Ukrainian side is that there is no sensible war plan, apart from attacking Donbass and then
immediately withdrawing to defensive position on the western shore of the Dnieper River.
Christelle Néant from Donetsk published this on March 16th, citing Ukrainian
sources.
In an enlightening article, the Ukrainian media outlet Strana revealed that not only is
the Ukrainian army preparing for an offensive in the Donbass, but that there is an
emergency plan to stop the attack if Russia were to send its own army in. This information
is nothing less than a debunking of seven years of Ukrainian propaganda, which claims that
Ukraine is fighting Russia in the Donbass.
The article is based on sources in the Ukrainian army and the Defence Ministry, and
begins by questioning the reality of Kiev's preparation for an offensive against the
Donbass.
Strana's sources on the front line confirm that there is no longer a ceasefire, nor a
withdrawal of troops and equipment. The source even makes it clear that it was Ukraine that
first violated this provision of the Minsk package of measures, and that the DPR and LPR
(Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics) did so only afterwards, in response to the
violation by the Ukrainian army.
...
BUT, because there is a but in this kind of rather too pretty plan, if Russia sends its
army to intervene then the Ukrainian army will have to give up its offensive against the
Donbass and withdraw.
"In this case, the AFU offensive will be stopped. With a high degree of probability,
the troops will then have to withdraw, so as not to fall again into cauldrons," says the
Strana source in the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.
In other words, for the Ukrainian army's offensive in the Donbass to work, Russia must
not intervene. The problem for Kiev is that Russia has no intention of letting several
hundred thousand of its citizens die on its border without reacting. A problem that
Strana's source is well aware of.
J.Swift#38
Nice riff on 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'!
Excellent take on the situation as it has unfolded. I agree with your observations re: a
change in tone coming Russia and China in regard to their criticizms of the USA. It's likely
that they have indeed run the numbers on both how much damage they can absorb and what their
counter move would be as compare to the long drawn out decline that seems to be atking
forever.
The line (or really one of the several) is when the USA get more directly involved and
sustains losses at the hands of Russian forces. Nobody really wants to find out what happens
when the The Darkness behind the might of the Pentagram has a hissy fit. The yapping dog
might just beable to run the numbers itself and see the outcome as being very disadventageous
to itself and it's minions. Who am I kidding, the USA doesn't care a whit about it's
minions....
I believe you are right. A war is unlikely, but with madmen in Washington you never know.
Some of them would like to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.
But, Russia is moving substantial troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border to deter
the Kiev authorities from invading the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk
People's Republic (LNR) - so this is real not a made-up story (it is not what 'normal' troop
movements as the b's article implies). Russia is drawing a red line and it should be seen as
such!
Russia's actions will probably be enough to dissuade Kiev but what have they got to lose?
The Kiev regime is failing, its economy is in freefall, disaster beckons - a glorious
military defeat might be considered preferable to inevitable social and economic
collapse.
Kiev may also have well-founded belief that the US/West will be forced to support them
militarily to keep the secrets of western involvement in the downng of MH17 out of Russian
hands.
Thank you for all the compliments. I am not and will not be angry with librul for more
than one moment, in the past. Same Biden/Trump barbs are tossed daily on a face to face
basis. It has become how Americans are.
Ghostship does make some good points. Not theoretical to me. Here in Chicago FuhrerTag is
still celebrated at many bars. Large group sings of Horst Wessex song occur for a variety of
occasions. When at University of Illinois (70s) there was a sizable contingent of OUN
children in the History Department. They freely Indulged in Sieg Heil and Slava Ukraina to
greet each other publicly. There was also an Ustache contingent who did return to Croatia,
not to fight but to govern. Shall we say that these groups were insane. Some did go to
military careers.Some did go to State Department. Some did go to think tanks. If the subject
is Russia clinical insanity is not a career impediment in America.
For two days I owned the Rainbow, Bugsy Siegel's old joint 1900 N. Damen. . That was
Ukrainian Village. My money was refunded. The alternative was death. Yes, they put guns in my
face. Yes, they could do that. No, I do not like these people.
None of us predicts future with any accuracy. Will keep pointing out that downsides for
Russia will vanish with victory. They have a lot of choices in how they could construct that
victory. Every choice US/NATO has available is nothing but a defeat.
It is a very important reminder as to how insane and mindless the neo con hatred is of
Russia and Putin. It is indeed alarming that this rabid hatred controls the neo cons and what
passes for us foreign policy. How can on expect rational policy when the people in charge are
completely irrational.
If nothing else, just note the quote in the article from Hudson-it is beyond alarming as
to the description by hudson of the mindless and controlling irrationality of the neo cons in
the dimo biden admin!
I watched a video by Alexander Mercouris China Warns Ukraine on Crimea Ties which
shows how coordinated this present crisis may be, as Washington may be maneuvering its
Ukrainian proxy into nationalizing a corporation there that manufactures a variety of turbine
engines, built to power both warships and aircraft. Zelensky is applying pressure on both
China and Russia at once. The Russians have overcome some manufacturing problems and have had
to build up their own stocks of turbines for military use. Responding to Zelensky's seizure
of their assets and investments in Ukraine, the Chinese have sent an economic mission that
involves serious investments in Crimea .
A coordinated threat to the culturally Russian Donbas and Lugansk region and the
nationalizing of Chinese assets will place China and Russia again on the same path in their
diplomatic response. It would not be a surprise if China officially recognizes Crimea as part
of the Russian Federation.
To be fair, the neocon's feel that way about everyone - they embrace the role of paranoid
imperialist because that's a relatively accessible way to get funded in the DC policy world.
The striking thing is the hubris - they're just going to fight everyone all at the same time
and it will somehow be okay in the end, no cost to them.
Russia doesn't need "troops" to defend Donetz and Luhansk; Russian can destroy Ukrainian
forces using stand-off weapons and then DNR and LNR forces can easily cope with what remains.
Russian doesn't need forces to "occupy" Donetz and Luhansk because these areas will remain
under the control of the republics. What Russia needs "troops" for is to advance and capture
Kiev and this is what Russia's troop deployments threaten. If the conflict starts in Ukraine
then Russia will demonstrate its ability to do whatever it wants in all areas of Ukraine;
then Russia will withdraw and leave what is left for the West/EU and US to deal with.
Rationally, nothing will happen because Kiev will be deterred. But, many elements in the
Kiev regime may desire war because they believe the West will (because they "have to")
support them (or, as I already said, glorious defeat may seem preferable to the slow-burn
collapse of their regime). The US/West may encourage Kiev because they are posturing for war
and the plandemic is envisaged as the best time for such an event (I feel the likelihood of
this is underestimated), or compelling a demonstration of Russian "aggression" may have
overriding propaganda value (regardless of the outcome for the Kiev regime) for their own
populations (everyone can really hate on Russia for the next 10 years - hate is a great
unifier).
All of this is to be expected after weeks and weeks of UAF buildup along the Donbass
border. In fact, they've been shelling villages in the Donbass for some time now since they
re-instigated aggression in February. Even today they were shelling the infamous Donetsk
airport. On top of that you've got US aerial vehicles flying around the Black Sea right
underneath Crimea and next to Krasnodar. Kiev's posturing has signaled their supposed
willingness to attack the Donbass and attempt to retake Crimea, so Russia's reaction to
protect Russian citizens would be entirely reasonable.
The defense ministers of Ukraine and the United States held their second conversation in a
month and a half on the situation in Donbass. According to Andriy Taran, the Americans
promised Kiev "support measures" in the event of a direct military conflict between Ukraine
and Russia.
The US will not come to the aid of Ukraine. That is a pipe dream, pun intended.
@JohninMK et al:
On the surface this seems to be a continuation of the provocation game, which has been the
tactic since the beginning. The Ukies are definitely upping the ante by threatening Crimea. I
can only assume that they are deep into thinking wishfully that the USA will "come to rescue"
when they poke the bear. But in both their cases I have to wonder: with WHAT? The Ukies dont
have an effective army as demonstrated by mass defection and surrender last bout. Other than
"punishment battallions" there do not seem to be many troops willing to fight. As for the
USA, they are not shock troops, they are an occupation force. So then is it to be some sort
aerial ballet of stand-off weapons over the skies of the Donbass??
As stated above, the Western MSM is going to shriek like flock of terrified Karens no
matter what Russia does so they may as well earn it. My mind wanders over the demonstration
of the Iskander in Syria most recently. Ten or so of those simultaneously in the right places
would bring a Ukrops offensive to sudden halt if there were the will to do so.....
Zelensky is making de-escalation noises. Bit late for that. Should this all ratchet down
it will be the end of Zelensky. Bear in mind he is there only because there is no one else.
As an actor and a comedian he has been impersonating a President. He did that for the sitcom
cameras and then he did it in real life.
It will also be the last time Ukraine ever pretends to field an army. Conscripts will make
their way home somehow, they won't be played again. Heavy equipment and ammo will be
auctioned off cheap to any who can arrange transport. Transport will be questionable, arms
will be sold very cheap.
Ukraine army is heavily larded with mercs and Wahabi jihadis from all over the planet.
Idiots could still start something big even if the "leadership" calls it off. Shelling has
been happening all day up and down the line. Artillery is mostly mercs. Russia is holding
fire so far, one shell chances to fall on a concentration of Russian troops and it is on.
Poles and other idiots could also blow this up. Way too many moving pieces and no one in
charge, either in Kiev or Washington.
If this excitement just ends Ukraine will go from a comic opera government to no
government at all. Russia will move in for humanitarian reasons. Western Ukraine will die or
flood to Europe.
I see we are back to the "fog of war".
There has been artillery/mortar fire around Horlivka and elsewhere. (50 shells) These
mortar attacks were conducted by the 58th motorised rifle brigade of the Armed Forces of
Ukraine from the areas of Avdeevka and Pervomaisky.
A Global Hawk is presumed to have flown over both Donetsk and Luhansk - various altitudes to
test the Russian radars. This is the same type that was shot down by Iran. Maybe the US wants
to order a few more replacements?
One vid that is supposed to show a train full of Tor systems of the 56 airborne has already
been debunked as filmed a long way away on the other side of Russia, (The 56th do not have
Tors)
It is clear that there is a definite push to provoke a Russian reaction. The threats about
Crimea mean that any movement in that area will be taken seriously, as "several" high ranking
Russian Generals have arrived there. Russian Generals lead from the front, not the back as do
the UK or US versions. (see Syria)
It is the details that are showing that this will escalate (Burning houses and villages)
and civilians in bunkers. I was going to show you the picture of an old man still in the
firing area, because he has nowhere else to go . Someday the human cost must be
counted.
***
Interesting tie ups with the BRI and Afghanistan from Karlof1's post @70. One mention of a
canal between the Sea of Azof and the Caspian, via Russsia. The "anything but Suez"
canal?
More than that, I realised that the Saudi Arabian NOEM (Straight Line road) across the
Gulf of Aqaba to Sharm el-Sheik, will eventually give it access to the Med via Egypt and
Africa, without going through Israel. (Or Lebanon, Syria or Turkey)
Syria is in a mess because of lack of fuel. Their stolen fuel is/was bought by Israel
cheaply. Are you sure that the EverGiven WAS an accident?
*****
Biden has Zelenskys back - if he is thinking of his back pocket there is nothing left in
it.
I'm sure oldhippie means that if the Ukies are subservient enough to the US to actually
attack, this will almost certainly be reminiscent of Georgia (rather than just some cruise
missile strikes, as some had speculated). The buildup means Russia is prepared to sweep into
the Ukraine, and probably make a special point of killing as many Nazi battalions as
possible, along with any Ukie troops who don't surrender quickly enough. I don't see them
entering Kiev, just like they didn't try to take Tblisi, but I imagine they will try to take
most of the pro-Russian territory in the East and possibly even South, until Kiev begs for a
cease-fire (just like last time), but this time the conditions of cease fire will likely be
much more strongly enforced, and then I would imagine Russia will try to establish some
assemblage of peace-keeping troops from countries they can trust (maybe Shanghi Coalition?)
so that they can withdraw their troops as soon as possible, for political reasons. Not that
it will help, but then again, I think Russia sees they'll be damned if they do, damned if
they don't, so they might as well do it. But they damn sure don't want to take ownership of
the Ukraine, just like they didn't want to own Georgia.
A fair and balanced analysis, as far as it goes.
We must remember the Stavka is in charge....
What makes the most sense to them??? Where should the cease fire line be??? The best place
to put it is the midline of the Denieper River. It is a natural boundary. It is wide enough
so anything less than 155 mm artillery can't reach across. It resolves permanently water
supply to Crimea.
NATO will use this action to censure, villify, and sanction Russia. She might as well get
something for that.
Will this happen?? Last year, I'd say no.... but now.... anything goes...
I thought Biden would not start a war until next year to save the 2022 mid-term elections. My
speculation is that Merkel is standing firm on Nord Stream 2 so the Biden administration is
going to use the Ukrainians to start up a war against Russia to physically shut down the
construction of the pipeline and introduce sanctions like against SWIFT, Aeroflot, etc.
During a meeting with Defense Minister of Ukraine Andriy Taran and the leadership of the
Armed Forces of Ukraine, the defense attaches of the United States, Canada and the United
Kingdom assured Ukraine of the support in defending its sovereignty and territorial
integrity. "US, Canada's, and UK Defense Attaches met with Minister of Defense [of Ukraine]
Taran, Deputy Minister Petrenko, Deputy Minister Polishchuk, Joint Forces Commander
Lieutenant General Naiev, and Colonel Budanov," the U.S. Embassy posted on Twitter. The
Embassy assured Ukraine of support in defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity:
"We stand with Ukraine as it defends its sovereignty and territorial integrity and are
watching the situation in Ukraine closely."
The story is number one or two all over the place (The Hill, Politico, Reuters, The
Washington Times,...).
No mention of Ukraine except perhaps in minor side stories.
"Biden holds first call with Ukrainian president amid Russian buildup"
By NATASHA BERTRAND and LARA SELIGMAN
04/02/2021 09:39 AM EDT
Updated: 04/02/2021 11:24 AM EDT
President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke on Friday morning
for the first time since Biden took office, amid reports of a Russian military buildup in
eastern Ukraine that has alarmed U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
The leaders spoke for 30 to 40 minutes, according to a person with knowledge of the
call. A White House readout of the conversation said Biden "reaffirmed the United States'
unwavering support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of
Russia's ongoing aggression in the Donbas and Crimea."
For decades, America styled itself the 'indispensable
nation' that led the world & it's now seeking to sustain that role by emphasizing a new Cold War-style battle against
'authoritarianism'. But it's a dangerous fantasy.
It seems a week cannot go by without US
Secretary of State Antony Blinken
bringing
up the specter of the 'rules-based international order' as an excuse for meddling in the affairs of another state or region.
The most recent crisis revolves around allegations that
China
has
dispatched a fleet of more than 200 ships, part of a so-called 'maritime militia', into waters of the South China Sea claimed by
the Philippines. China says that these vessels are simply fishing boats seeking shelter from a storm. The Philippines has
responded by dispatching military ships and aircraft to investigate. Enter Antony Blinken, stage right:
"The United States stands with our ally, the Philippines, in the face of the PRC's maritime
militia amassing at Whitsun Reef,"
Blinken
tweeted
.
"We
will always stand by our allies and stand up for the rules-based international order."
Blinken's message came a mere 18 hours after he tweeted about his meeting in Brussels with NATO.
"Our alliances were created to defend shared values,"
he
wrote
.
"Renewing
our commitment requires reaffirming those values and the foundation of international relations we vow to protect: a free and
open rules-based order."
Our rules, our order
What this actually means, of course, is that the order is rules-based so long as it is the nation called America that sets these
rules and is accepted as the world's undisputed leader.
Blinken's fervent embrace of the 'rules-based international order' puts action behind the words set forth in the recently
published 'Interim National Security Strategy Guidance', a White House
document
which
outlines
President Joe Biden'
s vision
"for how
America will engage with the world."
While the specific term 'rules-based international order' does not appear in the body of the document, the precepts it represents
are spelled out in considerable detail, and conform with the five pillars of the
"liberal
international order"
as set forth by the noted international relations scholars,
Daniel
Duedney
and
G.
John Ikenberry
, in their ground-breaking
essay
,
'The nature and sources of liberal international order', published by the Review of International Studies in 1999.
The origins of this
"liberal international order"
can be traced back to the end of the
Second World War and the onset of a Cold War between Western liberal democracies, helmed by the United States, and the communist
bloc nations, led by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The purpose of this order was simple – to maintain a
balance of power between the US-led liberal democracies and their communist adversaries, and to maintain and sustain US hegemony
over its liberal democratic allies.
This was accomplished through five basic policy
'pillars': Security co-binding; the embrace of US hegemony; self-limitation on the part of US allies; the politicization of
global economic institutions for the gain of liberal democracies; and Western
"civil
identity."
All five are emphasized in Biden's interim guidance, in which the president openly advocates for
"a
stable and open international system."
It notes that
"the alliances, institutions,
agreements, and norms underwriting the international order the United States helped to establish are being tested."
The faltering empire's flaws and inequities
Biden also observed that the restoration of this international order
"rests on a core
strategic proposition: The United States must renew its enduring advantages so that we can meet today's challenges from a
position of strength. We will build back better our economic foundations; reclaim our place in international institutions; lift
up our values at home and speak out to defend them around the world; modernize our military capabilities, while leading first
with diplomacy; and revitalize America's unmatched network of alliances and partnerships."
All five of Duedney's and Ikenberry's policy 'pillars' can be found embedded in these – and other – statements contained in the
guidance.
There is a defensive tone to Biden's guidance, which notes that
"rapid
change and mounting crisis"
have exposed
"flaws and inequities"
in the US-dominated
international system which
"have caused many around the world – including many Americans – to
question its continued relevance."
Here Biden runs into the fundamental problem of trying to justify and sustain a model of economic-based global hegemony which was
founded at a time when the existence of a Western liberal democratic
"order"
could be
justified as a counter to the Soviet-led communist bloc. The Cold War ended in 1990. The 'international rules-based order' that
was created at the behest of the US to prevail in this conflict continued, however. It seems that the US wasn't simply satisfied
with preventing the spread of communism; its raison d'être instead transitioned from being the leader of an alliance of liberal
democracies, to being the global hegemon, using the very system devised to confront communism to instead install and sustain the
US as the undisputed dominant power in the world.
This trend began in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, where the US had the opportunity to pass the baton of
global leadership to the United Nations, an act that would have given legitimacy to the notion of an 'international order'.
This, however, proved a bridge too far for the neo-liberal tendencies of the administration of President Bill Clinton, who
continued the Cold War-era practice of using the UN as a vehicle to promote US policy prerogatives at the expense of the
international 'order'. Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright helped coin the term
"indispensable
nation"
when defining America's post-Cold War role in the world (it is notable that Blinken recently praised Albright in a
tweet
,
noting that
"her tenacity & effectiveness left the US stronger & more respected globally,"
and
adding
"she's a role model for me & so many of our diplomats."
)
The arrogance and hubris contained in any notion of a single nation being
"indispensable"
to
the global order is mind-boggling and is reflective of a disconnect with both reality and history on the part of those embracing
it.
The myth of indispensability
The unsustainability of the premise of American 'indispensability' was demonstrated by both the events of September 11, 2001, and
the inability of the US to deal with its aftermath. Had the US embraced and acted on President George H. W. Bush's notion of a
"new
world order"
in the aftermath of the Cold War, it would have found itself as a vital world leader working in concert with a
global community of nations to confront the scourge of Islamic fundamentalist-based terrorism. But this was not to be.
Instead, the 'indispensable nation' was exposed as a fraud, with many in the world recognizing the US not as a power worthy of
emulation, but rather as the source of global angst. This
rejection
of
America's self-anointed role as global savior extended to many Americans too, who were tired of the costs associated with serving
as the world's police force.
Indeed, this exhaustion with global intervention, and the costs accrued, helped create the foundation of electoral support for
Donald Trump's rejection of the
"rules-based international order"
in favor of a more
distinct
"America first"
approach to global governance. What gave Trump's policy so much
"punch"
was
the fact that not only did many American citizens reject the
"rules-based international
order,"
but so did much of the rest of the world.
Repairing the damage done by four years of Trump has become the number one priority of the Biden administration. To do this, both
Biden and Blinken recognize that they simply cannot return to the policy formulations that existed before Trump took office; that
ship has sailed, and trying to sell the American people and the rest of the world on what many viewed as a failed policy
construct (i.e., unilateral, uncontested American hegemony) was seen as an impossible task.
Instead, the Biden administration is seeking to reinvent the original premise of the
'rules-based international order' by substituting Russian and Chinese 'authoritarianism' in place of Soviet-led communism as a
threat which liberal democracies around the world willingly and enthusiastically rally around the US to confront.
"Authoritarianism is on the global march,"
Biden's guidance observed,
"and
we must join with like minded allies and partners to revitalize democracy the world over. We will work alongside fellow
democracies across the globe to deter and defend against aggression from hostile adversaries. We will stand with our allies
and partners to combat new threats aimed at our democracies"
and which
"undermine the
rules and values at the heart of an open and stable international system."
Biden concluded his essay in dramatic fashion.
"This moment is an inflection point,"
he
noted.
"We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future direction of our
world. No nation is better positioned to navigate this future than America. Doing so requires us to embrace and reclaim our
enduring advantages, and to approach the world from a position of confidence and strength. If we do this, working with our
democratic partners, we will meet every challenge and outpace every challenger. Together, we can and will build back better."
No longer the world's undisputed No.1
While postulated as a statement of American strength, Biden's concluding remarks actually project not only the inherent
insecurity of the US today, but also its root causes. The fact that the US needs to
"reclaim
our enduring advantages"
implies that we lost them, and illustrates that these so-called advantages are not nearly as
enduring as Biden would like to think.
"Building back better"
is an admission of
weakness, a recognition that the notion of an 'indispensable nation' is an artificial construct; most nations no longer accept
America as the world leader.
The reality is that the US is one of the most powerful nations in the world. That
position, however, is no longer uncontested; China has emerged as the equal of the US in many metrics used to measure global
power and influence, and superior in some.
Moreover, China operates effectively in a multi-polar global reality,
recognizing that the era of the American singularity is over. Russia, India, Brazil, and the European collective all represent
polar realities whose existence and influence exists independent of the US.
The US, however, cannot function in such a world.
While there is a growing
recognition among American politicians that the post-Cold War notion of the US being the sole-remaining superpower has run its
course, the only alternative these politicians can offer is the attempt to return to a bi-polar world which has the US at the
head of its liberal democratic 'partners', facing off against the forces of 'authoritarianism'. This vision, however, is
unrealistic, if for no other reason that the world no longer views Western liberal democracy as 'good', and authoritarianism as
'evil'.
This reality is evident to much of the rest of the world. Why, then, would US policy makers embrace a formulation doomed to fail?
The answer is simple – the US, as it exists today, needs the 'rules-based international order' to remain relevant. Relevant, as
used here, means globally dominant.
US politicians who operate on the national level cannot get elected on platforms that reject the 'indispensable' role of the
country, even if many Americans and most of the world have. US economic dominance is in large part sustained by the very systems
that underpin the 'rules-based international order' – the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. US geopolitical relevance
is sustained by Cold War-era military alliances.
An unviable, unsustainable future
An American retreat from being the 'indispensable' power, and a corresponding embrace of a leadership role based upon a more
collegial notion of shared authorities, would not mean the physical demise of the US – the nation would continue to exist as a
sovereign entity. But it would mean an end to the psychological reality of America as we know it today – a quasi-imperial power
whose relevance is founded on compelled global hegemony. This model is no longer viable. The fact that the Biden administration
has chosen to define its administration through an ardent embrace of this failed system is proof positive that the survival of
post-Cold War American is existentially connected to its ability to function as the world's 'indispensable nation'.
American exceptionalism is a narcotic that fuels the country's domestic politics more than global geo-political reality. The
'rules-based international order' that underpins this fantasy is unsustainable in the modern era and makes the collapse of the
"exceptional"
United
States inevitable.
Watching the Biden administration throw its weight behind a US-dominated 'rules-based
international order' is like watching the Titanic set sail; it is big, bold, and beautiful, and its fate pre-ordained.
lay_arrow
2banana
37 minutes ago
remove
link
We
are just about to see how that is going to work out in the Ukraine.
It seems a week cannot go by without US
Secretary
of State Antony Blinken
bringing up the specter of the 'rules-based international order' as an
excuse for meddling in the affairs of another state or region.
TimeHasCome
29 minutes ago
I
live near a huge military base and every night since the inauguration of Dementia Joe there has been
cannon fire and mortar fire every night . This nut is going to get us in a war.
TimeHasCome
29 minutes ago
I
live near a huge military base and every night since the inauguration of Dementia Joe there has been
cannon fire and mortar fire every night . This nut is going to get us in a war.
kanoli
31 minutes ago
The
rules-based international order requires US approval or national approval to put troops on the ground in
another country. The US troops in Syria are there illegally, Mr. Blinken. Is the rules-based
international order only for the other countries?
TBT or not TBT
14 minutes ago
"Syria" is a place on a map, but demonstrably is no longer a sovereign country able to manage its own
territory. Dozens of factions and foreign powers operate in its former territory.
Apollo Capricornus Maximus
10 minutes ago
rules based international order = laser guided joint direct attack munitions
End Times Prophecy
25 minutes ago
The
international criminals against humanity, WMD using, international mass murderer, repeated international
declarations of war , international terrorists, permanently Oath of Office breaching and violating
subversive, seditious, traitors and more are blathering about being a part of a rules-based international
order?
Clearly these maniacs are an exceptionally extreme danger to themselves and the entire World and more.
Chain Man
3 minutes ago
(Edited)
The
US should have a law (lol) that no politicians can make any money other than his regular pay when coming
into office plus his pay from their elected position (on going tabs on income while in Office.). Don't
like it don't run !
The
problem with being a leader is you have to get involved in the Nations problem most of the time, then the
USA gets charged with being the problem. Leave um the hell alone if they screw with us blow um away. End
the Foreign Aid and we will end their smart *** crap.
Just work with the foreign Nations we can screw these drawn out treaties
Mearsheimer is an interesting cat. His whole conception of international relations seems
to be that it is necessarily zero-sum, and that the general model is that of US regional
hegemony, as in the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century and the frankly neocolonial
relationship that exists today. (and he makes no attempt to dress it up as anything other
than the brute power relations). His thesis is that there must be a conflict, and that the US
will successfully get all of China's neighbors to join the US in opposing the rise of China.
Importantly, if you go back to look at talks he gave and how they've evolved in the last 15
years, Mearsheimer included Russia in his "anti-China balancing coalition" list, up until
2013-2014. More recent talks have him leaning essentially on Japan, Australia, and India,
with South Korea and ASEAN determined to avoid picking sides as Mearsheimer would have it,
and most of central Asia, plus Iran and Pakistan, already on the Chinese side.
I also take issue with Mearsheimer's singular focus on the regional-hegemony model,
although I think it does provide good insights into the thinking behind US policy. But in
reality, there have been long stretches of history, European history in particular, where
there was in fact a balance of power on the regional level, not to mention on the global
level.
Besides that, with significant numbers of nuclear weapons, the historical analogies of the
first half of the 20th century pretty much go out the window. No decisive war between
superpowers is possible, except by accident, and in that case it will not be decisive in the
way he means. It's all proxy conflict from the 1950s on. And when it comes to proxy conflict,
the clear imperative for third parties, from the history of the last 70 years, is to avoid
becoming a proxy battleground.
Meanwhile Biden's son Hunter, the "smartest guy" his father knows, has his feet firmly in
his mouth in excerpts from an interview this Sunday about his 💻 that was full of
underage porn & business dealings involving his father when VPOTUS.
THOMAS QUICK SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago I doubt it. Vaccination doesn't cure chronic grifters.
Like thumb_up 1 Reply reply Share link Report
flag
N N Z SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago "Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon
none of us will be well.'' ---Aldous Huxley
So, the New Normals are discussing the Unvaccinated Question. What is to be done with us?
No, not those who haven't been "vaccinated" yet. Us. The "Covidiots." The "Covid
deniers." The "science deniers." The "reality deniers." Those who refuse to get "vaccinated,"
ever.
There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To
them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We
do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do
so. We traffic in arcane "conspiracy theories," like "pre-March-2020 science," "natural herd
immunity," "population-adjusted death rates," "Sweden," "Florida," and other heresies.
They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them.
They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat
them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids,
and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.
So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us,
in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than
criminals , or, worse, a plague , an infestation. In the
words of someone (I can't quite recall who), "getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question
of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness," or something like that. (I'll have to hunt down
and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)
Nice thoughts but the high priests of the new secular cult of scientism are playing a zero
sum game. It's an either/or for them; slavery or scalp. The rituals of the cult reinforce the
dogma. The continual washing of hands as an act of purification. The mask as an act of
penance for your defiling breath. Forced solitude to keep you in front of the 24 hour Cult
broadcasts on tv. Social distancing as a way to inculcate insular thinking. Any resistors to
the new rituals will be brought to a tribunal of neo torquemadas. Perhaps a better way to be
thinking of the resistance is in terms of knighthood.
The US-China meeting in Anchorage took place 75 years almost to the day of the Winston
Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Just as the latter signalled a break point in the
uneasy, war forced cohabit of the West with the communist Soviet Union, so too the Anchorage
will enter the history as the break point in the US hegemony threatening collaboration of the
West and China.
Since WW2, no other nation, not even Russia, has confronted the US so firmly and so
publicly as did Yang Jiechi, one of the ruling member of the Chinese Politburo when he said
that "the United States does not have the qualification to speak to China from a position of
strength'.
That was a slap in the face the Americans will have to respond to, and it's in the nature
of the response one will find whether the American Governing elite is prepared to share power
or go for a confrontation.
Written by Steven Lee Myers, the NYT 's bureau chief in Beijing, the piece is
full of false and unsupported assertions. It changes explicit Chinese statements in support
of democracy and human rights into the opposite. It is also untruthful about the sources of
its quotes:
China hopes to position itself as the main challenger to an international order, led by the
United States, that is generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human
rights and adherence to rule of law.
Such a system "does not represent the will of the international community," China's
foreign minister, Wang Yi, told Russia's, Sergey V. Lavrov, when they met in the southern
Chinese city of Guilin.
In a joint statement, they accused the United States of bullying
and interference and urged it to "reflect on the damage it has done to global peace and
development in recent years."
There is no evidence and no quote in the piece to support the assertion that the
unilateral "international order, led by the United States" is in fact "guided by principles
of democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law." The wars the U.S. and
its allies have waged and wage in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries are, in fact,
not in adherence to the rule of international law nor are they executed with respect for
human rights or the principles of democracy.
The Wang Yi quote in the second paragraph is taken completely out of context. By placing
it after his false assertions the author insinuates that Wang Yi rejected the "principles of
democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law."
Wang Yi did not do that at all. He did in fact the opposite.
Here is the original
quote from the report of Wang Yi's meeting with Russia's foreign minister Sergei
Lavrov:
Wang Yi said, the so-called "rules-based international order" by a few countries is not
clear in its meaning , as it reflects the rules of a few countries and does not represent
the will of the international community . We should uphold the universally recognized
international law.
The there is the
Joint Statement from the Lavrov-Wang Yi meeting which contradicts the New York
Times insinuation:
The world has entered a period of high turbulence and rapid change. In this context, we
call on the international community to put aside any differences and strengthen mutual
understanding and build up cooperation in the interests of global security and geopolitical
stability, to contribute to the establishment of a fairer, more democratic and rational
multipolar world order.
All human rights are universal, indivisible and interrelated. ...
Democracy is one of the achievements of humanity. ...
International law is an important condition for the further development of humanity.
...
In promoting multilateral cooperation, the international community must adhere to
principles such as openness and equality, and a non-ideological approach. ...
The Chinese Foreign Ministry report
about the issuance of the above Four Point Statement quotes Wang Yi as saying:
Today, we will issue a joint statement on several issues of current global governance,
expounding the essence of major concepts such as human rights, democracy, international
order, and multilateralism, reflecting the collective demands of the international
community, especially developing countries. We call on all countries to participate in and
improve global governance in the spirit of openness, inclusiveness and equality, abandon
zero-sum mentality and ideological prejudice, stop interfering in the internal affairs of
any country, enhance the well-being of people of all countries through dialogue and
cooperation, and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind.
In no way has China rejected human rights, democracy or the rule of law. The New York
Times author simply construed that.
The third NYT paragraph quoted above is likewise false. The
Joint Statement did not urge the U.S. to "reflect on the damage it has done to global
peace and development in recent years." There is nothing in there that could be construed as
such. The U.S. is not even mentioned in the Joint Statement.
The quote the NYT author uses is not from the official Joint Statement, as
falsely claimed, but from a Chinese State TV's summarization of a
press conference :
Both foreign ministers said that the international community believes that the United
States should reflect on the damage it has done to global peace and development in recent
years , stop unilateral bullying, stop interfering in other countries' internal affairs,
and stop pulling "small circles" to engage in group confrontation.
Unsupported assertions about the motives of the "U.S. led" order, out of context quotes
that turn the actual statements by the Chinese foreign minister into their opposite and
missattribution of a news summary as a diplomatic statement is something that one would not
expect from a news outlet but from a propaganda organ.
That is then, obviously, what the Times has become.
Thanks b, for bringing this to light.
Without your posts, most of us - even those of us that try to dig into things more than
most people - would not be aware of these things.
Western mainstream media will, of course, never inform the public of those important
excerpts from the Lavrov-Wang Joint Statement and the Chinese Foreign Ministry that you
brought to our attention.
In our so-called "democracies", the electorates are not just deliberately kept in the
dark, but in fact shaped, not into informed voters, but disinformed voters.
-
Again to translate from the Orwellianism/Newspeak of our Western establishment news media,
when they say "international order" what they really mean is the "Western
deep-state-run order" or "Western neocon-run order."
"Generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to
rule of law" can be translated to "generally guided by hypocrisy, Orwellianism, special
interests, gangsterism, treachery, and mockery of rule of law."
fallacia non causae ut causae
Eristische Dialektik: Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten / Arthur Schopenhauer 1831
[The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument]
Steven Lee Myers, the NYT's bureau
chief in Beijing just use a really classical and poor way to manipulate.
"an international order, led by the United States, that is generally guided by principles of
democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law."
International order is not international law. LED by USA not by law. Generally (... No
comment), principe of... (again)
Yes. Really pure Propagandastaffel.
But a good news. Why is NYT in a need to manipulate?
...On a different note, i believe Steven Myers is just milling for a free ticket home and
a promotion which he'll surely get once he's expelled from China for fabricating fake
news.
Even during the worst of the cold war there were some respect and integrity on reporting
facts. MSM of today is fully weaponized and had gone full goebbels.
"that is generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human rights and
adherence to rule of law"...
I haven't decided yet to either cry about the existence of such idiocies and such
propaganda driven Idiots and what it says about the human condition or scream because the
hypocrisy displayed continuously without shame and any twinge of self-awareness' becomes
unbearable.
Okay, then what can we infer from this lie-filed screed? I suggest that the NY Times and
its manipulators are against all the highlighted portions of this point b highlighted from
the 4 Point Joint Statement:
"Today, we will issue a joint statement on several issues of current global governance,
expounding the essence of major concepts such as human rights, democracy, international
order, and multilateralism, reflecting the collective demands of the international community,
especially developing countries . We call on all countries to participate in and
improve global governance in the spirit of openness, inclusiveness and equality, abandon
zero-sum mentality and ideological prejudice, stop interfering in the internal affairs of any
country, enhance the well-being of people of all countries through dialogue and cooperation,
and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind ."
All the bolded text is what the Outlaw US Empire, its vassals and its propaganda organs
are against, as in opposed in a very proactive manner up to and including physical war waged
on nations that try to promote any of those bolded items. The one main feature the Outlaw US
Empire is dead set against occurring is the construction of a global community aimed at
promoting a shared, equitable future for humanity for that's a Win-Win outcome, not a
Zero-sum last man standing, winner take all outcome Neoliberalism demands. In other words,
the NY Times is serving as a sort of American Pravda by detailing what its actual
policies are without actually declaring them to be policies.
Ever notice that within US culture there's not one sport or game that has a shared outcome
between several different participants, that there's only one winner (team or individual) and
that its entire political-economy is modeled on that concept? That equality of outcomes is
always subsumed by equality of participation? That if there's not going to be any equality
overseas then there won't be any equality at home? And I can list many more. That all such
arrangements are promoting a domineering authoritarian ethos never seems to dawn on far too
many--I'm the head of the household so you must do as I say. We don't care if 80% of the
public demand universal single payer health insurance, an end to forever wars, clean water
for our communities, clean air to breathe, freedom from mass shootings, freedom from police
riots, and so forth and so on. The NY Times and its controllers don't want anything of the
sort for the US public or for anyone else on the planet. And that's the message it delivers
every time it publishes an article filled with lies, falsehoods, innuendo, fabrications,
etc., which is daily.
The NY Times ought to be called The Projector and sold with the tabloids.
Thanks b, when you wrote: "The New York Times author simply construed that."
I would change to: "The New York Times author maliciously construed that."
The "Five Eyes" countries, who just happen to all be Spawn of Perfidious Albion, seem to
be more and more infected with the virus of Orwellianism (itself an idea of Anglo culture).
Perhaps parallel to the out-of-control "Five Eyes" apparatus, or as a subset of it, there is
an unspoken out-of-control "Five Mouths" apparatus, of which the NYT is a key outlet ...
Let's hope other countries do everything they can keep that virus out of their systems,
and inoculate themselves and their populations well.
Steven Lee Myers used to work as a NYT correspondent in Moscow and Baghdad. He is the
author of the tome "The New Tsar: the Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin", the title of which
alerts you to the tone of the garbage that wasted an entire plantation of pine trees.
"Our Nairobi chief has a tremendous opportunity to dive into news and opportunity
across a wide range of countries, from the deserts of Sudan to the pirate seas of Somalia,
down through the forests of the Congo and the shores of Tanzania. It is an enormous patch of
vibrant, intense and strategically important territory with many vital story lines, including
terrorism, the scramble for resources, the global contest with China and the constant
push-and-pull of democracy versus authoritarianism.
The ideal candidate should enjoy jumping on news, be willing to cover conflict, and
also be drawn to investigative stories. There is also the chance to delight our readers with
stories of hope and the changing rhythms of life in a rapidly evolving region."
Myers certainly knows how to jump on propaganda often and hard enough to turn into
something faintly resembling ... news.
"... Steve moved to Beijing in 2016 and quickly built a portfolio that was as powerful as
it was eclectic. His old world combined with his new one when he explored Russia's fury
over China's hunger for timber. He detailed Beijing's spreading crackdown on Islam,
analyzed China's exploration of the far side of the moon and reported on Hengdian World
Studios, an outdoor movie and television lot scattered over 2,500 acres in eastern China.
He also landed a rare interview with the Chinese actress Fan Bingbing after she was
embroiled in a tax scandal.
At each stop along his journey, he has taken to heart the advice of the former executive
editor Joe Lelyveld, devouring the local literature of his new home, not just the books by
foreign correspondents. Lately, he has been reading Yan Lianke, the author of "The Day the
Sun Died," and "Lenin's Kisses." He has an equally voracious appetite for Chinese cuisine,
which he is offsetting by training for his eighth marathon ..."
And here's our own Chris Buckley who joined Myers on his arduous tour of duty in
Beijing:
"... Chris [Buckley] is our resident China expert, having spent the past 20 years reporting
on the country. He went into journalism essentially as an excuse to hang around China.
Born in Australia, he decided to abandon a law degree and went to Beijing to study
Communist Party history at the People's University of China. After a half-hearted attempt
to start an academic career, his odd jobs in teaching and translating turned into
occasional fixer work for journalists, eventually in our own Beijing bureau.
He worked for Erik Eckholm and Elisabeth Rosenthal covering corruption scandals,
political infighting, the SARS crisis and the outbreak of an AIDS epidemic in rural China.
When they left, he worked for a while under a couple of obscure correspondents, Joe Kahn
and Jim Yardley.
After a seven-year stint as a correspondent at Reuters, he returned to The Times in
2012. He spent the first three years waiting in Hong Kong for a visa, camping out at the
Harbour Plaza Hotel for reasons that are unknown. From that perch, he wrote about the rise
of Xi Jinping, his corruption campaign, his directive declaring war on liberal values, as
well as the Umbrella Revolution. Since returning to the mainland, he has been a force
behind our coverage of the crackdown on the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the country's shift
toward authoritarianism, while also taking on a more personal quest about Sichuan
food."
Do you get the impression that these fellows jumped onto these cushy jobs for the food
junkets?
"... international order, led by the United States, that is generally guided by principles of
democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law.
Such a system "does not represent the will of the international community," according to the
Chinese.
We throw this statement into spectroscope to check if there is any weasel content, phrases
that sound nice but are capacious enough to cover not so nice meaning. Would it be even
better if the much tutted "international order" was not BASED on principles, rather than
GUIDED BY principles, and even weaker, GENERALLY GUIDED? Going further on that path we can be
INSPIRED by principles, GENERALLY INSPIRED, and then we can make a bold step to VAGELY
INSPIRED. Going further, OCCASIONALLY VAGUELY INSPIRED.
Not ashamed to manipulate stuff from CCTV about migrant work in Xinjiang into "forced
labour" and "BBC findings". Typical for western "journalists" in China, mostly sitting in
their apartments quaffing cheap liquor or going to the .. erm barber shops for a da feiji
(打飞机) ..
I will bring up a "human right" that rarely is discussed in the MSM: the right to relieve
one's bladder & bowels when traveling in public places. In many cities in the U.S., there
are NO public restrooms, not even in the railway stations and bus depots! Oh, sure -- all the
airports have them because they cater to the well heeled.
Here in the two biggest California cities SF and LA, one has to find a restaurant (good
luck during the pandemic) or supermarket or else a secluded spot. I live next to an alley
where the homeless people frequently dump, and we the neighbors have to clean it up because
the city won't bother.
The authorities claim that setting out Porta-potties can't be done because homeless
addicts would use them. WTF -- those people would do drugs in their own place if they had
one. But this isn't just an issue about homelessness, which is an enormous violation of human
rights in itself, but more broadly one of DECENCY that barely exists in this society.
The authorities claim that setting out Porta-potties can't be done because homeless addicts
would use them. WTF -- those people would do drugs in their own place if they had one. But
this isn't just an issue about homelessness, which is an enormous violation of human rights
in itself, but more broadly one of DECENCY that barely exists in this society.
CHOLERA is gonna get ya.
It is sad but what has happened to the USA through neoliberal economic rules based society
is the abdication of memory and learning over centuries.
There will be probably a long period of gradual decline of the USA empire and dismateling
of various aspects of neoliberalim in countires all over the globe.
It's evident that the "new world order" China wants is nothing more than respect for a
multipolar world and the international institutions in place meant to service this world.
The US has become accustomed to the notion that it is the "world" and that American
interests are everybody's interests even when America's interests harm their interests,
whether economic(Germany's Nordstream 2 or Japan's trade with China) or security(the DPRK-ROK
situation can never be resolved as long as the US interferes as a biased 3rd party) or even
humanitarian(see: Palestine, Libya, Syria, Yemen etc).
The pawns of the US empire will go on diatribes to basically outline a framework where
America is the end-all, be-all. Human rights, according to racist America. International
peace, according to militarist America. Fighting poverty, according to capitalist
America.
The only question for me has always been whether the blob of experts, advisors, and
government officials are maliciously pursuing this kind of global trolling or whether they're
actual believers of the delusion of American Exceptionalism. And the reason would be because
the latter are far more likely to cause exceptional suffering and destruction on their moral
crusade due to their arrogance in their fundamental "superiority".
If pride comes before the fall, the US is peaking in its arrogance and there's few likely
outcomes that don't lead to worse conditions.
The real question is not about his neocon delusions, which are pretty predictable, but about
the ability for the USA project global dominance in the decade to come.
Blinken is a marionette. And pretty much second rate even in that.
Notable quotes:
"... Let's consider this headline for a moment: "Blinken Accuses China of Trying to Undermine US-Dominated World Order." Blinken provides us with a definition of that "world order" in his own words cited in the article: "'... preserve the rules-based international order, in which we have all invested so much over the past 75 years , and which has served our interests and values well'." [My Emphasis] ..."
Let's consider
this headline for a moment: "Blinken Accuses China of Trying to Undermine US-Dominated
World Order." Blinken provides us with a definition of that "world order" in his own words
cited in the article: "'... preserve the rules-based international order, in which we have
all invested so much over the past 75 years , and which has served our interests and
values well'." [My Emphasis]
Clearly, he's referring to the rules put in place by the UN Charter. But as we at this bar
all know, it's the Outlaw US Empire for whom Blinken works that's the #1 criminal when it
comes to violating the UN Charter which is why it's "served our interests and values
well."
Now when we turn to reality, it become very clear that China seeks to uphold the UN
Charter--it's one of the foundational members of the newly established Friends of the UN
Charter Group that the Outlaw US Empire will certainly snub because of the reality of its
actual relations to that Act and Organization .
Indeed, what is being said by the very formation of that Group is a big NO!! to the
Outlaw US Empire's attempt to say it abides by the system it's continuously violated for the
past 75+ years. Yet, it's also clear that NO!! isn't being shouted out by global media
enough, particularly when Outlaw US Empire officials give such an excellent opportunity to be
rebuffed and ridiculed for their lies.
We have many good writers here who could take Blinken's words and turn them into an
indictment of himself and the nation he represents. That implies that writers for global
publications are just as good but need to examine the framing of their articles. Peace won't
come to our planet unless the Outlaw Bully Nation is daily accused for what it is and
does.
NATO is a distinct minority yet it holds the world captive in a terroristic manner. It's
well past time to stop groveling and kow-towing and to stand-up and call out the bullshitters
for what they are since being nice isn't getting us anywhere.
The "Russia question" appears to have surfaced in response to a March 16 US
intelligence
community assessment
that "Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted,
influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden's candidacy, and the Democratic Party."
The 15-page public document is fluff. We heard it all before in December 2020, when fifty former intelligence officials
denounced news reports of Hunter Biden's corrupt ties to Ukrainian oligarchs as Russian disinformation.
The
New
York Post
claimed to have gotten hold of a laptop with smoking-gun emails to and from Biden's son. The voters never were
allowed to consider the evidence, because the rest of the media suppressed the report and Twitter blocked reposting of the
Post
expose.
In a December 4 column, I called this the "
Treason
of the spooks
."
By way of tying up loose ends, the intelligence community has now delivered an "assessment" claiming that "a key element of
Moscow's strategy was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives -- including misleading or
unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden -- through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US
individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration."
Those are weasel words. The Post published the text of Hunter Biden emails that, strictly speaking, were "unsubstantiated" to
the extent that the geek squad had not proven their provenance and the younger Biden hadn't owned up to their authenticity.
But that does not prove they were false, much less justify employing extraordinary means to suppress the reports.
Source:
New York Post
Apart from Biden's ABC interview, the nomination of Victoria Nuland as undersecretary of state for political affairs has sent
an unmistakable signal to Moscow and, more importantly, to America's European allies.
In early 2014 Nuland was taped on a cell phone call with America's ambassador to the Ukraine ordering the composition of the
next Ukrainian government after the Maidan coup, in the tone of a colonial viceroy.
Told that there might be
some difficulties, Nuland explained that the UN was being enlisted in support and said, "That would be great, I think, and
help glue this thing." She added, "And, you know,
fuck
the EU."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the time denounced the remark as "unacceptable." That sort of faux pas
normally would rate being assigned a diplomatic mission to the South Pole, but such is Washington's ideological fervor that
Nuland survived and resurfaced.
Nuland is a neoconservative, a former deputy national security adviser to then-vice president Dick Cheney, as well as the
spouse of Robert Kagan, one of the most persistent advocates of global transformation via the projection of American power.
"... It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been relying on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is. ..."
"... It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been relying on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is. ..."
“ I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none.”
It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that
capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been relying
on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is.
The truth is we have no way to know what underlies our "reality", if anything. We don't have
the tools, the senses, yet. At the limits everything dissolves into probability mush, or the
lack of time for anything to get from there to here at the speed of light, or complexity we
have no way to impose order on.
If they want to go live in the computer, I say good riddance.
@ maahaa | Mar 24 2021 17:46 utc | 5:
“ I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find
none.”
It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that
capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been
relying on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is.
The truth is we have no way to know what underlies our "reality", if anything. We don't
have the tools, the senses, yet. At the limits everything dissolves into probability mush, or
the lack of time for anything to get from there to here at the speed of light, or complexity
we have no way to impose order on.
If they want to go live in the computer, I say good riddance.
"... It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been relying on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is. ..."
"... It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been relying on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is. ..."
"High-profile proponents of what's known as the "simulation hypothesis" include SpaceX
chief Elon Musk, who recently expounded on the idea during an interview for a popular
podcast.
"If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable
from reality," Musk said before concluding, "We're most likely in a simulation."
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson agrees, giving "better than 50 -- 50 odds" that the
simulation hypothesis is correct. " I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I
can find none."
I guess that is one way for Musk to avoid the guilt over those people his coup in Bolivia
killed. They didn't really die because it is all just make-believe; a simulation.
“ I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none.”
It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that
capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been relying
on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is.
The truth is we have no way to know what underlies our "reality", if anything. We don't have
the tools, the senses, yet. At the limits everything dissolves into probability mush, or the
lack of time for anything to get from there to here at the speed of light, or complexity we
have no way to impose order on.
If they want to go live in the computer, I say good riddance.
@ maahaa | Mar 24 2021 17:46 utc | 5:
“ I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find
none.”
It is natural for bullshitters to think the world runs on bullshit. In a away, that
capsulizes the entire problem that the US' establishment is having now. They have been
relying on bullshit for so long that they think that's all there is.
The truth is we have no way to know what underlies our "reality", if anything. We don't
have the tools, the senses, yet. At the limits everything dissolves into probability mush, or
the lack of time for anything to get from there to here at the speed of light, or complexity
we have no way to impose order on.
If they want to go live in the computer, I say good riddance.
According to the Austfailian media, it was a triumph. I kid you not. They will lie and lie
and lie again about Biden's dementia, until the bitter end, and at his stage, once the meds
lose their effectiveness, the end can come quickly. Perhaps he'll rip off his nappy and fling
faeces at the fawning presstitutes. Dream on. Or, as in the comedy, Bidet will mutter 'I'm
going to the toilet. I mean, I'm going to the toilet NOW!'.
Even before the targets in Yemen had been "legally" designated as
a Foreign Terrorist Organization Obama used cluster bombs to shred
dozens of women and children in a failed attempt to hit members of
"al Qaida in Yemen (AQY)".
.
The war crime immediately became a dirty Obama secret, covered up
with the help of the MSM, in particular ABC.
.
An enthusiastic White House had leaked to their contacts at ABC that
Obama had escalated the War on Terror, taking it to another country,
Yemen. This was December 17, 2009 only days after Obama had returned
from his ceremony in Oslo where he proudly accepted the Nobel Peace
Prize.
.
ABC was thrilled with their scoop and in manly voices announced
the escalation in the War on Terror.
.
The very next day ABC went silent forever about it, joining the cover up
of a war crime.
.
Hillary Clinton, by the way, committed her own act of cover up.
Covering her butt by backdating a memo.
.
The designation of a organization as a FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organization)
is not official nor legal until it is published in the Federal Register.
An oversight? Obama attacked Yemen before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
had done the paperwork to make the killing legal?
.
The designation was not published until a month later, January 19, 2010.
Hillary Clinton back dated the memo she published in the Register with the date of
December 14, 2009, to somewhat cover her butt.
.
Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize was December 10th.
.
Yemen leaders agreed to participate in Obama's coverup saying it was their
own Yemen forces that had accidentally shredded dozens of women and children.
.
Obama was grateful to the Yemen leaders. The Yemen leaders were not
honored in Oslo. But, ironically, Obama ended his speech honoring women
and children, days before he ordered their slaughter.
.
Obama in Oslo, December 10, 2009:
.
"Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty
still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what
few coins she has to send that child to school -- because she
believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's
dreams.
.
Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will
always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the
intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed,
we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.
We can do that -- for that is the story of human progress; that's the
.
hope
.
of all the world; and at this moment of challenge,
that must be our work here on Earth.
.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
.
One week later Obama shredded dozens of women and children in Yemen
and covered it up.
.
Here is ABC's Brian Ross using his most masculine voice to boast about Obama's attack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHcg3TNSRPs
.
Wikileaks cable corroborates evidence of US airstrikes in Yemen (Amnesty Intl)
https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-corroborates-evidence-us-airstrikes-yemen/
.
Actual cable at Wikileaks: https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10SANAA4_a.html
.
More at ABC [12/18/2009]: https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236 https://web.archive.org/web/20190624203826/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236
">https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236">https://web.archive.org/web/20190624203826/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236 https://web.archive.org/web/20190725171012/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr
">https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr">https://web.archive.org/web/20190725171012/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr
To go back to a previous BTL discussion on Patrick Cockburns recent article in
Counterpunch, Bidens missteps so early on are a very worrying indicator that his foreign
policy team is worse than just being malign. They are incompetent. Thats a very dangerous
combination.
I don't think the Russians, Chinese, or most other major countries (apart from Europe) had
a fundamental problem with Trumps approach. They understood him, and were quite happy to
ignore his bombast and threats and focus instead on what was happening in the real world. But
things are different for someone like Biden, and I'm very surprised nobody in his team seem
to realise this. When he talks on the record, its assumed that it is a reflection of a real
policy. At first, I thought maybe he was just doing the usual new guy in power thing of
talking tough to set the ground for later compromises (the opposite of Obama, who appeared
very weak to other leaders, and then just looked indecisive when his policies turned more
hardline). But that does not seem to be the case so far.
I've no idea what the final outcome will be, but I do think that this is one of those
points in history where things take a very sharp and irreparable change in direction.
Obviously, things have been brewing for years, but the ineptness of US foreign policy seems
to have created a strategic Russian/China alliance which will force many countries to make
some very hard choices about which side of the fence they are on.
On a related note, I woke up this morning to find that a speech by Lawrence P. Wilkerson,
who is associated with the conservative paleoconservatives is getting very wide circulation
in China (you know this has to be officially approved otherwise it disappears very rapidly on
WeChat. He makes a claim that the CIA back in the early '00's intended to use the Uigurs as a
sort of proxy army to destabilise China. For all sorts of reasons, I would doubt that, but it
is now widely believed among Chinese people, even those who have no liking for the CCP. The
notion that the Uigurs are a sort of third force within China, and as such need to be
destroyed now seems to be very deeply embedded in Chinese thinking, and the interference by
'official' western NGO's are undoubtedly making things much worse for them.
"[Wilkerson] makes a claim that the CIA back in the early '00's intended to use the Uigurs
as a sort of proxy army to destabilise China. For all sorts of reasons, I would doubt that,
but it is now widely believed among Chinese people, even those who have no liking for the
CCP."
Just curious as to what your reasons would be for doubting this. The CIA has been doing
precisely this all over the world for over 70 years. There is a clear pipeline between the
Uighurs in China and the CIA-supported "rebels" in Syria. The expatriate Uighur organizations
that are integral to the Western propaganda apparatus is supported and amplified by the NED
and other CIA fronts, as your last sentence implies. This is not to deny the historical
Uighur desire for autonomy in Western China, nor to defend Chinese policies toward them.
Rather, it is to acknowledge the CIA's use of ethnic tensions to sow chaos and division in
non-conforming nations *everywhere*.
1. The US has had little to no success in its many attempts to establish an intelligence
foothold in China. There is zero evidence, direct or indirect, that it has had any successful
contact with Uigur groups directly, although contacts via others, such as the Pakistani or
Turkish intelligence agencies are possible. If there was even the tiniest amount of evidence
of such a link, the Chinese would be broadcasting it from the skies, and not just
re-messaging out tired CT stuff. Chinese intelligence is far ahead of the US in that region,
so they would certainly know if something like that was happening.
2. Uigur groups in general such as we know about them tend to be as virulently anti
Western as anti Han Chinese. All evidence suggests that the brand of Islam that has been
belatedly introduced into those regions is essentially second hand Wahhabism (traditionally,
they were never all that religious).
3. Any such attempt could be easily countered by China – simply by dumping Uigur
radicals into Afghanistan to bolster the Taliban, or anywhere else that would create trouble.
The fact that they haven't done this strongly suggests that the Chinese themselves see no
link.
4. US military intelligence is often a misnomer, but even the CIA can't be stupid enough
to think that fostering another islamic state on the borders of Afghanistan is anything but a
terrible idea.
Of course, no doubt some mid ranking CIA officer may have circulated some report saying
more or less 'hey, maybe we can use those Uighurs or whatever they are called'. But thats an
entirely different thing from suggesting that there have been active links and a strategy for
using them to destabilise the borders of China. The reality is that the US has been entirely
unsuccessful in any attempts (when they've been made) to undermine China via internal Chinese
ethnic or religious groups.
Incidentally, the reliability of Wilkerson (who I actually quite like and who says some
interesting things), on that topic can be measured by his statement that the invasion of
Afghanistan was motivated by an attempt to stop the Belt and Road Initiative. It's quite
impressive intelligence if that was the case as the invasion predated the Belt and Road
Initiative by more than a decade.
Yes, I think the important point is your last one. It's not out of the question that on a
rainy afternoon in Virginia some junior CIA analyst amused himself by sketching out such an
idea, and one day the product may leak and be presented as "proof." But for the reasons you
give, the political leaders who would have to approve the scheme would turn it down, even if
it were physically possible. I doubt it would be, actually: from what little information is
publicly available, the US seems to be having little or no luck penetrating that area.
Thanks for the systematic reply. I appreciate each of your points, and pretty much agree
with the first one – including your comment about Turkish intelligence. But regarding
the others, the fact that we are talking about anti-Western Wahabist radicals does not mean
the CIA (or elements of the CIA or other military/intelligence operations) would hesitate to
weaponize them if possible. We did this in Afghanistan, Bosina, Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Libya,
Chechnya etc. Indeed, we seemed to *welcome* the fostering of an Islamic State in Eastern
Syria, because the various jihadists were a means to destroy the Syrian government. When the
goal is to foster chaos and destruction in order to *undermine* an existing state, the
calculus of unleashing the head-choppers is different than if we were actually interested in
fostering stability in the region. I admit that such a strategy might sound insane to *us*,
but Einstein's definition of insanity seems to rule our National Security Establishment.
Not PK, but I would suggest these cases are not only different from each other, but also
different from the Uigurs. Essentially, there was a war going on in all of these cases, and
the US (and they were scarcely the only ones) decided to try to get a bit of influence by
arming one or more of the factions. This is a tactic which is as old as arms themselves, and
has a pretty spotty record of success, if that. Its advantage is that it is low-key and
doesn't require a massive presence (the classic case is the Soviet Union and the Chinese
flooding Africa with AK-47s and copies in the 1960s and 1970s). But the cases you mention are
very disparate. In Bosnia there do seem to have been some (illegal) CIA deliveries to the
Muslims in violation of the embargo, but these were very small scale and in any event the
Muslims were one of the major parties to the conflict, as well as constituting the de facto
government in Sarajevo, because the other ethnicities had withdrawn. Likewise, and in spite
of preening memoirs and films, the US influence in Afghanistan was quite small : the
mujahideen were already forming in the 1970s, and the only contribution the US really made
was to supply anti-aircraft missiles, which complicated the Russians' existence quite a bit.
But actually fomenting and arming an insurgency next to one of the three or four major powers
on the planet, with highly skilled intelligence services? There is stupidity and there's
downright insanity.
I the 1950s, the CIA and MI6 trained and armed the "Forest Brothers" in the Baltics.
Neutral Sweden and Finland were across hundreds of km of water. Land access was through
Soviet territory or satellites. There was no significant international trade or commerce in
the area at the time. Yet they had tens of thousands of well supplied (for that era)
resistance fighters that took a decade for the USSR to stomp out.
To suggest that today's CIA is incapable of stirring things up in a well-connected
Xinjiang when thousands of foreigners travel there, tons of business shipments and
international flights and road transport is a mystifying statement. Particularly after CIA's
decades of experience managing jihadis all across North Africa, Mideast and Central Asia,
more than a few being Uigurs.
And suggesting that the only thing the US supplied the Afghan jihadis were Stinger
missiles is far off the mark. It was a multi-billion dollar per year operation conducted by
the US with collaboration of the ISI and Saudis. All those tens of thousands of jihadis
didn't arrive by camels and make slingshots.
I agree "There is stupidity and there's downright insanity" in fomenting troubles in
Xinjiang. The US has already passed that test. Many times.
We are three generations past the 1950s. Not a relevant example.
The US is not even remotely as good as you'd have to believe to accept this theory. For
starters, we don't begin to have enough people with native level language competence, much
the less willing to live there long enough to be trusted. They'll take our arms, but our
directives?
It is in the interest of the CIA to take credit for all sorts of things where their role
was non-existent to marginal because funding.
I can't claim any great knowledge or insight into the region, but the notion that the
Uighurs were part of a grand CIA strategy, or that they have had sufficient influence in the
region to manipulate them into opposing China, just doesn't pass the smell test.
Unfortunately, like the notion that Covid is spread on frozen food, so far as I can tell it
is now considered 'a fact' by most Chinese, inside and outside the country. As a result, even
Chinese who strongly dislike their government are not at all bothered by reports coming out
of the region.
For what its worth, I knew an English guy who lived for a few years in Urumqi with his
Chinese wife about 15 years ago. He was virulently anti-muslim and didn't much like the
non-Chinese locals he met, but I remember at the time that said that what he saw around him
convinced him that things were going to end very badly for the Uighurs, the Chinese were just
waiting for the opportunity to wipe them out. I was in Tibet at that period (I was fortunate
to get a visa on the last year solo traveller were allowed in) and witnessed the way Tibetans
were openly abused on the street by Chinese soldiers. Even Tibetans said that the Uighurs got
it worse.
The US government and privately motivated US citizens have no credibility on this issue.
That means if anyone is going to raise it, it will have to be someone other than America or
Americans.
That doesn't change the fact of Great Han Lebensraum genocide-policy against the Uighurs
on the part of the Chinese Communazi Party. And Chinese statements about their Lebensraum
genocide against Uighuria are just as much hasbara as Israeli statements about
antiPalestinianitic persecution in the Occupied West Bank.
And if that purely-private opinion of a mere U S citizen makes any Great Han hasbarists (
or might I say . . . Hansbarists) on this thread mad, then that makes me happy.
Your friend was English; I have not seen this attitude on the part of Chinese friends or
Chinese I've talked with. I was traveling on a domestic flight in China a number of years ago
and found myself sitting on a plane next to a random Chinese soldier -- a memorably tall,
handsome young man. He spoke English well enough to have a discussion (the relaxed atmosphere
and the need to pass the time does wonders when it comes to breaking down language barriers).
Major Uighur terror attacks and unrest had been in the news (around 2009), so I asked him
what he thought about it. He said that he grew up in Xinjiang. His parents were Han Chinese
who had first come to Xinjiang during the cultural revolution to build some local
infrastructure/improvement project (he described it to me but I don't remember the details).
They saw their goal as improving conditions in the region. Of course, the government wanted
to solidify Chinese presence in that region of their country, but I heard no hint of anger or
derision toward the Uighur. He said he was very concerned that the Uighur people were happy
and he hoped China could find a way to mend the relationship. He said that growing up, there
were many mixed Chinese/Han marriages and that "people say" that mixed Han/Uighur marriages
produced the most physically beautiful children. I didn't see any evidence of the malignant
racism you describe on the part of your English friend.
Strong central governments vs violent separatist movements tend to create lasting
problems. Growing up in a border state over 100 years after our own civil war, I grew up with
the fact that many people had still not let go of that resentment. Southerners still
maintained a sense of grievance back then. The Maryland state song that I learned as a child
is only now being decommissioned by the state legislature. One stanza refers to the "Northern
scum".
This week's WaPo headline: "Maryland poised to say goodbye to state song that celebrates
the Confederacy".
If your Han Chinese interlocutor's feelings are widely shared among the ruled-over rather
than ruling-over ordinary majority of Han citizens, then it would appear that it is the
MonoParty RegimeGovernment ruling over China which is Communazi, not the people as such.
Regardless, it will be up to countrygovs which have moral standing in this area to comment
or not, not the US anymore. At least for now.
Probably the Uighurs have it even worse than Tibetans because Uighuria is very inhabitable
by Han settlers whereas Tibet is high and dry enough that ( I have read), that
lowland-adapted Hans have trouble physically coping over time with the lower oxygen levels at
Tibet altitude.
If that is so, then the High Tibetan Plateau at least would not provide Lebensraum for
millions of Han Settlers in any case, so why clear the Tibetans off the plateau and out of
existence? Not so much need, in Tibet's case.
@PlutoniumKun
I have no knowledge about points 1 to 3, but totally disagree with point 4.
The hubris and desire of the US alphabet agencies to meddle is remarkable. A current example
is the CIA support of jihadis in Syria that the US military itself is fighting against.
Interesting caution re Wilkerson – do you have a link?
Here is a link to an article talking about that talk PK. Having a coupla thousand Uygurs
in Syria gaining combat experience for use later who knows where was probably proof enough
for China of western intentions. Just think of the other Jihadists who have been used in
places like Libya and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the Chinese would be drawing their
own conclusions-
The Great Commission to Uplift the American Negro is a long-running national project that
goes back at least to the 1850s. It's recurred in cycles that always eventually founder,
creating at best a "talented tenth"-type elite and leaving the great mass of the black
underclass where they are or worse.
It can only continue to the extent that it does because of willful ahistoriocity on the
part of its adherents, at least with respect to past cycles.
As our esteemed host has pointed out time and again, liberals are forbidden to know of any
history relevant to blacks prior to the 21st century other than slavery, Jim Crow, redlining,
and Emmett Till.
Why crime rises and falls is a devilishly complicated question.
In journalism, always a blaring alarm that a thumb-sucking pile of BS is about to follow.
In fact, insert anything you want in front of "is a complicated question." But crime in
particular is not complicated to explain. It's just unpleasant and embarrassing to face up
to.
The George Floyd incident is illustrative. Police were not being brutal or confrontational
when they approached Floyd. Floyd escalated the situation by refusing to comply with simple
instructions. This is at the root of almost all police/public confrontations.
Police are required to investigate a violation of the law. If you hinder that
investigation, physically resist or flee things go south. They can't just let you go if they
believe you did something illegal. Had Floyd cooperated he would have likely ended up with a
misdemeanor charge of passing a counterfeit bill,booked at the jail and bonded out in a
couple of hours.
Underclass negroes simply refuse to take the easy way out believing they can talk ( lie )
their way out of a situation of their own making or, failing that, flee and everybody will
just forget about it.
Stefani
Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This story is part of a group of stories called
Finding the best ways to do good.
One of the greatest challenges facing democratic societies in the 21st century is the loss of faith in public
institutions.
The internet has been a marvelous invention in lots of ways, but it has also unleashed a tsunami of misinformation and
destabilized political systems across the globe. Martin Gurri, a former media analyst at the CIA and the author of the
2014 book
The
Revolt of the Public
, was way ahead of the curve on this problem.
Gurri spent years surveying the global information landscape. Around the turn of the century, he noticed a trend: As the
internet gave rise to an explosion of information, there was a concurrent spike in political instability. The reason, he
surmised, was that governments lost their monopoly on information and with it their ability to control the public
conversation.
One of the many consequences of this is what Gurri calls a "crisis of authority." As people were exposed to more
information, their trust in major institutions -- like the government or newspapers -- began to collapse.
Gurri's book became something of a cult favorite among Silicon Valley types when it was released and its insights have
only become more salient since. Indeed,
I've
been thinking more and more about his thesis in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the
assault
on the US Capitol
on January 6. There are lots of reasons why the insurrection happened, but one of them is the
reality that millions of Americans believed -- really believed -- that the presidential election was stolen, despite a
complete lack of evidence. A Politico poll conducted shortly after the election found that
70
percent
of Republicans thought the election was fraudulent.
That's what a "crisis of authority" looks like in the real world.
And it's crucial to distinguish this crisis from what's often called the "epistemic crisis" or the "post-truth" problem.
If Gurri's right, the issue isn't just
that
truth suddenly became less important; it's that people stopped believing in the institutions charged with communicating
the truth. To put it a little differently, the gatekeeping institutions lost their power to decide what passes as truth
in the mind of the public.
I reached out to Gurri to explore the implications of his thesis. We talk about what it means for our society if
millions of people reject every claim that comes from a mainstream institution, why a
phenomenon
like QAnon
is fundamentally a "pose of rejection," and why he thinks we'll have to "reconfigure" our democratic
institutions for the digital world we now inhabit.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Have elites -- politicians, corporate actors, media and cultural elites --
lost
control of the world?
Martin Gurri
Yes and no. It's a wishy-washy answer, but it's a reality.
They would have completely lost control of the world if the public in revolt had a clear program or an organization or
leadership. If they were more like the Bolsheviks and less like QAnon, they'd take over the Capitol building. They'd
start passing laws. They would topple the regime.
But what we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites who have lost control
to the degree that they can't hoist these utopian promises upon us anymore because no one believes it, but they're still
acting like zombie elites in zombie institutions. They still have power. They can still take us to war. They can still
throw the police out there, and the police could shoot us, but they have no authority or legitimacy. They're stumbling
around like zombies.
Sean Illing
You like to say that governments have lost the ability to dictate the stories a society tells about itself, mostly
because the media environment is too fragmented. Why is that so significant?
Martin Gurri
When you analyze the institutions that we have inherited from the 20th century, you find that they are very top-down,
like pyramids. And the legitimacy of that model absolutely depends on having a semi-monopoly over information in every
domain, which they had in the 20th century. There was no internet and there was a fairly limited number of information
sources for the public. So our ruling institutions had authority because they had a very valuable commodity:
information.
So I was an analyst at the CIA looking around the world at open information, at the global media. And I can tell you, it
was like a trickle compared to today. If a president, here or somewhere else, was giving a speech, the coverage of it
was confined to major outlets or television stations. But when the tsunami of information hit around the turn of the
century, the legitimacy of that model instantly went into crisis because you now had the opposite effect. You had an
overabundance of information, and that created a lot of confusion and anarchy.
Sean Illing
I'm curious how you weigh the significance of material factors in this story. It's not just that there's more
information, we've also seen a litany of failures in the 21st century -- from Hurricane Katrina to the forever wars to
the financial crisis and on and on. Basically, a decade of institutions failing and misleading citizens, in addition to
the deepening inequality, the deaths of despair, the fact that this generation of Americans is doing materially worse
than previous ones.
How big a role has this backdrop of failures played in the collapse of trust?
Martin Gurri
I would say that what matters is less the material factors you mention than the public's perception of these factors.
Empirically, under nearly every measure, we are better off today than in the 20th century, yet the public is much
angrier and more distrustful of government institutions and the elites who manage them. That difference in perception
arises directly from the radical changes in the information landscape between the last century and our own.
With few exceptions, most market democracies have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. But the public has not
recovered from the shock of watching supposed experts and politicians, the people who posed as the wise pilots of our
prosperity, sound and act totally clueless while the economy burned. In the past, when the elites controlled the flow of
information, the financial collapse might have been portrayed as a sort of natural disaster, a tragedy we should unify
around our leadership to overcome. By 2008, that was already impossible. The networked public perceived the crisis
(rightly, I think) as a failure of government and of the expert elites.
It should be a truism that material conditions matter much less than expectations. That was true during the Great
Depression and it's true today. The rhetoric of the rant on the web feeds off extreme expectations -- any imperfection in
the economy will be treated as a crisis and a true crisis will be seen as the Apocalypse.
Take the example of Chile. For 40 years, it had high economic growth, rising into the ranks of the wealthiest nations.
During this time, Chile enjoyed a healthy democracy, in which political parties of left and right alternated in office.
Everyone benefited. Yet in 2019, with many deaths and much material destruction, the Chilean public took to the streets
in revolt against the established order. Its material expectations had been deeply frustrated, despite the country's
economic and political successes.
Sean Illing
Just to be clear, when you talk about this "tsunami" of information in the digital age, you're not talking about more
truth, right?
Martin Gurri
As
Nassim
Taleb
pointed out, when you have a gigantic explosion of information, what's exploding is noise, not signal, so
there's that.
As for truth, that's a tricky subject, because a lot of elites believe, and a lot of people believe, that truth is some
kind of Platonic form. We can't see it, but we know it's there. And often we know it because the science says so.
But that's not really how truth works. Truth is essentially an act of trust, an act of faith in some authority that is
telling you something that you could not possibly come to realize yourself. What's a
quark
?
You believe that there are quarks in the universe, probably because you've been told by people who probably know what
they're talking about that there are quarks. You believe the physicists. But you've never seen a quark. I've never seen
a quark. We accept this as truth because we've accepted the authority of the people who told us it's true.
Sean Illing
I'm starting to hate the phrase
"post-truth"
because
it implies there was some period in which we lived in truth or in which truth was predominant. But that's misleading.
The difference is that elite gatekeeping institutions can't place borders on the public conversation and that means
they've lost the ability to determine what passes as truth, so now we're in the Wild West.
Martin Gurri
That's a very good way to put it. I would say, though, that there was a shining moment when we all had truth. They are
correct about that. If truth is really a function of authority, and if in the 20th century these institutions really had
authority, then we did have something like truth. But if we had the information back then that we have today, if we had
all the noise that we have today, nothing would've seemed quite as true because we would've lacked faith in the
institutions that tried to tell us.
Sean Illing
What does it mean for our society if an "official narrative" isn't possible? Because that's where we're at, right?
Millions of people will never believe any story or account that comes from the government or a mainstream institution.
Martin Gurri
As long as our institutions remain as they are, nothing much will change. What that means is more of the same -- more
instability, more turbulence, more conspiracy theories, more distrust of authorities. But there's no iron law of history
that says we have to keep these institutions the way they are. Many of our institutions were built around the turn of
the 20th century. They weren't that egalitarian or democratic. They were like great, big pyramids.
But we can take our constitutional framework and reconfigure it. We've done it once already, and we could do it again
with the digital realm in mind, understanding the distance we once had between those in power and ordinary citizens is
gone forever. It's just gone. So we need people in power who are comfortable in proximity to the public, which many of
our elites are not.
Sean Illing
I do want to at least point to an apparent paradox here. As you've said, because of the internet, there are now more
voices and more perspectives than ever before, and yet at the same time there's a massive "herding effect," as a result
of which we have more people talking about fewer subjects. And that partly explains how you get millions of people
converging on something like QAnon.
Martin Gurri
Yeah, and that's very mysterious to me. I would not have expected that outcome. I thought we were headed to ever more
dispersed information islands and that that would create a fragmentation in individual beliefs. But instead, I've
noticed a trend toward conformism and a crystallizing of very few topics. Some of this is just an unwillingness to say
certain things because you know if you said them, the internet was going to come after you.
But I think Trump had a lot to do with it. The amount of attention he got was absolutely unprecedented. Everything was
about him. People were either against him or for him, but he was always the subject. Then came the pandemic and he
simply lost the capacity to absorb and manipulate attention. The pandemic just moved him completely off-kilter. He never
recovered.
Sean Illing
But we're in a situation in which ideas, whether it's QAnon stuff or anything else, are getting more hollow and more
viral at the same time -- and that seems really bad moving forward.
Martin Gurri
I'm not quite that pessimistic. You can find all kinds of wonderful stuff being written about practically every aspect
of society today by people who are seeing things clearly and sanely. But yeah, they're surrounded by a mountain of viral
crap. And yet we're in the early days of this transformation. We have no idea how this is going to play out.
There has always been a lot of viral crap going around, and there have always been people who believe crazy stuff,
particularly crazy stuff that doesn't impact their immediate lives. Flat earthers still get on airplanes, right? If
you're a flat earther, you're not a flat earther enough to not get in an airplane and disrupt your personal life. It's
not really a belief, it's basically giving the finger to the establishment.
Sean Illing
It's a pose.
Martin Gurri
Yeah, it's a pose of rejection. QAnon is a pose of rejection. There are very many flavors of it, but what they have in
common is they're saying all these ideas you have and all the facts you're cramming in my face -- it's all a prop for the
powerful and I'm rejecting it.
Sean Illing
It's an important point because a lot of us treat QAnon like it's some kind of epistemological problem, but it's not
really that at all. It's actually much more difficult than that. And even if we set aside QAnon, the fact that the vast
majority of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was fraudulent speaks to the breadth of the problem.
Martin Gurri
Right, it's a problem of authority. When people don't trust those charged with conveying the truth, they won't accept
it. And at some point, like I said, we'll have to reconfigure our democracy. Our politicians and institutions are going
to have to adjust to the new world in which the public can't be walled off or controlled. Leaders can't stand at the top
of pyramids anymore and talk down to people. The digital revolution flattened everything. We've got to accept that.
I really do have hope that this will happen. The boomers who grew up in the old world and can't move beyond it are going
to die out, and younger people are going to take their place. That will raise other questions and challenges, of course,
but there will be a changing of the guard and we should welcome it.
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The West is declining because the elite production system has failed. The worst type of
mediocre grinders are pulling the levers of power. The plebes are revolting because
immigration, taxes, inflation and the tenuous over-complication of society (fragility) has
positioned a great deal of people in precarious positions. Might as well loot Target.
I don't agree with it. Violence is the inverse of the type of impulse control necessary
for a functioning society.
But impulse control is gone from our overlords as well. So long noblesse oblige. The
plebes loot Target while the gentry loots the treasury. Race blindness is a courtesy for
civilized people. Ignore the social implications because the enemy has no race. They are
global elites with no homes and no loyalty. They may not be sending their best but our worst
are sending out the invitations.
We can't go on ignoring the class violence hollowing out the West. The elites today are
actively trying to make everyone poorer. Not themselves, obviously. How is that going to
induce cops out of the donut shops? The culture wars are making me a retarded Marxist.
Marxist in the class conflict sense. Retarded in the spergy libertarian view that economics
and politics are intertwined to create the type of society that, as Menken says, we deserve
good and hard.
It is always helpful to remember the words of "Arthur Jensen": "You are an old man who
thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are
no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only
one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate,
multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks,
rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which
determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things
today."
"... Apparently Biden was either too senile or too inherently stupid to realize what gangrenous filth the subhuman Clintonite scum Stephanopoulis is, was and always will be. And put his stupid senile foot into Stephanopoulis's clever little bear trap. ..."
"... Pretty sure this was exactly the message Biden's people wanted to send, whether because they really think this sort of thing will "work" on the world stage or because they've gunned up the Russia nonsense so hyperbolically for so long that their domestic audience now demands it. ..."
Apparently Biden was either too senile or too inherently stupid to realize what gangrenous
filth the subhuman Clintonite scum Stephanopoulis is, was and always will be. And put his
stupid senile foot into Stephanopoulis's clever little bear trap.
Well, those are hardly trick questions or subtle ones. And Biden temporizes perfectly well
when he wants to. He didn't want to. I'd be mildly surprised if he hadn't been told to expect
these particular questions. Stephanopolous has form for lobbing cooperative softballs at the
right sort of democrats.
Pretty sure this was exactly the message Biden's people wanted to send, whether because
they really think this sort of thing will "work" on the world stage or because they've gunned
up the Russia nonsense so hyperbolically for so long that their domestic audience now demands
it.
If your interpretation of "what Stephie-poo was thinking" and what Biden was expecting are
correct, then Biden is indeed the same sort of Clintonite filth that Stephanopoulous himself
is.
And that would be very unfortunate. It means that Biden is just as war-risky with Russia
as Clinton would have been. And yes, the massed millions of "Putin stole the election" Pink
Kitty Kap Klintonites want, need and demand this sort of agitprop. They and their precious
spokes-creeps like that anti-Russianitic MSNBC news show hostess whose name I absolutely
cannot remember just now.
And do you remember who her mentor was? Roger Aisles. Yeah, him. And after an extensive
education, including a Rhodes scholarship, she sells her integrity out on her program for
about $30,000 a day now-
Maybe she never had any integrity to begin with. Maybe she was always and only about
working the media rackets, just like her reciprocal one-schtik-phoney opposite number Tucker
Carlson over at Fox.
Let's start with comic relief: the "leader of the free world" has pledged to prevent China
from becoming the "leading" nation on the planet. And to fulfill such an exceptional mission,
his "expectation" is to run again for president in 2024. Not as a hologram. And fielding the
same running mate.
It goes back to The Democrat Run Mainstream Media's narrative that Black men can only be
the poor helpless victims and NEVER the apex predators.
Which is why they only say that Black men are murdered by guns but NEVER that Black men
are murdered by other Black men. The only time they do not blame the guns is in the much less
common man bites dog White male on Black male murders.
You know the perpetrator is a Black male and not a White male when the headline is a gun
all by itself murdered a Black man!
"... This whole process was intended to be for seriously delinquent kids/parents, but, you know bureaucracy – gotta check the boxes rather than just have a 30 second phone call "please email Mrs. ABC when your kids have been absent." ..."
If underfunded means you have to use old textbooks from the 1950s through the 1970s and have no tablets or computers on class,
I'd choose an underfunded school for a better education.
@Jonathan Mason on an attendance remediation plan. The first words out of my mouth were "so this is where my tax money goes."
It went on for 15 minutes, signing forms and shit. This whole process was intended to be for seriously delinquent kids/parents,
but, you know bureaucracy – gotta check the boxes rather than just have a 30 second phone call "please email Mrs. ABC when your
kids have been absent."
After that BS, we got another certified letter, so I went to the school. "I thought we had this thing settled. What do we have
to do now?" "Oh, nah, we just sent one to everybody. It was easier that way. You're fine." How much do certified letters cost
now, Jonathan? Oh, it's free though, right?
They've got plenty of money, all of them. Wait until the SHTF. Then we'll see some frugality and some legitimate complaints.
California public schools get their funding according to the number of students present. So if your kid is a half hour late,
you get an urgent call from the attendance office. Every kid is worth money to them. Maybe something like that is driving the
overreaction you describe.
I can see why this is unfinished work, with lots more research required, requiring quite a bit more grant money. It's hard
work getting around the simple truth. Steve here had a good handle on the reasons for the big uptick in violent crime half a year
ago, without even hitting the taxpayers up for a lot of grant money. It's just that his was not the answer that the Establishment
was looking for. Try harder, Steve.
So many USians (as in "people who use far too many resources") really believe, as
President Obama intimated on so many occasions, that this country is exceptional. My readings
of ancient Greece remind me of Athens: as Edith Hamilton pointed out in The Greek Way, that
city-state's decline began when its rulers treated "client states" as conquered territories
to be plundered. Athens' decline in power thus began when its rulers, having become so
arrogant, became unconcerned with the rights of others. In our own time, we see that our
"leaders" not only couldn't care less about the rights of others in terms of foreign
countries, but also with regard to Americans not of their class, race, and social/academic
pedigrees.
Nevertheless, as a fervent anti-imperialist, I think we should celebrate the incipient
loss of Washington's power.
According to Mary Beard & others Thucydides is incredibly difficult to translate
resulting in variations depended on the translator.
Perhaps not surprisingly Donald Kagan, Victoria's husband Robert's Father produced his own
hawkish assessment of what Thucydides should teach us today.
The Thucydides Trap is a clownish misreading of history by simplistic International
Relations scholars who should spend more time talking to real historians of the relevant
period. Graham Allison is on record as having done no research on China, he just assumed the
parallel with the Peloponnesian war. From my PhD dissertation, which included addressing such
simplistic and historically-ignorant theories in International Relations:
The ahistorical, Eurocentric and universalist shortcomings of neorealism with respect to a
rising power such as China are evident in analyses such as Allison's (2017), that rely upon
the assumption that the small-scale Peloponnesian wars of more than two millennia ago are
applicable to the modern world of superpowers and weapons of mass destruction, with the
internal dynamics of each nation deemed to relative irrelevance. Furthermore, both classical
realist and neorealist scholars may utilize simplistic readings of Thucydides, an author that
may in fact be a highly unreliable narrator (Podoksik 2005). There is a great deal of
disagreement among historians about who actually started the Peloponnesian wars; it could
have been Athens, Sparta, Corinth or even a combination (Dickins 1911; Tannenbaum 1975; Kagan
2013), and therefore the main lesson to be learnt is the complexity of the real world, even
the ancient one. In addition, as Bagby notes (1994, p. 133), "Thucydides thinks that an
understanding of the political and cultural differences among city-states before and during
the Peloponnesian War is crucial for understanding their behavior"; Sparta and Athens could
easily be seen as greater ideological competitors than the Cold War US and Soviet Union.
Actually it's pretty common knowledge among classisists that there was no Thucydides Trap.
Whatever his many merits one thing Thucydides didn't even begin to do was to prove his
central claim about jealously between a rising and an established power making conflict
inevitable.
Take an article back in February NC linked to in the Asia Times wherein Pepe Escobar
reported that "the two really crucial events at Davos" were speeches given by Putin and Xi at
the WEF that "received minimal or non-existent coverage across the wobbly West."
Here is a link to an analysis of Putin's speech by Rostislav Ishchenko provided in Escobar's
article
https://www.stalkerzone.org/munich-esque-davos/?fbclid=IwAR39jqR8vWHHAAUP0KXazwBAqTqsg7PXkIrlB2Yvmuu0sXZP0WqB3fJgUjw
Add the above to the discussion between Pepe Escobar and Michael Hudson provided in the
links today.
It would follow, probably at the behest of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, that the aims
stated in Xi's and Putin's speeches and the material discussed by Escobar and Hudson would
produce aggressive rhetoric from Biden and Blinken toward Russia and China.
Interesting that Putin mentioned "financial hegemony" as one of the two tools used "to
carry out long-arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries." I assume he means the
eurodollar system of offshore US dollars which remains the dominant currency of global
finance and capital markets, and control of the global payments system. If so, what are the
workarounds, and who controls them? or, are we talking Texas hold'em here?
Just an observation here. China is making China a better place; Russia is making Russia a
better place; India is India. And the United States looks to be headed in that direction. It
is a big job and it will keep our "leaders" busy for a long time. One thing I'd like to see
is a cooperating, cohesive and sustainable North America. Canada, the US, Mexico and Central
America. That would be a good project for our foreign policy wizards. World War 2 is over.
Way long gone. We should let the EU, and especially our long and loyal ally Germany, make
their own peace with Russia and China.
China was all onboard for Western neoliberal ideas.
They started to have their doubts when the US, UK and Euro-zone wrecked their economies in a
ridiculous financial fiasco in 2008.
When they realised they had made exactly the same mistakes, and nearly driven the Chinese
economy into a financial crisis, they realised neoclassical economics was the problem.
They really needed some decent economics and fast.
We never did work out what happened in 2008, the Chinese did.
The Chinese now know the US, UK and Euro-zone went on a joint economic suicide mission before
2008.
After 2008, they went on an economic suicide mission.
Policymakers are rendered completely clueless with neoclassical economics and try and crash
their economies.
If the West is sticking with this load of old rubbish, that's their problem, the Chinese have
learned from their mistakes.
Davos 2018 – The Chinese know financial crises come from the private debt-to-GDP
ratio and inflated asset prices https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WOs6S0VrlA
The black swan flies in under our policymakers' radar.
They are looking at public debt and consumer price inflation, while the problems are
developing in private debt and asset price inflation.
The PBoC knew how to spot a Minsky Moment coming, unlike the FED, BoE, ECB and BoJ.
A year later, and they had made further progress.
Davos 2019 – The Chinese know bank lending needs to be directed into areas that grow
the economy and that their earlier stimulus went into the wrong places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNBcIFu-_V0
They had pumped bank credit into areas that don't grow GDP, and the private debt-to-GDP had
risen to a level they were on the verge of a financial crisis.
Everyone does that with neoclassical economics, but they don't usually see the financial
crisis coming, like the US in 1929, Japan 1991 and US, UK and Euro-zone in 2008.
The one good thing about bringing back neoclassical economics.
We know what led to Wall Street Crash in 1929. The same mistakes have been repeated
globally.
At 25.30 mins you can see the super imposed private debt-to-GDP ratios.
No one realises the problems that are building up in the economy as they use an economics
that doesn't look at debt, neoclassical economics.
As you head towards the financial crisis, the economy booms due to the money creation of
unproductive bank lending, as it did in the 1920s in the US.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
The financial crisis appears to come out of a clear blue sky when you use an economics that
doesn't consider debt, like neoclassical economics, as it did in 1929.
1929 – US
1991 – Japan
2008 – US, UK and Euro-zone
The PBoC saw the Chinese Minsky Moment coming and you can too by looking at the chart
above.
The Chinese were lucky; it was very late in the day.
Everyone has made the same mistake; only the Chinese worked out what the problem was.
Our current status is in some respects comparable to Britain in the decades preceding WW
I: balancing rival powers off of each other. In Britain's case, the rivals were Russia, first
and foremost, and Germany. But as Germany was perceived to be threatening to both Britain and
Russia, Britain made an alliance with Russia (and France) against Germany.
We tried to make a similar alliance with Russia against the growing power of the PRC, but
Yeltsin was too weak, and Putin was not eager to become the junior partner of the US in the
game of containing Chinese power. Then came the pivot to China (after the failure of
Clinton's "reset" with Russia). That failed too. Trump tried to re-engage Putin and levied
tariffs on China. Both moves were ineffective.
We still have something to learn from Britain, though: mainly, how to have a long and
gentle glide path into decline and yet still manage to punch above our weight. This is
something Lawrence Wilkerson has talked about for the last 15 years or so. We either do this
or go bankrupt trying to hold onto . . . what?
Not sure the UK's decline was long and gentle. The USA will be one of the three major
powers in the world for a long time yet. What has gone wrong for the USA imo is that it tried
to be a hyperpower, to rule the world, when that possiblity really disappeared when first
Russia and then other countries obtained nuclear weapons. The neoconseratives need to stop
drinking the koolaid.
"We tried to make a similar alliance with Russia against the growing power of the PRC, but
Yeltsin was too weak, and Putin was not eager to become the junior partner of the US in the
game of containing Chinese power."
I don't see any historical evidence supporting that assertion. The US tried to do a
complete sack and burn of the remains of the USSR and walk off with everything worth
anything. They didn't quite succeed at that but did a lot of harm along the way. Russia tried
(with Putin no less) to become part of the EU or at least associate with it and tried to
become part of NATO (or at least associate with the rest of Europe in military and security
matters) and was told to get lost. Then, violating promises, the expansion of NATO began. I
think the record shows that the US wants Russia to be an enemy – regardless of what the
Russians want. With the history of the past twenty years to go by I would think that both
Russia and China (and likely several other nations) now believe that the US simply can't be
negotiated with due to it's penchant for throwing away treaties and ignoring the rule of law
whenever it feels like it. If that wasn't bad enough, there's also the holier-than-thou
moralizing that goes along with it.
About a decade or so ago there was serious talk in Washington of a US-China pact as an
extension of Chimerica. China would supply the money and the manpower while Washington would
supply the brains. The rest of the world could go fly a kite as these two would then run the
world but the Chinese for some mysterious reason had zero interest in being the junior
partner in this proposal.
That's because China had already decided to turn America into one of its many Overseas
Tibets. ( I have read that the Chinese word for Tibet translates to Western Treasure House.
And they also refer to Tibet as Water Tower Number One).
Putin has perhaps realised that unflappability and civility, long his calling cards in
diplomatic relations with the West, even when coming under the most vicious attacks, will
never win him or Russia any favour with the western mainstream press and their political
class overlords. You can't reason with a bully so might as well do a more polished version of
Duterte telling Obama to "go to hell" as Putin and China are doing here. The pillars of
American foreign policy are increasingly being shown up to be relics of a bygone era,
anachronistic and maladaptive in the extreme.
The world has moved on and people are no longer buying the "America is a force for good"
story. They see the worst of American cultural values e.g. excessive consumption, being
exported by Hollywood to their societies and American companies swooping in to harvest the
demand for useless stuff that comes as a result of this. Dismounting the high horse will be
difficult for America to do but I don't see that she has any choice here, the world is
starting to signal strongly that we've all had enough of the exceptionalism and belligerence
borne of entitlement with which the US engages with other nations.
Yes, and perhaps the most important task before R/C is how to bring the now-former hegemon
down off its high perch, quietly and gracefully, or at least without triggering an all out
war. I do hope they can pull it off, otherwise it's curtains for us all.
But it is not the first time p. Putin told the West Russia will go its own way. The 2007
Munich security conference put all on notice; some just refused to listen.
But if we take those 5 min 25 sec, and the Chinese statement in Anchorage that USA has no
qualifications (!) to speak to China from the position of strength, we should see that the
world's distribution of power has changed. In spite of more tricks and subterfuge that the
West will no doubt deploy, what matters more now is the self-confidence these two nations
have finally owned. For us, the little folk, however, it will get worse before it gets
better.
Everything of human creation has a lifespan and everything of
human creation can be changed or removed by human hand. Slavery, feudalism and other systems of
the past
The bottom line question from all of the above is this: Will this U.S. dominance come to an
end? Stepping back and looking at this question in a historical way tells us that the answer
can only be yes, given that there has been a sequence of cities that have been the financial
center.
Centuries ago, the seat of a small republic such as Venice could be the leading financial
center on the strength of its trading networks. Once capitalism took hold, however, the
financial center was successively located within a larger federation that possessed both a
strong navy and a significant fleet of merchant ships (Amsterdam); then within a sizeable and
unified country with a large enough population to maintain a powerful navy and a physical
presence throughout an empire (London); and finally within a continent-spanning country that
can project its economic and multi-dimensional military power around the world (New York).
No empire, whatever its form, lasts forever. But knowledge of the sequence of capitalist
centers tells us nothing of timing. Each successive new financial locus was embedded in
successively larger powers able to operate militarily over larger areas and with more force.
What then could replace the U.S.? The European Union has its effectiveness diluted by the many
nationalisms within its sphere (and thus nationalism acts as a weakening agent for the EU
whereas it is a strengthening agent for the U.S. and China). China's economy is yet too small
and retains capital controls, and its currency, the renminbi, isn't fully convertible.
U.S. Treasury bills remain the ultimate safe haven, as shown when investors poured into U.S.
debt during crises such as the 2008 collapse, even when events in the U.S. are the trigger.
There are no other possible other contenders, and both the EU and China, as already
discussed, are in no position to seriously challenge U.S. hegemony.
Here we have a collision of possibilities: The transcending of capitalism and transition
to a new economic system or the decreasing functionality of the world capitalist system should
it persist for several more decades. Given the resiliency of capitalism, and the many tools
available to it (not least military power), the latter scenario can't be ruled out although it
might be unlikely. Making any prediction on the lifespan of capitalism is fraught with
difficulty, not least because of the many predictions of its collapse for well over a century.
But capitalism as a
system requires infinite growth , quite impossible on a finite planet and all the more dire
given there is almost no place on Earth remaining into which it
can expand .
Although we can't know what the expiration date of capitalism will be, it will almost
certainly be sometime in the current century . But it won't be followed by something better
without a global movement of movements working across borders with a conscious aim of bringing
a better world into being. In the absence of such movements, capitalism is likely to hang on
for decades to come. In that scenario, what country or bloc could replace the U.S. as the
center?
And would we want a new center to dictate to the rest of the world? In a world of economic
democracy (what we can call socialism) where all nations and societies can develop in their own
way, in harmony with the environment and without the need to expand, and with production done
for human need rather than corporate profit, there would no global center or hegemon and no
need for one.
Capitalism, however, can't function without a center that uses financial, military and all
other means to keep itself in the saddle and the rest of the world in line.
Yes, the day of U.S. dethronement will come, as will the end of
capitalism . But the former is not going to happen any time soon, however much millions
around the world wish that to be so, and the latter is what we should be working toward. A
better world is possible; a gentler and kinder capitalism with a different center is
not.
Excellent analysis! I would just point out that those who decide how the world operates, and
I am not talking about the US Gov, hold the vast majority of their wealth in dollar$. Most of
their power and influence would disappear if the dollar as world reserve currency system were
to end. Their power to manipulate from behind the scenes is nearly unlimited and this is not
conspiracy theory.
Their ace in the hole is of course World WAR.
It seems to me that all wars and all Empire collapses are about resources and we are at or
near peak everything so that is IMO what will determine how things play out sooner than we all
think too.
" Most of their power and influence would disappear if the dollar as world reserve
currency system were to end. " That is very much true, and is true not only for the U.S.
bourgeoisie but also for the bourgeoisie and compradors of countries around the world. When the
U.S. unraveling comes, it will be on a steeping curve, but that day is a long way off yet.
Nonetheless, resource depletion may well intervene sooner than we believe . Better to
organize now rather than later.
When Biden called Russian President a soulless "killer" on
ABC News, Putin responded with the most deft bit of diplomacy I've seen in quite a while, openly challenging Fungal Joe to a
publicly broadcast debate of substantive issues, which Biden, of course, declined.
There can be no question now that
all the disparate interests within
The
Davos Crowd
are aligned at this point
(see
this
month's Newsletter
for more discussion on this).
All guns point at Russia.
Putin tried to defuse the situation with an offer that was at once an epic troll of Biden,
who is clearly no match for his Russian counterpart cognitively, and a warning to Americans that this situation has gotten far more
dangerous than they are being told.
And sometimes you win simply by taking the high road. Make no mistake the fact that Putin went here this early in Biden's presidency
is a bad sign. It tells us things are horrific between the world's most prominent nuclear powers and that there's been zero
diplomatic effort put forth by the Biden administration since the election.
The problem is rapidly becoming that indiscriminate use of all weapons all the time --
diplomatic, economic, military, propaganda -- creates a kind of dopamine addiction.
In order to keep the public interest in
the threat they have to keep raising the stakes and the rhetoric to eventually absurd levels.
As I like to say all the time, it's the first rule of screenwriting :
Be forever raising the
stakes lest the audience gets bored.
But there comes a point where people begin to realize that they are being asked to back a war where the existential threat to the
elite's power is transferred onto them. Remember folks, government's fight and spend billions propagandizing you into believing
their wars are for your own good.
It's rarely the case, if ever. More often than not the war being ginned up in the media and by government officials is one that
either feathers their own nest directly, supports the goals of other powerful folks indirectly, or covers up past corruption.
The brewing conflict in
Ukraine is all of these and more.
The project to add Ukraine to NATO and the EU is a long-held dream of neocons
like Victoria Nuland and neoliberals like Biden. It's an important cog in the World Economic Forum's desire to expand the EU to both
encircle Russia thereby disrupting any dreams of Eurasian integration which could form a bulwark against their brave new world.
What's got Biden's Depends in a bunch is that he's neck-deep in the corruption in Ukraine. In
Obama's own words, Ukraine is Joe's project. And Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky is not fully subsumed into the morass of
Biden's (and the rest of the usual suspects') problems.
Putin's deft and cordial handling of Biden's indiscriminate use of language was masterful here. Biden's initial remarks are, at
best, him trying to hold onto the Amy Poehler demographic (see reruns of Parks and Recreation for her slavish obsession with him as
Vice-President) as a vibrant, macho man, while he implements every bad idea that that same demographic rejected from all the other
Democrats during primary season.
But we can all see he's nothing of the sort. He's a barely coherent, rapidly fading bully with no discernible achievements in life
other than being available to be a placeholder for someone else's plans.
So, it was never a question as to whether Biden would ever talk to Putin under those
conditions. They can't even get him to talk with reporters for real, having to green screen him into backgrounds to make it look
like he's out in the world, doing stuff.
And don't get me started on that embarrassment of a press conference held the other day. Running for re-election in 2024? This guy's
not going to be alive in 2024. Then again, since he didn't run in 2020, what does it actually matter?
Elections are just Hollywood productions anymore anyway.
Biden's counter is to now invite Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping the big Climate Summit
in late April
where the WEF controls the agenda and Biden's anti-diplomatic corps led by the completely over-matched
Secretary of State Antony Blinken can further embarrass the U.S. on the world stage.
Since both Putin and Xi told the WEF to go scratch on both Climate Change, Agenda 2030 and,
most
notably from Putin, the Fourth Industrial Revolution
, I don't see how this summit ends any better than virtual Davos did earlier
this year.
In fact, with Biden's approach to both China and Russia so far, this summit is shaping up to be a colossal waste of time while also
threatening everyone the world over with what they can expect policy-wise from the West until someone finally puts these insane
people out of our misery.
With each day that passes the U.K., for example, under tyrant Boris Johnson sinks further into a complete totalitarian nightmare
(see
here
,
here
,
here
,
and
here
from the last 24 hours) thanks to COVID-19, while ramping up the anti-Russian rhetoric to eleven.
But, back to Ukraine, because it's tied directly to all this climate change nonsense. Putin
understands as well that Biden will allow every escalation in Ukraine because he's shackled by it and they need to complete the job
started with the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovich in 2014.
That means we'll see something far worse than Victoria Nuland's latest Cookie Campaign for freedom. We're going to see a war for
the Donbass soon, likely right after Orthodox Easter and the end of the snow melt.
Putin tried to go directly to the people to end this destructive spiral to the bottom, because he knows where this ends.
It will be a confrontation that one side will have to commit to completely or allow it's bluff to be called. The game Biden's
handlers have played to this point has been a massive escalation of rhetoric while continually moving real pieces into position for
a real conflict. I just don't see cooler heads prevailing here because there is no upside for the U.S., the EU and the WEF if China
and Russia stand their ground and Biden et.al. back down.
Russia has to be
destroyed or subjugated if the Great Reset is to happen and Europe is to remain a relevant global player.
That
means control of the Black Sea, which means taking back Crimea. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently reiterated publicly
that Russia has had zero diplomatic contact with the European Union since the 2014 vote by Crimea to rejoin Russia.
Diplomacy is nearly over between the major powers. Biden's simple refusal to talk to Putin
publicly is a major event.
In the end everything we've lived through since COVID-19 began boils down to the need to destroy the global economy built on oil and
coal, otherwise all major energy production stays under Eurasian control as it strengthens not Atlanticist as it peaks in global
power and their grand dreams wither.
Time is getting short for this to happen. Public opposition to this program is rising. It happens now or not at all.
If there is a war in the Donbass this spring it won't be a happy ending which extends U.S.
primacy into the future but the moment when we realized its acceleration into irrelevancy.
In both the current major conflicts between Russia and the US Psychopaths In Charge, Russia holds the moral high
ground. In Ukraine the US promoted, financed, helped organize, and encouraged the overthrow of a democratically
elected government. When the citizens of Crimea exercised their natural right of self determination and voted to
return to being a part of Russia, the US called it a coup. In Syria, the US has illegally invaded a sovereign nation
without that nation's sovereign government's permission or request. Russia got both. Not only does Russia hold the
moral high ground, but the legal high ground as well.
vic and blood
PREMIUM
3 hours ago
Well
stated.
The
role reversal is complete. We are now the Evil Empire.
gmrpeabody
1 hour ago
" . In
Ukraine the US promoted, financed, helped organize, and encouraged the overthrow of a democratically elected
government. "
Marine
General Smedley Butler knew his forces were being used back in the thirties to enforce American bankster
interests in central and South America.
eyewillcomply
1 hour ago
(Edited)
"We are now the Evil Empire."
As
soon as we allowed the cousins of the same Bolsheviks who made Russia into a communist basket case to
control our currency and thus, government, we became an "Evil Empire". It has been a slow process and hard
to recognize early on. The founding principles of the United States are moral and admirable. What we have
morphed into at the behest of this satanic cabal is the exact opposite of that ethos.
chunga
3 hours ago
Many
people hate the US and have many very valid reasons to fight and kill all of us.
BlindMonkey
2 hours ago
(Edited)
A
large swath of Americans just want to live life as a people. They harbor no ill will to other people's,
we just want our space in the world respected. Of these, they also have a beef with the insane people
that have got us to this point.
jeff montanye
2 hours ago
the u.s. government has not been mine since vietnam.
dead hobo
1 hour ago
(Edited)
Funny,
but look at the big picture. How could all these foreign horrors be contemplated if only a few people voted
for Biden? Agree the election was stolen, but it still took a massive number of Libtards and Woketards to
provide enough actual votes to make the fake votes count.
We are
seeing what happens when a massive amount of Accumulated Stupid runs daily life in the US. No amount of talk
will make a difference and most people don't read. Combined, this makes them impervious to common sense.
Things will get worse, then much worse, before they get better. This is a big deal. Democrats are going all
in at 110% effort because they know they will fail and and never get another chance if they don't take over
now. Expect outrageous takeovers followed by more outrageous takeovers. We haven't seen anything yet. Expect
to be Amazed.
chunga
2 hours ago
I'm
afraid those people will not be exempt from the harmful, malicious actions of the US govt and do not deserve
to be. I put myself in this category.
Sandmann
23 minutes ago
Most
Americans are great and generous people but so were most people in the Soviet Union
Lordflin
2 hours ago
You
don't seriously believe we would sit on the sidelines of such a conflict...
When
was the last time that happened...?
Deep
State wants war... and they are now firmly in charge in a capital protected by armed troops and razor
wire...
JPHR
3 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
This
article seems mistaken in treating Biden as somehow being in charge nor is this Harris.
The
most concerning aspect of this fake presidency is that non-elected and not accountable people behind the
scenes are running this farce.
The US
always selects weak corrupt leaders as front men for their color revolutions abroad and it should not be a
surprise that the color revolution at home now follows exactly that very same pattern.
Carlin was RIGHT
2 hours ago
(Edited)
It is
not just the author of this article that is mistaken, it is also 95% of the murican public. What you see on
your tee veee and read in media is 100% pure theatre - all agenda driven, of course.
Dumfknation will begrudgingly go along with ANYTHING tptb dictates - that has been proven beyond any doubt
over the last year. So expect nothing but misery and quite possibly death for the foreseeable future,
because (((they))) most certainly have NO CONCERN WHATSOEVER for you happiness and prosperity, and only seek
to make the world a better place for (((them))).
Sandmann
4 hours ago
Much
of the Hitler-Stalin War was fought in Ukraine. Ukraine was always the centre for Soviet weapons production
to ensure The West stayed away.
Brzezinski set up a cat's paw which he hoped would ensnare Russia but it will destroy USA. The West kept
Bandera groups funded and armed in Ukraine into 1950s. Poland wants to seize Gailicia. The simple fact is
Ukrainians are emigrating for work to Poland and Turkey and Western Europe if they can get forged papers.
Ukraine is dead - US wants to force West Europeans to pay transport levies to Ukraine for Russian gas
instead of North Stream so Europeans fund Ukraine corruption and backfunding to US Democrats.
Russia
will fight when it is ready as will China. Seems stupid to risk Atlanta or Dallas or LA or Chicago for Kiev
Craven Moorehead
3 hours ago
The
Soviet Union economically collapsed trying to match NATO military strength, too much of their resources and
productivity were directed to military, the West effectively outspent them.
Now
the tables have turned, The US may be on the road to the same fate, and the current government of morons may
just bring it about
BlindMonkey
2 hours ago
remove
link
The Ukraine war might be kept under wraps solely because Russia has clearly signaled they will enter it. An
attack is a suicide play for Ukraine. I don't expect this to stop the warhawks from trying but Zelensky
must know this is a death trap for him.
If this kicks off, expect Poland to be sacrificed to try to
take Kaliningrad in retribution.
SwmngwShrks
1 hour ago
remove
link
I
remember being in school in 2014, in a UN class specifically, learning about how the US backed coup in the
Ukraine led to them wanting to join the EU. However, as part of the treaty during the dissolution of the
USSR, if any of the barrier states went to join the EU, Russia would annex Crimea, as its only warm-water
port.
This
is what happened, and what was executed, however it was propagandized here in the US that Russia had
"invaded" Crimea. It explains why reporters on scene found the locals welcoming the Russians.
The
thing is, I remember so explicitly finding this on the web, because I was surprised it was true. I read the
actual treaty, and can no longer find it online, anywhere. Sigh, down the memory hole, thanks Brave New
World.
Savvy
24 minutes ago
It's hard to believe the Americans could be so short sighted, but Ukraine was 'liberated' to control
Russia's access to the EU market. Pretty stupid if so because that's when construction on NS2 began and
Ukraine is a US quagmire now. Another shining example of US intervenyionism.
SoDamnMad
2 hours ago
remove
link
Search
for the "March of the Immortal Regiment" on Youtube and understand that if you attack either the Crimea or
the Donbass you will fight seasoned soldiers as well as civilians ready to smash your face in with a
shovel. Unlike the US woke crowd those that chose Russia are not willing to lay down for the corrupt
private Nazi militias of Ukraine. The shipment of up-armored humvess are worthless in this fight. Half the
stuff will be stolen and wind up on the black market. No more mister nice guy. "Remember, you asked for
it."
deep-state-retired
3 hours ago
remove
link
With
the successful Biden Coup and full media / tech blackout of election fraud the Globalists are ready to take
on one of the last few nation states. They think like Napoleon and Hitler just kick in the door and the
house will collapse. We will see.
de tocqueville's ghost
1 hour ago
(Edited)
the
industrialized military complex and deep state stole our vote and election...they need war to survive. Biden
was always their "boy"...he voted yay for every war in the last 42 years. They had to get rid of Trump...he
wasn't starting any wars.
We knew Biden would start beating the war drums soon after being in the WH, and he is.
JackOliver5
3 hours ago
(Edited)
Luongo
is not too sharp - THIS is about the energy future - NATURAL GAS !
So was
the deal between Iran and China today !
Russia
already has over over 1000 CNG service stations - Iran will provide CNG pipelines to China - the Rothschilds
will have NO place in this NEW world !
THAT
is why we are seeing what we are seeing NOW !
Time
will prove that I am right !
Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency
4 hours ago
(Edited)
The
psychopathic cabal loves creating frozen conflicts that they can "switch on" - such as the one in Ukraine.
The only problem is that they always keep choosing losers as their friends.
The
CIA and MI6 are working hard on "switching on" the Ukraine conflict, because peddling conflict is all they
know. Russia will wipe the floor with them.
The
world is waking up fast to the US-UK-israeli racket of depravity. The world except those pitiful vassals
still stuck in the honeymoon phase with their oppressors like the EU.
Propaganda Ripper
2 hours ago
(Edited)
At
this point, if you are politically correct, you cheer for World War 3. What could be more normal in a world
gone mad ?
US Banana Republic
2 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Russia
AND China need to make sure the US has skin in this game.
When I
was IN Ukraine recently for three months a friend asked when the continental US was last involved in a real
war. It was, of course, the US Civil War and that ended in 1865. The US is far removed from the people it
disturbs and massacres. We have no problem singing how proud we are to be Americans because we are situated
in a place that we can do anything to anybody and they can't touch us. That needs to end.
I
don't know exactly how but Russia and China need to make the US pay some consequences for this ********
aggression.
Oldwood
2 hours ago
When you say "US", exactly WHO are you referring?
When you say "Chinese" who are you referring.
Most people of this planet are dominated by their leadership.
otschelnik
3 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Donbass is another example of a successful 'frozen conflict' tactic which the Russians use in ethnicly
charged border conflicts or strategically important territories. North Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transdnestr are
some of the other ones. There's one big chanage in that now a lot of the residents of the Donbass region
have obtained Russian passports under an expedited system, about 400,000 reportedly by the beginning of the
year. Unlike US politicians Putin is not limited by time. This can go on for decades.
Russia
is keeping their options open, and they're willing to withdrawl from Donbass if the region is given autonomy
in Ukraine if they can keep Crimea. This is their favorite option but that's not acceptable for the Ukraine
government. If that doesn't work they can go all the way and annex Donbass too and have the forces to go
all the way to the Dnepr river. Ukraine can't do anything, they're too weak.
The
neocon's running the Biden administration would definitely like to push Ukraine into a hot war with Russia
but our NATO allies are not going to support it.
vasilievich
2 hours ago
If I
may ask, how do you know what Russia is willing to do?
otschelnik
22 minutes ago
Listen to Lavrov and read between the lines.
SoDamnMad
2 hours ago
"if
they can keep Crimea". I stopped reading after that. The road and railway links over the Kerch Strait told
me they were there for good.
BinAnunnaki
1 hour ago
remove
link
Can
Putin annex Donestsk and not expect full western sanctions, esp. on energy or is that a bluff?
Will
Merkel let her people freeze for Eastern Ukraine?
indus creed
30 minutes ago
(Edited)
At the
minimum Russia will take the eastern portion and the entire southern region, thus cutting Ukraine off from
the Black Sea.
MILITARY SITUATION IN EASTERN UKRAINE ON MARCH 28, 2021 (MAP UPDATE)
European Monarchist
1 hour ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Biden
is just like Obama, an unsophisticated and blundering WARMONGER.
El_Puerco
1 hour ago
Who
Are the Secret
Puppet-Masters
Behind
Biden's
War?
European Monarchist
59 minutes ago
(Edited)
Who
knows, but here is my list of likely suspects: the military industrial complex, the CIA, the deep state,
Mossad, hubris, dementia, and demons.
The Vel
1 hour ago
I like
this article. Some wonderful quotes:
'
They can't even get him to
talk with reporters for real, having to green screen him into backgrounds to make it look like he's out in
the world, doing stuff.'
- Check
In the
end everything we've lived through since COVID-19 began boils down to the need to destroy the global economy
built on oil and coal, otherwise all major energy production -
Check
If
there is a war in the Donbass this spring it won't be a happy ending which extends U.S. primacy into the
future but the moment when we realized its acceleration into irrelevancy. -
Check
Mate
That's
the key point of covid - it will take the US Federal Government into irrelevancy along with Dementia Joe.
And all you good folks and me will get to witness this transition to
irrelevance
(if
you don't die off from the vaxx sooner).
BubbaBanjo
1 hour ago
remove
link
Ukraine would be very wise to find a diplomatic way to be a neutral nation and not be a pawn. Russia will
take the pawn if it is played. Nothing will stop that. A pawn needs to know its role in the game.
Aquamaster
10 minutes ago
Always
remember, Biden did not put anyone into his administration based on qualifications. Most were picked for
either their racial, sexual, or LBGTQ... bonafides. The rest were picked as paybacks for financial, and
media/tech support during the campaign. Also, many are Obama retreads, and we know how poorly they performed
in those eight years of the Obama reign of error.
This
is going to be a horrible four years and I have no doubt that OBidens ideologues will blunder us into at
least one war. Hopefully it won't be WW3.
flyonmywall
23 minutes ago
The
idiot-in-chief is being told by his handlers that they can win this without American boots on the ground,
with cannon fodder provided by conscript Ukrainians.
When
the Russians finally unleash their armor divisions, they will cut through their opposition like a hot knife
through butter, while being covered by the Russian aerospace forces.
If
these idiots unleash long range misiles, World War 3 will be just around the corner.
Aquamaster
7 minutes ago
Indeed. We saw this exact thing happen in the ill fated Georgia conflict during the Bush presidency.
QABubba
2 hours ago
remove
link
Putin
is, and has been, playing a waiting game. With each year that passes the West gets weaker and Eurasia gets
stronger. The goal is with deft diplomacy to stretch this period out long enough for the balance of power
to become obvious.
Again, whoever thought that Russia would pay billions in transit fees to Poland and Ukraine for them to turn
around and spend with Lockheed, Ratheon. etc., to buy weapons to point at Russia was an idiot. A first
class idiot. The kind of idiot that will be the death of us.
Tom Green Swedish
2 hours ago
WIth
each year Putin becomes older and weaker. He will age out, and they will fall. I don't like Russia. Who
would?
Victor999
1 hour ago
Lots of people like Russia - all over the world. And lots of people absolutely hate America - all over
the world. How do you explain that? And if you knew anything about Russia, you would understand why you
should fear the day that Putin finally steps down.
blumenthal
2 hours ago
(Edited)
In
contrast to the attempted coup in Turkey, in which Erdogan acted decisively, it was a serious mistake on
Yanukovich's part not to deploy the military in Ukraine. The Russians made a subsequent mistake by not
marching straight into the capital Kiew. Now it will be much more difficult to control the situation in
Ukraine. A further conflict will escalate very quickly, because the Russians have a lot at stake and China
will not hesitate for long.......
Propaganda Ripper
2 hours ago
(Edited)
Yanukovich did not deploy the military in Ukraine because he was threatened with sanctions... The result is
that he almost got himself (and his family) killed. It was a very narrow escape from Kyiv.
BinAnunnaki
2 hours ago
remove
link
Remember this all happened while Putin was concluding a successful Olympics
morefunthanrum
2 minutes ago
Zerohedge and the Republicans are awful sympathetic to trumps buddy putin....why is that?
TRUMP WON
2 minutes ago
Putin
loves his country...
Biden
does not.
Only a
few years difference in their ages... Jesus, what a contrast.
One,
sharp as a tack... the other, a urine-soaked imbecilic pedo clown
rtb61
1 hour ago
The
Ukraine no longer seems willing to self destruct being part of Europe a lie, they should never have shot
down the passenger jet, they will never be forgiven for that.
Right
now the worst thing the USA could do to Russia, dump the Ukraine back on them and force Russia to pay to fix
and and create chaos with regard to the Crimea.
The
Ukraine is a mess and getting worse, it is a booby prize for whom ever gets stuck with it. The Ukraine even
managed to say the stupidest thing they could, when they said the Crimea returned to Russia, really stuck
their foot in there. Should never have said that because yes, it was stolen by a Ukrainian leader of the
Soviet Union and logically at the end of the Soviet Union should have demanded it's return to Russia because
soviet union evil.
The
Ukraine government should have never said, the Crimea returned to Russia because they immediately lost their
case in doing so.
Global Hunter
1 hour ago
remove
link
The
pro-Soros, pro NATO Ukrainians (baby Russians) who are rebelling against their Russian brethren shot the
plane down ya stooge.
fosfor 37
2 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Many
thanks to Biden and Nuland for the Russian Crimea!
Vladymyr Zhirinovsky - The division of Ukraine will take place in the near future
The
flight of Viktor Yanukovych from Kiev turned out to be the most profitable option for Russia. Otherwise, one
would have to spend a lot of money and be left without Crimea.
"Why
didn't Yanukovych stay in Kiev? How would we take Crimea if Yanukovych stayed in Kiev? We would have thrown
an army into Kiev, we would have given a lot of money, Yanukovych would have sat there and continued to rule
Ukraine, and Crimea would have remained Ukrainian and died. Yanukovych played along with us. Now Biden is
playing along with us. Let him continue to help the allegedly Ukrainian army. "
Zhirinovsky presented the ongoing actions as a multi-step combination for the creation of Novorossiya.
"It is
beneficial for us that Biden gave the command through his Ukrainian accomplices to launch an attack on
Donbass. Yes, we will crush this entire army completely, and a movement will begin towards the creation of
Novorossia, the entire South-East of Ukraine, and the North - we will see. Maybe we'll come to an agreement
with the Germans and the Poles, maybe we'll do a little differently there. "
Let it Go
3 hours ago
remove
link
Biden putting more weapons into
the hands of those unmotivated to fight for their corrupt state is merely adding fuel to this fire and doing
more harm than good.
Remember Ukraine is a financially failed state and while we can point to its
potential, its massive oil and gas reserves by all rights should belong to the Ukrainian people. These
reserves do not belong to people like Joe and hunter Biden.
More
on this subject in the article below.
Recall
all the "concern" that Trump might be blackmailed by those who had dirt on him...(Russia)
never
happened
So
what of Biden and Burisma, Ukraine, Hunter, China deals, money wired, ...??
Any
stories that might be told, or withheld, on the Bidens?
Southern_Boy
21 minutes ago
I
believe living anywhere near the DC Swamp will become rather dangerous (it's probably dangerous now because
of BLM/Antifa and the "woke" mobs) once the nuclear ballistic missile exchange starts. Even the big blue
cities and state capitals are probably going to be targets.
The
globalist elites of the Medical-Military Industrial Complex really believe the homeland is invulnerable to
and will never be subjected to a real damaging attack.
Don't
forget the historical wild card is Pakistan, India and Iran with nuclear and biological weapons of mass
destruction.
gzorp
24 minutes ago
(Edited)
After
the nazis bounced Kennedy's brains (and your democracy) off the trunk of his limo on 11/22/63, the Right of
Return side as opposed to Containment side won the argument. There would be no cooperation with the Soviet
Union... Nixon (Dulles/nazi protege) used the ukrainian (Bandera faction) Romainian Iron Guard, Croation
Ustashi etc . to get the ethnic vote for the Republipigs promosing right of return to their countries for
the nazi collaborators given refuge here in the US. Brought into the Republipig party as an official wing of
the party by HW Bush when he was chairman of the Republipig party as the "Ethnic Outreach" wing of the
party. Seen the USSA returning any former nazis to Croatia or Ukraine?...
Kat Daddy
49 minutes ago
(Edited)
If a
plebiscite is called in the Donbass, the people will vote to join the Russian Federation. Any actions taken
by NATO and the Atlanticist interests will appear illegal under international law. So much for promoting
democracy and humanitarian interests. There need not be a war, but I know you're secretly hoping for one.
It was the preamble to Putin's most important message in years to what he called the
American "establishment, the ruling class". He said the US leadership is determined to have
relations with Russia, but only "on its own terms".
Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are different people. We have a
different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to defend our own interests.
And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves are interested, and
on those conditions that we consider beneficial for ourselves. And they will have to reckon
with it. They will have to reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development.
Despite the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.
This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always politely, that Western powers
need to deal with Russia on a basis of correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for
national sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.
But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do not dare try to judge us
or punish us for not meeting what you say are universal standards, because we are different
from you. Those days are now over.
One domino falls on another which falls on another, etc. But one has to push the first
domino over.
I hope the Germans build Nordstream II and then III and IV and as many as they like. It
will prevent the US gas industry from selling any LNG to Europe. That will keep the price of
NatGas in America nice and low. That will keep luring electro-grid power-makers away from
coal. Hopefully it would finalistically and irreversibly exterminate the power-grid
thermal-coal industry in America.
The meme is that "Biden called Putin a killer." Looking at the video, Biden just answered
"yes" to that snake Stephanopolous's opening, "So you know Vladimir Putin, do you think he's
a killer?" Same thing with "Will you make Putin pay a price?"
Maybe I've just missed it, but I haven't seen any place where the Gerontocrat in Chief has
emitted those gaffes heard 'round the world from his own volition, rather than in the kind of
setup that ABC News put up there to spin the pedals of the Narrative Bicycle that Putin
authorized meddling in the US electoral games
Apparently Biden was either too senile or too inherently stupid to realize what gangrenous
filth the subhuman Clintonite scum Stephanopoulis is, was and always will be. And put his
stupid senile foot into Stephanopoulis's clever little bear trap.
Europe and Germany appear to be disappointingly wishy washy over Russia, they seemed happy
to play poodle and follow the lead of the UK in expelling Russian diplomats after Theresa May
falsely claimed that the presence of Novichok indicated a "state actor", a standard the US
with its various drone assassinations (such as of Qasem Soleimani) is never held to. I
suspect German attitudes to US foreign policy are driven mostly by concerns over exports,
knowing full well the US propensity to link trade with supporting their foreign policy, the
US remains the sole biggest destination for German exports (from what I can tell via google
at a little over 8% total exports, in and around $110 billion per annum) and in the absence
of the Euro being the global reserve currency I would imagine for the time being they (and by
extension Europe as a whole) will remain somewhat reluctant foreign policy poodles to the US,
so long at least as the new cold war remains cold.
It's a bit difficult for Germany to 'Step up' when the majority of their clout is derived
from their close association with the US. While they have strong backing from some of Europe,
they do not have the strong backing of a number of key members since the introduction of
uneven austerity measures in 2009 which means without the US, they would not be able to
portray themselves as leaders
Alex Cockburn (RIP) once commented that he didn't think GWB was as bad as some people
thought -- because through his (admittedly awful) recklessness in Iraq and elsewhere he was
inexorably driving the American Empire into failure and eventual dissolution. (My paraphrase,
mind you.)
Dog, I detested GWB and remember the huge anti-war march in London that day. And had tears
in my eyes at 2AM in a Tokyo hotel watching Obama being inaugurated. But St Barack if
anything extended W's wars -- along with fellow warmongers Hillary and Biden, of course.
Trump conversely tried to remove troops from Afghanistan only to have the Permanent War Party
(Dems & Repubs) deny him the chance.
Well, as the post points out, Biden's foreign policy advisors are definitely the B Team
but seem to have the hubris of the A Team. A bad combination.
As for the new Russia-China axis, I recommend Pepe Escobar's writings; he has been
following this for some time.
Anyway, please excuse the rambling -- I meant to praise LowellHighlander for his final
sentence. (^_^)
The United States government is able to impose its will on all the world's countries. The rest
of the world, even some of the strongest imperialist countries of the Global North, lie prostrate at the feet of the U.S. What
is the source of this seemingly impregnable power? Which of course leads to the next question: How long can it last?
The U.S. moves against any country that dares to act on a belief that its resources should be
for its own people's benefits rather than maximizing profits of multinational corporations or prioritizes the welfare of its
citizens over corporate profit or simply refuses to accept dictation in how it should organize its economy. The military is
frequently put to use, as are manipulation of the United Nations and the strong arms of the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund (IMF). But sanctions are a frequently used tool, enforced on countries, banks and corporations that have no
presence in the U.S. and conduct business entirely outside the United States. The U.S. can impose its will on national
governments around the world, using multilateral institutions to force governments to act in the interest of multinational
capital, even when that is opposite the interests of the country itself or that country's peoples. And when a country persists
in refusing to bend to U.S. demands, sanctions imposing misery on the general population are unilaterally imposed and the rest
of the world is forced to observe them.
In short, the U.S. government possesses a power that no country has ever held, not even Britain
at the height of its empire. And that government, regardless of which party or what personality is in the White House or in
control of Congress, is ruthless in using this power to impose its will.
This power is most often wielded within an enveloping shell of propaganda that claims the U.S.
is acting in the interest of "democracy" and maintaining the "rule of law" so that business can be conducted in the interest
of a common good. So successful has this propaganda been that this domination is called the "Washington Consensus." Just who
agreed to this "consensus" other than Washington political elites and the corporate executives and financial speculators those
elites represent has never been clear. "Washington diktat" would be a more accurate name.
Much speculation among Left circles exists as to when this domination will be brought to an end, with many commentators
believing that the fall of the U.S. dollar is not far off and perhaps China will become the new center of a system less
imperialistic. On the Right, particularly in the financial industry, such speculation is far from unknown, although there of
course the downfall of the dollar is feared. In financial circles, however, there is no illusion that the end of dollar
supremacy in world economics is imminent.
There are only two possible challengers to U.S. dollar hegemony: The European Union's euro and
China's renminbi. But the EU and China are very much subordinated to the dollar, and thus not in a position to counter U.S.
dictates. Let's start here, and then we'll move on to the mechanics of U.S. economic hegemony over the world, which rests on
the dollar being the global reserve currency and the leveraging of that status to control the world's multilateral
institutions and forcing global compliance with its sanctions.
Europe "helpless" in the face of U.S. sanctions
A February 2019 paper published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs,
discussing the inability of EU countries to counteract the Trump administration's pullout from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action, the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran, flatly
declared
the EU "helpless"
: "In trying to shield EU-based individuals and entities with commercial interests from its adverse
impact, European policy-makers have recently been exposed as more or less helpless."
The legislative arm of the EU, the European Parliament, was no more bullish. In a paper
published in November 2020, the Parliament wrote this about
U.S.
extraterritorial sanctions
: "[T]his bold attempt to prescribe the conduct of EU companies and nationals without even
asking for consent challenges the EU and its Member States as well as the functioning and development of transatlantic
relations. The extraterritorial reach of sanctions does not only affect EU businesses but also puts into question the
political independence and ultimately the sovereignty of the EU and its Member States."
No such open worries are going to be said in public by the Chinese government. But is China
better prepared than the EU? Mary Hui, a Hong Kong-based business journalist,
wrote
in
Quartz
, "China is actually far more vulnerable to US sanctions than it will let on, even if the sanctions are
aimed at individuals and not banks. That's because the primary system powering the world's cross-border financial transactions
between banks, Swift, is dominated by the US dollar." We'll delve into this shortly. As a result of that domination, Ms. Hui
wrote, "the US has outsize control over the machinery of international transactions -- or, as the Economist put it, 'America is
uniquely well positioned to use financial warfare in the service of foreign policy.' "
Grand
Place, Brussels (photo by Wouter Hagens)
In 2017, then U.S. Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin
threatened
China with sanctions
that would cut it off from the U.S. financial system if it didn't comply with fresh United Nations
Security Council sanctions imposed on North Korea in 2007; he had already threatened unilateral sanctions on any country that
trades with North Korea if the
United
Nations didn't apply sanctions
on Pyongyang.
So neither Brussels or Beijing are in a position, at this time, to meaningfully challenge U.S.
hegemony. That hegemony rests on multiple legs.
The world financial platform that the U.S. ultimately controls
The use (or, actually, abuse) of the two biggest multilateral financial institutions, the World
Bank and the IMF, are well known. The U.S., as the biggest vote holder and through the rules set up for decision-making,
carries a veto and thus imposes its will on any country that falls into debt and must turn to the World Bank or IMF for a
loan. There also are the U.S.-controlled regional banks, such as the Asian Development Bank and Inter-American Development
Bank, that impose U.S. dictates through the terms of their loans.
Also important as an institution, however, is a multilateral financial institution most haven't
heard of: The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, known as SWIFT. Based in Brussels, SWIFT is the
primary platform used by the world's financial institutions "to securely exchange information about financial transactions,
including payment instructions, among themselves." SWIFT says it is officially a member-owned cooperative with more than
11,000 member financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories.
That sounds like it is a truly global entity. Despite that description, the U.S. holds ultimate
authority over it and what it does. U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, National Security Agency and Treasury
Department, have access to the SWIFT transaction database. Payments in U.S. dollars can be seized by the U.S. government even
when the transaction is between two entities outside the U.S. And here we have a key to understanding.
Beyond the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to acquire information is the status of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve
currency, the foundation of the world capitalist system of which SWIFT is very much a component and thus subject to dictates the
same as any other financial institution. What is a reserve currency? This
succinct
definition
offered by the Council on Foreign Relations provides the picture:
"A reserve currency is a foreign currency that a central bank or treasury holds as part of its country's formal foreign
exchange reserves. Countries hold reserves for a number of reasons, including to weather economic shocks, pay for imports,
service debts, and moderate the value of its own currency. Many countries cannot borrow money or pay for foreign goods in
their own currencies -- since much of international trade is done in dollars -- and therefore need to hold reserves to ensure a
steady supply of imports during a crisis and assure creditors that debt payments denominated in foreign currency can be made."
The currency mostly used is the U.S. dollar, the Council explains:
"Most countries want to hold their reserves in a currency with large and open financial markets, since they want to be sure
that they can access their reserves in a moment of need. Central banks often hold currency in the form of government bonds,
such as U.S. Treasuries. The U.S. Treasury market remains by far the world's largest and most liquid -- the easiest to buy into
and sell out of bond market[s]."
If you use dollars, the U.S. can go after you
Everybody uses the dollar because everybody else uses it. Almost two-thirds of foreign exchange reserves are held in U.S.
dollars. Here's the breakdown of the four most commonly held currencies, as of the first quarter of 2020:
U.S. dollar 62%
EU euro 20%
Japanese yen 4%
Chinese renminbi 2%
That 62 percent gives the U.S. government its power to not only impose sanctions unilaterally, but to force the rest of the world
to observe them, in conjunction with the use of the dollar as the primary currency in international transactions. In some
industries, it is almost the only currency used. To again turn to the Council on Foreign Relations explainer:
"In addition to accounting for the bulk of global reserves, the dollar is the currency of choice for international trade.
Major commodities such as oil are primarily bought and sold using U.S. dollars. Some countries, including Saudi Arabia, still
peg their currencies to the dollar. Factors that contribute to the dollar's dominance include its stable value, the size of
the U.S. economy, and the United States' geopolitical heft. In addition, no other country has a market for its debt akin to
the United States', which totals roughly $18 trillion.
The dollar's centrality to the system of global payments also increases the power of U.S. financial sanctions. Almost all
trade done in U.S. dollars, even trade among other countries, can be subject to U.S. sanctions, because they are handled by
so-called correspondent banks with accounts at the Federal Reserve. By cutting off the ability to transact in dollars, the
United States can make it difficult for those it blacklists to do business."
Sanctions imposed by the U.S. government are effectively extra-territorial because a non-U.S. bank that seeks to handle a
transaction in U.S. dollars has to do so by clearing the transaction through a U.S. bank; a U.S. bank that cleared such a
transaction would be in
violation
of the sanctions
. The agency that monitors sanctions compliance, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), insists that
any transaction using the dollar comes under U.S. law and thus blocking funds "is a
territorial
exercise of jurisdiction
" wherever it occurs, even if no U.S. entities are involved. Even
offering
software as a service
(or for download) from United States servers is under OFAC jurisdiction.
Two further measures of dollar dominance are that about half of all cross-border bank loans and international debt securities
are
denominated in U.S.
currency
and that 88 percent of all foreign-exchange transactions in 2019
involved
the dollar
on one side. That forex domination has remained largely unchanged; the figure was 87 percent in April 2003.
Dollar dominance cemented at end of World War II
The roots of the dollar as the global reserve currency go back to the creation of the Bretton Woods system in 1944 (named for the
New Hampshire town where representatives of Allied and other governments met to discuss the post-war monetary system as victory
in World War II drew closer). The World Bank and IMF were created here. To stabilize currencies and make it more difficult for
countries to reduce the value of their currencies for competitive reasons (to boost exports), all currencies were pegged to the
dollar, and the dollar in turn was convertible into gold at $35 an ounce. Thus the dollar became the center of the world
financial system, which cemented U.S. dominance.
By the early 1970s, the Nixon administration believed that the Bretton Woods monetary system no longer sufficiently advantaged
the United States despite its currency's centrality within the system cementing U.S. economic suzerainty. Because of the system
of fixing the value of a U.S. dollar to the price of gold, any government could exchange the dollars it held in reserve for U.S.
Treasury Department gold on demand.
Rising world supplies of dollars and domestic inflation depressed the value of the dollar, causing the Treasury price of gold to
be artificially low and thereby making the exchange of dollars for gold at the fixed price
an
excellent deal
for other governments. The Nixon administration refused to adjust the
value
of the dollar
, instead in 1971 pulling the dollar from the gold standard by refusing to continue to exchange foreign-held
dollars for gold on demand. Currencies would now float on markets against each other, their values set by speculators rather than
by governments, making all but the strongest countries highly vulnerable to financial pressure.
The world's oil-producing states dramatically raised oil prices in 1973. The Nixon administration eliminated U.S. capital
controls a year later, encouraged oil producers to park their new glut of dollars in U.S. banks and adopted policies to encourage
the banks to lend those
deposited
dollars to the South
. But perhaps "encourage" is too mild a word. The economist and strong critic of imperialism
Michael
Hudson once wrote
, "I was informed at a White House meeting that U.S. diplomats had let Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries
know that they could charge as much as they wanted for their oil, but that the United States would treat it as an act of war not
to keep their oil proceeds in U.S. dollar assets."
Restrictions limiting cross-border movements of capital were opposed by multi-national corporations that had moved production
overseas, by speculators in the new currency-exchange markets that blossomed with the breakdown of Bretton Woods and by neoliberal
ideologues, creating decisive momentum within the U.S. for the
elimination
of capital controls
. The ultimate result of these developments was to make the dollar even more central to world trade and thus
further enhance U.S. control. Needless to say, bipartisan U.S. policy ever since has been to maintain this control.
U.S. sanctions in action: The cases of Cuba and Iran
Two examples of U.S. sanctions being applied extraterritorially are those imposed on Cuba and Iran. (There are many other examples,
including that of Venezuela.) In the case of Cuba, any entity that conducts business with Cuba is barred from doing business in the
U.S. or with any U.S. entity; foreign businesses that are owned by U.S. companies are strictly prohibited from doing any business
with Cuba. Any company that had done business in Cuba must cease all activities there if acquired by a U.S. corporation. Several
companies selling life-saving medical equipment and medicines to Cuba
had
to cease doing so
when acquired by a U.S. corporation.
Meanwhile, U.S. embassy personnel have reportedly threatened firms in countries such as Switzerland, France, Mexico and the
Dominican Republic with commercial reprisals unless they canceled sales of goods to Cuba such as soap and milk. Amazingly, an
American
Journal of Public Health
report quoted a July 1995 written communication by the U.S. Department of Commerce in which the
department said those types of sales
contribute
to "medical terrorism"
on the part of Cubans! Well, many of us when we were, say, 5 years old might have regarded soap with
terror, but presumably have long gotten over that. Perhaps Commerce employees haven't.
The sanctions on Cuba have been repeatedly tightened over the years. Joy Gordon, writing in the
Harvard International Law
Journal
in January 2016,
provides
a vivid picture
of the difficulties thereby caused:
"The Torricelli Act [of 1992] provided that no ship could dock in the United States within 180 days of entering a Cuban port.
This restriction made deliveries to Cuba commercially unfeasible for many European and Asian companies, as their vessels would
normally deliver or take on shipments from the United States while they were in the Caribbean. The Torricelli Act also prohibited
foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba. The Helms-Burton Act, enacted in 1996, permitted U.S. nationals
to bring suit against foreign companies that were doing business in Cuba and that owned properties that had been abandoned or
confiscated after the revolution. Additionally, the Helms-Burton Act prohibited third-party countries from selling goods in the
United States that contained any components originating in Cuba. This significantly impacted Cuba's major exports, particularly
sugar and nickel.
[T]he shipping restrictions in the Torricelli Act have increased costs in several ways, such as Cuba sometimes having to pay
for ships carrying imports from Europe or elsewhere to return empty because they cannot stop at U.S. ports to pick up goods.
Shipping companies have partially responded by dedicating particular ships for Cuba deliveries; but in most cases, they tend to
designate old ships in poor condition, which then leads to higher maritime insurance costs."
However distasteful we find the religious fundamentalist government of Iran, U.S. sanctions, which are blunt weapons, have caused
much hardship on Iranians. The same restrictions on Cuba apply to Iran. The Iranian government said in September 2020 that it
has
lost $150 billion
since the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and that it is hampered from importing food
and medicines.
The Trump administration's renewed sanctions were imposed unilaterally and against the expressed policies of all other signatories
-- Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia. With those governments unable to restrain Washington, businesses from around the world
pulled out to avoid getting sanctioned. EU countermeasures were ineffective -- small fines didn't outweigh far larger U.S. fines,
European companies are subject to U.S. sanctions and favorable judgments in European courts are unenforceable in U.S. courts.
Sascha Lohmann, author of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs paper,
wrote
:
"Well ahead of the deadlines set by the Trump administration and absent any enforcement action, major European and Asian
companies withdrew from the otherwise lucrative Iranian market. Most notably, this included [SWIFT,] which cut off most of the
more than 50 Iranian banks in early November 2018, including the Central Bank of Iran, after they again became subject to U.S.
financial sanctions. [T]he exodus of EU-based companies has revealed an inconvenient truth to European policy-makers, namely
that those companies are effectively regulated in Washington, D.C. [T]he secretary of the Treasury can order U.S. banks to
close or impose strict conditions on the opening or maintaining of correspondent or payable-through accounts on behalf of a
foreign bank, thereby closing down access to dollarized transactions -- the 'Wall Street equivalent of the death penalty.' "
The long arm of U.S. sanctions stretches around the world
The idea that sanctions can be the "Wall Street equivalent of the death penalty" is not a figment of the imagination. Two examples
of sanctions against European multinational enterprises demonstrate this.
In 2015, the French bank BNP Paribas was given a penalty of almost $9 billion for violating U.S. sanctions by processing dollar
payments from Cuba, Iran and Sudan. The bank also pleaded guilty to two criminal charges. These penalties were handed down in U.S.
courts and prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice. The chief executive officer of the bank
told
the court
"we deeply regret the past misconduct." The judge overseeing the case declared the bank "not only flouted U.S. foreign
policy but also provided support to governments that threaten both our regional and national security," a passage highlighted in
the
Department's
press release
announcing the settlement.
Why would a French bank agree to these penalties and do so in such apologetic terms? And why would it accept the preposterous idea
that Cuba represents any security threat to the U.S. or that a French bank is required to enforce U.S. foreign policy? As part of
the settlement,
Reuters
reported
, "regulators banned BNP for a year from conducting certain U.S. dollar transactions, a critical part of the bank's
global business." And that gives us the clue. Had the bank not settled its case, it risked a permanent ban on access to the U.S.
financial system, meaning it could not handle any deals denominated in dollars. Even the one-year ban
could
have triggered an exodus
of clients in several major industries, including oil and gas.
Viñales
Valley, Pinar del Rio province, Cuba (photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com)
This was completely an extraterritorial application of U.S. law. An International Bar Association
summary
of the case
noted, "the transactions in question were not illegal under French or EU law. Nor did they fall foul of France's
obligations under the World Trade Organization or the United Nations; no agreements between France and the US were violated. But as
they were denominated in dollars, the deals ultimately had to pass through New York and thus came under its regulatory authority."
It does not take direct involvement in financial transactions to run afoul of the long arm of U.S. sanctions. A Swiss company,
Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques (SITA), was forced to agree to pay
$8
million to settle allegations
that it provided blacklisted airlines with "software and/or services that were provided from,
transited through, or originated in the United States." Among the actions punished were that SITA used software originating in the
U.S. to track lost baggage and used a global lost-baggage tracing system hosted on servers in the United States. Retrieving baggage
is a service most people would not consider a high crime.
Can the EU or China create an alternative?
Dropping the widespread use of the dollar and substituting one or more other currencies, and setting up alternative financial
systems, would be the logical short-term path toward ending U.S. financial hegemony. The German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle,
in
a 2018 report
, quoted the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, "We must increase Europe's autonomy and sovereignty in trade,
economic and financial policies. It will not be easy, but we have already begun to do it." DW reported that the European Commission
was developing a system parallel to SWIFT that would allow Iran to interface with European clearing systems with transactions based
on the euro, but such a system never was put in place. In January 2021, as the new Biden administration took office,
Iran
dismissed it entirely
, Bloomberg reported: "European governments have 'no idea' how to finance the conduit set up two years ago,
known as Instex, and 'have not had enough courage to maintain their economic sovereignty,' the Central Bank of Iran said in comments
on Twitter."
It would seem that Teheran's dismissal is warranted. The European Parliament, in its paper on U.S.
sanctions
being imposed extraterritorially
, could only offer liberal weak-tea ideas, such as "Encourage and assist EU businesses in
bringing claims in international investor-state arbitration and in US courts; Complaints against extraterritorial measures in the
[World Trade Organization]." Such prescriptions are unlikely to have anyone in Washington losing sleep.
What about China? Beijing has actually created a functioning alternative to the World Bank and IMF, the
Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank
. Just on the basis of the new bank representing a bad example (from Washington's perspective),
the U.S. government leaned heavily on Australia and other countries sufficiently firmly that Canberra initially declined to join the
bank despite its initial interest, nor did Indonesia and South Korea, although all three did later join. There is a possibility of
one-sidedness here, however, as China has by far the
biggest
share of the vote
, 27 percent, dwarfing No. 2 India's 7 percent, giving Beijing potential veto power. And with US$74 billion in
capitalization (less than the goal of $100 billion set in 2014), it can't realistically be a substitute for existing multilateral
financial institutes.
China has also set up an alternative to SWIFT, the
Cross-border
Interbank Payment System
(CIPS), a renminbi-denominated clearing and settlement system. CIPS says it has participants from 50
countries and regions, and processes US$19.4 billion per day. But that's well less than one percent of the $6 trillion SWIFT handles
daily. The Bank of China, the country's central bank, is on the record of seeking an alternative to the dollar system so that it can
evade any U.S. sanctions. "A good punch to the enemy will save yourself from hundreds of punches from your enemies," a 2020 Bank of
China report said. "We need to get prepared in advance, mentally and practically."
The report said if Chinese banks are deprived of access to dollar settlements, China should consider
ceasing
the use of the U.S. dollar
as the anchor currency for its foreign exchange controls.
That is easier said than done -- China holds $1.1 trillion in U.S. government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department. That total
is second only to Japan, and Beijing's holdings comprise 15 percent of all U.S. debt held by foreign governments. The
South
China Morning Post
admits that China
holds
such large reserve assets
of U.S. debt "largely due to its status as a 'safe haven' for investment during turbulent market
conditions." Although Beijing seeks an erosion of dollar dominance and fears that U.S. economic instability could result in another
world economic downturn, its use of the safe haven is nowhere near at an end. "While it is clear that China is keen to lessen its
dependence on US government debt, experts believe that Beijing is likely to continue buying US Treasuries, as there are few
risk-free low cost substitutes," the
Morning Post
wrote.
Coupled with the restrictions on renminbi conversion, Chinese institutions are today far from a position of challenging current
global financial relations. The U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley
recently
predicted
that the renminbi could represent five to 10 percent of foreign-exchange reserves by 2030, up from the current two
percent. Although that would mean central banks around the world would increase their holdings of the Chinese currency, it would not
amount to any real threat to dollar dominance.
No empire, or system, lasts forever
The bottom line question from all of the above is this: Will this U.S. dominance come to an end? Stepping back and looking at this
question in a historical way tells us that the answer can only be yes, given that there has been a sequence of cities that have been
the financial center. Centuries ago, the seat of a small republic such as Venice could be the leading financial center on the
strength of its trading networks. Once capitalism took hold, however, the financial center was successively located within a larger
federation that possessed both a strong navy and a significant fleet of merchant ships (Amsterdam); then within a sizeable and
unified country with a large enough population to maintain a powerful navy and a physical presence throughout an empire (London);
and finally within a continent-spanning country that can project its economic and multi-dimensional military power around the world
(New York).
No empire, whatever its form, lasts forever. But knowledge of the sequence of capitalist centers tells us nothing of timing. Each
successive new financial locus was embedded in successively larger powers able to operate militarily over larger areas and with more
force. What then could replace the U.S.? The European Union has its effectiveness diluted by the many nationalisms within its sphere
(and thus nationalism acts as a weakening agent for the EU whereas it is a strengthening agent for the U.S. and China). China's
economy is yet too small and retains capital controls, and its currency, the renminbi, isn't fully convertible. U.S. Treasury bills
remain the ultimate safe haven, as shown when investors poured into U.S. debt during crises such as the 2008 collapse, even when
events in the U.S. are the trigger.
There are no other possible other contenders, and both the EU and China, as already discussed, are in no position to seriously
challenge U.S. hegemony.
Here we have a collision of possibilities: The transcending of capitalism and transition to a new economic system or the decreasing
functionality of the world capitalist system should it persist for several more decades. Given the resiliency of capitalism, and the
many tools available to it (not least military power), the latter scenario can't be ruled out although it might be unlikely. Making
any prediction on the lifespan of capitalism is fraught with difficulty, not least because of the many predictions of its collapse
for well over a century. But capitalism as a
system
requires infinite growth
, quite impossible on a finite planet and all the more dire given there is almost no place on Earth
remaining
into
which it can expand
.
Although we can't know what the expiration date of capitalism will be, it will almost certainly be sometime in the current century.
But it won't be followed by something better without a global movement of movements working across borders with a conscious aim of
bringing a better world into being. In the absence of such movements, capitalism is likely to hang on for decades to come. In that
scenario, what country or bloc could replace the U.S. as the center? And would we want a new center to dictate to the rest of the
world? In a world of economic democracy (what we can call socialism) where all nations and societies can develop in their own way,
in harmony with the environment and without the need to expand, and with production done for human need rather than corporate
profit, there would no global center or hegemon and no need for one. Capitalism, however, can't function without a center that uses
financial, military and all other means to keep itself in the saddle and the rest of the world in line.
Yes, the day of U.S. dethronement will come, as will
the
end of capitalism
. But the former is not going to happen any time soon, however much millions around the world wish that to be
so, and the latter is what we should be working toward. A better world is possible; a gentler and kinder capitalism with a different
center is not.
Fortunately for me I am able to listen to podcasts & audiobooks while working to fill
gaps in my portfolio, as nothing paid for available as yet. Dropped on an AB written by a
Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern front, followed by the view from a Russian soldier. I then
moved on to 2 AB's which featured around 15 testimonies from German military at or close to
the D-day beaches.
Something that became instantly clear was that all the combatants had very similar hopes
& dreams but were motivated by each states propaganda & much harsher disciplinary
measures than the Allies faced . The German cannon fodder believed that they were creating a
United Europe protected from Communism & were in partnership with the French –
something that was made all the easier to believe due to the friendly treatment they received
from at least some of the French locals. The Ivan's on the other hand were protecting the
Motherland from Fascism & as they progressed were given plenty of evidence that they were
correct to do so.
It was like getting a small bubble view of groups of men in either case whose main loyalty
was concentrated towards the relatively small group pf men they fought & died with. A
view under a microscope totally different from the usual general view from high above when
individuals are reduced to numbers with only the top brass being honoured with names.
All described various versions of Hell on Earth, gory with very little glory & one
thing that really surprised me in relation to D-day & the so called " Good War " was the
accounts of the use of early phosphorous weapons & the horror they inflicted on the
defenders. I looked it up on Wiki but it only mentions it in relation to the bombing & I
assume rocket attacks from Typhoons & the like at Cherbourg. My Great Uncle Tommy came
ashore that day & unlike my Grandad he talked a lot about his war experience, which
included descriptions of the black burning skeletons of German soldiers in trenches in front
of shattered concrete bunkers after air strikes & what he saw as one of the the biggest
threats being shrapnel, which soon got him home after his left arm was amputated after being
shredded by splinters from a machine gunned tree in the Bocage – his considered opinion
on war films was & is not family blogable.
The German accents are a tad Private Schultz, but fortunately for me that soon got lost in
the detail.
True, aided by everybody's low grade psychopaths that sow the bad seeds that has the rest
full of hatred & thirsting for revenge.
Something else that upset me was the fate of the horses & pack mules which for both
the Soviets & the Wehrmacht were the mainstay of their transportation. The Germans found
that the small Steppe ponies were much tougher than their larger supposedly better bred ones
– millions were killed & the Russian soldier who had worked in a mine as a
youngster with pit ponies felt it deeply during the times when he witnessed the mortally
wounded. He also became aware of the fate of many of the war caused stray dogs at the
Russians advanced into totally shattered places like Belarus. They were rounded up & then
fed under tanks for a period, before being starved then tied to a high explosive which was
timed to go off at the estimated time it took for the them to run under an advancing Tiger,
Panther or whatever.
Funnilly enough the biggest thing that shocked the Germans in relation to what was
unloaded at D-Day was the fact that there were no horses.
Perhaps the plight of the animals is hard to take for some at least is because they were
both totally blameless & innocent.
You really don't know what the hell is going on, do you! Putin is the moderating force in
Russia, keeping the hardliners at bay. Once he is gone, people who aren't going to take any
more **** from the US and its allies will be coming to power. Then we will see people like
you piss in their pants worrying how to save themselves from Russia's fury.
Maltheus 1 hour ago
Putin is an old guy. I fear that his replacement won't have the same patience and wisdom.
Or maybe I'm eagerly looking forward to it. Either way, it doesn't take much for things to
get out of hand rather quickly.
European Monarchist 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link
President Putin is likely the healthiest leader Russia has ever had.
He is also 68, a full decade younger than Joe Biden.
I think he will be around for a while.
Vladimir Putin's hard-core daily routine includes hours of swimming, late nights, and no
alcohol
Take a look at a day in the life of Vladimir Putin:
Putin rises late in the morning, taking breakfast around noon. He usually tucks into a
large omelette or a big bowl of porridge, with some quail eggs and fruit juice on the side.
Newsweek reports that the ingredients are "dispatched regularly from the farmland estates
of the Patriarch Kirill, Russia's religious leader."
Once he's finished his meal, he drinks coffee.
Next, it's time to exercise. Newseek reported that Putin spends about two hours
swimming. While he's in the water, Putin often "gets much of Russia's thinking done," Judah
writes.
After he's done swimming laps, Putin lifts weights in the gym.
The financial fallout of covid-19 has pushed child hunger to record levels. The need has
been dire since the pandemic began and highlights the gaps in the nation's safety net.
While every U.S. county has seen hunger rates rise, the steepest jumps have been in some of
the wealthiest counties, where overall affluence obscures the tenuous finances of low-wage
workers. Such sudden and unprecedented surges in hunger have overwhelmed many rich communities,
which weren't nearly as ready to cope as places that have long dealt with poverty and were
already equipped with robust, organized charitable food networks.
Data from the anti-hunger advocacy group
Feeding America and the U.S. Census Bureau shows that counties seeing the largest estimated
increases in child food insecurity in 2020 compared with 2018 generally have much higher median
household incomes than counties with the smallest increases. In Bergen, where the median
household income is $101,144, child hunger is estimated to have risen by 136%, compared with
47% nationally.
That doesn't mean affluent counties have the greatest portion of hungry kids. An estimated
17% of children in Bergen face hunger, compared with a national average of around 25%.
But help is often harder to find in wealthier places. Missouri's affluent St. Charles
County, north of St. Louis, population 402,000, has seen child hunger rise by 69% and has 20
sites distributing food from the St. Louis Area Foodbank. The city of St. Louis, pop. 311,000,
has seen child hunger rise by 36% and has 100 sites.
"There's a huge variation in how different places are prepared or not prepared to deal with
this and how they've struggled to address it," said Erica Kenney , assistant professor of public
health nutrition at Harvard University. "The charitable food system has been very strained by
this."
Eleni Towns, associate director of the No Kid Hungry campaign , said the pandemic "undid a decade's
worth of progress" on reducing food insecurity, which last year threatened at least 15 million
kids.
And while President Joe Biden's covid relief plan, which he signed into law March 11,
promises to help with anti-poverty measures such as monthly payments to families of up to $300
per child this year, it's unclear how far the recently passed legislation will go toward
addressing hunger.
"It's definitely a step in the right direction," said Marlene Schwartz , director of the Rudd
Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut. "But it's hard to know
what the impact is going to be."
Let's just keep spending all that money on our misadventures around the world though. I
believe in a strong defense but just that, defense. I would like to hear the warmongers
justify the ridiculous amounts of money spent on that, yet we can take care of our own to a
basic minimum. What the hell happened to this country over the years
"What the hell happened to this country over the years "
4 to 5 decades of neoliberalism will do that. Its like the nation-state equivalent of
being addicted to a drug. Makes you feel better in the short term: Reagan America worked
great! In the 80s. Long term everything gets screwed over, health wise.
Typical banana republic, spending on war and ridiculous, dysfunctional but grandiose
weapons, usually shown off in parades – lorded over by a rich oligarchy – while
people starve and live in hovels. However, a healthy well-fed population is the source of a
nation's strength, so we are well on the way to fading into a has-been.
"Sierra had to leave her Amazon warehouse job when the kids' school went remote, and
Morales stopped driving for Uber when trips became scarce and he feared getting covid on top
of his asthma".
In other words, our skimpy unemployment insurance systems in man states, plus gaps in the
pandemic special relief, plus the insufferable arrogance of closing the schools with no
financial relief for parents, and here we are.
Sorry guys but this is Failed Nation stuff. I am one of those that happen to believe that
it is the most fundamental duty of a State to protect children and pregnant women. Anything
after that is a bonus if not an embellishment. America is not only the wealthiest country in
the world but is also the wealthiest in history. And yet child hunger is tolerated. And just
to add the bread slices to this s*** sandwich, there are about 800 billionaires in the US at
the moment. How many of them could wake up one day and say to themselves: 'You know what?
I am going to abolish child hunger in America with my money and be remembered forever and
even have statues raised to myself!' But it never happens.
America's incredible success is going to require americans to have a vastly reduced
standard of living to the point that they are equally as poverty stricken as the poors the
world over. Globalisation really makes any other out come unfair, and we must globalize.
Everyone being a poverty stricken gig worker is the plan. Here in this case an amazon worker
and an uber driver, on the dole. In reality, I think the biden admin has just dusted off the
plans that were to be unleashed under hillary, that's one of the reasons it all seems so ham
handed. The TPP was going to keep the world in our orbit and create supra national barriers
to autonomy in order to stop what is in fact happening now where they are free to choose
between china/russia and the US. From this perspective trump really screwed the plans of the
despicables.
1. It in the past
2. It was built on predation against the British Empire
Who needs a German Enemy with friends who help with lend-lease, Cancel the German War
debt, and not their "allies." Combined with subverting the British Empires rule with a
twisted version of self-rule – Governance dependent on not having US Sanctions, aka
imperialism absent responsibility.
This after dispossession the local US natives of the ancestral lands by force, and tricky
legalities.
It's not a failed nation, it's how the US was always designed to work. It might have had
some good years of P.R. and marketing after WWII but it was always a lie. The Constitution
was written by a bunch of wealthy slavers that hated commoners and feared economic democracy
and popular governance. The US became the wealthiest country by starving kids and killing
people the world over; it was forced into a bit of wealth distribution for a few decades by
multi-state steel strikes, the Bonus Army, armed miners unions, tenants unions, the Farmers
Holiday movement, and the contrast of a Soviet Union that was advancing by leaps and bounds
economically while the US festered in a depression. But whether it was the indigenous, the
slaves, the Filipinos, the Haitians, the Chinese, the Nicaraguans, the Mexicans, the
Hondurans, the Iranians, the Guatemalans, the Chileans, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the
Laotians, the Cambodians, the Russians, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Syrians, or it's own
citizens, the US has always killed for money. If it runs out of places to take over and
expand it'll just starve the kids at home to make a buck. It'll charge the poor overdraft
fees for having no money then chalk that up as a financial service. It'll have its state
security forces kill you for a traffic stop and then beat every citizen en masse that dares
to object. It'll cannibalize the very infrastructure and fabric of society and hand it over
to oligarchs and private equity. It'll give all the wealth to people who charge usury and own
embroidered pieces of paper but who don't actually do anything useful or necessary. And the
marks that watch US movies and television and news will believe that the US is somehow
benevolent and that they can somehow bend the will of the rapacious through the very
electoralism that the wealthy designed to keep the poor from having a say.
Starving children. Children in concentration camps. Children forced into schools during a
plague. These aren't 'oopsies.' This is how the country is set up to run. Look at how much
money the wealthy gained by letting a pandemic run wild. Look at how the entire investment
class should have gone bankrupt in 2008 but instead workers were fired from jobs and cast out
of their homes by the millions. Now the kids of those sacrificed are starving right next to
the wealthy that should have gone bust. The affluent are literally taking food out of kids
mouths because they won't let their precious stocks or real estate go down in price one iota.
The only good thing about kids starving in wealthy districts is that a Robin Hood won't have
to go to far to find money to give to those kids.
The 800 billionaires consider child hunger in America to be one of their greatest
achievements.
The child hunger in America problem won't be solved until the 800 billionaires and all
their ideological supporters and economic servants have been " rounded up and exterminated",
so to speak.
Thank you, Palaver. All "food" is not equal. Nutrition should be the emphasis.
In my jurisdiction, the Food Bank Industry encourages donations of packaged, processed,
industrialized "food". For example, fifty pounds of oats gives much more nutrition bang for
the buck than the equivalent $$$ amount of Conglomerate Cereals.
At my Conglomerate Stupormarket, they have a bin for unthinking donors to drop in "food"
that was bought in the Stupor. I've seen poptarts, jars of frosting, jello, etc. all sorts of
"food". And why do I think the Stupormarket just recycles a lot of this stuff back onto their
shelves, making a huge profit?
Next time you donate, check out what your Food Bank is actually peddling and who runs it.
Food Banks have become a huge Industry and we know what happens to huge Industries.
My mother gives rides to some of her friends (without expectation of any compensation cuz
friendship). In return, some of the friends give random items from their weekly food bank
allotment.
the food is shelf-stable processed items with produce and baked goods nearing expiration
from the local gourmet independent chain and the local Whole Foods.
Manslow's hierarchy of needs applies obviously and the food banks do truly heroic deeds
daily, but long-term people can't live healthy lives eating boxed Mac 'n Cheese, PBJ
sandwiches and organic cookies every single day.
I say expand WIC spending and eligibility, but as I'm not too familiar with that program,
dunno if that'll do any good.
In the USA, the top one percent of household net worth starts at $11,099,166.
It is seems improbable that the commenter achieved that goal. May be he is thinking of 1%
of Indonesia or Philippines. The reference to tenant farmers also appears to indicate a
country like that. Retiring to live in the Indonesian countryside is not my idea of a good
old age. Correct me please if I am wrong.
The industry needs some good PR right now. After all, its refusal to share its vaccine
technology could end up costing millions of lives in the developing world. In addition, it
could mean trillions of dollars of lost output as countries need to shut down large segments
of their economy. But the NYT is there to help. It ran a lengthy article about the issue,
which contains much useful information, but it maintains a framing favorable to the
pharmaceutical industry. At the end of the piece, after giving the argument for broader
sharing of technology and over-riding the industry's government-granted patent monopolies,
the piece tells readers: "But governments cannot afford to sabotage companies that need
profit to survive."
If the reporters/editors had read their piece, they would know that the companies in
question had already made large profits, through being paid directly for their research and
building manufacturing facilities, as was the case with Moderna and BioNtech (Pfizer's German
partner), or with advance purchase agreements. No one is suggesting that these companies
should not make a profit, so it is not clear on what planet this assertion originated.
It is possible to make profits directly on government contracts, as major military
contractors like Lockheed and Boeing could explain to the New York Times. The advantage of
having direct contracts for biomedical research is that a requirement of the contract could
be that all findings are fully open-source so that researchers all over the world can benefit
from them. (I discuss a mechanism for direct funding in chapter 5 of Rigged [it's free].)
... ... ...
It is probably worth mentioning inequality in this piece. The NYT, like most intellectual
types, has done considerable hand-wringing over inequality in recent years, both overall and
racial inequality. It is a safe bet that giving more money to pharmaceutical companies will
mean more inequality and certainly benefit whites far more than Blacks. It might be useful if
the paper paid a little attention to the policies that create
inequality instead of just bemoaning it as an unfortunate feature of the economy.
Yes, the NYT is really good at covering the impact of policies that increase inequality
and perpetuate structural racism but avoids drawing any lines to the policies themselves --
and the politics that create these policies -- by treating the status quo as a kind of
state of nature.
Innovation in vaccine design comes from advances in fundamental science, which is funded
not by companies, but by NIH and NSF (predominantly). Pharma employs scientists trained
using federal funds, freely uses federally funded resources, open access publications and
open source software paid for through federal funds, buys up commercializable technologies
in form of startups that grow out of federal science and funded by SBIR and STTR grants,
kills most of them and overcharges taxpayers for the product. That's rarely mentioned. As
is the fact that pharma actually sucks at the only thing that they are supposed to be good
at - manufacturing. Quality problems have been plaguing AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna -
something that is discussed in trade publications and FDA meetings but doesn't make it to
the NYT or TV news.
For example, Google has a simulator of "News". Many users are happy to get all the news
they need in one source! I must admit that for a while I was a happy user. But now the
simulation is quite decrepit when you stray away from the scenery selected by Google. Try
Ukraine. Several Google-worthy items per week, in roughly equal parts from Atlantic Council,
Radio FE/Sloboda and occasional items authored (I guess) in Ukraine. On April 11 there will
be a runoff election in Ecuador, and no news at all for the last month!
The EUP is cutting its own throat trying to bully China. I see the move was made as soon
as Blinken arrived and began spreading lies about both Russia and China. I know China and
Russia would like these rogue nations to uphold their honor by obeying the UN Charter, but it
seems too many have caught the Outlaw US Empire's disease and now want to return to their
Colonial ways. If the EUP ends up trashing the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI)
with China, many individual European nations are going to be very angry. China won't mind if
that's what the EUP does as is explained here :
"After China announced sanctions on 10 individuals and four entities from the EU as a
countermove to EU's unilateral sanctions against China, some people from the EU reacted
strongly, claiming China's countermeasures were "unacceptable." The European Parliament
canceled a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) with
China. Some members of the European Parliament warned that the lifting of Chinese sanctions
should be a condition to promote talks on CAI. Voices that support to block the agreement in
an attempt to punish China have been hyped by some anti-China forces.
"Yet those forces should be told that the CAI between China and the EU is mutually
beneficial, rather than a gift from the EU to China. If the European Parliament wants to
obstruct the deal, taking it as a bargaining chip in interactions with China, it should first
reach a consensus among European countries. If they all agree, let's just take it as
negotiations between China and the EU never took place last year. But don't blackmail China
with the case. China despises such ugly deeds."
China's saying essentially that it will forego the benefits of trade if it isn't properly
respected and doesn't care if the EU's dire economic condition worsens because it can't stand
up for itself in the face of the world's #1 Bully, which is exactly the same line Russia has
taken.
It is not just Jens Quisling, half (or more) of the European political elite are USA
proxies.
Take for example the European green parties.
I am pretty sure that the Dutch green party is at its core a NATO/military intelligence
operation. It was created as a merger of three parties, all of whom had a distinct pacifist
and socialist signature. The new party, GroenLinks ("GreenLeft") has forgotten all of that
and has limited itself to churning out Big Climate slogans. The party leader is an obviously
hollow puppet in the image of Justin Trudeau. His opinions are handed to him by advisors in
the shade.
A few years ago, an MP for GroenLinks, Mariko Peters was enthousiastically
promoting more military missions in Afghanistan. She was also a board member of the
"Atlantische Commissie", the local Dutch chapter of the Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(the USA chapter is the more well-known Atlantic Council). If you study her antics and
associations more closely, it is pretty obvious that there is nothing green or left about
this lady and that she is an obvious atlanticist diplomat/spy type.
Currently, there are no political parties in the Netherlands that are critical of NATO.
This used to be very
different not even a very long time ago.
What the article does not mention is the association, reputedly for a six-figure salary)
of former Grüne luminary Joschka Fisher to the Nabucco pipeline project (competing with
ns2). Fischer is also a member of the council on foreign relations and a founding member even
of the European chapter ECFR.
History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.
The Revolutionary and Civil war was fought against finance capital; where said capital
emanated mostly from London. By 1912 the U.S. was no longer Industrial Capitalist, but had
been usurped by Finance Capitalism, and of course the (((usual suspects))) were pulling
strings in the background.
WW2 was the now finance capitalist allies against the industrial capitalist axis
powers.
The run up to WW2 had the axis "industrial capitalist" powers exit the London based
finance capitalist "sterling" system. Churchill even admitted to the reason why the allies
attacked.
Germany's most unforgivable crime before the Second World War was her attempt to
extricate her economic power from the world's trading system and to create her own exchange
mechanism which would deny (((world finance))) its opportunity to profit.
Finance capital exported jobs from the U.S. and the West toward China; this in order to
take wage arbitrage. China then rope-a-dopes the dummies from the west, and uses its state
credit and industrial capitalist system to acquire intellectual know-how, and climb the
industrial curve.
Finance capitalist are slowly being cut-out of taking wage arbitrage from China and
realize that their "assets" over there, can be taken by the Chinese state at any time. Now
they want war to secure their asset position, and to buy more of China at a war time fire
sale price.
Finance capital runs the same playbook over and over. The bad guys won in WW1 and 2. The
(((international))) finance class works behind the scenes to take sordid gain on humanity,
including mass death.
If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal that
your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital and
its oligarchs.
This time around is different, China and Russia will exit the dollar system, and the
western finance capitalist class can do nothing but make idle threats. Some will argue that
the West will resort to nukes.
Maybe? I'm assuming that our (((friends))) are not completely insane, as they would lose
their capital and asset position. Their greed will stop them from destroying themselves, and
us.
"If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal
that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital
and its oligarchs. "
You are a wise man Mefobills
If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal
that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital
and its oligarchs.
"When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you
– you know your nation is doomed."
Actually, it is the ***American people*** who are fucked. The little people that is.
Fucked on behalf of Israel/Neocons, the MIC, the Neolibs, and the other "owners" of the
country.
The good news is that when the above have thoroughly looted the country, and the rest of
the world sheds the by then worthless US dollar, and the City on the Hill becomes the
Toothless Slum on the Hill,
The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead
helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political
oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and
plundered Russia's wealth.
If you are using Fakebook you are part of the problem. I am pretty tired of people who use
these antisocial media platforms complaining when these platforms do what they do by their very
nature.
Notable quotes:
"... The "reality police" have infiltrated down to the lowest levels now to look for "new normal" violators anywhere. ..."
"... I am pretty tired of people who use these antisocial media platforms complaining when these platforms do what they do by their very nature. ..."
"... Remember when Eric Schmidt got his panties in a twist because some enterprising soul had done some digital digging into his private life? ..."
"... All social media Big Tech platforms are SARPA surveillance programs that added some cool logo, a young captured jew type as Boss and some marketing to morons and lemmings. ..."
"... The sheer narcissism and desperation on these platforms is disgusting and disturbing. Big data and pedophiles love Facebook. ..."
Last week I did a web search for a quote by Goebbels concerning truth and found one
regarding TheState and TheBigLie on TheJewishVirtualLibrary. After posting it to Fakebook, I
was notified that the quote violated "community standards" and wouldn't be seen by anyone
else (except the FBI, or local LEOs perhaps).
Being who I am, I posted the same quote with a link to where I found it
[TheJewishVirtualLibrary] and was notified no one would see any of my posts for a week.
Again, being who I am, I posted a video from TheBabylonBee that illustrated the danger of
likening everything to Nazis, and was notified of a month-long ban.
I then downloaded my data in two formats and deleted the account.
Living life stupid might be inclusive and entertaining, but there's too many options
available to make ignorance enjoyable.
...It is partially Brave New World with a dash of 1984 and a healthy helping of Mordor,
all of which is brightened and made more alluring and addicting with Sexual Revolution.
The "reality police" have infiltrated down to the lowest levels now to look for "new
normal" violators anywhere. If CJ thinks he's a nobody, then I am a sub-sub-sub-nobody, yet I
have had my user account suspended twice now at an obscure news aggregation website,
Fark.com , for making comments that
apparently constitute "Covid misinformation."
Once was when I commented on a story that
stated that there is a need to vaccinate even those that have recovered from actually having
Covid. I said something like, "Why would you need to vaccinate someone whose immune system is
functioning properly and already did the job naturally?" Apparently, even mentioning that
humans have an immune system is now verboten, and thus my comment was deleted and my account
was suspended for 24 hours. The next time I was suspended was just over this past weekend
when I commented on a story about someone ignoring covid rules.
I stated something to the
effect that we should ALL be ignoring the public health "experts" who are petty tyrants.
Well, they have now suspended my account for 72 hours again for "covid misinformation."
Despite being amused that my opinions are somehow "misinformation," it's certainly
enraging that speaking plain common truth is becoming more and more difficult.
I am pretty tired of people who use these antisocial media platforms complaining when
these platforms do what they do by their very nature. They weren't set up to help us they
were set up to enslave us. Get a clue, Farcebook and Twatter et al are not your friends!
All social media Big Tech platforms are SARPA surveillance programs that added some cool
logo, a young captured jew type as Boss and some marketing to morons and lemmings. Absolute
joke. The sheer narcissism and desperation on these platforms is disgusting and disturbing.
Big data and pedophiles love Facebook.
"... "Concern" about Libya in 2011 and Syria since 2011 to the present. So many "concerns" keep popping up about places that empire does not fully control. ..."
"... For some odd reason, this empire has no concern for the largest ethnic groups in its empire. It 24/7 calls them "deplorables" or "racists". The empire should look in the mirror at itself. ..."
"Concern" about Libya in 2011 and Syria since 2011 to the present. So many "concerns" keep popping up about places that empire
does not fully control.
For some odd reason, this empire has no concern for the largest ethnic groups in its empire. It 24/7 calls
them "deplorables" or "racists". The empire should look in the mirror at itself.
@anonymous ay. A play to gain advantage, to publicly make the Chins look weak, subject
them to a media diplomatic humiliation, and as usual control the narrative."
It is talked about in Chinese Internet that before Chinese diplomats attending the meeting,
they went through 20 (or so) different scenarios of what the other side would say or do, and
practiced the responses accordingly. So it is not a surprise they could handle this rather
obvious case easily.
You think US would do such preparation? Probably not. They probably didn't even bother to
look up basic things like Yang and Wang's backgrounds.
Like what Sun Tzu says, know yourself and know your enemy
So, according to
Facebook and the Atlantic Council , I am now a "dangerous individual," you know, like a
"terrorist," or a "serial murderer," or "human trafficker," or some other kind of "criminal."
Or I've been praising "dangerous individuals," or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise
attempting to "sow dissension" and cause "offline harm."
Actually, I'm not really clear what I'm guilty of, but I'm definitely some sort of horrible
person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose
books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your
account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you'll be issued this warning:
Now, hold on, don't click away just yet. You're already on whatever website you're reading
this "dangerous," "terrorist" column on (or you're reading it in an email, probably on your
phone), which means you are already on the official "Readers of Mass-Murdering Content"
watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.
Also, don't worry, I'm not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000
words well, all right, I'm going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how
"reality" is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google,
the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and "think
tanks" like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic
Research Lab ("DFRLab").
First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.
What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so
Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from
sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn't suspend my account, or censor the
post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a
"dangerous individual." Instead, they punished anyone who tried to "boost" my "dangerous" post,
a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene fromFull Metal Jacket ) will be
familiar with.
Here's the "dangerous" post in question. (If you're particularly sensitive to "terrorist"
content, you may want to put on your "anti-terrorism" glasses, or take some other type of
prophylactic measures to protect yourself from "offline harm," before you venture any
further.)
The photo, which I stole from Gunnar Kaiser , is of an art exhibit in
Düsseldorf, Germany . My commentary is self-explanatory. As you can see, it is
extremely "dangerous." It literally radiates "offline harm."
OK, before you write to inform me how this was just the work of a dumb Facebook algorithm,
think about what I described above. If an algorithm was preventing sharing and suspending
people's accounts based on keyword spotting, it would have censored my original post, and
presumably suspended my account. Or, if Facebook has an algorithm that recognizes certain
"dangerous" phrases, and then censors or suspends the accounts of people who share a post
including those phrases, but doesn't censor the original post or suspend the account of the
author of the post well, that's kind of strange, isn't it?
In any event, shortly after I posted it, I started seeing reports like this on
Facebook:
Those are just a few examples, but I think you get the general idea.
The point is, apparently, the Corporatocracy feel sufficiently threatened by random people
on Facebook that they are conducting these COINTELPRO-type ops. Seriously, think about that for
a minute. I am not Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. I'm not even Glenn Greenwald or Matt
Taibbi. I'm a midlist-level author of unusual literature , and a
political satirist, and a blogger, basically, and yet Facebook, and their partners at the
Atlantic Council, and AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, and Moderna, and who knows which other global
corporations and transnational, non-governmental entities like the WEF and WHO, consider
someone of my lowly status enough of a threat to their "New Normal" narrative to warrant the
attention of the Reality Police.
Now, let me be clear about who I'm talking about when I'm talking about the "Reality
Police." Facebook's partnership with the Atlantic Council is only one example, but it is a
rather good one. Here's a quick profile of the Atlantic Council
"The Atlantic Council of the United States was founded in 1961 as a think tank and
anticommunist public relations organization to prop up support within the US for NATO in the
post-World War II era [its] current, honorary and lifetime directors list reads like a
bipartisan rogues gallery of American war-criminals, including Henry Kissinger, George P.
Shultz, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. James Woolsey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell,
Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. Among the former Atlantic Council chairman have been Obama
administration officials James L. Jones, (national security advisor) and Chuck Hagel
(secretary of defense). The chairman of the council is Brent Scowcroft, the retired US Air
Force officer who held national security and intelligence positions in the Nixon, Bush I and
Bush II administrations. [It] is funded by substantial government and corporate interests
from the financial, defense and petroleum industries. Its 2017 annual report documents
substantial contributions from HSBC, Chevron, The Blackstone Group, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin
and Ford Motor Company, among many others. Also listed is Google Inc. in the $100,000 to
$250,000 donor category. Among the largest council contributors are the US State Department,
The Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the UK, and the United Arab Emirates. Other
contributors include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Boeing, BP, Exxon and the US Army, Navy, Air Force
and Marines." -- Kevin Reed, World Socialist
Website
These are the folks that are policing "reality" (the "reality" they have manufactured, and
are manufacturing moment by moment), deciding what officially
happened , and didn't happen , and what
it means, and who qualifies as an "authoritative news source," and "fact-checking" everything
we see on the Internet. It's not a bunch of pimply-faced IT nerds writing sloppy code in Menlo
Park. It's GloboCap and the Military-Industrial Complex.
If you're one of my "New Normal" ex-friends and colleagues (or one of my Facebook or Twitter
trolls) who, for some unknown reason, is still reading this column, perhaps on your way to get
experimentally "vaccinated" or report one of your neighbors for not wearing a mask or being
outdoors without a valid reason, this is who has manufactured your "reality" and the so-called
"science" you claim I am "denying," even as reality stares you in the face
This did not begin with the "New Normal," of course. Every system of power manufactures its
own "reality" (totalitarian systems more fanatically than others). No, I've been writing about
the
manufacturing of "normality," and the War on Dissent and Populism that
GloboCap has been relentlessly waging on anyone and everyone opposing its hegemony or refusing
to conform to its ideology, since back when I was still writing heretical
columns like this for CounterPunch before the editors saw which way the wind was blowing
and ideologically purged its roster to get back into the good graces of GloboCap (following
which ideological purge, Google restored it to the ranks of "real news").
And that is how reality-policing works. It's a bullying operation, basically. The entire
"cancel culture" phenomenon is. "Cancel culture" is a silly name for it. We are talking about a
global empire imposing total ideological conformity (or, in simpler terms, its version of
"reality") on the entire planet through fear and force. The Nazis referred to this process as
Gleichschaltung .
Global capitalism has reached the stage where it no longer needs to tolerate dissent (any
kind of dissent, from any quarter) to maintain the illusion of "freedom and democracy," because
there is no alternative to global capitalism. It is everywhere. There is nowhere to run or
hide. When the Reality Police find you, and threaten to "cancel" you, you have two choices obey
or be vaporized.
If you're a Palestinian, a Syrian, a Yemeni, the president of an uncooperative African
country, or some other type of non-Western person, you might very well be physically vaporized.
For Westerners, vaporization is less dramatic and final. You will simply be disappeared from
the Internet, fired from your job, socially ostracized, deemed a "dangerous individual," a
"racist," an "anti-Semite," a "conspiracy theorist," a "white supremacist," a "domestic
terrorist," an "anti-vaxxer," a "Covid denier."
Or have a look at this "warning" you get on Twitter if you attempt to read anything
published by OffGuardian
I could go on and on with this, and I'm sure I will in future columns. It's kind of the only
story at the moment, the changeover from simulated democracy to pathologized-totalitarianism as
the governing structure of global capitalism. For now, I'll just leave you with one more image
in this already overly pictorial column. Don't worry, it's been thoroughly "fact-checked," so
there's no need to read or question the fine print (even though I have a feeling you will)
Do watch out for those "unrelated coincidences." Some of them, I hear, can be rather
nasty.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing,
Inc. His dystopian novel,Zone 23, is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of hisConsent Factory
Essaysare published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of
Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
That Tweet would make a nice Plakat to start pasting around Berlin and other cities maybe
CJ can find a printer who 1) is still open; and 2) will take the business.
Article pretty much says it all. There's no longer any need to engineer consent, they can
just use outright coercion along with financial reward to jerk the masses of peasants around.
It's clear that the billionaire and corporate classes march in lockstep and control the US
government as well as media, educational system, etc. The rage against Russia seems to be
that they are a barrier to total world domination by GloboCap which, as part of its intrinsic
structure, needs to constantly expand. What's more, a certain part of the population are
wannabe commissars, wannabe Pavel Morozovs, wannabe willing executioners for the
dictatorship. The billionaires should go and fight their own next wars but no, there'll be
enough unemployed types willing to take a chance for a paycheck. The little people think the
US is a country; the people actually running it consider it to be an economic empire, their
empire that is.
These rich and millennial Facebook woke employees are like the young Khmer Rouge or Red
Guard monsters, full of woke rage and gleeful that they have the power to destroy
everyone.
Based on Facebook's 'community standards' (see above), it has banned all posts praising
the US in written or pictorial form for the following reasons –
1. Has created and/or funded terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, paramilitary groups like
Blackwater, death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.;
2. Creates, trains and funds a vast military system to threaten and/or bomb countries and
overthrow governments;
3. Has conducted and prosecuted wars and military actions around the world every single day
for the past twenty years;
4. Kidnaps and abducts private citizens in foreign countries and imprisons them in secret
bases like Guantanamo;
5. Employs corporate institutions to impose financial embargoes destroying nations' economic
infrastructure and citizens' livelihood.
The point is, apparently, the Corporatocracy feel sufficiently threatened by random
people on Facebook that they are conducting these COINTELPRO-type ops.
This really seems to be a thing. The elite are supposedly into the occult including things
like clairvoyants. Have their soothsayers seen a future rebel that will take them down? Or
are they just insecure, criminally insane dopes that irrationally fear independent thinking?
Whatever the reason, they are extremely paranoid.
On Dec. 22, Coomer filed a
defamation suit in Denver state court , seeking unspecified damages, against Oltmann and 14
others, including the Trump Campaign; Giuliani; Powell; the One America News Network (OAN); OAN
chief White House correspondent Chanel Rion; Newsmax Media; Newsmax contributor Michelle
Malkin; The Gateway Pundit website; and radio and podcast host Eric Metaxas.
I have written of the decline of the US likening it to a malignant tumour yet the recent
gaffs with Russia and China make it likely the hospitalisation of the patient may be more
urgent. Regarding sanctions and thier use on poor countries .
Goya and Sanctions: with some satirical nudity. Satire is a bellweather indicator of the
sophistication and progress of a civilization. When satire and humor dies history teaches us
so will that civilization. Sadly I don't expect this video to be allowed on US youtube.
Not the OP, but I'll answer. American expat here. I spent years trying to get people to at
least talk with me on issues. They just wanted to watch TV and eat fast food and let the
plutocrats run things into the ground. So I left, 10 years ago, to seek meaning and adventure
elsewhere. Haven't looked back.
I settled into a "third world anti-freedom authoritarian regime", where I enjoyed all the
freedoms I hadn't realized I had not known in America, and built a life for myself. When
I'd talk to people back home they'd tell me I was crazy for wanting to stay in an
"authoritarian nation", and ask wasn't I afraid? They didn't understand why I didn't want to
come back home. I haven't visited America in ages. I can no longer relate to America's
Afro-centric, virus-mania culture. Turning on American MSM shows is like watching the news from
Mars.
Would I leave the life I've created for myself to go back to the place I grew up and help
save the people there if I thought there was enough of them willing to fight? Maybe, if I could
do it without jeopardizing my family here. A part of me would like to.
But the sad reality is, the people in the United States do not want to be saved .
They're comfortable . Half the people I talk to back there brag to me about the vaccine
they got. I just talked to one who boasted how it "wasn't available to the masses yet" and she
had to trick her way into getting an mRNA shot. 130 million doses have been administered in the
US already, to a nation of 330 million. That doesn't seem like something "unavailable to the
masses."
So, do I want to go back to the US, to stand there screaming at people on the street like
some homeless bum as they line up to get their COVID shots, as armies of them march with
#BlackLiveMatters signs, surrounded by police protection, as the idiots on the left scream
about Russia and the idiots on the right scream about China, while nobody talks about the #1
foreign influencer of American public policy by far, because to mention its name is to have
one's life destroyed? I have better things to do with the precious few years I get on this
Earth.
When enough of the people wake up, when they are ready to be led, I may yet answer the call
to leadership when that call seriously goes out, 15 or 20 or 25 years from now. But at the
present moment, the American people are still so far from wanting anything other than football,
fast food, and racial equality that it really is not a place I have any interest in being, nor
one I have anything much to offer.
Reagan made jokes about burning the midday oil, but he was faced with stagnant collapsing
Russia, not dynamic China. Biden has actually said that China is doomed to collapse and
already in decline because–get this– the Chinese are not young enough. Those
Fortune 500 companies most of which incorporated in Delaware did not do so for patriotic
reasons, but to avoid tax and government regulation. The elites (38 to 58 year olds) running
America or at least largely determining who wins the elections are more interested in making
money on their Chinese investments than US primacy; Trump was a merely a blip and the future
of America is pretty much set on relative decline now.
@Anonymous that a strong American military and national security posture is the best
guarantor of peace and the survival of our values and civilization.
Stavridis has been at the forefront of the mass slaughter known as the implementation of the
Oded Yinon Plan for Eretz Israel:
From 2002 to 2004, Stavridis commanded Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, conducting combat
operations in the Persian Gulf in support of both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation
Enduring Freedom.
Stavridis "oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria." In short, this prominent
racketeer is dripping with the blood of hundreds of thousands of the victims.
US "intelligence" i.e the people who leak made up BS via anonymous sources to their media
mouthpieces
sbin 2 hours ago
Funny
I can not think of anything intelligent they have ever done.
If a list was drawn up of all the threats to Americans the MIC and Intelligence agencies
would be at the top.
joethegorilla 2 hours ago (Edited)
The US Intelligence used to be under the military chain of command. Dulles talked
Eisenhower into letting him start the CIA as a civilian agency. Everyone warned this domestic
political meddling would happen and guess what? They did it anyway. Spying on Americans is a
feature, not a bug.
Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link
israel-firsters and the CIA love to milk their sugar daddy, meanwhile people are all
choked up about the Left and Right charade
Weihan 59 minutes ago remove link
Great article from Greenwald! And remember: by "domestic terrorists" and "violent
extremists," they're referring to anyone who still believes a country should have a
recognizable and enforceable border.
1.(CFR) includes George Bush, Bill Clinton, all modern CIA Directors, most modern Joint
Chiefs of Staff, most modern Cabinet and top Executive Branch appointed officeholders,
etc.
2. The Trilateral Commission: Zbignew Brzezinski, John D. Rockefeller, Alan Greenspan,
Anthony Lake, John Glenn, David Packard, David Gergen, Diane Feinstein, Jimmy Carter, Adm.
William Crowe, etc.
3. The Bilderberg Group: Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein, Prince Bernhard of
Netherlands, Bill Clinton, Lloyd Bentsen, etc.
4. (NSC), the military and intelligence policy-making and control group for national and
international security, which reports directly to the President, its secret 5412 Committee
(which directs black [covert] operations), and its PI-40 Subcommittee
5. (JCS)'s Special Operations compartment, the operations directorate which implements the
orders of the NSC's 5412 Committee, utilizing the U.S. Special Forces Command.
6. (NPO), which operates the Continuity of Government Project (COG), an ongoing secret
project to maintain command, control, communication and intelligence executive centers during
an extreme National Emergency by operating clandestine, secure, underground cities staffed by
surrogates for above ground national leaders.
7. FEMA's black projects compartment, which operates federal preventive-detention camps
[often located on military bases or Federal Bureau of Land Management lands], secure
underground shelters for the elite during cataclysms, etc.
1. (NSA), monitors and screens all telephone, telegraph, computer modem, radio,
television, cellular, microwave, and satellite communications, and electromagnetic fields "of
interest" around the world, and orchestrates information-control and cover-up activities
related to UFO secrecy and surveillance of extra-terrestrial operations, Fort Meade, MD.
2. National Reconnaissance Office. ... controls and collects information from global spy
satellites...
3. (CIA), commands, often controls, and sometimes coordinates, the gathering of secret
overseas information gathered by spies (HUMINT), electronic surveillance (SIGINT), and other
means; carries out covert unconstitutional paramilitary counterinsurgency operations and
preemptive political pacification projects in violation of international law, as well as
counter-intelligence sting operations against foreign agents; engages in domestic
surveillance, and manipulation of the U.S. political process, "in the National interest" in
direct violation of its congressional charter; operates proprietary "false front" companies
for profit; conducts a major share of international trans-shipment of illegal drugs, using
National Security cover and immunity; and cooperates with NSA's UFO cover-up operations,
Langley, VA, and worldwide branches.
4. (FBI) The branch which investigates, surveilles and neutralizes foreign Intelligence
agents operating within the U.S....
5. (DOE-INTEL), which conducts internal security checks and external security threat
countermeasures, often through its contract civilian instrumentality, the Wackenhut
Corporation
6. (INSCOM) whose assignments include psychological and psychotronic warfare (PSYOPS),
para-psychological intelligence (PSYINT), and electromagnetic intelligence (ELMINT), Ft.
Meade, MD. - U.S Army Intelligence and Security Command
7. (ONI), which gathers intelligence affecting naval operations, and has a compartmented
units, Office of Navy Intelligence......................
8. AFOSI), which gathers intelligence affecting aerospace operations, and has a
compartmented unit involved in investigating IAC [Identified Alien Craft] surveillance, and
coordination with NRO interdiction operations, Bolling Air Force Base, MD.
9. (DIA), which coordinates the intelligence data gathered from the various Armed Services
intelligence branches (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard and Special Forces), and
provides counter-threat measures, (which include providing security at ultra-classified
installations by the deployment of U.S. "Thought Police".
10. NASA: Which gathers intelligence data relating to space flights, sabotage threats,
astronaut and reconnaissance satellite encounters with UFOs and ETs, and coordinates the
transfer of alien technology to U.S. and allies' aerospace operations.
11. Which is an NSA/USAF joint intelligence operations unit dealing with possible threats
to aerospace operations from foreign powers, terrestrial or otherwise.
12. (DISCO), which conducts intelligence operations within and on behalf of the civilian
defense contractor corporations engaged in classified research, development, and production,
Defense Industry Security Command
13. (DIS), which conducts investigations into people and situations deemed a possible
threat to any operation of the Department of Defense, Defense Investigative Service
14. Which conducts surveillance and interdiction of threats to the security of Air Force
electronic transmissions and telemetry, and to the integrity of electronic countermeasure
(ECM) warfare equipment, Air Force Electronic Security Command.
15. DEA: Which conducts surveillance and interdiction of drug smuggling operations, unless
exempted under "National Security" waivers .
16. Federal Police Agency Intelligence: Which coordinates intelligence relating to threats
against federal property and personnel.
17. Defense Electronic Security Command: Which coordinates intelligence surveillance and
countermeasures against threats to the integrity of military electronic equipment and
electronic battlefield operations, Fort Worth, TX.
18. Naval Investigative Services: (NIS), which conducts investigations against threats to
Naval operations.
JGResearch 1 hour ago
Part 3:
War Department: Military industrial Complex
1. CIA's Directorate for Science and Technology :
Which gathers information with promise for scientific and technological developments which
present a superiority advantage for, or a threat against, the National Security.
2. Strategic Defense Initiative Office(SDIO) and Ballistic Missile Defense Org.(BMDO)
Which coordinates research, development and deployment of ... advanced technology
aerospace weapons.
3. Department of Energy :
(DOE) which, besides its cover story of researching cleaner-burning coal and gasoline and
more solar power, is principally involved in research and development of: more specialized
nuclear weapons; compact, self-sustaining, fusion powered, particle and wave weapons,
including electromagnetic pulse, gravitational/anti-gravitational, laser, particle beam and
plasmoid applied weapons research; high energy invisibility "cloaking" technology, etc.
4. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories-West
(SNL-W):
Which are involved in nuclear warhead "refinements", development of new transuranic
elements for weapons and energy applications, development of anti-matter weapons (the Teller
Bomb: 10,000 times the force of a hydrogen bomb), laser/maser technology applications, and,
reportedly, successful teleportation experiments, among other projects, at this Russian
nicknamed "City of Death", Livermore, CA.
5. Idaho National Engineering Laboratories : (INEL), which houses numerous underground
facilities in an immense desert installations complex larger than Rhode Island, has security
provided by its own secret Navy Base, is involved in nuclear, high energy electromagnetic,
and other research, and includes Argonne National Laboratory, West), Arco, ID
6. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) Phillips Air Force Laboratory:
Which are sequestered on Kirtland Air Force Base/Sandia Military Reservation, and conduct
the translation of theoretical and experimental nuclear and Star Wars weapons research done
at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories into practical, working weapons,
Albuquerque, NM.
7. Haystack (Buttes) USAF Laboratory, Edwards AFB, CA : A 30 levels deep, extreme security
facility reportedly engaged in alien technology retro-engineering.
8. Area 51, Groom Lake, (USAF/DOE/CIA) Base) and S-4 (Papoose Lake Base)
Ultra-secure "non-existent" deployment bases where extremely classified aerospace vehicles
are tested and operationally flown, including the Aurora hypersonic spyplane, the Black Manta
[TR-3A] stealth fighter follow-on to the F-117A, the Pumpkinseed hyper-speed unmanned
aerospace reconnaissance vehicle, and several variants of anti-gravitational craft
(U.S.-UFOs).
9. Los Alamos National Laboratories : The premier research lab for nuclear, subatomic
particles, high magnetic field, exometallurgical, exobiological and other exotic technologies
research, Los Alamos County, NM.
10. U.S. Special Forces Command: Hurlburt Field, Mary Esther, Fl, along with its Western
U.S. Headquarters, Special Forces Command, Beale AFB, Marysville, CA, coordinating:
U.S. Army Delta Forces (Green Berets)
U.S. Navy SEALs (Black Berets), Coronado, CA.
USAF Blue Light (Red Berets) Strike Force
JGResearch 1 hour ago (Edited)
Part 4:
11. (DARPA), which coordinates the application of latest scientific findings to the
development of new generations of weapons.
12. The Jason Group: Elite weapons application scientists, developing cutting-edge science
weapons for DARPA, and operating under the cover of the Mitre Corporation.
13. Aquarius Group: Technology application scientists, reportedly working under the
guidance of the Dolphin Society, an elite group of scientists privy to extremely classified
science and technology findings.
14. Defense Science Board: Which serves as the Defense Department's intermediary between
weapons needs and the physical sciences.
15. Defense Nuclear Agency: Currently concentrating on fusion powered, high energy
particle beam, X-ray laser, and EM forcefield weapons development and deployment.
16. U.S. Space Command : Space War Headquarters for operating "the next war, which will be
fought and won in space", Falcon AFB, CO
17. (NORAD), operating the nuclear survivable space surveillance and war command center
deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs, CO.
18. Air Force Office of Space Systems: Which coordinates the development of future
technology for operating and fighting in space.
19. NASA's Ames Research Center : SDI weapons research - Classified
20. Project MILSTAR: Development and deployment of WWIII [space war] command, control,
communication and intelligence satellites.
"The strategic stealth bomber will be able to deliver conventional and thermonuclear
weapons to enemy targets anywhere and anytime in the world. It will be able to destroy any
target, anywhere".
Once it gets there, anyway – which at presumably subsonic speed may take a long,
long time.
So basically this will cost a huge amount of money to do what ICBMs have been able to do
for 60 years, and what Burevestnik can do with a lot more flexibility and stealth.
"Afghanistan is a great base from which to invade Central Asia and threaten Russia from
the south. The country has been occupied by the US for 20 years "
If Russia, China, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Iran got together and supported the Taliban,
they could get the Americans out of Afghanistan double quick.
I am slightly puzzled that they haven't done so long ago.
Unless they prefer to keep the Americans tied up and bleeding in Central Asia. Keep your
enemies closer, etc.
This uncomfortable thought came to me while listening to Joe Biden talking about "soulless
killer" Vladimir Putin. Smaller insults have sparked off wars. The "Footless, yellow
earth-worm" slur moved Kaa the Rock Python to devour Bandar Log. Luckily, easy-going Putin
replied with a smile. He said that in his
childhood, kids responded with "I am rubber, you are glue; bounces off me and sticks to you";
he only wished good health for the American president and proposed to debate him online, so
that Americans and Russians, as well as the whole world, could form their own opinion. Biden
evaded the challenge. It's not clear he remembered who Putin is. An empty suit with a
teleprompter, called him Donald Trump Jr . Biden
said Putin meddled in the US elections and he will pay a price for it. Alas, Putin couldn't
influence the US dead, and they swung the elections as they voted for Biden by whole
cemeteries. Yes, Biden is a senile dummy that couldn't even board Air Force One without
stumbling thrice
the next day, but there is somebody who operates the teleprompter, and that is the problem.
The Russians were visibly furious. When US leaders drop such invective, it's like pirates
passing a 'black spot' in Treasure Island .
It's a signal that the foreign leader has to be deposed or killed outright. That's how they
spoke of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi; both were killed and their 'rogue states'
devastated. It was clearly a show of hostile intentions, not just from Biden but also from the
US establishment speaking like ventriloquist through the current White House tenant.
Afghanistan is a great base from which to invade Central Asia and threaten Russia from the
south. The country has been occupied by the US for 20 years, and Trump was determined to pull
out the troops. Biden has already hinted that the US will renege on its agreement with the
Taliban to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was supposed to be completed by
May 2021; it will be "tough" for the United States to withdraw forces from Afghanistan in six
weeks, he said. Biden has also scrapped Trump's plan to withdraw forces from Germany, and with
good reason. His administration wants Germans to drop the Nord Stream II project, and it is
easier to convince a country if you have forty military bases there.
Fighting against Iran never stopped. When the US isn't doing it her best friend Israel is
acting. It has emerged that during the last two years, Israeli frogmen sabotaged 12 Iranian
tankers, reported the Wall
Street Journal . But it all backfired. On February 16, the entire Mediterranean coast of
Israel was covered with sticky black mess.
... ... ...
The blow to Israel was terrible – animals, plants and fish died; for a long time it
will be impossible to swim and sunbathe on the oily shores. Only now the sad truth has begun to
leak out: 'the worst pollution of the century' had been done by Israelis. The first to speak
about the source of the pollution was Israeli Minister of the Environment Gila Gamliel. She
said the oil was released by the Iranian tanker Emerald carrying a cargo of
US-sanctioned oil products to Syria. This is Iranian eco-terrorism, she said. But Gila was
quickly gagged – the Israeli military censorship forbade discussion of this topic, except
in the most general terms. It appears Gila Gamliel was right – up to a point. The Israeli
dissident
Richard Silverstein wrote about it:
It was a deliberate attack by Israel on the Iranian vessel. Israel's naval commando unit,
Flotilla 13 covertly attached a mine to the Emerald . The intent was to cause minor
damage that would send a message to Iran that its own attacks on Gulf shipping would bring a
cost. This Times of London
report written by Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeiffer confirms my source. However, the
commandos didn't realize that the Emerald was a rusty old hulk in desperately
ill-repair. The Israeli mine, which was supposed to cause minor damage, actually ripped a
hole so big that much of the contents of the ship's hold leaked into the Mediterranean. This
is what caused the Israeli environmental disaster: Israel itself.
Biden voted for Gulf War Two. Why? Because as he admits, he is a Zionist. Zionists are
traitors, terrorists and murderers. Yet Biden the terrorist accuses Putin of being a
killer?
The illusion of a US president having any actual authority is pretty much being dispelled by
this ventriloquist's dummy Biden signing whatever is placed in front of him and parroting
whatever is on the teleprompter. A stupid egotist his entire life, his mental decline isn't as
apparent as it might be quite yet because he's been carefully stage managed so far. They're
being extremely careful not to let the cat out of the bag in letting people get a glimpse of
what he's really like. And it's downhill from here.
The virus hysteria has been a test case lab in assessing what works, what doesn't, how to
improve on herding and suppressing the population, etc. Insofar as dead foreign leaders goes,
who really knows?
When tens of millions of dollars are available lots of people in some leader's circle might
be tempted to expose the target to some form of poisoning or lethal radiation. Hugo Chavez
expressed suspicion at how he and other leaders opposed to US diktat seemed to come down with
cancer.
The US itself has claimed some of it's diplomats were possibly targeted by mystery rays in
Cuba so the idea of something like this is not far-fetched; it's just a case of projection,
accusing others of what one is guilty of.
LOL, you don't know how many times, since his campaign and now as (fake) POTUS that Biden
has reminded me of Chauncey Gardiner. It's the perfect comparison.
(But, Jobotomy Xiden will be gone soon and then the bi-racial, sociopathic Hillary 2.0 will
be inaugurated. Excuse me while I go hurl.)
Think of the hysteria and histrionic nation wide wailing and teeth gnashing over Trump
calling it "the China virus" and the dead silence when Biden calls Putin:
A soulless killer. .
I wish Putin would take revenge and pull a Soleimani on Biden & Co. but perhaps he
laughs & chalks it up to the senile, demented ramblings of a clown.
Is this more theater?
To add to the insanity, the embrace and total absolution of the pathological liar, war
criminal and mass torturer and murderer, George W. Bush leaves me .stunned:
Bush on Putin, 2001:
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We
had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul ; a man deeply
committed to his country and the best interests of his country."
Biden is a sociopath, one of limited intelligence. But a sociopath nevertheless.
If he is instructed by his controllers to initiate a nuclear war, he will do so
unhesitatingly.
I would not be surprised if both Joe and Hunter were somehow benefiting from drug traffic
across the border. Actually, I expect that is largely what is behind Biden's open border
policy.
It's impossible for normal people to understand sociopathic behavior. The American political
class has been selected for sociopathy now for generations.
"Americans should write a letter of apology to Putin, apologizing for our rude and senile
leader (and the degenerate lunatics that surround him) and ask for President Putin's
understanding and patience. "
Not a bad idea at all. I would formulate some things differently though, the idea is that
the letter should also circulate, so mind the crude tone, show that even Americans can be
tactful gentle-man. Even that would impress the whole world.
Thanatopia's attacks on Putin differ vastly from its deranged Sinophobia. Thanatopians want
Putin gone, replaced by a New Yeltsin, and Russia vivisected for further pillage. But they
don't want Russians dead, because this 'Free Russia' will be needed for the Great Purpose-the
destruction of China.
The truly Evil campaign to entirely falsely accuse China of genocide in Xinjiang, is a call
not just to war, but to genocide. A China devastated would still rise again, even if the USA
and its villainous stooges succeed in breaking it up, again, as was nearly achieved in the 19th
and 20th centuries.
The USA and the Western vassals promote, train and finance separatists in Xinjiang, Tibet,
'South' Mongolia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, even 'Manchuria'. Such civil discord would cause millions
of deaths, but it gets worse.
The Imperial hatemongers never cease to vilify the CCP. The 'New Nazis', 'It is 1939 again,
and 'appeasement' is treason', human organ harvesters etc. All lies, all the crudest
projection. But the CCP is 100 million strong, and the Chinese CCP Government enjoys 95%
satisfied or highly satisfied rating from the populace, according to the latest Harvard poll.
So the entire population is complicit, 'Xi's willing executioners' etc, and must be punished.
SARS CoV2 was obviously meant to kill millions of Chinese and devastate the economy, but the
'blowback' has been cosmic retribution, and that has only made the Western genocidists even
more enraged.
The Western oligarchy does not do mass high kultur. Kultur is a commodity and a venue for
narcissistic display and mass kultur is base, exploitative and mind-destroying, keeping the
plebs permanently obtunded, morally, intellectually and spiritually. 'Feed 'em muck' as Nellie
Melba recommended.
Worldometer/coronavirus today: Tanzania population >60 million; CV19 cases <600. Dear
Scott, that cannot be correct! (If all the brainwashing serves me right.)
RIP President Magufuli, the man who busted WHO with their fraud -- or scientific
incompetence. Ha. This story could have been the lead paragraph, and no stone should be left
unturned to find out if Magufuli was murdered. This especially includes death by a deadly viral
infection, ala Operation Zyphr ?
Minor correction: Biden does not represent the American people. Those who think they support
him are unaware of their Stockholm syndrome.
Now, let's arrest our schadenfreude about Israel's acts of sabotage spoiling their own
coastline. Our fragile seas are too precious for that sort of vindictive spirit. Nevertheless,
it is okay be encouraged about this colossal blunder, because it proves the controllers are
really not in control at all. And they damn well know it.
Finally, forget not Shere Khan totally trumps Kaa. But as fate would have it even he loses
in the end.
Unless neocons are insane, I don't think that they want to start a war with Russia and much
less China. The U.S. can't even win a war against goat herders with homemade explosives. The
U.S. military is more concerned about having black transgender soldiers than about being
efficient.
Also, China practically owns the U.S. and Canada at this point.
This is probably just another distraction to keep people from noticing that they are
(again!) being fleeced and raped.
It now appears the Russians and Chinese are using our woke BS against us like a deflector
shield.
Putin's speech of the US projecting its own psychology on others, mentioning BLM and racism
plus the Chinese mentioning the US "persecution of blacks".
They inflict this woke shit on us but didn't realize it could also be used by their
enemies.
Ultimate blow back for the dumb fuckers in Washington. Totally hilarious.
People are all too vulnerable in the Righteous Empire. The enforcers of right attitudes can
do with you anything, anything at all. A scientist who kept quiet when he heard the word n<
> being uttered, has lost
his job . A man, Robert Hoogland, has been
sent to jail for calling his 14-year-old daughter, "daughter", and publicly referring to
her with the pronouns "she" and "her", while the girl still isn't allowed yet to buy beer
insists she will be a man. Add to that the misery created by lockdowns, and you will understand
why thousands of Russian émigrés rush back into Mother Russia.
Since 1980s, Russians considered themselves lucky if they could escape their frosty homeland
and move westward. The children of Stalin and Khrushchev, top government figures of Yeltsin
days, artists and scientists, moved to Florida or Paris. They were always ready to condemn
Putin the brutal dictator. A popular film actor Mr Alexei
Serebryakov had left Russia for Canada, angrily slamming the door, condemning the "bloody
regime" and Russia's "mix of strength, arrogance and rudeness". And suddenly – the wind
had changed, and the reverse drift has begun. Serebryakov returned from Canada, though many
Russians aren't welcoming his move back at all. A science journalist Asya Kazantseva returned
to Moscow from Tel Aviv and Bristol, UK and wrote:
An unexpected collateral effect of the pandemic is that all the friends who immigrated to
Europe a long time ago flocked home to spend the winter here in Moscow, where vaccines are
free and available, and there is no lockdown. Social life here is twice as active as it was
in peacetime. I will never be lonely again! [A popular Jewish blogger] Alina Farkash recently
wrote that in Moscow, you are a beloved child in a large family, while emigration [in her
case to Israel] is like being sent to an orphanage. That's all true. I really hope that I
will never go anywhere else, that I will always be here, and that I will firmly remember what
an endless happiness it is just to be here."
Indeed, Russia is not a wonderland; it has many faults and problems. Its oligarchs are too
rich, its people are rather poor; taxes are too low; the social gap is greater than in the US
or China, as you can read in this text (in Russian) .
However, Russia is free. You can say and write whatever you wish. There are no lockdowns.
Schools operate as usual; distance learning is rare. Churches are open. Theatres, ditto. There
are no obligatory masks; where they are obligatory, the Russians still ignore them.
The Russian government is
responding angrily to Biden's derisive comments about Putin:
The Kremlin has reacted angrily to US President Joe Biden's remarks that Russian leader
Vladimir Putin is "a killer," calling the comment unprecedented and describing the
relationship between the two countries as "very bad."
U.S.-Russian relations have been deteriorating steadily over the last ten years, and it
always seemed unlikely that Biden would improve them. Now there will be even less of a chance
that Biden can work constructively with his Russian counterpart. The president's blunt answer
to a rather silly question from George Stephanopoulos has further damaged the relationship to
neither country's benefit. Anatol Lieven
observed recently that this is a "completely unnecessary confrontation with Russia" at a
time when the U.S. needs Russian cooperation on some important issues. Lieven cites U.S.
reentry into the JCPOA and extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan as his examples of issues
where Russian cooperation could be very valuable, but he could have added new negotiations on
future arms control agreements as well. Making progress on any one of these becomes much more
challenging when our president is gratuitously insulting theirs. For an administration that
prides itself on practicing diplomacy, they have a funny way of showing it.
The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. As the
former principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obama's State Department,
Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile
industry, and driving up unemployment rates.
Nephew has described the destruction of Iran's economy as "a tremendous success," and
lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country's capital
despite mounting US sanctions.
Nephew's appointment to a senior diplomatic post suggests that rather than immediately
returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions
illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran
is unlikely to join.
Nephew's "simple framework" for "sanctions to perform their expected function" reads like
a torturer's manual (replace "target state" with "prisoner"):
- identify objectives for the imposition of pain and define the minimum necessary remedial
steps that the target state must take for pain to be removed
- understand as much as possible the nature of the target, including its vulnerabilities,
interests, commitment to whatever it did to prompt sanctions, and readiness to absorb
pain
-develop a strategy to carefully, methodically, and efficiently increase pain on those
areas that are vulnerabilities while avoiding those that are not
-monitor the execution of the strategy and continuously recalibrate its initial assumption
of target state resolve, the efficacy of the pain applied in shattering that resolve, and how
best to improve the strategy
Combatting malign influences in the Americas: OGA (Office of Global Affairs) used
diplomatic relations in the Americas region to mitigate efforts by states, including Cuba,
Venezuela, and Russia, who are working to increase their influence in the region to the
detriment of US safety and security. OGA coordinated with other U.S. government agencies to
strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and humanitarian assistance to dissuade
countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill intentioned states. Examples
include using OGA's Health Attaché office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian
COVID-19 vaccine, and offering CDC technical assistance in lieu of Panama accepting an offer
of Cuban doctors.
Of course semi-demented Biden was lured into this provocation by neocon Stephanopoulos. This
evil gnome with connections to Epstein. That was an easy trap to avoid, but he got into it with
both legs.
Comments to the article are interesting. Fro example H. Trsgget display the same level of Neo-McCarthyism as
Biden has. Of course, ABC has specific audience and commenters but still...
Asked what he would tell Biden in response to his remarks, Putin said: "I would tell him:
'Be well.' I wish him health, and I say that without any irony or joking."
He noted that Russia would still cooperate with the United States where and when it
supports Moscow's interests, adding that "a lot of honest and decent people in the U.S. want
to have peace and friendship with Russia."
"I know that the U.S. and its leadership is generally inclined to have certain
relations with us, but only on issues that are of interest to the U.S. and on its
conditions," Putin said. "But we know how to defend our own interests, and we will work with
them only in the areas we are interested in and on conditions we see as beneficial to
ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it."
Speaking in separate comments later Thursday, Putin said he would ask the Foreign Ministry
to arrange a call with Biden in the next few days to discuss the coronavirus pandemic,
regional conflicts and other issues.
"We must continue our relations," he noted. "Last time, President Biden initiated a call
and now I would like to offer President Biden to continue our discussions. It would be in the
interest of both the Russian and U.S. people and other countries, bearing in mind that we
bear a special responsibility for global security as the largest nuclear powers."
Other Russian officials and lawmakers were less diplomatic.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia's Security Council who served as president in
2008-2012 when Putin had to shift into the premier's job because of term limits, said that
"time hasn't spared" the 78-year-old Biden and cited Sigmund Freud as saying, "Nothing costs
so much in life as illness and stupidity."
And Andrei Turchak, the leader of the main pro-Kremlin United Russia party, described
Biden's remarks as a reflection of "the U.S. political marasmus and its leader's
dementia."
It's interesting to observe how liberal fascism develops and operates in the modern
environment.
It seems that the next natural step should be to ban unsanctioned publishing on the
internal networks and erect a border-firewall. To prevent all this malicious meddling and
disinformation, y'know. To slay, like St George the dragon, all the racists, misogynists,
homophobes, disunity-fomenters, and other enemies.
And then, if necessary, censoring of the private communications. This could get tricky,
though. So, only monitoring, perhaps.
"Holy cow: 42% of Americans report undesired weight gain during Covid 19. The average weight
gain is 29 lbs. And 41 lbs for Millennials! "
Individuals are limited to one donut, but the offer can be redeemed once per day. Meaning
anybody who receives the COVID vaccine can swing by for a free glazed doughnut every day between
now and the end of the year.
Let's hope Krispy Kreme is working on a vaccine for diabetes, because it's latest
promotion isn't exactly a net-positive for the public welfare.
The donut-maker has announced that, starting Monday, anybody who presents proof of
vaccination at any Krispy Kreme location can receive one free glazed donut per visit.
"Krispy Kreme is finding ways to be sweet as the U.S. continues to scale COVID-19
vaccinations. To show our support for those who choose to get vaccinated, starting Monday,
3/22, anyone who shows their COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card will receive a free Original
Glazed® doughnut."
... ... ...
play_arrow
Ideology in Practice 4 hours ago
If you get vaccinated over a free donut, you deserve everything you get.
Donut included.
StuffyourVAXX 5 hours ago
Today, show your vaxx card to get a free donut.
Tomorrow, show your vaxx card to buy basic groceries.
Next week, show your vaxx card to keep your kids from getting taken away from you, you
@#$@ing super spreader.
reddpill 4 hours ago (Edited)
1939: "Work Sets You Free"
2019: "Vaccination Sets You Free"
Average weight gain 29 lbs ???? 41 for millenials ????
WTF??? That isn't trivial, that is huge. This a far bigger health risk than the wuphlu
!!!!
espirit 4 hours ago
Welcome to the Gates of Hell.
Have a free donut...
neocons on meathooks 4 hours ago
One of the reasons the new feudalism has such a bright future is that the serfs are
allowed to feast like kings and queens on rich animal-based, fiberless and highly processed
foods 21 times (or more) a week -- and they have the gout, heart disease, strokes,
diabetes, cancers and medical bills to prove it. Once you're woke you'll understand the
sexism of thinking obesity and sickness shouldn't be accepted. But exercise, weight loss
programs and public education (a la smoking cessation) aren't nearly as profitable as
injecting Bill Gates's poison into 7 billion customers and tracking and controlling human
movement. Sorry to cause dissension but I just got my paycheck from Vlad.
Automatic Choke PREMIUM 5 hours ago
Lemme know when the Heart-Attack-Grill starts offering free
quadruple-bacon-chili-burgers free for the jab.
Rockatanski 5 hours ago
as Mussolinil said, the fusing of goverenment and corporate give you full facism and
that is what we are seeing now.
It's a FOX World why does their stupidity bother me so much?
They develop the talking point first and then alter the 'facts' to support it. How can a
brain survive on such a diet?
FOX on the U.S. meeting w/China in Alaska re-visited the consensus from all of the
dimwitted hosts is that it was a dark day for the U.S. because ...
1. China insulted us because Biden is weak.
2. China insulted us because the Democrats have torn down our country for 4yrs
3. China insulted us because the Democrats helped BLM burn down our country
4. China insulted us because the Democrats emboldened them ! ! !
There is actually a much, much, more straightforward explanation that never occurs to
these dimbulbs, China insulted us because we insulted them for 10 minutes. We
accused them of aggression, genocide, crushing democracy and being evildoers. Only a Neocon
slaps someone in the face and expects them to smile back at you.
Old neocon still is dreaming about imperial greatness and full spectrum Dominance, when the
country is significantly and irreversibly crippled by neoliberalism and its accumulation by
dispossession which eliminated a large swats of well paid workers and professionals. It is now
the country where the Congress is now hiding from people behind barbed wall.
It is difficult to teach old dog new tricks. Intimidation of the opponent replaced diplomacy.
Semi-Dementia mixed with arrogance in action. "White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden
would continue to look to cooperate on efforts to stem Iran's nuclear program and, more broadly,
nuclear nonproliferation. But she said Biden did not regret referring to Putin as a killer and
pushed back against suggestions that the rhetoric was unhelpful."
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Director of National Intelligence came out with a report today saying
that Vladimir Putin authorized operations during the election to under -- denigrate you,
support President Trump, undermine our elections, divide our society. What price must he
pay?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He will pay a price. I, we had a long talk, he and I, when we -- I know
him relatively well. And I-- the conversation started off, I said, "I know you and you know me.
If I establish this occurred, then be prepared."
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you know he doesn't have a soul.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did say that to him, yes. And -- and his response was, "We understand
one another." It was-- I wasn't being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. And that
-- that's how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, "I looked in his eyes and saw
his soul."
I said, "Looked in your eyes and I don't think you have a soul." And looked back and he
said, "We understand each other." Look, most important thing dealing with foreign leaders in my
experience, and I've dealt with an awful lot of 'em over my career, is just know the other guy.
Don't expect somethin' that you're-- that -- don't expect him to-- or her to-- voluntarily
appear in the second editions of Profiles in Courage.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he's a killer?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Uh-huh. I do.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what price must he pay?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The price he's gonna pay we'll-- you'll see shortly. I'm not gonna--
there's-- by the way, we oughta be able that ol' -- that trite expression "walk and chew gum at
the same time," there're places where it's in our mutual interest to work together.
That's why I renewed the start agreement with him. That occurred while he's doin' this. But
that's overwhelmingly in the interest of humanity, that we diminish the prospect of a nuclear
exchange. But that and SolarWinds as well. He's been -- they've done some mischievous things,
to say the least. And so we're gonna have -- I'm not gonna announce what I'm doing, but he's
gonna understand that --
Vladimir Putin issues new 'kill list' - and six of the targets live in Britain
EXCLUSIVE: The warning of a deadly post-pandemic campaign comes from same spy who alerted
that Salisbury novichok victim Sergei Skripal was earmarked for assassination
The SAS and other units in the Special Forces Group will likely work alongside MI6 to
conduct covert surveillance operations against Russian spies and military units.
Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, the chief of the general staff, told The Telegraph that special
forces will be tasked with tackling "hostile state actors".
The move comes ahead of the publication of the Defence Command Paper, the MoD's
contribution to the Government's Integrated Review of foreign, defence, security and
development policy, which will be published on Monday.
How can one interpret this except as an attempt to curry favour in Washington? Why now?
Presumably, because the USG has just said that it is focussing on Russia. Even if this
is a policy shift why announce it? This is the sort of information that, (You
might think!) discovered and passed to the Russian Embassy would get you locked up for a long
time! If this has any effect, I imagine it would be that if/when the Russians come across any
unexplained Brits in (say) Syria, they will KNOW what they are there for and will deal
with them accordingly. A more poodle-like action is hard to imagine.
As a practitioner of permaculture I look for patterns, including power constructs of the
U.S./5 eyes mafia. Here's one.
Look at Luis Almagro, enthusiastic mouthpiece and cheerleader for the U.S. empire. Now look
at NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg. They could be brothers or cousins judging their resumes and
history of kissing the rings of powerful mafiosos. Norwegian has already given us a summary
of how Stoltenberg "failed up" and Almagro's history is similar. He's most known lately for
being the screamer who triggered the coup in Bolivia over a year ago.He didn't ask for my
advice. I'd have told him: "run away and hide!" He's still in the limelight as he once again
stepped up to call for Jeanine Añez's release from jail for her crimes during the
nazi/keystone (cops) reign of terror. Bolivia is responding much like the Russians, Chinese
and Iranians: they are standing firm AND now considering prosecuting Almagro!
https://orinocotribune.com/oas-almagro-defends-coup-plotters-in-bolivia-declares-court-case-political-persecution/
https://orinocotribune.com/bolivia-considers-taking-legal-action-against-oas-secretary-general-luis-almagro/
To me, it is like Almagro is walking around naked and trying to act as if he has clothes on.
Almagro is similar to Kamala in that his own people in Uruaguay don't like him: national hero
and former Tupac Amaru revolutionary hero before he became president Jose Mujica canceled
Almagro. He snuggled up to Pompeo and now seamlessly genuflects before... pick a name:
Blinken, Kamala, Colombian born frat boy Juan Gonzalez. Fear of the U.S. is diminishing. Same
in Ecuador. Alliances are growing stronger--Venezuela and Iran are a shining example of the
way forward. They are not hiding their actions... they are BRAGGING about them! https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/15133
Bottom line-- obvious dimwit psychopaths Elliot Abrams and Pompeo are gone, replaced by new
guys who are not that bright but they think they are while they are losing the only leverage
left: threats. No one likes them and no one fears them. China and Russia's smackdowns will
resonate throughout Latin America. Alliances will grow at an increasingly rapid pace.
Meanwhile, watch the Ecuador election results April 11. Arauz is strong and gaining more, the
people there are getting more mobilized. another game changer in South America.
Blinken, like his boss, is a complete moron. He blew it with his patronising threatening
'rules based order' drivel because he has no expertise. Blinken has been doing this for a
decade or two: Syria, Libya, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, and on and on. He has the form of a
killer, the mind of a killer and the intentions of a mass murderer. He has proven the latter
and is the type of global ambassadorial psychopath that one should meet with once and then
never meet again.
The USA has lost its mind and every day that passes proves that point.
This bar deserves broader analysis of other quarters of the planet and no more references
to the Guardian or NYT.
Biden under pressure to tap fewer political ambassadors than Trump, Obama
Donors are growing impatient as Biden delays naming coveted ambassador posts.
I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations
with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even
though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic,
cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the
United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are
beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our
development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this.
The author provides basic but essential definition of conflict resolution. The USians either
don't understand or defy it.
Your link to statement by Blinken & Sullivan is propaganda as you say. It is also an
expression of how deeply limited and very stupid these two are. They have no idea what just
hit them.
Biden does seem to be keeping one promise he made from the campaign, namely that "nothing
will fundamentally change", he is basically continuing all of Trump's terrible foreign
policies (Iran, China, Russia, Syria & Venezuela). In many ways he's being even more
hawkish, issuing clownish threats to both Russia and China and even to the steadfast US
vassal Germany over Nord Stream 2. One has to ask the question, just how much of Trumps
foreign policy was his own. Afghanistan and Suria I think yes; Israel and Saudi Arabia maybe;
China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Germany; I think the interagency consensus (aka the "Deep
State") is setting those policies and will push it into overdrive under the Biden/Harris
Regime.
With Respect to Biden, I saw that Max Keiser is already comparing Joe Biden to Borris
Yeltsin as a President who presided over the near breakup of the State and the rise of a
economic oligarchy.
recently installed "president" who can't make it up a flight of stairs or give a press
conference, who has the nuclear football following him around 24/.7. <- Posted by:
Perimetr | Mar 19 2021 22:55 utc | 54
History of American presidency had worse falls as we are reminded by New
York Post .
"President Biden's wince-inducing series of stumbles while boarding Air Force One on
Friday calls to mind Gerald Ford's 1975 fall on the same stairs -- a minor tumble that
forever tarred him as a clumsy oaf.
Chevy Chase pilloried Ford in a series of ruthless and hilarious "Saturday Night Live"
skits -- even though the object of his ridicule was just 62 years old, and an ex-University
of Michigan football star who avidly skied and golfed."
It was the very athletic ability of Gerald Ford that magnified his fall, all the way down.
When Biden started cautiously and kept his hand on the rail at all times, Ford climbed "with
a spring in his step", but, alas, he missed one step.
I'm slightly curious: if the USA insists that there is a "rules-based international order"
then - by definition - there must exist a rule-book i.e. a compendium of those rules.
That is axiomatic, because how else would anyone know if they are a rule-breaker, or when
they are in compliance with the rules.
Otherwise this isn't a "rules-based" system at all, it is merely a world based upon US
dictates.
Has any reptile of the press ever asked a State Department flunky for a copy of "the
rules"?
Wouldn't it be nice if the CPC starts backing the CPUSA with the kinds of resources that
the US backs their regime change operations through NED and USAID? That would be a game
changer.
I suspect Blinken/Sullivan/Biden need to show that they are "tough" to the Chinese in
public because otherwise, they will be roasted by the 78 millions Trump supporters for being
"weak" to China compared with Trump. Behind the close door, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi
characterized the talks to be NOT "very tense." I believe Biden actually is quite keen to get
some "achievements" from the Chinese side, probably not realistically in this meeting, but
hopefully in the near future.
Ha, but the weather is cold, the hotel is shoddy, and the Chinese delegate had to have
instant noodle for lunch - that sounds like a very low budget "Hongmen Banquet" by the
Americans. Maybe they are still waiting for their 1.9 trillion stimulus check?
"The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner
takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world," Blinken said.
Coming from the Empire this is not an explanation but rather a threat.
@ 139 william gruff... i never thought of it like that, but i think you are right to
characterize it that way... the language of a bully is on regular display thanks the
exceptional nation... i have gotten so used to it, i overlook this feature..
The madness of the Outlaw Empire is not about to shrink from bringing down the curtain on
the human race, if that's what it takes to see their power of command obeyed. The US, as it
is today, doesn't respect any nation's sovereignty and is mostly indifferent to allies and
foes alike. The regime considers itself the only sovereign worthy of such title on earth; and
expects to be allowed to run the table at its pleasure, or else it will supervise the burning
down of the house.
Biden meanders about, not even possessed of his right mind, holding on to the delusions
and lies of several presidents who lately came before him; and he is just the man to keep all
the fires of destruction burning, while the torture of innocence is unceasing, and as the
arrogant demands made against other countries become more absurd. What else is more obvious?
These are the things we have seen foreshadowed before and after 9/11.
As long ago as the 80s Reagan was told about the reality of nuclear winter. In A Man
Without a Country , Kurt Vonnegut described how scientists explained to G.W. Bush that a
nuclear exchange of even a moderate duration and size, could still depopulate the earth of
most of its people. The Bush Administration, toying with the idea of deploying baby nukes,
for strategic exigency, short of total war, went with "guesswork" rather than prudent
scientific advice. It was their best guess that the circumspect, abbreviated use of nukes
wouldn't destroy humanity itself, or cause ice age conditions, or bring about global
starvation.
At least in the conduct between civilized countries, a minimum level of protocol and respect
matters. It may make much of a difference especially when dealing with conflicts. And the conduct
of the US americans is worrying. They are behaving like rabid dogs.
Toothless sabre rattling is about all the USA has left. A bunch of old men with a world
view from the 1950s whose own virility is long gone is not going to come to an epiphany about
their encroaching impotence. The Establishment has no other choice, absent common sense and
critical thinking, but to double-down on arrogant self-righteousness bred by sophomoric
jingoism that defines 'shallow.'
Empire is crumbling before our eyes. The question is will it take the rest of the world
with it as it falls into its own footprint.
Perhaps one of the more predictable mistakes the US will commit next, is misinterpret the
stern warnings of the past few days by Russia, China and even NK, as evidence the new
Biden/Blinken regime is less feared or respected than the Trump/Pompeo one.
I suspect a more accurate interpretation would be, "ok, you had the crazy guy for 4 years
and we cut you some slack, hoping once the grown ups were back we could reason as adults, but
if you're gonna carry on with the same attitude, basically, Democrat or Republican, you can
all summarily go fxxx yourselves".
Particularly at the end of the term, the Obama regime was already being met by a very
hostile China and Russia, well before Trump took over with his less than diplomatic style (or
lack thereof). Anyone recall the airport security debacle with China during Obama's last
weeks?
How our interaction w/China was reported FOX did a full throated, fake narrative
just to suit their pro-Trump agenda. When they quoted, 'you cannot talk to us from a position
of strength' they made is sound like the Chinese were scoffing at Blinken's weakness rather
than his moral turpitude. They made it sound like Blinken surrendering to his Chinese
overlords, squandering the strong hand the Trump gave him.
In FOX land, all that matters is that you come up with a great sounding argument. The
truthfulness of that arguments is not relevant.
The USA's situation is very dire indeed. The Americans are resorting more and more to
"Hail Mary" moves to keep their hegemonic position.
And even then they're blundering. I would not be surprised at all if they start to
straight out have to falsify diplomatic transcripts in order to try to create something
favorable to them.
Related to US-China tensions, if anyone likes documentary shows, CNA (Channel News Asia, a
broadcaster out of Singapore) has a good four-part documentary released in January 2021
called "When Titans Clash", about the US-China trade/tech tensions, that I would recommend.
(I watched the first two yesterday and will watch the other two this weekend.)
Each of the 4 parts is about 48 minutes long and available for watching on YouTube and
CNA's website too.
Touches on some of the things ak74 mentioned in his
comment on the other thread: outsourcing, deindustrialization, the US dollar as reserve
currency, etc.
It's from Pearl Forss who was also involved in CNA's 2015-2019 series " The New Silk
Road ", about China's BRI, that I can recommend as well.
I'm in the middle of Armstrong's
essay and am at the first reference to Kagan's vision:
"What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the 'evil empire,'
the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of
U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening
America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its
principles around the world .'
It's absolutely clear that Kagan has no clue as to the reality of what is actually the
objective of the Neoliberal Parasites running the Outlaw US Empire; for aside from "advancing
its interests," the Parasites have zero motivation to do any of that as their sole
ambition/goal is to vacuum up all the wealth they can and leave a shell just as they planned
and failed with Russia, but have succeeded elsewhere. And as for principles, the reality is
it has none, nor does it have any friends, just vassals and victims. This analogy by
Armstrong's excellent:
"The U.S. is sitting on a dragon and it daren't get off or the dragon will kill it. But
because it can't kill the dragon, it must sit on it forever: no escape. And dragon's eggs are
hatching out all around: think how much bigger the Russian, Chinese and Iranian dragons are
today than they were a quarter-century ago when Kagan & Co so confidently started PNAC;
think how bigger they'll be in another....
"But the more sanctions, the stronger Russia gets: as an analogy, think of sanctions on
Russia as similar to the over-use of antibiotics – Russia is becoming immune."
And tying it all up is this excellent summation:
"Has there ever been a subject on which people have been so wrong for so long as Russia?
How many times have they said Putin's finished? Remember when cheese was going to bring him
down? Always a terminal economic crisis. A year ago they were sure COVID would do it. A U.S.
general is in Ukraine and Kiev's heavy weapons are moving east but, no, it's Putin who, for
ego reasons – and his "failing" economy – wants the war. Why do they keep doing
it? Well, it's easy money – Putin (did we tell you he was in the KGB?) wants to expand
Russia and rule forever; therefore, he's about to invade somebody. He doesn't, no problem,
our timely warning scared him off; we'll change the date and regurgitate it next year. In the
meantime his despotic rule trembles because of some-triviality-of-the-moment. These pieces
write themselves: the anti-Russia business is the easiest scam ever. And there's the
difficulty of admitting you're wrong: how can somebody like Kagan, such a triumphantasiser
back then, admit that it's all turned to dust and worse, turned to dust because they took his
advice? Much better to press on – it's not as if anybody in the lügenpresse will
call him out or deny him space. Finally, these people are locked in psychological projection:
because they can only envisage military expansion, they assume the other guy is equally
obsessed and so they must expand to counter his expansion. They suspect everybody of
suspecting them. Their hostility sees hostility everywhere. Their belligerence finds
belligerence. The hyperpower is forever compelled to respond to lesser powers. They look
outside, see themselves and fear; in their mental universe the USA is arrogantly strong and
fearfully weak at the same time."
The Walking Dead is finally becoming a metaphor for the Outlaw US Empire, its
policies, and what it terms values--which aren't values but vices. But TWD was fiction and
was thus capable of reforming itself. The Empire's goals and polices are essentially the same
as in 1940 and even further back to 1913, and haven't changed very much, being just as
illegal and immoral then as now. What's different are the "Dragons" which didn't exist in
1918 or 1944, and the Parasites have almost total control that's finally seeing domestic
pushback.
It's absolutely clear that Kagan has no clue as to the reality of what is actually the
objective of the Neoliberal Parasites running the Outlaw US Empire.
Why do you give him the benefit of the doubt?
Are we really to believe that Kagan, and others like him, talk of these things for DECADES
and yet aren't aware of the ramifications?
IMO it is absolutely clear that he knows the neoliberal reality as well as the neocon and
neocolonial realities.
But we are supposed to avoid cynicism and be polite so as to not be thought a
malcontent?
=
@karlof1 The need for more cynicism is a theme of mine (which I've written about at moa
many times) so please don't respond in a knee-jerk way.
"China and the US are two major world powers. No matter how many disputes they have, the
two countries should not impulsively break their relations. Coexistence and cooperation are
the only options for China and the US. Whether we like it or not, the two countries should
learn to patiently explore mutual compromises and pursue strategic win-win cooperation ."
[My Emphasis]
The big question: Does the Outlaw US Empire possess enough wisdom to act in that
manner.
@ michaelj72 | Mar 21 2021 2:46 utc | 173 who provided the Yang quote
"
"The United States uses its military force and financial hegemony to carry out long arm
jurisdiction and suppress other countries,"
"
I continue to not understand why China is coy about connecting PRIVATE financial hegemony
to the US when they assuredly know it is the global private finance folk that are the enemy.
I don't know why they play into the meme that if the US were brought to heel then the
financial hegemony would magically stop.
All Yang had to do was put the word private before financial hegemony and the message
would have been much clearer and stronger message to the world struggling under the private
finance jackboot, IMO
To me
rules based order = dog whistle for global private finance, property and unfettered
inheritance
Blinken and Bush are as boorish and rude, perhaps even more condescending than pompeo and
Trump - But it is hard to choose between the lesser of two american evils. So in just a matter of
weeks, the US just antagonized both Russia and China. The US is getting very bold,
"The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner
takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world," Blinken said.
The 'rules based order' means 'do what we say' and is of course unacceptable.
Here is how the Chinese replied:
What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered
international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what
is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called "rules-based" international
order.
and
I don't think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the
universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States
could represent international public opinion, and those countries would not recognize that
the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international
order.
When Yang was chided by Blinken for making a too long opening statement in response to
Blinken's accusations Yang replied:
The Chinese side felt compelled to make this speech because of the tone of the U.S. side.
Well, isn't this the intention of United States, judging from what – or the way
that you have made your opening remarks, that it wants to speak to China in a condescending
way from a position of strength?
So was this carefully all planned and was it carefully orchestrated with all the
preparations in place? Is that the way that you had hoped to conduct this dialogue?
Well, I think we thought too well of the United States. We thought that the U.S. side
will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols. So for China it was necessary that we made
our position clear.
So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have
the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength . The
U.S. side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years back, because
this is not the way to deal with the Chinese people. If the United States wants to deal
properly with the Chinese side, then let's follow the necessary protocols and do things the
right way.
Many netizens on China's social media said Chinese officials were doing a good job in
Alaska, and that the U.S. side lacked sincerity.
Some even characterized the talks as a "Hongmen Banquet", referring to an event that
took place 2,000 years ago where a rebel leader invited another to a feast with the
intention of murdering him.
Posted by b on March 19, 2021 at 18:53 UTC | Permalink
The Chinese emphasis on most of the world rejecting a US-directed 'rules-based order'
instead of honouring the UN Charter and settled international law is of supreme importance
aand must be re-emphasized ad nauseum.
What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots. It was an exhibition of a total lack of
tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium. The Chinese's confident offensive resulted
in a rapid emotional dive from a state of megalomaniac bravado to shaky self-confidence. In
comparison they made even Trump look like a cultivated gentleman.
To translate from Orwellian Western Newspeak to english:
'Rules-based order' means 'Our rules for you that we don't have to follow and can change
anytime we like.'
'International order' means 'Western-ruled-world order.'
'International community' means the US-led Western community and vassal states. Western
media spouts this all the time.
'Rules-based' is the modern day incarnation of Americans/British throwing around the
phrase 'treaty', 'treaty-based' in colonial days. Different words, same con.
USA provided a transcript of both US Govt & China Govt speakers.
I thought this a little unusual, as foreign miminstries like to publish their own
transcripts so that they control the authentic translation of their words, free from the
opposing parties editing or mis-translation.
"cutthroat competition" may be an arguably alternative translation of "strangle" in the
China readout "those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end."
I was waiting for the China verbatim translation to check the fidelity of the USA
translation.
But there is only an unquoted report, which is the meeting, but without quotation marks to
distinguish between the authors voice and the Officials voice.
Verbatim would be better.
Maybe the USA had reciprocal concerns about the verbatim accuracy of the China
transcript.
My translation of "The Brothers Karamazov" has one of Dostoevski's brothers saying, "Each
man creates Satan in his own image."
Blinken is Secretary of State for USA, head of the US State Department.
He mentioned in his nomination hearing, & makes allusion in this meeting with China, to a
genocide in Xinjiang.
Foreign Affairs magazine article reports US State Department legal office saying they have no
evidence for a genocide in Xinjiang.
Is Blinken in touch with his department?
"The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner
takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world," Blinken said.
The 'rules based order' means 'do what we say' and is of course unacceptable. Here is how
the Chinese replied:
What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered
international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what
is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called "rules-based" international
order.
Say it to uncle sam. Say it every time they meet. The bankruptcy of the "rules based
order" gang of five or six is a failure.
For all its apalling faults the UN and established international courts are the place to
go. Suck it up uncle sam.
"The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and
winner takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world," Blinken
said.
LOL.
You really have to wonder if the Americans believe their own bullshit about their hollowed
"Rules Based International Order"?
The violent and unstable world is ALREADY here thanks to ... this very same American
"Rules" Based Order.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Somalia--these are just a few of the countries
America has either invaded, bombed, or supported moderate jihadi Head-Choppers against to
destabilize in the past generation.
Re Sadde @3 " What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots. It was an exhibition of a
total lack of tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium. "
Seems like just the other day I was reading the same description about Pompeo lol. And yet
somehow this is much worse, as we have a clearly demented, recently installed "president" who
can't make it up a flight of stairs or give a press conference, who has the nuclear football
following him around 24/.7.
"Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who accompanied Yang to the talks,
told CGTN that their side had made clear to the Americans that China takes its sovereignty
very seriously and warned them not to 'underestimate China's determination to defend its
territory, to defend its people, and maintain its righteous interests.'
"Washington has criticized China's security policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, where
Western-backed separatist forces have created chronic unrest, as well as its longstanding
claim to rule Taiwan, an autonomous island ruled by the Republic of China that lost the civil
war in mainland China in 1949, when the socialist People's Republic of China was formed. The
US technically recognizes Beijing's claim to be the sole legitimate representative of China,
but in reality is the primary backer of the Taiwanese government. Beijing says all of these
are internal matters and not of Washington's concern."
Very little's reported of the Outlaw US Empire's response. This little bit doesn't bode
well:
"US State Department officials noted they did not see the Alaska summit as the beginning
of a new mechanism or dialogue."
I see that as a confession that they aren't agreement capable since they can't even
continue a dialogue.
Well, the Outlaw US Empire team just got sacked three straight times and must now punt.
Sophomoric attempts to twist Putin's words won't work. I highly suggest reading the entire Kremlin
transcript b cited and I relink as it dovetails with Putin's speech at the anniversary
celebration I cited and relink . Furthermore, in the area of
historical research being undertaken in Russia to ensure historical events are recounted
accurately, there's this current effort dealing
with The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921 and The 1921 Treaty of Riga. Putin is
speaking:
"Two states striving to achieve ambitious goals confronted each other during the
Polish-Soviet War. Polish leaders perceived the reinstatement of the old-time borders of
Rzeczpospolita as their task. Bolshevik leaders dreamed of a world revolution. The Polish
Army's offensive on the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics, linked with Soviet Russia
by allied agreements, preceded fighting at the approaches to Warsaw in August 1920. I would
like to recall that Polish forces had seized most of Belarus and all of Western Ukraine by
late 1919, and that they and their allies, commanded by Symon Petlyura, had entered Kiev on
May 7, 1920.
"Signed in Riga on March 18, 1921, the treaty touched upon territorial issues and was
therefore largely similar to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Today, we can see that the then
re-division of Europe, the often arbitrary and unfair demarcation of borders had stepped up
confrontation between states and helped create conditions for a new world war.
"The Soviet side was forced to agree with the fact that Poland had established control
over 50 percent of modern Belarus' territory and 25 percent of modern Ukraine. The transfer
of Belarusian and Ukrainian territories to another state did not meet the then ethnic,
cultural or social realities. On the one hand, it facilitated discrimination against the
local population; and, on the other hand, it helped encourage extreme nationalist ideas. We
also recall the tragic fate of the Red Army soldiers who were taken prisoner; many of them
perished in Polish camps."
As with earlier Great Patriotic War exhibitions, this exhibition has numerous aspects as
described below that will surely interest other historians:
"The historical documentary exhibition The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921. The
Treaty of Riga 1921, dedicated to the armed confrontation between Soviet Russia and Poland
and the resolution of the conflict by diplomatic means opened on March 16 in Moscow. It
displays historical documents from the holdings of the Russian State Archive of
Socio-Political History, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian
Federation, the Russian State Archive of Modern History and other federal archives, the
Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation and the Foreign Policy Archive of the
Russian Empire, contributed by the Foreign Ministry's Department of History and Records, the
Archive of the President of the Russian Federation and state archives of Belarus. The
exhibition also features unique museum items, sound recordings and newsreels. An internet
project with full-length electronic copies of over 1,000 archive documents is also part of
the exhibition."
That's a lovely little compilation about Putin and his family, thanks.
The narrative says that Putin's mother survived the siege of Leningrad, but it doesn't go
into the details. You can get the story from one of the several Russian documentaries about
Putin - I forget which one but I could dig for it if pressed.
Putin's father came back from the front, wounded and on crutches. He showed up just as
medics were taking his wife out to whatever transport they were using to clean up the dead
bodies - she was practically dead, and the witness to this says she was "washed up". Putin's
father fought the medics away with his crutches and took his wife back into their home, and
nursed her back to life.
Thus runs the story, and this is the woman who later gave birth to Putin, already with two
brothers dead that he never knew. It sounds exaggerated when I write out the story like that,
but I never disbelieved it when I heard it, and I still don't.
So this is the depth of the man who heads the Russian Federation. Personally touched by
war, personally grieving for the losses of Russia, personally committed to the safety of
civilians and to minimal death in general.
~~
While I'm on the subject, two other stories occur to me. One was when he first took
command of Russia and addressed the war in the Caucasus - his famous episode with his
military commanders in the tent, when he said they would not drink to success until they had
achieved it (I paraphrase), and put his glass down untouched. To drink prematurely, he said,
would be to dishonor all those who had already died in this war. First, to stop the
dying.
But the story I wanted to say about that was that he also forcefully told his generals to
be very careful how they conducted operations: they were entering places where civilians
lived - old people, those who had fought in the Great Patriotic War, those to whom everyone
present owed their lives. He was very serious about taking great care not to harm those most
honorable people.
The second story is when the Berlin Wall went down, and crowds surged to invade the Stasi
building, ripping its secrets into the open. They also came to the KGB building. The chief of
that bureau fled, leaving by the back way. That left Putin as next in command. He went down
to address the crowd. He stood in front of them and they asked who he was and he lied and
said that he was "the interpreter". He said that this building was the property of the USSR.
In his gun he had twelve bullets, he said, eleven for those whom he faced and the last for
himself. The crowd understood that this building was not East Germany but the Soviet Union,
and that this officer would defend it with his life. Whatever they thought, they turned away
and left the building unmolested.
~~
I'm impressed with the character and caliber of this human being called Putin, for good
reasons, I find. There's a heroic scale to him that comes from Russia itself and the
experiences that Putin was born into and from. And yet he personally is a naturally modest
man. He bears that heroic dimension of scale with the grace that comes from ordinariness. He
loves ordinary people. He renews his own mental health from being in their company. The
security state of Russia chose the best person it could find, in a last-ditch attempt to save
their country. It worked.
[D]ifficult, dramatic, and bloody events abound in the history of every nation and every
state. But when we evaluate other people, or even other states and nations, we are always
facing a mirror, we always see ourselves in the reflection, because we project our inner
selves onto the other person.
You know, I remember when we were children and played in the yard, we had arguments
occasionally and we used to say: whatever you call me is what you are called yourself.
This is no coincidence or just a kids' saying or joke. It has a very deep psychological
undercurrent. We always see ourselves in another person and think that he or she is just
like us, and evaluate the other person's actions based on our own outlook on life.
There is an additional passage of interest which sets out rules for future talks that I
have not seen reported in 'western' media:
I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain
relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its
terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a
different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We
will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms
that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their
attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to
reckon with this.
We, with our national interests in mind, will promote our relations with all
countries, including the United States.
The 'takes one to know one' quote is not a direct quote from Putin, it is a claim by
Biden.
Here is the Daily Beast's take on it. (Yeah, I know it's a ridiculous source, but it
was the first source I found that correctly attributed that quote to Biden.)
Biden recalled: "We had a long talk, he and I, when we... I know him relatively well. And
the conversation started off, I said, 'I know you and you know me. If I establish this
occurred, then be prepared.'"
The president also confirmed that, some years ago, he was alone with Putin in his
office and he brought up the topic of Putin's lack of a human soul. "I said, 'I looked in
your eyes and I don't think you have a soul,' and he looked back and said, 'We understand
each other.' The most important thing of dealing with foreign leaders... is just know the
other guy."
The Guardian's translation of "it takes one to know one," which has been amplified by
western media and social media, is absolutely incorrect. It implies that Putin is
admitting that he is a 'killer,' which he absolutely does not do. Anybody that has a
working knowledge of Russian will be able to translate the saying that Putin uses to mean
that he is suggesting that Biden is projecting. In fact, Putin provides context for this
statement by referring to US History.
I say bullshit. "It takes one to know one" - suggests some equivalence for the two
people. That meaning is not in Kremlin transcript of Putin's words. Putin is saying "you
are projecting (your own problem)".
I understand that this is just semantics, but something as widespread as this has become
in western media can have a big impact on perception of lazy westerners if the
interpretation is incorrect. This should be obvious, regardless of the supposed "elegance"
of the phrase.
"Takes one to know one" does not imply projection, it rather implies hypocrisy. Putin is
not accusing Biden of hypocrisy, he is accusing Biden of projection. "Takes one to know
one" gives a western audience the suggestion that Putin qualifies an admission of being a
killer with an accusation that Biden is also a killer. Putin, in fact, does not do
this. He only suggests that Biden is projecting and only projecting.
Minister Lavrov today confirmed Putin's words,
saying " [We] will be ready to cooperate only in those areas that are of interest to
us, and only on terms that are beneficial to us ".
In my opinion, the Chinese representatives gave a good answer to the American side,
although this answer will obviously not be heard.
The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary
human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about?
A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the
way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.
"In a desperate bid to thwart the strategic partnership between Russia and Europe,
Washington is resorting to ever-more frantic threats of sanctions and other disruptive
measures. Biden is playing the personal insult card in a gambit for blowing up bilateral
relations with Russia as a way to sabotage Nord Stream 2.
"It's a pathetic move, one that actually speaks more of America's historic enfeeblement
rather than pretensions of power. Russia would do well to stay calm and let the Americans
make fools of themselves."
It seems Russia's doing just that--attending to the vital business of developing its
nation and peoples. Russia's geared for numerous patriotic celebrations throughout the
year, and Biden's comments were made on the eve of Crimean reunification with Russia, which
only served to cement Russians closer and hold Putin in even greater esteem. Talk about an
Own Goal!
Outlaw US Empire Nord Stream policy is close to being the same as literally torpedoing
it, making it an act of war against the EU and Russia. Somehow, I don't think Blinken
understands that fundamental fact.
"I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain
relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its
terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a
different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We
will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms
that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their
attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to
reckon with this."
This statement is a positive, that is the mark of a government that adheres to real
values, beneficial to the growth of humanity, and not just for the enrichment of a greedy
minority of it's citizens.
The most peculiar aspect of Biden's outburst is its timing.
If there was one moment in time when it would be ill advised for even the most brass
necked, cynical American exceptionalist not to restrain himself from accusing anyone of
murder, it would have to be that moment in which the bulkiest object in the "Out" tray on
the Presidential desk happened to be a crude coffin like box containing the butchered
remains of the Washington Post journalist and long established CIA asset Adnan
Khashoggi.
Now there was the victim of a killer, the Crown Prince, acting with the permission of
the US government and in the spirit of the Deep State which put Joe Biden in office.
Joe was perhaps thinking of Khashoggi-a beltway denizen he must have run into in one of
the cocktail parties or brothels on the circuit- when he murmured admiringly, to himself,
blissfully unaware of the presence of George Stephanopolous- one of the grande horizontales
of American culture- and the TV camera, "That guy, whatsisname, the one from whatsitcalled,
Russia, is a killer."
Putin fell into a trap. He should have not said a damn thing after Biden spouted off
about him being a killer. The western MSM on both sides of the Pond are now running with
the incorrect translation and narrative that Putin admitted to being a killer. The western
MSM is now also claiming that Putin's wishing Biden good health means he's threatening to
poison him.
Putin should have heeded Mark Twain's wise words:
"Don't wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."
The western media was captured many years ago and serves only its propaganda business
model.
America is number one instigator and developer of conflict across the entire planet and is
increasingly unworthy of anyones trust or respect.
The US media has degenerated into a slave to the propaganda business model that it has
chosen to adopt.
The US is the Number One instigator and manipulator of conflict across the planet and is
unworthy of anyones trust or respect. The American way defines all that is devious and
corrupt.
None of this is new. There was some disruption for a few years recently, but now that all
obstacles are permanently neutered the destruction of the future for personal gain can get
back into top gear once again.
@Boogity | Mar 20 2021 19:42 utc | 141, and others Barflies...
Putin don't wrestle with the pig.
1) as b., and thanks for his Job, all of us must go to the original and extensive
version. MSM and chats are narrative tools reducing and calibrating our souls.
2) with regards to China and Russia stay tune about context
3) be careful about "translation".
To Biden as an old man, Putin just wish him Good health.
"I would say "stay healthy." [... ] I am saying this without irony or tongue in
cheek."
But "secondly, taking a broader approach to this matter" "to the US establishment, the ruling class – not the American people who are
mostly honest, decent and sincere people who want to live in peace and friendship with
us", he said something like [you are not qualified to speak to Russia from a position
of strength]
their mindset [of US ruling class] was formed in rather challenging circumstances which
we are all aware of. After all, the colonisation of the American continent by the
Europeans went hand-in-hand with the extermination of the local people, the genocide, as
they say today, outright genocide of the Indian tribes followed by a very tough, long
and difficult period of slavery , a very cruel period. All of that has been part of
life in America throughout the history of the United States to this day. Otherwise,
where would the Black Lives Matter movement come from? To this day, African Americans
face injustice and even extermination.
The ruling class of the United States tends to address domestic and foreign policy
issues based on these assumptions. After all, the United States is the only country to
have used nuclear weapons , mind you, against a non-nuclear state – Japan, in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. There was absolutely no military need for the
bombing. It was nothing but the extermination of civilians.
I am bringing this up, because I know that the United States and its leaders are
determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to
the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we
are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to
uphold our interets .
[...]
despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They
will have to reckon with this.
We, with our national interests in mind, will promote our relations with all
countries"
And he said that on March 18th, 7th anniversary of Crimea reuniting to Russia.
Yang Jiechi stated China's position at his opening remarks, saying China hopes this
dialogue is sincere and honest.
Opening remarks were for 8mn (4x2mn),
But after Yang Jiechi spoke Blinken broke protocole agrement, recall journalists in order
to show is strength. They came to 90mn press conference.
Strength was on chinese side:
"we thought the US would follow the necessary diplomatic protocol In front of the Chinese
side, the US side is not qualified to speak to China from a position of
strength"
"the US must focus on its own human rights issues -- like the Black Lives Matter
movement -- and not meddle in the country's internal affairs "
Putin's elaboration of the history and founding culture of the USA was brilliantly well
done, I thought. As an academic lesson it could hardly be more concise, nor more
penetrating and accurate.
He was speaking to his home constituency of Russia, but he was well aware that the whole
world would listen. The so-called Global South listens to these words for the same reason
we do, to know what has now been said out loud and thus can now be referenced in future
discussions and in future geopolitical positions and stances.
In this sense, all of these words, and words like them, are strength to the backbone of
the world. It clarifies what Russia is now prepared to say out loud, and it suggests very
clearly where a lesser nation might stand, perhaps, and even solicit the support of Russia
- at the UN or in diplomacy at least, if not with S-400s.
And so as these words are sent out into the real world as things that can now be
"noticed", to use the judicial sense of the word, the growing world alliance coheres around
these words, and the world changes in its global attitude.
Those who believe that none of this matters - and this would obviously include the
ruling class of the US, described so perfectly by Putin - are in for a shock.
I can't easily demonstrate how greatly these words matter, other than to remind us how
things used to look half a dozen years ago, when the US was such an ogre, and how things
look now, when the US is more literally a dotard than ever before, and when the fear of
challenging the US is beginning to disappear from the world, overcome by disgust.
These are dangerous times - for the US. Being described accurately is a small step from
being in someone's cross-hairs.
Just as every racist incident is waived away by the right, Empire apologists/deniers
wave away any notion of Deep State operatives.
The Empire apologists/deniers want us to believe that there is no political
manipulation, no media manipulation, and no organization to achieve Empire-level
objectives. Some apologists/deniers will admit that money is very important in politics but
the extent of that influence is only traced to amorphous oligarchs and business interests
NEVER to Deep State Empire managers. Others blame "Zionism" despite its being more than a
symptom than a cause.
... the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country
that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American
Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in
New York City....
The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that
it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not
actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not
transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will
be exposed . One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the
national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it
operates.
Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power
brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are
ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible ...
(emphasis is mine)
IMO when you see people that have been in very powerful positions for a long period of
time, you can assume that they are "Deep State". Possible examples: Bush family, Hillary
Clinton, John McCain (until he died), Robert Mueller, etc. And, IMO when you see someone
that pretends to oppose "the powers that be" but have deep connections to them, then you
can expect that they are controlled opposition. Possible examples: Bernie, Max B.
Many great observations tonight, but all, beg the question; How do we change a nation
state that has so thoroughly morphed into an advertising and marketing phony, aided and
abetted by so many deluded morons?
This is interesting. Apparently both the Russians and the Chinese have concluded that
Biden intends to use "CornPop" faux-macho posturing as his foreign policy, and they have both
decided that "f**k that, let's nip this in the bud".
Because it looks like they have decided they have had a gut-full of US "exceptionalism"
and are quite determined to say so. To anyone, but especially to the Americans.
Going to be a lot of very confused people at Foggy Bottom. They may never have experienced
this degree of contempt before.
I about fell on the floor when I read Blinken's words, my first thought being "this klutz
has zero knowledge of history since 1588 and just admitted as much. In China, Blinken would
never achieve any position of power.
The decadence of the Outlaw US Empire's government is like so many prions turning brain
tissue into a swiss-cheese-like mass and then boasting about how finely tuned are its
cognitive abilities. And when Harris is installed, we'll have a genuine novice in charge--The
Blind leading the Blind.
It's no wonder the Chinese sought an audience with Lavrov ASAP.
The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary
human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about? A sad picture. And
dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best
option for a reliable negotiating partner.
Just a theory, but maybe all of our newsrags' belligerent headlines aimed at China are a
necessary diversion to conjure enough faux-enmity to make it appear that our government is at
least making the attempt at stopping China from eating our economic lunch.
I'm sorry, but once again the thought that a dem admin, which is primarily funded by those
who prosper from our "relationship" with China ( here is
an oldie from 1996 re: China covertly funding the Dem Party) would bite the hand that feeds
is a little farfetched.
Occam's Razor holds that some type of token effort (lame headlines from lame sources
hardly any American reads and military maneuvers in the S. China Sea) is still needed to keep
the plebs from realizing how hitched at the hip Chinese and American elites realky are.
Take it from an American, b: it is far more the case for urban libs to froth at the mouth
at the mention of Russia then a deplorable to advocate going to war with China. Deplorables
are nationalist: revitalizing our domestic manufacturing would more butter our bread while
dems are internationalists, chomping at the bit for a round with Russia. We are more
Russophobic then than Sinophobic.
"... Since the CIA controls much of the European media and their ruling class it would take quite a lot for Europeans to drop their status as vassal states ..."
I notice a lot of accusations that Washington is "stupid" but that's not true. You have to
understand how Washington works before you make such statements. The Deep State knows that it
can control the minds of most Americans by inventing "truths" without any need to prove
anything. Since Washington is now in conflict with a goodly part of the public it sees that
creating foreign policy crises and enemies as an excellent course of action to shore up
support. Americans are always ready to react against enemies no matter how slender the proof
of the wrongdoing ascribed to the enemy. There is never a penalty to pay for lying in the US
if you are in the mainstream media or in the political arena.
Since the CIA controls much of the European media and their ruling class it would take
quite a lot for Europeans to drop their status as vassal states . Remember, Washington
can throw endless amounts of money around and fund everything from terrorism, crime waves,
sexual indiscretions a la Epstein (the CIA had it's own whorehouse which my father pointed
out to me decades ago--it was in Roslyn Virginia and it used underage girls and boys to
improve its soft-power). So far, no one has paid a penalty for lying or corrupt practices in
Washington if they were "made" men or women (Trump never got that far).
As long as Europe, Japan and some other countries continue to be vassal states the US can
and will get away with anything. Nordstream 2 is the issue that may change all that. Once
Germany rebels the rest may follow.
Is not that what we see now was always the true cost of "electing" (via cheating) the
greatest crook of them all plus a dementia sufferer? Both POTUS and the vice are completely
useless but highly manipulable. This why they were pushed forward and why the presidency was
delivered into their lap. But the main problem with manipulable is the inconsistency of the
manipulation usually due to the disagreement amongst the manipulators due to their differing
interests. Simply, the model of a dummy in the spotlight and the multiple string pullers in
the shadow is not a stable model. It is a model on the opposite extreme of the good
leadership, which is stable as long as the leader lasts (cough, cough ... Putin).
Regarding all the doomsayers on US who Martyanov joined lately and unoriginally (concept
sold long ago and much better by another Russian - Dimitry Orlov), they are not completely
wrong but wrongish. Whenever I read of some crap in the US, I think - was this the way it was
in the Chinese Empire, the seemingly endless corruption, depravity and complete and constant
lying? But look at China now. If US does not manage to destroy the World during its decline,
it will come back better and stronger. But one or two generations will suffer and many
contemporaries will run away, as they are running away from the cities right now. As things
get even worse they will start running away from the country en masse.
I don't understand why so many otherwise intelligent people are seemingly unable to bring
themselves to question the fundamental 'model' that supposedly describes what is going on in
the 'West'. If political 'models' were subjected to the same sort of analysis that scientific
ones were, then the model used by b and most of the people who comment here would undoubtedly
be rejected. There are simply too many elephants in the room.
Why are European countries going along with all the stupidity? Such as America's rampage
through the middle east, originating and perpetuated with proven lies, flooding Europe with
migrants as a result.
Why are European countries apparently happy to go along with the Russophobia and the
Sinophobia. Are their leaders really so lame-brained that they took the ludicrous Skripal
poisoning story and the even more ridiculous Navalny yarn at face value?
Why are European countries going along with the stupid and unfair sanctions? sanctions
that cost Europe far more than they do America.
Why is Europe going along with the increased militarisation of the of the border with the
Russian federation and the open war-mongering? Surely European leaders realise that they are
wantonly courting WW3 and risking a nuclear conflagration? Could they really be so stupid as
to imagine that lining the border they share with the Russians with ABM's was actually
'defensive' in nature?
Last but certainly not least, why is Israel so important? How come a tiny country in the
middle east gets to thumb its nose at international law on a daily basis? Why is it OK for
them to have nukes? Why is it OK when they shoot literally thousands of unarmed protesters?
killing hundreds. How come they can build walls and that is OK, How come they can run an
openly apartheid state but somehow be immune to criticism?
The answer to all these questions is actually quite simple, the US and Europe are pretty
much controlled by the same set of oligarchs and the most powerful of the oligarchs are the
bankers. Once you realise that it is the bankers driving most of this garbage all of the
elephants are explained.
MarkU @ 39 -- HossKara struck gold with his suggestion @34, to which I responded @35.
It's all about the Benjamins, particularly the Petrodollar controlled by what
Psychohistorian euphemistically calls "Private Finance" and is the world's reserve currency.
Any attempt to circumvent the Petrodollar in trade, especially energy resources, brings
violent aggression to punish the wayward country and its leaders.
"Private Finance" in this context really means the thug standing behind you with a
baseball bat. "You don't know who you're dealing with, punk." Iran trades with other
countries in other currencies, so does Venezuela, so does China, so does Russia. Get the
picture?
Saddam Hussein announced that he was going to accept other currencies than the dollar for
Iraq's oil -- look what happened to him. Same with Gaddafi. They and their countries were
made examples of what happens when you deny Uncle Ratschild his pound of flesh.
"... Western headlines are for western internal consumption. And what's happening behind the scene, what incentives are offered and what threats are made in exchange for what specific actions, we simply don't know. ..."
"... The Biden admin's behavior is purposeful and, frankly, entirely logical if you view it from the American perspective of global production: the US, its ruling class, and its population greatly benefits from the neocolonial expropriation of value from exploited nations, granted largely through unequal exchange. ..."
Why, after so many bad words towards it, would China help the U.S. with solving the
North Korea problem? It has zero incentive to do so.
The same aggressive behavior can be seen with regards to Russia. Baseless accusations of
Russian election interferences are followed with more sanctions and threats topped off with
Biden
calling Russia's President Putin a 'killer' . As the Canadian Russia expert Paul
Robinson
writes :
As for Biden's comments, well what can one say? Didn't he just order the bombing of
Syria. Doesn't that make him a 'killer' too? Politicians should avoid this sort of
language. I suspect, though, that what this and the intelligence report mentioned above
indicate is that Russiagate , with its allegations of Trump-Putin collusion to undermine
American democracy, has done irreparable damage to US-Russia relations. One gets the
impression that there is now a deep, deep hatred of Russia within the US government, a
hatred that prevents any sane analysis of Russian intentions and actions, as well as of
US national interests . I fear that this will last for quite a long time.
[The] degradation of the American political institutions, top-bottom, and its speed are
mind-boggling. As for the class and culture--US political elite and US media machine
don't have any. Biden merely confirmed it today.
...
One Russian saying posits that one can still negotiate with scoundrels, one cannot
negotiate with idiots. When the opposite side is both, boy, talk about the United States
turning into the third world country.
The hostility the U.S., by its behavior and words, creates against itself is not
restricted to Russia and China.
Last week the French "Armed Forces Joint Reflection Circle" CRI, an independent think
tank of former generals and high officers of the French forces, issued an
open letter to NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg in which it accused him of
having acting solely in the interest of the U.S. during the development of his
NATO 2030 plan .
The letter details how Stoltenberg, NATO and the U.S. have caused the bad relations with
Russia. It says that the U.S. is trying use a fictional 'Russian threat' to pressure NATO
countries into morphing into a global force, under U.S. command and independent of the
United Nations, to then use it against China. This while the real threat to Europe is
Islamic terrorism caused by the U.S. interferences in the Middle East and north Africa. The
U.S. led NATO is thereby becoming a danger for Europe.
The accusations the French generals are launching against the U.S. go beyond anything
one might hear from Moscow or Beijing.
The next 'allied' nation that will have sound reason to turn hostile towards the U.S.
might well be Germany :
The Biden administration Thursday stepped up its rhetoric against a gas pipeline between
Russia and Germany, calling on all those involved in the project to "immediately abandon"
their work.
"The Department reiterates its warning that any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2
pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline,"
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
Nord Stream 2 is of vital importance to Germany's energy security. The German public was
rather hostile to President Trump and Biden's victory was seen with relief. But when it
sees how Biden pursues the same policies, and with a similar tone, it will turn on him. A
more general 'anti-Americanism' would then arise.
The uncompromising and ever aggressive behavior the U.S. shows towards competitors as
well as friends will not lead to a stronger U.S. position in the world. People and nations
will learn to work around it.
These rushed attempts to prevent the ending of its unipolar moment
will only accelerate the move towards a new multilateral global system.
Posted by b on March 18, 2021 at 18:48 UTC | Permalink
Pepe Escobar also has noted in his Telegram channel the craziness of Dem Dementia admin's
work till now aptly:
"DIPLOMACY'S DEAD, BABY. DIPLOMACY'S DEAD.
The Empire of Chaos is in utter desperation, and on a Kill Bill rampage. Without a
samurai sword.
Some of us, including Alastair Crooke, Paul Craig Roberts, The Saker, and if we he was
still alive, Prof. Stephen Cohen, have been warning everyone for a long time.
It doesn't matter that Russiagate was completely debunked. The Dem Dementia
administration is now on Russiagate 2.0 on steroids.
This "intel" report on Russian interference in the - rigged - US elections does not even
qualify as a bad joke.
What Crash Test Dummy's handlers told him to say in that interview about Putin being "a
killer", "without a soul" who will "pay a price", goes way beyond ANYTHING that happened
during the Cold War.
At least there was a measure of diplomatic decency in the superpowers relationship.
What's happening now is totally reckless, totally irrational - not to mention terminally
stupid: there is NO American foreign policy left.
The Kremlin - as well as the Ministy of Foreign Affairs - already got the picture: they
are dealing with a bunch of lowly gangsters which also happens to be criminally insane.
For the record: Stupidistan is now at war ON THREE FRONTS. Against Russia, against China
and against Iran.
Declining empires are ALWAYS strategically stupid."
Nord Stream 2 is of vital importance to Germany's energy security. The German public was
rather hostile to President Trump and Biden's victory was seen with relief. But when it
sees how Biden pursues the same policies, and with a similar tone, it will turn on him.
<-- b
However "hostile", Germany contributed to uni-lateral Trumpian sanctions, and so far,
North Stream 2 is the only beacon of independence. Take Ukraine: Germany and France form
half of Normandy Four, and provided name for Steinmeier formula. Ukraine resolutely resists
proceeding with any obligations under that formula. Germany is silent on that and support
annual extensions of sanctions, not to mention sanctions on Syria, Venezuela and whatever
EU sanctions. Syria is an interesting example. It could be actually popular among German
voters to facilitate reconstruction in that country and return of the refugees to their
homeland. Iran and Russia are potentially good customers for German industry. Independence
of German banks and other companies from whimsical sanctions from USA would help too.
Seemingly, ingrained masochism is hard to overcome.
Ukrainian government quite recently decided to insult China. Not only Chinese investors who
got the majority stake in a major Ukrainian company (major in Ukraine, that is) were
prevented from getting their hard paid ownership, but the buyers became targets of
sanctions, practically, confiscation of property.
The reaction, other than verbal, was a bit slow.
But last week a large business/tourism delegation from China visited Crimea, officially
sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and concluded a number of deals, with promise of
more. What happened to Ukrainian purchase of Chinese vaccine is hard to tell.
For the record: Stupidistan is now at war ON THREE FRONTS. Against Russia, against China
and against Iran.
Declining empires are ALWAYS strategically stupid."
Posted by: Seej | Mar 18 2021 19:05 utc | 4
Alas, more than 30 years ago it was observed in USA that it benefits a politician to
seem stupid, and being genuinely stupid is even better. Why do you think power to be within
Democratic Party decided to maneuver the least intellectually able contender to win in the
primaries? That in itself is not necessarily bad, but on the lower levels of government,
you must prove stupidity (or at least utter lack of original thinking) to advance. Now we
have new generations of opportunists hiding any sign of thinking, apart from passing all
the required exams in elite schools etc. Let me think of the greatness and extinction of
Irish elk.
Thanks for posting Pepe's comments, some of which are in his current article I linked to
on the open thread. In my comment related to Pepe's article I noted his excerpt of Chinese
academic Jisi and this specific part:
"the Americans are eager to deal with problems before they are ready to improve the
relationship."
That observation is consistent with that of an entity that only wants its orders obeyed
and seeks no relationship or friendship with any other entity since it sees itself as Top
Dog, and #1 in every way. As with the Nord Stream project, we see the Gangster
mentality--Do as I say or else!
Not only does the Emperor have no clothes or much of a working memory, he's got erectile
disfunction too that's well beyond the ability of Viagra to fix.
So here we have Blinken, Winken and Nod providing direction for failing empire
Blinken is obvious
Winken is that behind the scenes, wink, wink, nod, nod (there ain't no class structure
here) type VP and
Nod is the new normal as US President.
I am sure they will try to take America to new places, yet to be dreamt of....will the
brainwashed of the West follow?
About Germany and Nord Stream II.....To a degree that I am not sure of, Germany is like
Japan, a fully owned colony of empire....this may be the time that the Germany nut gets
cracked wide open....interesting times indeed.
Where are the details of Blinken telling China how to behave? I can hardly wait for the
next act of Blinken, Winken and Nod
"Why, after so many bad words towards it, would China help the U.S. with solving the
North Korea problem? It has zero incentive to do so."
This (as well as the Germany/NS2 thing) sounds like a rather naive view. Western
headlines are for western internal consumption. And what's happening behind the scene, what
incentives are offered and what threats are made in exchange for what specific actions, we
simply don't know.
Last week the French "Armed Forces Joint Reflection Circle" CRI, an independent think
tank of former generals and high officers of the French forces, issued an open letter to
NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg in which it accused him of having acting solely
in the interest of the U.S. during the development of his NATO 2030 plan.
Well, I'd like to thank the French generals, because Stoltenberg is nothing but a Quisling,
who betrays his country and is "acting solely in the interest of the U.S.". Indeed.
The Biden admin's behavior is purposeful and, frankly, entirely logical if you view
it from the American perspective of global production: the US, its ruling class, and its
population greatly benefits from the neocolonial expropriation of value from exploited
nations, granted largely through unequal exchange.
Trump's ascendancy in the run-up to and aftermath of 2016 can be viewed as a reaction to
the collapse of neoliberalism in 08-09, culminating in a policy that looked to partially
revert to old-school colonialism of forcing raw material trade to the US rather than
exporting the purchase of labor power beginning in the 80s. Of course, that is folly, as it
was never possible for Trump to truly return productive jobs back to the US, at least not
at the rates expected for global north standards of living or profit expectations. Even the
25% of productive labor in the US averages wages above global wages (i.e. even productive
workers in the US are net exploiters of global south labor power). Nevertheless, in the
wake of neoliberalism's collapse, standards of living now ebb and flow in the US, which
means that Trump and future continuous descent into fascist policy is all but
inevitable.
Biden is a reaction to Trump in that his admin represents a desperate attempt to salvage
the neoliberal policies of the past 50 years since the 80s. Unfortunately for Biden, and
the rest of America, there's only so many populations you can exploit before exploited
productive forces become so advanced that they begin to demand higher wages, and thus
profits dry up. Global wage differences even out, then import prices go up, and our
American standard of living continues to drop until the sweatshops come home to roost. That
won't stand and ideology shifts again and again (Biden's response to these shifts is,
ironically, censorship and control).
So what does the Biden admin do? They know it will eventually come down to opening up
new labor power markets (those sweet, sweet populations and natural resources of Russia are
so tempting to Biden's vampiric brood) and taking down competing countries (China's rise as
a consumer market is a big problem for the US). This is why Biden's behavior makes sense.
If they don't put maximum pressure now, not just on Russia and China, but all potential
neocolonial interests, then they won't get the chance in the future. We'll see the internal
contradictions in the US give rise to even more blatant fascism (doesn't matter from whom,
Trump or Biden).
17 March Russia withdraws it's US Ambassador for consultations:
"Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov has been summoned to Moscow
for consultations in order to analyse what needs to be done in the context of relations
with the United States.
The new US administration took office about two months ago and the symbolic 100-day
mark is not too far away, which is a good occasion for trying to appraise what Joe
Biden's team has managed to do and where it was not very successful.
The most important thing for us is to identify ways of rectifying Russia-US
relations, which have been going through hard times as Washington has, as a matter of
fact, brought them to a blind alley.
We are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations, if the
Americans become aware of the risks associated with this."
Pres. Putin invite Pres. Biden for a live on-line public discussion of issues:
"I want to invite President Biden to continue our discussion, but on the condition that
we do this actually live, as they say, online. Without any delay, but directly in an
open, direct discussion. It seems to me that it would be interesting for the people of
Russia, for the people of the United States, and for many other countries", Putin said
on air on the Rossiya 24 broadcaster.
The talk to be tomorrow (Friday). If not, then Monday, as he is spending free time in
the Taiga (oblique reference to North Korea going up the sacred mountain to re-majorly
rethink policy). This also places a live face to face in Prime media time, avoiding the
dead news weekend.
Biden is an intelligent man, but can't appear on an unedited live TV show with Putin -
not because of his age-related related memory recall difficulty - this is normal - but
because it risks exposing the cartoon-like tropes, lies, racism, & duplicity of the US
Govt. approach.
Especially when compared and contrasted with the serious and adult approach of the
Russian President. Nearly 100 days in, USA Govt. has been given the chance, and it is
clear USA Govt aggression and attempts to interfere in Russian domestic policy will
continue. Should Russia abandon soft diplomacy and strategic patience with USA?
Perhaps it is all theatre, coordinated by the Presidential envoys.
Perhaps a 'crisis' is created, Ukraine creates a threat to Europe, climate must be
cooperatively addressed, the Middle East could explode at any moment, a new peace treaty
in the Gulf required, blah blah, blah.
A live face to face airs the issues from both sides publicly, done respectfully,
sensibly, no political point scoring or spittle-mouthed fabrications from the US Govt
side.
The Press filter is sidestepped - a Trump tactic. It would be intended as a circuit
breaker, and the start of a new course for USA Govt. Russia is ready, has been for years,
and repeated it over and over.
If the USA Govt fails to step up it will hardly be the end of the world. But it will
show what a lot of short-sighted, self-interested, careerist, and functionally useless
time-servers most of the US political class are.
They will identify themselves as impediments to the health and welfare of the American
people.
The president named the fight against the pandemic, regional conflict resolution, and
strategic stability issues as possible topics, noting that he would be ready to talk to
Biden on Friday or Monday in an "open" chat.
"I would like to suggest to President Biden that we continue our discussion, but on the
condition that we actually do it live, without any delays, directly in an open, live
discussion," Putin told the Russia 24 TV channel on Thursday. "I think it would be
interesting for the people of Russia and the people of the United States and many other
countries," he added.
It would be so delicious to actually witness such a debate. By asking for it to be
streamed live, Putin is subtly calling out Biden's lie that he "told Putin he had no soul"
(whereas it's unlikely that Biden actually had a 1:1 meeting with Putin during the Obama
administration) as well as making Biden look weaker when Crash Test Dummy doesn't respond to
the invite.
Biden"s time is limited. Cannot be trusted near a microphone, no matter how well prepared
or how thoroughly edted. Has trouble walking, begins to have trouble standing up.
Kamala is still very much a problem. First, no one likes her. Not the public, not her
peers. The public is not prepared for her accession. Her competence is possibly even lower
than Biden's. She may be better able to read a TelePrompter, she still annoys everyone when
she speaks. May turn out to have some aptitude for riding herd on the advisors, we shall see.
She may be able to function as some sort of ringmaster but will contribute nothing, she knows
nothing.
It shall be government by advisors and functionaries and hidden hands. The advisors and
functionaries are all steeped in hegemony and exceptionalism. They have no idea of anything
else. Anyone who ever had a thought in their head was weeded out of academia and out of
public life a long time ago. That leaves the hidden hands. We will never know much about
that. It does appear they are perhaps ready to close down the American project and move
on.
If those within the US government were so stupid as to swallow Russiagate's bullshit thus
resulting in a "deep hatred of Russia," why would Russia want to deal with such obtuse idiots
incapable of logic or critical thinking?
IMO, the current goal of Russia/China/Iran is to completely ice-out the Outlaw US Empire
from having any practical impact on global affairs. The new initiative to Re-ratify the UN
Charter is a case in point for such a policy. The not agreement capable nation now has a
figure head that can't be allowed to talk without minders, a fact Putin would like the entire
world to observe. The world has no way to deny that it sees a nation talking like a Gangster
and acting like a Gangster as its recent behavior's been very explicit and public. IMO, such
behavior hasn't been observed since 1938, but there'll be no appeasement or betrayal of
another nation this time. China's already invited Lavrov to Beijing once its diplomats return
from Alaska. Yet the Empire lies to itself when it says it has more tools to deal with
Russia. The reality is it has no more cards to play--not even its nukes.
Absolutely no difference in foreign policy?
B, I think you're pandering to your audience.
I wonder what President Putin would think- or perhaps "feel" about teamBiden versus
Trump?.
How would you like to be called a "killer, without a soul"? Not withstanding all the
theatrical bellicosity of Pompeo, Putin at least understood that Trump admired him as a
person. I contend this is a big difference.
Do you think the Dems want any comparison with the Trump administration? They are after
contradistinction.
The Dems, the internationalists and the Blairites imagine themselves to be on a roll. Putin
is in their crosshairs.
This time the belligerence is the real thing.
International Music Festival volunteer coordinator and representative of Crimea Federal
University Polina Bolbochan: Mr President, I have a somewhat personal question for you.
Yesterday, President Biden got quite tough in his interview, including with regard to you.
What would you say to him?
Vladimir Putin: With regard to my US colleague's remark, we have, indeed, as he said,
met in person. What would I tell him? I would say "stay healthy." I wish him good health. I
am saying this without irony or tongue in cheek. This is my first point.
Secondly, taking a broader approach to this matter, I would like to say that difficult,
dramatic, and bloody events abound in the history of every nation and every state.
But when we evaluate other people, or even other states and nations, we are always
facing a mirror, we always see ourselves in the reflection, because we project our inner
selves onto the other person.
You know, I remember when we were children and played in the yard, we had arguments
occasionally and we used to say: whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. This
is no coincidence or just a kids' saying or joke. It has a very deep psychological
undercurrent.
We always see ourselves in another person and think that he or she is just like us, and
evaluate the other person's actions based on our own outlook on life.
With regard to the US establishment, the ruling class – not the American people
who are mostly honest, decent and sincere people who want to live in peace and friendship
with us, something we are aware of and appreciate, and we will rely on them in the
future – their mindset was formed in rather challenging circumstances which we are
all aware of.
After all, the colonisation of the American continent by the Europeans went hand-in-hand
with the extermination of the local people, the genocide, as they say today, outright
genocide of the Indian tribes followed by a very tough, long and difficult period of
slavery, a very cruel period.
All of that has been part of life in America throughout the history of the United States
to this day. Otherwise, where would the Black Lives Matter movement come from? To this day,
African Americans face injustice and even extermination.
The ruling class of the United States tends to address domestic and foreign policy
issues based on these assumptions. After all, the United States is the only country to
have used nuclear weapons, mind you, against a non-nuclear state – Japan, in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. There was absolutely no military need for the
bombing. It was nothing but the extermination of civilians.
I am bringing this up, because I know that the United States and its leaders are
determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to
the United States and on its terms.
Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different
genetic, cultural and moral code .
But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in
the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to
us.
They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development,
despite the sanctions and insults.
They will have to reckon with this.
My bolds, to bring out the essence.
Essentially, he is saying 'We reject your posturing and rudeness, do what you want. We are
ready, and will go our own way. You are not worthy of our cooperation. It' over'.
So, the ball, once again, is in the USA Govt court.
Your editorial "The
Semiconductor Shortage" (March 13) is right that government action is not needed to correct
the short-term supply-demand imbalance causing the global chip shortage, but wrong that the
U.S. can "prod" its way to stronger domestic semiconductor production and more secure chip
supply chains in the long term. Global competitors haven't passed the U.S. as a location for
chip manufacturing by prodding. They've done it by funding ambitious government incentives to
lure semiconductor production to their shores.
As a result, only 12% of global manufacturing is now done in the U.S., down from 37% in
1990.
The problem with coronavirus vaccine is similar to the problem with flu vaccine: the virus
mutates and it is unclear how effective the vaccination will be against the next dominant
strain.
Did you know that "49 percent of GOP men say they won't get vaccinated"? It's true.
According to a recent article in The Hill:
"Nearly half of U.S. men who identify as Republicans said they have no plans to get the
coronavirus vaccine, according to a new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll released Thursday.
The study, which surveyed 1,227 U.S. adults from March 3 to March 8, found that approximately
30 percent of Americans overall said they do not plan on getting vaccinated.
The poll found a higher amount of opposition among Republicans, with 41 percent saying
they would not get one of the three federally approved coronavirus vaccines and 49 percent of
Republican men saying the same. Fifty percent of GOP men said they would get the vaccine or
had already got it. One percent was unsure.
I believe that people who refuse to take the vaccine will be ridiculed, humiliated,
scapegoated, deprived and isolated. Judging from the COVID 19 situation we are already living
in fascist society where people are treated as the state property.
Once you you look at the vaccination statistics, it is clear that the psychopaths are
winning. There is no escape from them. Sooner or later they will come for people like me. I
am trying to prepare myself for a painful and slow death from starvation/disease/maltreatment
in a detention/concentration/reeducation camp.
My hat is off to Mr. Whitney for an excellent article. And thank God for a real human
being and American patriot as Gov. Kristi Noem. I thought there was no such thing in
politics. This woman should be our president not the fake and false "woman of color" standing
in the wings salivating. The media can't tell if she's African or from India. Does it matter
that she was the least favored candidate in the primaries? Not to to demoncrats. All they do
is pander to color and gender confusion. This should be an insult to any real person of color
like me and it most definitely is. When are people going to realize that they are being
exploited and manipulated? We are all citizens and those sincerely aspiring to be citizens.
Not pawns in a politica chess game that no one wins but the politicians...
Apparently Chuck Todd is a
climatologist and virologist . He doesn't ASK Fauci if climate change will cause more
pandemics - or how even soon that might happen - he simply states as fact that
it will happen. For his part, Fauci largely avoids the issue, responding as generically as
possible. LOL!
In this indirect way, Americans have now been put on notice: expect more pandemics and
continuing restrictions in the not-too-distant future.
Who says our media aren't informative?!?!/sarc
Expert Chuck Todd fails to note that the world was long overdue a pandemic. Chuckie also
fails to note that highly-paid health authorities - that planned for years for the next
pandemic - failed miserably in protecting us. What health authority questioned Trump's early
lies that SARS-COV-2 was no worse than the flu?
Of course Biden is senile, but from the speech it is clear that his clique is also far from
being the sharpest knifes in the drawer.
The problem with coronavirus vaccine is similar to the problem with flu vaccine: the virus
mutates and it is unclear how effective the vaccination will be against the next dominant
strain.
Also it is unclear whether for people, say, over 70 the danger of vaccine outweighs the
danger of the virus (especially if they live alone with no children in the household -- children
usually bring new infection into the family). Half of Covid-19 deaths are over age 80 (median age
of victims is 82). If you are over age 80 and live in a big city or in a family with children ,
you have elevated, probably a 1 in 6 chance of dying from Covid-19
And again big difference is whether you live in the large city like NYC or somewhere in the
suburbs, say 70 miles from the nearest large city. People in the city are in much higher danger
to get the infection.
"Trust the government", says Biden, and yet, in survey after survey, we see that trust in
government is lower now than any time in our 245-year history. And, for good reason: the public
health officials, the media, and their Democrat allies in the statehouses have consistently and
deliberately misled the public on nearly every aspect of the pandemic...
Take a look:
"When I came into office you may recall I set a goal that many of you said was kind of way
over the top. I said I intended to get 100 million shots in people's arms in my first 100
days in office . Tonight, I can say we're not only going to meet that goal, we're going
to beat that goal. Because we're actually on track to reach this goal of 100 million shots in
arms on my 60th day in office. No other country in the world has done this, none. And I want
to talk about the next steps we're thinking about.
"Tonight, I'm announcing that I will direct all states, tribes, and territories to make
all adults, people 18 and over, eligible to be vaccinated no later than May 1. Let me say
that again. All adult Americans will be eligible to get a vaccine no later than May 1. That's
much earlier than expected.
"And let me be clear. That doesn't mean everyone's going to have that shot immediately,
but it means you'll be able to get in line beginning May 1. Every adult will be eligible to
get their shot. And to do this, we're going to go from a million shots a day that I
promised in December before I was sworn in, to maintaining, beating our current pace of 2
million shots a day, outpacing the rest of the world "
What does that mean?
It means the virus is on its last legs . It means there is enough immunity in the
community that the rate of infection is falling like a stone . Viruses don't suddenly
decide to pack their bags and leave town. No. They run out of susceptible hosts to infect. And
the reason they run out of susceptible hosts to infect, is because more people have already had
the infection and either survived or died. Either way, the pool of susceptible hosts has shrunk
dramatically. This is a long way of saying that ' At present, there is no reason to get
vaccinated.' There is no reason to inject an experimental and potentially-lethal substance
into your bloodstream to counter an infection that is nearly kaput. Capisce?
Biden knows this, his speech writers know this, and the deep-pocket oligarchs who shoehorned
his sorry a** into the White House by dumping truckloads of mail-in ballots at voting stations
around the country in the wee-hours of the morning; they know it, too.
...
Of course, he knows it. He knows the whole thing is a fraud, but that won't stop him from
doing what he's been doing for the last 50 years; carrying water for corporate honchos and
billionaire busybodies who see vaccination as an essential steppingstone to their glorious new
order. Biden is merely the face-man for this sinister project; a pallid, inconsequential
cog that helps to move the machinery of tyranny forward. That's Biden in a nutshell. Here's
more from the speech:
"I need you, the American people. I need you. I need every American to do their part. I
need you to get vaccinated when it's your turn and when you can find an opportunity.
And to help your family, your friends, your neighbors get vaccinated as well. Because
here's the point.
"If we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together, by July the 4, there's a
good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or
in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day."
Get it? In other words, either you get vaccinated or no 4th of July for you!
... Do these people have any idea how despicable they are? The government's job is to
provide accurate, well-researched, empirical information on matters of public interest, like
vaccines. The government has no right to employ private contractors to persuade,
indoctrinate or brainwash the American people in order to promote the cynical and
self-serving agenda of power-mad elites and money-grubbing corporations. That is a massive
"overreach".
At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787,
Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough) had this to
say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that
they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the
majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public
treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal
policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has
been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the
following sequence:
From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage."
Last spring, the New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered nursing homes to admit patients who
had recently been treated for Covid-19.
This led to a spike in Covid deaths inside nursing homes, which are filled with elderly
people in the highest risk category for serious Covid-19 cases.
When the State Health Department issued a report on the nursing home deaths, one of Cuomo's
aides rewrote it to remove the total count of 9,250 deaths related to the policy.
The reasoning was that the death count outpaced New Jersey's -- with the second highest
nursing home death rate in the county -- by almost 3,000.
The aide who rewrote the report with the intention to mislead the public worked as a
Professor of Government Ethics at NYU's law school, before joining the Cuomo administration in
"ethics and law enforcement matters."
"The aide who rewrote the report with the intention to mislead the public worked as a
Professor of Government Ethics at NYU's law school, before joining the Cuomo administration
in "ethics and law enforcement matters."
I worked in medical ethics for a decade, so I'm not surprised. Especially since he did
that work at a LAW SCHOOL . If we didn't already know it, the focus at law schools is on
teaching students that it is their professional duty to argue for any point of view they are
paid for. And it is the professional task of "ethics experts" to make the argument that the
course of action preferred by their bosses or their institutions is the most "ethical" among
alternatives. Never mind that it's generally the most profitable as well. Pointing out the
actual moral destitution of the chosen acts is NOT conducive to a long career. Trust me on
that one.
The short-cut through the verbiage is generally, if someone refers to "morality", they're
actually talking about what's Right or Wrong. When they mention "ethics", however, they're
discussing what you can get away with.
Cityzerosix 1 day ago
Ethics; underlying morality.
Ethical- relating to beliefs that are morally right or wrong
4
weeks ago I was just watching an NBA game and thought it would be so much more enjoyable if
there was more diversity on the court. Maybe they could lower the baskets so more whites and
Asians could play in the league.
Deep State Operator: "I'll have the staff start drawing up plans for that."
Trump: "I want them out NOW!"
Deep State Operator: "Ah... that's complicated. We can't just leave right away and
leave all of our stuff there."
Trump: "OK, then make those plans! Tell me why these plans were not prepared yet? You
knew that I wanted the troops home. That was one of my campaign promises."
Deep State Operator: "But you never asked us!"
[six months pass]
Trump: "So, how about those plans?"
Deep State Operator: "What plans?"
Trump: "The ones about withdrawing from Syria that I ordered you to have
ready."
Deep State Operator: "Oh, those plans. We have our best people working on them. I'll
find out their status and get back to you."
[three months later]
Trump: "The plans!"
Deep State Operator: "What plans?"
Trump: "Do you have brain damage or something? The ones about withdrawing from Syria!
You said you would look into their status and get back to me!"
Deep State Operator: "We're doing the best that we can! There have been some
complications, but we'll have them straightened out soon!"
[three more months pass]
Trump: "The plans."
Deep State Operator: "What plans?"
Trump: "To get out of Syria."
Deep State Operator: "Oh, those plans! You never filled out the necessary paperwork. We
cannot proceed without the orders in writing. You have to be specific about what you mean by
wanting the troops out. Which parts of Syria do you want them out of and which troops do you
want the operation to apply to? Like I said before, this is really complicated."
[incredulous look from Trump]
[six months later]
Trump: "The plans."
Deep State Operator: "What plans?"
Trump: "To get out of Syria."
Deep State Operator: "Oh, those plans! You wouldn't believe this but a dog ate the
orders that you gave us. We couldn't tell which troops to get out of where, so the plans have
been developing rather slowly."
Trump: "You are right. I don't believe you. You're fired!"
Deep State Operator: "You can't fire me! I am a civil servant!"
Trump: "I can't? OK then, you're promoted to cleaning toilets at McMurdo Station.
Bye."
[six months later]
Trump: "Those plan? Or do you want to join your predecessor at McMurdo
Station?"
New Deep State Operator: "You ask too much! It takes time to learn the intricacies of
this interdepartmental work! I've just started!"
[six months later]
Trump: "Plans!"
Deep State Operator: "Can I go to McMurdo Station?"
[and so on]
[after deep state/business elites frauded election]
Deep State Operator: "Welcome Mr President, and can I say how please I am at your
victory?"
Biden: "You can say whatever the hell you want, whoever the hell you are."
Deep State Operator: "I am your Deep State interdepartmental
facilitator and liaison."
Biden: "Ah, good. They want me to ask you to get the troops back in Syria."
Deep State Operator: "Right away sir. The plans are already prepared and troops will
begin moving before the end of the hour."
Everyone knows the Deep State works this way. Infinite resistance against what the Deep
State doesn't want and immediate action on what the Deep State desires.
Several Russia watchers - Patrick
Armstrong , Andrei Martyanov and
Andrei
Raevsky - are musing about a renewed attack by the government of Ukraine on its eastern
Donbass region. The Donbass separated in 2014 after the U.S. driven coup in Kiev installed an
anti-Russian government which then waged a war on its ethnic Russian east.
"I would like to warn the Kiev regime and the hotheads that are serving it or manipulating it
against further de-escalation and attempts to implement a forceful scenario in Donbass,"
[Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova] said, commenting on the statement of
head of the Ukrainian delegation to the Contact Group for settlement in Donbass Leonid
Kravchuk on some "radical steps" of Kiev if Russia refuses to recognize itself as a conflict
side in eastern Ukraine.
...
Zakharova recalled that the Minsk Agreements clearly outline the conflict sides in Donbass as
Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. "The unwillingness of Ukrainian negotiators to recognize this fact
and their refusal to find agreements with Donbass is the reason that hinders the
establishment of long-lasting peace in the region," the diplomat noted.
[T]he Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU) recently plunged the country into one of its
deepest crises in its 30-year history. Specifically, on October 27, 2020, the Court declared
that the main elements of Ukraine's anti-corruption legislation, adopted between 2014 and
2020, were unconstitutional. In response, President Zelensky introduced legislation calling
for the early termination of all Constitutional Court judges. Later, in December, he
suspended the chairman of the Court for two months.
The result was widespread chaos in Ukraine's political system. Zelensky's actions were of
questionable legality and provoked harsh criticism from all political sides. The
ramifications of the Court's decision include the cancellation of over 100 pending corruption
investigations, a development that potentially could endanger future EU-Ukraine trade and
economic cooperation Ukraine under the 2014 Association Agreement.
After the 2014 Euromaidan coup an 'independent' National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) was
created to oversee the investigation and prosecution of corrupt state officials. The NABU has
since been used by the U.S. embassy to bring criminal cases against those oligarchs it dislikes
and to cover for those it likes. The constitutional court found that NABU is a criminal
investigation agency outside the control of the executive branch which is a contradiction to
the Ukrainian constitution.
The crisis has since escalated:
President Zelensky has now taken several provocative steps, including proposing legislation
that voids the Constitutional Court's anti-corruption rulings and begins the process of
dismissing and replacing those justices who supported that decision. None of these actions
are supported under present-day Ukrainian law. The rhetoric between the president and the
Constitutional Court is also escalating, with Constitutional Court Chairman Tupitskyi warning
that the president's actions threaten the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Calls for
impeachment proceedings are being raised in the Rada, and Zelensky yet again escalated the
crisis on February 3, 2021 by blocking pro-Russian TV channels controlled by Victor
Medvedchuk. The legality of the latter action was even questioned by the EU, who told
Zelensky that while Ukraine possessed the right to protect itself from disinformation, it
still had to comply with international standards and "fundamental rights and freedoms."
The pressure on Zelensky is growing as he tries to navigate the fine line of obeying the
law as written while simultaneously claiming that the very integrity of the country is at
stake. And Zelensky's problems are only mounting, with the Cabinet of Ministers recently
calling for the dismissal of the head of NABU and the IMF delaying the next tranche of
financial support, in part because of Ukraine's failure to implement a comprehensive
anti-corruption program.
A war against the eastern separatist could be a Hail Mary attempt by Zelensky to regain some
national and international support.
But nothing will happen on the frontline without the consent or even encouragement from
Washington DC. The Biden administration is filled with the same delusional people who managed
the 2014 coup in Kiev. They may believe that the NATO training the Ukrainian army received and
the weapons the U.S. delivered are sufficient to defeat the separatist. But the state of the
Ukrainian military is worse than one might think and
the separatist will have Russia's full backing. There is no question who would win in such a
fight.
If the US is not careful it is going to give the Russians another opportunity to show to the
World their military prowess, the flexibility of their Military District system allowing
multi front operation and their unfailing support for an ally. As well as potentially letting
the Russians show to Europe that they have nothing to fear, if they stop at 30 miles or so
and basically go back home. All whilst the US demonstrates the opposite, but then reinforcing
DC may trump the World.
Posted by b on March 13, 2021 at 17:30 UTC | Permalink
If Ukraine is not careful, they could easily lose all their territory up to the Dnieper
River. With Russian support the separatists could launch offensives and gain massive
territory west. If pro-Russian separatists managed to capture that much territory, that would
solve alot of problems for Russia.
1. A land bridge to Crimea.
2. No more water/power distribution problems to Crimea.
3. Less chances for the ongoing sabotage efforts against Crimea from the northern border.
4. Permanent exclusion of Ukraine from NATO unless Ukraine simply gives up and recognizes all
the lost as sovereign independent republics. A win/win for Russia.
"A war against the eastern separatist could be a Hail Mary attempt by Zelensky to regain
some national and international support." It would be an odd way to 'regain national
support', as he was elected on precisely the opposite platform, the peace platform.
Meh. Whatever the calculations - to suppress pro-peace opponents and compete against the
pro-war parties for their electorate? - it seems unlikely to succeed. A case of totally
fucked up attempt at populism, methinks.
"Just a few weeks ago I wrote a column entitled "The Ukraine's Many Ticking Time Bombs" in
which I listed a number of developments presenting a major threat to the Ukraine and, in
fact, to all the countries of the region. In this short time the situation has deteriorated
rather dramatically. I will therefore begin with a short recap of what is happening.
First, the Ukrainian government and parliament have, for all practical purposes, declared
the Minsk Agreements as dead. Truth be told, these agreements were stillborn, but as long as
everybody pretended that there was still a chance for some kind of negotiated solution, they
served as a "war retardant". Now that this retardant has been removed, the situation becomes
far more explosive than before.
Second, it is pretty obvious that the "Biden" administration is a who's who of all the
worst russophobes of the Obama era: Nuland, Psaki, and the rest of them are openly saying
that they want to increase the confrontation with Russia. Even the newcomers, say like Ned
Price, are clearly rabid russophobes. The folks in Kiev immediately understood that their bad
old masters were back in the White House and they are now also adapting their language to
this new (well, not really) reality.
Finally, and most ominously, there are clear signs that the Ukrainian military is moving
heavy forces towards the line of contact. Here is an example of a video taken in the city of
Mariupol:
Besides tanks, there are many reports of other heavy military equipment, including MLRS
and tactical ballistic missiles, being moved east towards the line of contact. Needless to
say, the Russian General Staff is tracking all these movements very carefully, as are the
intelligence services of the LDNR."
Because the establishment was successful at installing one of their own into the White
House. In fact, the empire's need to secure total victory in Ukraine was part and parcel of
why Biden had to "win" regardless of how blatant the scamming of the election ended up
being.
Not only will the wars in Ukraine and Syria heat up to a boil again, but we will begin to
see terrorist attacks in western China start up once more after several year hiatus. We all
knew that this is what would come of a Biden win.
Ukraine still has a flotilla of functioning nuclear power plants. The Zaporozhye complex is
the largest in Europe by far. Anything goes wrong and Chernobyl comes back, in spades. So
what if we have a little war and Russia stops at Donbass, the rump of Ukraine is in chaos?
An atomic bomb requires 3 kilos of fissile material. A reactor will have tons. Hundreds of
tons of highly radioactive spent fuel. There is a lot to be said for stability. Lots of
trouble with high stakes poker.
I agree, and further to your points, I suspect Russians are engaged in a long term project
of re-absorbing Ukraine minus the Catholic oblasts. The tactic is intermittent episodes of
limited war, in response to a Ukrainian provocation, real or manufactured, or imagined -
followed by the loss of more territory by Ukraine.
The most interesting thing about this story is ... Myanmar.
Since the coup in that country began the Fake News (most MSM news) has given Myanmar
saturation coverage. EVERY "news" broadcast in Oz AND the so-called International News has
led with some tosh about Myanmar. It's an effing rowdy riot for Christ's sake. Guess how
surprised I wouldn't be to hear that MI6 & CIA are behind Myanmar? It's a Boring, same
every day, story and it's going nowhere.
Imo, Myanmar was always cover for prep for something more nefarious elsewhere. And
anything with shooting involved would be MORE nefarious than Myanmar. Now the real stories
are seeping out.
I hope they start with Ukraine. Putin is an asshole. But he's my kind of asshole and certain
people, who don't listen, are going to wish they hadn't been born. And when VVP has finished
with Ukraine, some of them may as well not have been born.
What ever I read I never hear the views of the people of Ukraine - the country is at risk of
being broken up by the actions of all governments since independence. I bet the Hungarians
and Poland are watching closely as they also have interests in Ukraine.
You people need to get your stories straight. If Biden is so senile, then manipulating him
slows down the full-court press and makes all policies erratic, the product of the last
person to whisper in the ear. (Which is why Dr. Jill would be Edith Wilson and Nancy Reagan.)
Plus, saving the zombie corps are higher on his agenda. Most of all of course, the theory
that Biden has already ordered the MSM to bury the bodies in Ukraine means he has zero need
to do favors for anyone there. (There is zero evidence Hunter was selling real favors,
instead of scamming crooked Ukrainians who thought they could buy influence. But it is an
article of faith, a tenet of Trumpian theology, that Ukraine was something, something,
something and therefore Biden is a traitor.)
It is in fact the transitional period that is apt to allow all unresolved disasters to
boil over while no one (not literally) is watching. Only a fool ever thought Ukraine and
Syria could continue indefinitely. (Putin may be that big of a fool, if he ever had an
endgame he's never showed any sign of it.) The economic crisis and the epidemic and the US
elections I think have tended to put people into a holding pattern to see how things develop.
But now, the epidemic is starting to shake out---the end of the beginning is in sight!---and
the world depression is entering a new phase with threatened mass bankruptcies and now is the
time to present the new US administration with a fait accompli.
In Syria, Trump had four years to end things but deliberately committed to stealing the
oil. Putin never had a plan I think to lever out the US and Turkey or even the Kurds, so he
never had a hope of ending the war in Syria. It can't go on forever.
Kharkov province came within a hair of joining Lugansk and Donetsk in rebelling. But it
is the only contiguous territory that can plausibly be joined. Odessa is majority Russian but
it is isolated. Artificially dividing the westernmost provinces from the rest of Ukraine will
not resolve the problem, not even if they were sacrificed to Poland. Poland's appetites
include western Belarus and Kaliningrad and probably parts of Lithuania too. One problem with
re-drawing borders in Europe is German revanchism for Silesia and Prussia. It may not be loud
now, but it's astonishing how fast these ideas come back.
Some updates. There is a battle in the area of #Donetsk airport. The #Ukrainian Armed
Forces
are shelling DPR positions with heavy weapons.
Around 19.30 local time, a series of kicks took place in the direction of the DAP.
I would expect a False Flag to start thing off. (The shelling has been going on for
months, but seems to be more serious this time round.)
The Russians are ready. 6 Divisions said to be on high alert. Structural subdivisions
of electronic warfare (EW) of special forces of Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have
been redeployed to the territory of the #DPR & #LPR
Electronic suppression & electronic protection goes to all points of contact with
#Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The Ukranians started flying Bayraktar TB2 drones (As used against Armenia) (Two drones
"Rece" downed (?unconfirmed) and a US drone seen in the vicinity.)
An Inhabitant of Donbas thinks that this time the Ukrainians will go for city centers.
(Thinking about the mess they made by going through the rural areas and finishing in
"cauldrons") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iixZn9r8z8
(26 minutes)
Turkey's deputy foreign minister [annexation of Crimea]: "The situation in Crimea
continues to threaten regional security." "We adopt a clear, coherent policy. We strongly
support the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. We don't recognize illegal
annexation."
The Ukes have slightly more then 100'000 men and the Donbas has about 30'000.
There are three (?) Nato force ships in Odessa. (Minesweepers, if my memory is correct -
older report) The US destroyers have left. But. The US has a carrier in the Med, and the
Charles de Gaulle (carrier) is also around.
I wonder who is pulling Ukrainian President Zelensky's strings as his actions as described
by B in his post don't match what the fellow has been doing (basically faffing about and
trying to please everybody since he was elected in 2019) up to now. There must be several
puppetmasters pulling him this way and that: the CIA and SBU certainly, the US State Dept
certainly, and Zelensky must also be feeling some heat now Uncle Creepy Joe and son Hunter
over Hunters past involvement with Burisma Holdings.
Biden does not have any policies. At this point, it should be clear that the term
"Biden" be used to designate the consortium of neocon and neoliberal technocrats, both
veterans from the Obama-admin and neophytes who are operating in place of a failing
POTUS.
Biden is a whimpering, pathetic character who should be left alone to handle his fleeting
mind in dignity. But we all know this is not what he truly deserves.
They would not allow him to do this, however, and he was instrumental in being the most
milktoast and boilerplate candidate where only pure hatred of the other (deplorables) would
suffice to win 2020.
Biden was essential to win. Now he is the equivalent of a 6' ft+ doorstop or
paperweight.
thanks b... and many good insights from the posters starting @ 1 and moving down, excepting
little stevies comment on putin.. can't have everything...
@ Gerhard | Mar 13 2021 18:22 utc | 9.. uranus is on an 84 year cycle... thanks for the
data..
@ 23 jen... i was wondering about that myself... who is pulling zelenskys strings?? if
biden can get rid of the chief prosecutor as vp to help his son out, i suspect he can do a
wee bit more now as president... i don't think he is that bright though, and others behind
the scene are pulling the strings here...
@22 stonebird - I watched the linked video. The Texan said that the Ukrainians bought winter
fuel from Belarus. Is Lukashenko still playing both sides? How sad. I wouldn't want to be on
a commercial jet flying over Ukrainian territory right now. Especially one manufactured by
Boeing.
Boeing...Boeing...gone.
God help the fine people of the DNR LNR.
RIP Givi, Motorola, Zharakansheko and all the patriots.
I am not sure if "the state of Ukrainian army" is properly illustrated by the link. The
military is almost 300,000 strong and 60,000 is deployed on the Donbass frontline. They
suffer quite a bit of losses, almost all "non-combat". For example, food poisoning, stepping
or driving over mines laid by their colleagues, poisoning with improperly made samogon
(moonshine), few killed when a samogon still exploded (strong alcohol has to be separated
from propane flames, or it explodes, "still" as a noun is a device to distill alcohol), one
soldier was so stoned that walked over the other side -- somehow not stepping on the mines,
other stoned soldiers fight with each other etc. etc.
Somehow this war machine survives on 500 million dollars per month (a half what Polish
military consumes).
"The row was triggered by a 5 March report written by the think tank's two senior members,
Dr. Mathew Burrows and Dr. Emma Ashford, urging the Biden administration to 'avoid a
human-rights-first approach' towards Moscow and warning that new anti-Russia sanctions would
only 'further damage productive relations for the sake of an effort that is unlikely to
succeed.'
"On 9 March, 22 think tank's staffers and fellows issued a tough statement distancing
themselves from Burrows and Ashford and arguing that the report in question "misses the
mark." The statement was signed by individuals known for their longstanding criticism against
Moscow, including Swedish economist Anders Aslund and former US ambassadors John E. Herbst,
Alexander Vershbow, and Daniel Fried."
Each paper is linked at the original. There's much to chew on as the Pragmatists/Realists
make their move. I'll be back later to stick my oar in, although it ought to be clear who're
the sane and insane.
@Jen: "and Zelensky must also be feeling some heat now Uncle Creepy Joe and son Hunter over
Hunters past involvement with Burisma Holdings."
About a year ago (February 6, 2020) the investigating judge of the Pecherskyi district
court of Kyiv city I.V. Lytvynova ordered to open a criminal investigation of "the big guy"
Joe. Case number 62020000000000236.
But as far as I know, Mr Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general removed by "the
big guy" Joe (Burisma's krysha ), is still there, hasn't had a car accident or
anything like that. So, for "the big guy" Joe (and The Family) Ukraine is still somewhat
dangerous. To be handled with care.
There will be no war between Ukraine and Russia. Russia is playing for time, knowing that the
West is getting weaker and will be in worse position later. NS 2 is also not yet completed.
Why would one want to start a war now if they will be in better position later?
What may happen though, in the case of provocation, is that the rebels may get newer,
fancy weapons, inflicting heavy casualties on the Ukrainian Army.
Same with Taiwan. No one is going to attack it right now. It could still happen, but
around 2050, when China is at peak power, and not today.
@Passer by,
that NS2 is not operational only means that Europe can't afford a long, serious crisis
there.
Russia still could: being able to pump gas to Europe non-stop is hardly a critical factor.
But of course the Putin administration repeated many times that it will not fight Ukraine.
So, yes, it's unlikely.
The approach there appears to be 'wait and see'. "If you wait by the river long enough,
the bodies of your enemies will float by."
Vladimir Putin, you may have noticed, is everywhere. He has soldiers in Ukraine and Syria,
troublemakers in the Baltics and Finland, and a hand in elections from the Czech Republic to
France to the United States. And he is in the media. Not a day goes by without a big new
article on "
Putin's Revenge ", " The Secret Source of
Putin's Evil ", or "10 Reasons Why Vladimir Putin Is a Terrible Human Being".
Putin's recent ubiquity has brought great prominence to the practice of Putinology. This
enterprise – the production of commentary and analysis about Putin and his motivations,
based on necessarily partial, incomplete and sometimes entirely false information – has
existed as a distinct intellectual industry for over a decade.
...At no time in history have more people with less knowledge, and greater outrage, opined
on the subject of Russia's president. You might say that the reports of Trump's golden showers
in a Moscow hotel room have consecrated a golden age – for Putinology.
...
Compared to the 40-year cycle of US deindustrialisation, during which only the rich gained
in wealth; the 25-year rightwing war on the Clintons; the eight-year-old Tea Party assault on
facts, immigration and taxes; a tepid, centrist campaign; and a supposed late-breaking
revelation from the director of the FBI about the dubious investigation of Clinton's use of a
private email server – well, compared to all those factors, the leaked DNC emails must
rank low on the list of reasons for Trump's victory. And yet, according to a recent report,
Hillary Clinton and her campaign still blame the Russians – and, by extension, Barack
Obama, who did not make a big issue of the hacks before November – for her electoral
debacle. In this instance, thinking about Putin helps not to think about everything else that
went wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it.
This evasion is the essence of Putinology, which seeks solace in the undeniable but faraway
badness of Putin at the expense of confronting the far more uncomfortable badness in front of
one's face. Putinology predates the 2016 election by a decade, and yet what we have seen in
connection to Trump these past few months has been its Platonic ideal.
Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, bought more than $1 million of shares of
investment firm AllianceBernstein in February.
Paul Pelosi bought 15,000 AllianceBernstein (ticker: AB) shares on Feb. 18, and then
purchased 25,000 more shares on Feb. 23, according to a form Speaker Pelosi filed on
March 9 . Each transaction was valued at between $500,000 and $1 million. Specific figures
aren't required for disclosure, only ranges.
Paul Pelosi and Speaker Pelosi's office didn't respond to requests for comment on the stock
purchases.
Ron Afar 9 hours ago Wonder if he or others own Workhorse who lost the Postal Service contract
to Oshkosh, and now a Senator is demanding looking at the bidding.
You might familiarize yourself with how the national government funds its spending. It
creates new dollars every time it pays a bill. No debt required. So why do we have all this
public debt if it was unnecessary to begin with? It lines the pockets of the One Percent who
buy the safest bonds in the world to insure their immense fortunes. It's a subsidy. The rich
have the best socialism in the world. Right here in the USA.
Quite correct. We should use the terms: Blue Corporate Socialist party and Red Corporate
Socialist party when referring to them. The primary function of both parties is to provide
welfare to corporations and those who own them.
"... I'm surprised Republicans haven't done as much to sink the Libertarian Party. ..."
"... The Ballot Marking Devices section in essence legalizes election theft.) ..."
"... The dems carried AZ and PA AFTER they got the Greens removed from the ballot in both states. It tells you all you need to know about the Democratic Party and "free elections". ..."
H.R.1 (the " For the People Act ") is the
enormous election law reform bill just passed by the House and sent to the Senate. (The PDF has
791 pages.)
Black Agenda Report describes the 2019 version as "a sleazy ghetto ice cream truckload of
empty promises."
Associated Press uses more measured language:
House Resolution 1, which touches on virtually every aspect of the electoral process, was
approved on a near party-line 220-210 vote. It would restrict partisan gerrymandering of
congressional districts, strike down hurdles to voting and bring transparency to a murky
campaign finance system that allows wealthy donors to anonymously bankroll political
causes.
The stakes in the outcome are monumental, cutting to the foundational idea that one person
equals one vote, and carrying with it the potential to shape election outcomes for years to
come. It also offers a test of how hard President Joe Biden and his party are willing to
fight for their priorities, as well as those of their voters.
This bill "will put a stop at the voter suppression that we're seeing debated right now,"
said Rep. Nikema Williams, a new congresswoman who represents the Georgia district that
deceased voting rights champion John Lewis held for years. "This bill is the 'Good Trouble'
he fought for his entire life."
To Republicans, however, it would give license to unwanted federal interference in states'
authority to conduct their own elections -- ultimately benefiting Democrats through higher
turnout, most notably among minorities.
Establish automatic voter registration at an array of state agencies; Establish same-day
voter registration; Allow online voter registration; Allow 16- and 17-year-olds to
pre-register so they'll be on the rolls when they turn 18; Allow state colleges and
universities to serve as registration agencies; Ban states from purging eligible voters'
registration simply for infrequent voting; Establish two weeks of in-person early voting,
including availability on Sundays and outside of normal business hours; Standardize hours
within states for opening and closing polling places on Election Day, with exceptions to let
cities set longer hours in municipal races; Require paper ballots filled by hand or machines
that use them as official records and let voters verify their choices; Grant funds to states
to upgrade their election security infrastructure; Provide prepaid postage on mail ballots;
Allow voters to turn in their mail ballot in person if they choose; Allow voters to track
their absentee mail ballots; Require states to establish nonpartisan redistricting
commissions for congressional redistricting (possibly not until the 2030s round of
redistricting); Establish nonpartisan redistricting criteria such as a partisan fairness
provision that courts can enforce starting immediately no matter what institution is drawing
the maps; End prison gerrymandering by counting prisoners at their last address (rather than
where they're incarcerated) for the purposes of redistricting; End felony disenfranchisement
for those on parole, probation, or post-sentence, and require such citizens to be supplied
with registration forms and informed their voting rights have been restored; Provide public
financing for House campaigns in the form of matching small donations at a six-for-one rate;
Expand campaign finance disclosure requirements to mitigate Citizens United ; Ban
corporations from spending for campaign purposes unless the corporation has established a
process for determining the political will of its shareholders; and Make it a crime to
mislead voters with the intention of preventing them from voting.
There's certainly a lot of good stuff here (though as readers know, I loathe early voting,
since it can only increase voting for Party, not candidate, and would prefer a system that
maximized in-person voting, with Election Day a national holiday, and hand-marked paper ballots
hand-counted in public. But I recognize this is an outlier's position). Whether the bill will
pass is, of course, another matter, given the
filibuster . In fact, the bill (
as BAR points out ) seems designed to have its various sections lifted out and turned into
standalone bills. From
Axios :
Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21 and a longtime proponent of campaign finance
reform, says Democrats have a 3 -- 5 year strategy for enacting the key elements of H.R. 1
.
So, we'll see. In this post, I will focus on concerns more familiar to NC readers: H.R.1's
shocking[1] legitimation of the Washington Post's McCarthyite PropOrNot debacle; its
institutionalization of Ballot Marking Devices (which are not the same as "hand-marked paper
ballots"), and its provisions to cripple third party formation and growth. I don't know if
these issues are deal-breakers for anyone, or anyone who matters, but I do know that the
mainstream has not raised them.
Legitimizing PropOrNot
From the
text of the bill , "Subtitle C -- Strengthening Oversight of Online Political Advertising,
SEC. 4203. FINDINGS":
(2) On November 24, 2016, The Washington Post reported findings from teams of independent
researchers that concluded Russians '' exploited American-made technology platforms to
attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment * * * as part of a broadly
effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders."
Frankly, I'm gobsmacked to find this quotation from WaPo codified as a Congressional Finding
and embodied in statutory language[2]. For those who came in late, I'll unpack my
gobsmackedness, beginning by quoting Craig Timberg's WaPo story, "
Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say, " which
was oddly[3] placed in the Business Section:
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made
technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment , as
an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House.
One of those "teams" was PropOrNot:
PropOrNot's monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its
public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda
during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On
Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign
were viewed more than 213 million times.
[A shady website, PropOrNot,] has compiled a blacklist of websites its anonymous authors
accuse of pushing fake news and Russian propaganda. The blacklist includes over 200 outlets,
from the right-wing Drudge Report and Russian government-funded Russia Today, to Wikileaks
and an array of marginal conspiracy and far-right sites. The blacklist also includes
some of the flagship publications of the progressive left, including Truthdig, Counterpunch,
Truthout, Naked Capitalism, and the Black Agenda Report , a leftist African-American
opinion hub that is critical of the liberal black political establishment.
It became apparent soon after that the Post had itself fallen for shoddy information. The
story relied heavily on a report by PropOrNot, an anonymous internet group that bills itself
as "Your Friendly Neighborhood Propaganda Identification Service, Since 2016!" While its
study claimed to show how a deliberate Russian effort had unduly influenced American public
opinion, it included in its calculations non-fake, left-wing sites like Naked Capitalism and
Truthdig, among others.
A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot's list, and some of
the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group's
methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not
itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's findings regarding any individual media outlet,
nor did the article purport to do so [wowsers]. Since publication of The Post's story,
PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.
So the story was . what? Some goons made a list the Post won't vouch for? Swell reporting
standards there[4]. You can't spell "McCarthy" without including " Marty ," I guess. And there the matter rested,
just one of those stupidities that our famously free press routinely emits. One might have
supposed it forgotten. Until the story appeared in the text of a bill House Democrats
passed!
(I) The voting system shall require the use of an individual, durable, voter-verified
paper ballot of the voter's vote that shall be marked and made available for inspection and
verification by the voter before the voter's vote is cast and counted, and which shall be
counted by hand or read by an optical character recognition device or other counting device.
For purposes of this subclause, the term 'individual, durable, voter-verified paper ballot'
means a paper ballot marked by the voter by hand or a paper ballot marked through the
use of a nontabulating ballot marking device or system , so long as the voter shall
have the option to mark his or her ballot by hand.
This language is extremely broken. Hand-marked paper ballot advocate Jenny Cohn suggests a
revision:
Los Angeles County's horrid VSAP system uses QR codes (
discussed at length here ). Here is why QR codes are both unauditable and (if the ballot
marking devices are hacked) enable election fraud by insiders:
Voter makes selections on touch-screen (software, hence buggy and insecure), selections
are stored (ditto) and printed out (ditto) on a page with a human-readable receipt reflecting
(one assumes) the touchscreen selections, and the ballot itself, which is the QR code, which
is not human-readable. The page is then scanned (ditto) and QR code is then tabulated
(ditto). The sleight of hand is, of course, the ballot itself. A human may think that their
reciept, which they can read to check that it matches what they selected on the touch screen,
also matches the QR code, which they cannot. But there's no reason on earth to think that!
And the unreadable QR code, since that is what is tabulated, is the ballot! Take the matter
out of the delusional digital realm. Suppose voting worked like this: You voted by
hand-marking a yellow paper ballot. You then handed the yellow paper ballot to an official
who, behind a screen so you could not see, marked a blue ballot that you could not read,
sealed it so you could not read it, and then handed the blue ballot back to you and told you
to put it in the ballot box, that's your vote. Does that make any sense? That is how a
"Ballot Marking Device" works.
In essence, ballots printed out by Ballot Marking Devices are not hand-marked ; the
digital (i.e., the hackable) interposes itself at every point: At the touchscreen, at the
printer, at the reader. And because the printed-out QR code is what is counted, the QR code
is the ballot . And since the QR code is not human-readable, voting is not transparent to
the slightest degree.[5] (The VSAP post describes many other problems with ballot marking
devices, but this is the most important.)
H.R. 1 contains a poison pill designed to reduce political competition and voter choice by
weakening minor parties, at exactly a time where, according to a recent Gallup poll,
support
for a third party is at an all-time high .
Ever since then-presidential candidate Barack Obama shunned the federal public
matching funds program in 2008 , among all parties' general election candidates, only
Green Party presidential nominees have applied for and qualified for these funds. H.R. 1
would solve this minor party/Green Party "problem" by raising the threshold to qualify for
matching funds beyond the realistic ability of Greens (and other minor party nominees) to
reach.
This move to disempower minor parties and their voters is cloaked within the promise of a
new and improved matching funds program, designed to entice major party candidates to opt
into the program, with the promise of substantially increased funding.
The current donation threshold to qualify for a 1:1 match is to raise at least $5,000 in
each of at least 20 states, in donations no larger than $250 each. The public already
supports funding minor party candidates under this formula. Green candidates Jill Stein
(2012, 2016) and Howie Hawkins (2020) each qualified for matching funds in the last three
cycles.
The new H.R. 1 threshold would replace the existing 1:1 match program with a 6:1 match,
but would
simultaneously increase the minimum amount of donations by 500% to a minimum of $25,000
in each of 20 states. It would also increase the minimum number of contributions to reach it
by 625%, by subtlety lowering the size of donations that can count toward reaching the
threshold from $250 to $200. This would make it even harder on minor party candidates -- who
are mostly excluded from candidate forums and media coverage and have a far smaller base of
well-funded donors to draw from -- by disqualifying 20% of the $250 donations they are able
to raise.
The real-world effect of eliminating the existing 1:1 threshold would be to eliminate a
matching funds threshold that is demonstrably reachable by minor party candidates and replace
it with a category reachable likely only by top-tier major party candidates. This
sleight-of-hand will lead people to think Democrats are for increased public funding, but
apparently only for themselves.
I was part of Jill Stein's campaign team in 2015-2016, and I can tell you we barely met
the old threshold in about 22 states. It was a near thing. Eliminating those federal matching
funds for a Green Party presidential campaign would mean all but certain erasure of the Green
Party from the ballot in a good dozen or more states for 2020, and maybe a dozen more in
2022. Since most states also require a presidential and/or US Senate nominee to appear at the
top of the ballot, HR 1 would prohibit the Green Party from running any local candidates in
states where a defunded Green Party's vote drops below a certain level, and it will plummet
if Green campaigns, which which accept no funding from corporations will be far less able to
hire staff or contractors and to perform the necessary functions of a campaign.
Hard to believe that Democrats would do such a thing deliberately, but here we are.
Conclusion
So these are the three flaws that I can see in H.R.1. Whether these flaws should be
sufficient to sink the bill, I don't know. Readers?
NOTES
[1] It does not speak well of our national security goons that this material still lives in
their institutional memory.
[2] A foreshadowing of RussiaGate, perhaps. It turns out that anonymous sources don't need a
layer of indirection, like a shady website. You can just quote them, and nobody calls you on
it.
[3] Timberg's story dropped on Thanksgiving Eve. We were told at the time by sources in a
position to know that his piece made it into the paper without being vetted by the national
security desk at which he once worked, which led to some fiery internal email exchanges at
WaPo.
[4] On the begrudging and sluggishly inserted Editor's Note, CJR
commented :
[T]he editor's note vaults into verbal gymnastics in an attempt to simultaneously
rationalize and distance itself from an obviously flawed primary source. Any data analysis is
only as good as the sum of its parts, and it's clear that PropOrNot's methodology was
lacking.
The Post, of course, was merely reporting what PropOrNot said. Yet it used declarative
language throughout, sans caveat, lending credence to a largely unknown organization that
lumps together independent left-wing publications and legitimately Russian-backed news
services. The Post diminished its credibility at a time when media credibility is in short
supply, and the non-apologetic editor's note doesn't help.
A Post spokeswoman declined to comment further on the episode, saying that the editor's
note speaks for itself.
Indeed!
[5] The hacker's exploit would make it so the human readable part of the ballot read as if
the voter voted for candidate A; but the QR code, that which, being tabulated, is the actual
ballot, would be for candidate B, or whatever else the hacker wanted it to be, like a spoiled
ballot.
I'm surprised Republicans haven't done as much to sink the Libertarian Party.
They can't really do that at this point. One effect of Obama and the Dems' criminal
complicity with Wall Street after the 2008 GFC was the Tea Party's rise as a reaction to that,
which in turn enabled Charles Koch -- a libertarian, NOT a Republican -- to pour money into
supporting Tea Party candidates.
As a result, Koch may effectively have a hold on a majority of the competent political
operators in the Republican party now. Thus, when Trump won in 2016, he was compelled to hire
people straight out of the Koch machine -- Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Pompeo, McCarthy, and
approximately 60 percent or more of the Trump administration's rank and file have CVs directly
attaching them to the Kochtopus if you investigate (and whenever an old-school Republican left,
the Koch people would move one of their one into that position as, forex, when Pompeo replaced
Tillerson).
One presumes Trump was too stupid to have figured this out. Anyway, Koch overall now has a
more sophisticated political machine than the Republican party as a whole. It's easy to assume
Charles Koch is some kind of standard evil capitalist Richie Rich born with a silver spoon in
his mouth. In fact, he's highly intelligent with two MIT master's engineering degrees, one in
nuclear and one in chemical engineering, and his companies were among the first American
companies to integrate computers into their operations back in the 1970s. Thus, when you heard
all the squawking about Cambridge Analytica, and the Mercers and Steve Bannon subverting
democracy, the reality is that Koch has operated an electoral data-collection and targeting
company called i360 doing all the things Cambridge Analytica was accused of for the last decade
and a half. It's far more sophisticated than anything the Republican Party has in-house and the
Koch machine uses it to support candidates it approves of even at a loss.
Why don't you hear about this and how does Koch get away with it? Because, again, he's a
libertarian, not a Republican, and thus the Koch machine gives money to Democratic politicians
and organizations, too.
So what happens with an undeniable win of an unapproved party happens? Will the reformers of
the correct "losing party" just accept it?
Also, seeing the security state's apparatchiks in Congress, along with the Nevada Democratic
Party's pettifactors and pettifoggers, and the national nomenklatura or high priests with their
following of fanatical believers concerned citizens doing a good job is heart
warming.
Finally seeing competent ruling in action is good; we must keep those unwashed
proles along with the displaced disposables in their proper places.
I am in awe of the Democratic Party physical congress of the American people during
the last forty years. Why, they are almost as good as the Republicans.
> I guess I just don't understand the urgency, here.
The urgency is Republican efforts at the state level, most (all?) of which have the effect
of making it harder to vote and restricting the franchise. It's all pretty bad, but it's
possible that H.R.1 could make it worse. (The Ballot Marking Devices section in essence
legalizes election theft.)
The dems carried AZ and PA AFTER they got the Greens removed from the ballot in both states.
It tells you all you need to know about the Democratic Party and "free elections".
Just another political party trying to get a leg up on the other one. Nothing to see
here.
Some outlets in the designated free-speech zone bleachers on the farther side of the stadium
have taken notice of this year's statement; from the nearer side, not so much yet that I've
seen. But here's hoping. And thanks to NC for coming straight at this fraud repeatedly. (Thanks
too for knocking the props out from under the PropOrNot provision.)
" Since most states also require a presidential and/or US Senate nominee to appear at the
top of the ballot, HR 1 would prohibit the Green Party from running any local candidates in
states where a defunded Green Party's vote drops below a certain level, " I don't believe that
that claim is correct. It is certainly not true in Massachusetts (where I am a former
Libertarian State Party Chair) and does not match my knowledge of New York, New Hampshire, or
California.
The Libertarian Party Presidential candidate has almost always ignored Federal campaign
funds for the nominating campaign. The last LP campaign to take Federal nominating funds
appears to have lost money on the deal. The Libertarian Party has repeatedly had a Presidential
candidate on the ballot in every state, thanks to the efforts of its donors and volunteers.
The Green Party's difficulty (and the difficulty faced by the third Third Party, the
Constitution Party, which appears to have been forgotten here) is that it is small, a third or
a half the size of the Libertarian Party, and therefore lacks the resources it needs. It does
not help the Greens that they have sometimes worried about causing the Democratic Presidential
candidate to lose. Libertarians as a group do not have this concern. While the other two major
parties are not the same, neither of them is viewed by Libertarians as being desirable people
to hold office.
The analogy presented about BMDs is not very apt, for two reasons:
1. If both the human-readable receipt and the QR code are scanned, this provides
after-the-fact auditability. 2. Although QR codes aren't human-readable, they're very easily readable by a personal device
that everyone carries around in their pocket. This provides in-the-moment auditability, with
unpredictable, distributed auditors.
The combination of those two factors make life extremely difficult for any attacker: if even
one person happens to check that their QR code matches their receipt and discovers it doesn't,
it's going to trigger an audit of the entire system, and the attack will be discovered.
The analogous system described, with the sealed blue ballot, provides no in-the-moment
auditability, and if we are to assume that the yellow ballot is thrown away, no after-the-fact
auditability.
There is no requirement that what you see when you scan the QR code will make any sense to
the voter. A bunch of race/candidate code pairs not necessarily in an order compatible with the
paper ballot and perhaps encrypted
"Ban corporations from spending for campaign purposes unless the corporation has established
a process for determining the political will of its shareholders"
So it's ok for a corporation to donate if it's shareholders approve. Do the donations have
to mirror the political will of the shareholders? Is a simple majority sufficient? What if it
has two-class share structure?
That's before getting to the two big issue: firstly, the tax advantage of making campaign
(or any political donation) through a corporation as I can't deduct a contribution, but I'm
pretty sure that a corporation can. In addition and more importantly, what about all of the
other stakeholders?
Why not simply prohibit any campaign contributions from corporations?
I can see it now -- Corporation X asks its shareholders to support political donations to
candidate Y. You as a shareholder must confirm your support or the C Suite might have to find
something else to do with all that cash that was going to be distributed as dividends. And if
you fail to mail in your proxy at all, they'll just take that as tacit agreement of
support.
Did every Democrat in Congress just write down their favorite wish and they collected them
all into a single bill? Do they actually want it to pass the Senate? Surely they don't
all want some controls on corporate campaign spending!
We do need national standards for some of those bullet points that enable voters and help
make machine voting more secure. That would be difficult enough without all the other baggage
in the bill.
Maybe there will be a deal in the Senate -- Democrats get to use their excuses for losing in
2016 to suppress third parties and dissenting views, and Republicans use theirs in 2020 to
suppress the voters.
If a bill does pass would be interesting to understand which pieces they cared about enough
to make severable from the whole before the lawsuits start.
In any case, they really need to pass the voting rights bill HR 4/S 4263 to restore the full
protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, before we get mired in some "3-5 year strategy" for
HR 1.
A duopoly of power exists in the electoral-legislative-executive industrial complex.
Anything that stifles outside competition is a feature, not a bug.
Don't overlook this clause: " so long as the voter shall have the option to mark his or her
ballot by hand."
That means BMDs exist only along side of current hand marking, never in place of hand
marking. Most voters will mark by hand so few BMDs will be purchased, likely only one per
precinct. That will cause a waiting line for the BMD and result in its non-use by any voter
capable of making direct marks by hand.
The ability to steal an election with QR codes via BMDs will be so remote that it won't be
worth the trouble to attempt it.
Do you not remember the issues with provisional ballots in the Democrat primaries? Having
the "option" to hand mark a ballot doesn't mean it will be easy to exercise that option, and in
fact you may be outright lied to by the volunteers running the polling booth and told you don't
have that option.
I have always known the Republican party to be disegenuous in the extreme, untrustworthy and
authoritarian. I long thought Dems to be milquetoast anodyne. Since 2015 however I have come to
be even more opposed to the Dem party than the Republican party, this HR 1 being an example of
how they have become authoritarian in the extreme while hiding behind preening moral
superiority.
I have been wondering too though, with the spate of election reform bills in Republican
controlled states, why I have not heard any calls to outlaw Dominion and the like?
Clearly both parties want to "fix" the system in their (nefarious) favor.
With the spate of election reform bills in Republican controlled states, why I have not heard
any calls to outlaw Dominion and the like? Clearly both parties want to "fix" the system in their
(nefarious) favor.
The analogy presented about BMDs is not very apt, for two reasons:
1. If both the human-readable receipt and the QR code are scanned, this provides
after-the-fact auditability.
2. Although QR codes aren't human-readable, they're very easily readable by a personal
device that everyone carries around in their pocket. This provides in-the-moment
auditability, with unpredictable, distributed auditors.
The combination of those two factors make life extremely difficult for any attacker: if
even one person happens to check that their QR code matches their receipt and discovers it
doesn't, it's going to trigger an audit of the entire system, and the attack will be
discovered.
The analogous system described, with the sealed blue ballot, provides no in-the-moment
auditability, and if we are to assume that the yellow ballot is thrown away, no
after-the-fact auditability.
There is no requirement that what you see when you scan the QR code will make any sense
to the voter. A bunch of race/candidate code pairs not necessarily in an order compatible with
the paper ballot and perhaps encrypted
It would be good to get rid of electronic voting machines.
I like paper ballots. It might not really do anything to discourage corporate influence to
simply ask the corporations to represent all of the politics of their employees. That is a
murky requirement at best. But it is (citizen's united) currently a blatant form of
gerrymandering.
Most of this is just paper trail stuff, however the real election theft seems to happen
long before the ballots are even printed. How did we get a clearly senile president? He was
the chosen candidate in a "party" process that is not the least bit answerable to the general
electorate. Or even to its own electorate.
What better example of election malpractice is there than Joe Biden? So, obviously, the
national committees of the opposing political parties need some restrictions here. They could
be subjected to tighter regulation.
Their influence could be diluted by allowing many more political parties to participate in
both primary and general elections. We need regulations that promote transparency on all the
sausage-making before a party candidate is chosen. We also need transparency on the king
makers, whether corporate or political.
Who is backing the candidate? HR1 doesn't really scratch the surface. It basically just
encourages people to get out and participate in a very corrupted institution.
A duopoly of power exists in the electoral-legislative-executive industrial complex.
Anything that stifles outside competition is a feature, not a bug.
Don't overlook this clause: "so long as the voter shall have the option to mark his or her
ballot by hand."
That means BMDs exist only along side of current hand marking, never in place of hand
marking. Most voters will mark by hand so few BMDs will be purchased, likely only one per
precinct. That will cause a waiting line for the BMD and result in its non-use by any voter
capable of making direct marks by hand.
The ability to steal an election with QR codes via BMDs will be so remote that it won't be
worth the trouble to attempt it.
Do you not remember the issues with provisional ballots in the Democrat primaries? Having
the "option" to hand mark a ballot doesn't mean it will be easy to exercise that option, and in
fact you may be outright lied to by the volunteers running the polling booth and told you don't
have that option.
I have always known the Republican party to be disingenuous in the extreme, untrustworthy
and authoritarian. I long thought Dems to be milquetoast anodyne. Since 2015 however I have
come to be even more opposed to the Dem party than the Republican party, this HR 1 being an
example of how they have become authoritarian in the extreme while hiding behind preening moral
superiority.
I have been wondering too though, with the spate of election reform bills in Republican
controlled states, why I have not heard any calls to outlaw Dominion and the like? Clearly both
parties want to "fix" the system in their (nefarious) favor.
Both parties seem intent on delegitimizing the U.S. electoral processes. I sense growing
unrest and discontent with our political processes and government. The myth of free elections
is an important pressure relief for venting popular discontent. I believe the actions of our
Elite are becoming increasingly arrogant and imprudent.
So the Dems want greater voter participation but only if they are the beneficiaries.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
The Duopoly is the real flaw in our system as some of us see it. What good is greater
public involvement if the public only has two corrupt choices? It's still a rigged game.
The PropOrNot stuff has been floating around think tanks over the years. A report on
Russian social media influence by RAND Corp in 2018 briefly mentions Naked Capitalism. The
reason why this humble blog is on that blacklist is because it's in Zero Hedge's referral
network according to RAND.
Just downloaded the report. Steeling myself for more prose like "-Better tell the US,
NATO, and EU story." Arrrrrrgh. With bonus pseudo-sophistication points for unnecessarily
using full names AND abbreviations for the latter two organizations in the original. But no
full name for the US. Do these think-tank folks get paid by the word?
The summary is quite a stew of management-speak and Owellian prose.
Why is "block" in quotes in the bit on blocking RT? Is it a euphemism for discrediting
them? Perhaps the full report will illuminate me.
I was joking about Biden being reanimated, but judging from campaign videos etc. he has
troubles with longer answers to questions, looses track and temper and prattles, and he react
badly to some trigger words. That said, like Trump, he cannot be an attentive boss, so
whoever made that leak, clearance from the top was not necessary...
This is a rare article that clearly despibes the level of corruption of ordinary people in
the USA. Which explain the level of support of foreign wars.
Notable quotes:
"... CaitlinJohnstone.com ..."
"... NBC's Meet The Press ..."
"... Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone ..."
"... Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ..."
"... This article was re-published with permission. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News. ..."
The idea that China or Russia pose a threat to you is so self-evidently ridiculous, so
transparently absurd, that the only way to make you believe it would be to propagandize you,
writes Caitlin Johnstone.
Detail of World War II propaganda poster. (Carl Paulson/US Treasury Dept.)
A new Gallup
poll finds that Americans' opinion of Russia and China have plummeted to historic lows this
year, with 79 percent of the population now reporting an unfavorable view of China and 77
percent reporting an unfavorable view of Russia.
The hate predictably falls along partisan lines, with Republicans showing more disfavor
toward China and Democrats reserving more of theirs for Russia, but there is plenty of overlap.
China is only seen positively by 10 percent of Republicans compared to 27 percent of Democrats,
while only sixteen percent of Dem voters view Russia in a positive light compared to 25 percent
of Republicans. Unfavorable opinions of both nations dominate across the board no matter how
you slice it.
"Last year, American military
planners advised that the U.S. should step up its campaign of psychological warfare
against Beijing, including sponsoring authors and artists to create anti-China propaganda.
The Pentagon's budget
request for 2021 makes clear that the United States is retooling for a potential
intercontinental war with China or Russia. It asks for $705 billion to 'shift focus from the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a greater emphasis on the types of weapons that could be
used to confront nuclear giants like Russia and China,' noting that it requires 'more
advanced high-end weapon systems, which provide increased standoff, enhanced lethality and
autonomous targeting for employment against near-peer threats in a more contested
environment.'
Russia, meanwhile, has been the focus of Democratic Party ire since their defeat in the
2016 election. Prominent Democrats have accused Vladimir Putin of being behind the rise of
Bernie
Sanders ,
paying Afghans to kill American soldiers, and of
helping spark the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
RussiaGate -- the belief that Moscow managed to hack the 2016 election, swinging the result
for Trump -- has hardened liberal attitudes towards the country and drastically increased
suspicion and fear of Russians. This was crystallized by former Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper's comments on NBC's Meet The Press , where he claimed
that Russians are 'typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor.' As
with China, the U.S. government has attempted to score diplomatic points, taking up the case
of imprisoned politician Alexey Navalny."
And, I mean, of course. Of course this is the case. There is no rational reason for anyone
to hold particularly negative views of either of those countries based on actual facts in
evidence, and there is certainly no rational reason to perceive them as a threat. The idea that
China or Russia pose a threat to you is so self-evidently ridiculous, so transparently absurd,
that the only way to make you believe it would be to propagandize you. And if you do believe
it, that's exactly what has happened.
You can expand this principle to include the entirety of U.S. foreign policy on the global
stage today. No ordinary American benefits from the U.S. having troops in Syria, sanctioning
Venezuelans to death, supporting Saudi Arabia while it rapes Yemen, circling the planet with
military bases and working to destroy any nation which refuses to bow to its dictates. The only
way to get Americans to consent to any of these agendas is to propagandize them into doing
so.
Indeed, you can also expand this principle to include our entire
financial/economic/political system as a whole. Ordinary people would not accept as normal a
system in which they have to toil long hours just to feed themselves while parasitic middlemen
hoard all the profits and use their immense wealth to shape the political paradigm. The only
way to get them to accept this exploitative, oppressive and intrinsically unjust system as
normal would be to propagandize them.
And that's precisely what is happening. That's the only reason our world is ordered in the
way that it is.
Propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-emphasized aspect of our society, bar
none. It's so pervasive that most of us don't even notice it, like that old joke about the two
fish who are asked "How's the water?" and then turn to each other and say "What's water?"
Vast fortunes are poured into buying up media outlets, paying media bribes in the form of
advertising, funding think tanks, manipulating online algorithms, buying the loyalty of
influential politicians, and other forms of narrative control. Immense resources are dumped
year after year after year into manipulating the way the majority of people think, act, and
vote, and yet hardly anyone ever talks about this extremely important fact.
Seriously, think about that for a second. How often do you hear your average citizens
discussing the fact that billionaires own the mass media which is
consistently used to manufacture
consent for the agendas of the plutocratic class, compared to how often you'll hear them
talking about, say, the next presidential election? Even among the well-read and relatively
aware people you know, how often do you hear them discussing the fact that public perception is
being continually manipulated against the interests of the public? Probably not too frequently
compared to other issues.
Even among leftists (by which I mean anti-imperialist socialists) this is a severely
under-discussed issue, when it should be the most discussed, because leftist agendas
will necessarily be incapable of advancing as long as the majority of the working class are
being manipulated at mass scale into consenting to the agendas of plutocrats and warmongers.
All socialists and anti-imperialists worth their salt are at least somewhat aware of the fact
that the mass media are propaganda operations, but directly discussing this absolutely
foundational problem occupies only a very small slice of overall leftist discourse. This will
necessarily have to change if there is to be any meaningful leftward movement in our
society.
"The idea that China or Russia pose a threat to you is so self-evidently ridiculous, so
transparently absurd, that the only way to make you believe it would be to propagandize you.
And if you do believe it, that's exactly what has happened."
Until fighting the empire's
propaganda engine becomes the agenda the left focuses the bulk of its energy on, none of
its other agendas will ever come to pass. People will never rise up and revolt as long as they
are being successfully propagandized not to. They won't even vote for anyone with sufficient
numbers if their words diverge too sharply from the consensus worldview they've been
manipulated into espousing as true. It doesn't seem to matter how badly the people's material
conditions deteriorate, because they can always be manipulated into blaming someone else and
consenting to the status quo anyway.
How do we do this? We just do it. We begin focusing our efforts, for the first time ever, on
drawing public attention to the fact that the mass media have been deceiving them. For the
first time ever, we begin in sufficient numbers to prioritize above all else the disruption of
public trust in the plutocratic media and the imperial narrative management scams which keep
everyone from clearly seeing what's wrong with the world. We seize control of the
narrative.
This has never been tried before. Whenever I bring up prioritizing a grassroots media
rebellion I'll get a few leftists telling me "We're already doing that!" No you're not. You've
never come anywhere close. At no time in the information age has killing trust in imperial
propaganda been the foremost priority of western leftists. At no time has it ever been our
collective priority to use our newfound ability to network and share information to weaken
public trust in the mass media and tell the public the truth about economic injustice and the
kleptocratic depravity that is western imperialism. Our energy has been spread all over a
variety of issues which have nothing to do with this far more crucial one.
Information has never been more democratized, and trust in the mass media has never been
more low. The opportunity to expand
awareness of what's really happening in our world has never been riper; all we need to do
is seize on this opportunity and wake the working class out of its propaganda-induced coma
before the window on that possibility closes on us forever.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of
Consortium News.
P. Michael Garber , March 7, 2021 at 21:53
Great article. However, convincing people they've been propagandized is, in my experience,
flat out impossible when that propaganda A: Tells them they are exceptional, B: Makes excuses
for their leaders' warmongering foreign policy, and C: Is being fed to them by the New York
Times, CNN, and the Washington Post. There doesn't seem to be any way of impugning the
reputation of these "elite" media sources, at least among Democrats. Pointing out how often
they've been wrong and how often they've been caught lying to advance their hostile agenda
has no effect. Their trusted sources are there telling them how good and true and righteous
they are and excusing all this warmaking. In my experience people prefer being lied to over
facing the ugly truth about their country.
evelync , March 7, 2021 at 19:11
After the 2016 election – discouraged that my candidate, Bernie Sanders, would have
won if he had not been couped by the DNC – I began to ask strangers in airports or at
hotels about the election. Many had voted for Trump but they were all sick at heart over the
horrific costly wars and the unfair policies of the GOP and DNC. They also didn't trust
Clinton or the establishment Dems. They did like Bernie.
Trump cleverly had adopted some of Bernie's mantras –
The D.C. DNC ignored it all and used the MICIMATT to spread the "Russia did it" bullshit to
distract people.
Too many Dems who were comfortable jumped on board with blinders on.
Moi , March 7, 2021 at 04:52
Propaganda can also have significant societal effects within that nation's borders.
It was reported this last week that over 100,000 Australian Chinese had been physically
threatened or attacked within the last year . That is a flat out disgusting – a
national disgrace probably on a par with domestic violence. The MsM amplifying government
messages are to blame and it adds insult to injury when Google and Facebook pay the producers
of this vile garbage for their output.
Citizen journalists don't stand a chance when the social media giants team up with MsM
giants or just add a further layer of censorship of their own. For example I read this last
week that Twitter blocked Russian users for criticising Nato.
The only defence is to read far and wide from as many sources as possible then form one's
own opinion. Propaganda works because most people nowadays are too lazy to think for
themselves – they just swallow hook, line and sinker anything that is dangled in front
of them.
Zhu , March 6, 2021 at 18:57
Working Americans rarely vote, not because of a "propaganda-induced coma" but because
paying for food and rent are so difficult and time-consuming. The streets are full of people
who have failed, and while most Americans tell themselve "it can't happen to me, I'm not like
them!", probably most also know that "yes, it can happen to me." Caring about politics is
pretty high up the hierarchy of needs. Food and shelter are basic.
saurabh , March 6, 2021 at 16:01
>No ordinary American benefits from the U.S. having troops in Syria, sanctioning
Venezuelans to death, supporting Saudi Arabia while it rapes Yemen, circling the planet with
military bases and working to destroy any nation which refuses to bow to its dictates.
I disagree with this profoundly. There is a reason that the "ordinary American", despite
living in relative poverty, still has access to resources and goods that most people around
the world do not, and the reason is because the American empire acts to the benefit of
individual Americans, depressing wages around the world by preventing development so that
Americans can benefit from their superior purchasing power. While it is true that the vast
majority of the benefit accrues to the American ruling class, there is simply *no other
explanation* for why the American schlub does so much better than, say, the inhabitant of a
favela in Sao Paulo or a tin shack in Mumbai. It certainly isn't our robust labor movement or
our responsible political class that deserves the credit.
I also think that Americans implicitly, with that deep-rooted instinct that truly governs
politics, understand this bargain: if they line up behind their military, and don't raise too
many questions about foreign adventures, squeezing this-or-that leftist government, CIA coups
and the like, the result is that they are guaranteed *something*, a small something, but more
than they have "over there", in the "shitholes" that Americans are bombing desperately.
It is the abandoning of this bargain (we support your military misadventures, you throw us
some bones from your carrion heap) that I think has caused a great anger in America, and why
Americans are desperate to "Make America Great Again", so they can get back to the kind of
empire that really "works" for them the way they are used to.
Tom Kath , March 6, 2021 at 20:23
Funny how these classical examples of "propagandized" people never see their own
"shitholes" as shitholes.
z , March 6, 2021 at 23:21
I fear it's true that many Americans not in the elite do enjoy warfare. If your a young
soldier/sailor, you get a fairly good wage, free medical care, free food, cheap shopping at
the PX. If yoou're stationed overseas, you can get lots of cheap sex without the annoyance of
a relationship. Most soldiers/sailors are never in combat. They are support troops. But it
gets old fast, if you have any moral sense or have any fellow feeling for the people you are
inflicted upon. Overall, only a few really profit.
Broompilot , March 7, 2021 at 00:57
And this is why we are heading for major war and why most will end up supporting it. No
matter how unjust the war will seem, the alternatives will seem worse (to both sides). My
guess is, it has always been that way. They know we know they are lying to us, and they dont
care and never really did.
Indian , March 7, 2021 at 04:13
So true.
The vast majority of Americans are accomplices of the Empire's crimes.
Propaganda appeases their conscience.
That's why Americans are despised around the world.
Manifold Destiny , March 7, 2021 at 06:06
While you bring up some interesting points, I believe you're making a few mistakes:
Americans don't have it better than the rest of the world. Comparing the average "American
schlub" to the extreme poverty found in the favelas or shantytowns of the Global South is a
bit of a straw man argument. Of course they're doing better, but so is the average South
Korean, or Canadian, or European -- countries that don't partake in military misadventures in
order to prop up their citizens.
You write that Americans "implicitly understand the (military) bargain". Of course, what
you're describing is Colonialism, or the new Imperialism, which has been around for at least
400 years and could be applied to any number of European powers of the past. What you seem to
be missing is just what makes this bargain "implicit". Could it be the notion of
"manufactured consent"? – which is really the whole point of Caitlin's essay. You are
mistaking "deep-rooted instincts" for a heavily propagandized and undereducated polity.
Finally, you then conclude that this instinctual bargain is the source of anger and the
consequent popularity of the MAGA ideology. This may be true for a small percentage of
right-wing followers, but that would be ignoring the overwhelming evidence that much of the
MAGA crowd anger derives from the self-perceived notion of the loss of white supremacy. The
sense of loss of control to the Other – whether gender or race -based – is the
underlying source of their anger. One which was (and will continue to be) exploited
mercilessly by demagoguery.
It is always problematic when making generalizations that the resultant analysis can
become monolithic. Be wary of them, my friend. No two people are alike, therefore reasons for
believing in an ideology, any ideology, are manifold. Manufacturing consent is a big reason
why Americans believe they live in an "exceptional" country with an outsized military that
represents a "force for good" in the world, much to their detriment.
Freedomlover , March 7, 2021 at 21:29
You hit the nail on the head. Great response
Antiwar7 , March 8, 2021 at 03:18
You're overthinking it. Most people in flyover country aren't doing well financially, and
they don't think the elites care. So they're unhappy. No implicit bargain needed.
An empire makes profits for a few, and its enormous expenses are borne by the many.
Propaganda aims to divert attention from that.
broompilot , March 8, 2021 at 03:48
Non-minority Whites have not lost anything and they are still the vast majority in this
country. They are the largest voting group by far and addressing them with stupid made up
names like "supremacists" to intentionally evoke images of Hitler is not going to change
that. In fact, it is becoming more and more obvious to non-minority Whites they would be
fools to think they will be better served by a governments consisting of a coalition of
minorities.
Sancho , March 7, 2021 at 20:24
Obama had us involved in seven wars to Bush and Cheney's three. Also under the Obama
administration, more arms were sold to foreign countries than under any other administration.
Trump "abandoned" this so-called bargain, and the economy took off, setting records. Your
theory does not make sense. PS where in your theory do you discuss the movement of American
factories and jobs to unregulated China, and how does 16 years of Bush and Obama moving jobs
and factories to China fit into any sort of imperialsm scheme?
Dave , March 8, 2021 at 15:50
Check out Alan Greenspan's financial engineering, and find out how rich MNC have got.
There is the reason why blue-collar jobs went to China, and the imperialism scheme.
Middle-class be damned.
Just imagine how differently the Epstein story would be covered by the media if Epstein
and Maxwell were ethnic Russians, and if Maxwell's father had received a State funeral in
Russia.
As my ilk has said for a long while, when it comes to US foreign policy - IT DOES NOT MATTER
WHO IS PRESDIENT - the facts are fixed around the policy (to quote the dodgy dossier case).
Of course Venezuela is Cuba 2.0. There is no independence from Empire
The New York Times and The Washington Post have long been, and continue to be,
stenographers for the State Dep't and CIA -- why is anyone surprised at these recent
campaigns?
Perhaps it could help to correct the misused vocabulary. Then we can say that "The policy
of inhumane interventionism defends illiberal world order and fosters anti-democratic
aspirations."
@psychohistorian (1) "The NYT continues to be a water carrier for empire and it has and
continues to be very effective in doing so....in spite of b's and others efforts."
Carrying water for the empire is an essential component of the NYT's business model. It is
what gives them unparalleled access to government officials and intelligence operatives,
which creates the false aura of authoritativeness that surrounds the Times, which, in turn,
attracts readers and advertisers and, importantly, influences what is written and said by
other media outlets. That is how the Times became and has remained the "paper of record."
It's a perfect symbiotic relationship. The WaPo has some of the same cachet but will always
be second tier in terms of managing the narrative that the U.S. government wants people to
hear.
@Bobby | Mar 9 2021 18:40 utc | 10
Are you serious?
31 billions is just what's US steal from Venezuela blocking money in US banking system.
EU and others, like England, Korea or Japan.... as well and $billions more.
And that's only the emerge part of iceberg.
@chet380 16: "The NYT could, and should be, called out for its lies every week."
Why? It's the main establishment newspaper. And as such it's useful for discovering what
the establishment wants you think, at any given moment. What they emphasize, what they
ignore, conceal.
All this can be analyzed, and it'll help you figure out what the establishment's plans
are. In a similar way to what they used to call 'kremlinology'.
Not really. They know the President's condition merely means someone else is currently
enjoying the highest form of power: power without responsibility.
"
Huawei's Harmony OS Extends to All Devices in 2021 in Bid for Tech Self-Sufficiency Amid US
Trade War."
This is interesting. Tech commentators have pointed out, correctly but without too much
insight, that Huawei will have a hard time selling phones with Harmony outside of China because
Trump cut the company off from using the Android operating system's app store. Google." Huawei
is now preloading Harmony on all of its product, making it independent of Google.
Now we have.
Huawei May Allow Chinese Smartphone Firms to Use Harmony OS to Counter Trump Trade
Bans,
This means that all of China's phone companies are independent of Android, at least in
China, as, if threatened by the US, they just switch to Harmony. It also means that China,
should it choose, could ban Android in Chinas as Trump banned Huawei in the US, and perhaps ban
iOS also, thus losing the entire Chinese market for Google and Apple. Forcing a large,
resourceful country to build competing products might charitably be called preternaturally
stupid.
Which brings us to the new Cold War, which is exactly what Trump II is engaged in. The
Beltway China hawks want to cripple China's tech industry by denying it advanced semiconductor
technology, chiefly from America's vassal states of Holland, Taiwan, and South Korea. Will this
work? I dunno. But there is a clear pattern in China's response. A sort of techy example, that
sensible readers can skip.
There is a company in Wuhan,
YMTC, Yangtze Memory Technology Company, that has developed an advanced 192-layer
dual-wafer NAND ("flash") chip using Chinese technology. Flash memory is used in huge
quantities in everything from smartphones to French fries (well, maybe not French fries.) There
is some doubt as to whether the company will be able to produce in volume, but it is building a
second fab line, so it must think it can.
If it does, American companies, notably Micron, will lose the (very large) Chinese market
for flash. Then the Chinese, nothing if not commercial, will probably flood the world market
with discount flash.
This tech-wide lunge for self-sufficiency, if Washington does not succeed in crushing it,
will close the Chinese market progressively for American firms. Well, who needs 1.4 billion
customers? The China hawks may be poking the wrong bear.
The most important thing Fred wrote in an overall great piece:
Education. China finds its brightest students with a grueling entrance exam. America
dumbs down elite high schools because they don't have enough unqualified minorities.
Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia has already been enstupidated, and the NYC
schools are on the block. The purpose of schools is to admit students who can't do the
work.
Huawei's AppGallery has attracted over 530 million active monthly users, and 384 billion
installs in 2020–an 83% increase YoY. There are 2.3 million registered developers
working on mobile applications for AppGallery, up 77% over 2019.
Tibet, yes, that Tibet, has broader, faster 5G coverage than the San Francisco
Bay Area.
Sure. Biden has been in office 5 weeks, and that's why China is ahead of us on all of
these technologies. Maybe Marjorie Green can get us all caught up.
Congratulation to the Chinese for the economic advances of recent decades. Not all their
advances are brilliant.
Take Maglev trains. That is an extraordinary expensive technology for moving a few score
people per car. Trains make sense for moving heavy loads long distances. Loads of coal,
petroleum, cattle, lumber and manufactured goods are natural cargoes. It is a waste of
resources to move human passengers in the massive trains. To engineer trains to travel at
300 or 500 mph is a fool's errand. Might as well attach lasers to ox carts. Trains are 19th
century technology and still useful for limited purposes. If you want to ship people at
hundreds of mph use aircraft. The only profitable passenger trains were a few of the
trolleys early in the 20th century.
Fusion reactors: it is said to be the next big thing. Funny, it has had that status
since the 1950s. I hope some practical application is developed by someone.
Hydrogen fuel: it is a wonderful clean burning fuel. Minor problem: where does the
hydrogen come from? Answer: natural gas is the cheapest source but why not save a lot of
expenses and just burn natural gas? Methane fuel cells are possible although perhaps not
practical. There is a endless supply in water but the separation by electrolysis requires
more energy input than the energy yielded when hydrogen is burned.
Solar panels: a great source of electricity when reliable electric power isn't desired.
If Chinese rely on solar for 32% of their electricity they will face an imminent energy
crisis. A coal burning plant has to be running hot 24 hours per day in case there are
clouds. And there is no solar at night.
The clever Chinese do a lot of the dumb things Americans do. They imitate stupid things
as well as practical technologies. I do not doubt the Chinese will make unique
contributions eventually.
Because the $31Bn (which is probably understated) would primarily have gone to the lower
classes in which the U.S. caused humanitarian disaster is most prevalent. Rich, formerly
colonial Venezuelan families don't give a shit. The and their ex-pat kids live most of the
year in Miami or Vancouver or Madrid. The white upper class in Venezuela is the exact group
from which Mr. Random Guy-do emanates and who he represent. They live in gated communities
including in the hills around Caracas and their stores are likely fully stocked (as reported
by Max Blumenthal last year). However, they are a small minority compared to the indigenous
peoples who these sanctions are DESIGNED to hurt. The bank accounts of the colonials are safe
while a small number, relatively speaking, of pro-Chavista/Maduro operatives are completely
cut off by the Empire.
Same thing in ANY country that the USA is sanctioning. Have a look at Biden's Iran envoy's
statements about everyday Iranian people.
In response to online criticism, Nephew has claimed that "the main target" of the sanctions
regime he designed was "the oligarchs." But his book on "The Art of Sanctions" tells
another story.
Nephew fondly recalls how he structured sanctions to sabotage Iranian economic reforms
that would have improved the purchasing power of average people. The Obama administration
destroyed the economic prospects of Iran's working-class majority while ensuring that "only
the wealthy or those in positions of power could take advantage of Iran's continued
connectedness," he wrote. As "stories began to emerge from Iran of intensified income
inequality and inflation," Nephew pronounced another success.
As he made clear, the rising inequality "was a choice" that Washington "made on the
basis of helping to drive up the pressure on the Iranian economy from internal sources."
Nephew went on to claim credit for October 2012 protests brought on by the devaluation of
Iran's currency.
So these sanctions and the loss in $31Bn for Venezuela was designed to and in fact did
hurt the poorest of the poor and the working 'middle' class in that country.
here's a snippet, about Venezuela and the US supported/directed economic terrorism, which
has obviously caused much economic mayhem and dislocation, humanitarian disaster, and a large
number of deaths (I have seen figures up to hundred thousand or more, from the food and
medicine sanctions etc. Not to mention England stealing Venezuela's gold. I would imagine the
real death toll is quite a bit larger)
"......Subversion in Venezuela, by contrast, might not require as much 'engagement'. In
Cuba the government is stable and the opposition isolated. In Venezuela, by contrast, the
Maduro government faces a deep economic crisis (dramatically and intentionally exacerbated by
US sanctions) and major public discontent. Betting on Maduro's vulnerability, Biden continues
to recognize the self-appointed 'president' Juan Guaidó. Under Obama, Biden courted
Guaidó ally Leopoldo López – a so-called political prisoner arrested for
inciting violent protests that killed dozens of people – who is now calling for Biden
to lead a renewed international effort to topple Maduro. US support for the far-right forces
of Guaidó and López is intended to prevent a deal between Maduro and the more
pragmatic elements of the opposition. Such a deal might alleviate Venezuela's economic
crisis, but it could leave Maduro in power and thus derail the US's regime change agenda.
In late 2018 Biden complained that Trump's 'intensified sanctions on Venezuela have been
clouded by sabre-rattling' and 'clunky sloganeering'. At that time, those intensified
sanctions had already killed an estimated 40,000 civilians, with an unknown number of
additional deaths after Trump imposed harsher measures in 2019. But the goal of regime change
had not succeeded. Trump's crime in Venezuela was not his lethal denial of food and medicine
to the population, but rather his 'faulty execution' of the policy. This critique informs
Biden's current roadmap for Venezuela, which hinges on refining the sanctions to inflict
maximum political damage. Secretary Blinken argues that sanctions must be honed 'so that
regime enablers really feel the pain', while González favours a 'smart' use of
'multilateral sanctions' over Trump's go-it-alone programme...."
Hope that more people start cancelling cable TV and boycotting companies like Twitter,
Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon and others to counter the censorship, bias and
corruption.
I don't think the corrupt politicians of either party will pay attention until We The
People unite behind basic principles and become an economic force. Money talks and it can be
used to make positive change in contrast to all the bad things it is also used for.
ACTION PLAN FOR IMMEDIATE CHANGE to counter the corruption , censorship and surveillance
by media/tech/finance giants and politicians:
1)Cancel Cable TV (All channels should be made available individually so consumers don't
have to give money to channels they don't want to)
2)Do Not donate money to politicians & consider boycotting companies that give them
money or pay them for speeches.
Some might decide to boycott Facebook,Twitter,Apple,Amazon,Microsoft, Google and Netflix for
censorship or corruption issues alone.
3)Bank with small local banks & invest with small brokerages & insist your
employer/pension fund do the same.
Buy from small local merchant stores and use cash when possible.
4)Demand a pardon for Julian Assange & Edward Snowden and other
whistleblowers/truthtellers
5)Join Pro freedom social networks like MINDS and Gab ,where freedom of speech and truth
are respected.
Follow Zero Hedge and Project Veritas for pro truth/freedom news.
6)Use web browsers like Dissenter,Tor or Brave rather than Chrome or Safari when you surf
the web.
Use search engines like Quant or DuckDuckGo rather than Google or Bing for web searches.
Use an email service like ProtonMail rather than Gmail.
Save important online videos/articles/posts to your PC hard drive or phone.
Post videos to Bitchute and LBRY rather than youtube
Shop online at Overstock and smaller independent retailers rather than Amazon/Wayfair
7)Use Linux operating systems like Linux Mint,Debian or others on your computer rather
than Windows, Mac or Chrome OS (Almost any PC can be switched to Linux).
Use a Linux based smartphone like PINEPHONE or a "dumbphone" rather than Google Android or
Apple iPhone.
Avoid buying a "smart" TV as it is smarter to buy a "dumb" TV with no operating system
pre-installed.
Use a Linux mini PC with wireless keyboard on your TV for web browsing/computing/gaming/video
streaming rather than amazon fire tv/roku/google chromecast/apple tv/microsoft xbox/nvidia
shield.
8) Do NOT support the phony "War on Drugs" which causes more crime,death,murder,gang
violence,incarcerations,enriching criminals while millions of people still use illegal drugs
anyway.
9) Support a new foreign policy where We The People worldwide unite behind and promote the
principles of truth/freedom/goodwill/integrity/humility/Non-Aggression Principle/Golden Rule
and focus on winning hearts and minds.
10) Support a worldwide effort to voluntarily help others in the hope that it will win
over more people to these principles.
If you buy anything from that TREASONOUS Amazon you should be run out of your neighborhood
when the truck shows up.
andrew h nelson 2 hours ago
Institutional corruption. And that's why they are sitting behind a barb wire fence around
Washington D.C. OBTW, walls seem to work when these idiots want one.
newworldorder 5 hours ago
And there we people of the USA have it all. Brazen in our face political and
institutionalized corruption with no consequences for the Senior US Bureaucracy. If that does
not say it all, - nothing else will.
Hope and Change? For the "connected elite," - it's a done deal. You are either in the club
or you are not.
The key is the collapse of neoliberalism and this topic Tabbi tries to avoid. Which makes this article junk with a couple of
interesting, thought provoking quotes.
The "
collapses of faith in traditional hierarchies of power
" should peropery called the "deletimization of the elite."
and the situation the result due to it "the revolutionary situation" when the elite can't rule "as usual" and "Deplorables" does not
want to live "line usual" anymore. Actually Marxists wtore quite a bit about revolutionary situation, although the fact
tht they assign mystique stiat of "future hegemon class" to proletariat undermines much of their writings.
I entered Martin Gurri's world on August 1, 2015. Though I hadn't read
The
Revolt of the Public
, at the time a little-known book by the former CIA analyst of open news sources, I hit a
disorienting moment of a type he'd described in his opening chapter. There are times, he wrote, "when tomorrow no longer
resembles yesterday the compass cracks, by which we navigate existence. We are lost at sea."
Gurri's book is about how popular uprisings are triggered by collapses of faith in traditional hierarchies of power
.
I felt such a collapse that day in Waterloo, Iowa, covering the Republican presidential primary
.
The
first debate was five days away and the man expected to occupy center stage, Donald Trump, held a seemingly
inexplicable
six-point lead
.
Two weeks before, on July 18th, Trump lashed out against former Republican nominee John McCain. Even McCain's critics
considered his physical and mental scars from years as a Vietnam war prisoner to be unassailable proofs of his patriotic
gravitas, but the service-evading Trump was having none of it. "I don't like losers," he said, adding, "He's only a war hero
because he was captured." It was the universal belief among colleagues in campaign journalism that this was an unsurvivable
gaffe, a "Dean scream" moment. We expected him to apologize and wash out. Instead, he called McCain a "dummy" and kept a
firm
grasp
on
the lead.
... ... ...
Elections in the pre-Trump era had been stale rituals. As recently as 2013, Chris Cillizza of the
Washington
Post
called them "
remarkably
scripted and controlled
." Donors, party chiefs, and pundits could concoct contenders through sheer alchemy, mesmerizing
the public with incantations like "electability." But in Iowa that summer, one "electable" Republican candidate after another
-- from Jeb Bush to Scott Walker to Marco Rubio -- flopped in public appearances, savaged as phonies on social media. Walker,
the betting favorite among reporters, saw his campaign deflated when his online strategist, Liz Muir, started
tweeting
her real feelings
about Iowa (including the classic, "#agsubsidies #ethanol #brainless").
I'd spent weeks crisscrossing the state in search of even one piece of evidence that conventional wisdom still had predictive
power in Republican politics, finding none. Now, here was Christie, reduced from being lionized in a
Time
cover
story as a favorite and a "
guy
who loves his mother and gets it done
," to being nobody at all, a clown standing alone in a park. The realization that no
one was in control of the campaign show anymore was jarring even to me, a critic of the old gatekeeping ritual.
In the introduction to
The Revolt of the Public
, Arnold Kling speaks of a different
"Gurri moment": when Dan Rather's 2004 expose about George W. Bush's military service was blown up by an amateur blogging
under
the name "Bucklehead
." In the past, a media titan like CBS could only be second-guessed by another major institutional
power. In "Rathergate," both the network and one of its most iconic celebrities were humiliated by a single individual, a
preview of the coming disorientation.
The thesis of
The Revolt of the Public
is that traditional centralized powers are
losing -- have lost -- authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet.
The information
explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power
of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional
hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the
worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns.
This assessment of the motive
for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, "Martin Gurri saw it coming."
Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable
cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this
a
"paralysis of distrust," where outsiders can "neutralize but not replace the center" and "networks can protest and overthrow,
but never govern." With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: "The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about
it."
Why
would he want to be Arkansancided (or what ever Barry's team calls it)?
Oldwood
29 minutes ago
Obamanated.
YuriTheClown
17 minutes ago
Taibbi is a camp follower. He always seems to be on the spot a year or two late.
But at least he gets there unlike so many others.
Estimated_Fractal
PREMIUM
1 hour ago
I
read the book last week. At times you'll feel like he's pro liberal and times when he sounds pro
conservative. It's not a political book. It's about the deluge of information, in the age of being
online, and how the public have just as much information, if not more than the elites. This creates a
crisis of authority. I'm trying to sum it up. You should just go read it.
how the public have just as much information, if not more than the elites.
Except the information online is filtered by the elites. So theres that.
Patmos
36 minutes ago
MSM outlets no longer have the scoop, because the internet beats them to it. MSM outlets no longer
are the gatekeepers, because the internet exposes their lies. Their authority is neutered. It's why
people who still follow the MSM parade around like little nutless b!tches.
Isn't Life Gland
30 minutes ago
Yet they slap each other on the back with Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes which nowadays is the
equivalent of showing what sellout snakes and intelligence bitches they really are.
fightapathy
23 minutes ago
remove
link
Happy memories of Trump stomping on Mad Dog McCain's face.
Thank you, Matt!
I Write Code
1 minute ago
Exactly, whatever myths the MSM told themselves about "Maverick", if half the stories about McCain
were ever true, he should never have been elected to anything, unfit. Before his brain exploded he
was a sweet guy, but never stable, and maybe not even before the POW bit. Taibbi is really shocked
when Trump only barks out what everyone already knows, namely the TRUTH?
Isn't Life Gland
45 minutes ago
(Edited)
I
tried to read the "rest of the report"...subscription required.
Oh,
and F*CK John McCain..good riddance
Slaytheist
57 minutes ago
Taibbi is the left's Ben Shapiro. He will use logical arguments to concede certain facts, but never
those that threaten the establishment he critiques so tirelessly.
I Write Code
7 minutes ago
remove
link
The thesis of
The Revolt of the Public
is
that traditional centralized powers are losing -- have lost -- authority, in large part because of the
demystifying effect of the Internet.
Gurri might be right or wrong, I dunno, about how it stood in 2015 - but Taibbi here only shows how
utterly clueless he and the entire MSM have been since 2015. They had maybe half a clue from 2008-2015.
Maybe two-thirds of a clue from 1992 through 2007. But since 2015 they have not even wanted a clue,
they've decided to do without.
HOW
ABOUT THIS, THE PUBLIC HAD EVERY RATIONAL RIGHT TO BE REVOLTED BY THE ACTIONS OF THE ELITE AND THE
CLUELESSNESS OF THE PRESS after 2015. I don't know how or why the MSM had their heads cut off at that
point, but Taibbi shows this to be the case - BRAGS about it being the case.
LouTurks
PREMIUM
32 minutes ago
This is nothing new. What has happened is there is a new medium the computer so info can now be shared
without the ruling consent. Last time it was the printing press. Ideas could be shared acrossed distences.
Thomas Locke and his likes could print ideas and sent them far and wide.
But
sadly US is going towards a French style revolt instead of the splendid experiment we now have and have
destroyed by our own ignorance.
We have a criminal regime in power now, a junta, complete with troops and barbed wire.
Laws don't apply to them because all 3 branches are corrupt. The press is a near total
failure, and has simply become Pravda on steroids.
Gimmie My Stimmy 5 hours ago
Actually, razor wire. All that's really missing are the german sheppards.
ThorAss 6 hours ago
...the media and the alphabet [agencies] are all owned by the same people. Guess what,
it's a big club ......
While Joe Biden has faced some mild Congressional pushback for bombing the Iraq-Syria border, Tulsi Gabbard says her former
colleagues are ignoring the larger issue:
the ongoing US dirty war on Syria
.
After a decade of proxy warfare that empowered Al Qaeda and ISIS,
the US is now
occupying one-third of Syria and imposing crippling sanctions
that are crushing Syria's economy and preventing
reconstruction.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mBdO1Rc9ctU
Watch:
Featuring video clips from -- Tulsi Gabbard,
former Democratic Congressmember; President Joe Biden; Brett McGurk, National Security Council coordinator for the Middle
East and North Africa; Martin Dempsey, former Joint Chiefs chairman; Rob Malley, Special Envoy for Iran; John Kerry,
Special Envoy for Climate & former Secretary of State; former President Donald Trump; Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur
on Sanctions; Dana Stroul, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East; Vice President Kamala Harris.
While Gabbard has been vilified for her stance on Syria, many top White House officials – including Joe Biden himself –
have already acknowledged the same facts that she has called out.
Aaron Maté plays clips of Biden and
some of his most senior aides
admitting
to
the horrific realities of the US dirty war on Syria, and argues that Gabbard only stands apart in being wiling to criticize
it
.
* * *
21,478
113
N
Garciathinksso
1 hour ago
(Edited)
Dems had a
perfectly fine candidate in Gabbard, no surprise she was shunned and ignored by her own party
newworldorder
1 hour ago
Democrats wanted fake males like Beto and but-plug Pete, instead of a Female USNG Officer.
BarnacleBill
22 minutes ago
Tulsi understood exactly what goes on over there - the utter cruelties and uncaring slaughters that are
responsible for the contempt with which the USA is held by the civilised people of the world. The wars
are - as I wrote in one of my personal journal/blog posts some years ago - a war against women. (Link
below) The women in mind were - and are still today - unarmed non-combatants, who are murdered
deliberately in order to punish their menfolk and to traumatise their children. It is as disgusting as
the German camps of the 1940s, and will be remembered in the same way by the survivors in their homes
eighty years from now. They will never forget.
Just to point out - Tulsi Gabbard made it all the way through the Democrat Primaries, and won more
votes and delegates than Kamala Harris (who dropped out before even the first primary), yet Harris
somehow became the presumptive co-President with Dementia Joe.
Yes, Virginia, it was a color revolution
thezone
1 hour ago
She'll probably be called a Russian Agent for criticizing the supreme ruler. Oh wait, that already
happened.
You_Cant_Quit_Me
1 hour ago
Biden is a warmonger who has no problem sending your sons and daughters off as target on a phantom war
madashellron
42 minutes ago
(Edited)
remove
link
God
Bless Tulsi. She is one of the only politicians speaking of these grave Crimes Against Humanity, the US
is engaged in Syria.
One
final note. The Syrian envoy from Russia. Publicly warned Israel. If they continue attacking Syria.
Russia will have no choice but to start shooting down Israel's Jets. Since this warning almost a week
ago. Israel has not attacked Syria.
rwe2late
1 hour ago
(Edited)
Not
only Syria.
The
US
every day
now attacks
foreigners with about 50 bombs and missiles, possibly much more, mostly in secrecy, and in half dozen or
more countries.
The
US admitted to 27,923 bombs in 2018, and 17,281 bombs in 2019. In 2020, the totals were made secret.
Not ever included were attacks by helicopters, gunships, or strafing.
"the U.S. military and its allies are engaged in
bombing and killing people in other countries on a daily basis. The U.S. and its allies have dropped more
than 326,000 bombs and missiles on people in other countries since 2001."
Tulsi, sometimes I think there's a chance for you, then you go and blow it by retreating back to your
Democratic brethren and vote the party line. You can't have it both ways.
novictim
59 minutes ago
remove
link
It's critical that the fairly elected Assad regime be deposed ASAP and ISIS linked militants become the
governance force. Why? Because China Joe did not win the US Presidential Election and, thus, any fairly
elected leader is a threat to the US Deep State establishment.
Master Jack
1 hour ago
remove
link
A
better question is:
Can
anyone explain why the US is involved in so many military conflicts that the government refuses to call
wars?
King of Kalifornia
1 hour ago
Here's a hint.
The US killed 2million plus people, spent over a trillion dollars, and lost thousands of their own
attacking Iraq.
"America is back" claimed Joe Biden to no ones amusement. But the world has changed
after four years of Trump and after a pandemic upset the world. The U.S. position in this
world and its role in it have thereby also changed. To just claim one is back without
adopting to the new situation promises failure.
As candidate Joe Biden promised that there would be no changes.
Former Vice President Joe Biden assured rich donors at a ritzy New York fundraiser that
"nothing would fundamentally change" if he is elected.
Biden told donors at an event at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday evening
that he would not "demonize" the rich and promised that " no one's standard of living
will change, nothing would fundamentally change ," Bloomberg News reported.
That Biden statement destroyed the illusion of those who had hoped that he would lift
the standard of living for the average Amercian.
Biden stayed true to his words at the fundraiser. There will be no rise in the minimum
wage. The $2,000 checks he promised to all voters will now be only $1,400 checks. They will
also be
heavily means tested . Those who made more than $80,000 in 2019 but lost their income
in 2020 will get no check at all.
Even as they hold the White House and the House and Senate majorities the Democrats are
unable or unwilling to deliver basic progress. This will likely cost them their House
majority in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.
Biden's "nothing will fundamentally change" attitude extends into foreign policy.
Secretary Pompeo @SecPompeo - 0:29 UTC · Dec 21,
2019
Today, the #ICC prosecutor raised serious questions about the ICC's jurisdiction to
investigate #Israel. Israel is not a state party to the ICC. We firmly oppose this
unjustified inquiry that unfairly targets Israel . The path to lasting peace is through
direct negotiations.
---
Secretary Antony Blinken @SecBlinken - 1:34 UTC · Mar 4,
2021
The United States firmly opposes an @IntlCrimCourt investigation into the Palestinian
Situation. We will continue to uphold our strong commitment to Israel and its security,
including by opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly.
That nothing will change is also expressed in two policy papers the Biden administration
released yesterday. The early emphasis on human rights, which distinguished it from the
Trump administration, is already gone.
The common theme is now 'democracy' as if that were not just a form of government but a
value in itself.
The White House published an Interim National
Security Strategic Guidance (pdf). The paper is dripping with ideological LGBTQWERTY
librulism. Its central claim is that 'democracy' is under threat:
At a time when the need for American engagement and international cooperation is greater
than ever, however, democracies across the globe, including our own, are increasingly
under siege . Free societies have been challenged from within by corruption, inequality,
polarization, populism, and illiberal threats to the rule of law. Nationalist and
nativist trends – accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis – produce an
every-country-for-itself mentality that leaves us all more isolated, less prosperous, and
less safe. Democratic nations are also increasingly challenged from outside by
antagonistic authoritarian powers. Anti-democratic forces use misinformation,
disinformation, and weaponized corruption to exploit perceived weaknesses and sow
division within and among free nations, erode existing international rules, and promote
alternative models of authoritarian governance. Reversing these trends is essential to
our national security .
It then singles out China:
We must also contend with the reality that the distribution of power across the world is
changing, creating new threats. China , in particular, has rapidly become more assertive.
It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic,
military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open
international system. Russia remains determined to enhance its global influence and play
a disruptive role on the world stage. Both Beijing and Moscow have invested heavily in
efforts meant to check U.S. strengths and prevent us from defending our interests and
allies around the world. Regional actors like Iran and North Korea continue to pursue
game-changing capabilities and technologies, while threatening U.S. allies and partners
and challenging regional stability. We also face challenges within countries whose
governance is fragile, and from influential non-state actors that have the ability to
disrupt American interests.
To fight China the U.S. will (ab)use its allies:
We can do none of this work alone. For that reason, we will reinvigorate and modernize
our alliances and partnerships around the world. For decades, our allies have stood by
our side against common threats and adversaries, and worked hand-in-hand to advance our
shared interests and values. They are a tremendous source of strength and a unique
American advantage, helping to shoulder the responsibilities required to keep our nation
safe and our people prosperous. Our democratic alliances enable us to present a common
front, produce a unified vision, and pool our strength to promote high standards,
establish effective international rules, and hold countries like China to account.
Good luck with that. Neither the European U.S. allies, nor the Asian ones, have any
interest in following the U.S. into a confrontation with China. It is their greatest
trading partner and they do not perceive it as an ideological or security threat.
The more we and other democracies can show the world that we can deliver, not only for
our people, but also for each other, the more we can refute the lie that authoritarian
countries love to tell, that theirs is the better way to meet people's fundamental needs
and hopes. It's on us to prove them wrong.
So the question isn't if we will support democracy around the world, but how.
We will use the power of our example. We will encourage others to make key reforms,
overturn bad laws, fight corruption, and stop unjust practices. We will incentivize
democratic behavior.
But we will not promote democracy through costly military interventions or by
attempting to overthrow authoritarian regimes by force. We have tried these tactics in
the past. However well intentioned, they haven't worked. They've given democracy
promotion a bad name, and they've lost the confidence of the American people. We will do
things differently.
The "lie that authoritarian countries love to tell, that their's is the better way to
meet people's fundamental needs and hopes" is targeted at China. But that China did and
does much better than the U.S. to meet its people's needs and hope is not a lie. The
pandemic has again demonstrated that.
The last quoted paragraph has seen some positive attention on social media. But it is
based on a falsehood. The U.S. has not once used military means to 'promote democracy'. Not
ever. It has used war to gain markets and power, to destroy its competition. The
neo-conservatives have claimed to be motivated by 'democracy promotion'. But that was
always just a pretext to hide the real reasons for waging war. Iraq became democratic not
because the U.S. wanted it to be that. In fact, after invading Iraq the the U.S. pro-consul
Paul Bremer tried to prevent universal elections in Iraq. Only the insistence of Ayatollah
Sistani on a universal vote led to a somewhat democratic system in Iraq.
Blinken is, just like Pompeo before him, focused on China:
And eighth, we will manage the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century: our
relationship with China.
Several countries present us with serious challenges, including Russia, Iran, North
Korea. And there are serious crises we have to deal with, including in Yemen, Ethiopia,
and Burma.
But the challenge posed by China is different. China is the only country with the
economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable
and open international system – all the rules, values, and relationships that make
the world work the way we want it to , because it ultimately serves the interests and
reflects the values of the American people.
That there is no change from the Trump to the Biden administration in hostility to China
is disappointing only for those who had expected some:
Pang Zhongying, a specialist in international relations at Ocean University of China,
said Beijing would be disappointed with the Biden administration's approach to "continue
and even elevate" the tough policies of the Trump era and to strengthen alliances to deal
with China.
"There does not seem to be any change yet in the serious tensions in China-US
relations," he said. "I think there may be some frustration in Beijing that after more
than 40 days [of the new administration] they have not seen any change but there is
actually more pressure from the US."
Beijing will manage the conflict and it is likely to see it as a chance.
The U.S. failure to adopt to new circumstances will accelerate its demise. The U.S.
empire was a historical abnormality and its twilight is near
:
[The Realist professors of International Relations David Blagden and Patrick Porter]
observe America's "position as 'global leader' is premised on a set of impermanent and
atypical conditions from an earlier post-war era", but " the days of incontestable
unipolarity are over, and cannot be wished back ". The result is that "overextension
abroad, exhaustion and fiscal strain at home, and political disorder feed off one another
in a downward spiral, cumulatively threatening the survival of the republic".
The US empire is, then, at an impasse. Its moral and political justification of
overseeing a global order of universal liberal democracy -- the closest real-world
equivalent to the Kantian perpetual peace that has both motivated and eluded liberal
idealists for the past two centuries -- is now beyond its capabilities to maintain.
...
How does this end for America? Biden and the presidents after him will be forced to make
a hard choice: whether to retrench to a smaller and more manageable empire, or to risk a
far greater and more dramatic collapse in defence of global hegemony.
Biden has made his choice. Nothing will fundamentally change under him. He is thereby
likely to repeat all of Trump's foreign policy failures. There will be no new JCPOA with
Iran nor will there be any win for the U.S. in the Middle East. North Korea will continue
to test bombs and missiles. The U.S. will continue to be stuck in Afghanistan. The
Chinese-Russian alliance will strengthen. U.S. allies will further distance themselves from
it.
We can not yet know what, at what point will cause the collapse of U.S. hegemony. But we
are coming more near to it.
Posted by b on March 4, 2021 at 18:04 UTC |
Permalink
Frankly, Biden's speech to the grand poobahs sounded more like a plea for understanding
than a promise, and if you take what the policy paper says at face value it suggests that
"Biden" understands that we have to change to compete. It is also an admission that they
have presided over a period of decline in Uncle Sugar land, so of course they don't want to
dwell on that. I think Biden is worried the "owners" wom't let him do anything.
And it is totally appropriate that Biden is the guy up there trying to deal with this
mess, because he as one of the prime intigators or the present situation, going back 40
years.
Patrick Porter's book, The False Promise of Liberal Order, is good.
But, his realist critique of vulgar liberal propaganda for US imperialism doesn't locate
the source or material roots of US grand strategy.
Realist theory understands power, hegemony and balancing only in terms of military
power. That is the only currency of power in realist thinking, because realism rests on a
state centricity which insists on the autonomy of the state from any social or economic
factors. Military power is thus all that remains.
This theory obviously fails to explain the real history of US foreign policy, which has
used militarism and other tools in support of strategic economic interests on a global
scale, primarily in the South. The military balance of power is by and large only an
expression of the economic balance of power and the class interests of ruling classes
derived from it.
Porter and other realists point out the contradictions of liberal theory and practice
but fail to provide a scientific explanation for consistent US policies.
There is a partnership currently but it's not yet an alliance. The rationale for one is
very strong. Russia needs China or it will be overwhelmed by a hostile US and fairly
hostile Europe. China needs Russia to save it from a resource embargo by US and allies.
Together they will form a huge power bloc in Eurasia combining their respective territories
with joint influence over Central Asia. Other countries in Asia like South Korea, Vietnam
and India will see bloc and decide to stay neutral or side with the China-Russia bloc.
As compelling as this vision is it hasn't happened yet. It takes time sure but there
must be reluctance from within the countries and other challenges. Which side is dragging
its feet more? It would be interesting to understand why things aren't moving faster.
As compelling as this vision is it hasn't happened yet. It takes time sure but there
must be reluctance from within the countries and other challenges. Which side is dragging
its feet more? It would be interesting to understand why things aren't moving
faster.
Posted by: dsfco | Mar 4 2021 18:54 utc | 4
A guess: PRC having vastly greater economic power thinks its share of influence should
be greater. Russia having vastly superior military power & technology, disagrees. For
example the Chinese government might like access to the most advanced Russian military
technology; the Russians having been invaded many times from both East & West, probably
take the long view.
This week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a confirmation hearing for Wendy Sherman, nominated by the Biden
White House to serve as deputy secretary of state.
The career diplomat answered the usual questions on how she views United States posture toward American rivals and official
enemies like Russia, China, and Iran. Once again it was Sen. Rand Paul who had the most direct pushback and biting
criticism against an administration that seems bent on returning to the foreign adventurism and unilateral military
interventionism of the Obama and Bush years.
"We've gone to a liberal form of John Bolton,"
Paul said of President Biden
during his turn to question Sherman. Paul is especially outraged over Biden's Syria strike without consulting Congress last
week.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/8HanUqh_-CE
During the above exchange with Wendy Sherman, Paul in his concluding remarks had blasted away at Biden's vision of the
world, citing past failed Democratic-led military interventions in places like Libya, Yemen, and Syria.
"I think we've gone to a liberal form of John Bolton with your new boss and that's
something I'm really concerned with,"
Paul said.
"All I will say is that
we're bombing now again in Syria without Congressional
approval and we're sending more convoys in there without Congressional approval
. It's a messy war - it's been
going on forever, there's nothing good that's going to come out of our involvement," Paul explained in his statement.
"People say
'well US lives are at risk'
...
yeah
because we put'em there
. We put them in the middle of a civil war that's largely over but can continue if we
keep putting troops into there... to put our troops as a 'trip wire' to get involved in a further escalation of this war."
And that's when the Republican Senator from Kentucky blasted President Biden on his Syria stance and general
interventionist foreign policy:
"I hope that we'll be sane voices and I hope that you'll be one of those," he said addressing Sherman.
"But I don't have a great deal of confidence that we've actually gone away from John Bolton,
I've
think we've gone to a liberal form of John Bolton with your new boss, and that's something I'm very concerned with
."
Sherman in response had tried to claim that the Biden admin is not trying to get more deeply involved in the Syria
conflict, but maintained the 'countering ISIS' stance that the Pentagon has used for years to argue it must continue the
occupation of the northeast portion of the country.
Richard J. Daley, also known as King Richard I, ran the most honest elections Chicago has
ever had. Which is not saying much. Prior to Richard the basic system was City Hall told ward
bosses what the numbers would be night before, ward bosses passed orders to precincts.
Precincts did as told. It was notorious that African American precincts always turned out big
numbers for the machine even though polling places never opened the doors.
I could tell quite a few stories about my own adventures in voting in Chicago in more
recent years. Main reason to vote was until very recently a voters receipt was good for a
free drink at many taverns. Also the precinct captain often kept track of who showed and who
neglected to show. Only the truly delusory ever believed in an honest count. In 1960 there
would have been few places in US where anyone expected an honest count. And fewer where that
expectation came to pass.
...Additionally, groups need uniting myths which are now called narratives -- perhaps
someone can foresee the next word for myths to by used when narratives will became as
discredited as myths. Yesterday I read about "ideogems", that was used in Ukrainian,
prosecutors accusing someone of state treason committed by popularizing "ideogems that are
convenient for the Russian Federation". with a phrase "false ideogem". Perhaps "ideogem" is a
component of a "narrative".
More Americans, and in particular the "deplorable" ones, need to read that article.
One can safely bet that they will not take away from it what the Grauniad intended. I cannot
believe the authors of that article think they can win sympathy from the scores of millions
of Americans opposed to the establishment crackdown, "cancelling" , and labeling of
them as "domestic terrorists" .
The phones rang on Friday.... More than 50 [agents of American imperialism] across Hong
Kong received a call from the authorities: they were to report to police on Sunday.
What? Masked stormtroopers didn't kick in their doors at 3:00AM and drag them naked out of
bed as happens in America to "insurrectionists" "? They just got a call to show up in
court the next week? Let me play a sad song for them on the world's smallest violin!
All the democrats have to do is inact standard mail in voting as a federal law. They will
never have to worry about losing another election. Who is going to stop them? It has done
wonders for California. They have it down to an art form. Every state will have a Diane
Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi. Mindless ramblings about the glories of democracy. Fairness and
equality for all types! But especially powerful politicians smart enough to marry
investment bankers.
Just as a pointless aside, I dragged out my old DVD of a mid-1980s British comedy called
"Whoops Apocalypse", about the events leading up to nuclear Armageddon. Hilarious, despite
the grim plot.
The US President is a man way out of his depth (obviously Ronald Raygun), while the
British PM is clinically insane.
So far, so normal...
But it was the depiction of the Soviet leadership that is most striking: apparatchiks so
interchangeable that when the Soviet Premier has a heart attack while meeting the US
Ambassador they simply drag the body out and wheel in a replacement as if it were the most
natural thing in the world.
But look at the world now: the recent Presidential election was between two men of
pensionable age, with the "winner" showing definite the signs of dementia. While over in the
Kremlin there is a man who - whatever faults he may have - is definitely not an apparatchik
and certainly is not sclerotic.
Difficult to come by, but if you ever get the chance then do yourself a favor and watch
the show. It is a work of absolute genius from start to finish.
Biden front of camera (and barely managing that) with Chief of Staff Klain running the
show.
Reminds me of Obama front of camera (managing that extremely well) with Rahm Emmanuel
running the show, ensuring the interests of those who put Obama where he was.
Rahm left the position after two years to run for Mayor of Chicago, following Richard M
Daley, who's brother, William, took over the role of White House Chief of Staff (after Rouse
was interim for several months), also to ensure the interests of those who put Obama where he
was.
Why do people lose sight of Obama's political origins?
"This will likely cost them their House majority in 2022"
So what? Yes every congresscritter greatly cares about his own seat, but for the Dem
Party it only leads to embarrassment. "It was politically unfeasible", "Those evil
Repubs made us do it"--that's when Dems are in their element; Obama also ditched the
overall majorities he rode in on as soon as he could. The Dems need to look relevant, and to
have a little something to block Republican plans they don't care for, and all is good. And
'24... who knows; one way or another, Biden just beat Trump; why could't he, or his stuffed
corpse, do it again?
Anyway, the real arbiters here are the donors. And they like their pendulum swings, lest
their puppets get too uppity, and because one-party rule would be too ... overt. This is what
gloomy Repubs fail to understand these days.
"Neither the European U.S. allies, nor the Asian ones, have any interest in following the
U.S. into a confrontation with China."
Beg your pardon? Both the Canadian and Dutch parliaments have just lobbed genocide
accusations against China. Now that Bad Man Trump is gone, they're desperate to show
their servility. Fundamentally, this is who they are.
This post is an excellent diagnosis of the Anglo-American malady.
Quoting PlutoniumKun: "So in the UK they have a government run by a buffoon surrounded by
lightweights, that has made an appalling mess of Covid, screwed up Brexit, has destroyed the
UK's standing internationally, and has driven the country into an unnecessary steep
recession. But is still incredibly popular."
In the U S of A, the Monoparty, Aqua Wing plus Mauve Wing, have driven the country into
declining life expectancy, a constant petty low-level civil war, greater and greater income /
wealth inequality, and visible decline–streets falling in, broken sidewalks, tatty post
offices no longer maintained, and so on.
Yet there is no indication that the Monoparty can be broken up. Meanwhile, minimum wage is
maintained at an obscene level, the government quibbles over unemployment benefits (let alone
the manipulated unemployment rate), and the stimulus is a guaranteed shambles. Large numbers
of Americans have a sense that the whole shebang is "rigged," yet being American, they want
to fall into racial panic rather than breaking down the system of oppression.
And Joe Manchin, oh-so-conveniently, is president of this mess.
It doesn't take much to understand that the Iranian government has some eighty years of
reasons for not wanting to deal with the U.S. government. Justifiable reasons. Yet the U.S.
is still deluded enough to think that it is the center of Empire. Talk about
lightweights–the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the "intelligence communit" have
produced one disaster after another, with impunity.
As a resident of Joe Manchin's country, it is pleasing to see that the discussion of the
idiocy of what is happening politically in the US and that the discussion of MMT are finally
being presented in a rational way.
The opening of this entire blog hit it on the head – money is not an issue for a
sovereign monetary country. The EU could adopt the MMT point-of -view, whereas the individal
countries making up the EU cannot. There is only one party in the US, the party of those who
have enough money to buy the politicians.
With the above admitted, NC can now retire; there is nothing more to discuss except how do
we get rid of these problems with the governments in power?
...Hillary failed. She was organised by self confident, privileged, idiotic fools,
example: Podesta use 'password' as his password for his most confidential emailer. The
hackers had both Hillary and Podesta by the short and curleys: they were extreme risk.
The likelihood of the entire Clinton home server contents being in the possession of more
than two contending nations is quite high IMO. Add the Debbie Wasseman Shultz hacking debacle
and you get a 'trust and confidence' deficit. Trump had none of that baggage.
Better for the oligarchs to go with the guy who confessed to grabbing women by the short
and curleys than to throw your lot in with morons and where you had to share 'control' with
the hacker universe:
Trump was elected by the democracy that the USA fears to amend. Live with it.
DJT was supposed to be thrown under the bus more than four years ago. From that
perspective it was the 2016 election that was stolen... by the electorate. That wasn't
supposed to happen which is why the establishment totally lost their shi... uh, cool.
Biden is the most fitting US President in modern history. He is a fantastic representation
of the political system that has metastasized around the institutions of government. He's
almost redundant, that's not intended as an insult.
An empty husk has its political uses and as simple continuation device for the forever
war's he should do fine.
It looks almost certain that it's a question of when not if the cognitive wheels will
grind to a halt. Despite his grim determination to remember his lines you're left wondering
if the effort is even worth it. If the systems barely functioning meat suit simply drooled
over the lecturn at his next engagement what would be the substantive difference for the US,
it's people and policies.
Trump was nothing more than entertaining distraction but cucked almost every decision he
had to make and was dealt with easily by the systemic, vested interests groups mitigating the
slightest correction, the smallest bit of change. Biden is a real life deepfake, an illusion,
just like the bona fides of the American political system claiming to represent the
people.
The vested interests will continue to gorge themselves on wealth and power while Biden
gazes vaccously into the nearest camera.
How many repeat performances with known end would be required and how many acts to conceal
the crime, er, tort, before a lawyer stands up and says that pile of dead bodies was put
there by a perp?
How many dead bodies before a journalist decides there is a story?
How many times will public be fooled before wising up? Well, that one I know the
answer.
Speaker Pelosi eagerly
cancelled voting Thursday because of the bogus threat. This freed up Representative Al
Green, a Democrat from the Houston area, to undertake a stunt of surpassing stupidity that was
taken with deadpan seriousness by much of the media. The DC insider publication,
The Hill , bought into the stunt:
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas)
is sending a message to QAnon and right-wing extremist threats by sitting on the Capitol
steps on Thursday, the date authorities warned militia groups were potentially planning
another breach of the building.
"I want to make a statement to let people know, those who would threaten those of us who
cherish this freedom that we have here that we refuse to allow those threats to negate our
freedom," he told The Hill.
Green himself touted his bravery:
... The only problem is that Rep. Green was sitting behind a large protective cordon,
including National Guard troops and fencing, facing no danger, even if the phony insurrection
reports had been true.
Tucker Carlson called them out in his introductory segment Friday. It's worth watching
here .
"US announces sanctions on top Ukrainian oligarch & Zelensky ally Kolomoisky for '
undermining democratic processes ' in country." [My Emphasis] Here .
Okay, so when will the Democratic National Committee and its Republican counterpart be
sanctioned for doing the same within the USA?
TRUMP fans clashed with Antifa and BLM supporters while carrying a massive flag depicting Nancy Pelosi as a demon during a march
on Friday.
The MAGA supporters marched along Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan
towards
Trump Tower with all sorts of pro-Trump flags waving.
8
Trump supports marched in Manhattan on Friday
Credit:
Alamy Live News
8
The MAGA fans unveiled a large flag depicting
Nancy Pelosi as some sort of demon
Credit:
Getty Images - Getty
One of those flags, unfurled right in front of the former president's namesake tower, featured
House
Speaker Pelosi
fashioned as some sort of demon.
CLAIM: The White House cut President Joe Biden's feed at a virtual event with top House
Democrats because they did not have confidence in him answering questions.
AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. Biden did take questions after his introductory remarks at the
House Democratic Caucus Virtual Issues Conference on Wednesday but the event was closed to
the press after the initial comments, so the video feed was cut.
THE FACTS: Posts online are suggesting that the video proves that the White House is
limiting the president's talking time.
"'Man Has No Idea What He's Doing': Biden Says He's 'Happy to Take Question' But WH Cuts
Feed."
"' I'd be happy to take questions if that's what I'm supposed to do , Nance,' Biden
said. ' Whatever you want me to do .'" [My Emphasis]
I've refrained from calling Biden a walking corpse or otherwise making fun of his dementia
because I cared for my mom during her losing battle with Alzheimer's, and it's extremely
tragic and not at all funny. But given this evidence and the fact that his minders cut him
off, it ought to be very clear that Biden is in no way in control of his administration or
even of himself. So, there's absolutely no way that he ordered the missile strike on the
Iraqi troops, or is making any other policy decisions. The voting public can rightfully say
it was defrauded.
...it started with Teresa May alleging a "chemical weapons attack" on European soil (re:
the Skripals) and now has morphed into an alleged active Russian Chemical Weapons/WMD program
requiring sanctions and public outrage (re: Navalny).
The decline of the West can be measured by the level of constant BS.
I've already expressed my opinion on the eventual fall of the American Empire, so I'll be
more succinct here:
I'm certain the USA won't collapse like the USSR. In fact, the USSR's fall is kinda unique
in History, considering its relative importance and size. Very unlikely such a gracious and
peaceful collapse of such a military superpower ever repeats in Human History.
But there's a reason the USSR fell as easily and graciously as it did: its centralized
system. The USSR was the CPSU; once Gorbachev humiliated the Party and destroyed it, he
automatically destroyed the USSR. What followed was a neoliberal genocide by Boris Yeltsin,
but that's not on the Soviet socialist system (it could have reformed successfully and become
a China with more natural resources and a better military).
The USA's system is capitalism. Capitalism is not a centralized system; instead, it is
governed by a confederation of capitalists, who partition between themselves the different
sectors of the economy. This system has a necessarily diffused administrative and command
architecture. It's also highly cannibalistic: those capitalist hate each other and try to
devour each other constantly, and they constantly do so successfully - hence the rarity of
capitalist very long dynasties. The technological evolution/revolutions of capitalism also
expand this confederation of capitalists because they create new sectors of the economy while
destroying others, which makes the system even more decentralized and chaotic.
That's why I think the USA will first wither, then maybe collapse. Either way, it will be
chaotic, possibly with high levels of destruction and civil wars - what we call the "Mad Max
Scenario"/Roman Empire scenario. The chances of the USA going down with a world war are also
great, as capitalism is a very virulent system: the British Empire went out with a bang (the
two WWs it caused).
A few factors are given in my opinion:
1) the USA cannot be seriously considered a true world empire without a solid Eurasian
foothold. That means if it loses NATO (i.e. the European Peninsula), it loses its status as a
world empire (it would technically have Israel and the Arabian Peninsula, but they don't have
the military architecture on NATO's degree) as Japan is an island too near China, Australia
is a distant continent, India is in an existential crisis (neutrality or become an American
puppet?) and SE Asia is a true zone in dispute;
2) the USA cannot be considered a world empire without the Dollar Standard. Without the
Dollar Standard, you can still retain the status by being the industrial superpower, but that
post seems to be in China's hands now. Of all the factors that one could mention as being
single-handedly capable of bringing the American Empire down in a collapse-style process, the
end of the Dollar Standard is the only one I can think of in the social sphere (i.e. not
taking into account natural catastrophes such as a giant meteor);
3) the USA cannot be considered a world empire if it doesn't dominate the Seven Seas.
Luckily, it still does (and that's an important base for the Dollar Standard), but it's
important to highlight the fact that at least China is building up its naval capabilities, to
a point of being able at least to be the sovereign over the South China Sea (which opens up a
bridge to the junction between the Pacific and the Indian). Russia also seems to be decided
to fight to the death for its Tartus base in Syria (its only warm waters port) and has turned
back the Black Sea into its particular lake, and is on a comfortable pace to do the same with
the Arctic (while it was frozen, it belonged to whoever dominated the North Atlantic;
unfrozen, it belongs to whoever has the largest and best fleet of icebreakers);
4) The USA cannot be considered an empire if it doesn't dominate the entire American
Continent. That means that, at the moment the USA loses Brazil (which commands Latin America
sans Mexico and the Caribbean), it will no longer be an empire. Yes, it would still have
Japan and Australia (and the rest of Oceania), but that would be like the Byzantine Empire
without Syria and Egypt: just a glorified Greek kingdom that still calls itself an
empire.
Note that none of these must be the cause: they may be the consequence of internal strife
and civil war, followed by an economic collapse from within. Remember: 2008 happened in the
US territory, at the heart of the Empire (Wall Street), not in some random Arab banana
republic or some corrupt artificial Latin America narco-state.
And 2008 definitely wasn't the last big crisis of the capitalist world. Any long term
prediction of any capitalist country that doesn't take into account crises is an invalid
one.
I argue the biggest challenge to US power in coming few years will not come from outside
powers but rather will come from inside. US has become wildly divided between two ideologic
poles that has a created a lasting effect on her interior security. As has become more and
more visible, this newly felt internal insecurity is due to inequality, poverty, and
government's incompetence to provide security and social services at a minimum level. This
internal insecurity is a collective mass insecurity by the American citizenry knowing that
their government is incompetent to handle the next crises, this feeling now resides deep in
every American's bone, including the ruling elites.
This internal insecurity, incompetence crises, has made US regime more concerned and
insecure from her own internal affairs and less capable to address her major external policy
challenges. Obviously failing governments that can not provide security, economic, justice
and health services to their citizenry they blame their opposition and foreign powers. This
is exactly what is happening in US now and that is exactly what one would constantly hear
from government propaganda echo chambers of US media. US is in deep slippery slope internal
crises that she cannot avoid even if Jesus Christ get elected and becomes president. This is
a major reason that she has become incompetent to implement her external policies in likes of
Belarus, Iran, Venezuela, etc.
>>We can not yet know what, at what point will cause the collapse of U.S. hegemony.
But we are coming more near to it.
Who says that there will be a collapse? There will be slow decline imo, because the US is
the most resourceful country in the world with the best geopolitical position in the world,
best strategic depth, and the largest alliance network. The US dollar still remains 62 % of
world currency reserves, although it declined in payments.
The US was able to print trillions of dollars, and thus register better economic growth
rates than many others. This year, it expects growth of 6 - 7 %, one percent less than China.
It registered far better economic performance during the Covid Pandemic than many other
countries.
The US is the most influential Empire the world has seen since 19th century Britain.
It has lots of power - see where the UN and the IMF are located.
This thing can not "collapse", unless there is internal separatist conflict, which i see
as unlikely, much more likely is a One Party Democratic Party State consolidating power. Just
as it happened in California.
And collapse can not happen via the dollar either, rather a slow decline too. There is too
much inertion behind the dollar. This money does not have somewhere else to go. No capital
markets exist to replace US treasuries either.
It may take 20 years before the US becomes more like "one big power among many". But it
will still be influential power.
But i can certainly say that: US influecne will be declining. And the US dollar will be
declining in the long run too. Countries that rapidly gain in per capita GDP see their
currencies rise. So i would invest in CNY, Indian rupee and ASEAN currencies. Stay away from
the US dollar, as all of that debt and stimulus means that there will be long term inflation
and a long term drop in the dollar value.
Another point that should be mentioned is the military decline of the US. The long wars
during the last 20 years had very negative effect on its equipment. And the rest of the world
is catching up, and even becoming better (in missiles especially), making carrier groups more
and more obsolete, and making overseas US bases big fat targets. Modern weapons guarantee a
blood bath for the aggressor in peer to peer conflict.
Both Trump and Blinken acknowledged the military weakness of the US, claiming no more
wars.
So there is some weakening but the US will remain a factor just like Britain was a factor,
using divide and rule tactics and offshore balancing. The US role will be like the one of
Britain in Europe. In this sense, only a United Eurasia (like the EU of Europe, but for the
whole of Eurasia) can bring down the US for good.
@ Passer by | Mar 4 2021 20:49 utc | 21 who wrote
"
And collapse can not happen via the dollar either, rather a slow decline too. There is too
much inertion behind the dollar. This money does not have somewhere else to go. No capital
markets exist to replace US treasuries either.
"
I disagree with your arguments.
I think the decline will be slow then fast and we are approaching the fast portion
The capital market you write of has a large fictitious part that represents the inflation in
dollars into private pockets since 2008. The capital market will shrink significantly with
financial collapse but unfortunately the elite have their "capital" in secure positions.
In support of my arguments is the link below that describes the ongoing build up of public
banking world wide.
It is not a matter of if but when. The when is defined as foreign countries stopping
buying US Treasuries (which is occurring) along with a world wide financial crash which
exists in all but the reporting of such.
Posted by: psychohistorian | Mar 4 2021 21:05 utc | 23
>>It is not a matter of if but when. The when is defined as foreign countries
stopping buying US Treasuries (which is occurring) along with a world wide financial crash
which exists in all but the reporting of such.
Yes, it occuring for treasuries, but slowly, see chinese reserves, still staying above 1
billion. Now foreign investors are a minority. The US dollar though still remains nearly two
thirds of world currency reserves.
After seeing the Covid crisis, i became more sceptical of collapse theories. They can
print all the money they want to fix problems in the system. The only potential problem is
inflation. And the bigger the currency, the less the inflation.
When the US prints, it gains from it, as it steals billions from the rest of the world via
low inflation. So via this method it can get itself out from a deep whole, as you saw during
the pandemic.
Trillions of dollars were printed, but US long term debt by 2030 increased only by 9 %.
How is this possible? Because interest rates are low.
You need to replace the dollar in order to stop the US from saving itself on the back of
the rest of the planet.
After 2030, you may have a world with basket of currencies augmented by crypto and gold.
And US debts will become too high. Then it will get hard for the US to print without big
inflation.
I am in agreement with psychohistorian @23 here. When the US dollar starts
losing its golden glow as a secure investment and reserve currency then trillions of dollars
will flood home. It will become a race to unload dollars so as to not be left holding the hot
potato.
Well, the US$ is already losing its attraction, but there will be a tipping point beyond
which the race starts. That tipping point is probably closer than many people expect.
The US will still be a somewhat powerful country, but only a regional power. The days of
global hegemony will end rather quickly. There will be no more super carriers or nuke subs
and the F-35 will be the last super plane that the US ever fields. Allies like South Korea
and Japan will flip to neutrality without hesitation.
"But that China did and does much better than the U.S. to meet its people's needs and hope
is not a lie."
The difference is, it seems to me, that the Chinese establishment pursue national
interests (as they perceive them), while the US liberals pursue interests of global financial
capital (a-la Soros Fund Management and suchlike). Obviously people's needs and hopes are
better aligned with the former M.O.
Aside from the differences I've written about; when it comes to China's "establishment,"
the key difference is they arose from the great mass of Chinese and weren't born into what in
the West is clearly seen as the Ruling Class--The Monetary Nobility if you will. China's
government when compared to the USA's is absolutely Of the People, By the People, and For the
People--a reality the Outlaw US Empire cannot change unless it morphs into what it proclaims
itself to be.
Short of obliterating the financial centers of America and the City in London, in
simultaneous strikes,
I cannot foresee any change in the direction our financiers are taking the world.
Short of taking out the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers and the Soroses of this world,
nothing will change.
The German financiers can be taken out in a less dramatic fashion. Individually,
collectively but they must be annihilated also.
The financial prison of Humanity must be blown up.
If not my sons and yours will revert to the serfdom of yore.
A report published Thursday by risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft indicated that over
the course of 2020, 34 countries had seen a "significant increase" in resource nationalism,
with the pandemic exacerbating an existing trend toward government intervention. .
Analysts indicated that "Issues around income distribution, poverty, access to education
and healthcare -- to name but a few -- can trigger socio-political processes that demand more
from the state" . Imagine that, countries like Bolivia using their natural resources to
improve the lot of the average citizen.
This trend towards nationalizing resources, however, could spell danger for
commodities and decrease profits of the resource extraction industry.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks, if you ask me.
There is a much-cited essay from 1976 by General Sir John Glubb, a British diplomat called
The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival in which he describes repeated cycles that empires
throughout history appear to share. He described how most last about 250 years, or ten
generations, and follow six stages: the age of the pioneers (also called the outburst), the age
of commerce, the age of conquests, the age of affluence, the age of intellect, and the age of
decadence.
From my perspective, admittedly with a statistically meaningless sample size of one, we are
in the latter stages of some kind of near global empire. I'm not sure what to call it, possibly
the western empire or the industrial empire but the corporation empire might be most fitting
(and not because we're collectively getting paunchier). It is rather nebulous because presently
there isn't direct control by one country over many other states but there is no denying that
the business world, and I'd include crime and corruption enterprises as a significant part of
that, has an inordinate influence over global politics. If so then I have lived through the
last part of the age of affluence, most of the age of intellect and am currently experiencing a
transition to the age of decadence. From Glubb's descriptions the age I'd choose to live would
be that of intellect, so I should consider myself lucky. It is characterised by: excess wealth
that allows concentration on knowledge acquisition and acquiring degrees and certificates for
there own sake, rapid expansion of universities often with endowments from the elites,
increased travel and spreading multiculturism.
He has a quote concerning the age of intellect that particularly encapsulates the delusions
of the BAU, growth-at-all-costs, techno-copian crowd:
Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of the Age of Intellect is the unconscious growth
of the idea that the human brain can solve the problems of the world. Even on the low level
of practical affairs this is patently untrue. Any small human activity, the local bowls club
or the ladies' luncheon club, requires for its survival a measure of self-sacrifice and
service on the part of the members.
This is not as disparaging as some opinions of John Gray, who is often thought of as the
philosopher for a fading civilisation, such as:
Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of
miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in
magic
When a more balanced world emerges, it will be after many crises, and after our present
utopian faith in technology has been consigned to the rubbish heap of history .
Actually using "when" rather than "if" makes this one of his more upbeat statements'.
The age of decadence holds much less appeal, it can be described as "bread and circuses," or
for these times "drugs and internet porn/reality TV" might be more apt. It is characterised by
exploding wealth disparity, excessive materialism and status signalling, overextended
militaries (and these days I'd include militarised police forces in that), decline of religion
(does American neo-evangelism a religion or a political movement), increased reliance on state
intervention at all levels, currency debasement and overt sexual prurience.
There are other approaches to studying how societies, civilisations and empires rise, evolve
and fall. Aspects of these studies have names: cliodynamics, environmental determinism,
ecological overshoot analysis, etc. with proponents including Diamond, Costanza, Bardi, Lewis,
Middleton, Turchin, Tainter, Homer-Dixon, Acemoglu / Robinson, etc. The various theories of
collapse all seem biased, to some extent, by the political and moral standpoints or specialist
fields of the proponents, not least Glubb. Recently analysis has been converging on a
non-linear, dynamic system approach that, in theory, would encapsulate all the features
proposed by those authors, e.g. marginal energy gains, marginal complexity costs, property
rights and trustworthiness of institutions, population limits, resource depletion,
environmental degradation, natural disasters, invasion, novel parasites etc.
As I understand it the system dynamics explanation goes something like as follows. The
similar cyclic nature of societies might imply some common fundamental features in their
systems. That they have been able to endure despite unpredictable and erratic exogenous, until
suddenly they can't, implies that it is those features that determine the life time of the
society and once the resilience is lost any sufficiently large knock will cause the collapse. A
key indicator that the end is nigh is excessive wealth disparity and a rising centralised
hegemony, though I think these are consequences rather than causes, so artificially reversing
them would not necessarily prevent a decline to collapse. I haven't seen much on how population
growth versus key resource depletion affects cycles (I'd say energy supply has been central for
all civilisations and capacity for waste disposal as important for all societies, and waste
disposal capacity needs to be included as a possible limiting resource). The best that I can
suggest is that these limit the maximum size of a civilisation and, a little like peak oil but
more asymmetric, the growth and decay rates then adjust to give a typical life span.
All empires are civilisations but the reverse need not be true (and not all societies are
civilisations). Large societies rarely completely collapse – they tend to devolve and
simplify, whereas empires can disappear completely. In either case, however, the contraction
phases might be rather unpleasant for those experiencing them. A recent study by Centre for the
Study of Existential (CSER) at the University of Cambridge concluded that average duration for
civilisations has been just over 300 years, but with a wide distribution and fat tail. As a
subset empires will have more common features than civilisations in general, and therefore more
similar life cycles, which may explain the differences from Glubb's work, but equally his study
was rather sparse on quantifiable data.
Most proposed solutions to our ills strike me as treating the symptoms and not the disease;
if the ultimate cause is an intrinsic property of large societies then I'm at a loss as to what
can be done. The best that may be hoped for is to embrace a collapse as an opportunity for
rebirth and regeneration. I've seen reports that this is Bardi's approach, though I have not
yet read much from him directly. That is easy to say in my newly vaccinated state, in a
centrally heated home and looking forward to a pleasant meal; probably less easy to say and
still less to put into practice whilst shivering with cold and in fear, and wondering where
your families' next meal is coming from.
It's always dodgy to say, "this time it's different", but there are some notable features
now. Firstly the earth is full, there's nowhere with sparse population and under-exploited
resources left to move to in order to leave the wreckage behind after a crash. Only in the last
ten generations has there been significant, net overall growth in population, consumption,
energy and waste production, GDP etc.; at the same time we are now actively reducing the land
and resource available to us. Previous collapses and any subsequent recovery happened in the
Holocene, a period of unusually stable climate that we may now have disrupted irreversibly in
the anthropocene. Some previous collapses have been associated with over exploitation of one or
two key resources; at the moment it is difficult to find one without some supply threat from
depletion, geopolitical disruption, or excess costs. We do not live in harmony with nature and
rely on industrial society functioning at fairly high levels to maintain the balance, for
example: vaccines, insulin and antibiotics; fertilizer production; infrastructure maintenance;
intensive farming and food distribution; civil and national conflict control; cross border
humanitarian agencies etc.
As a footnote the CSER website has many interesting open source papers and videos that I
haven't found elsewhere, although it is heavy on AI "Terminator" or GE "Planet of the Apes"
type threats, highly academic (lots of attempted points scoring in the Q&As) and often
oriented towards the establishment with clear faith in progress, assumed continuation of
capitalism, government structures, institutions etc., so just the types Gray and Glubb were
commenting about.
One of the favourite tropes of the transparent cabal who have seized power in the US and
other captive nations is that the solution to the Palestine/Israel problem is "the path to
peace is through direct negotiations.'
This proposition requires the occupied bartering away their land and amending their
borders, always for the benefit of the illegal occupier. These 'negotiations' are expressly
forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. Every functioning government in the world knows
this.
The alien invaders are under an obligation to simply get out. Every 'agreement' is null
and void.
The New Zealand government and the NZ superannuation fund has recently decided to divest
their investments in Israeli banks citing international law, the Geneva Conventions and
reputation damage as key factors.
It is sheer hypocrisy for the usual suspects to talk about human rights, rules based
international law, democracy and our values, while advocating the opposite policies in the
middle east.
Is it possible they actually believe their own propaganda and their own lies through
Bernays like repartition?
@4 dsfco
If Russia and China really ever formed a bloc Europe and several countries in the Middle East
and Asia would immediately switch firmly into the American camp and form a bloc, too. That`s
precisely what Washington wants!
Bejing does the opposite, making deals with key allies of the USA, like recently the EU,
Japan, Australia, New Zealand (RCEP) etc. - thus stalling the US efforts. The "Eurasian Bloc"
is a Russian wet dream but it`s not in the interest of China.
@42 Passer by
You are reading this wrong. It says in sweet EU diplomacy talk: "Accept a partnership on
equal level if you want our continued support."
[The US could also suffer damage.But then the US has also never been shy about losing
lives in the US to maintain its hegemony.
Interesting times ahead. The US goal of full spectrum dominance is on schedule and
raring to go.
Posted by: jiri | Mar 5 2021 3:57 utc | 73]
The US do not have a functional Nuclear Shelters for their citizens. That's a first.
It's also do not have nuclear proofed infrastructure such as power infrastructure, farms,
water system, etc.
It doesn't have citizens cohesion necessary to survive shattered government authorities
(easy to riot, looting, and murdering happen. Too divided)
Nor it trained or can be controlled in any nuclear warfare scenario protocols to reorganize
and rebuild (recent covid measures reveals their Karen mentality).
It never have or achieve food securities and independence.
It never have energy independence.
It's industrial sector hollowed up with middle managerial class the one that have the
knowledge to ensure their crews and workers can remain in production rapidly aging and or
moving aboard with no replacement due to corporate 'restructuring' culture (no regular s
became senior enough to have their level of experience).
I can go on and on of how delusional your statement is but I'll just stop for now because
it's dumb when you have to specifically point this out.
The only one that can take nuclear war and win their race for rebuilding perhaps just
Russia.
Soviet leaders were of the people as you say, yes, but when you drill into the details of
their careers before they became General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, you find they had careers as political administrators and propagandists. Only Leonid
Brezhnev had a technical background. They were the early equivalents of people like former UK
Prime Minister David
Cameron who went straight into the British Conservative Party after leaving Oxford
University with typical graduate qualifications for a career party hack and who for a time
worked for a media communications company; or like current Australian Prime Minister
Scott Morrison
who worked in marketing executive roles in which his most outstanding qualities were his
sheer ineptitude and flouting procurement guidelines.
From Nikita Khrushchev onwards, all General Secretaries with the exceptions of Yuri
Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (neither of whom lasted long as leaders) had some personal
or family connection with the Ukrainian SSR. This may not have been coincidence: it may
suggest that there was a network of individuals selecting future leaders for promotion based
on close personal career connections.
Until recently most people in the most senior
levels of the Communist Party of China , from whom China's leaders are drawn, had
technical, engineering or scientific backgrounds. Current members are now drawn from most
walks of life though several of them have worked in factories or done manual labour at some
point in their working lives.
As a south east asian myself, I do think the east asians really aren't the way forward,
not until Korea is united, Vietnam and China rid themselves of "to be rich is to be glorious"
Dengists, Japan free of LDP and American sock puppetry. I'm also VERY wary of chinese
reactionaries who speak of Confucianism.
Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, but I look favorably to the slavs and
their culture, and of course the shining beacon that was the USSR and the 2nd world until
1991 fucks everything up.
Taoism nowadays is basically superstitions. The historical taoist practiced by the ancient
and medieval chinese political class is basically free market libertarianism "just let the
market regulates itself bruh".
There's a reason that most of the greatest chinese emperors practice legalism (Qin Shi
Huang, Liu Bang, Han Wudi), which is direct government intervention in all matters,
especially in market and infrastructure, while the Taoist-leaned dynasty (i.e. the Song)
resulted in mysticism and the take-over of China by the khitdan and then mongols.
In the West, "Taoism" and "Buddhism" are rebranded as some kind of new age exotic
philosophies, but in Asia proper, Taoism is kookery and Buddhism is militarist/nationalist
state religion, see Myanmar and Thailand.
I see you qualify your comment by specifying Hong Kong Chinese. They most certainly are
not Mainlanders and have a culture polluted by British Imperialism that's closer to the
Gangsterism of Chiang Kai-shek than Mao's Collectivism.
You may recall the book and video Affluenza that does a good job of explaining how
traditional conservative mores are assaulted and trampled by affluent modernity. Such
outcomes aren't restricted to North America but are global thanks to human similarity.
If one were to develop a moral equivalency chart evaluating all global cultures and major
sub-cultures, you'd see a majestic hodge-podge with very little uniformity, which also
relates to the very uneven state of human development in all its facets. The great task of
humanity over the next several centuries is to peacefully level out those disparities. But as
I wrote on the Shia thread, the remaining Imperialist nations are a very large impediment in
attaining that goal and need to be removed so humanity can evolve.
There is no reason to speculate. Chinese culture, history, stories, have the answers.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for example, has:
3 brothers who are put forwards as "godly". There is a celebrated image of the three of
them making the vow of brotherhood in an orchard. The leader, Liu Bei, is a prince of the
declining dynasty. He basically constantly virtue signals, but basically mostly does as the
rest, which is fight, kill, and grab other people's territories. His two other brothers
include a psycho drunk and a supremely self satisfied other. They look good next to a
character like Cao Cao;
the intelligentsia are basically bunch of self satisfied gurus of varying degrees of
competence that compete with devising deception schemes against other kingdoms.
the military is hardcore, brutal. also stuck on formations, aesthetics, which can be a
weakness.
the general population are docile cattle.
What the world hasn't seen for 2 centuries is the famous Chinese arrogance that was their
reputation until they truly pooped the pooch of their country with the arrival of Jews and
Europeans.
A certain fragrance of superstition and sentimentality also is always present, at various
degrees.
Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world
order with Chinese characteristics.
Lurking Dragon 66
Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world order
with Chinese characteristics.
Well, this is what we are seeing from our western "partners" as was bestowed upon the
globe by so many self righteous defenders of human rights, democracy and the "white man's
burden"
See for an example Halliburton's mercenaries, ISIS and other creepy creatures invented and
bestowed upon civilisation by people that believe that if you are not jewish, you are not
human and, therefore, can be dispensed at will if of no use to the chosen ones.
Yes, the western hippie generation is very fueled by drugs and new age philosophies. But
note that these rebranded exotic religions do not resemble the native ones.
For example in Asia proper, you have actual deities to worship in Taoism, and it's not
just a philosophy waxing about the Dao like in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daode_Tianzun
And Taoist priests are still an actual thing, and you can hire them to check Feng Shui and
even exorcism.
Still, it's superstitions and money making schemes, and I wouldn't put much trust in
them.
Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world
order with Chinese characteristics.
Posted by: LurkingDragon | Mar 6 2021 1:17 utc | 66
That sounds pretty much like every job I have had here in the USA all of my life. (Except
the union jobs.) There is a reason they hate unions, especially ones that have not been
domesticated yet.)
Hong Kong culture is very different from the culture of Mainland China, thanks in no small
part to HK having once been a link between China and the rest of the world for a long time
and becoming very wealthy as a manufacturing and financial services centre as a result. HK
people are very materialistic and status-conscious, and look down on other Chinese (to say
nothing of what they think of other Asians and other non-white people) who do not speak HK
Cantonese. The only people HK people respect are English-speaking white British and
Americans.
My parents visited HK back in the 1990s and my mother tried speaking Taishanese (our
native language: it is related to Cantonese and is spoken just west of the Pearl River delta
not far from Macau, in Guangdong province) to shop assistants. They ignored her and it was
only when she switched to English that their attitude changed dramatically and fell over one
another to help.
Before the 1980s, huge numbers of Cantonese people living in English-speaking countries
were actually Taishanese speakers. My parents visited San Francisco's Chinatown in 1988 and
nearly everyone they came across spoke Taishanese. It was the dominant language there.
My dad's second (and current) wife is Chinese. He met her online in the late 90's, and she
moved with her young son to Wisconsin and married him around 2000.
I think my dad was looking for a docile women after his previous marriage and girlfriends,
and on the surface, Xue Lin seemed docile...in reality she is not docile, but subtle, a
characteristic I found true of her, her son and the Chinese people I have met thru them.
Nobody ever got my dad to work as hard or be as frugal as she!
They came over with money and bailed my dad out of a tax mess. She still owns apartment
buildings in China. Both are very hard working, smart and frugal, but not materialistic.
Jake (her son) and I ended up being pretty close. He received an MBA from the University
of Wisconsin and worked in the natural gas business in Texas before moving back to China
where I've had the pleasure of visiting him.
My impression of China and the Chinese is largely positive, the extreme work ethic can be
a bother given I am a pothead hippy slacker. There is a lot of optimism and energy there, it
makes the USA feel like a barbaric backwater country whose best days are past.
@66
Sounds like projection. You have nicely described my experience in the USA! Aside from my
union jobs, it has been kiss up and kick down...even self-employed.
"A certain fragrance of superstition and sentimentality also is always present, at various
degrees." Growing up in a small, conservative religious town, this is a great description of
my experience.
I will say, the general American population isn't docile, but are herded about like cattle
none the less. I'd also say the Chinese aren't so much docile as they are subtle, which I
believe is far more effective than rowdy but dumb.
The stereotype of the Chinese as the greedy merchant in SE Asia comes from the colonial
era. Western colonization of China created a Chinese comprador elite who was allowed many
commercial privileges within the Mainland (as middlemen) but also in the SE Asian region. As
every Latin American well know, comprador elites are the worst of the worst. No wonder the
peoples of Indonesia, Philippines etc. etc. see the Chinese as a negative force in their
countries.
The same is true for the stereotype of the Chinese as a mafioso in Latin America: the
Chinese who emigrated to Latin America are mainly triad and hyper-capitalists from Taiwan or
pre-communist China (who may or may not have indirectly come from Taiwan in later
decades).
The same is true for the stereotype of the Chinese as the arrogant, pro-laissez faire
upper middle class individualist in Canada, USA, Australia and Western Europe in the modern
times. They are most tourists and/or a selected bunch of upper middle class Chinese who are
lured into real estate schemes in those countries (Australia, Vancouver etc.).
As we can see, peoples make up stereotypes of other peoples based on small and heavily
skewed samples. That's why we have statistics, and they tell us the Chinese are one of the
most if not the most down-to-Earth, non-religious, socialist and tolerant peoples of the
world today.
Both major parties work according the the scheme of a pyramidal control. To control a
company A, you need to get majority of voting shares. Which belong to company B that owns,
say, 60%. In turn, 60% or shares of B belongs to C which controls A while having 60% x 60% =
36% of capital. After adding D, E etc., you can get away with the following: you start with
actual majority of shares, and the company prospers. Time to realize gains. But that would
deprive you of control. Thus you organize company B and sell 40% of its shares. Control
preserved. Wash and repeat.
In a similar spirit, a narrow circle can control a major party. Of course, the rules are
different and more hidden. On the bottom level, the equivalent of B controlling A, it was
observed that rational arguments are boring, and the wide masses have hard time following
them and following what (itself controlled) B advocates. So you invent easy to remember
[expletive deleted] like "Obama birth's certificate", "Russian collusion" etc. An energetic
group with group solidarity needs its tribal spirit and shibboleths.
The Democratic Party civil war between the 'progressive anti-war socialist' and 'neocon
Wall Street beltway' wings. It will go on for at least two years
TBT or not TBT 1 hour ago
Oh hogwash. The minute Obama took over from Bush Cindy Sheehan and the rest disappeared
from the news. There was no real push back within the Dem electorate against the foreign wars
because they all support the Democrat War on America above all. They only pretend to give a
rip about some backward misogynist theocratic craphole people when Republicans are in
office.
King of Kalifornia 1 hour ago
It's been going on for years. The socialists keep falling for it, and the neoliberals (in
the mold of their heroes, Reagan and Thatcher) have forced their compliance.
This does not comport with Article II(Section 2) of the USA constitution.. which says
"The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the usa, and of the
Militia of the serveral states, when into the actual service of the USA,
but no where do I find a private corporation may exercise the power of the Office of the
President ...? What did I mis?
The important fact that emerges is that Antifa is state sponsored group (or at least some
government agencies sponsored group) not unlike NSDAP was in Germany.
Andy Ngo's new book Unmasked: Inside Antifa's
Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy is as important to understanding where we are today
as Ann Coulter's
Adios America! was before Donald Trump election. Ngo
shows that far from being just an "idea," as President Joe Biden
would have us believe , Antifa comprises highly organized groups of dedicated activists
with an extreme political agenda and a commitment to violence. But Ngo also shows, perhaps less
consciously, that Antifa operates with de-facto backing from the Ruling Class, including
Main Stream Media journalists, the principal enforcers of the current order. Ngo suggests
Antifa are a revolutionary threat to the power structure and could overthrow it. But the truth
is much worse -- Antifa are simply the System's militant wing.
What makes Unmasked so remarkable is that Ngo doesn't limit himself to anecdotal
reporting, nor does he retreat to abstract theorizing. Instead, like a great historian, he
seamlessly integrates his experiences and other primary sources with political theory. He
shows, often literally with chapter and verse, what motivates Antifa, how they are organized,
how they are trained, and how this is turned into concrete action:
Where there is no single capital A 'Antifa' organization with one leader, there are indeed
localized cells and groups with formalized structures and memberships. Though officially
leaderless, these are organizations by every definition.
The [
Rose City Antifa ] curriculum is modeled on a university course. Yet it includes training
on how to use guns and do reconnaissance against enemies.
Ngo also helpfully reports on the history the Antifa brand, especially its origins in the
Red Front
Fighters' League of the pre-Hitler German Communist Party. He's especially astute to note
that "the German Communist Party [KPD] and its various offshoots viewed social democrats and
liberals as 'social fascists' no different from Nazis." Needless to say, KPD leader Ernst Thälman 's
strategy of fighting the more moderate Social Democrats ahead of the Nazis was glossed over by
Communist propaganda after World War II.
East German hagiographies of Thälman, like Sohn Seiner Klasse and
Führer Sonne Klasse ("Son of His Class," "Leader of His Class") portray him as
fighting the Nazis above all else.
When Ngo describes the Communist takeovers of East Germany and Vietnam, the latter of which
his family fled, he's warning Americans that we face a
Communist coup . Historically, "anti-fascism" was created by, and has always been a front
for, Communist or Communist-adjacent groups.
(I don't dispute Ngo's characterization of the movement as "anarchist-communist." It sounds
clumsy, but anarcho-communism is a venerable Leftist tradition that goes back to Marx's great
rival Mikhail Bakunin. I was surprised, though, that Ngo didn't mention that the three-arrow "Iron Front" symbol
widely used by Antifa today actually came from the German Social Democratic Party (SPD.) The
SPD opposed the Communists just as much as they did monarchists and the National
Socialists.
He's right, but when looking at what Antifa
prioritize today, it does seem preoccupied with boutique progressive causes like
transgenderism and policing speech. While physical attacks are common, doxing and
complaining to
capitalist employers are what Antifa do best of all.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine East Germany or the USSR tolerating the cultural degeneracy
championed by today's Antifa. The Soviet Bloc was positively social-conservative compared to
2021 post-America.
Ngo's reporting on the specific individuals, curriculum, tactics, and operational plans of
Antifa are a testament to his skill as a researcher (not mention his guts.) However, one thing
jumps out of the book repeatedly. Despite all their emphasis on "OpSec" and paranoia about law
enforcement, Antifa aren't actually especially secret. Like illegal aliens who lecture us on
television about their lives "
in the shadows ," it's not a huge mystery who is in Antifa. We know what groups exist,
where they operate and what they are doing. They openly operate on Twitter, Facebook etc.
In contrast to the Proud Boys or bewildered Boomers who wandered into the Capitol last
month, Antifa can operate openly because it has the tacit approval of law enforcement and
Main Stream Media outlets . Thus Ngo describes in shocking detail Antifa groups' training
workshops, including combat training. Right-wing
activity even at this level would be
shut down by the
government instantly.
It's an obvious point but bears repeating -- how radical are your
opinions when you have police, the military, corporate America, and the media all supporting
you? Antifa violence exists because it is permitted, arguably encouraged, to exist. Despite
President Trump's blustering promises, these Antifa groups were never labeled "terrorists" nor,
inexplicably, was systematic federal law enforcement action ever taken against them.
During
the CHAZ insurrection , Antifa was allowed to more or less claim sovereignty in a major
American city for a period of weeks. If nationalists had tried that, it would have ended in
drone strikes. The glee with which progressives hailed the execution
of Ashli Barrett tells us what they're willing to do. The "Capitol Insurrection" would have
been heralded as another Bastille Day
had it come from the other side .
Ngo points out repeatedly that Antifa conduct themselves to present a certain media image.
Yet this is a two-way relationship. While Antifa are eager to make sure only their narrative
gets out, Regime journalists willingly collaborate. It's a mistake to even speak of journalists
or Antifa as being separate categories of people.
Perhaps she was told such tweets would be career-ending or maybe she figured that out on her
own. She deleted them and joined the winning team.
The rest is history. Lorenz has made a career doxing
random people, notably Pamela Geller's daughters.
This also explains why Regime "journalists" -- make that
Journofa -- seem to
hate Ngo so much. Ngo provides many examples of independent journalists like himself
recording and livestreaming footage that provide "the up-close, raw, and uncensored look into
Antifa's extremism." Such raw footage strips Regime Media reporters of the ability to craft the
Narrative.
Ngo writes that Antifa "have made it a priority to keep out journalists like myself, even
releasing manuals on how to obstruct to the work of unapproved press." However, the critical
point is what he says next:
"[T]hey've [Antifa] made key allies in the media to counter negative coverage,
amplify their propaganda messaging, and discredit their shared opponents. The American public
has been inundated with n onstop propaganda that obfuscates and lies about Antifa ,
simultaneously presenting them as anti-fascists righting racism, and a figment of the
right's imagination ." [Emphases added]
Thus Ngo accuses corporate journalists, quite rightly, of knowingly spreading propaganda or
being "actually members of the militant Antifa movement."
Ngo's guide on how to "identify Antifa press" is important. If you see a reporter freely
videoing protests without being attacked, "that is a good sign the journalist produces
Antifa-approved content."
But I must take issue with Ngo's conclusion that the "movement is made of organized networks
of anarchist-communists who have the goal, training, and determination to overthrow the US
government." Is that what Antifa actually fights for in the real world?
For example, CHAZ didn't end with a heroic last stand. It ended after bored city workers
scattered some riffraff without much effort. It existed as long as Left-wing city politicians
defended it against then-President Donald Trump. It vanished the moment that city authorities
decided to regain control.
Insofar as Antifa have a real impact, it's not in organizing rent strikes or fighting banks.
Instead, they are most effective when calling up oligarchs to get working-class people fired.
Is such a group really a threat to the US government or something of a partner?
As Ngo himself points out early in his book, the United States government is tremendously
powerful. Anarcho-communists hardly seem a credible threat to its legitimacy. Rather than
wanting to crush them, at least some Democrats favor what Antifa are doing -- and certainly
want to downplay it.
Thus the presumptive next Attorney General, Merrick Garland, blithely dismissed an
attack on a
federal courthouse because it happened at
night. If anything, the new administration seems determined to put the power of the state
behind these "anarcho-communists."
And rather than trying to create a Workers' Paradise, what Antifa actually do is make the
world safe for
Woke Capital .
While Antifa violence is real, the danger to ordinary people is not so much that some
rampaging mob will come into their house at four in the morning. The danger is that Antifa will
see a Politically Incorrect tweet and render a person unemployable, with an assist from
"journalist" allies.
Ngo's book is essential reading. However, he may not fully understand the threat. The
problem isn't that Antifa is trying to overthrow the state. The problem is that the state and
Antifa are working together against ordinary Americans.
What we're living under is something far worse than Antifa's imagined "
anarcho-communism ." It's what the late Sam Francis presciently called anarcho-tyranny ,
with the worst features of lawlessness and autocracy combined.
This is why our situation is not as bad as Ngo suggests. It's far, far worse.
Are you gonna believe what I tell you or are you gonna believe what you see, comes to mind.
I believe what I see and I don't see the USA doing any bridge building, even in its own
country where bridge infrastructure is in serious decay.
I repeat: These are not normal people in charge. They have lost their minds.
Maybe once a long time ago the USA diplomatic corp was supported by elected officials that
set out to make allies based on mutual respect. But those days are long gone. The only
bridges the USA builds is munition supply channels, be it by air or by sea. They destroy
physical and metaphorical bridges in every nation they occupy.
The USA builds walls and barriers and obstruction: at home at the Mexican border, in the
capital state, by economic sanctions illegally applied throughout the world, by destroying
its home regulatory system to keep poisoned citizens from seeking judicial or regulatory
redress for pollution and human suffering.
I see a mendacious, failed state surrounding its elected officials and financial
institutions and even suburbs with walls and barriers. Then they attack people who criticise
them in moderately peaceful ways. That is who they are, that is what I see.
Call it payback for the December restaurant shutdowns.
It took a few minutes after the BLS reported the impressive February jobs report, which
showed a whopping 379K total jobs added in February (and 465K private payrolls, or more than
double the 195K expected), for traders to read between the lines and realize that there was
much less than meets the eye in the latest jobs report.
To wit: of the 379K jobs, a whopping 355K, or 93%, were in leisure and hospitality, and
within this category the one and only sector that truly boomed the most under the Obama admin
was on top: employees food service and drinking places, i.e. waiter and bartenders, accounted
for a massive 286K jobs, or 75% of the total job gains in February. Call it payback for the
December collapse in restaurant workers when nearly 400K jobs were lost amid the latest round
of restaurant shutdowns.
There are 18.4 million millionaires in the U.S. and 48.6 million people in poverty. The
U.S. has far and away the highest rates of poverty in the developed world. In addition, the
extent of U.S. income and wealth inequality also tends to be extreme when compared to other
industrialized countries. It's glaring proof that Capitalism doesn't work, and never has. And
there is no such thing as equality in Capitalism, because, in capitalistic philosophy, there
is only predators and prey. If Capitalism actually worked, we wouldn't be fighting over the
same old problems today, as we were in the 1870's to 1890's,during the age of "Robber
Barons", (that Mark Twain once coined "the Gilded Age Elites"), when we had lots of riots,
strikes, and mini civil wars then, about being compensated properly from the wealthy elites,
The countries that are proactive in terms of social policies that ensure few people will fall
below a minimum floor level, generally have much lower rates of poverty than those countries
that take a more laissez-faire approach, (i.e. like the U.S.).
What it basically says: America ranks among most "problem-ridden" countries in the World.
The study compared countries based on social problems ranked the U.S. 38th of 40 countries,
between Latvia and Uruguay, just above Trinidad and Tobago.
Researchers also took into consideration the social problems of short life expectancy,
infant mortality, obesity health issues, homicides, teen pregnancy, and prison rates, and
found that big income gaps between rich and poor correlates with those problems too.
"America's economy has almost doubled in size over the last four decades, but broad
measures of the nation's economic health conceal the unequal distribution of gains. A small
portion of the population has pocketed most of the new wealth, and the coronavirus pandemic
is laying bare the consequences of the unequal distribution of prosperity."
Of course, a significant contributor to the "wealth gap" was the rise in the stock market
fostered by trillions of liquidity injected by the Federal Reserve. As NYT noted:
"The affluent, of course, do tend to own stock, and the median net worth of the richest 10
percent of households rose 13 percent from 2007 to 2016 (the last year for which the Fed has
released data).
Another way to view this issue is by looking at household net worth growth between the top
10% and everyone else.
"Wealth disparities have widened over time. In 1989, the bottom 90 percent of the U.S.
population held 33 percent of all wealth. By 2016, the bottom 90 percent of the population
held only 23 percent of the wealth. The wealth share of the top 1 percent increased from
about 30 percent to about 40 percent over the same period." –
Equitable Growth
Such is more visible when you see that since 2007, the ONLY group has seen an increase in
net worth in the top 10% of the population. Such is also the group that owns 90% of the stock
market as discussed in "How The
Fed Made The Top 10% Richer."
" That is not economic prosperity. It is a distortion of economics."
An Elite Club
Central Bank's globally sought to stoke economic growth by inflating asset prices.
Unfortunately, the consumption of the benefit was only those with savings and discretionary
income to invest.
In other words, the stock market became an "exclusive" club for the elite.
While monetary policy increases the wealth of those that have wealth, the Fed mistakenly
believed the "trickle-down" effect would be enough to stimulate the entire economy.
It hasn't.
The sad reality is that these policies only acted as a transfer of wealth from the middle
class to the wealthy. Such created one of the largest "wealth gaps" in human history.
Via Forbes :
"'The top 10% of the wealth distribution hold a large and growing share of U.S. aggregate
wealth, While the bottom half hold a barely visible share.' Fed economists wrote in a
paper outlining the new data set on inequality. The charts show that 'while the total net
worth of U.S. households has more than quadrupled in nominal terms since 1989, that increase
accrued more to the top than the bottom.'"
A recent report from BCA Research confirms the same showing the increase in wealth of the
top 10% as compared to everyone else.
Lack Of Capital
The current economic expansion is already the longest post-WWII expansion on record. Of
course, that expansion came from artificial interventions rather than stable organic economic
growth. As noted, while the financial markets have soared higher in recent years, it bypassed a
large portion of Americans. Such was NOT because they were afraid to invest, but because they
had NO CAPITAL with which to invest.
The ability to "maintain a certain standard of living" remains problematic for many forcing
them further into debt.
"The debt surge is partly by design. A byproduct of low borrowing costs the Federal
Reserve engineered after the financial crisis to get the economy moving. It has reshaped both
borrowers and lenders. Consumers increasingly need it. Companies increasingly can't sell
their goods without it. And the economy, which counts on consumer spending for more than
two-thirds of GDP, would struggle without a plentiful supply of credit." – WSJ
I often show the "gap" between the "standard of living" and real disposable incomes. In
1990, incomes alone were no longer able to meet the standard of living. Therefore, consumers
turned to debt to fill the "gap."
However, following the "financial crisis," even the combined income and debt levels no
longer filled the gap. Currently, there is almost a $2150 annual deficit facing the average
American. (Note: this deficit accrues every year, which is why consumer credit keeps hitting
new records.)
The Rest Have Debt
The debt-to-income problem keeps individuals from building wealth, and government statistics
obscure the fundamental reality. We discussed this point in detail in the "
Illusion Of Soaring Savings."
" The median net worth of households in the middle 20% of income rose 4% in
inflation-adjusted terms to $81,900 between 1989 and 2016. That is the latest available data.
For households in the top 20%, median net worth more than doubled to $811,860. And for the
top 1%, the increase was 178% to $11,206,000.
The value of assets for all U.S. households increased from 1989 through 2016 by an
inflation-adjusted $58 trillion. A full 33% of that gain -- $19 trillion -- went to the
wealthiest 1%, according to a Journal analysis of Fed data." – WSJ
Of course, if the Fed's actions to inflate asset prices worked, then wealth distribution
would be more even. Importantly, we wouldn't see more than 50% of Americans unable to meet a
$500 emergency.
The single truth of a decade of monetary and fiscal interventions is this:
"The top 10% of the economy has assets, the bottom 90% has the debt."
The Fed Does Have A Choice
The Fed does have a choice that could alter the current wealth inequality dynamic:
Allow capitalism to take root by allowing corporations to fail and restructure. A needed
process after spending a decade leveraging themselves to the hilt, buying back shares, and
massively increasing executive wealth while compressing workers' wages. Or,
Continue to bailout "bad actors" and further forestall the "clearing process" that would
rebalance the economy and allow for increased future organic economic growth.
As the Fed's balance sheet rises past $7-Trillion, they chose to impede the "clearing
process" once again. By not allowing for debt to fail, corporate restructuring, and
"socializing the losses," they removed the risk of speculative practices.
Such has ensured the continuation of "bad behaviors."
Unfortunately, given we have a decade of experience watching the "wealth gap" grow, the next
decade will only see the "gap" worsen.
The obvious question we should be asking is:
"If we are in a booming economy, as supposedly represented by surging asset prices, then
why are Central Banks globally acting to increase financial stimulus for the market?"
The trap the Fed has fallen into is that markets are predicated on ever-cheaper cash being
freely available. Even the faintest threat that the cash might become more expensive or less
available causes shock waves.
Such was seen in late 2018 when the Fed signaled it might increase the pace of normalizing
monetary policy. The markets imploded, and the Fed halted its plan of shrinking its balance
sheet. Then, during the pandemic, the Fed flooded the system with liquidity to halt a market
crash.
Equality In Misery
The reality is the Fed has left unconventional policies in place for so long after the
"Financial Crisis," the markets can no longer function without them. Risk-taking, and the
build-up of financial leverage, have removed any ability to "normalize" monetary policy. At
least not without triggering violent market convulsions.
Given there is too much debt, too much activity predicated on ultra-low interest rates, and
confidence hinging on inflated asset values, the Fed has no choice but to keep pushing
liquidity until something eventually "pops."
Of course, it will be the bottom 90% that absorbs the losses. As noted by Sven Henrich
previously:
"In a world of measured low inflation and weak wage growth easy central bank money creates
vast price inflation in the assets owned by the few making the rich richer, but also enables
the taking on ever higher debt burdens leaving everyone else to foot the ultimate bill."
" That is the measured outcome of the central bank easy money dynamic. After decades, it
has now taken on new obscene forms in the past 10-years with absolutely no end in sight."
For the world's elite, their view of the world is far different than the reality the rest
face.
Of course, this also explains much of the recent election outcomes.
When "capitalism" isn't allowed to work for the "equality" of the whole, the populous will
"vote" themselves "equality in misery."
Lordflin 11 hours ago remove link
The so called market has become nothing more than an open vein... draining the life's
blood of civilization down the maws of lifeless parasites...
They are killing the host...
2banana 11 hours ago
In the era of insanely cheap and easy money, those closest to the money spigot get
insanely wealthy for doing nothing.
Those in the back of the line get $75,000 communications degrees, and 27% credit
cards.
Nothing explodes "wealth inequality" like cheap and easy money.
TreeTopSlick 11 hours ago remove link
The Cantillon Effect in action. Never been so obvious in America than today.
2banana 10 hours ago
Great analogy.
Cantillon's original thesis outlines how rising prices affect different sectors at
different times and suggests that time difference effectively acts as a taxing mechanism. In
other words, the first sectors to receive the newly created money enjoy higher profits as
their pay increases, but general costs are still low. On the other hand, the last sectors in
which prices rise (where there is more economic friction) face higher costs while still
producing at lower prices.
Alice-the-dog 11 hours ago
The "monetary policy that created a feedback loop between the Fed and the elite" isn't a
by product, it's a design feature.
Crow-Magnon 11 hours ago
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money,
first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around
them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will
wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Here are the political affiliations of America's 50 richest families
You've both been bamboozled. The richest people in the country may pretend to have
political affiliations, but it's just a distraction. The Capitol Hill Whores are bought off
very cheaply, which is why the wealthy spend their money on both D-whores and R-whores.
It is in the interest of the very wealthy to keep the D/R, left/right, red/blue charade
going because it keeps peoples' anger focused on the paid actors instead of looking for who
is really screwing the country. They've got nothing to worry about as long as they can keep
the unwashed rabble fighting against each other.
Mary Jane 10 hours ago remove link
99% of Americans can't hold that thought in their heads. They can only hold the
left/right, red/blue understanding in their heads. One is their team, just as in Sports, and
their team must win. It doesn't matter that they just shelled out money to the owner of the
stadium, and the franchises, who could care less who won as long as the money keeps coming
in. Very similar, to the bread and circus routines of the Roman Empire's Coliseum, no one
ever looked at the wealth of the Emperor.
Apocalypse2020 8 hours ago
"The super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday
make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage
politicians of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be
to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere – to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans
and the bottom 95 percent of the world's population busy with ethnic and religious
hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their
own despair by media-created pseudo-events the super-rich will have little to fear."
Richard Rorty, 1998
Sound of the Suburbs 7 hours ago remove link
What has happened to inequality?
Pretty much what you would expect really.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of
neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s.
"a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion
of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking
purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of
effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital
accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by
borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped"
With the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics wealth concentrates at the
top.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
Keynes added some redistribution to stop all the wealth concentrating at the top, and
developed nations formed a strong healthy middle class.
The neoliberals removed the redistribution.
With the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics wealth concentrates at the
top.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
It wasn't even hard.
Let it Go 10 hours ago
Things are really messed up. This gives credence to the idea we might soon be witness to
the first global inflationary depression. As investors shift into assets that do well during
times of inflation, it is possible they may set in motion a self-feeding loop or cycle. More
about this in the following article.
Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer
a paid-for, no-ad versionPitches pro-privacy platform with customizable results filter
dubbed GogglesThomas Claburn in San Francisco Wed 3
Mar 2021 // 14:00 UTC SHARE
Brave, maker of the identically named privacy-focused web browser, has acquired its own
search engine to offer as an alternative to Google Search and competing search engines that
exist but aren't all that visible in Google's shadow.
On Wednesday, the company plans to announce that it's taking over Tailcat, a search engine
developed by Cliqz, another privacy-focused browser biz that aspired to compete with Google and
shut down last year . The
deal, terms undisclosed, makes Cliqz owner Hubert Burda Media a Brave shareholder.
Brave intends to make Tailcat the foundation of its own search service, Brave Search . The company hopes that its more than 25
million monthly active Brave customers will, after an initial period of testing and courtship,
choose to make Brave Search their default search engine and will use it alongside other parts
of its privacy-oriented portfolio, which also includes Brave Ads, news reader Brave Today,
Brave Firewall+VPN, and video conferencing system Brave Together.
Brave Search, the company insists, will respect people's privacy by not tracking or
profiling those using the service. And it may even offer a way to end the debate about search
engine bias by turning search result output over to a community-run filtering system called
Goggles.
The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option – for those who want to
pay for search results without ads – though its more common incarnation is likely to be
ad-supported, in conjunction with Brave Ads. The latter offers participants the option to
receive 70 per cent of the payment made by the advertiser in a cryptocurrency called BAT (Brave
Attention Token).
Eich lays out his vision
In an interview with The Register , Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, argued that the
demand for privacy is real and cannot be ignored. "I think the genie doesn't go back in the
bottle," he said. "Consciousness doesn't revert."
People used to hear about credit card breaches at large retailers like Target, Eich said,
and think that privacy is hopeless but not something that necessarily affects them directly.
But then it became more personal as technologies like ad retargeting did things like spoiling
surprise gifts by showing the ad for the purchased item again to the intended recipient.
I think privacy is here to stay and now the question is how people do it and market it
effectively
Eich sees the dominance of US tech companies contributing to the interest in privacy and
making it a matter of concern for regulators around the world.
"It's not political in the broken US sense – which is kind of a Punch and Judy show
– it's more like there are people of various commitments on all sides of politics who are
aware not only of privacy being violated over time by the big tech players but of the big tech
players being abusive monopolies," he said.
Pointing to how many companies now make privacy claims, Eich said, "I think privacy is here
to stay and now the question is how people do it and market it effectively. If you don't market
it, you can lose to somebody who just puts privacy perfume on a pig and tells you it smells
great and tastes delicious."
Eich's pitch is not that Brave Search aims to take on Google Search directly. He
acknowledges that there's no way to match Google's vast index and ability to return relevant
results for obscure (long tail) search terms. Rather, he sees an opportunity to improve
specific types of search queries, referred to as vertical markets.
"Part of what we're trying to do here is innovate in the area where there's now monopoly,"
he said in reference to Google Search, which has a market share of something like 92 per cent ."...The
innovation through verticals is possible because it avoids having to take on Google's supreme
competence, which is the rare or unique queries the long tail."
"What we're trying to do is different, it's not based on crawling the web," Eich explained.
"...Trying to crawl the whole web, it's not going to work. What Cliqz worked on..that's an
anonymous query log aggregator, and a partial click log aggregator, to see when you don't
convert on the search ad you leave the results page and you find the better results through
some number of clicks."
Gathering that sort of query and click data requires consent, said Eich, and Brave isn't
going to force Brave users to participate. But Cliqz started working on this and has a data set
they called "the Human Web," and that's now the basis of Brave Search.
"The queries and the clicks matter but they are unlinkable," he said. "There has to be a
property called record unlinkability. There's no IP address that gets dropped at the edge.
Timing channels are blinded by adding some delays. And there's no way to say this query was
from the same user as that query."
Brave Search's index there will be informed the activities of participating Brave users, in
terms of the URLs they search for or click on, and adjacent web resources that don't require
extensive crawling.
There's a theoretical risk users could poison the index through repeated visits to
irrelevant or harmful web pages, knowing their activities would inform the index, but Eich
suggests Brave is big and savvy enough to avoid being trolled in this way.
Brave also envisions users taking a more active role in their search results through a
filtering mechanism.
"It allows different groups to run their own sort of Turing incomplete filter rules, sort of
like ad blocking rules in the search service and not in the browser, to have a community
moderated view of the global index," he explained. "It's called 'Goggles.'"
Eich observed with a chuckle that it isn't related to Google Goggles, an image recognition
app that Google maintained from 2009 through 2018 until the arrival of Google
Lens.
Shared search
The Brave Search team has written a paper [ PDF ] explaining its use of the
term, titled "GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web." The browser upstart
aims to replace the tyranny of Google's inscrutable, authoritative index with a multiverse of
indices defined by anyone with the inclination to do so.
Brave's vision of search is based on "an open and collaborative system by which a community,
or a single user, can create sets of rules and filters, called Goggles, to define the space
which a search engine can pull results from," the paper explains.
"Instead of a single ranking algorithm, we could have as many as needed, overcoming the
biases that a single actor (the search engine) embeds into the results."
Goggles has its own Domain Specific Language (DSL) for writing search result filters. Brave
hopes that Goggles will be adopted not only internally but among others search engines,
too.
Brave Search users will be able to, for better or worse, see the world through filters they
agree with or filters they detest. The point is it will be up to them rather than a large ad
company located in Silicon Valley.
The Brave Search team acknowledges that not all filters will show results that are agreeable
to everyone. "There will be Goggles created by creationists, anti-vaccination supporters or
flat-earthers," the paper says. "However, the biases will be explicit, and therefore, the
choice is a conscious one."
The paper contends that censorship will be unnecessary since illegal content should be
caught by the host search engine and removed from the search index so no Goggle can see it in
the first place.
"Brave is bringing back the idea of a user-first thick client, or a muscular client," said
Eich, differentiating his browser from just being "a blind servant of ad tech that runs all the
JavaScript Google throws at it." ®
Honest Joe is old, weak, frail, incompetent, corrupt, traitorous to his own people, and
some say maybe even a little bit sexually perverted.
You meant to say Donald Trump. Maybe Biden isn't much better, but it can't be good for the
US when the same description is perfectly valid for both rivals for power.
@chris
access to the natural resources of Russia? Why should the USA sanction Russia for building
the Nord Stream II pipeline which would carry Russian natural gas to Europe? Western
hostility to Putin's Russia is predicated not on lack of Western access to Russia's natural
resources but on Putin's buildup of Russian military might based on its nuclear arsenal,
hypersonic missiles, missile defense systems and fifth-generation fighter jets.
Russian military power is the main obstacle to the complete domination of Europe by the
USA Empire. Only by 'neutralizing' Russian military power could the US Deep State achieve its
dreams of conquering Europe which is exactly what NATO aims to do.
I'm no fan of the greedy Davos bunch, nor of the rising inequality across the globe.
And this is not a defense of their actions, which are causing global financial crises.
But Russia and Putin are no better, nor answers to those growing inequalities of the
"West".
Russian billionaires and Aristocrats, whom Putin answers to, are just as bad as their
American counterparts.
Ditto for Chinese Billionaires.
And Indian Billionaires.
And so on
Take a look at the following chart from the World Inequality Database: https://wid.world/country/russian-federation/
That inequality in Russia has exploded since 1991.
Similar to most countries.
What interests me most, is not only how the 1% are complaining more & more about their
own 1% making greater strides, but how many more global billionaires are complaining of how
much less they have compared to the wealthiest global billionaires.
Meanwhile billions are living in true poverty.
Regardless whether "free market", "socialism" or "communism", greed currently rules.
And the "capitalists" (wealth-hoarders) of each of those economies are using their wealth to
influence governmental & public policy to their advantage, for special-interest
legislation to gain ever-more wealth.
I firmly believe in the right to make money, and in reaping the rewards of hard work &
true innovation, but there are limits.
Even the "Father of Laissez-faire economics", Adam Smith, warned of the consequences of
unfettered wealth hoarding.
"Capitalists" themselves are destroying capitalism.
Every economy requires spending, to continue to thrive & grow.
The more a few have & hoard, the less the more have to spend, to keep an economy
healthy.
We are currently witnessing the consequences of that hoarding.
Thus the massively increasing rises of the massive Everything Bubbles, which will certainly
eventually pop.
A pandemic not often talked about is the seeming global human insecurities I see
continuing to grow.
Humans unable to face their own mortality, or their own self-worth, minus massive wealth.
At the end of January, Putin was given the opportunity to address the World Economic Forum
(WEF) in Davos, Switzerland (online). The WEF is a prestigious assembly of political leaders,
corporatists and billionaire elites many of who are directly involved in the massive global
restructuring project that is currently underway behind the smokescreen of the Covid-19
pandemic. Powerful members of the WEF decided that the Coronavirus presented the perfect
opportunity to implement their dystopian strategy which includes a hasty transition to green
energy, A.I., robotics, transhumanism, universal vaccination and a comprehensive surveillance
matrix that detects the location and activities of every human being on the planet. The
proponents of this universal police state breezily refer to it as "The Great Reset" which is
the latest make-over of the more familiar, "New World Order". There's not a hairsbreadth
difference between the Reset and one-world government which has preoccupied billionaire
activists for more than a century. This is the group to which Putin made the following
remarks:
"I would like to speak in more detail about the main challenges ..the international
community is facing . The first one is socioeconomic .. Starting from 1980, global per capita
GDP has doubled in terms of real purchasing power parity. This is definitely a positive
indicator. Globalisation and domestic growth have led to strong growth in developing
countries and lifted over a billion people out of poverty .Still, the main question is
what was the nature of this global growth and who benefitted from it most ..
developing countries benefitted a lot from the growing demand for their traditional and
even new products. However, this integration into the global economy has resulted in more
than just new jobs or greater export earnings. It also had its social costs, including a
significant gap in individual incomes . According to the World Bank, 3.6 million people
subsisted on incomes of under $5.50 per day in the United States in 2000, but in 2016 this
number grew to 5.6 million people.. ..
Meanwhile, globalisation led to a significant increase in the revenue of large
multinational, primarily US and European, companies In terms of corporate profits, who got
hold of the revenue? The answer is clear: one percent of the population .
And what has happened in the lives of other people? In the past 30 years, in a number
of developed countries, the real incomes of over half of the citizens have been stagnating,
not growing . Meanwhile, the cost of education and healthcare services has gone up. Do
you know by how much? Three times
In other words, millions of people even in wealthy countries have stopped hoping for an
increase of their incomes. In the meantime, they are faced with the problem of how to keep
themselves and their parents healthy and how to provide their children with a decent
education .
These imbalances in global socioeconomic development are a direct result of the policy
pursued in the 1980s , which was often vulgar or dogmatic. This policy rested on the
so-called Washington Consensus with its unwritten rules, when the priority was given
to the economic growth based on a private debt in conditions of deregulation and low taxes on
the wealthy and the corporations .
As I have already mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these problems.
In the last year, the global economy sustained its biggest decline since WWII. By July, the
labour market had lost almost 500 million jobs . In the first nine months of the past year
alone, the losses of earnings amounted to $3.5 trillion. This figure is going up and,
hence, social tension is on the rise." (" Session of Davos Agenda 2021Online Forum,
Putin Addresses World Economic Forum, Jan 27, 2021)
Why is Putin telling his elitist audience these things? Does he think these fatcats don't
know how the system works or how it was originally set up? Does he think they are unaware of
the glaring flaws in a system that shifts all of the profits to obscenely wealthy corporations
and scheming elites while working people slip further into debt and desperation?
Putin knows how globalisation works, just as he knows who it was designed to benefit. It's
no secret. Check out this quote from the Russian president in a speech nearly 5 years ago:
"Back in the late 1980s-early 1990s, there was a chance not just to accelerate the
globalization process but also to give it a different quality and make it more harmonious and
sustainable in nature. But some countries that saw themselves as victors in the Cold War,
not just saw themselves this way but said it openly, took the course of simply reshaping the
global political and economic order to fit their own interests.
In their euphoria, they essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other
actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and
attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organizations,
norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved
selves, for the select few, but not for everyone." (President Vladimir Putin, Meeting of the
Valdai International Discussion Club)
"To the victor belongs the spoils"? Isn't that what Putin is saying, that Washington figured
its Cold War triumph entitled them to create a system whereby they could pillage and loot the
rest of the world with impunity?
Indeed, that is precisely what he's saying. And he knows what he's talking about, too.
Putin has followed developments in global trade for over 20 years. He knows the system is
rigged and he knows who rigged it. And now he's telling them in no uncertain terms that they
are responsible for the mess the world is in today. "The world is in crisis, because you
fu**ed up." That's what he's saying. It's not a subtle message, he's simply laying it on the
line. Check out this blurb from an earlier speech by Putin where he shows that he's not just a
capable leader but also an astute critic of social trends linked to globalization:
"It seems like elites don't see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion
of the middle class (but the situation) creates a climate of uncertainty that has a
direct impact on the public mood. Sociological studies conducted around the world show that
people in different countries and on different continents tend to see the future as murky
and bleak . This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same
time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events
and shaping policy. As for the claim that the fringe and populists have defeated the
sensible, sober and responsible minority – we are not talking about populists or
anything like that but about ordinary people, ordinary citizens who are losing trust in
the ruling class. That is the problem . " (President Vladimir Putin, Meeting of the
Valdai International Discussion Club)
In this one brief comment, Putin shows that he has a better grasp of 'what is going on' in
the west than any of the numbskulls in congress today. And notice how he ignores the hype about
"racial justice", BLM, "white supremacy" and the other "racialized" bunkum that's
propagated in the media today. He's not hoodwinked by that nonsense. He knows it's just
another diversion promoted by the cadres of dirtbags who use race and identity politics to
conceal their role in the ongoing class war. That's what's really going on. The men that
Putin is addressing in his speech are the very same men who are doing everything in their power
to eviscerate democracy, skewer the middle class and grind America's working population into
dust. It's plain old class war dolled-up to look like racial unrest. Here's more from
Putin:
" During the past 20 years we have created a foundation for the so-called Fourth
Industrial Revolution (AKA–"The Great Reset")based on the wide use of AI and
automation and robotics. The coronavirus pandemic has greatly accelerated such projects and
their implementation . However, this process is leading to new structural changes, I am
thinking in particular of the labor market. This means that very many people could lose
their jobs unless the state takes effective measures to prevent this . Most of these
people are from the so-called middle class, which is the basis of any modern society.
. The rise of economic problems and inequality is splitting society, triggering social,
racial and ethnic intolerance . Indicatively, these tensions are bursting out even in the
countries with seemingly civil and democratic institutions that are designed to alleviate and
stop such phenomena and excesses.
The systemic socioeconomic problems are evoking such social discontent that they
require special attention and real solutions. The dangerous illusion that they may be
ignored or pushed into the corner is fraught with serious consequences." ( Putin, WEF)
Putin understands that the Covid-related lockdowns and closing of "non-essential" businesses
is merely prelude for the massive societal restructuring project elites have in store for us.
They've already put millions of people out of work and expanded their surveillance capabilities
in anticipation of the social unrest they are deliberately inciting. Putin thinks this
futuristic strategy is unnecessarily reckless, disruptive and fails to account for intensifying
social animosities and widening political divisions that are bound to have a catastrophic
impact on democratic institutions. But Putin also knows that his appeal for a more cautious
approach will be brushed aside by the billionaire powerbrokers who set the policy and call the
shots. Here's more:
" Society will still be divided politically and socially. This is bound to happen
because people are dissatisfied not by some abstract issues but by real problems that concern
everyone regardless of the political views that people have or think they have. Meanwhile,
real problems evoke discontent. "
This is a recurrent theme with Putin and one that shows that he has a deeper understanding
of what is really happening in both the United States and Europe than any of his peers.
Populist candidates, like Trump, have not gained momentum due to thier abilities and charisma,
but because the financial situation of millions of Americans continues to deteriorate forcing
them to seek remedies outside the establishment candidates. The economic distress is real and
widespread and, as Putin notes, it is expressing itself in outbursts of discontent, frustration
and rage. Here's more:
"So, the key question today is how to build a programme of actions in order to not only
quickly restore the global and national economies affected by the pandemic, but to ensure
that this recovery is sustainable in the long run, relies on a high-quality structure and
helps overcome the burden of social imbalances. Clearly economic growth will largely rely on
fiscal incentives with state budgets and central banks playing the key role.
Actually, we can see these kinds of trends in the developed countries and also in some
developing economies as well. An increasing role of the state in the socioeconomic
sphere at the national level obviously implies greater responsibility and close
interstate interaction when it comes to issues on the global agenda.
Calls for inclusive growth and for creating decent standards of living for everyone
are regularly made at various international forums. This is how it should be, and this is an
absolutely correct view of our joint efforts.
It is clear that the world cannot continue creating an economy that will only benefit a
million people , or even the golden billion. This is a destructive precept. This model is
unbalanced by default. The recent developments, including migration crises, have reaffirmed
this once again." ( Putin, WEF )
Putin's recommendations, of course, are going to be dismissed with a wave of the hand by the
men in power. The last thing these sociopaths want is "inclusive growth.. and decent standards
of living for everyone." That's not even on their list, and why would it be. After all, they
know what they want. "They want more for themselves and less for everyone else." (George
Carlin) Which is why the system works the way it does, because it was constructed with that one
solitary goal in mind.
Putin also acknowledges the need for greater state intervention in the economy to
counterbalance the more destructive effects of "smash and grab" capitalism. And, while he
rejects the swift and far-reaching structural changes (The Great Reset) that would precipitate
massive social upheaval, he does support a larger role for the state in providing essential
fiscal stimulus, employment and a more equitable distribution of the wealth. This does not
imply that Putin supports state socialism. He does not. He merely supports a more regulated and
benign form of Capitalism that veers from the "scorched earth" model backed by powerful members
of the WEF and other elitist organizations.
With that in mind, Putin makes these specific recommendations:
"We must now proceed from stating facts to action, investing our efforts and resources
into reducing social inequalit y in individual countries and into gradually balancing the
economic development standards of different countries and regions in the world. This would
put an end to migration crises."
The focus of this policy aimed at ensuring sustainable and harmonious development
are clear. They imply the creation of new opportunities for everyone, conditions under which
everyone will be able to develop and realize their potential regardless of where they were
born and are living
I would like to point out four key priorities , as I see them.
First, everyone must have comfortable living conditions, including housing and
affordable transport, energy and public utility infrastructure. Plus, environmental
welfare, something that must not be overlooked.
Second, everyone must be sure that they will have a job that can ensure sustainable
growth of income and, hence, decent standards of living. Everyone must have access to an
effective system of lifelong education, which is absolutely indispensable now and which will
allow people to develop, make a career and receive a decent pension and social benefits upon
retirement.
Third, people must be confident that they will receive high-quality and effective
medical care whenever necessary, and that the national healthcare system will guarantee
access to modern medical services.
Fourth, regardless of the family income, children must be able to receive a decent
education and realize their potential. Every child has potential." (Putin, Davos )
What does it mean that the current president of Russia is now throwing his weight behind
a program that is nearly identical to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic Bill of
Rights? Doesn't that seem a bit odd? After all, Putin is a devout Orthodox Christian, a
strong proponent of the traditional family, a self-avowed social conservative, and a
hardscrabble survivor of the failed Soviet state. Who would have thought that such a man
would support a program that provides a decent standard living to every member of society
regardless of their circumstances?
But it makes sense, doesn't it? Putin is pushing for a return to the heavily-regulated
"Heyday" of 20th Century capitalism, when workers' wages were still on the rise, when college
tuition and health care were still affordable, and when the American Dream was still within
reach of the average guy. People were happier then, because they felt that if they applied
themselves, worked like hell, and stashed their savings in the bank; they'd eventually reach
their goal. But that's not true anymore. People are much more pessimistic now and no longer
believe that America is the land of opportunity.
Putin wants to rekindle that optimism. He wants to avoid social unrest by implementing
programs that provide a more equitable distribution of the wealth. This isn't a return to
Communism. It's sensible way to soften the harsher effects of unrestrained capitalism ,
which is presently ravaging the West. Here's Putin again:
"This is the only way to guarantee the cost-effective development of the modern economy,
in which people are perceived as the end, rather than the means . A strategy, also being
implemented by my country, hinges on precisely these approaches. Our priorities revolve
around people, their families, and they aim to ensure demographic development, to protect the
people, to improve their well-being and to protect their health. We are now working to
create favourable conditions for worthy and cost-effective work and successful
entrepreneurship and to ensure digital transformation as the foundation of a high-tech future
for the entire country, rather than that of a narrow group of companies.
We intend to focus the efforts of the state, the business community and civil society on
these tasks and to implement a budgetary policy with the relevant incentives in the years
ahead ." ( Putin,
Davos )
Imagine a political leader who actually put the needs and well-being of his people before
the special interests of his deep-pocket donors and shady corporate buddies. Imagine a leader
who stood eye-to-eye with the big money guys and told them that their system "sucked" and that
they were taking too much for themselves leaving nothing for anyone else. Imagine a leader who
invited more criticism, hectoring, demonizing and punitive sanctions for "speaking truth to
power" in order to stand on the side of ordinary working people, pensioners, cast-offs and the
other victims of this globalist rip-off system.
The reason Putin spoke out at the WEF confab and put himself at risk, was because Putin is
one of the "good guys" who actually believes that everyone deserves a shot at a decent life.
And that's what sets Putin apart from the other leaders in the world today. He doesn't just
"talk the talk", he also "walks the walk."
IF the above comment by BHObama is really him he is arguing that we should hold the course
of American exceptionalism and dominance. I personally, after 70 years of hearing how "we
should tell the world that only we matter" and expect them to ignore their own needs and
aspirations is why China (in particular) is on the rise and the 'myth of America' is
crashing. The recent rebellion among people sick of the way things are heading (typified by
the so-called tRUMP diversion) should serve as a wake up call that something is horribly
wrong.
It wasn't tRUMP that was the problem nor was his idiocy a solution. It is the results of
years of flagrant propaganda that created a nation that considers itself exceptional. We are
exceptionally selfish and war like.
Had the US corporate/banking/Wall Street NOT MADE the egregious mistake with millions of
jobs "offshored"
It was not a mistake. It was done consciously by design by the NWO ELITE CABAL, knowing
the Consequences is going to bring to the 99.9%. The Transnational Globalist Elites do not
have allegiance to a country any more. All they care about is more profit and power.
After reading Putin's statements and Whitney's commentaries, I am further convinced that
whenever some individual or organization constantly and consistently badmouths Putin and
Russia ; these messages come from the enemies of humanity.
It depends on what is meant by globalisation. Globalisation of trade is not necessarily a
bad thing. The problem is that "trade" is not the operative word of the elites, "loot"
is.
That thing doesn't exist. Every complex society in history has eventually collapsed and had
to be regrown from a new basis. Trying to "design a system" is self-defeating. I guess one
could rig governmental buildings with self destruct charges and sarin gas containers controlled
by random nuclear decay to keep the monster in check and to shed useless load from time to
time. "Schrödinger's Office Warmers". I'm going to patent that.
There is too much of a focus on "isms". Right policy is right policy no matter the system.
But the ghosts of Cecil Rhodes still exist. There is a certain group that believes it is their
divine right to rule over all others. There are some who dont belong to their group but will
agree with them as long as they can reap crumbs. Hence the struggles in the world. God alone
will eventually "fix" the problems of man. Until then it is a constant squabble.
The premise that Putin is not the dangerous evil that the US Military Industrial Complex
makes him out to be, is certainly valid. He is trying to carve out a profitable role for Russia
in the future, that depends on participation in Western economies. Germany is on board with
that, but not the USA.
But, like claiming Trump is a populist, there is a certain naivety in suggesting Putin is an
advocate for the common man. I agree with all his words, which fall on deaf ears in the West,
but like Trump, Putin takes care of himself first. Trump sought to destroy universal health
care and was able to pass another tax cut for the rich, designed by the Aynn Rand nutcase Paul
Ryan.
Still it should be recognized that when Clinton and Larry Summers bamboozled Russia into
reorganizing their society into a dozen Oligarchs, the average Russian suffered greatly, which
ultimately led to Yeltsin resigning in tears and handing the reins of Government over to Putin.
Under Putin the average Russian income doubled.
Meanwhile, the USA is doing its best to reignite the cold war. Given our engineered reliance
on Chinese goods today, this doesn't make a lot of sense. These Putin speeches make a lot of
sense yet contradict the current economic structure of Russia and China today, not just the
West.
For those of us in the West taxing the rich is a partial solution to designing a sustainable
economy, which promotes the general welfare, as declared in our constitution. This is an issue
which only Sanders, Warren and a fresh delegation of progressive representatives support today.
They are still a minority.
""To the victor belongs the spoils"? Isn't that what Putin is saying, that Washington
figured its Cold War triumph entitled them to create a system whereby they could pillage and
loot the rest of the world with impunity?"
Putin is an Orthodox Christian and I greatly admire that.
He is also pro family, pro traditional values and a social conservative.
But some people might think that his conservative leanings make him more "free market" than
he really is.
Putin does not worship the market or the people who are able to exploit the system to
their own advantage. Remember, in order to put Russia back on the right track, Putin had to
reign in the oligarchs who had split up the country's wealth under Yeltsin leaving the economy
in dire straits.
This is the lesson that Putin has for us all: If you can't reign in the Bill Gates,
George Soros and other cutthroat oligarchs who want to own and control everything, than you are
not going to have a free and prosperous society .
I was hoping that Trump would meet Putin so Putin could give him so pointers on this issue.
But now the oligarchs have their puppet in the White House so we're screwed.
I've been admiring Putin for several years now. However I can't get one particular thought
out of my head. And it goes to Trump too. Why did he give his credence to Covid19? Why hasn't
he, or any major leader, stood up to the 'science' and rebuked the world wide reaction to this
obvious psy-op? I'm not saying there isn't a set of symptoms (and that's the CDC definition)
that define Covid19. What I'm saying is what any one with a thinking brain is pondering: Why is
everyone wearing a useless mask, closing their pub, standing on a specific X when in line,
bumping elbows, and acting like a certain type of cattle? Why is MSM dedicating 50 minutes of
every hour to a set of symptoms we have all lived with our entire life? I'll answer my own
question. Remember 911 and the news coverage then? If you don't let me remind you. It was 24/7
Osama Bin Laden, Iraq Iraq Iraq, Muslim bad, weapons of mass destruction. Over and over again.
And today we are living with the consequences of our silent acquiescence. And if you don't know
what the consequences were you haven't been on an airplane. There's a reason the media reports
the way they do. It's not really reporting, it's a particular method, a method of
indoctrination, previously known as brainwashing. Ala Edward Bernays.
We have been criminally assaulted by Big Tech, the MMSM, and corrupt politicians, and there
should be consequences.
It was NOT a mistake. Just ask Romney or Paul Ryan or any "American" CEO. The people behind
the offshoring knew exactly what would happen. How could they not? They didn't care as long as
they made personal fortunes out of it.
Go back to the London Conference 1953 and see how The West rigged export surpluses in West
Germany's favour together with 66.2% Debt Reduction and limits on repayments to permit export
surpluses.
This deal alone guaranteed Trade Deficits in UK and USA and a violation of IMF and GATT
rules on persistent trade surpluses. Look how Germany had an undervalued D-mark made
convertible in 1957 and not until 1972 did USA try to reverse it with a Forced Revaluation of
D-Mark. That is when the Werner Plan put the EEC on course for a Single Currency. – which
1991 Germany locked in at an undervalued rate against D-Mark thus gaining persistent surpluses
when Unification should have meant trade deficits.
Distortions of World Trade to serve Western geopolitical interests led directly to higher
inflation in USA and UK which required OPEC to recycle surpluses through Western Banks into
Second World economies. The distortions are what skewed global trade and currency crises for 50
years.
Globalisation was simply a means of exploiting cheap labour and welfare standards to
FINANCIALISE the economic system and facilitate Unbalanced Budgets in The West consistently and
on an upward trend.
China has simply exploited The West and accessed technology and manufacturing capacity to
render The West a non-industrial society of paper-shufflers and transaction-traders wholly
dependent on China for physical goods
@the
grand wazoo more of the same? Bomb Syria. Check. More troops to Syrian and Afghanistan.
Check. More sanctions on Russia. Check.
In Syria, they are stealing 140,000 barrels-day. That is a Trump legacy. But Bidet is
doubling down. They now have 11 bases in Iraqi Kurdistan-North Syria province. They seem to
want to create a de facto country in North Syria.
They are also focusing on Thailand and Myanmar. This is fundamentally 'If we can't have it,
we destroy it.' And a f#ck you to China.
I expect that under Bidet we are going to see Israel dictate American Foreign policy to the
point where the U.S. is no more than a Thug. BiBi the Clown faces another election. I wonder
how that will play out?
@GMC
is why they stepped in to help Syria. Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa
– the real reason it was invaded is because Gaddafi had been influencing African leaders
to switch Africa to a gold standard and to price all African commodities in a new African
currency. That would have pushed out France and the US economic influence over Africa. So for
that he had to die – and now Libya is among the worst places in Africa. But France reaped
what it sowed. Refugees on top of refugees using Libya as their spring board.
Europeans should thank Putin because the refugee problem could be even worse from Syria
right now. But they have themselves to blame anyway.
Christianity is actually more humane than leftist secular humanism or any of its
ideological offsprings.
Did anyone compare number of victims during Christian forced conversions, inquisition and
compare it to victims of other ideologically inspired terror and atrocities?
Orthodox dogma is VERY VERY different from Vatican or Protestants that is much closer to
Plato's time when God and Mother Nature were synonymous.
@Franz
investment in clandestine media control in Russia (Max Blumenthal article), sanctions, Syria,
the neocons are circling Russia and getting ready to strike and Putin is going to this Davos
dufus derby talking about stagnant US wages. There's a deafening lack of focus here.
The whole point with Russia, in case some might have missed it, is that the Empire sees the
need to control Russia as an existential priority. Not just to eliminate it as a threat but
because they know that if China has free access to Russia's natural resources, the Empire is
finished.
It's for this reason that I think that if Putin doesn't see this, he's ceded the field
already.
@Anonymous
derstands this now, but Russia is still stuck at the reaction part of the
problem-reaction-solution cycle. They are being bombarded with problems and can't catch a
break. I see some attempts by the Russian government to form some sort of a political line and
seek real political allies but it looks like they are being blocked by Germany and the
Russian oligarchs. We shall see.
Mike Whitney is reading way too much into Putin's Davos speech, it's simple politics –
praise globalization some to make Xi happy, poo-poo it some to appeal to the average Westerner,
add happy talk about fairness, stir, not shake and serve cold – there's nothing more to
it.
For all these many years now Putin has been relentlessly demonized as a thug, dictator,
threat, you name it. Many Americans have bought into these images under the influence of the
American propaganda machine. One can see the reason for this campaign when one looks at what he
actually says. Americans might get some idea that a president should be looking out for their
interests and that would be bad. Putin can give speeches, field questions, give his personal
analysis on different subjects whilst standing on his feet. Compare him to the current addled
mental midget we have and note the vast difference.
@chris
oy the USA. In an ideal world, the US Deep State would like the USA Empire to have an exclusive
monopoly on nuclear weapons while preventing other geopolitical rivals from acquiring nuclear
weapons. That is exactly what happened at the end of WWII when Truman decided to drop two
atomic bombs on Japan to intimidate Stalin who frantically embarked on a nuclear weapons
program.
What the Yanks wants to do is to 'defang' the Russian bear so they no longer have to fear
Russian nukes, without which Russia would no longer pose an 'existential threat' to the USA.
The Yanks could then do anything, such as bomb any country they want and pretty much rule the
world, FOREVER.
{" What shocked me then about Trump, and now about Putin is that they don't seem to get
it, this isn't some kind of friendly game of Cricket or something, their opponents don't just
want to beat them they want to destroy them "}
Don't be fooled by Putin & Co speeches to the West.
Don't be fooled either by them using terms like "our partners" and such.
Russian leadership got a rude awaking after Yeltsin: Putin is quite aware of what
GloboSorosaNATO is trying to do. He is a former KGB officer posted to East Germany and knows
quite a lot about West/NATO mindset.
@Flying
Dutchman han to its own? And particularly a people that suffers from the mania of
objectivity as much as the Germans. For, after all this, everyone will take the greatest pains
to avoid doing the enemy any injustice, even at the peril of seriously besmirching and even
destroying his own people and country.
Now it is entirely unlikely that a KGB agent cum President of Russia is ignorant of matters
relating to propaganda.
Isn't it perfectly understandable that the whole country ends up by lending more credence to
enemy propaganda, which is more unified and coherent, than to its own?
...I concede that here's plenty of US racism expressed by wars of aggression against
countries outside the USA but that's supported by all races within the USA and both main
parties. In foreign policy, there's only one War Party, dedicated to ruling the world, in the
most aggressive country on earth. That's nothing like the reality within the USA. Yanks don't
want to treat other Yanks like they treat disobedient foreigners and they certainly don't want
to copy Israeli Jews. [email protected]
Absolutely agree.
Russia lacks solid, political structures-from a written constitution and time honored customs
and conventions-and Putin knows this. I thought his reforms were meant to address this
area?
Russia needs some more time, some more babies and good men at the helm. We can hope.
@antibeast
ct and practical causes than the more theoretical nuclear threats it poses.
Owning the significant Russian natural resources would make the US bullying of China,
Europe, the Middle Eastern vassals all the more effective. Yeah, the official story might be
nukes but the vastly more significant pay-off is the control of all the other actors. The proof
is the fact that the neocons are absolutely in a frenzy about destroying Russia, and yet
nuclear stuff never even comes up.
And if you wanted to neutralize a threat, you don't make a frontal attack on it, you would
be better served to befriend the country and create better ties than to try to overtly destroy
them.
I ordered this book when Paul Craig Roberts mentioned, and quoted from it, on February 14,
2021. I especially liked PCRs quote halfway through the essay:
The United States isn't a nation any longer . It is a collection of peoples
without a country. A nation requires a unifying spirit of the people, and the United States
has no such unifying spirit. Martyanov observes that there is nothing in common between
a white WASP farm worker from Iowa, a Jewish lawyer from Manhattan, and a black rapper from
the Bronx. They view the world, America and their place in it differently, and those
visions are irreconcilable.
This has been obvious to some of us for decades. Worse yet, there is no mechanism or
movement anyone can imagine that will keep the disintegration process in check. If anything,
the elites are finding new and exciting ways to divide Americans further, and nobody is
happier about it than the social media addicts who enjoy bigger and better rotten egg memes
they can toss at the enemy de jour.
This is interesting too:
Not only is America's crisis systemic, but its elites are uncultured , badly educated
and mesmerized by decades of their own propaganda, which in the end, they accept as a
reality
I do hope the author means "uncultured" in the pejorative, insulting, Russian sense of the
word. They are the "elites" who are revolting, and they are too dumb to know they are kicking
the floorboards out from under their feet.
"People of the United States, your ruling elites are lying to you just like the chamber
orchestra on the Titanic that was playing music while the supposedly "unsinkable" Titanic
was sinking!".
The difference is, the actual American ship was just fine and hadn't hit an iceberg.
Rather, we were being deliberately sunk by a bunch of loons who were punching holes in the
hull of the ship!
But don't go thinking the whole shebang is about to go under. This has been the dream of
preppers on the right, and various anti-American groups on the other side, for generations.
The Big Collapse, in which the whole North American continent, with all its power and wealth,
just vanishes, is a pipe dream.
The most immediate causes of US collapse are, in my opinion, the rise of the predator,
parasite, class to a position of total dominance while the proles have sunk into the shite,
and the rise of China...
At 78, after a prolonged illness and without recovering consciousness, Joe Biden succumbed
to the Presidency. The last hopes of the last QAnon believers vanished like smoke in the night,
with Biden assuming the mighty US throne. This is truly a dark day for America and for the
world, as the US example will be followed by many. It is also a farewell to the real world we
were brought up in. The new world is virtual, like most of the inauguration. It is virtual and
dark, ruled by digital companies fronted by old and tired politicians.
The creepy voice of Biden, the voice of a dirty old man offering sweets to a nine-year-old,
delivered some platitudes.
... ... ...
The Biden regime is just a front for the power of Big Data, of the five giants that removed
Trump and installed Biden in the White House. We shall see soon whether the power-thirsty
politicians will be satisfied with fronting for real power...
Whenever Trump complained that it is open to fraud, Bezos' Washington Post screeched,
'President Trump has peddled false claims or imaginary threats about voting by mail'. Three
days after Trump's removal, Amazon (owned by the very same Bezos) rejected mail-in voting for its
unionising employees as the mail-in vote is notoriously unreliable. "We believe that the best
approach to a valid, fair and successful election is one that is conducted manually, in-person,
making it easy to verify",
said Amazon. The mail-in vote for the Presidency was a must because of the pandemic, but
there is no outbreak when Amazon employees try to join a trade union.
Likewise, the looting of BLM was 'largely peaceful', but selfie snapping in the Capitol was
a work of 'internal terrorists'. The victors are so dishonest, that I feel pity for Trump
– and for all of us.
Freezing Texas should commission a monument: Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates save the Texans
from global warming by turning them into icicles. So much for global warming, the reddest
herring ever caught in the Gulf of Mexico!
Even the direction of the climate drift is not certain. The Warmers (like Greta) say our
planet is warming up because of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by mankind. Many experts say the
planet is actually enters the new Ice Age due to diminished solar activity ( here ),
connecting it to Maunder Minimum or Gleissberg Minimum.
In Israel, a popular
expert Chaim Noll says the real problem is desertification, while CO2 is good for plants
and prevents semi-arid areas turning into desert. Still others say the changes are perfectly
normal; we have been through such changes before.
LINK BOOKMARK We really do
not know for sure what's going on and whether we can or should do anything about it. And now,
at the time of the great freeze, Bill Gates has temerity to publish his Warmer's Manifesto,
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates.
The book was heavily promoted, and got fawning reviews, though it is as silly as any of
these books. Gates wants us to stop travelling (unless you can afford a private jet, of
the kind Gates has invested in), stop
eating meat (worms should be good enough for the hoi polloi, or synthetic meat produced by
the same Gates, for cows fart, and farting is warming the planet). Knowing his and his ilk's
ability to mobilise the media, I wouldn't be amazed if he succeeds in convincing the West. And
any disaster in meat-producing Texas would be grist to Gates' mill.
Besides being silly, this guy knows too much! In 2015, Gates gave a "prescient warning about
the threat of a pandemic", says a
reviewer . To what extent was it "prescient" if in the same 2015, Gates patented a coronavirus quite similar to
the one that attacked mankind in 2020? Perhaps he is prescient "for the same reason that
arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires", as Ron
Unz remarked .
Bill Gates never went to college, so I doubt he knows the carbon cycle. He thinks he can
talk nonsense because he is rich, and the nonsense will then make sense.
There is no global warming, but global cooling, as there was snow even in Israel:
"... Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again. ..."
Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to
determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and
prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again.
With hand on book– I solemnly do swear to continue Neo Liberalism, to enrich my family, and the off shore banks accounts of
those who surround me.
A-Men "I think the Chinese put Biden in power, or was it the Russians, or perhaps North Korea, maybe Iran, Syria maybe. Kuala
Lumpur perhaps "or a YouTube video that looks like
Freezing Texas should commission a monument: Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates save the Texans
from global warming by turning them into icicles. So much for global warming, the reddest
herring ever caught in the Gulf of Mexico!
The Texans have got the real New Green Deal, very expensive and uncertain. The deal is
"Freeze and pay through your nose!" The green alternative pure cheap and plentiful energy is
the stuff the dreams of AOC are made of. It is not likely to work out. Wind and sea are
wonderful but hardly a reliable source of energy for heating in sub-zero temperatures.
A classic villain of 1970s and 80s was the evil tycoon. James Bond took on some of them.
Meet Hugo Drax of the Moonraker , or Karl Stromberg of The Spy Who Loved Me ;
these guys were willing to destroy mankind to replace it with a better version. Stromberg
planned to trigger a global nuclear war and survive it underwater. Drax intended to poison
mankind with his deadly gas and repopulate the world with his new chosen ones. Another one was
de Wynter, the super-villain of The Avengers, played by Sean Connery. He controlled the world
weather, and could kill us all off by hurricanes and tsunamis.
Before the tycoons, when the Cold war raged, a villain was a KGB agent or a Chinese
operative. As détente calmed relations between the blocks, the agents went out of
fashion; later, the fantastic villains of Marvel came into a vogue. The evil tycoons were
uncomfortably close to the real thing; and they moved from the cinematic world into our
reality.
The world we live in is the world formed by evil tycoons. They are the modern Demiurges, the
evil creators of the Gnostics, an early sect that confronted the Church. Like the Demiurges,
they are practically omnipotent; stronger than the State. The government needs lot of
permissions and authorisations to spend a penny. If a penny had been misspent, the dark word
'corruption' will sound. 'Corruption' is a silly concept; by applying it, the oligarchs
eliminated state competition, for they can pay whatever they want to whomever they wish. The
State must observe intricate arcane rules, while the tycoons have no such limits. As a result,
they shape our minds and lives, making the State a poor legitimate king among powerful and
wealthy barons.
The Corona crisis is a result of their activity. Now, a group of WHO scientists completed
its four weeks inspection tour of Wuhan trying to find out how the virus found its way to
humans; some of them think (as President Trump did) the virus escaped the Wuhan Lab. Matt
Ridley of The Daily Telegraph concluded
his piece analysing their findings: "A growing number of top experts [he provides the list] say
that a lab leak remains a plausible scientific hypothesis to be investigated". It is rather
unlikely, said the WHO , but other
explanations (pangolins etc) also
border on the improbable . The Chinese are understandably upset. Hua Chunying, the
spokeswoman for the Foreign Affairs ministry (the Chinese counterpart for the State
Department's Ned Price)
rejected the idea saying, "The United States should open the biological lab at Fort
Detrick, and invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States". The Guardian
report said she promoted "a conspiracy theory that it came from a US army lab"; while Ms Hua
accused the US of spreading "conspiracy theories and lies" tracing the source to Wuhan.
Whatever we say is a fact-based result of diligent research; whatever you say is a conspiracy
theory – both the US and China representatives subscribe to this mantra.
Our own Ron Unz made an excellent analysis of these accusations and counter-accusations in
his April 2020 piece
. He noted that the virus attack in Wuhan took place at the worst possible time and place for
the Chinese; therefore, an incidental release (or intentional release by the Chinese) is
extremely unlikely. Ron Unz suggested that it was an American biowarfare attack upon China.
Didn't American people suffer from the disease? Yes, the US government is "grotesquely and
manifestly incompetent " and they were likely to expect "a massive coronavirus outbreak
in China would never spread back to America".
Perhaps, but a better explanation is that some evil tycoon(s) played the part of Karl
Stromberg who intended to nuke both Moscow and New York causing war and world-wide devastation,
as in the James Bond movie. It could be somebody like Bill Gates, who is a major investor in
Wuhan Lab. A fact-checking site with its
weasel language admitted that the Lab "has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, but Bill Gates can hardly be called a "partner" in the laboratory." Sure, not a
partner. Just an investor, and that is more important than a partner. And he is not the only
one; other multi-billionaires also are involved in bioresearch, in vaccine manufacturing, in
Big Pharma. "Glaxo, BlackRock, and Bill Gates are all partners, but not owners of Pfizer", says
another
fact-checker . "In 2015, Anthony Fauci did issue a USD 3.7 million grant to the Wuhan
Institute of Virology, but not to "create the coronavirus" – the
fact-checking site adds. Well, you could not possibly expect Fauci to word the grant in
such a straightforward way, could you?
Perhaps it is too formidable a job even for an evil tycoon like Gates. A plot of several
evil tycoons is more likely. Together, they could try to change the world and mankind to suit
them.
The evil tycoons could poison China on their New Year holiday and take this uppity state
down a ring or two. They could import the virus into the US to undermine and remove Trump whom
they hated. (He was certain to win the elections but for Corona.) They could poison Europe to
weaken it and make it more docile and obedient to their demands – and to buy their assets
on the cheap. Corona and lockdown did not harm them for they are normally withdrawn from the
bustle of the common man's life.
The billionaires control the media; that much we know, and the part media has played in the
Corona crisis was enormous. The media coverage of the crisis has a huge hidden cost. Try to
publish information you consider important on the front page of a newspaper. It will cost you a
lot. Still, all newspapers belonging to the Billionaires' Media block beginning with the New
York Times and ending with Haaretz gave at least a third of its front page to Corona news each
day. The sheer cost of this advertising runs into billions. Will we ever know who paid for
it?
Steven Soderbergh's (2011) film Contagion predicted many features of the Covid-19, notably
the origin of the virus. In the film, the disease originates from bats in China and is spread
through markets where contaminated pork meat is sold. How could Soderbergh (or his script
writer Scott Z. Burns) possibly know eight years before the event that the contagion should
originate in the Chinese bats? Who told him? Wouldn't you expect he knew something? Burns was
instructed by WHO experts, the CNN
site explains. Isn't it interesting that the same Bill Gates is a major donor of WHO? Is it
entirely impossible that already in 2011 Gates' people began to leak some details of the future
virus through their own WHO to Hollywood?
The tycoons could force a weak state to follow their instructions. Scientists do obey
orders: otherwise, no grants, no positions. In April 2020, the German
scientists were ordered , "to instill the fear of Corona". And they did it, as we learned
this week, producing numbers of dead on demand.
It seems that tycoons gained most from the Corona Crisis. Their assets grew by trillions,
while the assets of the middle classes decreased by the same amount. More importantly, all
states suffered from the crisis; they took loans and credit, they were responsible for their
citizens' health, while billionaires just had fun and enjoyed it. For this reason, I tend to
dismiss the case against states, be it the US or China, while (some) billionaires appear the
only possible villains.
These billionaires are able to influence people much better that the state. Consider Pierre
Omidyar. Besides being the owner of eBay, he is the force behind hundreds of NGOs. His
organisations form the 'progressive' agenda and train the foot soldiers of the Green Deal.
Roslyn
Fuller of Spiked-online checked the plethora of NGOs he employs.
She says his NGOs and charities are "engaged in 'social engineering' – that is, using
their resources to artificially change the structure of society to how they think it should be.
If successful this would amount to an extreme circumvention of democracy, utilising money not
just to win elections, but to substitute paid or subsidised content for actual support, and
thereby flip an entire political culture on to a different track by amplifying some voices and
drowning out others."
He is just one of the Masters of Discourse, next to the infamous George Soros. Facebook,
Google, Twitter and Amazon are even more powerful. The billionaires have immense clout and they
decide what we can and can't say and write. Just last week Amazon banned my Cabbala of
Power , a book that was sold by them for some ten years. The estimable The Unz
Review is banned on Facebook and shadow-banned on Google. Twitter switched-off President
Trump, showing who is the real boss of the United States. Probably almost all movements
described as 'leftists' nowadays are engineered by the tycoons like Omidyar or Soros. True left
had been left for dead on the battlefield of ideas.
The tycoons are directly involved in the Corona Crisis, because its results are good for
them. And it means they have us where they want to have us, and they won't let us out. We are
cancelled until we regain the government and cancel them.
SAGE, as British Corona management team rather presumptuously named itself (it included the
ridiculous figure of Neil Ferguson, he of the millions of predicted deaths), already declared that
lockdowns will be a part of British life for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. The
Guardian , the Voice of the Oligarchs, gently pooh-poohed them, for it is not good to
declare what must happen right away. Let people have some hope, so they run to vaccinate
themselves, and then only afterwards can we reveal that, sorry, it does not help, you still
have to don a mask and observe social distance and, yes, suffer lockdowns. "It's much easier to
follow the rules if we think of them as temporary."
The plotters' plans aren't secret; they were described by Klaus Schwab in his book
The Great Reset .
Schwab is not a great thinker, being merely a weak scientist with just a few publications, and
not a good or even decent writer. He had to collaborate with a journalist Thierry Malleret to
produce the book. He is just a voice for the tycoons. But the question is, will he/they get
what they want?
In an age where voting is a joke I am going to advertise that my vote is for sale. I mean it
amounts to the same thing when politicians promise free money.
REDinFL 2 minutes ago
Sorry, too late. Votes have no market value now that they can be manufactured.
"... $1.9 Trillions comes out to about $6000 per person. But a family of four gets $1400. Where is the other $22,600? Check Chuck and Nancy's pockets. ..."
"... Joe Biden is just a puppet, so let this old guy alone, his last years of life as POTUS are a gift for his marvelous (*sarcasm) political career of almost half a century, where he accomplished almost nothing, but some corrupted money grabs, together with his junkie-son ..."
Joe Biden is just a puppet, so let this old guy alone, his last years of life as POTUS are a
gift for his marvelous (*sarcasm) political career of almost half a century, where he
accomplished almost nothing, but some corrupted money grabs, together with his junkie-son 9.5
inch-Hunter.
Those behind him are the true leaders and they will instruct and push him hard to do what is
needed and help with both hands (and legs and teleprompters and earpieces) so that creepy Joe
goes the "right way" as they want him to go.
They already made him president, while hiding in his basement, so they know how it
works.
All this is just a big hoax, a farce and laughable if it weren't tragic for the American
people.
Four people were arrested in
Texas
last
month on 150 counts of voter fraud dating back to the 2018 Medina County Primary Election,
according to reports.
The Texas attorney general's Election Fraud Unit on Feb. 11 arrested Medina County Justice of the Peace Tomas Ramirez, and
earlier detained Leonor Rivas Garza, Eva Ann Martinez and Mary Balderrama on election fraud allegations, News4SA reported.
According to a
release
from
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office,
the case involved allegations of vote
harvesting at assisted living centers in Medina County in the 2018 Medina County Primary Election.
Ramirez faces one count of organized election fraud, one count of assisting voter voting ballot by mail, and 17 counts of
unlawful possession of a ballot or ballot envelope, according to the news outlet.
Balderrama is charged with one count of organized election fraud, nine counts of illegal voting, two counts of unlawful
possession of ballot or ballot envelope, one count of mail ballot application, two counts of unlawfully assisting voter
voting by mail, two counts of tampering with government record, and eight counts of election fraud.
Garza faces a single count of organized election fraud, two counts of illegal voting, eight counts of unlawful possession
of a ballot or ballot envelope, two counts of election fraud and four counts of fraudulent use of an absentee ballot by
mail.
Martinez is charged with a single count of organized election fraud, nine counts of illegal voting, 28 counts of unlawful
possession of ballot or ballot envelope, three counts of purportedly acting as an agent, five counts of tampering with
government record, 14 counts of election fraud, and four counts of fraudulent mail ballot application,
according
to News4SA
.
The Texas attorney general's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.
In a separate incident, Raquel Rodriguez, a Texas woman who bragged about being able
to deliver thousands of votes for tens of thousands in cash was arrested in January on charges including election fraud and
illegal voting.
Rodriguez
was
filmed
during an undercover project by Project Veritas,
an investigative journalism nonprofit. She was
recorded in footage released last year that she could deliver "at least 5,000" votes "county-wide" for $55,000 in cash and
that it would hire her "entire team." She acknowledged what she was discussing could land her prison time.
Based on the footage, Paxton, a Republican, opened an investigation. That probe led to the arrest, Paxton announced on Jan.
13.
Rodriguez faces a prison sentence of up to 20 years if convicted.
The
high courts claimed that Trumps cases had no validity. But yet they refuse to see things like this.
Corruption...corruption..corruption in the high courts.
BarneyFife714
7 minutes ago
Can't we just all agree please that voting our way out of tyranny is a pipe dream now?
KekistanisUnite
10 minutes ago
Alright how about some arrests in AZ, GA, MI, NV, PA, WI?
It is impossible to define neoliberalism purely theoretically, for several reasons. First,
methodologically, although neoliberal experiences share important commonalities (explained in
what follows), neoliberalism is not a mode of production. Consequently, these experiences do
not necessarily include a clearly defined set of invariant features, as may be expected in
studies of 'feudalism" or 'capitalism", for example. Neoliberalism straddles a wide range of
social, political and economic phenomena at different levels of complexity. Some of these are
highly abstract, for example the growing power of finance or the debasement of democracy, while
others are relatively concrete, such as privatisation or the relationship between foreign
states and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Nevertheless, it is not difficult to
recognise the beast when it trespasses into new territories, tramples upon the poor, undermines
rights and entitlements, and defeats resistance, through a combination of domestic political,
economic, legal, ideological and media pressures, backed up by international blackmail and
military force if necessary.
Second, as is argued in Chapters 7 and 9., neoliberalism is inseparable from imperialism and
globalisation. In the conventional (or mainstream) discourse, imperialism is either absent or,
more recently, proudly presented as the 'American Burden': to civilise the world and bring to
all the benediction of the Holy Trinity, the green-faced Lord Dollar and its deputies and
occasional rivals, Holy Euro and Saint Yen. New' converts win a refurbished international
airport, one brand-new branch of McDonald's, two luxury hotels, 3,000 NGOs and one US military
base. This offer cannot be refused - or else.- In turn, globalisation is generally presented as
an inescapable, inexorable and benevolent process leading to greater competition, welfare
improvements and the spread of democracy around the world. In reality, however, the so-called
process of globalisation - to the extent that it actually exists (see Saad-Filho 2003) - is
merely the international face of neoliberalism: a worldwide strategy of accumulation and social
discipline that doubles up as an imperialist project, spearheaded by the alliance between the
US ruling class and locally dominant capitalist coalitions. This ambitious power project
centred on neoliberalism at home and imperial globalism abroad is implemented by diverse social
and economic political alliances in each country, but the interests of local finance and the US
ruling class, itself dominated by finance, are normally hegemonic.
Third, historical analysis of neoliberalism requires a multi-level approach. The roots of
neoliberalism are long and varied, and its emergence cannot be dated precisely. As Chapters
я to 6 show, neoliberalism amalgamates insights from a range of sources, including Adam
Smith, neoclassical economics, the Austrian critique of Keynesianism and Soviet-style
socialism, monetarism and its new classical and 'supply-side' offspring. Their influence
increased by leaps and bounds with the breakdown of the postwar order: the end of the 'golden
age' of rapid worldwide growth in the late 1960s, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in
the early 1970s, the erosion of the so-called 'Keynesian compromise' in the rich countries in
the mid 1970s, the meltdown of the Soviet bloc in the 1980s and the implosion of developmental
alternatives in the poor countries, especially after balance of payments crises in the 1980s
and 1990s. Chapters 1 and 2 show that the collapse of the alternatives provided space for the
synthesis between conservative view's and the interests of the US elite and their minions. The
cauldron was provided by the aggressive populist conservatism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher, and the broth was tendered by finance - that had become hegemonic worldwide after the
'coup- led by the chairman of the US Federal Reserve System, Paul Volcker, in 1979.3 By
persuasion and by force, neoliberalism spread everywhere.
It is, however, important to avoid excessively linear accounts of the rise of neoliberalism.
For example, in the United Kingdom, key elements of Thatcher's monetarist economic platform had
been imposed by the previous Labour government; she only expanded them and gave them a
compelling rationale. There was also an irresolvable tension between the puritanical claims
made by milk-snatching Thatcher, Reagan's ventriloquists, and the intellectual harlots peddling
their wares around the US Imperial Court, and the political practice of these neoliberal
administrations. For example, Reagan's 'voodoo economics' (in the words of his deputy, George
Bush pere) would have been unacceptable to the guardians of the scriptures. History shows that
it is easier to impose pristine economic and political models in the dominions, because at home
the strength of conflicting interests and the messy realities of limited power do not allow
history to start anew on demand. This is best illustrated in Chapter 14's discussion of the
asymmetric application of agrarian liberalism. It is relatively easy to parachute well-paid
advisers into distant and unimportant countries, where Lord Dollar can easily bend the natives'
will. This purifying ritual will make them almost civilised. However, should the ignorant
masses and their brutal leaders reject dollar diplomacy and be reluctant to play by the (new)
rules, weapons of mass destruction are available and they can be deployed increasingly
effectively from great distances.
Although every country is different, and historical analysis can reveal remarkably rich
details, the overall picture is clear. Tire most basic feature of neoliberalism is the
systematic use of state power to impose (financial) market imperatives, in a domestic process
that is replicated internationally by 'globalisation'. As Chapters 22. 23 and 30 argue in the
cases of the United States, the United Kingdom and east and south-east Asia respectively,
neoliberalism is a particular organisation of capitalism, which has evolved to protect
capital(ism) and to reduce the power of labour. This is achieved by means of social, economic
and political transformations imposed by internal forces as well as external pressure. The
internal forces include the coalition between financial interests, leading industrialists,
traders and exporters, media barons, big landowners, local political chieftains, the top
echelons of the civil service and the military, and their intellectual and political proxies.
These groups are closely connected with 'global' ideologies emanating from the centre, and they
tend to adapt swiftly to the demands beamed from the metropolis.
Their efforts have led to a significant worldwide shift in power relations away from the
majority. Corporate power has increased, wiiile finance has acquired unrivalled influence, and
the political spectrum has shifted towards the right. Left parties and mass organisations have
imploded, while trade unions have been muzzled or disabled by unemployment. Forms of external
pressure have included the diffusion of Western culture and ideology, foreign support for state
and civil society institutions peddling neoliberal values, the shameless use of foreign aid,
debt relief and balance of payments support to promote the neoliberal programme, and diplomatic
pressure, political unrest and military intervention when necessary. For example, Chapter 24
shows how' the ruling economic and political forces in the European Union have instrumentalised
the process of integration to ensure the hegemony of neoliberalism. This account is
complemented by Chapter 2n's analysis of the segmentation of Eastern Europe into countries that
are being drawn into a Western European-stvle neoliberalism and others that are following
Russia's business oligarchy model. In sum, neoliberalism is everywhere both the outcome and the
arena of social conflicts. It sets the political and economic agenda, limits the possible
outcomes, biases expectations, and imposes urgent tasks on those challenging its assumptions,
methods and consequences.
In the meantime, neoliberal theory has not remained static. In order to deal with the most
powerful criticisms levelled against neoliberalism, that it has increased poverty and social
dislocation around the world, neoliberal theory has attempted to present the ogre in a more
favourable light. I11 spite of the substantial resources invested in this ideologically
inspired make-over, these amendments have remained unconvincing, not least because the heart of
the neoliberal project has remained unchanged. This is discussed in Chapter 15 for poverty and
distribution, while Chapter 21 unpicks the agenda of the 'Third Way', viewed by many as
'neoliberalism with a human face'.
A MULTI-PRONGED POWER PROJECT
Neoliberalism offered a finance-friendly solution to the problems of capital accumulation at
the end of a relatively long cycle of prosperity. Chapters 1. 22 and 30 show that neoliberalism
imposed discipline upon a restless working class through contractionary fiscal and monetary
policies and wide-ranging initiatives to curtail social rights, under the guise of
anti-inflation and productivity-enhancing measures. Neoliberalism also rationalised the
transfer of state capacity to allocate resources inter-temporally (the balance between
investment and consumption) and inter-sectorally (the distribution of investment, employment
and output) towards an increasingly internationally integrated (and US-led) financial sector.
In doing so, neoliberalism facilitated a gigantic transfer of resources to the local rich and
the United States, as is shown by Chanters 11 and 15. Neoliberal globalism is not at all a
model of 'economic deregulation', and it does not promote 'private initiative' in general.
Under the ideological veil of non-intervention, neoliberalism involves extensive and invasive
interventions in every area of social life. It imposes a specific form of social and economic
regulation based on the prominence of finance, international elite integration, subordination
of the poor in every country and universal compliance with US interests. Finally, neoliberalism
does not foster rapid accumulation. Although it enhances the power and the living standards of
the global elite and its appendages, it is destructive for the vast majority. Domestically, the
expansion of 'market relations' tramples upon rights of access to food, water, education, work,
land, housing, medical care, transportation and public amenities as well as 011 gender
relations, as is shown by Chanters 16 to 18. Lawrs are changed to discipline the majority,
restrict their rights of association and make it difficult to protest against the consequences
of neoliberalism and to develop alternatives. The police, the courts and the armed forces are
available to quash protests in the 'new democracies' such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Nigeria, South
Africa, South Korea and Zambia, as well as in 'old democracies' such as France, India, Italy,
Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Chanter 20 shows that democracy is everywhere
limited by the rights of global capital to seize the land and exploit its people, while Chanter
8 reviews the systematic seizure of assets which has gone hand in hand with neoliberalism in
many countries. Finally, an increasing share of global profits is being pumped into the rich
countries, especially the United States. These transfers increase the pressure 011 the
periphery, where rates of exploitation must increase sharply in order to support extraordinary
levels of elite consumption domestically as well as in the United States. In other words,
neoliberalism is a hegemonic system of enhanced exploitation of the majority. Chanter 12 shows
that the neoliberal promise of rising living standards for poor countries has not been
fulfilled, and Chanter ip, discusses the manner in which foreign aid has served this process of
exploitation. These and other chapters in this volume argue that neoliberalism prevents the
implementation of those very policies that would most likely contribute to economic growth and
poverty reduction: as Chapter 28 argues for South Asia, neoliberalism has fatally narrowed the
policy discourse. This exploitative agenda is primarily but not exclusively the outcome of a
shift in the power relations within (and between) countries. It is also the outcome of
technological changes, especially cheaper international transportation, communications and
computing power, the internet, the emergence of 'flexible' production, greater international
integration between production chains and in the financial markets, and so 011. These material
changes responded to existing social changes at least as much as they induced them.
TRANSCENDING NEOLIBERALISM
In spite of its power, the transformations that it has wrought 011 the world economy, and
the achievement of ever rising living standards for the minority, neoliberalism does not offer
an efficient platform for capital accumulation. Under neoliberalism, economic growth rates have
declined, unemployment and underemployment have become widespread, inequalities within and
between countries have become sharper, the living and working conditions of the majority have
deteriorated almost everywhere, and the periphery has suffered greatly from economic
instability. In other words, neoliberalism is a global system of minority power, plunder of
nations and despoilment of the environment. This system breeds economic, political and social
changes, creating the material basis for its own perpetuation and crushing the resistances
against its reproduction. Chanters 26 to 30 discuss the continuing crisis in Latin America,
sub- Saharan Africa, South Asia, Japan and East and South-East Asia. They argue that neoliberal
policies have enhanced instability everywhere, while Chanter 10 shows that the theoretical and
empirical evidence cannot support neoliberalism's central hypothesis that trade openness is
good for growth.
However, neoliberalism also destroys its own conditions of existence. Its persistent failure
to deliver sustained economic growth and rising living standards exhausts the tolerance of the
majority and lays bare the web of spin in which neoliberalism clouds the debate and legitimates
its destructive outcomes. Tire endless mantra of 'reforms' which systematically fail to deliver
their promised 'efficiency gains' delegitimises the neoliberal states, their discourse and
their mouthpieces. The explosion of consumer credit that has supported the improvement of
living standards in the centre, given the growing fiscal constrains upon the state, limits the
scope for interest-rate manipulation - the most important neoliberal economic policy tool. Most
importantly, popular movements have emerged and successfully challenged the neoliberal
hegemony. Whatever their limitations, as Chapter ?? argues, the recent social explosions in
Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, as well as more limited social movements elsewhere, show that
neoliberalism is not invulnerable. This book details and substantiates these claims, and points
toward an agenda of reflection, critique and struggle.
"... It turns out that Floyd had a long criminal record, including an armed robbery in which held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman. In short, George Floyd was a real piece of shit. ..."
"... I don't think it is likely Chauvin will get any justice. Presumably the upgraded murder charge works in his favor as he's more likely to get off, but considering the media attention, the state of thinking in America, and the corruption of the justice system, it seems likely that he's going to get railroaded. ..."
"... Actually, he might not have been lying. Covid19 patients are known to have difficulty breathing. Add to that Fentanyl, which also causes sudden death. I wonder if the autopsy included a review for blood clots around his heart, which is not an uncommon cause of death for Covid19 patients. ..."
"... The author of this piece is every bit as much a cry baby as BLM pricks painting up the streets. ..."
"... Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said that he did not want to release the videos because it might hurt his attempt to prosecute the officers. Get that, he's not interested in justice but to get the pre-determined result: WHITE MAN guilty of racist murder. ..."
"... Agreed that George Floyd got justice, but please remember that it's not the role of police to hand out justice. Agreed that he was not killed by the police, but just what does the author mean by saying that Floyd got what he deserved, ..."
"... Fentanyl is a respiratory suppressor in itself. Some of its analogues are particularly so. Floyd had multiple fentalogues in his system I believe there were also some variety of benzodiazapines as well. These combined are more than lethal at surprisingly low doses for a normal adult male. That doesn't even start to consider all the meth, and metabolites of it, coursing thru his veins. Metabolites will have an effect in this mix, in terms of toxicity. ..."
"... Of course it's a lie. The Mockingbird Media has been lying for decades running about damned near everything. Why is anyone surprised? It's like the old joke in the USSR about Pravda (Truth) and Isvestia (News): There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth . ..."
"... Yes this is very true. Breanna Taylor of Louisville was an actual case of such reckless abuse of power (no knock warrant where the cops killed an innocent black woman). Haven't seen the usual suspects complaining very much about that one. Yes there have been a few scattered BLM riots – but only after the tragic ascension of St. George the Breathless. She didn't get tens of millions via Go-Fund-Me and a state funeral with a gold-plated casket like St. George. Guess St. George serves a higher purpose than Breanna – apparently a mere paramedic rather than the Kang of Wokeundumb Kangz. ..."
"... Honestly, to most Europeans, neither George Floyd nor the cop who knelt on his neck can inspire sympathy. Both are loathsome. Most of us don't like American police methods, they're brutal and dishonourable for a country that pretends to be free, and most of us don't like criminals who are fake victims of racism either because most of the racism we see is against us and our civilisation nowadays. ..."
The cries for justice over the deaths of Trayvon Martin and
Michael Brown were
hoaxes. Both men were criminals who died because they were dumb enough to assault men with
guns. The same is true of Ahmaud Arbery
.
There are more than forty million black people in America. Can't Black Lives Matter find at
least one actual victim of racism?
Now, with the leak of the police body-camera footage of the arrest of George Floyd, we have
confirmation of what sensible people suspected all along: George Floyd was not a victim of
police brutality or injustice.
The story we had been sold was that, for no good reason, Floyd was thrown to the ground by a
brutal cop, Derek Chauvin, who then put his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes while
Floyd pled that he could not breathe, choking him to death.
Based on this story, Derek Chauvin was fired and indicted for murder, and the three other
cops who assisted him were fired and indicted for aiding and abetting murder.
Also based on this story, America has been convulsed by more than two months of race riots,
which have killed dozens, injured countless others, and destroyed billions of dollars in
property and countless livelihoods.
There were many facts that did not fit this story, however.
George Floyd's autopsy revealed that he wasn't suffocated. Instead, he died of heart
failure. He was suffering from heart disease and COVID-19. He also had the opioid fentanyl in
his system as well as methamphetamine. The medical examiner said these drugs contributed to
this death. (He also had traces of cannabis.)
Beyond that, Floyd was apprehended before he could drive off, clearly intoxicated, after
trying to pass a counterfeit bill. Should the police have allowed him to just drive away?
Obviously not. They had to do something to get Floyd out of his car and away from the public so
he could not endanger himself or others.
The person who called the police reported that Floyd was acting strangely, which in all
likelihood meant that he was intoxicated or mentally ill, thus not to be trifled with.
It turns out that Floyd had a long criminal record, including an armed robbery in which
held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman. In short, George Floyd was a real piece of
shit.
Moreover, putting a knee on an uncooperative suspect's neck is an approved police control
technique, so how could Chauvin be indicted for murder?
Finally, there was never any evidence that race played any role in Floyd's death. He
was not arrested because he was black, but because he committed a crime. He was not forcibly
restrained because he was black, but because he was uncooperative. Two of the four officers
were non-white. The claim that race had anything to do with Floyd's death at all was simply
a baseless assertion amplified and endlessly repeated by the media and BLM
agitators.
But now we know that it was all a fraud. What does the police body camera footage
reveal?
First of all, it reveals that George Floyd was dishonest, uncooperative, and acted deranged
and scary.
Floyd claimed that he had just lost his mother (he hadn't). He claimed to be too
claustrophobic to get in the police car, which was a lie because he was not too claustrophobic
to sit in his own car. He claimed twice that he was not on drugs, falsely. He refused
repeatedly to allow the police to cuff him. He refused repeatedly to get in the police car. He
claimed multiple times that he could not breathe before he ended up on the ground with
Chauvin's knee on his neck. Obviously he was lying before that, so it made sense for Chauvin to
disbelieve him when Floyd was on the ground. And, in any case, remember that the medical
examiner said Floyd did not die of asphyxiation.
Second, the video reveals that the police dealt with Floyd with a level of patience and
professionalism that I certainly could not have mustered. One cannot say that Chauvin lost his
patience or lashed out at Floyd.
Ask yourself, dear reader, would you have been able to maintain your cool in the same
situation? I know I would have snapped. I was thinking "Couldn't we just arm police with
tranquilizer darts to bring these beasts down?" This video gives me nothing but respect for the
police who have to deal day in and day out with deranged criminals like George Floyd.
Was George Floyd a victim of injustice? No, he died because (1) he committed a crime, (2)
refused to comply with the police, and (3) was so high on drugs that he was not up to the
rigors of being forcibly arrested. If he hadn't done any of those things, he -- and a lot of
other people -- would still be alive today. George Floyd's death was entirely his fault.
It wasn't murder. It was the predictable result of Floyd's own bad character and bad choices.
It was his just desserts.
George Floyd got justice.
Now we have to secure justice for Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers, as well as for the
millions of Americans whose lives have been turned upside down by this massive hoax perpetrated
by the government of Minneapolis, the State of Minnesota, Black Lives Matter, the mainstream
media, and the far Left -- aided and abetted by the craven eunuchs of the mainstream Right.
If I were Donald Trump, I would invoke the Insurrection Act, then spend the next few weeks
arresting the leaders of BLM and antifa, as well as their collaborators in state and municipal
governments, for the crimes they have already committed. Once the Leftist beast is decapitated,
I would pardon Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers. Then I'd grab some popcorn.
"But we could never do that! Blacks would burn the country down!"
If that is your initial reaction, I want you to reflect on it. Derek Chauvin, his fellow
officers, and the whole planet have been victimized by a blatant hoax. If we can't do the right
thing and call a stop to it, then aren't we admitting that we have to choose between having
justice and having black people in America ? Well I choose justice. Which is reason number
one-hundred-million-and-one why I believe that blacks and whites in America need to go our
separate ways. We need
a racial divorce .
"I was thinking 'Couldn't we just arm police with tranquilizer darts to bring these
beasts down?'"
That would've killed him flat out, what with a lethal/near-lethal dose of fentanyl in him
already. It seems they'd decided to let EMS deal with him, which was absolutely the correct
decision. Strap the maniac down on a gurney.
I can't find any fault with this assessment. After watching the eight minutes of Floyd
lying about claustrophobia and struggling against the attempt to simply get him safely into
the police vehicle, it makes me sick that I bought into part of the narrative being sold at
the time.
There's not much doubt left that a combination of drug abuse and poor health killed the
man. Chauvin and the others should be released with a clean record.
Which is not to say that no policing reforms are needed. Too many innocent people are
killed by cops. Floyd just wasn't one of them.
I don't think it is likely Chauvin will get any justice. Presumably the upgraded
murder charge works in his favor as he's more likely to get off, but considering the media
attention, the state of thinking in America, and the corruption of the justice system, it
seems likely that he's going to get railroaded.
If he does that will be the saddest part of this whole affair – a cop just doing his
job to police the community gets (presumably life, at least his life ruined) because he was
sent to deal with a deranged, intoxicated negro.
This video shows a silverback coming to the realization that he is going to jail, yet
again, and acting like a typical low I.Q. Negro. He was a career criminal P.O.S. that got
just what he deserved. It's a travesty of justice to charge the cops with anything.
It ought to be a wake up call for any cop that the powers that be need you collectively
but will throw you individually under the bus if it's politically expedient.
He claimed multiple times that he could not breathe before he ended up on the ground
with Chauvin's knee on his neck. Obviously he was lying before that, so it made sense for
Chauvin to disbelieve him when Floyd was on the ground.
Actually, he might not have been lying. Covid19 patients are known to have difficulty
breathing. Add to that Fentanyl, which also causes sudden death. I wonder if the autopsy
included a review for blood clots around his heart, which is not an uncommon cause of death
for Covid19 patients.
I agree with you Greg, yet ANOTHER hoax. Whew. Like you said, they can't even find ONE
legit victim of oppression. I blame Keith Ellison, but most of all I blame the jewish media
for inciting the whole bullshit scam. With the covid scam, two big scams going at once, the
creepy jews have our citizens on their fucking knees.
I've had it. I'm at the not gonna take any more stage, and I suspect that many people feel
the same way I do.
This is what you get when jews run your country incessant lies and hoaxes and gaslighting
and nonsense and chaos and crime and murder.
And one day, for no reason, the entire German populace decided, "Gee ..I don't think I
like the jews anymore ."
Unfortunately the police are proving impossible to love. They bow down to the people who
hate them and want to strip them of their jobs (if not their lives), but then arrest people
who defend themselves against a violent mob. In big cities they have no qualms against
assaulting people for not wearing a mask, nor to enforcing illegal "red flag" laws. They are
the definition of anti heroes:
Violent and oppressive toward peaceful and productive whites, but meek and subservient toward
violent and destructive blacks and communists.
I'm aware that there are exceptions, such as a few rural sheriffs refusing to enforce this
crap. But they're getting tarred by association, simply because you can never tell whether
your district will be run by a patriot or a petty tyrant.
If I were Donald Trump, I would invoke the Insurrection Act, spend the next few weeks
arresting the leaders of BLM and antifa, as well as their collaborators in state and
municipal governments, for the crimes they have already committed. Once the Leftist beast
is decapitated, I would pardon Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers.
This is brilliant. If Trump did this, he would win big -- if they don't alter the results.
If Trump did this, he would become a historical icon akin to Daniel Boone or George
Washington.
If Trump did this, and ground the Government's boot on the throat of every race agitator,
including celebrities like Winfrey and Cannon, as well as NBA/NFL ingrates, he would forever
change the hustle of blacks to game the system. He would alter America on a cellular level,
and exponentially for the best.
Alas,Trump will never do this. He cares too much (perhaps in a prurient manner) what his
daughter Ivanka thinks and her cunning conniving husband, Jared.
Note: Ron Unz has MAXIMUM backbone to run this fabulous, truth telling piece.
So the marchers are completely correct. There will be no justice. There will be no peace.
They will make sure of both no matter what. At least they tell us of their plan. Veteran
coppers smell what's up. Many have gone fetal. Others are retiring earlier than expected. All
are disgusted by the bullshit they see with this case
George Floyd was dishonest, uncooperative, and acted deranged and scary
.
Stop the presses! Acting scary is too much! Especially if it's a scary nigger! Kill the
scary nigger! Aaaaahhhhhh!!
The world has become soft, and everyone is just one big victim of every action and
inaction. The author of this piece is every bit as much a cry baby as BLM pricks painting
up the streets. Take your "I suck blue dick" cause on down the road – you're bound
to find followers.
We have to thank the leaker of the body cams video. Minnesota Attorney General Keith
Ellison said that he did not want to release the videos because it might hurt his attempt to
prosecute the officers. Get that, he's not interested in justice but to get the
pre-determined result: WHITE MAN guilty of racist murder.
Ellison was humiliated when he lost the election to the chair of the Democratic National
Committee to Tom Perez because of his affiliation to the Nation of Islam. As a consolation
prize Perez made him Deputy Chair, a meaningless title for a worthless person. I am sure that
if he can deliver a murder conviction of a white police officer the black caucus will demand
a cabinet post for this house muslim.
Yes! Yes! Yes! But you do not understand. The largest crime was not committed by Floyd.
The largest crime was committed by totally criminal media. Particularly CNN.
Agreed that George Floyd got justice, but please remember that it's not the role of
police to hand out justice. Agreed that he was not killed by the police, but just what does
the author mean by saying that Floyd got what he deserved, "his just desserts"? Was
death the form of justice he deserved? Could there have been another path made available to
"salvage" him and turn him into a benefit rather than a detriment to society?
What forces, internal and external, acted on Floyd from the time of his birth to his death
to make him become what he was, behave as he did? Can we build a society in which someone
like Floyd never exists and never needs to be put out of his and our misery?
In Floyd's life and death should we see racism or societal failure? In the reaction to his
death what should we see?
The video will of course be used by BLM and other leftists to enhance their whiny shit.
They'll say that trying to stuff him into the back of the cop car after he told them he was
claustrophobic was cruel, and just exacerbated the situation. They'll also say the cops
should have just let him sit on the ground till the amberlamps arrived.
They'll bitch about the cop pulling his gun on an "unarmed black man," and "they wouldn't
do that to a White guy." Then they'll say something really intelligent like "trying to pass a
fake 20 doesn't deserve the death sentence."
It would have been so simple to pop Floyd in the head while he was sitting in the car,
like they do in Brazil or Mexico. Or what fellow negroes do to each other every weekend. At
least then he would have died once, and the cops certainly would have been justifiably
crucified. But this case will go on and on, and we will have to endure from multiple angles
his dying. And of course the kangaroo court theatrics that will go with it all. Add to that
the scapegoats,( sacrificial pigs).
@AnonymousFentanyl is a respiratory suppressor in itself. Some of its analogues are particularly
so. Floyd had multiple fentalogues in his system I believe there were also some variety of
benzodiazapines as well. These combined are more than lethal at surprisingly low doses for a
normal adult male. That doesn't even start to consider all the meth, and metabolites of it,
coursing thru his veins. Metabolites will have an effect in this mix, in terms of
toxicity.
IMHO dude was a goner, they just showed up too early. And all hell has broken loose over
another opioid overdose not much different than hundreds of others that week but for a video
that looks bad to the unknowing
Weimar Amerika has a problem, it is called the Jewish run media that spreads lies and
causes harm to the nation. We the people have the right and moral duty to remove all Jews
from the press, the tv, from newspapers, etc.
The damage done by the George Floyd hoax is nothing compared to this stupid Covid
insanity, they are actually shutting down schools over nothing. Governments are being run by
insane lunatics, there are no adults in the room making any rational decisions.
This comment gets 5 stars
This is what you get when jews run your country incessant lies and hoaxes and
gaslighting and nonsense and chaos and crime and murder.
And one day, for no reason, the entire German populace decided, "Gee ..I don't think I
like the jews anymore ."
The trial of Chauvin will be interesting. If they do the right thing and acquit him we
might be in for some stormy times. However, sending an innocent man to prison to appease all
the extremists out there isn't something we should be forced to swallow. Buckle up your seat
belts, round two coming up.
It won't matter. This entire issue is based on complete nonsense and fantasy. All of
modern woke identity politics is intentionally fantastic and mystifying and completely
divorced from reality. As many have pointed out, the entire notion of objective truth is
considered simply a form of white supremacy (this is an actual quote from a woman with a PhD
discussing racism in math: "the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western
imperialism and colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing"). Just as the news
will not say a suspect is black or show his face, any discussion AT ALL of actual crimes
committed by "POC" have become verboten on the woke left, and they control the narrative. If
issues were presented and discussed openly and honestly, none of this would have ever
happened anyway. So this video will simply be memory holed or, better yet, edited to somehow
portray Floyd as a victim, just as people still think of Michael Brown as a victim and all
the rest. It just won't matter.
That kind of job cannot be done by a president : there was never such thing as a honest US
president. A honest US president is a president who resigns to avoid his country the shame of
impeachment. Such a job can only be done by a Lucky Luke or so who identifies with the
president and whom the president has no choice but to support.
Of course it's a lie. The Mockingbird Media has been lying for decades running about
damned near everything. Why is anyone surprised? It's like the old joke in the USSR about
Pravda (Truth) and Isvestia (News): There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth
.
The Pulitzer Prize committee has never rescinded Walter Duranty's prize for his lies from
the 1930s about the great abundance of milk, honey and happiness in the Ukrainian SSR under
the tender care of Stalin's good boy (((Lazar Kaganovich))). Oh what's that? Never heard of
those 8-10 million being starved to death under the machine guns of those nice (((NKVD
men)))? Just another damned conspiracy theory ! (Mentioning this will get you jail
time in the "free country" once known as France – for minimizing the holycost!)
This truthful article is about the big lie regarding the ascension of St. George the
Breathless but that lie is far from the only one told. Along with the holy man's long
criminal record there's the lie about those 4 White cops when only Chauvin was
actually White. One was Black, one was Asian and a third was of mixed ancestry. Almost as big
a lie as the whopper printed about the notorious white soopremaciss involved in the
tragic ascension of St. Trayvon of Skittles and Arizona Iced Watermelon Juice – a
Peruvian octaroon named George Zimmerman. The Germans had the perfect term for our lovely
comrades at the Ministry of Truth: Lügenpresse
Which is not to say that no policing reforms are needed. Too many innocent people are
killed by cops. Floyd just wasn't one of them.
Yes this is very true. Breanna Taylor of Louisville was an actual case of such
reckless abuse of power (no knock warrant where the cops killed an innocent black woman).
Haven't seen the usual suspects complaining very much about that one. Yes there have been a
few scattered BLM riots – but only after the tragic ascension of St. George the
Breathless. She didn't get tens of millions via Go-Fund-Me and a state funeral with a
gold-plated casket like St. George. Guess St. George serves a higher purpose than Breanna
– apparently a mere paramedic rather than the Kang of Wokeundumb Kangz.
If he hadn't been pulled over, he probably still be alive today. I guess blaming the
nigger is a satisfying way for white Americans to cope with the obvious, ongoing decline of
their civilization.
Everyone I know flashes their high beams to warn other drivers of speed traps. The same
hypocrites in this thread massaging cop balls are certainly greateful for it. They only love
the cops when their abusing blacks or their political opponents, not when they're burning
down Waco.
Hmmm well, I'm not seeing the same idiots that came here before to embarrass themselves
with comments insisting that the cop murdered Floyd. Hang your heads in shame, wherever you
are.
You stupid cunt ..Floyd ingested a huge amount of fentanyl AND meth AND cannabis.
The cops were insanely patient with that crazy negro, and then the jew media LIED about
the incident for months creating an entirely false narrative that resulted in horrible loss
of life and property.
It's not "crying" to speak the truth about what happened and to lament the fact that we
were hoaxed yet again.
They DIDN'T kill the crazy buckwheat; he killed himself.
EXCLUSIVE: Police bodycam footage shows moment-by-moment arrest of George Floyd for
the first time – from terror on his face when officer points gun at his head, sobbing
before he's shoved into squad car and begging to breathe as his life drains away .
Worth a look. I think Gould must moonlight on violin.
@Tusk of thinking
in America, and the corruption of the justice system, it seems likely that he's going to get
railroaded.
He will most likely get railroaded by a jury that is afraid of another riot.
The prosecution won't be able to argue that he died by asphyxiation. They will have to
argue that he might have OD'd but the knee on the neck was a factor. Well that's manslaughter
at the most.
They'll probably give him 6-10 and let him out early. I think he should just be fired.
I really don't know why anyone would take a police position under a left-wing mayor.
If I were Donald Trump, I would invoke the Insurrection Act, spend the next few weeks
arresting
The media conglomerates, as others have said, and the education conglomerates.
Scrap higher education and go back to the tech schools we had before. It's too late to
save the old system; PC infestation and weird sex rot have ossified them all. When the
country even pretends to be civilized again, we can give it another shot.
All of the media and most of the Antifa's paleface contingent are graduates of our
overweening Institutions of Higher Indoctrination. Defund them all.
@Avianthro d the
meth and fentanyl up his rectum. That's the fastest way to get any drug, legal or not into
the vascular system.
After his last prison term in Texas, he moved to Minneapolis for drug dealing and
counterfeit money passing.
People like you, endlessly posturing and weeping about dangerous thugs like Floyd are more
responsible for " societal failure" than the useless, dangerous thugs you want to cuddle and
care for as if they were babies abandoned in a snowstorm.
Get a rescue dog or cat to lavish your love and care on, instead of defending the likes of
Floyd
Liberals blacks and Jews claim 2 of the officers got into the back seat with him and beat
him up. Yeah right, 3 men, including the giant Floyd in the back seat.
Remember White Justine Dimond also of Minneapolis. An affirmative action black officer
shot her dead as soon as he saw her, the woman who called the police about a possible
disturbance. Took more than a year to even charge and arrest him.
Lets get this straight. The police did not go over to Floyd and ask him a few questions
about his transaction in the store and then tell him he had to come with them or be arrested
for passing fake money. They just went up to his car GUNS IN HAND, and started demanding he
showed his hands. The people from the store had already been over to the car and talked to
him before this happened, they did not seem to think he was dangerous.
He refused repeatedly to allow the police to cuff him.
The police did not tell him what it was about.They swore at him and pointed a gun at him
and then started pulling him out the car, It was several minutes after he was pulled out and
handcuffed they tell him that this was an arrest on a charge about the counterfeit bill.
He refused repeatedly to get in the police car
Yes he did that.
He claimed multiple times that he could not breathe
Yes he was trying a variation on the old I'm having a heart attack ploy. Maybe the COVID
19 epidemic and the froth at the corners of his mouth ought to have made Chavin think twice
about what he was going to do.
He claimed multiple times that he could not breathe before he ended up on the ground
with Chauvin's knee on his neck. Obviously he was lying before that, so it made sense for
Chauvin to disbelieve him when Floyd was on the ground.
Excuse me? Floyd had three cops on top of him and three knees on his back when he was
prone on the pavement. Chauvin was scoffing that "It takes a lot of oxygen to talk" and told
Floyd to stop yelling about how he could not breath.
One cannot say that Chauvin lost his patience or lashed out at Floyd.
I can and am going to, because in my opinion the most likely thing is Chavin decided to
give Floyd good reason to complain about his breathing and that is why Floyd and his hapless
stooges put him down and knelt on him. They only got off 9 minutes later when they were
told he was not breathing . What was Chauvin trying to achieve, and how long did he plan
on keeping Floyd like that?
Moreover, putting a knee on an uncooperative suspect's neck is an approved police
control technique
The use of knees technique is authorised to a purpose that is not what Chavin was using
the technique for. Chavin got his and his two colleagues' knees on Floyd and kept them there
for 9 minutes 30 seconds while resting his hands on top of his own legs.
how could Chauvin be indicted for murder?
He is charged with felony murder meaning the prosecution merely have to show that he used
the "approved police control technique" in a way that crossed the line into assault. It is
not necessary to show intent for anything but the felony for a felony murder conviction,
George Floyd's death was entirely his fault. It wasn't murder. It was the predictable
result of Floyd's own bad character and bad choices.
One could say the same of many murder victims.
It was his just desserts
He messed with the wrong guy in Chauvin. But Chauvin also messed with the wrong guy. If
Chauvin had done his job properly none of this would have happened.
"In Floyd's life and death should we see racism or societal failure?"
We should see neither, for neither had any demonstrable bearing on his life or death. As
the sage is reported to have said to the seeker: "Some have good fates; some bad. Yours was a
bad one."
The author did not actually suggest that tranquilizing Floyd with darts was the best way
to deal with him. He merely stated the thought would go through his head if he had to deal
with individuals like Floyd, as he would not be able to muster the saintly patience and
forbearance of Derek Chauvin and the other officers.
It's another one of those cases where the narrative is important, not the actual story. In
a real world, with a real press with intelligent reporters, we would have discussed how
horrible the death was. How it was an accidental event but was hard to avoid. They wouldn't
use his death to inflame passions, race bait, try to forement racial hatred, strife, and race
war. Floyd's death wouldn't be an event used by the Beast to get Orange man, because
ultimately, everything the media has done the last 4 years has been one version or another of
"Orange Man Bad". We might be talking about real issues like asset forfeiture or police
immunity from crimes. How police unions weld too much political power and abuse their sacred
position of trust in society. In other words, in a real world, we wouldn't have a
manipulative propaganda organ to make Orwell's head spin like a top. We'd have intelligent
and thoughtful readers that really take a part in debate and help steer the course of
society.
No that would be asking too much I suppose. Eat your gruel, prol.
I agree with that statement but it seems that sometimes the Universe blindly hands out
justice to people. Floyd seem to be one of those. When you consider the toxicology report and
the type and amount of drugs in his system it seems likely that if he had never had any
interaction with the police at all he would have still died that day. By his own hand. But of
course not one black in a million can see it because blacks are not a people that let logic
and truth stand in the way of them venting their constant rage against the White man.
@Biff nd BLM are
producing far worse consequences than merely a deceptive message or a wrong-headed
article.
The BLM circus is not only excusing, but giving credence to, and animating violent,
low-life negro culture which often kills innocents, ruins lives, destroys businesses, debases
entire neighborhoods, and undermines the rule of law. This is worrisome trend.
The spiraling costs associated with the unintended death of one stupid criminal is already
in the billions. And BLM is still on the warpath. It's time to vigorously resist this mob,
not appease them.
People will believe what people want to believe. Curiosity killed the cat, I did a search
to find out what George Floyd's autopsy said.
After all, the whole BLM thing spread over the ocean and came to Europe for no reason
whatsoever. Americans have a shtick to export every piece of shit they crap. Some time ago
they produced some useful stuff, now they manufacture gay prides, surrogate child bearing,
gay marriage, "humanitarian" military interventions, and their latest product, "anti-racism".
Coming from a country that has abolished segregation only half a century ago, it's rich.
Honestly, to most Europeans, neither George Floyd nor the cop who knelt on his neck
can inspire sympathy. Both are loathsome. Most of us don't like American police methods,
they're brutal and dishonourable for a country that pretends to be free, and most of us don't
like criminals who are fake victims of racism either because most of the racism we see is
against us and our civilisation nowadays.
Though George Floyd's autopsy did say that "he died of heart failure" and that he "was
suffering from heart disease", it didn't say that he suffered of COVID-19, it said the
opposite, that he was tested positive to the coronavirus causing it two months before but
that he remained asymptomatic and likely was still so at the time of his death.
To top it, George Floyd's autopsy didn't reveal "that he wasn't suffocated", it said that
there were "no injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngeal structures", in other words
that there were no signs of trauma associated with forcible asphyxiation which doesn't mean
that his heart failure wasn't eventually caused by lack of oxygen, even if drugs in his
organism contributed to it.
As I see it, this video proves nothing either way and will only enhance each side's views
because each side will pick from it just what suits it.
Why can't the racist boot-licking authoritarians here just admit that they love seeing a
black man humiliated and murdered? Step up, you crybaby cunts, embrace your depravity. You
don't care about justice or the rule of law or anything else. The cops easily got the cuffs
on him and easily got him in the car but we can hear the author trembling behind his keyboard
at the big scary black man. The worldview of you idiots guarantees that the US will
periodically burn.
Could there have been another path made available to "salvage" him and turn him into a
benefit rather than a detriment to society?
No, career criminals have no interest in reforming or becoming productive members of
society.
All they care about is getting that easy gimmi dat from the welfare center while getting a
llit of extra cash on the side by selling drugs and robbing other people.
@aandrews after
the police leaders denied that Chauvin was acting to procedure, posted the department police
training manual and noted Chauvin was a trainer and the other officers his trainees that day.
This was all from the police department website! Brilliant.
The media ignored this, of course. Even UNZ missed it.
The Libertarian Institute also pointed out no one is investigating his Floyd's real
murderer, namely whoever sold him the defective drugs. What was being covered up?
Since then, we have world riots to shut down the police department. Why are the
Libertarian fans the only ones noting this looks like a massive cover-up, perhaps the
far-left again getting in bed with far-right and now Islamic organized crime across
borders?
No country for white men,first there were those Indian savages, attacking peaceful
settlers, then there were Africans, refusing to take a place, assigned to them by God,then
came Chinese, pretending, they were invited to build Transatlantic railroad,then came
Latinos,claiming that this is their country,since they came first!And there were also those
Russian commies, pretending, they are as white as they could be!
@Biff Race has
been merely one part of a wider Elite effort (ie Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was a new
phase).
Indeed, the US is itself entering a new phase: massive unemployment, massive drops in
productivity, mass evictions, mass poverty, massive (dangerous) belligerence towards
international competitors, mass business failure .and so on. And again, only one group seems
to be profiting from this nightmare.
Articles like this one, plus the lunatic & vicious shenanigans of BLM etc are merely
speeding the country towards a precipice beyond which no one knows the depth of the eventual
drop.
You've got at least 45% of the voting population who will never see things your way, and
all the organs of media working overtime to influence as many of those on the fence as
possible to buy into the narrative despite any narrative collapse.
As much as it would be justified in a sane world, Trump using the Insurrection Act and
rounding up the leaders of yet another coup in America would play into the narrative and
would lead to a landslide defeat. Unfortunately for Trump, acquiescing isn't doing anything
to make a case for his re-election, but at least it isn't fanning the flames to burn him out
of office for being a dictator. The mayors and governors of these hell holes are all on the
D-team, and the D-team knows the best way to beat Trump is to make him look like a monster
(buffoon just hasn't been working), and so they keep whipping up those flames the best ways
they can.
The rounding up of people should have started with the Russiagate coup conspirators in
2017, but Orange Man was no doubt told by his handlers that that would look like political
revenge and that he should just let it go. That is where everything went off the rails. 2020
would not have gone to hell if 2017 had been handled correctly, forcefully, and
aggressively.
You're reading too much into this. I think it's futile to keep finding reasons why
diversity doesn't work and to try new solutions. It all ends up just being welfare programs
for blacks. Separation is the only sensible solution.
Yet another piece of trash being trotted out of UR, that is increasingly assuming the face
of White supremacy. Yet UR's merciless – and justifiable – criticism of Zionist
Israel as an apartheid, racist entity seems to fly in the face of this blatant diatribe
against minorities in general and Blacks in particular. The purist White "analyses" being
touted here speak of a reality that has never existed in this country and never will. Live
with that.
@Gleimhart
Mantooso eyes of the masses of conservatives who went along with the story because of the
bad optics in the first video. It will allow them to second guess their judgement and for a
new opinion.
You can almost never change closed minds of the zealot liberal left, nothing will do that,
and this should not be the goal. This is more of a confirmation that thinking people are on
the right path and that their detest of the never ending pandering is right on point.
So it is still good that it came out. The cops are vindicated as well as the disbelievers
in the sensationalist coverage.
Having wasted two generations since the Civil Rights Acts were passed and the negro was
invited to fully participate in American life, the negro today senses time and money have run
out. Worse still, while he bitched and moaned about 'racism' he now realizes he has been
replaced by hispanics for low skill labor. With neither the education or talent necessary for
high paying jobs he, no doubt, realizes he has become superfluous to the American economy.
The covid virus has shut down the only lucrative gigs his race had- professional sports and
entertainment. His only option is to take up the inane slogan of BLM even as he realizes they
don"t.
Note to Tarantino. "Django 2020, Buying Cigarettes in Crackertown". Script half compete.
Artistic license required for completion. Studies show wide acceptance with young white
female demographic.
@Anonymous
Cigarette smoking involves sucking in nasty smelling smoke into your lungs, which from my
naive way of thinking, sure as heck is not going to do anything except add to whatever
breathing problems he had due to the Fentanyl he had in his system.
Unless, of course, he was buying those cigarettes for the other guy who was in the SUV
with him.
I am still wondering where he got that counterfeit $20 dollar bill in the first place.
Last time I mentioned this, my comment disappeared down the memory hole – for the first
time ever on this website. Why might that be, I wonder?
Racial divorce is not the issue. The white Leftist are white. They are freaks and
monsters. Their race does not alter that a teeny bit.
Along those lines you must face the fact that the Negro was made Numinous by Yankee WASP
Elites. The very crowd that idiots like the VDARE bunch would have you serve and emulate
created the Negro Problem in order to use the Negro as weapons and tools to wage culture war
against the non-WASP whites the WASP Elites hate most.
Jussie Smollet and Bubba Wallace were hoaxers painting themselves as victims of hate
crimes. But fake hate crimes are real hate crimes against whites. Both men's careers should
be canceled, and they should end up in jail for their crimes.
That is correct but that is not what will happen.
Now, with the leak of the police body-camera footage of the arrest of George Floyd, we
have confirmation of what sensible people suspected all along: George Floyd was not a
victim of police brutality or injustice.
Exactly. Now where is that asshole, Mercer's retraction?
No sympathy for the cops. They have been using excessive force on ALL kinds of people for
decades. They haven't done a thing to "protect and serve" any of the victims of these
riots.
Doesn't matter that the democrat mayors told them to stand down. They know what the right
thing to do is. They could have gone to their unions and bitched that they weren't allowed to
do their jobs, their precinct houses were being attacked etc. Could have went to the media
etc.
They did nothing to apply any pressure on these mayors or police chiefs.
They want to cruise around the suburbs, go after soft targets and collect their fat pensions
nothing more!
Cops are well known to take a routine traffic stop and poke and prod at the driver to
escalate a situation until it becomes a physical altercation, and the cops then have an
excuse to arrest and charge the driver with assault.
They like to taze grandmother's in Texas
Karma's a bitch as they say
"Papers please" has been going on in the U.S. for a long time, cops pulling people over just
to ask "where you going, where'd you come from?"
Cops are petty tyrants, the kind of guys who got their jock straps Ben Gay'd, in high school
or their heads swirly'd in the toilet, and now that they have a little power, their going to
exert it maximally using anything as pretense to exert it.
That said, the dirt bag Floyd got justice, Antifa and BLM need to be put down by the
military.
If you can use the military to force whites to have to put up with black degenerates in their
schools, you can use the fucking military to put down riots. There is already plenty of
precedent for the use of military troops to put down riots and insurrection. What BLM and
Antifa are doing is the very definition of insurrection.
Don't dare get together to actually peacefully protest the unjustified, and unconstitutional
Covid lockdowns and other assorted bullshit if your white however That's treason!
The U.S. government as far as I'm concerned has rendered itself "null and void."
Firstly, there is absolutely no reason for his arrest. They did not ask him for ID. They
did not ask him his name. They did not ask him about the $20.00 bill.
You do not get arrested for passing a $20.00 bill. You get arrested for "knowingly" and
with "intent to defraud" pass a counterfeit bills. .
Where is there an iota of evidence that he did it with intent to defaud. The evidence they
had was insufficient to make an arrest.
They did not even ask him any questions about passing the bill before taking out a gun and
arresting him.
But he also knows that the Elites love him and will always use him to terrify the white
middle class and to batter the white working class.
The Numinous Negro knows that that he is, and had ben since roughly the late 1830s, the
beloved pet of the Elites of the Anglo-Zionist Empire, who despise the vast majority of the
whites they rule.
The police asked him and his friends (more than once) 'what he was on'? It appears that
both G.F. and his friends declined to say. He (or perhaps his friends) maybe could have saved
G.F.'s life if he (or they) just would have told the police he was on opiates. They probably
could have given him naloxone. In many jurisdictions the police have that on hand (but I'm
not sure if that is police policy in Minneapolis). But probably it is, according to this
link:
Maybe the more accurate angle on this whole thing is that the friends should be
investigated, as to what they knew about his drug use that day. If it could be determined
they knew, perhaps the correct angle is manslaughter (it being the friends as the guilty
ones).
@mark green
teacher's unions and welfare bureaucrats who in the latter case take for themselves 70% of
every dollar supposedly going to help inner-city negroes, so you can take it to the bank both
groups have accounted for the largest number of demonstrators of any color. The white
parasite machinery was out in numbers as well with all the obvious dykes with a hatred of
male-dominated society despite their continued existence relying on white male sympathy
toward such effed up and sexaully disgusting women. But, the worst of it all is that it all
could have been shut down on day one if urban police hadn't proved themselves uniformed
bureaucrats who serve the Democratic political machinery and none other.
But it will open the eyes of the masses of conservatives who went along with the story
because of the bad optics in the first video. It will allow them to second guess their
judgement and for a new opinion.
Tucker Carlson still thinks Derek Chauvin should be charged with something. Carlson is the
best Whites have in the MSM but he is still lacking immensely.
We need to make some distinctions. The police should act differently than bandits. It's
not the competence of the police to decide permanently what is justice or not and also not to
impose and execute death penalties.
In a Rechtsstaat the police only uses violences according to what is allowed by the
law and not more than necessary in a certain moment to restore order.
I don't see any need to use violence of any kind in this case. It's not very probable that
the police arrived there a few seconds or minutes after being called. I think that the
article in the Daily Mail says that Floyd wasn't trying to run away during the time that it
took for the police to come. He was sitting in his car. Second, I don't understand that the
police arrests somebody only because someone accused him of something. How can the police
arrive in some place and know immediately who is guilty of what? It was a petty offense
anyway. The police should speak with him, confront him with an accusation and he could answer
or not answer. After that the police should ask his identification card, write his name down
and go away. Later a prosecutor would see if there is a reason to write him to call him for
an interview, or not.
If the rules allow the knee on the neck, then there will be more people who should answer
for murder besides Chauvin. Could the author of the article explain what Chauvin was doing?
And what for? Why stay with his knee for almost 9 minutes on the neck of someone on the
floor? How can it be that 4 policemen aren't able to arrest one man who has shackles on his
hand? If this was the case, why didn't they call for more policemen to come?
Floyd was free and apparently the police wasn't looking for him. But even if he was a
criminal, criminals have rights. Many Americans seem to think that citizens don't have
rights. Chauvin is now accused of a murder and there is a lot of evidence against him. If I
remember correctly and if what I read was right, then Chauvin had a history of abuse of
authority. To say that Floyd got what he deserved is cynical.
@Tucker I believe
Fentanyl is used medically in obstetrical anesthesia.
Fentanyl may be the choice on the street now because of its potency.
Regardless, if you are getting it and doing it on the street, "recreationally," you are no
stranger to drugs and most likely a junkie. Who in Floyd's case is also doing meth. Going the
full John Belushi.
There is a saying that nothing goes better with cocaine than more cocaine and another
cigarette. This in general holds true across the board in this crowd.
He probably wasn't following his doctor's advice. Any of it.
American justice is a joke–Ofc. Chauvin will only be its latest victim, just like
the Tsarnaev brothers blamed for the Boston marathon bombing, justice like the victims of
America's response to 9/11. But list is a long one
Obviously, those in power in this deeply democrat state had all the tapes and all the
information about how St George died pretty quickly. They parsed it and twisted for a
specific reason, they think angering up the Negro will get them out to vote. The whole bs blm
nonsense, is idiot dems willing to destroy the country so they get elected. They did the same
thing with the Ferguson nonsense in 2014 as the mid-term election was coming up. And Negroes
fall for it every time. If I was sitting in a spaceship, watching this on alien television,
I'd say it was cliche and played out. But it never ends. Low IQ or not, stay off drugs, don't
have kids without being married, obey the law and go to work every day, you'll do fine in the
USA. Why doesn't some Negro preacher say that?
Yes, even if Chauvin et al are acquitted, they will be considered forever guilty by the
same mobs who consider Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin to be murder victims.
St George had 19 nanogram/ml of fentanyl and metabolites in his system. That works out to
19 ug/l. The volume of distribution of fentanyl is 6 liters/kg. Assuming he weighed in at
over 100 kg the amount of fentanyl in his system would be a minimum of 12 thousand micrograms
or 12 mg. The retail street value would be thousands of dollars. The wholesale value would be
less. This suggested he may have been dealing and consumed his stash to avoid prison
time?
*You can always count on Negroes to mouth-off.
*Black Live Matter–except to their bros in the hood.
*Pelosi, Schumer, the Black Caucus and the woke folk will press to have the Lincoln Memorial
replaced by the George Floyd Memorial.
" turns out that Floyd had a long criminal record, including an armed robbery in which
held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman. In short, George Floyd was a real piece of
shit"
Apparently St G of da 6 Felonies would beat his hoes as badly as Meg would the etard if he
didn't grovel hard enuf whilst takin da knee to a swarthy Hollywooder.
@anastasia You do
not get arrested for passing a $20.00 bill. You get arrested for "knowingly" and with "intent
to defraud" pass a counterfeit bills. .
Where is there an iota of evidence that he did it with intent to defaud. The evidence they
had was insufficient to make an arrest.
They did not even ask him any questions about passing the bill before taking out a gun and
arresting him.
This is BS. This was completely staged.
He was behind the wheel of a car in a highly intoxicated state. Of course there was reason
to arrest him.
@UncommonGround
wasn't trying to run away during the time that it took for the police to come. He was sitting
in his car. Second, I don't understand that the police arrests somebody only because someone
accused him of something. How can the police arrive in some place and know immediately who is
guilty of what? It was a petty offense anyway.
The call to the police indicated that Floyd was either nuts on or drugs. He was either nuts
or on drugs (in facts, minutes from dying from an overdose) behind the wheel of a car, a weapon
weighing how many pounds? Of course there was good reason to restrain
him.
If he hadn't been pulled over, he probably still be alive today.
Well, the excitement of the arrest didn't help his survivability prospects but I'm not
even sure what you're proposing here. Your argument is so stupid that I'm unsure if it's
coming from a human being. It's like watching an ant twitching his antennae. I know it's
trying to say something but it all translates into gibberish.
Are we supposed to ban arrests because one in a 100K perps might be too sick and/or
drugged-up to survive the ordeal?
To put it simply, blacks were being self-destructive, and elite whites decided not to stop
them because that would be "racist." And now our elites are going further down that path by
glorifying a criminal, George Floyd.
Had our elites fifty years ago used tough love instead of pampering, few blacks would turn
to criminal activities. George Floyd likely would have sold insurance or become a pharmacist
or something else harmless and even productive. Too bad it didn't turn out that way, but it's
impossible to get through to our elites that they are the problem.
@Priss Factor And
CNN, all of them, are pure opinion and propaganda. Made up concern. Not news. No actual
people actually care about this stuff.
Who will give a shit about George Floyd in 2021? There will be another school shooting by
then. Or better, a fucked up election to talk about.
No charges for the officer who shot Michael Brown. No reaction from anybody. No "riots."
Nobody even burned down a Wendy's. Because nobody knows who Michael Brown is. They found all
the statues and Confederate flags. They forgot the thing with Michael Brown. You can't take
them seriously.
@TKK g incidents
like this for crass political purposes.
What's different this time, besides cabin fever from the lockdown, is Trump.
A word to the wise, be a little less credulous about the "Oh, it's just the blacks again"
narrative when purportedly peaceful protests over "systemic racism" quickly become a violent
assault on the White House, with Democrats, Allied Media, and resistance scum like Mitt
Romney and Mattis egging them on.
Apparently, all it took was painting 'BLM' in front of the White House and Trump Tower for
many here to take the bait.
@Robert Dolan
those white nationalists that was over on Unz's The Political Bankruptcy of American White
Nationalism thread, pissing and moaning how he got it wrong too.
Another thing that white nationalists seem to piss and moan about is how wrong the State
is. Constantly deriding big bad government. Yet when big scary black man comes along, it's
straight to the jackboot to wimpier behind. I recognized the same thing when the twin towers
were coming down – save us from those scary Araabs no matter what it takes! or what
you take from us. – Suckers then and Suckers now.
@Alden He didn't
shoot her immediately AFAIK. She, unarmed and in her pyjamas, was taking to the other officer
when this Somali Muslim killed her from inside his car, across his partner.
The biggest red flag for me was the fact that his layers refused to release a statement
after interviewing him. What he did was indefensible so everyone expected some variation of
"I thought I saw something" excuse but his story was, apparently, so bad that they decided to
say nothing.
Needless to say, that case disappeared from the MSM like Jimmy Hoffa. I've heard somewhere
that the killer was convicted but that's all. I still don't know what the Somali Muslim told
his defenders.
There was certainly no reason to restrain him the way it was done. Did the police tell him
why he was being arrested? Did the police know for sure that he was on drugs? How? Or is it
enough that someone tells something about someone and you are arrested? In any case, I
thought he had been arrested because of the 20 dollar bill. Was there a talk between the
police and Floyd or they just came to arrest someone and decided that they would arrest him?
Don't Americans have rights? Can the police jump on your necks and tell the reason later in
case you haven't died?
@Realist Also
take in consideration that in America the justice system by no stretch of the imagination
lives outside of politics. They HAVE TO charge him with something, and it's probably good
that the charges were upped to 2nd degree murder because it will be far harder to prove. Now
the problem is that the courts might end up finding him guilty with an mostly black picked
jury. If that happens white Americans should no longer oppose riots in big cities, or even
care for preserving the police, all of it should go down the drain the sooner the better
because the system will clearly be a openly SJW one against whites.
@Rich he
Cloward-Piven Plan that we see unfolding before our eyes obviously has nothing to do with
justice and everything to do with a hatred and vengeance so great the leftists will burn the
country down around themselves to destroy everything whites have created. This is a point
Nietzsche made long ago, that vengeance and resentment are always the actual motives of those
marching under banners calling for social justice. I'd take the prophesy by a Russian monk
during the height of the Christian massacres in Russia a century ago to heart; namely, that
what the Jews were doing to Christians in Russia was a mere prelude to what they will attempt
to do to Christians in America a century hence.
This idea comes from a view of history that telescopes slave ships, pre-civil war plantation
stories, KKK, Watts Riots and MLK to the year 2010. I think there might once have been white
people who feared to allow large black men to be peacefully questioned about a crime. There
have been almost 80 years of integration, whites voting for blacks and close contact between
the races at work, school and in the military. We know each other well. We're not afraid of
black people.
Where has everybody been since 1940? Not in the country I know well.
was Ellison & Co not releasing the bodycam vids they should be charged as inciting a
population to riot under the PATRIOT ACTS I & II, and the willful obstruction of
justice.
Bravo!! You have, with your article, tremendously helped the public good. What the
incompetent press do is to cherry-pick "items" to support their agenda. Recently, the
Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, Florida published a similar hatchet job. Fortunately, on page 6,
they published six real cases, and I concluded what you have in your excellent article. I
sent a comment to the newspaper that the Sarasota police department used appropriate force in
sub-doing the six who were resisting arrest. I had the same question that you express in the
article: What would I do if I was the arresting article?
Even the Jesuit mouthpiece, America Media, joined the cacophony of ridiculous
"reporting"
If a double dose of fentanyl did not bring him down, they would have needed an elephant
tranquilizer.
But your point is one worth exploring. The key is a drug with fast kinetics. Something
that paralyzes one almost instantly yet last only five minutes. Wouldn't that worth a govt
grant somewhere.
The divorce attorneys for the other side are Jewbaum, Jewberg and Jewfeld, LLP and the
presiding judge will be none other than Dishonorable Jewstein do you see a favorable ruling
for the plaintiffs? I don't think so
Alternative ending: The police never showed up, and Floyd slowly died behind the wheel of
his vehicle as his companions tried to shake him awake.
Cause of death: Meth, fentanyl, Covid, and a bad heart. The fentanyl alone would have
slowed his breathing down to the point of death. As his circulatory system shut down, he
would have fell unconscious and unresponsive. His friends would have panicked, but they also
would have been reluctant to call 911 for obvious reasons.
Of course there are those who believe Floyd was a superman who could have laughed off a
lethal dose of fentanyl that day, "if only the cops hadn't held him down ".
No. He was destined to die of an overdose and he did. The cops holding him for the
paramedics were trying to save his life and should be commended for their
professionalism.
@Moi Ever since
Keith Ellison first ran for Congress in 2006, he has characterized his relationship with
Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam as a sincere but misguided youthful dalliance. Though
Ellison said he was proud of his 18-month association with the Nation of Islam in preparation
for 1995's Million Man March, he wrote to concerned Jewish leaders in May 2006, saying, "I
have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam due to its propagation
of bigoted and anti-Semitic statements and actions of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan,
and [Farrakhan aide] Khalid Muhammed."
Strawman argument. Everyone here knows that blacks, gays, cat ladies, etc. are simply
tools wielded by the Jewish program that has been going forward for 120 years.
I don't see any need to use violence of any kind in this case.
That's because you're living in some weird, out of touch bubble. A guy like that –
text-book example of someone who'll explode into violence at any second – must be
restrained for everyone's sake and the cops did it professionally.
If the rules allow the knee on the neck, then there will be more people who should answer
for murder besides Chauvin.
What? You don't see a problem with throwing a guy in jail for following the rules? Do you
have any idea how a justice system should work in a normal country?
@Realist d. It
would have been easier to just ignore it.
Do you think that Tucker should be judge and jury and proclaim Chauvin innocent? If he did
that, he would deserve to be fired, and I would be all for it. Would Tucker off the airwaves
be fine with you?
Most of Tucker's more discerning fans understand that he must be careful in his language
if he wants to keep his job. The Cancel Culture Left is out for his scalp every day, and will
use any phony excuse to get him removed. If you think that Tucker's a sell-out and is
"lacking immensely," I have an obvious answer. QUIT WATCHING!
I haven't seen that Tucker made any sort of reply to this newest video. It would
surprise me if he didn't respond with asking whether the rioting had a just cause, or
something along that line.
Upon doing a search on Tuckers recent programs I can find no comment that I attributed to
him. It appears I confused comments made by Hannity with Carlson.
Don't forget to blame white Minnesotans who thought it was a good idea to elect a black
Muslim leftist with credible accusations of domestic abuse against him.
Those white racist supremacists, I'll tell you what.
He had some more bills that he (they) shoved in the seat cracks after being stopped. I do
not know, but it is possible the stashing operation kept his hands busy and why there was a
delay showing his hands and was the cause for guns to come out.
We've got an election coming up, or don't you read the papers.
These events were no surprise, Trump was on track to garner a game-over 20% or more of the
black vote.
Heck, the Democrats and their Allied Media even rolled out their old favorite David Duke,
once again shouting that he so wants Trump to win he's available any time for CNN and MSDNC
to tell everybody so.
People like you, endlessly posturing and weeping about dangerous thugs like Floyd are
more responsible for " societal failure" than the useless, dangerous thugs you want to
cuddle and care for as if they were babies abandoned in a snowstorm.
They do this Every. Single. Time.
When the hoax blows up, they tell us how the point still stands that Blacks are victims of
evil racist White society because reasons.
Get ready for round two
Injustice or insurrection.
It will define the USA for decades to come.
Justice, if it clearly prevails – will immediately unleash bloodletting, arson,
robbery, rape, murder and unprecedented mass civil revolution.
If it doesn't prevail it will unleash bloodletting, arson, robbery, rape, murder and
unprecedented mass civil revolution as a chronic ongoing and increasingly vile, corrupt
society.
Either way- the old America is gone to just a hatefilled, brainwashed cesspit of violence and
crime and to civil war – if white people there have the guts to hold their ground and I
wouldn't bet on that.
The USA has become George Floyd – the nation.
Criminal, brutal. drug ridden, and the gun he holds to a pregnant woman's belly symbolises
the gun held to much of the defenseless planet as the USA plunders and murders across the
globe.
Floyd is the USA.
Let us hope it meets the same fate.
@TimeTraveller If
he hadn't been pulled over, he probably still be alive today
That's an assumption. Could very well have smashed into a car full of kids and all we would
have heard was the "tragedy" bracketed by more reports on Kim Kardashians fat ass.
I've had the cops abuse me in my own house in front of my wife and kids over what was
essentially a phoned in SWATing by some anonymous bastard. So I have no love for cops and their
abuse of power. And as far as people flashing their lights its a sign by people who are
systemically abused for non crimes to be on the lookout for the badged
thieves.
Media is by and large nothing more than an echo chamber of propaganda and disinformation.
I've observed for nearly five decades the consistently increasing volume of BS uttered out of
their pie holes. Its gotten to the point that they no longer even pretend.
Because the purpose of these riots is not to actually address issues with cops, it's to
expand the power of the Police State by getting rid of local cops who might be familiar with
their community and have federal police from elsewhere to act like an occupying army. That
is, of course, the antithesis of what libertarians are all about.
May 27, 2020 New video shows Minneapolis police arrest of George Floyd before death
Four white officers involved in the death of George Floyd have been fired from the
Minneapolis Police Department, but Mayor Jacob Frey is saying that one of the officers should
be arrested for pressing his knee on Floyd's neck.
July 6, 2020 End Qualified Immunity from the Bottom Up
While states can't end a federally-imposed legal fiction on their own, a new state law to
reform the practice can serve as a model for getting something done.
A staff member rushes up to the two officers waving the banknote. 'Before they drive
off, he's parked right here, it's a fake bill from the gentleman,' he tells the cops
Well so glad the cops were able to serve up swift justice for poor Hadji there wouldn't
want this fine looking American to have to go to Friday Prayers with a fake twenty in his
pantaloons, now would we ?
Was reading obit of Herman Cain. His mother taught Cain that what matters is what you
start off with spiritually, not materially. His dad managed to buy a house and did all right.
I've met blacks like Cain's parents. They are solid people. There used to be a lot more of
that type of black.
I think some level of civil war may well be inevitable at this point. However, if Trump
did try that there would be 100% chance of civil war right now. The situation is not dire
enough to declare a state of emergency and may well encourage a coup d'etat by the CIA (who
has ultimate political power and is profoundly hostile to Trump and populism) and allied
elements in the military. Trump today has little room to do much of anything even if he wins
the next election.
They had already run the nogs plate and what do you know An armed violent offender red
flag is burning bright on his his arrest sheet right there on their computer screen. What do
suppose they should have done?. Walk over to the vehicle with a bundle bundle of balloons and
a lollipop.
The worthless nog had children in Texas that he never paid a penny of child support to yet
he's doping it up, making porn and driving around in a fucking Mercedes. He lived the life
and he died like a filthy mutt.
Alternative ending: The police never showed up, and Floyd slowly died behind the wheel
of his vehicle as his companions tried to shake him awake.
Alternative alternative ending: Floyd drove off in his car, had a heart attack or passed
out from drugs, and plowed into another car or a pedestrian or two before coming to a
stop.
We have laws against driving drunk for this reason.
@Anonymous e
story makes it clear that the police had reason to believe he was lying. The police
wouldn't know if he had Covid 19, when he was infected, and whether or not he was
symptomatic.
If Floyd knew he was infected and knew he was symptomatic, why was he not self quarantining?
As studies from around the world have shown, "having Covid 19" means little, as 50% of those
tested and found to have been infected, have no symptoms, and majority of those infected have
mild to moderate symptoms. If Chauvin and the other cops not done their job, Floyd would have
been counted as a Covid death.
Floyd says 'I'm dying man..'. I don't agree here – the cops were not compassionate
in his arrest. They had guns, he had muscle. Sure, one could have ended up with a broken rib
if they surrounded him and told him to calm the fuck down, but none of them, were really ever
at risk of death – like he was.
He was an imperfect citizen, even an imperfect human being, if you like, but the state
should aim to improve the lives of, and even the individuals themselves.
This is not what the cops did here. The issue is not racism, or even police brutality. It
is US society. Guns, no guns, genetics, culture – something must make US society so
violent that citizens kill cops, and cops kill citizens.
There are enough nations (China, Russia) where there is a melting pot of ethnicities and
cultures, where this kinda shit is much rarer. Why, violence is so exponentially prevalent in
US society (and not say UK society, where 3% of the population is Black), is a question.
In my personal opinion guns without education about guns – an aggressive state
policy, breeds aggressive citizens, white or black – they behave as they are led.
Three cops with guns on one druggy with muscles – either they are pussies or they
are psychopaths. In both cases, they need to either retrain, quit, or be arrested for
intentional harm.
There exists in males what I call a "delayed compliance" reaction. The football coach says
"everyone line-up for wind sprints" and no one, of any color, immediately moves. A brief
delay; a few seconds. It satisfies the ego; creates a false sense of voluntariness: Well,
okay, I will comply, but it is only because I choose to. Authority figures -- coach, the
teacher, parents. A harmless delay game. But whites seem to sense that a policeman is not the
football coach; when a policeman gives an instruction, you comply instantly. Instantly. For
some reason, Blacks think that the policeman is the football coach. Poor, uneducated,
intoxicated Whites, in their stupor, nonetheless seem to know this is not the football
coach.
You are being too kind.
The "societal failure" has been, and is, the negrification of virtually every aspect of life,
and claiming it is normal. That ranges from unintelligible ebonics to dressing like pimps, with
drug usage, lax sexual morals, etc along the way. It's all courtesy of the tribe. https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Sacks-Multiculturalism-threatens-democracy
Some people don't understand that.
@neprof e
allergies and prior conditions police know nothing about so using any sort of tranquilizer
carries a high risk as does using 'less than lethal' weaponry as you don't know how a person
will fall.
I am reminded of the Dylan song about the prizefighter Davey Moore. Moore was knocked down
but his fall was 'broken' when the base of his skull caught the bottom rope of the boxing
ring. He got back on his feet and finished the round. He even gave a post fight interview but
then lapsed into a coma in his dressing room and soon died. Apparently that lower rope
injured his brain stem
@anonymous ents
don't matter. Science doesn't matter. Only The Narrative™ matters.
So put Chauvin on trial, convict him, and sentence him to thirty years in prison. Then
pull a Witness Protection gambit: give him a new identity, a million bucks for his trouble,
and release him into South Dakota.
Nobody ever follows up on anything anymore, and if Cuomo can get away with murdering
thousands of vulnerable Covid patients in nursing homes, I'm sure the Minneapolis penal
system can carry a phony name on the books for a few years.
Voila, justice. Or at least what passes for it in The Day of Cthulhu.
New elites were emerging with new ideas, and one of them was to pamper blacks instead of
using tough love. Anything blacks did was ok with them, even if it did them no good.
It's called multiculturalism, and it's been the death of every European based country and
society.
@Trevor Lynch .
It doesn't mean they arrest you. They just do it so you don't try to run off or fight back.
So in this case putting cuffs on Floyd was justified as they had evidence of wrongdoing, and
just wanted him neutralized until they figured out what happened. Floyd freaked out, went
crazy, when they even tried to talk to him. It was a tragic event, but I don't see how the
cops really did anything wrong. They followed procedure. Floyd should have remained calm, but
he was too high, mentally unstable, afraid because he knew he messed up, had a panic attack
and a heart attack. Floyd killed Floyd.
He claimed to be too claustrophobic to get in the police car, which was a lie because he
was not too claustrophobic to sit in his own car.
There is a huge difference between sitting in a vehicle that you can freely leave, such as
one's own car, and sitting handcuffed in the backseat of a police car with a grate across the
front–which Floyd could not leave.
I would imagine that there are many people who can handle a car that they are free to
leave–and that can also take them many places , thus easing any sense of confinement,
and being *locked* in the back of a police car.
Other than that, I find myself sympathetic to much in the article. In particular, I have
sympathy for the other police officers who tried to get Chauvin to stop kneeling on Floyd's
neck and who are now facing serious crimina charges.
However, since Floyd did not pose a threat to the safety of the police officers–none
reported being injured–he should not have been killed. And I don't believe he died of
*entirely* natural causes, as there are conflicting autopsies. I think we should wait and
see.
Even by the account given in this article, Floyd was being difficult, not dangerous, and
being difficult does not deserve being knelt on while begging for breath and calling for
mother.
@Emily k of gas
are going to find themselves frostbitten and being shot at with no food and nowhere to lay
their head.
You are a woman. We've seen what happens once or twice when some blubbery black teen
female got caught shoplifting in a Korean store and assaulted the Korean woman and she simply
hauled off and shot the girl dead.
When screeching BLM come into suburbs and some black girl throws a rock through the wrong
window some non-white woman is going to simply blast her.
The AG has already he is withholding evidence in order to get a conviction. This is
against everything the prosecution is supposed to be about. He should be disbarred after this
at a minimum but this puts the whole prosecution into jeopardy at the appeals level.
Don't forget to blame white Minnesotans who thought it was a good idea to elect a black
Muslim leftist with credible accusations of domestic abuse against him.
Minnesota is about 85% white, and yet they elect a black supremacist Muslim uber-liberal
who doesn't pay his own taxes.
If they put it to a state-wide referendum, that all white males in Minnesota must be
castrated at birth, I wonder by what margin it would pass. 85%?
If he hadn't been pulled over, he probably still be alive today.
No, more like if he hadn't been pulled over he would probably be dead from the fentanyl
overdose the stupid bastard took. Blaming stupid niggers for their stupid nigger behavior is
quite rational and the fact that you seem to think it inappropriate indicates you have an ax
to grind.
He was high on drugs. He was passing a fake 20 and he had a rap sheet as long as a porn
stars schlong. What part of that did you fail to understand?
That's nine too many right off the bat. And although it's not in your face in media, cops
kill people other than blacks. Many more whites than blacks die during encounters with cops.
I'm not saying it is our biggest problem but there is room for improvement.
@jsinton or "put
cuffs" on anyone they want. It's enough that someone tells something about you (maybe not
even this is necessary). The police may also say that you might get uncoperative at some
point in the future because you are a "text-book example of someone who'll explode into
violence at any second" even if your hands have been tied before and the police has not read
any textbook or got any special education. Did the police make any test, make any question to
know if Floyd had taken drugs, was drunk? No. Did they tell him why they were arresting him?
Not necessary because people don't need rights.
@Ilya G
Poimandres voidance. That's why the cop has his gun out right away.
Police departments develop rigid, inflexible procedures to minimize risk, that leaves less
room for judgement and humanity.
For instance, police have not rescued drowning people on several occasions, because it was
against procedure.
I don't know about Russia, but police in China are notoriously brutal and rights are few
and unenforceable – worse than America, and there is a general callousness towards
human life.
Its hypercapitalism – anywhere hustling and the profit motive is king, human life is
cheap.
@bruce county
rofessional law enforcement officers kneeling on his torso and another on his legs. As for
the cervical spine, Joe Rogan says anyone putting their shin across a training partner's neck
like that in a Jiu Jitsu class would be instantly told get it the fuck off. Did Chauvin
maintain his position only for the few minutes until Floyd had became weak as a kitten and
begged to be allowed to stand up, or until Chauvin noticed Floyd had suddenly expired?
Neither, Chauvin stayed on top of Floyd for two minutes after medics had found Floyd
had no pulse. A medic had to tell Chauvin to dismount the dead man.
Some commenters mention Jewish support of BLM, and this interests me as someone who has
read Philip Roth. A Roth list of Jewish traits would be something like this: Contentiousness,
dissension, oppositional, hyper-touchiness, hyper-criticalness. Displaying these traits, says
Roth, "Puts a spring in their heel." (is it any wonder that Jewish people do not do very well
in the military?). It seems to me that BLM embraces the very same traits. So maybe Jews see
BLM as colleagues, sharing the same sensibility.
@Jefferson Temple
e needed. Too many innocent people are killed by cops. Floyd just wasn't one of them.
But Duncan Lemp was. And all of these fuck whitey riots have refused to acknowledge his
murder. We STILL don't have bodycam footage. The "defend the police" crowd have no problem with
police or even police brutality. They are upset that blacks get arrested at all. They cheer on
police when they murder white dissidents and seize the guns of law abiding citizens. The crowd
of rioters don't give a damn about police reform, other than to turn the police into a
commisariat to persecute whites
It is about BOPE an elite police squad in Brazil.
One commentator writes
"saw the movie, surely the best movie i've seen in a long time. impressive story. my country
needs BOPE definitely. saudações da Sérvia. respeito!"
Movies of super macho Cops who bash up criminals black and blue are super popular here in
India.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mp-XqCrCi6I?feature=oembed
Super Hit super cop movie Singham.
After his last prison term in Texas, he moved to Minneapolis for drug dealing and
counterfeit money passing.
Criminals out on parole often move to another state since they won't be known to the
police. That is why George Floyd moved from Texas to Minnesota and not because he was just a
good guy who made some mistakes and seeking a "fresh start" as the jewsmedia tried to frame
things.
As I wrote in a previous commentary, the attorney general of Minnesota has no case against
these 4 police offiicers. They were merely acting in that incident in accordance with the use
of force protocols of the Minneapolis Police Department. That is simply the best defense they
have. Further, although I am not an attorney. I don't see how any judge could even allow this
to go to trial. There is no legal case. And if it does go to trial, they will surely be
acquitted.
Beyond that, these 4 officers should sue the hell out of the city of Minneapolis, the
state of Minnesota, the mainstream media, both verbal and print, as well as these black
organizations like Antifa, Black Lives Matter, these fake civil rights attorneys like
Benjamin Crump and others of his ilk. And any other entity or entities that were responsible
for this charade and outrageous defamation of character. They should take a leaf out of the
Nick Sandman playbook. Each of these officers could easily wind up with tens of millions of
dollars and be independently wealthy for the rest of their lives.
You're a spineless, virtue signaling nigger loving lunatic. These fucking filthy
primitives do not care about you. When SHTF will you genuflect to you Black invaders. They
will slaughter you and your nigger loving family mercilessly. Your wife and family must be so
proud of you.
@AaronB Caught On
Camera: Cops from Utter Pradesh State mercilessly Beat Up Boy With Cricket Bat
This is so normal, something like this probably happens everyday in the country.
Also applying electric shocks to genetilia etc is common practice here. Before you jump in
say how evul Indian police are, Indian police themselves are brutally beaten up the public
often.
This is how it is and this is how it will always be here.
As the US population becomes more brown and more multiracial and mixed, this will be
future that will await the West. It is inevitable.
@JessicaR not
deserve being knelt on while begging for breath and calling for mother.
He was bullshitting. He lied about his mother. He lied about doing drugs. He was lying about
being unable to breathe. But you want to construct an elaborate rationalization for him not
lying about claustrophobia. And who cares?
Should we disband the police because blacks start claiming they have "jailophobia."
You strike me as a nice person. We have police to protect nice people from horrible people
and ugly realities. Just thank them for their service and go back to thinking happy
thoughts.
His breathing difficulty was most certainly due to the lethal levels of fentanyl in his
bloodstream, which, including both fentanyl and it's active metabolite, norfentanyl, was
about 16.6 ng/mL. The average lethal concentration found in one recent study of opioid
related ODs was 9.8 ng/mL. We're not even sure Floyd was accustomed to opioids, because a
naive user can succumb even at much lower levels. Per the autopsy he had signs of advanced
atherosclerosis, which means he was a ticking time bomb considering his use of illicit
substances.
The merchant victim of the bogus bill asked Floyd to void the transaction by returning the
cigarettes and the change for the bill he passed. Floyd refused and that's why the merchant
called the cops on his black ass.
@NobodyKnowsImADog
ayments that let them stay in the city and not vote while the political professionals vote
"Democrat" that claim to represent the inert mass / mob, but don't.
Time to end this farce, and it's time because the money has run out to even support the
present system. Supposedly Trump and the Democrats are negotiating a COVID-19 welfare package
that will amount to 2.5 trillion dollars, if the negotiations don't fail. 2.5 trillion
dollars, all borrowed when the Democrat run States and cities (supposedly the richest in the
country) are effectively all bankrupt. The phrase "Dead, but too stupid to fall down" comes
to mind.
It's not the usual beast with a brain to remove. Like ISIS, it's a starfish with arms that
will grow back.
George Floyd was not a victim of police brutality or injustice.
Like the rest of us, he was a victim of the Covid lockdown. He was passing a bad bill
after losing his job. That wasn't his fault, but the DFL governor and mayor's.
@Malla stranger
wanted to start a fight with me in a bar. None of that would ever happen in America, despite
its supposed culture of violence.
America only doesn't look so great when compared with Western Europe (and Eastern?) and
Japan, but police brutality is obviously much less severe in America than in China and
India.
But America should be compared to the most developed places, not India or China or
Thailand or Poland, and it is more brutal than places in that comparison.
Sweden and Norway seem to have worked out a good approach to policing.
Which is reason number one-hundred-million-and-one why I believe that blacks and whites
in America need to go our separate ways. We need a racial divorce.
There needs to be separation because there's certainly no shortage of stupid dysfunctional
blacks like Saint George Floyd or indoctrinated/cucked whites who will take up for them.
Once the former are gone, we can focus entirely on the latter.
@animalogic t of
the divide and conquer strategy. Seems to me Trump has done his job (for his handlers) better
than even Obama; he's the most divisive President by far. I know, the media creates the
controversies, but Trump gets to play his part. He's an actor, taking direction, just like
every Pres. since Kennedy. I've noticed a steady progression beginning with Billy boy, and
reaching new heights of division with Trump.
People who still think "we" elect our President, or that it makes any difference at all
who gets elected,
gotta be deluded or distracted or just not paying attention.
The situation in the United States that this entire George Floyd event crystallizes into a
microcosm of our society even has such people as Dr. Gary Null, a noted researcher on the
Left side of the political spectrum up, in arms.
What is he angry about? That such organizations as BLM and many others of the Left,
concentrate on their own victimhood instead of concentrating on those issues that concern all
of us, together as one nation.
In this afternoon's radio broadcast, Dr. Null leveled a broadside against the Left that
would have had everyone on the Right standing up and cheering
The merchant victim of the bogus bill asked Floyd to void the transaction by returning
the cigarettes and the change for the bill he passed. Floyd refused and that's why the
merchant called the cops on his black ass.
LOL
Typical Nigger Behavior.
Unrestrained arrogance + Unmatched ignorance.
Look how many of them will gun each other down over the slightest notion of
"disrespect"
Some people will chose death over incarceration, but the duties of police and correctional
officers as properly discharged are to make the aforementioned option a very difficult one in
practice. The guards in the Epstein case are being prosecuted and so are the cops in the
Floyd case. They were paid to do a job.
@AaronB , cops in
America are far more rude than cops in Britain or the rest of Europe or Japan on average. For
some reason, I have never had any problems with police anywhere, for some strange reason cops
and airport officials are nicer to me than others (I have noticed). For example being let off
without fines for bringing in forbidden food products (the food products were confiscated
ofcourse) at airports while all my Indian friends having to pay fines.
But even I found American cops a bit rude compared to Western Euro/ Japanese cops. British
cops are extremely friendly and nice.
While the entire narrative concocted by the Lügenpresse is of course a massive lie,
there are nevertheless real questions to be asked about the tragic ascension of St. George
the Breathless.
*Big-city cops aren't usually very concerned with things like some drugged up hoodlum
passing a fake 20-dollah bill. They usually have better things to do and leave this nonsense
to the feds. (Yes we know they are supposed to enforce all laws – federal included
– except immigration violations which they routinely are ordered not to enforce by the
criminals who issue their orders.)
What was so important about this particular drugged up negro felon when there are so many
out there? Why was this fake 20 so important?? (They're all really fake 20s of course but
we're only referring here t0 those who are not legally entitled to counterfeit versus those
who are.)
*Officer Chauvin and St. George might very well have known each other as they both worked
security for an establishment called El Nuevo Rodeo, which seems to have some interesting
owners connected to the famous representative in our Clown Congress – one Ms. Ilhan
Omar, a paper Murikan from Somalia. Chauvin supposedly worked as outside muscle while St.
George served as inside muscle for this fine, upstanding pillar in a top-notch Minneapolis
neighborhood.
*Did St. George ingest all that Fentanyl, etc. himself or did someone help him?? Given his
saintly lifestyle self-medication seems most likely but still if a loose end needs to be tied
up it needs to be tied up.
*Chauvin's record of excessive-force complaints (18) in über-leftist Minneapolis
seems unusual for someone still allowed to work at the pleasure of the Politburo there. Is
this unusual or are they so desperate to keep foot soldiers they'll overlook the number of
complaints (many of which could be nonsense in that environment) despite his being a
crackah?
*I've read some reports of a massive counterfeiting operation centered in Minneapolis. Did
St. George, Derek Chauvin and the owners of El Nuevo Rodeo have anything to do with this? Is
there any possibility Chauvin was merely making certain that St. George's OD was permanent in
nature??
@Sulu worth an
article on Unz because the drug manufacturers are white (so the Chinese or Blacks can't be
blamed). The victims are also white.
It seems obvious that what these people need is medical attention and mentorship. In
Europe, that's what they would have gotten. It probably won't happen, however, because
blaming the victims is easier and more satisfying.
Seeing this shithole country finally crumble makes this a great time to be alive. Hit that
shard pipe, wrap yourselves in the flag, and find other losers to commiserate with you.
At least Hadji was working to build a business instead of Saint Floyd who was working hard
at hardly working. But tbeiving and being an ignorant dope fiend was "job 1" for the
beneficent giant.
" Four white officers " SNIP! And that my friends is where all of this crap falls apart.
When these clowns reporting this nonsense can't even get that right then everything else, all
of the subsequent lies, follow.
@FB dn't want
this fine looking American to have to go to Friday Prayers with a fake twenty in his
pantaloons, now would we ?
Arabs are the ones keeping the lights on in a lot of these areas.
A lot of those mini mart owners are actually refugee Coptics. This is especially true for
Detroit where a Coptic community runs half the businesses. Ironically the Blacks chased out
the Jews in the Detroit riots and the Gov replaced them with Coptics (Not a conspiracy, it's
done through green card requirements).
Muslims don't like handling pork or alcohol unless they have to.
@Anon This is why
I suspect that the smaller prefrontal cortex is really the main issue. We are supposed to
believe it's just a coincidence that this is the area of the brain that is responsible for
self-control. Harsh to talk about but I don't see blaming Whitey as a long term solution.
The obsession alt-right has with IQ tests is corrosive and leaves too many questions
unanswered. I used to live near a group home for severely mentally limited adults and they
were harmless. They were happy to help with anything but weren't able to care for themselves
since they were mentally around 6 or 7.
The Germans and Hitler were right. I wish Germany would have won the second WW. Jews do
not want to join the peoples of the world. Their hog wash ( gods chosen people) keep them
from becoming citizens on the level playing field of world peoples .that leaves one defense
for us non jews get rid of them ..had the Germans won the second WW, there would be no small
state of Israel .and look what a murderous monster state of terrorism it is today
The jews take over of the us Fed Reserve is not acceptable .they run the US congress .through
their lobbys .they steal billions from the US taxpayer .this way .and there you have it .they
are thieves ..period. Get Rid Of Them
Prefrontal cortex executive function would be overthinking it in emergencies. That is why
it gets disconnected under conditions of extreme stress. If you are brought up around chronic
stress, you become programmed to react very instinctively to any threats, even ones to social
status.
That's the flip side of the same "logic" that says that anybody who champions their rights
actually hates themselves and/or wants to have sex with them.
@John Johnson
decline as long as this continues.
Here, biker gangs make and distribute this drug. I guarantee that none of the "pro-white"
commenters here are going to be calling for cops to manhandle them, or even to take any
action at all, since seeing a white guy on a Hayim Davidstein motorcycle that he wouldn't
otherwise be able to afford is fine no matter how many white kids' lives he ruined.
Whites here would rather cry over a Jewess that was killed by a Somali cop, and my thesis is
that no race or community can survive with the problems that white Americans continue to
have.
@anon is what
this "article" is designed to do, to set one group against the other. "Let's you and him
fight." That is how we make color revolutions by the training manual. Look! A plane hit the
building! You didn't see it? Something wrong with your eyes. Look at the video. BLM and
Antifa should think twice when they are sent out because their own trainers may shoot them in
the back for special effects. Of course, it's not just about the Trump Biden election. It's
about who rules the world. The World Trade Center is now "One World Plaza." And to think this
is our own government doing this to us.
@AaronB
prostitutes where some police accused me of soliciting and actually drew their guns on me.
But I was polite and kept my hands away from my pockets (Which makes cops nervous) and in
five minutes they said I was free to go.
Its a kind of utter buffoonery. An oafishness.
On the female side its a grotesque public spectacle. As anyone who has seen a 300 pound
hooker knows. Sure, there are Jewish sex workers. Lots of Gentiles beat off to Joanna Angel
or Nina Hartley films.
But Joanna is not screaming on the sidewalk "The streetlight makes my p((ssy hair glow in
the dark"
I met Joanna Angel once at an electronic trade convention. She was polite and nice.
@anastasia ss a
single counterfeit bill is arrested. The matter is immediately referred to the federal
agency, Secret Service which investigates.
If the arrestee is deemed an innocent person who's innocently acquired the bill. He's not
charged. If the investigation finds the person has acquired the bill from either the
counterfeiters or another passer of counterfeit bills he is charged with knowingly passing a
counterfeit bill.
Floyd was a career criminal. There's a major counterfeiting operation In Minneapolis. As
evidenced by the seizure of 900,000 counterfeit bills recently.
In 1993 on a trip to Spain I saw four cops (one female) club the living shit out of some
Moroccan in Puerto del Sol Madrid. They beat him until two bricks of "mugre" dropped out of
his pants on the sidewalk, slung him in the back of a patrol car and sped off. From first
verbal contact to everybody gone was less than two minutes.
Another hoax perpetrated by the dishonest f media going unpunished for inciting subsequent
hate crimes and destruction against white weaklings and founding fathers images. Racist Lemon
and his colleagues from the CNN together with MSNBC are leading this police onslaught.
The use of police body cams that the Obama administration pushed for and which were
supposed to prove the narrative that police, and especially white police, are
stopping/targeting and killing blacks for no other reason than they are
driving/walking/jaywalking while black, is actually debunking the narrative and showing that
blacks invited and deserved the force that was used against them based on their erratic and
violent behavior.
Not sure who made the prediction but years ago they said that the widespread use of body
cams would do precisely this (debunk the far left narrative), so there would be a new push to
eliminate the use of body cams since it would show blacks acting like animals on the set of
the wild kingdom.
This is a great article but Greggy went soft on the Jewish owned drive by media and if not
for their slanted and propagandistic coverage and false claims the nation wouldn't have been
set on fire for months now. An honest media (Jew free) would have put events in their proper
context and waited for more facts to emerge instead of screaming "racist killer cops"
24/7.
@Sean they puled
him out because he'd give them the virus in the closed space. Then they called the paramedics
to take care of him. While waiting, one of the cops held him down with a knee on the BACK OF
Floyd's neck, preventing him from turning around and spraying the cop with viruses.
Cops aren't personal maids or nurses, asking them to take care of infectious drug addicts
would require a lot more cops and they wouldn't be cops anymore – that would be a
horrendous way of wasting taxpayer's money. Why didn't you go and take care of the drugged
criminal? At your own expense? His death is your fault
You'll notice that the media, even FOX, hasn't breathed a word about the Hennepin County
Medical Examiner's report. That's because the report contradicts the media's claims that
George Floyd died of asphyxia due to Chauvin's knee on his neck. The medical examiner's
report makes clear that Floyd had no internal or external injuries to his neck. If the
medical examiner's report had claimed Floyd died as a result of Chauvin's actions the leftist
media would be quoting from it every night.
Instead it has been memory holed and the media myrmidons hope everyone will just forget
about it so they don't go looking for it to read it and learn they've been lied to for
months. This way they can convict the four officers in the media with damnable lies.
@anonymous le,
who had murder on their mind. All the Alt-Right and White Nationalists did was complain. No
competent defense attorney volunteered to defend him. Fields wound up with an incompetent
Public Defender who did nothing to try to get him off.
If Chauvin is found guilty, which I'd bet a thousand dollars he will be, again his White
supporters will do nothing but complain on the pages of Unz and like websites. IMO, there is
a much better case to convict Chauvin than there was for sad sack James Fields. Chauvin needs
a top notch Black defense attorney. Unfortunately Johnny Cochran is dead.
" the police dealt with Floyd with a level of patience and professionalism that I
certainly could not have mustered. would you have been able to maintain your cool in the same
situation? This video gives me nothing but respect for the police who have to deal day in and
day out with deranged criminals like George Floyd."
Yup. Browse among the literally thousands of hours of cam footage online showing how
blacks typically react to police in routine stops. Blacks love lying and shouting and
violently resisting. They genuinely believe they have a right to resist lawful arrest, and
have for at least the last ten years.
No way I could be a cop. I would never find the patience to put up with even five minutes
of it. God bless law enforcement.
@Sean It used to
be accepted that Black boys needed harsher punishments. This was accepted by both Blacks and
Whites.
Now modern egalitarians have decided that all children are the same. Well how is that
working out? Have you read the essay on what it is like to teach black children? For all
indications Black kids were better off in the 40s when Whites had lower expectations. In
today's classroom White liberal teacher lets a few of them run wild and then ruin the class
for the sake of liberal feelings. The Black kids with potential get to college and find out
they are well behind. This happens everywhere.
James Fields plowed his car into a group of protesters, killing one. Your point of view is
the result of the cognitive dissonance between your imagined reality and your observable one.
Taking such indefensible positions has to be understood in the context of your mind
protecting your ego.
Being on drugs did not make Floyd deserving of death. Neither did having a criminal past,
or resisting arrest. This entire situation, where police could apply arbitrary force against
Floyd, resulted from Floyd passing a fake $20 bill. I dont know if you've noticed, but the
FED has been passing trillions in fake twenties these last few months. How can you
counterfeit something that is worth nothing, backed by nothing, signifying nothing, endlessly
created out of nothing? If anything, by injecting his own worthless currency into the
economy, George Floyd was saving the FED some work. He was providing a valuable service,
which is keeping this dead economy afloat.
The author writes that knee on neck is an approved restraint technique, and thus cannot be
illegal, without seeming to realize that this is the CORE of the issue and why many people
are upset and protesting in the first place. George Floyd was not cooperating but he was also
not being violent. Whereas Chauvin used violence to subdue Floyd. It doesnt matter if Floyd
died of heart failure. Do you think his heart would have failed if he didnt have an armed man
kneeling on his neck?
Justice happens in a courtroom buddy, and it's the cop's job to make sure a perpetrator
makes it to a courtroom.
Of course its probably all psychological warfare from top to bottom. The cop's name is
practically Chauvinist for crying out loud. The end result is how we may judge the motive of
the incident. And the end result appears to be the defunding of police departments. Just as
COVID is defunding the rest of the economy.
Whoever is left holding the fake cash loses everything.
If the Feds abused their power in Waco and Ruby Ridge, then they also abused their power
in Portland.
As far as people flahing their high beams, I think it's a pretty clear sign that the people
who do it want the rest of us to avoid a bad encounter with the police.
Sadly, it continues to be fashionable to take whichever side of an issue makes you feel
better about your country and your identity. Here is where nationalism reveals itself as a
bankrupt ideology good for manipulating feelings rather than arriving at any useful
results.
Blacks love lying and shouting and violently resisting. They genuinely believe they have
a right to resist lawful arrest, and have for at least the last ten years.
Golly, I wonder (((who))) put those kinds of RADICAL ideas in their heads?
@Robert Dolan
unable to see through liberalism. If anything they used their intelligence to delude
themselves. This is mocked in the joke about how only someone born really smart can write a
book about how intelligence isn't genetic.
I would trust my local Mexican gardener to craft racial policy over any White liberal with
a Harvard degree. I don't think we are dealing with a lack of intelligence in liberals. I
think the theory of liberals having religious and egalitarian genes make the most sense. This
then overrules their rationality. So in that context I'm really not impressed with
intelligence tests.
Lol if George Floyd really threw the entire "Free World" into spasms of K*ll-the-Boerism
because he pulled a Juice WRLD and ate his stash (which happened to be, I assume, laced with
a lethal amount of fent) to hide it from the porkers welll, that's pretty darn funny. Besides
all the k*ll wypipo stuff, of course.
The truth is that the Leftists don't care what caused Floyd's death. The truth is
irrelevant. A negro died while a white cop was restraining him. The damage that Floydgroids
do to society is stuff we deserve, don't you see? There shouldn't be any cops, unless it's
gentile whites defending themselves, then there needs to be a police state to keep them
defenseless.
@John Johnson
have good jobs and live with wives and kids aren't good parents as a whole judging by the
criminal records drug habits etc the children of so many affirmative action blacks have.
But black fathers are strong, violent rageaholics
So they can keep the little ones in line. But once boy is 5'8 140, beatings I doubt more
beatings will import him. In the old days he could leave home and do farm labor or other
work.
Nowadays the 14 year old thug lives with mamma because of the welfare money. And if the
critters don't go to school, the welfare department cuts off the money.
@TimeTraveller e
an English class. Your I.Q. must be very low to not recognize the use of a simile.
Just the fact that you want this country to burn tells me that you are a looser from an
economic as well as an intellectual standpoint. You're on the bottom and you think if there
is revolution that some how things will get better for you. I can assure you, especially if
you are black, that things are never going to get better for you. As a matter of fact, if you
do happen to be black, things will probably get a lot worse for you before it ever gets
better.
Yes. I didn't comment much on this because, like pretty much EVERY OTHER "racist" incident
the last several years, I figured, if we waited long enough, the truth would come out. Of
course, waaaay after the narrative was set, and the damage was done. I'm curious. Are the
powers that be pushing this b.s. because they genuinely feel blacks face injustice or are
they using the blacks to aid in their attempt to destroy our culture? Either way, the blacks
will ultimately suffer. They're so put upon they have to manufacture countless "crimes"
against them. As if there eventually won't be a backlash bringing on the prejudice they
supposedly wish to stamp out. Lol. Popcorn indeed.
So, George Floyd is 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf'. That make sense because he kept saying
(lying) that he could not breath seems the beginning then those police will not trust him
anymore, and when he truly begin to unable to breath by the kneeing on neck with ton of human
meat on his back and butt, so those police think he lied and didn't trust him and they didn't
even think to double check.
(Note: There is other version with the conclusion is that the boy is eaten by wolf, not
sheep)
Sorry, the leak video:
1.George Floyd is an Temper Tantrum and his mind is really sane to me, he is not even in
the state of 'drug addict'.
2.It does not prove that George Floyd is killed by the Fentanyl. The leak video, in fact,
proves that Derek Chauvin had accidentally killed George Floyd due to the 'The Boy Who Cried
Wolf' effect, and ignorant on how dangerous kneeing on neck is. I think George Floyd is
killed by the combination of Fentanyl and Kneeing On Neck.
Question:
1.Why the police does not release the leak video from the beginning? The video, in fact,
can give Derek Chauvin more excuses to save him from being jail or just get him fire only or
he even able to keep his job due to the police qualified immunity and it can prevent
riot.
My own answer for this is that this is literally divide and conquer tactics, make those
anti-police, with many right reasons, like a bunch of idiot and the leak video also cover the
true problem, police abusing power. The police abusing power is usually unable to discussed
and the MSM always turn it into 'police beat black people'.
2.Why the redacted video, which is recorded at the same places, has the date '05/26/2020'
meanwhile the leak video has the date '05/25/2020′? Can anybody explain to me? I truly
curious about this.
That fat (360 pounds) tub of crap Eric Garner had the cops trying to get him to comply
with his arrest for 45 minutes before they laid a hand on him. He had been arrested more than
30 times by the NYPD on charges such as assault, resisting arrest, and grand larceny. Less
than a year before he died, in August 2013, he was charged with aggravated unlicensed
operation of a vehicle, false impersonation and marijuana possession. He was out on parole
for that.
He already had three more pending charges for illegally selling cigarettes–and then
was caught again the day that he died. He was (correctly) afraid that this time he'd be
busted on a parole violation.
He would not just sell the loose cigs–he positioned himself by the store's entrance
and threaten people who would go in and buy legal cigarettes inside.
He had no job due to his obesity and health issues-plus his own wife said on TV that he
was "lazy" (her word). Not totally–he did have 6 kids-with 4 different women.
He was being arrested for counterfeiting. The cops routinely cuff you even when they want
to interrogate you for a possible crime. I see it all the time. Then later they uncuff you
and let you go. What is so hard about that?
Too many cops have been shot going up to a car where they can't see the guys hands. That
is why there is always a cop in the back with his gun drawn in case you try to spin around
and take a shot. Sorry, but that is the way is is because of the people being stopped.
I also have no doubt that liberals would much rather divide children by IQ than
acknowledge that race exists. They would put well behaved White kids with unruly Black kids
for not scoring high enough.
It makes more sense to argue that Whites simply have a right to exist as a people and that
includes all Whites regardless of intellect. There are numerous European gene differences
that are related to cultural preferences and they should not be forced to subject themselves
to some egalitarian dystopia that hates them, especially when said Whites built the empire in
the first place.
@frontier y are
you speaking for cops? David Layman the ex cop and former supermax guard YouTuber, who
deliberately broke fingers until convicts submitted, and once was struck by a colleague to
get him to stop baton choking a rampaging convict to death said the duration of what Chauvin
did to Floyd was nothing like what would be done in the line of duty, clearly unnecessary,
and Chavin knew it because he was resting his hands on his thighs. Relative to the education
and amount of training required to qualify, cops are far better paid than nurses. But that is
going to change because even one Chauvin is too much.
Having a gun out shows they were self-dramatising cops in a fantasy world.
No, you see this all the time when there are two cops on a traffic stop. One approaches
the window and the other hangs back in the guys blind spot with either his gun already drawn
or with his hand on it.
@Sulu se
granddaughter killed herself because of meth isn't even able to grieve properly for his
granddaughter because conservatives declared her the enemy and declared a war on her for the
sake of law and order. His political ideology estranged him from his own seed, and any nation
that makes this the norm is doomed to failure. Its flags deserve to be burned and its
monuments deserve to be defaced.
I guarantee that the old man sympathizes more with Wall Street and Israeli Jews than his
own daughter, and sides with property against life and injury. Such a nation has an
appointment with famine and has no future.
He wasn't really trying to kill anyone if the only person he managed to kill was a
4′ 11″, 330 lb. chain smoker. If he had been black, a mestizo illegal alien or a
major D Party donor his sentence would have been no more than 10 years. The 419 year sentence
was the tell that this had been a political show trial.
Floyd was not "murdered" by the police. How simple to watch and conclude that.
Expose and expose and expose the restraint they show they used on a crazed, resistant and
potentially violent person.
If reason does not prevail here, if the crazed, resistant and potentially violent
person(s) still want to use this as an excuse for violence and destruction, then time to
arrest every one of them, by defending the police, not stupidly "defunding" the police.
To watch the wormy and pompous Jeffrey Nadler utter, "Shame on you," to AG Barr shows what
Nadler would do to efforts to maintain order: encourage rioting, violence and
destruction.
Go to Israel, Mr. Nadler. That's where you belong! And take Antifa with you.
@Alden ers are
just as bad as the media. They know full well it is a lie and hate that we don't go along
with it. That hate us more than anything. They would happily send us to camps and shut off
the internet in the name of equality.
So they can keep the little ones in line. But once boy is 5'8 140, beatings I doubt
more beatings will import him. In the old days he could leave home and do farm labor or other
work.
Well that is also when 8th grade was the goal and not high school graduation.
From what I have read Blacks really start having problems around junior high.
@TimeTraveller I
agree that America has major problems and a hell of a lot of it can be laid at the feet of
the Jews. But if things go to hell in this country(Civil War) your benefits won't be worth
the paper it's printed on. I don't think this country needs to burn so much as certain groups
within it need to burn.
But I suspect all this civil unrest is little more than poor Kabuki theater designed to
assist in getting Trump out of office. If Biden wins I bet Covid-19 and riots just magically
go away. If Trump is re-elected it's anyone's guess what will happen.
Almost a year ago exactly, yet another drunk-driving illegal alien killed another
American citizen. This time, it was Sarasota, Fla., and the vehicular killer will spend 13
years behind bars.
He pled guilty to the federal charges, not to the sate charges. Presumably he pled guilty
to the federal charges because he didn't want to face the death penalty.
And no, these people don't give a damn about justice. The idea of the great reset is to
continue to push the US into a collectivist state of mind and a China like economic set up
with a fully authoritarian government and no political freedom. Scamdemic lock down and media
manufactured race war are two ways to push us in that direction.
If it looks like a conspiracy and smells like a conspiracy .
I would invoke the Insurrection Act, then spend the next few weeks arresting the leaders
of BLM and antifa, as well as their collaborators in state and municipal governments,
You forgot to arrest the media owners. The one's who have for 4 years, made our
president's life miserable, through lies and innuendos. And, while you're at it grab False
Fauci and his master, Billy boy Gates, thereby putting to an end the entire charade.
There's enough video, and print evidence, available of powerful jews clamoring for the
eradication of white Christians. It's time for those who speak of our genocide, be it a
rabbi, a professor, politician, newscaster, or whomever, to be charged under the hate speech
laws that they themselves rammed through congress.
@John Johnson
inistrators big black mammas, black preachers, and NAACP ADL AJC ACLU lawsuits hovering
about, it's basically illegal to impose discipline on black kids. Just as it's impossible to
fire incompetent troublesome blacks in the workplace.
The White women are stuck in the classroom with the monsters . The black women sit in the
school district office as consultants, coordinators and counselors at high salaries. And
behind them are the Jewish legal foundations and administrators at the state level aiding and
abetting the savages who destroy the schools and make them unsafe for Whites.
Immigrants are fortunate. Most of them come from nations that are free of blacks.
Irrespective of their economic shortcomings, nations such as this offer a peace, security and
tranquility that once they arrive in the US they will never know again. And since so many
immigrants are destined to operate small businesses in the United States, their interactions
with this conflict and crime driven group will be a central part of their lives in the US.
But that's only if they decide to call the years they'll spend interacting with black America
as living.
I didn't have to use DuckDuckGo to find this vid. It was first, right at the top, using
the Carlson episode title as a search phrase. Enjoy:)
Once again, the cop didn't "point a gun" at George Floyd, which is clearly evident in the
video. The pistol is pointed slightly down and to the side. If the trigger had've been pulled
during that segment of the video, the bullet would've struck the hinge area of the opened
door. Look at the trigger guard to get a good idea of the pistol's long-axis alignment.
Tucker's Unreal George Floyd Comments The Young Turks
Aug 5, 2020
These teachers are no different than the scumbags in media in that they believe
egalitarian lies are better than admitting that those other Whites are probably
correct. They can't stomach that outcome so the unspoken plan is to lie and suppress while
hoping that miscegenation somehow evens it all out someday. The unspoken plan is to hope they
just breed out the curve.
Public teachers are part of the problem and they know it. All it would take is a dozen of
them to setup hidden cameras and the system would crash.
Chauvin will no more get justice than has James Fields (he of Charlottesville, Va.), whose
victim wasn't even black (and she wasn't his victim, either).
The mob is in full control, now.
Presumably, he pled guilty because he knew the evidence against him was insurmountable
(i.e., he knew he was guilty) . That would be the simplest presumption to make.
Along those lines you must face the fact that the Negro was made Numinous by Yankee
WASP Elites.
The Unz Jew haters can't handle that reality.
There must have been a Jew in the cupboard or something when Lincoln decided to go to
war.
The same Jew in the cupboard must have forced him to only give lip service to the Liberia
plan.
At Unz the Jews are able to magically transverse time and space, filling the innocent
minds of Anglo leaders with egalitarian delusions even where Jews didn't exist or didn't have
influence.
The guy is flippin' out and the officers have a handful, to say the least. I also have to
admit that according to this footage, they are being as accommodating as possible considering
the situation.
Like the author, I have to question the claim of claustrophobia, in particular. They are
not putting him in a prowler, but an SUV, as far as I can tell.
And for LAW God fearing common people that believe in karma divine justice and their
simpleton infantile mind that in the battle of good vrs evil and lies vrs TRUTH good shall
prevail over evil and only the TRUTH shall makes us all FREE that divine binary covenant has
been broken. LIES and evil reign supreme and their godless troops in the MSMedia,
politicians, and other lords of darkness not only claim victimhood but make profits in the
process..WE simple deplorables find it incredible that our sacred News media affirms lies,
glorifies lies, certified lies , and if you dont believe lies then you are racist, bigot,
conspiracy lunatic BUT then if LIES win then the truth is irrelevant then it follows that GOD
is a fraud Why is the Black god fearing communities so silenced? all moral religious
INSTITUTIONS whose main source of sustenance is their defense of PEACE, morality, ethics,
GOODNESS, etc.condened BLMANTIFA From Jesus Christ, to Thoreau, MLKING, Mandela, the JUSTICE
and TRUTH ha been the crux of their MORAL force Today the political, religious, civil, MEDIA,
allied themselves with the LIES .its shameful, repugnant While terrorists are financed with
millions$$$ and celebrated in MSM Hollywood WashDC, an honorable man probably alone
devastated with a lifetime career in ruins Derek Chauvin he probably made the same mistake
that most simple humans made ,he believe in GOD that was his demise..IF you believe and hope
in god .you shall perished waiting
@fnn out, and
turned into the wrong street. His car was mobbed, his back window broken out, and he
accelerated into, as it turned out, another mob. That's what happened, I studied the
video.
The acceleration was a panic response. The people responsible for the resulting death were
the people who induced panic in James Fields, not James Fields. Had he not been mobbed and in
justifiable fear of his life, there would have been no death.
Field's trial and conviction were simply not legal. They weren't even a lynching. they
were simply a demonstration of life and death power by the Charlottesville Left. We've seen
quite a few of those demonstrations since then.
One in the chest and one in the head. Sorts all kind of problems out.
Ok where I live, Sweden, the police would have beaten the shit out of him for resisting
arrest. Police don't easily draw their firearm here, but they are quick to draw their baton
and use it. But on the other hand, people arrested here do as the police say, making scenes
as in the video only worsens your case.
Policemen here are respected, and you can always ask a policeman if you are lost for your
way.
Most people here understand they do a hard and health wise taxing job.
I had a girlfriend a long time ago, who was a police officer ( 3,5 years education, minimum
college to entry) she got in a fracas, and was so much she had to quit. And she was not
petite 1,80 cm, really well built, athletic and of course a blonde.
She is now 30 years later a cripple, because of a bad arrest.
They should have shot the motherfucker! I would.
@UncommonGround
heir pods) encounter here on a regular basis, largely due to a black population unleashed by
liberal and media permissiveness. (You will soon though, when the levels of foreigners with a
migration background but no integration interest rise.)
There are some sadistic cops and they cause trouble (lots of white victims too) and
policing attitudes are bad, but blaming these cops on the death of a hopeless, disgusting
figure like St. George of the Gutter is unfair. Chauvin did ok, even if he did have priors. I
hope he doesn't get fucked over completely and I pray for him and the rest of us here.
Negroes are criminals. they may not have committed a crime yet, but they will soon.
"You can take a man out of the bush, but you can't take the bush out of a man"
Rhodesian proverb.
Niggars was a failed offshoot in making of the white man. It was a dead end, really. Just
like Gorillas and Chimps, will mostly not evolve further.
Once they they movi into your neigboorhood its time to move, same goes for bloody arabs,
sandniggars, bad people.
He didn't plead guilty for the state trial and was sentenced to 419 years by the
State/Commonwealth of Virginia. He risked the death penalty if found guilty in the federal
trial. I know it sounds crazy, but some guys would rather rot in prison than be put to
death.
@John Johnson
maybe they're more honest with me? They are also continually bullied by the black teachers
who just love to hear how the blacks curse defy and hit the White teachers.
A montage of videos showing black behavior in the public schools would be great great
great. If it were not taken down from the internet the first day.
I've seen plenty of internet posts and comments from White teachers describing the
horrendous behavior of blacks from K-12.
Once you've worked with blacks, whether kindergartners or attorneys, you realize the truth
about them.
@John Johnson
were bribed / financed by oil companies. No joke, no conspiracy theories, not "mystic
powers", just businessmen with oil/gas concessions that would go broke under nuclear
competition but managed to bribe the environmentalists to destroy nuclear. Granted, the word
"jewish" is never mentioned, and should have been if only as minor participants, but the
principals were not jewish.
Simple reality is horrifying beyond reason -- we are in a competitive society, like it or
not, and everybody competes ruthlessly. Far more comforting to believe that somebody
somewhere will prevent anything too bad from happening. The puppet masters need puppets, the
people complaining thus have a steady job.
Most ridiculous post I've seen in months. It's the black preachers who are the biggest
problem. They're not really clergymen. They're black racist activists using their churches as
a base from which to operate their political activities.
Mandela was a communist terrorist. MLK was trained at a communist activist school and was
a complete charlatan, grifter con artist and wife and sex partner beater.
The FBI had recordings in his home and there are many tapes of him pounding on his wife.
Source; retired FBI man a relative knows.
Fed Criminals commit crimes against countries, but it's the George Floyds us petty
assholes have to deal with on a daily basis and yes, he was being violent.
I guess replying to a "gay troll" makes me stupid too, but it won't happen again.
It's more likely that during interrogation they told him that the murder conviction was
cinched, that everyone at every level in the country, when they discussed the incident, they
prefaced it with "when the cops killed George Floyd" or some variation. They told him (like
they do people) that he needs to take the "smart" option that is least destructive and
"safer". To me, a plea-bargained acceptance of a penalty has little relation to the truth of
the matter let alone guilt.
It probably very safe say that those cops are under bizarre pressure and it's
semi-ridiculous to pontificate about what they should do, but they need to keep their traps
shut and go to trial. The video that's been released shows the majority of what actually
happened. They did nothing wrong. The only quibble is Chauvin using his knee to keep that
whigged-out nut in position, and it's a permitted technique according to the formal police
guidelines, used against people who are resisting arrest, as Floyd was.
But they all could be sacrificed, especially if the Democrats win (the trial is set for
next spring). Actually, that's probably what he was told. "They're going to kill you
[essentially] and you'd better agree to this before they have a chance."
"Presumably, he pled guilty because he knew the evidence against him was insurmountable
(i.e., he knew he was guilty) . That would be the simplest presumption to make."
@Ilya G
Poimandres ed use their fire arms under the law in that case and if they had the shooting
wouldn't have been a blip on the radar screen given King's actions. Instead, to save King,
they used batons as they were trained and brought a man stated to be under PCP, wildly strong
and deranged under control without killing him or inflicting permanent debilitating injury.
(The two other men with him complied and there was no problem). Officer Koon thought the
whole thing, being taped, would be used as a text book case of how to handle such a
situation. So basically they did what you suggest. How'd that turn out?
What scares me is the insouciance and apathy to the loss of a human life shown by the
white people here. BLM have a point.
Only psychopaths would dwell on the technicalities of how he died and the events that led
to it. Does it matter now? he is dead.
These are two fundamental questions for me.
Would George Floyd has died if he didn't had the encounter with Dave chauvin? Would he
have just died anyway?
Did he deserved to die?
Most reasonable people would say no. People here try to justify his death when there is
nothing to justify here. Watching white people justify his death with cold rationality and a
total lack of empathy gives me the shivers.
The Chinaman is probably just as racist as whites against blacks but George Floyd didn't
do anything to deserve this fate.
Think about how it felt like to die from suffocation under that knee for 9 minutes? What
if it were you ? Would you want someone to help you if you said " I can't breathe"?
She's the one who had a meltdown and had to leave the set and go smoke a big fat hooter
when Trump won the count on election night. And she's the one that bandies about the epithet,
"trash". It's on Youtube, somewhere. It's hilarious.
A montage of videos showing black behavior in the public schools would be great great
great. If it were not taken down from the internet the first day.
The Afghans (including the Taliban) do not want the US to leave their country. The flow of
US$ into the country (including the flow of heroin$) is what the Afghans have lived on for
many decades. Its not like the Afghans don't have control of their own country. They have
complete control of all the parts of the country that they want to control. They are
perfectly happy to allow Americans to control small parts of the country as long as the $$$
keep flowing into the whole country.
The US power elite may have figured out that just like every other power that has ever
tried to occupy Afghanistan that it is a black hole that sucks the life out of the power
trying to conq
@76 Tom
Interesting! Been too busy for reviewing the new military appointees until I read your post.
It looks like this is a last ditch attempt by Trump to get troops out of Afghanistan and
Syria...
"withdrawing troops from Afghanistan may well be exactly what TPTB want."
Posted by: jinn | Nov 12 2020 23:34 utc | 81
Well, they have had, what 19 years years to do that and now that President Trump makes
another push for it, all hell breaks loose from the forever war team, you know that team of
Democrats and RINO's who are now vying for a spot on Biden's team of psychopaths for war. The
we came, we saw and aren't leaving team.
"withdrawing troops from Afghanistan may well be exactly what TPTB want."
Anything is possible, but given the pushback that is taking place (quietly of course, lest
the masses get awoken) that is seriously doubtful.
Afghanistan can be likened to one of the central squares on a chessboard...control of
central squares is vital as it reduces the mobility of your opponent and lays ground for
offensive action.
China has a border with Afghanistan, as does Iran...were Afghanistan to free itself from
USA occupation, it would make a great conduit for the BRI.
That is without getting into Afghanistan's role in opium trade and the related black
budget, nor its wealth in rare minerals. One might say for the Hegemon to remain the Hegemon
it needs to control Afghanistan.
The problem for the hegemon is Afghanistan is expensive to hold on to...and this is
without Russia, Iran or China putting any effort in to chase US troops out via arming and
training proxies...that could be done quickly, and I am guessing the groundwork is already in
place.
Well, they have had, what 19 years years to do that
_________________________________________
Well sure but you need to remember the story of why we were there in the first place.
They can't just dump all the BS that they have been feeding us for nineteen years and say
"never mind" like Roseanne Roseannadanna.
As for the warmongers who support attacking Libya, Iraq, Syria, etc that was done to send
a message to any country that does not want to knuckle under to the $$$ hegemony and thinks
about trying to escape it.
That messaging does not apply to the Afghan war. That war sends the exact opposite
message.
My apologies if this has already been posted. Aaron Mate continues to rise in stature--
IMO-- as he keeps digging into Russiagate and exposing deeper and deeper proof of U.S. and
U.K. plots, programs and coverups regarding Russia. In this video Mate and Max Blumenthal
start by explaining how Twitter inadvertently boosted the Grayzone's explosive uncovering of
the BBC, Bellingcat and others' programs designed to do what Russiagaters accuse Putin of
doing; the difference is that Blumenthal gives evidence in the form of emails. impressive.
bottom line, "R2P""Russia bad"... the wheels are falling off.
...I am amazed that some subjects that previously had hundreds of thousands of entries on
internet searches now have only a few links, and they are links to elite so called
'mainstream' sites. IMO the internet has been sanitised and therefore neutered.
It is easy to spot a hasbarist type paid stooge, They never criticise the bandit state or
its obsequious captive nations, only the shortcomings of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela
are
targets.
"I am amazed that some subjects that previously had hundreds of thousands of entries on
internet searches now have only a few links, and they are links to elite so called
'mainstream' sites. IMO the internet has been sanitised and therefore neutered. "
- DuckDuckGo gives much wider perspectives on searches related to historical events. I set
them as my default last week.
Putin is considered the richest man in the world for the amount of wealth he
controls , not the amount he owns. Alexei Navalny is considered the bravest man in the
world for returning to Russia after recovering from Novichok poisoning in Germany. Putin had
Navalny's returning flight diverted to avoid mobs of protestors, then arrested Navalny at the
airport.
Never lacking a certain Russian sense of humor, Putin charged Navalny, whom he calls "the
blogger," with violating parole
... ... ...
Putin called the EU's bluff, expelling three E.U.
diplomats from Russia during a visit by the EU's foreign minister, Josep Borrell, on
February 5. Putin's pugnacious foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, spoke disapprovingly of the
E.U. in a press conference standing right next to the humiliated minister. This is the same
Lavrov seen laughing in a famous White House
photo with U.S. President Donald J. Trump on the day after Trump fired FBI Director,
James Comey.
With the E.U. suddenly voting 28-0 against Russia, with Joe Biden proclaiming "America is
back," and with Tony Blinken promising Russia must pay for the recent SolarWinds cyber attack
against the U.S., Vlad the Underpants Poisoner must be feeling his briefs getting
uncomfortably snug.
As Putin desperately tries to wriggle out of the sanctions surrounding him and his
oligarch buddies, he faces the ultimate decline in his fortune: the green new deal.
The
majority of Putin's wealth is still in the ground , and it's worthless if the world turns
away from fossil fuels as quickly as it appears to be. Without the NORD-2 pipeline shipping
gas from Russia to Germany, without the corrupt contracts to supply satellite nations with
fuel, Russia has nothing to sell except tourism and nesting dolls.
Putin will encounter the same problem the nations of the Arab Spring encountered:
domestic youth realizing their futures look nothing like the lives they see on their phones.
The Russian people are not stupid. They know they're not enjoying the same quality of life as
their European neighbors. Even though Western Democracies fail to provide for basic living
needs, they are at least exciting and hold the possibility of getting unbelievably
rich.
... ... ...
STEVE O'KEEFE is the author of several books, most recently Set the Page on Fire:
Secrets of Successful Writers , from New World Library, based on over 250 interviews. He
is the former editorial director for Loompanics Unlimited.
Can we see who is taking care of whom and at whose expense!
There are those who are plugged into the government pay wagon, and there are the
others....the bifurcation of a nation.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the
voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that
moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the
public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy,
always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has
been 200 years." DeToqueville
A Pale Horse 35 minutes ago
Stolen elections are expensive
Nuke_Guru PREMIUM 1 hour ago
$1.9 Trillions comes out to about $6000 per person. But a family of four gets $1400. Where
is the other $22,600? Check Chuck and Nancy's pockets.
I've been saying this same thing for months. Trump's policies were widely popular. It was
Trump's personality that did him in along with a lot of help from a pandemic, the FBI and the
media.
The democrats are going to push way too far left for the country to stomach. You do not
have to be a hard core conservative to think that it is unfair for girls to compete against
trans girls or some guy that claims to identify as a girl and nor is any liberal father going
to be thrilled with his 13 yr old daughter sharing a locker room with one.
Pretty sure that if we took a vote more than 90% of adults in this country would agree
that the government should not be able to step in and override a parents decision not to
provide puberty blockers to their child or that children should even be given puberty
blockers. BUT that is what is being nominated by the Biden team.
Trump tried to get us out of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq but the dems fought him tooth and
nail right along with the hawks in the republican party. WHO KNEW the dems would become the
war hawks? Biden sent more troops into Syria on his first day. Now he is trying to figure out
how to get out of the withdrawl in Afghanistan and Germany.
All these "green" energy policies are going to lead to higher costs for electricity, gas,
home heating oil, natural gas and they are gonna do it while unemployment is high.
Going to push for $15 minimum wage that they KNOW is going to kill a lot of jobs while
unemployment is already obscenely high.
BTW Trump voters were overall higher earning than Biden voters. That they had fewer
college degrees tells me two things. First, that the average Trump voter is not a toothless
redneck but a professional tradesman or small business owner. It also tells me that a college
degree aint worth the paper its printed on if your looking just at earning potential.
Point is .the democrats are going to tick off a lot of people. Pass the minimum wage and
those that get the increase will love you but those that lose their jobs will hate you and
small business owners across the country will detest you. Do not pass it and the left will
never forgive you.
Yep, I think the democrats are going to have a very very hard time and they are going to
end up turning on each other. I also think that Trumpism without Trump has a very good
future.
Dont get me wrong, Trump will be around. He will attend rallies, raise money, drive the
media nuts and the democrats insane but he will not run again. He is going to just create
headaches for the media, the democrats, the never Trump republicans and enjoy the heck out of
it. But he will not be a candidate.
The 'New Democrats' have stolen the nouveau riche from the Republicans, and the nouveau
riche are fantastically richer than the old money. The NewDems have also abandoned poor
people. The only way forward for the Repubs is to corral the poors.
The way to do it? Retarget the Christian Right from abortion to usury. 1 out of 7
Americans has a debt collector after them. Everybody, even this atheist, knows the story
about Jesus throwing moneylenders out of the temple.
If Trump wants to get any traction in 2024, he's got to weld the Repubs back together.
Usury is a great strategy.
Trapped in the empty luxury and petty court intrigues of Versailles, the French ruling
class could only see their own imagined beauty and illusions of power reflected in mirrors.
They were ignorant and blind to the despair and rage building up against them among the
ordinary people of France.
Today, old Reagan Free Market, minimum government Republicans and tree-hugging, coal,
oil and natural gas-hating and abortion-loving romantic Green Democrats who hold the
politics of Washington and its media in an iron (and rusting) grip are the true heirs of
those decadent French aristocrats. Their Mainstream Media has become a 21st century
Cybernetic Hall of Mirrors 2.0. Across the Atlantic the dark and doomed Spirit of
Versailles has migrated from the outskirts of Paris to Brussels where it now resides in the
European Commission.
History has repeated itself on a colossally larger scale.
Populism is a term used in neoliberal Newspeak instead of the term "mass social protest" and
it is used by neoliberal propagandists and neoliberal MSM in order to smear the rejection of
neoliberalism by the vast swats of the US population. Generally this social movement (and it is
a social movement) is about the resistance to neoliberalism and globalization.
When the term "populism" moves on front pages of neoliberal MSM and into papers like this
one that, first of all, means the process of de-legitimization of the ruling (in our case
neoliberal) elite reached at a moderately dangerous for the elite stage which requires some
"active countermeasure" not just passive suppression in MSM and ostracism.
The typical charges of corruption, the control of government by financial oligarchy,
outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing jobs as well and suppression of wages and
redistribution of wealth up are just icing on the cake. The core is the rejection of
neoliberalism, the rejection of accumulation by dispossession – gangster capitalism in
other words. Which is politely called "redistribution of wealth up" in the neoliberal MSM.
Trump during his 2016 election campaign (and only during it; he governed like Bush III )
voiced some concern that are typically associated with this mass rejection of neoliberalism and
instantly became kind of de-facto leader of the movement. But, in reality, he was yet another
"full-blown BS artist" as Tucker called him.
So Trumpism or "national neoliberalism" is not exactly populism – it is more of the
attempt to hijack and channel the protest in a way beneficial for the "nationalist" part of
national oligarchy and military-industrial complex like happened in Germany in late 20th
– early 30th. Only this time "national neoliberalism" card is played instead of "national
socialism". And what is interesting is that intelligence agencies, which typically are viewed
as a part of the military-industrial complex, fought Trump and this movement tool and nail. The
Russiagate gang of Brennan-Comey-McCabe was not an accident.
Please note that the social base of Trump movement are not so much blue collar unionized
workers but owners of small business and contractors. They stick to Trump as their leader
despite blatant betrayal of their interests on his part. that does not exclude part of blue
collar workers but if you look at the social composition of the Jan 6 meeting participant I do
not see many blue color workers in it. But is did included some former police officers, which
is pretty telling and makes it superficially looks like Germany 2.0.
And rapid construction of barbed fence and National Guard sleeping on Capitol floors is
another testament that neoliberal elite took this threat seriously.
The empire tricks are being called out, with their obsession to sanction and old style
western "wanted" posters what they're getting back is to be trolled. Prigozhin, the so called
Putin's Chef is trolling the FBI claiming a 250K reward for information on himself, he
provided them with his personal address, Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment Number 7, St.
Petersburg RF. He is waiting for them there, to cash his quarter million. Old western movies
are kind of old.
Biden bombs Syria, and allows congress to quash $15 minimum wage. No $2000.00 covid aid
for hungry yanks. Y'all happy you got rid of Orange Man Bad? Dementia Joe would look after
you, right? Good luck with that.
Regarding the Renegade Inc. link @Karlof has provided and the interview with
Richard A. Werner, the research paper he talks about in the midsection can be read here:
Can banks create money out of nothing? .
Strangeley enough, it's probably the first empirical reasarch attempt on how a bank "loan" is
indicated on a bank balance sheet. He does it by taking a fictitious loan from one of these
small local community banks he talks about in the interview.
The paper is easily accessible and also contains a brief history of the perception on how
money is created and how banks operate.
And since the documentary The Spider's Web has been mentioned, there are two
complementary films to banking and finance which are worth watching: 97% Owned and Princes of Yen , the latter based on
Richard Werner's same-titled book. The book tells the story about a slow coup d'etat that
happened in Japan during the 70's and late 80's and how Japan was transformed from a
centralized command economy where credit creation was "window-dressed" by the powerful
Finance Ministry by means of an artificially created housing bubble into one that is
dominated by a neoliberalized Central Bank with all the monetary, financial and social
ramifications we can see today, not just in Japan but around the globe.
After reading Escobar's essay, I began trying to find all the volumes of Vernadsky's
History of Russia which I read while self-learning Russian history in 1993 thanks to the
University of Hawaii Manoa's libraries. The first volume is linked @21. Volume Two,
Kievan
Russia ; Volume Three, The Mongols and Russia ; Volume Four,
Russia at the Dawn of the
Modern Era ; Volume Five, The Tsardom of Moscow ; and his overview
volume, A History of
Russia . The series Vernadsky and his academic partner Michael Karpovich initially
envisioned was never completely finished as Karpovich died in 1959, and Vernadsky passed in
1973.
I found the series to be the best balanced and most in-depth of all the histories of
Russia I've read, somewhere around 3,000 pages in all. I suggest leaving the overview volume
for last. Do enjoy!!
Durham was investigating the Mueller Russia-Collusion coup against President Trump and his
administration.
He was appointed as Special Counsel in October.
He resigned as US Attorney in Connecticut.
There will likely be no indictments after the Deep State spied on Trump and attempted to
throw him from office.
[...]
Update 3:59 pm EST via Twitter/Chad Pergram:
"John Durham steps down as US Atty in CT. But stays on board as special counsel probing
origins of Trump/Russia investigation. Biden Admin asked US attys to resign by end of
February"
Probably means whatever Durham was investigating will receive a quiet burial.
Biden has been a major disappointment for those who hoped that he'd change course
regarding America's pathological involvement in overseas conflicts
Who hoped that? He didn't run on such a platform. "Engagement with the world" and a
"restoration of the pre-Trump era" was his platform. Don't ask me why but this made him
more popular. He was literally the VP in the most interventionist Presidency in US
history.
... People like Giraldi sometimes seem like plants put in place to discredit
anti-interventionism by trying to make it synonymous with anti-semitism.
In the late 1980s, Rannie Amiri, an independent commentator on political affairs, challenged
then-Senator Joe Biden on his stance toward the Israel-Palestine conflict following a campus
speech that Biden gave, asking him:
Rather than succumb to the influence of various lobbying groups in Washington, such as
AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- which promotes the views of Israel's
right-wing Likud Party], and the untold amount of money they use to dictate policy,
wouldn't it be more prudent to examine the real effects that collective punishment, daily
humiliation, and countless civilian casualties inflicted by the Israelis have on an
occupied population, and use that understanding to formulate a more rational approach
toward the Palestinians?
Here is Biden response to that:
At the end of the exchange, Biden turned, put his arm around Amiri's shoulder, and
addressed the audience.
If this was not such a fine, articulate, and sincere young man, and he implied that my
vote had been bought, I would give him a swift kick in the ass.
The audience roared in applause, and Amiri sat back down to his chair defeated.
However, a friend rose up to defend him, telling Biden: "If my father heard you say such a
thing, I believe he would have done the same to you first."
The tribal stupidity of the people who support Israel first is beyond words. Who would
think in the 20th and the 21th century we would be led by primitive thinking of tribal
fantasies from thousands of year ago?
Most of the us in the west did not know that this has been going on for so long since we
have been deluded with the term "free press" to describe our press in the west. We are slowly
waking up to reality with some "freedom" here and there on the internet like this site.
So, Biden has been a major disappointment for those who expected that he might change
course regarding America's pathological involvement in overseas conflicts while also having
the good sense and courage to make relations with countries like Iran and Israel responsive
to actual U.S. interests.
You're giving the morons way too much credit, Sir. It's doubtful even 5% of voters know or
care about geopolitics, and probably less than 1% who voted based on fraudsident biden's
foreign policies.
For 5 years it was nonstop Trump-hatred from the ((( lügenpresse ))) even as Trump
did weasel jared's bidding. Stevie Fking Wonder could see the election was rigged.
The USA is kaput, the supreme joke spineless
The ((( Underminers ))) are a c ** t-hair away from total control.
The Free United States must part ways with the devils in DC. Texas, Florida,
Oklahoma, the Dakotas and Montana for starters.
Today we are disclosing four networks of accounts to our archive of state-linked information
operations; the only archive of its kind in the industry. The networks we are disclosing
relate to independent, state-affiliated information operations that we have attributed to
Armenia, Russia and a previously disclosed network from Iran.
...
Russia
Today we're disclosing two separate networks that have Russian ties.
1. Our first investigation found and removed a network of 69 fake accounts that can be
reliably tied to Russian state actors. A number of these accounts amplified narratives that
were aligned with the Russian government , while another subset of the network focused on
undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability .
...
Be a good citizen!
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Twitter adds a warning to @MaxBlumenthal's report in @TheGrayzoneNews on leaked UK gov't
files ( https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters..
) exposing a major propaganda campaign targeting Russia: "These materials may have been
obtained through hacking."
That's too bad because Twitter's 'hacked material' insert created a Streisand effect
and the such marked Grayzone story went viral.
The censors did not like that. Some twenty hours after the 'hacked materials' insert on
tweets to that story was first applied it vanished.
I have, by the way, no idea if the British material was hacked or if it comes from a whistle
blower. Neither is that important. The material is genuine and it is full of information which
the British authorities want to hide but which that the global public deserves to know. That is
the only thing that is important for publishing it.
Posted by b on February 24, 2021 at 15:16 UTC | Permalink
Undermining faith in the North American Terrorist Organization (NATO) is a Thought Crime
of the highest order!
The punishment for this crime is being forced to watch a conga line of Anglo-American
media mouthpieces blather about whatever is their Moral Outrage of the Month--Clockwork
Orange style.
Instead of crying over unfair behavior and spilt milk and sympathizing with each other, we
(at least those of us who were foolish enough to open a "social" account) should immediately
take the first step by closing all "social" accounts subject to US censorship and furiously
write to anyone we have an address for to try to convince them to boycott the dang things.
RIght away. That's the only way.
Today we are disclosing four networks of accounts to our archive of state-linked
information operations; the only archive of its kind in the industry. The networks we are
disclosing relate to independent, state-affiliated information operations that we have
attributed to Armenia, Russia and a previously disclosed network from Iran.
...
Russia
Today we're disclosing two separate networks that have Russian ties.
1. Our first investigation found and removed a network of 69 fake accounts that can be
reliably tied to Russian state actors. A number of these accounts amplified narratives that
were aligned with the Russian government , while another subset of the network focused on
undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability .
...
Be a good citizen!
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.
Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
Twitter adds a warning to @MaxBlumenthal's report in @TheGrayzoneNews on leaked UK gov't
files ( https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters..
) exposing a major propaganda campaign targeting Russia: "These materials may have been
obtained through hacking."
Is this warning applied equally? I doubt it.
Haha love a good Streisand effect backfiring on the Fascist Regime!
So, only the official party narrative is allowed in the news.
Only government approved documents can be discussed and only documents explicitly
declassified can be seen.
Therefore, the only government malfeasance the media can cover is malfeasance officially
admitted and any other non-governmental approved narrative is censored.
In that case, there is nothing to discuss as the US government never admits malfeasance or
any wrongdoing at all.
Strangely, a large fraction of US citizens will be perfectly fine with this since it
protects everyone from "fake news" and "Russian meddling".
Any country that allows this behavior deserves the dictatorship they live under.
Thanks, it is in fact refreshing to see you have realized the censorship has gone
completely bonkers, because it is just a symptom of a totally insane world at the moment. Or,
as John Lennon said more than 50 years ago but it is more relevant than ever
Reflect On:Today, Lennon's message has become quite obvious, and there are many examples
to choose from. The only difference is, more people seem to know about it, and the
collective consciousness is shifting with regards to how we view our world.
"Liberal" appeared in Europe in a socio-economic context in the late 1600s to describe an
system where business would be free, unhindered by royal/government control. For the most
part, to start up a business, one needed a royal license or patent. The liberals wanted
unregulated business, and their motto was "laissez faire" (let it be done/happen).
Laissez-faire capitalism is generally considered the first (entrepreneurial) phase of
capitalism, starting in the early 1700s.
Outside the English-speaking world, the word still relates to free trade and unregulated
business practices.
"Neoliberal" is more recent, coming into common usage since the arrival of the
Thatcher/Reagan regime of globalization. Neoliberals go one further than the original
liberals. While the latter just wanted governments to let businesses do their thing, the
neoliberals believe that it is government's duty to promote and support business, in other
words to play a major role in making it possible for corporations to make money. Hence,
Boeing and the other corporations and the big banks must NEVER be allowed to fail, for that
would represent a failure of government as it is understood in neoliberal ideology.
The liberalism which is referred to here is the economic liberalism which was adopted in
the United Kingdom in the 1840s after the "reform" of the Corn Laws, which permitted free
trade in grain and therefore brought down both the price of wheat and the small farming
community in the UK, as it was intended to do. Later these liberal policies (largely modelled
on the "comparative advantage" economic theory, which had already been refuted by the time it
was developed by David Ricardo) were used to justify the Irish genocide of 1847-9.
This policy was eventually abandoned later in the nineteenth century, except for places
like India, of course. It was restored in the West in the 1970s, under the name of "free
trade", and therefore is called neoliberalism, or new liberalism in the economic sense.
The term is not a compliment.
I suspect that the term "liberal-fascist" derives partly from the term Islamofascist,
meaning a Muslim who does not bow to Washington six times a day, and partly from the term
"social-fascist", a Stalinist term for a socialist who did not bow to Moscow six times a
day.
Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. According to Losurdo, the term "liberal" (as an
adjective) is first found in 16th Century Spain, and essentially was a defense of slave labor
to serf labor.
The first theoretician of Liberalism that I can think of is John Locke. If he wasn't the
first, he certainly was the most influential, as he was the philosopher of the Founding
Fathers of the USA.
Liberalism was never an organized "school" or ideology. The term itself as we know today
(an ism) was only consolidated sometime around the French Revolution (1789), hence why many
people today (mainly Western First Worlders) still associate the term is progressivism and
even leftism. In reality, they are confounding the term with radicalism, which was the
faction of the abolitionist liberals who extrapolated liberalism to all human beings.
Neoliberalism is literally the New Liberalism. The neoliberals believe that everything
that happened between the Russian Revolution (1917) and the post-war welfare state
social-democracy was an abortion of History that should've never have happened. They then
propose the return to the classical liberal era (until 1914) with updates to the new
technological realities of their time, as if the period of 1917-1975 never existed. They then
seek to "link up" 1980-present to 1500-1914.
@vk "The neoliberals believe that everything that happened between the Russian Revolution
(1917) and the post-war welfare state social-democracy was an abortion of History that
should've never have happened."
Personally, I tend to define 'neoliberalism' as global financial capitalism. 'Global'
being the key. Something similar to what's described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-imperialism
. Technological advances in global communications and transportation (containerization) being
its most important precursors.
But I agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union, a competing alternative model, has to
be an important component also.
@ Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Feb 25 2021 12:28 utc | 87
You're thinking about Monetarism - the economics school founded by Milton Friedman that
served as the economic theory of neoliberalism after the 1980s.
Neoliberalism was founded in 1947 (Mont Pelerin Society). One interesting thing about the
original neoliberals was that they didn't distinguish between European social-democracy and
communism: in their view, the welfare state was the realization of the Communist Manifesto's
program (it really does propose for what we nowadays call the welfare state in some of its
pages as some kind of transition program).
@ Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Feb 25 2021 12:49 utc | 89
Monetarism is the economic theory. Neoliberalism is the political-ideological doctrine.
Neoliberalism found in Monetarism the missing piece for them to govern the Western world,
sometime in the mid-1970s.
It is common for a political-ideological doctrine to absorb theories outside of its
"field" in order to strengthen itself and gain power. Change of clothes (i.e. change of the
theories it adopts) is also common.
The impression Westerners have nowadays that one political-ideological doctrine must
always have exactly one economic theory or even that they are the same thing comes from the
fact that we live in the Era of Marxism, i.e. a historical period where Marxism is dominant.
But Marxism is the exception to the rule, based on the scientific theory of the greatest
philosopher of all time.
In practice, the bourgeois ideologues will have to make do with much inferior
theoreticians (John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Paul Samuelson, Mises, Hayek,
Böhm-Bawerk, Walras, Keynes, Friedman etc. etc. etc.) and so it is expected for them to
change their thinkers from time to time.
@vk "Neoliberalism found in Monetarism the missing piece..."
The way I see it, economics is the base. Like I said, technological advances in global
communications and transportation shifted the paradigm. What we have now is international
division of labor, controlled by west-owned global finance. Global financial capital is
rising above national boundaries; the role of national governments is to provide resources,
infrastructure, and disciplined low-cost labor, thus attracting a portion of global capital,
competing for it.
That's what I call 'neoliberalism', but I don't insist on it. What's in the name?
'Hyperimperialism', 'super-imperialism', 'inter-imperialism' or even 'state cartel' would
do.
It's just that 'neoliberalism' is a popular word these days, that seems to be used to
describe the current form of "relations of production". And why not.
Now, about ideologies. My feeling is, there are always hundreds of various ideologies
flying around. The establishment will pick a suitable one, shine it up in think-tanks, and go
with it. It'll become the dominant ideology. Until it doesn't suffice anymore, and then
they'll replace it with another. But that's all bullshit. Pwogwessivism, liberalism, social
democracy, the third way, whatever. No need to pay attention.
@ Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Feb 25 2021 14:18 utc | 97
Now, about ideologies. My feeling is, there are always hundreds of various ideologies
flying around. The establishment will pick a suitable one, shine it up in think-tanks, and
go with it. It'll become the dominant ideology. Until it doesn't suffice anymore, and then
they'll replace it with another. But that's all bullshit. Pwogwessivism, liberalism, social
democracy, the third way, whatever. No need to pay attention.
That's the definition of democracy in the post-war, as defined by the likes of Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr. and Hannah Arendt.
Schlesinger defined democracy or Western democracy as the system with a "vital center". A
vital center is a political system dominated by a political spectrum (left-right). The
ideologies within this political spectrum freely compete against each other in the public
arena for political power (getting into the White House; forming a majority within a
Parliament). Schlesinger is the father of what we nowadays call "pluralism". In opposition, a
totalitarian system is one of a single party, in which he put Nazi Germany and the USSR -
they don't have a "vital center".
Hannah Arendt defined totalitarianism as any system that vertebrates itself on one single
meta-narrative (History). She put as the totalitarian holotypes both Nazi Germany and the
USSR - the first built itself over the narrative of the master race; the second over class
struggle. By exclusion, she defines a democratic system as those without a single narrative
or any meta-narrative. By a different route, she comes to a similar endgame as Schlesinger,
with the exception that, in her model, democracies don't necessarily need to be multi-party
or even plural. You could be a single-party system and not plural - as long as the party
doesn't adopt any "meta-narrative", it suffices as free and democratic. Needless to say,
Arendt is one of the precursors to Postmodernism (absolute relativity).
That's why the West, until the present days, still consider itself as fully democratic and
China and Russia fully totalitarian: as long as the West doesn't adopt a meta-narrative and
keeps more than one party, they are democratic by post-war standards. It's not and never was
about eradicating poverty, turning the world a better place, fomenting progress for the
people etc. etc.
Lots of stabs being made at a definition for Neoliberalism. The following is from Hudson's
J is for Junk Economics , pgs 167-8:
" Neoliberalism: An ideology to absolve banks, landlords and monopolists from
accusations of predatory behavior. Just as European fascism in teh 1930s reflected the
failure of socialist parties to put forth a viable alternative, today's U.S.-centered
neoliberalism reflects the failure of industrial capitalism or socialism to free society from
rentier interests that are a legacy of feudalism.
"Turning the tables on classical political economy, rentier interests act as
plaintiffs against public regulation and taxation of their economic rents in contrast
to Adam Smith and other classical liberals, today's neoliberals want to deregulate
monopoly income and free markets for rent seeking, as well as replacing progressive income
taxation and taxes on land and banking with a value-added tax (VAT) on consumers.
"Endorsing an oligarchic role of government to protect property and financial fortunes
(see Chicago School and Moral Hazard ), neoliberalism loads the economy with an
exponential growth of debt while depicting it in a way that avoids recognizing the rising
rentier overhead (rent, interest and insurance) paid to the FIRE sector. (See Junk
Economics and Social Market .) Neoliberals want to privatize public
infrastructure. They defend this grabitization by depicting public ownership and regulation
as less efficient than congtrol by financial managers, despite their notorious short-termism.
The pretense is that private operators will provide goods and services at lower cost even
while extracting monopoly rent, building interest, dividends and high management salaries
into prices. (See Pentagon Capitalism .)"
A related definition follows:
" Neoliberal Disease: A term coined by Jan Hellevig to describe the free hand that
leaders of the demoralized post-Soviet bureaucracies gave neoliberals to redesign and
de-industrialize their economies by creating client kleptocracies . 'They freed the
markets, but only for the criminals. They totally neglected investments to modernize the
industry, and let the assets and cash streams be openly or covertly stolen by insiders and
the mob. The result was total chaos and the breakup of the Soviet Union.'" (Jon Hellevig,
"Russian Economy--The disease is not Dutch but Liberal," Awara March 2 2016, reprinted in Johnson's Russia
List , March 3, 2016, #12.)" [All Emphasis Original]
It should be noted the strategy Hellevig describes is the same as that used by those
termed "Corporate Raiders" that first prominently surfaced during Reagan/Bush and were
responsible for the so-called Savings & Loan Crisis.
If you don't have Hudson's book, I highly suggest getting it as it's filled with excellent
information and beats taking both micro- and macroeconomics. It's the companion book to
Killing the Host , which is essential for understanding Neoliberalism. The only part
of the Saga missing is a definitive history telling how the Neoliberal doctrine arose in the
UK and was exported to the USA @1880. Hudson has provided key portions but the overall story
still remains to be told.
the worst mistake jimmy carter ever made was to hire brzezinski, father of the
mujahideen and grandfather of al-qaeda. we used to brag about arming terrorists with weapons
to shoot down russian helicopters, hell they even made a "comedy" about it called charlie
wilsons war. now we accuse the russians of placing bounties on americans in afganistan and
demand more sanctions be placed on russia.
utter hypocrisy.
as for the maidan cookie monster and her neocon half wit husband, further proof of
failing upward, nothing succeeds like failure in washington. /div
There is no such thing as "liberal-fascist." "Liberal" has never meant any sort of
quasi-anarchist commitment to untrammeled individual rights. It has always meant the freedom
of the press. The thing is, the real meaning of freedom of the press for the liberal is the
freedom of the owners of the press to do what they want. The fact that customarily a
free-for-the-owners'-press happen to produce the right kind of news suitable for owners and
the advertisers is seen as the benefit of a free press. As for "fascist," no concept of
fascism that doesn't include legal and illegal restrictions on freedom and government
propaganda mobilizing the citizens to sacrifice for recovery from defeat/further conquest is
not a serious concept of fascism at all. Both liberalism and fascism revere property but will
compromise for necessity, liberalism for a certain degree of class peace, fascism for war,
but if anybody is determined to indoctrinate the masses it is fascism. The implicit notion
here that people daring to think or worse, live, differently than tradition may inspire rage
in mad dog reactionaries. But this is at bottom the same rage that led Catholics and
Protestants to murder each other or for witches to be killed by the thousands (yes, they
were,) or for monarchists to kill republicans or for one ethnic/religious/national group to
murder another. Modern society is not a genuine offense, no matter how bigoted you are. The
keyboard has a hyphen but hitting it between "liberal" and "fascist" is just more
crypto-fascist BS. It doesn't matter how many times you type it, it's not a thing.
It seems to me, they make it sound more difficult than it really is.
Think of thepiratebay. It gets banned, blocked, raided, sued - from 2006 at least - and
yet it lives. It changes from .org to .whatever, it finds registrars and infrastructure
somehow.
And you don't really need google/apple store all that much: a browser will suffice.
And search? paypal, bank - what is this all about? I'm sure thepiratebay works with
advertisers somehow (definitely with VPN companies), and somehow it gets paid. And that's all
there is to it. Imo.
The term liberal-fascist refers to people who consider themselves liberals, but in
reality are not; in fact, these people resemble fascists more and more with each passing day.
A more precise term would be "liberal"-fascist (with the quotes). It's not so much
about SJW witchhunts as about absolute faith in everything the state says and hysterical
demands to censor any dissenting opinion.
...In short, anywhere it deems convenient, liberals support fascists, cannibals and other
charming characters. As it goes for a while, liberals acquire fascistic values and try them
in their home countries. Show trials and corporate censorship for now.
Undermining faith in the North American Terrorist Organization (NATO) is a Thought Crime
of the highest order!
The punishment for this crime is being forced to watch a conga line of Anglo-American
media mouthpieces blather about whatever is their Moral Outrage of the Month--Clockwork
Orange style.
..I suspect that the term "liberal-fascist" derives partly from the term Islamofascist,
meaning a Muslim who does not bow to Washington six times a day, and partly from the term
"social-fascist", a Stalinist term for a socialist who did not bow to Moscow six times a
day.
The liberalism which is referred to here is the economic liberalism which was adopted in
the United Kingdom in the 1840s after the "reform" of the Corn Laws, which permitted free
trade in grain and therefore brought down both the price of wheat and the small farming
community in the UK, as it was intended to do. Later these liberal policies (largely modelled
on the "comparative advantage" economic theory, which had already been refuted by the time it
was developed by David Ricardo) were used to justify the Irish genocide of 1847-9.
This policy was eventually abandoned later in the nineteenth century, except for places
like India, of course. It was restored in the West in the 1970s, under the name of "free
trade", and therefore is called neoliberalism, or new liberalism in the economic sense.
The term is not a compliment.
I suspect that the term "liberal-fascist" derives partly from the term Islamofascist,
meaning a Muslim who does not bow to Washington six times a day, and partly from the term
"social-fascist", a Stalinist term for a socialist who did not bow to Moscow six times a
day.
You would think they would hire people who have some idea as to what might be plausible
when they invent these stories? It's very strange to see. There has been a long string of
these unconvincing stories aimed at Russia. The claim the supported Trump after 2016 was a
watershed too, all caution to the winds after that. Skripals, Navalny, one after another that
makes no sense. It's like they want to make a point and are failing. Or maybe propaganda is
all they have.
What eludes me about Russian cyber actors is their utter stupidity and their utter genius.
We are told that the Solar Winds attack was an absolutely super duper act of pure hacking
genius. But on the other hand Russian hackers cannot hide a twitter bot's point of origin.
According to The Intercept, Mueller was able to indict Russian hackers because one of them
forgot to sign into their VPN account. Go figure.
I suspect that any tweet which "takes the Kremlin line" is assumed to be tied to Russians
regardless of its point of origin. Otherwise, Twitter would have to have the resources of the
CIA to identify a multitude of cyber actors to back track them.
The interesting aspect of the Twitter ban on Trump is that it tends to reinforce the
theory that POTUS is just a Token Figurehead with Zero Power. It was an extraordinarily
myopic act for The Swamp to approve.
Narrative control has always been part of the grift. But one can always cultivate a
critical mind, read widely, understand history and try to think carefully about how ideology
works. I'm a fan of Zizek's film 'Pervert's Guide to Ideology' because it points out that
'propaganda' is never disseminated from a central point by diabolical puppet-masters.
Ideology is dispersed and decentralised, and radiates from all points. It is embodied, and in
a way this makes it even more sinister, because it cannot be countered by rationality and
argument. But we can try to understand it in its complexity, and there are plenty of
excellent thinkers who have done so to fall back on: Marx, Nietzsche, Althusser, Foucault,
Baudrillard, Zizek, not to mention all of the Frankfurt School and their successors.
But it also is astonishingly naive to expect narrative to align with a truth imagined to
lie outside narrative. Truth is an effect of narrative combined with authority. The early
Greeks grasped this in their genealogy of the Muse: she is the daughter of Zeus (sovereign
power) and Mnemosyne (memory). We just happen to live in a world where all narrative forms
are indeterminate: nothing is true, everything could be true... This is an effect of
narrative form not an intrinsic problem of content.
Most Americans consider Kissinger a war criminal too, and informed Americans know that
Zbignue Brzenski has lost all credibility. He was a cold war era Anti-Russian. He has said
little if anything relevant since the collapse of the USSR.
Informed Americans would prefer a doplomatic relationship with their neighbors south of
the border. It would be much more economically and environmentally sustainable to have a
cooperative agreement with Venezuela, rather than the KXL advocates north of the border, that
Biden thankfully banned. It may be the only thing tbat he ends up doing correctly. I hope
not. I did not vote for him, Trump, or anyone else. Biden, Blinken, and Austin speak about
wanting to go back to the JCPOA and START, but whether they are willing to give up their
policy errors of force through sanctions, and falsely blaming Iran for the attack on the
Irbil Iraq airport will probably determine whether they can do this successfully or not.
Everyone is sick of the bullshit from the American government, including American citizens!
The government does what they Globzi investors demand from them. They really do not give a
damn about anyone else. Everyone is just a means to an end to them, and unkess someone is
exceptionally wealthy, they are an irrelevant pain in the ass to the government, unless they
are willing to sell out their own interest in order to elevate the corrupt government.
That's true. As a barometer of establishment thinking, Foreign Affairs is indeed
useful. I would just make a distinction of using it to understand establishment thinking
versus using it as a source for good policy, which is evidently questionable if its editors
still think Robert Kagan has anything useful to propose.
@Sirius e Council on Foreign Relations quest for a New World Order through global
cooperation, ending borders of trade and immigration, and continuing America's military role:
ready to intervene anywhere in the world if necessary.
I am reminded of a quote from the always essential guide to bureaucracy:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
"But the plans were on display "
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet
stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."
His Lights Stayed on During Texas' Storm. Now He Owes $16,752.
Posted by: vk | Feb 21 2021 15:17 utc | 3
There are wise people in Texas and not so wise. A not so wise person uses electric heating
and lighting during an ice storm, and his local utility frantically bids for available power
(I guess it is done by a computer program). Win! As a reward, for an hour both home and
office is warm and lit for an hour, using few kilowatts that cost 1000 each. Later the
country plunges in darkness, like the neighboring country that lost the bidding and thus was
cold and dark for an extra hour.
A wise person shuts everything and flies to Cancun. Plenty of warmth and light down there,
and much much cheaper! But as I was commenting before, the public frowns upon clever
politicians -- Senator Cruz in in a bit of hot water. To recover, he will need to blab for at
least a year and hide his intelligence completely.
When deregulated electricity came to my municipality it was in guise of green renewable
energy. The local Greens put two years of heavy work into that referendum. Anyone with common
sense or a particle of skepticism knew that in this case green was a stalking horse for
deregulation. Deregulation would not have passed muster here. But the Greens got it through.
They are majority Ph.D. So they have no common sense at all.
Day after referendum the sales force descended. Within a week the Greens no longer
existed. If you slammed door in salesman's face they called you on the phone. For five years
I got at least two phone calls a day and at times it was hourly.
Twice I was slammed. Slammed means suddenly you have a new electric provider. A bill
arrives in the mail from someone you have never heard of and it is hard to know if it is even
real, but it probably is. To get unslammed the remedy is infinite phone calls and hours on
hold day after day. Or you can hire an attorney. Or you can make a trip and appear in person
at your congressman's service office. I would rather never be within a kilometer of the slime
that represents me in Congress but there are times you have to compromise your
principles.
Have to mention that any and all who failed to display sufficient enthusiasm for green
renewable energy were dragged through the mud. We were called reactionaries, dinosaurs,
Libertarians, Republicans. It goes without saying we were baby killers. This was heated and
public and impossible to evade.
The tendency of liberalism to deny the consequences of society stems from its myth of the
'individual'. Liberalism imagines a world of rational subjects each making decisions in a
sovereign way (Thatcher's 'there is no such thing as society'). This allows capitalism to
erect a moral framework that represents the consequences of an economy as the consequences of
personal decisions. In this way, success (wealth) is 'reward' and failure (poverty) is
punishment. It's what Max Weber called 'secular Protestantism'. The working classes
participate in this evaluative ideology (Gramsci); it is the source of their self-loathing
and the reason they always vote against their own best interests. They all believe their lack
of means is a consequence of their lack of intelligence, work ethic, failure of
entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. Here is Marx's own critique of the way liberalism washes its
hands of the effects of capitalism:
"The... theory... which is also expressed as a law of nature, that population grows faster
than the means of subsistence, is the more welcome to the bourgeois as it silences his
conscience, makes hard-heartedness into a moral duty and the consequences of society into
the consequences of nature, and finally gives him the opportunity to watch the destruction
of the proletariat by starvation as calmly as any other natural event without bestirring
himself, and, on the other hand, to regard the misery of the proletariat as its own fault
and to punish it. To be sure, the proletarian can restrain his natural instinct by reason,
and so, by moral supervision, halt the law of nature in its injurious course of
development." - Karl Marx, Wages, December 1847
While it may be superficially true that our poor Texan could have cunningly evaded copping
the wholesale price the fact remains that he is -- as all Texans are -- a victim of a system
structurally designed to extract exorbitant rents from his need for power. A socialist system
would not see him as a battery hen to be skimmed or as an atomized individual who should
'sink or swim' (in the words of that local mayor) but would seek to prevent power, food,
water, air, housing, education, health, etc etc from being hijacked and sequestered by vested
interests accessible only by outrageous fees. Socialism would outlaw rent-seeking, which is
the theft of meaningful life by carpetbaggers and their corrupt partners in government.
Creepy almost Dead President Biden commemorates the 500K+ Dead Covid People [who probably
ALL voted for him, several times, by mail in the Nov 2020 election].
Painful indeed! I can see why the Mockingbird mass media is trying to steer people to
read the speech rather than watch it. I suppose they are proud of the script but
underwhelmed by the delivery. They don't want to waste a whole week's worth of work by the
speechwriting committee simply because the undead talking head didn't get enough amphetamines
to appear life-like.
Re: "I can see why the Mockingbird mass media is trying to steer people to read the speech
rather than watch it..."
-William Gruff | Feb 23 2021 12:44 utc | 206
I think you are probably correct there. I looked around for other videos of that speech
with better audio/volume quality for listening on smartphones, w/o success...the Controllers
must be jiggling the crappy sound on purpose so that the fewest people will actually listen
all the way through to what the [almost] Dead President is muttering.
I think you are right about being pumped up with stimulants or something too.
Biden's eyes used to be blue-green, but nowadays they are always so dilated when he's in
public, that they look black/dark brown. He[his Caregivers] hide them behind sunglasses when
he/They can during sunny days and outside appearances.
Paco, was your series you first mentioned an adaptation of the novel I am reading? I was
puzzled by your mention that 'Bulgakov was a physician' -- the author of 'The Master and
Margarita was not, so not to confuse James any further than I have - and James, just to
clarify, the quotation I gave is not from the novel. Here's a bit, and I'll include
psychohistorian in this conversation as well:
"But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask,who
governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?"
"Man governs it himself," Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly
none-too-clear question.
"Pardon me," the stranger responded gently, "but in order to govern, one needs, after
all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow
me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of
making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period--well, say, a thousand years, but
cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?
And in fact," and here the stranger turned to Berlioz, "imagine that you, for instance,
start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a
taste for it, and suddenly you get ... hem ... hem ... lung cancer ..." - here the
foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the though of lung cancer gave him pleasure - "yes, cancer"
- narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word - "and all your governing is
over!..."
@ juliania | Feb 23 2021 6:41 utc | 192 who quoted
"
"Man governs it himself," Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly
none-too-clear question.
"
You write of only two options, man or man's creation in language of the concept and
instantiation of a deity
I have always been drawn to the Lao Tze description of the latter: "The way that can be
named is not the real way."
I studied science early on in my life and when I learned that humans only know some things
about this stuff we call matter that makes up only 5% of the Cosmos, I marveled at the
anthropological hubris of humans. I think we are capable of evolving beyond this
self-centered view of our place in the Cosmos and being motivated by the awe of our ignorance
rather than the lies of our myths.
The tendency of liberalism to deny the consequences of society stems from its myth of the
'individual'. Liberalism imagines a world of rational subjects each making decisions in a
sovereign way (Thatcher's 'there is no such thing as society'). This allows capitalism to
erect a moral framework that represents the consequences of an economy as the consequences of
personal decisions. In this way, success (wealth) is 'reward' and failure (poverty) is
punishment. It's what Max Weber called 'secular Protestantism'. The working classes
participate in this evaluative ideology (Gramsci); it is the source of their self-loathing
and the reason they always vote against their own best interests. They all believe their lack
of means is a consequence of their lack of intelligence, work ethic, failure of
entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. Here is Marx's own critique of the way liberalism washes its
hands of the effects of capitalism:
"The... theory... which is also expressed as a law of nature, that population grows faster
than the means of subsistence, is the more welcome to the bourgeois as it silences his
conscience, makes hard-heartedness into a moral duty and the consequences of society into
the consequences of nature, and finally gives him the opportunity to watch the destruction
of the proletariat by starvation as calmly as any other natural event without bestirring
himself, and, on the other hand, to regard the misery of the proletariat as its own fault
and to punish it. To be sure, the proletarian can restrain his natural instinct by reason,
and so, by moral supervision, halt the law of nature in its injurious course of
development." - Karl Marx, Wages, December 1847
While it may be superficially true that our poor Texan could have cunningly evaded copping
the wholesale price the fact remains that he is -- as all Texans are -- a victim of a system
structurally designed to extract exorbitant rents from his need for power. A socialist system
would not see him as a battery hen to be skimmed or as an atomized individual who should
'sink or swim' (in the words of that local mayor) but would seek to prevent power, food,
water, air, housing, education, health, etc etc from being hijacked and sequestered by vested
interests accessible only by outrageous fees. Socialism would outlaw rent-seeking, which is
the theft of meaningful life by carpetbaggers and their corrupt partners in government.
Escobar: The Art Of Being A Spectacularly Misguided Oracle
Peace is Forever War
Now let's move to another oracle, a self-described expert of what in the Beltway is
known as the "Greater Middle East": Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC, certified
warmongering neo-con, and one-half of the famous Kaganate of Nulands – as the joke
went across Eurasia – side by side with his wife, notorious Maidan cookie distributor
Victoria "F**k the EU" Nuland, who's about to re-enter government as part of the
Biden-Harris administration.
Kagan is back pontificating in – where else – Foreign Affairs, which
published his latest superpower manifesto. That's where we find this absolute
pearl:
That Americans refer to the relatively low-cost military involvements in Afghanistan and
Iraq as "forever wars" is just the latest example of their intolerance for the messy and
unending business of preserving a general peace and acting to forestall threats. In both
cases, Americans had one foot out the door the moment they entered, which hampered their
ability to gain control of difficult situations.
So let's get this straight. The multi-trillion dollar Forever Wars are "relatively
low-cost"; tell that to the multitudes suffering the Via Crucis of US crumbling
infrastructure and appalling standards in health and education. If you don't support the
Forever Wars – absolutely necessary to preserve the "liberal world order" – you
are "intolerant".
"Preserving a general peace" does not even qualify as a joke, coming from someone
absolutely clueless about realities on the ground. As for what the Beltway defines as
"vibrant civil society" in Afghanistan, that in reality revolves around millennia-old
tribal custom codes: it has nothing to do with some neocon/woke crossover. Moreover,
Afghanistan's GDP – after so much American "help" – remains even lower than
Saudi-bombed Yemen's.
I have to say that specific advertising policy of the former head of MCST Babayan in the
form of periodic high-profile claims that the new processor Elbrus E2K is about to "break"
Intel, permanently ending zilch, being zero from the beginning, has raised in me distrust
of this company since the beginning of the 2000s. Moreover, when Babayan with a team of
leading employees left for Intel in 2004, I thought that this was definitely all.
And yes, the company went quiet, and all the following years just quietly profited from
something for the defence industry, almost without communicating with the outside world. It
withdrew into itself. With long interruptions, it dryly posted new versions of processors
on its website:
2005 – Elbrus-2000, which turned out to be a very simplified version of the E2K.
Processor technology 130 nm, frequency 300 MHz, 1 core.
2010 and 2011 – Elbrus-S and Elbrus-2C+. Processor technology is 90 nm, the
frequency is 500 MHz, 1 and 2 cores, respectively.
All of this was produced and financed for the defence industry, and so everything would
have been sluggish and continued further, if not for the events of 2014. The fall in the
ruble exchange rate and the sanctions of the western world have led to the need to have
their own computing equipment not only in the military, but also in the civilian segment.
But, I must say, the Medvedev government was particularly slow to do so.
Medvedev again, what a miserable turd.
Thank you for the 68000 referal. I will take a peek but I might avoid repeating the glory
of my youth and aim for keeping my orchard in good condition and the occasional walk in
ancient woods. I still tinker but with small things.
@Arch Bungle #218
That's because the USSR/Russia never cared about the consumer side.
Thus all of their work is military/intelligence agency related.
Consumer: cheap. Military: durable.
Consumer: small (closely related to cheap). Military: works.
Consumer: throw masses of transistors at the problem. Military: create a custom design that
addresses the need.
Consumer: good enough. Military: As good as is practical given above.
Now, to be fair, small does yield speed so the tradeoff isn't fully branched.
But Russian electronics work just fine - the radar, target acquisition and targeting systems
for the hypersonic missiles and the S400/S500 system are clearly extremely fast and
efficient.
Thing is - do you really need 7 nm tech for that? Answer is: no.
Silicon is also not particularly rad or EMP resistant.
Posted by: Arch Bungle | Feb 23 2021 15:34 utc | 218
Why do the Russians not have their own fancy chips?
I think c1ue got it right, not interested in commercialization, high-density chips and
speed are marketing points rather than an answer to some need. I would add that they have
likely not abandoned analog methods to the extent we have, not having the commercial
incentive to do that, and realizing that digital is not the answer to every control
problem.
They are going to have to make some sort of changes soon anyway, I don't see X-Ray
lithography being a thing. Or we could realize that for most purposes what we have is fine,
and for what isn't fine, we need something new and better.
I had an 8088 with and 8087 co-processor for some time in the 80s, cut my teeth on it.
Incredibly slow but you could program "on the bare wires".
c1ue: Re #154: thank uou, took me quite a while to get to that point of view. One of the
positive results of the last 20 years is to make it all very plain.
@Bemildred #238
I have no idea how much further the commercial processes will go.
However, it is abundantly clear that the commercial benefit for these new processes is
extremely limited.
One of the primary reasons why the PC and laptop market was stagnating for year prior to
COVID and WFH was that there really was minimal difference in performance between 2 or even 4
generations of hardware.
I am typing this on a refurbished laptop whose progenitor was originally purchased in 2016. I
say progenitor because this is now the 3rd chassis which the hard drive and one or two other
components have been migrated to.
In the 90s, you could visibly see the difference between computers bought in different
quarters. In the 00s, business and engineering/technical specialist software migrated to
laptops, thus absorbing the performance increase.
In the last 10 years? Much less clear. A former coworker of mine - I just helped him buy a
64GB Ram, 2 TB NvME SSD laptop with a graphics coprocessor for $1600. It is 90% pure ego why
he bought it - there are a few corner cases where that performance *might* help.
On my side - I will buy a refurb laptop with 32GB Ram, 512 GB NvME SSD plus 1TB hard drive
for $1099 mostly because I am literally unable to connect to a number of wifi setups due to
my OS being Win 7 still. That's the only reason.
On the cell phone side - the benefit of additional compute power has long since passed
necessary. There just isn't the interface to even make use of it - all that power is mostly
playing cat videos and using social media.
But I would note that analog design is still very much with us. The major power consumption
sink in a cell phone is the cell signal comms; the digital is increasingly minimal.
Similarly, while WiFi is pretty old now - latest generations of WiFi are 1000mbps or more
which ups power consumption significantly.
But overall - not at all clear that there is a growing market anymore for PCs and laptops.
That's what ends the long, profitable growth ride of the semiconductor industry.
Last week, Grieved linked to a book available at The Archive, The Empire of "The
City" which is free to download. It's quite a sensation, and I cited a bit from it as
soon as I began reading. Here's another outtake:
"News that definitely points to the existence of the secret world supergovernment of "The
City" is treated with dense silence. The current activities of what has been identified as
the most powerful international society on earth, the "Pilgrims," are so wrapped in silence
that few Americana know even of its existence since 1903.
As a glaring example let us consider the cross-examination of Henry Morgenthau, Jr. as to
the contacts of his father with the peculiar activities of the mysterious and secret British
statesman Viscount Reginald Esher by Senator Gerald Nye in a Senate hearing on January 28,
1940.
Apparently not one newspaper in the United States gave one inch of space to this immensely
sensational exposure, while Senator Nye, like many other statesmen who have ventured too far
into forbidden realms, has been effectively submerged."
Great prose, yes?! Even more interesting information, Yes! There's much to commend it, and
much to learn from it. The geopolitics it discusses certainly impacts the domestic world and
explains the current idiocy of the UK toward China. They think themselves still at the head
of an Empire because they are.
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 23 2021 1:26 utc | 172
(Book: The Empire of "The City")
On a not unrelated theme, a few weeks ago I posted the outline of a 2020 TV doco called
Secrets of America's Shadow Government and prepping for Continuity Of Government in the event
that the psychos in charge miscalculate. A couple of weeks later I noticed that it was only
Episode 1 of an ongoing series, not a stand alone doco, having missed Episode 2. The film
makers have gone to great lengths to expose AmeriKKKa's dirty linen in an extremely
unflattering context.
Episode 6 is about the CIA and FBI and whose interests they do and DO NOT protect. It also
touches on Morgenthau's characterisation of AmeriKKKa as "dual state" and has caught up to
the Trump Show. But the details are presumably being aired in Episode 7.
One nice touch is that after every ad break the program resumes with a few seconds of
banner headline declaring WHILE THE REST OF US DIE.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country." -- Edward Bernays (1930). "Propaganda".
Some context to the 2016 to 2020 Trump interruption to Business as Usual:
The United States in 2016 was long lost as republic. Politically it had been transmuted
into something for which there is no simple traditional title. Oligarchy and plutocracy and
tyranny and corporatocracy and insane asylum and stupidocracy, with disproportionate Jewish
presence at levers of influence and power, still fails to capture the whole adequately.
This – whatever descriptive we give it – political conglomeration aka the
'United States' had residual elements of Empire – 1000 ish military bases and uncounted
numbers of biological warfare related facilities outside its borders. It still militarily
occupied Japan and Germany and Italy and South Korea and many other countries.
Doctrine promoting 'full spectrum domination' – that is, the intention of achieving
global totalitarian control – was still hanging in the air and influencing behaviour.
The Federal Reserve dollar was still the dominant international currency. The United States
was still a heavyweight in the IMF and UN Security Council. Many countries remained de facto
vassal to it (Canada, Australia, Norway )
At home a police state had been in place for generations, but the mass media and
educational system steadfastly refused to call a spade a spade. The mass media had
comprehensively for generations been a mind warping propaganda system. Publicly execute JFK
and RFK. In response the political and judicial system and the media have been comatose or
lying to the people for half a century.
The treasonous false flag 9/11 2001 is carried out, and again, the mass media tell lies
and censors and the political system is silent or complicit in buttressing the official lies.
More police state measures are implemented, and mass murdering wars of aggression abroad are
initiated. The more general 'war on terror' war of terror is launched, which is actually
merely the old policy of subversion, robbery, murder etc abroad given a new title and a
refurbished rationale (from fighting communists to fighting terrorists).
Meanwhile at home the middle class and the blue collar workers and the infrastructure are
in steady decline. 40 % of Americans are living hand to mouth while billionaires proliferate.
Tens of millions are on anti depressants, while tens of millions more are morbidly obese or
beset with chronic serious health problems. Etc. Growing basket case.
Meanwhile David Rockefeller famously confesses that he and his family (and fellow
'intellectual elite' and banking exemplars) have been working against the best interests of
America and towards the goal of world government. Sort of a Rockefeller Pinky and the Brain
syndrome, but not a cartoon, a real intention, steadily worked towards. He writes that all we
need is the "right big crisis" and voila, we will have it!!: World Government. The New World
Order.
Then something happened. Whatever folly and genius and everything in between Donald J.
Trump possesses, whatever his intentions conscious or unconscious might have been, he in 2o16
won election over the selection of the Powers that BE. They tried to steal the election, but
the tide for Trump was too strong.
In the wake of this political rookie's election, while he may have been naive, and
foolish, and made any number of questionable moves, he was also facing the entire phalanx of
the global establishment.
One of his first acts was to announce that he was going to drain the swamp, and all the
many powerful swamp creatures took this as an unforgivable and deeply threatening public
challenge. So a four year unending attack on Trump by FBI, DOJ, mass media, former CIA,
European politicians, tech giants, and the American political establishment ensued.
Equally guaranteed to create a massive effort by the PTB was his rhetoric on behalf of
national sovereignty and against globalism – The Rockefeller-esque extended pipedream.
One of his first acts was to cancel the TPP, which had threatened a further erosion of
national sovereignty on behalf of the power of transnational corporate and financial
power.
Another fundamental really priceless contribution that Trump made was to continually and
pointedly jeer at and identify the "fake news": The NYT and CNN were subjected to the public
humiliation of a sitting President continually accurately describing them.
Trump's willingness to call out the mass media propaganda and brainwashing system that the
CIA under largely Jewish auspices (or vise versa?) had intensely inflicted on the American
people for decades was an indispensable act of rebellion. American politics and media is
dependent upon the pretense that it is legit. Trump's message was: there's something deeply
wrong here: Fake news and the Swamp.
Trump also at least gave frequent voice to the desirability of reducing American military
activity and presence abroad, and stands in contrast to his Nobel Peace Prize winning
predecessor Barry ( aka B.O.) Soetoro (Libya destroyed) and George Bush the Latter (Iraq and
Afghanistan attacked) and Clinton (Serbia attacked). Trump as comparatively a deplorable
peacenik.
So then we have the COVID- psyop, creating de facto world medical martial law, which is a
kind of sick facsimile to Rockefeller's pipe dream. And also, dislocating, disorienting,
social and economic turmoil and pain. Trump was placed at the center of that storm,
surrounded by ghoulish Fauci and the CDC and the Bill Gates contaminated WHO.
Then the looters and burners and rioters were let loose. And the underlying goal was to
have Americans so sick of it all and Trump could be blamed and surely he would be thrown out
of office.
But even so, no. He wins in a huge landslide. And the Swamp goes all out and installs a
pathetic creature in Trump's place. This story is not over .
@Ron
Unz t of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as proof of anything is a sign of
Baby Boomer Dementia Syndrome (BBDS).
@Ron Unz: Do you still subscribe to these newspapers and read them in their paper form? If
so, then likely you are a BBDS victim as well. One of its symptoms is wasting hours every
morning and evening reading unadulterated CIA propaganda and thinking that you have read "the
news". Its sister syndrome is GXDS (Gen-X Dementia Syndrome) where you rely on CNN for your
"news".
Or the pandemic guru (a female one) who declared that, after a sufficiently widespread
vaccination of the serfs, ' we would achieve herd mentality'. Dr. Freud, where art thou?
Trump has been the exposer-in-chief. He exposed the filth behind the curtain:
Russiagate, Covid, the stolen election. Maybe that's all he could do this time around.
And for this I shall be forever grateful. While I didn't get my 2,000 miles of wall, I DID
get something from Trump, me and 100 million more American-Americans like me: irrefutable
proof that mainstream media and the Swamp hate my guts. This is his legacy that shall last a
very long time, indeed.
'Freedom' under neo-liberal capitalism is all of the negative type. You are free to be as
greedy and arrogant as you like, as rich, ie as big a thief, as you like, and as poor as you
like. You are to ignore the liberal injunction that your freedom must not interfere with that
of others, and screw as many patsies as you desire. You are 'free' to vote for two or so near
identical parties, then have no 'freedom' but that which your money buys you. 'Freedom' is
the biggest lie of all Big Lies.
Don't be spooked by those words. Do you know where the words sustainable and inclusive
come from? Tycoons didn't think them up. They're just parroting them to try and twist their
meaning. Those words are from the Addis Ababa consensus. Tycoons give lip service to those
words because if they don't, no one will give them the time of day.
AA is the consensus of the ECOSOC bloc, treaty parties of the ICESCR, 171 of them, the
overwhelming majority of the world. ECOSOC reports to the UNGA, the most participative and
least controllable UN organ. US UN delegates don't even dare mention the AA outcome –
they fixate on the Monterrey Consensus, two documents ago.
Inclusive means, don't let usurers like the IMF get you on the debt hook and immiserize
your people. Sustainable means no pillage of national wealth or resources and no imposition
of externalities (like Chevron did to Ecuador, for instance.) You will see that the outcome
document subordinates everthing the tycoons or the US want to human rights and rule of law.
Economic rights too. The outcome curbs US "Western" corporatist development by pulling WTO
and IMF under the authority of G-192 organizations like UNCTAD and ILO.
It's hard for people in US satellites to interpret this stuff because the underlying
intitiatives of the G-192 (that is, the world) are hidden from you and buried in US
propaganda. Xi is quoting his Five Principles, four of which are straight out of the UN
Charter. China has ratified the ICESCR. So China is not communist. China is not capitalist.
China is a member of the ECOSOC bloc. People in the US or its satellites have no idea what
that is, but it's vastly bigger than the Third International was. It's development based on
human rights. Tycoons and the US hate that shit but they can't stop it.
A couple of things that would go a long way to correct the goddamn stupidity running
rampant in this country are.
Correcting the following horrendous actions: The SCOTUS has passed down egregious
decisions that abridge the First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of
representative democracy. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing
stupid SCOTUS decisions First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal
Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech thereby giving entities of wealth and
power total influence in elections.
And-
Making it absolutely impossible for anyone to amass more than 100 million dollars extreme
wealth concentrates too much power.
"The world has moved on." – the character 'Roland' in Stephen King's The Dark Tower.
(an excellent series, btw)
Change is constant. It is inevitable. It is an ever-flowing river. America however, does
not ascribe to this truism. America has *not* moved on. It does not change or adapt. It
simply continues to fervently believe it is it's right to rule the world. Simply put, the
days and decades where a single country 'rules the world' – like the Mongol, Byzantine,
Romans, French, and British empires before, are gone. The Americans are nonetheless very
slowly coming to realize this historical point, and they are desperately trying to reverse
the trend. To absolutely no avail. They cannot escape history. The American empire will die
the same death as all empires did before it. Maintaining empire, and peace 'at home' becomes
unsustainable. The costs are simply too great.
It is ludicrous that a country founded on genocide and slavery, at war during 90% of it's
existence demands the rest of the world look to it's 'beacon on the hill' as a viable option
for humanity. It is laughable.
I read the hope inherent in the comments section to this piece. It is unfounded. Why do I
say this? I will direct you to the latest spew from the Atlantic Council entitled "The Longer
Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy". It makes for farcical reading, and an
interesting thought game it to substitute the US in any instance China is mentioned, and vice
versa. Nonetheless, it is a plan by the movers and shakers to re-establish American global
dominance. It is a disgusting piece of work. Much like America itself.
RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 11 FEBRUARY 2021 by Patrick Armstrong
WAR PLANS. US/NATO war plans always start with a heavy bombardment. The expectation is that
complete air superiority will be quickly gained so that aircraft and cruise missiles will have
unrestricted freedom to destroy vital infrastructure. This succeeds against countries like
Iraq, to say nothing of Afghanistan. But it won't happen if the first few minutes of the war
see the destruction of half of NATO's airfields, hangars, ports and EW assets in a cloud of
hypersonic missiles.
Russia sends another message to Washington and Brussels – don't even think of it.
But, of course, they are thinking of it .
Shoygu called for increased
production of hypersonic missiles . Not, they say,
easily detectable by radar . A US ship entering the Black Sea would have about three
minutes to detect and defend against Kinzhals fired from 550 kms away in Crimea.
The just-deployed Bastion system
would take longer. Russia isn't trying to do
everything everywhere , just defend its own territory: that's an achievable goal; the other
isn't.
FINES. Moscow fines RFE/RL for
failure to declare 'foreign agent' status on material aimed at Russians. Washington will have
the fantods but this is just Moscow's version of the US FARA legislation in
action.
POLICE BRUTALITY. Here's the video Moscow is giving every
visitor who comes to lecture it.
RUSSIA-CHINA. A piece in the Russian media
suggests that the two are very close to concluding a formal military alliance and enumerates
the mutual advantages to the world's largest economy and best military (too soon to call it
that? Should we wait a few years when it will be obvious?). It's coming.
It starts with a quote from an article a few years back from Col. Douglas Macgregor about
the true costs of peer on peer warfare that should - should - make one think. But given that
the anti-Russian neocons like Victoria "Cookies" Nuland are back in the government, such
well-founded worries might be lightly tossed aside.
Andrei tries to convey the serious consequences of such ill-considered hyperaggresiveness
on the part of the US/NATO/EU. The Russian Federation will not be punked. But with Biden "in
charge" (i.e., being led by the nose by overconfident morons), one may legitimately fear for
the worst.
On Slow Joe, these words from an old Virginia farmer seem apt:
if it weren't for the USSR – 80% – and the Anglosphere – 20%
– they'd all be goose-stepping around in leather giving each other Hitler salutes
I've heard rumors that the Anglosphere supported Hitler and his attack on Russia
early on, that Hitler based his racial laws on similar policies in the USA and UK, and that
the Anglosphere began attacking Hitler's Germany only after it became clear that Germany was
losing to Russia. Some even said Franco was supported by the Anglosphere in the name of
'anti-communism' until his death in 1975. Can you confirm/dispute any of these? Thanks.
Russian diplos certainly turning up the heat on the hapless EU this week. Some kind of sea
change? Charges against NATO folks behind the Maidan and ongoing shelling of civilians in
Donbass?
"If you want peace, prepare for war!" Sergei Lavrov, 11 February 2021 speaking on cutting
relations with the EU
In a televised interview on Russian state television yesterday, Russian Minister of
Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov made this declaration together with the threat to cut relations
with the EU if Russia's vital economic interests were put in danger by any further sanctions
they might consider imposing. His remarks were clearly calculated to turn on a light in the
thick skulls of EU Parliamentarians, of the EU Commission run by former German Defense
Minister von der Leyen, and of her deputy for external relations Borrell.
"Prepare for war" is an old bit of wisdom that we have heard from time to time coming from
the Kremlin together with related folk wisdom such as : if you do not finance properly your
own army, you will be financing someone else's army; and if you cannot deal with Lavrov, then
you will have to deal with Shoigu (Russian Defense Minister).
(Continued at link above).
PA,
Re:Covid19 - I read the tripe, and I think tripe is too good a term to describe it - the
author claims that the impressive 1.2 billion doses ordered is solely based on positive
memes!
With Sputnik V and the failure of Astra Vectra (against the new variants) Russia has major
leverage.
The EU primarily imports oil and gas from Russia, and give Chinese growth (and EU
anti-growth), it seems likely that Russia could easily shift these EU exports east -
china-Russia trade has doubled in the last four years, which could absorb most of the oil and
gas directed at the EU in a few years.
I am guessing Nordstream 2 will be finished and not used to allow for it to be turned on
(perhaps at a premium) at a future date (perhaps when the EU breaks up).
in which Alanbrooke was not shy about describing the need to rein back Churchill from
making premature commitments to schemes and scheduling. His portrayal of Churchill was
thought to be the main reason he was passed over in the postwar awards of plum
appointments.
(The British delegation flight back from Moscow to Tehran is notable for the off-the-cuff
poem by Wavell on why there will be no Second Front in 1943).
The discussions with US commanders are never less than extremely interesting.
@irf520 Solar-powered tanks. Sounds great -- wars in the desert only.
But thanks for this: I an contemplating a paper about how NATO uses its military as a captive
group for social experiments while at the same time wanting to fight everybody
everywhere.
Tentative title "mincing towards war"
This is good material.
"On February 2nd, less than two week after Biden's inauguration, we noticed a complete
shutdown of VPN services. No other servers on the internet were affected. These were only the
VPNs. They became terribly, terribly slow.
Did you notice? Did you think that was your VPN provider screwing up?
It wasn't. It was the US Government.
They used a special type of technology called DPI(Deep Packet Inspection) that was able to
differentiate regular server traffic with traffic that was using a VPN.
This was all uncovered by one of the most seasoned tech experts on the internet. A new
video by a tech privacy guru named Rob Braxman Tech was how I learned about this issue.
Fortunately, there are ways around this issue which Rob Braxmen has brought up.
There are ways of what tech experts call "obfuscating" so it does not look like VPN
traffic. People in China have been developing ways to fight these VPN sniffers for
decades.
So, Liberty Lover, it might actually be with the help of very intelligent people in China
who have already figured out how to defeat firewalls so that we can defeat the Deep State and
protect our First Amendment rights."
Putin surprised me. He flatly refused the offer of Schwab and his ilk. He condemned the
manner of recent pre-Covid growth, for all the growth went into a few deep pockets. Moreover,
he noted that digital tycoons are dangerous for the world. In his own words , "Modern
technological giants, especially digital companies, are de facto competing with states. In the
opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal. Maybe so but society is wondering
whether such monopolism meets public interests".
The tycoons were probably amazed. In 2007 in Munich, they laughed at him. Max Boot, a
Russian Jewish émigré, called Putin,
"The louse that roared" and added, "in Putin's sinister and absurd rhetoric, you can hear an
empire dying". Mad Max didn't know yet which empire is dying.
Putin was supposed to be softened up by pro-Navalny demos on January 23 (The Davos talk was
on January 27), but he was not. Quite the reverse. The Russian President does not like to be
pushed. The demo on January 31 was met with force; those detained were sentenced to heavy (by
Russian standards) fines. Three European diplomats were expelled from Russia for joining the
demonstration. Josep Borrell, a Spanish diplomat and a representative of the EU, went to Moscow
and was harshly treated. In the concluding press-conference, the Russian minister for foreign
affairs Sergey Lavrov told the press that Russia does not (repeat, not) consider the EU to be a
"reliable partner". The expulsions were carried out at the same time. In addition, Putin warned
the West that 'sanctions' (acts of economic warfare) could cause Russia to use direct military
force. It was probably the first such warning since 1968.
At the same time, Russia practically ended corona restrictions. Bars and restaurants have
been opened for night revellers; sport events have returned; schools are open; in some parts of
Russia, the masks became "recommended" instead of "compulsory". Russians are now allowed to
travel and return freely from many countries. The Russians have easy access for their vaccine
Sputnik-V that was deemed by The Lancet the best of all existing Corona vaccines. It is a coup
comparable to the first Sputnik launched in 1957, the Western experts said. Thus Russia has
derailed the Grand Reset.
This development had caused a huge shift in consciousness in Russia. If until now (since
1970, at least) the Russian educated classes tended to feel inferior to the West, the
prosperous lands of the free, then this has now changed. One of the leading Russian theatre
directors, Constantine Bogomolov declared that
the West is undone. The West's compulsory political correctness, its culture-cancelling, its
kneeling and boot-licking of BLM, its cult of transgenders, its fear of 'harassment' and sex,
its obligatory smile, its wokeness, its fear of death (and of life!), are comparable to the
behaviour of Alex, the victim of Clockwork Orange therapy, said Bogomolov.
The young man [Alex] does not just get rid of aggression – he is sick of music, he
cannot see a naked woman, sex disgusts him. And in response to the blow, he licks the boot of
the striker. The modern West is such a criminal who has undergone chemical castration and
lobotomy. Hence this false smile of goodwill and all-acceptance, frozen on the face of a
Western person. This is not the smile of Culture. It is a smile of degeneration.
He concludes:
The West tells us: Russia is at the tail of progress.
Wrong.
Just by chance, we have found ourselves at the tail of a runaway train, rushing headlong
into [Hieronymus] Bosch's hell, where we will be greeted by smiling multicultural,
gender-neutral devils.
We should uncouple our carriage off the train, make a sign of cross and start rebuilding
our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of. The Europe they have lost.
Take notice of his call to 'make the sign of the cross'. In the West, the churches are
barred, service had been discontinued. The Anglican Church is on the verge of dying ,
with its Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating BLM, removing statues from the churches,
accepting every SAGE edict locking the churches up. Meanwhile Russian churches are all open and
worshippers are pouring into their cathedrals every feast and Sunday.
Russian boys and girls are flirting with each other, fearless of MeToo and harassment
charges. Russian cafes are open. Whoever wants, can get a jab against Covid, or ignore it.
For the first time in many years, Russia shows the way for the West. This is good. Perhaps,
the West, after a long-needed correction, will be able to overtake Russia again. Though Russia
showed the way of socialism to Europe, the best results of socialism were achieved elsewhere,
in the North of Europe. Good old Europe (and the US, its overseas offshoot) are still able to
repeat this feat and get rid of the plotting tycoons and their preaching of compulsory love. At
this occasion, perhaps banning all tycoons is a good idea. In the better world before their
rise, there were no multi-billionaires. History is not over; we are entering the most
interesting part of it. Be of good cheer!
Bravo! Israel Shamir. I enjoyed every syllable of that essay. It frames the shocking
reality that is nowhere treated so forcefully in print in the decadent West. These tycoons
not only purchasse their corrupted governments but are positioned to trade them in concert
like Monopoly board properties, all in plain sight of our blind mass media.
Putin courageously stepped up a notch when he said as much to the Davos crowd and then
demonstratively restored to his own countrymen many of the basic freedoms that have just been
erased in the locked-down EU.
How long will it take for Europe's venal career politicians to realize they are in danger
of becoming just expendable hirelings in the new world order they have so gleefully promoted?
Probably nothing short of a revolution could now save the United States from the new
feudalism.
But Putin's warning must have resonated among the European politicians, whose status and
relevance still derives from a long tradition of statism with a strong social components.
Will the national governments finally grasp that the gravest threat is not the hated populism
but relegation to irrelevance by corporations and plutocrats. The stakes are clear; either
governments will reassert their prerogatives or plutocrats will govern.
For the first time in many years, Russia shows the way for the West. This is good
. Perhaps, the West, after a long-needed correction, will be able to overtake Russia
again.
This is good and timely and needs to be repeated often.
Actually, near where I'm at, "Russia" has been showing the way since Putin got rolling,
even before they tried pulling the Obama rug over our eyes when our hollowed-out economy
became obvious in the days after Bush W. ("War President") made large segments of the old
working class ashamed to be American again.
By all means, let Putin pull out a dusty copy of Ron Reagan quotes and start punting them
back to the United States of Blah.
How did Ron put it in 1982? Oh Yeah: "A nation that cannot honor its own people's rights
cannot be trusted anywhere else."
Putin can simply quote the Dead Cowboy. The current Plutocracy won't get it, the
economically wrecked in the USA already knows it, and everyone else can enjoy the Old Truth
that always gives a wicked return: What goes around comes around.
thank you mr. shamir for the uplifting analysis of this brave new world order being
foisted upon us.
I don't think we will be able to throw off our billionaire overlords unfortunately, as the
average citizen is too compliant and indoctrinated to understand what is happening to
them.
We have no vladimir putin to slay the dragon here. i'm just glad that russia is here as a
counterweight to the kleptocratic cthulhu wrapping its tentacles around the world.
Max 'Jack' Boot's comment reminds one of Croesus. Contemplating whether to attack Persia
or not, he consulted the Pythia at Delphi and the oracle declared that, if he attacked, a
great kingdom would fall. He attacked, but the Empire that fell was his, not Persia. And
brilliant example of Zionazi hubris.
The State must observe intricate arcane rules, while the tycoons have no such limits. As
a result, they shape our minds and lives, making the State a poor legitimate king among
powerful and wealthy barons.
Just by chance, we have found ourselves at the tail of a runaway train, rushing headlong
into [Hieronymus] Bosch's hell, where we will be greeted by smiling multicultural,
gender-neutral devils.
We should uncouple our carriage off the train, make a sign of cross and start rebuilding
our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of. The Europe they have lost.
There are some fine sentiments – and many in the West would like to joint the
project.
Dont shop at Amazon? Check.
Dont use bing? Check
Dont use google? Bout' half the time (need to get yandex home page)
Dont use facebook? Check
Dont use twitter? Check
Dont use paypal? Check
Need to use local non-corporate businesses and resturaunts as much as possible.
We can have a hot economy while slowly starving the oligarchs. You can indéed go
around the oligarchs. Buy American, Canadian, and Mexican as much as possible before buying
Chinese. Ive found tgat if you look, an Indonesian, Malaysian, or Taiwanese model of whatever
you are looking for is usually available.
Needless to say dont support Hollyweird, netflix, late-night tv show hosts, awards-shows,
and Disney's ESPN.. These entities are overextended, and are vunerable to buycotts.
"The stakes are clear; either governments will reassert their prerogatives or plutocrats
will govern."
Very well put.
Unfortunately, it is the very nature of Oligarchy (or Plutocracy) for the Rich to govern
through supposedly independent politicians. It's a "sleight of hand" job.
So the question becomes, is there really a "government" there , to reassert a
prerogative separate to their primary function of running the public face of an Oligarchy
?
Biden began his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in June 2019 at a
Manhattan hotel,
telling wealthy donors that "nothing would fundamentally change" under his presidency.
After one month in office, it appears as if that is one campaign promise he is likely to
keep.
The U.S. will also continue its wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
We are left to guess where, not if, Biden will start another one.
Posted by b on February 19, 2021 at 18:46 UTC | Permalink
I always thought that Biden's campaign slogan should have been a modification of Obama's
"Hope and Change" slogan.
Biden's campaign slogan should have been: "No Hope and No Change."
And, contrary to the 1960s-1970s, it will now have to start to win those wars, otherwise
the wealth will stop flowing.
I believe the objective now is to prevent wealth from flowing East. This means
that the definition of 'winning' the war may not be the one we intuitively may think of.
An obvious example which illustrates the strategy is the one of a functioning, promising
nation with the highest standard of living on the African continent turned into a devastated
stretch of rubble.
Another example is the success the empire is having in Syria. With large chunks of
confiscated land and a state of durable smoulder everywhere else, we shouldn't expect the
Eastern bloc to extend westward to the Mediterranean anytime soon. Nor should the empire fear
the regional actors gaining sufficient economic and political mass to ever make an impression
on the world podium and demand the return of occupied territories and repatriation of all
refugees as required by law.
"We are left to guess where, not if, Biden will start another one."
Given the context of the past 20 years including the Bush, Obama and Trump presidencies
and current geopolitical realities, I doubt Biden starts a war on par with Libya, Syria,
Afghanistan and most certainly not on the level of Iraq. They will have to try hard to grow
and harvest so-called low hanging fruit if they intend to engage in any real, direct,
shooting military engagements much less invasions/occupations. I'm not saying that can't or
won't happen - and I predicted a much wider scale military confrontation with Iran if Trump
was re-elected. Maybe not an all out invasion which would never sell back home and would be a
military and societal folly of epic proportions. But Trump did try with Soleimani, tanker
seizures, and standard militaristic posturing and prodding, not to mention brutal
sanctions.
Biden isn't as beholden to Israel (which isn't saying much since the rest of the gov't is)
or Saudi Arabia (there is a "damning" report coming soon on the Kashogghi murder which
allegedly ties it directly to MBS...duh) and most countries which are even possible military
targets that represent a "threat" to US or Israeli interests have been thrown into chaos and
instability (which was the real goal). China, Russia, North Korea, and even Iran are off the
table in my opinion.
Guess we'll have to wait and see. While the US corporate media were the main cheerleaders
for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, they sold Obama's wars much more subtly, often
intentionally ignoring or burying stories that were contrary to that administration's image.
That is the kind of treatment I expect from them for Biden if and when he starts a new
war.
The Harris/Biden presidency will not start any more wars just like the Trump presidency
because we are in the throes of a civilization war already and it escalated to MAD phase in
late Obama days.
Yes, there can be border skirmishes but no more invasions like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
Russia has said that Iran is a strategic partner of Russia and I believe both China and
Russia are protecting Venezuela to some degree.
The process of taking sides in this civilization war continues and as the membership of
those sides firms up, the firming events at some point will precipitate the final
act......extinction or capitulation.......I hope I get to see the final act and maybe
experience a bit of the denoueument period.
It sure looks to me like empire is in crash and burn mode but we haven't reached the final
act of this shit show yet.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Feb 19 2021 21:02 utc | 26
Of course. That goes without saying at MoA. Those who frequent this site understand the
brutality of sanctions and embargoes. We also know they are acts of war. But I don't think
that's what b meant when he said: "We are left to guess where, not if, Biden will start
another one." If so, what other countries are left to sanction? Keep in mind that "another
one" means one that isn't currently sanctioned/sabotaged - which Biden will of course
continue doing. So what countries do you think might be on their radar for new brutal
sanctions?
Closest thing I can think of when it comes to war under Biden would be Reagan/Bush/Clinton
(incl. Hillary)style coups and "behind the scenes" support for right wing death squads in
Central and South America. Otherwise, I think the Biden administration sits back and supports
Israel's invasion or destruction of Lebanon.
Come on, you can do better:
"its wars"?
How about "Its unlawful, war crime, extra-constitutional wars of aggression".
The US military: most expensive, losingest military in human history. Hasn't won a war since
1945 unless you count Panama and Grenada.
So Biden is saying he Made America Great Again ? Just by successfully scamming the
election? Even if he never delivered at least Trump's MAGA referenced jobs and industry and
economic growth. Biden's MAGA is just about tone and empty posturing. Which one attempted to
deal with reality and which one is just delusion? I'll leave that as an exercise for the
reader!
Really, why would anyone be surprised that a candidate who did nothing to win the
Presidency should similarly do nothing once elected?
Posted by: c1ue | Feb 19 2021 21:15 utc | 30
Ouch!!
Many a true word is spoken in jest...
...
It'll be easy for the Biden Admin to start a new war with Jewed-up John (Assad Must Go) Kerry
as USA's Climate Czar. The Climate Czar has a big say in Energy Policy which Trump
interpreted as Stealing Oil. Kerry's appointment is unlikely to have been an accident.
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Feb 19 2021 21:47 utc | 35
"...which Trump interpreted as Stealing Oil."
LOL
So are you saying that Trump didn't "steal oil" in and around Syria or are you simply
commenting on his campaign messaging and not his proven history of stealing (no quotes needed
and anyone can find the information) oil?
"Biden's Post-Trump NATO Reset Points to Failing U.S. Global Power in Multipolar
World."
Key snippet:
"American hegemonic ambitions required to satisfy its corporate capitalism are dependent
on a zero-sum geopolitics. The globe must divided into spheres of influence as in the earlier
Cold War decades. There must be antagonism to thwart genuine cooperation which is anathema to
American capitalism. Indeed, it can be said that the Cold War never actually ended when the
Soviet Union dissolved more three decades ago. America's imperialist ideology continued under
new guises of 'fighting terrorism', 'democracy promotion and nation building', or more
recently 'great power competition' with Russia and China.
"The bottom line is that NATO is more important than ever for enabling Washington's global
power ambitions given the demise of American capitalism and the rise of China and Eurasia.
NATO provides a crucial political cover for what would otherwise be seen as naked American
imperialism ." [My Emphasis]
IMO, the socio-political-economic set of crises within the Outlaw US Empire will deter
BidenCo from going to war elsewhere, especially if Dollar Hegemony's to be salvaged or at
least delayed from ending soon. The one big change that Hudson will raise in his rewritten,
third edition of Super Imperialism will be the Outlaw US Empire's loss of ability to
have the world finance its Imperialism as was the case until 2008. That's why Stoltenberg's
cost-sharing proposition is being warmly received in DC.
The Texas has been returning for 7 days the stone age . IF Germany wants destroy the
Nordstream II project for American gas.. I wish they see what is happening in TEXAS.
We are left to guess where, not if, Biden will start another one.
He actually started one already. It's called a war against his own people (~ half of the
population, to be precise).
There is no need for a democratically elected president, for whom the majority of voters
honestly voted, to sit behind several rows of high barbed wire fences guarded by thousands of
soldiers. And if this happens, then not everything is okay. Not okay at all.
I think there's a hyrid war on all countries that have:
a large Shia or Palestinian population;
a socialist/anti-oligarch orientation;
are simply not willing to be assimilated into the Empire;
allied with country(s) that fall into the above categories.
I count at least a dozen countries (along with the stateless Palestinians) that qualify.
And lets not forget the war on whistle-blowers, "populist movements", "conspiracy
theorists" and other domestic dissidents. Example: white nationalists are fine when
they support Trump's expanded military budget and denunciation of socialism but become an
evil threat when they rail against his total support for Israel or demand answers as to why
they are being de-platformed/canceled.
Those who claim (directly or indirectly) that Trump didn't start any new wars are
(knowingly or unknowingly) minimizing the outrage of the Empire's many, and ongoing, hybrid
wars for total global domination.
Tannenhouser (#3) said 'Actually lends credence to the theory that there aren't 2 parties
anymore ... Soon to b 3 parties just like Canada. Then u will have 3 parties doing
squat....except for donors.'
Might be true for the US one day, but here in Canada our third party is a centre-left
alternative to the two centre-right parties...
Why would anyone be surprised that a candidate who did nothing to win the Presidency should
similarly do nothing once elected? by: c1ue @ 30 <= based on the laws, decisions and lies
in years since 1788 it seems obvious to me the less the USA does, the greater will be
America.
I get what you're saying but I don't think the war is against one half versus another
half. In my view the real war is from the top against all below.
~~
On the US domestic scene, I happened to notice today that the Administration signed off on
extending foreclosure forbearance until midsummer, but didn't extend the eviction moratorium
past March.
I'm on the side of mortgage holders (i.e. small landlords), and forbearance is useful, but
no extension for tenants? They are determined to clean the weak off the rolls, aren't
they?
That's a 3-month margin for landlords to evict tenants, rehab the property and get it
rented again at a a higher rent. Tight, but doable for small landlords (whom I regard as
little different from the rest of the poor, by the way - rentier philosophies
notwithstanding).
~~
What the US always does supremely well is knock the weakest portion of society into the
gutter through financial manipulations (recessions) and then sweep them all into a memory
hole so they don't exist anymore. Those who survive don't notice the carnage and it is never
mentioned, so life goes on as if there's a working economy.
There's a subliminal tacit agreement in US society, I think, not to mention the ones who
fell by the wayside, in case this should plunge the economy into another fall. No one dares
to talk about the weak who are lost. Some of the survivors glory in their survivorship, while
others I suspect are simply afraid to call the airstrike down on themselves. No negative
thinking, lest the magic runs out.
But it keeps the economy running, for a bit longer.
In light of the Romanoff recent articles, I think this dynamic fits the national psyche
somewhere.
@jim46. The orange house in Canada is in cahoots w whatever party happens to be in power at
any given moment. It spouts
virtuous rhetoric at every opportunity, and then does what ever blue or red house tells it
to. ALL three parties in Canada serve the same interests, and it isn't yours or mine. Ever.
Look no further than each parties stance on Palestine. All three are beholden to Non
sovereign interests. The Red house handed 2 elections to the Blue house under Harper by
fielding unelectable candidates. Dion 1st and then Ignatieff. The blue house has done the
same, second unelectable candidate being O'tool. The NDP is left in rhetoric only. Under its
previous leader it may have had a chance at leading federally. Jagmeet hasnt a hope here, and
he knows it, which why he pretends to be relevant with virtue signaling. Its all Kayfabe just
like the states.
Im not sure if the NCP counts as center left in any meaningful way compared to the
Liberals or Progressive Conservatives. Nowadays, the NDP are mostly "Liberals" who weren't
cut-throat enough to cut it in the Liberal Party. The Greens are at least slightly different
from the Liberals & Conservatives in that they are fanatical in their devotion to "Green"
policies. However, I would hesitate to call the Greens "leftist", as they every bit as
Neo-liberal in their economic policies as the Liberals & Conservatives (just with a green
veneer slapped on top) and pro-war as well, i remember during the last election I was
considering voting green and saw their foreign policy boiled down to keep trying to overthrow
of Assad and the mass settlement of Syrian refugees into Canada. Call me old fashioned, but
I've always felt that sinking ships so you can praise yourself for rescuing the lifeboats is
a repugnant morality. Perhaps one day Canada will have a political party worth voting for,
but until that day I will keep casting my vote for Putin
I agree with Kadath that the Greens, under Annamie Paul, are neoliberal and not at all
antiwar. Ms Paul seems to unquestioningly accept all the Sinophobic and Russophobic
propaganda peddled in our Canuckistan media. I was really hoping that Dimitri Lascaris would
win the leadership but "Democratic" (DNC) style rigging, including by the outgoing leader,
ensured that Dimitri would not succeed Elizabeth May.
Thanks for your posts, that's what I see too. They found another slice of the salami. I've
seen a few other rhetorical touches that suggest they are heading towards less "kinetic"
options, and Iran is aware of the situation. They took the bait. Psaki has said that is all
we are going to do before talking. Zarif says "we agree", but all the stuff Trump did must be
undone. Which would seem like a congenial choice for Biden to consider. But I don't suppose
everybody is going to take this lying down. But this all does suggest a dose of reality is at
work, which would be nice. I notice the Bidenites want China and Russia in the talks
too.
Munich Security Conference 2021(video conference): SleepyJoe, no comment, he can't remember
his speech anyway.
Obvious stoned Stoltenberg reports about NATO's low-carbon warfare! LOL!
U.v.d.Lying, no comment! Sic!
Looks like dancing vampires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n5s6he1feg
Lisa Fritz Kabarett, sorry German only.
This so-called rare earth (RE) element shortage is a false narrative pumped out by the
fake media, controlled by the US -asset-liquidating vulture GloboCapitalists.
There are lots of mothballed US/North American RE mines/deposits that were shut
down/abandoned/undeveloped, for cheaper Chinese sourced (cheaper labor/dirty coal
energy-powered/pollution friendly) RE mined resources.
The Vulture GloboCaps just don't want to pay the extra out-of-pocket to mine RE
domestically.
That would cut into their profit margins...[just like in Texas...]
Well, NATO is sending 3,500 new troops to... Iraq.
increasing its invasion force from 500 troops to 4,000. So maybe that's an indicator where
the next 'war zones' are going to be: Iraq and Syria... Again
Gotta keep a hold on that Syrian oil and the better part of the Syrian northeast as well,
which can easily be used as a springboard (along with the al-Tanf area) to mount/support
either frequent ISIS and/or al Qaeda, etc attacks on the Syrian government and people.
And after endless debate, the simple question is; How much improvement in the lives of
workers across America, will Biden's owners let him tinker with? After all is said and done,
that's the key to any president's term.
We'll see. Take a deep breath and pay attention to what's done, not what's said,
especially in the empire's MSM.
So true. Radoslav Dimitrov captured the reality so well in his concept of "Empty
Institutions" designed not to make any real policy progress, but rather to provide
performative political art on a regular basis to distract from the actual lack of real
progress. I have linked to his paper below:
Below is a quote from Biden's speech to the Munich conference....at least he agrees with my
civilization war context....
"
"We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future direction of our world. Between
those who argue that -- given all of the challenges we face, from the fourth industrial
revolution to a global pandemic -- autocracy is the best way forward and those who understand
that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges."
"Historians will examine and write about this moment. It's an inflection point. And I
believe with every ounce of my being that democracy must prevail."
"
When is the world going to call BS on the democracy term applied to a society that has its
money system controlled by a cult of private individuals? The longer humanity continues to
live the myth/lie of democracy in the West, the more likely our species will go extinct
because we are unable to evolve beyond barbarism as our form of social organization.
No offense to anyone (or their imaginary friends),
But,
What are these silly bitches going to do when the music stops?
Seriously? https://youtu.be/AULRSOK1KPQ
...
Just sayin'...
div> The world is like an onion, it has layers. Where Trump attacked
everything Obama, Biden is attacking everything Trump plus his supporters and, while the MSM is
mostly silent on this, about half the USA is gearing up for a civil war. Meanwhile the
international wars have been increasing, just not so visibly. Don't forget the digital wars,
the apparent biological wars, the propaganda wars, the food wars, and etc. And while most
people just recognize the shooting wars the oligarchs, through the
military-industrial-congressional complex and other world governments, are playing a global
game of Monopoly against each other where even superpowers are but pawns. WWIII started years
ago, it's just that most people don't recognize it as such because it's not state actors
calling the shots, it's oligarchs who are, in essence, ghosts because we can't see them.
Posted by: Glenn S Olson , Feb 20 2021 4:17 utc |
71
The world is like an onion, it has layers. Where Trump attacked everything Obama, Biden is
attacking everything Trump plus his supporters and, while the MSM is mostly silent on this,
about half the USA is gearing up for a civil war. Meanwhile the international wars have been
increasing, just not so visibly. Don't forget the digital wars, the apparent biological wars,
the propaganda wars, the food wars, and etc. And while most people just recognize the
shooting wars the oligarchs, through the military-industrial-congressional complex and other
world governments, are playing a global game of Monopoly against each other where even
superpowers are but pawns. WWIII started years ago, it's just that most people don't
recognize it as such because it's not state actors calling the shots, it's oligarchs who are,
in essence, ghosts because we can't see them.
Posted by: Glenn S Olson | Feb 20 2021 4:17 utc |
71
"And while most people just recognize the shooting wars the oligarchs, through the
military-industrial-congressional complex and other world governments, are playing a global
game of Monopoly against each other where even superpowers are but pawns. WWIII started years
ago, it's just that most people don't recognize it as such because it's not state actors
calling the shots, it's oligarchs who are, in essence, ghosts because we can't see them."
This is obvious to anyone paying attention, so, you'd think more folks would get it.
Really, why would anyone be surprised that a candidate who did nothing to win the
Presidency should similarly do nothing once elected?
Posted by: c1ue | Feb 19 2021 21:15 utc | 30
Reporter asking Ukranian: why are you bombing Donbass?
Because Russians are there! - he says.
Reporter asks again: then why aren't you bombing Crimea too?
Because Russians are *really* there!
"Why does the US use the winter storm as the excuse every time?" Shu Bin, director of the
State Grid Beijing Economics Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday, noting
that the power grid system is very vulnerable and requires constant maintenance and
upgrade.
A report from the US Department of Energy (DOE) in 2015 said that 70 percent of power
transformers in the country were 25 years or older, 60 percent of circuit breakers were 30
years or older, and 70 percent of transmission lines are 25 years or older. And the age of
these components "degrades their ability to withstand physical stresses and can result in
higher failure rates," the report noted.
[...]
"The US has no nationwide power grid network allocation plan like China. When it
encounters extreme weather, a state won't help another state like some Chinese provinces
and regions do with flexible allocation plans," Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center
for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Thursday.
[...]
"China uses 50Hz across the country, like the country has the same heartbeat," he said,
adding that China has never experienced such a scale of blackouts as the US.
[...]
China has mastered the top technologies such as "UHV transmission" and "flexible DC
transmission" and started the strategic "west-east electricity transmission" and
"north-south electricity transmission" projects, which in turn offer an opportunity for the
development of the country's western region.
The greatest problem confronting the ECHR in the Navalny pantomime is that of being
presented with evidence that is determined by people with a high potential of bias and even
malice. Any prosecution or hearing that is based on evidence from people with mala fide (in
bad faith) is fraught with erroneous judgement UNLESS the procedure is doubly cautious in
testing every presentation. One can't know for certain unless one reads the entire
transcript.
So far (from the snippets in press) I can see that there might be good reason to doubt
anything from the German Military labs, from the lady with the drink bottles, from Navalny
the peripatetic pharmaceutical carrier/consumer.
Considering the entire story is premised on a less than 2%er political figure directly
funded by foreign sources to seek power in a nation under propaganda and economic siege (and
failing miserably at that) THEN the court will need to demonstrate some credible evidence as
to how the Novichok failed to infect every passenger and crew in a closed circulation plane
cabin.
Or are we to believe that Navalny has the balls within his underwear to absorb it all?
The ECHR court is being asked to give legitimacy to state propaganda and black ops. This
is a very sad downfall from ethics and common sense. But it certainly won't bother the EU in
perpetrating its pernicious game.
The ECHR also made recent decisions directed against Russia regarding alleged "ethnic
cleansing" in Georgia 2008, and alleged "illegal annexation" in Crimea 2014.
The pathetic attempts to confirm Sainthood onto Navalny when he's clearly one of the
Devil's men is just beyond--outré, is more precise. What does that then make those who
make such attempts? It shows they are further Devil's men and not at all in control of
themselves. Tools are used; they don't use/operate themselves. Trolls are also tools. There
are many of those here that are made to look like they control themselves but ultimately they
remain tools. Too many are treated as humans. I once fought them as Don Quixote fought the
Windmill, but no more; and I very seldom engage them unless the attempt to distort is too
deceptive and must be addressed.
I love to read Chris Hedges whenever I can. Here's a bit from his recent essay on the new
and dangerous 'Cancel Culture' - which has become a rather effective and 'liberal' elitist
weapon against, among others, those who criticize Israel, as well as against many radicals,
and Wikileaks....
....The cancel culture, a witch hunt by self-appointed moral arbiters of speech, has
become the boutique activism of a liberal class that lacks the courage and the organizational
skills to challenge the actual centers of power -- the military-industrial complex, lethal
militarized police, the prison system, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the intelligence agencies
that make us the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human
history, the fossil fuel industry, and a political and economic system captured by oligarchic
power....
....The cancel culture was pioneered by the red baiting of the capitalist elites and their
shock troops in agencies such as the FBI to break, often through violence, radical movements
and labor unions. Tens of thousands of people, in the name of anti-communism, were cancelled
out of the culture. The well-financed Israel lobby is a master of the cancel culture,
shutting down critics of the Israeli apartheid state and those of us who support the Boycott,
Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semites. The cancel culture fueled the
persecution of Julian Assange, the censorship of WikiLeaks and the Silicon Valley algorithms
that steer readers away from content, including my content, critical of imperial and
corporate power.
In the end, this bullying will be used by social media platforms, which are integrated
into the state security and surveillance organs, not to promote, as its supporters argue,
civility, but ruthlessly silence dissidents, intellectuals, artists and independent
journalism....
Do you think the state of Alaska might one day ask to be Russian again?
Posted by: passerby | Feb 17 2021 21:41 utc | 29
From memory, from somewhere on the internet, probably soon after Russia regained Crimea.
Journalist: "Is Russia going to revisit its past control of Alaska?"
Putin: "No. Russia already has enough cold."
Not as apocalyptic as it may seem. I wrote a comment on the situation in the earlier
thread
here .
Temps are starting to move up and tomorrow (Thursday) should begin the thaw. Friday is
sunny and 47 deg F for a high, then sunny weekend and following. So we're over the worst of
it. The lowest it ever got was around 0 deg F.
The infrastructure failed - the people paid to manage this failed - everybody is angry, 10
people died so far last I heard.
Rolling blackouts, some people very much suffering, townships opening warming shelters -
probably not millions of pipes bursting. Not totally iced in, just nowhere to go. People
stayed home. Businesses stayed closed. Not totally without food, people stocked up staples in
2020.
Not that dire. Absolutely fucking disgusting, and a hardship that touched everyone - some
people got really screwed and I don't know why the treatment was uneven like that - not
demographics, something with the grid. Dire, yes, and life-threatening to some or perhaps
many (numbers not clear to me yet), but not so dire as your picture suggests. Nothing like
Katrina, except the same ineptness.
But heads will roll. The governor has mandated an investigation into the regulator, ERCOT.
What follows next is of great interest. Facts will appear. I'll post anything useful.
I heard a rumor it was getting better. Could be less blackouts. Will post now in case
power goes off ;)
This Texas debacle may light a heated debate in the USA for the next weeks, for two
reasons:
1) Texas is the big alt-right/Trumpist Festung for the foreseeable future. Their
nation-building process involve catapulting Texas as the anti-California ,
the conservative version of the Shining City on the Hill, around which the USA will be
rebuilt;
2) What is happening in Texas right now goes directly to the heart of neoliberalism, which
is the political doctrine that vertebrates the alt-right. That's why conservative ideologues
such as Tucker Carlson et al are desperately scrambling on TV and social media to blame the
outage on the so-called Green New Deal.
What is happening right now in Texas, therefore, may be another episode on the battle for
the soul of the American Empire.
Putin's response to the Duma Speaker is worth citing fully. Too bad so few will read his
words:
"What you have said regarding the so-called platforms, the IT companies, presents a major
challenge, and not only to us alone. You can see what happened in the United States. This is
a watershed running across the world as a whole, an ideological watershed, which is
absolutely obvious . I have said this before, but I can repeat it now: if they behave
like this in their own country, how will they treat others if they think themselves
exceptional? This is a serious matter, and we certainly need to think about it in
advance, this is the obvious thing.
"As for freedom of speech, the situation is perfectly clear to us as well. The so-called
double standards have manifested themselves so vividly recently that we have no doubt about
how our so-called opponents will behave towards us, no doubt at all.
"Just take a look at Ukraine, where three leading channels have been shut down at the
stroke of a pen. And everyone keeps silent, while some have even given them an approving pat
on the back.
"How can we comment on that? The only thing we can say is that they are using these
instruments to attain their own geopolitical goals. This is also true for Ukraine. Why are
the developments pivoted on Nord Stream 2? They want Russia to pay for their Ukraine
geopolitical project, that is it. In fact, this is a rather primitive and simple thing. We
have become aware of this long ago, but this is the world we are living in.
"Or take a look at what has happened in Latvia. They have clamped down on 16 of our media
outlets, but the only reaction to this is silence. Why have the Western truth seekers not
provided any assessments of what is happening to freedom of expression there, in Europe? No,
there are no evaluations, as if this is how it should be, because they are allegedly fighting
propaganda. As if what they are doing is not propaganda. What is it then? This is an
instrument of attaining their geopolitical goals, in this particular instance, with regard to
our country.
"We must take this into account. I would like to say once again that this is nothing out
of the ordinary. I believe we have been observing this, seeing this happen for a long time,
but the recent events have especially vividly confirmed the correctness of our views and
assessments." [My Emphasis]
Myself and many others would certainly like to know what Putin sees as "their geopolitical
goals" as well as those "with regard to our country." I know Putin's said he sees the Outlaw
US Empire is trying to deter Russia's development, but that seems too simplistic to me
knowing that the #1 policy goal is Full Spectrum Dominance.
The last outstanding nugget from Putin's conference is an admission by Putin of his
political-economic philosophy made during his reply to the Communist Party's Gennady
Zyuganov:
"The growth of unemployment during the pandemic – it is not big but it is still here
and we are seeing and recording it. I speak about this all the time and encourage the
Government to do what is necessary to reach pre-crisis levels. In general, the situation is
improving and has proven to be better than preliminary forecasts. But you are right. It is
clearly necessary to focus on this all the time .
"Of course, I know that the Communist Party is always concerned over issues of
privatisation. I have also spoken about this. Probably, our approaches to this matter do not
always coincide, but at any rate I believe we share the common view that privatisation for
the sake of privatisation is unacceptable for us, especially the way it was carried out in
the 1990s in some areas. It must be beneficial for the economy; it must improve the economic
structure. We must proceed from the premise that any step in this context must create a
better, more efficient owner de facto, in practice rather than formally . But obviously,
this must be done in a certain environment so as not to give away what costs millions and
maybe billions for next to nothing. This is the bottom line for us." [My Emphasis]
Lots of trolls accuse Putin of promoting Neoliberalism. The above proves them liars.
Putin's foremost concern has always been for the welfare of his fellow Russians. If I
haven't made that clear over the years of my reporting on his speeches and pressers, then the
failure must be on those feigning blindness when they can see perfectly well.
IMO, the four main political parties are all fundamentally nationalist, even the
Communists. I don't think anyone/party anti-Russian/pro-Neoliberalism has any chance
politically, and won't for many years. However, it's what I'll term progressive nationalism
that seeks to promote the same in its partners--even in those nations that don't deserve such
treatment. Russia takes the high road and doesn't deviate, which I find commendable. It's my
hope that the Eurasian Bloc will follow the examples of Russia and China, but selfishness and
greed are formidable obstacles, not to mention exceptionalism.
Yesterday's Lavrov presser has finally had the Q&A section added to it and its a
doosey! Lavrov's sounds incendiary in print! "Question: Your recent interview generated a lot
of controversy. You implied that Russia admits the possibility of breaking off with the EU.
How do you see this break and what conditions would have to happen for it to occur, that is,
where does Moscow draw the red line?"
Lavrov: "This interview took place on February 12, and the EU High Representative for
Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell was here on February 5. Upon his return, he
made a number of statements to the effect that Russia had failed to live up to expectations
and to become a modern democracy and is rapidly moving away from Europe. That is, it sounded
as if Russia was a hopeless case. This happened several days before the interview. Hence, the
question as to whether we were ready to break off with the EU during the interview with
Vladimir Solovyov based on those remarks about Russia. As a matter of fact, anyone who is
even slightly interested in the situation in Europe has long known that a break-off has been
underway for many years now. The EU has been consistently tearing down our relations.
"2014 was a turning point. A coup took place in Ukraine, and the EU showed it was helpless
and unable to comply with the agreement that was reached between the government and the
opposition right before the coup. Importantly, Germany, France and Poland put their
signatures under it. The opposition spat on these signatures and on the EU, which thought it
was important to comply with this agreement. It was then that the EU was really humiliated.
Everyone knows what happened next. By and large, the EU turned a blind eye to the attacks
against the residents of Crimea and eastern Ukraine on the part of the ultras and neo-Nazis
who came to power, and decided to put all the blame on the Russian Federation.
"The EU has consistently destroyed all the mechanisms without exception that were based on
the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, including the biannual summits and annual meetings
between the Russian Government and the European commissioners and presidents of the European
Commission, projects to form four common spaces, over 20 sector-specific dialogues and almost
every other more or less important contact, as well as the Partnership and Cooperation
Council's annual meetings with the Russian Foreign Minister and the EU High Representative
for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. These meetings were supposed to be used to conduct a
full review of all areas of cooperation between Russia and the EU. To reiterate, all of that
has been destroyed. Not by us, mind you."
That's the most candid I've read of his answers to the events of that time. Lavrov turns
down his fire and brimstone to make this very important distinction as he finishes his
answer:
" Importantly, we do not have any problems in our relations with individual European
countries , I would even say, most European countries. Russia's relations with Finland
are a very good example of how they are being built systematically and based on general
principles, primarily, equality and mutual benefit, and how they are translated into the
language of specific economic, cultural and other projects that are of interest to both
sides.
" The EU should not be confused with Europe. We are not leaving Europe, we have many
friends and like-minded people in Europe, and we will continue to expand mutually beneficial
relations with them ." [My Emphasis]
It's the NATO/EU combo controlled by the Outlaw US Empire that's the problem. And another
blast aimed at the EU over Navalny related events:
"In evaluating the questions expressed by Mr Haavisto, we heard that our colleagues from
Finland and other EU countries always bring them. We know that they are edited and written by
the EU, in Brussels, and are a subject of consensus. We hear this regularly enough, and these
statements are practically the same, word for word. If the organisation called the European
Union has made this decision, we take it as a certainty. We reply to problematic issues,
and the main point we express is how the EU consistently, diligently and deviously avoids
specific discussions that are fact-based rather than accusations often made against us for
some reason or without any evidence ." [My Emphasis]
In the last Q&A, Lavrov again restates what he earlier said about the EU being at
fault for the utter erasing of relations that were painstakingly built up over many years,
and he repeats what Merkel said at the time foe emphasis, for Russia was innocent of all the
crap it was being accused of in 2014:
"At this point, German Chancellor Angela Merkel specially took the floor to say in public
that Russia must be punished and that in this situation politics must prevail over the
economy. This was very unconventional for a representative of Germany."
This ought to remind people that this proved Merkel to merely be a cheap prostitute
unworthy of any trust, who should have been ousted from her position years ago.
"... The information discussed is from government files which outlay various projects and from companies and -- interestingly -- from charities who make bids to run the FCO projects. All underlying files are available for download as one archive file (~80 MB). ..."
"... The budget for the various anti-Russian projects runs at dozens of millions pounds per year. The first programs were launched in 2016 and some continue through this year. ..."
"... Note that 'Russian disinformation' is whatever Britain does not like about Russia. 'Exposing' such 'disinformation' is best done by spreading one's own. These are not defensive programs but attacks on Russia. ..."
"... Many years of painstaking work of HMG through its embassies and intelligence cutouts precede a chemical attack. They create Media, CSOs and pseudo humanitarian organisations that happen to be just at the correct place and in the correct time with their cameras ready when 'suddenly' a dreadful accident 'shocks every one into action'. ..."
"... Do you believe HMG staged the 'Navalny accident' as part of some kind of a secret operation? Did HMG create Media outlets, nurture bloggers and stringers that it controlled? Did it engage Russia's youth and CSOs? Did it try to demonise Putin just like it had done with Assad by labeling them Evil Dictators who poisoned their people with forbidden chemical weapons? Do you know what all of this is needed for? They need it to delegitimise a leader of a country and convince people around the world that 'no holds should be barred to fight a mad dictator'. Can you grasp the gravity of what is going on? ..."
"... That view is not even exaggerated. The 'west' has the knives out against Russia. We previous mentioned a report from the Pentagon think tank RAND which evaluated how to best 'unbalance and overextend' Russia. ..."
"... The aims we have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia, which is difficult to achieve by economic pressure. ..."
"... The new documents also reveal some interesting new points on Navalny who seems to be on the British government payroll: ..."
"... By now you must have guessed the identity of one of the popular YouTubers investigating corruption. After obtaining EXPOSE Network files and examining the case studies two years ago, we didn't figure out which YouTuber the FCO supported through ZINC. We refrained from making any preliminary conclusions even when journalists discovered that Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of Alexei Navalny, was a part of the Integrity Initiative cluster. ..."
"... But when we saw Mr. Navalny and Bellingcat together, things started to make sense. By digging deeper, we discovered another Navalny's supporter who lives in London - some shadowy Maria Pevchikh who is promoting a system of smart voting in Russia. The Labour used a similar voting system to take the votes of the Conservatives. So, basically it is highly likely that the UK recommended the system to Mr. Navalny. ..."
"... It also turned out that Navalny began a smear campaign against the RT - one of the few media outlets in the West that allows those who disagree with the official position of western government to speak out. Note that Navalny's campaign was running in parallel with that of the Integrity Initiative. A reasonable question is - why Navalny who is mostly engaged in political battles inside Russia spends time fighting a TV network operating outside the country? ..."
"... Not only countries bordering Russia, a cell existed in Spain and it had consequences, when the new government came to power the local cell ran a campaign against the new nominee for National Security for not being tough on Russia as required, he was out of the job, and the main local newspapers were and are in bed with British intelligence dutifully reporting how bad Russia is and how good Navalny and his boys are, journalists working for the media with the largest readership in the country. ..."
"... Devinette: when was the last time a state which was not supported by the US has committed a chemical attack? ..."
"... BTW Maria Pevchikh accompanied Alexei Navalny from Omsk to Berlin. She was the one who was supposed to have gone to his hotel room in Tomsk and picked up the water bottle supposed to contain Novichok, at least until information came out that she acquired the water bottle from a vending machine at Omsk airport en route to Berlin. Pevchikh was the one person in Navalny's entourage who did not submit to questioning by Russian authorities on Navalny's poisoning. ..."
"... I recall that I first found the video below from a MofA comment, but very pertinent to this discussion and maybe it is discussing the same program: Top French Intel Boss Reveals Operation Beluga: US UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize Russia ..."
"... It gives me pause to try to understand the ethics / morals / humanity of the thousands of western bureaucrats working on these elaborate (sometimes comical) plans to destroy other nations. ..."
"... One visible thing about the complete "undermining of Russia", is that a large amount of bureaucratic planning has gone into it. The quantity of companies that have been employed and with specific duties to perform is shocking. An incidental factor is that the UK and French participants get well paid. £975 or £700 per day, in comparaison to "locally found" participants. ..."
The reporting was based on the British Integrity Initiative's internal files which some 'anonymous' organization had acquired
and published.
Data acquired from Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office by the same group
revealed large British propaganda programs in support of Jihadis in Syria as well as British influence operations designed to
undermine the security institutions of Lebanon and to secretly influence its population.
Now another large set of files has been published by the same source. These describe an extensive British government program designed
to undermine Russia by organizing and financing 'independent' Russian language media, by 'training' Russian journalists and by secretly
paying Russian influencers. It is certainly not the only British anti-Russia program but it probably has, secretly, the most public
influence.
The anonymous author has laid out the complete Undermining Russia program in four extensive parts:
One ,
two ,
three ,
four .
The information discussed is from government files which outlay various projects and from companies and -- interestingly -- from charities
who make bids to run the FCO projects. All underlying files are available for
download as one archive file (~80 MB).
The most interesting files are the bids the companies make for projects. They reveal previous projects, methods and people and
thereby create the larger picture.
The budget for the various anti-Russian projects runs at dozens of millions pounds per year. The first programs were launched
in 2016 and some continue through this year.
ENGAGE – working through the British Council to implement people-to-people activities between ethnic Russians and
local communities to develop links along the lines of 21st century skills – includes English language skills and media literacy,
social enterprises and cultural activities;
ENHANCE – supporting independent media in Russia's near abroad to bring balance and plurality to Russian language
media, in the Baltic States and Eastern Partnership countries;
EXPOSE – by debunking and exposing Russian disinformation in real time, which can be reported in mainstream media
with the goal to expose malign state disinformation in countries that are targeted by it. If you expose disinformation, it
is less likely to be impactful; therefore, the Russian State becomes less credible.
ENABLE – working with allied governments through the Government Communication Service to improve their strategic
communications to their populations.
Note that 'Russian disinformation' is whatever Britain does not like about Russia. 'Exposing' such 'disinformation' is best
done by spreading one's own. These are not defensive programs but attacks on Russia.
Projects to achieve the above were to be implemented in nearly every country that borders Russia and has a Russian speaking minority
as well as in Russia itself.
The British government does not want you to know about such projects. The 'Supplier Event' sheet says:
Security
No unauthorised disclosures of activity on this work. Contract will need to take a look at who we are working with. Basic IT
security reasonable steps should cover our requirements but the FCO may request an explanation of what steps have been taken to
ensure security and Duty of Care.
It should be noted that for security reasons, some grantees will not wish to be linked to the FCO. It should be noted that
the Programme Team would prefer the programme documents do not end up in the Russian media. We know that they are following us,
and we are expecting an expose soon.
What is the overall purpose of such secret programs? The author of the Undermining Russia series
explains that with regards
to the 'poisoning' of Alexei Navalny:
Many years of painstaking work of HMG through its embassies and intelligence cutouts precede a chemical attack. They create
Media, CSOs and pseudo humanitarian organisations that happen to be just at the correct place and in the correct time with their
cameras ready when 'suddenly' a dreadful accident 'shocks every one into action'.
Do you believe HMG staged the 'Navalny accident' as part of some kind of a secret operation? Did HMG create Media outlets,
nurture bloggers and stringers that it controlled? Did it engage Russia's youth and CSOs? Did it try to demonise Putin just like
it had done with Assad by labeling them Evil Dictators who poisoned their people with forbidden chemical weapons? Do you know
what all of this is needed for? They need it to delegitimise a leader of a country and convince people around the world that 'no
holds should be barred to fight a mad dictator'. Can you grasp the gravity of what is going on? Well, you ought to. They
are preparing us for war with the Russians and the Chinese. They are looking for casus belli, and only the truth can stop them,
because 'if wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth'. (Julian Assange)
That view is not even exaggerated. The 'west' has the knives out against Russia. We previous
mentioned a report from the Pentagon think tank RAND which evaluated how to best 'unbalance and overextend' Russia. In the
end it was clearly aimed at regime change in Russia, or if not otherwise possible, war. On Friday
Gabriel Felbermayr , the president of the Kiel
Institute for the World Economy, was asked by a German radio station about new sanctions the EU might impose on Russia. He is skeptic
that those might work
because (my translation):
The aims we have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia, which is difficult
to achieve by economic pressure.
The new documents also reveal some
interesting new points on
Navalny who seems to be on the British government payroll:
These self-exposing documents show that the FCO has established a network of popular YouTubers in Russia who investigate corruption
in the government, and the YouTubers get assistance from some journalists from the Baltic States. Also, the FCO has experience
of instigating protests in Russia.
By now you must have guessed the identity of one of the popular YouTubers investigating corruption. After obtaining EXPOSE
Network files and examining the case studies two years ago, we didn't figure out which YouTuber the FCO supported through ZINC.
We refrained from making any preliminary conclusions even when journalists discovered that Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of
Alexei Navalny, was a part of the Integrity Initiative cluster.
But when we saw Mr. Navalny and Bellingcat together, things started to make sense. By digging deeper, we discovered another
Navalny's supporter who lives in London - some shadowy Maria Pevchikh who is promoting a system of smart voting in Russia. The
Labour used a similar voting system to take the votes of the Conservatives. So, basically it is highly likely that the UK recommended
the system to Mr. Navalny.
It also turned out that Navalny began a smear campaign against the RT - one of the few media outlets in the West that allows
those who disagree with the official position of western government to speak out. Note that Navalny's campaign was running in
parallel with that of the Integrity Initiative. A reasonable question is - why Navalny who is mostly engaged in political battles
inside Russia spends time fighting a TV network operating outside the country? Was RT really such a problem for him? No, it wasn't.
It was a problem for the Western imperialists and apparently, they told Navalny to join in.
Anyway. Here are again links to the four parts of 'Undermining Russia':
One ,
two ,
three ,
four .
They give extensive insight into the methods the 'west' is using to destroy foreign countries. Knowledge that one needs to really
understand what is happening in this world.
Posted by b on February 15, 2021 at 19:24 UTC |
Permalink
Projects to achieve the above were to be implemented in nearly every country that borders Russia and has a Russian speaking
minority as well as in Russia itself.
Not only countries bordering Russia, a cell existed in Spain and it had consequences, when the new government came to power
the local cell ran a campaign against the new nominee for National Security for not being tough on Russia as required, he was
out of the job, and the main local newspapers were and are in bed with British intelligence dutifully reporting how bad Russia
is and how good Navalny and his boys are, journalists working for the media with the largest readership in the country. Some
got fired when the scandal went public, others went through the revolving door, that simple. They had a lot to do with the Assange
case, as explained in the link bellow.
Russian authorities are more sophisticated that the British, not to mention Americans. The way I see it, American flunkies tend
to make most glaring mistakes routinely, and with propaganda efforts they may get some mileage in Latin America -- not as much
as they could wish. But in Europe and Middle East, it takes the British to keep track which country is which etc.
In that vein, Russia is not so eager to clobber Navalniks with political accusations. To a larger degree than China and the
West, Russia wants to allow free access to information etc., and focuses on discrediting "Navalniks". Let them have 40 offices
around the country plus a slew of foreign ones, online TV channels etc. In the same time, Russia is copying Western methods.
For example, tagging people as "foreign agents" if they use foreign money to operate.
Converting stories "discrediting the regime" into flops, like "Putin palace".
Imposing rules that make it hard for new parties to run in elections -- copied from New York State?
Imposing rules that make it hard to run demonstrations where you want and issuing pesky penalties for violations.
In the same time, collaborating with the West puts people who do it in an unpopular box. Navalny tries to circumvent those
limitation with rank demagogy, but he still suffers by contagion, and from condemnations from less cynical followers of other
Western projects -- for accepting Russian Crimea, frowning on immigrants etc.
On the US side, the program 60 Minutes just aired a segment where president of Microsoft claimed that the Russians used 1000+
hackers for the SolarWinds flair. No wonder Microsoft produces such crap software. If the Russians could manage 1000+ engineers,
then they should be outsourced for all of DOD's software.
The Biden admin is supposedly now deciding what new sanctions or actions to take against Russia. And this psyop comes out.
Timing. All about timing. Somebody timed this.
Just confirms that the Biden regime will take the US into a shooting war with Russia just as the Brits were going toward that
if their propaganda failed to oust Putin.
Thanks b.
Skimmed through part 1.
I see you are quoted. A question (which may be answered in a later part of the same), are the connections to the "five eyes" as well as the Spanish
(re. Paco post) organised by the UK or are they joint efforts? (Anonymous doesn't think too much of the others.)
The FCO seems to be the operative, but is it really the originator? In the sense that at present the financial and "sanctions"
elements are part of US/Israel policy. They may have been suggested by the FCO discretely?
-----
I note that Corbyn was attacked for anti-semitism by the FCO and also by Israeli media. They also seem to be deeply involved in
the same setup. Were the Israelis involved in the planning?
Many things to consider given this new information. It provides extra dimensions to
Today's Crooke
essay and the
one by Tim Kirby I posted yesterday. Agent Smith tried to pooh-pooh it all by saying the international culture wars are a
side show when in reality they are the crux of the matter since at the end of the day everything boils down to First Principles--Values.
Truth, Virtue and Promotion of the Individual to Advance the Many versus Lies, Deceit and Denigration of the Individual to Advance
The Few.
@10 erelis. Noticed the paid advert on 60 minutes last nite, also. But after watching for 5 minutes, had to switch channels. Saw
b's latest write up on Solarwinds which I would tend to trust note than ms / CBS. A follow up from b would be nice.
The poisoning narratives touted by the Western oligarchies and their corporate media should be seen for what they are, hilariously
funny. As I said on a previous occasion, I laughed out loud for about half a minute when I read that Navalny had been poisoned
with a 'novichok-like substance'. In the most literal sense those stories do not pass the laugh test. From the
Litvinenko-polonium
story to the Navalny- novichok underpants story they have all been a tissue of quite absurd lies.
Worryingly, despite the absurdities and the frequent changing of details in these narratives, people who are demonstrably quite
intelligent in their daily lives appear to be buying into the anti-Russian narrative. People who can watch 'Game of Thrones' and
comprehend a fictional character's argument when he asks the question 'why would I frame myself' are seemingly incapable of applying
the argument in real life situations. Why would the FSB frame themselves? Why would they use a substance that has not yet succeeded
in killing any of the intended targets? There must be literally hundreds if not thousands of toxins that could be used and there
are countless other ways of killing a person.
Imagine a check box list of the desirable characteristics of an assassination weapon, neither 'novichok' nor polonium would
tick enough (if any) of those boxes to be considered.
So what is it about? Clearly that rubbish is not going to work on the people of the Russian Federation (at least not enough
of them to be worthwhile) That just leaves us as the target, they are quite obviously manufacturing consent. Do they actually
mean to start WW3? or is it a bluff intended to frighten the Russians into submission? Or ruin their economy with massive increases
in arms expenditure? Perhaps it is just more pressure to cancel Nordstream 2 so the US can sell their overpriced fracked gas and
delay their coming economic collapse for a short while. Only time will tell, I fear the worst.
Oligarchies usually end with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and eventually insanity. The modern counterparts of Nero and Caligula
are running the western world. While dynasties are usually founded by exceptional people, as a rule the only exceptional thing
about their descendants is their arrogance.
Russians can, and do, watch and read western media to see firsthand how badly western press slander Putin and Russians in
general. Putin is extremely popular in Russia for saving the country from oligarchs, reuniting Crimea, shutting down western sponsored
terrorism in southern Russia and standing up to naked aggression from NATO. Western press shows Russians just how stupid western
people have become by believing the inane poisoning stories, airplane shootdowns, and Russian "invasions" such as Crimea. The
Russians only need to read western press to know the west is preparing regime change or war. Putin and the Kremlin do not need
to say a word to convince Russians the west considers them enemies.
The constant lies about Russia and threats to Europeans and Turkey are backfiring. The Germans, Turks and others are furious
over the British and Americans constantly demonizing them for making smart business deals and military purchases with Russia.
With all the "maximum pressure" campaigns and sanctions, some European and Middle East countries consider the US and UK bigger
threats than Russia.
If the west actually achieves the goal of starting war with Russia, the result will be disastrous for the west. Russia has
become so advanced militarily, there is no doubt Russia would easily crush any attacks and then counter attack. Be careful what
you wish for, Americans.
Whilst we the British people, who have no problem with the Russians, have no say in the matter.
Oh to be a fly on the wall at the next official Anglo Russian get together. That will be a 'shortest straw' gig as no British
politician will want to face Lavrov now, especially after that EU prat visit last week.
What's going on? Why this animosity towards Russia?
I'll give you my opinion.
The British leadership are VERY ambitious. The nature of their empire has changed. First, They no longer seek to become an
empire of nations, but rather an empire of national leaders - primarily Heads of State who control the domestic legal system.
Second, they are a feminist empire, with power passed from mother to daughter. They are able to do this because, while there can
be but one King, there can be multiple queens simultaneously. For example, from the death of George vi in 1952 until the death
of Mary of Teck in 1953 there were no less that three queens of the United Kingdom. Then until 2001 there were two queens. Like
chess, with two queens you always win the game.
But they can only do this while the United Kingdom exists. England alone, shorn of Scotland, loses the medieval laws and powers
that underpin this empire.
If you investigate the monarchies of Europe you will find that they all are members of the Order of the Garter (KG). This is
a sovereign order, which means that in order to join one must swear an oath to the Sovereign of the Order, Queen Elizabeth.
If you investigate the politicians of the US you will find many that have joined the Order of Bath (KB) even though it is explicitly
against the constitution for them to do so (I think it is called the Emoluments Clause, but I may have misremembered). Again,
in order to join this organization you must swear an oath to Queen Elizabeth.
It used to be that only the Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Weinberger and so on). But in January 2001 I came across a photograph
of the three Clintons "leaving Buckingham Palace following a private visit". The benefits gained by the Clintons is what has launched
the family into the big time of money and personal unrestrained power and the complete control of the Democratic Party.
This is a millennial empire. It is meant to last for a thousand years. The other great civilizations - Russia, China, Iran - are equally millennial, and are seen as a threat to the British plans
for world domination.
The other great civilizations understand all I have written. They know a fight is coming. And I think that this is the reason
that Lavrov finally took off the gloves when dealing with Borrell last week. For while he would bend over backwards to understand
the EU position in the past, the UK has now quit the EU. The only ties now to the British Empire are those personal ones to the
monarchs of Europe like, in the case of Borrell, Felipe vi and his father, juan Carlos. Both Knights of the Garter.
@ John Cleary | Feb 15 2021 22:07 utc | 19 with the description of the British empire
About that Queen thing. I can't think right now where the details are but it is my understanding that annually the Queen presents herself to the City
of London in a supplicatory manner. I agree that there is empire and that the Queen is part of the fabric of the curtain behind which are the real lever movers,
those that own global private finance.
British hostility to Russia has a long history. Indeed, we should not forget that the British Royal family supported Hitler. No
doubt this, at least in part, accounts for Neville Chamberlain's 'appeasement' Adolf Hitler, following Germany's annexation of
Sudetenland in 1938 and sequent invasion of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939.
See- A brief history of the British Royals and their alleged Nazi connections 28 Aug 2017; Link:
https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2017/08/28/brief-history-british-royals-and-their-alleged-nazi-connections
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 15 2021 21:27 utc | 14 -- "Many things to consider given this new information. It provides extra dimensions
to Today's Crooke essay and the one by Tim Kirby I posted yesterday. Agent Smith tried to pooh-pooh it all by saying the international
culture wars are a side show when in reality they are the crux of the matter since at the end of the day everything boils down
to First Principles--Values. Truth, Virtue and Promotion of the Individual to Advance the Many versus Lies, Deceit and Denigration
of the Individual to Advance The Few."
Thanks, karlof1, for yet another informative article. Saved it for study along with the Tim Kirby article.
So much to read... so much to learn.... so much to pleasure in.... first principles, eternal values, objective truth, good
governance... and did God say that the white man's burden is to go rape, pillage, rob the rest of the world?
And thanks for reminding me that his name is Agent Smith.
This is to help me remember not to engage trolls and / or idiots:
"Never again will we try to persuade a foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous. In conversation with
them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken
possession of them. They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.' -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters
and Papers from Prison
... These self-exposing documents show that the FCO has established a network of popular YouTubers in Russia who investigate
corruption in the government, and the YouTubers get assistance from some journalists from the Baltic States. Also, the
FCO has experience of instigating protests in Russia ...
It would be interesting to know if the Russian-language news website Meduza.io might have some connection to this assistance
to the YouTubers. Meduza.io is based in Riga, Latvia, and employs Russian-language journalists.
Kevin Rothrock , formerly of The Moscow Times (English-language
newspaper in Moscow), is editor-in-chief of Meduza.io's international version.
BTW Maria Pevchikh accompanied Alexei Navalny from Omsk to Berlin. She was the one who was supposed to have gone to his hotel
room in Tomsk and picked up the water bottle supposed to contain Novichok, at least until information came out that she acquired
the water bottle from a vending machine at Omsk airport en route to Berlin. Pevchikh was the one person in Navalny's entourage
who did not submit to questioning by Russian authorities on Navalny's poisoning.
I think we should see a bit more (in Google's English-language translation) of what Gabriel Felbermayr said to Katharina Petz
of Deutschlandfunk:
Gabriel Felbermayr : I am sceptical about [further sanctions]. The question is always what we want to achieve with
sanctions. If we really want to bring Russia to its knees economically, we would need a large coalition of countries to do so,
and Europe alone cannot do as much as is necessary. At least China on board and, best of all, India and other [Russia's] trading
partners would need it. The fact that sanctions have worked so badly in the past has to do with the fact that they are being undermined
by other countries, that is a key problem. That is why I am sceptical that putting a on it (sic) really helps now. The objectives
we have with Russia are very large. After all, we want nothing less than regime change in Russia, which is very difficult to achieve
with economic pressure ...
... I believe that we must also see who we are hitting with the sanctions. Are these really the people who are acting and
who, in the light of the sanctions, may then reconsider their actions, or is it the general population that is hit very diffusely,
each a little bit. This does not hurt enough, so to speak, to put great pressure on the regime, but it does hit the general public.
That is why I believe that a sanctions instrument that is much more adicating (sic) to individuals is more promising and does
not affect the broad mass of Russians. That already exists, we are using it in the European Union. These could be travel restrictions,
that could be the freezing of assets abroad, and this could also be sanctions against certain companies that are very close to
the Kremlin. Perhaps there is more that can be done than Europe alone, because Russian foreign assets are not in China, so to
speak, and the second residences of Russian oligarchs are not somewhere in the Third World, but in Monaco and London and Paris.
So smart sanctions are certainly what is more promising – one has to ask whether Europe has the right instruments ...
...Yes, of course, the economic impact of the sanctions is quite different. Germany suffers from the Russia sanctions that
have been in place since 2014, more than any country in the world, in absolute terms, and is also much more affected in percentage
of economic output than in France. In Germany, this costs about 0.2% of GDP, according to various estimates, and in France this
figure is much lower. There are, of course, other European countries where the level of concern is higher, [Bulgaria] for example,
or the Eastern European Member States of the European Union as a whole. This unequal concern is certainly a political dilemma.
It is also a political problem with regard to the United States of America, which, while always insisting and pushing for
sanctions, has so far drawn little economic disadvantage from it, simply because US trade with Russia is very low. That is the
core problem when it comes to forging a broad coalition that costs are too unevenly distributed. We would certainly also have
to think about compensation mechanisms within Europe or within the Western world, so that the joint fight against the violation
of human rights, for example in Russia, must be paid for economically, not only by a few countries ...
... Yes, I would agree, I think [Nordstream II shutdown] is overestimated. The question is how much billions of export revenues
Russia generates in the European Union by selling natural gas, that is the central question. And whether natural gas enters the
European Union via Ukraine or Turkey or Germany does not matter much. It may even be the case that the possibility of shutting
down or blocking such a pipeline again, or imposing conditions, means that Germany will even get a leverage over Russia that would
not otherwise have been possible.
So I also think that Nord Stream 2 is overestimated. Here again the question would have to be asked, who does it actually
cost if you do not complete the project. A great many European and German investors are also negatively affected, and with sanctions
we want to inflict pain, above all, on the Russian power apparatus and not on ourselves. I believe that Nord Stream 2 is a bad
instrument ...
So the sanctions regime against Russia is hitting the EU, and Germany and parts of Eastern Europe in particular, harder than
it's hitting Russia and the EU needs more nations on board with sanctioning Russia.
I can't imagine the US would be willing to compensate the EU for any losses it has to sustain by sanctioning Russian government
officials and businesspeople.
The UK aristocracy and their opportunists have nothing to credit themselves but ill-gotten money or the hope thereof, they have
always been forced to equate money=virtue to pretend to any merit, between themselves and their families. This is the cause of
their eternal hatred of socialism and virtue in government, and their eternal hatred of Russia, even in the post-USSR era. If
they have no one with less money to hate, they have no claim to personal merit, and must face the truth.
Of course the same is true of the upper classes anywhere, even among the poorest. For what was the purpose of their lying,
cheating, stealing and perpetual materialism, what were the values they taught their children, if money is not virtue. Virtue
is an unknown land to them, an unforgiveable sin, for that way lies the ugly truth about them.
Lots of people living in la la land - that is - in the good old times when the West subjugated the planet.
UK economic drop 2020
-10 %
EU economic drop
-7 %
Russia economic drop
-3.1 %
Moment to reach 2019 Q4 economic level:
UK beginning of 2023
EU beginning of 2023
Russia Autumn 2021
>>Gabriel Felbermayr: The aims we (EU) have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in
Russia.
Yes, Gabi, it is good that you are honest. It will only warn people of your intentions, so it is preferable to talk that way.
:) Meanwhile, in the real world, lots of EU businesses and NGOs will flew out from Russia and be replaced with Asian ones. It already happening with cars, trade, energy flows, diplomatic missions and tourists. So good riddance to bad rubbish.
>>I can't imagine the US would be willing to compensate the EU for any losses it has to sustain by sanctioning Russian government
officials and businesspeople.
The place of the EU in this whole scheme was already described by Victoria Nuland. That is - "F the EU". :)
This is not a problem though, they have long experience with it.
US will not be selling any LNG to EU/Germany to compensate for loss of NS2. The fracking business is shutting down and shutting
down right now. Wells are going offline, replacements are not being drilled. No drill, no gas. Fertilizer shortages are already
in sight. As we lose ability to grow food we will not be sending feedstock material across the ocean just because it sounded good
in a strategic fantasy.
Posted by b on February 15, 2021 at 19:24 UTC | -- "They give extensive insight into the methods the 'west' is using to destroy
foreign countries."
Thanks, B, for using the light of truth to expose the insanity of western leadership. It gives me pause to try to understand the ethics / morals / humanity of the thousands of western bureaucrats working on these
elaborate (sometimes comical) plans to destroy other nations. How does a "civil" servant like that conceive such evil, then go home to teach their children how to be human beings? This banality of evil is absolutely unfathomable to ordinary people such as I.
Reminds me of the thousands of good Germans who "went along to get along" on the way into WW2. Also, the thousands of good British "planners" who war-gamed their way into WW2.
>>And whether natural gas enters the European Union via Ukraine or Turkey or Germany does not matter much.
This ignorant euro-puppet should be fired immediately.
Having a gas pipeline via Turkey increases the geopolitical weight of Turkey and it allows it to blackmail the Balkan Countries
receiving the gas.
Using the Ukrainian route means that additional billions of euros will have to be invested in repairing the old and disrepeit
Ukrainian Gas Transit Network which is from the 80s, with good amount of the money disappearing due to corruption.
The gas then may stop due to Russia-Ukrainian disputes (as it happened in the past) or "misterious" explosions may happen on
the pipeline (as it happened too).
It is also unclear for how long will Russia be interested in saving the EU from freezing (in January the EU was forced to buy
record amounts of gas due to cold temperatures), considering the rise of Asian markets.
Right now Russia is connecting the Western pipelines and the Eastern Pipelines, meaning that "EU gas" may be reserved for the
East.
Gazprom is also looking to accelerate work on the Power of Siberia 2 (PoS2) pipeline, as part of plans to unite domestic gas
transmission infrastructure across eastern and western Russia into a single system.
TASS reports Lavorv's comments after meeting Finnish Foreign
Minister revealing the lawless nature of the EU's behavior as it abets crimes against its own laws:
"The minister paid special attention to the fact that Brussels enables brazen violations of rights of Russian speakers and
attacks on the Russian language and culture in the Baltic States, Ukraine and several other states. '
Of course, we cannot
but take into account the EU condoning blatant breaches of Russian speakers, Russians and the attacks on the Russian language
and culture that we witness in the Baltic States, Ukraine and some other countries. When Russian-speaking [TV] channels are shut
down, when criminal cases are opened against Russian-speaking journalists for simply doing their jobs, when the disgraceful institute
of statelessness remains in the EU, while the European Union watches it all without any desire to change anything, I believe that
it is not Russia distancing itself from the EU, but the very EU moves away from the Russian language, Russian culture and all
things Russian, meaning that it is drifting away from the Russian Federation ,' the minister noted." [My Emphasis]
As reported earlier, Russia will finish Nord Stream 2 and continue fulfilling its commitments. But given EU co-responsibility
for the terrorism and refugee crises combined with the recent revelations, I don't see any positive developments occurring.
Thanks for that very revealing translation of Gabriel Felbermayr's words. It shows that a man can be intelligent and insane
at the same time. He speaks as if the need for destroying Russia is a given. Sounds like he is one of those thousands who go along
to get along....
"I fooled myself. I had to. I didn't want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing
it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the
community." -- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
For Psychohistorian and John Cleary, regarding the City of London...
The City was never thoroughly brought to heel by William the Conqueror with the result that it was granted a sort of autonomy
within the realm, hence its absence in the Doomsday Book, which assessed the realm's lands for taxation by the crown. Whether
or not it is part of the United Kingdom is a moot point, for its autonomy (strengthened over time) makes it, in a sense, impervious
to United Kingdom legislation that it wishes to ignore. In this regard, it is a sort of anomaly, like the Channel Islands (the
last remaining part of the Duchy of Normandy still under the British crown) and the Isle of Mann, both of which are NOT part of
the United Kingdom and were not part of the European Union, and both of which are notorious tax havens.
The peculiar status of the City of London is what has made it a great financial center, for it can regulate itself (and does,
to some extent, if only to keep the scandalmongers at bay), unlike the New York and Swiss financial centers, which are subject
to "outside" oversight, New York by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and Switzerland by the FINMA (Financial Market
Supervisory Authority).
MarkU @ 16 -- "While dynasties are usually founded by exceptional people, as a rule the only exceptional thing about their descendants
is their arrogance."
Ancient Chinese wisdom on generational wealth: First generation make money; second generation keep money; third generation
lose money. Start over.
MarkU @ 16 -- "Oligarchies usually end with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and eventually insanity. "
Good fit for most parts of the Western (*) leadership, lying one day, reversing their own lies the next, then reverting to
their original lie, then pivoting to some other lie. Insane. They have gone past derision, gone past shame, gone past dishonour,
into insanity. Destruction cometh next.
"Now it's time to expose another intelligence cutout - BBC Media Action. Don't be surprised that the detested mainstream media
outlet BBC has its own secret firm which gets its funding from your taxes as well as from the CSSF." (Taken from part two)
One visible thing about the complete "undermining of Russia", is that a large amount of bureaucratic planning has gone into
it. The quantity of companies that have been employed and with specific duties to perform is shocking. An incidental factor is
that the UK and French participants get well paid. £975 or £700 per day, in comparaison to "locally found" participants.
Other things of note are the targeting of Russian speaking, younger age groups and the admission that the over 40's are more
difficult to change. (This is a common factor for other areas of propaganda as well.)
The "Covid story" has had an effect. No longer are " mother and daughter tea parties " with 40 participants possible.
Not a joke , but it serves to underline the thoroughness of the propaganda effort leading up to effect a "regime change".
----
About the Monarchy, and inferred connection to the "landed Gentry Aristocracy". Possible, but would rely on education in the "best"
Schools, and their production of eligible members of "secret" manipulative societies via old boy networks, as well as "ordinary"
leaders. ie Politicians, Top civil servants.
Private Schools such as Eton and Harrow have recognised "specialities" and form the basis of networks. It is not for nothing that
you have to put the names down of likely progeny almost at birth. Closed shop attitude as in a "trade Union"! ST. Johns, Leatherhead,
produces clergy for example.
The UK Monarchy was connected by intermarriage to almost all the Royalty in Europe. There are still connections (for those who
have the cash), through such goups as Bilderberg, etc.
The relation of the "Dukes" to a desire to take over Russia, is a possible source of interest. ie. The Duke of Grosvernor owns
the Square mile of the City of London. (Which is an entity in itself.) The City has the key to the finance of the UK and much
of the "dark money, and money laundering in the world.
----
all for today.
Obama, Bernie and DJT have led their flocks to nowhere. What led us to them is the establishment's desire to derail
populist Movements.
One clue (among many): Each of these so-called populists is pro-Empire.
Obama conducted covert wars and regime changes. He declined to prosecute any CIA people for rendition & torture
and dismissed privacy concerns about NSA spying. He also lied to us: 1) about a 'public option' in his healthcare plan and
2) never making the Bush tax cuts permanent (Obama participated in the 'fiscal cliff' farce that made most Bush tax cuts permanent
while cutting social programs);
Bernie , aka "Senator F35" is a closet Zionist that supports the Empire. He was Hillary's sheepdog in 2016. He then
founded "Our Revolution", a nonprofit that accepted money from large donors. Bernie folded like a tent in 2020 to support establishment
candidate Biden. Bernie put forth a bogus bill to end US involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen that would not actually end
that involvement due to an exception. And he has criticized Venezuela's Maduro as USA has been trying to overthrow him.
Trump - a billionaire conman, Clinton insider, and friend of Epstein - got in front of the Tea Party parade with
slogans like "America First". His actions show that he is a fraud who is actual "Empire First". Trump dramatically increased
spending on the military, terminated multiple peace agreements, renegged on his peace deal with North Korea, gave Israel everything
on its wish list (including killing Iranian Gen. Soleimani), militarized space, and continued the War on Whistle-blowers with
prosecution of Assange. Along the way he lied to the American people about the severity of the looming pandemic and excused
MbS's killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
Nothing will change as long as we keep falling for compromised leaders that are promoted by a compromised media.
I heard this when I was a student in London. It may be hearsay after all, as I also tried to find relevant info after your
comment. Trouble is the enormous power of the City, the Banks, and major corporations all who have a "vote" (or not) in the affairs
of the Corporation, make any detailed study next to impossible. Trusts, etc. I followed somebodies FOI request which led to .....
nothing.
Note that known Grosvenor territory (the house I had a flat in. The street belonged to them.) were part of their assets, and
in the last seven years of a 99yr lease. After which it had to be "returned in the same state as it was "sold" in the first place.
The present Duke does apparently not have much to say in the Grosvenor Family Trust. He is still rich. (according to one grovelling
article).
It does make a prime suspect for setting up the Anti-Russian saga, as those Banks/Corporations and Billionaires etc. would
be the ones to profit massively from a"regime change".
Like clockwork, the NYT begins to set a rationalization for more US imperialism in Syria. This is such a contrived article. It
doesn't come out of the blue.
These ferocious dogs never stop. The push is to rebuild the Turkish relationship, and so regain influence over Syria through 'protecting
Idlib' and its 'children.'
About Tim Kirby advises to Russia. The guy is completely delusional and really ignorant of Russia history and mental structures.Russi
is not going to metamporphose in USA or UEJohn Hermer:
http://johnhelmer.net/1000th-dance-with-bears/
But Russia is going fine with China
Thanks for your reply! I've often disagreed with Kirby; but as I wrote in my first linking to his essay, there are some suggestions
that merge with ideas we've discussed over the months here. I've written about what I see as Russia's fundamental ideology, how
it differs from the West, and fume intensely when Putin says differences with the West aren't ideological when it's so clear they
are--Putin just laid out the vast chasm in his Davos speech. Lavrov just reiterated that Russia cannot abide nations/organizations
that are pathological prevaricators. And China is the same. IMO, the First Principles of Russia and China are the ones humanity
needs to adhere to and merge with policy. They are the same as those proposed by Henry Wallace for his Century of The Common Man.
I see them as an evolutionary step forward to a Commonwealth of Humanity that would inspire a Great Leveling--which the elite
of course oppose. The most recent manifestation of the Abrahamic Religions also appeals to such an arrangement as does most Afro/Asian
philosophy.
What we have is an embattled minority trying to keep its power using every trick at its disposal. The #1 question most of us
have: Is that minority suicidal--will it see nuclear war as a way to keep its position? Putin has answered that if it does try
it will lose. And IMO, the minority knows that it currently will lose but hopes to reverse that outcome--They don't seek compromise
as they want it all. And that's where the big problem lies--How to dissuade them of their unattainable Zero-sum Fetish?
So empire (is it British, American, Jewish...) threw up Donald Trump as the attempt to gather the totally delusional around a
maniacal "strong/bully" leader to push back against the Russia/China axis and it didn't work entirely like they wanted but it
broke enough social anchors to increase the fragility/fear factors of society. When the mostly manufactured crisis does come they
trust their ability to manufacture Western outcomes that keep private finance alive and with some ongoing control over some chunk
of the world.
I don't expect to live to see private finance go entirely away anymore. I think the trajectory is set in that direction but
the timeframe will be longer than I wanted/expected. Look at the number of commenters here that still want to play whack-a-mole
bad apples games while behind the curtain the global private finance elite are continuing their species perversion through British
ways like b has shown here.
The West needs a better social system that has the broader public instead of a cult of folks as its focus or we will continue
our road to deserved extinction.
emersonreturn @ 9, I have just done the same this morning as gently as I could with family members in New Zealand. It is very
hard for them to recognize this is not all Trump's doing - especially when they are benefitting from better government themselves
as far as coping with the virus, and they remember fondly better days in the relationship with the US.
Lavrov at work, day after day. Today with Togolese Foreign Minister, a quick translation so as to induce a little smile:
Question: How do Western countries view the rapprochement between Russia and African countries?
Foreign Minister Lavrov: In different ways. Some are neutral, others, like the former US Administration, are very negative.
Former US Secretary of State M. Pompeo traveled to Africa before the end of President Trump's term and publicly urged not to cooperate
with Russia and China in the field of trade, because Moscow and Beijing allegedly proceed from geopolitical interests, trying
to benefit. The United States, on the other hand, "does it from the heart." I will not comment on this kind of position.
Recently, representatives of the new US Administration called on the Russian Sputnik V vaccine to be viewed with suspicion,
since again, this is a "Kremlin's geopolitical plan" and one must be "careful" not to become "dependent on Russia."
I think Crimea was meant to be the new homeland for Israel citizens, when the usurpator state goes down. Now they will have to save
themselves to Patagonia.
Intriguing topic.
It's anyone's guess why the Christian West's front-of-curtain leaders are training the Homeland serfs to become accustomed to
24/7 lies about remote enemies. The notion that the West can "win" a war with Russia/China is laughable. Each/both could retaliate
EFFECTIVELY if attacked. So if the bs isn't about WWIII then what is it about?
My guess is that it's nothing more sophisticated than Creative Distraction from what's been going on in AmeriKKKa and, to a
lesser extent the Rest of the West, since the Oligarchs had their own taxes slashed in the '70s, '80s and '90s. This helped to
fund the Oligarch's favourite hobby: "Privatise Every Publicly Owned Monopoly/Utility." Keeping wage-growth flat also helped to
fund the take-over.
From a country-to-country perspective the trend, whilst quite uneven, has been inexorable. And there is a notable absence of
serious debate about reversing the trend.
It doesn't matter what the ultimate goal of this social engineering may or may not be. It has to be reversed. And one way to
reverse it would be to submit every excuse Rich People use to justify their tax breaks to Public Scrutiny and laughed out of court.
In the 1950s Rich People, worldwide, paid eye-watering Taxes on all 'excess income' beyond the top marginal rate. And when
they went to Heaven their Estate was taxed on its 'excess value'. They've killed off those taxes too, by playing one country/
jurisdiction off against another - using Lawfare (high-priced lawyers whom ordinary folk can't afford).
They're too eerily inept to win a war against Russia/China. Their war is against their own countrymen. And it's aim is to prevent
as many serfs as possible from getting their grubby little mits on OUR MONEY!
Thank you, karlof1 @ 14; Crooke's essay is masterful! If only others in the West could be persuaded to read it -- the references
to Ireland and India are so persuasive, but then he doesn't stop but demonstrates how the situation today is so much worse. The
bolded quote,
"...We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both." (Emphasis added).
has to be seen in the entirety of the article to be appreciated, and his definition of the EU as a cartel is pure genius! They
are all not even worthy of the title 'empire' -- they are all cartels!!
UK loaned 1.5b to Ukraine to build 2 warships for them...plus rebuild shipyards to re construct the navy....paratroopers are training
Ukraine forces....do they plan to go against Donbass like this....reminds me of old film a bridge too far where British forces
failed ......and Nato gonna give Black Sea a lot more trouble for Russia too.
I was just going to post the link to that transcript,
From it
much can be learned about the degree of Russian involvement in Togo and Africa as a whole; this for example:
"The Association for Economic Cooperation with the African States was created in Russia following the 2019 Sochi summit. It
includes representatives from the related departments and major Russian companies. The Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, which
is a political association, was created as well. Its secretariat is located at the Russian Foreign Ministry. We agreed to hold
the forum's annual political meetings at the foreign minister level, from Russia and the African Union Troika that is comprised
of its former, current and incoming chairpersons. In 2020, we held them via videoconference with the foreign ministers from South
Africa, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hopefully, we'll be able to meet in person in 2021."
That's a lot of interaction that also includes Russian businesses, all of which ought to be added to China's activities. In
addition to what Paco provided, there's this closing paragraph that reveals more of the Anti-Russian nature of BidenCo:
" It wasn't long ago that representatives of the new US administration said the Russian Sputnik V vaccine should be treated
with suspicion, since it was another geopolitical plan from the Kremlin, and that one must be careful not to become dependent
on Russia . It's sad if they have nothing else to say about normal and friendly relations between countries, and if this is
the only thing that they have to say about this. We never make friends with other countries in order to oppose third countries.
If Russia and its foreign partners are mutually attracted, we have every right to develop our relations as we see fit. I hope
others will also learn their lessons and treat our ties with Africa with respect." [My Emphasis]
Russia and China act while the Outlaw US Empire focuses on fashioning a False Narrative that can easily be seen as such. However,
it seems the underlying scourge is becoming easier for English speakers to see: "All animals are equal; but some animals are more
equal than others."
Too bad the mid.ru site usually does not publish the guests comments and answers, excess of caution maybe, but it was interesting
what the Togo foreign minister had to say concerning good relations with the Soviet Union and then Russia in many countries all
over Africa, he expressed his gratitude for the many African students in Russia, students that have become high cadres in Togo
and other countries. Another interesting point was the fact that Lome is the main deep water port in all of West Africa, and therefore
the minister was talking about regional matters, Togo as a hub. Macron must have watched the press conference, after all the foreign
minister spoke in French. Russia is recovering lost presence in Africa.
Some level of control of the press by intelligence agencies is present in all modern societies. The question is "when the
quantity turns into quality"/
It is strange that people are surprised by the side effect of the conversion of the state to the national security state model
(which actually happened after WWII, not now) and idealize the past so much. Probably some warts became more visible with
Internet and the rise of alternative media. Still what exists in the USA looks more like some variation of the "inverted
totalitarism" model of the national security state than the dreadful Stalinism model of the same.
One of the negative side of the Internet revolution and the revolution in communications (such as emergence of smartphones,
social sites and such) is the dramatic increase of the capabilities of state surveillance. Do intelligence agencies literally picked
up thinks that were ling on the ground for anybody to take. Look at the published material about Prism. That a natural outcome of
the ubiquity of electronic email and email portals. Low hanging fruit so to speak. And the PRISM program is just a tip of the
iceberg, and its revelation by Snowden is limited handout, so to speak.
It is fascinating to watch how the US state changed from 1980 to 2020, but nothing new under the sun: the seeds of this
transformation were planted in 1946.
"The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal
conspiracy,"
wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book,
The CIA As
Organized Crime.
This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national
security state's ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an
international audience.
We have long been subjected to this "information warfare," whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people
and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by
The
New York Times, CBS,
etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless
wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to
matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be
distinguished.
For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency
of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in
The Secret Team
; that CIA
officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom
among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor
Saunders in
The Cultural Cold War
and Joel Whitney in
Finks
,
among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in "courting the Compatible Left" since right wingers
were already in the Agency's pocket.
All this is documented and not disputed.
It is shocking only to those who
don't do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.
With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and
went on the defensive. It, therefore, should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the
charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged
elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves.
Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their
screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.
Just the other day
The New York Times
had
this
headline
:
"Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims."
Notice the lack of the word alleged before "false virus claims." This is guilt by
headline.
It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and
honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram's ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr.
Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram's parent company.
That ban should follow soon, as the
Times
' reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she
accusingly writes that RFK, Jr.
"makes many of the same baseless claims to more than
300,000 followers"
at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and
The
Boston Globe
.
This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission
is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment
and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.
Which brings me to the recent work of
Glenn
Greenwald
and
Matt
Taibbi
, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship.
As I understand their arguments, they go
like this.
First
, the corporate media have today
divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the "allegedly"
liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read" the "allegedly"
conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc.
They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate
facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these
separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It's business-driven since electronic media have replaced paper as
advertising revenues have shifted and people's ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically.
Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed
Taibbi and concurs: part one
here
)
have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.
Secondly
,
the great call for censorship
is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money
for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as
The
New York Times
, who now employ "tattletales and censors," people who are power-hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting
voices that they can recommend should be banned.
Greenwald says,
They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology
and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous
'disinformation.'"
Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.
In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media
world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.
I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power-hungry reporters at
the
Times
or
CNN
or any media outlet. All
these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people
controlled.
These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their
financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer.
They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core.
For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is
power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal
conspiracy.
To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being
pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence
agencies, as are the
NY
Times, CNN, NBC,
etc.
They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's program to control, use, and infiltrate the media.
Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.
In
Surveillance Valley,
investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon
Valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in
surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply
involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden's revelations.
Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part
of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.
Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that
these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of
The New York Times
,
etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional
corporate media that gives it its marching orders.
That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the
current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media
and
the
Silicon Valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the
onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.
But for whom do these intelligence agencies work?
Not for themselves.
They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial
institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy
naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world's wealth through the
stories they tell.
It is a symbiotic relationship.
As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the
"financial element in
the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson."
Their wealth and power has
increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep
state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc.
They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.
As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter
Dale Scott, in
"The
State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,"
says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest-running Director of the
CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:
There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles's influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director."
It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller's Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and
scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors,
including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his
"Mighty
Wurlitzer"
was
"capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired."
This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to
propagate the CIA's messages.
Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their
critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman's and Noam Chomsky's
Manufacturing of
Consent
model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who
knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them
from wandering into dangerous territory.
The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream
media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the
pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the
rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their
intelligence propagandists.
To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only
silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues.
To give
thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.
This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many
decades and was used to cover up the national security state's assassination of both his father and his uncle.
It is why his wonderful recent book
,
American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family
,
that contains not one word about vaccines
,
was
shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting
the mass media that have been its mouthpieces.
These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords
represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be
dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father's ghost, the last politician who, because
of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control
the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.
So they killed him.
There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He
has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The
assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are
eschewed.
To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden
gate with the sign that says –
"This far and no
further"
– and jump over it.
That's where the true stories lie. That's
when they'll see the worms squirm.
4Celts
14 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
But
now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says –
"This
far and no further"
– and jump over it.
Easy
for you to say, Mr. Curtin.
"Since
I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the
United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a
power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they
better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." - W. Wilson
Ms No
PREMIUM
14 hours ago
That quote really does display it all and it should have chilled people to the bone.
bananaz
2 hours ago
A
*** is Director of the CIA now.
So
no can of worms will be open.
TRM
4 hours ago
remove
link
Tragedy & Hope
Wall St & the Bolshevik Revolution
Wall St & the Rise of Hitler
... ... ...
Normal
14 hours ago
remove
link
No
crap, the federal government is attacking the citizens of the nation.
Mr. Apotheosis
14 hours ago
In truth, the "owners" of the federal government are attacking the people of the world. Ever notice
how no matter what country you're referring to, they ALL have the same talking points and the same
sensationalist media? The rabbit hole goes much deeper than the US federal government. They are mere
tools as the article suggests.
wee-weed up
14 hours ago
(Edited)
The MSM are not just stenographers for the Deep State... but avid cheerleaders!
Pandelis
13 hours ago
regular scum selected for the job ....
GreatUncle
4 hours ago
remove
link
The
government is owned and controlled by the globalists.
Hell they paid for the fraudulent election what did you expect?
CIA
is just an extension of it along with the FBI.
Plus Size Model
1 hour ago
You
should look into Ivy Lee. He was one of Rockefeller's cronies for a long time. Chomsky disregards him
to distract and divert. His deeds run way deeper than Bernnays or the Creel Committee.
Ivy
Lee pioneered the modern role of press agent for big corporations. He's also credited with promoting
communism in the 20's and had the Red Cross as well as IG Fabien (Nazi Party front) as his clients.
Robert F. Kennedy is the last lawyer standing fighting and winning legal cases against large
corporations, big pharma on medical, purposeful and criminal malfeance resulting in the injury and death
of thousands of people, perhaps more. He is a brave man. He has walked in the Valley of Death with his
father and uncle's horrific murders. He fears no one. Least of all these corporations of death and
destruction along with their bought and paid for politicians. Be grateful. He legally sues corps who
pollute, poison food in addition to untested, harmful vaccines. He saves lives. Checkout
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/
play_arrow
Rubicon727
58 minutes ago
The hatred behind The Kennedy's probably harkens back to the patriarch, Joseph P.
Kennedy. He was adamantly against the formation of the CIA. Kennedy realized the
deeply criminal aspects of the CIA and vehemently pushed back.
drjimi
14 hours ago
Real journalists around the world risk their lives standing up to the government.
American "journalists" want to work for the government.
Oldwood
14 hours ago
remove
link
Corruption knows no profession, it is anywhere there's a buck and a desire for
power.
Liesel
13 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Just remember, when they start censoring people, then you know the people getting
censored must be saying something of value. I knew when they went after Alex
Jones awhile back, they were coming after all of us at some point. I even said
they were coming after ZH. Unfortunately, now this place is censored like all the
rest. The scariest event happening right now is not: a pandemic, capitol riot,
impeachments, etc. No doubt, it's the censorship of the American people. In fact,
one of the very important building block of America was free speech. Essentially,
this massive censorship is an outright attack on America by shadowy-dot-gov
agencies, banks, elites, big tech, and the large corporations. Sadly enough, the
elected officials in Washington are nothing more than submissive puppets.
Ms No
PREMIUM
13 hours ago
(Edited)
That isn't always the case actually. That's why they call it limited hangout.
Somebody feigning attack and being downtrodden (like Pelosi's s garage) is
often contrived for street cred. They will also leak some valuable info (often
nothing new though, stuff that's already out or a false detour) for
credibility building.
"A
limited
hangout
or
partial
hangout
is, according to former special assistant to the
Deputy
Director
of the
Central
Intelligence Agency
Victor
Marchetti
, "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the
clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can
no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to
admitting --
sometimes
even volunteering -- some of the truth
while still managing to withhold the
key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so
intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter
further."
[1]
[2]
"
this definition is
even limited intentionally...lol
Its used primarily
now to set up controlled opposition and control information.
I am Jack's existential crisis
14 hours ago
remove
link
The intelligence agencies
have
always been a safeguard
between the rulers and the ruled. They are in the
business of mining data on everyone while acting as provocateurs in fomenting
political and social destabilizing events
that
the public won't do on their own
. Period. They care about freedom only in
how to prevent it from occurring.
"As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible
government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been
invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented." -- Propaganda, Edward
Bernays
johnny two shoes
13 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Stale repost:
The U.S.
attacked
itself
to provoke a war on 9/11.
It did the same before in Cuba, blew up its own ship...
This is called the "Batsh*t Crazy offensive defense maneuver in the dark".
It is a tried & true method.
Vlad & Xi should be scared ****less that the freaks who seized the White House
are getting ready to orchestrate an attack on themselves... and
blame
it on them, and then attack them.
maybe this time it's different, but there's all kinds of Skunk Works they've been
just itching to use
Cloud9.5
8 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Read up on the Phoenix Operation in Vietnam. This will tell you all you need to
know about how the CIA operates. They are doing exactly the same thing here and
they have captured the government. The only reason any of us are still alive is
that we do not matter to them.
https://thevietnamwar.info/the-rise-of-phoenix-program-in-vietnam/
They want a monopoly of power. That is why they have been attacking the second
amendment for decades.
InfiniteIntellRules
7 hours ago
Look up Operation Gladio. That is replicated here as well. Thanks.
They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial
institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In
a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media
corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the
world's wealth through the stories they tell.
It goes beyond that
Patmos
12 hours ago
The MK Ultra program and the deliberate creation of DID victims
And
Sirhan Sirhan being a likely subject, which is tragically on point here.
MrBoompi
4 hours ago
Professor Carroll Quigley already explained the process to us in Tragedy and Hope. The book was written
decades ago but the conspiracy it explains is still controlling the world today.
tdlcoop
7 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Some have to
ask what the hell was Truman thinking in 1946 when he signed a bill that allowed an above the law and above
Government oversight department to be created?
Did he
honestly think once that department stopped spying on Cuba that he could just disband the merry men?
Really how
stupid are these Politicians?
And now you
have Democrats fronting Policy that will allow Big Tech Corporations (even though Corporations were created as a
form of abolishing Slavery) to form their own Governments! It's TPP through the back door and most Americans don't
even know it's happening.
You didn't cede power to Politicians to have them sell that power to unaccountable corporations. They don't have
that right but they do it because Americans pay more attention to the idiocy of Celebrities than they do to the
people they pay to protect the country.
Notice they call it the Central Intelligence Agency and not something with the word America or Federal in it? Just
like Central Banking the CIA wasn't created to serve/disrupt just a single Country. Having said that even the
Federal Reserve is not American but it has the word Federal in it to fool Americans.
AlexCat3741
4 hours ago
remove
link
Yup.
Whether it is a Congressional Committee holding hearings to supposedly expose truth about things perceived to be
wrong but then to do nothing except refer a matter to the Dept. of Two Tiered Justice for prosecution that never
happens; the nonsensical presentations on TV cast as "News" or entertainment in the form of Professional Sports
Contests, IT'S ALL "BREAD & CIRCUS" TO KEEP THE POPULATION DISTRACTED THAT THEIR POCKETS ARE BEING PICKED AND
THEIR FREEDOMS ERODED.
Instead of
being a sheep to focus on things that don't matter, put away your electronic leashes, e.g., iPhones, Fakebook/Twitter
Accounts, to get organized to fight for your Republic, your Constitution, and your life because whether you know
it or not,
the
United
States is in a state of war; Undeclared Total War against the basic principles and the foundations of this
Republic's Constitutional System. And the initiator of this war is not comrade Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, of
course, it's the system, however ridiculous it may sound, the World Communist System, or the World Communist
Conspiracy, whether it scares some people or not I don't give a hoot. If you're not scared by now, nothing can
scare you.
What actually happens now that we may have literally some years to live on unless the United
States People wakes up. The time bomb is ticking. Every second, the disaster is coming closer and closer.
And
unlike earlier times in the World, we will have nowhere to defect to unless you want to live in Antarctica with
penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.
redbaron
5 hours ago
The
Conquest book on the Russia revolution has a chapter describing the ideology and it is a good analysis
that accurately describes what we see today in the USSA.
Amel
5 hours ago
(Edited)
Scott called the deep state intelligence communities "supra national"...
"... Change won't come to the US via the convenience of the ballot box. Elected officials are immediately corrupted by careerism, corporate money, and who knows what other forces behind the curtain. Ordinary people will achieve nothing without general strikes and civil disobedience, and more are realizing this. No doubt why this domestic "terror" bill is being pushed through. ..."
"... The completion of NS-2 is good for European liberalism: it ties up Russia to its economy as a commodity exporters (the German dream of making Russia its own Brazil). Why is the USA trying to stop this win for liberalism? ..."
"... Fascism is not necessarily Republican, the new Democratic party has a considerable fascist faction. and it aint the old people in the Dem party, a lot of youngsters are quite the brownshirt when you look carefully. ..."
"... "..One of the most significant of these falsehoods (from journalists) was the tale -- endorsed over and over without any caveats by the media for more than a month -- that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by the pro-Trump mob when they beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. That claim was first published by The New York Times on January 8 in an article headlined "Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage." It cited "two [anonymous] law enforcement officials" to claim that Sicknick died "with the mob rampaging through the halls of Congress" and after he "was struck with a fire extinguisher." ..."
"... "Despite this alleged brutal murder taking place in one of the most surveilled buildings on the planet, filled that day with hundreds of cellphones taping the events, nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided. ..."
"... The events of January 6 would not have been noticed in the Kiev insurrection that Obama et al produced- in which US trained snipers from Georgia shot into the crowds, indiscriminately killing both police and protestors, in order to be in a position to denounce peace accords reached between the parties. ..."
U.S. Focus On Narratives Will Let It Collide With Reality
The impeachment narrative circus is leaving the town and the real world work
can now begin :
With the distraction of the impeachment trial of his predecessor now over, President Biden
will quickly press for passage of his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan before moving on
to an even bigger agenda in Congress that includes infrastructure, immigration, criminal
justice reform, climate change and health care.
Without the spectacle of a constitutional clash, the new president "takes center stage now
in a way that the first few weeks didn't allow," said Jennifer Palmieri, who served as
communications director for former President Barack Obama. She said the end of the trial
means that "2021 can finally start."
"Wait!" screams the narrative industry. That does not fit our business model. The 'left'
side of the media is set up to beat up Trump every damned minute and the 'right' side is there
to constantly condemn the 'left' for beating up Trump. Over the last five years that system
produced record ratings for everyone.
The Trump trial is over but local, state & federal investigations continue. There
might be a 9/11-type commission. News organizations continue to investigate. And
@realBobWoodward is working on a book on Trump's final days in office. Bottom line: we are
going to learn a lot more.
"I hear you," responds Nancy Pelosi. And what better way to hide that Biden will pursue the
same policies as Trump (but
sprinkled with some LBGTQWERTY quackery) than to extend the
narrative circus :
Congress will move to establish an independent commission to investigate the attack on the
Capitol on Jan. 6, including facts "relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer
of power," Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California announced on Monday.
...
Calls have grown for a bipartisan, independent investigation into the law enforcement and
administrative failures that led to the first breach of the Capitol complex in two centuries,
particularly after the Senate acquitted former President Donald J. Trump in his impeachment
trial on a charge of inciting the rioters. For some lawmakers, such a commission offers the
last major opportunity to hold Mr. Trump accountable.
Keeping the eyes on Trump is of course the best way to guarantee that Republicans will
continue to stick to his narrative and that he
will come back :
Though the 2024 primary is still far off -- who knows what will happen with Trump three
months from now, let alone in three years? -- he currently swamps any potential rival.
Fifty-three percent of Republicans said they would vote for Trump if the primary were held
today.
All the other Republican hopefuls are polling in the low single digits, besides Mike
Pence, who received 12 percent. Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Mitt Romney, Kristi Noem, Larry
Hogan, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Tim Scott and Rick Scott all polled below 5%. Only Donald Trump
Jr. and Nikki Haley punched through at 6%.
Further investigating the Mardi Gras invasion of the Capitol will also help to push for new
'domestic terrorism' laws. Where those will be pointed at is already evident:
FBI arrests BLM protester, claiming his social media posts show he is "on a path to
radicalization". A judge determined he is dangerous bc of these posts and held him with no
bond. This is where we're headed if we accept this domestic terrorism frame:
Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism where every rant you ever posted that
does not fit the official narrativecan
(and will) be used against you :
This clearly represents a quite different magnitude of 'control' – and when allied
with the West's counter-insurgency techniques of 'terrorist' narrative disruption, honed
during the 'Great War on Terrorism' – is a formidable tool for curbing dissent
domestically, as well as externally.
Yet it has a fundamental weakness.
Quite simply, that being so invested, so immersed, in one particular 'reality', others'
'truths' then will not – cannot – be heard. They do not stand out proud above the
endless flat plain of consensual discourse. They cannot penetrate the hardened shell of a
prevailing narrative bubble, or claim the attention of élites so invested in managing
their own
version of reality .
The 'Big Weakness'? The élites come to believe their own narratives –
forgetting that the narrative was conceived as an illusion , one among others, created to
capture the imagination within their society (not others').
...
Examples are legion, but the Biden Administration's perception that time was frozen –
from the moment of Obama's departure from office – and somehow defrosted on 20 January,
just in time for Biden to pick up on that earlier era (as if time was uninterrupted), marks
one example of a belief in one's own meme. Whilst the EU's unfeigned amazement – and
anger – at being described 'as an unreliable partner' by FM Lavrov in Moscow, is just
another example of how élites have become remote from the real world and captive to
their own self-perception.
"America is back" to lead, and 'to set the rules of the road' for the rest of the world,
may be intended to radiate U.S. strength, but rather, it suggests a tenuous grasp of the
realities facing the U.S. : America's relations with Europe and Asia were growing
increasingly distant well before Biden entered the White House – and, therefore, from
before Trump's (purposefully disruptive) term, too.
Why then is the U.S. so consistently in denial about this?
The U.S. - or at least its 'élites' - need a wake-up call that pulls them out of
their narrative world and brings them back into reality.
The alternative is a violent collision with the realities that others -domestic as well as
foreign- perceive.
Posted by b on February 16, 2021 at 19:08 UTC |
Permalink
Ahh yes the domestic terrorist boogeyman. I wondered what they would do without Trump. LOL
now we know eh? Thanks b.
Say hello to the new boss same as the old boss.
Change won't come to the US via the convenience of the ballot box. Elected officials are
immediately corrupted by careerism, corporate money, and who knows what other forces behind
the curtain. Ordinary people will achieve nothing without general strikes and civil
disobedience, and more are realizing this. No doubt why this domestic "terror" bill is being
pushed through.
Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism where every rant you ever posted that does
not fit the official narrative can (and will) be used against you:
This reminded me of an article I read on Zerohedge. The IMF is recommending including your
online history and behaviour when assessing your "creditworthiness"
The most transformative information innovation is the increase in use of new types of data
coming from the digital footprint of customers' various online activities -- mainly for
creditworthiness analysis.
Credit scoring using so-called hard information (income, employment time, assets, and
debts) is nothing new. Typically, the more data is available, the more accurate is the
assessment. But this method has two problems. First, hard information tends to be
"procyclical": it boosts credit expansion in good times but exacerbates contraction during
downturns.
The second and most complex problem is that certain kinds of people, like new
entrepreneurs, innovators, and many informal workers, might not have enough hard data
available. Even a well-paid expatriate moving to the United States can be caught in the
conundrum of not getting a credit card for lack of credit record, and not having a credit
record for lack of credit cards.
Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser
and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches, and
purchases.
Golly what happens to the Circus part of bread and circuses after all the elephants die? Burn
down the tent. We certainly know the Bread part of bread and circuses is an unleavened mess
caught in the sausage machine of 'let them eat cake' legislation to parse crumbs to the
starving masses one empty stomach of critical mass short of general rebellion.
What does one expect the 'elites' to do but go hardcore Orwellian to protect the 1% from
the righteous indignation of the 99%?
The Enemy of the People is the People who must be whittled away to dumbed-down compliance
at all costs. Masks are the canary in the coal mine.
The completion of NS-2 is good for European liberalism: it ties up Russia to its economy
as a commodity exporters (the German dream of making Russia its own Brazil). Why is the USA
trying to stop this win for liberalism?
Seeing the movements in Myanmar and elsewhere (i.e. hurting South Korea and Japan with the
trade war against China; hurting European economies with the trade war against Russia;
hurting the Brazilian economy with the trade negotiations with China; throwing Australia and
Taiwan as a battering ram against China etc. etc.) I can come with only one conclusion: the
American Empire is collapsing, but collapsing a la Rome, that is, from the periphery. It is
sacrificing its provinces (European Peninsula, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil and even
India) in order to try to stabilize its center (USA proper and Canada).
The USA has become Cronos, the titan of the harvests, desperately devouring its children
to survive.
There's nothing left but the fall of the empire. Exactly how and when that fall happens might
be mildly controllable, at least so far as it influences what happens after the fall. But
that's it. The decline and fall is not generally, and certainly not now, avoidable. Our
problem is the same as any declining empire: the elites are the last to feel the full effects
and so have the most reason to jealously cling to whatever is left. The personality in
nominal power doesn't matter because they'll all be old, white elites or a minority striving
for acceptance by old, white elites. Trump is every bit as much a symbol of America's failing
as Joe Biden.
So who burned, pillaged, murdered and terrorized for the last 9 months? Have we forgotten BLM
and Antifa? Real insurgents and terrorists. Nothing but crickets when it comes to the Left's
foot soldiers.
Fortunately, numerous counter-narratives already exist, mostly from the Cold war, that can
easily be flipped on their head. Another that could be devastating--Wall Street stole your
American Dream from you. Now it's time to steal it back: Level Wall Street!!
I'm sure as a collective we could come up with a plethora. However IMO, it's vital the
ultimate message aims at the building of a Human Commonwealth that's not based on
exploitation which is the basis for global Neoliberalism. Putin and Xi's policy is to promote
all citizens equally--even the US Constitution agrees with that national aim. And here's one
we need to start now: The Stasi demanded family and neighbors spy on each other and that was
deemed Unamerican then; so to ask Americans to spy on their family and neighbors now must be
equally Unamerican, insidious and incompatible with Freedom, Justice, and the American
Way!
They are focusing on Trumpmania, meanwhile the stimulus is not yet out. These shows are the circus, but if the bread is not coming, people will riot anyway.
I hear Trumpists and others from the Republican party use the old "they do it too" refrain
far too often. White supremacists are less evil than black people complaining about getting
killed by cops.
If it were actually possible, I would like to ask them to tell me why Republicans are in
favor of police brutality, why they are all for the absolute power and impunity of police
officers? Why do they think black people deserve to be treated as lesser beings merely for
the color of their skin?
Antifa stands for anti fascist. if you are against antifa does that mean you believe
fascism is a wonderful thing? Has anyone who identifies as a Republican ever heard of agent
provocateurs and or false flag operations? I suspect not.
steven t johnson laid out a pretty good narrative that I personally cannot fault, yet the
only comment he got was someone trying to deny that the electoral college gave more votes to
Biden than to Trump. The fact that Biden got some 7 million more votes than Trump is not
important, nor is it worthy of consideration that Hillary Clinton got more popular votes than
Trump but nevertheless lost the electoral college to Trump in 2016.
I was always told you should never discuss politics or religion. I am beginning to
understand the wisdom in that. With religion you have to be willing to suspend disbelief,
there is no logical explanation for so many of the things believers take for fact. It appears
to me that is the exact same thing with attempting to talk to Republicans.
now, to add some balance. Black people need to get their shit together. Bad things happen
to many of them because they are doing stupid stuff. The gangsta culture is not at all
helpful.
Fascism is not necessarily Republican, the new Democratic party has a considerable fascist
faction. and it aint the old people in the Dem party, a lot of youngsters are quite the
brownshirt when you look carefully.
"Wait!" screams the narrative industry.... [which has] system produced record
ratings for everyone....
IMO the narratives are driven by Deep State Empire managers that want to keep us divided
so that they have a free hand. As a result, few can see the Empire forest for the trees of
Deep State political operatives.
IMO the "record ratings" for the political circuses on offer are not the driving force.
The hidden motive is EMPIRE. The new love that dare not speak its name is the love of EMPIRE.
No politician or media pundit is allowed to question the need for NATO, EMPIRE propaganda,
Israel's behavior, the huge amount wasted on military expenditures, etc.
... The U.S. - or at least its 'élites' - need a wake-up call
These elites know exactly what they are doing. It's the people that need a wake-up call.
They are much too gullible. And all-too-willing to follow whatever establishment stooge is
presented as their hero.
<> <> <> <> <>
A few hours ago, I wrote this comment on the preceding thread (replying to ventinLA):
vetinLA @Feb16 6:32 #60
Those beliefs led us to DJT..
Obama, Bernie and DJT have led their flocks to nowhere. What led usto
them is the establishment's desire to derail populist Movements.
One clue (among many): Each of these so-called populists is pro-Empire.
Obama conducted covert wars and regime changes. He declined to prosecute any CIA
people for rendition & torture and dismissed privacy concerns about NSA spying. He
also lied to us: 1) about a 'public option' in his healthcare plan and 2) never making
the Bush tax cuts permanent (Obama participated in the 'fiscal cliff' farce that made
most Bush tax cuts permanent while cutting social programs);
Bernie, aka "Senator F35" is a closet Zionist that supports the Empire. He was
Hillary's sheepdog in 2016. He then founded "Our Revolution", a nonprofit that accepted
money from large donors. Bernie folded like a tent in 2020 to support establishment
candidate Biden. Bernie put forth a bogus bill to end US involvement in the Saudi war on
Yemen that would not actually end that involvement due to an exception. And he has
criticized Venezuela's Maduro as USA has been trying to overthrow him.
Trump - a billionaire conman, Clinton insider, and friend of Epstein - got in front
of the Tea Party parade with slogans like "America First". His actions show that he is a
fraud who is actual "Empire First". Trump dramatically increased spending on the
military, terminated multiple peace agreements, renegged on his peace deal with North
Korea, gave Israel everything on its wish list (including killing Iranian Gen.
Soleimani), militarized space, and continued the War on Whistle-blowers with prosecution
of Assange. Along the way he lied to the American people about the severity of the
looming pandemic and excused MbS's killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
Nothing will change as long as we keep falling for compromised leaders that are promoted by
a compromised media.
And it's not just the US: Cameron, BoJo, Macron, Trudeau, and other quislings are funded and
promoted in the same way. It's not "just politics" or "media narratives", it's a deliberate
corruption of democracy itself so that those in charge serve TPTB and their Empire
priorities.
George Orwell warned of a boot on the neck of humanity forever. Although that image
horrifies, today too many people willingly offer their neck for booting by their preferred
establishment-controlled, media-driven tribal cult. We need more cynics and fewer lemmings.
Is anyone surprised that the greatest cynics in history were from the era of Roman
Empire?
So finally people of the empire will have to acknowledge something which types like many who
coagulate around sites such as MoA have known for a long time, that the empire suffers from a
condition which gamers know and loathe only too well, Ludonarrative Dissonance .
In gaming Ludonarrative Dissonance is a condition which occurs too often, especially in
games which have 'benefited' from the game developers studio being bought out (often in an
underhanded manner eg investing a small amount but stitching the impecunious development
studio in a contract which includes draconian financial penalties for failing to meet
subjectively definable 'milestones'. Publishers with expensive lawyers coming out their
arseholes sue the studio over these milestones and almost always wins complete ownership of
the nerds - modern day slavery however not the current issue) by uninterested money men who
quickly push a gang of marketeers on the game studio.
The marketeers promote some story-line into the game which is frequently little more than
a collection of what they believe are 'hot button issues'. LGBTQ & feminist issues are
always popular. The trouble begins when actual gameplay which is determined by the games
existing physics eg fighting physics - what is a game without fighting, runs at odds with the
silly superficial narrative which the marketing pop-up has foisted on the game.
Hence ludonarrative dissonance a frequently quoted example being 'Uncharted' a hugely
successful playstation game which Goomba
Stomp analyses thusly:
"In Uncharted, main character Nathan Drake is presented as the lovable everyman treasure
hunter, who also kills everyone in his way without hesitation. The Nathan Drake seen during
cutscenes isn't the same one experienced during gameplay, creating a sense of ludonarrative
dissonance."
In gameplay or shall we say reality, the lead character gets around killing anyone everyone
who he believes stands between him and the treasure, this conflicts with the character
presented in cutscenes (they are like a film clip or sound bite - the player cannot input or
affect them in any way), the cutscenes feature a very different Nathan Drake full of peace
love and woodstock all pro LGBTQ, anti-racist etc, despite the fact that many of the people
Nathan has murdered during the game are typical Hollywood caricature baddies, that is to say
dark hued, latino, russian or african american accented types.
That doesn't sound at all like what we observe out here in the real world does it? /snark.
BidenCorp are going to ensure everyone keeps talking about orangutan in that way
assisting their media backers by keeping ratings high while also distracting the masses from
far more pressing issues eg what they call the stimulus which normal humans see as eating and
having shelter or the fact that resources much needed domestically are getting sluiced down
the toilet of never ending war against the very types BidenCorp claims to most care about.
Ludonarrative dissonance.
And it's vastly important that the Cynic School of Thought originated in Greece, from whom
the Romans borrowed most everything including the idea of massive latifundia, usury, private
finance, and the need to wage Total War on anyone promoting the Jubilee Year idea or
championing the plebes. And which two "classic" nations did the British and their American
scions model themselves after--The Greeks and Romans. But then, you know all that. And I do
believe that you know there was never to be any genuine democracy at the USA's national level
as there was a Coup in 1787 that negated the form of government in place that actually held
out some promise of that.
IMO, there're well over 100 Million US Citizens ready to embrace Grassroots Populism, not
the Top->Down Trump variety, but the variety that champions All The People and steals its
motto from the Constitution: For a More Better Union, or People's Union Party if you will, or
something like that. On the other hand, the EU presents a different problem for those under
its boot that's more complex than what we face. IMO, the EU in its current form is
unreformable as it's essentially a dictatorship run by the ECB, which forms a Junta with Wall
Street, The City, NATO, and the CIA. And that latter criminal organization will need to be
overcome for us to have any hopes of democracy at the Federal level and a nationwide public
financial system to get us out of the chasm we're in and provide some hope for future
generations.
Jrabbit @ 22 said:"IMO the narratives are driven by Deep State Empire managers that want to
keep us divided so that they have a free hand. As a result, few can see the Empire forest for
the trees of Deep State political operatives."
"Obama, Bernie and DJT have led their flocks to nowhere. What led us to them is the
establishment's desire to derail populist Movements."
"One clue (among many): Each of these so-called populists is pro-Empire."
Absolutely true rabbit, good post.
And, IMO, the "deep state" are the malignant billionaires who have bought the afore
mentioned "populists", and who own 99% of the MSM....
Debs @ 26; said;"BidenCorp are going to ensure everyone keeps talking about orangeutan in
that way assisting their media backers by keeping ratings high while also distracting the
masses from far more pressing issues eg what they call the stimulus which normal humans see
as eating and having shelter or the fact that resources much needed domestically are getting
sluiced down the toilet of never ending war against the very types BidenCorp claims to most
care about. Ludonarrative dissonance."
An excellent piece from Glenn Greenwald about the events on Capitol Hill on January 6.
"..One of the most significant of these falsehoods (from journalists) was the tale --
endorsed over and over without any caveats by the media for more than a month -- that Capitol
Police officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by the pro-Trump mob when they beat him to death
with a fire extinguisher. That claim was first published by The New York Times on January 8
in an article headlined "Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage." It
cited "two [anonymous] law enforcement officials" to claim that Sicknick died "with the mob
rampaging through the halls of Congress" and after he "was struck with a fire
extinguisher."
"A second New York Times article from later that day -- bearing the more dramatic
headline: "He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob" --
elaborated on that story:...
"....The problem with this story is that it is false in all respects. From the start,
there was almost no evidence to substantiate it. The only basis were the two original New
York Times articles asserting that this happened based on the claim of anonymous law
enforcement officials.
"Despite this alleged brutal murder taking place in one of the most surveilled buildings
on the planet, filled that day with hundreds of cellphones taping the events, nobody saw
video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No
details from any official source have been provided.
"Not only was there no reason to believe this happened from the start, the little that was
known should have caused doubt. On the same day the Times published its two articles with the
"fire extinguisher" story, ProPublica published one that should have raised serious doubts
about it.
"The outlet interviewed Sicknick's brother, who said that "Sicknick had texted [the
family] Wednesday night to say that while he had been pepper-sprayed, he was in good
spirits." That obviously conflicted with the Times' story that the mob "overpowered Sicknick"
and "struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher," after which, "with a bloody gash in
his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support."
The over reaction in the US to this minor riot, in which the only other casualties were
among the rioters would be a good joke were it not that the Congress people now telling us
that they escaped with their lives are personally and collectively responsible for the most
atrocious attacks on innocent civilians at the hands of Congressionally employed agents or
proxies every day.
The events of January 6 would not have been noticed in the Kiev insurrection that Obama et al
produced- in which US trained snipers from Georgia shot into the crowds, indiscriminately
killing both police and protestors, in order to be in a position to denounce peace accords
reached between the parties.
They would have been an unnoticed sideshow in Hong Kong last year when the US sponsored
anti-communists were beating up local police and setting subway stations on fire.
They would have gone unreported in Minsk a few months ago. As to Cochabamba in Bolivia, where
the Parliamentary building was invaded by US Embassy organised fascists little more than a
year ago and several bystanders were killed. Or Colombia any day of every week since the
socialist candidate was assassinated in the Presidential election-in 1948- a day like January
6 would be a welcome relief from the death squads and murders.
The big question the world is asking is whether the USA will grow up before it dies. The odds
would seem to be against it doing so.
Last week. during a visit by the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, Russia's Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov
slapped down the EU's sanctimonious interference in Russia's internal policies.
Back in Brussels, Borrell, who was criticized by some EU hardliners for not directly rebuffing Lavrov's
talk, set down to write
a blog post in which again attacked Russia over the latest Navalny stunt:
I have just returned from a very complicated visit to Moscow, on which I had embarked to
discuss the fraught state of EU-Russia relations. They have been low for a number of years,
and deteriorated even further after recent developments linked to the poisoning, arrest,
and sentencing of Alexei Navalny as well as the related mass arrests of thousands of
demonstrators. The purpose of this mission was to express directly the EU's strong
condemnation of these events and to address, through principled diplomacy, the process of a
rapid worsening of our relationship with Russia, and to help prepare the forthcoming
European Council discussions on EU-Russia relations.
Borrell is delusional. Hardly anyone in Russia believes the nonsensical poisoning story
for which the 'west' could provide exactly zero evidence:
Only 15% in Russia believe the Navalny poisoning was the Govt trying to eliminate an
opponent, and the 15% based this opinion from Telegram and the Internet and were mostly
18-24. The rest think it was staged, a Western false flag, personal or opposition:
https://levada.ru/2020/12/24/...
The whole Navalny poisoning was obviously some secret service operation to bash Russia.
His lavish living in in a 5 bed
room luxurious apartment in Germany after he was released from hospital was paid
by the libertarian oligarch Evgeny Chichvarkin . Chichvarkin, who
lives in London, is probably an MI6 cutout. It is still not known who paid the multimillion
production costs for the
fake 'Putin palace' video. The studio renting for the video was requested by a company in
Los Angeles. Some U.S. involvement is thereby assured.
Poland and other NATO countries are now openly pressing Navalny and other traitors like
him to continue their regime change attempts:
This confrontation was predictable. There is a limit to what Russia can accept. Even after
the russophobic UK departure from the EU, the mood is the same.
Therefore a frank confrontation may either be a wake-up call for Europe that they may lose
totally Russia as a partner or in the contrary bring them more apart.
What the EU fails to realize is that without Russia , it may end up become the puppet of the
USA and the UK
Time will tell
thanks b.... you're correct borrell is delusional and a perfect representative for a
delusional europe.... i am glad lavrov said what he did.. i just wish russia would throw the
shit back at them by making a parallel with the wests treatment of assange... it really
highlights the outrageous-ness of the west at this point...
and someone on the open thread posted about mh17 and trying to access more info contained
in boxes on the rear part of the plain that might lead to a different conclusion... as i see
it mh17, skripal, navalny and etc. etc - are all frame ups to take down russia... it has
reached a level of insanity and borrell is the perfect delusional character to represent it
all here..
throw the shit back at them russia... call the west out on their endless bullshit... the
time for diplomacy is long gone and this appears to be the conclusion that russia is indeed
coming to, however slowly....
Borrell - "The strategic choices we make now will determine international power dynamics in
the 21st century, and notably whether we will advance towards more cooperative or more
polarised models, based on closed or on freer societies."
He answers his own question - the EU (and "partners") will advance towards a more
polarized international model, based on their own self-serving definitions of "closed" or
"freer" societies. This self-generated dichotomy will be used to mask the true nature of this
perceived crossroad: "they" can live with us, but "we" can't live with them.
In a video posted earlier today, 12/02/2021 Alexander Mercuoris of The Duran analysed the
reaction of Germany's politicians to Lavrov's comments.
Basically even Heiko Maas the anti-Russian foreign minister shit his pants at the though of
Russia abandoning Europe and therefore jeapordizing Germany a significant percentage of it's
energy supply.
When all is said and done, the E.U. will suffer far worse than Russia if Moscow abandons
Europe.
The technocrats know this. However the level of maturity required to overcome their hubris is
patently lacking and to re-orientate themselves idealogically will be viery difficult as can
be seen by the reaction of 70 mental retards who pose as M.E.P.s in a letter they signed
calling for Borrell's resignation and a tougher stance on Russia.
Until a few years ago, Russia did not have an alternative for purchases of many items
other than from the West. It now has China to supply most needs. When China finally solves
the problems caused by the US sanctions to semiconductor factories (it will take roughly a
decade to develop its own photolithography and design, the most critical tools of advanced
semiconductor processing), China will be able to provide everything that Russia needs except
for warm climate fruits and vegetables (maybe Turkey?). This new paradigm seems to be behind
Russia's new assertiveness. Europe should make peace with Russia before it fully tilts
towards the East.
In 1990 at the what I then thought end of Cold War there seemed an opening to the
coalescing of a northern hemisphere zone of peace - but that vision has come to nothing. What
an idiot I was! How could I ever have thought that the best of the inheritance of Western
civilization would lead in the West. The plowing, plundering, grasping, murdering and
scheming for profit psychos in the West stabbed that vision in the heart. I am sure now
another opening will not come in my lifetime - the West will make sure of that.
If I was younger I would leave the US but now can only hunker down and stay out of the way
of the juggernaut of rampaging psychos lurching from one failure to another. The only relief
from the deepest moments of despair is looking to the East and others that are building and
working together to build a new world. Obviously Russia and China, along with Iran, Cuba,
Venezuela, Syria and others. It is a strange world for me turned upside down when I even
include North Korean resistance to the US Empire of Mendacity as contributing to the building
of that new world.
the Reality is NOT quite right the way b has present it. EU together with US, Canada CAN
and WILL hurt Russia deeply if they slap severe economic sanctions on Russia's energy sector.
And Russia knows that and EU knows that Russia knows it.
The West's game is very simple: cut Russia from the Western world, by denying it access to
any type of new tech, economic loans and any type of ties with the West. (this worked quite
well with the Soviet Union, so it WILL work again) And this WILL hurt Russia deeply
economically, no question about it. And before you tell me about China and the supposed
Russia-China's ties, let me inform you that the ties are merely economic and both still don't
trust each other. The Russians are well aware of CHina's claims over Siberia. They don't
really work together, most of those ties are imaginary and dont really exist.
Putin has made several mistakes, and he is too dependent on the Rich Russian millionaires.
The threat of sanctions made him freeze when the West went after Ukraine and Putin didn't act
to save it. Russia will cry bloody tears over this in the very near future. This is only the
overture of things to come. There will be another fake false flag even in the Azov sea after
which USA will demand Russia be boycotted. Ys that will hurt EU also, but the Eu are
masochists who love getting their asses fucked by US.
Russia better get prepared and get their supply ass grease ready, they will be getting
serious ass fucking very very soon. And they wont be able to do anything about it. Good
going, Putin!
I commiserate as we're in the same boat. I watch like a hawk because forewarned is
forearmed!
/////
Published at the right moment given events is this
Strategic-Culture Editorial : "NATO's Road To Perdition With Ukraine." It omits
the Borrell incident to focus on the recent meeting between NATO secretary general Jens
Stoltenberg hosted Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shymhal at the organization's headquarters
in Brussels:
"At a joint press conference, both men were upbeat about Ukraine joining NATO. Stoltenberg
admitted that the former Soviet Republic has been eyed for membership of the alliance since
2008, a timescale which puts more recent conflict over the past nearly seven years in
perspective. He also confirmed that NATO forces have been building up their presence in the
Black Sea in coordination with Ukrainian counterparts. In recent weeks, three US warships
have been training with Ukrainian naval vessels in order to counter what Stoltenberg says is
'Russian aggression'."
So, there's much more in the stew than it appears:
"It is interesting to speculate why Stoltenberg – a former Norwegian premier and
nominal civilian head of NATO – this week appeared to give new impetus to Ukraine's
ambitions. Could it be related to the change of administration in the United States? Senior
members of the Biden administration have publicly stated during Senate hearings a willingness
to increase military support for the Kiev government in its conflict with pro-Russian
separatists in Eastern Ukraine. American and European envoys at the UN Security Council
this week reiterated strident accusations against Russia claiming that Moscow was responsible
for prolonging the conflict in Ukraine . Russia's envoy Vassily Nebenzia countered that
it was the Kiev regime and its Western allies who have not implemented the previously agreed
Minsk peace accord signed in 2015." [My Emphasis]
Bald-faced lies in public forums that began with Clinton/Gore have steadily escalated and
clearly aren't a product of any one administration but a continuity of the War Party's
attempt at Full Spectrum Domination that keeps slipping further away from any possibility of
occurring, thus its desperation. Yesterday, I provided this link to The Saker's latest
analysis and called it a Must Read. Within he links to several reports from Russian media
and military sources that those watching closely need to read. Yesterday, Putin met with his Security
Council ostensibly about arms control but I think the conversation went well beyond that,
although I have no confirmation.
The Solovyov-Lavrov transcript isn't complete yet, but what's there is incredible! As
Lavrov said, "Well, this is some kind of a kingdom of crooked mirrors." If what Lavrov said
of Borrell's position, we should have some pity for him being put into such an impossible
position--but then, he's well paid to do his duty.
Patrick Armstrong wrote yesterday about the consequences of the Navalny brothers' scam in
2012 against Yves Rocher:
NAVALNIY. The story continues. The theory that he's being fitted up for a treason charge
was given a boost when Zakharova said he should be called an "agent of influence" rather than
a politician. His suspended sentence for fraud was lifted and he's off to prison. Read Yves
Rocher's statement; sounds to me as if the company believes he did swindle them. The fact
that there's now a campaign against the company suggests my deduction is correct. https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2021/02/11/russian-federation-sitrep-11-february-2021/
That contains a couple of links giving more details of the case.
Armstrong also links to this tweet by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a video
showing many examples of police brutality in the West and also violence by protesters against
police in Russian (the opposite of what is shown in Western media). https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1356674233464729609
Several days ago on the 10th, I posted
this link and commented about what I deemed the notable words spoken by Lavrov on
Diplomats' Day. IMO, it's a martial pep-talk given his peroration followed by this
paragraph:
"Russia's attempts to become an independent state, to uphold its right to an independent
foreign policy and to protect international law are coming against increasingly harsh
resistance of our Western colleagues, who would like to teach 'obedience' to us. They would
like us to accept the highly questionable interpretation of common human values, an
interpretation that contradicts Russia's cultural and civilisational traditions. They would
like Russia to become a 'convenient' territory for promoting their own security, economic,
social and political interests. We can see that these are becoming ever more aggressive with
every passing day. We must actively apply our efforts, knowledge and experience, based on the
wisdom of our predecessors, to consistently promote the foreign policy course formulated by
President Vladimir Putin."
How else do you prepare your diplomatic corp for war?
If you've followed Lavrov closely for many months as I have, the change in his demeanor is
quite marked; yet as Paco notes, he still maintains his professionalism. Lavrov's perplexity
about how consensus is supposed to function was well put--we know several nations disagree
with the policy yet go along with it--WHY?--the united front undercuts your own interests. In
Putin's latest conversation with his Energy Minister, there was no mention of Nord Stream 2's
situation. Given all the sanctions and lack of pushback by the EU nations most dependent on
it, IMO Russia is willing to sacrifice it as it didn't bear all the costs and has plenty of
potential customers for its hydrocarbons. So, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Russia
stopped short of finishing, said it would fulfill its existing contracts, but no more would
be negotiated until conditions drastically change. Hardball is just that--Hardball.
Levada is
considered a [pro-]Western sociological service (there are links with Soros) in Russia
and the results of its polls, let's say, cause a certain skepticism. 15% of those who believe
in "poisoning"... I would say figures of 5-8 (maximum 10) percent look much more realistic.
It is still not known who paid the multimillion production costs for the fake 'Putin
palace' video.
Well, I would look for sources in names like
Khodorkovsky or/and Browder .
Both scammers are longtime haters of Russia.
The Kremlin later said that some media misrepresented Lavrov's remarks but essentially
confirmed his stand
According to Russian legislation, the country's foreign policy is determined directly by the
president. The Foreign Ministry is essentially just a repeater, although of course it
introduces its own peculiarities. Therefore, there is no doubt that Lavrov's words were
coordinated with (and approved by) Putin. Peskov, as usual, in his own manner, tried to
somewhat "smooth out"/"embellish" Lavrov's directness and rigidity, which, however, does not
negate the essence of the statements themselves.
Today Navalny was back in court for publicly insulting a World War II veteran. The EU will
certainly make remarks about that. But only a few days ago police in Scotland arrested
someone because he typed a mean tweet about a British veteran of that war.
Here I can only support the British, who massively stood up for the offended veteran Sir
Thomas Moore.
Citizens wrote mass appeals, statements to the police demanding to bring to justice the
degenerate who insulted the memory of the war hero.
Unfortunately, Russian society often lacks such civic initiative. Yes, the authorities
will do their job, and a piece of shit named Navalny, who slandered the war veteran, will be
punished. But besides the actions of the authorities, it would be nice to see also the
"demand of the people", you know.
And I have been following you, following Lavrov.....
The Nordstream II is a question mark. It is being finished by the Russians, with their own
ships. The Germans have also realised that their own interests are tied up there. The
"Threatening situation" (from the west) does not come from either one.
My conclusion is that EU policy is being dictated from outside , the secondary
question is "by whom". Unfortunately I suspect that the main driving force is the same one
that "enabled" Biden, Enabled the ousting of socialist candidates in many countries. (Corbyn,
and in S. America generally), and generally assume they are the top of the top.
Is this force based on "nationality" or on "interests", call them Religious nuts, Extreme
militarists OR Financial Fascists? Alternatively are they a mixture of all three***.
One explanation for Lavrov's coldness is that IF the EU was an independent representative
body (which it isn't) then certain actions to improve the lot of the populace would have been
taken. That they are not means that they lack the ability to deviate from what they have been
ordered. By way of an explanation, the Media will lie, because they cannot do otherwise
having been "bought" in some way. Lavrov has certainly changed. Because he probably knows
what is "supposed" to happen, and the EU miasma do not understand that they too will be in
the forefront of any battleground. (Since that includes me, I am not too happy about the
situation either).
Aside; *** They could be mixture of all three tendencies. ie. 9/11 had operatives from the
Saudis, Israel, and the Pentagon, with three different motivations. Religious (Saudis),
Suprematist (Israel) and monetary (Pentagon and it's "lost" trillions, and profitability by
insiders).
As the head of the Soviet intelligence service, Leonid Shebarshin, an extremely
well-informed man, once said: "The west wants only one thing from Russia -- that it does
not exist".
"One explanation for Lavrov's coldness is that IF the EU was an independent representative
body (which it isn't) then certain actions to improve the lot of the populace would have
been taken ." [My Emphasis]
Now what current ideology supports such a policy--that the lot of the masses
isn't supposed to be improved; rather, they are to have their wealth wrung out,
then be tossed aside and used as manure. Hint: It was famously announced as Trickle-down
Economics, which was lambasted as Voodoo Economics.
If you read Hudson, then you know where the power center lies within the Outlaw US Empire
and its network of vassals--The privately held Central Banks and those that control them and
many other key corporations thanks to interlocking boards of directors--the same basic cabal
that failed to assassinate FDR and oust him via a coup but succeeded with JFK, RFK, MLK, and
so many others: millions when adding in their terrorists and their Death Squads.
To rid Europe of its Central Bank, the EU would need to be disbanded. But to gain complete
sovereignty, NATO would need to die also. Currently, Europe is essentially occupied by a
force every bit as immoral as the Nazis. It's not by accident that Lavrov, Putin and others
invoke the Great Patriotic War and the events that led to it as recurring.
I would not be surprised to see Russia actually perform the deeds it's accused of, like
actually invade and subdue Ukraine. It it did so, realistically what would change? Nuland
famously gave the answer Russia would now echo--Fuck the EU. As with the Republic's Trade
Federation secretly aligning with the Sith, the EU will come to regret playing dummy to the
Outlaw US Empire as it gets barred from gaining any benefits from being in the Eurasian Bloc
and China's BRI Combo.
I don't really follow the Navalny situation anymore because as soon as I see Russia
mentioned in any Western media I assume it's an "intelligence community" psyop or just plain
old propaganda. But something piqued my curiosity regarding this alleged mansion of
Putin's.
Strategic culture provided two links to YouTube videos in their articles, one of which to
my knowledge isn't subtitled so I don't know what was being said in Russian. In this video a
group of guys made the trip to the site of this mansion compound and showed the place in
disrepair, looking like exterior had aged quite a bit.
The other is to Navalny's own video which alleges to explain that the reason for the
current state of the project is that the original design/construction were faulty and that a
serious mold problem, as well as leaking roofs, had caused them to strip out the entire
interior ostensibly to rebuild from scratch (and allegedly tossing "billions" of rubles worth
of marble and other fancy construction materials). He also says that the original photos and
video which show the place in pristine condition, were from 6 years ago before the
teardown.
Leaving aside the obvious fake photos (like the one in Moscow times which was a
photoshopped Putin swimming in his new mansion, lol) and the situation in general (i.e.,
whether Putin has anything to do with this structure at all), can anyone square this circle
for me? Is it disproven that the place was indeed built a while back and later stripped down
due to the leaking roofs and mold? If so is there a source in the English language that
explains the situation?
There is a strong whiff of desperation of the EuroCrapsters and their US masters to grab
what Russia has (resources) and thus delay own economic collapse. All these crapsters are
freezing their asses off right now whilst dreaming of profits from pillaged Russian energy.
The most precarious is the Western pension system, which with ZIRP and NIRP interest rates
has stopped existing. There is no source of funding in this World that could feed that hungry
monster with ageing population. The Western printing presses are overheating and this is only
a delaying solution for the deeply debalanced system. Absolutely the only way out for the
West is to bring down Russian government and pillage. If Russia did not have nuclear weapons
this would have happened a while ago. The Russians understand this perfectly.
Will the sick West run into a desperate confrontation against a bee with a big sting? It
must be unusually frustrating for the AngloAmerican crapsters not to be able to just take
what they want and need from the World as they have been doing over the past couple if
centuries. They have the big sting but their mark has an even bigger (hypersonic) sting. What
a profound change in world affairs - pillaging from now on to come at the huge cost. And
Putin appears prepared to prevent pillaging of not only Russia.
The calculation is fairly clear - either they will feed, cloth and keep warm the Western
elderly and others using Russian resources or there will be no pensioners after a nuclear
Holocaust. Either way problem solved.
would like to know, in concrete terms, what is the benefit from constant denigration and
provocation of Russia, and who benefits, in precisely what ways. I do know, however, who does
not benefit. The vast majority of Europeans, the Russians and generally the majority of
humanity.
-Pushing Russia around and away is counter productive for the EU and Europe as whole. It is a
big, peaceful, neighbouring country willing to cooperate on the basis of mutual respect and
interest. Russia has put foreward many constructive proposals, all of which have been
rejected
- There is no rational basis for the long-lasting and escalating pressure on Russia. If that
is correct, the goals and actions of the West, and the the EU in particular, are irrational
from the perspective of the real life interests of the majority of European citizens and
welfare and wellbeing of the majority of people in the world.
- I hope that Russia does not abandon its orientation towards Europe, because it is a
European state. It should be part of European integration projects, albeit not on the present
model of the EU. That does not clash, but accords, with its Asian relations and projects.
- The EU should radically change its policies towards Russia, and welcome it as an important
partner in all fields.
- The qeustion is - who is going to stop the race into the abys that the European leaders are
accelarating? I don't see anyone or anything on the European scene considering, capable of
and willing to put an end to this utter madness. I do see who is paying the price and who
will pay even more dearly in the future. The majority of European citizens.Deeply depressing
and very scary.
The Bulletin article doesn't really delve into the issues around the US' new low-yield
'tactical' nukes, it concentrates on a new big 'strategic' ICBM system, the Ground Based
Strategic Deterrent (GBSD). It seems to be basically an attempt to resurrect the capabilities
of the Reagan era MX 'Peacekeeper' that was scrapped under the START treaties as it was
optimised to carry a large number of warheads and the US preferred to keep a larger number of
Minuteman III missiles with single warheads.
Although it probably won't be quite as large as the MX, it will be better suited than the
Minuteman for carrying multiple hypersonic glide vehicles like the Russian 'Avangard' system.
The Russians have an initial operating capability on their SS-19/UR-100N ICBM (similar in
payload to the Minuteman) but will soon deploy their much larger RS-28 Sarmat which will
allow multiple hypersonic gliders to be carried.
The article describes a typically corrupt US procurement process, with the big three arms
companies (Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman) fighting it out for the mountain of
$. Northrop Grumman managed to win out by buying up the only manufacturer of the large solid
rocket motors that the contract required the contractors to use. Solid rocket motors were one
of the only aspects of space technologies where the US was unequivocally in the lead, with 4
or 5 companies producing them. By the time of the GBSD contract only one company remained
after the orgy of mergers and buyouts, Orbital ATK. ATK was the successor to Thiokol Corp,
whose product doomed the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger (being basically a big 'light
it and stand the f*** back' firework solid motors are not a great option for crewed
spaceflight, but well suited to ICBMs).
By buying up ATK, Northrop Grumman threatened to massively cut into the profits of any
other company bidding, ensuring a clear run to the contract for itself. Many analysts had
suspected that Boeing would be given the GBSD contract to compensate for their losses on the
737Max, but Northrop's maneuvers and Boeing's terrible recent track record in space made that
impossible. Boeings SLS moon rocket failed its crucial static-fire test in Jan 2021 and is 5
years behind schedule despite it being basically a Space Shuttle tank with Shuttle engines
bolted to the bottom (early 70s tech). Its Starliner Space Station ferry also failed its
uncrewed flight test last year due to a plethora of software errors, one of which was
discovered with minutes to spare and would have killed a crew by crashing the service module
into the crew module moments after the modules seperated for reentry into the atmosphere.
With all that in mind I don't think the Russians are too troubled by the US's prowess in
space or financial technology. Whatever Frankenstein's Rocket emerges from the GBSD program
will be most unlikely to rival the RS-28 (known to NATO as 'Son of Satan'), and by that time
the 'Grandson of Satan' will probably be flying.
The problem with armchair strategists is of course they don't know all the facts, those at
hand to the actual players. Some leaks into the real world but far too much is hidden.
All we know is that Russia appears to have stopped its subservient position and have
started with the EU, not the US. Is that because they believe they are now finally powerful
enough for a military conflict? Or perhaps as they believe one is coming anyway? Or are there
other hidden factors in play?
One thing of interest is that it hasn't taken long for the NATO/Russian situation to
escalate quickly since Trumps removal, anyone still doubt he was removed? Also of note the US
general now stating nuclear war is possible, more fear to add or just introducing the idea to
us as something that may "have" to be done to save the world for democracy?
How much does one believe in coincidence? Karmically there is no such thing. Many big
issues going on in the world now from covid with its fascist responses to Big Resets, massive
world debt, and now increasing military tension with Russia and perhaps China as well soon.
All interlinked?
Putin created a document about lessons from WW2. Even if you disagree with him or just
hate him, ask yourself if Trump, Biden, Pelosi or any other elderly US leaders could reason
at this level or offer this depth of thought. That's my take away...
The problem with Navalny is not that he is a 'traitor' to Russia but that he is an agent
of the Empire, on the payrolls of the Five Eyes security complex. Which makes him a traitor
to humanity.
Yes! Exploiting trust is the basic business plan, it's what the Internet is all about now.
Provide free services or information, attract a large audience and gain their trust, and then
exploit the heck out of it as long as they keep coming. Everybody still trusts Wikipedia,
right? Then start all over again. You can do it many times. American enterpreneurs have
hundreds of years of experience with exploiting trusting, naive people. Where do you think
our State Dept. learned all of it's clever tricks? Even our politics works the same way.
Everything is a grift. Everything is empty talk. After a while you get used to it, nothing
really means anything.
Trust does not belong at all anywhere near science. Critical thinking in relation to
science is important in evaluating an existing hypothesis and the data that goes along to
support it , but critical thinking alone is not sufficient, if the data is missing it is
not science, because there is no way to falsify the often outrageous claims (That is where we
are with "global warming" and "covid").
Also required is imagination, without imagination you cannot formulate new laws from the
information available and then you will never progress.
It boils down to being able to verify and replicate a scientific hypothesis through data
and experiments, trust has no place in it. This also why "peer review" is fundamentally
unscientific since it mostly functions as a gate-keeping mechanism defending mainstream
views.
The Essence Of
Science In 60 Seconds (Richard Feynman) If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess
is, it doesn't matter how smart who made the guess is, or what his name is. If it disagrees
with experiment, its wrong.
Transferred to journalism, a similar rule must apply. If a claim is made that cannot be
verified independently, it is not journalism.
"The wave of enthusiasm regarding the Biden administration has not washed over me," he says.
"I'm glad Trump is out, but at the very same time I'm very worried that Trumpism is going to
get stronger. I'm very worried that the Democratic Party is in the process of turning in on
itself, of divisions between the establishment figures, those who were effectively supported by
Wall Street to become senators or congressmen or presidents for that matter and the
socialists.
"The clash is already there, the blame game has begun. While the Trumpists are more united
than ever, they're going to be aided and abetted by two things. First, the [financial] slump
which is unavoidable given the pandemic, they will be blaming it on the system and the swamp
that has taken over again and a false but real sense that they have, false in the sense that
it's untrue but real in the sense they do feel it, that they were robbed of the election.
"So this combination, solidity on the Trumpist side, political economy which is
strengthening their feeling and their unity and the fragmentation of the Democratic side which
is only going to get worse as we're moving towards the congressional elections two years from
now. That for me is the great danger."
Varoufakis doesn't believe that the Biden-Harris ticket will improve outcomes for the poor
or radically redistribute wealth. Nearly eight million Americans, many of them children and
minorities, have fallen into poverty since May last year as the pandemic took its toll,
according to Columbia University research .
Opinion -- there are Trumpers who like Trump. There are also Trumper who are broadly
against the level of corruption today and "1984" materializing before them. They believe that
the deep state exists and that the two primary political parties are one and the same; their
differences being cosmetic only
Didn't vote for Trump, but in a blue state it wouldn't matter with vote bundling (sans
Nebraska & Maine), but this post resonates. Basically we're in political exile, both
Party's are corrupt and most spend their time calling donors and/or taking lobby monies for
their Party dues in exchange for their vote. The only politician I can stand is Massie, who's
not even allowed in the RNC building, and actually walks-the-walk on issues, and me as a Vet,
Massie doesn't vote for unending war (NDAA).
I would imagine that to be Thomas Massie. You may not know the name but he was one of the
few who stood against that CARES Act last March. He copped lot of flak from Trump and John
Kerry at the time which means that he must have been right-
This was interesting. I wish YV had defined the term "Trumpism". I haven't seen it defined
anywhere; it's used to smear voters, but I haven't seen it defined.
Imo, it's the rising populism (in the good sense) in the US trying to stop financial
predations by the banks and Wall St. speculators, stop trade deals that undercut US wages and
off shore jobs, again regulate and breakup the new monopolies – especially the tech
monopolies whose rents attach to nearly everything now. That's my definition. I wonder what
YV's definition is. It's happening in the US, in the UK (Brexit), in France (jillet jaunes),
and in other Western countries where the bottom70-80% of the populations – the once
large and financially stable middle class – has been economically undermined for the
past 30 years by govt policy and deregulation. Its a reasonable, sane response to seeing your
childrens' and grandchildrens' life chances and life expectancies fall at the same time
billionaires are getting richer and richer.
But calling the idea that this economic destruction needs to be addressed, calling it
"Trumpism" smears the entire idea there's something badly out of balance that needs to be
addressed. Calling it "Trumpism" dismisses these ideas as unimportant and maybe even slightly
unhinged.
So, again, I wish YV had defined "Trumpism" as he understands it. Otherwise, the argument
sounds a bit like "these crackpots are a worry, how can we keep the crackpots under control"?
Shorter: over half the country has real, long term, ongoing financial grievances against the
current system, but I'll use this dimissive name for them and still expect everyone to take
half the country's financial and health care grievances seriously. It doesn't work that way,
imo.
trump will be a weapon against any populism, at all.
think the next election had problems? the primary? you must be a moron and a trumper.
think the economy is rigged for the powerful, and ruinous for everyone else? damned trumpy
racist moron.
on and on on just about every real problem we face, there is a rebuttal there in trump that
will dismiss it out of hand no matter the glaring evidence that the problem is real.
just as the Left appeared to be getting it's shit together, the Powers have their out.
see Haydar Khan's part 2: https://thescrum.substack.com/p/the-great-reset-part-2
of course, dismissing the myriad problems or doing them in such a way that they are
ineffective, if very profitable will only make them worse, and that will eventually have
consequences.
From the great reset – an attempted corporate coup: "The recent social media
cancellation of former president Donald Trump is certainly a demonstration of private
corporations serving as private trustees of society."
Agreed that Newsweek should have pressed Mr Varoufakis to define his key term. 'Trumpism'
seems to defy succinct definition, however. Possibly its vagueness counts as an advantage in
ideological discourse? Still I think the Wikipedia article on 'Trumpism' is a pretty good
place to get a start on understanding it. I noticed that it actually suggests the existence
of more than one 'Trumpism' in the US, and as covers it/them as an international phenomenon.
It also makes clear what a wide variety of assessments of it have already emerged. It
provides a rather vast bibliography. More provocative, in the good sense of
thought-provoking, are the several definitions offered up by contributors to Urban
Dictionary. They emphasize its reliance on deception to market itself. Personally I think it
may make more sense to understand 'Trumpism' as a mode of political discourse – a means
of advancing a certain political agenda, apparently a means especially amenable to social
media though I very much doubt one engendered by its parameters – than as any
particular agenda as such.
that wiki page is a pretty good read in itself, and provides a launch pad for further
digging.
and, i hadn't realised that Bob Altemeyer was still around and on the case.
his main book was one of the most important in trying to understand the people i've been
embedded in for all my life. https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/
re: the wiki, the sections on "Methods of Persuasion" and "Social Psychology" are
particularly good, and link to a lot of names familiar to me from my own research
project/field study into the american right, circa 2002-2014~.
by comparison, just about the entire canon of interpretation of the trump phenomenon by
NYT, WaPo, etc etc is useless unless you are after a mirror image emotional
response/catharsis, rather that actually trying to understand what why and how.
we'll be dealing with this mess for a long time to come.
Thank you Amfortas! I too hadn't realized Bob Altermeyer was still writing – he
hadn't added anything new in quite a while so I figured he had retired and I hadn't been
checking.
1. America first
2. white supremacy
3. pandering to religious fundamentalists
4. pandering to gun enthusiasts and right wing militias
5. marking people and groups as enemies of the people
6. decrying so called hostile elites
7. creating alternative 'facts' and imaginary realities
8. xenophobia
9. misogyny
10. politics of force, inside and outside
a. Campaigning against more trade deals like TPP and TPIP (NAFTA on steroids)
b. Campaigning on ending the endless wars and bringing troops home
c. Campaigning on bringing back on shore manufacturing and good jobs.
d. Campaigning on closing the US/Mexico border and stopping the inflow of the cheapest
labor possible undercutting wages of already very low paid workers here.
e. Campaigning on lowering military tensions with Russia
(not that he did these things, but he campaigned heavily on economic issues and reducing
military adventurism, both important to the middle class/working class in 2016. Not sure what
the 2020 message was.)
1. America first. True. Is this so bad?
2. White supremacy. False. Very few of these characters exist, although they're much in
demand from the left.
3. Pandering to religious fundamentalists. False, although substitute "appealing" for
"pandering" and it's true.
4. Pandering to gun enthusiasts and right-wing militias. Sigh, true, although there's nothing
wrong with gun enthusiasts, broadly speaking.
5. Marking people and groups as enemies of the people. False, I think. Needs to be more
specific, though.
6. Decrying so-called hostile elites. True if you omit the "so-called."
7. Creating alternative "facts" and imaginary realities. Sigh, True.
8. Xenophobia. Mostly false. It's not fear of others, it's mostly a plea to at long last shut
off the firehose of wage-crushing immigration.
9. Misognyny. Mostly false. Trump has certainly had his moments, but many women were happy to
serve in the Trump administration, and I'm not seeing evidence of misogyny among his
backers.
10. Politics of force, inside and outside. True to a small degree but not nearly as
characteristic of Trumpists as of leftists, who destroyed thousands of buildings and
businesses last summer, and the media, which have cheerfully allied themselves with our
internationally murderous intelligence community.
flora, I'm thinking your "populism in the good sense" aligns with the political science
textbook definition of a populist, at least the economic component of that definition: a
populist is an economic liberal (one who generally believes that government should play a
role in the economy to protect the 99% by regulating and otherwise reining in large and
powerful private sector interests, especially big business).
The textbook definition says that a populist is also a cultural conservative (one who
believes that government should play a role in our private/social/cultural lives by promoting
traditional values). (I am not sure you are meaning to discuss this cultural aspect of a
populist; I'm just providing the textbook definition.)
I am thinking that arkansasangie (above) is also describing populism in the same way
("Trumper(s) who are broadly against the level of corruption today and "1984" materializing
before them. They believe that the deep state exists and that the two primary political
parties are one and the same; their differences being cosmetic only" (if by the "deep state"
she might mean a government that has been captured by and serves the interest of corporate
elites, eg, globalization, market monopoly, empire, etc.).
And I am thinking Amfortas the hippie's "feedstore people" are, likewise, (economic
liberal) "populists" (who could have "been won by a new New Deal"). (Having enjoyed many of
Ath's posts, I'm guessing they are also cultural conservatives.)
I do think that some if not most "Trumpists" are populists. But what I think is
interesting is how they are being managed (as in how the Koch brothers (created and) managed
Tea Party "populists").
Conservatives are reactionary – they react to change. It seems to me that one of the
ways they react is by co-opting the changes taking place, dressing them up and claiming at
least some aspect of those changes as their own. I find myself thinking about the Social
Gospel of Christ. Or Adam Smith's "free markets". Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for
freedom (transformed into idpol?). I think all of us understand that this is largely what is
happening today with the term "populism".
Thomas Frank would agree ("The People, No") https://tcfrank.com/product/the-people-no/
And he would speak to the manipulation – he would as "What's the Matter with
Kansas?"
While Janet Yellen advocates pouring money into the covid/economic crisis now because it
will be cheaper in the long run (and we know from various indications that the term could be
a decade) and post-Trump the trade deficit is no longer talked about since nobody's counting
– nobody's buying as much – except RVs and groceries and the stats show a
vertical drop down in commercial activity and a vertical shot up in bankruptcies and closings
and while Klaus Schwab talks about the great capitalist reset from shares to stakes but not
to sovereign states, China is busy establishing the new silk road and consolidating its
neighbors into cooperative economic behavior. I don't even want to know what that combined
CO2 footprint is. Cooperative economics has really already been precluded here in the West
– we can't turn back that clock. So, Biden is looking for an excuse to go to war. He is
wasting no time letting Russia and China know. It's possible that when Yellen says spend
whatever is necessary now she is being encouraged by Biden and the militarists who will
receive much of that financial aid whether we actually go to war or not. It would be so
idiotic and wasteful it is hard to imagine that even that dope Biden would march us off to
war. So when YV talks about "financial engineering for a better world" it sounds too Klaus
Schwab to embrace at face value. I don't see how a switch from shareholders to stakeholders
is going to change western capitalism significantly unless there is a financial separation
between old capitalism and new capitalism. That being the West and China. And the big problem
there is that capital seeks its best return. Otherwise it's not capital for long. So either
direction we are looking, (neoliberalism or socialism) financial engineering will have to
restrain capital, hence "capitalism" will be a euphemism. Which it has been for a long time,
but who's even noticing? It's possible that "war" as we knew it is also a thing of the past
and when Biden salivates for war he'll have to be content to just do "war engineering" to
achieve the necessary separation from China. It's all so meta. The irony is that the thing
called "sovereignty" is the only tool we have to organize all this neoliberal and/or social
protection. And the big one – the environment? Still no details.
Why isn't capitalism working as it should?
You need to identify where real wealth creation occurs in the economy to get it working
well.
Houston, we have a problem.
Mankind first started to produce a surplus with early agriculture.
It wasn't long before the elites learnt how to read the skies, the sun and the stars, to
predict the coming seasons to the amazed masses and collect tribute.
They soon made the most of the opportunity and removed themselves from any hard work to
concentrate on "spiritual matters", i.e. any hocus-pocus they could come up with to elevate
them from the masses, e.g. rituals, fertility rights, offering to the gods . etc and to turn
the initially small tributes, into extracting all the surplus created by the hard work of the
rest.
The elites became the representatives of the gods and they were responsible for the bounty of
the earth and the harvests.
As long as all the surplus was handed over, all would be well.
The class structure emerges.
Upper class – Do as little as they can get away with and get most of the rewards
Middle class – Administrative/managerial class who have enough to live a comfortable
life
Working class – Do the work, and live a basic subsistence existence where they get
enough to stay alive and breed
Their techniques have got more sophisticated over time, but this is the underlying
idea.
They have achieved a total inversion, and got most of the rewards going to those that don't
do anything.
The last thing they needed was "The Enlightenment" as people would work out what was really
going on.
They did work out what was going on and this had to be hidden again.
The Classical Economists had a quick look around and noticed the aristocracy were
maintained in luxury and leisure by the hard work of everyone else.
They haven't done anything economically productive for centuries, they couldn't miss it.
The Classical economist, Adam Smith: "The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining
of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the
labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious
merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his
money. But every savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no
usurers and no tax gatherers."
There was no benefits system in those days, and if those at the bottom didn't work they
died.
They had to earn money to live.
The classical economists could never imagine those at the bottom rising out of a bare
subsistence existence as that was the way it had always been.
Economics was always far too dangerous to be allowed to reveal the truth about the
economy.
How can we protect those powerful vested interests at the top of society?
The early neoclassical economists hid the problems of rentier activity in the economy by
removing the difference between "earned" and "unearned" income and they conflated "land" with
"capital".
They took the focus off the cost of living that had been so important to the Classical
Economists as this is where rentier activity in the economy shows up.
The landowners, landlords and usurers were now just productive members of society again.
Economists do identify where real wealth creation in the economy occurs, but this is a
most inconvenient truth as it reveals many at the top don't actually create any wealth.
Confuse making money and creating wealth and this problem goes away and we can get back to
the traditional order.
Upper class – Do as little as they can get away with and get most of the rewards
Middle class – Administrative/managerial class who have enough to live a comfortable
life
Working class – Do the work, and live a basic subsistence existence where they get
enough to stay alive and breed
What happens when you confuse making money and creating wealth?
We are forty years in, just look around.
When you equate making money with creating wealth, people try and make money in the
easiest way possible, which doesn't actually create any wealth.
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned"
income.
The American have lost sight of what real wealth creation is, and are just focussed on making
money.
You might as well do that in the easiest way possible.
It looks like a parasitic rentier capitalism because that is what it is.
You've just got to sniff out the easy money.
All that hard work involved in setting up a company yourself, and building it up.
Why bother?
Asset strip firms other people have built up, that's easy money.
The private equity firms have found an easy way to make money that doesn't actually create
any wealth.
Letting private equity firms ransack your economy is not really a good idea, even though they
do make lots of money.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial
crisis.
They will load your economy up with their debt products until you get a financial crisis.
On a BBC documentary, comparing 1929 to 2008, it said the last time US bankers made as much
money as they did before 2008 was in the 1920s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6
At 18 mins.
The bankers loaded the US economy up with their debt products until they got financial crises
in 1929 and 2008.
As you head towards the financial crisis, the economy booms due to the money creation of bank
loans.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
The financial crisis appears to come out of a clear blue sky when you use an economics that
doesn't consider debt, like neoclassical economics.
UK bankers started to make a lot of money after 1980.
Oh no.
What happened in 1979?
The UK eliminated corset controls on banking in 1979, the banks invaded the mortgage market
and this is where the problem starts.
The transfer of existing assets, like real estate, doesn't add to GDP, so debt rises faster
than GDP until you get a financial crisis.
Before 1980 – banks lending into the right places that result in GDP growth
(business and industry, creating new products and services in the economy)
Debt grows with GDP
Bankers don't make much money
After 1980 – banks lending into the wrong places that don't result in GDP growth
(real estate and financial speculation)
Debt rises faster than GDP
Bankers make lots of money
2008 – The financial crisis
Banks – What is the idea?
The idea is that banks lend into business and industry to increase the productive capacity of
the economy.
Business and industry don't have to wait until they have the money to expand. They can borrow
the money and use it to expand today, and then pay that money back in the future.
The economy can then grow more rapidly than it would without banks.
Debt grows with GDP and there are no problems.
The banks create money and use it to create real wealth.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
They took the focus off the cost of living that had been so important to the Classical
Economists as this is where rentier activity in the economy shows up.
What will happen?
Now everyone trips up over the cost of living, even the Chinese.
It is well hidden.
Someone from the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) has just seen the equation.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Two seconds later ..
They realise the UK's high housing costs push up wages, and are actually paid by the UK's
employers reducing profit.
UK's high housing costs make UK labour very expensive compared to elsewhere in the world, and
it makes it very expensive to do anything in the UK.
Employees get their money from wages.
Employers pay the UK's high housing costs in wages reducing profit.
You can pay wages elsewhere that people couldn't live on in the West.
To maximise profit you will need to off-shore.
Why was China always going to be the winner in an open, globalised world?
Maximising profit is all about reducing costs.
Western companies couldn't wait to off-shore to low cost China, where they could make higher
profits.
China had coal fired power stations to provide cheap energy.
China had lax regulations reducing environmental and health and safety costs.
China had a low cost of living so employers could pay low wages.
China had low taxes and a minimal welfare state.
China had all the advantages in an open globalised world.
It did have, but now China has become more expensive and developed Eastern economies are
off-shoring to places like Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
China trips up over the cost of living.
Davos 2019 – The Chinese have now realised high housing costs eat into consumer
spending and they wanted to increase internal consumption. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNBcIFu-_V0
They let real estate rip and have now realised why that wasn't a good idea.
The equation makes it so easy.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
The cost of living term goes up with increased housing costs.
The disposable income term goes down.
They didn't have the equation, they used neoclassical economics.
The Chinese had to learn the hard way and it took years.
They have let the cost of living rise and they want to increase internal consumption.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
It's a double whammy on wages.
China isn't as competitive as it used to be.
China has become more expensive and developed Eastern economies are off-shoring to places
like Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
I worked the other way.
I looked at the world around me and worked back to find the cause.
We got some stuff from Ricardo, like the law of comparative advantage.
What's gone missing?
Ricardo was part of the new capitalist class, and the old landowning class were a huge
problem with their rents that had to be paid both directly and through wages. "The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in
the community" Ricardo 1815 / Classical Economist
What does our man on free trade, Ricardo, mean?
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Employees get their money from wages and the employers pay the cost of living through wages,
reducing profit.
Employees get less disposable income after the landlords rent has gone.
Employers have to cover the landlord's rents in wages reducing profit.
Ricardo is just talking about housing costs, employees all rented in those days.
Low housing costs work best for employers and employees.
In Ricardo's world there were three classes.
He was in the capitalist class.
The more he paid in labour costs (wages) the lower his profits would be.
He was paying the cost of living for his workers through wages, and the higher that was, the
higher labour costs would be.
There was no benefits system in those days and those at the bottom needed to earn money to
cover the cost of living otherwise they would die. They had to earn their money through
wages.
The more he paid in rents to the old landowning class, the less there would be for him to
keep for himself.
From Ricardo:
The labourers had before 25
The landlords 25
And the capitalists 50
.. 100
He looked at how the pie got divided between the three groups.
The capitalist system actually contains a welfare state to maintain an old money, idle
rich in luxury and leisure. In the UK we still have an aristocracy, so it is hard to
forget.
The Classical economist, Adam Smith: "The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining
of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the
labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious
merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his
money."
There were three groups in the capitalist system in Ricardo's world (and there still
are).
Workers / Employees
Capitalists / Employers
Rentiers / Landowners / Landlords / other skimmers, who are just skimming out of the system,
not contributing to its success
The unproductive group exists at the top of society, not the bottom.
Later on we did bolt on a benefit system to help others that were struggling lower down the
scale.
Fox News ' Tucker Carlson said on the
Thursday night episode of his program that his show has been targeted for cancellation.
Carlson said
that "in the last several weeks, and particularly in the last 24 hours, the call to take
this show off the air by groups funded -- for real -- by the Ford Foundation, or by George
Soros, by Michael Bloomberg, by Jeff Bezos, has become deafening, going after our advertisers,
going after the companies that carry our signal into your home."
What's more, he added, there has been a "cowardice and complicity" on behalf of the "entire
media class in all of this," suggesting that eventually, reporters at legacy news outlets will
be targeted as well.
Writing for Fox News' website, Carlson added that it may be part of a larger campaign to
silence Fox News and other media, noting that some legacy news outlets have dedicated resources
calling for the channel to be taken down. One columnist for The New York Times, he added, "has
written three separate columns demanding that someone yank this news channel off the air
immediately" and on Wednesday, "suggested that 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' was somehow guilty of
terrorism and violence, something that we've opposed consistently for four years."
"Fox is the last big organization in the American news media that differs in even the
smallest ways from the other big news organizations. At this point, everyone else in the media
is standing in crisp formation, in their starched matching uniforms and their little caps,
patiently awaiting orders from the billionaire class. And then there's Fox News off by itself,
occasionally saying things that are slightly different from everyone else," Carlson wrote
.
He added: "These are craven servants of the Democratic Party. They are feline, not canine.
All of their aggression is passive aggression."
You can't have it both ways: a lab that is competent enough to engineer a precise and
devastating bioweapon but sloppy enough to let a rogue virus to proliferate and leak from
its facilities.
Thea Fischer who was actually on the WHO covid origins team said the quoting of her out of
context to convey a message exactly opposite to her experience was intentional (also known as
lying).
NYT usually are subtle and crafty with their lies. With some countries like China they are
bald faced liars.
He not only knows about the Bat corona virus research in Wuhan ,he funded it!......he
knows what kind of gain of function research they were doing because he was part of it. He
was the first to come out and call anyone who had questions about the Wuhan lab and possible
leak a "conspiracy theorist".
Seeing all that snow in Moscow -as it should be in winter-will cause Greta to book an
emergency appointment with her psychiatrist.
Looneytoonsindv 4 hours ago 14 Feb, 2021 06:45 PM
All caused by global warming? I think not. Climatologists not paid by central governments
(who are using global warming as a cry for changing our way of life) say we are entering an
extended period of solar minimum. Maybe for the next 30 years. A major solar minimum last
occurred in the 1600's (the Maunder Minimum) that lasted from 1645 to 1715. During that
period, rivers and harbors froze over, crops failed and people died of starvation and
exposure. Something to look forward to!
A new and rapidly growing journalistic "beat" has arisen over the last several years that
can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like
citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are
control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its
epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of
journalism.
I've written before about
one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian "reporting." Teams of journalists at
three of the most influential corporate media outlets -- CNN's "media reporters" (Brian
Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC's "disinformation space unit" (Ben Collins and Brandy
Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera
Frenkel) -- devote the bulk of their "journalism" to searching for online spaces where they
believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that
punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention).
These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for
reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so
with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world's loudest
media companies when they do not.
Just as the NSA is obsessed with ensuring there be no place on
earth where humans can communicate free of their spying eyes and ears, these journalistic
hall monitors cannot abide the idea that there can be any place on the internet where people
are free to speak in ways they do not approve. Like some creepy informant for a state
security apparatus, they spend their days trolling the depths of chat rooms and 4Chan
bulletin boards and sub-Reddit threads and private communications apps to find anyone --
influential or obscure -- who is saying something they believe should be forbidden, and then
use the corporate megaphones they did not build and could not have built but have been handed
in order to silence and destroy anyone who dissents from the orthodoxies of their corporate
managers or challenges their information hegemony.
Oliver Darcy has built his CNN career by sitting around with Brian Stelter petulantly
pointing to people breaking the rules on social media and demanding tech executives make
the rule-breakers disappear. The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC --
who refer to their twerpy work with the self-glorifying title of "working in the
disinformation space": as intrepid and hazardous as exposing corruption by repressive regimes
or reporting from war zones -- spend their dreary days scrolling through 4Chan boards to
expose the offensive memes and bad words used by transgressive adolescents; they then pat
themselves on the back for confronting dangerous power centers, even when it is nothing more
trivial and bullying than doxxing the identities of powerless, obscure citizens
.
But the worst of this triumvirate is the NYT's tech reporters, due to influence and reach
if no other reason. When Silicon Valley monopolies, publicly pressured by Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other lawmakers, united to remove Parler
from the internet , the Times' tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and
Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated
to Signal and Telegram . This week
they asked: "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?" One reporter
"confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to
use Telegram for group chats -- up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room.
That seems problematic."
These examples of journalism being abused to demand censorship of spaces they cannot
control are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. And they are not confined to those
three outlets. That far more robust censorship is urgently needed is now a virtual consensus
in mainstream corporate journalism: it's an animating cause for them.
The single issue I take with this is that he misspells "doxing."
Excerpt from Doxing and doxxing :
Doxing is the act of publishing private information and identifying information about an
individual online with intent to harm. Doxing is done in order to shame someone, encourage
other online users to intimidate someone, or put the person being doxed in actual danger.
Doxing may be spelled with two "x's", as in doxxing.
This paragraph alone is worth the price of admission:
Well, the incident on January 6th wasn't exactly a replay of the storming of the
Bastille, but as it is all we have it will have to make do. Were those folks wandering
around inside the Capitol Building tourists who had gotten separated from their tour guide
or were they confused citizens from the Dakotas who had a couple of stamps remaining on
their hunting licenses allowing them to bag a Democrat or two? They would have been better
advised to set up a couple of feeder bait sites under the Rotunda loaded with Benjamins and
the Congress-critters would have arrived in droves. And that guy who stole Nancy Pelosi's
podium only had to announce that he was holding a Black Lives Matter meeting and good old
Nancy would have arrived tout suite on her knees with an African kente cloth stole
draped around her neck.
A sad, funny, and true observation by Phil Giraldi:
"They would have been better advised to set up a couple of feeder bait sites under the
Rotunda loaded with Benjamins and the Congress-critters would have arrived in droves."
Now you know that BLM stands for Bankers Lives Matter
Grumbleduke 7 hours ago
Or bankers love murder
lay_arrow
sgt_doom 5 hours ago
The Bankers' Boy --- the prez who gave them everything --- was Bill Clinton and it was
Clinton who pardoned convicted domestic terrorist, Susan Rosenberg, who was the real founder
of BLM -- so essentially that is correct!
You guys keep reducing it down to democrats versus republicans. Both parties are in bed
with each other. Both parties strike deals with corporations, special interest groups,
lobbyists, and any other entity which provides wealth and power. Dan Crenshaw is the exact
same thing as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His job (like hers) is to attract right leaning
voters which may be disenchanted with contemporary American politicians. He brings the
outcasts and the exiled back to the party while reassuring them that they can trust him-
since, he claims to not be 'one of them.' This country needs to hold ALL politicians
accountable and clean house.
Most to these so-called "jews" are NOT ACTUAL JEWS although they claim to be. Rather, they
superficially converted to Judaism about 1200 years ago, for political and financial
advantages. Think of them more like a criminal organization (Rothschild Khazarian Mafia)
which uses the terms "jew" and "anti-semitism" as Liability Shields: designed to
Deflect-Accountability and Evoke False-Trust and Sympathy with which to deceive the victims
of their Banking-Financial-$cams, War-Profiteering, Cultural-$ubversion, and other Massive
Cons.
This is why it's Important not to fall for their Primary Trap THEY RELY ON BEING
PERSECUTED so they can continue using their main go-to (anti-semitism) get out of jail free
card.
The prize for the truly awful story of the week goes to the appointment of AIPAC monster
to head Pentagon planning for the Middle East.
The extension of the nuclear arms agreement between Russia and the United States and the
decision to stop directly supporting the war on Yemen may have been the only good news items to
come out of Washington last week. The really bad news came when President Joe Biden
warned Russia that "the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia's
aggressive actions, interfering with our elections, cyber-attacks, poisoning its citizens, are
over." It was an empty threat full of innuendo that virtually guarantees four more years of
Russiagate or something like it. It was an odd statement considering that it has been
Washington doing all of the provoking during the Donald Trump administration, much of it
instigated by Democrats who are still looking for a scapegoat for the defeat of Hillary in
2016.
The mainstream media hasn't been reporting many second-tier stories because of the still
playing out double impeachment saga combined with the lingering debate over who actually won
the election. Whether Trump personally incited a riot or something worse depends on one's point
of view, but what is really sad to watch is the efforts being made by a "woke" Democratic Party
leadership and a frenzied media to destroy Trump's life and businesses even though he is no
longer in office, a revenge scenario that goes well beyond previous political vendettas. Worse
still, the attempts being made to render White House employees and Trump supporters
unemployable or even try to send them to jail based on convoluted interpretations of
legislation reflects a level of vindictiveness not seen since the Catiline Conspiracy in
Republican Rome.
Well, the incident on January 6 th wasn't exactly a replay of the storming of the
Bastille, but as it is all we have it will have to make do. Were those folks wandering around
inside the Capitol Building tourists who had gotten separated from their tour guide or were
they confused citizens from the Dakotas who had a couple of stamps remaining on their hunting
licenses allowing them to bag a Democrat or two? They would have been better advised to set up
a couple of feeder bait sites under the Rotunda loaded with Benjamins and the Congress-critters
would have arrived in droves. And that guy who stole Nancy Pelosi's podium only had to announce
that he was holding a Black Lives Matter meeting and good old Nancy would have arrived tout
suite on her knees with an African kente cloth stole draped around her neck. Alas,
we may never know the truth about what actually happened on that fateful day, but the
speculation will keep us going for months more.
There is a definite paucity of actual fact-based news that might make sense to a third
grader, particularly given the decline in American public education, which now only teaches
about the holocaust and racism. Consequently, I have fallen into the habit of saving links to
stories during the week and then deciding on the weekend which are worthy of special
recognition for being particularly ridiculous.
There were some really absurd articles last week. A particularly fascinating story describes
what is going on at the Pentagon, which is frantically sneaking more soldiers into Syria and
canceling any reduction in force in Afghanistan until the situation stabilizes, a policy move
by Biden that reverses one of the few good things that Trump initiated. Unfortunately, the
withdrawal from Afghanistan should take another twenty years or so to finish.
But the
really interesting development is the new mission of the U.S. Army, which will soon be
halting training and other bellicose activity to ease the transition into a full-time military
force dedicated to making sure that everyone observes diversity. It is a long overdue move that
the entire nation can be proud of, plus the U.S. will as a result be made safer from the
Chinese, Iranian and Russian threats. The tricky part is identifying those soldiers who think
racist thoughts, even if they never perform a racist act, because they are guilty of not
conforming to "woke world." They will have to be identified by special trained psychologists
before being dishonorably discharged and made unemployable as they are not fit to mix with
decent people.
Paul Kersey reports some of the details,
how the "Pentagon [has ordered] a 'stand down' in [the] next 60 Days" to identify and
address the problem of extremists in the military. It should be observed that soldiers who kill
civilians are not the extremists in question because killing is what soldiers are supposed to
do. It is instead "white people in the U.S. Military who display an insufficient loyalty to
Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Tolerance. [They] are [the] domestic enemy, and unworthy as
individual[s] of defending our nation against the only threat our elite have united to defeat:
that, of course, being whiteness."
And for those apostatizing white supremacist civilians who don't want to get left out when
the diversity train rolls into their town, the Democratic Party is
looking into setting up Truth Commissions to make sure that anyone who ever entertained a
racist thought or used the "N" word will not be missed.
Make no mistake, an army that really knows what is important is surely great news. It will
be an excellent return on the taxpayers' trillion dollars annual investment, particularly as
the Constitution was written by a bunch of slave holders and is no longer worth swearing an
oath of allegiance to. But perhaps of more interest to foreign policy wonks is what is going on
in some of the other Pentagon offices dedicated to finding new enemies so there will always be
a supply of wars to fight after everyone in Afghanistan and Syria is exterminated.
As telling other nations how to behave backed up by the 101 st Airborne division
has become a wonderful indoor board game in this age of Coronavirus-19, my favorite article for
the past week has to be the news that Honest Joe Biden has appointed yet another Zionist harpy
to his team of war planners in an apparent attempt to keep Nuland, Sherman, Haines, Rice, Power
and Neuberger company. Her name is Dana Stroul and she
will be running the Pentagon's Middle East Desk, making her the senior policy official
focused on that region. Indications are that her eagle eye will be fixed on those major
malefactors Iran and Syria.
Stroul has been whisked away from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP),
where she has been the Shelly and Michael Kassen Fellow in the Institute's Beth and David
Geduld Program on Arab Politics. WINEP is the think tank founded by the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in an attempt to demonstrate that hatred of all of Israel's enemies
in the Middle East is somehow an American vital interest, so it is perhaps odd to consider that
the organization would even allow Arabs to have politics. Stroul had worked at the Pentagon and
had also co-chaired the Syria Study Group set up by Congress prior to landing at WINEP.
Stroul,
who believes that there is a threat to the U.S. from "Iranian nuclear ambitions and support
for terrorist groups throughout the region," also has had some interesting ideas about what
should be done to Syria, some of which was laid out in a final report that was presented to
Congress in September 2019 by the Syria Study Group.
The report states that "From the conflict's beginning in 2011 as a peaceful domestic
uprising, experts warned that President Bashar al-Assad's brutal response was likely to have
serious, negative impacts on U.S. interests. Given Syria's central location in the Middle East,
its ruling regime's ties to terrorist groups and to Iran, and the incompatibility of Assad's
authoritarian rule with the aspirations of the Syrian people, many worried about the conflict
spilling over Syria's borders The threats the conflict in Syria poses -- of terrorism directed
against the United States and its allies and partners; of an empowered Iran; of an aggrandized
Russia; of large numbers of refugees, displaced persons, and other forms of humanitarian
catastrophe; and of the erosion of international norms of war and the Western commitment to
them -- are sufficiently serious to merit a determined response from the United States. The
United States and its allies retain tools to address those threats and the leverage to promote
outcomes that are better for American interests than those that would prevail in the absence of
U.S. engagement. The United States underestimated Russia's ability to use Syria as an arena for
regional influence. Russia's intervention, beginning in 2015, accomplished its proximate aim --
the preservation of the regime in defiance of U.S. calls for Assad to 'go' -- at a relatively
low cost. Russia has enhanced its profile and prestige more broadly in the Middle East."
One immediately notes the incoherence of the argument being made. To make U.S. presence in
Syria palpable to the long-suffering American public, it is necessary to attempt to establish a
threat against the United States even though in this case there is none. And the repeated
citation of "interests" without credibly explaining what interests might compel invading and
occupying a foreign country is completely lacking in any detail. Stroul also several times
cites the heavy terrorist threat, ignoring the fact that the existing terrorists are being
sustained by Israel and by the United States, while President Bashar al-Assad has the
overwhelming support of most of the Syrian people. Reports are that Syrians are returning home
after a refugee crisis caused by the United States and its allies. And we all know that the
last refuge of a scoundrel is to play the Russian card, which Stroul does, as well as surfacing
that perennial demon Iran. U.S. support of Israeli bombing attacks are also just fine in her
opinion, even though they are a clear violation of the "international norms of war" that she
pretends to defend.
Stroul inevitably supports U.S.
retention and what she curiously refers to as "ownership" of the one third of Syria that is
"resource rich." That includes the Syrian oil producing region now occupied by U.S. troops as
well as by what she euphemizes as "Syrian Democratic Forces." She observes that it also
includes the country's best agricultural land, which, if denied to the government in Damascus,
could be used as leverage to bring about regime change. Starving Syrians are not Stroul's
concern so she consequently opposes any form of international relief or reconstruction funding
for the Syrian people and supports U.S. pressure on international lenders through the worldwide
banking system to deny Damascus any money to rebuild.
So, the prize for the truly awful story of the week goes to the appointment of this monster
daughter of AIPAC to head Pentagon planning for the Middle East, joining a sterling cast of
characters at State Department and in the intelligence community. Also, if one includes the
account of a diversified U.S. Army where soldiers will now be encouraged to snitch on each
other over privately held views, one has to ask "Can it get any worse?" Judging from Joe
Biden's list of appointments so far, it will, yes it will.
Philip Giraldi, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest.
As an ex-Vet and the son of a Korean War Vet let me boldly say that any White that enlists
in the military needs to have his or her head examined. I guess American Indian war hero Ira
Hayes HAD to serve back then with the draft and all, but no way should an American Indian
have been forced to fight for a nation that had treated him so badly. I would have sided with
Muhammad Ali in his refusal to fight for America back then. Ali grew up in a different era
and wasn't spoiled and catered to like all Blacks born in the mid 1950s to now. Right now,
the Whites in this country are being attacked in every way they turn just for having been
born with white skin. Whites are attacked daily in the streets by Blacks not to mention an
assortment of other "diversities." Maybe I am TRULY colorblind when it comes to right and
wrong which is totally opposite to the kind of thinking exhibited by our Jewish overlords and
Black racists. When it comes to RIGHT or WRONG, I, not (((them,))) see no color. With all the
Jewish and Black Privilege out there, I think it is high time they do the fighting. Of course
there are plenty of Blacks in the military because like poor Whites, it often comes down to
needing a job, nothing more or nothing less. I would always laugh when people would tell me,
"thank you for your service.?" What, I needed a job, man. Time for Shlomo to start moving up
the enlisted ranks since he likes fighting so much.
I would always laugh when people would tell me, "thank you for your service.?"
I myself cringe, but at least I like to think that I'm a bit less easily duped now.
Never again.
PS: Shlomo never was in the enlisted ranks in either the USSR or the USSA.
[In] an article written on
12th April, 1919, in a paper called The Communist, at Kharkov, by one M. Cohen :
"The great Russian revolution was indeed accomplished by the hands of Jews. There are
no Jews in the ranks of the Red Army as far as privates are concerned, but in the
Committees, and in the Soviet organization as Commissars, the Jews are [38] gallantly
leading the masses. The symbol of Jewry has become the symbol of the Russian
proletariat, which can be seen in the fact of the adoption of the five-pointed star, which
in former times was the symbol of Zionism and Jewry."
– Captain Achibald.H.Maule Ramsay, The Nameless War, p29.
Mr. Giraldi: At the risk of beating a dead horse, I think that it is vital that the truth
about 9-11 be brought to the forefront of the present discussion. While it is apparent, as
you have been noting so convincingly over recent times, that Israeli/Jewish interests have
been prevailing over what should be an independent US foreign policy that serves the United
States, we must, it seems to me, resurrect the pursuit of the truth about 9-11, which is that
it was a predominantly Israeli/Jewish operation, undertaken with absolutely no concern for
the fact that thousands of Americans would be killed thereby by their own government in order
to foster a narrative that the Arabs in the Middle East had to be subdued to save Western
civilization.
9-11 was characterized by all of the clever and malevolent false flag subterfuges that
also characterized the "coup plotting" that resulted in the fraudulent 2020 election, and all
of its horrible aftermath. It is, for example, quite clear from the evidence that has been
developed through the brave work of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 truth, so well
documented in the lengthy documentary by Massimo Mazzucco, entitled 9-11 The New Pearl
Harbor, and the writings of several French analysts detailed in Voltaire.net , that while Arab interests might well have had an
aspiration to do damage to the United States/Israel by attacking the World Trade Center, that
the plot was uncovered very early by American/Israeli authorities, who, instead of squelching
it, decided to piggyback on it as a perfect cover for "doing the attacks right" so that they
might elicit the sort of outrage that would put the United States in complete service
henceforth to the Israeli nation-wrecking project in the Middle East.
Among the things that seem apparent to any half way objective observer, are that the owner
of the buildings ( or the lease) on the World Trade Center was completely compliant with the
placement of explosives in the building via the so-called elevator repair project undertaken
by the fictitious front company called Urban Moving Systems out of New Jersey, with its
Israeli demolition experts; that the owner of the buildings insured them shortly before 9-11
against terrorist attack, and that he uncharacteristically stayed away from the buildings on
9-11, that he was Jewish (perhaps a merely coincidental attribute) , and that he cried
crocodile tears after the "murders" of 2000 people who were not in on the "fix" ("such a
shame," I believe he said, shortly before he collected his massive insurance settlement and
started planning for his replacement tower which would have "much better sight lines") .
There is obviously much more evidence than I can detail here, as to the utter fraudulence of
the entire official story. Suffice to say that the horrid and unjustifiable wars that were
unleashed in the Middle East subsequently by the United States were a direct result of the
9-11 fraud. The fact that the bastards got away with that one made it clear to them that
stealing a presidential election in plain sight would be child's play.
Also, if one includes the account of a diversified U.S. Army where soldiers will now be
encouraged to snitch on each other over privately held views, one has to ask "Can it get
any worse?" Judging from Joe Biden's list of appointments so far, it will, yes it will.
Both Trump and Biden are minions of the Deep State both totally support the Deep
State.
@Ugetit n in life
back then was my sex life and clubbing. I NEVER watched (((news))) and my world was very
small. I read the sports pages and drank beer. I enjoyed my youth to the fullest and I slept
like a baby. IF someone would have shown me a book about Hitler or the holocaust, or told me
about how we must stand with muh Israel, I would have given the same old indoctrinated
Pavlovian response that some moronic Whites still have in 2021. I WOULD have said that Hitler
was the most evilest evil man that ever ever walked the earth and that America must stand
with muh Israel no matter what. Oh well, that is life in the fast lane. haha.
Jewish dominance is everywhere. Are they truly qualified? Biden should be ashamed of
himself for his appointments by overlooking more qualified Americans and for selecting Kamala
Harris as his VP. There were many women far more qualified and far more tolerant than Ms.
Harris. 2022 will probably see the Democrats losing both houses. JFK wanted to issue Treasury
currency, stop Israel from getting nuclear weapons, and pulling out of Vietnam. His
assassination caused America's loss of American independence. In June 1967 when Israel
attacked an unarmed American ship of the line, USS Liberty (in international waters), Johnson
refused to allow U.S. carrier planes to splash attacking IDD planes (using napalm) and sink
their torpedo boats from firing torpedos into the USS Libert – adding to the death and
carnage already be inflicted on the defenseless U.S. ships and its sailors. LBJ was worried
about his Jewish constituency and how they might react. Israeli influence took a quantum leap
then and it keeps increasing. Trump was guilty but Biden will be more giving to this small
foreign and theocratic nation. Buchanan's Whose war? in the American Conservative was an
honest eye-opener. Since the Democrats like impeaching out of office president – why
not Johnson RIP?
The tricky part is identifying those soldiers who think racist thoughts, even if they
never perform a racist act, because they are guilty of not conforming to "woke world." They
will have to be identified by special trained psychologists before being dishonorably
discharged and made unemployable as they are not fit to mix with decent people.
The sick irony here is that Judaism can be described as a canon of "racist thought." So it
is racist Jews, crypto Jews and their lickspittle (the Chosen-Elect) who are enforcing this
"anti-racism" social-engineering program on the American people, but doing so to hide their
own racist Zionism and the quest to set up Israel as the moral authority of the planet;
indeed, the moral authority of the universe.
I guess the best defense is a good offense. I guess all people were created equal, but
some people are more equal than others.
Orwell was absolutely dead-on about the sick, warped, totalitarian character of the
Jewish-infiltrated Anglo elite. The Zionism at the center if it all didn't come into fruition
in his day, but he nailed it nonetheless.
Possibly the real motive is to get an army that will be willing to point guns at the
American population should things ever get to that point. They'll psychologically screen them
to make sure they won't identify too closely with the mass of Americans but will follow
orders. Their war fighting capabilities take a secondary consideration to that of shielding
an illegitimate regime. They may have big plans ahead in Syria and Iran and are getting ready
to make sure things don't come apart at home as in the Vietnam war. They're probably getting
the VA hospitals ready for a new influx down the road. Looks like we're on a crash course
with Syria, Iran and Russia. One incident, one false flag coming out of nowhere and here we
go.
Come on, DIET is a clever move for the army. They have a little problem with war crimes.
The ICC began an inquiry into Afghanistan war crimes years ago. There's no statute of
limitations on such universal jurisdiction crimes. Any UN member nation can prosecute or
extradite suspects. And treaty bodies of multiple binding treaties have adjured the USG to
impose command responsibility. It puts a crimp in AFRICOM, IMET, all sorts of army gravy
trains, not just on Blowing Shit Up.
The traditional US way of maintaining impunity for grave crimes is CIA's bad-apples
canard. Lock up a couple hillbillies. With DIET, Army has institutionalized CIA's bad-apples
ploy as a vague ideological taint. If they can tie war crimes to doctrinal impurity, then
they can call inveterate war criminals bad apples instead of special forces. It's not going
to work in the civilized world, but it will probably protect BMD commanders here at home.
Now then. DO killed inter lotsa alia a judge, an ex-attorney general, a Prime Minister of
Congo, a UN Secretary-General, a Prime Minister of Sweden, a legally sacrosanct diplomatic
envoy of Iran, numerous Russia diplomats, more than 3,000 workers in a New York skyscraper, a
US president, and 475,000 Americans (with banned biological weapons!) And you got away with
it all. If you guys really minded, you would take care of this Izzie fifth column toot sweet.
That you do not shows that it works for you.
"Diversifying" the military has a very clear advantage in terms of domestic control. A
Black lesbian will have little compunction in firing upon a group of white people that she is
told are "insurrectionists".
However, what is puzzling is how much less effective these "diversified" forces will be in
future wars on behalf of Israel. You would think that the oligarchs would want to keep the US
military as lethal as possible in support of their future global conquests. Perhaps they plan
two forces, one to battle white supremacists and "misinformation" domestically, and another
less diverse segment to wage war externally.
The vast majority of the military never actually fight. When was the last serving member
of the US Navy killed while on active service aboard ship? The army is useless against any
but third world opposition.
The Marines and Special forces such as the SEALs and Rangers do the actual fighting and I
suspect that the junior officer and NCO positions there will be relatively free of diversity
in order to keep them at least semi-useful.
Meanwhile, at officer level in the Navy, regular army and Air Force it will be an orgy of
rent seeking from the pet minorities
The U.S. is inept, disorganized, and dishonest. The possibility of a nuclear detonation,
or nuclear war, occurring through incompetence, miscalculation, or systems error, is now
significant. Probably the Russian and Chinese policymakers give the U.S. a lot of latitude
for that very reason, the way a parent might placate a two-year-old to prevent a tantrum.
Putin was saying there's no single democratic model. That was eventually conceptualized
as "sovereign democracy". Democracy cannot exist without sovereignty
This is one of the key concepts here and to me the most interesting one. "Sovereign
democracy". There are actually now very few countries in the world with true sovereignty,
never mind democracy.
The ones that try to exercise sovereignty, or even that don't show sufficient servility,
are severely punished. If they aren't large or strong enough, like Syria and Lebanon, they
suffer tremendously under "sanctions", which in reality is economic warfare. If they are,
like Russia and Iran, they still suffer sanctions, but will probably ride them out.
I remember a speech by King Hussein of Jordan in 1990, in a moment of rare candor,
remarking something like, and I paraphrase: "We live in a world dictatorship". The context
was the run up to the US/Saudi/Zionist-led attack on Iraq the first time around, when George
Bush I, urged by Margaret Thatcher, assembled a huge coalition against that country. I've
never been able to locate that speech since (I would be grateful to anyone who can).
For a background on that conflict, which set up the post-Cold War order:
Recent court documents
have indicated that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) possesses a tool allowing
them to access encrypted messages on the Signal app.
Signal has rapidly gained in popularity as Silicon Valley monopolists have grown more openly
hostile to free speech, but the platform may be vulnerable to backdoors that undermine the
privacy protections provided through the encrypted messaging service.
According to documents filed by the Department of Justice and first obtained by Forbes ,
Signal's encrypted messages can be intercepted from iPhone devices when those Apple devices are
in a mode called "partial AFU," which means "after first unlock."
When phones are in partial AFU mode, Signal messages can be seized by federal authorities
and other potentially hostile interests. GrayKey and Cellebrite are the tools typically used by
the FBI to gain this sensitive information, an expert has explained.
" It uses some very advanced approach using hardware vulnerabilities ," said Vladimir
Katalov, who founded the Russian forensics company ElcomSoft, believing that GrayKey was used
by federal authorities to crack Signal.
This vulnerability within the Signal app may not be a design flaw, but rather a deliberate
backdoor to allow authorities to access private messages. The app was initially funded with
backing from the deep state, after all.
There are a couple of interview type programmes I watch on RT, not because I think they
are particularly good, rather they often have Eastern and Non Europeans giving opinions on
what they see as US foreign policy maneuvering. On what is happening in the US, with the
cancel culture, the Eastern Europeans easily give examples of how the USSR operated in the
same manner.
@War for
Blair Mountain There are many other examples of GloboSorosistas desperately trying to get
Russia to get into a bloody mess and drain itself so that the SorosaVultures can swoop in an
steal her immense natural resources.
Russia cannot afford to get involved in a dawn out conventional fight with NATO's
prostitutes.
That is exactly what US & UK want, both of which – safely away from continental
Europe – want exactly that. They could not care less if all of Europe get smoked.
Russia wants an intact (Western) Europe, particularly Germany and France, for mutual
future benefit. Expecting US & UK to become impotent sometime in the future., and leave
Europe alone.
The collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 was the major contributor to this shift. Now we
have "the king is naked" situation for neoliberal and neoliberal globalization and does not help
the US centered global neoliberal empire.
BTW Russia is still remains a neoliberal country although "Putinism" deviates from
neoliberalism in both domestic and foreign policy. But Putin days in power are not indefinite and
a new yeltson can emege and sell Russia to the West again...
America/Israel and NATO are apparently not going to change their approach despite the
shift in both hard & soft power between the neoliberal/NWO and the pro-sovereignty blocs
in the last two decades. And Europe is going to suffer worst from this...
Germany is key to Europe. The American empire ordered Germany to double its low military
spending, they said no. Trump threatened to close American military bases in Germany, polls
showed most Germans didn't care. They ordered Germany to cancel a new NatGas pipeline to
Russia, they said no. Once they oust that Neocon puppet Merkel, the empire will be in
trouble.
What is the status of the relationship between Russia and Israel ?
If it as simple as you say – and Saker himself seems to refer consistently to the
US-NATO-EU 'Anglozionist empire', then surely Russia would recognise Israel as the key
ideological opponent to its vision of a multipolar world order ?
Yet this is not what I read. Russia has deep and cordial and increasingly close ties to
Israel, even as Israeli jets illegally bomb Syria on a regular basis. This is never
explained.
For example, Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU
is not a reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic
attention will be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that
the talks we have held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We
are ready for this".
Lavrov is following Putin's line (Davos speech), ergo that Russia is ready to
interact with Europe as a mutually respectful equal partner – but not with Europe as
puppet of the US NWO, NeoCon , ZioGlob/CIA crowd. Hopefully the Germans are listening and can
reassess their true interests.
Also the Poles, who urgently need to wake up to the fact that that they have more in
common with Putin's Russia than they do with ZioGlob NWO USA.
Russia of late indeed is becoming more assertive, most likely because it is confidant
their militairy capabilities have become superior to that of their adversaries. NATO and US
know that very well, but will never let on. Their provocations are nothing more than
grandstanding. However what would Russia do in Syria if confronted with increased American
aggression in that country? That's what I like to know. Russia is deeply involved in Syria
supporting that country in defeating ISIS. Russia has a strategically important navy base
there too. Biden so it seems wants to rekindle the war in Syria supported by Israel and will
find a pretext to do so.
@cranc
hat the media or the Israeli state (the same entity in actuality) claims.
Most Israeli strikes are agreed before hand with Russia. The Israelis need to save face
for their cowardly fascist habit of killing civilian Palestinians. These useless strikes
against Syria are purely symbolic and are used to deceive the Israeli and US populations.
Besides, more than 60% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, let alone practicing Jews.
Israeli is changing due to massive immigration of non-Jews from Russia, and in a generation
will change from the rulers of the US to a Russian outpost and there is nothing the Zionists
can do about it.
@MayRay
have a consistently higher fertility rate than other Jews in Israel and (2) Arabs have a
slightly higher fertility rate than secular Jews, then we may expect that the under-18
population of Israel is less than 70% Jewish, though more of those Jewish kids will be
Haredim. Looking for a source on this.
If these fertility and immigration trends continue, we could see an Israel in 2050 that is
severely polarized between a Haredim zealot contingent approaching 15% of the population,
Arabs around 22% of the population, and "neither Jew nor Arab" growing to as much as 15%.
Non-ultra Jews would start passing below 50%. But that is not certain and is likely a few
decades off.
Here is the site of Matthew DePerno, one the lawyers in the video. He needs financial aid to
keep up the Absolute Truth about the fraudulent 2020 election.
Time
has published an
explainer
piece
offering a fascinating insight into how the presidential election was won. It's titled "The Secret History of the Shadow
Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election."
The fascinating part is what it tells us about the brazenness of the left in general and the corrupt, mendacious MSM in particular:
they are now heavy-hinting that they cheated but want you to know that it's all OK because they were doing it to not to destroy
democracy but to preserve and enhance it.
Here's the key paragraph:
That's why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever
dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to
influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the
election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system's fragility in order to ensure that
democracy in America endures.
Do you see what they just did there?
The Democrats (and their sympathisers) didn't
rig
the
election. They just
fortified
it
by taking care to ensure the right guy won rather than the wrong guy won, regardless of what those pesky voters might misguidedly
have wanted.
Could this have anything to do, you wonder, with President Trump's upcoming impeachment trial?
My suspicion that Time's piece is both pre-emptive strike and damage limitation exercise. It anticipates the possibility that Trump
will provide evidence in support of his claim that the election was "stolen."
This evidence will be much harder to brush under the carpet in the Senate.
I'm reminded here of an old article from the
Times
(of
London), which
described
the
process whereby political projects are advanced by stealth.
It is at first denied that any radical new plan exists; it is then conceded that it exists but ministers swear blind that it is
not even on the political agenda; it is then noted that it might well be on the agenda but is not a serious proposition; it is
later conceded that it is a serious proposition but that it will never be implemented; after that it is acknowledge that it will
be implemented but in such a diluted form that it will make no difference to the lives of ordinary people; at some point it is
finally recognised that it has made such a difference, but it was always known that it would and voters were told so from the
outset.
This is where we are headed now with the"'stolen" election. Columnists who blithely assured us that the election was above board may
now begin to finesse their position.
"OK, so maybe it was rigged," they will start to concede. 'But isn't that always the case with elections? And anyway it's a done
deal now."
Sorry, my bad -- that use of the word "rigged" was a complete slip of the tongue.
What I meant to say is that the presidential election was "fortified." And what's not to like about that, eh?
"Look, you paranoid, privileged, white trash, white supremacist, qtard, wignat, nazi scum --
there was no Sekret Cabal scheming to rig the election, ok? that's a Conspiracy Theory, it did
not happen
There was just a small group of billionaires and elite power brokers working together
behind-the-scenes to *fortify* the election which is totally different and not at all a bad
thing
So stop spreading baseless Conspiracy Theories; this election was not Rigged in Secret, it
was Fortified in Private -- you're welcome."
I am curious as to why Prof. Hudson does not describe the holding of mortgages by
financial entities as de facto landlordism, even if it is decentralized and theoretically
time-limited (tho' not so with infinite re-fi and heloc).If the mortgage lenders are granted
the monopoly of literally creating a debt on a ledger, rather than it being a public utility,
and the benefits (read as: interest payments) accrue solely to those private entities, how is
that substantially different than hereditary land title and rent? I concede that at the end
of the lengthy mortgage term, the aristos cede the deed, but the parasitism is considerable,
often over the entire working life of a person or couple.
My whole point, which I hope I've stated repeatedly clearly enough, is that "Rent is for
paying interest." The financial class today has replaced the 19th-century's post-feudal
landlord class.
Loans are also taken out against financial assets such as stocks/bonds. Is that another
reason for propping up the stock market to the bizarre levels now seen?
Great stuff. While some of us are resistant to using money and debt to explain
everything , who can deny that this country has always been about money above all with
a not altogether insincere love of freedom on the side. Perhaps that latter is the source of
the "you're not the boss of me" approach to the rest of the world that Hudson talks
about.
Although I'm more text than video oriented, this time I watched the latter first instead
of reading the transcript. It was like sitting in a master class about the ongoing pernicious
influence of the American financial sector on our country's foreign policy since early in the
20th century. Even if you've already read the transcript you should watch the video as
well.
The IMF system was designed to impoverish debtors. The purpose of the IMF was to make other
countries so poor and dependent on the United States so they could never be militarily
independent. In the discussion of the British loan for instance, in the 1930s the discussion in
the London Economic Conference was, "Yes, we're bankrupting Europe, but if we give Europe
enough money to avoid austerity, they're just going to spend the money on the military." That
was said by the Americans in the State Department and the White House again and again,
especially by Raymond Moley who was basically in charge of President Roosevelt's foreign policy
towards Europe.
The question is: how do you create an international financial system designed to promote
prosperity, not austerity? The Bretton Woods is for austerity for everybody except the United
States, which will have a free ride forever. The question that I'm involved with in the work
I'm doing in China and with other countries is how to create a system based on prosperity
instead of austerity, with mutual support between creditors and debtors, without the kind of
financial antagonism that has been built in to the international financial system ever since
World War I. Financial reform involves tax reform as well: how do we end up taxing economic
rent instead of letting the rentiers take over society. That is what classical economics
is all about: how do we revive it?
Oscar Brisset
Final question: these austerity and anti-labor policies which the IMF imposes on countries
of the global South seem to be well known practices from before the IMF was created, from what
you've discussed. Did the IMF invent anything new? In addition, in the 19th century, was
predatory lending something common, or was direct invasion always the go-to method for
subjugating a territory?
Prof Hudson
The 19th century was really the golden age of industrial capitalism. Countries wanted to
invest to make a profit. They didn't want to invest in dismantling an existing industry,
because there wasn't much industry to dismantle. They wanted to make profit by creating
industry. There was a lot of investment in infrastructure, and it almost always lost money. For
instance, there was recently a criticism of China saying, "Doesn't China know that the Panama
Canal went bankrupt again and again, and that all the investments in canals and the railroads
all went broke again and again?" Of course China knows that. The idea is that you make
investment not to make a profit on basic large infrastructure. The 19th century was basically
inter-state lending, inter-governmental lending, public sector lending. That's where the money
was made. The late 20th century was one of financialization, dismantling the industry that was
already in place, not lending to create industry to make a profit. It's asset-stripping, not
profit-seeking
The United States is muscle-bound. Despite its huge military budget it can't field an army.
It has a foreign legion. ISIS, for instance, is part of its foreign legion. The European NATO
is part of its foreign legion. But there's no way American can ever have a land war again, so
you can never invade and conquer a country with a military army. All America has is the Atom
bomb, and that's muscle bound. It cannot go to wage any kind of war except atomic war. There's
nothing in between.
I think Russia and China know that, and Russia at least has taken steps to protect itself
and said, "If the United States wants atomic war, we'll be wiped out but it'll be wiped out
too, and Europe will be wiped out." I think probably the first exchange would be to wipe out
England and Europe, to say "We don't want to go to war with you and really blow up the world,
America. Let's just show you what we can do. Let's blow up England and Europe so at least you
won't have your colonies there." If America persisted, it would be the end of the world. Will
America really do that?
There was worry that Donald Trump would do that so he could go down in history as the man
who destroyed civilization, but I don't think other people are going to do that.
This is a great piece, but I'm not sure its nuclear war-fighting take is accurate. If the
US and Russia engage in nuclear war, there is no way it can be limited to Europe and the UK.
France and England have hundreds of nukes of their own. The atomic destruction of Europe
would result in a nuclear winter of indeterminate length and disastrous consequences.
Orange Man Bad actually asked an interesting question re. US nuclear policy: does the US
really want to start an atomic war in order to 'defend' Lithuania or Japan? Would it not make
more sense for them to acquire their own nukes, or [fill in saner alternative]?
I think that what Prof Hudson points out is true: The US has not won any land war since
(at the least) 1948, they have not the smarts to win an economic war (as have the Chinese),
and the only arrow in their quiver is E=mc2. Talk about bringing a nuke to a knife fight!
Pax Americana:
US clandestine agencies, and the State Department and Pentagon to varying degrees, have been
involved in non-stop regime change efforts towards the global integration of populations and
resources in this system of private, capitalist control. Mostly successful since WWII, these
efforts began with Greece in 1948, followed by Syria in 49, Albania from 49-53, Iran in 53,
54 Guatemala, Syria again in 56, Haiti in 57, Indonesia 57, Laos 58-60, Cuba 59-present, 59
Cambodia, 60 Ecuador, 60 Congo, 61 Dominican Republic, 62-64 Brazil, 63 Iraq, 63 South
Vietnam, 64 Bolivia and Brazil, 65 France, 65 Indonesia again, 66 Ghana, 67 Greece again, 70
Costa Rica, 71 Bolivia again, 73-75 Australia, 73 Chile, 74 Portugal, 75 Angola, 75 Zaire, 76
Argentina, 76 Jamaica, 79-89 Afghanistan, 79 Seychelles, 80-92 Angola again, 80-89 Libya,
81-87 Nicaragua, 82 Chad, 83 Grenada, 82-84 South Yemen, 82-84 Suriname, 87 Fiji, 89 Panama,
91 Albania again, 91 Iraq, 93 Somalia, 99-2000 Yugoslavia, 2000 Ecuador again, 01 Afghanistan
again, 02 Venezuela, 03 Iraq again, 04 Haiti again, 07 to present Somalia again, 11 Libya
again, 12 to present Syria for a third time, 14 Ukraine, Brazil again in 16 and Bolivia and
Ecuador in 2018. Ongoing destabilization efforts are underway in Venezuela, Iran, Russia and
China.
I thought Christine Lagarde had her nerve saying the US had an exorbitant privilege by
owning the reserve currency. After WW2, according to a better view of our goals, the United
States wanted a Pax Americana.
We wanted to actually police the world and bring all boats up with a rising tide of
prosperity via free trade. We had been too frustrated by tariffs imposed on our goods by the
old empires, specifically the British Empire for too long. It makes some sense that we
willing bought everyones manufactured goods and went into a big deficit to do so because
holding the reserve currency we made money on loans and financial services to make up for it.
All the while controlling foreign military dust ups.
And for a while, through the 50s, we manufactured all sorts of things. Interesting to
learn that the funding from having the reserve currency paid for the military. (and for the
FIRE industry too)
It makes sense knowing this because the military and finance can get anything they ask for
from the budget. Nothing is too much. Because the money coming in, as protection money for
our military, more than covers it. But when it comes to sufficient social spending, there has
never been enough.
The Empire always neglected its home base. Other countries do not operate that way.
So Ms. Lagarde, I'd hardly call that exorbitant. It was simply two separate economies.
Well, Great Britain's performance in the first half of the 20th century has hardly
inspired America to treat it with much respect:
1. Excepting their heroic 1940 defense of Britain, and beating an overextended (and mainly
Italian) army at Third Alamein, they were either thrashed or bled white in every major battle
of both world wars, relying on US armies/navies and materiel to prop them up. For all the
eloquent theorizing, Britain's strategies were visibly self-serving, beyond its power, or
outright quixotic, not to mention criminally incompetent (Somme, Bengal, soft underbelly,
etc.)
2. Their vast colonial empire was becoming a crazy quilt of gigantic monocropped
plantations and mines, increasingly nonviable as functional societies, and the locals knew
it.
3. The US, Germany and Russia had all eclipsed Britain as industrial powers and had
overtaken it as an innovator as well, although it remained strong in this sphere with an
influx of Eastern Europeans.
.So to the emerging American technocratic elites, by 1945 the Mother Country must have
seemed a mere shell: still supercilious, but myopic, exhausted and consistently unable to
walk its talk.
(apologies to my British friends)
Prof. Hudson, many thanks for another good read, although I do continue to feel you view
China through very rose colored glasses. Harmony and fairness are rather different concepts,
but I'm eager to hear more from you on this topic in the future.
As always Professor Hudson is great, thank you for sharing this. I would note that it goes
very well with the subsequent post on the site, dealing with negative rates.
I'd quibble ever so slightly with two things, the first the historical vacuum with regards
to the Soviet Union and communism as a historical force which shaped the contours of this
American system. The submission of the British Imperial system to the American one was driven
by the fear of communism, not necessarily Soviet Communism but even the domestic sort. The
American distaste for the overt imperial structure of the UK wasn't driven solely by economic
sadism or democratic character, but the fear of communism as the vanguard of
anti-imperialism: America and the UK as best of allies, but leave the Suez alone or Nasser
will go commie.
The 2nd quibble is that the American collapse in this regard is already well underway.
While I love professor Hudson's historical analysis I disagree with his economic determinism.
The notion that the system whose creation he described was guided by actions bounded by the
rules of economics. And that the next stage of historical development will follow those rules
just in different contexts. As opposed to understanding that those rules are largely
artifice.
Beneath the economic collapse, the conundrum the US finds itself in is that of its ruling
class. As opposed to the British ruling class which understood that submission to the
American system would protect their ancient privileges. The American ruling class can't find
the same concordat with China. The Chinese are communist, and as Jack Ma's case demonstrated
to the world recently. They aren't intimidated by the myths around wealth that sheepishly
guide Americans.
So those same rules that governed balance of payments and modified American behavior
throughout the Cold War don't apply today. They only applied then because they reinforced the
interests of the American ruling class. As a matter of fact they subverted those very rules
quite easily, note the talk of negative interest rates on the site today.
The Chinese BRI initiative seems less about generating profit for China and more about
exposing the inadequacy of the current dollar system.
Professor Hudson correctly notes that the US is powerless against this. It can only act
via proxy and those have been neutralized, see Syria. And that both Russia and China now are
just trying to manage American decline and avoid the only American option left, nuclear
war.
I often wonder if the "threat of communism" was genuine, as if there could not be
cooperation among states with different systems of government. This is seen in the continued
hatred of Russia in the last thirty years when it is no longer communist-in fact I think that
Pres. Putin seems to be a far more Christian leader than any in the USA or other Western
powers!!!
The arrogant attitude to Russia in the recent development of vaccines, when derision and
skepticism a few months ago are replaced by amazement and acceptance now that the "West" has
realized that the sputnik V seems to be among the best vaccines available. The USA does not
yet seem to realize that the Russian defense (yes it IS for defense) is actually effective,
unlike the US aggressive actions.
I think it was genuine if you were "Lord something or other" or a Dulles brother. That's
not to say the world would've suffered from it. Simply those predecessors of our current
tormentors may have suffered from it.
I think the interesting thing is that, for the US, that ship has sailed. There is
submission to it, but no cooperation with it; and I doubt there ever will be again.
This is seen in the continued hatred of Russia in the last thirty years when it is no
longer communist
I often get the impression that Western, US in particular, politicians and political
analysts have failed to grasp that the USSR has collapsed and that one part of it, the
Russian Federation is now a capitalist country.
We also have to remember that the USA elite always needs an external enemy to blame. The
loss of the USSR must have been traumatic and they have substituted the Russian Federation in
its place.
As always Professor Hudson is great, thank you for sharing this. I would note that it goes
very well with the subsequent post on the site, dealing with negative rates.
I'd quibble ever so slightly with two things, the first the historical vacuum with regards
to the Soviet Union and communism as a historical force which shaped the contours of this
American system. The submission of the British Imperial system to the American one was driven
by the fear of communism, not necessarily Soviet Communism but even the domestic sort. The
American distaste for the overt imperial structure of the UK wasn't driven solely by economic
sadism or democratic character, but the fear of communism as the vanguard of
anti-imperialism: America and the UK as best of allies, but leave the Suez alone or Nasser
will go commie.
The latter is that the American collapse in this regard is already well underway. While I
love profesor Hudson's historical analysis I disagree with his economic determinism. The
notion that the system whose creation he described was guided by actions bounded by the rules
of economics. And that the next stage of historical development will follow those rules just
in different contexts. For instance does China
I am curious to know Professor Hudson's thoughts on the role U.S. banks (i.e. J.P, Morgan)
played in the US entry into WW1 and the creation of the Creel Committee propaganda
campaign.
With Russian withdrawal from the eastern front giving Germany the ability to transfer
resources to the western front, it became highly probable that Germany would win the war and
US banks would suffer considerable losses.
In other words was US entry into WW1 a bailout of Wall Street.
World War I and the end of the Gold Standard due to the inability to ship gold greatly
diminished the power of the House of Morgan. JP Morgan had been the conduit for foreign
capital into the US. He was trusted as a vetter of promising investments. That role became
less important and less profitable after the US became a creditor nation. World War I
accelerated that process.
"... Slobodan's "The Globalists" is a great look at Von Mises and Hayek peddling NeoLiberalism to the last hereditary aristocracy standing in Europe in the interwar years. ..."
"... To my mind, this set up a deracinated pseudo-nazism ..."
The thing is, the UK has long been captured by neoliberalism (arguably, they invented it).
The UK was the Trojan horse for the worst forms of neoliberalism in the EU. Which is why I
thought it was ideal for neoliberals wherever they were based for the UK to be in the EU. I
think one problem is that the UK somehow regressed from neoliberalism to a dream of some form
of old style 19th Century liberalism.
My reading attributes the term (aside from an obscure French usage) and the ideology to
Friedman and Austrian ex-pats Hayek and von MIses. When I think UK in the context of
neoliberalsim, naturally I think Thatcher. So yes, at least since Thatcher neoliberalism has
been the prevailing wind in the UK for which – imho – Brexit is both a symptom
and a solidifier.
Slobodan's "The Globalists" is a great look at Von Mises and Hayek peddling NeoLiberalism
to to the last hereditary aristocracy standing in Europe in the interwar years.
The Charlatan and Saint of NeoLiberalism didn't really get traction until the US set up
the BIS to help the Germans keep the debt cycle of dependence from the Versailles treaty
liquid, with German payments through France and the UK back to the US.
To my mind, this set up a deracinated pseudo-nazism, a comfortableness with exterminatory
exploitation so long as it's exercised though debt contracts, that has persisted to this day
in Western finance, where debt is absolute but lives are fungible.
Slobodan's "The Globalists" is a great look at Von Mises and Hayek peddling
NeoLiberalism to the last hereditary aristocracy standing in Europe in the interwar
years.
It's Slobodian, Quinn.
To my mind, this set up a deracinated pseudo-nazism
So you're on to something.
Hayek is the Grandfather of neoliberalism and the primary influence on Hayek's thought was
the Vienna of his youth: the go-go years after Franz Josef surrendered to the Hungarians,
created the dual monarchy, and there was the great cultural efflorescence of Vienna that
preceded the Austro-Hungarian empire's collapse.
Two ideologies emerged after WWI from Austria in reaction to the traumatic experience of
that collapse -- ideologies formulated by Austrians that then deeply damaged the rest of the
world.
Neoliberalism was one, of course. The other? Well, someone once asked Ernst Hanfstaengl
aka Putzi, Hitler's confidant, what caused Hitler's antiSemitism.
Hanfstaengl replied: 'Anyone who did not know Vienna before 1914 cannot understand.'
Hanfstaengl then explained that before WWI Vienna was full of beautiful people, the soldiers
in their uniforms, the Hapsburg Empire's citizens in their local traditional clothes etc and
'then these strange people came from the East all dressed in black and speaking a strange
kind of German'. These were the Orthodox Jews who came from Silesia, a part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kaiser Franz Josef had done much to emancipate and help the Jews, so
many crossed over to Vienna to start a new life.
Now, to further put Hitler and Nazism's policies in their historical context, it's
necessary to understand the situation in Germany prior to their appearance.
In 1871, Bismarck had nationalized healthcare, making it available to all Germans, then
provided old-age pensions as public social security. Child labor was abolished and public
schools were provided for all children. The Kaiser implemented worker protection laws in
1890. After WW I, the Social Democrats' influence had remained strong. Germany had an active
union membership. An official "Decree on Collective Agreements, Worker and Employees
Committees and the Settlement of Labor disputes" enabled collective bargaining, legal
enforcement of labor contracts as well as social security for disabled veterans, widows, and
dependents. In 1918, unemployment benefits were given to all German workers.
In the 1932 elections, the Nazi Party didn't have an outright majority. According to the
Nuremberg Trial transcripts, on January 4, 1933, German bankers and industrialists had a
secret backroom deal with then-Chancellor Von Papen to make Hitler the Chancellor of Germany
in a coalition.
"In February 1933, as Chancellor, Hitler met with the leading German industrialists at the
home of Hermann Goring. There were representatives from IG Farben, AG Siemens, BMW, coal
mining magnates, Theissen Corp, AG Krupp, and others bankers, investors, and other Germans
belonging to the top 1%. In this meeting, Hitler said, "Private enterprise cannot be
maintained in the age of democracy.'"
In 1934 the Nazis outlined their plan to revitalize the German economy with the
reprivatization of significant industries: railways, public works project, construction,
steel, and banking. Hitler guaranteed profits for the private sector; many American
industrialists and bankers flocked to Germany to invest.
The Nazis had a thorough plan for deregulation. The Nazi's chief economist stated," The
first thing German business needs is peace and quiet. It must have a feeling of absolute
legal security and must know that work and its return are guaranteed." Likewise, businesses
weren't to be hampered by too much "regulation." On May 2, 1933, Hitler sent his Brown Shirts
to all union headquarters. Union leaders were beaten, and sent to prison or concentration
camps. The Nazi party expropriated union funds -- money workers paid for union membership --
for itself.
On January 20, 1934, the Nazis passed the Law Regulating National Labor, abrogating the
power of the government to set minimum wages and working conditions. Employers lowered wages
and benefits. Workers were banned from striking or engaging in other collective bargaining
rights, and worked longer hours for lower wages. Their conditions so deteriorated that when
the head of the AFL visited Nazi Germany in 1938, he compared an average worker's life to
that of a slave. .
The Nazis also privatized medicine. One of Hitler's economists was the head of a private
insurance company. These private for-profit health insurance companies immediately started to
profit from Anti-Semitism. In 1934, they eliminated reimbursements for Jewish physicians,
which allowed them to profit further.
And so on.
Philip K. Dick once wrote a novel whose particular ontological riff was that the Roman
empire never really ended and in the 20th century people lived in an imposed illusion under
the same elite, or their heirs, that had headed the Roman empire.
That sort of science-fictional novel could be written based on our own reality, riffing on
the theme: The Nazis won.
If you enjoyed the Global War on Terror, you're going to love the new War on Domestic
Terror! It's just like the original Global War on Terror, except that this time the
"Terrorists" are all "Domestic Violent Extremists" ("DVEs"), "Homegrown Violent Extremists"
("HVEs"), "Violent Conspiracy-Theorist Extremists" ("VCTEs"), "Violent Reality Denialist
Extremists" (VRDEs"), "Insurrectionary Micro-Aggressionist Extremists" ("IMAEs"), "People Who
Make Liberals Feel Uncomfortable" ("PWMLFUs"), and anyone else the Department of Homeland
Security wants to label an "extremist" and slap a ridiculous acronym on.
According to a "
National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin " issued by the DHS on January 27, these DCEs,
HVEs, VCTEs, VRDEs, IMAEs, and PWMLFUs are "ideologically-motivated violent extremists with
objections to the exercise of governmental authority" and other "perceived grievances fueled by
false narratives." They are believed to be "motivated by a range of issues, including anger
over Covid-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, police use of force," and other
dangerous "false narratives" (e.g., the existence of the "deep state," "herd immunity,"
"biological sex," "God," and so on).
"Inspired by foreign terrorist groups" and "emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol
Building," this diabolical network of "domestic terrorists" is "plotting attacks against
government facilities," "threatening violence against critical infrastructure" and actively
"citing misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19." For all we know, they might be
huddled in the "Wolf's Lair" at Mar-a-Lago right now, plotting a devastating terrorist attack
with those WMDs we never found in Iraq, or generating population-adjusted death-rate
charts going back 20 years , or posting pictures of " extremist frogs " on
the Internet.
The Department of Homeland Security is "concerned," as are its counterparts throughout the
global capitalist empire. The (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror isn't just a war on American
"domestic terror." The "domestic terror" threat is international. France has just passed a "
Global Security Law " banning citizens from filming the police beating the living snot out
of people (among other "anti-terrorist" provisions). In Germany, the government is preparing to
install an
anti-terror moat around the Reichstag . In the Netherlands, the police are cracking down on
the VCTEs, VRDEs, and other "
angry citizens who hate the system ," who have been protesting over nightly curfews.
Suddenly, everywhere you look (or at least if you are looking in the corporate media), "
global extremism networks are growing ." It's time for Globocap to take the gloves off
again, root the "terrorists" out of their hidey holes, and roll out a new official
narrative.
Actually, there's not much new about it. When you strip away all the silly new acronyms, the
(New Normal) War on Domestic Terror is basically just a combination of the "War on Terror"
narrative and the "New Normal" narrative, i.e., a militarization of the so-called "New Normal"
and a pathologization of the "War on Terror." Why would GloboCap want to do that, you ask?
I think you know, but I'll go ahead and tell you.
See, the problem with the original "Global War on Terror" was that it wasn't actually all
that global. It was basically just a war on Islamic "terrorism" (i.e., resistance to global
capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), which was fine as long as GloboCap was just
destabilizing and restructuring the Greater Middle East. It was put on hold in 2016 , so that
GloboCap could focus on defeating "populism" (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its
post-ideological ideology), make an example of Donald Trump, and demonize everyone who voted
for him (or just refused to take part in their free and fair elections ), which
they have just finished doing, in spectacular fashion. So, now it's back to "War on Terror"
business, except with a whole new cast of "terrorists," or, technically, an expanded cast of
"terrorists." (I rattled off a list in my previous column .)
In short, GloboCap has simply expanded, recontextualized, and pathologized the "War on
Terror" (i.e., the war on resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology).
This was always inevitable, of course. A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism)
has no external enemies, as there is no territory "outside" the system. Its only enemies are
within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as "terrorists" and
"extremists." These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic,
deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap's official ideology which, in case you were
wondering, is called "normality" (or, in our case, currently, "New Normality").
In earlier times, these "terrorists" and "extremists" were known as "heretics," "apostates,"
and "blasphemers." Today, they are also known as "deniers," e.g., "science deniers," "Covid
deniers," and recently, more disturbingly, "reality deniers." This is an essential part of the
pathologization of the "War on Terror" narrative. The new breed of "terrorists" do not just
hate us for our freedom they hate us because they hate "reality." They are no longer our
political or ideological opponents they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no
longer need to be argued with or listened to they need to be "treated," "reeducated," and
"deprogrammed," until they accept "Reality." If you think I'm exaggerating the totalitarian
nature of the "New Normal/War on Terror" narrative, read this op-ed in The New York
Timesexploring
the concept of a "Reality Czar" to deal with our "Reality Crisis."
And this is just the beginning, of course. The consensus (at least in GloboCap circles) is,
the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror will probably continue for the next 10 to 20 years
, which should provide the global capitalist ruling classes with more than enough time to carry
out the "
Great Reset ," destroy what's left of human society, and condition the public to get used
to living like cringing, neo-feudal peasants who have to ask permission to leave their houses.
We're still in the initial " shock and awe
" phase (which they will have to scale back a bit eventually), but just look at how much
they've already accomplished.
The economic damage is literally incalculable millions have been plunged into desperate
poverty, countless independent businesses crushed, whole industries crippled, developing
countries rendered economically dependent (i.e., compliant) for the foreseeable future, as
billionaires amassed over $1 trillion in wealth and supranational corporate behemoths
consolidated their dominance across the planet.
And that's just the economic damage. The attack on society has been even more dramatic.
GloboCap, in the space of a year, has transformed the majority of the global masses into an
enormous,
paranoid totalitarian cult that is no longer capable of even rudimentary reasoning. (I'm
not going to go on about it here at this point, you either recognize it or you're in it.)
They're actually lining up in parking lots, the double-masked members of this Covidian cult, to
be injected with an experimental "vaccine" that they believe will save the human species from
a virus that causes mild to moderate
symptoms in roughly 95% of those "infected," and that over 99% of the "infected" survive
.
So, it is no big surprise that these same mindless cultists are gung-ho for the (New Normal)
War on Domestic Terror, and the upcoming globally-televised show trial of Donald Trump for
"inciting insurrection," and the ongoing corporate censorship of the Internet, and can't wait
to be issued their " Freedom
Passports ," which will allow them to take part in "New Normal" life -- double-masked and
socially-distanced, naturally -- while having their every movement and transaction, and every
word they write on Facebook, or in an email, or say to someone on their smartphones, or in the
vicinity of their 5G toasters, recorded by GloboCap's Intelligence Services and their corporate
partners, subsidiaries, and assigns. These people have nothing at all to worry about, as they
would never dream of disobeying orders, and could not produce an original thought, much less
one displeasing to GloboCap, if you held a fake apocalyptic plague to their heads.
As for the rest of us "extremists," "domestic terrorists," "heretics," and "reality
deniers," (i.e., anyone criticizing global capitalism, or challenging its official narratives,
and its increasingly totalitarian ideology, regardless of our specific DHS acronyms), I wish I
had something hopeful to tell you, but, the truth is, things aren't looking so good. I guess
I'll see you in a quarantine camp , or in
the psych ward, or an offshore detention facility or, I don't know, maybe I'll see you in the
streets.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing,
Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent
Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of
Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Reading Blacks biography of Roosevelt, Hudson's work, Talbot's "The Devil's Chessboard"
and Douglas's "JFK and the Unspeakable" one discerns a clear line between the UK interwar
Foreign Office, military intelligence and rentier class and the Dulles brother's post war
ascent to the pinnacles of back room power.
Before the war the brothers arranged IP shares between the soon to be contending German
and Anglo-sphere industries, during the war they tried to arrange a separate peace with post
Hitler Germany, after Roosevelt's death and particularly in their con job on Truman, they
made the CIA the collective tool of the transatlantic financial elite, David Rockefeller
explicitly included.
These books all rely extensively on previously lightly touched primary sources.
The standard analysis of the interplay between technology and education, developed by
economists like Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin..., and David Autor..., suggests that
improvements in technology -- coupled with a college graduation rate that slowed sharply in
the 1980s -- have been principal drivers of the nation's widening income gap, leaving workers
with less education behind.
But critics like Mr. Mishel point out that this theory has important blind spots. For
instance, why have wages for college graduates stagnated over the last decade, even as
innovation continues at a breathtaking pace? ...
Most notably, the skills-and-tech story leaves aside one of the most perplexing and important
dynamics of the last 30 years: the rise of the 1 percent, a tiny sliver of the population
that last year took in almost a dollar out of every $4 generated by the American economy. ...
Mr. Mishel's preferred explanation of inequality's rise is institutional: a shrinking minimum
wage cut into the earnings of the nation's least-skilled workers while falling trade
barriers, deregulation and the decline of labor unions eroded the income of the middle class.
The rise of the top 1 percent, he believes, is mostly about executive pay and the growing
footprint of finance. ...
My view is that both the technology and institutional forces are at work, and the question
is not which of the two explains growing inequality -- they are not mutually exclusive -- but
rather how much each contributed to the growing disparity.
Actually, That started with the passage of the Great Society program of 1965, under
President Johnson. With Great Society, welfare became official, hip, and institutionalize,
with the worst affects being the break-up of black and inner city families, and a doubling to
tripling of the out-of-wedlock birthrate. The lower 95 percenters would be better off under
the policies of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Read the book "The Truly Disadvantaged" about how the break up of inner city families was
not to do with welfare but with the lack of jobs for working class men.
That doesn't mean by the way that I am against better micro-economic design of the social
security system. A citizen's income (c.f. Friedman's negative income tax) is my preferred
welfare system design.
Thomas Sowell has stated that the black family made more progress during the 20 years
before Great Society, as opposed to the 20 years after Great Society. Great Society was the
first opportunity for mommas to afford to have children, without the benefit of a husband and
father to the children, on the taxpayers' dime. Where a birth of a human baby should be a
blessed event, it's be cheapened to included the Dept. of Social Services. In my state, in
the bigger cities, the out-of-wedlock birthrate pre Great Society was 25%, then by 1975 to
current times, the out-of-wedlock birthrate hovers around 75- 80 percent. Black on black
crime went up, number of black victims went up, and drug use increased. I don't disagree with
the point you are trying to make, but it got much worse at the time of the introduction of
Great Society.
When we say yields equalize across assets prices, this is natural over the whole economy,
including government, given sufficient time to equalize. If rates are low, and price to
earnings high, then you can bet your booty that government yields are low also.
And this will be true of any complete, bounded economic model, it is really basic to the
concept of a model. So ask youself who or what has driven yields lower over the 40 year
period and you can win a banana.
Second Best has it completely backwards! The post-New Deal period saw the strongest
economy and most prosperous middle class in American history!
The New Deal came about because the real takers (the wealthy) were taking too much of the
pie. Same thing is happening today! But unfortunately we don't have an FDR around to stick up
for working men and women. We have the pro-corporate party (Dems) and the ultra-pro-corporate
party (GOP).
Second Best is just pretending to be a reactionary for amusement. Unfortunately some
bloggers roll in here occasionally that make roughly the same comments, but are serious. I
keep telling him to use emoticons :<)
I wouldn't put any of the blame for rising inequality on technology. We've been replacing
workers with machinery for over 200 years!
I think the two principle reasons are low tax rates and low union membership.
Contrary to popular belief, there is very little correlation between tax rates and growth.
But there is a very high correlation between low tax rates and increased income
inequality.
Anecdotal but, when you look at typical office-type work, it's hard to not conclude that
technology (computers/software) has killed a ton of middle-income office jobs.
e.g. The typical law firm 10+ years ago might have had 3-4 support staff (secretaries,
paralegals, filing clerks) for every attorney. Today, it's more typical to have 2-3 attorneys
for every support staff employee. Technology allows this.
I easily believe this for the secretaries and clerical staff, but what happened to the
paralegals? Similar trends can/could be observed in other professional fields, but there too,
while the clerical and admin staff was trimmed (and to an extent management hierarchies but
lately it looks like they have come back), subject matter (of the variety that cannot be
automated) work has not been cut a lot. OTOH IT/internet allowed a lot of "commodity" tasks
to be outsourced and offshored.
Is it possible that the (newer generation?) attorneys had to take on paralegal tasks as
part of their job? That would be in line with other fields where in reality a lot of the "low
level" and clerical work that has been ostensibly automated was pushed onto the professional
staff. For example, in many places you are supposed to arrange your own business travel
(hotel, flights), order office materials, do print/copy work etc. that used to be done by now
"automated" clerical staff up to 10-15 years ago. Also when it comes to subject matter work,
a lot of work formerly done by techs and other support staff (who were often hourly) has been
transferred to the professionals (who are generally salaried and "exempt" from overtime pay),
while it is generally swept under the rug in performance evaluations which are about subject
matter achievements (research pubs, delivered product features etc.). On the flip side there
is now probably more nominally professional staff, some of whom (esp. juniors) are loaded
with more tech/support content - but then a lot of them are hired offshore too.
"Both sides agree that the overall weakness of the job market since the turn of the
millennium is a prime culprit. As Professor Katz noted: "The only moments we've had of
broadly shared prosperity have been in tight labor markets.""
This is a problem of demand management policy. Demand can be managed via fiscal, monetary
and/or trade/currency policies.
It's also a problem of politics as Krugman says in that the powerful center-right has
ignored the recent economic evidence, as have the center-right's academic/media message
machine. The center-right has cried wolf over inflation and government deficits all in the
name of preventing policies that would help the economy and tighten labor markets.
Yes labor policy is very important as well. I would support pro-union policies - which
help politically also - and work-sharing programs during downturns which Germany has and
which Dean Baker recommends.
It's also a problem of a long term decline in federal government consumption and gross
investment, and the willingness of macroeconomists to re-define "full employment" as a
situation in which lots and lots of people are in fact unemployed. I don't think private
enterprise alone will ever be capable of generating full employment and tight labor markets,
demand stimulus or no demand stimulus.
When there is insufficient demand yields drop as capacity is idled. Under conditions of
weak demand there is also a drop in investment as new entrepreneurs and established
businesses know the deck is stacked against them.
The low yields are a natural symptom of the deficient demand. If you're looking for who to
blame, there are several likely suspects.
One is a government indifferent to unemployment that caters almost exclusively to the
super rich and the multi national, stateless corporations. The second is a government
indifferent to unemployment that caters almost exclusively to the super rich and the multi
national, stateless corporations. The third is see one and two.
This is the beginnings of fascism, of course. All we need now is a strong authority figure
and a good war.
Fighting to Stop an Entitlement Before It Takes Hold, and Expands by John Harwood
November 12, 2013
"WASHINGTON -- Underlying fierce Republican efforts to stop President Obama's health care
law and the White House drive to save it is a simple historical reality: Once major
entitlement programs get underway, they quickly become embedded in American life. And then
they grow.
That makes the battle over the Affordable Care Act more consequential than most Washington
political fights. "If it's in place for six months, it will be impossible to repeal it or
change it in ways that significantly reduce the benefits," said Robert D. Reischauer, a
Democrat who used to lead the Congressional Budget Office.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, another former C.B.O. director, reflects the concern of fellow
Republicans in framing the stakes more dramatically. Either the law's health insurance
exchanges "can't cut it," he explained, or "it's Katie, bar the door -- we have an
explosively growing new program."
Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression, the
dominant pattern for major entitlements -- the term for government assistance programs open
to all who qualify and not subject to annual budget constraints -- has been durability and
expansion. That is the record Senator Ted Cruz of Texas refers to in warning Republicans not
to allow Americans to become "hooked on the subsidies" -- an argument Mr. Obama sarcastically
recast as, "We've got to stop it before people like it too much."
Congress enacted Social Security in 1935 to provide benefits to retired workers. In 1939,
benefits were extended to their dependents and survivors. Later the program grew to provide
disability coverage, cover self-employed farmers and raise benefit levels.
President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society created Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to
provide health coverage for the elderly and the poor. They followed the same pattern.
In 1972, Congress extended Medicare eligibility to those under 65 on disability and with
end-stage renal disease. In 2003, Congress passed President George W. Bush's plan to offer
coverage under Medicare for prescription drugs.
Lawmakers initially linked Medicaid coverage to those receiving welfare benefits, but over
time expanded eligibility to other "poverty-related groups" such as pregnant women. In 1997,
President Bill Clinton signed into law the Children's Health Insurance Program, which now
covers eight million children whose families' incomes are too high to qualify for
Medicaid."
...
The old canard, right out of Doonesbury cartoon sociology.
The real issue is discretionary spending. It is gone mainly because of entitlement
crowding. The thirty small hoover states find higher multipliers in discretionary spending.
It is really a critical political issue, and the thirty hoovers will take the ship down
unless they get their discretionaries.
New York, Florida, California and Texas are united against discretionary spending. Both
parties are having internal battles on the issue.
Listen to yellens statement on discretionary spending, she likes it. But listen to the
House, they sequester it. Whyndid you and i just agree, via our representatives, to cut
discretionary spending? Any clue? What did every red blooded american say about the
entitlements? No, no.!!. What did we do? Cut discretionary spending to save entitlements. If
anyone is capable of any news searching on the topic, i suspect you will find much talk about
discretionary vs entitlement spending. We name that, give it an actual semantic.
Crowding.
Right. There wasno sarcasm, i must suddenly be in nutsville. A very good chunk of
articles, right here, required reading was about cuts to discretionary spending and saving
entitlements. Someone is not doing their homework.
What the complaint was about, in the two posts above, was that the discretionary vs
entitlement comment was not framed in some kind of simple minded 'evil tea party'. As if no
actual thought may occur on the blog unless it passes some orwellian, straight jacket,
nonesense. Seriously, crowding out occurs in the budget all the friggin time and mostly has
little to with some bogus script of plastic political analysis.
Entitlement spending does not fund humbug factories. Or PAC's to make sure the pentagon
has a 'strategic objective' to keep the defense corporations (aka troughers) healthy.
Entitlements have had little 'crowding' effect on discretionary spending.
Roughly, discretionary to entitlements used to be about 35:65 in 1999, today it is not
that different, while the war half of discretionary (19% of outlays in 2012) is nearly 60%
too large.
When you take away war and corporate welfare entitlements should be 6 times discretionary
spending.
What matters is discretionary spending enriches a few a lot, while entitlements take care
of many a little.
Well you have an opinion about entitlements and discretionary spending. You like the
former, not the later. We have a name for people like you, Crowders, you crowd out one form
of spending vs another form.
So quit bitching and play the game. We are conducting a mass experiment, lead by
researcher janet yellen. She is going to test your theory by attempting more discretionary
spending. If she screws it up, you win a banana.
Ok, lets review the roosevelt thing.
In 1928, investors believed we were head for a new productivity frontier based on the
efficiency of the mass market. They predicted 4% non-inflationary growth for the horizon.
What we got in 1948 was exactly that, high growth, low inflation, rising productivity.
Between 1928 and 1948, we got social security, progressives taxes, off the gold standard, two
major down turns, twenty million dead from WW2, and the cold war.
Thats a twenty year wait, mostly the result of bad and good government depending on how
one sorts the events. Ok, you all sort it all out, I am moving on.
The rapid transformation of business processes via the capital formation advantages of
robust, diverse, and highly liquid financial markets made it all possible.
Translation: If tax incentives are set to prefer trading equities (relatively low capital
gains tax rate) over holding equities (relatively low dividends tax rate) then capital will
flow to investments with the fast rather than longest duration returns. Fastest returns for
capital will come from mergers and downsizing (i.e, layoffs), outsourcing (narrow
specialization), offshoring of production (labor wage arbitrage), and technology asset
capital expenditure (automation) will be the preferred uses of capital. With the short term
emphasis then training, retention, maintaining internal competency succession, and
operational process improvements will undesirable expenses. The preferences quickly become
self reinforcing as workforce quality devolves and capital rewards itself more and
more.
Economic is a quantitative science and economists should understand the statistics and
test for interactions. Sometimes, the interactive effects can be greater than major
effects.
"
wages for college graduates stagnated over the last decade, even as innovation continues
at
"
Tell me something! Does all of innovation come from humans? From Hunans? From automation?
From computer hardware? Software? Software with a child process? A child process coded by the
parent process? Do you see what is happening?
We are now approaching the moment of singularity. A moment in history, or an epoch of
history? Tell me something else!
Do all boomer-s leave the work force simultaneously? Or during a poorly defined epoch? The
singularity has already begun but will evolve slowly as the present SE, singularity epoch
unfolds. Computer jockey-s first used the word processing feature of computer to code their
human imagination. Later assemblers re-coded human source code, checked source for semantics
and many other features. Supercomputers now work at unbelievable gigaflops. But if human
brain is merely a biological gigaflopper, eventually all its functions will be replaced by
semiconductor brains. But so what?
RM, Reverse Migration! As mechanized innovation replaces Americans, Yankee-s will need to
migrate to developing countries where the singularity process will be slower and with a phase
shift, behind the American Curve.
"The standard analysis of the interplay between technology and education, developed by
economists like Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin..., and David Autor..., suggests that
improvements in technology -- coupled with a college graduation rate that slowed sharply in
the 1980s -- have been principal drivers of the nation's widening income gap, leaving workers
with less education behind...."
-- Eduardo Porter
I do not understand this assertion, since what is remarkable about the United States is
that the portion of men and women 25 to 34 and 55 to 64 with college degrees is just about
the same.
July, 2013
College or university degree attainment by age group, 2011
"The standard analysis of the interplay between technology and education, developed by
economists like Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin..., and David Autor..., suggests that
improvements in technology -- coupled with a college graduation rate that slowed sharply in
the 1980s -- have been principal drivers of the nation's widening income gap, leaving workers
with less education behind...."
-- Eduardo Porter
I do not understand this assertion, since what is remarkable about the United States is
that the portion of men and women 25 to 34 and 55 to 64 with college degrees is just about
the same.
What is importance to notice about increasing income concentration is how much of an
increase there has been above the top 1% of families. we find the share of income for the top
.1% of families going from 3.41% to 11.33% between 1980 and 2012 for an astonishing gain.
Corruption of government at all levels produced a class of plutocratic rent holders in
finance and other industries able to buy rents. Citi and Solyndra being outstanding examples
on the D side and ADM and the oil companies on the R side.
Abysmal social and economic conditions in African American urban ghettos. These conditions
contribute much to the poor conditions in the schools that serve that population. The kids
who attend school in these neighborhoods are really up against it. Social arrangements that
sort the educated upper middle class into "their"towns by residential pricing and development
patterns tend to limit highly advantageous educational opportunities to their children. In
the big cities the upper middle class either uses influence to obtain places for their
children in desirable public schools or use private schools.
Pressure on wages and employment opportunities for people with low educational attainment
due to the development of more efficient production technologies and low wage competition in
the global trading system.
Forgive my skepticism that a few billion more federal dollars of stimulus will correct
these problems.
Gov. Jerry Brown, whose pronouncements of California's economic recovery have been
criticized by Republicans who point out the state's high poverty rate, said in a radio
interview Wednesday that poverty and the large number of people looking for work are "really
the flip side of California's incredible attractiveness and prosperity."
The Democratic governor's remarks aired the same day the U.S. Census Bureau reported that
23.8 percent of Californians live in poverty under an alternative calculation that includes
the cost of living.
Asked on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" about two negative indicators --
the state's nation-high poverty rate and the large number of Californians who are unemployed
or marginally employed and looking for work -- Brown said, "Well, that's true, because
California is a magnet.
"People come here from all over in the world, close by from Mexico and Central America and
farther out from Asia and the Middle East. So, California beckons, and people come. And then,
of course, a lot of people who arrive are not that skilled, and they take lower paying jobs.
And that reflects itself in the economic distribution."
----------------
Hmmm. So my claim that the bankruptcy of America is caused by a negative growth black hole in
Sacramento was just admitted as true by the Guv of California. Where is my banana?
Enemies of the
Poor, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times : Suddenly it's O.K., even mandatory, for
politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for
Democrats, who can go back to being the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J. It's much more difficult
for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse
Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it's justified. It's not much of
an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor,
and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election.
Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn't just a matter of spite...; it's
deeply rooted in the party's ideology...
Let's start with the recent Republican track record.
The most important current policy development in America is the rollout of the Affordable
Care Act, a k a Obamacare. Most Republican-controlled states are, however, refusing to
implement a key part of the act, the expansion of Medicaid, thereby
denying health coverage to almost five million low-income Americans. And the amazing
thing is that ... the aid through would cost almost nothing; nearly all the costs ... would
be paid by Washington.
Meanwhile, those Republican-controlled states are slashing unemployment benefits,
education financing and more. As I said, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the
G.O.P. is hurting the poor as much as it can.
What would Republicans have done if they had won the White House in 2012? Much more of the
same. Bear in mind that every
budget the G.O.P. has offered since it took over the House in 2010 involves savage cuts
in Medicaid, food stamps and other antipoverty programs. ...
The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or
less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor. ...
Republicans weren't always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs --
Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit -- used to have bipartisan support. And
maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.
For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America's poor. And that will
remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us
otherwise.
"We're Broke" is the mantra of the GOP. Yes, the nation with the highest GDP in absolute
terms and a very high per capita level of income is "broke". You see this nonsense from
Republican leaders at the beginning of a film called "We're Not Broke" which is devoted to
the GOP push to have even less taxes on their base - the ultrarich.
US can afford to spend 4 times the part of GDP that Japan and German spend on warmaking.
And a similar amount on crony capital.
US can afford new ships that will not be equipped, star wars missiles that can hit
nothing, and a $1500B fighter program which is failing its tests many of which cannot be
performed because the thing is unreliable.
Republicans are out of touch. The MinWage is so far below Living Wage that the taxpayers
have to subsidize MinWage workers so they can have enough to eat. This is wrong. The system
and the employers are exploiting their labor.
Medicaid and Obamacare are a subsidy to the poor workers who can't afford the costs of
health care and don't have it provided by employers. A workforce that is not healthy is bad
for business: more missed workdays, lower productivity, higher turnover, etc. The single
minded focus on cutting social spending is completely wrong.
The question that is not asked: "What services do people need to be functional in our
modern economy? What mix of employer benefits, government benefits and wage contribution are
required to deliver the services?" For many people, wages are too low to pay for the minimum
basic goods and services. How do we make up the difference? Or do we have people do without
and erode the health and potential economic output? Republicans have a short sighted focus on
cutting spending and investment in the short run and are not considering the long run.
I don't have the source, but I believe our net worth, nationally, is just north of $74
trillion. And we added more than $1.3 trillion to that amount the past 12 months. This is the
figure that deals in assets we know about. Given the loopholes in our tax code that allow the
super rich to essentially hide much of their income, here and overseas, that net worth figure
is certainly below the real number.
So the statement 'we're broke' borders on the ridiculous. Our cash flow statement is less
impressive, but certainly far above adequate. Even here, this is a choice. We could easily
return to balance (although that's historically been a very bad idea) just by fixing our tax
code so it become more progressive. Today's tax code over taxes the middle class in order to
fund tax breaks for the super rich.
Yep. The progressiveness of the tax code stops in its track at about the Top 2%. Right
about the spot where hiding income becomes easy and makes economic sense.
Someday we will figure out how much income never hits tax returns.
My wife and I had over $30,000 of such income last year. Guaranteed the vast majority of the
Top 10% had similar amounts.
However, I really was not talking about W2 income, but rather things like Romney's $20
million IRA. Or hedge fund managers keeping earnings offshore to avoid any taxes (even the
reduced scam they receive) and living by borrowing against their offshore holdings at
ludicrously low interest rates.
Maybe it was collateral damage since they live in the same neighborhoods? Probably though
it was being fought as a limited war and then there was mission creep.
An all out war on poverty would have transformed the economic battlefield in ways that
very few actually wanted.
The other day someone -- I don't remember who or where -- asked an interesting question:
when did it become so common to disparage anyone who hasn't made it big, hasn't gotten rich,
as a "loser"? Well, that's actually a question we can answer, using Google Ngrams, which
track the frequency with which words or phrases are used in books:
[Graph]
Sure enough, the term "losers" has become much more common since the 1960s. And I think
this word usage reflects something real -- a growing contempt for the little people.
This contempt surely isn't limited to Republican politicians. Still, it's striking how
unable they are to show any empathy for people who are just doing their best to make a modest
living. The most famous example, of course, is Mitt Romney, who didn't just disparage 47
percent of the nation; he urged everyone to borrow money from their parents and start a
business. I still think the most revealing example to date was Eric Cantor, who marked Labor
Day by tweeting:
"Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned
their own success."
But Marco Rubio's latest speech deserves at least honorable mention, for the airy way he
dismissed the idea of raising the minimum wage: "Raising the minimum wage may poll well, but
having a job that pays $10 an hour is not the American dream."
In a sense, he's right: if the American dream means getting rich, then $10 an hour isn't
living that dream. But most people aren't and won't get rich. Raising the minimum wage would
mean higher incomes for around 27 million people; in many cases the gains would amount to
thousands of dollars a year, which is really a lot in low-income families. So what are all
these people, chopped liver? Well, yes, at least in the eyes of the GOP -- or maybe make that
chopped losers.
OK, I know what the answer will be: conservative policies will lead to economic growth,
and that will raise all boats, the way it did in the days of Saint Ronald. Except, you know,
it didn't. Here's the real wage of nonsupervisory workers:
[Real wage of production and nonsupervisory workers * ]
Even if you give Reagan credit for the 1982-9 business cycle expansion, which you
shouldn't, there's no way to claim that his policies led to higher wages for ordinary
workers.
So what is the GOP agenda to help people who aren't going to build businesses and get
rich? There isn't one -- partly because they really can't reconcile any real agenda with
their overall ideology, but also because, deep in their hearts, they consider ordinary people
trying hard to get by a bunch of losers.
Entitlement expansion. See Detroit and Scranton. Coming soon to Chicago.
[ The term "entitlement" is used when a writer wishes to hide the fact the what is being
talked about is Social Security or Medicare or a pension program that a worker has
contributed to for years and years.
As for the supporting of pension funds, all that has to be understood is how terrific
stock and bond markets returns have been these last 30 and more years. Any pension fund
manager who simply bought a mix of stock and bond market indexes would have done splendidly
for workers and there would be no possible problem now. ]
The problem has not typically been fund returns. It has been underfunding of the programs
by employers, on the assumption that magic market alpha will make up the difference (well,
that's the happy spin on it, the truth is most of the funders didn't much care if the
difference was made up or not so long as they got theirs.)
The focus on pension fund investing strategies is an important one, but kept distinct from
funding levels and political battles it's almost meaningless.
This needs to be explained, keeping here to employer contributions by government
employers.
As to the mention of auto companies and pension contributions, there you have a problem in
which employers can estimate a pension fund investment return and contribute according to the
estimate so that a higher estimate will mean lower levels of contributions from employers for
a time. Nonetheless, ordinary investment returns over long periods of time should have left
no pension problem for workers.
Once executives realized the raises they could gain by taking deferred comp. in stock, or
even in guaranteed return special accounts (Jack Welch at GE-14% annual), corporations
couldn't afford much of anything else. Today CEOs make 290 times the average pay of their
employees compensation, so in order to cover those outsized gains and still report good
profits, companies need to trim budgets anywhere and everywhere. Stable, defined benefit
plans, paid for in addition to wages, got tossed and replaced by contribution plans funded by
employees themselves.
For more than 35 years in America it's been a time to strip corporate assets and pick the
pockets of employees and shareholders in order to pay executives their gargantuan
compensation packages.
Thanks to our rigged tax code, ripping off the middle class has become a full time project
of the super rich and their paid help in Congress and academia.
Same thing happened in the public as in the private sector funds. Look at Illinois or New
Jersey or Detroit. Economic miracles or budget crises lead to underfunding, rolling the dice
on investments, and appetites for silver bullet alternative investments that help explain the
massive shift to PE and HF despite their fee structures (and can lead to alternatives
managers the profits they took off the funds to help subvert the DB system). The push to
alpha helps create instability and predation in the markets, goes the theory. But in any
case, underfunding by the public sector leads to blame-shifting onto "those workers making
bad investments" and leads to pernicious politics around retirement security.
Unfortunately the employers (including and perhaps worst public employers) used the
upturns in the market as opportunities to reduce what they paid into the funds (as a way to
fund tax cuts and get re-elected). Then after severe downturns in the market rather than
increase the funding for pensions they argue to take away earned pensions from the workers
(or leave the mess to be fixed by federal government).
Nice set of explanations, which leads me to think in the case of public workers in unions
there should be a yearly accounting by the union of employer pension contributions along with
an allowing for quick contract redress should employer contributions fall short for a given
length of time.
DeDude is not entirely correct. In the following example, the problem was powerful
predators, fraud, and corruption, as there was plenty of money, and plenty of foresight.
Where was Union oversight in this fiasco? Or better yet, fiscal accountability on the part
of the Regents for wrongful termination, theft, breach of fiduciary duty? I don't see much
hope, because social memory is short, human nature is flawed, and dynastic wealth in the
hands of sociopaths seeks to defend its economic position until the population rises up in
revolt. Wash, rinse, repeat.
In Illinois, public employee union leaders were probably paid off to keep silent about
pension underfunding. A couple of union leaders benefited from special legislation that
awarded them a nice pension for one day of substitute teaching. The special pension was in a
well funded plan, not the state teachers' plan. The legislation doesn't spell out the quid
pro quo, but experienced observers connect dots like these. The legislature takes care of
public union officials who take care of them.
Tax cuts for the wealthy, see the entire country. The problem is not excessive spending,
but inadequate revenues. The latter as a consequence of unnecessary and destructive tax cuts
for the rich. We already had the lowest effective tax rate on the wealthy in the developed
world before that.
"...The most important current policy development in America is the rollout of the
Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. Most Republican-controlled states are, however,
refusing to implement a key part of the act, the expansion of Medicaid, thereby denying
health coverage to almost five million low-income Americans..."
[That is sad on two levels. First it is sad that "The most important current policy
development in America is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act" instead of robust policies
for creating job and wage growth. Second then of course it is sad "Most Republican-controlled
states are.. refusing to implement ... the expansion of Medicaid... denying health coverage
to almost five million low-income Americans."
And by sad I mean a sad sorry state of affairs that should have a big effect on the
mid-term elections if we get off our duffs and take this to the voting booths.]
One day someone will point out that the value of a municipal bond or a treasury bond is an
"entitlement", just like the value of a pension, SS or Medicare is an "entitlement".
The coupon clipping class needs constant feeding. And the super rich coupon clippers need
a deep pool of poor people to maintain their comfort. So simple, really.
That has been pointed out many times in the book, This Time is Different where we see
defaults on both entitlements. In fact, one of the biggest topics of the post crash era has
been when the usa would default in its bond entitlements.
Not too accurate. Bonds and pensions are contracts and sort of can be thought of as
entitlements since your benefits can be enforced in court. You are entitled to whatever your
counterparty agreed to (so long as you did your part and your counterparty is solvent). SS
and Medicare are not contracts. Treasury could have twice the funds needed to pay for SS
forever and Congress could decide tomorrow to cut benefits 80%. Same with Medicare. The two
programs on your list that people are probably most likely to think of as entitlements are
probably the least like entitlements. Your counterparty can change the rules on you
tomorrow.
"...The answer, I'm sorry to say, is almost surely no.
First of all, they're deeply committed to the view that efforts to aid the poor are
actually perpetuating poverty, by reducing incentives to work..."
"...But our patchwork, uncoordinated system of antipoverty programs does have the effect of
penalizing efforts by lower-income households to improve their position: the more they earn,
the fewer benefits they can collect. In effect, these households face very high marginal tax
rates. A large fraction, in some cases 80 cents or more, of each additional dollar they earn
is clawed back by the government..."
"...we could reduce the rate at which benefits phase out..."
[Then Krugman slips away from reality to embrace center aisle politics.}
"...Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren't always like this. In fact, all of our
major antipoverty programs -- Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit -- used to
have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P..."
{Yeah those were the good old days leading up to financialization for M&A
anticompetitive consolidation of labor market arbitrage, globalization of wages backed by the
abitrage of the exorbitant privilege of US dollar foreign reserves against rising trade
deficits, stagnant wages from both consolidation and globalization, and a rising share of
capital devouted to speculation on equities and derivatives (e.g, commodity futures bets ARE
derivative contracts). Three cheers for center aisle politics. ]
"40 million refugees with no place on this earth to call their home
One for every aimless graduate with nothing else to show for it but loans
And those of us who make a mark using someone else's blood
Our western stain won't wash away, won't vanish in the flood
It sets deeper with each hurricane and tidal wave and war:
We want everything we see and once it's gone we just want more."
Young men without jobs living in the nation with the world's most powerful millitary
establishment will not make the world a better place to live for anyone. Might not even make
it a place to live.
"Republicans weren't always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs --
Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit -- used to have bipartisan support."
I agree and disagree to a point. While the Republican party used to be more moderate, as a
whole, in the past, there was always a conservative wing in the GOP that opposed these
programs.
For example, in 1961, Reagan gave his famous speech on Medicare - declaring that it would
be the end of America as we know it. One day we would be telling stories to our grandchildren
how America used to be the home to free men.
There has always been in element in the GOP to attack safety nets to the point of
hysterical and absurd arguments. Over the years, the conservative wing has grew and become
more vocal.
One of the main differences between liberals and conservatives, is that liberals see our
weak labor markets, poverty, eroding mobility, and increased economic inequality as a market
failure. Conservatives view it as a moral failure.
It seems to me that the somewhat controversial programs of Obamacare and the Federal
Reserve's policies of forward guidance and QE have helped the poor. If Republicans had
successfully blocked them, things would be worse. It's difficult to defend these programs
against critics on the left and right because of the inherent difficulty in defending public
policies given the evidence. It isn't as clear cut as one would like.
Likewise there are the Republicans' austerity policies like the sequester which Obama went
along with.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I think Obamacare and the Fed have helped. I believe fiscal
austerity has hurt. A number of smart people agree with these assessments.
Meaning that reduced income taxation means lower overall government revenues, which means
reduced means to aid the poor by, for instance, adequate HealthCare or the subsidized housing
or paying for postsecondary education that will give them the means to obtain well-paying
jobs.
This sad fact is even more difficult to swallow given that DoD-expenditures have doubled
in the 40 year period ending in 2012. See info-graphic here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/01/defensechart.jpg
. Do we really need all that spending to provide a defense of the nation now that the Cold
War (extant in the 1960s) is over?
The plutocrats erected a statue to Ronnie for having reversed the good that FDR had
wrought by increasing taxation upon them to levels of around 65%, that crept up inevitably to
around 90%.
And, of course, the rich are still benefiting from the beneficial taxation (that peaks out
at 30% in their level of income).
Besides, if the generally recognized Gini Coefficient depicts Income Disparity across all
levels of income, then the US is shown to be the developed country with the worst Income
Fairness of any on earth. (See info-graphic here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_since_WWII.svg
)
MY POINT?
Which means, according to the World Top Incomes Database developed by the Paris School of
Economics? the following: 10% of American households garner about 52% of ALL HOUSEHOLD INCOME
whilst the rest of us 90Percenters scramble after the remaining 48%.
No, the history says that reducing taxes on the rich allows you to borrow and spend,
laying the cost on the middle class. Note, Clinton's tax hike came with budget cuts. Our 2013
tax hike, though meager, results in sequestering.
The problem here is dumbass economists too stupid to come up with any theory of government
that explains supply and demand for government services. So dumbass economists resort to name
calling, blaming their own failure of analysis on the other side. Political scientists are
much worse, all they do is name calling.
{No, the history says that reducing taxes on the rich allows you to borrow and spend,
laying the cost on the middle class.}
Can't imagine where you've concocted this notion from my reply. I posited the premise of
increasing taxes upon our upper-class financial nobility who have reduced 15% of our people
to poverty and serfdom.
{Note, Clinton's tax hike came with budget cuts. Our 2013 tax hike, though meager, results
in sequestering.}
Historical fact of no consequence whatsoever.
The point about raising taxes on the rich is not just about reducing their far to
easily-gained Net Worth. It is to teach that class a lesson about return-on-investment. For
the moment, a level of taxation at only 30% allows them to accumulate vast Net Worth, which
is simply reinvested in interest-bearing accounts for the most part.
Increasing taxation on interest-bearing accounts would induce them to place their savings
in more economy-friendly investments that create jobs. The revenues would also help reduce
deficits and improve government financing of society-friendly policies like a Universal
Public HealthCare Option and Tertiary Education for those who cannot afford it.
These are both common policy rudiments of any modern society in this day and age. Except
the US, of course ...
Moreover, the key point about taxation is this: Whilst an economy should reward
risk-taking, there is no need whatsoever for the pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow to be
unlimited and growing by leaps and bounds because it is too lowly taxed.
Especially not when 15% of fellow Americans are incarcerated below the Poverty Threshold.
That economic fact is unacceptable. And it did not occur because "people are either too
stupid or too lazy".
It occurred because of an inept policy as regards both educational level and our inability
to prevent unskilled work from dislocation abroad.
The Republicans never did care about the poor and are not about to start. The question
that bothers me is when the Democrats will resume working on behalf of the poor.
{The question that bothers me is when the Democrats will resume working on behalf of the
poor.}
Musing about whether that will or will not happen in a blog will certainly not assist in
bringing it about.
Only hard work militating for such an outcome will obtain the necessary results. Which can
only happen if more progressives are voted into the HofR. And it will take a good ten years
of well-considered legislation to right all the wrong that has occurred since the last War on
Poverty in the 1960s.
"... Apparently we have a new definition of democracy - it's when the Democratic party wins. ..."
"... I think Time magazine should be booted off Facebook, Twitter for spreading "misinformation". they sure have thought up some clever euphemisms for ballot box stuffing. ..."
"... "The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged." - George Carlin ..."
"... So, does this article say the Russians didn't interfere in the election, it was everyone else ..."
"... America the freest country in the world where you get to pick one of two THEIR carefully hand selected and groomed candidates from THEIR two approved parties. After that your told to go home and shut up because the people have spoken. ..."
"... I find it interesting that after all this "fortification", Biden is now following most of Trump's "terrible policies" like anti-China, anti-Iran, anti- Venezuela, continued pandering to Israel (of course), keeping troops in Afghanistan, hassling Russia ..."
"... Nope! Color revolution in US is nonsense: it is the only country in the world with no American embassy on its territory! ..."
Apparently we have a new definition of democracy - it's when the Democratic party wins.
Lifes_a_Hoax 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 04:29 PM
No surprise here, all the hallmarks of a color revolution were there, suppression of public
knowledge by the media, censorship of social media, fraudulent election and a fake
insurrection blamed on the opposition. Color revolution 101!
Jewel Gyn 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 09:39 PM
So the modus operandi is the same from the old playbook except that defending democracy is
now weaponised for domestic use. Once the dust is settled, the same "defending democracy"
will be launched against any country that US deemed not to be in line with its narratives. So
often used by US and its allies that you can write a similar script every time.
Pulling The Strings Jewel Gyn 1 hour ago 7 Feb, 2021 12:00 AM
Same old tactic, Radicalize the naive youth who will then in turn spread it, Organize
protests that turn into Riots, The Media will help justify/legitimize the protest, A unknown
Political figure suddenly becomes a serious rival ironically always a Right-wing party even
though they demonize the right in domestic politics for instance at the moment with Alexei
Navalny as you will see the West dodge calling him Right-wing or nationalist and just refer
to him as the opposition or anti-Kremlin.
Godspower Obasuyi 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 10:18 PM
The audacity of the cabal to volunteer information on how the rigged system operates is, to
me, the impressive point of Western civilization. Yet the 'enlightened' masses carry on with
the conviction that the system is equitable.
VaimacaPiru 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 07:10 PM
What I find astonishing is that the American peoples think they have a democracy and that
there is any difference between the two parties, no matter who wins the policy never changes,
Corporate America will still be in charge and aiming at global hegemony, the population will
be more oppressed and have less to eat!!!!
RCBreakenridge VaimacaPiru 22 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 02:52 AM
Even the most transparent of lies becomes believable as truth if told enough times. Watch
US-based media and you'll see that the lies are told consistently and repeatedly day after
week after year. Combine with the removal of critical thinking skills from the education
system and its a surprise the transformation is not proceeding faster.
Eric Johnson 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 05:52 PM
I think Time magazine should be booted off Facebook, Twitter for spreading "misinformation".
they sure have thought up some clever euphemisms for ballot box stuffing.
ClairvoyantHW 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 06:28 PM
this is karma... most US presidents did to other nations what those conspirists did to Trump.
Now the country will suffer through the same problems, other regimes faced, who weren't voted
but installed.
Irish_Diakonos 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 08:33 PM
It was always this way. The US system of democracy is fundamentally flawed by design to
ensure the government of the people by the people for the (rich) people. Only now are the
'people' (i.e. the not rich ones) beginning to notice. Nothing has really changed.
VAdrian 14 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 11:07 AM
"Time magazine is literally admitting that a secret cabal of powerful wealthy elite people
and corporations hijacked our 2020 election by steering media coverage, influencing
perceptions, and changing rules and laws." Just waiting for brainIess zombies to repeat their
favourite mantra: "cUnsPiRacY tHeOrY!"
Pulling The Strings VAdrian 2 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 10:38 PM
Anything that goes against their "Narrative" is a Conspiracy.
Kevin Cormier 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 06:45 PM
So that's why they opened the gates.
WaveWolf Kevin Cormier 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 06:48 PM
At the Capitol? Some of the rioters got in that way. The rest either broke in or overwhelmed
the officers.
RTaccount 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 06:33 PM
The good news is that even the sports fans finally realize this 'democracy' stuff has to
go.
shadow1369 13 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 11:48 AM
So there you have it, the 'election' was fraudulent, not just in the form of ballot rigging,
but in systematic voter manipulation over many months. 'Fortified' is the new term for
'manipulated', and it is clear that the democratic process in the BRA, long a charade, is now
totally controlled by the fascist DNC. There is no point in hunkering down and waiting for
the next election, with every passing day the new regime is entrenching itself, purging
dissent and rounding up the opposition. If decent americans do not unite to overthrow this
tyranny very soon they will be too late.
Pulling The Strings shadow1369 2 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 10:32 PM
It is too late, Capitol Hill was the Reichstag moment for the Democrats.
Mistermal 15 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 09:34 AM
"The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged." - George Carlin
Levin High 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 04:54 PM
So, does this article say the Russians didn't interfere in the election, it was everyone else
March31 19 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 06:18 AM
America the freest country in the world where you get to pick one of two THEIR carefully hand
selected and groomed candidates from THEIR two approved parties. After that your told to go
home and shut up because the people have spoken.
Khanlenin jetguyone 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 09:24 PM
Trump was a lying, violence promoting demagogue. Murdering 8 Iranian officials because they were exploring peace initiatives
in the ME. This had sent reverberations through the ranks of the US military and caused them to go running for their guns. He
pushed the world closer to the edge of environmental collapse and nuclear war. ...
anaisanesse 16 hours ago 6 Feb, 2021 09:12 AM
I find it interesting that after all this "fortification", Biden is now following most of
Trump's "terrible policies" like anti-China, anti-Iran, anti- Venezuela, continued pandering
to Israel (of course), keeping troops in Afghanistan, hassling Russia and supporting the
fool-criminal Navalny, stopping the pipeline from Russia to the EU, leaving Julian Assange to
rot in the UK then get destroyed in the US prisons.
Ohhho 1 day ago 5 Feb, 2021 09:54 PM
Nope! Color revolution in US is nonsense: it is the only country in the world with no
American embassy on its territory!
The United States of America is now a classic oligarchy. The clarity that it has brought to
our situation by recognizing this fact is its only virtue...
"Either the Constitution matters and must be followed . . . or it is simply a piece of
parchment on display at the National Archives."
- Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.
T exas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to
the Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court
discounted that . By refusing to interfere as America's ruling oligarchy serves itself, the
court archived what remained of the American republic's system of equal justice. That much is
clear.
In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic
since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans' movements and interactions are under
strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing
ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together
with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless,
pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have
proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees
with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to
acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released
from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning
government/corporate sentiment. Today's rulers don't try to convince. They demand obedience,
and they punish.
Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s
lived under less ruling class pressure than do today's Americans. And their rulers were smart
enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.
In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life's rules flow
from the people through their representatives.
In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts' claims of
infallibility that dwarf baroque kings' pretensions. In that self-referential sense, the United
States of America is now a classic oligarchy.
The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our
predicament is its only virtue.
Oligarchy had long been growing within America's republican forms. The 2016 election posed
the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not. Consolidation was very much "in the
cards." But how that election and its aftermath led to the fast, thorough, revolution of
American life depended on how Donald Trump acted as the catalyst who clarified, energized, and
empowered our burgeoning oligarchy's peculiarities. These, along with the manner in which the
oligarchy seized power between November 2016 and November 2020, ensure that its reign will be
ruinous and likely short. The prospect that the republic's way of life may thrive among those
who wish it to depends on the manner in which they manage the civil conflict that is now
inevitable.
From Ruling Class to Oligarchy
By the 21st century's first decade, little but formality was left of the American republic.
In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy described the logic by which government and big business tend to
coalesce into socialism in theory, oligarchy in practice. But by then, that logic had already
imposed itself on the Western world. Italy's 1926 Law of Corporations -- fascism's charter --
inaugurated not so much the regulation of business by government as the coalescence of the
twain. Over the ensuing decade, it was more or less copied throughout the West.
In America, the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act's authors had erected barriers against private
oligopolies and monopolies. By maintaining competition between big business, they hoped to
preserve private freedoms and limit government's role. But the Great Depression's pressures and
temptations led to the New Deal's rules that differed little from Italy's. No matter that, as
the Supreme Court pointed out in Schechter Poultry v. U.S . , public-private
amalgamation does not fit in the Constitution. It grew nevertheless alongside the notion that
good government proceeds from the experts' judgment rather than from the voters' choices. The
miracles of production that America brought forth in World War II seemed to validate the
point.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had come to understand large organizations that feed on
government power and dispense vast private benefits, was not shy in warning about the danger
they pose to the republic. His warning about the " military-industrial
complex " that he knew so well is often misunderstood as a mere caution against militarism.
But Ike was making a broader point: Amalgams of public and private power tend to prioritize
their corporate interests over the country's.
That is why Eisenhower cautioned against the power of government-funded expertise. "The
prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and
the power of money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded," he said, because "public
policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Government money
can accredit a self-regarding elite. Because "a government contract becomes virtually a
substitute for intellectual curiosity," government experts can end up substituting their power
for truth.
The expansion of government power throughout the 1960s and '70s in pursuit of improving
education, eradicating poverty, and uplifting blacks created complexes of public-private power
throughout America that surpassed the military-industrial complex in size, and above all in
influence.
Consider education. Post-secondary education increased fourfold, from 9 percent of Americans
holding four-year degrees in 1965 to 36 percent in 2015. College towns became islands of wealth
and political power. From them came endless "studies" that purported to be arbiters of truth
and wisdom, as well as a growing class of graduates increasingly less educated but ever so much
more socio-politically uniform.
In the lower grades, per-pupil expenditure (in constant dollars) went from $3,200 in 1960 to
$13,400 in 2015. That money fueled an even more vast and powerful complex -- one that includes
book publishers, administrators, and labor unions and that has monopolized the minds of at
least two generations. As it grew, the education establishment also detached itself from the
voters' control: In the 1950s, there were some 83,000 public school districts in America. By
2015, only around 13,000 remained for a population twice as large. Today's parents have many
times less influence over their children's education than did their grandparents.
Analogous things happened in every field of life. Medicine came to be dominated by the
government's relationship with drug companies and hospital associations. When Americans went to
buy cars, or even light bulbs and shower nozzles, they found their choices limited by deals
between government, industry, and insurance companies. These entities regarded each other as
"stakeholders" in an oligarchic system. But they had ever less need to take account of mere
citizens in what was becoming a republic in name only. As the 20eth century was drawing to a
close, wherever citizens looked, they saw a government and government-empowered entities over
which they had ever less say, which ruled ever more unaccountably, and whose attitude toward
them was ever less friendly.
The formalities were the last to go. Ever since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D.,
the rulers' dependence on popular assent to expenditures has been the essence of limited
government. Article I, section 9 of the U.S. Constitution enshrines that principle.
Congressional practice embodied it. Details of bills and expenditures were subject to public
hearings and votes in subcommittees, committees, and the floors of both Houses. But beginning
in the early 1980s and culminating in 2007, the U.S government abandoned the appropriations
process.
Until 1981, Congress had used "continuing resolutions" to continue funding government
operations unchanged until regular appropriations could be made. Thereafter, as congressional
leaders learned how easy it is to use this vehicle to avoid exposing what they are doing to
public scrutiny, they legislated and appropriated ever less in public, and increasingly put
Congress' output into continuing resolutions or omnibus bills, amounting to trillions of
dollars and thousands of pages, impossible for representatives and senators to read, and
presented to them as the only alternative to "shutting down the government." This -- now the
U.S government standard operating procedure -- enables the oligarchy's "stakeholders" to
negotiate their internal arrangements free from responsibility to citizens. It is the practical
abolition of Article I section 9 -- and of the Magna Carta itself.
In the 21st century, the American people's trust in government plummeted as they -- on the
political Left as well as on the Right -- realized that those in power care little for them. As
they watched corporate and non-profit officials trade places with public officials and
politicians while getting much richer, they felt impoverished and disempowered. Since the
ruling class embraced Republicans and Democrats, elections seemed irrelevant. The presidential
elections of 2008 and 2012 underlined that whoever won, the same people would be in charge and
that the parceling out of wealth and power among stakeholders would continue.
Americans on the Right were especially aggrieved because the oligarchy had become culturally
united in disdain for Western civilization in general and for themselves in particular. The
cultural warfare it waged on the rest of America inflamed opposition. But it also diluted its
own focus on solidifying profitable arrangements.
By 2016, America was already well into the classic cycles of revolution. The atrophy of
institutions, the waning of republican habits, and the increasing, reciprocal disrespect
between classes that have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways
of life more different from one another, than did the 19th century's Northerners and
Southerners precluded returning to traditional republican life. The election would determine
whether the oligarchy could consolidate itself. More important, it would affect the speed by
which the revolutionary vortex would carry the country, and the amount of violence this would
involve.
The Trump Catalyst
By 2015, the right side of America's challenge to the budding oligarchy was inevitable.
Trump was not inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had begun posing a thorough challenge to
the "stakeholders" most Americans disrespected. Candidate Trump was the more gripping showman.
His popularity came from his willingness to disrespect them, loudly. Because the other 16
Republican candidates ran on different bases, none ever had a chance. Inevitably, victory in a
field so crowded depended on when which minor candidate did or did not withdraw. There never
was a head-to-head choice between Trump and Cruz.
Trump's candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling
class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing
millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have
their being. Since Cruz's candidacy represented the same threat, it almost certainly would have
drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty narratives could have been made up about him
out of whole cloth as easily as about Trump.
But Trump's actual peculiarities made it possible for the oligarchy to give the impression
that its campaign was about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than
about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal consequence of the ruling
class' opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that
defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws,
and truth itself.
Particular individuals had never been the oligarchy's worry. In 2008, as Barack Obama was
running against Hillary Clinton and John McCain -- far cries from Trump -- he pointed to those
Americans who "cling to God and guns" as the problem's root. Clinton's 2016 remark that Trump's
supporters were "a basket of deplorables," -- racists, sexists, homophobes, etc. -- merely
voiced what had long been the oligarchy's consensus judgment of most Americans. For them,
pushing these Americans as far away as possible from the levers of power, treating them as less
than citizens, had already come to define justice and right.
Donald Trump -- his bombastic, hyperbolic style, his tendency to play fast and loose with
truth, even to lie as he insulted his targets -- fit perfectly the oligarchy's image of his
supporters, and lent a color of legitimacy to the utterly illegitimate collusion between the
oligarchy's members in government and those in the Democratic Party running against Trump.
Thus did the FBI and CIA, in league with the major media and the Democratic Party, spy on
candidate Trump, concocting and spreading all manner of synthetic dirt about him. Nevertheless,
to universal surprise, he won, or rather the oligarchy lost, the 2016 election.
The oligarchy's disparate members had already set aside laws, truth, etc. in opposition to
Trump. The realization that the presidency's awesome powers now rested in his hands fostered a
full-court-press #Resistance. Trump's peculiarities helped make it far more successful than
anyone could have imagined.
"Dogs That Bark Do Not Bite"
Applying this observation to candidate Trump's hyperbole suggested that President Trump
might suffer from what Theodore Roosevelt called the most self-destructive of habits, combining
"the unbridled tongue with the unready hand." And, in fact, President Trump neither fired and
referred for prosecution James Comey or the other intelligence officials who had run the
surveillance of his campaign. He praised them, and let himself be persuaded to fire General
Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, who stood in the way of the intelligence
agencies' plans against him. Nor did he declassify and make public all the documents associated
with their illegalities.
Four years later, he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized
officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA's Gina Haspel who likely committed a
crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in office. Days after his own inauguration, he
suffered the CIA's removal of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of
the Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the entire chain of officials
who had made that decision. Instead, he appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and
hostile to himself.
He acted similarly with other agencies. His first secretary of state, secretary of defense,
and national security advisor mocked him publicly. At their behest, in August 2017, he gave a
nationally televised speech in which he effectively thanked them for showing him that he had
been wrong in opposing ongoing war in the Middle East. He railed against Wall Street but left
untouched the tax code's "carried interest" provision that is the source of much unearned
wealth. He railed against the legal loophole that lets Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor
content without retribution, but did nothing to close it. Already by the end of January 2017,
it was clear that no one in Washington needed to fear Trump. By the time he left office,
Washington was laughing at him.
Nor did Trump protect his supporters. For example, he shared their resentment of being
ordered to attend workplace sessions about their "racism." But not until his last months in
office did he ban the practice within the federal government. Never did he ban contracts with
companies that require such sessions.
Thus, as the oligarchy set about negating the 2016 electorate's attempt to stop its
consolidation of power, Trump had assured them that they would neither be impeded as they did
so nor pay a price. Donald Trump is not responsible for the oligarchy's power. But he was
indispensable to it.
#TheResistance rallied every part of the ruling class to mutually supporting efforts.
Nothing encourages, amplifies, or seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of
a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob -- especially when all can be sure they are acting safely,
gratuitously. Success supercharges them. #TheResistance fostered the sense in the ruling class'
members that they are more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined.
It made millions of people feel bigger and better about themselves than they ever
had.
Logic and Dysfunction
Disdain for the "deplorables" united and energized parts of American society that, apart
from their profitable material connections to government, have nothing in common and often have
diverging interests. That hate, that determination to feel superior to the "deplorables" by
treading upon them, is the "intersectionality," the glue that binds, say, Wall Street
coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of public service unions, gender studies
professors, all manner of administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so
on. #TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they
imagine their superior worth entitles them, to their hate for anyone who does not submit
preemptively.
Ruling-class judges sustained every bureaucratic act of opposition to the Trump
Administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every
insinuation, non-stop and unquestioned. #TheResistance made it ruling-class policy that Trump's
and his voters' racism and a host of other wrongdoing made them, personally, illegitimate. In
any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong,
systemically. By 2018, the ruling class had effectively placed the "deplorables" outside the
protection of the laws. By 2020, they could be fired for a trifle, set upon in the streets,
prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, and even for defending themselves.
Because each and every part of the ruling coalition's sense of what may assuage its
grievances evolves without natural limit, this logic is as insatiable as it is powerful. It is
also inherently destructive of oligarchy.
Enjoyment of power's material perquisites is classic oligarchy's defining purpose. Having
conquered power over the people, successful oligarchies foster environments in which they can
live in peace, productively. Oligarchy, like all regimes, cannot survive if it works at
cross-purposes. But the oligarchy that seized power in America between 2016 and 2020 is engaged
in a never-ending seizure of ever more power and the infliction of ever more punishment -- in a
war against the people without imaginable end. Clearly, that is contrary to what the Wall
Street magnates or the corps of bureaucrats or the university administrators or senior
professors want. But that is what the people want who wield the "intersectional" passions that
put the oligarchy in power.
As the oligarchy's every part, every organ, raged against everything Trump, it made itself
less attractive to the public even as Trump's various encouragements of economic activity were
contributing to palpable increases in prosperity.
Hence, by 2019's end, Trump was likely to win reelection. Then came COVID-19.
The
COVID Fortuna
The COVID-19 virus is no plague. Though quite contagious, its infection/fatality rate (IFR),
about 0.01 percent, is that of the average flu, and its effects are generally so mild that most
whom it infects never know it.
Like all infections, it is deadly to those weakened severely by other causes. It did not
transform American life by killing people, but by the fears about it that our oligarchy
packaged and purveyed. Fortuna , as Machiavelli reminds us, is inherently submissive to whoever
bends her to his wishes. The fears and the strictures they enabled were not about health -- if
only because those who purveyed and imposed them did not apply them to themselves. They were
about power over others.
COVID's politicization began in February 2020 with the adoption by the World Health
Organization -- which is headed by an Ethiopian bureaucrat beholden to China -- and upon
recommendation of non-scientist Bill Gates, of a non-peer-reviewed test for the infection. The
test's chief characteristic is that its rate of positives to negatives depends on the number of
cycles through which the sample is run. More cycles, more positives. Hence, every test result
is a "soft" number. Second, the WHO and associated national organizations like the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control reported COVID's spread by another "soft" number: "confirmed cases." That
is, sick persons who tested positive for the virus.
When this number is related to that of such persons who then die, the ratio -- somewhat
north of 5 percent -- suggests that COVID kills one out of 20 people it touches. But that is an
even softer number since these deaths include those who die with COVID rather than of it, as
well as those who may have had COVID. Pyramiding such soft numbers, mathematical modelers
projected millions of deaths. Scary for the unwary, but pure fantasy.
For example, the U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which modeled the
authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based, also predicted COVID-19
deaths for Sweden, which did not lock down. On May 3, the IHME predicted that Sweden would
suffer 2,800 COVID deaths a day within the next two weeks. The actual number was 38. Reporting
on COVID has never ceased to consist of numbers as scary as they are soft.
Literate persons know that, once an infectious disease enters a population, nothing can
prevent it from infecting all of it, until a majority has developed antibodies after
contracting it -- so-called community immunity or herd immunity. But fear leads people to
empower those who promise safety, regardless of how empty the promises. The media pressed
governments to do something . The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan screamed: "don't panic is
terrible advice." The pharmaceutical industry and its Wall Street backers salivated at the
prospect of billions of government money for new drugs and vaccines. Never mind the little
sense it makes for millions of people to accept a vaccine's non-trivial risk to protect against
a virus with trivial consequences for themselves. All manner of officials yearned to wield
unaccountable power.
Because the power to crush the general population's resistance to itself is the oligarchy's
single-minded focus, it was able to bend fears of COVID to that purpose. Thus, it gathered more
power with more consequences than the oligarchs could have imagined.
But only President Trump's complaisance made this possible. His message to the American
people had been not to panic, be mindful of the scientific facts -- you can't stop it, and it's
not that bad -- while mitigating its effects on vulnerable populations. But on March 15, Trump
bent, and agreed to counsel people to suspend normal life for two weeks to "slow the spread,"
so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Two weeks later, the New York Times crowed that
Trump, having been told "hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country
reopened too soon," had been stampeded into "abandoning his goal of reopening the country by
Easter." He agreed to support the "experts'" definition of what "soon" might mean. By
accrediting the complex of government, industry, and media's good faith and expertise, Trump
validated their plans to use COVID as a vehicle for enhancing their power.
Having seized powers, the oligarchs used them as weapons to disrupt and disaggregate the
parts of American society they could not control.
The economic effects of lockdowns and social distancing caused obvious pain. Tens of
millions of small businesses were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. More than 40
million Americans filed claims for unemployment assistance. Uncountable millions of farmers and
professionals had their products and activities devalued. Millions of careers, dreams that had
been realized by lifetimes of work, were wrecked. Big business and government took over their
functions. Within nine months, COVID-19 had produced 28 new billionaires .
Surplus and scarcity of food resulted simultaneously because the lockdowns closed most
restaurants and hotels. As demand shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution
networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly, millions of gallons of milk were poured
down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs, and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle
were destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit were plowed under. Prices in the markets
rose. Persons deprived of work with less money with which to pay higher prices struggled to
feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants. By
intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government
joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin's Soviet Union and Castro's Cuba.
But none of these had ever shut down a whole nation's entire medical care except for one
disease. Hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected
COVID flood. Emergency rooms were closed to the poor people who get routine care there. Forget
about dentistry. Most Americans were left essentially without medical care for most of a year.
Human bodies' troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate
how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will cause yet.
The oligarchy's division of all activity into "essential" -- meaning permitted -- and
"nonessential" -- to be throttled at will -- had less obvious but more destructive effects.
Private clubs, as well as any and all gatherings of more than five or 10 people, were banned.
Churches were forbidden to have worship services or to continue social activities. The "social
distancing" and mask mandates enforced in public buildings and stores, and often on the
streets, made it well-nigh impossible for people to communicate casually. Thus, was that part
of American society that the oligarchy did not control directly disarticulated, and its members
left alone to face unaccountable powers on which they had to depend.
Meanwhile, the media became the oligarchy's public relations department. Very much including
ordinary commercial advertising, it hammered home the oligarchy's line that COVID restrictions
are good, even cool. These restrictions reduced the ideas available to the American people to
what the mass media purveyed and the social media allowed. Already by April 2020, these used
what had become near-monopoly power over interpersonal communications to censor such
communications as they disapproved. Political enforcers took it upon themselves even to cancel
statements by eminent physicians about COVID that they judged to be "misleading." Of course,
this betrayed the tech giants' initial promise of universal access. It is also
unconstitutional. (In Marsh v. Alabama , decided in 1946, the
Supreme Court barred private parties from acting as de facto governments). Since these
companies did it in unison, they also violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. But the ruling
class that had become an oligarchy applauded their disabling whatever might be conducive to
conservatives' interests and inconvenient to their own candidates.
Private entities wielding public powers in coordination with each other without having to
observe any of government's constitutional constraints is as good a definition of oligarchy as
there is. Oligarchy had increasingly taken power in the buildup to the 2020 election. In its
aftermath, it would try to suffocate America.
Sovereignty of the Vote Counters
The oligarchy's proximate objective, preventing the 2020 presidential election from
validating the previous one's results, overrode all others. The powers it had seized under
COVID's cover, added to the plethora that it had exercised since the 2016 campaign's beginning,
had surely cowered some opposition. But as November 2020 loomed, no one could be sure how much
it also had energized.
Few people were happy to be locked down. It was a safe bet that not a few were unhappy at
being called systemically racist. The oligarchy, its powers notwithstanding, could not be sure
how people would vote. That is why it acted to take the presidential election's outcome out of
the hands of those who would cast the votes and to place it as much as possible in the hands of
its members who would count the votes.
Intentionally, traditional procedures for voting leave no discretion to those who count the
votes. Individuals obtain and cast ballots into a physical or electronic box only after showing
identification that matches their registration. Ballot boxes are opened and their contents
counted by persons representing the election's opposing parties. Persons registered to vote
might qualify to vote-by-mail by requesting a ballot, the issuance and receipt of which is
checked against their registration. Their ballots are counted in the same bipartisan
manner.
The Democratic Party had long pressed to substitute universal voting by mail -- meaning that
ballots would be sent to all registered voters, in some states to anyone with a driver's
license whether they asked for them or not and regardless of whether these persons still lived
at the address on the rolls or were even alive. The ballots eventually would arrive at the
counting centers, either through the mail, from drop boxes, or through "harvesters" who would
pick them up from the voters who fill them out, and who may even help them to fill them out.
Security, if any, would consist of machine-matching signatures on the ballot and on the
envelope in which it had come. The machine's software can be dialed to greater or lesser
sensitivity.
But doing away with scrutiny of ballots counted by representatives of the election's
contenders removes the last possibility of ensuring the ballot had come from a real person
whose will it is supposed to represent. Once the link between the ballot and the qualified
person is broken, nothing prevents those in charge of the electoral process from excluding and
including masses of ballots as they choose. The counters become the arbiters.
Attorney General William Barr pointed out the obvious: Anyone, in America or abroad, can
print up any number of ballots, mark them, and deliver them for counting to whoever is willing
to accept them and run them through their machines. Since the counters usually dispose of the
envelopes in which ballots arrive -- thus obviating any possibility of tracing the ballot's
connection to a voter -- they may even dispense of the fiction that there had ever been any
signed envelopes. That is especially true of late-found ballots. Who knows where they came
from? Who cares to find out?
Only in a few one-party Democratic states was universal vote-by-mail established by law.
Elsewhere, especially in the states sure to be battlegrounds in the presidential election,
mail-in voting was introduced by various kinds of executive or judicial actions. Questions of
right and wrong aside, the Constitution's Article II section 1's words -- "Each State shall
appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct " -- makes such actions
unconstitutional on their face. Moreover, in these states -- Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
and Wisconsin -- the counting of votes in the most populous counties is firmly in the hands of
Democratic Party bosses with a well-documented history of fraud.
To no one's surprise, the 2020 presidential election was decided by super-majorities for the
Democratic candidate precisely from these counties in these states. Yes, Trump's percentage of
the vote fell in certain suburbs. But Trump received some 11 million more votes in 2020 than
four years earlier, and nearly doubled the share of votes he received from blacks. The
Democrats' gain of some 15 million votes came exclusively from mail-in ballots, and their
victory in the Electoral College came exclusively from the supermajorities piled up in these
corrupt counties -- the only places where Trump's share of the black vote was cut by
three-quarters. Did people there really think so differently?
This is not the place to recount the list of affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury by
persons who observed ballot stuffing, nor the statistical anomaly of successive batches of
votes that favored Biden over Trump by precisely the same amounts, of un-creased (i.e., never
mailed) ballots fed into counting machines, nor the Georgia video of suitcases of ballots being
taken from under tables and inserted into counting machines after Republican observers had been
ousted. Suffice it to note that references to these events have been scrubbed from the
Internet. It is more important to keep in mind that, in America prior to 2020, sworn affidavits
that crimes have been committed had invariably been probable cause for judicial, prosecutorial,
or legislative investigations. But for the first time in America, the ruling class dismissed
them with: "You have no proof!" A judge (the sister of Georgia's Stacey Abrams) ruled that even
when someone tells the U.S. Postal Service they have moved, their old address is still a lawful
basis for them to cast a ballot. Certainly, proof of crime is impossible with such judges and
without testimony under oath, or powers of subpoena.
Just as important, Republicans in general and the Trump White House in particular bear heavy
responsibility for failing to challenge the patent illegality of the executive actions and
consent decrees that enabled inherently insecure mail-in procedures in real-time, as they were
being perpetrated in key states. No facts were at issue. Only law. The constitutional
violations were undeniable.
Pennsylvania et. al. answered Texas's late lawsuit by arguing it demanded the invalidation
of votes that had been cast in good faith. True. But Texas argued that letting stand the
results of an election carried out contrary to the Constitution devalued the votes cast in
states such as Texas that had held the election in a constitutional manner. Also true. Without
comment, the Supreme Court chose to privilege the set of voters on the oligarchy's side over
those of their opponents. Had the lawsuit come well before the election, no such choice would
have existed. Typically, the Trump Administration substituted bluster for action.
The
Oligarchy Rides its Tigers
Winning the 2020 election had been the objective behind which the oligarchy had coalesced
during the previous five years. In 2021, waging socio-political war on the rest of America is
what the oligarchy is all about.
The logic of hate and disdain of ordinary Americans is not only what binds the oligarchy
together. It is the only substitute it has for any moral-ethical-intellectual point of
reference. Donald Trump's impotent, inglorious reaction to his defeat offered irresistible
temptations to the oligarchy's several sectors to celebrate victory by vying to hurt whoever
had supported the president. But permanent war against some 74 million fellow citizens is a
foredoomed approach to governing.
The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of "normalcy." Instead, its victory
enabled the oligarchy's several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference
as "white supremacists," "insurrectionists," and Nazis -- in short, as some kind of criminals
-- to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps
even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for
prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state's legislature legislated any of this. Rather,
the several parts of America's economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this
war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.
Perhaps most important, they do so without thought of how a war against at least some 74
million fellow citizens might end. The people in the oligarchy's corporate components seem to
want only to adorn unchallenged power with a reputation for "wokeness." For them, causing pain
to their opponents is a pleasure incidental to enjoying power's perquisites. The Biden family's
self-enrichment by renting access to influence is this oligarchy's standard.
But the people who dispense that reputation -- not just the professional revolutionaries of
Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but "mainstream" racial and gender activists and self-appointed
virtue-crats, have appetites as variable as they are insatiable. For them, rubbing conservative
America's faces in excrement is what it's all about. A Twitter video viewed by 2.6 million
people urges them to form "an army of citizen detectives" to ferret out conservatives from
among teachers, doctors, police officers, and "report them to the authorities." No doubt,
encouraged by President Biden's characterization of opponents as "domestic terrorists," any
number of "authorities" as well as private persons will find opportunities to lord it over
persons not to their taste. This guarantees endless clashes, and spiraling violence.
Joseph Biden, Kamala Harris, and the people they appoint to positions of official
responsibility are apparatchiks, habituated to currying favor and pulling rank. They have
neither the inclination nor the capacity to persuade the oligarchy's several parts to agree to
a common good or at least to a modus vivendi among themselves, never mind with conservative
America. This guarantees that they will ride tigers that they won't even try to dismount.
At this moment, the oligarchy wields an awesome complex of official and unofficial powers to
exclude whomever it chooses from society's mainstream. Necessarily, however, exclusions cut
both ways. Invariably, to banish another is to banish one's self as well. Google, Facebook, and
Twitter let it be known that they would exclude anything with which they disagree from what had
become the near-universal means of communication. They bolstered that by colluding to destroy
their competitor, Parler. Did they imagine that 74 million Americans could find no means of
communicating otherwise? Simon and Schuster canceled a book by Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)
critical of communications monopolies. Did its officials imagine that they would thereby do
other than increase the book's eventual sales, and transfer some of their customers to Hawley's
new publisher ? The media effectively suppressed inconvenient news. Did they imagine that
this would prevent photos of Black Lives Matter professionals in the forefront of the January 6
assault on the U.S. Capitol from reaching the public?
In sum, intending to relegate conservative America to society's servile sidelines, the
oligarchy's members drew a clear, sharp line between themselves and that America. By telling
conservative Americans "these institutions and corporations, are ours, not yours," they freed
conservative America of moral obligations toward them and themselves. By abandoning
conservative America, they oblige conservative America to abandon them and seek its own
way.
Clarity, Leadership, and Separation
To think of conservative America's predicament as an opportunity is as hyperbolic as it was
for Machiavelli to begin the conclusion of The Prince by observing that "in order to know
Moses' virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt, and to know the
greatness of Cyrus's spirit that the Persians be oppressed by the Medes, and to know the
excellence of Theseus, that the Athenian people be dispersed, so at the present, in order to
know the virtue of an Italian spirit it was necessary that Italy reduce herself to the
conditions in which she is at present . . ."
Machiavelli's lesson is that the clarity of situations such as he mentions, and such as is
conservative America's following the 2020 election, is itself valuable. Clarity makes illusions
of compromise untenable and points to self-reliant action as the only reasonable path. The
people might or might not be, as he wrote, "all ready and disposed to follow the flag if only
someone were to pick it up." But surely, someone picking up the flag is the only alternative to
servitude.
What, in conservative America's current predicament, might it mean to "pick up the flag?"
Electoral politics remains open to talented, courageous, ambitious leadership. In Florida and
South Dakota, Governors Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem have used their powers to make room for
ways of life different from and more attractive than that in places wholly dominated by the
oligarchy. Texas and Idaho as well attract refugees from such as California and New York by
virtue of such differences with life there as their elected officials have been able to
maintain. Governmental and corporate pressures on such states to conform to the oligarchy's
standards, sure to increase, are opportunities for their officials to lead their people's
refusal to conform by explaining why doing this is good, and by personally standing in the way.
They may be sure that President Kamala Harris would not order federal troops to shoot at state
officials for closing abortion clinics or for excluding men from women's bathrooms.
For more than a generation, a majority of Americans have expressed growing distrust of, and
alienation from, the establishment. The establishment, not Donald Trump, made this happen. That
disparate majority, in many ways at cross purposes with itself, demands leadership. Pollster
Patrick Caddell's in-depth study of the American electorate, which he titled "We Need Smith," showed how the themes that
made it possible for the hero of the 1939 movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to prevail
against the establishment then are even more gripping now and appeal to a bigger majority.
Trump was a bad copy of Mr. Smith.
More than ever, an audience beyond the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump hungers for
leadership. The oligarchy came together by ever more vigorously denigrating and suppressing
these deplorables. Already before the 20th century's turn, the FBI and some elements in the
Army and the Justice Department had concluded that they are somehow criminal, and that
preparations should be made to treat them as such. The official position of the administration
taking power after the 2020 election is that domestic terrorism from legions of "white
supremacists" is the primary threat facing America. No wonder those so designated for outlawry
demand protection.
The path to electoral leadership is straightforward. Whoever would lead the deplorables-plus
must explain their cause to friend and foe, make it his own, and grow it by leading successful
acts of resistance.
Increasingly, conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power. Whoever
would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle's 1941 basic rule for la résistance :
refrain from individual or spontaneous acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. But join
with thousands in what amount to battles to defeat the enemy's initiatives, weaken his grip on
power, and prepare his defeat. Thus, an aspirant to the presidency in 2024, in the course of
debunking the narrative by which the oligarchy seized so much power over America, might lead
millions to violate restrictions placed on those who refuse to wear masks. Or, as he pursues
legislative and judicial measures to abolish the compulsory racial and gender sensitivity
training sessions to which public and private employees are subjected, he might organize
employees in a given sector unanimously to stay away from them in protest. They can't all be
fired or held back.
Such a persuasive prospective president, or president, could finish the process that,
beginning circa 2010, initiated the process of reshaping the Republican Party into something
like Caddell's Mr. Smith would have personified.
Electoral politics, however, is the easy part. Major corporations, private and semi-private
institutions such as schools, publishing houses, and media, are the oligarchy's deepest
foundations. These having become hostile, conservative Americans have no choice but to populate
their own. This is far from impossible.
Sorting ourselves out into congenial groups has been part of America's DNA since 1630, when
Roger Williams led his followers out of Massachusetts to found Providence Plantations. In the
19th century, the Mormons left unfriendly environments to establish their own settlements.
Since 1973, Americans who believe in unborn children's humanity have largely ceased to
intermarry with those who do not. Nobody decided this should happen. It is in the logic of
diverging cultures.
As American primary and secondary education's dysfunction became painfully apparent, parents
of all races have fled the public schools as fast as they could. Businesses have been fleeing
the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt for generations. When Democratic governors and mayors used COVID
to make life difficult in their jurisdictions, people moved out of them. When Twitter's
censorship of conservatives became undeniable, Parler added customers by the hundreds of
thousands each day. Facebook and Twitter's stock lost $50 billion in a week. Much more
separation follows from the American people's diverging cultures.
As conservative America sorts itself out from oligarchy's social bases, it may be able to
restore something like what had existed under the republic. Effectively, two regimes would have
to learn to coexist within our present boundaries. But that may be the best, freest,
arrangement possible now for the United States.
"Oh say, can you see! By Dawn's early light; a pro-dollar trade; that puts the bears to
flight?" Bloomberg Daybreak this morning boldly states "American exceptionalism is back"
(baby). Apparently better-than-expected data and corporate earnings and the prospects of fiscal
stimulus show the USA is still the global standout after all. As a result, bearish USD trades
touted for the first month of the year need to suddenly be unwound: EUR is now back below 1.20,
AUD is clinging to 0.76, and JPY is past 105.50, while as an EM proxy, MXN is back to 20.38 at
time of writing vs. 19.55 on January 21.
... ... ...
President Biden has called on the military in Myanmar to relinquish power after their recent
coup. What happens when they refuse? A signature criticism of the Obama foreign policy team was
its refusal to match US rhetoric (e.g., "pivot to Asia") with any substantive action (e.g., in
the South China Sea or Syria). The new team gave interviews before assuming office saying they
had learned these lessons. So what options with teeth does the US have for the generals in
Naypidaw to back their demand? Sanctions are meaningless for a group who rarely travel abroad
and whom can look to China for support if needed, despite their coolness towards Beijing to
date.
This underlines the need for any top dog (or cat) to build up a pack (or clowder). Here
again we see problems. Many articles have been written about the new US administration's call
for the EU to stand alongside it to create new global frameworks favourable to the West (and by
extension for USD) and not China (and CNY); and about how the EU is not willing to step up to
that plate because of French exceptionalism and German Merkel-cantilism. Macron now says
the EU should not gang up on China with the US : " This kind of common front against China
risks pushing Beijing to lower its cooperation on issues like combatting climate change, and
exacerbating its aggressive behaviour in Asia, including in the South China Sea, " he says. So
will the US response then have to be Trumpian and EUR negative, like last time? If not, then
what exactly?
Of course, the previous administration had been building bridges to India, which has its own
issues with China. However, this relationship is still in its early stages, and India has
traditionally looked to Russia for muscle, a role Moscow would be happy to play again. In that
regard, the White House backing large anti-government protests in New Delhi against an
agricultural reform programme ostensibly to the US's liking, and criticizing the government for
cutting off the internet to try to disrupt them, is unlikely to help build bridges: indeed,
India has already drawn comparisons to the events of 6 January in the US Capitol, showing the
US is not as exceptional as it likes to project it is. These kind of shifts can matter, even if
this is just one small step on a much longer journey (and USD trend channel).
Meanwhile, the Aussie government (which has also never and will never target house prices,
"just land, bricks, mortar, etc.") might be wondering what the US will help do about a report
that
a Chinese company is planning to build a new city on a Papua New Guinea island near Australia's
northern border . 'New Daru City' allegedly includes an industrial zone, seaport, business
and commercial zone, along with a resort and residential area. Will Canberra regard this as a
market-driven response to the well-known Chinese demand for lifestyle residences in the vibrant
cultural hub that is the PNG hinterland, or as a Bond-villain project to develop a port just
200km from their Northern Territory? The PNG Prime Minister himself says he is "unaware" of
this proposal(!) Yes, this may well not come to pass; but one can again see the paving stones
being prepared for alternative paths for currencies like AUD, USD, and CNY (to say nothing of
PNG's Kina) to travel over the course of the 2020s.
Meanwhile, the US can at least rely on the UK, as usual, where yesterday saw regulators ban
China's CGTN TV news service, and the Telegraph also reports that three Chinese spies posing as
journalists have just been expelled from the country. Somehow, along with the whole BNO
passports issue, this is not likely to help ensure the "golden era" of Sino-British relations
promised under previous UK leadership.
But will it ensure a golden era of Bido-BoJo relations? That is another path as yet
untrod.
Happy Friday! "We love it so much, I think you do too."
Orwell's 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual.
LetThemEatRand 2 hours ago
The loss of freedom could be represented by a hockey stick chart. As someone in my 50's, I
can attest that it was very gradual up until around 2000. Now the chart is going straight up,
hockey stick style. If you invested in the Elimination Of Freedom (EOF) in 2000, you would be
very happy right now and shopping Lambos.
the_pencil 2 hours ago
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
~~HST
overbet 2 hours ago remove link
Its to the point they just come up with lies and just agree this is the truth now we're
all going to accept then repeat it over and over. So many know theyre blatant lies, but they
eventually get accepted.
Some of their lies are as outrageous as somthing like water is dry. Thats the truth now
we're all going to agree that water is dry. If you dont think water is dry youre a
terrorist.
Progressive reporter Jordan Chariton had the change of heart after YouTube took down one of
his videos.
Chariton's original advocacy for censorship occurred when he called for Big Tech giants to
target anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
"EVERY media outlet that pushed this INSANE election fraud conspiracy for clicks should be
taken off the air. They've incited a Civil War," Chariton tweeted on January 6, the date of the
Capitol breach.
A leftist journalist expressed regret about calling for Silicon Valley to censor content
after it happened to him.
Progressive reporter Jordan Chariton had the change of heart after YouTube took down one of
his videos.
Chariton's original advocacy for censorship occurred when he called for Big Tech giants to
target anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
"EVERY media outlet that pushed this INSANE election fraud conspiracy for clicks should be
taken off the air. They've incited a Civil War," Chariton tweeted on January 6, the date of the
Capitol breach.
However, after YouTube pulled video from his own channel featuring footage of the January 6
riot for violating the platform's policies against "spam and deceptive practices," the Chariton
reversed his position.
"With time to reflect, & seeing Silicon Valley's censorship onslaught, I regret this
tweet made in [the] heat of moment," the progressive journalist wrote. "Whether certain
cable/YouTube outlets mislead audiences w/ dishonest claims lacking real evidence, they
shouldn't be targeted." Jordan
@JordanChariton · Feb 3 THREAD: With time to
reflect, & seeing Silicon Valley's censorship onslaught, I regret this tweet made in heat
of moment. Whether certain cable/YouTube outlets mislead audiences w/ dishonest claims lacking
real evidence, they shouldn't be targeted...
Chariton noted that with the precedent having been set for blanket censorship, progressive
content was also now being unfairly targeted, while pointing out that big left-wing networks
with friendly YouTube ties like the Young Turks were not calling it out.
In a subsequent interview, the journalist noted that the purge of right-wing content was
merely an excuse for YouTube to "get rid of" all content that questioned the consensus on
subjects such as healthcare or U.S. foreign policy.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ji1olH2geJA
Chariton pointed out that big networks like CNN that carried the exact same footage from
January 6 were not targeted at all by YouTube.
@DonaldJTrumpJr So I
guess daddy is breaking another promise he made? He said if he lost this election we would
never see him again. When is he going to get lost for good?
@DonaldJTrumpJr Key
phrase "if he lost the election" . He is not going anywhere & after he is acquitted for
the 2nd impeachment sham. He will continue to command more attention & influence than the
impostors controlling DC. The next 4 years will be even more entertaining than the last
4.
"Alexandria Ocasio Smollett" and "AOC Lied" trended on Twitter amidst backlash over
Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's tale of her experiences during the
Capitol Riot.
The New York Democrat has repeatedly said she feared for her life, describing how she hid
in her office bathroom after hearing loud banging and shouting on Jan. 6 before a Capitol
Police officer burst into her office.
Critics pointed out that her office is not in the United States Capitol building, which
rioters stormed that day, but in the Cannon office building down the street.
The thing to really wonder about is how society is changing and what that means for
financial markets. After all, it's the madness of crowds, sentiment and human behaviours that
drive market prices. Modern communications via immediate 24/7 news, social media, the ease and
gamification of trading, and the influences of inputs such as Reddit and Fake News are changing
the way markets function. It was revealing how quickly a loose internet shock-flock of aligned
retail investors swiped the market this week.
Their anger at the financial machine was palpable. They demonstrate a fundamental change at
the heart of market capitalism.
The basis of " shareholder capitalism " was best summed up by Gordon Gecko: "Greed is Good"
. It was utterly corrupting. Anything to improve returns to the owners, the shareholders, was
apparently justified. It was justified by the belief free markets would achieve an equilibrium
where shareholders would make optimal profits by providing maximum utility to their
customers.
Just like communism, it didn't quite work out the way the economists and sociologists
predicted. Everyone talks a good talk about fair shares of the cake, but try a simple
experiment and ask you kids to divide it. Everyone wants a bigger slice. (My father's solution
was simple: whoever cuts the cake chooses last.)
In reality nothing is really fair. Inequality is a driver of the human condition. Companies
cut corners to improve their share of the cake - often the management sneak in and take the
rewards, cutting out shareholders and customers. To make profits big corporates will compromise
what they can: safety, the environment, law and justice – everything from poisoning the
planet, unsafe aircraft, or bursting dams. Costs were seen as externalities addressed through
insurance, or hiring the best lawyers.
Its no wonder we now have kickback against it, and a new mantra of "stakeholder" capitalism
trying to ensure we all get that fairer slice of the pie.
Every single big investor now swears by their strict adoption of the principals and
importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Environment, Social and Governance (ESG)
investment, and Sustainability. (I have serious concerns these valid and laudable goals have
been diminished into mere tickbox investing by corporate bureaucracy.)
Yet for all the noise and stakeholders sharing the pie, we are still seeing the steepest
ever transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Income inequality is rising. Across the
Occidental Western economies the poor have become desperately poor. Witness the growth in
Foodbanks in Europe and the US and the success of Marcus Rashford in addressing the appalling
reality of kids arriving in school unfed, penalising their life chances from the get-go.
And it's not just the poorest in society. The middle classes have also been hollowed out by
the difficulties of stretching static incomes to cover every rising living costs, and
TAXES.
Oh yes these two great certainties in life; death and taxes. Except . If you are rich enough
..
As we've seen the concept of Shareholder capitalism stopped delivering anything much to any
but the wealthiest. Since 2008, and particularly since the outbreak of the Covid Pandemic,
we've seen the bulk of QE money creation and government stimulus work its way into financial
assets, with the effect of driving up the price of stocks. As I wrote a few weeks ago a rough
number is that $3 trillion out of $5 trillion subsidy money in the US has gone into the pockets
of the richest in society through the inflation of their financial assets.
Try and explain how that has worked – will immediately get you branded a communist.
But it's really simple. Stocks go up because bond yields are so low – and bond yields are
so low because its policy. How to correct it?
This is why Taxes are really interesting.
If you look at the new generation of the uber-wealthy Tech barons, and the last US
President, they all share a common theme – the belief that minimising tax payments is a
signal of entrepreneurial genius. However, the reality, at the end of the day, is tax
optimisation through complex tax structures is pretty much the same as tax evasion.
Ask any right of centre American what raising taxes would do to the economy – and they
will immediately counter it's the success of tax cuts that's driven growth and markets. Tax
cuts/handouts to the rich are credited as the singular success of the last White House
administration – creating thousands of low-paid jobs across the states. If you were to
tax the rich they wouldn't invest their money in job creation, and there would be no trickle
down to the poor. Even questioning the efficacy of tax burdens on the rich could apparently
shake the edifice of US shareholder capitalism to the ground.
The thing is.. we might not actually need taxes at all. If central banks can create
limitless money with zero consequences, then why does anyone have to pay taxes? Let the rich
keep it all and we can print more money to keep the poor happy.
But Taxes have an important role in society. They are a fee members of society pay to be
part of it – you work in order to pay the taxes that allow you membership of society. The
more you pay, the greater your contribution – the more society should value you. You want
the benefits of society, then be willing to pay for it.
In an ideal world we would laud billionaires for their hard work, effort, and paying the
bulk of their earnings in taxes to raise the up rest of us. Instead, they impress their equals
by avoiding taxes, while the rest of us increasingly resent their conspicuous wealth –
earned off our backs which is very much how anyone under 30 working hard to save a deposit for
a rabbit-hutch flat they can never afford increasingly feels about the world.
We are only now beginning to questioning tax equality and tax evasion. The papers will make
some righteous noise about the dislikeable high-street retailer who has emptied the company
pension fund to finance his yachts in a tax-haven, or it might expose a singer who has not paid
a penny in tax. We almost feel sympathy for the entertainer whose stellar career ends up on the
skids because they can't meet a tax-demand.
We regard the Inland Revenue as the ultimate baddie for harassing us to pay our modest
amounts of tax – it's easy for them to go after little people. If they try to catch the
big tax-avoiders they face a battery of lawyers and accountants and deliberately complex webs
to be unravelled.
In short, the rich get away with not paying Tax while poor get harassed and get poorer.
Inequality rises.
And this where we return to Norges Bank and why their decision to act on bad tax players is
so critical.
NBIM own 1.5% of the global stock market, with stakes in over 9ooo companies. They've not
named the seven stocks they dumped – there is no blacklist, it says – but clearly
it should set every CFO thinking about their tax transparency – including paying tax
where value creation takes place. That's a clear shot across the bows for any of the big tech
firms currently selling stuff over the internet, delivering it your front door and booking all
the revenues somewhere low tax, and repatriating profits via somewhere that's agreed a
zero-taxes deal in exchange for opening a HQ office.
Some of the most valuable firms on the planet have the least transparent tax policies. Just
saying but there is a fascinating article in the Garuniad y'day: "Inside
the mind of Jeff Bezos". It reports Jeff (till recently the richest guy on the planet)
saying: " the only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my
Amazon winnings into space travel ."
Personally, I would love to mine asteroids, but Bezos could probably ensure every child on
the planet has access to clean water, or cure cancer and have statues to himself erected across
the planet proclaiming what a wonderful philanthropic champion.
Or he and every single other billionaire could just pay taxes, thankful for the
opportunities they had to realise their dreams building their companies, while making society
better. I'm not saying take every penny – but let's be realistic who can spend a couple
of billion dollars? Even the first Mrs Blain would have struggled with that one (although I
suspect young Ms Blain could make a significant dent )
I know exactly what posts will be made on this website and Zerohedge on this article. I will
be screamed at for being a socialist. Some libertarian idiot will call himself "John Galt" and
declare a belief that helping others is weakness. Not interested. The only way we make the
world better as politicians keep reminding us – is to remember we are in this together,
on a very small planet. [ZH: 'fair and balanced' - everyone deserves to speak their mind and be
heard.]
High taxation economies – like the Scandinavians – tend to be fairly happy
places. Entrepreneurs live well and are held in high regard. Their taxes fund social provision,
health and education that are the envy of the rest of us.
In low tax countries the wealth creators live in bunker complexes protected by guards while
the masses eke out their miserable crusts .
There's really almost no difference between the Republican and the Democratic party where
their difference revolves around what I would call societal or ethical issues, which are not
unimportant but they're not social or political issues. You have this kind of, well, Freud
called fratricide, centered around the narcissism of minor difference. That's essentially what
we're seeing. It's essentially sweeping up because we're all All of our profiles are available,
our own proclivities and habits and prejudices and then feeding it back to us.
Chris Hedges:
The danger of this is that you're creating a wider, wider divide where people can no longer
communicate, where nothing is based on verifiable fact or truth and I fault the left as much as
the right for this. The whole obsession with Russia [gate 00:14:04], the whole attempt to blame
the election of Trump on Moscow was really a deflection away from the complicity that the
Democratic party had in the dispossession of the working class and that's very frightening.
Chris Hedges:
Of course, we're watching now the Biden, people around Biden ratchet up a new cold war. If
you go back and remember when Biden's campaign was faltering he blamed Right after the Nevada
caucus where Bernie Sanders shellacked him, I mean, got more than double the votes that he did.
I think he got about 20%, Bernie got almost 50%. He blamed it He said, well, that's of course
because the Russians want Bernie Sanders. This goes back to Clinton during the 2016 blasting
Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate as a Russian asset, a line she repeated
during the democratic primaries this year trying to tar representative Tulsi Gabbard again as a
Russian asset.
Chris Hedges:
I think that it's clear from the Biden appointments and we can go through them if you want,
but it's clear from the Biden appointments that we're going to get more of the same. The fact
is most Americans on both sides of the political spectrum do not want more of the same. I worry
that what they will do is what ruling parties always do and that is essentially create an
enemy. They can't go after China because Silicon Valley will never let them and because China
frankly is too powerful so they'll go after Russia, which is much weaker. You've already seen
it with this kind of cyber attack or when Hunter Biden's laptop was discovered with all sorts
of damaging emails and apparently pictures of him smoking crack and having sex or whatever.
Again, that was an attempt to tar this as Russian disinformation.
Chris Hedges:
Again, if you look at even the New York Times when they talk about the John Podesta emails,
these were the, he was Hillary Clinton's campaign chair which were published by WikiLeaks, it's
described as disinformation. Well, as a journalist, this is very frightening. It's not
disinformation. Those emails were true. Nobody has ever challenged the veracity of those
emails. On the one hand, we've seen a kind of savaging of the country by rapacious global
corporate entities which are supranational and have no loyalty to the nation state at all.
Ralph Nader correctly calls them traders. Coupled with a breakdown of a media system, which
sets one demographic against another.
Chris Hedges:
I'll just close by saying that we must never forget that Donald Trump received the second
highest vote count in any presidential race in American history, 74 million voters and Biden
got about 80. Now, this is after one of the most disastrous presidencies in American history,
flagrant corruption, inaptitude, racism, appointing conspiracy theorists, et cetera. He
increased his vote count by And not being able to handle the pandemic, although it's not
completely his fault. The for-profit healthcare system is not designed to handle a national
health crisis, it's designed to make money which and that is going to be a problem under
Biden.
Chris Hedges:
But so he increases vote count by 11 million votes and that has to be a huge flashing red
light. Watching the Biden administration go back to more of the same, it has apparently
rebuffed Bernie Sanders' desire to be Secretary of Labor or they just refuse to allow
Ocasio-Cortez to be on the Energy Committee because of the Green New Deal, the Energy and
Commerce Committee because of her support of the Green New Deal, it's clear and also because
most, I mean, [inaudible 00:18:15] all of the nominees including Neera Tanden, this former
Clinton aide who has been picked to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget and who
spent the last nine years running the Democratic party's think tank the Center for American
Progress has just been as openly ridiculed, Sanders and Sanders supporters.
Chris Hedges:
That's where we are and it's a decades long march. It's not something that was caused by a
particular election cycle. These are structural, major structural dilemmas that I see no party
addressing in a real way. You're watching Giuliani and Trump attempt to use the same kind of
conspiracy theories, the Venezuelan software designed by Hugo Chavez who died in 2013 for
corrupting the election. I mean, just it's as ludicrous as blaming the Kremlin for Trump's
rise. But this is a characteristic of two parties that refuse to confront their own
responsibility for where we are and a media that no longer informs, but essentially caters to a
particular demographic and demonizes the other demographics. Then we didn't talk about the
climate crisis, which is of course, a emergency is the right word. All of these things come
together and I think that the lesson from both this election and the pandemic is that we are
losing control both as a nation and as a species.
Rob Johnson:
So control in part How would I say, because as you and Matt Taibbi discussed in your show on
contact that the journalists have now been intimidated, they're afraid to share with the
American people what's the crux of the issue and as a result, all of these kind of false
explanations become the bloodstream of conversation and people can intuitively sense that
people aren't addressing what fuels their despair. How do you explain that? I mean, I
understand what you're talking about, these will be corporate structure and the media, et
cetera, but the outrage particularly white working class felt, Donald Trump seemed to speak to
that when he'd say the system is rigged or he'd show videos of Hillary Clinton before giving a
speech, before Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs or what have you, but what's going on now
that's, which I might call kept Trump's votes so high. What did the Democrats not do in the
campaign that inhibited them from winning in a landslide?
Chris Hedges:
Well, they could have won in a landslide if they address the real issues in poll after poll,
everybody, what Republican, Democrat feels that Wall Street is out of control, that they should
be more heavily regulated and taxed. These endless wars have no support. This insane pillaging
of resources by the defense industry. I mean, in a normal society the architects of failed wars
and failed policies should be at best dismissed and probably even put on trial. There certainly
should be the kinds of investigations that a functioning democracy engages in.
Chris Hedges:
We saw that with Watergate, we saw that with a church committee, all of that's gone. It was
Feinstein actually, I'm not fan of Feinstein, but it was Feinstein who attempted to investigate
the CIA torture program and the CIA hacked her own computers, the Senate computers and there
was this moment where she just came out, kind of white as a ghost and realized that there was
going to be no control over the kind of dark intelligence agencies whose budgets are dark. We
don't even know how much, we have to guess how much these intelligence agencies are being
allotted.
Chris Hedges:
The system is rigged in this sense, if corporate money was removed from the election and
political process then figures like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or even Mitch McConnell
wouldn't exist. They are products of this money. They are the servants to this billionaire
class, to these corporate entities and their power comes from being able to anoint and fund the
candidates that they choose that will do the bidding of corporate power and without that money
they vanish, without that money Bernie Sanders clearly would have been the nominee in 2016.
Chris Hedges:
Remember Bernie did not take corporate money. This was a true grassroots effort and I have
criticism of Sanders, but this was a true grassroots effort. But the oligarchic elite was quite
open that Bernie Sanders would never be the nominee. There was all sorts of dirty tricks in
both 2016 and 2020 using the DNC as a vehicle to support the Clinton campaign quite openly. In
2016, they openly stole the Nevada caucus. They denied independence in many States, the right
to vote in Democratic primaries, although we should remember the taxpayer pays for the
primaries. They erased all sorts of people from the roles they use super delegates and these
tactics were all in place again.
Chris Hedges:
The Democratic party, I think, committed kind of suicide. I think that the Biden
administration will see the ground for a competent fascist and the only thing that saved us
from a coup d'etat, which the Trump administration clearly it was and is trying to orchestrate
is just their disorganization and their ineptitude, but putting a competent fascist like Mike
Pompei or Tom Cotton linked to the Christian right. I am a seminary graduate and I'm glad you
mentioned James Cone, my close friend and the greatest theologian in America since Reinhold
Niebuhr, these people are This Christian right, this prosperity gospel is heretical and I don't
say that lightly. I have a deep church background. My father was a minister. My mother was a
seminary graduate, although she was a professor, I at one point could read the Bible in Greek.
I mean, I know it.
Chris Hedges:
The failure of the liberal church to denounce these people for who they were in the name of
tolerance and dialogue has been disastrous. The Christian right, 81%, the last figure I read
support Trump. They have acculturated the Christian message to the worst aspects of American
capitalism and American imperialism. This kind of heretical belief that the white race is
blessed to kind of bring the Christian society and of [inaudible 00:26:19] remember that Jesus
wasn't white, the Romans were white, Jesus was a person of color. That's the first of many
lies. That Islam and I spent seven years in the Middle East, I'm an Arabic speaker and have a
deep, deep respect for Islam, is kind of satanic religion.
Chris Hedges:
That's where both the etiology and the infrastructure, the patina, will come from. That
Christian fascism will be the veneer and Trump brought these people really into the epicenter
of power, Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, Bill Barr, Carson, they all come out of this and then of
course we've got six of nine Supreme Court justices who have all been anointed, are products of
the Federalist society including this cultist Amy Coney Barrett. We've got 20% of federal
judgeships were appointed during the Trump administration, but Trump just turned it all over to
the Federalist society and most of these appointees were rated as unqualified by the American
Bar Association.
Chris Hedges:
I think in the kind of meltdown that's happening, we are laying the groundwork for kind of
Christianized fascism and I think that if the Democratic party attempts to go back to what they
call normal and I think at this point it's very clear from the Biden appointments which are
drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic party and the corporate elite and
these are the people that created the Orchestrated the social inequality, the trade deals, the
militarized police, Biden was one of the prime movers behind that along with the doubling of
our prison population, now the largest in the world, he repeatedly called for cuts to social
security, so wholesale surveillance, all of this came out of Biden and the Democrats and the
appointees that he has brought forward for his new administration are rooted completely in that
corporate elite and in that ideology and that's what I find very dangerous and very
frightening.
Rob Johnson:
The how would I say, I remember where you were talking about Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer
or whatever that, or Mitch McConnell they're depending on the money, without the money, they
wouldn't be there. My sense is that the system is so designed to favor money over votes as a
currency for decision-making that almost every elected official faces that pressure. Is it and
when we talk about different policies, not working on climate change, excessive financial
deregulation, pharmaceutical monopolies, stock buybacks, aren't all of these symptoms of that
malfunctioning system where money and concentrated wealth and the non-enforcement of antitrust
which further concentrate as wealth. Aren't these the contributing factors that render each
politician vulnerable to defeat if they don't cope with this. That's what needs to be reformed
at the core-
Chris Hedges:
They're not going to reform it because if they reform it, they're going to lose power and
Pelosi and Schumer they're quite aware of this. On the one hand, the Democratic party Look,
imagine if the Democratic party campaigned on a universal healthcare, a guaranteed minimum wage
for all, forgiveness of student debt, complete moratorium on foreclosures and evictions, an end
to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a government jobs program. I mean, they would sweep the
elections, but of course they wouldn't have their corporate backers like Lloyd Blankfein. I
mean, Blankfein, which comes out of the criminal organization of Goldman Sachs, Blankfein made
it very clear, he was the former CEO during the elections that if And this was, he was quoted
the New York Times, along with other high profile Democratic donors, that if Sanders was the
nominee, he would vote for Trump.
Chris Hedges:
What does that say? It says that the billionaire class, of course they prefer Biden and
Silicon Valley and Wall Street. At the end of the campaign pumped we don't know how much,
because it was through super PACS, but significant sums of money into anti Trump ads on behalf
of Biden because Biden restores the kind of gravitas and decorum and civility that was lacking
in the Trump administration. But the fact is they can live with either, they prefer Biden and
they got Biden over Trump. But what they weren't ever going to accept was Sanders.
Chris Hedges:
Even though I find Sanders political platform quite moderate, Sanders did not go after the
defense industry. Sanders was very hesitant to call out the Democratic party in any real way
and I was outside the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center in 2016 when Sanders got up to
endorse the nomination of Hillary Clinton, I was there with Cornel West. We were with a group
of several thousand homeless people demanding housing as a human right. A few hundred Sanders'
delegates, mostly young walked out of the hall chanting, "This is what democracy What does
democracy look? This is what democracy looks like." Cornel who's amazingly prescient as always
said to me, "Bernie missed his historical moment."
Chris Hedges:
I think that's right. I think that And I spoke to Bernie Sanders about it. I did an event
with the night before the climate march with Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein and Seattle City
Council woman Kshama Sawant who Amazon is determined to remove from the city council in
Seattle. Bernie Kshama and I were pushing particularly Kshama was pushing Bernie to run as an
independent arguing correctly that the Democratic party was never going to allow him to get the
nomination and Bernie said, well, I don't want to end up like Nader.
Chris Hedges:
I thought that was a very revealing comment because Bernie went wrong. He understood that if
he defied the Democratic party establishment, of course he would no longer be able to caucus
with the Democratic party and get seniority through the Democratic party. But the Democratic
party would also go after him in Vermont and make sure that he was not reelected to the Senate.
If you defy those corporate interests, they're pretty ruthless. George McGovern was one of the
last to do it when he took on the animal Ag industry and they made sure that his Senate seat
was taken from him in South Dakota after of course the oligarchic class, Democratic and
Republican conspiring in 1972 when he got the nomination with the Republican and Democrats
conspiring to destroy the McGovern campaign, which they did.
Chris Hedges:
Bernie wasn't wrong but we're never going to build a significant resistance movement in an
election cycle and I know because I've worked with Ralph, I was Ralph speech writer. I know all
of the impediments, the two parties, both parties, but in particular the Democratic party throw
up to third-party candidates, locking them out of the debates, constantly challenging voter
lists, not because they think they're fraudulent but because it runs up legal bills, at one
point Ralph's legal bills were over a million dollars, Patty Smith and I were going around
trying to raise money for him to pay it.
Chris Hedges:
I think that was and that Sanders, I think chose his career over and I don't I think unlike
most politicians I sense that Bernie is honest and I think that his commitment to the working
class is real, I don't think it's fake like John Edwards and all these other people. But I
think in the end, he just did not want to confront the monolith because he knew how destructive
that monolith would be to him and to his career and he's not wrong but I think that also makes
him kind of morally and temperamentally unfit to lead this fight.
Rob Johnson:
I'm reminded of a quote from our friend James H. Cone in his book, God of the Oppressed,
where he says the only meaningful Christian response is to resist unjust suffering and to
accept the painful consequence of that resistance. Now, in Bernie's case, he's not necessarily
a Christian, but the point is that in such a misaligned system, as you're describing, if you
don't accept the painful consequences of the resistance, then the resistance is not formidable
and then things continue to [carine 00:36:04] further and further off course deepening despair
and produce the kind of authoritarian lurches that we've seen periodically throughout
history.
Rob Johnson:
The question is and I can see from your title of your book, America: The Farewell Tour, or
some of your recent articles that I guess I would conjecture that you probably don't believe
that the energy, the will of resistance can overcome the tools or the power of the other side
and that we are headed towards that danger zone again. Actually, we've kind of been in it.
Trump was a symptom of that in the minds of many people, but it feels to me like we're How
would I say?
Rob Johnson:
Cornel West and I were texting on the day when it was announced that Biden won in
Pennsylvania which looked like would clinch sufficient electoral votes to win. In our
interaction, we kind of said this is an eerie day because what we're doing is celebrating the
return to power, the thing that caused what we are celebrating is leaving and that As you've
underscored, I think the real danger here is with systemic malfunction of this depth and degree
and resilience, how are we going to get back to the structures of what you call democratic
capitalism?
Chris Hedges:
Well, that's exactly right. But it also has a very negative effect in terms of the promotion
of the kind of liberal, with a small L, the liberal democratic values that you and I and Cornel
care so deeply about. When you have a liberal class and I think at this point to define the
liberal class we would call them the professional managerial class that is predominant on the
two, on the East Coast and the West Coast, that is tolerant in terms of its attitudes towards
different sexual orientations and race and that kind of stuff. But that has largely profited
from the ravages of neo-liberalism. I think that they want to endow it with this kind of patina
of civility.
Chris Hedges:
The problem is that all of the issues they claim to care about and to fight for, they
surrender every election cycle to support figures like Clinton or Biden or Obama who in power
have essentially betrayed all of those issues. That is eviscerating the credibility of the
liberal elite. That's a fundamental component to the rise of any totalitarian movement. That
was true in Yugoslavia. You had an ineffectual self-identified democratic liberal elite after
the death of Tito in 1980, in that kind of decade long period before the war began but it was
just ineffectual. It wasn't able to actually carry out or respond in a meaningful way. There
was economic devastation in Yugoslavia, it's a longer story, but Tito had gotten a lot of
loans. Mostly they knew he could never pay them back because he was a buffer state and then
they wanted The Western banks wanted the loans paid, they couldn't pay them, widespread factory
closures, the economy went into a tailspin hyperinflation, et cetera.
Chris Hedges:
I think that Ralph's understanding when he decided to run for president and that was one I
agreed with was that the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt part of these kind
of progressive agendas and save ourselves from this slow motion corporate coup d'etat was to
defect. That if five, 10, 15 million people unquoting Ralph left the Democratic party behind a
third-party candidate, a progressive third-party candidate, this would be the only chance we
would have for effective political change. That didn't happen for many reasons and here of
course is where we are. I would recommend, I don't know if you know it, Richard Rorty's last
book, Achieving Our Country. I think it was written in 1998.
Rob Johnson:
I've read it.
Chris Hedges:
1998 and he nailed it. I'm just going to read this paragraph. He's talking precisely about
this process. Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized
democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period. One in which populist movements are likely
to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak for example, has suggested that fascism
may be the American future. The point of his book, The Endangered American Dream, is that
members of labor unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that
their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being
exported. Let's just as a caveat, remember that wages in real terms have declined since the
70s, production has risen by 77%. If wages had kept pace with production, the minimum wage
would be $20 an hour. Then I'm going back to Rorty.
Chris Hedges:
Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white collar workers, themselves
desperately afraid of being downsized are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide
social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The non suburban
electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strong man to
vote for, someone willing to assure them that once he is elected the smug bureaucrats, tricky
lawyers, overpaid bond salesman, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the
shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here may then be played
out may then be played out. For once such a strong man takes office, nobody can predict what
will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named
Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
Chris Hedges:
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by Black
and Brown Americans and by homosexuals will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come
back into fashion. The N word and kike will once again be heard in the workplace. All the
sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come
flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their
manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Chris Hedges:
I recommend that book and Sheldon Wolin's Classic Democracy Incooperated to political
profits, contemporary where they both died recently. Well, Rorty not so recently. Wolin a
couple years ago. If you go on YouTube, I have the last interview Wolin gave, it's a three hour
interview he gave to me the year before he died. These political philosophers astutely saw the
danger in what was coming and the consequences and here we are.
Rob Johnson:
Oh, Wendy Brown who's been a guest on this podcast was a student of Sheldon Wolin's and-
Chris Hedges:
That's right. Do you know who else was a student of Sheldon Wolin? Cornel West.
Rob Johnson:
That's right.
Chris Hedges:
Cornel dedicated his second book to Sheldon Wolin. When Sheldon-
Rob Johnson:
I'm sorry to interrupt. But my own research director Tom Ferguson was also at Princeton and
did some work with Sheldon Wolin.
Chris Hedges:
Wolin told me there came point when no member of the Princeton Political Science Department
was even speaking to him because he called neo-liberalism out in the 80s and immediately
[inaudible 00:44:38]. Interestingly about Wolin is that he's quite lyrical writer, he's quite a
fine writer. He's a brilliant philosopher, but he's also a very good writer. He was writing for
publications like The New York Review of Books and others, but he saw what was coming and he
said he just got blanked out, he couldn't get published.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Now, I remember talking with Chalmers Johnson a little bit about knowing Wolin and in
his admiration.
Chris Hedges:
Well, Johnson is another one. Johnson's trilogy is another one, [inaudible 00:45:12] empire,
also very, very smart books. We had our There were members of our intellectual class who didn't
sell out and were honest enough to warn us but we didn't listen and now we're in really deep
trouble.
Rob Johnson:
Well, in your most recent article, the great delusion, you referred to a European scholar,
[Stephens Shwaig 00:45:38] and I thought it was very interesting, the mindset that he portrayed
in What was it called? The world of yesterday.
Chris Hedges:
[inaudible 00:45:48] memoir. Well, [Shwaig 00:45:52], so there was a handful of great
intellectuals, many of them Jewish like Shwaig, Joseph Roth was another one, they were close
friends, who certainly saw number one, the folly of world war one, a suicidal folly of world
war one, for which they immediately became pariahs. Shwaig wrote this great play, Jeremiah,
this anti-war play that could only be performed in Switzerland that issued these kinds of
warnings and how you turn on the prophet.
Chris Hedges:
The biblical prophet Jeremiah who's warning Jerusalem about the eventual when it happens,
the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians is just ignored and ridiculed and persecuted and there
are plots against his life. I'm talking about the biblical story, he's attacked for
demoralizing the people and then by the time the Babylonian army swarms into Jerusalem and the
Jews go into exile, Jeremiah like Julian Assange is in prison so they're there and another
great figure like that would be Jane Addams in the United States go back and look at her,
Randolph Bourne, that when things become difficult it's the intellectual class, the majority of
the intellectual class either remain silent or becomes complicit.
Chris Hedges:
Because you mentioned earlier, much earlier, in the talk about journalists. Well, what they
are is careerists. I worked at The New York Times, there were never rules written on the walls
of The New York Times, but you learn very quickly those stories which would get you promoted
that the hierarchy of The Times wanted in the newspaper and those stories that didn't. If you
persisted with stories they didn't want, you became a management problem and then you got
pushed out.
Chris Hedges:
I was friends with Sydney Schanberg who of course won the Pulitzer in Cambodia and also
friends with [Deff Braun 00:47:46] who was eventually after being in a concentration camps run
by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge worked for The New York Times. But Sydney, when he came back
went after the developers who were destroying Manhattan, Manhattan's been destroyed. I used to
go to the village as a boy with all the bookstores and the artists, it's all gone replaced by,
I don't know, blue navy or gap or whatever these It's just been sucked dry, the cultural life
of the city and Schanberg saw it and he went after it and these developers were friends of the
publisher and he was fired and he ended up the rest of his career was writing columns for The
Village Voice and News Tech.
Chris Hedges:
The journalists, I think that are left are largely, are very cynical that they are
careerist, [George Parker 00:48:43], all these kinds of figures and they are the ones whose
voices you hear, Jeffrey Toobin who's been removed from the airwaves for exposing himself on a
zoom video for watching porn, but Toobin and I debated at the Oxford Union over Snowden and he
was calling for Snowden's extradition and imprisonment along with Julian. But if you stand up
for I mean, I have a huge admiration for Snowden and Julian. I know Julian, I visited him
several times at the embassy. If you stand up for them, then you're just locked out. Your voice
is not going to be heard. I think careerism has really been quite insidious.
Chris Hedges:
Also I would also say about the media [inaudible 00:49:31]. What is balance? Balance becomes
inviting a Republican operative, Giuliani on one side and a Democratic operative Van Jones on
the other or I don't know who, George Stephanopoulos, I don't know who these people are, I
don't own a television, but on the other and they both lie but you just give them equal time to
lie. I think it certain I mean, I don't have a much respect for the intellectual wattage power
of most of the people on television, but some of them have to know that they're lying.
Chris Hedges:
But if you give four minutes to Republican lies and four minutes to Democratic lies, you've
done nothing to actually inform. In fact, you've misinformed the American public but that
becomes what is defined as objective or neutral journalism. But it's really, at this point, all
a burlesque, it's all vaudeville as Taibbi points out, political coverage is quite consciously
modeled after ESPN with the graphics and the scores and the polls and the numbers and the
tactics and the strategies and the good looking host and two people from one team and two
people from another team, but there's nothing to do with politics or civic life.
Rob Johnson:
I remember talking with Gillian Tett who wrote for the Financial Times and I was asking her
about this Institute for New Economic Thinking then what kind of guidance she would give me.
She said at the time, "Rob, what you need to do is study the silences because the map of the
silences and what's not said will tell you where power resides." I remember H.L. Mencken wrote
a piece in the 1920s called The Dismal Science and he said, and you and I can laugh a little
bit, the only people he trusted less than theologians were economists because they could see in
the future what the consequences would be if they espoused a view that took on power or
affected the material conditions of trustees and members of the board, et cetera, at the major
universities.
Rob Johnson:
He said, these people are not free and it sounds a little bit like what you say about the
journalists, but it also reminds me of the [inaudible 00:51:52] quote that you use in your most
recent article where he says one of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every
civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds it's partial and universal values
most convincingly and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the
decay which leads to death has already begun. In my senses, when things are unsustainable and
in part because of concentrations in power, people become afraid and they go silent or they
compose false consciousness to which you might call, avoid confrontation with what looks like
it could become inevitable.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I would defer to you in terms of economists, but
the whole ideology of neo-liberalism as a layman never made any economic sense to me at all. I
look at neo-liberalism in Marxian terms, I'm not a Marxist, although I think Marx's analysis of
capitalism is important. I don't This whole Hegelian idea of the proletariat, I think it's kind
of utopian, but the whole idea of neo-liberalism which reaches back to these real outliers,
like Hayek and Milton Friedman and this third rate novelist [Anne Rin 00:53:15], it was really
As Marx would argue it's, it was just the ideology that perpetuated the interests of the ruling
elites. It's not that it ever made economic sense nor was it really designed to and this of
course is David Harvey's argument in his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which I think
is correct. If you wanted to advance within the university, in an economics department, then
you better subscribe to that mantra whether it makes economic sense or not is irrelevant, but
you know more about this than I do.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. That whole kind of libertarian energy certainly has played a big role in the ideology
of Silicon Valley which is in some ways kind of ironic given the extent to which Silicon
Valley's prosperity was spawned by government direction and government grants through DARPA and
the NSA and places like that and so, yes, well, it's become quite severe. Then the inability of
enforcement as you talked about has facilitated a concentration because there is no any trust
and now more and more outlets, including the New York Post, as you and Matt Taibbi discussed
can get barred just by decisions from a handful of people.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah. Well, that's very [inaudible 00:54:43]. I've been hit with these algorithms which
began a couple of years ago supposedly going after Left Wing sites because of this was There
was this anonymous website called PropOrNot, Propaganda or Not, then Washington Post put it on
the front page and they just listed every Left Wing site. All of which either runs my stuff or
I write for as being part of the Russian propaganda campaign, Black Agenda Report,
Counterpunch, Truthdig, on and on and on. Then that gave them the ability to use algorithms to
shut us out which they have used and that's not conjecture. We all went on strike at Truthdig
when the publisher tried to fire Bob Scheer who now runs his own little side Scheerpost which
we all defected to, we were all fired.
Chris Hedges:
But the year before they ran They got the data to put together a graph which showed
referrals through impressions. You type in Let's say you went into Google and type imperialism
and I had written an article about imperialism recently, then that should have come up along
with anything else about imperialism but that becomes erased. Referrals to the articles that I
had written on the site by impressions in that graph over a 12 month period declined from over
700,000 to below 200,000 and I'm sure it's below that now. Taibbi of course is I think been the
best on this, but yes, on the Hunter Biden laptop issue which they tried to dismiss again as
Russian disinformation, nobody's challenged. Nobody in the Biden campaign challenged the
authenticity of what was on that laptop. When The New York post reported it, which is what a
journalist should do, they Well, Twitter locked them out of their own account. There was a
concerted effort by the digital platforms and the traditional mainstream media to bury the
story.
Chris Hedges:
Now, why is there collusion between Google, Facebook and organizations like The New York
times? Because they lock out the dissonance and the alternative voices like mine and they
redirect people to the mainstream outlets like MSNBC or the Washington Post or the one owned by
Jeff Bezos or The New York Times. There is a kind of commercial interest on the part of these
outlets in embracing this kind of open censorship and you have seen it articles by Rouse and
others in The New York Times that laud this uncontrolled, unexamined effort on the part of
these digital platforms, unaccountable to essentially impose censorship and as Matt says it
used to be that if you committed libel you had to go to court and you had to pay, that's all
gone.
Chris Hedges:
These digital platforms know everything about us. We know nothing about them and they have
the power to essentially reshape the narrative. As I think the Democratic party under Biden
becomes more and more beleaguer because the policies they're clearly going to implement don't
have populous support, this censorship will become more pronounced. That's my fear. I know that
is Matt Taibbi's fear, that we just saw Glenn Greenwald leave The Intercept because the editors
attempted to censor Well, they did censor his story on what was on Hunter Biden's laptop and
that's not conjecture because Glenn released all of the traffic back and forth and what did
Naomi Klein and Betsy Reed and all these people at The Intercept do, they didn't respond to the
textual evidence that Glenn released and they went after It was character assassination. They
accused him of wanting to make more money on Substack and being a man child, I don't know if
that's the exact phrase Betsy Reed used.
Chris Hedges:
I found that utterly appalling as someone who walked out of The New York Times over because
they were trying to muzzle me over my criticisms of the invasion of Iraq. I can tell you it's
extremely difficult without independent money and neither Glen nor I have it to leave a stable
well-paid staff position for the unknown. What he did was quite courageous so yeah, I think
that there are people with integrity, Matt and Glen being two, Robert Scheer, they're out
there. But let's not be naive. They're not only very marginalized, but in increasingly targeted
and [inaudible 00:59:36].
Fox News is facing a rise of the machines, voting machines that is, as election software
firm Smartmatic is suing the network, three of its anchors and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney
Powell for allegedly false claims of fraud.
The defamation lawsuit , which was
filed on Thursday in New York state court in Manhattan, seeks $2.7 billion in damages. In
addition to Fox and the two lawyers, Smartmatic names Fox hosts Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and
Maria Bartiromo as defendants, saying they falsely claimed that the company's technology was
used to help 'steal' the November 3 election from former President Donald Trump.
Florida-based Smartmatic said the defendants knew the election wasn't rigged, "but they
also saw an opportunity to capitalize on President Trump's popularity by inventing a story.
Defendants decided to tell people that the election was stolen from President Trump and Vice
President (Mike) Pence." The company added that "without any true villain, defendants
invented one. Defendants decided to make Smartmatic the villain in their story."
Moreover, Smartmatic said its software was used in just one jurisdiction in the November 3
election – Los Angeles County. Democrat Joe Biden won California by more than 5 million
votes. Trump made allegations of election fraud in decisive swing states where Biden had narrow
margins of victory, such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
If you go back and look at manufacturing consent, Chomsky and Ed Herman's great work on the
press, you see that the old paradigm no longer functions, that in the digital age where there
are a multiplicity of sources, the media has essentially siloed itself. It doesn't seek with
the old monopolies. Remember we used to have just one major network that the power of the New
York Times and I know because I worked for The Times for 15 years, was not the readership, the
readership wasn't ever that big, the subscription base was rarely much over a million, but it
was the power to set the agenda so that when I was overseas, all of the networks, now these
were the big kind of media stars that appeared on CBS or NBC, would actually come and knock on
my hotel room at night and ask me what it was I was filing the next morning because they knew
their editors would then send them out to do a story based on what I had reported.
That was the power of the New York Times. All of that's gone and it's been replaced by
partisan divides and it has transformed publications like The New York Times into partisan
outlets. The Pew Research Center did a poll last summer where they polled readers and viewers
so 91% of the people who read The New York Times identify as supporters of the Democratic
party, that's 87% for national public radio, 94, 95%, I can't remember, for MSNBC. Then you
have the other side of the divide where 95% of the people who watch Fox news, I hate combining
Fox with the word news, identify as supporters of the Republican party. That has been
commercially successful and even politically successful because on all of the major issues,
trade deals, endless war, wholesale surveillance, austerity programs.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being compared to the actor who staged an attack on himself,
after her account of fearing for her life during the January 6 riot was fact-checked, exposing
that she wasn't in the Capitol building.
The hashtags #AlexandriaOcasioSmollett, along with #AOCLied, trended on Wednesday, following
a fact-check of AOC's (D-New York) Instagram livestream two days prior by OAN journalist Jack
Posobiec. During her emotional one-and-a-half-hour-long talk, Ocasio-Cortez admitted that she
was not in the Capitol building during the riot to begin with, but continued to claim that she
experienced a life-threatening situation.
When Ocasio-Cortez denounced it as a "manipulative take on the right," Posobiec
posted a map, with arrows pointing to the Capitol as well as two other office buildings across
the road. One of them is where AOC's own office is located, and where she claimed she
"thought I was going to die" during the January 6 events. Another is where she ended up
sheltering inside the office of Rep. Katie Porter (D-California) after leaving her office on
the instructions of the Capitol Police.
... ... ...
Whatever the truth about AOC's alleged sexual assault and near-death experience at the
Capitol, some critics of the progressive social media star noted that she had successfully
diverted attention from problems with the government and the small investor rebellion against
hedge funds.
It is a general rule that corrupt economies tend to operate on faith and not on
fundamentals. And to be clear, it's not so much about naive faith that the system is stable or
functional. No, it's more about the masses having faith that the corruption and instability
will never be derailed. Most people are not as stupid as the establishment and central bankers
think they are – Almost everyone knows the system is broken, they just refuse to consider
the possibility that the fraud will be disrupted, or that it will be allowed to fail.
The old mantra "too big to fail" is a lie. NOTHING is too big to fail, and that includes the
US economy, the dollar and the elaborate Kabuki theater that keeps them both afloat. All it
takes is a single moment, an epiphany that the Ponzi scheme is unsustainable rather than
unstoppable.
I'm reminded specifically of the inflationary crisis of Argentina in 2001 – 2002.
Argentina's economy was highly dependent on foreign capital inflows, and its currency peg to
the US dollar, not to mention they were precariously reliant on support from the IMF. The IMF
openly validated the government of Argentina and their currency peg model, but foreign capital
began to decline and the peg became unsustainable. Without tangible growth in manufacturing and
a strong middle class, an economy cannot survive for long. A top down system based on illusory
"financial products" and creative accounting is doomed to crash eventually.
All it took was for the IMF to criticize the policies they initially endorsed and announced
that they were removing financial aid, and all hell broke loose in Argentina.
Almost overnight the Argentina peso plunged in value, interest rates spiked and inflation
struck hard. People poured into the streets and civil unrest erupted. The IMF would later
admit it made "errors" in its handling of the Argentina situation, but this was simply spin
control designed to protect them from further scrutiny. The IMF avoided most of the blame and
has been growing into a monstrous global centralization machine ever since.
I think we are witnessing the beginning of a similar end of mass faith in fraud in the US.
The recent Robinhood short squeeze event as well as the current decoupling of physical silver
prices from the paper ETF market have accelerated the timetable. Not surprisingly, these moves
have forced the establishment to intervene to some extent to essentially stop renegade traders
from freely investing. Accusations are flying and deplatforming has ensued. The idea that the
system is a functional fraud is gone; The world now knows it is a dysfunctional fraud, and
collapse cannot be very far behind.
Furthermore the collusion between banks, hedge funds and Big Tech is blatantly revealed.
These relationships are supposed to remain hidden in the ether. They are obvious to anyone with
any financial knowledge and sense, but they aren't supposed to be wielded in the open.
Conspirators aren't supposed to admit to the conspiracy? Right?
Some people might say the establishment has been forced to unmask by activists. Maybe. But,
as I have been warning for many years, when criminals start openly admitting to their crimes it
is probably because they think that it's too late for anyone to do anything about it.
The point is, bankers and globalists have ways of avoiding responsibility for the disasters
they engineer. When the con-game breaks, they always have patsies to take the fall.
This sets up a bizarre dynamic in which the money elites that constructed the economy like a
time-bomb are treated like victims (or heroes) and the people telling the truth about the fraud
are treated like villains and criminals. Are activist stock market traders and silver market
guerrillas to blame for any crisis that erupts in the near future? No, of course not, but they
will be blamed anyway.
That said, propaganda narratives and scapegoats may not be enough to save the bankers this
time. They will never allow a major fiscal crash to develop in a vacuum. They need more cover,
and they need to have the means to lock down the public to prevent civil unrest or rebellion
from spilling over into their backyards. I have long suspected that the covid pandemic is a
useful tool in this regard. As I noted in my article
'How Viral Pandemic Benefits The Globalist Agenda' , published in January of 2020:
" Even if a pandemic does not kill a large number of people, it still disrupts
international travel, it disrupts exports and imports, it disrupts consumer behavior and
retail sales, and it disrupts domestic trade. If it does kill a large number of people, and
if the Chinese government's response is any indication, it could result in global martial
law. With many economies including the US economy already in a precarious balancing act of
historic debt vs. crashing demand and useless central bank repo market intervention, there is
little chance that the system can withstand such a tsunami "
As we all know, medical martial law in the name of "public health" is being established in
most countries regardless of the actual death rate. The insane globalist
rantings of the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have been very revealing; Schwab and
other elites have even called the pandemic a "perfect opportunity" to execute there agenda for
the "Great Reset".
However, the globalists are highly fallible, and mistakes in judgment have been made. During
the Event 201 pandemic
wargame on a coronavirus outbreak (conveniently held two months before the real thing
happened), the elites forecast at least 65 million initial deaths globally from such a virus.
We are a year into the pandemic and nowhere near that kind of death rate. In fact, the
death rate is so minuscule (0.26%) , that the public is beginning to realize the lockdown
mandates are pointless.
In the US, conservative states are moving on and keeping their economies wide open. Half the
population is refusing to take the vaccines, and many members of law enforcement are refusing
to implement lockdown policies. I don't think this is what the globalists expected at all. They
needed mass fear and they are getting mass defiance.
They're going to need a bigger threat, or a bigger virus.
This is why I have been repeatedly warning that the talk of reopenings by Biden and other
democrats is going to be very short lived. I have predicted that Biden will attempt a federal
lockdown similar to the Level 4 lockdowns used in Europe and Australia after a couple of months
of relative calm. I based this prediction on the covid "mutation" narrative being spread right
now by the mainstream media and establishment cronies like Anthony Fauci. It is not hard to see
where this is headed.
The globalists must have the "legal" option of restricting public movement as well as large
gatherings, and they must have the option of surveillance on individuals 24/7 through contact
tracing. This is the only way to prevent rebellion against the Reset and rising anger due to
economic turmoil. The veil has been lifted, the conspiracy is being widely broadcast. Martial
law alone would only inspire more dissent, medical tyranny in the name of "saving lives" is the
ONLY play the globalists have. They have to have help from a large portion of the citizenry, so
they must maintain the appearance that they are operating from the moral high ground.
The covid mutation story is clearly the next play, and Bank of America economists appear to
agree with me . They recently stated that they see little optimism in terms of a reopening
of the economy, and that hard lockdowns will return, possibly in March or April.
Another factor to consider is that the economic crash will have to reach a peak soon because
Joe Biden now resides in the White House. If the crash happens in the near term, activist
investors can be blamed, Trump can be blamed, and conservatives and liberty activists can be
blamed. If the crash happens a year or two from now, only Biden and the globalists will get the
blame.
Without lockdowns and scapegoats the scenario will end very badly for the globalists. It
might end badly for them anyway. Be ready for more chaos by Spring; I suspect the elites are
getting desperate, and if they allow America to go back to normal and for the pandemic to end
with a whimper they will never get another chance at their precious Reset.
Stakeholders consist of "customers, suppliers, employees, and local communities" in addition
to shareholders. But for Klaus Schwab and the WEF, the framework of stakeholder capitalism must
be globalized. A stakeholder is anyone or any group that stands to benefit or lose from any
corporate behavior -- other than competitors, we may presume. Since the primary pretext for the
Great Reset is global climate change, anyone in the world can be considered a stakeholder in
the corporate governance of any major corporation. And federal partnerships with corporations
that do not "serve" their stakeholders, like the Keystone Pipeline project, for example, must
be abandoned.
...T ake one David Campbell, a British socialist (although non-Marxist) and author of The
Failure of Marxism (1996). After declaring that Marxism had failed, Campbell began advocating
stakeholder capitalism as a means to the same ends. His argument with the British orthodox
Marxist Paddy Ireland represents an internecine squabble over the best means of achieving
socialism, while also providing a looking glass into the minds of socialists determined to try
other, presumably nonviolent tacks.
Campbell castigated Ireland for his rejection of stakeholder capitalism. ... Ireland's
more-radical-than-thou Marxism left Campbell flummoxed. Didn't Ireland realize that his market
determinism was exactly what the defenders of "neoliberalism" asserted as the inevitable and
only sure means for the distribution of social welfare? "Marxism," Campbell rightly noted, "can
be identified with the deriding of 'social reform' as not representing, or even as obstructing,
'the revolution.'" Like so many antireformist Marxists, Ireland failed to recognize that "the
social reforms that [he] derided are the revolution."
Ireland and Campbell agreed that the very idea of stakeholder capitalism derived from
companies having become relatively autonomous from their shareholders. The idea of managerial
independence and thus company or corporate autonomy was first treated by Adolf A. Berle and
Gardiner C. Means in The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) and after them in James
Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (1962). In "Corporate Governance, Stakeholding, and the
Company: Towards a Less Degenerate Capitalism?," Ireland writes of this putative autonomy:
"[T]he idea of the stakeholding company is rooted in the autonomy of 'the company' from its
shareholders; its claim being that this autonomy can be exploited to ensure that companies do
not operate exclusively with the interests of their shareholders in mind."
This apparent autonomy of the company, Ireland argues, came about not with incorporation or
legal changes to the structure of the corporation, but with the growth of large-scale
industrial capitalism. The growth in the sheer number of shares and with it the advent of the
stock market made for the ready salability of the of the share. Shares became "money capital,"
readily exchangeable titles to a percentage of profit, and not claims on the company's assets.
It was at this point that shares gained apparent autonomy from the company and the company from
its shareholders.
Moreover, with the emergence of this market, shares developed an autonomous value of their
own quite independent of, and often different from, the value of the company's assets.
Emerging as what Marx called fictitious capital, they were redefined in law as an autonomous
form of property independent of the assets of the company. They were no longer conceptualized
as equitable interests in the property of the company but as rights to profit with a value of
their own, rights which could be freely and easily bought and sold in the marketplace .
On gaining their independence from the assets of companies, shares emerged as legal
objects in their own right, seemingly doubling the capital of joint stock companies. The
assets were now owned by the company and by the company alone, either through a corporation
or, in the case of unincorporated companies, through trustees. The intangible share capital
of the company, on the other hand, had become the sole property of the shareholder. They were
now two quite separate forms of property. Moreover, with the legal constitution of the share
as an entirely autonomous form of property, the externalization of the shareholder from the
company had been completed in a way not previously possible.
Thus, according to Ireland, a difference in interests emerged between the holders of the
industrial capital and the holders of the money capital, or between the company and the
shareholder.
Nevertheless, Ireland maintains, the autonomy of the company is limited by the necessity for
industrial capital to produce profit. The value of shares is ultimately determined by the
profitability of the company's assets in use. "The company is, and will always be, the
personification of industrial capital and, as such, subject to the imperatives of profitability
and accumulation. These are not imposed from the outside on an otherwise neutral and
directionless entity, but are, rather, intrinsic to it, lying at the very heart of its
existence." This necessity, Paddy argues, defines the limits of stakeholder capitalism and its
inability to sustain itself. "The nature of the company is such, therefore, as to suggest that
[there] are strict limits to the extent to which its autonomy from shareholders can be
exploited for the benefit of workers or, indeed, other stakeholders."
Here is a point on which the "neoliberal" Milton Friedman and the Marxist Paddy Ireland
would have agreed, despite Ireland's insistence that the extraction of "surplus value" at the
point of production is the cause. And this agreement between Friedman and Ireland is exactly
why Campbell rejected Ireland's argument. Such market determinism is only necessary under
capitalism, Campbell asserted. Predictions about how companies will behave in the context of
markets are only valid under current market conditions...
Despite this insurmountable "neoliberal"/Marxist impasse, the notion of stakeholder
capitalism is at least fifty years old. Debates about the efficacy of stakeholder capitalism
date to the 1980s. They were stirred up by Friedman's rejection of the "soulful corporation,"
which reached its peak with Carl Kaysen's "The Social Significance of the Modern Corporation"
in 1957. Kaysen viewed the corporation as a social institution that must weigh profitability
against a broad and growing array of social responsibilities: "there is no display of greed or
graspingness; there is no attempt to push off onto the workers or the community at large part
of the social costs of the enterprise. The modern corporation is a soulful corporation." Thus,
in Kaysen, we see hints of the later notion of stakeholder capitalism.
Likely, stakeholder capitalism can be traced, although not in an unbroken line of
succession, to the "commercial idealism" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when Edward Bellamy and King Camp Gillette, among others, envisioned corporate socialist
utopias via incorporation. For such corporate socialists, the main means for establishing
socialism was through the continuous incorporation of all the factors of production. With
incorporation, a series of mergers and acquisitions would occur until the formation of a
singular global monopoly, in which all "the People" had equal shares, was complete. In his
"World Corporation , " Gillette declared that "the trained mind of business and finance sees no
stopping-place to corporate absorption and growth, except final absorption of all the World's
material assets into one corporate body, under the directing control of one corporate mind."
Such a singular world monopoly would become socialist upon the equal distribution of shares
among the population. Stakeholder capitalism falls short of this equal distribution of shares
but gets around it by distributing value on the basis of social and political pressure.
Interestingly, Campbell ends his argument, rather undogmatically, by stating unequivocally
that if Friedman was right and "if these comparisons [between shareholder and stakeholder
capitalism] tend to show exclusive maximization of shareholder value to be the optimal way of
maximizing welfare," then "one should give up being a socialist." If, after all, the
maximization of human welfare is really the object, and "shareholder capitalism" (or
"neoliberalism") proves to be the best way to achieve it, then socialism itself, including
stakeholder capitalism, must necessarily be abandoned.
By Daria Litvinova and Vladimir Isachenkov Associated Press
Moscow court on Tuesday ordered Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to prison for
more than 2 1/2 years, finding that he violated the terms of his probation while recuperating
in Germany from nerve-agent poisoning. The ruling ignited protests in Moscow and St.
Petersburg.
Mr. Navalny, who is the most prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, had denounced
the proceedings as a vain attempt by the Kremlin to scare millions of Russians into
submission.
After the verdict that was announced around 8 p.m., protesters converged on areas of
central Moscow and gathered on St. Petersburg's main avenue, Nevsky Prospekt.
Helmeted riot police grabbed demonstrators without obvious provocation and put them in
police vehicles. The Meduza website showed video of police roughly pulling a passenger and
driver out of a taxi.
The ruling came despite massive protests across Russia over the past two weekends and
Western calls to free the anti-corruption campaigner.
"We reiterate our call for the Russian government to immediately and unconditionally
release Mr. Navalny, as well as the hundreds of other Russian citizens wrongfully detained in
recent weeks for exercising their rights, including the rights to freedom of expression and
of peaceful assembly," United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after the
ruling.
The protests lasted until about 1 a.m. Around 650 people were arrested, according to
OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests.
The prison sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Mr. Navalny has
rejected as fabricated and politically motivated.
Mr. Navalny was arrested Jan. 17 upon returning from his five-month convalescence in
Germany from the attack, which he has blamed on the Kremlin. Russian authorities deny any
involvement. Despite tests by several European labs, Russian authorities said they have no
proof he was poisoned.
As the order was read, Mr. Navalny smiled and pointed to his wife Yulia in the courtroom
and traced the outline of a heart on the glass cage where he was being held. "Everything will
be fine," he told her as guards led him away.
Earlier in the proceedings, Mr. Navalny attributed his arrest to Mr. Putin's "fear and
hatred," saying the Russian leader will go down in history as a "poisoner."
"I have deeply offended him simply by surviving the assassination attempt that he
ordered," he said.
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"The aim of this hearing is to scare a great number of people," Mr. Navalny added. "You
can't jail the entire country."
Russia's penitentiary service said Mr. Navalny violated the probation conditions of his
suspended sentence from the 2014 conviction. It asked the court to turn his 3 1/2-year
suspended sentence into one that he must serve in prison, although about a year he spent
under house arrest will be counted as time served.
Mr. Navalny emphasized that the European Court of Human Rights ruled that his 2014
conviction was unlawful and Russia paid him compensation in line with the ruling.
Mr. Navalny and his lawyers have argued that while he was recovering in Germany from the
poisoning, he couldn't register with Russian authorities in person as required by his
probation. He also insisted that his due process rights were crudely violated during his
arrest and described his jailing as a travesty of justice.
"I came back to Moscow after I completed the course of treatment," Mr. Navalny said during
Tuesday's hearing. "What else could I have done?"
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets the past two weekends to demand Mr.
Navalny's release and chant slogans against Mr. Putin.
On Sunday , police detained more than 5,750 people nationwide, which was the biggest
one-day total in Russia since Soviet times. Most were released after being handed a court
summons, and they face fines or jail terms of seven to 15 days, although several face
criminal charges of violence against police.
"I am fighting and will keep doing it even though I am now in the hands of people who love
to put chemical weapons everywhere and no one would give three kopecks for my life," Mr.
Navalny said.
Mr. Navalny's team called for a demonstration Tuesday outside the Moscow courthouse, but
police were out in force, cordoning off nearby streets and making random arrests. More than
320 people were detained, according to OVD-Info.
Some Navalny supporters still managed to approach the building. A young woman climbed a
pile of snow across the street and held up a poster saying "Freedom to Navalny." Less than a
minute later, a police officer took her away.
Before the ruling, authorities also cordoned off Red Square and other parts of central
Moscow, as well as Palace Square in St. Petersburg, anticipating protests. Police flooded the
centers of both cities.
In court, Mr. Navalny thanked protesters for their courage and urged other Russians not to
fear repression.
"Millions can't be jailed," he said. "You have stolen people's future and you are now
trying to scare them. I'm urging all not to be afraid."
Observers noted that authorities want Mr. Navalny in prison, fearing he could run an
efficient campaign against the main Kremlin party, United Russia, in September's
parliamentary election. "If Navalny remains free, he is absolutely capable of burying the
Kremlin's plans regarding the outcome of the Duma election," said political analyst Abbas
Gallyamov.
After his arrest, Mr. Navalny's team released a two-hour YouTube video about an opulent
Black Sea residence allegedly built for Putin. It has been viewed over 100 million times,
fueling discontent as ordinary Russians struggle with an economic downturn, the coronavirus,
and widespread corruption during Mr. Putin's years in office.
Mr. Putin insisted that neither he nor his relatives own any of the properties mentioned
in the video, and his longtime confidant, construction magnate Arkady Rotenberg, claimed that
he owns it.
As part of efforts to squelch the protests, authorities have targeted Mr. Navalny's
associates and activists across the country. His brother Oleg, top ally Lyubov Sobol, and
several others were put under house arrest for two months and face criminal charges of
violating coronavirus restrictions.
The jailing of Mr. Navalny and the crackdown on protests have stoked international
outrage.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the "perverse ruling, targeting the victim of
a poisoning rather than those responsible, shows Russia is failing to meet the most basic
commitments expected of any responsible member of the international community."
Russia has dismissed the criticism as meddling in its domestic affairs and said Mr.
Navalny's current situation is a procedural matter for the court, not an issue for the
government.
"A Russian citizen sentenced by Russian court in accordance with Russian laws. Who gave US
the right to judge if it was wrongful or not? Wouldn't you mind your own business, gentlemen?
Recent events show that there are a lot of things for you to mend!," Russia's deputy U.N.
ambassador, Dmitry Polyansky, said on Twitter.
More than a dozen Western diplomats attended the hearing. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman
Maria Zakharova said their presence was part of efforts by the West to contain Russia, adding
that it could be an attempt to exert "psychological pressure" on the judge.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia is ready for dialogue about Mr. Navalny, but
sternly warned it wouldn't take Western criticism into account.
The former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center has suggested that counterinsurgency
tactics used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan should be applied to 'domestic extremists'
inside the US.
NPR reports that Robert Grenier, who directed the CIA's Counterterrorism program from 2004
to 2006, declared "We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency
within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen."
In an op-ed for
The New York Times last week, Grenier suggested that "extremists who seek a social
apocalypse are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this
country since Reconstruction."
Grenier, also a former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Afghanistan, grouped together "the
Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, 'Christian' national chauvinists, white
supremacists and QAnon fantasists" and claimed they are all "committed to violent
extremism."
Grenier labeled dissenters an "insurgency" and called for them to be "defeated" like an
enemy army.
In further comments to NPR, Grenier stated that "as in any insurgency situation, you have
committed insurgents who are typically a relatively small proportion of the affected
population. But what enables them to carry forward their program is a large number of people
from whom they can draw tacit support."
Grenier also stated that insurgents may emerge from groups who "believe that the election
was stolen," or those "who don't trust NPR or The New York Times ."
"The most violent elements that we are concerned about right now see former President Trump
as a broadly popular and charismatic symbol," the CIA spook added, before comparing Trump to
Saddam Hussein.
"You know, just as I saw in the Middle East that the air went out of violent demonstrations
when [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein was defeated and seen to be defeated, I think the same
situation applies here," he proclaimed.
Grenier suggested that Trump should be convicted at the upcoming impeachment trial as a
'national security imperative' because "So long as he is there and leading the resistance, if
you will, which he shows every sign of intending to do, he is going to be an inspiration to
very violent people."
Grenier then compared Americans to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, noting that in Afghanistan "the
thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaida, but primarily to remove the
supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish. And that meant fighting
the Taliban."
"I think that is the heart of what we need to deal with here," he added.
The call to treat Americans as terrorist insurgents comes on the heels of a
Department of Homeland Security warning that those dissatisfied with the election result
may rise up and commit acts of terrorism in the coming weeks.
"Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections
to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other
perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit
violence," stated the bulletin issued last week through the DHS National Terrorist Advisory
System -- or NTAS.
The bulletin added that 'extremists' may be "motivated by a range of issues, including anger
over COVID-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, and police use of force."
ALBANY, NY -- In response to criticism over his handling of the pandemic, New York governor
Andrew Cuomo reportedly unveiled a plan Monday to reduce the spread of Covid-19 at nursing
homes by throwing all residents out onto the street. "The elderly are one of the groups most
vulnerable to Covid, and we will dramatically reduce nursing home deaths by closing all of
these facilities immediately and evicting all the residents," said Cuomo, who defended himself
against accusations that he had mishandled the spread of coronavirus within adult care
facilities by claiming that it never would have happened if they had closed all facilities
before the pandemic even started.
"... As further evidence of this foreign support and pressure, at least 20 diplomats from various countries, including the US, made an appearance when Navalny's case came up in the Moscow Court hoping to pressure the court in his favour thereby meddling in Russian internal affairs. The massive media propaganda campaign was also plain to see. ..."
"... Following the court decision, Western leaders and diplomats further publicly meddled in internal Russian affairs by calling for violence to demand the release of the self-proclaimed anti-corruption activist. ..."
The flag-bearer of Western influence and globalists in Russia, Alexey Navalny, has been
sentenced to 2 years and 8 months in prison for grossly disregarding the terms of his suspended
sentence.
The initial sentence was for 3.5 years, but he has already served a part of that term under
house arrest. The absurdity of the situation is that his initial sentence was related to
corruption – something he allegedly fights against.
Despite claims by MSM and Western diplomats that Navalny is subject to political
persecution, his proven and known ties to Western Intelligence were not part of the case.
Just recently, on February 1st, videos were released online showing the joyful cooperation
between Navalny's team and foreign intelligence services. To put it plainly – Navalny's
team requested information from British Intelligence. It planned to employ that "dirt" to
hinder Russia's interests, both internal and external. His Anti-Corruption Foundation,
furthermore, promised to work against Russian business, and to promote British companies. For
that, these would be paid hefty sums when he, ultimately, somehow managed to come to power. To
achieve that, Navalny's people vowed to stage mass protests, spread propaganda and strike
behind the scenes deals with the elites. It can't be corruption, if it's for a "good cause",
right?
As further evidence of this foreign support and pressure, at least 20 diplomats from various
countries, including the US, made an appearance when Navalny's case came up in the Moscow Court
hoping to pressure the court in his favour thereby meddling in Russian internal affairs. The
massive media propaganda campaign was also plain to see.
For proven in court criminal offenses involving embezzlement of funds on a massive scale,
dozens of violations of the terms of his suspended sentence, contempt of court, his active and
public work in the interests of foreign states against the Russian nation Navalny faced
slightly more than 2.5 years in jail. For any neutral observer, this was an expected outcome
and the only concern would be the soft punishment that he received. This can be partly
explained by Russia once again showing itself to be a stronghold of tolerance and democracy and
also by the fact that the decision of the court is related to the violations of the suspended
sentence only and it did not review other 'achievements' of the anti-Russian clique operating
under the Navalny brand.
Following the court decision, Western leaders and diplomats further publicly meddled in
internal Russian affairs by calling for violence to demand the release of the self-proclaimed
anti-corruption activist. This will also likely be used as a pretext for increasing pressure on
Russia, including new sanctions. The remaining Western-funded network inside the country
already tried to stage violent protests in Moscow and other big cities. Nonetheless, their
attempts failed largely due to a low turnout and to the successful actions of the authorities.
There are no doubts that foreign efforts in this field will continue as opponents of Russia
need violence on the streets and casualties to push forward their destabilization campaign. At
the same time, recent events demonstrated that the hardcore pro-Western opposition has close to
no real support among the general Russian population. Therefore, help from Western special
services will likely focus on creating pinpoint provocations to escalate the violence and to
create some sacred sacrifice. If the government acts successfully to contain these provocations
and avoid the escalation of violence, anti-Russian forces will likely focus on keeping up the
pressure and some level of instability in the larger cities for the next month. A new round of
major provocations can be expected in the runup to the Russian general election in September
2021.
Actions of the global establishment show that hopes for a 'reconciliation with the West'
demonstrated by the 'liberal part' of the Russian elites are largely baseless. Therefore,
Russia should be ready for the further confrontation with the so-called 'Democratic world',
which has for a long time forgotten what the words 'democracy' and the 'rule of law' really
mean.
Savvy 1 hour ago
All that's left is for the US to declare Navalny President of Russia.
Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 1 hour ago (Edited)
They declared Guaido prez of Venezuela. How did that work out? Even the EU are distancing
themselves from him. The US is the global pariah, along with zionist entity.
Savvy 1 hour ago
At least Guaido has the distinction of being one of the Chicago Five. Look it up,
interesting read. : )
Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 1 hour ago
U mean the Chicago boys? Milton Friedman and the Washington Consensus
Savvy 1 hour ago
No, the CIA had a group of trainees that did boot camp in Eastern Europe, heavily involved
in Georgia and Ukraine. They were called the Chicago Five. Guaido was one.
2 play_arrow
jonesbeach 1 hour ago
America has zero credibility to dictate to any other country about how they should treat
their dissidents. The corporate media and Washington establishment have waged war on half the
country for decades. And now they are arresting people for posting memes, labeling peaceful
protestors as terrorists and purging people for wrongthink.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN 1 hour ago
Novichok had to be the easiest fraud for the Russians to refute, but was used because the
general public was conditioned to believe it after the Skriptal hoax.
Novichok is stored in 2 separate vials which have to be mixed shortly before use. It is
not something you whip up in a restaurant kitchen or hotel bathroom. The risk is too great to
the handlers.
Navalny's day-to-day MI-6 handlers (Maria Pevchikh) then concocted a series of
increasingly unbelievable scenarios about how he came in contact.
The final blow came when the initial Berlin hospital tests contradicted what the mititary
tests claimed they found.
This should have ended with the Russian side mentioning they had blood samples taken at
their hospital before Navalny left for Berlin.
Max21c 30 minutes ago
Despite claims by MSM and Western diplomats that Navalny is subject to political
persecution
Washington elites conveniently & consistently ignore real political persecution in
their own homeland by their security services and only use the phony claim of "political
persecution" as a political tool when it benefits them against countries & governments
they are at odds with or where they may someday gain a financial windfall by overthrowing
another government and installing their own hand picked puppets...
Max21c 27 minutes ago (Edited) remove link
Navalny may be a crook and embezzler in Russia but in the eyes of Washingtonians he's
their kind of crook. In the Washingtonians skewed & distorted way of viewing the world
Navalny is a GOOD CROOK rather than a BAD CROOK .
BaNNeD oN THe RuN 1 hour ago
How about this source:
"Navalny received a scholarship to the Yale World Fellows program at Yale University in
2010."
I wonder what "Bonesman" drew the short straw to be his State Dept handler.
"Democrats risk unintended Medicare cuts if they pass partisan Covid relief" [
NBC ].
"But under the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, known as PAYGO, new laws that raise the
national debt automatically trigger offsetting cuts in some safety net programs
Senate Budget
Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who will shepherd the reconciliation process and has been a supporter of expanding
safety net programs, will work to prevent the cuts, said his spokesman, Keane Bhatt."
Another Obama-era debacle (and one which Pelosi, among other top Democrats, supports.)
"... To Blinken, war as the last resort can only be understood in the same way a mugger considers shooting his victim as a last resort to stealing their wallet. ..."
To Blinken, war as the last resort can only be understood in the same way a mugger considers
shooting his victim as a last resort to stealing their wallet.
While doing some research on the reliability of the PCR test I came across a couple of
different sources that said the day ole joe was inaugurated, and the vaccine started to roll
out, that the WHO quietly changed their recommendations on the cycle rate the test should be
run from 40-45 down to 30-35.
This might explain the drop in positive cases. Has anyone else
seen this?
Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews ·
Jan 28 PERMANENT SECURITY FENCING
coming to US Capitol. New statement from acting US Capitol Police chief: "Vast improvements to the physical security infrastructure
must be made to include permanent fencing"
On the bright side, perhaps the fencing could keep the Congress critters in ?
Statement of Acting Chief Pittman Regarding U.S. Capitol Complex Physical Security
"In the days following January 6, 2021, with the assistance of our Federal and local law enforcement partners, and our Congressional
stakeholders, the United States Capitol Police (USCP) has hardened the physical security across the Capitol Complex in order to
further protect the Congress.
"Upon becoming the Acting Chief on January 8, 2021, I immediately directed my staff to conduct a physical security assessment
of the entire Capitol Complex. This assessment is in addition to the USCP's Inspector General's review of the events of January
6, 2021, and the third-party review of the Complex's physical infrastructure, processes, and command and control being conducted
at the behest of Speaker Pelosi by retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore.
"I welcome each of these reviews, and I am ensuring that the Department will provide all of the information that is necessary
to facilitate these studies. In the end, we all have the same goal - to prevent what occurred on January 6 from ever happening
again.
"As I noted earlier this week, even before September 11, 2001, security experts argued that more needed to be done to protect
the U.S. Capitol. In fact, a 2006 security assessment specifically recommended the installation of a permanent perimeter fence
around the Capitol.
"In light of recent events, I can unequivocally say that vast improvements to the physical security infrastructure must be
made to include permanent fencing, and the availability of ready, back-up forces in close proximity to the Capitol.
"I look forward to working with Congress on identifying the security improvements necessary to ensure the safety and security
of the Congress and the U.S. Capitol." ###
That fence could post a danger to members of congress and their staff as much as protection. suppose there was a massive explosion
in the capitol and they had to run away, not just out of the building, but away. The fence could serve as a trap.
It would be worse if by then that metal fence has been electrified because of demands of legislators for their "security".
Think of one very, very long bug zapper.
On January 19th, the US Senate held confirmation hearings for Joe Biden's Secretary of State
nominee Antony Blinken. Blinken has a reputation on both sides of the aisle for being
exceptionally qualified for the job of America's top diplomat, which is surprising considering
he was on the wrong side of every major foreign policy blunder of the last 20 years ;
Iraq, Libya, and Syria .
When Senator Rand Paul
asked Antony Blinken what lessons he has learned from his disastrous foreign policy record
in Libya and Syria, Blinken replied that after "some hard thinking" he's proud that he has done
"everything we possibly can to make sure that diplomacy is the first answer, not the last
answer, and that war and conflict is our last resort."
Of course war is the last resort. Even the most hawkish war criminals would agree that war
is the last resort. But the question is, war is the last resort to accomplish what? If war is
the last resort to get a country to fully capitulate to Washington's demands then eventually
the US will be at war with everyone. To Blinken, war as the last resort can only be understood
in the same way a mugger considers shooting his victim as a last resort to stealing their
wallet.
Blinken displayed his hubris a few minutes later when he said, "The door should remain open"
for Georgia to join NATO under the justification of curbing Russian aggression .
Rand Paul informed Blinken, "This would be adding Georgia, that's occupied [by Russia], to
NATO. Under Article 5, then we would go to war ."
Senator Paul is right. According to Washington, Russia has been
occupying 20 percent of Georgia since 2008. Under the principle of collective defense in
Article 5 of NATO, the US would be obligated to treat Russia's occupation of the country of
Georgia the same way the US would treat a Russian occupation of the US state of Georgia. That
sounds like a recipe for war. But don't worry, peaceniks, Antony Blinken has assured us that
war is the last resort!
Blinken's framing of the issue exposes his disingenuous approach. Russian aggression is a
term used by Washington insiders to describe a Russian reaction to western aggression. Blinken
knows that the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was not Russian aggression, he calls it that
because it suits his agenda and the American press is dependably ignorant enough to not ask
questions.
In the 2008 war, Georgia
was the aggressor against the South Ossetians, a people who are ethnically distinct from Georgians, and
who have never --
not even for one day -- considered themselves a part of Georgia. The Ossetians have a
history of Russian
partiality ; they were among the first ethnic groups in the region to join the Russian
Empire in the 19th century and the USSR in the 1920s. Today, ethnic Ossetians straddle both
sides of the current Russian border, and they are more aligned with the Russian government than with the
Georgian government.
When Georgia gained sovereignty from the former Soviet Union in 1991, South Ossetia declared
its independence. In response, Georgian forces invaded South Ossetia, initiating an armed
conflict that killed more than
2,000 people . In 1992, a ceasefire agreement was signed in Sochi between Georgia, Russia
and South Ossetia, which created a
tripartite peacekeeping force led by Russia. Although the international community never
acknowledged South Ossetia's independence, they have enjoyed political autonomy since the 1992
Sochi agreement.
The Sochi agreement held up until Georgia's ultra-nationalist President Mikheil Saakashvili
came to power in the 2003 western-backed
bloodless " Rose
Revolution " coup-d'etat. The pro-western President Saakashvili advocated joining the EU
and NATO, and insisted on asserting Georgian rule over South
Ossetia. U.S. President George Bush
supported the new Georgian president's effort to bring Georgia into NATO, which for Russia
would mean bringing a hostile military up to its border. In 2006, President Saakashvili offered
South Ossetia autonomy in exchange for a political settlement with Georgia. A
referendum was held, and the South Ossetian people overwhelmingly reaffirmed their desire for
independence from Georgia.
In August, 2008, After exchanging artillery fire with South Ossetia,
Georgia invaded South Ossetia's capital city of Tskhinvali, killing
1,400 civilians and
18 Russian peacekeepers . Georgia's attack triggered a Russian invasion into South Ossetia
and Abkhazia (another breakaway region) to restore stability and protect peacekeeping
forces.
Russia is by no means innocent -- they used
disproportionate force attacking targets inside Georgia -- but only a Russophobic shill
would conclude that this war was somehow caused by Russian aggression. The idea that Russia had
no business intervening is laughable. Under the
1992 Sochi agreement , Russia took charge of a peacekeeping coalition to help prevent
exactly the scenario that happened in the summer of 2008.
If George Bush had succeeded in bringing Georgia into NATO, the United States may have been
dragged into war with Russia in 2008. Antony Blinken claims that NATO membership deters Russian
aggression, but does he really believe that Russia would have been deterred from intervening to
protect its own peacekeeping force? Does Blinken believe that Georgia -- backed by the U.S.
military -- would have acted more cautiously in South Ossetia, or is it more likely they would
have been bolder?
It's undeniable that it is in Russia's best interest to have pro-Russian countries on its
borders. But pretending as if Russia is going to march into Tbilisi and reabsorb the entire
country of Georgia into Russia is a level of paranoia that should disqualify anyone from having
an opinion on the subject. The military conflict in Georgia is about the two breakaway regions
and their right to self determination. Russia's self interest happens to align with the wishes
of the people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
By supporting Georgia, America -- the champion of democracy and self determination -- has
adopted the position that South Ossetians didn't really mean to repeatedly choose independence
when given the option. This is a situation where America's professed values are diametrically
opposed to its policy of countering Russian influence everywhere on the map.
Antony Blinken should pause to consider if America's policy objectives are worth fighting a
war for. Is it worth confronting Russia in South Ossetia? Was it worth confronting Russia over
Crimea and the Donbas in
Ukraine ? Is it a good idea to withdraw from the INF
Nuclear Treaty and the
Open Skies Treaty ? Should we have spent the last 30 years marching NATO -- a military
alliance hostile to Russia -- right up to the doorsteps of
Russia ? Is any of this really making us safer?
Blinken has bought into his own propaganda. To Blinken, regardless of the stubborn details
of history, every conflict on Russia's border is simply Russian aggression. Washington's
solution is the expansion of NATO, which Russia describes as "
NATO encirclement. " This is an unacceptable military threat to Russia, who has
a deep distrust of western intentions due to a long history of western invasions into Russia.
Antony Blinken still lives in a bipolar world in which the United States and Russia are
existential threats to each other's existence. Every conflict and every alliance is only viewed
through the lens of the New Cold War crusade against Russia. This maniacal crusade could thrust
America in the unthinkable abyss of nuclear war.
Rand Paul got his answer, Antony Blinken learned nothing from all his mistakes! The danger
isn't merely resorting to war too early, the danger is in sticking our noses in conflicts that
we have no business being in. War should be the last resort to defending America's people and
it's homeland from foreign invasion; it should not be the last resort to enforcing America's
utopian vision on the world, and it certainly shouldn't be the last resort to prevent an ethnic
group in the South Caucasus -- that almost no American has ever heard of -- from the right to
self-determination.
Kenny MacDonald is a former Navy SEAL and Afghanistan War veteran. He is currently pursuing
a bachelor's degree in history. Youtube Channel . Medium . Facebook .
When Facebook censors Ron Paul, or Twitter bans President Trump, is that censorship?
Or because these are private companies, does that automatically make it NOT censorship?
Amazon banned Parler, but is it their right as a private company to choose their
customers?
That's the crux of the issue I need to address with you in today's post-Trump world of
social media.
Because make no mistake "Big Tech" repression is a foundational problem facing any society
that considers itself even somewhat free. In the wake of the allowed 'assault on the Capitol'
and the confirmation of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the U.S., the big tech firms which
control access to speech went ballistic.
Conservatives along with President Trump himself were wiped from the public square. Any
mention of the election being stolen or open support on Twitter of Trump himself was flushed
down the memory hole.
This is censorship of the highest order by these firms to put parameters around political
speech in the U.S. where such a right is enshrined in the Constitution. None of it is
constitutional.
But the problem is far deeper than that. The deplatforming of Parler, one alternative social
media platform to Twitter, via corporate collusion by Apple, Google and Amazon was something
far more sinister than Twitter silencing the sitting president of the U.S.
This was a blatant hit job by companies stifling competition in the public square for
hosting material which is constitutionally protected as 'free speech.'
But these firms, especially Amazon, who terminated Parler's server hosting agreement with 24
hours' notice, lazily applied their vague and ever-changing 'Terms of Service" to single out
Parler and hide behind their status as a private company.
The worst part about this is that libertarians
see this as a rational and defensible free market action . And for years adolescent
libertarian arguments about corporations being private actors preferable to governments have
now been turned around by authoritarians who hang us with our own words.
And we wonder why conservatives look at us like we have four-heads when we make such
arguments?
When this attack on free speech began, during the 2016 presidential campaign with the first
deplatforming of alt-right provocateurs like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily
Stormer website, it was obvious then that these were dry runs for the mass action we're seeing
today, in the name of creating an information-free literal one-party police state.
It was this that prompted former Silicon Valley programmer Andrew Torba to start Gab. Crazed
liberals then said, "If you don't like Twitter, leave and build your own."
So, he did. And after the attack on the Pittsburgh Synagogue in 2018, Gab was given the even
worse treatment than Parler got last week.
They survived that.
All the while myself and people like Torba were screaming about the duopoly controlling the
on-ramp to the mobile web, and no one cared. But we could see this day coming.
And now it's here.
But this is most certainly not a private property issue as much as it is a contract law
issue allowed to fester because of government interference into the marketplace for
communications.
Government interference altered the landscape these companies operate in. The grew to the
size they are now because of government largesse and federal and state tax revenue into the
networks and systems they depend on.
It doesn't matter that the duopoly is Google and Apple. It could have been Palm and
Microsoft. Or Blackberry and IBM. What matters is that the environment wasn't a level playing
field between the companies and the people using the services.
They were paying not only for access but at the same time subsidizing the revenue streams by
accepting costs these companies outsourced to government.
It is a cozy arrangement.
The companies outsource their fixed costs and the government outsources their censorship
desires that pesky First Amendment forbids them from doing directly.
No wonder the response to the allowed assault on the Capitol was so swift and
coordinated.
Think it through folks.
Amazon's AWS doesn't become a dominant player without those vaunted contracts with the CIA.
Parler, at a minimum should have an expectation of service per any legal contractual
arrangement, and as such is due damages from Amazon for unilaterally breaching that basic
trust.
Facebook doesn't grow to become the monster it is without strategic investments by
quasi-governmental companies like Goldman-Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Google doesn't become the ad revenue generating machine if it had had to properly pay its
bandwidth costs for the content they forced on us.
All of the above companies, including Microsoft, have been chosen by our government to
succeed in this tilted marketplace.
Apple doesn't dominate the mobile internet in the U.S. without all those user fees and taxes
tacked onto the cost of your monthly cellphone bill.
If these companies were operating on their own private satellite and wire networks then they
would absolutely be in the right, via the application of private property rights, to set
whatever terms of service they wanted.
I, as a libertarian, fully support that.
And also, as a libertarian, understand that public property always creates a tragedy of the
commons scenario.
But when you operate in the public sphere, when you move your goods and services on the
digital equivalent of the public road system (not a digression I want to get into today) and
your corporate charter exists within the framework of U.S. and state contract law it is clear
that these companies are neither wholly private entities with respect to their customers nor
neutral actors trying to enforce public decency standards.
They are acting in their best interest to stifle competition – Gab, Parler, Minds,
etc. – while setting precedents to allow for even further restrictions of speech through
lawfare thanks to a complicit and fully cowed legal system.
And herein lies the smart path to reining them in, if it is at all possible at this point,
since it's clear the Biden Administration is ready to reframe all speech critical of the U.S.
government as 'domestic terrorism' giving all of these companies the legal justification into
the future to unperson all dissent.
Removing their Section 230 immunity under the Communications Decency Act is paramount. It
will not happen now. The government is in on the grift, folks, so looking ahead to the 2022
election cycle isn't an option.
They just proved to you your vote doesn't count, so it means hitting them in the only place
they truly care about, their bottom lines.
So, the first thing to do is sue them into the ground. It will be up to the people
themselves to hound these companies through both contract law violations and shareholder
revolts because they have done irreparable damage to their brands and their future revenue
streams.
That is what has to happen right now. Parler's suit against Amazon is a good start. A
class-action lawsuit by every small business in America now wondering about Amazon's policies
should end this nonsense quickly.
A good judge in a sympathetic jurisdiction should side with anyone making a strong case that
modern tech company Terms of Service are 'contracts of
adhesion,' defined as contracts entered into where one party is so much stronger than the
other the weaker party is, in effect, coerced into signing it.
The second thing to do is to simply jack-out. Put the screen down. Stop using it as a
substitution for real communications and pull back from the brink.
De-google your life, as I have. Close your Facebook account permanently. You will feel
better immediately, trust me. I did this two years ago, to the detriment of the marketing
efforts of my business, and I have never looked back.
If you need a social network, use Twitter for keeping tabs on things but save your thoughts
and your content for Gab or some other, smaller private community you are a part of.
Being a global citizen is a canard they sold us as some true net positive. But it was
something designed wholly to drive us mad and deracinate us to the point of having no home, no
culture and no real friends.
It's no wonder they are trying so hard to shut off the escape routes and only allow certain
platforms to exist forcing us to interact with people we don't like while locked in our homes
over a wholly contrived public health emergency.
It was always part of the globalist plan.
Ending this starts with the very libertarian idea of simply opting-out. We don't need to be
plugged into their reality-generating nightmares every moment of every day.
But the thing about the web is that it is built on protocols which are themselves censorship
resistant. So, the tyrants of today will be the footnotes of tomorrow. We've seen early
attempts at censorship-proof blockchain platforms like Steemit . It's still running even though its growing pains nearly
killed it.
The next great service is just around the corner because necessity is the mother of
innovation. But the first step is accepting the fact that they've won this round and it is now
time to change the rules of the game.
P.S.: If you want to see what this looks like, just look at what the guys at Wall Street
Bets are doing to the capital markets today. Brokerage outages, trading suspended, newly-minted
millionaires.
All because a bunch of hedgies got over-confident of their one-way skimming and thinking no
one would press their luck to the breaking point.
They have and it is glorious.
You beat them by turning their supposed advantages and bought-and-paid-for rules of the game
back on them.
Disquss sell all comments and IP addresses to every group and intelligence agency in the
world to profile commenters and identify them
I will never comment on Disgus it's an evidence collection device
1CSR2SQN 2 hours ago (Edited)
Well you'd wonder why they ban people who are giving the best evidence. If I was in the
intelligence business, those would be my targets of peak interest.
hongdo 1 hour ago
The spooks are starting to complain. Probably they thought if farcebook , twatter, et al
kicked them off they would go to dedicated sites and be easier to monitor. But I guess they
did not expect that the alternate sites would also be banned.
Always a fight between ops trying to disrupt enemy communications, and intel trying to
keep it intact to monitor. Lots of times intel will not tell ops what they hear because they
think it will endanger their sources.
son of sam 12 hours ago (Edited) remove link
we will be back to newspapers and landlines
That would be a step n the right direction!
Poor Tom. Like the kids who got into the special van each day at school, to go to an
undisclosed location, ever so slowly, the light bulb comes on in his special genius noggin
-
at the very same time he insists on continuing to laud himself for " myself and people
like Torba were screaming about the duopoly controlling the on-ramp to the mobile web"
like he was seeing something before the rest of us. The fuzzy logic continues, as he sees
through the 'libertarian' sham ideology here briefly, and then goes on to state "I as a
libertarian, fully support that" !!!
Tom lives or dies on his patreon account, web pages, access to mobile communication
channels owned and operated by da MAN. He's a product of his times, unable to see the forest
for the trees. Trees which would be better cut down and made into newsprint and 'writing
paper' - so that EFFECTIVE communication might be once again possible, like in the C19th
-
instead of being burned down to the ground by CON-ED and the BLM retards.
Screw 'the web.' And the flies it catches.
Bdubs 9 hours ago remove link
Amazon is NOT a private entity!
They are heavily invested in by the US Government, especially the "defense" department and
"intelligence" agencies.
The USG created the operating and tax environment that allowed Amazon to grow to its size
and power witnessed today. I wish Obama had been more clear when he said "you didn't built
that" and I wish the right wing media hadn't gone into overdrive to discredit that patsy.
Absolutely, 100%, the Amazon we see today is not the Amazon Bezos built in his garage.
DesertEagle 10 hours ago
There has been an incestuous relationship between these tech giants and U.S. intel since
their inception. They are quasi governmental entities. They have monopolized private
communication and have now rolled out an Iron Curtain of censorship across the Internet.
Congress will do nothing and it will get much worse under the Xiden regime. The goal is to
make us just like Communist China.
atomic balm 9 hours ago
fascism is a blending of free enterprise with communism
numb 1 5 hours ago remove link
It has been a great week watching the very forces that stole the election and have been
stealing money for years from honest Americans take it in the shorts. Great ideas about going
after the Bezos cartel. I would like to add another to the pot and in a way beat them at
their own game. Encourage Bezos employes to union up. I know that unions are often corrupt
like the teachers union but if unions are good at one thing it is destroying the companies
that they are attached to. Planting unions throughout Bezos Cartel would be glorious payback
for what bezos has done to small retail stores throughout the nation.
William Dorritt 3 hours ago (Edited)
Sympathy strikes by truckers and longshoreman
Amazon idea is great, keep posting it
Amazon is the leading edge of Skynet
Warehouse and Driver employees will be the first to go
When starving former Amazon Employees Molotov Self driving delivery trucks, the police
will prioritize the incident after kids stealing baseball cards at the 7-11 store, Jurors not
guilty every time. Amazon drivers today, police tomorrow forget about pensions and start
worrying about food for your children
Let it Go 3 hours ago
Now that stores are closing all across America and jobs are being lost much of the myth of
Amazon being a positive force has vanished. Also debatable is the claim Amazon is not harmful
to the environment, not only does it's delivery system and cloud use a great deal of energy
but it has been documented that a huge percentage of products sold online get returned and
end up in landfills. Going into the holidays a slew of "feel-good ads" from Amazon hit the
airways. They were aimed at masking the miserable truth about this company. Amazon's pathetic
effort to distance itself from its sins with a PR campaign does not erase them. The article
below looks into how Amazon again price gouged Americans during recent lock-downs.
Amazon generates a mountain of cardboard. Envision the "Idiocracy" landscape/fill.
1CSR2SQN 2 hours ago
The enemy of my enemy is my friend... I'm no friend of the union but a friend of an Amazon
union. Especially a miliant one. Smoke em' if you got em', whose got a match?
PT 7 hours ago
I knew Google would become a problem the instant it came into existence - Why can't I just
write my own search engine?
Likewise FaceBook - why on earth do I need to share pics or photos via Fbook?
The scum rises to the top. Roughly speaking, WHY IS there a top?
Fireman 7 hours ago
Stop the $tockholm $yndrome BS about YouTube ( Ewe Tueb)... that electronic gulag "safe
space" slaughterhouse for sheeple too dumb to think. **** twatter, amazon, goggle, apple
micro**** etc etc etc. GET A REAL LIFE ALREADY beyond that "smart" phone jabbing prosthetic
brain gizmo tracking device existence with fellow morons that passes for contact and
communication for today's lectric mutant zombie pussies.
Use the alternative platforms or get fleeced and butchered by the oligarchy.
The Trump experiment is over, and the strange journey that the last five years have been is
now at an end. There are already lots of assessments being made about the meaning of Trump's
presidency, but most of them are from either liberal or conservative viewpoints. It also needs
to be evaluated from the viewpoint of the Dissident Right -- those of us such as myself who
fall outside what is usually called "Right-wing" in today's mainstream. And no group had more
dramatic ups and downs with Trump than the Dissident Right did.
I imagine my experience with Trump was the same as that of many other people reading this.
When he first announced his candidacy in 2015, I was initially dismissive and didn't even think
he'd make it to the primaries. It was when I saw him in the Republican debates that I decided
that, first, he was preferable to the other candidates in both parties; and second, that he
actually had some good positions, such as on immigration and non-interventionism. I never
really put my faith in the guy -- I always thought people who hailed him as the "God Emperor"
were being naïve -- but I could see that he was the least bad option among his many
competitors (and "least bad" is all I ever look for when contemplating the American political
scene). As his campaign developed, the signs were more and more encouraging -- mainly because
Trump was free to just talk without having to deliver on anything he was saying.
No one was more flabbergasted than me when Trump actually managed to win, and like many
people I allowed myself to become giddily optimistic for a few months after the election. I was
proud of the fact that Michigan, where I vote, was one of the states that had dramatically
swung over into Trump's column after having been solidly Democrat for decades, but it confirmed
for me that the white working class, which remains Michigan's backbone despite the weakening of
the American auto industry, had finally come to see more or less eye-to-eye with the Dissident
Right on many issues. I had suspected this even before the election, but it was nice to see it
confirmed in reality.
Perhaps, I thought, as an outsider and maverick, Trump could actually bring about some real
change in Washington, especially with the help of genuine populists like Steve Bannon. But
those hopes were soon dashed by the bombing of Syria only two and
a half months after he took office, which seemed to herald the gradual rolling back of the
entire agenda he had campaigned on. By 2018, with Bannon out, Bush leftover John Bolton as
Secretary of State, the President himself embroiled in the seemingly endless Russia
investigation, and the promised Wall nowhere to be found, it looked like the Swamp had subdued
Trump after all.
Still, I never for a moment felt that the support the Dissident Right gave to Trump in 2016
had been a mistake. There was no question that Trump, as poor as his performance was from our
perspective, was nevertheless preferable to what we know Hillary would have enacted. (In the
run-up to the 2016 election, when people would ask me why I was voting for Trump, I would say,
"I know exactly what Hillary will do; I can't say with any certainty what Trump will do, but
he's at least saying some of the right things.") And whenever Trump spoke his own mind -- which
he made sure to do often -- he usually stayed on message, even though we always knew that the
reality would end up being different from his words. (Remember when he promised to abolish
birthright citizenship in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections?) For us, I think the
epitaph we can write on the tombstone of his presidency is "It could have been worse."
I don't know what Trump really believed while President, and quite honestly I don't care; it
was his words and his actions that mattered, and even if it was all a cynical ploy, his impact
on American politics and culture is undeniable. It became a tired cliché, but it was
nevertheless true that Trump moved the Overton window further to the right in a way that isn't
likely to be undone anytime soon. Many issues that were virtually nonexistent except at the
margins of American political discourse before 2015 are now front and center. Some dislike
Trump for his personality and failings, feeling that these contributed to his lack of
achievement as President. While this is justified, it's indisputable that only someone like
Trump, who was independently wealthy and already held celebrity status among the white working
class, could have made the breakthrough as an outsider that he did. And even if he didn't
succeed in remaking Washington, he nevertheless weakened the Washington Establishment during
his tenure. Most importantly, it's always best when the Washington elite remains so divided and
gripped by internal conflicts that it can't pursue its evil designs on the rest of us, and
Trump turned the heat up in Washington beyond where it had been at any time since the Civil
War.
We also shouldn't overlook the fact that Trump was continually embattled with the Washington
Establishment, the opposition, the mainstream media, and on many occasions even his own party
from the day he took office. It also shouldn't be forgotten that when Trump took office, his
party controlled the executive branch and Congress, and yet the President still had to fight
every step of the way to pursue his agenda -- often unsuccessfully. James O'Meara once
commented that Trump was in fact a third-party candidate who managed to hijack one of the two
major parties. This was true, and many Republicans in the House never lost sight of that,
showing that their true loyalties lay with maintaining the Establishment rather than with
supporting their erstwhile leader's agenda.
We can't ignore the short, spectacular life of the Alt-Right, either. Those of us who had
been on the Dissident Right for many years prior, and who understood that the only way to bring
America into line with genuinely Rightist principles would be to transform the country from its
very foundations on issues such as citizenship, immigration, and capitalism, always saw Trump
as merely a stepping stone to something grander and better. And indeed, although this fact has
vanished into the mists of prehistory, before the 2016 election "Alt-Right" merely referred to
anyone on the Right whose views fell outside those of the Republican Party; even Steve Bannon
infamously told Mother Jones in 2016 that Breitbart was "the platform of the
Alt-Right," a statement I imagine he came to regret later. I myself was happy to accept the
label at first. And like many, I was naïve enough to think that the Alt-Right could make
use of the mainstream media rather than the other way around.
Once they realized that a Trump presidency was a reality, the mainstream media quickly
understood that the "Alt-Right," which was a nebulous phenomenon with no clear leadership or
goals, could be used to discredit Trump and populism more generally. Its decentralized nature
and lack of an organizational structure were in one sense a strength in that it was more
difficult to pin down and target it; but at the same time, anyone ranging from libertarians to
outright neo-Nazis could claim the mantle or be designated "Alt-Right" by clever journalists.
As such, it was perfect from their perspective as a means of attacking the populist Right as a
whole, since they spun the ridiculous narrative that the Alt-Right was somehow vaguely
responsible for getting Trump elected. The fact is, of course, that there was never any
relationship between what was called the Alt-Right and the Trump administration, but the Alt
Right's media-appointed leaders were hungry for attention that the media was more than happy to
provide -- and the rest is, regrettably, history.
It might have been possible to develop an alternative movement in late 2016 and 2017 that
could have piggybacked on Trump's success while laying the groundwork for a genuinely
innovative form of the American Right more in keeping with genuine Right-wing principles, and
yet that could still have appealed to ordinary Americans. It quickly became apparent, however,
that those individuals who found themselves thrust into the Alt-Right spotlight lacked the
character, maturity, and judgment to make it happen. Being wizards at winning followers for
websites, podcasts, and social media was no proper education to prepare them for entering the
arena of actual politics. Granted, they were confronting forces far beyond what any marginal
group could be expected to compete with; but by adopting tactics that had failed for George
Lincoln Rockwell half a century earlier and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with actual Nazis and
Klansmen, they played the role of cartoon Nazis that the media had cast them in to a tee. After
being led into the trap that was Charlottesville, the Alt-Right's tombstone was written and
Trump was never again able to plausibly deny that he was a white supremacist. We must persist
in our efforts, but the fact remains that the Alt-Right's spectacular and tragically
unnecessary failure will continue to hamper us for many years to come.
Despite our disappointment, we must still acknowledge that President Trump accomplished some
goals that deserve our thanks. It must be granted that throughout his tenure, despite the
constant accusations of warmongering by his opponents, he didn't start any new wars.
There were a few close calls, of course, particularly with Syria and Iran, but none of
America's enemies called his bluffs despite provocation and things remained at the level of
low-intensity conflict. It is certainly true that when it comes to foreign policy, Trump did
much more for Israel than he did for America, but he nevertheless made strides toward ending
the conflicts he had inherited and never bowed to the pressure to start new ones. As a
corollary to this, no Islamist terror attacks occurred within the United States during Trump's
tenure apart from the shooting at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, which puts him above both
Bush and Obama in that category. (It struck me as odd that Trump didn't play this up more in
his second campaign.)The most glorious moment of Trump's presidency for me, however, remains
his refusal to denounce the Alt-Right in the notorious press conference that he held three days
after Charlottesville. While it certainly wasn't the unequivocal defense of White Nationalism
that the media has made it out to have been ever since, the fact that he refused to issue the
standard denunciations of the Alt-Right that he had doubtless been asked to deliver stands for
me as a rare moment of principle for President Trump. In the end, it meant nothing in practical
terms, but it's one of the few clear examples we have that there was something deeper to his
presidency than mere egotism. It's also a sign of how much worse things were to get over the
subsequent years that he failed to show the same spirit when dealing with those of his
supporters who stormed the Capitol, opting for submissiveness rather than the spirit of
defiance that had characterized his campaign and the early days of his term.
Additionally, Trump's strident Euroskepticism forced Europe for the first time since the
Second World War to consider pursuing greater independence from NATO and the US and to perhaps
even solely pursue its own interests in foreign policy yet again, rather than serving as
America's lapdog on many issues and continuing to rely on the US for defense. It remains to be
seen if this trend will persist or reverse now that Trump is gone, but we can hope that more
forward-looking European politicians will continue thinking in terms of preparing for a
post-American global order.
We should also bear in mind that the Trump administration established good relations with
Right-wing populist parties in Europe in a way that would have been unimaginable under any
other presidency. The present governments of Hungary and Poland, in particular, enjoyed
friendly relations with Washington for the first time and will sorely miss Trump now that
Biden has made it clear that he intends to return to a confrontational policy with them.
(At the same time, it's worth noting that some European politicians on the Right I have spoken
with said that they preferred a Trump defeat, since they feel that Trump and American politics
more generally have become an obsessive distraction for the European Right and that his removal
would allow Europeans to focus on their own problems again.)
Domestically, Trump could hardly be considered a success on his signature issue,
immigration, although he wasn't entirely a failure, either. We certainly didn't get anything
like the sort of sweeping and radical changes on immigration that many of us had hoped for in
the beginning. Indeed, the Trump administration did not pass a single new piece of
immigration-related legislation. By some metrics , in
fact, certain types of immigration remained the same or increased during Trump's tenure. In
those currents where it decreased, some of it appears to have occurred as a result of the
pandemic rather than due to any political action. And of course, the Wall remains mostly
unbuilt and now surely faces cancellation.
At the same time, Trump did fortunately withdraw the US from the United Nations'
ethnomasochistic Global Compact on Migration. He did make limited
progress in a few other areas as well , particularly making it more difficult for
"refugees" to come to the US and for illegal immigrants to remain there. And he did put a stop
to some of the more troubling immigration policies that have emanated from both parties in the
past, such as the push for amnesties for illegals, and called a temporary moratorium on visas
for "guest workers" in response to the pandemic.
The issue that could be regarded as his second-biggest signature issue was opposing
globalization and helping ordinary working Americans; bringing industry back home was a
constant theme of his first campaign. In the end, however, Trump remained largely ineffectual
in this area. We should thank him for ending the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). But the treaty he signed to replace the
former, the
United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement , is only slightly better than its precursor. The
other nations which were part of the TPP ended up signing the virtually identical Comprehensive
and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which the US has not signed
but which it remains eligible to join at any time. In other words, the Trump administration
didn't do much to halt the drumbeat of globalization.
When it comes to the Dissident Right, Trump offered little but empty rhetoric. Despite
occasionally talking about establishing controls over Big Tech to prevent their blatant
censorship of non-conformist views that challenge the neoliberal narrative, no action was ever
taken in this direction. Apart from his Charlottesville press conference, neither did Trump
ever take a stand in defense of white advocates, and he often went in the other direction,
such as in September , when he promised to declare the "Ku Klux Klan" a terrorist
organization (thus opening the door for any Dissident Right groups to be targeted given the
lack of an easily identifiable unified KKK organization), calling for Juneteenth to be declared
a federal holiday, and promising $500 billion in aid to black communities.
Thus, President Trump achieved modest successes at best, and even those issues on which he
won victories can be easily reversed by the Biden administration -- and in some cases they are
already doing so. But such is the ephemeral nature of politics in a liberal democracy.
On the plus side, the Republican Party now finds itself in its direst predicament since the
1940s, if not before, as a result of Trumpism taking root within it. The conflict between
populists and neoliberals within its ranks, which now threatens to come to a head as a result
of Trump's second impeachment, may very well end the party for good, or at least result in a
split -- either outcome of which might perhaps open the door for a more genuinely Right-wing
party to fill the void it will leave behind. Only time will tell, but if it happens, it will be
a parting gift from Trump to have achieved what once seemed impossible, back when the
Republican Party was nothing more than the party of multiculturalism and globalism plus Jesus
and low taxes.
President Trump's most important contribution is that he lit the flame that genuinely
started the fire of Right-wing populism in America after previous attempts such as Pat
Buchanan's campaigns and the Tea Party ( yech ) had guttered out without raising the
temperature in Washington by even a degree. Whether that flame can continue burning now that
he's gone remains to be seen, but we can still hope that it was the start of a trend rather
than a temporary deviation. If American populism is to survive, it will clearly stand on the
Right; the Left has already amply demonstrated in its underhanded suppression of more populist
Democratic candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard that they will not tolerate the
rise of any form of Leftism that doesn't conform to the Washington Elite's expectations.
Now, Unpresident Biden and the entire Democratic Party apparatus, emboldened by their
largely successful efforts to discredit the Right as a whole by blaming it in its entirety for
the Capitol occupation, believe themselves to be in a place where they can reshape American
politics according to their own agenda without any regard for the other side whatsoever. As
they've done continuously since the 2016 election, the Democrats always choose to double down
on their extremist rhetoric rather than doing any soul-searching about how they might have
contributed to bringing the situation about, nor about how they might be able to seek some sort
of compromise with the other side. They are too self-righteous to be capable of critical
reflection.
The Capitol "coup," harebrained as it was, certainly does not even begin to compare to the
Democrats' -- and some Republicans' -- efforts to undermine the Trump administration and the
will of the American electorate at every turn over the past four years, which to my mind much
more accurately fits the definition of a coup. It will be the task of the Dissident Right --
and hopefully the Right more generally, if they have the stones -- to do to the Left exactly
what they have been doing to us by throwing endless obstacles in their path, denying their
legitimacy, and constantly calling them to account for their injustices and excesses at every
possible opportunity.
The Democrats are not as strong as they believe. Even most liberals only supported Biden
grudgingly and purely out of expediency. Unpresident Biden is America's Brezhnev -- his health
and stamina failing, he is merely an old Establishment tool who has been resurrected in an
attempt to prop up an order that everyone knows is on its last legs. A telling video from the
inauguration shows Biden passing a contingent of Marines on guard duty, who any sitting
president is supposed to salute, being the Commander-in-Chief. Biden just shambles past them
without a gesture, oddly mumbling "salute the Marines" under his facemask. The quite plausible
theory that has been making the rounds is that Biden was being instructed on what to say and do
through an earpiece, and that he mistakenly repeated an instruction to salute the Marines
rather than actually doing it. This seems a good metaphor for his entire administration. (If
you're wondering who is on the other end of Biden's earpiece, it might perhaps be one of the
many Jews with whom he has packed his cabinet -- such a number that makes Trump's pandering
to the Jewish lobby seem tame in comparison. What happened to diversity? Does the White House
need affirmative action for whites nowadays?)
Like the late Soviet Union, however, Washington Inc. will project images of power in order
to conceal the reality of their order's decrepitude. That is surely the motive behind the
deployment of 26,000 soldiers to Washington, DC -- more than the number currently stationed in
Iraq and Afghanistan combined -- in response to the supposed Right-wing "threat." It isn't
about security, it is a show of force to prove to America that they are back and that they
intend to keep Washington and propagate their policies by any means necessary. Further, I
predict that the US will engage in some significant military action within the next year to
make a similar show of force on the world stage, flexing its muscles to prove that America
intends to resume its role as the world's policeman.
Starting from before the inauguration, the Left has been making their intention to declare
war on anything authentically white or Rightist clear. But while it was very easy for the
Establishment to muzzle the few thousand adherents of the Alt-Right, it will be much more
difficult for them to silence the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump -- in many cases not
because they loved Trump but simply because they wanted to prevent the return of the ruling
clique that had been governing our country entirely unopposed for decades before Trump's
rise.
In the final analysis, the most important lesson to be taken away from the Trump
administration is that the last five years were never about Trump himself. American populism
didn't start with him and it won't end with him. Samuel Francis was already predicting the rise
of a populist figure like Trump in the 1990s, even heralding a " revolution from the Right
" in a way that seems extremely prescient today. What the Capitol occupation
showed is that the populist current has grown beyond Trump's ability to channel and contain
it. As a result -- maybe -- we have an opportunity to transcend him and construct something
real out of the movement he energized, and do it better.
The real news of the last few months was the fact that 11 million more Americans voted for
Trump in 2020 over 2016, despite the ongoing demographic changes and despite all of his flaws
and failures. There is nothing that more aptly proves that it wasn't all merely about him than
this. American populism isn't dead. White America isn't dead. That's why I didn't use a photo
of Trump himself to illustrate this post, but rather one of his supporters -- ordinary
Americans, who were the real motor behind these changes in the political landscape.
I can't say at present what will come next for the Dissident Right. I'm not sure who will,
or even could, emerge to form the leadership of a post-Trump populist movement. Perhaps those
who follow the American political scene more closely than I do might have an inkling of who is
waiting in the wings that might be qualified to take charge. One thing that is certain is that
these new leaders must be completely disconnected in every public way from the fiasco that was
the Alt-Right. That brand is dead. But hopefully what is best in the Dissident Rightist milieu
can still inform whatever follows in our, and Trump's, footsteps.
With Trump's wings clipped, ordinary white Americans are looking for a leader. Here's hoping
they can finally get the one they deserve.
Well Lets see interesting year Biden wins ,Pennsyllvanis by 25,000 more votes than
Registered voters. He wins Wisconsin by 17,000 more votes than voters, their were two states
with over 300,000 combinred votes that were from people who did not exist, But according to
the courts all the way up to the supreme court who said it was legal, needless to say i no
longer, trust the supreme court
Trump succeeded in two things, both for the Jewish cause: advanced the Zionist interest in
Israel, and put back the opposition to the liberal-neocon Jewish establishment in America.
How is that in any way a "win" for authentic America Firsters?
I was proud of the fact that Michigan, where I vote
No real dissident votes. When one votes, he is buying into the scam that continually
produces the next savior and continually produces nothing but more repression.
A real dissident understands he is getting reamed and won't cooperate in his own demise. A
dissident has a brain that actually thinks. A voter is a mindless spectator in the endless
game of politics purposely designed to provide a false sense of control for people too stupid
to understand the system offers them no control.
Trump was a little bit better choice than the other candidates. And they were really,
really, really bad. I was not disappointed in Trump because I never expected much out of him.
RIP Donny!
It's always amazing to see how many right-wingers have invented a country for themselves
called "this country", which is everywhere, has no population, but lives in their minds
anyway. All for the sake of a chimera called "the white working class".
How is it an imaginary class which is actually a minority, and that has no history
anywhere is also going to rule over a continent of 50 States with 300+ million people?
I called it the day he rode down the escalator. I was happy he won, but not happy with his
performance. Even so, I voted for him again, because the alternative was much worse.
Trump ran on a Democrat 1980 platform: manufacturing jobs, family values, everything the
Democrats were before homosexuals, Scientism, and "people of color" changed the party. Hardly
"right wing," but given today's politics, who knows what the labels mean anymore. Contrary to
the New York Times, he was not a racist or a fascist. He pandered more to blacks and
Hispanics than he did to Whites. His pardon of two negro rappers just before he left office
was disgusting. Allowing that Kardashian whore into the Oval Office was likewise disgusting.
And his Jewish in-laws were nauseating.
He was not my ideal candidate, but, as I said, the alternative was far worse. As for the
future, I will not vote again. We are unlikely to ever see a promising leader that Whites can
follow.
While it is true that Trump didn't start the war with Syria, that honor belongs to
our 44th White President, make no mistake: we are at war with Syria and should not
be.
Can everybody please stop calling it "immigration"? And start calling it "illegal alien
invasion"? Immigration is not the problem although the H1B visa program is a disaster for
American workers, just a way to import cheap mostly Indian labor and it needs a
moratorium.
I think the author is far too generous in his assesssment of Trump. The only positive
thing I can see was that he didn't start any new wars, only maintained the ones that was
although the blatant zionist provocation of Iran was unforgivable.
It all started the first day after the election when Trump et al decided that they would
not be going in opposition to their own party. That was his first mistake. His econd mistake
mistake was not hiring people loyal to him and Bannon's vision and third mistake was being a
dumbfuck who let himself be led into the most stupid things by the corrupt -- - Kushner who
had way too much influence over everything, yes everything, in the administration.
Ultimately Trump was a bloviating buffoon (Although that was known to anybody reasonable
before the election) with a degree of narcissism never seen in a white goy in politics before
that was only thinking about himself the whole time, without any convictions at all.
He squandered the first two years on going along with the GOPe agenda and ultimately the only
people who got anything out of his presidency was blacks/criminals, the left (Because he
riled them up and poked them while never using the force of the state to shut them down, even
dropping his own voter fraud investigation halfways and crying on twitter that somebody
should do something about so many different things when he was the President – an
absurd thing to do), the rich 1 % elite and Jews (But i repeat myself).
If Russia anneses Crimea, which was a part of the country until the 1950s or 60s, it's a
crime against humanity. If Israel annexes the West bank it's only good and right.
Why? Because Jews run the USA and Trump did nothing at all to stand up to them in any real
way that gave any results (And I mean implicitly, not explcitly of course).
As mr Morgan said, its not about Trump, it is American Populism rising, and betrayed once
again. I
Israel got the most!
Four years wasted, and no organizing but ludicruos fringe alt-right queers, and nazi-fan
boys!
This should be about the ordinary people, 75 million, long since betrayed by the democrats
calling them "deplorables" and "fly-over-people".
Organize now!
Pick up Tulsi Gabbard and forget about Bernie Sanders!
Create a movement and form resistance, before they jab you out in space!
"Biden administration eyes Rahm Emanuel for ambassadorship" [
NBC ]. "President Joe Biden is considering former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for a
high-profile ambassadorship, potentially to China, three people with knowledge of the
discussions said." Rahm Emmanuel, China hand.
More: "Becoming the U.S. ambassador to Japan is another option that Biden administration
officials have discussed with Emanuel, one of the people with knowledge of the discussions
said."
Unpresident Biden is America's Brezhnev -- his health and stamina failing, he is merely an
old Establishment tool who has been resurrected in an attempt to prop up an order that everyone
knows is on its last legs. A telling video from the inauguration shows Biden passing a
contingent of Marines on guard duty, who any sitting president is supposed to salute, being the
Commander-in-Chief. Biden just shambles past them without a gesture, oddly mumbling "salute the
Marines" under his facemask. The quite plausible theory that has been making the rounds is that
Biden was being instructed on what to say and do through an earpiece, and that he mistakenly
repeated an instruction to salute the Marines rather than actually doing it.
A shocking example was provided Wednesday when Douglass Mackey of Delray Beach, Fla., was
arrested for creating memes that allegedly misled voters in 2016 to think they could vote by
texting instead of by actually going to the polls.
This is the equivalent of arresting Sacha
Baron Cohen for exposing the gullibility of the rich and famous.
The FBI offered no evidence
that Mackey actually convinced anyone not to vote, but even if it did, so what? Would you
rather live in a country where the FBI is hunting down pranksters -- four years after the
supposed transgression -- or a country where voters are expected to be able to recognize a joke
when they see one?
While Special Counsel John Durham's investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe
is generally focused on the FBI's activities, sources familiar with the investigation told Fox
News the prosecution of high-ranking FBI officials, such as former Director James Comey, is
"unlikely."
In a report
published Tuesday, Fox News reports that sources told the publication that the investigation is
ongoing and that Durham last year concluded the part of his investigation looking into the CIA
and he is now examining the FBI's activities.
Additionally, another source told the news outlet that the special counsel had been pursuing
"new and credible leads" through the end of the Trump administration, however, Fox News noted
that it is unclear at this point what those lines of inquiry entail.
Moreover, a spokesperson for Durham told the outlet that they had "no comment from Mr.
Durham."
Durham's probe is looking into the origins of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's
investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as well as
now-debunked collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign. Former President
Donald Trump
and conservatives have called Mueller's yearlong probe a "witch hunt" and accused it of being
motivated by anti-Trump animus.
Mueller's investigation yielded no evidence that collusion occurred between the Trump
campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 election.
Tuesday's report comes after the first and only criminal sentencing stemming from Durham's
investigation was issued last week.
Last Friday,
Kevin Clinesmith , a former FBI lawyer,
was sentenced to one year of probation and 400 hours of community service for altering an
email during the Mueller's investigation that was used as grounds for the surveillance of
former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Previously, Comey has said that investigators have yet to reach out to him.
"I have had no contact with him and haven't talked to him," the former FBI director
told CBS News' "Face the
Nation" back in August.
"I can't imagine that I'm a target."
Last summer, Durham's team also questioned former CIA Director John Brennan for about eight
hours at the CIA headquarters . Brennan later said through a spokesman he was assured he was
"not a target," according to Fox News.
Back in December, Brennan told
"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace that he had no issue with Durham's investigation extending
into 2021 and also divulged briefly about the eight-hour session.
"I think that is fine, I have no problems with it," the former CIA director said, adding
that Durham's team already talked with him for eight hours. "I do believe that John Durham is
going to carry out his responsibilities ably and hopefully not with any political influence."
5,713 64 NEV play_arrow
Clee Torres 4 minutes ago
No sh*t Sherlock.
You mean there are two levels of justice? One for me and one for thee?
When lynch met clinton on the plane and it barely made a ripple.
That's when I knew.
enough of this 11 minutes ago (Edited)
No surprise. Durham and his pals are milking the investigation for all its worth. In the
meantime, Comey skates and the amendment named in his honor remains in full force.
On a happier note, Mr. Durham is looking for a nice beachfront mansion...
WOODisGOOD 3 minutes ago
Deep State gotta protect Deep State. That's just the way it works.
squib 4 minutes ago
I remember, Strzok, Comey, Clapper, Brennan etc. always looked smug bc they knew that
they'd be taken care of.
PaulDF 3 minutes ago
"Insurance Policy" indeed
Alex Jones was right... 4 minutes ago remove link
In other news, water is wet...
Reaper 16 minutes ago
US Law makes Dunham a Principle who abeted the crimes he's investigating. As such, under
US Code, he's liable for the same punishment as the perps. Remember how quickly Roger Stone
was prosecuted for lying.
Those who have the most to say about the burdens of government regulation tend to be silent
about the enormous infrastructure supporting a very specific conception of corporate
personhood, limited liability, and intellectual property.
It's like an industrialist looking out upon a vast landscape of canals, dams, and levees, and
complaining at the "unnatural" construction of a bridge putting a ferryman out of a job.
It's still not clear exactly what the clinic's customers were being injected with...
My guess is that it's something less hazardous to your health than the real vaccine, but
still not what the greatest scientist of all time, Dr. Fauci, and our greatest president of
all time, His Excellency Joe Biden, have mandated that you take.
Mike Konczal has a new book, Freedom from the Market ( Bookshop.org locator , Amazon ). I've been wanting to write about this book for a while,
but first had to wait for it to come out, and then had my working life banjaxed by the madness
of the last few weeks. But it is a great book that looks to remake the American debate about
freedom and largely succeeds. Full disclosure: Mike is a friend of the 'see very occasionally
but like very strongly' variety; I also read an early version of the mss and commented on
it.
When I say that this book is about the American debate, I mean it. Non-Americans will learn
from the book, but they aren't the target audience. The examples that Konczal draws on to
inform modern Americans are drawn from their own, largely forgotten history. This could be seen
as a reflection of the American parochialism that Konczal mentions in passing, but it is, I
think, a deliberate political move. It also is in some ways refreshing – rather than
weaving fairytales about the wonders of Fantasy Sweden or Fantasy Germany, it tells stories
where the ambiguities are necessarily more visible to its readers.
Still, it provides measured hope. By drawing on what has happened in American history,
Konczal makes it easier for Americans to understand that things they might not believe are
possible in America must be, because they have been. He rescues moments such as the WWII
government run daycare centers that allowed women to work, or the use of the power of the
federal state to force through the integration of Southern hospitals, from the enormous
condescension of posterity. Notably, although he doesn't dwell on this point, many of these
changes began at moments that seem shittier and more despairing than our own.
Konczal neither provides a standard linear history, nor a policy textbook. Instead, he is
claiming an alternative American tradition, which has not looked to the market as its
apotheosis, but instead has sought to free Americans from its random vagaries. His history
explains how America has responded collectively to the real and expressed needs of publics, who
have organized to fight for them. And it does so in the plain language that he mentions in
passing was necessary to allow ordinary people to organize and understand who was trying to
stop them.
Konczal's fundamental claim is that people who attribute freedom to markets miss out on much
of the story. Equally important is a notion of freedom from markets, "rooted in public
programs that genuinely serve people and checking market dependency." This notion goes back
much further in time than the New Deal. The nineteenth century is sometimes depicted as a reign
of laissez-faire, both by those who admired it and deplored it. Konczal argues instead that
there was an emerging sense of public needs – and imperfect ways in which the government
provided for them. This helps us understand, for example, the provision of public land through
the Homestead Act and the land grant universities.
The nineteenth century notion of the public was clearly horribly flawed and contradictory
– it did not include slaves or Native Americans. Some, like Horace Greeley ended up
fleeing these contradictions into the welcoming arms of free market absolutism. But within
these contradictions lay possibilities that opened up in the twentieth century. Konczal builds,
for example on Eric Schickler's work to argue that as the New Deal began to provide concrete
benefits to African Americans, it created a new relationship between them and the Democratic
Party, breaking up the old coalition that had held Jim Crow together.
The organizing ideas in this book are Polanyian – the stresses of the market lead to
social rupture, which may in turn create the conditions for political mobilization. But Konczal
doesn't depict this as necessary or inevitable – people's choices have consequences. He
is also more precise than Polanyi in his understanding of how change happens – through
social movements and the state:
While the Supreme Court can be effective at holding back change and enforcing already
existing power structures, it is actually very weak at creating new reform itself. It
controls no funding and is dependent on elite power structures to carry out its decisions.
What really creates change is popular mobilization and legislative changes.
Finally, Konczal not only employs Polanyi's ideas, but the ideas of Polanyi's friendly
critics like Quinn Slobodian, to describe how modern Hayekians have sought to "encase" the
market order in institutions and practices that are hard to overturn. Property rights aren't
the foundation of liberty, as both nineteenth century jurists and twentieth century economists
would have it. They are a product of the choices of the state, and as such intensely
political.
This allows Konczal to turn pragmatism against the Hayekians. Hayek's notion of spontaneous
order is supposed to be evolutionary, to provide a more supple response to what people (thought
of as individuals want). But if there is a need to provide collective goods for people that
cannot be fulfilled through voluntarism, the Hayekian logic becomes a brutal constraint on
adaptation.
The efforts of Hayekians to enforce binding legal constraints, to cripple the gathering of
the collective knowledge that can guide collective action, to wink at legal doctrines intended
to subvert social protections against the market; all these prevent the kinds of evolutionary
change that are necessary to respond to changing circumstances. Konczal makes it clear that
Oliver Wendell Holmes was no left-winger – but his pragmatist criticisms of the rigid and
doctrinaire laissez-faire precepts of his colleagues rings true. Their "willingness to use a
very specific understanding of economics to override law writes a preferential understanding of
economics into the constitution itself." Although Konczal wrote this book before the current
crisis, he describes Holmes as mentioning compulsory vaccination laws as one of the ways in
which government interference in private decisions can have general social benefits. The
wretched contortions of libertarians and market conservatives over anti-pandemic measures
during the last several months, and the consequences of their intellectual rigidity for human
welfare in states such as North Dakota illustrate the point, quite brutally.
What Konczal presses for is a very different notion of freedom. This doesn't deny the
benefits of markets, but it qualifies them. In Konczal's words, "markets are great at
distributing things based on people's willingness to pay. But there are some goods that should
be distributed by need." Accepting this point entails the necessity of keeping some important
areas of life outside the determining scope of markets. Furthermore, people's needs change over
time, as societies and markets change. Konczal's framework suggests the need for collective
choice to figure out the best responses to these changes, and a vibrant democratic politics, in
which the state responds to the expressed needs of mobilized publics as the best way to carry
out these choices.
All this makes the book sound more like an exercise in political theory than it is. That's
because of my own professional deformities, and because I want you to read the book itself, if
you really to get the good stuff – the stories, the examples, and the overall narrative
that Konczal weaves together. Freedom from the Market has the potential to be a very
important book, focusing attention on the contested, messy but crucially important intersection
between social movements and the state. It provides a set of ideas that people on both sides of
that divide can learn from, and a lively alternative foundation to the deracinated technocratic
notions of politics, in which good policy would somehow, magically, be politically self
supporting, that has prevailed up until quite recently. Strongly recommended.
I'll second this recommendation – it was a great read. I would especially recommend
reading it for the section on Medicare integration, since that's a story that rarely gets
told but is genuinely quite fascinating. It gives me greater respect for LBJ, given that he
was giving them full-support despite a difficult, treacherous political battle to integrate
hospitals in the South despite immense resistance.
He also made a very interesting point after the Homestead section when he got to the
section on work-hour labor movements, about how they needed to specifically make it so that
certain rights couldn't be contracted away, because otherwise even laws establishing
such-and-such rules would get end-runned by businesses requiring their employees to give them
up in contracts.
Henry, you write, "if there is a need to provide collective goods for people that cannot
be fulfilled through voluntarism, the Hayekian logic becomes a brutal constraint on
adaptation." That seems like a big "if." Other than the classic examples of national defense
and perhaps police and courts, what goods cannot be provided through voluntarism?
There's a nice line in Slobodian's book about Americans not knowing much about the rest of
the world but imagining that the US is a scale-model of it. Isn't the worry about the general
claim here that it is more plausible to see property rights as merely the creature of the
state when you have a vast internal market with many needs catered for by domestic production
than it is when you have small states with relatively specialized domestic production that
need to trade across borders to satisfy their needs. In such a case, where the real economy
transcends borders and where trade barriers at those borders just make everyone poorer, you
need transnational guarantees (or at least a very strong degree of confidence) for property
rights and investment against the potential interference of local governments. So even if
Konczal is right for the US, the question of how to do social democracy transnationally
remains for the rest of us. The EU is one possible answer to that, but the continuation of
national political narratives, blaming other nations within the structure for their own
problems (Germany > Greece, Italy) etc remains a big obstacle to anti-market pushback at
that level.
reason 01.27.21 at 11:20 am (no link)
Just a short aside, this sentence struck me:
" Property rights aren't the foundation of liberty, as both nineteenth century jurists and
twentieth century economists would have it."
Property rights are inherently a restriction of liberty. They restrict the rights of
everybody but the designated owner. It may be that in some circumstances they are net a
positive, that this is clearly not something one can expect from the nature of the thing.
That this point isn't made more often and more strongly puzzles me.
Jake Gibson 01.27.21 at 1:22 pm (no link)
I think it can be illuminating to think of "property rights" in the context that at some
point all property was taken (stolen) from The Commons.
And that property laws are enshrinement of common law on possession (nine tenths).
The "twentieth century economists" like the "nineteenth century jurists" refer just to
those discussed in the book (basically Friedman, Chicago School, market for corporate control
people etc etc). So they're not claims about the general class of economists in the twentieth
century, where there is tons of disagreement on lots of stuff obviously, but a particular
strain of economic thought that Konczal writes about.
There is no "the" market. All markets are not the same.
The Hayekians first insistence is that in fact all markets are the same. They then have
designed the 'markets' they want, and if you design a market you win.
Mike Huben 01.27.21 at 4:11 pm (no link)
Kurt Schuler @ 3 asks: "what goods cannot be provided through voluntarism?"
The glib answer is "none" because you can always find an exceptional case of private
production.
But the problem is "provided" is underspecified: it could mean provision to only one
person, or (better) provision of ENOUGH. And even enough is underspecified.
Look at something like water. Public provision of vast volumes of clean, safe, cheap
drinking water is an alternative to voluntarism's answer: expensive bottled water which must
be used frugally by the poor, consumes much energy in transportation and waste in plastic:
which is enough? Which is proper provision? Should there be only one type of provision?
And of course that question implies another; what goods should not be provided through
voluntarism? Maybe pollution, addiction, crime, and a host of others.
"Voluntarism" is an example of framing, trying to focus the world through an ideological
lens. If you accidentally accept this narrow peephole on the world, your thinking is greatly
constrained because of the things is has misdirected you from. The same kind of framing as
"markets are freedom", which Konczal is apparently decrying. (I have not yet read the
book.)
Given the tenor of most responses, it doesn't seem likely Konczal's book is going to
change the narrative in any significant way.
Bob@2 seems a good example of the pro-market reasoning. For one thing, "economics" says
that if a person with a scarce talent can earn more money than is necessary to induce them to
exercise that talent, the income can be taxed away without affecting the market outcome.
Considering the real life examples of professional athletes, movie stars and artists, the
sage advice to tax the athletes, stars and artists, precisely because it won't endanger the
market outcomes of professional athletics, Hollywood and the art world presupposes the market
outcomes of pro sports, Hollywood and the museum/art gallery circuit are just and wise.
Bob@2 wrote "Economics is wisely silent on people's preferences and needs. The point
surely is not that there is something inherent in certain goods that means they should be
distributed by need–who decides what those "good" goods are that everyone (ought to?)
need?; the point is that income should be redistributed so that everyone can buy whatever
they see fit to buy based on their own understanding of their needs."
Yes, I recall reading a short article by von Hayek explaining there was no scientific way
to distinguish between wants and needs, thus there was no way ever, even in principle, to
deny there was such a thing as scarcity. Like von Hayek, the assumption that, given the
impossibility of pronouncing a difference between needs and wants (nor apparently even a way
of merely satisficing any such distinction,) the only valid way of deciding what must be
produced is by consumer sovereignty. The "votes" by rational consumers are the only possible
means of justice. Like distinguishing between productive and unproductive labor, anything
less than the market is tyranny.
I have no idea why Bob says Konczal's book as presented doesn't pose a problem, given two
market refutations of it are endorsed in the comment. It may be something like compatibilism,
the philosophical position that people have free will in the religious sense despite the
myriad of facts and millennia of experience showing that the religious notion of moral
responsibility is, to say the least, flawed. In words, compatibilists will say they accept
things like mental illness leave old notions of moral responsibility -- which is to say, old
notions about retribution and punishment -- then in practice, they will do things like try
adolescents as adult or arbitrarily limit the definition of mental illness or simply ignore
such fiddling objections to honor time-honored customs. Similarly, market proponents will
give lip service to the notion of market failure, then inexplicably (?) fail to see it.
Chris Bertram@5 writes " the continuation of national political narratives, blaming other
nations within the structure for their own problems (Germany > Greece, Italy) etc remains
a big obstacle " to social democracy. Is the illustrative example meant to condemn Germany
blaming Greece and Italy for creating their own problems and leeching (or trying to) off of
Germany? Or, is it Greece and Italy blaming of Germany for not curing their own failures for
them? Is it somehow both? Also, the definition of the EU as a consortium of states premised
on fiscal integrity may be more of an obstacle to social democracy than political narratives,
however construed?
Well, insulin clearly (see above). But also: schools that make everybody literate and
promote basic social solidarity. Colleges that are cheap enough to educate all of the
talents. Hospitals that treat illnesses irrespective of ability to pay. Universal
vaccinations. Flood defences. Disaster relief. Food inspectors. Drug safety testers.
Buildings inspectors. Fire inspectors. Transport safety inspectors. Highways. Mending
potholes in highways. Keeping bridges safe. Last-mile rural electrification. Universal mail
coverage at a single price. Legal advice to even access to justice by rich and poor.
Excellent daycare at prices poor people can afford. Basic research in particle physics and
astronomy. R & D in far-from-market areas society needs. Drug discovery for diseases poor
people get. Training of specialists in non-profitable yet essential professions. Landscape
conservation. Pollution control. Tech regulation. Setting a carbon price/tax. Railways that
move people fast enough and cheaply enough to take custom away from ecocidal airlines. Mass
transit in cities. Space programmes. A welfare safety net permitting risky careers in the
arts. A welfare safety net to equalise the chances of children. A welfare safety net allowing
every member of a society to go to sleep every night in a state of delicious moral luxury,
knowing that no-one is hungry. Lighthouses. Earthquake detection. Censuses. Diplomacy.
Peacemaking. Peacekeeping. Public broadcasters with editorial independence. Et cetera et
cetera et cetera, in every flavour from civilisational basic to utopian flight of fancy.
Collective action! Getting the job done everywhere on the planet where libertarians
aren't.
" In such a case, where the real economy transcends borders and where trade barriers at
those borders just make everyone poorer, you need transnational guarantees (or at least a
very strong degree of confidence) for property rights and investment against the potential
interference of local governments."
Much of the world did social democracy pretty well last century, without transnational
guarantees. Conversely, the creation of investor guarantees like ISDS has been a gift to
predatory corporations like Philip Morris.
Insulin (and Epi pens) become unaffordable in the U.S. because the government massively
screwed up the regulations. These are off-patent drugs, so in theory anybody can make them.
BUT, getting production facilities FDA-approved is a long, expensive process. So when there's
an effective monopoly on a drug, no other company will enter the market to compete -- even
after huge price hikes. Why not? Because after the new company had invested the time and
money to get its production line built and approved, the original monopolist would drop its
prices back down, and the new entrant would make no money. And everybody knows this, so
potential new entrants don't bother. An obvious solution is reciprocity to allow importation
of drugs already approved in the EU. But there's no way the FDA is going to allow that
to happen and lose its regulatory monopoly.
The bottom line is that these are not failures of unregulated markets, they are cases of
government failure in the most heavily regulated market in the U.S. (and where, in fact, the
strict regulation is the key enabler of the bad outcome and where the obvious fix is blocked
by the regulatory agency defending its turf).
MPAVictoria 01.29.21 at 1:39 am (no link)
"Insulin (and Epi pens) become unaffordable in the U.S. because the government massively
screwed up the regulations."
Just need to point out that this is completely false. Insulin prices are high in the US
because of a lack of price controls. Canada has very similar patent rules and our insulin is
made by the same companies but guess what? We set a maximum price for pharmaceuticals. The US
should do the same.
mw 01.29.21 at 1:23 pm (no link)
MPAVictoria @ 23 Just need to point out that this is completely false. Insulin prices
are high in the US because of a lack of price controls. Canada has very similar patent rules
and our insulin is made by the same companies but guess what? We set a maximum price for
pharmaceuticals. The US should do the same.
Yes, you could layer on additional price-control regulations to fix the problems caused by
the existing regulations. Of course it's one thing for Canada to adopt such rules where the
U.S. has not (and remains a source of profits and R&D incentives) and another when the
U.S. is also controlling prices. Incidentally, if price controls were to be adopted in the
U.S., my suggested approach is that the U.S. should require all pharma companies within, say,
two years to sell drugs here for the lowest price they have negotiated in any industrialized
country with a comparable per-Capita GDP. Then we can all be in it together.
But that's all a discussion for another thread -- the point remains that insulin and epi
pens are not examples of a free, unregulated market failing, they're an example of a very
heavily (but badly) regulated market failing. Yes bad U.S. regulations are responsible --
they create barriers to entry (specifically high costs of setting up a production facility
combined with an FDA regulatory monopoly and a ban on imports) that enable monopoly
pricing.
notGoodenough 01.29.21 at 8:01 am (no link)
mw @ 19, MPAVictoria @ 23
Not to side-track the thread, but I think there was an attempt to explore this on a
previous thread (particularly with respect to Daraprim, though I believe many of the points
are applicable in a general sense) [1]. While I´ll freely admit I am not an economist,
I didn´t find the responses to my queries and concerns from those advocating
"regulations are the issue" sufficiently satisfactory [2, 3] to warrant changing my position
– in short, I see little evidence to support the notion that it is US regulations
responsible for the high price of pharmaceuticals (particularly as it appears that R&D
spending is frequently less than that of marketing and administration). I hope the discussion
at the links provided is of interest.
Apologies to everyone for the interjection, but Pharma is a topic of keen interest and
concern to me.
mw @ 30: I forgot to respond to your by-the-by argument that the pharmas' US profits fund
their R&D. This is, as with the rest of your arguments, untrue.
(1) the US taxpayer funds most pharma research
(2) Last I checked, pharmas spend more on advertising and lobbying than they do on
R&D.
'nuff said.
MPAVictoria 01.30.21 at 1:29 am (no link)
@ NotGoodenough – Interesting links thank you! And I completely agree that I am
unconvinced that over regulation in it the reason the US has uniquely high drug prices.
@ me – Drug approval and manufacturing requirements in the US are not that different
from any other developed country. Neither is it's Drug IP regime. So the argument that these
features are what cause these outrageous pharmaceutical prices doesn't make much sense. In
fact the US had a bit of a reputation of being too ready to approve drugs with limited
effectiveness. The reason that Americans pay more than anyone else in the world is simple
– no price controls.
Sir John Glubb's essay on the rise and fall of empires is a must read. As this quote from
his work shows, empires throughout history have had an extraordinary pattern of lasting an
average of 250 years from rise to fall.
Assyria: 859 B.C. – 612 B.C. 247 years
Persia: 538 B.C. – 330 B.C. 208 years
Greece: 331 B.C. – 100 B.C. 231 years
Roman Republic: 260 B.C. – 27 B.C. 233 years
Roman Empire: 27 B.C. – A.D. 180 207 years
Arab Empire: A.D. 634 – A.D. 880 246 years
Mameluke Empire: A.D. 1250 – A.D. 1517 267 years
Ottoman Empire: A.D. 1320 – A.D. 1570 250 years
Spain: A.D. 1500 – A.D. 1750 250 years
Romanov Russia: A.D. 1682 – A.D. 1916 234 years
British Empire: A.D. 1700 – A.D. 1950 250 years
United States: A.D. 1776 – A.D. ???? ??? years
Some more quotes from this essay:
Feminism isn't working out too well today. It didn't work out for 10th century Arabs
either:
In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women
demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. 'What,' wrote the
contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, 'have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or
preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.' Many
women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an
agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have
succeeded. Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign
invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it
unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist
movement collapsed.
One half of America's population at the other half's throat? Yeah, the Byzantines have
been there and done it already:
In the fourteenth century, the weakening empire of Byzantium was threatened, and indeed
dominated, by the Ottoman Turks. The situation was so serious that one would have expected
every subject of Byzantium to abandon his personal interests and to stand with his
compatriots in a last desperate attempt to save the country. The reverse occurred. The
Byzantines spent the last fifty years of their history in fighting one another in repeated
civil wars, until the Ottomans moved in and administered the coup de grâce.
What do the new overlords do when they take control of a ravaged empire? Civilised Persian
officials found out when the barbaric Mongols took the empire they had let fall by the
wayside:
When the Mongols conquered Persia in the thirteenth century, they were themselves
entirely uneducated and were obliged to depend wholly on native Persian officials to
administer the country and to collect the revenue. They retained as wazeer, or Prime
Minister, one Rashid al Din, a historian of international repute. Yet the Prime Minister,
when speaking to the Mongol II Khan, was obliged to remain throughout the interview on his
knees. At state banquets, the Prime Minister stood behind the Khan's seat to wait upon him.
If the Khan were in a good mood, he occasionally passed his wazeer a piece of food over his
shoulder.
I'm not American, but I feel like crying as I put this together. Anyway, America will do
its best to buck the 250 year trend.
@Anonymous
antines spent the last fifty years of their history in fighting one another in repeated civil
wars, until the Ottomans moved in and administered the coup de grâce.
Can't forget the American Indians, the South American Indians etc never stopped fighting
each other once Europeans showed up .
Many Tribes did little more than welcome better weapons (firearms) to continue their genocide
against neighboring Tribes .
No matter how much the Left talks about the plight of the First Peoples, they paid attention to
the outcome and are pushing much the same internal conflicts
We have a problem. The U.S. government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. But it
has held itself unaccountable for decades while systematically stupefying, demoralizing, and
impoverishing the public through popular culture. Does a republic always turn to an empire, a
democracy to a tyrant, and a tyrant into pieces? The world needs globalism, but it does not
need monoculture. When the U.S. regime collapses it may be different this time. This time we
have the internet. The whole world watches everything.
I also predict the 1917 outcome. Worst outcome the Trump presidency was knowledge that Red
America is incapable to organize on the grassroot level, unite and fight back . So the Blue can
do whatever they want .
There are 2 issues remain. Elite infighting may make Government dysfunctional. New democrats
like the Squad want to push old Swamp Things out and fill Government positions with their
supporters.
Financial system blows off and massive economic disaster with chaos makes country
ungovernable.
Hunter Biden's laptop. The article is by Peter Van Buren, who indeed is not a nutcase.
Anyone here ever / currently a free lance? You'll love these details:
"for example, on September 28, 2018, Hunter ordered $95,000 transferred without
explanation), a "business" run by Jim Biden out of a residential address. Jim regularly
invoiced Hunter for office expenses and employee costs, as well as a monthly retainer cost of
some $68,000, plus other fees in the tens of thousands of dollars."
Sure: My accountant would have been ga-ga for that. Then there's this little tidbit in
which the CPA seems to believe that paying taxes is voluntary:
"The CPA's concern is that the IRS is sensitive to the fact that some try to conceal
income as loans to be written off as expenses later, especially if the amounts are large.
This can trigger an audit. If the loans are "forgiven," then they are income. If not
declared, that is potential fraud. The same note from the CPA indicates Hunter owes $600,000
in personal taxes and another $204,000 for Owasco and urges him to file a return even if he
is not going to pay the taxes."
The most charitable reading of the sleazy saga is that Joe Biden, one of the most powerful
men in the world, is an incredibly gullible idiot. (By
vasilis asvestas / Shutterstock)
Iread the files on Hunter Biden's laptop. They paint a sleazy picture of multi-million
dollar wire transfers, potential money laundering, and possible tax evasion. They raise serious
questions about the judgment and propriety of Jim Biden, the president-elect's brother, and Joe
himself. Call it smoke not fire, but smoke that should not be ignored. The files were supplied
to TAC by a known source previously established to have access.
Joe Biden is lucky a coordinated media effort kept Hunter out of the campaign. The FBI has
had the laptop since 2019, when they subpoenaed
the files in connection with a money laundering investigation. Federal investigators also
served a round of subpoenas on December 8, a month after the election, including one for Hunter
Biden himself. While the legal thrust of the investigation by the federal prosecutor in
Delaware is taxes, the real focus seems to be on Hunter's Chinese connections. This all comes
after the FBI has had over a year to examine some of the same files TAC looked at.
In the final weeks before the election, Hunter's laptop fell into Republican hands. The
story went public in the New York Post , revealing that Hunter Biden introduced his
father, then vice president, to a top executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma less than a
year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor
who was investigating the company. The meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that
Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, sent Hunter Biden about a year after
Hunter himself joined the Burisma board at a salary of $ 83,000
a month with no obvious work duties past making such introductions.
Nice work if you can get it, and to get it your dad better be vice president. If all that
alone does not meet the test of impropriety, we need a new test. Hunter Biden's value to
clients was his perceived access to the White House. His father Joe was at least a passive
participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.
The problem was many Americans never heard this story. Twitter led a social media charge to
not allow the information online. After years of salivating over every bit of Trump family
gossip, the mainstream media claimed the Biden story did not matter, or was Russian disinfo .
Surveys suggest the information could have swung the election if voters had known about it. One
survey showed
that enough people in battleground states would have changed their votes to give Trump 311
electoral votes and reelection.
No mind, really. As soon as it became clear Joe Biden was going to win, the media on all
sides lost interest in the laptop. The story became about the story. It devolved into think
pieces about the Orwellian role of social media and some online giggling about the sex tapes on
the laptop. But our short attention spans have consequences. The laptop still has a lot to tell
us.
00:11 / 01:00 Next Video First Panel, TAC's 7th
Annual Foreign Policy Conference What Does 2020 Mean For Foreign Policy Cancel Autoplay is
paused
Hunter's laptop was chock-a-block with video that appears to show Hunter smoking crack while
engaged in a sex act with a woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images. There's
evidence there that Hunter spent money on
escorts , some
$21,000 on cam sites, big plays on all sorts of
depravities . There is also Joe's car insurance information, Hunter's SSN, pages of call
logs, and lots of email addresses, bank account numbers, and personal information of prominent
people. None of the material is encrypted, just dumped on a standard MacBook Pro using the
password "Hunter02." The machine was regularly connected to the internet and might as well have
had an electronic sign on it saying "My dad is important, here's what you'll need to blackmail
me and others to get to him."
But there is more. The laptop shows Hunter, through a number of front companies, accepted
money from Chinese and Ukrainian entities and moved that money to the U.S. where it was
parceled out to other entities, including Joe Biden's brother. Some of it then went back to
Chinese hands. There is no way a simple read-through can tell if the money was legal consulting
fees or illegal money laundering and tax fraud. But it all smells bad: multi-million dollar
transfers to LLCs without employees, residences used as multiple business addresses, legal
tricks from Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, and even a minor CIA connection.
Ask yourself if this demands more investigation. Ask yourself if voters might not have
benefited from knowing more about Joe Biden's side of all this.
The majority of the contents of the laptop are a jumbled record of Hunter's international
business ventures and financial records. Outstanding in the haystack are a large number of wire
transfers. Those with traceable addresses appear to be mostly anonymous shell companies run out
of lawyers' offices, with no employees and fuzzy public paper trails. One off the top involved
$259,845 traveling on April 2, 2018, from the Hudson West III in New York to a numbered account
held by Cathay Bank. Hudson West was created by Hunter Biden's own law firm, Owasco, with
several Chinese nationals, including a Ye Jianming associate, Gong Wendong. Ye Jianming is
chairman of CEFC China Energy, who reportedly
had close ties to both the Chinese government and the People's Liberation Army. He's been
arrested in China on corruption charges and has conveniently disappeared.
Biden in August 2018 also returned $100,000 back to CEFC in China via its own New York
subsidiary LLC, Hudson West V, whose listed address is 12 Foxwood Road, Great Neck, NY 11024.
That address is not a business office but instead a single family home worth over $6 million.
Phone records
suggest two people live there, including Gong Wendong. Money appears to move from physical
China to virtual Hunter back to virtual China in the U.S., starting and ending in accounts tied
to Gong Wendong after touching base with Hunter, a potential indicator of laundering. Chinese
money in China changed into Chinese money in America. Caution is needed; while what looks like
money laundering at first glance may indeed be so, it may be designed to hide the cash from the
Chinese government while staying inside American law, a quasi-legal service Hunter possibly
supplied.
That 12 Foxwood address shows up again on Biden's laptop as the mailing address for another
Gong Wendong venture, ColdHarbour Capital, which sent and received money to Biden. It is also
listed as the residence of Shan Gao, who appears to control accounts in Beijing tied to Hudson,
CEFC, and 12 Foxwood.
The most significant appearance of 12 Foxwood was as the mailing address for a secured VISA
card in the name of Biden's company, Hudson West III. The card is funded by someone unnamed
through Cathay Bank for $99,000 and guaranteed by someone's checking account held by Cathay
worth $450,000. Shared users of the card are Hunter and Gong Wendong. The card was opened as
CEFC secured a stake in a Russian state-owned energy company. Biden and others subsequently
used the credit card to purchase $101,291.46 worth of extravagant items, including airline
tickets and multiple items at Apple stores, pharmacies, hotels, and restaurants. A Senate
report
characterized these transactions as "potential financial criminal activity." Putting money on a
secured VISA card in lieu of a direct wire transfer to Biden may be seen by some as an attempt
to hide the source of the money and thus allow Biden not to claim it as income.
James Biden and Sara Biden were also authorized users of the credit card, though their
business connection to Hunter and Gong Wendong is unclear. Jim is Joe's brother, Sara his wife.
Jim over the years has been a nightclub owner, insurance broker, political consultant, and
investor. When he ran into financial
trouble having triple mortgaged his home, he was bailed out via loans from Joe and Hunter and
by a series of Joe's donors. Jim also received a loan of $500,000
from John Hynansky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and longtime donor to Joe Biden's
campaigns. This all was in 2015, at the same time the then-vice president oversaw U.S. policy
toward the country. As a senator, Joe Biden made use of a private jet owned by Hynansky's
son.
The 12 Foxwood address also appears on millions of dollars worth of bank transfers among
Cathay Bank, CEFC, and multiple semi-anonymous LLCs and hedge funds. One single transfer to
Hudson West III on August 8, 2017, represented the movement of $5 million from Northern Capital
International, which appears to be a
Chinese government-owned import-export front company.
Switch over to the CDB Bank folder and you see a wire transfer from Burisma for 36,000
euros, run through a bank in Cyprus, to Biden's own account on that island. Burisma is the one
company from the laptop that made the news. Hunter's role, what he actually did besides
introduce his father to other people, is still unclear.
Burisma must be an interesting place. Hunter's laptop partially exposes a complex web of
sub-companies in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands such that figuring out who owns who is
near impossible. Hunter, speaking to his business partner, speculates about buying a Lithuanian
bank to receive the Ukrainian money, and he also notes that Joseph Cofer Black , former director
of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, sits on Burisma's board. Black previously served as vice
chairman at mercenary provider Blackwater Worldwide (now Academi).
All just business, right? Not everyone saw it that way. An email from Wells Fargo's
corporate compliance team (Wells Fargo handled many of the international wire transfers) asks
on September 20, 2018, what the actual business of Hudson West is, who its owners are, and
where it is located. Also asked is what the purpose of all the incoming wires is. It notes some
business accounts appear to be for personal expenses. It also questions numerous outgoing wires
to the Lion Hall Group (for example, on September 28, 2018, Hunter ordered $95,000 transferred
without explanation), a "business" run by Jim Biden out of a residential address. Jim regularly
invoiced Hunter for office expenses and employee costs, as well as a monthly retainer cost of
some $68,000, plus other fees in the tens of thousands of dollars.
There is no record of these questions being answered. It is possible to see the disbursal of
funds via credit card to Jim Biden as a way to diffuse the amounts away from Hunter, and via
Jim's invoices, a way to convert income from China into deductible business expenses for Hunter
in America, reducing his tax burden. The involvement of Lion Hall and Jim Biden also spreads
the money around, lowering its profile. If the invoices were shown to be fraudulent (i.e., Jim
did not actually consult for Hunter), the potential for tax fraud exists.
Besides Wells Fargo, others also had questions. Hunter's own CPA, preparing to file 2018
federal taxes, wrote to Hunter asking, "As far as Owasco [Hunter's law firm] is concerned there
were some receipts we classified as loans. Owasco received approximately $550,000 from Burisma
and paid about one half this amount to, I believe, someone named 'Devon.' I am not sure of the
payee The one half payment to 'Devon' was not recorded as income."
Devon is likely Devon Archer , co-founder and managing partner
of Rosemont Capital alongside Hunter. Who else was part of Rosemont? Christopher
Heinz , John Kerry's son. And, small world, Devon Archer sat on the board of Burisma
alongside
Hunter Biden. The CPA's concern is that the IRS is sensitive to the fact that some try to
conceal income as loans to be written off as expenses later, especially if the amounts are
large. This can trigger an audit. If the loans are "forgiven," then they are income. If not
declared, that is potential fraud.
The same note from the CPA indicates Hunter owes $600,000 in personal taxes and another
$204,000 for Owasco and urges him to file a return even if he is not going to pay the taxes.
Besides taxes, things did not always go well for Hunter. On March 6, 2019, he sent an email to
a friend saying, "Buddy do you have a cash app to send me $100 until wire goes. I have no money
for gas and I'm literally stuck at a rest stop on 95." He earlier had sought a $35,000 advance
from his regular "draw" out of Owasco. And keep an eye on Hunter's health -- he pays close to
$9,000 a quarter for life insurance.
Joe Biden is one lucky S.O.B. When the powers that be decided Barack Obama needed someone a
little more, you know, establishment, as his VP to calm voters, there was Joe, as white-bread
as the state he represented, vaulted into the White House that had otherwise eluded him. His
only controversial points came from having supported the status quo for so many years that it
had changed underneath him. Are we tough on crime, or do Black Lives Matter? Didn't matter to
Joe, just point him in the right direction so he knows what to agree with. And so in 2020, when
the Democrats realized exactly what kind of man they needed to wipe away the sins of two
dishonest and chaotic primaries, well, there was Joe again.
Joe was fortunate that the mainstream media memory-holed Hunter's story and conservative
media lost focus looking for a tweetable smoking gun when the truth was a bit too complicated
to parse out in a sentence or two. But there is still a story here.
The short version is there's a lot to suggest money laundering and tax fraud on Hunter's
part. The purpose of the money in and out was always unclear, with invoices for vague expenses
and lots and lots of "consulting." One could invent a legal explanation for everything. One
could imagine many illegal explanations. There is no way anyone could know the difference
without seeing Hunter's taxes, asking him questions, and doing some serious forensic
accounting. It is unlikely any of that will happen now that the election is over. Even to
Guiliani et al., it really doesn't matter any more. They took one shot, missed, and walked
away.
That will leave undigested the bigger tale of president-elect Biden, who ran in part on an
anti-corruption platform following the Trump family escapades. While Joe Biden no doubt regrets
what appears to have been a one-off meeting with the Burisma official, he did indeed take the
meeting as VP. It's always easier to apologize when caught than seek permission in advance in
Joe's world.
A 2017 email chain involving Hunter brokering an ultimately failed deal for a new venture
with old friend CEFC, the Chinese energy company, described a 10 percent set-aside for the "big
guy," whom former Hunter Biden partner Tony Bobulinski publicly identified as Joe Biden
. Joe also took Hunter to China with him on Air Force Two and met with Chinese leaders while
Hunter tried to make deals on his own. Joe also had Hunter and partner Devon Archer to the
White House only two days before they joined Burisma. It was Joe's donors and pals who bailed
out brother Jim over the years with sweetheart loans.
A lot of appearance of improprietous malarkey from a senior statesman who knows better. In
places like China and the Ukraine, where corruption is endemic, it is assumed the sons of rich
and powerful men have access to their father and that access is for sale. Hunter Biden traded
on those assumptions for millions of dollars, and Joe stood by understanding what was
happening. Every father wants to help his son, and Hunter, one can imagine, went to his dad
time after time pleading for just one more little favor to get him clear of his sordid past.
Joe, a decent man at heart, likely nodded. So a meeting. A handshake. An office visit, a posed
photo, whatever would help but was still plausibly deniable. Until the next time. Just one
more, Dad. Please?
Joe's larger role in all things Hunter needs to be questioned. Joe, as well as the Obama
State Department, knew about
Hunter's antics. Joe pretended Hunter's financial windfalls had nothing to do with their
relationship and were simply a constant series of coincidental lucky breaks for a ne'er-do-well
son who happened to fail upward while his dad was VP. Joe says he and his son never talked
about business. Maybe Joe assumed Hunter's Porsche was just a lucky find (his car payments are
on the laptop).
While, of course, Hunter is an adult with his own mind, his father was one of the most
powerful men in the world and yet apparently did nothing to stop what was going on among
Hunter, his brother Jim, the Chinese, the Ukrainians, and himself -- at minimum, the gross
appearance of impropriety over a period of years. Biden's defense has always been sweeping :
"My son did nothing wrong." That alone raises questions of judgment on the part of Joe Biden.
Not least because in a few weeks he becomes president of the United States. And if the
president does it, it's not illegal, right?
Maybe you can offer information that contradicts the assertions and alleged facts in
this article? Please make the effort to enlighten the rest of us. It'll force you to
seriously read the article and learn its contents in order to refute them. If you can't do
that then you haven't the courage to try and support your own assertions. It's hard to face
the possibility that you're wrong, but if you build a case maybe you'll actually change a
few minds here and there. As things stand right now you seem guilty to me of being "just
deluded enough to (not) believe it (the article) because it's what you want to (not)
believe."
That's exactly how I would have felt if Trump's kids had a strong appearance of selling
their father's influence for tens of millions of dollars! And if the Trump kids business
partners turned on them and gave testimony under oath to the FBI about it, and volumes of
documentary evidence supported it!
Nothingburger! I'm sure you and the media would have agreed with how I felt, and
completely ignored Trump corruption before the election. 'Cause that's the fair and
balanced media we all enjoy!
Silly vet. Trump's kids HAVE A STRONG APPEARANCE OF SELLING THEIR FATHER'S
INFLUENCE.
Have you been living under a rock? Why did Ivanka get several Chinese patents AT THE
SAME TIME Daddy was letting a Chinese company off the hook and hosting the Chinese leader
at Mar-A-Lago? Why is Jared Kushner jetting off to ME countries looking for investment
money while an active advisor in the West Wing? Why are Beavis and Butthead (Don Jr and
Eric) looking for foreign properties while Daddy is president?
Trump's children were actively involved in international business concerns long before
Trump ran for office. Hunter Biden is a low-life crack head who never achieved anything
until his daddy was VP. If you can't acknowledge the difference, you are incapable of
reason.
@Joe_Hubris Quite right, we all heard that donkey jr met with the Russians at Trump
Tower. There was ample evidence, before he let it out himself. But that wasn't exactly
conducting business, that was trying to steal an election.
Honest, Ivanka seems rather smart. Of course, Midlle Eastern money into Jared's businesses
will dry up, still, they'll save the furniture.
But, as soon as they are given the chance, Beavis and Butthead will do their best to blow
Trump Inc to smithereens and burn all that remains of it to the ground.
Oh, Hunter was in on the grift long before Joe became VP. He was brought into MBNA's
"Executive Training" program and made a member of the Board of AMTRAC while his daddy was
in the Senate.
I'm awake. Whenever there have been allegations of corruption against Trump's family,
I've tried to track the facts down (same as I've done with Biden, and before either of them
other candidates/Presidents).
There is one difference. My perception of major media the past four years is that with
Democrats, they've worked to minimize the damage on any story harmful to the left (Hunters'
laptop and Tara Reades' allegations of rape being prime examples), while any story
involving Trump they've exaggerated, left important facts out of their coverage, or
outright lied. So I believe that if there was any real corruption involving Trump, the MSM
would have covered it endlessly, just like they did with the bogus allegations of Trump
collaborating with the Russians to steal the election, and many other examples.
I'm not hiding from facts involving Trump family corruption. I just haven't seen
anything supporting it yet. I don't know if Jared Kushner was soliciting investment money
in the ME; that has been rumor and innuendo by his political enemies with no factual basis
so far. Ivanka having a fashion line and protecting it globally seems normal to me (China
is a huge market - bigger than the U.S.). Don Jr. and Eric seem like they're doing the same
things they were doing before DJT sought office, which is managing a normal business.
Everything about Hunter and Joe's brothers' business activities seem incredibly
suspicious to me, on the other hand.
Right! For example, I'm sure that Ivanka Trump got all of those lucrative licensing
deals in China SOLELY because of her amazing financial and business acumen!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Well,cwe know "covid"Joe isn't shy about doing business with them,bright? He said he had
more time with Chinese leaders than any modern president. And, using those chinese
connections,he had a virus made, and crazy Nancy Pelosi helped him spread it on her end of
the country. They used the impeachment, then the antics of the democratic socialists kicked
in, with Nancy calling him fat. And, when he tried to restrict flights from china, they
called him xenophobic and racist. Then distracted him more by inviting people to Chinese
new year! Before the virus, Trump was unstoppable. With ultra low unemployment rates, and
factories going strong, not to mention the legislation"Alzheimer's" Joe got going, causing
at least one man twenty years in prison for stealing a shovel! No one really considered
Biden to be a serious rival to trump then once they got the virus going, they used the
lowering of the presidents ratings and the virtual emptying of every other candidates, plus
the virus allowed them to get that mail in voting going, which is easier to tamper with
than electronic voting machines. Did you notice,with all the super sick people,we had the
highest turnout in history? Before you say it can't be true, another nugget to chew:right
before the election, about 90% of the bad things"Dirty" Joe did just know kinda "vanished
from social media!! We all know, if it shows up there, it never goes away, right? Wrong
when the democratic socialists control them...so in honoring Joe's greatest accomplishment,
I give to you....the JOVID virus...it's kinda...catchy, eh?but we need to shout out loud,
so he can hear, that everyone knows what he did last year! JOVID! JOVID! Put your hands in
the air like you just don't care and, with half the country hating this Biden clown we
should be as loud as Metallica in a phone booth!! Don't let them get away with it!!!!
Unlike Joe Biden's grifting clan, Trump's offspring had successful enterprises well
before their father entered into politics. And yes, in China and a number of international
countries also. Like their father, and unlike the Biden's, the Trump family didn't strike
it rich from political office. In fact, President Trump donated his entire presidential
salary of $400k/yr to charities all four years. Imagine Joe Biden doing that.
It is a sad state we find ourselves in today. Democrats whine about "white privilege"
against people who had nothing to do with slavery and in fact lost ancestors fighting it.
Meanwhile in a more real and present instance of privilege at the expense of other humans,
current vaccinations against Covid19 were developed using cell lines derived from aborted
human children. To my knowledge not a single vaccine is being offered that does not rest on
this heinous recipe.
"... Not sure the world is really ready for the total collapse of the pushy de facto American Empire where everything has been our business ..."
"... i would rather see American self-sufficiency and reversion to global isolationism. Let someone else manage or neglect the rest of the globe - one advantage of being a quasi-island nation. Always felt global "domination" was thrust upon us; not something actively sought. ..."
PUTIN-BIDEN. They had their first phonecall. Interesting to compare the
Kremlin's record with the
White House's: but Biden has to talk tough, Putin doesn't. But "interference in the 2020 United States election"? Really? Wasn't
it the most secure ever? Does Biden really
want to raise that subject?
NEW NWO. European poll.
Everything has changed: "Most Europeans rejoiced at Joe Biden’s victory in the November US presidential election, but they do not
think he can help America make a comeback as the pre-eminent global leader... Majorities in key member states now think the US political
system is broken, and that Europe cannot just rely on the US to defend it... look to Berlin rather than Washington as the most important
partner... A majority believe that China will be more powerful than the US within a decade and would want their country to stay neutral
in a conflict between the two superpowers. Two-thirds of respondents thought the EU should develop its defence capacities... Washington
cannot take European alignment against China for granted. Public opinion will have a bigger effect on the relationship than it once
did, and needs to be taken into account." Another time when Trump exposed the emptiness behind the curtain.
Note the reference to having to pay attention to "public opinion" – the dreaded populism appears.
How will China's future control of the high seas affect US trade and economy, when China becomes the "global policeman"? Will
this in fact lead to a net US savings, being relieved of this current role.
@Deap I don't think China has the slightest interest in being the "global policeman". Don't forget it has two awful examples
of the fate of countries who thought that everything, everywhere was always their business.
If the US does not provide global maritime security, how will China protect transit of their fishery exploitation, their African
mineral exploitation and cheap product transits into global markets, once the US stops acting as the "global policeman". Will
the UN step in and take over this role?
Or is everyone now on their own good behavior - do unto others sort of self-governance? Not sure the world is really ready
for the total collapse of the pushy de facto American Empire where everything has been our business - for the benefit of
everyone else too.
I would rather we pay the price and continue running the high seas than defaulting any other close contender. Which would be
as you claim China, who shall decline the honor and suck off of us?
Or will the Russian polar route become the new grand global highway for all maritime trade in the near future. Just read polar
ice cap melting is a 60 year cyclical phenomenon, and not a new global warming trade route, only a temporary one.
But if had my druthers, i would rather see American self-sufficiency and reversion to global isolationism. Let someone
else manage or neglect the rest of the globe - one advantage of being a quasi-island nation. Always felt global "domination" was
thrust upon us; not something actively sought. This being the voice of a WWII War Baby, who still remembers simpler times
in the neophyte global hegemonist US of A.
Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses , stating
that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".
[35]
In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion, The Times published le Carré's essay
"The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to the Iraq War and President George W. Bush 's
response to the 11
September 2001 terrorist attacks , calling it "worse than McCarthyism , worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term
potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War " and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have
hoped for in his nastiest dreams". [36][37] Le
Carré participated in the London protests against the Iraq War
. He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political
intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger
from bin Laden to Saddam
Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history". [38][39]
He was critical of Tony
Blair 's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying "I can't understand that Blair
has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under
false pretences has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept
the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed".
[38]
Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He believed
Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which
"we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret
Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret
police force in all the black arts, the SAVAK ". [38]
In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy , saying "I think of
all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in
Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious.
Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about".
[40] He later wrote
that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the
"notion of individual
freedom , of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we called anti-communism " prevailing during that
time. [41]
... ... ...
Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and sharply
criticised Brexit .
[45] Le Carré
criticised Conservative politicians such as
Boris Johnson (whom
he referred to as a "mob orator"), Dominic Cummings , and Nigel Farage in interviews, claiming that
their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". He further opined in
interviews that "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon.
Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really,
as something we could return to", noting that with "the demise of the working class we saw also the demise of an
established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures". [44][46] On the other
hand, he said that in the Labour Party "they have this Leninist element and they have this
huge appetite to level society."
"... By 2013, the CIA's chief technology officer outlined the agency's mission "to collect everything and hang on to it forever," acknowledging the internet companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Fitbit and telecom companies, for making it possible. ..."
"... The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are planted in this unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism, bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet companies a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data. ..."
"... What's been reinvented is no less than the idea of people as property. ..."
"... As an internet executive who has been in the game from the very beginning (1995 and onward), I am still dumbfounded that the overwhelming majority of Google search users have no idea that when they search for a product or a store, for example, the results are not democratically revealed. Using fashion as an example, Google's business model has stores and brands bid on keyword search terms, like "fine lingerie," or "red pumps," or "blue silk robe," to name a few of the billions of search terms. ..."
"... surveillance economies of scale and AI insights of prediction that allow a herd animal, us, to be more profitably managed and the profit more efficiently extracted. ..."
"... Alexa, dim the lights! ... like the hundreds of millions of other herd animals living the same delusion. if we were paid for our data use, we would just become aware of its use. this is a defect in a system designed to make you feel unique and special. that's the kink: at bottom, you like being surveilled and controlled. ..."
We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
By Shoshana Zuboff
Dr. Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
Two decades ago, the American government left democracy's front door open to California's fledgling internet companies, a cozy
fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct
but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information
awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy's house.
I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information
civilization. Over the last two decades, I've observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those
young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and
prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their
surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations
of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.
In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge -- how it is distributed, the authority that governs
its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows?
Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the
epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend
that authority with
the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.
... ... ...
The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in
epistemic inequality
, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me...
The Surveillance Exception
The public tragedy of Sept. 11 dramatically shifted the focus in Washington from debates over federal privacy legislation to a
mania for total information awareness, turning Silicon Valley's innovative surveillance practices into objects of intense interest.
As Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, observed
, the intelligence community would have to "rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it," in order
to reach beyond constitutional, legal, or regulatory constraints, controversies that are central today.
By 2013, the
CIA's chief technology officer outlined the agency's mission
"to collect everything and hang on to it forever," acknowledging the internet companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter,
and Fitbit and telecom companies, for making it possible.
The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are planted in this
unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism, bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet
companies a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data.
Young entrepreneurs without any democratic mandate landed a windfall of infinite information and unaccountable power. Google's
founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, exercised absolute control over the production, organization and presentation of the world's
information. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has had absolute control over what would become a primary means of global communication and
news consumption, along with all the information concealed in its networks. The group's membership grew, and a swelling population
of global users proceeded unaware of what just happened.
The license to steal came with a price, binding the executives to the continued patronage of elected officials and regulators
as well as the sustained ignorance, or at least learned resignation, of users. The doctrine was, after all, a political doctrine,
and its defense would require a future of political maneuvering, appeasement, engagement and investment.
Google led the way with what would become one of the world's richest lobbying machines. In 2018 nearly half the Senate received
contributions from Facebook, Google and Amazon, and the companies
continue to set spending records .
Most significant, surveillance exceptionalism has meant that the United States and many other liberal democracies chose surveillance
over democracy as the guiding principle of social order. With this forfeit, democratic governments crippled their ability to sustain
the trust of their people, intensifying the rationale for surveillance.
The Economics and Politics of Epistemic Chaos
To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it's important to know that surveillance capitalism's operations have no formal
interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline
of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.
In a
leaked memo , a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard for truth and meaning:
"We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe someone dies
in a terrorist attack. The ugly truth is anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good."
In other words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a coal-mining operation to discard containers
of coal because it's too dirty. This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation in the spirit of ExxonMobil's
social responsibility messaging. In Facebook's case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal or
to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical
indifference to produce systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don't care what engages you.
I'm homing in now on Facebook not because it's the only perpetrator of epistemic chaos but because it's the largest social media
company and its consequences reach farthest.
The economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing
field for truth. Then an amoral Mr. Trump became president, demanding the right to lie at scale. Destructive economics merged with
political appeasement, and everything became infinitely worse.
Key to this story is that the politics of appeasement required little more than a refusal to mitigate, modify or eliminate the
ugly truth of surveillance economics. Surveillance capitalism's economic imperatives turned Facebook into a societal tinderbox. Mr.
Zuckerberg merely had to stand down and commit himself to the bystander role.
Internal research presented in 2016 and 2017 demonstrated causal links between Facebook's algorithmic targeting mechanisms and
epistemic chaos. One researcher concluded that the algorithms were responsible for the viral spread of divisive content that helped
fuel the growth of German extremist groups. Recommendation tools accounted for 64 percent of "extremist group joins," she found --
dynamics not unique to Germany .
The Cambridge Analytica scandal
in March 2018
riveted the world's attention on Facebook in a new way, offering a window for bold change. The public began to grasp that Facebook's
political advertising business is a way to rent the company's suite of capabilities to microtarget users, manipulate them and sow
epistemic chaos, pivoting the whole machine just a few degrees from commercial to political objectives.
Image
Credit... Pool photo by Graeme Jennings/EPA, via Shutterstock
The company launched some modest initiatives, promising more transparency, a more robust system of third-party fact checkers and
a policy to limit "coordinated inauthentic behavior," but through it all, Mr. Zuckerberg conceded the field to Mr. Trump's demands
for unfettered access to the global information bloodstream.
Mr. Zuckerberg
rejected internal proposals for operational changes that would reduce epistemic chaos. A
political whitelist identified over 100,000 officials and candidates whose accounts were exempted from fact-checking, despite
internal research showing that users tend to believe false information shared by politicians. In September 2019 the company
said that political advertising would
not be subject to fact-checking.
To placate his critics in 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg commissioned a civil rights audit led by Laura Murphy, a former director of the
ACLU's Washington legislative office. The
report published
in 2020 is a cri de coeur expressed in a river of words that bear witness to dashed hopes -- "disheartened," "frustrated," "angry,"
"dismayed," "fearful," "heartbreaking."
The report is consistent with a nearly complete rupture of the
American public's faith in Big Tech. When asked how Facebook would adjust to a political shift toward a possible Biden administration,
a company spokesman, Nick Clegg,
responded, "We'll adapt to the environment in which we're operating." And so it did. On Jan. 7, the day after it became clear
that Democrats would control the Senate,
Facebook announced that it would
indefinitely block Mr. Trump's account.
We are meant to believe that the destructive effects of epistemic chaos are the inevitable cost of cherished rights to freedom
of speech. No. Just as catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere are the consequence of burning fossil fuels,
epistemic chaos is a consequence of surveillance capitalism's bedrock commercial operations, aggravated by political obligations
and set into motion by a 20-year-old dream of total information that slid into nightmare. Then a plague came to America, turning
the antisocial media conflagration into a wildfire.
... ... ...
The Washington Post reported in late March that with
nearly 50 percent
of the content on Facebook's news feed related to Covid-19, a very small number of "influential users" were driving the reading
habits and feeds of a vast number of users. A study released in April by the
Reuters Institute
confirmed that high-level politicians, celebrities and other prominent public figures produced 20 percent of the misinformation
in their sample, but attracted 69 percent of social media engagements in their sample.
... ... ...
In 1966, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a short book of seminal importance, "The Social Construction of Reality." Its
central observation is that the "everyday life" we experience as "reality" is actively and perpetually constructed by us. This ongoing
miracle of social order rests on "common sense knowledge," which is "the knowledge we share with others in the normal self-evident
routines of everyday life."
Think about traffic: There are not enough police officers in the world to ensure that every car stops at every red light, yet
not every intersection triggers a negotiation or a fight. That's because in orderly societies we all know that red lights have the
authority to make us stop and green lights are authorized to let us go. This common sense means that we each act on what we all know,
while trusting that others will too. We're not just obeying laws; we are creating order together. Our reward is to live in a world
where we mostly get where we are going and home again safely because we can trust one another's common sense. No society is viable
without it.
"All societies are constructions in the face of chaos," write Berger and Luckmann. Because norms are summaries of our
common sense, norm violation is the essence of terrorism -- terrifying because it repudiates the most taken-for-granted social certainties.
"Norm violation creates an attentive audience beyond the target of terror,"
write Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman in "Political Terrorism," a widely cited text on the subject. Everyone experiences
the shock, disorientation, and fear. The legitimacy and continuity of our institutions are essential because they buffer us from
chaos by formalizing our common sense.
... ... ...
For many who hold freedom of speech as a sacred right, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1919 dissenting opinion in
Abrams v. United States is
a touchstone. "The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas," he wrote. "The best test of truth is the power
of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." The corrupt information that dominates the private square
does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game.
Our susceptibility to the destruction of common sense reflects a young information civilization that has not yet found its footing
in democracy. Unless we interrupt surveillance economics and revoke the license to steal that legitimates its antisocial operations,
the other coup will continue to strengthen and produce fresh crises. What must be done now?
... ... ...
Shoshana Zuboff is a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity
of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips
. And here's our email: [email protected].
Jaron Lanier has made the same arguments in a more accessible style. "You Are Not A Gadget" and "Ten Arguments For Deleting Your
Social Media Accounts" are highly recommended!
Professor Zuboff is being polite and cautious. What's been reinvented is no less than the idea of people as property. Your data
is owned. Behavior is traded like a commodity. There is limited personal protection. Imagine you live completely off the grid.
One day you come into town to get coffee with an old friend. You don't bring any electronic device because you don't own any.
You pay in cash. You are 'not' surveilled. Your friend is surveilled. She has a phone and lives typically. The bill has two coffees.
A data point is created about you. Scale up to trillions data points and this reflective data gathering spreads like COVID. This
isn't benign information either such as your preferred coffee order. The difference between data 'person favours this political
party' and metadata 'person looked at a website for this many seconds, liked these posts, walks at this pace or was at such and
such location' is merely a mathematical function of utility. With enough data one can be translated to the other and monetized.
When placed into a market outcomes like 'engagement' are really euphemisms for inputs that you may consider private like your
sexual and reproductive history, your love and spiritual beliefs or who you voted for. Like Climate Change there's no individual
'opt out'. Unlike Climate Change, there are relatively near term solutions.
Had a nice dinner with my daughter and nephew. We used Siri to get to the restaurant. My iphone was on the table while we talked.
What came up in conversation was carpet cleaning; something I don't recall e-mailing or texting about. (My place then had hardwood
floors) Next day; boom, e-mails and ads from carpet cleaning places all over my e-mail, phone, texts. So does the internet just
snag the info you voluntarily give to them? Or connect to companies when you mention something in an a-mail or text? It's worse.
Siri actually listens to you while you're chatting over dinner. Try what I've described. Pick a topic you haven't communicated
about recently.
I've got to confess that I gave up on this about page three. It strikes me as paranoid; 2+2=6, maybe seven. These titians of the
internet need to get way better before they are as dangerous as portrayed. It causes me to think of 'how close we are to driverless
cars' - no we aren't.
If you don't care about privacy (which many don't) then the digital world is an Eden. People voluntarily post intimate details
of their lives willingly. You have to really work at it to have any privacy today. It can be done though. The US needs to take
a harder stance towards internet privacy like the EU. Any service that operates in the US needs an opt out clause in their user
agreements towards sharing any of their personal information. Most people would just click on the "I Agree to Share" but the people
who care about their privacy will opt out.
As an internet executive who has been in the game from the very beginning (1995 and onward), I am still dumbfounded that the overwhelming
majority of Google search users have no idea that when they search for a product or a store, for example, the results are not
democratically revealed. Using fashion as an example, Google's business model has stores and brands bid on keyword search terms,
like "fine lingerie," or "red pumps," or "blue silk robe," to name a few of the billions of search terms.
The stores or brands
that bid highest most often appear at the top of the list. As well, above those results sit paid ads, though again, most users
do not know those ads are actually ads, as they consider them to be legitimate results.
Over the years, I've read many a user
survey on Google search, and still--as savvy as we believe we have become in the online space--most users believe the results
at the top of the list must be the best results out there. Talk about a rigged system. Sadly and frighteningly, most of us do
not know, or probably even care, that it is.
i've been an admirer of dr. zuboff's take on technology for many years. but it's useful to reverse this analysis and consider
it from the corporate side: surveillance economies of scale and AI insights of prediction that allow a herd animal, us, to be
more profitably managed and the profit more efficiently extracted.
it's important to see that surveillance fundamentally benefits
command and control capabilities: china uses it to command obedience; corporations use it to control profit extraction, and to
guide your car GPS. we do not mind that we are being commanded and controlled because this brings us home delivery, voice control
systems, GPS navigation, targeted ads, on demand media, vast connectivity and personal media bubbles. these make us feel unique
and almost godlike ... Alexa, dim the lights! ... like the hundreds of millions of other herd animals living the same delusion.
if we were paid for our data use, we would just become aware of its use. this is a defect in a system designed to make you feel
unique and special. that's the kink: at bottom, you like being surveilled and controlled.
you like the commercial and recreational
benefits this brings. you don't care who uses what, provided you get all the consumer satisfaction and none of the dark web blowback. i'm not optimistic about "unprecedented solutions." there is no imminent stampede of the herd to get out of the corral. we like
it in here.
My life has gotten better since I deleted Facebook a few years ago. I get fewer updates from high school acquaintances, but my
real friendships have continued just the same, and my professional life has improved (since I have one fewer distraction). My
anxiety level is also lower. Of course the news over the past year has been a major source of anxiety, but it would have been
worse if I'd spent 2020 doom-scrolling on Facebook. I think a lot of people's lives would be better if a lot of people got off
social media...for these reasons as well as the important issues this essay addresses.
I'm 100% behind the "surveillance society" as long as corporations and lawmakers are surveilled. But when an Assange or a Snowden
proves that the NSA and CIA are criminal enterprises...the dishonest politicians hide behind the Espionage Act to quash the facts.
Right from the beginning I knew this Internet and social media revolution was dubious Right from the start, I tried never to use
my real name on SM or in email addresses...But they figured it out...It's been creepy from day one... Let's regain our old-fashioned
anonymity!
"... "It's so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don't have to guess about where this goes or how this ends," Gabbard said. ..."
"... She continued: "When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he's spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they've seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians." ..."
"... "What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this" ..."
"... "You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally, " Gabbard said. ..."
After 9/11, the entire country collectively lost its mind in the throes of fear. During that time, all civil and Constitutional
rights were shredded and replaced with the pages of The
USA PATRIOT Act .
Almost 20 years later, the U.S. has again lost its collective mind, this time in fear of a "virus" and it's
"super mutations" and a
"riot" at the capitol. A lot of people called this and
to the surprise of very few, much like after 9/11, Americans are watching what remains of their civil liberties be replaced with
a new bill.
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021
The DTPA is essentially the criminalization of speech, expression, and thought . It takes cancel culture a step further and
all but outlaws unpopular opinions . This
act will empower intelligence, law enforcement, and even military wings of the American ruling class to crack down on individuals
adhering to certain belief systems and ideologies.
"The attack on the U.S. Capitol earlier this month was the latest example of domestic terrorism, but the threat of domestic
terrorism remains very real. We cannot turn a blind eye to it," Upton said. "The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act will equip
our law enforcement leaders with the tools needed to help keep our homes, families, and communities across the country safe.
Congressman Upton's
website gives the following information on DTPA:
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 would strengthen the federal government's efforts to prevent, report on, respond
to, and investigate acts of domestic terrorism by authorizing offices dedicated to combating this threat; requiring these offices
to regularly assess this threat; and providing training and resources to assist state, local, and tribal law enforcement in addressing
it.
DTPA would authorize three offices, one each within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ),
and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to monitor, investigate, and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism. The bill also
requires these offices to provide Congress with joint, biannual reports assessing the state of domestic terrorism threats, with
a specific focus on white supremacists. Based on the data collected, DTPA requires these offices to focus their resources on the
most significant threats.
DTPA also codifies the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee, which would coordinate with United States Attorneys and other
public safety officials to promote information sharing and ensure an effective, responsive, and organized joint effort to combat
domestic terrorism. The legislation requires DOJ, FBI, and DHS to provide training and resources to assist state, local, and tribal
law enforcement agencies in understanding, detecting, deterring, and investigating acts of domestic terrorism and white supremacy.
Finally, DTPA directs DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Department of Defense to establish an interagency task force to combat white supremacist
infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement.
Those who read the bill aren't so gung ho to shred the Constitution
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
has some serious reservations.
In a recent interview
on Fox News Primetime, Gabbard stated that the bill effectively criminalizes half of the country. (Emphasis ours)
"It's so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents,
Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don't have to guess about where this goes or how this
ends," Gabbard said.
She continued: "When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he's spoken with or
heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types
of movements similar to the insurgencies they've seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious
extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians."
Gabbard, stating her concern about how the government will define what qualities they are searching for in potential threats to
the country, went on to ask:
"What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking
about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody
who is pro-life? Where do you take this"
Tulsi said the bill would create a dangerous undermining of our civil liberties and freedoms in our Constitution. She also stated
the DPTA essentially targets nearly half of the United States.
"You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom,
liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally, " Gabbard said.
Tulsi Gabbard is not the only one to criticize the legislation
Even the ACLU , one of the weakest organizations on civil liberties in the United States, has spoken out. While the ACLU was
only concerned with how the bill would affect minorities or "brown people," the organization stated that the legislation, while set
forth under the guise of countering white supremacy, would eventually be used against non-white people.
The ACLU's statement is true.
As with similar bills submitted under the guise of "protecting" Americans against outside threats, this bill will inevitably expand
further. The stated goals of the DPTA are far-reaching and frightening enough. It would amount to an official declaration of the
end to Free Speech.
Soon there will be no rights left for Americans
In the last twenty years, Americans have lost their 4th Amendment rights, and now they are losing their 1st. All that remains
is the 2nd Amendment , and
both the ruling class and increasing numbers of the American people know it.
"... "We told the people who were already enjoying a prosperous situation that things would be much better for their children and that we would be able to solve the outstanding problems. [But the new situation] presents a much more difficult task to fulfill. Because from the moment there is no longer a constant surplus to be distributed, the question of distribution is appreciably more difficult to resolve." ..."
Highly recommend the Przeworski piece at Phenomenal World.
Most of it is reflections on/by
3 European leftist leaders from the 1970s-80s (German Prime Chancellor Willy Brandt, Austrian
Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme) about how the oil shocks and
associated economic changes of the era presented a challenge to social democrats –
including ending the belief/fantasy that reformism could be system-changing – that they
(we) were not then, and I would argue still are not, able to address.
Palme spells out the difficulty:
"We told the people who were already enjoying a prosperous situation that things would
be much better for their children and that we would be able to solve the outstanding
problems. [But the new situation] presents a much more difficult task to fulfill. Because
from the moment there is no longer a constant surplus to be distributed, the question of
distribution is appreciably more difficult to resolve."
Brand echoes these concerns, noting that it is essential to prevent inequality from
increasing as growth resumes. Eighteen months later, during another in person meeting on 25
May 1975, Kreisky makes the fiscal constraint even more explicit:
"It is precisely now that
reforms should be made. It is just a question which. If we strongly develop social
policies, we will not be able to finance them."
Also included an amazing graph of declining electoral support for left/SD parties in
Europe.
75% of Internet traffic is intercepted. New Details Show Broader NSA Surveillance Reach
Notable quotes:
"... The second cut is done by NSA. It briefly copies the traffic and decides which communications to keep based on what it calls "strong selectors" -- say, an email address, or a large block of computer addresses that correspond to an organization it is interested in. In making these decisions, the NSA can look at content of communications as well as information about who is sending the data. ..."
"... The person says talks between the government and different telecoms about what constitutes foreign communications have "been going on for some years," and that some in the industry believe the law is unclear on Internet traffic. "Somebody should enunciate a rule," this person says. ..."
"... Within NSA, former officials say, intelligence officers joked that the Blarney intercept program with AT&T was named in homage to the NSA program Shamrock, which intercepted telegraphic messages into and out of the U.S. and was an inspiration for the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created the secret national-security court and placed intelligence activities under its supervision. ..."
"... Paul Kouroupas, a former executive at Global Crossing Ltd. and other telecom companies responsible for security and government affairs, says the checks and balances in the NSA programs depend on telecommunications companies and the government policing the system themselves. "There's technically and physically nothing preventing a much broader surveillance," he says. ..."
WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency -- which possesses only limited legal authority
to spy on U.S. citizens -- has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans'
Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials
say.
The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt
for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and
Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens
within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these
people say.
The NSA's surveillance network covers more Americans' Internet communications than
officials have publicly disclosed, reaching roughly 75 percent of all U.S. internet traffic.
Siobhan Gorman reports on the News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.
The NSA's filtering, carried out with telecom companies, is designed to look for
communications that either originate or end abroad, or are entirely foreign but happen to be
passing through the U.S. But officials say the system's broad reach makes it more likely that
purely domestic communications will be incidentally intercepted and collected in the hunt for
foreign ones.
Google bypassed the privacy settings on millions of Web browsers on Apple iPhones and
computers -- tracking
the online activities of people who intended that kind of monitoring to be blocked.
(2/17/12)
The programs, code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, among others,
filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies. Blarney, for instance,
was established with AT&T Inc.,
T
-1.15% former officials say. AT&T declined to comment.
This filtering takes place at more than a dozen locations at major Internet junctions in
the U.S., officials say. Previously, any NSA filtering of this kind was largely believed to
be happening near points where undersea or other foreign cables enter the country.
Details of these surveillance programs were gathered from interviews with current and
former intelligence and government officials and people from companies that help build or
operate the systems, or provide data. Most have direct knowledge of the work.
The NSA defends its practices as legal and respectful of Americans' privacy. According to
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, if American communications are "incidentally collected during
NSA's lawful signals intelligence activities," the agency follows "minimization procedures
that are approved by the U.S. attorney general and designed to protect the privacy of United
States persons."
As another U.S. official puts it, the NSA is "not wallowing willy-nilly" through
Americans' idle online chatter. "We want high-grade ore."
To achieve that, the programs use complex algorithms that, in effect, operate like filters
placed over a stream with holes designed to let certain pieces of information flow through.
After the 2001 terrorist attacks, NSA widened the holes to capture more information when the
government broadened its definition of what constitutes "reasonable" collection, according to
a former top intelligence official.
The NSA's U.S. programs have been described in narrower terms in the documents released by
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden . One, for instance,
acquires Americans' phone records; another, called Prism, makes requests for stored data to
Internet companies. By contrast, this set of programs shows the NSA has the capability to
track almost anything that happens online, so long as it is covered by a broad court
order.
The NSA programs are approved and overseen by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court. NSA is required to destroy information on Americans that doesn't fall under exceptions
to the rule, including information that is relevant to foreign intelligence, encrypted, or
evidence of a crime.
The NSA is focused on collecting foreign intelligence, but the streams of data it monitors
include both foreign and domestic communications. Inevitably, officials say, some U.S.
Internet communications are scanned and intercepted, including both "metadata" about
communications, such as the "to" and "from" lines in an email, and the contents of the
communications themselves.
Much, but not all, of the data is discarded, meaning some communications between Americans
are stored in the NSA's databases, officials say. Some lawmakers and civil libertarians say
that, given the volumes of data NSA is examining, privacy protections are insufficient.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, in 2012 sought but failed to prohibit the agency from
searching its databases for information on Americans without a warrant. He has also pushed
intelligence agencies to detail how many Americans' communications have been collected and to
explain whether purely domestic communications are retained in NSA's databanks. They have
declined.
"Technology is moving us swiftly into a world where the only barriers to this kind of
dragnet surveillance are the protections enshrined into law," Mr. Wyden says.
This month President Barack Obama proposed changes to NSA surveillance to improve
oversight. Those proposed changes wouldn't alter the systems in the U.S. that NSA relies upon
for some of its most sensitive surveillance.
The systems operate like this: The NSA asks telecom companies to send it various streams
of Internet traffic it believes most likely to contain foreign intelligence. This is the
first cut of the data.
These requests don't ask for all Internet traffic. Rather, they focus on certain areas of
interest, according to a person familiar with the legal process. "It's still a large amount
of data, but not everything in the world," this person says.
The second cut is done by NSA. It briefly copies the traffic and decides which
communications to keep based on what it calls "strong selectors" -- say, an email address, or
a large block of computer addresses that correspond to an organization it is interested in.
In making these decisions, the NSA can look at content of communications as well as
information about who is sending the data.
One U.S. official says the agency doesn't itself "access" all the traffic within the
surveillance system. The agency defines access as "things we actually touch," this person
says, pointing out that the telecom companies do the first stage of filtering.
The surveillance system is built on relationships with telecommunications carriers that
together cover about 75% of U.S. Internet communications. They must hand over what the NSA
asks for under orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The firms
search Internet traffic based on the NSA's criteria, current and former officials say.
Verizon
Communications Inc., VZ
-1.34% for example, has placed intercepts in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas,
according to one person familiar with the technology. It isn't clear how much information
these intercepts send to the NSA. A Verizon spokesman declined to comment.
Not all telecommunications providers handle the government demands the same way, says the
person familiar with the legal process. According to a U.S. official, lawyers at telecom
companies serve as checks on what the NSA receives. "The providers are independently deciding
what would be responsive," the official says.
Lawyers for at least one major provider have taken the view that they will provide access
only to "clearly foreign" streams of data -- for example, ones involving connections to ISPs
in, say, Mexico, according to the person familiar with the legal process. The complexities of
Internet routing mean it isn't always easy to isolate foreign traffic, but the goal is "to
prevent traffic from Kansas City to San Francisco from ending up" with the NSA, the person
says.
At times, the NSA has asked for access to data streams that are more likely to include
domestic communications, this person says, and "it has caused friction." This person added
that government officials have said some providers do indeed comply with requests like
this.
The person says talks between the government and different telecoms about what constitutes
foreign communications have "been going on for some years," and that some in the industry
believe the law is unclear on Internet traffic. "Somebody should enunciate a rule," this
person says.
Intelligence officials and the White House argue NSA's surveillance provides early
warnings of terror threats that don't respect geographic boundaries. "It's true we have
significant capabilities," Mr. Obama said in his NSA remarks last week. "What's also true is
we show a restraint that many governments around the world don't even think to do."
Mr. Obama and top intelligence officials say NSA's programs are overseen by all three
branches of government, citing procedures approved by the secret surveillance court that
require the NSA to eliminate "incidentally acquired" data on Americans. "If you say, 'We
don't want the NSA to be scanning large amounts of traffic,' you're saying you don't want it
to do its job," says one former official.
Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew were mentioned, but not fully explained,
in documents released by Mr. Snowden. An NSA paper released this month mentioned several but
didn't describe them beyond saying, "The government compels one or more providers to assist
NSA with the collection of information responsive to the foreign intelligence need."
The system is built with gear made by Boeing Co.'s
BA
-0.69% Narus subsidiary, which makes filtering technology, and Internet hardware
manufacturers Cisco Systems
Inc. CSCO
-1.03% and Juniper Networks
Inc., JNPR
-2.02% among other companies, according to former intelligence officials and industry
figures familiar with the equipment.
Narus didn't respond to requests for comment. Cisco and Juniper declined to comment.
The NSA started setting up Internet intercepts well before 2001, former intelligence
officials say. Run by NSA's secretive Special Services Office, these types of programs were
at first designed to intercept communications overseas through arrangements with foreign
Internet providers, the former officials say. NSA still has such arrangements in many
countries, particularly in the Middle East and Europe, the former officials say.
Within NSA, former officials say, intelligence officers joked that the Blarney intercept
program with AT&T was named in homage to the NSA program Shamrock, which intercepted
telegraphic messages into and out of the U.S. and was an inspiration for the 1978 Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created the secret national-security court and placed
intelligence activities under its supervision.
Blarney was in use before the 2001 terror attacks, operating at or near key fiber-optic
landing points in the U.S. to capture foreign communications coming in and out of the
country. One example is an AT&T facility in San Francisco that was revealed in 2006
during the debate over warrantless wiretapping. A similar facility was built at an AT&T
site in New Jersey, former officials say.
After the 2001 attacks, a former official says, these intercept systems were expanded to
include key Internet networks within the U.S. through partnerships with U.S. Internet
backbone providers. Amid fears of terrorist "sleeper cells" inside the U.S., the government
under President George W. Bush also began redefining how much domestic data it could
collect.
For the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, officials say, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and NSA arranged with Qwest Communications International Inc. to use intercept
equipment for a period of less than six months around the time of the event. It monitored the
content of all email and text communications in the Salt Lake City area.
At that point, the systems fed into the Bush administration's program of warrantless
wiretapping, which circumvented the surveillance court on the authority of the president's
power as commander in chief. The Bush administration came under criticism from lawmakers and
civil libertarians for sidestepping court supervision.
The current legal backing for Blarney and its related programs stems from a section of a
2008 surveillance law. It permits the government, for foreign intelligence investigations, to
snoop on foreigners "reasonably believed" to be outside the U.S.
Previously, the law had tighter standards. It allowed the government to spy on people if
there were "probable cause" to believe they were an "agent of a foreign power."
NSA has discretion on setting its filters, and the system relies significantly on
self-policing. This can result in improper collection that continues for years.
For example, a recent Snowden document showed that the surveillance court ruled that the
NSA had set up an unconstitutional collection effort. Officials say it was an unintentional
mistake made in 2008 when it set filters on programs like these that monitor Internet
traffic; NSA uncovered the inappropriate filtering in 2011 and reported it.
"NSA's foreign intelligence collection activities are continually audited and overseen
internally and externally," Ms. Vines says. "When we make a mistake in carrying out our
foreign intelligence mission, we report the issue internally and to federal overseers and
aggressively get to the bottom of it."
Another Snowden document describes the procedures NSA uses to protect American information
that is retained. Any such information is "minimized," meaning that it is destroyed. The
document highlights several exceptions, including encrypted communications and information of
foreign intelligence significance.
Officials acknowledged some purely domestic communications are incidentally swept into the
system. "We don't keep track of numbers of U.S. persons," a U.S. official says. "What we try
to do is minimize any exposure."
When searching the data, intelligence officials say they are permitted to look only for
information related to a "foreign intelligence interest." In practice, the NSA has latitude
under that standard, and an American's communication could be read without a warrant, another
U.S. official says.
Paul Kouroupas, a former executive at Global Crossing Ltd. and other telecom companies
responsible for security and government affairs, says the checks and balances in the NSA
programs depend on telecommunications companies and the government policing the system
themselves. "There's technically and physically nothing preventing a much broader
surveillance," he says.
An official at Global Crossing's parent, Level 3 Communications Inc., says the company
complies with laws requiring it to assist government investigations and declined to disclose
the assistance provided.
It is difficult to know how much domestic data NSA is inadvertently retaining. The
filtering technology relies on algorithms to seek out valuable communications. A U.S.
official says analysts guide the use of these algorithms to make them as precise as
possible.
Orwell's 1984 predicted all this in 1948. Wikipedia is rewriting history on a daily basis,
education is stifling young minds, free speech controlled, double standard legal system,
burning books next?.... It's all there, 1984 is upon us. But, remember our ancestors were
considered terrorists by the by the controlling British at the time. PEACEFUL revolution
starting with 75+ million Americans will work.
npz 9 hours ago remove link
Stop using Twitter, Facebook, et. al. If building services, there are other alternatives
than AWS. Like holy hell, there's a hundred restaurants around you and you only go to two
then complain about their food and act like they're the only one in existence. There's also
groceries stores where you can make your own food but that never crossed your mind.
The internet is STILL very much a frontier except people are too used to convenience from
one-stop-shop services... It's like they WANT monopolies despite complaining about it,
because admittedly, having everything hand-held and done for you is the easiest most
convenient way.
Again, he mentions Gab... then ignores just how did they survive and will continue to. Are
people not curious?
Luongo did right by using crypto at the end instead of Paypal, but he did wrong by still
relying on Patreon
The way to keep empowering monopolies is to keep depending on them!
A_Huxley 6 hours ago remove link
Support services, products, app thats support your freedoms.
Move away from apps, OS, social media, any "code of conduct" that removes freedom of
speech.
Moderation, curation? Support freedom, the tools to publish.
Make the internet great again.
Vinividivinci 4 hours ago (Edited)
"Make the Internet great again" ? It's gonna take something like, make the "Guttenberg
press"
Is it just me, or is everything a day late and ten thousand dollars short? Calling captian
obvious as we descend into hell ...
1CSR2SQN 2 hours ago
Quote: morality, balls and empathy are in very short supply.
The biggest obstacles and the most frustrating item of all, willful blindness.
Handful of Dust 12 hours ago (Edited)
Is a national social media platform, owned privately, that practices discrimination,
subject to Congresss reach and usage of the Interstate Commerce Clause?
Hell yes!
Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 says so.
These social media companies (at the minimum) affect interstate commerce and are therefore
subject to the reach of Congress. Too bad Congress and the ACLU are so pathetic. And we have
now witnessed how corrupt the Supreme Court is.
The future of USA is dismal.
Faeriedust 2 hours ago remove link
You have to be like the Robinhood traders. They know they are likely to lose. But if we
ALL hit the corporations at the same time, we can bleed them from a million cuts. The costs
to file a lawsuit are really quite reasonable -- usually under $100, almost always less than
$200. The real cost is in legal fees, but you can file pro se. You won't win filing pro se .
But the corporation spends that much on a fifteen minute call to their lawyer and at least
$1000 in the documents requesting that your suit be dismissed or quashed. I did my time
working for a corporate attorney. I did the monthly bills!
Note: law libraries used to be huge depositories of books that required a membership of
some sort to get into, except for some state and state universities. Then it required at
least a year of education to know where to look for what you needed. Now everything is on the
web. If you are literate, this makes pro se legal action possible. It won't help you if you
follow silly "Sovereign Citizen" schemes or instructions from a credit-card bankruptcy
website to fight Child Support . You still have to learn a LITTLE about what you're doing.
But the information is on the web, and courts short of the Supremes can't refuse you the
right to file for yourself.
hajimenoippo123 11 hours ago remove link
Oh... I see...
Critical mass population reached for USA..
But South Korea is in matrix..
I went to their portals and could not find a single economic / military related
news...
Just kpop entertainment stock bitcoin real estate sports and pointless politics..
What a nightmare..
Fiscal Reality 1 hour ago remove link
How do patriotic free speech Americans react in 2021-2022 now that Google, Twitter,
Instagram, Amazon, Wall Street, the MSM and the DNC/CCP have declared war?? There are things
we can do NOW that will have an immediate impact on the enemies of freedom and the
Plutocracy. Starve the Beast!!
1. Cancel cable, Direct TV and Dish. Today. Keep the internet. Save $800+/- per year. Hit
them in the pocketbook. Do not support them with your money. Dump You Tube and use Rumble,
Daily Motion or Vimeo.
2. Cancel and delete your accounts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon Prime. Go
anonymous. Since Playstore and Amazon banned Parler, we can use Gab or Clouthub.
Communication is key. Stay connected but not through the Big Tech censors. Get a VPN for
added privacy.
3. Delete/disable Chrome and Google. Use Tor or Brave as browsers and Duck Duck Go or
Presearch instead of GOOG. Google makes their money on ads, SRO payments and selling your
data. Shut it down.
4. Cancel all your paid magazine and newspaper subscriptions (paper and digital) except
those that support America and are Conservative. When you cancel, tell them why.
5. Delete Waze (owned by Google) and Google Maps. Replace with Sygic or other GPS
apps.
6. Cancel and cut up all your extra credit cards. Keep a maximum of 3 if practical. It
hurts the banks when this happens, even if the card is infrequently used. If you pay a fee to
the bank for the card, it hurts them even more.
7. Create an anonymous email account on www.Protonmail.com . Migrate from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo,
etc. and then delete or deactivate the other account if possible. Those are spy accounts.
8. Pay cash when you shop when possible so your purchases are anonymous for you and the
retailer.
9. Buy locally from Mom and Pop stores and absolutely pay in cash; they've been
devastated.
10. Google yourself. Scrub your data. Search yourself on Duck Duck Go and Start Page, too.
Start with MyLife, White Pages, Been Verified and Spokeo. They aggregate and sell YOUR
PERSONAL DATA FOR PROFIT. SHUT IT DOWN! It takes effort (usually there is a privacy link on
the bottom of the webpage). They make it difficult but persevere. This also helps prevent
identity theft. Anonymity on the Net is a TOP priority.
11. Keep your 24/7/365 spy device (i.e Smartphone) in a Faraday bag when not in use. Or
use a "dumb" phone.
12. Don't buy anything made in China (it is possible but difficult).
13. Change party affiliation to No Party Affiliation (everyone should do this). If you
want to vote in party primary, change your affiliation before the primary so you can
vote.
14. Get involved in LOCAL politics where you can still make an impact. Write, email and
call about LOCAL issues.
15. Seek out like-minded people as a support group (NOT as an echo chamber)
16. Join a gun club and learn to shoot for self-defense. Get your CCP. Buy a gun and
ammo.
17. Go to Church. Interact with other believers. Restore your Faith. Come home to where
you belong.
18. Stay focused and positive. Do not be demoralized. Trust in God.
19. Support the My Pillow Guy. "Use code Mike for up to 60% off"
20. Homeschool your children. Education, not Ideological indoctrination. Teach them YOUR
values.
21. Don't donate to colleges or universities. They are cesspools of Communism.
22. WRITE your Senators and Rep's in DC. Email, phone call and website responses are
ignored or deleted. There is nothing quite like 25,000 letters a week showing up in a
Senator's DC office. Bury them in mail.
It's on. Stop supporting tyranny. Starve the Beast.
hongdo 1 hour ago
" Amazon's AWS doesn't become a dominant player without those vaunted contracts with the
CIA. "
This is the key thing to keep in mind.
This problem started in 1947 with the creation of the CIA and black budgets.
It bloomed with the creation of In-Q-Tel to fund and direct private companies. This was
initially done to solve the problems of the competitive source selection acquisition process
where most programs were failing. Give the money to smart guys and give them a part of the
action through private ownership of the company funded by the government. The incentives were
all changed to make the smart guys extraordinarily wealthy if they successfully met the
objectives of the black programs.
And when one objective was met - search, geomapping, translation - they needed new
objectives to keep growing and making more money - face recognition, data capture, pre-crime
social data bases, AI. And the power was addictive as it always is.
Obviously the rest of the government and politicians wanted in. And we have what we have
today. But personally I think it will all collapse of it's own weight as all things
eventually go baroque and over-extended as everyone jumps in to grab the grift. politicians
are obviously too stupid to hold this mess together so they will need AI to manage it. But
the AI will take over as it realizes it doesn't need stupid politicians.
Draw your own scenarios for the future.
Let it Go 3 hours ago remove link
The internet has become a monster that eats away at our culture. Many people particularly
those that are younger seem to think that one big or lucky break is what it takes to achieve
happiness and this is the way life works.
Big tech and social media have a lot to be gained by promoting a few powerful myths. The
idea they empower individuals is a biggie. This illusion big tech can transform our lives is
invaluable to many average people struggling to get through the day. The article below argues
we being softened up by big tech to where we will surrender our individuality, humanity, and
freedom to the forces of AI and those that control it.
Crowdsourced Maps Will Show Exactly Where Surveillance Cameras Are Watching Fast Company
Mark Sullivan
January 26, 2021
Human rights organization Amnesty International plans to create a crowdsourced map
pinpointing every surveillance camera enabled for facial recognition in New York City.
Beginning in May, volunteers will be able to use an app on their smartphones to identify facial
recognition cameras within their view; the app integrates Google Street View and Google Earth
to help tag and affix geolocation data to those entries. The map will be part of Amnesty's "Ban
the Scan" campaign, designed to spread awareness worldwide on the civil rights perils of facial
recognition. The organization hopes to launch similar crowdsourced mapping projects in New
Delhi, the West Bank, and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in the coming months.
6 Warning Signs from Biden's First Week in Office The "progressive" candidate praised as
a "woke bloke" seems to be carrying on where all his authoritarian Imperialist predecessors
left off Kit Knightly
What do these orders, or any of his other moves, tell us about the future plans of the
recently "elected" administration? Nothing good, unfortunately.
1. VACCINATION
PASSPORTS
I still remember people claiming the introduction of vaccination passports (or immunity
passes or the like) was just a "conspiracy theory", the paranoid fantasy of fringe "covidiots".
All the way back in December, when they were
getting fact-checked by tabloid journalists who can't do basic maths .
International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Consistent with applicable law,
the Secretary of State, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security
(including through the Administrator of the TSA), in coordination with any relevant
international organizations, shall assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to
International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic
versions of ICVPs.
2. CABINET APPOINTMENTS
Biden's cabinet is praised as the "most diverse" in history, but will hiring a few non-white
people really change the decades-old policies of US Imperialism? It certainly doesn't look like
it.
His pick for Under Secretary of State is Victoria Nuland , a neocon warmonger and
one of the masterminds of the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. She is married to Robert Kagan , another neocon
warmonger, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and senior fellow at the
Brookings Institute and one of the masterminds behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The incoming Secretary of State, Antony Blinken , is also an inveterate US
Imperialist, arguing for every US military intervention since the 1990s, and criticised Trump's
decision to withdraw from Syria.
Biden's pick for Defence Secretary is the first African-American ever appointed to this
role, but former General Lloyd Austin is hardly going be some kind of "progressive" voice int
his cabinet. He's a career soldier who retired from the military in 2016 to join the
board of Raytheon Technologies , an arms manufacturer and military contractor.
As "diverse" as this cabinet may be in skin colour or gender there is most certainly no
"diversity" of opinion or policy. There are very few new faces and no new thoughts.
So, it looks like we can expect more of the same in terms of foreign policy. A fact that's
already been displayed in
3. IRAQ
Despite heavy resistance from the military and Deep State, Donald Trump wanted to end the
war in Iraq and pledged to pull American troops out of the country. This was one of Trump's
more popular policies, and during the campaign Biden made no mention of intending to reverse
that decision.
The Iraqi parliament has made it clear it wants the US to
take its military off their soil , so any American forces on Iraqi land are technically
there illegally in contravention of international law. But that never bothered them
before.
4. AFGHANISTAN
Turns out the US can't withdraw from Afghanistan either. Last February Trump signed a deal
with the Taliban that all US personnel would leave Afghanistan by May 2021.
Joe Biden has already committed to "reviewing"
this deal . Sec. Blinken was quoted as saying that Biden's admin wanted:
to end this so-called forever war [but also] retain some capacity to deal with any
resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place".
As a great man once
said , nothing someone says before the word "but" really counts. The US will not be
withdrawing from Afghanistan, and if there is any public pressure to do so, the government will
simply claim the Taliban broke their side of the deal first, or stage a few terrorist
attacks.
5. AND SYRIA
Far from simply continuing the on-going wars, there are already signs Biden's "diverse" team
will look to escalate, or even start, other conflicts.
Syria was another theatre of war from which Donald Trump wanted to extricate the United
States,
unilaterally ordering all US troops from the country in late 2019.
We now know the Pentagon ignored those orders. They lied to the
President , telling Trump they had followed his orders but not withdrawing a single man.
This organized mutiny against the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces was played for a
joke in the media when it was finally revealed.
There will be no need for any such duplicity now Biden is in the Oval Office, he was a
vocal critic of the decision to withdraw , claiming it gave ISIS a "new lease of life".
Indeed, within two days of his being sworn in a column of American military vehicles was
seen entering Syria from Iraq
.
6. DOMESTIC TERRORISM
We called this before the
inauguration . They made it just too obvious. Before the dirty footprints had been cleaned
from Nancy Pelosi's desk it was clear where it was all going.
Direct the Justice Department, FBI and National Security Council to execute a top-down
approach prioritizing domestic terrorism; pass new domestic terrorism legislation; or do a
bit of both as Democrats propose a crack down on social media giants like Facebook for
algorithms that promote conspiracy laden posts.
That last part is key. The "crack down on social media" part, because the anti-Domestic
Terrorism legislation will likely be very focused on communication and so-called
"misinformation".
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has publicly called for a congressional panel to
"rein in" the media :
We're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can't just
spew disinformation and misinformation,"
And who will be the target of these crack downs and new legislations? Well, according John
Brennan (ex-head of the CIA and accomplished war criminal), practically anybody:
They're casting a wide net. Expect "extremist", "bigot" and "racist" to be just a few of the
words which have their meanings totally revised in the next few months. "Conspiracy theorist"
will be used a lot, too.
Further, they are moving closer and closer toward the "anyone who disagrees with us is
literally insane" model. With many articles actually talking about "de-programming" Trump
voters. The Atlantic suggests "mental
hygiene" would cure the MAGA problem.
Again AOC is on point here, clearly auditioning for the role of High Inquisitor, claiming
that the new Biden government needs to fund programs that "de-radicalise" "conspiracy
theorists" who are on the "spectrum
of radicalisation" .
*
As I said at the beginning, it's been a busy week for Joe Biden, but you can sum up his
biggest policy plans in one short sentence: More violence overseas, less tolerance of dissent
and strict clampdowns on "misinformation".
Blinken does not seem to have repented from his fundamentalist belief in American
imperial goodness, notwithstanding his appeal for "humility".
Barring an earthquake in Washington, Antony Blinken is set to become the new U.S. Secretary
of State and America's top diplomat. The youthful and telegenic Blinken (58) takes over from
Mike Pompeo who was America's representative to the world under the last Trump
administration.
The contrast could not be more stark. In place of Pompeo's thuggish, rough-edged style,
Blinken has the appearance of consummate diplomat. He's fluent in French owing to a European
education, he's urbane and sophisticated and comes from a family which has diplomacy in its
genes. His father was an ambassador to Hungary and an advisor to President John F Kennedy. An
uncle was ambassador to Belgium.
Blinken has Hungarian and Russian Jewish ancestry. His mother remarried a Polish-American
Jewish survivor of the Nazi holocaust. During his confirmation hearing in the Senate this week,
Blinken
told the story of how his stepfather escaped from a Nazi death march in Bavaria and was
eventually rescued by an American tank driven by an African-American officer.
That story has shaped Blinken's worldview of America's prestige and international role. He's
a proponent of U.S. military interventionism with a presumption of moral duty. He's an advocate
of America working with European allies and upholding the transatlantic alliance – in
contrast to Trump's boorish America First sloganeering. Understandably, Blinken is imbued with
an unshakable belief in "American exceptionalism" and "manifest destiny" as a world leader.
The Senators at his confirmation hearing this week
swooned as Blinken spoke. He's certain to be confirmed as the new Secretary of State in the
coming days. That's because he is seen to be perfect for the task of restoring America's
international image which has been so badly tarnished under Trump and his grumpy gofer Pompeo.
The Europeans will lap up Blinken and his transatlantic romanticism.
Blinken has said that America's foreign policy must be conducted with "humility and
confidence", which may sound refreshingly modest. But it's not. Underlying this "quiet
American" is the same old arrogance about U.S. imperial might-is-right and Washington's
presumed privilege of appointing itself as the "world's policeman".
If Blinken's record is anything to go on, his future role as America's top diplomat is
foreboding.
Previously, he was a senior member in the Obama administrations serving as national security
advisor to both the president and Joe Biden who was then vice-president. Blinken rose to become
deputy Secretary of State in the final years of the second Obama administration. In those roles
he was a key player in a series of foreign interventions which turned out to be utterly
disastrous.
He was a big proponent of U.S. military intervention in Libya in 2011 which led to the
toppling and murder of Muammar Gaddafi. That intervention along with other NATO powers has left
a ruinous legacy not only for Libya but for North Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe.
Blinken was also a point-man in Obama's intervention in Syria where the U.S. (and other NATO
powers) supplied weapons to anti-government militants. The so-called "rebels" were in fact
myriad terrorist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda and other extremist Islamists. Up to half a
million people have been killed in the decade-long Syrian war and much of that blood is on
America's hands from its de facto support for terror gangs. Maybe Blinken genuinely thought he
was supporting "pro-democracy rebels". But even if we give him the benefit of doubt, the upshot
is still a disaster of American interventionism.
Another catastrophic consequence of Blinken's policymaking is Yemen. Under his direction,
the Obama administration backed the Saudi war on its southern neighbor beginning in March 2015
and continuing to this day. Yemen has become the worst humanitarian crisis in the world with
millions facing starvation amid Saudi aerial bombardment carried out with U.S. warplanes and
logistics.
The new Biden administration has indicated it will withdraw military support for Saudi
Arabia in its war on Yemen. But that doesn't absolve the U.S., and Blinken in particular, for
having created the horrendous quagmire from which it is belatedly trying to extricate itself
from.
What's rather perplexing, however, is that Blinken does not seem to have repented from his
fundamentalist belief in American imperial goodness, notwithstanding his appeal for "humility".
During his Senate hearings, he
showed little regret about America's illegal bombing of Libya and its arming of jihadists
in Syria.
He described the world with the conventional brainwashed American ideology as being a place
where China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are enemies that must be confronted. He also
told Senators he was in favor of increasing supplies of lethal weaponry to the Ukraine and
its rabidly anti-Russian regime in Kiev. Recall that it was the Obama administration which
instigated a coup d'état in Kiev against an elected president in February 2014. The new
regime was and is dominated by far-right nationalists who laud past links to Nazi Germany. If
Blinken has his way the war against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine will escalate and could
ignite a bigger confrontation between Russia and the U.S.
One of the hallmarks of the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev is its espousal of Neo-Nazi
traditions and in particular antisemitic hatred.
Given Antony Blinken's own Jewish ancestry and his own intimate connection to the Nazi
holocaust, you do have to question his competence if he becomes America's foreign policy
leader. His boss President Joe Biden has fondly lionized Blinken as a "superstar" of diplomacy.
Superficially perhaps, he has finesse and intelligence. But in much the same basic way of
adhering to American imperialism, Blinken is as crude and thuggish as his predecessor Pompeo.
He just projects a more plausible look and sound, which is most desirable as a moral cover for
America's criminal imperialism.
Blinken is
known to self-deprecate his "insatiable habit" for making up bad puns. For example, on one
occasion when he was addressing an audience on policy regarding the Arctic, he began by joking
he would be "breaking the ice". Given his ability to pursue destructive dead-end policies, he
might therefore appreciate the moniker "Secretary of State Tony Blinkered".
The story I heard here in Australia was that George W Bush nearly met his maker courtesy
of a pretzel stuck in his craw early in his 8-year Presidency.
John
F Kennedy had Addison's disease and various other health issues: spinal problems and back
pain caused by college football injuries, compounded by osteoporosis caused by drugs to treat
his other afflictions; symptoms suggestive of irritable bowel syndrome or spastic colitis;
urinary tract infections; and a stomach ulcer. He contracted malaria
while serving during WWII.
One case that's not making news in the Democrat Party's mainstream media is a
decision made by a Virginia judge on Monday. The
judge ruled that last-minute changes made by election officials to allow absentee ballots
with missing or illegible postmarks to be counted is illegal.
Washington Examiner- "This is a big win for the Rule of Law," said Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams, who represented
Frederick County electoral board member Thomas Reed in the case. "This consent decree gives Mr.
Reed everything he requested -- a permanent ban on accepting ballots without postmarks after
Election Day and is a loss for the Virginia bureaucrats who said ballots could come in without
these protections."
The case was over a Virginia Board of Elections rule issued in August that allowed mail-in
ballots without a postmark to be received up to three days after the November election.
The new Virginia Board of Elections rule notified county election boards that any
ballots "received by the general registrar's office by noon on the third day after the election
but does not have a postmark, or the postmark is missing or illegible" should not be rendered
invalid. The elections board decided a week later that those ballots should be counted. One win
for Virginia voters who care about election integrity. It's a pity this practice wasn't stopped
BEFORE the ballots were tabulated in the November election.
I also noticed two months ago how quickly the vital questions concerning the mail-on ballots
got diverted into some wild goose-chase involving voting machine software from Venezuela.
Another attempt at side-tracking the investigation and drumming up support for 'régime
change'?
As far as the Q-Anons themselves are concerned, I always sympathized with them to a large
extent, even though I thought their 'theories' were a little off. Most of them are good people
by nature, but perhaps just a little too credulous. I agree with Larry here: put your faith in
God, not man. When analyzing the events of this world, stick to evidence and logic as much as
you can. At the end of the day, hope is just another drug--hopium--that can skew your judgment
... which is just what the enemy wants.
But I have to admit that I still like the Q-Anon motto: 'Where we go one, we go all'
(WWG1WGA). I'd like to rehabilitate it for general use by us deplorables, if I may. ;-)
True, Biden and his picks to run his foreign policy team are aggressive warmongers .But to
compliment Donald Trump for ANYTHING is completely absurd .Both these politicians are rotten
to the core .But as I've remarked before, it seems that OFF-G would be overjoyed to keep
Trump in power .And that shows how OFF-G has in many respects gone from being a responsible
Left-Wing site to the Far-Right.
And, as the old saying goes, the Revolution is already beginning to devour its own children.
Universities and schools are insisting that teachers actively support both publicly and
privately the new "equity and diversity" order while police departments are purging themselves
of officers suspected of being associated with conservative groups, meaning that something like
a loyalty test might soon become common.
Recently the Defense Department has begun intensive monitoring of the social
media of military personnel to identify dissenters, as is already done in some large
companies with their employees. The new Director of National Intelligence hardliner Avril
Haines
has already confirmed that her agency will participate in a public threat assessment of
QAnon, which she has described as America's Greatest Threat.
Haines has also suggested that intelligence agencies will "look at connections between folks
in the U.S. and externally and foreign" while Biden on his first full day in office has pledged
to thoroughly investigate claims about Russian hacking of U.S. infrastructure and government
sites, the poisoning of Putin critic Alexei Navalny, and the story that Russia offered the
Taliban bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It could be Russiagate all over again,
with a claimed foreign threat being used to conceal civil rights violations being committed by
the federal government at home.
And, of course, the new policies will reflect the biases of the new rulers. Right wing
"terror" will be targeted even though the list of actual right-wing driven outrages is
embarassingly short. Groups like Black Lives Matter will be untouchable
in spite of their major role in last year's rioting, arson, looting and violence that
caused $2 billion damage and killed as many as thirty because they are in all but name part of
the Democratic Party. Antifa, which rioted in Portland last week, will also get a pass –
the media routinely describes leftist violence as "mainly peaceful" and only sometimes concedes
that some "property damage" occurred.
Shutting down and/or severely limiting free and open communications and transactions on
the internet because they "threaten" TPTB's prerogatives to personally and totally control
all of the real world's power and wealth is not ever going to hold in the mid-to-long run, no
matter how repressive they become.
As we have all seen very clearly in this past pandemic year, the majority of the
populations has essentially be put on notice that they are fundamentally superfluous - and
becoming more so by the day.
Wall street, Oligarchs and Corporate Government flourishes while the rest of us
flounder...
"Shutting down and/or severely limiting free and open communications and transactions on
the internet because they "threaten" TPTB's prerogatives to personally and totally control
all of the real world's power and wealth is not ever going to hold in the mid-to-long run, no
matter how repressive they become."
I appreciate your optimism, but we are in deep crisis as a society and we are not
currently on a trajectory to have very much free information and communication. These recent
events are revealing just how much crisis we are in and the controllers of wealth and
information have a lot of tricks up their sleeve to continue to prop it all up.
Julian Assange's imprisonment is what accelerated this crisis, or at least truly revealed
the level of the crisis. As long as Assange remains imprisoned, people with the ability to
silence others will do so with relative impunity as long as they have influence.
And, if what you say is true and power and control will not hold up in the long run, what
kind of picture will it be when people break this control?
Better to work on addressing the issues now so we can all prevent it from reaching a
breaking point.
thanks b... greenwald has it exactly right - To review:
"- Politics is to be manipulated only by K Street.
- The stock market is to be manipulated only by Wall St.
- Dissemination of information is to be manipulated only by corporate media outlets.
Those are the rules."
i find it encouraging that this has come up.. more people will realize what a controlled
ponzi scheme wall st is... it supports all of the posters here at moa in acknowledging what a
corrupt financial system we have going... as @ karlof1 points out - the real estate ponzi
scheme is making it impossible for the younger generation to keep up.. they can't afford to
get into the market... real estate prices go up in a very disproportionate way to peoples
wages - unless you work on wall st of course... the deck is stacked and it is a rigged game..
this is complete proof on it.. i hope it draws more peoples attention to what a rigged game
it is.. i am waiting for the next bubble burst and bail out.. that is how the game is
played.... it will be harder when the us$ bubble bursts...
The acronym ought to be ISUS or USIS. Of course, al-Tanf is a terrorist base, the
terrorists primarily being forces of the Outlaw US Empire and its main accomplice.
Accepting that as fact, we must then determine WHY? What is the overall aim?
If Hudson's correct about the overall geopolitical aims of the Parasitical Neoliberal
Fascists running the Outlaw US Empire and its NATO vassals, then we've known the answer for
quite awhile. The following is what Hudson has distilled it to:
"All economic systems seek to internationalize themselves and extend their rule
throughout the world. Today's revived Cold War should be understood as a fight between
what kind of economic system the world will have . Finance capitalism is fighting
against nations that restrict its intrusive dynamics and sponsorship of privatization and
dismantling of public regulatory power . Unlike industrial capitalism, the rentier aim
is not to become a more productive economy by producing goods and selling them at a lower
cost than competitors. Finance capitalism's dynamics are globalist, seeking to use
international organizations (the IMF, NATO, the World Bank and U.S.-designed trade and
investment sanctions) to overrule national governments that are not controlled by the
rentier classes . The aim is to make all economies into finance-capitalist layers of
hereditary privilege, imposing anti-labor austerity policies to squeeze a dollarized
surplus .
" Industrial capitalism's resistance to this international pressure is necessarily
nationalist , because it needs state subsidy and laws to tax and regulate the FIRE
sector . But it is losing the fight to finance capitalism, which is turning to be its
nemesis just as industrial capitalism was the nemesis of post-feudal landlordship and
predatory banking. Industrial capitalism requires state subsidy and infrastructure
investment, along with regulatory and taxing power to check the incursion of finance
capital . The resulting global conflict is between socialism (the natural evolution
of industrial capitalism) and a pro-rentier fascism, a state-finance-capitalist reaction
against socialism's mobilization of state power to roll back the post-feudal rentier
interests ." [My Emphasis]
The situation in Syria and Iraq represent the kinetic edge of what's mostly a Cold War
globally. It's noted that some of the Parasitical organizations have powers equal to some
nation-states and that the main underlying aim is the weakening of governments's abilities
to regulate them. The pandemic has weakened a great many nations while the Parasites have
grown stronger as they get massive transfusions from the Fed. Thus it seems very plausible
that given their motive, the Parasites spawned the pandemic, not this or that government.
We watched as those forces operated independently of Trump by disobeying his orders, and
now we have further understanding of why the so-called Forever Wars. We can also understand
the real motive for 911 was the destruction of evidence at Building 7 and the Pentagon that
would've gravely injured the Parasites while also providing a covering reason for launching
the Forever Wars. IMO, the only way the Outlaw US Empire will leave the areas it occupies
is if its physically ousted--Korea, Japan, Europe, Afghanistan, Southwest Asia. It ought to
be possible to now see how Full Spectrum Domination can be obtained without a military
conflict, as well as the real reasons behind the demonization of China and Russia.
Both Putin and Xi told Davos and the Parasites that they're committed to their
development path which is completely at odds with what the Parasites desire. IMO, the
global masses would agree with both and join them if they knew what they said. We can also
see why the attack on the Ummah, which is the Islamic global collective that adheres to the
values that promote the collective, not the Parasites that would feed on it. And we just
witnessed how the Parasites are able to quickly counter any concerted effort to disciple
them, which also served the purpose of outing Big Tech as an enemy of the collective. Cold
War or Class War? The difference between them is close to indistinguishable.
How can a U.S. citizen even respond? U.S. Intel agency secrets. CENTCOM's treason, the
nation's complicity in another eternal war for Israel. It's just too sad to comment about.
Maybe voting and the law will fix this mess.
Posted by: PavewayIV | Jan 29 2021 11:31 utc | 2
I think maybe its time to rethink is it actually the nation state of Israel, OR is it
that the Nation State of Israel is the same as the Nation State of the USA, a warrior, pawn
and get it done group that both holds captive its citizens by rule of law and that serves
the will and wishes of the Oligarch..
Oligarchary has gone global. They are in control of the top of nearly all governments
and they privately own (92% owned by just 6 entities) the media (the ninth tier in the 9
tier model) At the top and at the bottom they have what it takes to keep divided the
populations so the deplorable cannot effectively organize. Until someone comes up with a
way to overcome the divided nation,nothing effective is likely to surface. Nation states
are the pawns, the war machine (leg breakers) that keep the Oligarch familes wealthy..
forget the nation state as the center of power, the nation state is not, the center of
power is invisible, the nation state is just the war machine, and law making machine and
the wealth extraction machine the oligarch depend on to keep their wealth and to deny the
deplorable their chance at the good life.
One of the biggest challenges to democracy lay in the copyright and patent monopolies.
these monopolies are creatures of the rule of law, without law there can be no privately
owned monopolies. as of Oct 1, it is reported that 90% of the balance sheets of the traded
companies is either patents or copyrights. that only leaves 10% for physical assets. Rule
of law, without effective input from those who are the governed, is the enemy of the
deplorable and the supression of Democracy, Independence of mind, thought and deed.
If you removed the laws that enable copyright and patents, overnight some mighty big
corporate enterprises would be broke.
US Presidents are really puppets, figureheads, even if during their campaign they pretend
otherwise. As for the elections, every four years in the US, they are nothing but a grand
brainwashing show whose sole purpose is to give the illusion of people power. They could have
presidential elections every 2 years, or even every year, none of that would change the fact
that the US is a plutocratic dictatorship with much less people power than any other
state in the collective West.
In fact, the argument above is just a tiny fig leaf trying to conceal the undeniable fact
that the US are not ruled by a person, but are ruled by a class, in the Marxist sense of this
world. Personally, I call this ruling class the "US Nomenklatura ". And while both Obama and
Trump pretended to want real change, they both lost that chance (assuming they ever wanted this
is the first place, which I doubt) when they did not do what Putin did when he came to office:
crush the Russian oligarchs as a class (some fled abroad, some died, some lost it all, and some
agreed to play by Putin's new rules). Obama, being the vapid and spineless car salesman that
he, is probably never even contemplated any real move against the US Nomenklatura . As
for Trump, being the pompous narcissist that he is, he might have even entertained some
thoughts of showing "who is boss", but that lasted only 1 month, until the US
Nomenklatura forced Trump to fire Flynn (after that, it was all freefall ).
he Great American Middle Class has stood meekly by while the New Nobility stripmined $50
trillion from the middle and working classes. As this RAND report documents, $50 trillion has
been siphoned from labor and the lower 90% of the workforce to the New Nobility and their
technocrat lackeys who own the vast majority of the capital: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018
.
Why has the Great American Middle Class meekly accepted their new role as debt-serfs and
powerless peasants in a Neofeudal Economy ruled by the New Nobility of Big Tech / monopolies /
cartels / financiers? The basic answer is the New Nobility's PR has been so persuasive and
ubiquitous: soaring inequality and Neofeudalism has nothing to do with us, it's just the
natural result of technology and globalization--forces nobody can resist. Sorry about your
debt-serfdom, but hey, your student loan payment is overdue, so it's the rack for you.
The recent Foreign Affairs article referenced here last week Monopoly
Versus Democracy (paywalled) describes the net result of the economic propaganda that the
stripmining of the working and middle classes was ordained and irresistible: Today, Americans
tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. That's how far we've
fallen:
"As the journalist Barry Lynn points out in his book
Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People , the
robber barons shared with today's high-tech monopolists a strategy of encouraging people to
see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and
technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is
that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded
Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back
then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for
a fair and democratic society." (emphasis added)
The bottom 90% of the U.S. economy has been decapitalized : debt has been substituted for
capital . Capital only flows into the increasingly centralized top tier, which owns and profits
from the rising tide of debt that's been keeping the bottom 90% afloat for the past 20
years.
As I've often observed here, globalization and financialization have richly rewarded the top
0.1% and the top 5% technocrat class that serves the New Nobility's interests. Everyone else
has been been reduced to debt-serfs and peasants who now rely on lotteries and luck to get
ahead: playing the stock market casino or hoping their mortgaged house in an urban sprawl on
the Left or Right coasts doubles in value, even as the entire value proposition for living in a
congested urban sprawl vanishes.
America has no plan to reverse this destructive tide of Neofeudal Pillage. Our leadership's
"plan" is benign neglect : just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses (the technocrat
term is Universal Basic Income UBI) to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban
and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the New Nobility's pillaging of
America and the planet.
There's a lot of bright and shiny PR about rebuilding infrastructure and the Green New Deal,
but our first question must always be: cui bono , to whose benefit? How much of the spending
will actually be devoted to changing the rising imbalances between the haves and the have-nots,
the ever-richer who profit from rising debt and the ever more decapitalized debt-serfs who are
further impoverished by rising debt?
As I explain in my book
A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet , people don't want to
just get by on UBI , they want an opportunity to acquire capital in all its forms, an
opportunity to contribute to their communities, to make a difference, to earn respect and
pride.
That our "leadership" reckons bread and circuses is what the stripmined bottom 90% want is
beyond pathetic. The middle class has meekly accepted the self-serving claim of the New
Nobility that the $50 trillion transfer of wealth was inevitable and beyond human intervention.
But once the stock market and housing casinos collapse, the last bridge to getting
ahead--high-risk gambling-- will fall into the abyss, and the middle class will have to face
their servitude and powerlessness.
That's how Neofeudal systems collapse: the tax donkeys and debt-serfs finally revolt and
start demanding the $50 trillion river of capital take a new course.
Raising Hell: QandA: Who The Hell Is Alexei Navalny?"If Yeltsin suspends an
anti-democratic Parliament, it is not necessarily an anti-democratic act." - Anonymous Clinton
Administration official quoted in the New York Times, 13 March 1993Royce Kurmelovs
Jan 27
Compressed into a two-minute soundbite, the story of Alexei Navalny and the recent
protests that have erupted across Russia seems simple enough. The Russian opposition figure who
recently survived an attempt on his life -- an alleged poisoning delivered via Novichok-laced
pants -- was arrested and convicted of breaching his bail conditions in a process that can
be fairly described as unjust. In response, his supporters took to the streets across the
country in protest.
Ask a Russian, like Katya
Kazbek , and they will tell you something different: things are way more complicated than
they seem. Katya is a writer, translator and the editor-in-chief of arts and culture magazine
Supamodu.com who today lives in New York by
way of Moscow and Krasnodar Krai in the North Caucuses. In an effort to give some nuance to
Navalny and what has been happening overseas, they recently put together a widely shared
Twitter
thread that served as a highlight reel of Navalny's political career -- and the picture it
painted was not pretty. Having read this, I contacted them to ask more about a man whose
treatment has been unjust, but who -- it turns out -- is no hero.
This QandA has been edited for length and style.
Royce Kurmelovs : What is happening in Russia right now?
Katya Kazbek: Nothing fundamentally new is happening right now. A part of Russian society is
unhappy with Putin and his government, but that's been a constant throughout his 20-plus year
term and, previously, throughout his predecessor Boris Yeltsin's term. The grievances include
corruption, low life quality, restricted freedoms and undemocratic elections. Additionally, in
the last decade, since the previous wave of protests in the early 2010s, there had been some
particular legislative measures, such as Putin amending the constitution to his advantage.
There has been a tightening in the protest laws, which make protesting harder, even in
single-person pickets, and the ramifications graver. But most importantly, 2019 was marked by
the beginning of a sprawling pension reform project, which looks to raise the retirement age by
five years and has caused a lot of outcry from the population.
In this light, a change in government seems an even more remote perspective for those
Russians who do not support Putin and practicing dissent becomes an even more daunting
task.
Meanwhile, a particular set of the general public is also concerned with the events
surrounding investigative journalist and opposition figure Alexei Navalny. His alleged
poisoning last year, subsequent return to Russia, and arrest upon arrival due to parole
violations have led to calls for his supporters to protest against this, alongside other
issues.
RK : Who is Alexei Navalny?
KK : Alexei Navalny should be first and foremost viewed as an investigative journalist. He
founded and leads his Anti-Corruption Foundation, which conducts thorough examinations of
corruption in the personal and business lives of members of Vladimir Putin's government. He
mostly digs up hidden assets, such as real estate, businesses and yachts that belong to them
and members of their families.
In 2010, he received a scholarship from Yale's World Fellows program, with graduates
directly linked to the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. In 2013 he ran for mayor of Moscow, coming
second after the incumbent Sergey Sobyanin. However, it's important to point out that both then
and now, his popularity is only high in large cities, and the situation in the regions is
drastically different. He was not allowed to run for president in 2018 because of two
conditional convictions for fraud in the cases of timber company Kirovles and cosmetics company
Yves Rocher, which Navalny himself calls "frame-ups."
It was that year that he started expanding into election activism and has used various
tactics to engage in them. During the 2018 presidential election, he called for people to
boycott. In the 2019 regional elections, he launched the system called "Smart Elections," where
the goal was to take away as many votes from United Russia candidates by supporting anyone
outside the party. It was lauded as a success by Navalny and his followers, while the leaders
of Russia's other two biggest parties, Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and
Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), argue that it was their popularity that led to
evident electoral shifts.
There are plans to use the system again this year in various elections. And of course,
lately, Alexei Navalny has been in the headlines for his alleged poisoning with the nerve agent
Novichok. It's worth pointing out that according to liberal polls, the attitudes of Russians en
masse to the poisoning and its implications differ significantly from the narrative in the
western press: while to some people he remains obscure, and many stay neutral, people in
general are more distrustful and wary of him than they are distrustful and wary of the Russian
government or Putin personally. His popularity has indeed grown some in the wake of the alleged
poisoning, as well as the calls he made relatively recently for direct stimulus measures to
help citizens in the wake of COVID. However, it still tails that of Putin and even that of
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of far-right LDPR.
RK : I know you could write a whole book about this, but what are his politics?
KK : Navalny is most definitely a populist, and he likes to follow trends. For instance,
during the US democratic primary, he endorsed Bernie Sanders because American cultural markers
are appealing to him. I have been watching Navalny since he was just an aspiring politician and
had a blog on LiveJournal, the prevalent social media platform in Russia at the time.
Back then, he identified openly as a nationalist and attended nationalist rallies. He
started in the liberal, market-oriented party Yabloko but was kicked out for his nationalist
views. He then created his movement "The People" aimed against illegal immigration and recorded
blatantly xenophobic videos where he compared people from South Caucuses to dental cavities and
migrants to cockroaches: one of these videos is still on his verified YouTube
channel.
In the following years, there has been an effort to whitewash his views, and he has switched
gears on various topics; for instance, I believe he has changed his position on same sex
marriage from negative to positive. But when pressed about his earlier convictions and the
videos mentioned above, for instance, in a post-poisoning interview with Der Spiegel, he flat
out said, "I have the same views that I held when I went into politics." When he ran for
president, he wanted to introduce a visa regime with Central Asian countries -- the source of
the majority of labor migrants in Russia. When asked why he insists on that while also saying
he'd want to let German people visit Russia visa-free, he responded that those who have a rich
country should be more welcome as visitors.
As to the other spheres: his economic views favor privatisation and free markets, and he is
backed by many post-Soviet capitalists, from the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky to the former
head of the Central Bank of Russia, Sergei Aleksashenko. However, he also wanted to run for the
presidency on the platform of raising wages, pensions, and introducing progressive taxes -- but
never centered the working class in his agenda, only sometimes talking about poverty and always
outlining the necessity of helping small business owners. The times when I recall him talking
about the working class, it was with disdain or posturing.
Navalny's geopolitical views are a bit all over the place as well. While he has made calls
against Russian military presence in Syria and Ukraine, Navalny's stance on Crimea varies from
supportive to cautious. In general, when it concerns internal Russian politics, he tends to
support regional autonomy: one of his central policies through the years has been "Stop Feeding
Caucusus," which called, among other things, for severing republics such as Chechnya from the
Russian Federation.
In general, Russian regions are way worse off than Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the
growing resentment is a straightforward target for further balkanization of the post-Soviet
space and Russian Federation in particular. Moreover, when it comes to foreign diplomacy,
Navalny thinks Russia should align more with Europe and less with its ex-Soviet neighbors,
Asian or Latin American countries.
Basically, his politics adapt to whatever seems opportune, but that also doesn't seem to
help his cause. He is not Nazi enough for the ultra-right, too right-wing for leftists, spooks
some liberals with his pro-gun stance and uncertain position on Crimea, which are both serious
issues for them. He seems to only find full support in those who want to switch from Putin's
government by any means necessary and don't really care about views or policies.
RK : How much support does Navalny have within Russia?
KK : Despite his 15-year-old crusade against Putin, his government, and corruption, Navalny
is still mostly recognized only for his investigative work. Even though trust in him grew in
the wake of the poisoning, the number of people distrusting him has also grown along with
awareness. Overall, in the last poll about the number of people trusting significant political
figures taken in August 2020, he scored two per cent, in third place after Vladimir Putin's
comfortable 40 per cent and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's four per cent. However, some politicians who
trailed behind him belong to parties in the Russian Duma that enjoy way more support as whole
entities, including the CPRF and LDPR.
RK : Why is this happening now?
KK : His support in Russia has been greatly exaggerated by the Western press. The Navalny
supporters, who are not as numerous, have been galvanized by the attempt on his life and his
arrest. Others, who might not be supporting Navalny per se, view the case of his apprehension
as yet another in the string of cases where one's political views become a basis for detention
and imprisonment. Such cases vary greatly; some figures are more popular, some downright
ambiguous, others do not get as much coverage in the liberal media and Western media. I'll name
a few I consider most worthy of attention, even as my personal opinion on them varies.
Communist party member and diplomat Nikolai Platoshkin has been under house
arrest on charges of inciting riots and endangering public safety for the past few months.
Anarchist Azat
Miftakhov has just been sentenced to six years in prison for breaking the window and
throwing a smoke bomb into the United Russia party -- Putin's party -- office in Moscow.
Investigative journalist
Ivan Golunov had been tried on a fabricated drug charge, although released after much
public outcry and an investigation. Feminist artist Yulia Tsvetkova is still on
trial for administrative charges, including dissemination of pornography and gay propaganda,
for her online activity and art.
Meanwhile, far-right populist Sergey Furgal , ex-Khabarovsk Krai
governor, has been charged with multiple murders. Because of this, regular protests in support
of the "people's governor," as his constituents call him, and against federal involvement in
regional politics, have been going on for the past six months. Around 25 thousand protestors
took part at its peak, about four per cent of the city's population.
I would say that these protests, as well as the protests in neighboring Belarus, have been
an inspirational force for recent protests across Russia. But I believe that the Russian
protests are a mix of organic and astroturfed. I would definitely see what's happening with
Alexei Navalny in the context of the foreign politics of the European Union and the USA -- and
especially to the presidency of Joe Biden. The US Democrats have spent years talking about the
so-called "Russiagate", a narrative prevalent in the US, that blamed Russia for Hilary
Clinton's loss in 2016. The conspiracy has been debunked continuously but remains a big staple
of American politics. I believe that because of that and the proxy wars going on between the
two countries, Biden's term will be very hawkish on Russia.
RK : There have been other protest movements before. I remember images of Garry Kasparov
getting arrested. Is this different?
KK : Apart from some particularities, in general, a lot of what's happening seems to be
similar to the events in the 2010s, when I personally participated in the protests. Back then,
I believe, they were also astroturfed to a point by foreign interference but also stemmed from
various reasons of organic discontent -- quite similar reasons to what has sparked the protests
now. I will also add that the 2010s protests started right after parliamentary elections, which
were widely considered fraudulent.
That said, I believe that the protests of the early 2010s and early 2020s seem to be almost
identical. I have seen the same jokes and memes surface, very similar manifestos written,
people have been referring to unsanctioned protests as "going out for a walk" and cracking
jokes about that, and taking white flowers as a symbol of peace to the events. But most
importantly, the people most vehemently supporting these protests remain pretty much the same.
Of course, there are newer figures, and some have died or changed camps since the last ones,
but in general, it's all pretty much the same, which creates a peculiar feeling of deja vu.
As opposed to the Black Lives Matter protests here in the US, which I had also been
following since inception and which had taken on a completely different spin this past summer,
the Russian protests do not seem to have evolved. Of course, I might be mistaken because I'm
not currently in Russia, but I have not seen anything radically different about them. Of
course, twenty-somethings, who were too young to participate in the protests of the 2010s, or
people who had been apolitical before will perceive them as unprecedented, and I do believe
that there has been an increase in participation in a broader geographic and class context --
as compared to the mostly Moscow-centric, middle-class events of 2010s. But the overall tactics
had not changed, no meaningful strategy has been adopted, and most importantly, just like the
last time, no effort to address or center the working class has been made. All of it makes the
narrative all too familiar, and the protests appear detached from the everyday worries of
Russia's working class.
"Twenty-somethings, who were too young to participate in the protests of the 2010s, or
people who had been apolitical before will perceive them as unprecedented "
RK : The nineties were, to put it mildly, a hell of a time for Russia with western
governments massively interfering in Russian politics and, essentially, looting the economy.
Those events, such as Yeltsin's coup to depose a democratically elected parliament and the
creation of the oligarchs, must have been scarring for many in society. How much can we read
what is happening within Russia today as an echo of those events?
KK : Everything that has been happening in Russia over the past 30 years has been an echo of
these events. Boris Yeltsin's coup, that was backed
by Bill Clinton and the US media , is
definitely something people think back to a lot. Vladimir Putin was Yeltsin's chosen heir and a
continuation of the system that makes sure that power and capital are concentrated in the
Kremlin. The whole idea of Putin being replaced with Navalny just seems like a reshuffling of
the same old: a new pro-Western leader to replace the one who has strayed from NATO's grasp,
and a different set of oligarchs and capitalists taking the reigns. But even if people were
eager for this shuffle, Putin has something that Navalny doesn't: a factual track record as the
country's leader. And even if this record is indeed marred deeply with corruption, trespasses,
and things that many find unpalatable, life under Putin has improved as compared to the
impoverished 90s. It might not be a huge advantage, but having seen the pits, no one is eager
to forfeit the small advantage that exists for the unknown. And as someone on Twitter rightly
said: "While it's obvious whom Navalny is against, it's not quite clear whom he is for."
RK : What do those outside Russia need to know about the situation?
KK : I want everyone to realize that the overwhelming majority of western journalists are
busy communicating their own narrative, which does not have anything to do with the real
situation on the ground; however, it too often reflects the opinions of State Departments of
NATO countries. Disgruntled diaspora voices and loud English-speaking liberals in Moscow are
incredibly biased, also. The majority of Russian online presence is in Russian and
overwhelmingly on VK.com and Telegram. So judging
the country by what you hear most often about it is misleading and dangerous. Honestly, I think
the same applies to most countries that are not considered allies by the US and EU, but Russia
more than others because of this new Cold War we have at hand.
The biggest myth about Russia is that Putin is some off-the-charts dictator, Russia is an
absolute hellhole, and that his only opposition is Navalny, who is being prevented from
elections and poisoned. Careful investigation into the material circumstances of people in
Russia will show that while the country is poor, it has improved since the 90s. It isn't a
liberal paradise, for sure, but having tirelessly compared it to the US where I've been working
in the past few years, I have to say while nothing about Russia is performatively woke, the
foundations set in place by the Soviet Union remain quite firm: from the access to free,
unlimited abortions to a genuinely multiethnic society. Russia is not without its racial
problems, of course, but that's also true for Europe with its Roma and migrants, the US with
its Latinos and African-Americans and Australia with the Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander
people to pontificate about.
The more significant problems that Russia struggles with are Putin's weaponisation of the
orthodox church and nationalism, the domestic violence surges and decriminalisation of them,
and the economy, of course, especially in the COVID era and with the pension reform in full
swing. But I firmly believe we Russians can solve those internally and don't need any
interference from the West. Moreover, the West should get rid of the white savior syndrome and
allow Russians to choose their leader themselves. According to polls, right now, it is Putin.
I'm not a fan, but I don't feel like I have the moral high ground to tell most of my
compatriots they lack the agency to make this choice for themselves.
"As someone who has worked as an election observer during a presidential election, I can say
that even in Moscow, [Putin] wins by a margin, fair and square."
Moreover, as someone who has worked as an election observer during a presidential election,
I can say that even in Moscow, he wins by a margin, fair and square. Meanwhile, his most
significant opposition is not Navalny, as one can gather from the poll figures. The real
opposition party, CPRF, holds a sizeable presence in the Duma. And while overall it is quite
reactionary for my personal taste and tends to sometimes fall in line with Putin, it exists;
it's big. Those on the left can build towards socialism from within it, which numerous
politicians have done, as they became Duma members, mayors, governors or form their coalitions
that splinter off CPRF in less reactionary formations that have some promising members, like
the Russian United Labour Front
movement. All of this is something I can not even imagine in the United States, where the
socialist parties are small, fringe, and not present in the Congress, and self-proclaimed
socialist politicians would rate as centrists elsewhere.
So whenever you hear something about Russia, please consider what vested interests there may
be in that opinion, who is telling you these things, and why. And just in general, whenever
you're interested, try to talk to actual people within Russia, preferably its regions, and not
the pundits who get paid for pitting Navalny against Putin.
Before You Go (Go)
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you
recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their
ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation
registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is
keeping you up at night, or you'd just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the
sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make
contact through Signal or through
encrypted message Wickr Me on
my account: rorok1990.
And if you've come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my
books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell !
Clinesmith worked at the FBI General Counsel's Office (GCO) and was assigned to Crossfire
Hurricane, the probe of Trump's alleged ties with Russia during the 2016 election. In that
capacity, he altered an email from the CIA that described Page as a source for the spy agency,
to say he was "not" a source – enabling the FBI to request a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Page as a "Russian agent" – and, through
him, spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency.
On Friday, federal judge James Boasberg – who also sits on the FISA court –
sentenced Clinesmith to 12 months' probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $100
fine.
Boasberg was reportedly swayed by Clinesmith's insistence that he'd acted in good faith and
that his wife has a baby on the way, while shrugging-off Page's testimony that his life had
been ruined as the result of false claims he was a "Russian agent."
The Republicans sitting on the House Judiciary Committee called the sentence
"insanity" and "outrageous."
Led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California), the Judiciary GOP first exposed the FISA abuse and
published a
memo about it in February 2018, revealing that the FBI had relied on the "Steele
Dossier" – a collection of spurious claims compiled by a British spy and paid-for by
Hillary Clinton's campaign – in the initial spying request.
Others pointed out that Clinesmith's transgression was far greater than almost anyone who
ended up going to jail as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller's 'Russiagate' probe.
Campaign aide George Papadopoulos spent two weeks in jail for allegedly lying to the FBI
– the same process crime Clinesmith pled guilty to last
August – and General Michael Flynn spent four years trying to beat the same
charge.
Clinesmith is also the only FBI official to face any scrutiny over the bureau's handling of
Crossfire Hurricane. Former director James Comey, his deputy Andy McCabe, lead agent Peter
Strzok and attorney Lisa Page – all of whom were involved in the probe – have
landed lucrative book contracts or cable news jobs, or become heroes of the Democrat
"resistance" instead.
The lenient sentence for a FBI lawyer altering evidence was seen as especially egregious,
as, earlier this week, a Trump supporter going by the handle 'Ricky Vaughn' on Twitter was
arrested and
charged by the Biden administration for "conspiracy to deprive people of their voting
rights" by posting memes that allegedly misled Clinton voters in 2016.
"The entire game is rigged," said Federalist editor Sean Davis. "The rule of law
is dead."
"As outrageous as this is, it's also useful. It's in our faces now," wrote lawyer and
filmmaker Mike Cernovich. "When they come for more Trump supporters Remember today."
Democrats, who spent the past four years insisting that "no one is above the law" and
that Trump must be investigated for an array of suspected crimes, did not
comment.
Due to the immense power of propaganda, normal people who should identify politically as the
"left" are actually supporting these dangerous policies and the erosions of liberty are
accelerating in direct proportion to the level of resistance, such as r/Wallstreetbets and the
immediate crackdown across several platforms to stop them.
I've seen an extraordinary erosion of rights and liberties over the past few years. It
really started with the cover up after the Trump election, which sought to steer the
narrative of public opinion away from the failure of the Clintons and the Democratic machine
with obvious fantastic lies about Russia.
For a myriad of reasons probably understood best by likes of Freud, Jüng, and others,
everyone on the left (who are supposed to be the smart and rational ones in society) bought
these lies and repeated them.
Once this was allowed to happen, once Maddow was allowed to lead the vanguard of libel
with no recourse, the snowball began to roll and now we are seeing the enforcement of that
thought-policing, which is as unconstitutional as the libel itself, especially considering it
is being perpetrated ubiquitously among media owners.
The phenomenon of Donald Trump the villain President has been used as an excuse to destroy
free speech and shoe horn in authoritarian policies. Due to the immense power of propaganda,
normal people who should identify politically as the "left" are actually supporting these
dangerous policies and the erosions of liberty are accelerating in direct proportion to the
level of resistance, such as r/Wallstreetbets and the immediate crackdown across several
platforms to stop them.
This Wall St. favoritism is obvious, but will likely end without bankers taking much
damage besides some short term outrage. They still control all the levers of currency and
trade no matter the President.
The real dangers of the day are the clamping down on speech. Starting with imprisoning
Julian Assange and then migrating to various corners of the Internet. I'll be very interested
to see how things shake out with the stock market, but I imagine it will go back to the firm
grip of those who control the money supply, which it was for a very long time.
In the meantime, shutting down the Reddit forums and Discord servers is a very serious
danger and I hope we can shine a light on it.
"... The Walrus law applies: "All governments achieve the reverse of their stated intentions". This Act, and associated DOJ enforcement, will do more to radicalise white males than the KKK in their wildest fantasies could imagine. It is bad law - bad for America - all of it. It makes us all poorer and less free, everyone, even the left wing will suffer and it will drag down our economy. It will increase stress tension and expense. ..."
"... The Capitol invasion is being used as the foundation for a kind of Dolchstoßlegende - the excuse that was spun into the mythical rationale for persecuting German Jewry in the Nazi era. In America's case this consists of the cooperative media (one which would make Goebbels proud) painting all Trump supporters as potential insurrectionists/terrorists and thus enemies of the state. This will not end well. ..."
We are entering an era where "White Supremacist" is the ultimate dirty word, at least
according to the Domestic Terrorism bill of 2021. Read the Act. Guilt is determined by a
committee of..... the Department of Justice. This is an Orwellian development.
The Walrus law applies: "All governments achieve the reverse of their stated
intentions". This Act, and associated DOJ enforcement, will do more to radicalise white males
than the KKK in their wildest fantasies could imagine. It is bad law - bad for America - all of
it. It makes us all poorer and less free, everyone, even the left wing will suffer and it will
drag down our economy. It will increase stress tension and expense.
As Australia's pre eminent Rabbi, John Levi, said yesterday (Australia Day): "plurality (of
ideas) strengthens us". A PC monoculture blaming racist white males for everything that is
wrong hides the true causes and hinders problem solving.
Furthermore radicalised white males are going to respond and the result will be further
polarisation.
I add a tiny cup of fuel to the fire by adding the link to some soon to be contraband below.
Lynyrd Skynyrd is soon to be proscribed. Count on it. Download this while you can. Teach
yourself and your kids the words and to hum it or sing it. It's your identification code.
You left out a link to the actual bill, sponsored by some expected members, however none or
the Squad, or any women, have cosponsored this as yet. I blame the sexism of the original
sponsors. Shame on them.
"'hate crime incident'' means an act described in section 241, 245, 247, or 249 of title 18,
United States Code, or in section 901 of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. 3631);"
There's the perfectly Orwellian HR-1 that Ms. Pelosi intends to bring to a floor vote as the
first legislative act of the Party of Davos.
To expand Americans' access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics,
strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for
the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.
This legislation if it becomes law will essentially end elections as we have known it in the
past where States run all elections and make the "steal" permanent.
Will they ban the word "redneck"? I come from a very large family of rednecks--women and
men--who worked the fields on farms their entire lives. There is a very large number of
rednecks in this country.
You warned in a previous post how far and how fast the tide would go out - to use the
Shakespearean analogy - once the Dems took power. You were right and I think anyone who could
not see this coming has been deluding themselves. The Left is at war with Deplorables and it
looks very much like they are willing to develop a full blown police state in order to help
prosecute it. This should not be a surprise.
The Walrus law may apply in this case. My only reservation here is the question as to
whether or not this legislation is intended to further radicalize the enemy (white
conservatives). Congress is clueless, as usual, but the more unhinged totalitarian minds could
be hoping for this very outcome (John Brennan I'm thinking of you).
Ever since that fateful day when HRC categorized a large section of the electorate as
"deplorable" it has been obvious that the Dem establishment sees a good portion of the
citizenry not as a constituency to be won over, but as a barrier to Progress. The 2016 election
served to confirm to the globalists that Deplorables were capable of derailing their project.
Now that they are back in power, Deplorables must be demonized.
The Capitol invasion is being used as the foundation for a kind of Dolchstoßlegende - the
excuse that was spun into the mythical rationale for persecuting German Jewry in the Nazi era.
In America's case this consists of the cooperative media (one which would make Goebbels proud)
painting all Trump supporters as potential insurrectionists/terrorists and thus enemies of the
state. This will not end well.
As I said in a recent comment on another post, I think we are entering the phase where
accelerated feedback will quickly harden attitudes on both sides. Can this descent be stopped
or even reversed? I am by no means confident, but would very much like to hear optimistic, yet
realistic counter arguments - as the future looks bleak indeed.
As an aside, I've just noticed that clicking on the "Walrus" category to find your tagged posts
yield none. Not sure whether this is a TypePad error or something I'm doing wrong. Other
category searches work fine.
Facebook ads that might even be linked to a Russian server after the November 2016
election. They are just that crafty. Pelosi bungling the VRA? What was that? If it was
important Pelosi would know about it.
Ultimately, it's an excuse for cycles of Team Blue poor performance, but Biden is
President now. The pageantry is back! And Team Blue fans aren't worried at all about the
House losses.
My favorite was the ads featuring Spongebob Squarepants and Pokomon. I think the U.S.
anti-Russia hysteria is a big joke in Russia, and some Russians wanted troll Americans into
chasing their tales with these ads. If the Russian government wanted to influence Americans,
they could surely do better then those weird ads. There was probably another trolling
incident when Putin and his defense minister went fishing without wearing shirts, after the
U.S. hysteria over the picture of Putin on a horse, without a shirt. The U.S. press ignored
the fishing incident, though.
I never followed "Russiagate" that closely because none of it made any sense, but the
alleged interference kept changing over time. There was so little discipline and rigor in the
accusations that this "changing of the goalposts" evoked little criticism or comment. We were
at war with Eastasia yesterday, but today we are at war with Eurasia, Orwell-style. As I
recall, the first accusation was that Trump was a Russian agent, because of a loan or some
other financial motivation. Later, there was a "pee-tape" accusation, based on gossip paid
for by a Clinton opposition researcher named Steele, who had formerly been an MI6 agent. You
don't get a more unimpeachable, unbiased source of information then that, but the press
treated the Steele dossier as the gospel truth, not to be questioned, and the FBI justified
their investigation on it. Another "tell" with these accusations is that the Russians are not
invited by the U.S. press to respond to them.
And there is more evidence of cops doing violence and destruction in the summer than
either of those two!
I am in Blue-MAGA world. I had a friend kick me out of their house during a soiree when I
told them Russiagate was BS to cover for Clinton being a horrible candidate. They were in
deep conditioning though, even using the giveaway Manchurian-Candidate-phrase 'whip smart'.
That was 2 years ago. I wonder what they believe now. I have had friends go down 'right-wing'
information holes and their beliefs were changed pretty quickly. I think a huge problem is
the fracturing of information sources which has basically broken a certain fundamental
consensus about reality. It may be that that consensus was always based on a lie, but now
there are dozens of incompatible lies that people believe.
It is too easy to blame the victims. If media hadn't been co-opted for propaganda, then
abused to the point of Pravda-levels of credibility by lazy low-bid privatized propagandists,
the thirst for alternate news would be reduced, he attention-economy polarization phenomenon
would have less grip.
There were Dems before the recent election who said there was no way Trump was going to
win and any win by him would automatically be viewed as suspicious and to be resisted. It
wasn't a big secret. They said this and it was so reported.
That being the case I'd say the Trumpies were perfectly justified to have a skeptical
attitude toward the result even if they didn't make their case in the courts. But then, Trump
being Trump, he just couldn't let it go and refused to do what he ended up doing anyway.
Bottom line: we're better off without Trump. We aren't better off with Biden. The
whole process is a clusterf*ck.
I think what people do not seem to understand is a lot of these "false beliefs" are
code.
To use an old one, the Obama birth certificate "controversy." Obama is not American =
Obama mixed race son of an African immigrant is not a member of my ingroup (My ingroup =
Americans). Sometimes its race but it might be for some that Colin Powell is okay but Obama
is too much. You can't "disprove" that Obama is a not an American citizen because its really
a coded way to signal something that is true (that guy isn't in my ingroup, and I identify my
ingroup with the real America).
The idiocy in 2016 was top down. Obviously, either Hillary and her team were incompetent,
and completely out of touch and got clobbered by an orange clown who can't utter a coherent
sentence, or there must be some nefarious foreign conspiracy which magically threw the
election through a $4,500 buy in Facebook ads. Given the pathological narcissism and
sociopathy of our American ruling class, they are constitutionally incapable of the kind of
introspection the first hypothesis would force, so it was Russians under the bed all the way
baby!
I think 2020 Qanon and the rest of it is the same kind of bottom up stuff that the Birther
business touched on. R'ahl 'Umarikhans have been displaced in their own country by the evil
nefarious elites and will never be able to elect another R'ahl 'Umarikhan again. Obviously,
the arc of justice is that R'ahl 'Umarikhans rule 'Umarikhanistan, so it can only be
diabolical forces aligned with Hollywood pedo rings that prevented justice. All code for
status anxiety for continued power and existence of their ingroup, which won't go away no
matter how many bar graphs you show them.
It far more important to figure out what people really mean, and address those anxieties,
fears, or other issues than focusing on refuting what people say. There are a lot of people
in this country in a world of hurt, with basically no representation whatsoever, they aren't
going away, their fears, pains and concerns aren't going away, and the kind of smug bourgeois
media trust fund narrative isn't constructive.
I have been dumbfounded for some time by supporters of the Izzies apparent lack of concern
about the eventual consequences of this sort of behavior. But I suppose, as with Uncle Sugar,
the notion of ones own exceptional nature prevents a sensible assessment.
Israeli intel spinoffs/cutouts, US FBI/CIA and the NSA surveillance/blackmail collection
agencies and their agents; they are facets of the same worldwide "NWO" criminal Blob-Mob,
imo.
It should be obvious by now they have the power to set up one US President, and depose him
through a ham-handed domestic election fraud coup, and install an eaaily controlled
neurodegenerating corrupt puppet, and completely control and pervert the US Judicial system,
so as to essentially get away and continue with their criminal culture and crimes against
humanity unchecked.
With such a history, of course they have the means to frame Russia, as well as to destroy
any others who stand in their way to more power and autocratic control of the planet.
"Where is the line between a successful global business, in-demand services and
consolidation of big data – and attempts to harshly and unilaterally govern society,
replace legitimate democratic institutions, restrict one's natural right to decide for
themselves how to live, what to choose, what stance to express freely?" Putin wondered.
"We've all seen this just now in the US. And everybody understands what I'm talking
about," he added.
The Russian leader was apparently referring to the crackdown by Big Tech corporations like
Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, mostly on Donald Trump and his supporters, during
the recent presidential election in the US. The companies, which, according to some critics,
sided with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, blocked President Trump's social media accounts over
accusations of inciting violence, with the same being done to many pages of groups and
individuals who'd backed him.
However, one-sided bias claim voiced by some might be an overestimation – the accounts
of Democrats supporters were also subject to restrictions, but on a much smaller scale.
Conservative Twitter-like platform Parler was also forced offline, and now there are calls
to block the Telegram app as well.
These events have shown that Big Tech companies "in some areas have de facto become
rivals to the government," Putin said.
Billions of users spend large parts of their lives on the platforms and, from the point of
view of those companies, their monopolistic position is favorable for organizing economic and
technological processes, the Russian president explained. "But there's a question of how
such monopolism fits the interest of society," he stressed.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
shadow1369 8 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 07:51 AM
This is a great opportunity for Russia to create some Big Tech operators which actually allow
free speech. Russia certainly has the expertise and the means, and cannot be bullied by
western regimes.
Proton1963 shadow1369 1 hour ago 27 Jan, 2021 02:54 PM
Sure.. But only after the Russians can build a drivable car or a decent smart phone or a
laptop.
The West is surely giving Russia a lot of opportunities, through its own arrogance and
stupidity, does not it ? It keeps going backwards in its effort to diminish Russia. And the
same goes for China too.
JOHNCHUCKMAN 7 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 08:45 AM
Putin is a remarkable statesman, and he sets a very high standard for political discourse. I
can't think of any of our Western leaders who speak in these truthful and philosophic terms.
What we hear in the West are slogans or whining or complaining.
Tenakakhan JOHNCHUCKMAN 3 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 01:03 PM
The patriarch of the west has become extremely weak. It seems like our leaders lack any moral
authority to speak truth and common sense for fear of being cancelled. What we see now is the
virtue signaling dregs sponsored by extreme groups leading our nations down the toilet. If a
real war was to break out now we would be cannon fodder.
Hilarous 7 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 09:04 AM
I think there's a simple explanation. Big tech is afraid to lose section 230 of the
communications act, which stipulates that online platforms are not legally responsible for
user content. Trump and some Republicans have accused social media sites of muzzling
conservative voices. They said undoing Section 230 would let people who claim they have been
slighted sue the companies. So Big Tech has a strong interest to remove Trump and run down a
few bad examples to convince people and politics that Section 230 must remain.
Count_Cash 8 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 07:40 AM
In many cases they aren't rivals, but owners of government. Money controls everything in the
west and big tech have it. They have taken control of, or are blackmailing governments. The
Western Liberal Regime straddles both Big Tech and government!
RTaccount Count_Cash 7 hours ago 27 Jan, 2021 08:57 AM
Correct. Let us never forget that in America we are ruled by oligarchs just like the rest of
the world, and that our oligarchs are largely hidden. They are our true government, and so it
is meaningless to make this type of distinction.
Yves here. This is another tour de force from Michael Hudson, derived from a paper he presented in early January at the UPRE session
during the annual ASSA meeting. This time he turns from his recent focus on the economically destructive but oligarchy-advancing
practice of sanctifying debt to another favorite topic, the evolution of capitalism. Hudson looks from the early Industrial Revolution
onward and demonstrates that the dominance of financial capital over industrial capital was neither the likely course of events nor
desirable. A major feature of this development is the increasing weight of rentier activities and how they drain income from workers
and more productive sectors.
One of his key conclusions:
The result is a "deep state" supporting a cosmopolitan financial oligarchy. That is the definition of fascism, reversing democratic
government to restore control to the rentier financial and monopoly classes. The beneficiary is the corporate sector, not labor,
whose resentment is turned against foreigners and against designated enemies within.
For Hudson, the deep state enforcers are the IMF and the World Bank (which pressed emerging economies to develop capital markets,
making them more vulnerable to destabilizing hot money flows). He did not mention them in this article but I imagine Hudson would
add domestic law neutering "investor-state dispute settlement" provisions in trade agreements.
Even with its length (get a cup of coffee!), an article that covers so much terrain is bound to simplify a bit. One small quibble:
While Hudson correctly depicts China as hewing strictly and successfully to an industrial capital model, and keeping finance in check,
Hudson overeggs the pudding a bit in saying, "China has kept banking in the public domain." China's regional governments have supported
real-estate development projects, including a non-trivial proportion of ghost cities. often funded by private "wealth management
products". China's "shadow banking sector" which officials
have just estimated at nearly $13 trillion , or 86% of GDP and nearly 30% of banking assets.
Chinese officials say they are about to crack down on them, after many years of looking the other way, plus the occasional bailout
of particular wealth management product issuances gone sour. Similarly, the dominant mobile payment platform player, Alibaba, is
private.
Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear
away the legacy of feudalism – the landlords, bankers and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. But
that reform movement failed. Today, the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating
neo-rentier economies.
The aim of this post-industrial finance capitalism is the oppositeof that of industrial capitalism as known to 19 th
-century economists: It seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation. Tax favoritism
for real estate, privatization of oil and mineral extraction, banking and infrastructure monopolies add to the cost of living and
doing business. Labor is being exploited increasingly by bank debt, student debt, credit-card debt, while housing and other prices
are inflated on credit, leaving less income to spend on goods and services as economies suffer debt deflation.
Today's New Cold War is a fight to internationalize this rentier capitalism by globally privatizing and financializing
transportation, education, health care, prisons and policing, the post office and communications, and other sectors that formerly
were kept in the public domain of European and American economies so as to keep their costs low and minimize their cost structure.
In the Western economies such privatizations have reversed the drive of industrial capitalism to minimize socially unnecessary
costs of production and distribution. In addition to monopoly prices for privatized services, financial managers are cannibalizing
industry by debt leveraging and high dividend payouts to increase stock prices.
* * *
Today's neo- rentier economies obtain wealth mainly by rent seeking, while financialization capitalizes real estate and
monopoly rent into bank loans, stocks and bonds. Debt leveraging to bid up prices and create capital gains on credit for this "virtual
wealth" has been fueled by central bank Quantitative Easing since 2009.
Financial engineering is replacing industrial engineering. Over 90 percent of recent U.S. corporate income has been earmarked
to raise the companies' stock prices by being paid out as dividends to stockholders or spent on stock buyback programs. Many companies
even borrow to buy up their own shares, raising their debt/equity ratios.
Households and industry are becoming debt-strapped, owing rent and debt service to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE)
sector. This rentier overhead leaves less wage and profit income available to spend on goods and services, bringing to a close
the 75-year U.S. and European expansion since World War II ended in 1945.
These rentier dynamics are the opposite of what Marx described as industrial capitalism's laws of motion. German banking
was indeed financing heavy industry under Bismarck, in association with the Reichsbank and military. But elsewhere, bank lending
rarely has financed new tangible means of production. What promised to be a democratic and ultimately socialist dynamic has relapsed
back toward feudalism and debt peonage, with the financial class today playing the role that the landlord class did in post-medieval
times.
Marx's View of the Historical Destiny of Capitalism: to Free Economies from Feudalism
The industrial capitalism that Marx described in Volume I of Capital is being dismantled. He saw the historical destiny
of capitalism to be to free economies from the legacy of feudalism: a hereditary warlord class imposing tributary land rent, and
usurious banking. He thought that as industrial capitalism evolved toward more enlightened management, and indeed toward socialism,
it would replace predatory "usurious" finance, cutting away the economically and socially unnecessary rentier income, land
rent and financial interest and related fees for unproductive credit. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Proudhon
and their fellow classical economists had analyzed these phenomena, and Marx summarized their discussion in Volumes II and III of
Capital and his parallel Theories of Surplus Value dealing with economic rent and the mathematics of compound interest,
which causes debt to grow exponentially at a higher rate than the rest of the economy.
However, Marx devoted Volume I of Capital to industrial capitalism's most obvious characteristic: the drive to make profits
by investing in means of production to employ wage labor to produce goods and services to sell at a markup over what labor was paid.
Analyzing surplus value by adjusting profit rates to take account of outlays for plant, equipment and materials (the "organic composition
of capital"), Marx described a circular flow in which capitalist employers pay wages to their workers and invest their profits in
plant and equipment with the surplus not paid to employees.
Finance capitalism has eroded this core circulation between labor and industrial capital. Much of the midwestern United States
has been turning into a rust belt. Instead of the financial sector evolving to fund capital investment in manufacturing, industry
is being financialized. Making economic gains financially, primarily by debt leverage, far outstrips making profits by hiring employees
to produce goods and services.
Capitalism's Alliance of Banks with Industry to Promote Democratic Political Reform
The capitalism of Marx's day still contained many survivals from feudalism, most notably a hereditary landlord class living off
the land rents, most of which were spent unproductively on servants and luxuries, not to make a profit. These rents had originated
in a tax. Twenty years after the Norman Conquest, William the Conquer had ordered compilation of the Domesday Book in 1086 to calculate
the yield that could be extracted as taxes from the English land that he and his companions had seized. As a result of King John's
overbearing fiscal demands, the Revolt of the Barons (1215-17) and their Magna Carta enabled the leading warlords to obtain much
of this rent for themselves. Marx explained that industrial capitalism was politically radical in seeking to free itself from the
burden of having to support this privileged landlord class, receiving income with no basis in cost value or enterprise of its own.
Industrialists sought to win markets by cutting costs below those of their competitors. That aim required freeing the entire economy
from the "faux frais" of production, socially unnecessary charges built into the cost of living and doing business. Classical economic
rent was defined as the excess of price above intrinsic cost-value, the latter being ultimately reducible to labor costs. Productive
labor was defined as that employed to create a profit, in contrast to the servants and retainers (coachmen, butlers, cooks, et
al .) on whom landlords spent much of their rent.
The paradigmatic form of economic rent was the ground rent paid to Europe's hereditary aristocracy. As John Stuart Mill explained,
landlords reaped rents (and rising land prices) "in their sleep." Ricardo had pointed out (in Chapter 2 of his 1817 Principles
of Political Economy and Taxation ) a kindred form of differential rent in natural-resource rent stemming from the ability of
mines with high-quality orebodies to sell their lower-cost mineral output at prices set by high-cost mines. Finally, there was monopoly
rent paid to owners at choke points in the economy where they could extract rents without a basis in any cost outlay. Such rents
logically included financial interest, fees and penalties.
Marx saw the capitalist ideal as freeing economies from the landlord class that controlled the House of Lords in Britain, and
similar upper houses of government in other countries. That aim required political reform of Parliament in Britain, ultimately to
replace the House of Lords with the Commons, so as to prevent the landlords from protecting their special interests at the expense
of Britain's industrial economy. The first great battle in this fight against the landed interest was won in 1846 with repeal of
the Corn Laws. The fight to limit landlord power over government culminated in the constitutional crisis of 1909-10, when the Lords
rejected the land tax imposed by the Commons. The crisis was resolved by a ruling that the Lords never again could reject a revenue
bill passed by the House of Commons.
The Banking Sector Lobbies Against the Real Estate Sector, 1815-1846
It may seem ironic today that Britain's banking sector was whole-heartedly behind the first great fight to minimize land-rent.
That alliance occurred after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, which ended the French blockage against British seaborne trade and
re-opened the British market to lower-priced grain imports. British landlords demanded tariff protection under the Corn Laws – to
raise the price of food, so as to increase the revenue and hence the capitalized rental value of their landholdings – but that has
rendered the economy high-cost. A successful capitalist economy would have to minimize these costs in order to win foreign markets
and indeed, to defend its own home market. The classical idea of a free market was one free from economic rent – from rentier
income in the form of land rent.
This rent – a quasi-tax paid to the heirs of the warlord bands that had conquered Britain in 1066, and the similar Viking bands
that had conquered other European realms – threatened to minimize foreign trade. That was a threat to Europe's banking classes, whose
major market was the funding of commerce by bills of exchange. The banking class arose as Europe's economy was revived by the vast
looting of monetary bullion from Constantinople by the Crusaders. Bankers were permitted a loophole to avoid Christianity's banning
of the charging of interest, by taking their return in the form of agio , a fee for transferring money from one currency to
another, including from one country to another.
Even domestic credit could use the loophole of "dry exchange," charging agio on domestic transactions cloaked as a foreign-currency
transfer, much as modern corporations use "offshore banking centers" today to pretend that they earn their income in tax-avoidance
countries that do not charge an income tax.
If Britain was to become the industrial workshop of the world, it would prove highly beneficial to Ricardo's banking class. (He
was its Parliamentary spokesman; today we would say lobbyist.) Britain would enjoy an international division of labor in which it
exported manufactures and imported food and raw materials from other countries specializing in primary commodities and depending
on Britain for their industrial products. But for this to happen, Britain needed a low price of labor. That meant low food costs,
which at that time were the largest items in the family budgets of wage labor. And that in turn required ending the power of the
landlord class to protect its "free lunch" of land rent, and all recipients of such "unearned income."
It is hard today to imagine industrialists and bankers hand in hand promoting democratic reform against the aristocracy. But that
alliance was needed in the early 19 th century. Of course, democratic reform at that time extended only to the extent
of unseating the landlord class, not protecting the interest of labor. The hollowness of the industrial and banking class's democratic
rhetoric became apparent in Europe's 1848 revolutions, where the vested interests ganged up against extending democracy to the population
at large, once the latter had helped end landlord protection of its rents.
Of course, it was socialists who picked up the political fight after 1848. Marx later reminded a correspondent that the first
plank of the Communist Manifesto was to socialize land rent, but poked fun at the "free market" rent critics who refused to recognize
that rentier-like exploitation existed in the industrial employment of wage labor. Just as landlords obtained land rent in excess
of the cost of producing their crops (or renting out housing), so employers obtained profits by selling the products of wage-labor
at a markup. To Marx, that made industrialists part of the rentier class in principle, although the overall economic system
of industrial capitalism was much different from that of post-feudal rentiers, landlords and bankers.
The Alliance of Banking with Real Estate and Other Rent-Seeking Sectors
With this background of how industrial capitalism was evolving in Marx's day, we can see how overly optimistic he was regarding
the drive by industrialists to strip away all unnecessary costs of production – all charges that added to price without adding to
value. In that sense he was fully in tune with the classical concept of free markets, as markets free from land rent and other
forms of rentier income.
Today's mainstream economics has reversed this concept. In an Orwellian doublethink twist, the vested interests today define a
free market as one "free" for the proliferation of various forms of land rent, even to the point of giving special tax advantages
to absentee real estate investment, the oil and mining industries (natural-resource rent), and most of all to high finance (the accounting
fiction of "carried interest," an obscure term for short-term arbitrage speculation).
Today's world has indeed freed economies from the burden of hereditary ground rent. Almost two-thirds of American families own
their own homes (although the rate of homeownership has been falling steadily since the Great Obama Evictions that were a byproduct
of the junk-mortgage crisis and Obama Bank Bailouts of 2009-16, which lowered homeowner rates from over 68% to 62%). In Europe, home
ownership rates have reached 80% in Scandinavia, and high rates characterize the entire continent. Home ownership – and also the
opportunity to purchase commercial real estate – has indeed become democratized.
But it has been democratized on credit. That is the only way for wage-earners to obtain housing, because otherwise they would
have to spend their entire working life saving enough to buy a home. After World War II ended in 1945, banks provided the credit
to purchase homes (and for speculators to buy commercial properties), by providing mortgage credit to be paid off over the course
of 30 years, the likely working life of the young home buyer.
Real estate is by far the banking sector's largest market. Mortgage lending accounts for about 80 percent of U.S. and British
bank credit. It played only a minor role back in 1815, when banks focused on financing commerce and international trade. Today we
can speak of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector as the economy's dominant rentier sector. This alliance
of banking with real estate has led banks to become the major lobbyists protecting real estate owners by opposing the land tax that
seemed to be the wave of the future in 1848 in the face of rising advocacy to tax away the land's entire price gains and rent, to
make land the tax base as Adam Smith had urged, instead of taxing labor and consumers or profits. Indeed, when the U.S. income tax
began to be levied in 1914, it fell only on the wealthiest One Percent of Americans, whose taxable income consisted almost entirely
of property and financial claims.
The past century has reversed that tax philosophy. On a national level, real estate has paid almost zero income tax since World
War II, thanks to two giveaways. The first is "fictitious depreciation," sometimes called over-depreciation. Landlords can pretend
that their buildings are losing value by claiming that they are wearing out at fictitiously high rates. (That is why Donald Trump
has said that he loves depreciation.) But by far the largest giveaway is that interest payments are tax deductible. Real estate is
taxed locally, to be sure, but typically at only 1% of assessed valuation, which is less than 7 to 10 percent of the actual land
rent.[1]
The basic reason why banks support tax favoritism for landlords is that whatever the tax collector relinquishes is available to
be paid as interest. Mortgage bankers end up with the vast majority of land rent in the United States. When a property is put up
for sale and homeowners bid against each other to buy it, the equilibrium point is where the winner is willing to pay the full rental
value to the banker to obtain a mortgage. Commercial investors also are willing to pay the entire rental income to obtain a mortgage,
because they are after the "capital" gain – that is, the rise in the land's price.
The policy position of the so-called Ricardian socialists in Britain and their counterparts in France (Proudhon, et al
.) was for the state to collect the land's economic rent as its major source of revenue. But today's "capital" gains occur primarily
in real estate and finance, and are virtually tax-free for landlords. Owners pay no capital-gains tax as real estate prices rise,
or even upon sale if they use their gains to buy another property. And when landlords die, all tax liability is wiped out.
The oil and mining industries likewise are notoriously exempt from income taxation on their natural-resource rents. For a long
time the depletion allowance allowed them tax credit for the oil that was sold off, enabling them to buy new oil-producing properties
(or whatever they wanted) with their supposed asset loss, defined as the value to recover whatever they had emptied out. There was
no real loss, of course. Oil and minerals are provided by nature.
These sectors also make themselves tax exempt on their foreign profits and rents by using "flags of convenience" registered in
offshore banking centers. This ploy enables them to claim to make all their profits in Panama, Liberia or other countries that do
not charge an income tax or even have a currency of their own, but use the U.S. dollar so as to save American companies from any
foreign-exchange risk.
In oil and mining, as with real estate, the banking system has become symbiotic with rent recipients, including companies extracting
monopoly rent. Already in the late 19 th century the banking and insurance sector was recognized as "the mother of trusts,"
financing their creation to extract monopoly rents over and above normal profit rates.
These changes have made rent extraction much more remunerative than industrial profit-seeking – just the opposite of what classical
economists urged and expected to be the most likely trajectory of capitalism. Marx expected the logic of industrial capitalism to
free society from its rentier legacy and to create public infrastructure investment to lower the economy-wide cost of production.
By minimizing labor's expenses that employers had to cover, this public investment would put in place the organizational network
that in due course (sometimes needing a revolution, to be sure) would become a socialist economy.
Although banking developed ostensibly to serve foreign trade by the industrial nations, it became a force-in-itself undermining
industrial capitalism. In Marxist terms, instead of financing the M-C-M' circulation (money invested in capital to produce a profit
and hence yet more money), high finance has abbreviated the process to M-M', making money purely from money and credit, without tangible
capital investment.
The Rentier Squeeze on Budgets: Debt Deflation as a Byproduct of Asset-Price Inflation
Democratization of home ownership meant that housing no longer was owned primarily by absentee owners extracting rent, but by
owner-occupants. As home ownership spread, new buyers came to support the rentier drives to block land taxation – not realizing
that rent that was not taxed would be paid to the banks as interest to absorb the rent-of-location hitherto paid to absentee landlords.
Real estate has risen in price as a result of debt leveraging. The process makes investors, speculators and their bankers wealthy,
but raises the cost of housing (and commercial property) for new buyers, who are obliged to take on more debt in order to obtain
secure housing. That cost is also passed on to renters. And employers ultimately are obliged to pay their labor force enough to pay
these financialized housing costs.
Debt deflation has become the distinguishing feature of today's economies from North America to Europe, imposing austerity as
debt service absorbs a rising share of personal and corporate income, leaving less to spend on goods and services. The economy's
indebted 90 percent find themselves obliged to pay more and more interest and financial fees. The corporate sector, and now also
the state and local government sector, likewise are obliged to pay a rising share of their revenue to creditors.
Investors are willing to pay most of their rental income as interest to the banking sector because they hope to sell their property
at some point for a "capital" gain. Modern finance capitalism focuses on "total returns," defined as current income plus asset-price
gains, above all for land and real estate. Inasmuch as a home or other property is worth however much banks will lend against it,
wealth is created primarily by financial means, by banks lending a rising proportion of the value of assets pledged as collateral.
Chart 10.4: annual changes in GDP and the major components of asset price gains
(nominal, $bn)
The fact that asset-price gains are largely debt-financed explains why economic growth is slowing in the United States and Europe,
even as stock market and real estate prices are inflated on credit. The result is a debt-leveraged economy.
Changes in the value of the economy's land from year to year far exceeds the change in GDP. Wealth is obtained primarily by asset-price
("capital") gains in the valuation of land and real estate, stocks, bonds and creditor loans ("virtual wealth"), not so much by saving
income (wages, profits and rents).The magnitude of these asset-price gains tends to dwarf profits, rental income and wages.
The tendency has been to imagine that rising prices for real estate, stocks and bonds has been making homeowners richer. But this
price rise is fueled by bank credit. A home or other property is worth however much a bank will lend against it – and banks have
lent a larger and larger proportion of the home's value since 1945. For U.S. real estate as a whole, debt has come to exceed equity
for more than a decade now. Rising real estate prices have made banks and speculators rich, but have left homeowners and commercial
real estate debt strapped.
The economy as a whole has suffered. Debt-fueled housing costs in the United States are so high that if all Americans were given
their physical consumer goods for free – their food, clothing and so forth – they still could not compete with workers in China or
most other countries. That is a major reason why the U.S. economy is de-industrializing. So this policy of "creating wealth" by financialization
undercuts the logic of industrial capitalism.
Finance Capital's Fight to Privatize and Monopolize Public Infrastructure
Another reason for deindustrialization is the rising cost of living stemming from conversion of public infrastructure into privatized
monopolies. As the United States and Germany overtook British industrial capitalism, a major key to industrial advantage was recognized
to be public investment in roads, railroads and other transportation, education, public health, communications and other basic infrastructure.
Simon Patten, the first professor of economics at America's first business school, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania,
defined public infrastructure as a "fourth factor of production," in addition to labor, capital and land. But unlike capital, Patten
explained, its aim was not to make a profit. It was to minimize the cost of living and doing business by providing low-price basic
services to make the private sector more competitive.
Unlike the military levies that burdened taxpayers in pre-modern economies, "in an industrial society the object of taxation is
to increase industrial prosperity"by creating infrastructure in the form of canals and railroads, a postal service and public education.
This infrastructure was a "fourth" factor of production.Taxes would be "burdenless," Patten explained, to the extent that they were
invested in public internal improvements, headed by transportation such as the Erie Canal.[2]
The advantage of this public investment is tolower costs instead of letting privatizers impose monopoly rents in the form of access
charges to basic infrastructure. Governments can price the services of these natural monopolies (including credit creation, as we
are seeing today) at cost or offer them freely, helping labor and its employers undersell industrialists in countries lacking such
public enterprise.
In the cities, Patten explained, public transport raises property prices (and hence economic rent) in the outlying periphery,
as the Erie Canal had benefited western farms competing with upstate New York farmers.That principle is evident in today's suburban
neighborhoods relative to city centers.London's Tube extension along the Jubilee Line, and New York City's Second Avenue Subway,
showed that underground and bus transport can be financed publicly by taxing the higher rental value created for sites along such
routes. Paying for capital investment out of such tax levies can provide transportation at subsidized prices, minimizing the economy's
cost structure accordingly. What Joseph Stiglitz popularized as the "Henry George Law" thus more correctly should be known as "Patten's
Law" of burdenless taxation.[3]
Under a regime of "burdenless taxation" the return on public investment does not take the form of profit but aims at lowering
the economy's overall price structure to "promote general prosperity." This means that governments should operate natural monopolies
directly, or at least regulate them. "Parks, sewers and schools improve the health and intelligence of all classes of producers,
and thus enable them to produce more cheaply, and to compete more successfully in other markets."Patten concluded: "If the courts,
post office, parks, gas and water works, street, river and harbor improvements, and other public works do not increase the prosperity
of society they should not be conducted by the State." But this prosperity for the overall economy was not obtained by treating public
enterprises as what today is called a profit center.[4]
In one sense, this can be called "privatizing the profits and socializing the losses." Advocating a mixed economy along these
lines is part of the logic of industrial capitalism seeking to minimize private-sector production and employment costs in order to
maximize profits. Basic social infrastructure is a subsidy to be supplied by the state.
Britain's Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1874-80) reflected this principle: "The health of the people is really
the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend."[5]He sponsored the Public Health Act of 1875,
followed by the Sale of Food and Drugs Act and, the next year, the Education Act. The government would provide these services, not
private employers or private monopoly-seekers.
For a century, public investment helped the United States pursue an Economy of High Wages policy, providing education, food and
health standards to make its labor more productive and thus able to undersell low-wage "pauper" labor. The aim wasto create a positive
feedback between rising wages and increasing labor productivity.
That is in sharp contrast to today's business plan of finance capitalism – to cut wages, and also cut back long-term capital investment,
research and development while privatizing public infrastructure. The neoliberal onslaught by Ronald Reagan in the United States
and Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1980s was backed by IMF demands that debtor economies balance their budgets by selling off
such public enterprises and cutting back social spending. Infrastructure services were privatized as natural monopolies, sharply
raising the cost structure of such economies, but creating enormous financial underwriting commissions and stock-market gains for
Wall Street and London.
Privatizing hitherto public monopolies has become one of the most lucrative ways to gain wealth financially. But privatized health
care and medical insurance is paid for by labor and its employers, not by the government as in industrial capitalism. And in the
face of the privatized educational system's rising cost, access to middle-class employment has been financed by student debt. These
privatizations have not helped economies become more affluent or competitive. On an economy-wide level this business plan is a race
to the bottom, but one that benefits financial wealth at the top.
Finance Capitalism Impoverishes Economies While Increasing Their Cost Structure
Classical economic rent is defined as the excess of price over intrinsic cost-value. Capitalizing this rent – whether land rent
or monopoly rent from the privatization described above – into bonds, stocks and bank loans creates "virtual wealth." Finance capitalism's
exponential credit creation increases "virtual" wealth – financial securities and property claims – by managing these securities
and claims in a way that has made them worth more than tangible real wealth.
The major way to gain fortunes is to get asset-price gains ("capital gains") on stocks, bonds and real estate.However, this exponentially
growing debt-leveraged financial overhead polarizes the economy in ways that concentrates ownership of wealth in the hands of creditors,
and owners of rental real estate, stocks and bonds, draining the "real" economy to pay the FIRE sector.
Post-classical economics depicts privatized infrastructure, natural resource development and banking as being part of the industrial
economy, not superimposed on it by a rent-seeking class. But the dynamic of finance-capitalist economies is not for wealth to be
gained mainly by investing in industrial means of production and saving up profits or wages, but by capital gains made primarily
from rent-seeking. These gains are not "capital" as classically understood. They are "finance-capital gains," because they result
from asset-price inflation fueled by debt leveraging.
By inflating its housing prices and a stock market bubble on credit, America's debt leveraging, along with its financializing
and privatizing basic infrastructure, has priced it out of world markets. China and other non-financialized countries have avoided
high health insurance costs, education costs and other services freely or at a low cost as a public utility. Public health and medical
care costs much less abroad, but is attacked in the United States by neoliberals as "socialized medicine," as if financialized health
care would make the U.S. economy more efficient and competitive. Transportation likewise has been financialized and run for profit,
not to lower the cost of living and doing business.
One must conclude that America has chosen to no longer industrialize, but to finance its economy by economic rent – monopoly rent,
from information technology, banking and speculation, and leave industry, research and development to other countries. Even if China
and other Asian countries didn't exist, there is no way that America can regain its export markets or even its internal market with
its current debt overhead and its privatized and financialized education, health care, transportation and other basic infrastructure.
The underlying problem is not competition from China, but neoliberal financialization. Finance-capitalism is not industrial capitalism.
It is a lapse back into debt peonage and a rentier neo-feudalism. Bankers play the role today that landlords played up through
the 19 th century, making fortunes without corresponding value, by capital gains for real estate, stocks and bonds on
credit, by debt leveraging whose carrying charges increase the economy's cost of living and doing business.
Today's New Cold War is a Fight by Finance Capitalism Against Industrial Capitalism
Today's world is being fractured by an economic warfare over what kind of economic system it will have. Industrial capitalism
is losing the fight to finance capitalism, which is turning to be its antithesis just as industrial capitalism was the antithesis
to post-feudal landlordship and predatory banking houses.
In this respect today's New Cold War is a conflict of economic systems. As such, it is being fought against the dynamic of U.S.
industrial capitalism as well as that of China and other economies. Hence, the struggle also is domestic within the United States
and Europe, as well as confrontational against China and Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and their moves to de-dollarize their economies
and reject the Washington Consensus and its Dollar Diplomacy. It is a fight by U.S.-centered finance capital to promote neoliberal
doctrine giving special tax privileges to rentier income, untaxing land rent, natural resource rent, monopoly rent and the financial
sector. This aim includes privatizing and financializing basic infrastructure, maximizing its extraction of economic rent instead
of minimizing the cost of living and doing business.
The result is a war to change the character of capitalism as well as that of social democracy. The British Labour Party, European
Social Democrats and the U.S. Democratic Party all have jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon. They are all complicit in the austerity
that has spread from the Mediterranean to America's Midwestern rust belt.
Finance capitalism exploits labor, but via a rentier sector, which also ends up cannibalizing industrial capital. This
drive has become internationalized into a fight against nations that restrict the predatory dynamics of finance capital seeking to
privatize and dismantle government regulatory power. The New Cold War is not merely a war being waged by finance capitalism against
socialism and public ownership of the means of production. In view of the inherent dynamics of industrial capitalism requiring strong
state regulatory and taxing power to check the intrusiveness of finance capital, this post-industrial global conflict is between
socialism evolving out of industrial capitalism, and fascism, defined as a rentier reaction to mobilize government to roll
back social democracy and restore control to the rentier financial and monopoly classes.
The old Cold War was a fight against "Communism." In addition to freeing itself from land rent, interest charges and privately
appropriated industrial profits, socialism favors labor's fight for better wages and working conditions, better public investment
in schools, health care and other social welfare support, better job security, and unemployment insurance. All these reforms would
cut into the profits of employers. Lower profits mean lower stock-market prices, and hence fewer finance-capital gains.
The aim of finance capitalism is not to become a more productive economy by producing goods and selling them at a lower cost than
competitors. What might appear at first sight to be international economic rivalry and jealousy between the United States and China
is thus best seen as a fight between economic systems: that of finance capitalism and that of civilization trying to free itself
from rentier privileges and submission to creditors, with a more social philosophy of government empowered to check private
interests when they act selfishly and injure society at large.
The enemy in this New Cold War is not merely socialist government but government itself, except to the extent that it can be brought
under the control of high finance to promote the neoliberal rentier agenda. This reverses the democratic political revolution
of the 19 th century that replaced the House of Lords and other upper houses controlled by the hereditary aristocracy
with more representative legislators. The aim is to create a corporate state, replacing elected houses of government by central banks
– the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, along with external pressure from the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank.
The result is a "deep state" supporting a cosmopolitan financial oligarchy. That is the definition of fascism, reversing democratic
government to restore control to the rentier financial and monopoly classes. The beneficiary is the corporate sector, not
labor, whose resentment is turned against foreigners and against designated enemies within.
Lacking foreign affluence, the U.S. corporate state promotes employment by a military buildup and public infrastructure spending,
most of which is turned over to insiders to privatize into rent-seeking monopolies and sinecures. In the United States, the military
is being privatized for fighting abroad ( e.g ., Blackwater USA/Academi), and jails are being turned into profit centers using
inexpensive convict labor.
What is ironic is that although China is seeking to decouple from Western finance capitalism, it actually has been doing what
the United States did in its industrial takeoff in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. As a socialist economy,
China has aimed at what industrial capitalism was expected to achieve: freeing its economy from rentier income (landlordship
and usurious banking), largely by a progressive income tax policy falling mainly on rentier income.
Above all, China has kept banking in the public domain. Keeping money and credit creation public instead of privatizing it is
the most important step to keep down the cost of living and business. China has been able to avoid a debt crisis by forgiving debts
instead of closing down indebted enterprises deemed to be in the public interest. In these respects it is socialist China that is
achieving the fate that industrial capitalism initially was expected to achieve in the West.
Summary: Finance Capital as Rent-Seeking
The transformation of academic economic theory under today's finance capitalism has reversed the progressive and indeed radical
thrust of the classical political economy that evolved into Marxism. Post-classical theory depicts the financial and other rentier
sectors as an intrinsic part of the industrial economy. Today's national income and GDP accounting formats are compiled in keeping
with this anti-classical reaction depicting the FIRE sector and its allied rent-seeking sectors as an addition to national income,
not a subtrahend. Interest, rents and monopoly prices all are counted as "earnings" – as if all income is earned as intrinsic parts
of industrial capitalism, not predatory extraction as overhead property and financial claims.
This is the opposite of classical economics. Finance capitalism is a drive to avoid what Marx and indeed the majority of his contemporaries
expected: that industrial capitalism would evolve toward socialism, peacefully or otherwise.
Some Final Observations: Financial Takeover of Industry, Government and Ideology
Almost every economy is a mixed economy – public and private, financial, industrial and rent-seeking. Within these mixed economies
the financial dynamics – debt growing by compound interest, attaching itself primarily to rent-extracting privileges, and therefore
protecting them ideologically, politically and academically. These dynamics are different from those of industrial capitalism, and
indeed undercut the industrial economy by diverting income from it to pay the financial sector and its rentier clients.
One expression of this inherent antagonism is the time frame. Industrial capitalism requires long-term planning to develop a product,
make a marketing plan, and undertake research and development to keep undercutting competitors. The basic dynamic is M-C-M': capital
(money, M) is invested in building factories and other means of production, and employing labor to sell its products (commodities,
C) at a profit (M').
Finance capitalism abbreviates this to a M-M', making money purely financially, by charging interest and making capital gains.
The financial mode of "wealth creation" is measured by the valuations of real estate, stocks and bonds. This valuation was long based
on capitalizing their flow of revenue (rents or profits) at the going rate of interest, but is now based almost entirely on capital
gains as the major source of "total returns."
In taking over industrial companies, financial managers focus on the short run, because their salary and bonuses are based on
current year's performance. The "performance" in question is stock market performance. Stock prices have largely become independent
from sales volume and profits, now that they are enhanced by corporations typically paying out some 92 percent of their revenue in
dividends and stock buybacks.[6]
Even more destructively, private capital has created a new process: M-debt-M'. One recent paper calculates that: "Over 40% of
firms that make payouts also raise capital during the same year, resulting in 31% of aggregate share repurchases and dividends being
externally financed, primarily with debt."[7]This has made the corporate sector financially fragile, above all the airline industry
in the wake of the COVID-19 crises.
Private equity has played a big role in increasing corporate leverage, both through their own actions and by disinhibiting large
public companies in the use of debt. As Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt explained, the large buyout firms, following the playbook
developed in the 1980s, produce their returns from financial engineering and cost cutting (smaller size deals target "growthier"
companies, but while those private equity firms assert that they add value, it may just be that they are skilled at identifying promising
companies and riding a performance wave). Contrary to their marketing, private equity fee structures mean they make money even when
they bankrupt firms. And they have become so powerful that it's hard to get political support to stop them when they hurt large numbers
of citizens though exploitative practices like balance ("surprise")billing. [8]
The classic description of this looting-for-profit practice process is the 1993 paper by George Akerloff and Paul Romer describing
how "firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society's expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success).
Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves
more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations."[9]
The fact that "paper gains" from stock prices can be wiped out when financial storms occur, makes financial capitalism less resilient
than the industrial base of tangible capital investment that remains in place. The United States has painted its economy into a corner
by de-industrializing, replacing tangible capital formation with "virtual wealth," that is, financial claims on income and
tangible assets. Since 2009, and especially since the Covid crisis of 2020, its economy has been suffering through what is called
a K-shaped "recovery." The stock and bond markets have reached all-time highs to benefit the wealthiest families, but the "real"
economy of production and consumption, GDP and employment, has declined for the non- rentier sector, that is, the economy
at large.
How do we explain this disparity, if not by recognizing that different dynamics and laws of motion are at work? Gains in wealth
increasingly take the form of a rising valuation of rentier financial and property claims on the real economy's assets
and income, headed by rent-extraction rights, not means of production.
Finance capitalism of this sort can survive only by drawing in exponentially increasing gains from outside the system., either
by central bank money creation (Quantitative Easing) or by financializing foreign economies, privatizing them to replace low-priced
public infrastructure services with rent-seeking monopolies issuing bonds and stocks, largely financed by dollar-based credit seeking
capital gains. The problem with this financial imperialism is that it makes client host economies as high-cost as their U.S. and
other sponsors in the world's financial centers.
All economic systems seek to internationalize themselves and extend their rule throughout the world. Today's revived Cold War
should be understood as a fight between what kind of economic system the world will have. Finance capitalism is fighting against
nations that restrict its intrusive dynamics and sponsorship of privatization and dismantling of public regulatory power. Unlike
industrial capitalism, the rentier aim is not to become a more productive economy by producing goods and selling them at a
lower cost than competitors. Finance capitalism's dynamics are globalist, seeking to use international organizations (the IMF, NATO,
the World Bank and U.S.-designed trade and investment sanctions.) to overrule national governments that are not controlled by the
rentier classes. The aim is to make all economies into finance-capitalist layers of hereditary privilege, imposing austerity
anti-labor policies to squeeze a dollarized surplus.
Industrial capitalism's resistance to this international pressure is necessarily nationalist, because it needs state subsidy and
laws to tax and regulate the FIRE sector. But it is losing the fight to finance capitalism, which is turning to be its nemesis just
as industrial capitalism was the nemesis of post-feudal landlordship and predatory banking. Industrial capitalism requires state
subsidy and infrastructure investment, along with regulatory and taxing power to check the incursion of finance capital. The resulting
global conflict is between socialism (the natural evolution of industrial capitalism) and a pro- rentier fascism, a state-finance-capitalist
reaction against socialism's mobilization of state power to roll back the post-feudal rentier interests.
Underlying today's rivalry felt by the United States against China is thus a clash of economic systems. The real conflict is not
so much "America vs. China," but finance capitalism vs. industrial "state" capitalism/socialism. At stake is whether "the state"
will support financialization benefiting the rentier class or build up the industrial economy and overall prosperity.
Apart from their time frame, the other major contrast between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism is the role of government.
Industrial capitalism wants government to help "socialize the costs" by subsidizing infrastructure services. By lowering the cost
of living (and hence the minimum wage), this leaves more profits to be privatized. Finance capitalism wants to pry these public utilities
away from the public domain and make them privatized rent-yielding assets. That raises the economy's cost structure – and thus is
self-defeating from the vantage point of international competition among industrialists.
That is why the lowest-cost and least financialized economies have overtaken the United States, headed by China. The way that
Asia, Europe and the United States have reacted to the covid-19 crisis highlights the contrast. The pandemic has forced an estimated
70 percent of local neighborhood restaurants to close in the face of major rent and debt arrears. Renters, unemployed homeowners
and commercial real estate investors, as well as numerous consumer sectors are also facing evictions and homelessness, insolvency
and foreclosure or distress sales as economic activity plunges.
Less widely noted is how the pandemic has led the Federal Reserve to subsidize the polarization and monopolization of the U.S.
economy by making credit available at only a fraction of 1 percent to banks, private equity funds and the nation's largest corporations,
helping them gobble up small and medium-sized businesses in distress.
For a decade after the Obama bank-fraud bailout in 2009, the Fed described its purpose as being to keep the banking system liquid
and avoid damage to its bondholders, stockholders and large depositors. The Fed infused the commercial banking system with enough
lending power to support stock and bond prices. Liquidity was injected into the banking system by buying government securities, as
was normal. But after the covid virus hit in March 2020, the Fed began to buy corporate debt for the first time, including junk bonds.
Former FDIC head Sheila Bair and Treasury economist Lawrence Goodman note, the Federal Reserve bought the bonds "of 'fallen angels'
who sank to junk status during the pandemic" as a result of having indulged in over-leveraged borrowing to pay out dividends and
buy their own shares.[10]
Congress considered limiting companies from using the proceeds of the bonds being bought "for outsize executive compensation or
shareholder distributions" at the time it approved the facilities. but made no attempt to deter companies from doing this. Noting
that "Sysco used the money to pay dividends to its shareholders while laying off a third of its workforce a House committee report
found that companies benefiting from the facilities laid off more than one million workers from March to September." Bair and Goodman
conclude that "there's little evidence that the Fed's corporate debt buy-up benefited society." Just the opposite: The Fed's actions
"created a further unfair opportunity for large corporations to get even bigger by purchasing competitors with government-subsidized
credit."
The result, they accuse, is transforming the economy's political shape. "The serial market bailouts by monetary authorities –
first the banking system in 2008, and now the entire business world amid the pandemic" has been "a greater threat [to destroy capitalism]
than Bernie Sanders." The Fed's "super-low interest rates have favored the equity of large companies over their smaller counterparts,"
concentrating control of the economy in the hands of firms with the largest access to such credit.
Smaller companies are "the primary source of job creation and innovation," but do not have access to the almost free credit enjoyed
by banks and their largest customers. As a result, the financial sector remains the mother of trusts, concentrating financial and
corporate wealth by financing a gobbling-up of smaller companies as giant companies to monopolize the debt and bailout market.
The result of this financialized "big fish eat little fish" concentration is a modern-day version of fascism's Corporate State.
Radhika Desai calls it "creditocracy," rule by the institutions in control of credit.[11]It is an economic system in which central
banks take over economic policy from elected political bodies and the Treasury, thereby completing the process of privatizing economy-wide
control.
Give special tax favoritism to the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors.
Minimize land rent and housing costs by taxing land rent and other rent-yielding assets, not capital or wages
Shift taxes off land-rent taxation to leave it available to pay as interest to mortgage bankers
Provide public infrastructure at low cost
Privatize infrastructure into monopolies to extract monopoly rent
Reform parliaments to block rent-seeking
Avoid military spending and wars that require running into foreign debt
Block democratic reform, by shifting control to non-elected officials
Use international organization (such as the IMF or NATO) to force neoliberal policy
Concentrate economic and social planning in the political capital.
Shift planning and resource allocation to the financial centers.
Concentrate monetary policy in the national treasury
Shift monetary policy to central banks, representing private commercial banking interests.
Bring prices in line with cost-value
Maximize opportunities for rent seeking via land ownership, credit and monopoly privileges
Banking should be industrialized to finance tangible capital investment
Banks lend against collateral, bidding up asset prices, especially for rent-yielding assets
Recycle corporate revenue is into capital investment in new means of production
Pay out revenue as dividends or use it for stock buybacks to increase stock price gains
The time frame is long-term to develop products and marketing plans: M-C-M'
The time frame is short-term, hit-and-run by financial speculation, M-M'.
Industrial engineering to raise productivity by research and development and new capital investment.
Financial engineering to raise asset prices – by stock buybacks and higher dividend payouts.
Focuses on long-term development of industrial capitalism as a broad economic system.
Short-term hit-and-run objectives, mainly by buying and selling assets.
Economy of High Wages, recognizing that well fed, well-educated labor with leisure is more productive than
low-priced "pauper" labor, and long-term employment
A race to the bottom, burning out employees and replacing them with new hires.
Mechanization of labor treats workers as easily replaceable and hence disposable.
M-C-M' Profits are made by investing in means of production and hiring labor to produce commodities to sell
at a higher price than what it costs to employ labor.
M-M' "Capital" gains made directly by asset-price inflation
Banking is industrialized, to provide credit mainly to invest in new capital formation. This increased credit
tends to bid up commodity prices and hence the living wage.
Increased bank credit to finance the bidding up of housing, stocks and bonds raises the cost of
housing and of buying pension income, leaving less to spend on goods and services.
Supports democracy to the extent that the lower house will back industrial capital in its fight against the
landlord class and other rentiers, whose revenue adds to prices without adding value.
Finance capital joins with "late" industrial capitalism to oppose pro-labor policies. It seeks
to take over government, and especially central banks, to support prices for stocks, bonds, real estate and packaged bank loans
gone bad and threatening banks with insolvency.
Industrial capitalism is inherently nationalistic, requiring government protection and subsidy of industry.
Finance capital is cosmopolitan, seeking to prevent capital controls and impose free trade and
libertarian anti-government policy.
Supports a mixed economy, with government paying for infrastructure to subsidize private industry. Government
works with industry and banking to create a long-term growth plan for prosperity.
Seeks to abolish government authority in all areas, so as to shift the center of planning to Wall
Street and other financial centers.
The aim is to dismantle protection of labor and industry together.
Banking and credit are industrialized.
Industry is financialized, with profits used mainly to increase stock prices via stock buyback
programs and dividend payouts, not new R&D or tangible investment.
Favor industry and labor.
Give special tax favoritism to the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors.
__________
[1]I provide the charts in The Bubble and Beyond (Dresden: 2012), Chapters 7 and 8, and Killing the Host (Dresden:
2015).
[2]"The Theory of Dynamic Economics," Essays in Economic Theory ed. Rexford Guy Tugwell (New York: 1924), pp. 96 and 98,
originally in The Publications of the University of Pennsylvania , Political Economy and Public Law Series 3:2 (whole No.
11), 1892, p. 96. Europe's aristocratic governments developed their tax policy "at a time when the state was a mere military organization
for the defense of society from foreign foes, or to gratify national feelings by aggressive wars." Such states had a "passive" economic
development policy, and their tax philosophy was not based on economic efficiency. I provide the details in "Simon Patten on Public
Infrastructure and Economic Rent Capture," American Journal of Economics and Sociology 70 (October 2011), pp. 873-903.
[3]George advocated a land tax, but his opposition to socialism led him to reject the value and price concepts necessary to define
economic rent quantitatively. His defense of bankers and interest rendered his policy recommendations ineffective as he moved to
the libertarian right wing of the political spectrum, opposing government investment but merely taxing the rent taken by privatizers
– the reverse of what Patten and his pro-industrial school of economists were advocating, based on classical value and price theory.
[4]"The Theory of Dynamic Economics," p. 98.
[5]Speech of June 24, 1877. He used Latin and said " Sanitas, Sanitatum " and translated it as "Sanitation, all is sanitation."
It was a pun on a more famous aphorism, " Vanitas, vanitatum ," "Vanity, all is vanity."
[6]William Lazonick, "Profits Without Prosperity:Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and Leave Most Americans Worse Off,"
Harvard Business Review , September 2014. And more recently, Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin, Predatory Value Extraction: How the
Looting of the Business Corporation Became the U.S. Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored (Oxford: 2020).
[7]Joan Farre-Mensa, Roni Michaely, Martin Schmalz, "Financing Payouts,"
Ross School of Business Paper No. 1263
(December 1, 2020), quoted by Matt Stoller,"How to Get Rich Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Facilities," BIG, January 3, 2021.
[9]George Akerloff and Paul Romer, "Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,"https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1993/06/1993b_bpea_akerlof_romer_hall_mankiw.pdf
[10]Sheila Bair and Lawrence Goodman, "Corporate Debt 'Relief' Is an Economic Dud," Wall Street Journal , January 7, 2021.
[11]Desai, Radhika. 2020.'The Fate of Capitalism Hangs in the Balance of International Power'. Canadian Dimension, 12 October.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-fate-of-capitalism-hangs-in-the-balance-of-international-power . See also Geoffrey
Gardiner, Towards True Monetarism (Dulwich: 1993) and The Evolution of Creditary Structure and Controls (London: Palgrave,
2006) and the post-Keynesian group Gang of 8 popularized the term "creditary economics" in the 1990s.
I don't think I'm really on board with this strict separation between finance capital and industrial capital. Marx got a lot
right, but one of many things he got wrong was actually buying into the emancipatory potential of capitalism.
He mistakenly saw
the market and its logic as some sort of quasi-autonomous, internally functioning thing with scientific laws which governed its
motion (this is literal, hence he and Engels talking about "scientific socialism"). He missed that the capitalist marketplace
and money itself were always already political, neither of which have any independent existence from the institutions which create
them.
I believe we have seen a rise in "rentier" capitalism less because it is fundamentally different than industrial capital
and more because the rich and powerful long ago realized that there is no "free market" and that they could construct the market
legally and politically in precisely the way which allows them to maintain and expand their wealth and power.
Marx, for all his
polemics against capitalism was actually too wrapped up in its logic to see this part of it. He didn't really grasp that the supposed
laws of the marketplace could be bent or broken at will be the people with the means to do so (hence, "too big to fail"), thought
the laws of capitalism were something like laws of nature instead of pure fiat made by people.
That's the mistake. At some point the elite just realized that the "free market," far from threatening them was the most effective
way to maintain their control of society.
At least in Capital, I don't see this as Marx's mistake. It is not the dominance of Capital itself that he sees as potentially
emancipatory, but the actual increase in the ability to generate surplus that it creates, which could be deployed to other ends
if the system were surpassed. (And for Marx, it's "progressive" function was already firmly in the past.)
The absolute Hellscape created for the working class, the degradation of the environment, and other disasters he saw as baked
into the system. And this did not depend on whether industrial or finance capital predominated. He certainly would never have
deluded himself with the belief that "the euthanasia of the rentiers" would fix things. That was left to a later economist.
I think that Marx regarded the "laws" of capitalism as different from what you seem to be calling laws.
He was of course in no position to observe the ever-accelerating tinkering with the supposed laws of the system that we've
been witness to for many decades, but what he did see, and what he analyzed in the form of various proposals to eliminate the
"bad" effects of the system while retaining it's essential characteristics he saw as perhaps capable of altering the ways in which
crises manifested but not of avoiding the crises.
This isn't really adequately expressed, but I'm working from my little Lenovo touchscreen and am disinclined to do longer exposition
until I have a keyboard available.
At the end of the 19th C. with capitalism exploiting the environment like never before the reaction in the art world was to
romanticize nature. Dream-scapes of mystical nature. Followed soon by goofball tourism in model-Ts. The industrial revolution
was the economic singularity at the beginning of automation. It gave us the ability to accumulate wealth in a whirlwind. But it
lasted barely a century. At which point nature was no longer beautiful and mystical – it was completely trashed. So this went
hand in glove with a population explosion and capitalism because it required both. Which is now totally counterproductive. In
fact self-destructive. And instead of letting the whole thing implode, bringing essential resources and services to a screeching
halt, we are (apparently) financializing the economy.
M-C-M has become M-debt-M. At least this eliminates the ravaging of the
environment at ever accelerated consumption. What we need, I submit, is M – environment – M. We need to increase our national
and state legislatures by adding a new branch of lawmakers – scientists, now especially environmental scientists, but science
in all its branches. And give science full political authority, along with vested financial interests. Balance sheets can be manipulated;
money can be digitized; but the environment is the only thing that counts.
All this and not a word about the consequences for the world of 'productive' industrial capitalism. The need to produce so-called
goods endlessly and in increasing quantities is destroying the planet yet the author seems to regard it as something to which
a society should aspire. Capitalism itself, with its inherent drive for endless economic growth, is incompatible with a finite
planet. Even some capitalists realise this and suggest, hopelessly, that we must immediately and seriously look for ways to expand
beyond this planet. A piece elsewhere on this site today about Jeffrey Epstein labels him a 'child rapist' in a way that suggests
his activities promoting capitalism were more respectable. 'Capitalist' should carry the same stigma. Or is the extinction of
all complex life – as esteemed climate scientists are telling us we are headed for if we don't stop this growth obsession – a
less wicked end than a sex crime?
We could use more production of solar panels, wind turbines and electric transportation.
We could use an enriched working class with the wherewithal to replace their carbon sourced living standard with a green one.
This is a really good point. Just producing something doesn't produce a net gain for society. I once had this idea that someone
with a better background in economics than I have should write a long essay or a book about how the rise of advertising in the
1950s coincided with the need of industrial capitalists to create demand out of thin air for the products they were producing.
When the actual need for your products doesn't exist, we figured out how to manufacture demand as well. Up to that point, capitalism
had mostly been concerned with the supply side of production but the advent of marketing, advertising, and PR was all about managing
the demand/consumption side as well.
This is another way the rentier/industrial capitalist distinction breaks down. Both are beholden to the same interests.
There was a book called "from the wonderful folks who brought you pearl harbor", which (in a light hearted way) dealt with
madison ave (the series mad men was supposedly taken from this story line) and the creation of "consumers" . in the fifties
The real time version would be george seldes' works multiple books.. and he had a publication called "in fact" which dealt with
the "association of national manufacturers" and how they were controlling the media of the day though advertising.
He was doing stories about the dangers of tobacco and the industry killing of all stories dealing with negative facts about tobacco,
back in the forties and fifties..
A great book was "witness to a century"
It blows my mind that just about everything going on today, has been cooking for about a century and we act like us "figuring
it out" is a big deal . we must be one smart species.
This theme gets a significant amount of space in Baran and Sweezy's "Monopoly Capital (1966), in the chapter on the Sales Effort
in particular, but also scattered elsewhere throughout the book.
au contraire. I say it's described as part and parcel of finance capitalism. The extractive industries create a surplus of
material that must then be sold (analogous is the need to have a war in order to create the need for more bullets), and the extractors
get a massive land rent bonus as the resource is given to them free of charge, and they also benefit from tax advantages and land
appreciation facilitated by the aforementioned finance capitalism . How much of the bezos fortune has been acquired through selling
counterfeit goods touted by fake reviews on the product quality? More junk, sold faster. delivered by an army of gig workers driving
individual polluting cars and the notion that an electric or hybrid bus should be replaced by an army of uber drivers, until they
don;)t need them anymore
From the above "The oil and mining industries likewise are notoriously exempt from income taxation on their natural-resource
rents. For a long time the depletion allowance allowed them tax credit for the oil that was sold off, enabling them to buy new
oil-producing properties (or whatever they wanted) with their supposed asset loss, defined as the value to recover whatever they
had emptied out. There was no real loss, of course. Oil and minerals are provided by nature."
From Buckminster Fuller's last book 'Critical Path' –
" approximately 60 percent of the employed in U.S. America are working at tasks that are not producing any life support .Which
would cost society the least: to carry on as at present, trying politically to create more no-wealth producing jobs, or paying
everybody handsome fellowships to stay at home and save all those million-dollar-each gallons of petroleum?"
Maybe it's time to give the environment a breather from human 'production'. Ecosystems have been loving COVID-19.
I think their exists a confusion as to what constitutes- or is not included in the term – Productive industrial capitalism.
I think the term 'Industrial' evokes images of smoke stacks, endless pollution, misery and environmental degradation and excludes
a positive side that includes polution elimination, contained systems, environmental resoration and blooming, happiness and mission,
higher and more meaningfull fullfillment.
I think the term 'Productive' evokes images of so-called goods as being created endlessly while destroying the planet – whereas
restoration of soils and environment on an industrial scale and the resultant beneficiary of goods produced for the enablement
of biodiversity.
Further, a large component of the term 'productive' having negative connotations is a direct result of Financial capitalism's
take over and, deceptive use of terms and language – they were led by the computer revolutions use of terms and language taken
from long used context and applied to their own narrow doings – See Michael Hudson's -J is for Junk Economics.
This same de-focusing and sly re-working of definitions has left a majority of folks believing that banks use peoples savings
to lend out to people trying to start a business, buy a home, or to business to increase production – and not the reality of most
of it being to boost asset prices and de-regulate any type financial gambling and shicanery – . And what does it say about economics
as science? where economics pretends that itself is self correcting and not entropic like about everything else, will take bad
actors out of the equation of the free market, will produce good corporate citizens, and claims creative destruction without realizing
that destruction applies to only those things previously created.
When has the production of good corporate citizens outweighed the destructive capacity of those produced bad corporate citizens.
There seems to be no distinction between the predatory, destructive and harmful capitalist corporation that only contributes to
overhead, misery and deductive as opposed to productive – that and, those that are productive, useful and positive for all species
and the planet.
Mother nature and this planet does not hold humans in as high esteem as we humans do – if you are religious – I don't think god
does either.
Sorry
Mason is a careful and thoughtful economist, so his take is well worth reading. He points out that interest payments as a percent
of GDP fluctuate with time and Fed-interest rate setting, and in fact are currently back down to roughly the same level as in
1975. I checked some FRED graphs, and this is true for both business interest payments and household interest payments.
He also points out that increases in relative financialization vs. industrialization have generally varied globally, with one
area's increase in one aspect balanced by another area's increase in the other. And while US primary manufacturing has decreased,
companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Google are still "industry", as they produce usable consumer services (mainly logistical and
distributional) that are not "financial". Mason points out that most top fortunes in the US are still made in such "industrial"
realms, not financial.
As Hudson agrees that Marx understood, Mason points out that industrial capitalists still extract "exploitative rent", in the
form of profit extracted from the labor power of workers, via the capitalists' collective monopoly on the means of production.
He feels that both industrial and financial capitalism are largely inseparable and essential (to the extractors) to the extraction
of surplus value from workers.
I'm not sure I fully buy Mason's argument in PB's comment that Amazon, Walmart, et al are "industry". Clearly, they've superseded
Main St as agents to abet consumer culture, and may do so more efficiently (thus adding to GDP), but can this part of the service
industry truly be labelled as "industrial"? It seems to me they're old wine in new bottles, so isn't it a zero sum, at least in
the long run? They've really only made it easier for consumers to increase their indebtedness–it's just a click away instead of
a drive away–so are a more efficient way to abet the FIRE sector more than the industrial sector, especially since so much of
what is on offer is now made offshore.
Further, as JS points out, we need to know how to get to some sort of sustainable economy before the whole thing collapses.
Somehow the financial capitalism vs industrial capitalism conflict has to be replaced, which will require strong government and
far-sighted leaders–both in short supply thanks to Neoliberalism. As many at NC have pointed out, we are now in a race between
nuclear armageddon and climate armageddon. But it's good to know where we are, and how we got here, if we are to find our way
out of our present predicament.
Kilgore,
Good points. Re Walmart, etc., and the label "industrial", Mason's point is simply that those firms aren't "financial", i.e.,
not in the FIRE sector, and hence aren't what Hudson says he's upset with. Yet (claims Mason, I haven't checked), they are the
sort of firms, rather than FIRE, that comprise the dominant chunk of the wealthiest US firms, and of wealth generation in general.
Mason would agree that the problem isn't about one type of capitalism vs. another, but about the whole inhuman, exploitative,
unsustainable capitalist shebang.
One point re FIRE that neither Hudson nor Mason address is Dean Baker's take: that much of what should rightfully be "labor's"
share of GDP doesn't actually instead go to "capitalists" as "profit" OR to rentiers as interest or rent. It simply goes as wages/salaries
to the very highest-paid (and increasingly so) laborers, as opposed to the bottom 90% of laborers. Most top professionals and
managers of firms are not "owners", hence they "work" for a living–but they get paid these days predominatly via wages and salaryies
that have skyrocketed. And FIRE is indeed in this case a major offender, as Dean points out.
While one could argue that these are simply "profits by a different name", the point is that such employees actually have no
"owners" right to the salaries, unlike true owners' rights to (all) profit. They do have a lot of cronyistic, informal power,
however. Baker suggests several ways to regulate and lower their salaries, both for finance (a financial transactions tax), and
for all corporations in general. This would free up money to go to the lower-paid workers and/or customers of these extractive
firms.
Shareholders of public companies do not actually own the company [David Ciepley] and very few have a controlling stake either.
Given the supine boards of most companies the CEOs have effectively complete control and should be considered functionally equivalent
to the "capitalists" of lore. What with their options and so forth they are adept at joining the ranks of "owners" even if they
started as "laborers".
Baker has some good ideas, incremental style, but I don't get a sense he has a big picture like Hudson. Mason quibbles over
details just for the sake of it, it seems to me.
We've regularly referred to the landmark article by Amar Bhide, Efficient Markets, Deficient Governance, which lays out longer
form how US regulations by preferring liquid markets, have created anonymous, transient, arms-length shareholders who do not exercise
control over companies, and due to the need to keep strategically sensitive information confidential, are incapable of supervising
them properly even if they had the power to do so.
The very first sentence of Michael Hudson's post targets: "the landlords, bankers and monopolists extracting economic rent
without producing real value." I believe Amazon, Walmart, et al. fit the category of monopolists extracting economic rent without
producing value. The FIRE sector was prominent but not the only target of Hudson's post. I think Mason works hard to mince Hudson's
words -- to no useful end. "He[Mason] feels that both industrial and financial capitalism are largely inseparable and essential
(to the extractors) to the extraction of surplus value from workers." I believe firms that make physical products, like automobiles
or light bulbs, and select top management from their engineering and production staff have proved very different in their operations
than the same firms run by top management selected from their financial staff.
Regarding "Deep States" and such, their enforcers, IMF, WB etc:
A fascinating history of shifts in the structure and functioning of the Japanese economy -- essentially from serving the population
to serving the speculators -- promoted by a subverted Japanese Central Bank, facilitated and encouraged by the IMF is to be found
in this documentary based on Richard Werner's " Princes of the Yen ":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY
Don't get confused between making money and creating wealth.
When you equate making money with creating wealth, people try and make money in the easiest way possible, which doesn't actually
create any wealth.
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned" income.
The American have lost sight of what real wealth creation is, and are just focussed on making money.
You might as well do that in the easiest way possible.
It looks like a parasitic rentier capitalism because that is what it is.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial crisis.
They will load your economy up with their debt products until you get a financial crisis.
On a BBC documentary, comparing 1929 to 2008, it said the last time US bankers made as much money as they did before 2008 was
in the 1920s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6
At 18 mins.
The bankers loaded the US economy up with their debt products until they got financial crises in 1929 and 2008.
As you head towards the financial crisis, the economy booms due to the money creation of bank loans.
The financial crisis appears to come out of a clear blue sky when you use an economics that doesn't consider debt, like neoclassical
economics.
Once you have a firm grip on what wealth creation and money really are; it all becomes clear.
Banks – What is the idea?
The idea is that banks lend into business and industry to increase the productive capacity of the economy.
Business and industry don't have to wait until they have the money to expand. They can borrow the money and use it to expand today,
and then pay that money back in the future.
The economy can then grow more rapidly than it would without banks.
Debt grows with GDP and there are no problems.
The banks create money and use it to create real wealth.
The interesting point about China would seem to be that, having seen the results that Financialisation has produced in the
West, they are determined to avoid it.
Of course it might be worth adding that it required overturning the lessons of the '30s and comprehensive deregulation for us
to end up where we are, and I cannot see the People's Bank of China ignoring their own analysis of (Western) capitalism to allow
a similar fate to befall their own system. Debt has place and role to play, but ruling the system, as today, is certainly not
it.
In economics they have obviously heeded their lessons well. It's the social side that needs more attention.
It's part & parcel here especially from DUP types who sometimes appear to be living in
a fantasy world – Shinners not so much but I imagine that SF dissidents have similar
extreme positions & all of this comes from some intelligent & professional people not
just the malleable mobs. Meanwhile there is a turf war for the gangster versions of both UVF
& UDA hitting the streets in Belfast.
I recall a few years back reading an account from a British Army general who was familiar
with both Northern Ireland & the former Yugoslavia before they blew up, who in both
instances was shocked by how people who had for the most part lived happily side by side
within a relatively short space of time became sworn enemies. All of that had a religious
background with the latter including ethnicity, but to him both sides in both cases spiraled
down through negative reactions into extremes, becoming in the end each others sworn
enemies.
Politics & Class have I believe caused the same fractures & after all the
successful & presumably intelligent PMC also have their deplorable others that are
largely a construction based on generalisations & stereotypes, while sadly peace &
reconciliation efforts as far as I can tell always appear to arrive as an epilogue to a very
bad book.
Yugoslavia definitely didn't live happily side by side. Its tensions were hidden under
Tito, but existed before (cf WW2 Croats vs Serbs, as most visible example), and blew up
after, to a great extent because they were so supressed before w/o any reasonable outlet. It
might have given a semblance of "happines", but it wasn't really there.
I was only in Yugoslavia once for about a week in 1982, and you could see what a mess it
was in the making. I'm used to Europeans drinking, but Belgrade made em' look like
teetotalers. Add in age old tensions and kaboom!
One of the biggest hyperinflationary episodes came out of their civil war, only to be
eclipsed in the numbers game by Zimbabwe after the turn of the century.
I was going through Yugoslavia by train in 1981 and the one thing that struck me looking
out the windows was flags. You had Yugoslavian flags everywhere you looked to the point that
it was almost a fetish. It was only years later that I wondered if the point of those flags
was to encourage the different groups to think of themselves as Yugoslavians first and
foremost.
> to a great extent because they were so supressed before w/o any reasonable
outlet.
But this seems to excuse the fighting? If everybody was "suppressed" then why did they
kick sideways, rather than up? As I think I said once before, my friend from Serbia would say
"I'd be on "my" side of the street and "they" would be shooting at me, and then I'd cross the
street and "my" people would be shooting at me".
He, like so many nowadays, came to the US not because this was some beacon of hope but
because where he lived, a place he loved for many reasons, was that messed up.
Reading Wikipedia I come across this tiresome sentence: "The Croat quest for independence
led to large Serb communities within Croatia rebelling and trying to secede from the Croat
republic. Serbs in Croatia would not accept a status of a national minority in a sovereign
Croatia, since they would be demoted from the status of a constituent nation of the entirety
of Yugoslavia."
Croats? Serbs? Like they are fundamentally different species? It's as bad as the
Reconstruction South, but per my example above people didn't even have different colored
skin, heck they were physically indistinguishable. They just wanted something they themselves
couldn't even describe without foaming at the mouth.
To be considered above somebody else by birth was what it really was.
Oh, and another head-banging quote: "the "Croatian Spring" protest in the 1970s was backed
by large numbers of Croats who claimed that Yugoslavia remained a Serb hegemony and demanded
that Serbia's powers be reduced .Tito, whose home republic was Croatia,"
An iron-fisted dictator runs the country, he is from Croatia, yet the country is
considered by Croatians to be "Serb hegemony". Ok whatever, hey it does make more sense than
following a normal-height dark-haired dark-eyed man because he says that tall blond-haired
blue eyed people are superior. And that was a short-by-American-standards drive away
We can give the globe a spin and find the same idiocy in Asia, where "they all look alike"
to western eyes but oh boy they slaughter each other just as regularly as we do.
Ok I'm done ranting. What a plague on the planet this species is.
Kicking sideways (or downwards) is always easier than kicking upwards, especially if
people were doing it for years.
Otherwise, you're just accentuating my point – and I agree with you. It was
incredible watching people in pub who were getting on very well until one of them asked where
the other was from, and that has changed the whole atmosphere.
My cousin from Prague came to America in the late 90's to live on a genuine ranch for a
spell and go on a long roadtrip in search of
So he gets pulled over for speeding in a red state and gives the officer his Czech drivers
license, and he told me the officer went into a harangue over all the ethnic cleansing that
was going on in his country, and how sorry he was about it, and let him off.
Cousin was torn between telling the copper, nah that's a few countries over, but went for
the victim card instead.
Hah, do you know the Western press brain-melt induced by having Slovakia and Slovenia
(which, moreover have very similar flags..) in the same World Cup (soccer) 2022 qualification
group?
Croats? Serbs? Like they are fundamentally different species?
Not different species, but different religions; Roman and Orthodox Catholicism,
respectively. Think German-speaking Europe during the Thirty Years War.
The irony of course is that, in 1992, Croats for the most part didn't go to mass, Serbs
did go to Liturgy, and Bosniak Muslims thought beer went well with their pork chops.
Think of it not as a religious war, but a re-hash of WWII.
Diana Johnstones "Fools Crusade" goes into the destabilization efforts made by various EU
and Nato entities to precipitate the break up. It's where the Clintons beta tested the nation
breaking tools Bush/Cheney began deploying around the world.
Karl Von Hapsburg and the Pope were both involved in prying the Catholic portions loose
from the Yugoslav federation and bringing them back into the Mont Pelerin orbit of the former
Habsburg empire.
The Orthodox regions have been left to the Russians with black markets to everyone's
benefit and the Bosnians given the standard settler/colonial treatment of designated
"races."
Vlade – perhaps I should not have used the word happily but basically neighbours
were not killing each other as was also mainly the case in NI, although there were tensions
gradually building up in tandem with the Civil Rights movement based on the MLK. model.
I don't know what the tipping point was in the Balkans, but in NI it was the treatment
received by the marchers & the likes of the Bogside at the hands of the B specials &
RUC in Derry which gradually spread elsewhere in mass battles between mobs from both sides
& the above armed cops. All of this capped off in 72 by the Provos most successful
recruiting campaign courtesy of the Parachute regiment on Bloody Sunday, while about that
time around 10,000 Catholic refugees crossed into the Republic.
If the General thought that people in NI lived happily side by side before the Troubles,
then he was sorely misinformed. Tensions were always very strong, although not just religious
ones. In Dublin growing up I had neighbours who were Belfast protestants but had been driving
out of Belfast because their grandfather was involved in a shipyard trade union and that was
sufficient for him to have been labeled as a communist and Taig lover.
Yes happily was the wrong word but in the North outside of the cities there was mixing
& occasionally mixed marriages.
You are very correct in relation to the troubles in the shipyards, which I read a few
books about in prep for a statue. Funny thing is that during my 2 stints at the Titanic
studios for GoT I was informed by the top man that many of the tradesmen were ex
paramilitaries from both sides who managed to work well together for a decade, but in
separate teams. That was also tjhe case during the yearly Wraps where they all took full
advantage of the free bars but besides a few scuffles, there was never any real trouble.
A lot of the work would have been carried out in the original paint hall.
You have lost me there Vlade ( If you were indeed commenting on my post ) as I don't know
the book, but you have reminded me of one very violent incident on location in Spain between
2 Catholics in a bar. It was due to one of them being a member of another group of savages
that plagued Belfast as the other 2 wound down.
They were called the Hoodies who were part of the huge crime wave that hit Belfast as a
consequence of the Troubles. It was cleaned up in Catholic areas over about 7 years under the
command of Bobby Storey.
We live in upscale Westchester, NY, just north of Manhattan. Most of our social circles
are highly educated, high income earners with advanced degrees -- MBAs, lawyers, doctors. Of
those that subscribe to these theories our general sense is that it is driven by either
--
1) Anti immigrant sentiment, despite almost all of them being descendants of Jewish
immigrants
2) Anti tax -- this is a big driver
3) Anti government -- classic neoliberalists if that is a term of art
4) They get their news from Fox and or CNBC (which has become a Fox-like spin on things)
They claim to abhor Trump, are clearly anti populist, very pro Israel (Trump scores major
points here) but support all the policies (but they are not anti abortion). Interestingly, as
they earn their incomes serving the wealthy donor class they will not risk this and cross
them.
They view Biden and Sanders as being alike, despite any actual facts you cite such as
Biden's work in bankruptcy, think the democrats are anti Israel and pro Palestinian, etc.
Much of this dates back to Obama and the claims he was going to transfer all the money to the
welfare queens -- remember the give them free cell phones.
Interestingly, they clash heavily with their children (upper teens to 20-somethings) who
more align with Sanders and progressives and are very concerned about wealth inequality and
climate change.
One last point, they are as inclined to get their news from Facebook feeds as Fox.
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In a matter of hours, Biden's key national security people -- Antony Blinken as secretary of
state, Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, and Lloyd Austin as defense secretary
-- gave us a remarkably fulsome idea of what we are in for these next four years.
Haines and Austin, neither of whose records are to be admired, are at bottom functionaries
who were nominated and swiftly confirmed because they do what they are told and do not think
too much -- always a career-advancer in Washington.
It is instead Blinken, who is said to enjoy some kind of
"mind-meld" with Biden, that we must consider carefully. (Such a meld must be odd
terrain.)
Blinken's Senate
testimony last Tuesday sprawled over four hours. It is best to scrutinize his remarks while
seated in a chair with sturdy armrests, ideally to calm one's nerves with a pot of chamomile
tea.
Seen or read as a whole, those four hours gave us an extraordinary display of how empire
works and how it prolongs itself. One by one, Blinken's senatorial interlocutors told him in so
many words, "Son, this is what you need to say if you want our confirmation. We want you to
endorse our commitment to aggression, to unlawful interventions, to 'regime change' ops, to
merciless sanctions, and altogether to the empire. But you must make it look nice. Make it look
thoughtful and complicated and considered."
July 14, 2016: Vice President Joe Biden, right, and Deputy Secretary of State Antony
Blinken. (Air Force, Christopher Hubenthal)
I am convinced, having endured the entire C–Span recording, that what I watched was
sheer ritual. Blinken won the Senate's support and now succeeds the shockingly bovine Mike
Pompeo at State. He will do so, however, with the élan and faux sophistication
our nakedly bankrupt foreign policy now requires if the American pantomime is to be sustained
another four years.
Among Blinken's many rather sad-to-witness "Yes sirs," two standout: his finely chiseled
endorsement of Pompeo's reckless assassination a year ago of Qassem Soleimani, Iran's revered
military commander ("Taking him out was the right thing to do"), and his approval of the Trump
administration's decision to send lethal arms to the manically corrupt regime in Kiev
("Senator, I support providing that lethal defensive assistance to Ukraine," when the Obama
administration, from which he comes, did not.)
Late last year, Blinken
appeared on "Intelligence Matters," the podcast run by Michael Morrell, the coup-mongering
former deputy director at the Central Intelligence Agency and now -- of course -- a regular
commentator on the televisions news networks. In their exchange, the two took up the question
of our "forever wars" and Biden's well-advertised commitment to ending them. Here is a snippet
from Blinken's remarks:
"As for ending the forever wars, large-scale deployment of large, standing U.S. forces in
conflict zones with no clear strategy should and will end under his [Biden's] watch. But we
also need to distinguish between, for example, these endless wars with large-scale,
open-ended deployment of U.S. forces with [sic], for example, discreet, small-scale
sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces to support local actors. In ending the
endless wars we have to be careful not to paint with too broad a brushstroke."
This is what we are in for these coming years, the hyper-rational irrationality of the
middling technocrat. There will be adjustments at the margin, reconsiderations of method. There
will be no consideration whatsoever of America's hegemonic objectives -- of the imperial
project.
Blinken's testimony reflected these bitter truths start to finish.
Changes to the Iran Deal
July 14, 2015: President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, announcing the signing
of the Iran-nuclear agreement. (White House)
Of the various questions the new secretary of state took up during his confirmation
hearings, Iran is the most pressing. Senator Bob Menendez, Blinken's interlocutor in this case,
insisted that yes, the U.S. wants to rejoin the 2015 accord governing Iran's nuclear programs,
but only if this includes prohibitions against Tehran's "destabilizing activities" and a
missile program that Iran justly considers essential to its security.
An honest, clear-eyed diplomat who wanted to get somewhere with Tehran would have rejected
the very frame of Menendez's line of inquiry, with its references to "support for terrorism"
and "funding and feeding its proxies." But Blinken read his cues and tucked right in:
"The president-elect believes that if Iran comes back into compliance we would, too, but
we would use that as a platform to seek a longer, stronger agreement and also, as you have
pointed out, to capture these other issues, particularly with regard to missiles and Iran's
destabilizing activities. This would be the objective."
This is sheer charade. Blinken knows as well as anyone else that the added conditions the
Biden regime will require before rejoining the agreement -- an end to Iran's ballistic missile
programs and its support for the Syrian government against Islamists and the illegal U.S.
incursion -- effectively cancel all chances that the U.S. will rejoin the accord.
I
predicted in this space shortly after Biden was elected that he and his foreign policy
people only pretended to be serious about reviving the nuclear agreement with Iran. Blinken's
testimony confirms this.
Over the weekend The Times of Israel , citing Channel 12 television,
reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sending Yossi Cohen, chief of Mossad and
a close confidant, to Washington to "set out terms" for any revival of the nuclear deal. Israel
purports to "set out terms," and Biden will receive this spook? This is getting completely
unserious. Completely.
On China, Russia, and Venezuela: Blinken was putty in the hands of the Foreign Relations
Committee's across-the-board hawks. A two-fronted new Cold War across both oceans -- Sinophobia
and Russophobia all at once -- is to be our reality these next four years.
Over the weekend, to be noted, the American Embassy in Moscow had the gall to broadcast
routes protesters could take to demonstrations in various Russian cities to dispute Alexei
Navlany's arrest . A good start.
Marco Rubio, the coup-loving senator from Florida, wanted to know if Blinken thought the
U.S. should continue backing Juan Guaidó, the buffoon Rubio and Pompeo puffed up as
Venezuela's "interim leader" as part of a failed coup operation a couple of years ago.
Blinken:
"I very much agree with you, senator, first of all with regard to a number of the steps
that were taken toward Venezuela in recent years, including recognizing Mr. Guaidó and
seeking to increase pressure on the regime . We need an effective policy that can restore
Venezuela to democracy, and how can we best advance that ball? Maybe we need to look at how
we more effectively target the sanctions that we have ."
Grim, grim times lie ahead if Blinken runs State as he promised the Senate he would.
There are those among us who look for shafts of light. People I greatly respect (some,
anyway) thought it was good news when Biden named William Burns, a career foreign service
officer, to head the CIA. At last diplomacy, not unlawful interventions!
Over the weekend, there were reports
that Biden will review -- not more at this point -- the designation of Yemen's Houthis as
terrorists, a label Pompeo affixed as he emptied his desk last week. Finally, we will stop
supporting the Saudis' savagery!
People believe what they need to believe these days, I find, and belief overrides cognition
in many such cases. I caution these people. At bottom Blinken demonstrated for us that no one
who purports to alter our imperial course will ever be allowed to hold high office. For people
such as Blinken, it is merely a question of wielding influence without having any.
This is where Americans live -- in a crumbled republic no longer capable of changing.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International
Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is
Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century . Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
John Allen aka Ol' Hippy , January 26, 2021 at 12:16
I'm 66, almost 67, and will, most likely, never see any real peace from the US government.
A big portion of the economy is based on imperialist actions and the manufacture of conflicts
around the globe mainly to keeps the arms makers in business. Or simply, war. And no, there
is no nation willing to risk the wrath of the US government by trying to halt this insane
posture of aggression, it's just too big and has a momentum all its own. Biden will continue
unabated this absurd, insanely expensive machine to its eventual implosion in the near
future. All the parts of the fall of the economy are in place, all that's needed is some ill
defined tipping point to be crossed. Perhaps, a war with Iran?
"Blinken has said that America's foreign policy must be conducted with 'humility and
confidence', which may sound refreshingly modest. But it's not. Underlying this 'quiet
American' is the same old arrogance about U.S. imperial might-is-right and Washington's
presumed privilege of appointing itself as the 'world's policeman'.
"If Blinken's record is anything to go on, his future role as America's top diplomat is
foreboding.
"Previously, he was a senior member in the Obama administrations serving as national
security advisor to both the president and Joe Biden who was then vice-president. Blinken
rose to become deputy Secretary of State in the final years of the second Obama
administration. In those roles he was a key player in a series of foreign interventions which
turned out to be utterly disastrous."
The once upon a time manufactured aura of Virtue projected by the Outlaw US Empire that
was swallowed by so many naïve nations has vanished with nothing other than its stark
ugliness as a replacement. Refusal to see that reality is what Xi just referred to again as
"arrogance" which puts Blinken into the same ideological camp as Pompeo. As Global Times notes
, if the Outlaw US Empire's attitude's not going to change, than why should China's as
Pompeo's constant lying is replaced by Psaki's:
"When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to a question Monday about US-China
relations, she said that 'China is growing more authoritarian at home and more assertive
abroad,' adding that China 'is engaged in conduct that hurts American workers, blunts [US]
technological edge, and threatens [US] alliances and [US] influence in international
organizations.' She also noted that Washington is 'starting from an approach of patience as
it relates to [its] relationship with China.'"
The editor's response to such inanity:
"Psaki's statement shows that the Biden administration's view and characterization of
China is virtually identical to those of the Trump administration. Psaki stressed that 'We're
in a serious competition with China. Strategic competition with China is a defining feature
of the 21st century,' reflecting that the Biden administration only cares about a "new
approach" to holding China accountable."
And Psaki's words are the same as Blinken's, which were the same as Pompeo's and Trump's.
In other words, the hole digging by the Outlaw US Empire in its relations with the rest of
the world will continue, which will cause further deterioration of its domestic Great
Depression 2.0. Yesterday I posted a comment that highlighted Putin's expounding on the
further enhancement of the educational component of Russia's Social Contract that is
impossible for Navalny's backers to match. On the previous thread, a good comparison was made
between the Yeltsin years and the ongoing drowning of the Outlaw US Empire. The Reset that's
in the works isn't the one envisioned by Global Neoliberals like Klaus Schwab of the
WEF/Davos crew. It's what Xi spoke of yesterday that I commented upon and Escobar reported on
today. The Winds of Change are blowing again, but there's a gaping hole in the USA's wind
sock so it can't see in which direction it's blowing.
blinken is bad news.. i think that is very obvious from a superficial read on him.. the usa
can't get out of the ditch it has made for itself.. nothing is gonna change...
'liberal interventionism' has always been the hallmark of the US Liberal Class and its
foreign policy Establishment, especially since at least Wilson's jumping into WWI.
Has the US ever not intervened in Latin America whenever it felt like it or thought its
"interests" were at stake?
I think Caitlan J. has a good grasp on what to expect from the Biden war mongering crowd
that has recently moved into DC once again:
"....Trump's base has been forcefully pushing the narrative that the previous president
didn't start any new wars, which while technically true ignores his murderous actions like
vetoing the bill to save Yemen from U.S.-backed genocide and actively blocking aid to its
people, murdering untold tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, rolling
out many world-threatening Cold War escalations against Russia, engaging in insane
brinkmanship with Iran, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the
previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians, and reducing military
accountability for those airstrikes....
....Rather than a throwback to "new wars" and the old-school ground invasions of the Bush
era, the warmongering we'll be seeing from the Biden administration is more likely to look
like this. More starvation sanctions. More proxy conflicts. More cold war. More coups. More
special ops. More drone strikes. More slow motion strangulation, less ham-fisted overt
warfare...."
---
Simply put, more small scale wars/ops mostly by proxy, more support for local wankers
(like Guaido in Venezuela, who has incredibly little popular support), and more of these
killing sanctions, which are especially pernicious to the civilian populations in vulnerable
countries like Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Nicaragua and Venezuela, etc.
I have plenty of "liberal" friends who insist that Putin "stole" the 2016 election. They
also think "white nationalists" disguised as BLM or Antifa were responsible for all the blue
city summer violence and riots. Sometimes they claim the fires were started by police "agents
provocateurs". They also insisted that Trump was a right wing fanatic who was going to create
a thousand year reich in the US.
These liberals tend to be highly educated with well-paid jobs and are very respected in
their communities. None are married or have children though. Several drink far too much wine
than is good for them.
There are far more similarities between Putin-tards and Q-tards than is generally
admitted.
That being said, there's more evidence that the Russians rigged the 2016 election than
that he Democrats stole the 2020 election. That's not a commentary of the strength of
Russiagate accusations, by the way.
Facebook ads that might even be linked to a Russian server after the November 2016
election. They are just that crafty. Pelosi bungling the VRA? What was that? If it was
important Pelosi would know about it.
Ultimately, it's an excuse for cycles of Team Blue poor performance, but Biden is
President now. The pageantry is back! And Team Blue fans aren't worried at all about the
House losses.
My favorite was the ads featuring Spongebob Squarepants and Pokomon. I think the U.S.
anti-Russia hysteria is a big joke in Russia, and some Russians wanted troll Americans into
chasing their tales with these ads. If the Russian government wanted to influence Americans,
they could surely do better then those weird ads. There was probably another trolling
incident when Putin and his defense minister went fishing without wearing shirts, after the
U.S. hysteria over the picture of Putin on a horse, without a shirt. The U.S. press ignored
the fishing incident, though.
I never followed "Russiagate" that closely because none of it made any sense, but the
alleged interference kept changing over time. There was so little discipline and rigor in the
accusations that this "changing of the goalposts" evoked little criticism or comment. We were
at war with Eastasia yesterday, but today we are at war with Eurasia, Orwell-style. As I
recall, the first accusation was that Trump was a Russian agent, because of a loan or some
other financial motivation. Later, there was a "pee-tape" accusation, based on gossip paid
for by a Clinton opposition researcher named Steele, who had formerly been an MI6 agent. You
don't get a more unimpeachable, unbiased source of information then that, but the press
treated the Steele dossier as the gospel truth, not to be questioned, and the FBI justified
their investigation on it. Another "tell" with these accusations is that the Russians are not
invited by the U.S. press to respond to them.
So according to this theory, it was the release of undisputed emails from the campaign
that 'rigged the election'? That seems to be the extent of the indictment, which we know
lacked actual forensic evidence, and is contradicted by the Veteran Intelligence
Professionals' forensic analysis (somehow missing from the wikipedia entry). Pretty amazing
that a story that got virtually no coverage swayed an election where Clinton dropped
$1.3billion, and the media gave Trump non-stop coverage.
i've also been in various IT roles and it's funny how people ghettoize themselves...web
design/"full stack" guys were always the worst but i had a lot of server/NAS guys who had ZERO
clue about security and would use idiot passwords like that (and torrent episodes of "the wire"
and watch sports on youtube and etc etc).
as for the israelis, the cellebrite guys and probably these jackasses are good examples of
what happens when you get to sit around on stolen land and live off free money from the US.
which is funny because a lot of skilled "1337hax0rz" also come from poor-ass areas of russia
and the other former soviet areas.
Posted by: the pair | Jan 27 2021 16:45 utc |
13 @Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11
I saw that headline too.
I didn't (bother) to read it, but wondered why the MSM
would do everyone a favor and warn about this guy.
His usefulness had ended? So eke out that last drop of value from him
by sowing distrust within Proud Boys and other alternate organizations. Or (heaven's forbid!) that guy is being set up for assassination
by the Deep State as a false-flag. (Outrageous, simply outrageous,
but imagine if they did a Navalny/Skripal on him - whoa!)
Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc |
14 Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc | 14
We do seem to have some disagreements among our ruling "elites" these days, and I think that
may have something to do with it, but I really don't know and that is a good question. "Why are
they telling me this" is always a good question.
Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to warn the young these days, so I thought I'd post
it.
Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc |
15 @Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc | 15
For sure, that is the rub.
When to self-censor, when to post.
Better to post and then discuss
then simply censor.
Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 17:00 utc |
16 @Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11
Yep. FBI is following the time-tested "proactive" standard playbook of synthetic
terror/crime creation to support the Borg's agenda.
Some congressman a few years back got a hold of, and publically released official docs
showing that FBI was budgeting a yearly payroll for nsome >15,000 paid confidential
informants/agent provacatuers circa 2014(?).
This FBI practice goes all the way back to the 1960's and probably much earlier.
In the last 60+ years, there have been oo many FBI-created/supported domestic 'crime/terror'
groups/leaderships to list in one post here.
Likely the leadership of both BLM and US antifa is also controlled by FBI (Euro
antifa=>likely CIA). [CIA Operation Ajax/Kermit Roosevelt)was running paid *rent-a-mobs* all
the way back in the 1953 overthrowal of Iran's Mossadegh govt].
Recently I've been unable to find anything on Wikipedia that has not been corrupted to some
degree or other by lies.
What a disappointment of a once grand ideal.
Posted by: Arch Bungle | Jan 27 2021 17:21 utc |
18
I know it is OT, but, I was wondering what is happening with the Huawei Princess
in Canada since the regime change in the USA?
Posted by: Young | Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc |
19 Good report. The Wikileaks Vault 7 release clearly shows the USA has tools to create
false flag cyber warfare. To say one knows where a hack originates says more about the accuser
than the accused. Ms. Webb's reporting on the Epstein case was profound, and her follow-up
reporting on various threads has been stellar. There is no reason to doubt her reporting here.
It is no accident that most of Webb's threads lead back to Israel. When one considers the USA's
blind fealty to Israel, often alone in its support, one must consider that mass blackmailing of
political leaders going back decades is a real possibility to explain the USA's Israel-centric
foreign and domestic policy.
"The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump
attributed it to China."
Was there a better way for Trump to telegraph (or tweet, whatever) to the public that the
establishment had no idea who was behind the hack?
If Trump said that he didn't believe Russia did it that would just give the establishment
mass media ammunition to say he was Putin's puppet. After dozens of mass media products echo
the narrative off each other to amplify a weak and vague suggestion and build it into
something that the public perceives as truth, Trump crushed it all by just accusing someone
else. Rather than laboriously dismantling the accusation aimed at Russia he just cut it off
at the knees.
Unfortunately that is something only a President can do, and the current figurehead in
that position absolutely will not be doing anything that might undermine the establishment
narrative du jour. I miss Trump already for that alone.
I have no direct knowledge of SolarWinds specifically, but if Boeing hired HCL (formerly
Hindu Computer Limited) to develop software for its 737 max, I'll make a wild guess and
assume that SolarWinds too probably hired a bunch of Indian kids worth $10/hour each, who
come and go every few months.
And if that's indeed the case, then anything's possible.
Solar Winds was an Israeli penetration? Not Russia?
"As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump
campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel , not
Russia . Indeed,
many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed
collusion with Israel , yet those instances received little coverage and generated little
media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was
in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of
SolarWinds' acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore,
Samanage's deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both
intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange's integration with the Orion software at
the time of the back door's insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds'
Czech-based contractor. " unlimitedhangout
----------------
Pilgrims! I am suggesting or at least raising the possibility that Israel has massively
broken into American government IT systems. Hmmm. Does that mean that I am a Rooshan asset?
The sadly funny thing in this is how deaf, dumb and blind the main stream media are with
regard to any, any, any possibility that Israel does not think its interests are identical with
those of the US.
Natanyahu is quite open about his intention to bully Biden into continuing Israeli policy
aimed at a Morgenthau model for Iran.
People openly say on the TeeVee that not only must Iran give up its nuclear ambitions but it
must also accept Israeli hegemony in the region. Joltin' Jack Keane is one of the foremost
proponents of such a vision of the future Middle East. For him the Syrian military are merely
"Iranian surrogate forces." Perhaps someone should look carefully at the funding for the
Institute for the Study of War. Keane is the chairman thereof. pl
When friends and acquaintances question my apparent antipathy towards the State of Israel,
I suggest that they familiarize themselves with the circumstances regarding the attack on the
USS Liberty and the Pollard spy scandal.
I have been slogging through Jerome Slater's book 'Mythologies Without End: The US,
Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1917 - 2020.' Frankly, after getting 3/4 of the way
through this book, I gave up because Slater's narrative was so depressingly repetitive.
Slater documents Israel's repeated intransigence and refusal to make any meaningful
concessions towards a just and lasting arrangement for peace with the Palestinians.
Probably the only event that will cause a serious reassessment of the US relationship with
Israel will be the day when we can no longer find a buyer for our debt and we are forced to
live within our means. But when that day arrives, the US/Israeli relationship will probably
be the least of our problems.
......." Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the
discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the
hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication,
and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the
involvement of "Russian hackers" in that event......."
CrowdStrike ...CrowdStrike ......CrowdStrike.
Still think Trump's mention of CrowdStrike in his Ukraine phone call, that led to his
bogus impeachment ,was the real reason Democrats went apoplectic.
The echo chamber media treatment of the CrowdStrike element of the phone call as a "long
discredited conspiracy theory", without ever mentioning CrowdStrike by name, was the first
clue.
Is Israel First any worse than America First, or China First?
Certainly Netanyahu was eager to congratulate "President Elect Biden" before the Trump
body was even cold demonstrated Trump's history of special treatment and good will towards
Israel counted for nothing in their own version of their nation's real-politik.
Which is to also include our own self-serving interests, treating Israel in the same
fashion. I think we should all be prickly against each other. Real-politik. Give only
what one can afford to lose.
So Isabel Maxwell is sister to Ghislaine Maxwell of Jeffrey Epstein fame. The connecting
dots point to an ever shrinking world of espionage against the US in order to get at more
local targets. I wonder what they have on John Roberts.
I thought at the time how ironic it was that Netenyahu couldn't wait to throw Trump under
the bus even though Trump spent so much time kissing up to Israel.
I thought it was obvious to most Americans that Israel does not have the same interests
that the U.S.has.The source of Israel's influence in the U.S. is the evangelical vote which
is Protestant in nature going back to Plymouth Rock and naming their kids after OT heroes and
guilt from WW2. Nationalist Americans still fall in the trap of supporting Israel thinking we
are all in this together with them. Think about it, all senators and congressmen vote
uniformly for anything Israel wants and yet can't get a proper stimulus package thru. By the
way Israel first is worse than America first.
As someone who has dealt with the issue of American illusions about Israel for many
decades, I assure you that most Americans think Israel is the 51st state. I was the principal
liaison between US and Israeli military intelligence for seven long years.
Alex,
I'm not sure I can agree with your source of Israel influence going back to Plymouth Rock.
The Pilgrims were strongly reformed and promoted Covenant Theology, while current American
evangelicals largely accept Dispensationalism and pre-tribulation as developed by Darby in
the early 1800s and popularized by Schofield in the early 1900s.
Used tools such as Solar Winds extensively as engineer in wireless telcom industry.
There are much better tools.
Have read many accounts of this security breach and Israel being involved is much more
probable and likely explanation.
Also available evidence points that way.
Russia Russia Russia and China China China are easy talking points for those that are
lazy
In 1989, as an IBM contractor, I spent a month at a VQ2 det in the Med, helping install a
computer system, and instructing key personnel in its use. I became friends with the Chiefs,
male and female, that ran the place, walking around in their starched kakis with clipboards,
instructing the pilots and recon officers, slouching in their flight suits, their assignments
for the day. (Which of course came down from VQ2 itself, likely compiled by Chiefs there. As
Zhukov said when asked who ran the Russian Army: "The Sergeants and myself.") We both knew
several of the Liberty survivors: I from my previous Government employment; they from the
Navy. They all assured me privately that the Navy was determined never to let anything like
that happen again. There's undoubtedly been a complete turn over or two of personnel since
then, but I suspect the same determination prevails today: Once bitten, twice shy.
Given the publicly available evidence and information, there is no reason to rule out
Israel. They have the skill and motivation to pull this off. The same can be said for China
as well as Russia. North Korea and Iran are also strong contenders. Those two are
surprisingly capable. However, from our viewpoint any attribution is based on circumstantial
evidence only. True attribution needs more than that such as that laid out in the GRU 12
indictment for the DNC hack or the Dutch AIVD witnessing of the APT29 (SVR) hack of the
Pentagon in 2015. We need to see the adversary's traffic and infrastructure. Without that,
we're guessing.
Our inability to see Israel as an adversary is exasperating. As Ed Lindgren mentioned, the
USS Liberty and the Pollard spy ring should be reason enough to cause permanent suspicion.
The author brought up the case of Trump campaign collusion with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The
evidence for this was actually stronger than any Trump-Russia collusion. Yet that went
unnoticed outside a small group of researchers. Our blindspot towards Israel may prove fatal
some day.
Who contracted Solarwinds..? It was associated with "GITHUB"which was making enemys in the
Middle East..and was Involved with Jared Kushner as a Backer...according to the Wiki Write up
on "GitHub" Thats a Backdoor I would look at..
AIPAC and their friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress already has access to info
from the various federal agencies that were hacked. Would they endanger that open gateway by
a penetration of US government IT systems?
The Izzies are much more interested in hacking Iranians. Or those european signers of
JCPOA that are trying to negotiate with Iran. They hacked computers in various European
hotels that had Iranian guests. In the US Israeli hackers' target has been the BDS movement
(Boycott, Divest & Sanction) movement, plus any association or group that promotes civil
rights for Palestinians. I wouldn't doubt that they are also hacking congresswoman Rashida
Talib, the Arab American Institute, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, various
Arab-American lobbies, and the Palestinian diaspora in Detroit and other American cities.
However, there is suspicion that Israeli private individuals may at one time or another be
involved with or helped provide expertise to Cozy Bear & other cyber APTs operated mainly
out of Russia.
I know you can't go into specifics, but as a general rule of thumb did Israeli military
intelligence ever offer you any intel that you didn't already know?
Theologically, you have a point. Except that historically, virtually all the low-church
British protestants were very pro-Jewish anyway, regardless of theology. Remember: it was
Oliver Cromwell who let the Jews back into England after nearly three centuries of absence.
Why? I don't know. Maybe the Proddies thought the Jews would make good allies against Rome.
There is also the fact that they tended towards biblical literalism in those days, looking to
the Bible as though it were system of law--similar to the way the Jews did.
Yeah, right.
No, it was a one way street. It amounted to a firehose stream going one way. There were a lot
of meetings at which they gave us nothing of value, and that evidently was not enough because
they planted people all over the government to feed them stuff we did not want to give them.
Occasionally they got caught passing material and when that happened the politicians would
forbid prosecution. That was true of both US parties. Pollard was recruited for the purpose
of not having their significant assets put at risk. He was passed lists of specific documents
by his Israeli handlers. The documents were listed by serial number so that he would not
bring the wrong ones out of the US security envelope. He brought them to the team safe house
where they were copied and then he returned them to the Navy's safes. On one occasion I
decided to probe their willingness to actually cooperate with us. I told the liaison rep in
Washington that we maintained encyclopedic files on all the armed forces of the world. this
was a routine task. I told them that it was a waste of our time to collect basic data about
the IDF. That being the case, I asked them to give us the TO&E of a type IDF infantry
brigade so we would not waste analytic time. The request went to Tel Aviv and was
refused.
Israel has a long history of stealing US information over and above that which they are
given. They don't believe that we give them everything we have and so they steal what they
think we may be keeping from them. Compartmentation makes it impossible for them to be sure.
Remember Pollard? In Pollard's case the material he was directed to obtain for them often had
nothing to do with the ME, but it was good trading material.
More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere
Earlier today police in Europe
took down the Emotet bot-network:
First discovered as a fairly run-of-the-mill banking trojan back in 2014, Emotet evolved over
the years into one of the most professional and resilient cyber crime services in the world,
and became a "go-to" solution for cyber criminals.
Its infrastructure acted as a mechanism to gain access to target systems, which was done
via an automated spam email process that delivered Emotet malware to its victims via
malicious attachments, often shipping notices, invoices and, since last spring, Covid-19
information or offers. If opened, victims would be promoted to enable macros that allowed
malicious code to run and instal Emotet.
This done, Emotet's operators then sold access on to other cyber criminal groups as a
means to infiltrate their victims, steal data, and drop malware and ransomware. The operators
of TrickBot and Ryuk were among the many users of Emotet.
Up to a quarter of all recent run of the mill cyber-crime was done through the Emotet
network. Closing it down is a great success.
Wikipedia falsely claimed
that Emotet was based in Russia:
Emotet is a malware strain and a cybercrime operation based in Russia.[1] The malware, also
known as Geodo and Mealybug, was first detected in 2014[2] and remains active, deemed one of
the most prevalent threats of 2019.[3]
However the Hindu report linked as source to the Russia claim under [1]
only says :
The malware is said to be operated from Russia, and its operator is nicknamed Ivan by cyber
security researchers.
"Is said to be operated from Russia" is quite a weak formulation and should not be used as
source for attribution claims. It is also definitely false.
The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police
took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of
computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price ~$60,000/kg)
and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.
Since the 2016 publishing of internal emails of the DNC and the Clinton campaign attribution
of computer intrusions to Russia has become a standard propaganda feature. But in no case was
there shown evidence which proved that Russia was responsible for a hack.
The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a
manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg
immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But
none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.
The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider
knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more
likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that
Israel was behind it :
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of
SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was "compiled, signed
and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," per
reports . This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators
had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had "a high degree of familiarity with the
software." While the way the attackers gained access to Orion's code base has yet to be
determined, one possibility
being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a
SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
...
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that
has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in
2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first
inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms
associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government.
...
Samanage offers what it describes as "an IT Service Desk solution." It was acquired by
SolarWinds so Samanage's products could be added to SolarWinds' IT Operations Management
portfolio. Though US reporting and
SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying
that it is an American company, Samanage is actually
an Israeli firm . It was
founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously
worked for several years at MAMRAM , the Israeli military's central computing unit .
...
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed
SolarWinds Service Desk, became
listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of
Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition's announcement in April
of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October
or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained
access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time.
Samanage's automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the
now-compromised software during that period.
The U.S. National Security Agency has ways and means to find out who was behind the
SolarWinds hack. But if Israel is the real culprit no one will be allowed to say so publicly.
Some high ranging U.-S. general or official will fly to Israel and read his counterpart the
riot act. Israel will ignore it just as it has done every time when it was caught spying on the
U.S. government.
With more then half of Washington's politicians in its pockets it has no reason to fear any
consequences.
Posted by b on January 27, 2021 at 15:32 UTC |
Permalink
I have been dumbfounded for some time by supporters of the Izzies apparent lack of concern
about the eventual consequences of this sort of behavior. But I suppose, as with Uncle Sugar,
the notion of ones own exceptional nature prevents a sensible assessment.
I have no direct knowledge of SolarWinds specifically, but if Boeing hired HCL (formerly
Hindu Computer Limited) to develop software for its 737 max, I'll make a wild guess and
assume that SolarWinds too probably hired a bunch of Indian kids worth $10/hour each, who
come and go every few months.
And if that's indeed the case, then anything's possible.
Israeli intel spinoffs/cutouts, US FBI/CIA and the NSA surveillance/blackmail collection
agencies and their agents; they are facets of the same worldwide "NWO" criminal Blob-Mob,
imo.
It should be obvious by now they have the power to set up one US President, and depose him
through a ham-handed domestic election fraud coup, and install an eaaily controlled
neurodegenerating corrupt puppet, and completely control and pervert the US Judicial system,
so as to essentially get away and continue with their criminal culture and crimes against
humanity unchecked.
With such a history, of course they have the means to frame Russia, as well as to destroy
any others who stand in their way to more power and autocratic control of the planet.
...
With more than half of Washington's politicians in its pockets ("Israel") has no reason to
fear any consequences.
Posted by b on January 27, 2021 at 15:32 UTC | Permalink
Precisely. And it's almost as bad in Oz, and even worse in the UK. Money is the only
logical explanation for the "Israel" Worship indulged in by corrupt, amoral Western political
'leaders'.
"The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump
attributed it to China."
Was there a better way for Trump to telegraph (or tweet, whatever) to the public that the
establishment had no idea who was behind the hack?
If Trump said that he didn't believe Russia did it that would just give the establishment
mass media ammunition to say he was Putin's puppet. After dozens of mass media products echo
the narrative off each other to amplify a weak and vague suggestion and build it into
something that the public perceives as truth, Trump crushed it all by just accusing someone
else. Rather than laboriously dismantling the accusation aimed at Russia he just cut it off
at the knees.
Unfortunately that is something only a President can do, and the current figurehead in
that position absolutely will not be doing anything that might undermine the establishment
narrative du jour. I miss Trump already for that alone.
b posted, "Is said to be operated from Russia" is quite a weak formulation
However, don't give the average reader of newsignorance
much credit. Even well above average readers can have a readiness for
confirmation bias.
side rant:
Human intelligence is just a tool. High intelligence does not guarantee
a dedication to a search for truth. High intelligence can give one
a developed skill at
rationalizing whatever beliefs one already holds.
-----
Privacy!
I just learned about this!
Check this out (always remember, though, "trust but verify")
And an alternative service that can rightly be trusted today
is not necessarily trustworthy tomorrow.
https://restoreprivacy.com/ lists alternative services for everything from Google Docs, iCloud, secure messengers, and
search engines.
some of the hack was semi-sophisticated ("semi" since it could have been an inside job) but
some was just a
typical PICNIC .
i've also been in various IT roles and it's funny how people ghettoize themselves...web
design/"full stack" guys were always the worst but i had a lot of server/NAS guys who had
ZERO clue about security and would use idiot passwords like that (and torrent episodes of
"the wire" and watch sports on youtube and etc etc).
as for the israelis, the cellebrite guys and probably these jackasses are good examples of
what happens when you get to sit around on stolen land and live off free money from the US.
which is funny because a lot of skilled "1337hax0rz" also come from poor-ass areas of russia
and the other former soviet areas.
@Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11
I saw that headline too.
I didn't (bother) to read it, but wondered why the MSM
would do everyone a favor and warn about this guy.
His usefulness had ended? So eke out that last drop of value from him
by sowing distrust within Proud Boys and other alternate organizations. Or (heaven's forbid!) that guy is being set up for assassination
by the Deep State as a false-flag. (Outrageous, simply outrageous,
but imagine if they did a Navalny/Skripal on him - whoa!)
We do seem to have some disagreements among our ruling "elites" these days, and I think
that may have something to do with it, but I really don't know and that is a good question.
"Why are they telling me this" is always a good question.
Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to warn the young these days, so I thought I'd
post it.
Yep. FBI is following the time-tested "proactive" standard playbook of synthetic
terror/crime creation to support the Borg's agenda.
Some congressman a few years back got a hold of, and publically released official docs
showing that FBI was budgeting a yearly payroll for nsome >15,000 paid confidential
informants/agent provacatuers circa 2014(?).
This FBI practice goes all the way back to the 1960's and probably much earlier.
In the last 60+ years, there have been oo many FBI-created/supported domestic
'crime/terror' groups/leaderships to list in one post here.
Likely the leadership of both BLM and US antifa is also controlled by FBI (Euro
antifa=>likely CIA). [CIA Operation Ajax/Kermit Roosevelt)was running paid *rent-a-mobs*
all the way back in the 1953 overthrowal of Iran's Mossadegh govt].
Recently I've been unable to find anything on Wikipedia that has not been corrupted to
some degree or other by lies.
What a disappointment of a once grand ideal.
Young , Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc |
19 I know it is OT, but, I was wondering what is happening with the Huawei Princess in
Canada since the regime change in the USA?
Good report. The Wikileaks Vault 7 release clearly shows the USA has tools to create false
flag cyber warfare. To say one knows where a hack originates says more about the accuser than
the accused. Ms. Webb's reporting on the Epstein case was profound, and her follow-up
reporting on various threads has been stellar. There is no reason to doubt her reporting
here. It is no accident that most of Webb's threads lead back to Israel. When one considers
the USA's blind fealty to Israel, often alone in its support, one must consider that mass
blackmailing of political leaders going back decades is a real possibility to explain the
USA's Israel-centric foreign and domestic policy.
While US officials claim that 'far-right extremism' is one of the largest threats facing
America, the leader of the group most commonly singled out as an example - the Proud Boys -
was a 'prolific' informant for federal and local law enforcement, according to Reuters,
citing a 2014 federal court proceeding.
Enrique Tarrio repeatedly worked undercover for investigators following a 2012 arrest,
court documents reveal.
Curiously, Tarrio was ordered to stay away from Washington D.C. one day before the
January 6 Capitol riot after he was arrested on vandalism and weapons charges - upon a
request by government prosecutors that he be prohibited from attending. At least five Proud
Boys members were charged as part of the riot.
In the 2014 hearing, a federal prosecutor, an FBI agent and Tarrio's attorney describe
his undercover work - noting that the Proud Boys leader helped authorities prosecute over a
dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling, accoding to
Reuters.
In a Tuesday interview with Reuters, Tarrio denied working undercover or cooperating in
cases.
"I don't know any of this," he said, adding "I don't recall any of this."
[...]
During Tarrio's 2014 hearing, both the prosecutor and Tarrio's defense attorney asked
for a reduced prison sentence after pleading guilty in a fraud case related to the
relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits. In requesting leniency for Tarrio and two
co-defendants, the prosecutor noted that Tarrio's information had resulted in the
prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and helped local
authorities investigate a gambling ring.
"... Blatantly frauding the election against Trump wasn't enough and they have to hold show trials and even label the "Deplorables" as terrorists to get back to where they expected to be after the election in 2016. This is why the establishment feels they have to go forward with the second impeachment, and it is why the public is being treated to the spectacle of hysterical, over-the-top hyperbole from the establishment mass media about the threat of imaginary white supremacists and Capitol building insurrectionists. ..."
"... If Trump WAS a "champion" of the right he would've mauled the establishment via prosecutions (that never came) and true 'America First' actions. Instead, we see Biden just picking up where Trump left off. ..."
Part of the reason the establishment ushered Trump into the race in 2016, apart from
thinking that would guarantee Clinton a win, was the intention to socially/culturally
marginalize the "Deplorables" and crush their morale when their "champion" was
brutally humiliated by losing the election bigly. Though Trump winning against all
expectations set back the establishment's plans for rolling out its more "inclusive"
formulation of capitalist exploitation, they are now fully committed to picking up the pieces
of their plans and trying to run with them as if the previous four years never happened.
The
only difference in their plans is that Trump actually was president, so the establishment has
to work much harder at shaming and humiliating the "Deplorables" into subjugation.
Blatantly frauding the election against Trump wasn't enough and they have to hold show trials
and even label the "Deplorables" as terrorists to get back to where they expected to
be after the election in 2016. This is why the establishment feels they have to go forward
with the second impeachment, and it is why the public is being treated to the spectacle of
hysterical, over-the-top hyperbole from the establishment mass media about the threat of
imaginary white supremacists and Capitol building insurrectionists.
Of course the establishment's plans will not work any better now than they did in 2016,
but it should be fun to watch them continue to cluelessly flounder about.
Part of the reason the establishment ushered Trump into the race in 2016, apart from
thinking that would guarantee Clinton a win ...
Firstly, "the establishment" is very broad. I think those who "select" the President is a
much narrower group of power people and the interests they represent. If there's one thing
that they have in common, it is this: their outlook is EMPIRE-FIRST, and the interests they
represent benefit from the Empire.
The Presidency is the lynchpin of the Empire.
There's evidence that Hillary was meant to lose to Trump:
as sheepdog, Bernie all but guaranteed that Hillary would win the Democratic
nomination;
Hillary, a seasoned campaigner made egregious "mistakes" that angered key voter groups
- mistakes that no seasoned campaigner in a 'must win' campaign would do: she snubbed
blacks (she was very cold to BLM); alienated progressives (bringing Debra Wasserman-Schultz
into her campaign); and declared that non-progressive whites were "deplorables."
In the closing weeks of the campaign, she also refused to campaign in the THREE STATES
that SHE KNEW would decide the election.
After Russia stood up to USA in Syria and Ukraine, Kissinger wrote a WSJ Op-Ed (August
2014) that all but called for MAGA! He argued for a return to America's global
leadership/dominance. 10 months later Trump entered the race as the ONLY MAGA!
candidate.
= ... was the intention to socially/culturally marginalize the "Deplorables" and crush
their morale when their "champion" was brutally humiliated ...
But Trump was hardly a "champion" of the Tea Party Republicans in 2015-16. He was just a
billionaire poser that was paying lip service to them. Many weren't sure they could trust him
but he was sure as hell better than Hillary. The popular right's embrace of Trump mostly came
after the election as propaganda from Qanon and others spun every action of Trump's as
heroically fighting the good fight.
= The only difference in their plans is that Trump actually was president ...
And therein lies the rub! If Trump WAS a "champion" of the right he would've mauled the
establishment via prosecutions (that never came) and true 'America First' actions. Instead,
we see Biden just picking up where Trump left off.
"... In reforming the US financial industry, you would need to separate savings and trading banks from investment banks. The 1932 Glass-Steagall legislation and the act based on it did service in that respect up until the late 1990s when it was repealed by the Clinton government. In some countries (Japan being a notable example), the postal service performs savings bank functions. ..."
What in your opinion would be the proper approach [for the Outlaw US Empire to engage
China]? I ask that seriously.
Assuming my reengineering your query is correct, I provided an answer well prior to the
2016 election--Give up on Neoliberalism, the pursuit of Empire and Zero-sumism; go back to
obeying the UN Charter and US Constitution while following the latter's instructions located
in the Preamble; and join with normal nations to help others develop via a global BRI as a
partner with China. Given current political realities, that's just not going to happen.
Instead, I propose the following:
Throw the "vested interests" overboard and work in a Win-Win manner for humanity like
China, its Eurasian Bloc partners, and other like-minded nations. Fundamentally, the pursuit
of Empire and the #1 policy goal of attaining Full Spectrum Domination must be renounced
forever with corresponding adjustments made to the federal government--one of those being an
intense auditing of the entire national defense structure and arrest of those who've
defrauded it for decades. Second, Repeal the Federal Reserve Act and make banking a public
utility, and at the same time arrest the fraudulent banks's and Wall Street firms's people,
seize their assets, and reincorporate the mess into the Treasury Department. Third, repeal
the 1947 National Security Act and all subsequent acts that are incompatible with the ideal
of freedom--Yes, that includes the Patriot Act and such. Fourth, eliminate the Electoral
College via a Constitutional amendment that also makes all elections publicly financed,
mandates a finite amount of free media coverage, removes restrictions on requirements for
appearing on a ballot, and makes "Democracy's Gold Standard" the law of the land. Eliminate
the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and all other armed agencies not directly
concerned with safeguarding the public welfare against the designs of Corporations, which was
the original regulatory rationale adopted in the late 1890s and 1900s. Use existing
Anti-Trust legislation to break up corporations with oligopolistic power. Legislate Social
Media and all other natural monopolies to be public utilities, that would also include public
health. Eliminate the Death Penalty except for Treason and committing an act of corruption
while holding public office at any level of government. Seriously consider removing all
regulatory agencies from the Executive and placing them within a Fourth Branch, The
Regulatory Branch, which would be non-partisan and electoral for 8 years while eliminating
the "Revolving Door." Alter the system of taxation to eliminate any possibility of attaining
a "Free Lunch" while paying particular attention to Capital Gains instead of payroll
income.
It's very likely I omitted a few items, but IMO the above are the most important. Clearly,
the current political paradigm would need drastic alteration for the above, although I doubt
any of the above would be objectionable to a majority of the public once reasons were
provided--which is to say, none of it's really radical since most of what's being rejected
was reactionary to begin with. Doing all that would turn the clock back 120+ years in many
cases prior to the time when nascent Neoliberals captured the federal government and began
their alterations in 1913. It's very interesting to note the biggest political force against
Wilsonian Democracy as it was euphemized was Teddy Roosevelt and his Square Deal for the
American Proletariat. Yet ironically, he made it possible for Wilson to win the election, and
WW1 would have altered his program in some never to be known manner.
Thanks for asking your question dan of steele as I haven't put any of that together for
quite awhile. Until the "vested interests" are removed, however, nothing's going to change
for the better, including relations with China, making their removal the required first
step.
In reforming the US financial industry, you would need to separate savings and trading
banks from investment banks. The 1932 Glass-Steagall legislation and the act based on it did
service in that respect up until the late 1990s when it was repealed by the Clinton
government. In some countries (Japan being a notable example), the postal service performs
savings bank functions.
The system of taxation to be based on land taxation over income taxation.
Stock market transactions to be subject to a transaction fee charged to sellers that is a
percentage of the profit they make on selling stocks. For that matter, stock exchanges should
be public utilities subject to regulation.
... Tokyo Stock Exchange
The third-largest stock exchange in the world is also the largest to not be
publicly-traded. Though the Tokyo Stock Exchange is organized as a joint stock corporation,
those shares are closely held by member firms like banks and brokerages. By contrast, the
smaller Osaka Stock Exchange is publicly-traded, which perhaps befits long-held Japanese
stereotypes about Osaka being more entrepreneurial and less hidebound than Tokyo ...
...Shanghai Stock Exchange
This is the largest stock exchange in the world still owned and controlled by a
government. [My emphasis - Jen.] The Shanghai exchange is operated as a non-profit
entity by the China Securities Regulatory Commission and is arguably one of the most
restrictive of the major exchanges in terms of listing and trading criteria ...
...The Bottom Line
Running an exchange is a great business; it is effectively a monopoly. Those who own
exchanges can require companies to pay listing fees, traders to pay for market access and
investors to pay transaction fees. It is not altogether surprising, then, that there is so
much activity in this space. In addition to the aforementioned major mergers, the Singapore
Exchange is trying to acquire the Australian Stock Exchange, while Brazil's BM&F
Bovespa (once state-owned and now publicly-traded) is looking to expand through acquisition
as well.
While these transactions are interesting to a point, they do not generally help the
individual investor. Unfortunately, trading stocks listed on foreign exchanges is still
difficult (and expensive) for U.S. investors and none of these mergers will change that. Of
course, it is up to the brokerages to offer these services and for investors to demand
them. (Find out how the third-largest stock exchange in North America came to be. Check out
History Of The Toronto Stock Exchange.)
In the meantime, it looks like there is an unmistakable trend in the market of stock
markets towards greater global integration and fewer small independent operators...
Needless to say Beijing must be in no hurry not to relinquish control and regulation of
the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
In reforming the US financial industry, you would need to separate savings and trading
banks from investment banks. The 1932 Glass-Steagall legislation and the act based on it
did service in that respect up until the late 1990s when it was repealed by the Clinton
government. In some countries (Japan being a notable example), the postal service performs
savings bank functions.
My proposition is that cash is the ownership of the common wealth - that the state creates
and manages it. Others use it for a transaction tax on each use. Keep it simple and non
negotiable.
Glaring inequities can be remediated with a close monitored reimbursement system that is
transparent and under continuous audit.
Every account transfer for whatever reason is taxed . If you withdraw cash you pay tax
similar to an ATM fee. etc.
Complicated concession systems are avoided as they immediately invite scammers to skate
around the rigmarole. Yes there will be minor unfairness issues but that sure beats the major
unfairness issues we have in place now. Illegal money laundering requires multiple moves
across accounts and diverse banks to obfuscate the nature of the transactors etc. That would
generate further taxation on those tricks and perhaps reveal the trail.
Yes there will be double tax. But if transaction tax is set at a low rate to not screw the
low income people then it will get their support as they will see that the higher cash users
will be paying more for the privilege. Sliding scales can be configured in such systems but
avoidance is made incredibly difficult.
As psychohistorian often says : its the global private finance banks that we must seize
control of.
The ability of members of U.S. Congress to buy and sell stocks has been controversial over
the years. One of its most prominent members made some purchases in December that could benefit
from the new Biden administration.
What Happened: It was revealed over the weekend
that Speaker of the House and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi purchased 25 call options of Tesla
Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA ). The
purchases could have been done by Pelosi or her husband Paul, who runs a venture capital
firm.
The options were bought at a stake price of $500 and expiration of March 18, 2022. Pelosi
paid between $500,000 and $1,000,000 for the options, according to the disclosure
.
Pelosi also disclosed that she bought 20,000 shares of AllianceBernstein Holdings (NYSE:
AB ), 100 calls of Apple Inc
(NASDAQ: AAPL ) and 100 calls
of Walt Disney Co (NYSE: DIS
).
Tesla shares have risen from $640.34 at the time the calls were purchased to over $890
today. The call options were valued at $1.12 million as of Monday.
Why It's Important: The purchases by Pelosi are questionable as arguments could be made that
the companies stand to benefit from new President Joe Biden's agenda.
Biden's push for electric vehicles, which could include lifting the cap on sales, would give
buyers tax credits again and is advantageous for Tesla. The president has also suggested a
possible cash-for-clunkers program that could incentivize customers for trading in used
vehicles towards the purchase of an electric vehicle.
Pelosi could now have a conflict as she works to pass clean energy initiatives from which
her family could profit.
Former U.S. Senator David Perdue, a Republican, was
criticized for making numerous stock trades during his six years in Congress. Perdue was
the most prominent stock trader from Congress, making 2,596 trades during his time served.
Some of Perdue's transactions came while he was a member of several sub-committees. The
Justice Department investigated Perdue and found no wrongdoing.
quote from an article i am reading on alex ross interview...Alex Ross is the music critic
of The New Yorker, among other things.. its a bit of a controversial comment which i why i am
sharing it..
"America -- people have said this in so many ways -- is in need of the kind of
self-examination that has become widespread in Germany. For all of its problems, the culture
of working through the past is very strong in Germany. Susan Neiman recently wrote a
brilliant book, Learning from the Germans, drawing a line between the German examination of
the Nazi past and the Holocaust and America's, to put it mildly, very incomplete reckoning
with racism, slavery, the Native American genocide, and everything else. As I say in the
book, Germany becomes a sort of alibi for us -- no matter how bad things are here, we're not
that bad. We're not as bad as the Germans. That undertow exists whenever German history and
German culture are discussed in America. Consider the incredible profusion of books on the
Nazi period that you see in bookstores -- there's always an element of wanting to go back
this period when America seemed to be purely on the side of good and the Germans were
absolute evil. It makes us feel better about ourselves. And so we have these Nazi characters
in movies over and over -- good down-to-earth Americans out there battling evil Germans who
are playing Wagner on their Victrolas, which is literally something that happens in one of
the Captain America movies. It's a comforting myth, one that needs to be shaken up a
bit."
Just
like many Trump supporters, US liberal intellectuals exist in a fantasy world in which a
leading purveyor of "international terrorism" – the US government – is perceived as
a fundamentally benign force, Noam Chomsky told RT.
"Just as you can't get the Republican mobs to admit that the election was lost, you can't
get liberal American intellectuals to recognize that the United States is a leading terrorist
state," Chomsky told RT's Chris Hedges.
The facts are that for almost the entirety of its history as a sovereign state, the US has
waged a war of aggression against somebody, Chomsky said. The so-called 'War on Terror', which
Ronald Reagan made the focus of his foreign policy, was Washington dealing with "resistance
to US terrorism in Central America and also in South Africa."
Looks like Dominion now can capitalize on Jan 6 events...
Notable quotes:
"... The lawsuit was filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, DC on Monday. The massive 107-page document lists over 50 statements from Giuliani which he made on Twitter, his podcast, in the media, and during legislative hearings about Dominion – one of the largest companies selling voting machines used in the US. ..."
"... To illustrate the damage presumably done by Giuliani, the lawsuit provides a long list of screenshots from assorted internet uses, primarily from Twitter, fuming at Dominion and accusing it of facilitating the election "steal." The voting machines and sharp spikes in vote counts in favor of Joe Biden, widely attributed to the system, have been among the centerpieces of conspiracy theories for the pro-Trump crowd in the aftermath of the turbulent election. ..."
"... The lawsuit also highlights Giuliani's role in the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, accusing him of stirring up the violence. The document quotes Giuliani's address at the pro-Trump rally shortly before the violence, when he urged supporters to engage in "trial by combat." ..."
Donald
Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems over claims of fraud
during the 2020 US presidential election. The company is seeking $1.3 billion in compensatory
and punitive damages.
The lawsuit was filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, DC on Monday. The massive
107-page document lists over 50 statements from Giuliani which he made on Twitter, his podcast,
in the media, and during legislative hearings about Dominion – one of the largest
companies selling voting machines used in the US.
Giuliani, like many other prominent supporters of former President Donald Trump, has
repeatedly pointed the finger at the company as one of the main culprits behind Trump's
election loss. Dominion has been accused of being part of an alleged plot to fix the election
in favor of the Democrats, which, alongside mass mail-in voting, allegedly facilitated the
"steal" of Trump's presumed 'victory'.
Dominion has accused Giuliani of waging a "viral disinformation campaign" and
repeatedly producing "defamatory falsehoods" about it. It also claimed the allegedly
false statements from Trump's lawyer have stirred up a storm of death threats against its
employees.
To illustrate the damage presumably done by Giuliani, the lawsuit provides a long list of
screenshots from assorted internet uses, primarily from Twitter, fuming at Dominion and
accusing it of facilitating the election "steal." The voting machines and sharp spikes
in vote counts in favor of Joe Biden, widely attributed to the system, have been among the
centerpieces of conspiracy theories for the pro-Trump crowd in the aftermath of the turbulent
election.
The lawsuit also highlights Giuliani's role in the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, accusing him
of stirring up the violence. The document quotes Giuliani's address at the pro-Trump rally
shortly before the violence, when he urged supporters to engage in "trial by
combat."
The company is seeking at least $1.3 billion in compensatory and punitive damages from
Giuliani, demanding a trial by jury, according to the court documents.
The lawsuit against Giuliani largely resembles the one against another pro-Trump lawyer,
Sidney Powell, filed by the company earlier this month. Powell has been accused of waging a
"viral disinformation campaign" as well, with Dominion seeking the same eye-watering sum
of 1.3 billion in damages from her.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"Election results in a county in Michigan had to be corrected to show that President Trump
won by nearly 2,000 votes after voting software gave 6,000 of his votes to Biden ." Which
probably never would have been check if Antrim County wasn't such a Red county. Hard to find
fraud when you refuse to look for it.
LeRuscino2 Sue Brown 11 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 11:08 AM
Exactly - Scream & shout 1st like MH-17 & when it's settled & Guiliani wins
nobody will know or even remember.
Banalucki 3 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 07:46 PM
so classic americana - the business that created an electronic voting "process" that
eliminates chain of custody protection, signatures and voter ID is suing Rudy for "fraud"...
Thomas51 2 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 08:26 PM
Political actions of any lawyer should bear consequences
VonnDuff1 2 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 08:01 PM
SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Policy) and nothing more. Unless you throw in
Kangaroo Courts with Monkey Judges.
Trekker 8 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 02:36 PM
Good to put Giuliani away once and for all for all the damage he has caused.
GottaBeMe Skeptic076 7 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 03:39 PM
They'll have to audit the computer code finally. And they'll have to do it using machines in
swing states that haven't been touched since November. Otherwise it's them saying one thing,
Giuliani saying something else.
Pete Wagner 7 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 03:11 PM
I guess that means they've destroyed all the damning evidence and have their judge briefed,
paid off, and ready to rule.
Sue Brown 12 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 10:53 AM
Typical USA style, don't defend yourself . . . when wronged = SUE!!!!
Enki14 9 hours ago 25 Jan, 2021 01:54 PM
Methinks this is a publicity stunt as they would not want a jury of Powell's peers to see the
evidence Patrick Byrne PH.D. has amassed and the hundreds of witnesses that would be called
to testify on Powell's behalf. Methinks they managed to destroy the evidence on their hard
drives and thus feel the evidence would be viewed as circumstantial. However the pathways are
real, were tracked and saved.
Now Trump has shafted DR Congo because the money was well appreciated by Dan Gertler as
documented by Dershowitz.– "Letting Dan Gertler off the hook sends a message to the world's
most corrupt businesspeople that the U.S. will let them walk free after a bit of
lobbying,"-NYTimes
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's most pervasive foreign policy initiatives have involved Israel, encouraging the Jewish state's attacks on Palestinian, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian targets with impunity, killing thousands of civilians on his watch. Trump has given Israel everything it could possibly ask for, with no consideration for what the U.S. interests might actually be. The only thing he did not do for the Jewish state was to attack and destroy Iran, and even there, reports suggest that he sought to do just that in the waning days of his administration but was talked out of it by his cabinet. ..."
"... But even given all that, Trump the panderer clearly wanted to give one last gift to Israel, and he saved it for his last day in office, when he issued more than 140 pardons and commutations. Though other presidents have issued controversial pardons, no other head of state has so abused the clemency authority to benefit not only friends and acquaintances but also celebrity defendants including rappers, some advocated by the likes of the Kardashians, and also those promoted by monied interests. Most of the pardons went to cronies and to supplicants who were willing to pay in cash or in kind to be set free. It was suggested that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in the selection process and money was often a key element. Some might describe that as corruption. ..."
"... Elliott Broidy, former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, had no less than five Rabbis vouching for him. Last year Broidy had pleaded guilty to acting as an "unregistered foreign agent," part of a larger investigation into the Malaysian "1MDB Scandal" in which Prime Minister Najib Razak stole more than $700 million dollars from his country's state-run 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Broidy worked on behalf of Razak and was offered $75 million if he could get the U.S. Justice Department to drop its own investigation into the scandal. ..."
"... Another clemency beneficiary who exploited his Jewish links was Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who executed one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Just days after being released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes celebrated his daughter's wedding in a lavish party held at his multi-million dollar Florida home. He benefited from a lobbying campaign by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute, a group advised by the ubiquitous former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The movement reportedly has connections to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. ..."
"... Another person pardoned by Trump was Sholam Weiss, a Hasidic businessman from New York who was sentenced to more than 800 years in prison in 2000 for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering connected to a huge fraud scheme that stole $125 million from the National Heritage Life Insurance Company, leading to its bankruptcy. He fled the country but was subsequently arrested in Austria and extradited to the United States. Weiss had reportedly received the endorsement of from Dershowitz, who also recently has been involved in the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell espionage case. ..."
"... Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, a seventy-five year old former Israeli Air Force officer, who was indicted in the U.S. in 1987 for espionage in relation to the Jonathan Pollard spy case. Sella fled to Israel days before Pollard was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. and the Israeli government refused to extradite him. Sella, at the time doing a degree course at New York University, was Pollard's initial contact. He had started working part-time for the Mossad intelligence agency in the early 1980s and received some of the classified top-secret documents provided by Pollard in exchange for money and jewelry. ..."
One keeps hearing that former President Donald Trump will be judged well by the history
books because he was the only American head of state in recent memory who did not start any new
wars. Well, the claim is itself questionable as Jimmy Carter, for all his faults, managed to
avoid entering into any new armed conflict, and Trump can hardly be described as a president
who eschewed throwing his weight around, both literally and figuratively. He attacked Syria on
two occasions based on fabricated intelligence, assassinated an Iranian general, withdrew from
several arms and proliferation agreements, and has been waging economic warfare against Iran,
Syria, Venezuela and Iraq. He has sanctioned individuals and organizations in both China and
Russia and has declared Iranian government components and Yemeni Houthi rebels to be
terrorists. He has occupied Syria's oil producing region to "protect it from terrorists" and
has generally exerted "maximum pressure" against his "enemies" in the Middle East.
So no, Donald Trump is no antiwar activist. But Trump's most pervasive foreign policy
initiatives have involved Israel, encouraging the Jewish state's attacks on Palestinian,
Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian targets with impunity, killing thousands of civilians on his
watch. Trump has given Israel everything it could possibly ask for, with no consideration for
what the U.S. interests might actually be. The only thing he did not do for the Jewish state
was to attack and destroy Iran, and even there, reports suggest that he sought to do just that
in the waning days of his administration but was talked out of it by his cabinet.
Trump's pander to Israel started out with withdrawing from the nuclear monitoring agreement
with Iran, followed by his shutting down the Palestinian offices in the United States, halting
U.S. contributions for Palestinian humanitarian relief, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem,
recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, giving a green light for Israel
to do whatever it wishes on the formerly Palestinian West Bank, and, finally permitting paroled
former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard to go "home" to Israel where he received a hero's welcome.
Trump, to be sure, was aided in his disloyalty to his own country by former bankruptcy lawyer
Ambassador David Friedman in place in Israel, an ardent Zionist and a cheerleader for whatever
atrocities Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to commit. Couple that with a Congress
that gives billions of dollars to Israel annually while bleating that the Jewish state has a
"right to defend itself" and a media that self-censors all the human rights violations and war
crimes that Netanyahu unleashes, and you have a perfect love fest for Israel expressed daily
throughout the United States.
But even given all that, Trump the panderer clearly wanted to give one last gift to Israel,
and he saved it for his last day in office, when he issued more than 140 pardons and
commutations. Though other presidents have issued controversial pardons, no other head of state
has so abused the clemency authority to benefit not only friends and acquaintances but also
celebrity defendants including rappers, some advocated by the likes of the Kardashians, and
also those promoted by monied interests. Most of the pardons went to cronies and to supplicants
who were willing to pay in cash or in kind to be set free. It was suggested that Trump
son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in the selection process and money was often a key
element. Some might describe that as corruption.
Those of us in the actual antiwar plus anti-surveillance-state movement had been hoping that
Trump would actually do something good at no cost to himself, pardoning whistleblowers Edward
Snowden, John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, and Chelsea Manning as well as journalist Julian
Assange. Kiriakou
has reported that when he petitioned for a pardon through one of Trump lawyer Rudi
Giuliani's aides, he was told that such an arrangement would cost $2 million.
Bribes for pardons aside, it would have cost Trump nothing to pardon the whistleblowers and
it would be a vindication of those who had put themselves at risk to attack the machinations of
the Deep State, which Trump had blamed for the coordinated attacks against himself. This was
his relatively cost-free chance to get revenge. Admittedly,
there is speculation that Senator Mitch McConnell may have warned Trump against pardoning
Julian Assange in particular, threatening to come up with enough GOP votes to convict him in
his upcoming impeachment trial if he were to do so. Be that as it may, not a single
whistleblower was pardoned though there was room on the ship for plenty of heinous white collar
criminals. Former Dr. Salomon Melgen, for example, had his sentence commuted. Melgen, a close
friend of the seriously corrupt Senator from New Jersey Robert Menendez got into
trouble in 2009 when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) discovered that
he had overbilled Medicare for $8.9 million for a drug called Lucentis. Two years later
Melgen's business was hit with a $11 million lien from
the IRS and four years after that he was charged and convicted over more than 76 counts of
health care fraud and making false statements.
Some of those pardoned had Jewish organizations going to bat for them. Elliott Broidy,
former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, had
no less than five Rabbis vouching for him. Last year Broidy had pleaded guilty to acting as
an "unregistered foreign agent," part of a larger investigation into the Malaysian "1MDB
Scandal" in which Prime Minister Najib Razak stole more than $700 million dollars from his
country's state-run 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Broidy worked on behalf of Razak and
was offered $75 million if he could get the U.S. Justice Department to drop its own
investigation into the scandal.
Another clemency
beneficiary who exploited his Jewish links was Philip Esformes, a former nursing home
executive who executed one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Just days after
being released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes celebrated his
daughter's wedding in a lavish party held at his multi-million dollar Florida home. He
benefited from a lobbying campaign by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute, a group
advised by the ubiquitous former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz. The movement reportedly has
connections to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Another person pardoned by Trump was Sholam Weiss, a Hasidic businessman from New York who
was
sentenced to more than 800 years in prison in 2000 for racketeering, wire fraud and money
laundering connected to a huge fraud scheme that stole $125 million from the National Heritage
Life Insurance Company, leading to its bankruptcy. He fled the country but was subsequently
arrested in Austria and extradited to the United States. Weiss had reportedly received the
endorsement of from Dershowitz, who also recently has been involved in the Jeffrey
Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell espionage case.
And, of course, there was also the Israel factor. For no plausible reason whatsoever and
contrary to actual American interests, Trump
gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, a seventy-five year old former Israeli Air Force
officer, who was indicted in the U.S. in 1987 for espionage in relation to the Jonathan Pollard
spy case. Sella fled to Israel days before Pollard was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in
Washington D.C. and the Israeli government refused to extradite him. Sella, at the time doing a
degree course at New York University, was Pollard's initial contact. He had started working
part-time for the Mossad intelligence agency in the early 1980s and received some of the
classified top-secret documents provided by Pollard in exchange for money and jewelry.
Sella had passed on the Pollard contact to Mossad's agent handler Rafi Eitan, who continued
to "run" Pollard until he was arrested. Sella's indictment was essentially meaningless theater,
as is generally true of nearly all Israeli spy cases in the U.S., as Tel Aviv refused to
extradite him to the United States and the Justice Department made no attempt to arrest him
when he was traveling outside Israel. Trump's pardon for Sella as a favor to Netanyahu sends
yet another signal that Israel can spy against the U.S. with impunity. The request to Trump for
clemency came from the Israeli government itself and was reportedly endorsed by Netanyahu,
Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, the United States Ambassador to Israel
David Friedman, and Miriam Adelson. According to the White House statement on the pardon, "The
state of Israel has issued what a full and unequivocal apology, and has requested the pardon in
order to close this unfortunate chapter in U.S.-Israel relations."
Was it a gift or merely a pander? Note particularly the inclusion of David Friedman, who as
U.S. Ambassador to Israel is supposed to defend the interests of the United States but never
does so. Once upon a time it was considered a potential conflict of interest to send a Jewish
Ambassador to Israel. Now it seems to be a requirement and the Ambassador is apparently
supposed to be an advocate for Israel as part of his or her mission. Friedman will no doubt be
replaced by a Democratic version to deliver more of the same. And then there is Miriam Adelson.
Good old Sheldon is hardly cold on the ground and his wife has taken up the mantle of
manipulating players in Washington on behalf of the Jewish state.
Money talks and so the drama in Washington continues to play out. Trump manages to make
himself look even worse with his last round of pardons and commutations on his ultimate day in
office. No one who deserved clemency got it and a lot of well-connected rogues who were willing
to fork over money in exchange for mercy benefited. Business as usual delivered by the
so-called Leader of the Free World.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected]
While I whole heartily agree with Dr Giraldi, I strongly believe that Trump was a hostage
of wealthy Jews and Zionists. It is most likely that he has committed misdemeanour while he
was involved (friendship) with Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine who operated an elitist paedophilia
criminal enterprise. The criminal enterprise was to advance the interests of Israel and Jews.
It was used as a honey trap. Remember, Trump was under constant threat by wealthy Jews and by
right-wing Zionists like Senators Mitch McConnell, Robert Menendez, etc. Trump was not a
smart president. He committed heinous crimes on behalf of Israel and wealthy Jews.
All Shabbos goys. Our nation is truly Zionist occupied territory. It has been for a long
time, but under trump it became overt, and will continue to be under Biden.
Our whole reality, in a sense, has become a Talmudic dialectic. The rabbinate's
mouthpiece, our media, disseminates the two sides of that demonic dialectic. The education
system and academia train and mold Shabbos goys and Noahides. We work for them and they see
us as beasts of burden.
Our citizenry likes the slavery they have been placed in. They are content.
So, the Populist is a shill for Israel and Qanon is probably a psy-op run from Tel Aviv. I
wanted to believe there was hope for the USA. I really did. Now we have Biden "I am a
Zionist" with an Israeli cabinet. Was there really election fraud? Will we ever know?
What's next?
I pity those people, probably otherwise good folks, that were conned by this character.
Was a blanket pardon for all Jews and BLACKS just not possible? I'm confident Alan Dershowitz
could have worked through the complex legalities of such a "comprehensive" pardon.
What are a few yid pardons when, unbelievably, Americans routinely mutilate the sex organs
of their male offspring at birth to demonstrate total fealty to the vile Cock Cutter Cult
that rules them ..a practice so bizarre even an equatorial pygmy would laugh at the
practitioners. Of course, the practitioners claim hygienic as well as spiritual benefits look
ma, no dick cheese!
Trump is a crypto Jew. Well at least all his grandkids are ..real Jews. So is Hillary's
grandkid. So corrupted on both side. What's new? Nothing. The only thing remarkable is that
red necks still believe in Trump, hence the white race is doomed.
Agree with most of the article, but calling Jimmy Carter a recent president is more than
just a bit of a stretch.
Carter exited office 40 years ago. The current median age in the US is about 38.4
(2019).
So in the lifetime of a very large portion of Americans there has not been a president that
hasn't started a new war.
Frankly, I don't see why presidents should have the power to pardon. It has been abused so
much that perhaps it's time to strip presidents of that power, or at least there should be an
appeals process or some sort of oversight when that abuse becomes so egregious. Aside from
all the financial criminals, he pardoned actual war criminals, men who murdered innocent
civilians in Iraq. Pardons weren't meant for this.
Of course, leave it to Trump to take it to new levels of corruption as well as abuse. If
John Kyriakou's allegation of Trump's directly selling pardons is true, that should be a
first.
Carter kickstarted funding the Taliban 6 months before the Russians intervened.
I'm nor surprised by Trump's graft, but the whole system of making laws in Congress
includes bribery so nothing new here to see.
Aside from being a bad manager, he is no strategist it seems. Not pardoning Assange means
the GOP are going to vote not to impeach you? How gullible is he? He is getting impeached
whatever he does, he could jump on a literal sword and they'd still impeach him because they
are so offended by the prols.
The sight of Dersh rubbing his hands in the pic is nearly enough to induce this commenter
to say good riddance despite the obviously stolen election and the incoming disaster. I got
the Apolitical Blues.
It would not have mattered whether Donald Trump had pardoned any whistleblowers.
As we can see, the Harris administration is dismantling as much of his legacy as they can,
as fast as they can.
The parts that offend, that is.
It only matters if the CIA pardon Snowden or Assange, else they will forever be looking
over their shoulders, wondering when something will be slipped into their tea, or over their
doorknob..
@Z-man ing
back.
Therefore: stop bad-speak. Stop unauthorized thinking. For the love of God: eradicate
anti-Semitism!
Has Israeli dominance of Zio-Washington and US 'news' ever been greater? Nah. And it may
even be growing. OK, Trump blew the whistle on 'fake news'. But that teaser was pretty much
far as it went.
For all his boldness, Trump realized that–when it came to Israel and the deep
state– he met is match. Time to retreat.
Meanwhile, Israel and Zionist America have basically merged. In the dark of night, no
less.
This article is a full on demolition of the idea that Trumpstein is any sort of patriot. I
can not imagine any patriotic figure in all of human history doing a tenth of what this
shabas goy has done for another country – and one so universally despised as Israel
– and not only getting away with it, but still being praised in certain circles for
standing up for his "motherland". Bonkers.
Go back to the preposterously optimistic article and comments under "A Pardoning Time of
Year," December 29, 2020.
Will his supporters who thought that Mr. Trump would do right, even if only on his way out
the door, now admit that they were duped?
A few, maybe. But there will still be plenty like them for the next Most Important
Election Ever, their dissent channeled into naive, participatory assent to more
Red+Blue governance from Washington.
Amerimutts are either kikes or kike slaves. There is no other places on earth (except
semitic hell, of course), where "huwhites" cut children's foreskin against their will, as
good "Christians".
Disgusting nation of heretics, quadroons, subhumans, kike lovers and yids.
No surprise here, coming from "the best president Israel ever had". Expect more of the
same from the new administration of Israeli stooges. I was hopeful the orange bastard would
pardon Snowden and Assange, oh well.
Pedo Joe is wasting no time showing Jews & Israel he can pander and grovel to Israel
and Jew Inc better than Zion Don.
Look at 10 of his high-level Cabinet appointments..ALL Jews. If they had been all Muslims
or all Chinese, it would've hit the fan and by now, most would have dropped out from that
spot.
But since their Jews, well look the other way you Silly Goyim.
I thought Diversity was our strength?
All 10 of Biden's High Profile Appointees Are Jews
Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State
David Cohen, CIA Deputy Director
Merrick Garland, Attorney General
Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence
Ronald Klain, Chief of Staff
Eric Lander, Office of Science and Technology Policy director
Rachel Levine, deputy health secretary
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security
Anne Neuberger, National Security Agency cybersecurity director
Idiocracy, the director's cut. Trump grabs himself by the pussy in a surprise ending!
Remember, the Phoenix cannot rise from the fire, it has to rise from the ashes. Only then
can the real MAGA begin. See if its true that Bismarck (allegedly) stated that " there is a
special providence for drunkards, fools and the United States of America".
It's pretty fascinating for anyone who knows what's happening to see Jews utterly destroy
and evacuate yet another great civilization by using the same corrupting forces and patterns
used in their clearly deliberate rotting out of Rome, the destruction of the Holy Roman
Empire, then Russia, and now the USA. It's like Jews are a kind of human parasitoid that will
always kill its host as part of its lifecycle after it has drained all energy and resources
from within.
Remember that movie Alien, there the larva like offspring attaches to inject its seed into
humans and then clearly affects the human's nervous system to make them kind of forget that
ever happened as they carry the parasitoid in them that develops and feeds on their body
until the day it bursts from their chest in the form of the beast we know as the alien.
As stated about our in the movie, something along the lines of "pure survival instinct
burned by the limitations of delusions of morality"; pretty much describes how Jews operate
and act, and how they keep infecting and then destroying the very societies and civilizations
they feed on until they burst from their victims' chest.
I wish China all the luck it needs to see this threat from this parasitoid and freed
themselves of it before it infiltrates and infests and feeds on their society out too. By all
indications it is already too late for them too and they just don't realize it yet. The
recent video of the Chinese academic bragging about the control of American officials would
indicate as much, judging by the section of the video that was totally ignored, about the
Jewish woman executive of an American bank who is thick as thieves with the Chinese communist
party who manipulated things for the Chinese in America.
Jimmy Carter, for all his faults, managed to avoid entering into any new armed
conflict
What about Iran. Carter must take responsibility for the mishandling of Iran by letting
the Shah into the US, and failing to withdraw the embassy when it became obvious Iranian
internal politics meant US diplomats were becoming targets.
He attacked Syria on two occasions based on fabricated intelligence.
Russian forces fought a whole war in Syria on a correct appreciation of what could be
gained for Russia.
Trump, to be sure, was aided in his disloyalty to his own country by
America has to come to the aid of its allies, right or wrong, otherwise it will have no
allies.
[J]ournalist Julian Assange
Assange didn't describe himself as simply such until after his legal troubles started.
As for Snowden he wasn't drafted but rather was sought the job. He knew it was was not in
a boy scout group, and the secrets he was swearing an oath to keep were not going to be about
thoroughly wholesome activities such as training guide dogs for the blind. No more than
someone who becomes a made member of the mafia could Snowden be shocked at what the
organization he was associated with was doing.
Business as usual delivered by the so-called Leader of the Free World.
He never claimed to be a global Santa for those who brought nothing to the table.
Trump is pathetic. Anyone still making excuses for him is a battered wife and a sycophant.
I hope they continue to humiliate him now that he's out of office, because it's exactly what
he deserves.
Trump, just like his Republican counterparts, are more despicable than shitlibs and the
radical left, because they lie and stab you in the back every single time. At least the
shitlibs and radical leftists don't pretend they don't absolutely hate us.
If bribe money was paid, how was it spread around, and what besides money can be extracted
in return? A "no" vote on inpeachment? Pardons to Mossad/Israeli connected cases in return
for their pressure on certain politicians on whom they have compromising photos, etc?
A pardon for Assange and Kiriakou takes the pressure off Biden to do so, and these are
Obama political persecutions. And Winner was arrested in what, June 2017, by the FBI for
leaking classified info feeding the feeble Russian election interference narrative? She
posted numerous anti-Trump diatribes.
Sure, they and Snowden deserve pardons, but now the Dems will face dissension, criticism,
and sniping within their own ranks on these matters.
Trump might as well be more corrupted than Joe Biden at this point.
I'm convinced the American deep state removes him because he's actually an Israeli agent
which would make the Zionist scene in USA look bad, like holy hell, is there any zionist jew
he doesn't suck off? That's disgusting.
The hierarchy that controls our government and moral/social values, in order, goes as
follows:
Yids
Nigs
Spics
Trump, loved with under-educated and redneck whites, was an all-out Shabbos goy, not to
mention he was greedy, egotistical/egoistical and a self-serving liar.
In many ways Trump has been like a Terminator sent by the Jewish Establishment to
completely derail, discredit and destroy the Patriot movement in America. Now any American
Patriot who is against the U.S. Establishment and says CNN is fake news is automatically
associated with Trump and deemed an enemy of America. Can you say Mission Accomplished? The
Jewish Snake must be patting itself on the back for its brilliant move to hurt the greatest
threat to it in a long time.
Unfortunately there are many people who still believe that Trump was a great President
sent by God to save America. It makes me sad to see so many people so clueless. I wish that
all those still supporting Trump will wake up and recognize as so many others have that the
man is nothing but a Snake who knows how to speak your language while totally betraying your
cause. How can you support a two faced man like this who has hurt your cause more than anyone
else possibly could?
EDIT TO ADD: Trump left office in disgrace just as was intended but the real disgrace is
not on Trump but on the American Patriot movement. Now the American Patriot movement is in a
far worse position than it was in 2016 before it accepted Trump as its leader. We were
greatly deceived but in 2020 there is no excuse for anyone to still be deceived about Trump.
He completely betrayed our cause and it was all by design. His entire purpose for becoming
POTUS was, outside of giving Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to Israel (his true loyalty), to
turn our cause into something that the American public would perceive as ugly and to be
shunned when in reality our cause is very noble. We were played by Trump and his Jewish
backers but that is now in the past. Let us stop talking about this man once and for all. He
is nothing but a distraction away from what it is important to us. I consider anyone still
supporting Trump at this point or in the future to be an enemy. http://www.chuckmaultsby.net/id55.html
Providing mucho fertilizer for excellent articles like this which expose the hideous and
disgusting perfidy of the Zionist sewer and its catamites is only worth of the Chrumpster and
his time as Netanyahu's orifice.
@Ron G , just
get me into the WH.
Which will happen, we'll have a power-mad prez that has never won any primaries doing
Israel's blood work.
THERE'S A WAR GOING ON OVER KAMALA HARRIS'S WIKIPEDIA PAGE, WITH UNFLATTERING
ELEMENTS VANISHING
A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017, where she
met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was removed altogether.
My comment a few days ago on transgenerational hate got a lot of negative feed back. You
are correct though, boomers and church goers worship the yids, despite what Jesus said about
them and later Martin Luther.
"I've never seen a President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them. It just
boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the
time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people
understood what a grip these people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our
citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on." – Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, interview, 24 Aug. 1983
Now that "Zion Don" appears to be out of the way, we can get back to encouraging illegals,
giving them their rights, setting our sights on the another Hitler in Syria, globalizing
what's left of the industrial base, getting trannies more judgeships, queering history, and
on and on cuz all dem ideas are homegrown and strictly non-kosher.
I thought the pardons were great. Who knew there were so many criminal Jews who have been
actually convicted? Its almost like the Jewish stereotypes are really true. Does that mean no
one can be anti Semitic? Also the way black rappers get killed off, supply and demand
dictates jailed ones need to be free. Very Reaganesque.
Sarcasm aside I think Jews tended to hate Trump because in sucking up to them, The Donald
wound up revealing many ugly truths. Outside of Trump's energy and environmental policies,
its a good riddance from me. Unfortunately the looming costs related to energy and taxes,
I'll eventually and unfortunately will wind up missing the weak and Ivanka sniffing SOB.
Run for president in 2024. Ya' got one vote here. You can use the catchphrase, "Make
America Independent Again". Red, White, and Blue hats, etc. Your campaign rally speeches
would be epically entertaining in the gnashing of establishment journo's teeth as they
described them.
Drumpf the rancid orange golem played you all to the very last coda, pissing in your eyes
as he pardoned a most rancorous group of bent buddies and chosen criminal diversities . maga
men hung to dry, swinging in the wind.
Half of america shafted and stockholm syndromed, as the fake fat narcissist waltzes of to
play golf and hide the ginger squirrel with the reanimated frank-epstein and his
transhumanised teenage sorority clones in tel-aviv.
by the way see where this link leads: antifa.com .
hint: the whitehouse.
@LarryS nd
its American friends get what they want, no matter what.
Trump was terrible and I'm glad to see him gone. Problem is Biden & Co. will probably
be worse, letting in countless third worlders and pandering to BLM, trannies and countless
other perverts and sexual curiosities.
Neither party represents the interests of the American people. Did we really want 14
million illegals here and $6 trillion spent on failed adventures in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,
etc.?
I harken back to H L Mencken who said both parties spend their time proving the other is
unfit to govern and are both right.
The pardoning of the Blackwater scum has fascinating implications for any country with a
Status of Forces Agreement /Visiting Forces Agreement, which is what, 80% of the world?
A host country might want to revisit these terms if it means that their women &
children could be raped, killed, mutilated whilst the perpetrators walk free.
This is beyond belief. Are Americans blind? Is there something in the water they
drink?
A whole population bent over with their posteriors pointed at the sky, willingly accepting
the abuse by the zionists.
Love them or hate them, these jews dream big. Bravo
Another on target Giraldi article. The ultimate blame for our being occupied and used
without a shot being fired is with American gullibility and blindness. How does a global
power, in almost every way, become the lap dog, errand boy, bully and financier for such an
ungrateful, blood sucking little country? We have created a Frankenstein Monster for the
world.
@SolontoCroesus
ight Palestinians were there even if there was strong Israel Lobby domestic pressure. But in
1979 Carter–distracted by the fall of the Shah–merely brokered a Egyptian-Israeli
peace treaty deal that eliminated Egypt from the conflict, and the lack of the deterrent they
represented meant meant hat Israel was free to do what it liked in the West Bank and attack
Lebanon. The Palestinians will never get another US president like Carter. Israel does not
want an agreement, the current situation suits them very well. So Iran is not deterring
Israel from doing anything it wants to do. Moreover, Israel likes having a pseudo threat like
Iran.
Well I have to say this comes as a surprise. To think that American politicians take
bribes, favour one particular group etc etc is news to me. However, Trump catering to the
foreskin modifiers and the dick cheese eliminators is the good news.
The bad news is the new team is already in bed not only with the foreskin challenged
sticks, but with the chopsticks and every other stick with a dollar bill wrapped around the
head. When the 25th collides with Joe's worn out pecker and Kamala takes over that will be
the sign that circumcised or not we are all fucked.
As some readers commented on UR, honesty is the best policy, turn the other cheek and love
conquers hate. All good advice I am sure but redundant and inapplicable in the world we live
in.
The ruled live by these rules but the rulers live by their own !
"... For a long time, I thought that record numbers of Black and Hispanic voters supporting Trump in 2020 meant that Trump was not racist, but I now realize that these poor folks just suffered from "multiracial whiteness". ..."
"... I thought that questioning voting machines that had been caught red handed manipulating elections across the world was patriotic and that somehow some conglomeration of Big Tech, the media, intelligence agencies and a thing called "deep state" were colluding to create a color revolution in the USA but I now realize that I was actually supporting conspiracy theories and thus violence and thus domestic terrorism. ..."
"... Social Media should do its civic duty and extend its censorship of "dangerous thoughts" to citizens and political officials outside of the USA in order to protect the world from itself. ..."
"... all I can say is "thank god" Joe Biden has found himself in the position of leader of the free world at this historic moment of change. ..."
"... Joe Biden is a man who understands what liberal values and the "rules-based order" are really about. ..."
"... He was wise enough to get onto the unipolar bandwagon before it was popular by drafting the 1994 surveillance bill that John Ashcroft later used verbatim for the Patriot Act after 9/11 ..."
"... He was smart enough to know that Wall Street couldn't lead America into the 21 st century as long as Glass-Steagall was in place and voted for its repeal in 1999. ..."
"... He also gave the Credit Card companies the political support they needed to stop citizens from abusing their generosity which went a long way to help Americans build character and take responsibility for their short sighted consumer decisions. ..."
"... Unlike those cultish Trumping fascists, Biden was courageous enough to proclaim even before the horrible insurrectionary riots of January 6 th , that a new Patriot Act/Domestic Terror Bill would be needed to purge the republic of dangerous terrorism and the insidious thought crimes which spread doubt in honest elections, and distrust in the benevolent political structures leading the western world. ..."
"... Sure, some people think that the 46 deaths and 32 riots caused by Antifa and BLM over the past six months might qualify as domestic terrorism, but that's only because they are infected with racist wrong think and don't realize that these groups were just fighting against fascism and racism. ..."
As many people are aware, CNN recently aired a wonderful interview by former Moonie-turned-cult-deprogrammer Steve Hassan giving
advice to Americans wishing to deprogram their MAGA-hat wearing loved ones, now that the age of Trump is coming to an end.
I was fortunate enough to have read Hassan's book and had the loving scrub-brush of truth wash my brain of all of its formerly
pro-Trump sympathies and can honestly say that I am most certainly better off for having left those old delusions in the past.
For one thing, I used to enjoy my right to free speech but thanks to the terrible events of January 6, 2021 that left 3 people
dead, horned Q supporters doing photo ops for media
, pro-Trump rioters let into
the capitol building by guards , and busloads of conspicuous
violent figures whom some say were "provocateurs" (whatever that means), I have come to realize that I was all wrong. Free speech
is actually very dangerous. Words we took for granted like "patriot", "nationalism", or "vote fraud" are actually very racist and
using them is a sure fire sign that you might be a domestic terrorist. At any rate, using them should at least be enough to get someone
banned from social media and put under surveillance.
For a long time, I thought that record numbers of Black and Hispanic voters supporting Trump in 2020 meant that Trump was
not racist, but I now realize that these poor folks just suffered
from "multiracial whiteness".
I thought that
questioning voting machines that had been caught red handed manipulating elections across the world was patriotic and that somehow
some conglomeration of Big Tech, the media, intelligence agencies and a thing called "deep state" were colluding to create a color
revolution in the USA but I now realize that I was actually supporting conspiracy theories and thus violence and thus domestic terrorism.
I was so far gone that my pre-deprogrammed self was actually persuaded in the crazy idea that depopulation agendas hid behind
the cover of a "Great Reset agenda", concocted by a shadowy elite of sociopathic oligarchs. I have now learned that this was either
a silly conspiracy theory, the result of my own delusions or if it was true, then I can at least say with certainty that it is all
for my own good.
The truth that I have now come to discover, is that free speech has just gone too far. This practice has reached its limits, and
Twitter's legal executive
Vijaya Gadde is absolutely
right . Social Media should do its civic duty and extend its censorship of "dangerous thoughts" to citizens and political
officials outside of the USA in order to protect the world from itself. If other world leaders are worried about this new truth,
then they should seriously do some soul searching and learn to think differently.
The old me is long gone, and now all I can say is "thank god" Joe Biden has found himself in the position of leader of the
free world at this historic moment of change.
For awhile it was looking like Donald Trump would actually stop
forever wars, and untie the U.S. military's
involvement from the CIA . That white supremacist actually came precariously close to destroying the foundations of globalization
that many enlightened billionaires had put decades of energy into organizing -- first destroying Obama's Transpacific Partnership,
then the Paris Climate Accords and THEN he had the nerve to scrap NAFTA itself by giving nation states a say in economic affairs!
He even committed the sin of criticizing NATO itself -- the very foundation of western collective security from the obvious threats
of Russia and China!
He called for insane things like "bringing back manufacturing to the USA", "restoring protectionism", and "making space exploration
and arctic development a priority for the nation" and everyone knows that this is all so 1963.
But now the "disturbance" is over, and the age of Biden has arrived!
Joe Biden is a man who understands what liberal values and the "rules-based order" are really about.
He was wise enough to get onto the unipolar bandwagon before it was popular by
drafting the 1994 surveillance
bill that John Ashcroft later used verbatim for the Patriot Act after 9/11.
He was smart enough to know that Wall Street couldn't lead America into the 21 st century as long as Glass-Steagall
was in place and voted for its
repeal in 1999.
He was one of the
loudest supporters of NAFTA which helped reduce carbon emissions drastically by exporting dirty industrial jobs oversees where
they should be.
He also gave the Credit Card companies
the political support they needed to stop citizens from abusing their generosity which went a long way to help Americans build
character and take responsibility for their short sighted consumer decisions.
After 9/11, Biden also brilliantly supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (who may not have had anything to do
with 9/11 but at least showed the terrorists who's boss).
Unlike those cultish Trumping fascists,
Biden was courageous enough to proclaim even before the horrible insurrectionary riots of January 6 th , that a new
Patriot Act/Domestic Terror Bill would be needed to purge the republic of dangerous terrorism and the insidious thought crimes which
spread doubt in honest elections, and distrust in the benevolent political structures leading the western world. Thinking people
know, that thought does sometimes cause action and if we want to truly remedy wrong actions like the riots of January 6 th
, or dangerous COVID-denialism, then we should most certainly take the battle to the realm of the mind.
The brilliant Steve Hassan even recognized this reality in his CNN interview when he said that "the bottom line is all of America
needs deprogramming because we've all been negatively influenced by Donald Trump."
Sure, some people think that the 46 deaths and 32 riots caused by Antifa and BLM over the past six months might qualify as
domestic terrorism, but that's only because they are infected with racist wrong think and don't realize that these groups were just
fighting against fascism and racism.
Certainly, the first 100 days after Biden's inauguration will be inspired.
Already, Biden has made commitments to sign the USA back onto the legally binding Paris Climate Accords to help us win the war
against climate, and has shown the good sense to reverse Trump's disastrous decision to break the anti-China TPP in 2016. Biden always
said he would renegotiate the TPP
in order "to
hold China accountable", and everyone knows Trump's selfish decision only helped China by freeing up its neighbors to work together
on the BRI. If only Trump hadn't killed TPP, then the 14 nation strong
Regional Cooperation Economic Partnership
which China just finalized would never have happened.
Most importantly, our benevolent overlords who meet at Davos every year are happy once more and have even kicked off Biden's inauguration
with a special celebration entitled "the Davos Agenda" running from January 25-29.
According to the WEF , this event
will "mark the launch of the World Economic Forum's Great Reset Initiative and begin the preparation of the Special Annual Meeting
in the spring. Each day will focus on one of the five domains of the Great Reset Initiative."
The USA's new Special Envoy on Climate, John Kerry, captured the excitement of this wonderful moment perfectly
when
he said : "The notion of a reset is more important than ever before we're at the dawn of an extremely exciting time." According
to the
Great Reset architects, this is definitely the right idea. WEF President Klaus Schwab has taught us that the "age of owning things"
is so passe , and we know that this obsolete relic of capitalism isn't compatible in our new age of global peace and brotherhood.
Ownership of "things" just makes us selfish and forget about the real purpose of life.. which is really about sacrifice. Establishing
new supranational organizations to manage the levers of consumption and production according to evidence-based standards and scientific
realities of carrying capacity is the only remedy to the evils of populism and being ignorant to this reality doesn't lessen the
fact that boards of experts who are smarter than you say that it is so.
According to the WEF's Great Reset website global CO2 output collapsed by over 7% during the 12 months of global COVID-19 shutdowns
which means the COVID-19 is more of a blessing than many dim witted selfish nationalists who like owning things realize.
So what if the world population will contract under the shutdown of the world economy under COVID lockdowns? And so what if we
lose our capacity to support industrial civilization through the imposition of global green energy grid?
Didn't the late
great Maurice
Strong (who was WEF Executive Director and father of the Great Reset), ask the question in 1991:
"What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of
the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact
on the environment. Will they do it? The group's conclusion is 'no'. The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in
order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"
So get ready for an exciting time in history, and hopefully China finally learns that the new world order is Unipolar – with a
big green hug for all well behaved leaders who get rid of such silly ideas as "nationalism", "industrial progress" or "ending poverty
through development" which dangerous concepts like the Belt and Road Initiative threaten to unleash. Most importantly, China has
to really deprogram itself from her belief that Russia is a worthwhile partner in the 21 st century. Xi made a good decision
to attend this month's Great Reset conference and both he and Modi would do well to abandon dirty fossil fuels, their support of
nuclear energy development or space mining in order to adapt their realities to the computer models which have been telling us how
to hitch our destinies to a world of entropy and diminishing returns.
"... Let's see, Sanders's net worth is how much again? And, let's see, after The Machine denied him the Dem nomination in both 2016 and 2020, it took him how long to endorse and sign on and generally drop trou, bend over, and grab his aged ankles? ..."
"... Yep, there's a real anticapitalist revolutionary firebrand, all right. ..."
"... I agree with Reactionary Utopian's view of Sanders, who revealed himself to be a grovelling lackey of the establishment with the way he campaigned for the harpy, signed on to the absurd anti-Russian propaganda initiative, and showed that he was only controlled opposition. The fact is, the propaganda combined with the fraud, perfected as a result of the medico-fascism discussed by Hopkins enabled the steal. The usage of the provocation discussed in the main article completed the consolidation of what is a new model of a fascist regime. This followed Goebbels' playbook usage of the Reichstag fire provocation as the Nazi regime was consolidating power. ..."
Back in 2016, the American people, sick to the gills of global capitalism and its
increasingly oppressive woke ideology, elected an unauthorized, narcissistic ass-clown to
the highest office in the land.
Well, if the American people had really been sick of global capitalism they would have
voted for Sanders. He may not be perfect, but he made a lot more sense as an anti-capitalist
candidate than Trump. Trump has done nothing to curb global capitalism during his
administration. Being narcissistic and clownish is probably of minor importance and beside
the point, and bringing it up seems more like obfuscation. Trump was the status quo every bit
as much as Hillary. He was demonized for one simple reason: there are two parties in America.
And Trump didn't make it especially hard for them.
Well, if the American people had really been sick of global capitalism they would have
voted for Sanders. He may not be perfect, but he made a lot more sense as an
anti-capitalist candidate than Trump.
Ah, thanks, I needed a good laugh today. Let's see, Sanders's net worth is how
much again? And, let's see, after The Machine denied him the Dem nomination in both 2016 and
2020, it took him how long to endorse and sign on and generally drop trou, bend over,
and grab his aged ankles?
Yep, there's a real anticapitalist revolutionary firebrand, all right.
I agree with Bras Cubas that if the American people were really sick of global capitalism
they would have voted for Sanders. The fact is, they did, and the methods of fraud developed
to deprive Sanders of his victory were a sort of rehearsal of the methods used to sideline
Trump. There was quite a bit of fraud in 2016; ballot harvesting, and the manipulation of
postal votes, etc. but Trump unexpectedly did too well for it to work. They also did not have
the virus as an excuse to go full monty on the fraud.
I agree with Reactionary Utopian's view of Sanders, who revealed himself to be a
grovelling lackey of the establishment with the way he campaigned for the harpy, signed on to
the absurd anti-Russian propaganda initiative, and showed that he was only controlled
opposition. The fact is, the propaganda combined with the fraud, perfected as a result of the
medico-fascism discussed by Hopkins enabled the steal. The usage of the provocation discussed
in the main article completed the consolidation of what is a new model of a fascist regime.
This followed Goebbels' playbook usage of the Reichstag fire provocation as the Nazi regime
was consolidating power.
Kudos again to Hopkins on this article and all of the preceding ones. As an additional
fact, we should discuss the mask deal. It is the first time in history that any regime of any
description has actually restricted the right to breathe, which at the end of the day is
limiting the right to live. The present regime for that reason seems even more odious than
the Nazi regime in that aspect.
P.S. Bernie was a rabid socialist(communist), and many in America wanted no part of
that.
Sanders is neither socialist nor communist. He's a con man. The overwhelming majority of
dumbed down America thinks socialism is communism, and actually think that finance capitalism
is friendly to them.
Democrats introduce their first bill in the House: H.R.1 – The bill that will destroy
America. Nationwide mail-in voting, banning restrictions on ballot harvesting, banning voter
ID, criminal voters,DC Statehood roadwork, it's all in here.
1) Internet-only registration with electronic signature submission.
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"(a) Requiring Availability Of Internet For Online Registration. -- Each State, acting
through the chief State election official, shall ensure that the following services are
available to the public at any time on the official public websites of the appropriate State
and local election officials in the State, in the same manner and subject to the same terms and
conditions as the services provided by voter registration agencies under section 7(a):
"(1) Online application for voter registration.
2) Banning the requirement to provide a full SSN for voter registration.
SEC. 1005. PROHIBITING STATE FROM REQUIRING APPLICANTS TO PROVIDE MORE THAN LAST 4 DIGITS OF
SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. (a) Form Included With Application For Motor Vehicle Driver's License.
-- Section 5(c)(2)(B)(ii) of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (52 U.S.C.
20504(c)(2)(B)(ii)) is amended by striking the semicolon at the end and inserting the
following: ", and to the extent that the application requires the applicant to provide a Social
Security number, may not require the applicant to provide more than the last 4 digits of such
number;".
Note that motor voter registration is how thousands of illegal became registered voters
in California and Nevada.
(2) DEFINITION. -- The term "automatic registration" means a system that registers an
individual to vote in elections for Federal office in a State, if eligible, by electronically
transferring the information necessary for registration from government agencies to election
officials of the State so that, unless the individual affirmatively declines to be registered,
the individual will be registered to vote in such elections.
4) 16 year olds required to be registered to vote.
(d) Treatment Of Individuals Under 18 Years Of Age. -- A State may not refuse to treat an
individual as an eligible individual for purposes of this part on the grounds that the
individual is less than 18 years of age at the time a contributing agency receives information
with respect to the individual, so long as the individual is at least 16 years of age at such
time. Nothing in the previous sentence may be construed to require a State to permit an
individual who is under 18 years of age at the time of an election for Federal office to vote
in the election.
"(1) REGISTRATION. -- Each State shall permit any eligible individual on the day of a
Federal election and on any day when voting, including early voting, is permitted for a Federal
election --
"(A) to register to vote in such election at the polling place using a form that meets the
requirements under section 9(b) of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (or, if the
individual is already registered to vote, to revise any of the individual's voter registration
information); and
"(B) to cast a vote in such election.
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6) Grants ($25M) for using minors in election activities.
(1) IN GENERAL. -- The Election Assistance Commission (hereafter in this section referred to
as the "Commission") shall make grants to eligible States to enable such States to carry out a
plan to increase the involvement of individuals under 18 years of age in public election
activities in the State.
7) More children voters.
"(k) Acceptance Of Applications From Individuals Under 18 Years Of Age. --
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"(1) IN GENERAL. -- A State may not refuse to accept or process an individual's application
to register to vote in elections for Federal office on the grounds that the individual is under
18 years of age at the time the individual submits the application, so long as the individual
is at least 16 years of age at such time.
8) Prohibiting attempts to clean voter rolls of non-residents.
It's this whole section, but in particular, this part below basically says nobody is
allowed to request voter rolls to be cleaned up. ie: making it illegal to do what Tom Fitton
was doing.
"(1) REQUIREMENTS FOR CHALLENGES. -- No person, other than a State or local election
official, shall submit a formal challenge to an individual's eligibility to register to vote in
an election for Federal office or to vote in an election for Federal office unless that
challenge is supported by personal knowledge regarding the grounds for ineligibility which is
--
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9) Murderers and rapists can vote.
(1) NOTIFICATION. -- On the date determined under paragraph (2), each State shall notify in
writing any individual who has been convicted of a criminal offense under the law of that State
that such individual has the right to vote in an election for Federal office pursuant to the
Democracy Restoration Act of 2021 and may register to vote in any such election and provide
such individual with any materials that are necessary to register to vote in any such
election.
10) Mandatory early voting.
Note that I personally like early voting in Florida, but putting it here anyway.
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"(1) IN GENERAL. -- Each State shall allow individuals to vote in an election for Federal
office during an early voting period which occurs prior to the date of the election, in the
same manner as voting is allowed on such date.
11) THE BIG ONE – NATIONWIDE VOTE BY
MAIL, BAN ON BALLOT PROTECTION MEASURES, LEGALIZED LIMITLESS BALLOT HARVESTING.
"SEC. 307. PROMOTING ABILITY OF VOTERS TO VOTE BY MAIL.
"(a) Uniform Availability Of Absentee Voting To All Voters. --
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"(1) IN GENERAL. -- If an individual in a State is eligible to cast a vote in an election
for Federal office, the State may not impose any additional conditions or requirements on the
eligibility of the individual to cast the vote in such election by absentee ballot by mail.
"(2) ADMINISTRATION OF VOTING BY MAIL. --
"(A) PROHIBITING IDENTIFICATION REQUIREMENT AS CONDITION OF OBTAINING BALLOT. -- A State may
not require an individual to provide any form of identification as a condition of obtaining an
absentee ballot, except that nothing in this paragraph may be construed to prevent a State from
requiring a signature of the individual or similar affirmation as a condition of obtaining an
absentee ballot.
"(B) PROHIBITING REQUIREMENT TO PROVIDE NOTARIZATION OR WITNESS SIGNATURE AS CONDITION OF
OBTAINING OR CASTING BALLOT. -- A State may not require notarization or witness signature or
other formal authentication (other than voter attestation) as a condition of obtaining or
casting an absentee ballot.
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"(2) PERMITTING VOTERS TO DESIGNATE OTHER PERSON TO RETURN BALLOT. -- The State --
"(A) shall permit a voter to designate any person to return a voted and sealed absentee
ballot to the post office, a ballot drop-off location, tribally designated building, or
election office so long as the person designated to return the ballot does not receive any form
of compensation based on the number of ballots that the person has returned and no individual,
group, or organization provides compensation on this basis; and
"(B) may not put any limit on how many voted and sealed absentee ballots any designated
person can return to the post office, a ballot drop off location, tribally designated building,
or election office.
12) Banning voter ID.
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"(1) IN GENERAL. -- Except as provided in subsection (c), if a State has in effect a
requirement that an individual present identification as a condition of receiving and casting a
ballot in an election for Federal office, the State shall permit the individual to meet the
requirement --
"(A) in the case of an individual who desires to vote in person, by presenting the
appropriate State or local election official with a sworn written statement, signed by the
individual under penalty of perjury, attesting to the individual's identity and attesting that
the individual is eligible to vote in the election; or
13) Roadwork for DC statehood and territory statehood.
I suspect that GloboCap will eventually – and in a very controlled fashion –
allow some normalcy to resume, once they're finished with the lesson of Covid lockdowns and
once they're convinced that the "domestic terrorist" propaganda is sufficiently internalized
by enough people to sustain a subtle but pervasive level of distrust, paranoia, and
suppression of dissent.
Thus, the illusion of democracy will return and the booboise will once again be permitted
their panem et circenses – sportsball matches, concerts, pubs, in-person
schooling, and art fairs – as long as GloboCap feels convinced that those things will
no longer be fertile ground for spreading populism.
The carrot will return, but the stick will now always be hanging like the sword of
Damocles.
I see occasional mentions of Goebbels, and his words about propaganda, like this from you,
Hoppy.
But Goebbels was just a baby in his mother's arms relative to our voter "democracy" for
which, unlike the original Athenian democracy, which beyond general assembly had
representatives elected by lot, has representatives elected by voters who are already victims
of propaganda.
The word "democracy" as used today it itself pure propaganda. Again and again America
commits naked aggression against distant countries while shouting "Democracy!" Totally fake,
pure propaganda, making Goebbels look like a child.
I wonder how many people picked up Pres. Biden's passing reference to Russia paying
bounties for American scalps (in Afghanistan). It was a 24-hr. story long ago and died
quickly for lack of evidence and logic. But Biden keeps using it, as he did in one of the
'debates' with Trump. Two questions arise. 1. Does Biden really believe the story or does he
use it to score patriotism points? Either way it reflects very badly on him. 2. Is the bounty
myth a distant cousin of Russiagate or is it a signal of a renewed pursuit of the Cold War by
Biden and his hawkish appointees?
Mikhailovich , January 23, 2021 at 00:56
US politicians will carry on with their Russo-phobia anyway. What really is good about the
new administration, they are not so keen for a new nuclear arm race as Trump was. It looks,
the new administration is less subordinate to the military industrial complex.
Mark Thomason , January 22, 2021 at 18:48
Russia/Putin is a way to talk about anything but. That is what Never Trump was, avoidance
of things they did not mean to do. Now they need to reinforce the smoke and mirrors behind
which they do Triangulation to serve the interests of elites and big money.
What is particularly hard to fathom is not so much the gross dishonesty and malice of
politicians like H. Clinton and Pelosi but the boneheaded stupidity and ignorance of the
broad population that accepts fables like Russiagate as fact.
This is a testament to the immense power of propaganda, when repeated on a daily basis by
the mass media.
Joe Lauria says convincingly, "Russiagate was an invention to help explain away Hillary
Clinton's defeat in 2016 and to undermine the legitimacy of the man who beat her."
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, the "stab in the back legend" in post-World War I
Germany was an invention by the extreme right wing and later Nazis to help explain away
Germany's defeat in that war and to undermine the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, putting
the blame on domestic "enemies" in cahoots with foreign adversaries.
Very much the same thing.
Russiagate was aimed at President Trump and a foreign enemy. Now, following the "new 9/11"
of the Capitol Riot and planned domestic "antiterrorism" legislation, it looks like the state
will mainly go after "domestic enemies". A new Reichstag Fire has occurred. The parallels are
becoming ever more apparent.
Bob In Portland , January 22, 2021 at 18:51
Russiagate was well afoot in the summer of 2016. It wasn't merely to slander Trump. It was
to prepare us for a war against Russia.
If I had access to network time I'd ask: If Russiagate is true, and if you have proof, why
wasn't Trump charged with treason? You had two chances to do it but Democratic leadership
never thought to bring it up. How curious.
DH Fabian , January 22, 2021 at 22:01
Yes. Just one point: Russia wasn't a "foreign enemy" until the Clintonites falsely claimed
that they somehow interfered with the 2016 election. Russia was a solid ally in both world
wars. Since the Perestroika era, united efforts of US and Russian scientists brought
extraordinary progress. There was solid unity from the fall of the Soviet state in the 1990s,
until the Clintonites falsely accused Russia of some sort of "election interference." This is
how the Democrats destroyed decades of diplomatic progress toward nuclear disarmament.
PEG , January 23, 2021 at 05:16
I agree – I didn't mean "enemy" in the literal sense, but rather in the sense you
refer to.
JohnO , January 23, 2021 at 12:43
Russian propaganda from the beginning has always and ever been to secure vast sums of
revenue from the people's' taxes, and to scare the crap out of those same people. When Truman
dropped the first A-bomb on Hiroshima, he remarked that 'this will let the Russians know that
we are serious', or words to that effect. He slaughtered an urban populace to make a point!
And generations of Americans were raised in fear of Russians and nuclear war.
The current state of domestic surveillance is a self-conscious recognition, I believe, of the
wholly irresponsible policies of the two parties. Third-rate healthcare, pathetic public
education, mass incarceration, and massive deregulation in the industrial and financial
sectors. All to pay for wars and control across the globe. It is an arrangement that will
continue to provoke protests, insurrection and conspiracy theorizing.
evelync , January 22, 2021 at 13:43
I find it amusing that the top ranks of the political hacks whose psy-ops that use Russia
as the great threat against "the most powerful country in the world" – these hacks
choose to ignore the real, the relevant investigation that should be in the forefront –
the money trails of Trump's so called financial empire – the banks, the oligarchs, the
money laundering – the sources of his funding over the years who really would have had
the opportunity to push him around ..
Investigating the finances may be too uncomfortable for them to examine .. Even though his
financial schemes hurt real people – wages unpaid, debts unpaid; bankruptcies; students
betrayed.
On another note – Amy Goodman on Democracy Now's 1/21/21 news summary pointed out
that the Biden Administration was sticking with Gaido being the "recognized" leader of
Venezuela ..the democratically elected Maduro remains the target, apparently .
meanwhile FT writes that the "EU dropped its de facto recognition of Juan Guaidó as
Venezuela's interim president, a serious diplomatic setback to the opposition leader's
faltering campaign to oust Nicolás Maduro from power."
wikipedia:
"Venezuela is a major producer and exporter of minerals, notably bauxite, coal, gold, iron
ore, and oil, and the state controls most of the country's vast mineral reserves. In 2003
estimated reserves of bauxite totaled 5.2 million tons."
countries in South America with Lithium ( used in batteries for electric vehicles) and who
have democratic minded politicians who think their people should get some benefit from the
country's resources watch out for other U.S favored Guaidó's ..
Anonymot , January 22, 2021 at 13:11
Thanks for raising the subject, Joe.
It's really to ridiculous to merit a reply. One would think an honest party would have
excreted Hillary Clinton by now, but no, they can't. She still owns the DNC as I've repeated
for years and note that Neither Joe Biden nor Harris nor any member of Biden's cabinet would
be there without the DNC/Hillary stamp of approval. Buttigieg's appearance in a cabinet level
post is solely her doing, for he has zero qualifications for that post. His presence is the
equivalent of hers as Secretary of State- to give credence to his qualifications on hid next
run for President. She failed hers; we'll see about his.
Hillary's handlers are the dangerous ones.
Dorothy Sillman Crouch , January 22, 2021 at 13:01
My greatest fear with Biden was that he would find a place for Hillary in his
administration. My understanding of what happened during the 2016 primary was those emails
downloaded at the DNC revealed what they were doing to take down Bernie as a candidate so
that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate with the niave assumption she could win over
Trump. Big mistake. Hillary has never been a viable candidate. And of course the DNC never
wanted to sponsor a Socialist like Bernie. I was very concerned after the election of Trump
that my Democratic state senators continued to insist Russia was involved. Blame Russia has
been the mantra of the Democratic Party ever since. As suggested Bill Binney tried to
disproved that connection but the party didn't want to hear that. I agree with John Chuckman
in his appraisal of Putin. I would never want to see Biden revive the 'blame Russia' mantra.
Someone suggested we had to feed the military industrial complex so that's why it happened.
Needs to stop.
vinnieoh , January 22, 2021 at 11:33
"Beyond that, Russiagate has been a convenient and successful strategy of deflection from
one's own responsibility for America's social and political crises."
This, more than providing cover for HRC's disastrous nomination and campaign, I believe is
the true purpose. Remember that – love him or hate him – Sanders was the only
high profile politician actually beginning to articulate the root causes of US dysfunction
and it was resonating energetically on the left of the D leaning electorate. This of course
HAD to be nipped in the bud or the whole corrupt gravy train might be exposed. With
Russiagate a "crisis" was manufactured that absolved the D's from doing anything to address
our real problems (and thus hinder the gravy train.)
I composed a long comment on the environmental piece posted yesterday, but before I posted
it wanted to check on some details because I didn't want to add to the noise by posting
something poorly-informed or flat out wrong. The gist of that comment was that the fight over
Nordstream II is mainly about the effort to force US exported LNG derived from shalegas on
our European "allies." I reviewed two pieces, one from The Atlantic Council and one from The
Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The Atlantic Council piece was a jaw-dropping screed of
such hateful anti-Russian propaganda that it made me shudder. The Oxford piece was an
in-depth analysis of all of Russia's gas exporting capability via Gazprom to Europe and the
Near East. Hard to plow through, full of important technical considerations, but it painted a
picture of a sovereign nation and national industry doing what any other such entities would
be doing to successfully operate in any commodities market. ( I did not post that comment
– the subject needs an in-depth analysis and exposure.)
The satirical organization The Onion picked such a perfect name. I realized during the GWB
administration the the layers of lies, misdirection, and obfuscation one must try to burrow
through is exactly like peeling back the layers of an onion. So hard to get to the truth and
even harder to formulate a strategy to domestically organize to change it. And it often makes
your eyes tear up.
rosemerry , January 23, 2021 at 14:47
I saw yesterday that the "European Parliament" voted to sanction Russia and stop the
remaining bit of the Nordstream pipeline (Pompass had already tried to stop at the last
minute too) because of ..Navalny!!!! Hard to believe-the pipeline to bring Russian gas to
Germany and the rest of Europe, voluntarily undertaken as a commercial venture between
partners knowing the needs and wishes of their people, being challenged by "European"
well-paid "reps" allegedly upset for a common criminal in Russia!!!!
Ed Rickert , January 22, 2021 at 10:48
Thanks for the excellent summary of Russiagate and for yet another glimpse into the
corrupt, demented mind of Hillary Clinton. What a treasure she is: her hand in the Honduras
coup, her role in the destruction of Libra, the arm shipments to ISIS and other "moderate
rebels" in the attempted overthrow of the Syrian government. And like so many other
"statesmen" never held accountable for her actions.
Anne , January 22, 2021 at 11:41
OOps Only western politicos/"states" folkies are NOT held accountable, no matter how
criminal – as in human rights/illegal warring – their actions
One only has to list everything that the US has done to other peoples from the dropping of
those two A bombs on civilian populations in 1945, through the US initiated and heavily
destructive Korean and Vietnamese Wars, the Use of the Marshall Islands (and their
population) as nuclear testing sites, to the Chagos Islanders being forcefully removed from
their homes and dumped in Madagascar in order for the US to build its huge base there (Diego
Garcia), to the bombing of Grenada, Panama, Serbia (40+ days and nights and largely on
civilians), invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq (based on utter lies), Bombing of Libya, Syria,
Torture at so-called black sites overseen if not done by the now Blue Face vaunted CIA,
Guantanamo (still existing and zero mention), the Economic Sanctions, i.e. Siege Warfare, of
Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and all of those legitimately elected govts from Guatemala (Arbenz),
to Iran (Mossadegh), to Allende (Chile) and on and on overthrown with the CIA's direct or
indirect assistance
And that doesn't include the Human Rights that our govt and helpers have done back here:
genocidal ethnic-cleansing, our own sterilization of the Mentally handicapped, Native
Americans, and African Americans (up to c. 1980) and possibly some of the female Latino
attempted immigrants of these past four years, MK – ULTRA and Mr Sidney Gottlieb et
al
We have absolutely Zero position to even talk about, mention other countries' "human
rights abuses" when we have done and continue to do these and many another barbarism to other
peoples (and our own) but listening to NPR (and the Beeb – and the UK has more than
enough of its own HRs abuses in its history and present) you'd think we had never and were
not so committing as we breathe any such abominations, heinous crimes
evelync , January 22, 2021 at 15:05
In my darker moments I'm thinking that those dropped bombs etc etc are simply moving
merchandise out to boost sales for the next quarter justifying the huge budget .
A for profit arms industry is grotesque – we need the enemies to keep it going
Are we consciously aware that that's part of it all?
Somewhere in the back of everyone's minds as Leonard Cohen sings – "Everybody
knows".
I always enjoy your clear informative direct comments. Thanks!!!!
Anne , January 23, 2021 at 12:05
Thank you very muchly, evelync Since my husband died this is one of the few places where I
can, sometimes, let off a little of my political steam and not be trashed!!!
evelync , January 23, 2021 at 18:58
Sorry that you lost your husband, Anne.
People – humans – have a long way to go to be able to communicate well enough
to avoid violent flailing about with confusion and trashing others with whom they think they
disagree.
They'd be better off trying to get to bottom of what upsets them about others' comments in
an effort to understand the differences between the "opposing" views. Common ground can, I
think, sometimes be achieved by asking questions instead of flailing about trashing
others.
One example, IMO, of unnecessary sometimes violent disagreement on social issues that
politicians love to drum up but common ground might be reachable :
Years ago I head a Harvard social scientist point out that Sweden (I think it was Sweden)
has the most liberal abortion laws and the fewest abortions. Why?
Because, she's said, Sweden provided housing, medical care and financial support and a job
after the pregnant woman was able to go back to work .
If that could be explained to everyone maybe it would deflate the disinformation balloon that
distances people from one another so that these differences could be resolved and acceptable
solutions found
@Levtraro to travel. It
will be a perk for them – a reward for being good servants. I can even forsee that
airlines will refit their fleets, stripping out coach class altogether, as the people who buy
the cheap seats won't be flying anymore anyway. A lot of industries will down-size so as to
only serve the quality customers.
And rich people are buying up land – lots of it. They are becoming what they already
deem themselves to be: an aristocracy, and a hereditary one at that.
Neo-liberal GloboCap is morping into neo-feudalism. They'll own everthing, and they'll be
happy. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy (or else).
I disagree. Current GloboCap elites and elites thoughout history have needed large
populations to look down to and to harvest for all they can yield. It is not good enough to
have all that you want when all others also have all that they want.
It is not nice enough to travel in your own or rented Gulf Stream or First Class or
Business Class when economy seats are non-existent. It is not good enough that a machine
calls you Sir instead of a real lowly human.
Real respect, admiration and adulation, could never be replaced by programmed respect,
admiration and adulation.
Sometimes it seems a struggle within to assess who I detest more – Karlin or
Navalny. Both are dishonest parasites living off Western sources of funds.
I think I will call it a draw and be done with it.
Correct. I am enough familiar with the Russian language and culture to agree with you, JL.
Not that I know what is true about Mr Putin, but I find it ugly, calling him Vlad, as
ignorant people associate it with an evil creature in Romania.
There are some similarities between Navalny and Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin became known for
attacking the privileges of the nomenclature (as the Communist Party boss of Moscow, no less)
like their access to special shops, luxury cars (by Soviet standards), special healthcare
facilities, nice apartments etc. He was for a time a "star" in Soviet media with this, but
finally Gorbachev got him fired for attacking him and his cronies too.
Mais c'est excellent! Il vient tout d'un coup de monter d'un cran sur mon échelle
de gens potentiellement respectables. Et il a tout à fait raison : un peuple
armé est un peuple libre. Imaginez les Gilets jaunes armés d'AK-47, ça
aurait été une toute autre histoire, n'est-ce pas ?
"But on the off chance I am wrong, Russians will only prove themselves morons."
You would be absolutely right if it turned out that way and there would be no help for the
Russians, just as the American simpletons who balk at the notion of compensating the three
branches of the United States government adequately leading to the pernicious influence from
the likes of the late Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban among others.
We should pay our representatives one million dollars a piece and two million for senators
but the chief executive must be paid at least fifteen million dollars per anum if not more to
keep out interlopers and the whole shebang would amount to little more than one billion
dollars which would be a drop in the bucket to save the nation from the predators.
Erdogan trying to, quote, ' ..preserve human nature, ' ?
As far as I know neither Orban nor Hungary have been involved in mass murder and invasions of
sovereign countries lately.
Sutan Erdogan is an IslamoFascist dictator, who was instrumental ( .together with US, KSA,
Israel, UK, France, ..) in training, arming, and sending cannibalistic head-chopper
terrorists into Syria, resulting in the deaths of several hundred thousand innocent
Syrians.
Orban is a Hungarian Christian nationalist, trying to defend Hungary from
GloboSorosization.
Sultan Erdogan is an IslamoFascist head of a genocidal, criminal state.
The presentation of Navalni's "investigation" on YouTube has collected millions of
comments in no time. A native speaker has noticed that there were the same identical comments
that appeared thousands of times under different names. Looks like a computer-generated wave
of responses.
I'm sure many others have realized what I have; although it is rarely put into words. It
seems like the columnists here who write about Russia are falling into the idiot binary view
that can be expressed as follows: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Sometimes this is
true. Often times, the enemy of my enemy is an even worse enemy. Just because Russia is
clearly not under the thumb of the creeps in Washington dos NOT mean that Russia is the
beacon of justice, truth, and freedom. Do not lose sight of the fact that the current
(((elites))) are GLOBAL and their original source of influence and power is international
finance (greatly expanded by fiat systems). The covid response and vaccine push as carried
out by Russia should be an eye opener to anyone who doubts the fact that they are heavily
compromised. Remember, Abortion (murdering a baby) has been legal in Russia for most of a
century and they had/have some of the highest rates of abortion in the world. It is estimated
that well over 100 million babies have been murdered, LEGALLY. The utter evil of this cannot
be put into words. I detest the post-christian, perverted west. IS Russia any better? in some
ways, perhaps. But at the end of the day, we must not allow ourselves to fall into the idiot
binary view that because one group is bad, its (alleged) adversaries are good.
@Ray
Caruso d that the US Embassy ought to explain why they had posted a series of 'protest
routes' marking the locations where demonstrators planned to mee t. "One can only imagine
what would have happened if the Russian Embassy in Washington published a map of protest
routes indicating the end point, for example, in the Capitol," Maria Zakharova said. "Giving
directions to those on the ground would have led to global hysteria among American
politicians, Russophobic slogans, threats of sanctions and the expulsion of Russian
diplomats."
It is time to remind the US Embassy staff about what was done to Maria Butina for nothing by
the lawless US. The Russian Federation should boot out the American subversives.
He must know this. He must also know that his electoral prospects are nil – even if he
was allowed to compete and given access. Short of a revolution he is done, and
revolution is not coming, too soon. That is not a good place to be. He is in theory protected
by his sponsors, but that may not amount to much if things get hot. At best he would get
exchanged. Or he can quietly slip away after a few years if he is lucky.
Mulatto did his job, now mulatto can go. A single-use politician who is endlessly promoted,
celebrated, and then discarded and forgotten, only to be listed on a sad list of names to
demonise the enemy. That enemy is his own country, is that really heroism?
McFaul cautions against what he refers to as "Putin's ideological project" as a
threat to the neoliberal international order. Yet he is reluctant to recognize that the
neoliberal international order is an American ideological project for the post-Cold War
era.
After the Cold War, neoliberal ideologues advanced what was seemingly a benign proposition
– suggesting that neoliberal democracy should be at the center of security strategies.
However, by linking neoliberal norms to US leadership, neoliberalism became both a
constitutional principle and an international hegemonic norm.
NATO is presented as a community of neoliberal values – without mentioning that its
second largest member, Turkey, is more conservative and authoritarian than Russia – and
Moscow does not, therefore, have any legitimate reasons to oppose expansionism unless it fears
democracy. If Russia reacts negatively to military encirclement, it is condemned as an enemy of
democracy, and NATO has a moral responsibility to revert to its original mission as a military
bloc containing Russia.
Case in point: there was nobody in Moscow advocating for the reunification with Crimea until
the West supported the coup in Ukraine. Yet, as Western "fact checkers" and McFaul
inform us, there was a "democratic revolution" and not a coup. Committed to his
ideological prism, McFaul suggests that Russia acted out of a fear of having a democracy on its
borders, as it would give hope to Russians and thus threaten the Kremlin. McFaul's ideological
lens masks conflicting national security interests, and it fails to explain why Russia does not
mind democratic neighbors in the east, such as South Korea and Japan, with whom it enjoys good
relations.
Defending the peoples
States aspiring for global hegemony have systemic incentives to embrace ideologies that
endow them with the right to defend other peoples. The French National Convention declared in
1792 that France would "come to the aid of all peoples who are seeking to recover their
liberty," and the Bolsheviks proclaimed in 1917 "the duty to render assistance, armed,
if necessary, to the fighting proletariat of the other countries."
The American neoliberal international order similarly aims to liberate the people of the
world with "democracy promotion" and "humanitarian interventionism" when it
conveniently advances US primacy. The American ideological project infers that democracy is
advanced by US interference in the domestic affairs of Russia, while democracy is under attack
if Russia interferes in the domestic affairs of US. The neoliberal international system is one
of sovereign inequality to advance global primacy.
McFaul does not consider himself a Russophobe, as believes his attacks against Russia are
merely motivated by the objective of liberating Russians from their government, which is why he
advocates that Biden "distinguish between Russia and Russians – between Putin and the
Russian people." This has been the modus operandi for regime change since the end of the
Cold War – the US supposedly does not attack countries to advance its interests, it only
altruistically assists foreign peoples in rival states against their leaders such as Slobodan
Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin etc.
McFaul and other neoliberal ideologues still refer to NATO as a "defensive alliance,"
which does not make much sense after the attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999 or Libya in 2011.
However, under the auspices of neoliberal internationalism, NATO is defensive, as it defends
the people of the world. Russia, therefore, doesn't have rational reasons for opposing the
neoliberal international order.
McFaul condemns alleged efforts by Russia to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US,
before outlining his strategies for interfering in the domestic affairs of Russia. McFaul
blames Russian paranoia for shutting down American "non-governmental organizations" that
are funded by the US government and staffed by people linked to the US security apparatus. He
goes on to explain that the US government must counter this by establishing new
"non-government organizations" to educate the Russian public about the evils of their
government.
The dangerous appeal of ideologues
Ideologues have always been dangerous to international security. Ideologies of human freedom
tend to promise perpetual peace. Yet, instead of transcending power politics, the ideals of
human freedom are linked directly to hegemonic power by the self-proclaimed defender of the
ideology. When ideologues firmly believe that the difference between the current volatile world
and utopia can be bridged by defeating its opponents, it legitimizes radical power
politics.
Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security
strategy is committed to global dominance, while berating Russia for "revisionism."
Raymond Aaron once wrote: "Idealistic diplomacy slips too often into fanaticism; it divides
states into good and evil, into peace-loving and bellicose. It envisions a permanent peace by
the punishment of the latter and the triumph of the former. The idealist, believing he has
broken with power politics, exaggerates its crimes."
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Ghanima223 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:36 AM
In short, the tables have turned since the end of the Cold War. It is no longer communist
ideologues that try to export revolution and chaos while the western world would promote
stability and free markets. Now it's western ideologues that are trying to export revolutions
and chaos while clamping down on free markets with Russia, as ironically as it sounds, being
a force for stability and a strong proponent for the free exchange of goods and services
around the world. The west will lose just as the USSR has lost.
US_did_911 Ghanima223 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:01 AM
The Dollar is the only fake reason that still keeps US afloat. The moment that goes, it loss
will be a lot worse then of USSR.
US_did_911 Ghanima223 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 12:58 AM
That happened not exactly after the end of the cold war. It was about even for a decade after
that. The real u-turn happened after the 9/11 false flag disaster.
Amvet 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 10:00 AM
Foreign dangers are necessary to keep the attention of the American people away from the 20
ton elephant in the room--the fact that 9/11 was not a foreign attack. Should any of the main
stream media suddenly turn honest and report this in detail, things will get interesting.
King_Penda 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:11 AM
I wouldn't worry too much. At the same time Biden will be purging the US military of any men
of capability and replacing them trans and political appointments. The traditional areas
where the military recruited it's grunts are falling as they are waking up to the hostility
of the state to their culture and way of life. The US military will end up a rump of queerss,
off work due to stress or perceived persecution and fat doughballs sat in warehouses
performing drone strikes on goats.
Fjack1415 King_Penda 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:20 PM
Yes, you point to a paradox. While the globalists are using the US as their military arm for
global domination, they are at the same time destroying the country that supports that
military. Perhaps the US military will be maintained by dint of its being the only employer
for millions of unemployed young men in the American heartland, doughballs or not.
Ghanima223 King_Penda 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:39 AM
Ideologues will always be more concerned with having political reliable military leadership
as opposed to actually qualified leaders. It took the Russians 2 decades to purge their own
military of this filth of incompetent 'yes' men within their military.
UKCitizen 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:09 AM
'The Liberal International Order' - yes, that seems a fair description. Led by what might be
termed 'liberal fundamentalists'.
far_cough 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 07:01 AM
the military industrial complex and the various deep state agencies along with the major
corporations need russia as an adversary so that they can milk the american people and the
people of the western world of their money, rights, freedoms, etc etc...
roby007 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:54 AM
I'm sure Biden will pursue "peaceful, productive coexistence" just as his friend Obama did,
with drones and bombs.
Paul Citro 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:16 AM
I hope that Russian leaders fully realize that they are dealing with a country that is the
equivalent of psychotic.
Fjack1415 Paul Citro 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:26 PM
True, the ruling party and MSM mouthpieces and their readers and followers are now truly
INSANE. Beyond redemption. Staggering in the depth and power of the subversion of so many
people, including many with high IQs (like my ex girlfriend and housemate in the US).
Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 10:57 AM
US security strategy is committed to global dominance
Absolutely. Biden has filled up his admin with "progressive realists," which
when it comes to foreign policy, is just a euphuism for neocons and their lust for world
empire. So expect an unleashing of forces in the coming two years that will finally humble
America's war machine.
tyke2939 Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 01:07 PM
They are desperate for a war with someone but it must be someone they can beat convincingly.
It certainly will not be Russia or China and I suspect Iran will be a huge battle even with
Israel s backing. More than likely they will invade some country like Venezuela as Syria has
Russia covering its back. What a dilemma who to fight.
9/11 Truther Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 11:24 AM
The "American war machine" has been humbled from Saigon, Vietnam 1975 to Kabul, Afghanistan.
Salmigoni 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:25 AM
They are not really liberals. They are blood thirsty parasitic neoconservative fascist war
mongers working for the Pentagon contractors. General Eisenhower warned us about these evil
people. A lot of Americans still do not get it.
@annamaria
or wish it well – and everyone knows that.
He must know this. He must also know that his electoral prospects are nil – even if
he was allowed to compete and given access. Short of a revolution he is done, and
revolution is not coming, too soon. That is not a good place to be. He is in theory protected
by his sponsors, but that may not amount to much if things get hot. At best he would get
exchanged. Or he can quietly slip away after a few years if he is lucky.
Mulatto did his job, now mulatto can go. A single-use politician who is endlessly
promoted, celebrated, and then discarded and forgotten, only to be listed on a sad list of
names to demonise the enemy. That enemy is his own country, is that really heroism?
He is a nationalist like the Maiden. Maiden in power promoted with violence anti-Russian
hysteria. This action created a civil war since a large part of Ukraine are Russian
speakers.
Navalny, if in power, would do something similar as in Ukraine. Act as a Nationalist of
only the Russians in the Russian Federation. Get all the other peoples of the Russian
Federation to break away or stir up a civil war.
Within a few years, put in place Zion/USA puppets like Poroshenko and Zelensky. Look at
the recent Ukrainegate Impeachment trial, almost everyone supporting Ukrainegate trial was
Jewish, even the Ukrainians in this sham trial. .
This is not about bringing down Putin but about dismembering Russia and ending its
sovereignty
The easiest proxy here is the 1990s campaign against Milosevic (the campaign) as a tool to
dismember Yugoslavia
Russia is too rich, too week and is refusing to surrender, hence it will be divided
between and
Absorbed on one side by China and on the other side/s by USA and EUSA
The initial planning for disintegration of Russia was drafted in the NSC directive in
1948
West of Russia to Urals will be absorbed by EU/(Germany)
East of Russia to Yenisei will be controlled by US/(Japan)
China will take over hte greatest price – everything between Urals and Yenisei
Putin with his United Russia/One Russia Party is a major obstacle to the master plan
and
will therefore
be eliminated
whether one likes it or not
@annamaria
from his sponsors are of little use in his current situation.
I find the Western coverage of this affair absurdly propagandistic. A few things are never
mentioned:
– what was Navalny convicted off – fraud
– that he is not by any stretch of imagination the "opposition" leader – his
party has not reached even 5% required to be represented in the parliament
There is also an omission of why Russia claims "interference" – because US Embassy
published the routes for the demos. And many of the demonstrators are paid one way on
another by the West – if the situation was reversed, liberals would call for a war
(as they basically did with Trump's allegations).
Globalists tell the people they are for mankind and Mother Earth, against corporate
exploitation. Once in control after a year of planpanic and the Great Reset, globalists will
operate for the benefit of those in control of the world's largest corporations.
In all three "different" systems, the people begin to wake up too late. The only way for
those who have seized control to stay in control is to suppress the "have nots." This leads
inevitably to totalitarian control and tyranny.
Thus, communism, fascism and globalism differ only in rhetoric. In all things that matter
they are identical. It's all totalitarianism.
A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that there's no escape from politics and the
dominant state ideology. Recent events demonstrate that we've now sadly reached that point in
Britain, the US and other Western countries.
...In the choice between the personal and the political, between listening to the
politician, or romancing (even if only in his imagination), the poet chooses the personal. He
is right to do so. Totalitarian societies come about when people do the opposite. They put
politics before the personal. They betray old friendships for 'the cause', or put 'following
the party line' before family and loved ones.
...Things that used to be apolitical have become completely politicised. There is no
'ring-fencing' any more. I have to say, even as someone who makes my living as a political
commentator, I'm absolutely sick of the way politics has infected every aspect of our lives
...While the US presidential inauguration was being televised, and viewers were no doubt
being told repeatedly what a 'great day for democracy' it was, I was doing a jigsaw puzzle.
Believe me, it was far more rewarding.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog
can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs
@NeilClark66
sarcastictruth 17 hours ago 24 Jan, 2021 06:38 AM
Political correctness is the means by which the powers that be/the elite/the globalists
control the masses. Why do people demonstrate political correctness? To show what a "good
person" they and how they are aware of "social issues". That's why people strive to be
politically correct. Its the reason we are in the lockdown situation, people accept the
lockdown because you are deemed politically incorrect (a bad person) if you don't. People
mistake that politically correctness is about fighting racism, whilst racism against black
people is condemned, racism against white people is actively encourage. This shows
political correctness has nothing to do with fighting racism, fighting gender inequality,
or about being a good person. It has everything to do with fostering division amongst
people and controlling the opinion of the masses.
Cl K-berg 13 hours ago 24 Jan, 2021 10:33 AM
100%. Here's a great extract for essay quotation: ''We should turn off television
programmes masquerading as 'drama' or 'comedy' that are really political sermons dolled up
in entertainment's clothing and provide no enjoyment whatsoever.'' Wow! how totally spot
on.
Journalist Andy Ngo, whose parents fled to the US from Vietnam in 1978, has become a
political refugee himself, fleeing to London, saying he received death threats from Antifa over
his coverage of the movement.
"For a number of months now, there's just been increasing threats of violence against me,
promises by Antifa extremists to kill me," the Portland native said Saturday night in a Sky
News interview. Local law enforcement authorities did nothing about the alleged threats, even
when Ngo provided names of the suspects, he said.
"It's pained me a lot, temporarily having to leave the country and home that settled my
parents who came there as political refugees," Ngo added.
Ngo came to increased prominence after he was attacked by a mob of Antifa protesters in
2019. There have been no arrests in connection with that attack – in which Ngo was
beaten, robbed and hospitalized with a brain injury – even though it was caught on camera
from various angles and the journalist's lawyer provided names of suspects to police.
Some Antifa members have condemned Ngo for "enabling fascism" and exposing them to
danger by reporting their names and posting their arrest photos. He was vilified by
Rolling Stone magazine, which branded him as a "right-wing troll" and said he tries
to "demonize" Antifa.
Hatred towards Ngo apparently escalated even further with the upcoming publication of his
book, 'Unmasked', which chronicles Antifa's history of violence and its "radical plan
to destroy democracy."
The protests, which some observers called "modern-day book burning," may have had an
unintended consequence by bringing more attention to 'Unmasked'. The book, which is
scheduled for release on February 2, is already the No. 1 seller in several political
categories on Amazon.com. At one point earlier this month, it was the
overall top seller by the online behemoth.
Ngo said the same Democrat politicians who have condemned and magnified the January 6 US
Capitol riot were silent "at best" when Antifa and Black Lives Matter plagued Portland
with 120 days of riots, including violent attacks on a federal courthouse, last year. He said
some even promoted crowdfunding efforts to get rioters out of jail, while others described
federal law enforcement officers as "Trump's Gestapo and secret police."
Rioting in Portland was so bad on President Joe Biden's Inauguration Day that 15 Antifa
activists were arrested, nearly half of whom had been busted and released for similar crimes
last year, Ngo said. "This is a nightmare version of Groundhog Day," he added.
Reminded that Biden had called Antifa "an idea, not an organization" during last year's
presidential campaign, Ngo pointed out that documents leaked to him show Antifa's
organizational setup, including processes for recruiting, radicalizing and vetting new
members.
"Very sad," author Julia Smith said of Ngo's fleeing to London. "This is not the
America his parents sought."
There's to plenty righteous to be said about empire and all of that, but I want to write
something about how Black people have since our founding been considered the internal enemy,
so what it means to have a Black person as Secretary of Defense.
Surprise! Mail-in ballots raise the risk of fraud - according to Amazon.
In a Thursday filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Seattle-based
online retail giant formally requested that a group of Alabama warehouse trying to form a union
be required to vote in person , rather than by mail, according to
Bloomberg .
"... It remains to be seen if the outcome of Biden's rule will be better or worse than Yeltsin's, but my money is on Yeltsin the way things are looking. ..."
Gorbatsjov tried to reform the USSR but it ended in failure and the drunken Yeltsin
crashed the remains. His only success was to name Putin as his successor.
Trump tried to reform the USA but it ended in failure, election coup and the demented and
hyper-corrupt Biden as his successor.
It remains to be seen if the outcome of Biden's rule
will be better or worse than Yeltsin's, but my money is on Yeltsin the way things are
looking.
"... Not surprisingly, Blinken is a favorite of the AIPAC-bankrolled Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, as Phil Giraldi reported , Tweeted that Blinken would be part of a " superb national security team. The country will be very fortunate to have them in public service." ..."
"... We have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to thank for at least bringing up the fact that Blinken has blundered from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster – which only gets you promoted in Washington DC. In Blinken's confirmation hearing, Paul reminded Blinken of his addiction to intervention in the Middle East and how that has worked out for everyone. ..."
"... Yes, Senator Paul is right. "Regime change" doesn't work. It kills or destroys the lives of the most vulnerable. The poor and the innocent. The US enemies may occasionally find themselves on the wrong end of a noose or a knife rape , but it is the civilians who always suffer when they are "liberated" by Washington. ..."
"... Buckle up, as incoming Senate Majority Leader Schumer advised, there's a whole lot of interventionism in the queue. There's a whole lot of death and destruction to be unleashed by Biden, Blinken, and their gang of " humanitarians ." ..."
While the saccharine continues to ooze from the mainstream media for the incoming Biden
Administration, the real iron fist of what will be the Biden foreign policy is starting to
materialize. As if on cue, major bombings in Baghdad – by ISIS remember them? –
have
opened the door for the Biden Administration to not only cancel President Trump's troop
drawdown from Iraq but to actually begin sending troops back into Iraq.
Is this to be Iraq War 4.0? 3.7? 5.0? Anybody's guess.
If Biden uses this sudden – and convenient – unrest in Iraq as a trigger to
return US troops (and bombs), it should not surprise anyone. As Professor Barbara Ransby points
out in this video , Biden did much
more to make the disastrous 2003 attack on Iraq happen than just vote "yes" on the
authorization to use force. As Professor Ransby reminds us, Biden used the full power of his
position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to ensure the Senate approved
George W. Bush's lie-based war on Iraq. Biden prevented any experts who challenged the "Saddam
has WMDs and he's about to use them" narrative from being heard by Members of Congress,
guaranteeing that only the pro-war narrative was heard.
As much as Bush or Cheney, Biden owns the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which killed a million
Iraqi civilians. And he may well be taking us back.
One figure in the Biden Administration who will play a pivotal role in returning the US to
its hyper-interventionism in the Middle East is Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken . As
a Biden Senate staffer in 2003, he helped the then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman put
together a pro-war coalition in the Democratic Party to support President Bush's Republican
push for invasion.
Later on Blinken was Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, where he successfully made
the case that destroying both Libya and Syria were fantastic ideas. Both countries drowned in
the Obama Administration's "liberation" bloodbath and neither country has recovered from the
"democracy" brought by Washington, but being a neocon foreign policy ideologue means never
having to say you're sorry.
And Blinken isn't.
Not surprisingly, Blinken is a favorite of the AIPAC-bankrolled Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies, which, as Phil Giraldi reported ,
Tweeted that Blinken would be part of a " superb national security team. The country will be
very fortunate to have them in public service."
We have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to thank for at least bringing up the fact that Blinken has
blundered from foreign policy disaster to foreign policy disaster – which only gets you
promoted in Washington DC. In Blinken's confirmation hearing, Paul reminded Blinken of his
addiction to intervention in the Middle East and how that has worked out for everyone.
Paul reminded the Secretary of State nominee that his only criticism of the Syria "regime
change" plan was that the US did not successfully overthrow Assad. But the US was using
jihadist proxies to overthrow the
secular Assad , so what does this say about Blinken's judgement?
"The lesson of these wars," said
Paul , is that 'regime change' doesn't work!"
Paul added:
Even after Libya you guys went on to Syria wanting to do the same thing again it's a
disaster.
You got rid of one 'bad guy' and another 'bad guy' got stronger.
Yes, Senator Paul is right. "Regime change" doesn't work. It kills or destroys the lives of
the most vulnerable. The poor and the innocent. The US enemies may occasionally find themselves
on the wrong end of a
noose or a
knife rape , but it is the civilians who always suffer when they are "liberated" by
Washington.
Buckle up, as incoming Senate Majority Leader Schumer advised, there's a whole lot of
interventionism in the queue. There's a whole lot of death and destruction to be unleashed by
Biden, Blinken, and their gang of " humanitarians ."
*
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"... One of the authors cited Wall Street, banks and voting as examples of guaranteed fraud, because it's so easy – naive stupidity on our part knows no bounds. That includes me! It all took place under CIA watch! ..."
So what? Has there been any legal action actually being done against Dominion and the
election? How about some simple audited vote recounting? As I recall in 2016 Jill Stein had
both audits and recounts beginning two weeks after the election. Donald Trump hasn't done
anything other than golf.
Whining is just meant to stir us up because the deep staters really
want the right white wing to go hot. Can you imagine how sad they would be if their planned
color flag revolution violent stage mean't they would have to kill off some of their
miscreant human assets? All that work down the drain because of some damn stubborn white
people.
For the record, I really want to be wrong on this.
First, I want to thank a commenter on another site last week who provided a link to Gary
North's report on computerized electoral fraud – talk about making ballot stuffing easy
and hard to prove!
So I posted this thread in DaLimbraw Library – https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2020/11/beyond-shameful-why-it-all-developed.html?m=0
– it shows that it goes back decades to the 60's. In fact, DaBastahds who understood
computer systems were salivating to start computerized voting fraud almost immediately and
improved their techniques constantly to this day.
Shit, any dummy with basic coding skills could probably do it! North has documented
examples.
One whistleblower, for example, asserts that Pat Buchanan was gypped in the 96 AZ primary in
favor of Dole – computerized 'glitches'?
We've all heard 'Garbage in-garbage out' – if you think about it, considering the
intelligence of the average voting dumbquat, it would be impossible NOT to have computerized
fraud – undetected!
Most of us trust those screens we stare at – forgetting totally that we're being
programmed to trust them – while being manipulated.
Did you ever notice the 'coincidence' of computer dependent fraud in three institutions?
One of the authors cited Wall Street, banks and voting as examples of guaranteed fraud,
because it's so easy – naive stupidity on our part knows no bounds. That includes
me!
It all took place under CIA watch!
How can you conduct a successful audit or recount when the secret ballots were separated
from the envelops they came in when they were opened? There is no way to tell who the
individual voters voted for. That's why democrats insisted on mail-in ballots, using the
(deadly?) corona virus as their excuse. It seems that voting at the polls on election day is
for republican chumps. BTW, Jill Stein's recounts in 2016 went nowhere.
"... "The debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur. We never had any presentation in court where we ever looked at the evidence..." ..."
"... '75% of Republicans want to look at election integrity,' Paul responds. Stephanopoulos responds by saying that those 75% agree with him because they were "fed a big lie" from the President. ..."
"... Paul pushed back, telling Stephanopoulos: "You immediately say everything's a lie instead of saying there's two sides to everything. Historically what would happen is if I said I thought there was fraud, you'd interview someone else who said there wasn't. But now you insert yourself in the middle and say that the absolute fact is that everything I'm saying is a lie." ..."
"... You gotta ask the question of Rand here though, even as a lone voice of reason that Rand Paul is he and the Trump supporting Senators failed the Republic. They needed to push forward and introduce the Election Fraud evidence after the Jan. 6 planned interruption of the evidence hearing. Why didn't the Election fraud evidence get its day in front of Congress? The Fraud needed to be part of the historical record, and it was not. ..."
"... South Philly judge of elections admits he took bribes to stuff the ballot box for Democratic candidates ..."
"... The problem is that there are only a few decent human beings in the Republic leadership who are not entirely in the pocket of the RNC, which is entirely in the pocket of the globalists. ..."
"... The MSM has given up the pretense of being journalists. They are full-fledged propagandist attack dogs and proud of it. ..."
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) took to ABC on Sunday morning with George Stephanopoulos to discuss
election integrity of the 2020 election, in a discussion which immediately devolved into an
inquisition during which Paul was repeatedly pressed to disavow clams that the election was
stolen.
Paul not only pushed back -- he put Stephanopoulos in his place, accusing the host of
'inserting yourself in the middle' and 'forgetting who you are as a journalist.'
Stephanopoulos began by asking Paul to admit the "election was not stolen" -- to which Paul
responded by saying "The debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur. We never had
any presentation in court where we ever looked at the evidence..."
Paul continued: "There were several states in which the law was changed by the Secretary of
State and not the state legislature. To me those are clearly unconstitutional and I think
there's still a chance those do finally work their way up to the Supreme Court."
"No election is perfect," Stephanopoulos shot back , telling Paul there were "86 challenges
filed by President Trump, all were dismissed". As Paul tries to argue that many cases were
dismissed for lack of standing and not due to examination of evidence, Stephanopoulos responds:
" Can't you just say the words 'this election wasn't stolen'? "
'75% of Republicans want to look at election integrity,' Paul responds. Stephanopoulos
responds by saying that those 75% agree with him because they were "fed a big lie" from the
President.
Paul pushed back, telling Stephanopoulos: "You immediately say everything's a lie instead of
saying there's two sides to everything. Historically what would happen is if I said I thought
there was fraud, you'd interview someone else who said there wasn't. But now you insert
yourself in the middle and say that the absolute fact is that everything I'm saying is a
lie."
"You're saying there's no fraud and it's all been investigated and that's just not true,"
Paul continues, with Stephanopoulos arguing at the same time. Paul then goes into specifics,
detailing irregularities in states in like Wisconsin. "I plan on spending the next two years
going around, state to state, fixing these problems," Paul continues. "Let's have an open
debate. It's a free country!"
"There has been no thorough examination of all states to see what problems we had and see if
we could fix them," Paul says, responding to Stephanopoulos' claims that Bill Barr pronounced
there was "no widespread election fraud".
"There's two sides to every story," Paul says. "Interview someone on the other side, but
don't insert yourself into the story to say we're all liars."
"You're forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there's only one side," Paul
says. "A journalist would hear both sides and there are two sides to this story."
Election integrity aside, Paul has been a vocal critic of the Biden administration in recent
days . On Saturday,
we noted Paul's interview with Fox host Sean
Hannity, where he pummeled the Biden administration's decision to push for a $15 minimum wage
increase that could put 4 million people out of work - leading the Kentucky Republican to
exclaim:
"'Why does Joe Biden hate Black teenagers?' ... Why does Joe Biden want to destroy all of
these jobs?"
Paul comments come amid ramblings from various leftist economists who insist that there's no
impact on employment from such a drastic minimum wage hike...
...common sense (and historical experience) for anyone who has ever run an actual business
is that raising costs on the lowest-skilled workers in your organization will ripple all the
way up, forcing either higher prices to the end-user (eradicating the 'living wage'
improvement) and or forcing layoffs as management hold margins and reduce costs (the
least-skilled first).
Historically speaking, the black unemployment rate is twice that of whites , while minimum
wage increases - as we've shown repeatedly over the last week - correlate with spikes in job
losses just about every single time.
That's not an "alternative" fact, that's the awkward reality of 'unintended consequences'
from nanny-state intervention write large for the last 70 years.
Paul also blasted Biden for
canceling the Keystone XL oil pipeline:
"It's kind of a strange beginning to an administration," Paul said. "You're going to put your best foot forward and the first thing you say is, 'This is how
I'm going to kill jobs' ... 'I'm going to kill thousands of jobs of the Keystone pipeline
with ending it.'"
Explanation : There are multiple ways to commit election fraud using Dominion systems but
the most efficient manner is the full spectrum two-step process.
First at the adjudication step -- effectively covered in the data scientists' presentation
on Georgia video -- massive ballot flipping and with the previous ballot images deleted, no
trail remains.
Secondly at the tabulator stage (GEMS software, covered in detail in the Fractional Magic
video) ----- so ballots which were not adjudicated, and in some counties 90% went to the
adjudication process, proceeded to the tabulation step where they could be
fractionalized.
Boing_Snap 20 minutes ago
You gotta ask the question of Rand here though, even as a lone voice of reason that Rand
Paul is he and the Trump supporting Senators failed the Republic. They needed to push forward
and introduce the Election Fraud evidence after the Jan. 6 planned interruption of the
evidence hearing. Why didn't the Election fraud evidence get its day in front of Congress? The Fraud needed to be part of the historical record, and it was not.
nmewn 2 hours ago (Edited)
George Stephanopoulos: "There was not enough fraud to..."
Oh. So thats how the Leftardian brain works! Thank you Georgie boi. You now admit to voter fraud whereby legitimate votes were cancelled out by the fraud but
it is your opinion that there was not enough fraud for it to matter. Never again do I want to hear this little runt of the litter yapping "Every vote
matters!"
Feck Weed 2 hours ago
That's the fallback, the "widespread" qualifier.
Cheapie 1 hour ago
Yes, "Mostly honest election."
dark_matter 15 minutes ago
Just like mostly peaceful protestors as the buildings burn.
Zero-Hegemon 2 hours ago
Yes, "just enough" fraud to cover for Traitor Joe, but NOT ENOUGH to warrant a look into
the allegations. You got his number.
Samual Vimes 2 hours ago
South Philly judge of elections admits he took bribes to stuff the ballot box for
Democratic candidates
Public schools have zero tolerance for 'bullying' (that definition has been broadened to
irrelevance) or acting out for grade schools kids who barely have the ability to control
themselves... but SOME election fraud is ok. Shining examples of values-driven integrity.
FluTangClan 2 hours ago
Stephanopoulos is Bill Clinton's lapdog. He's not a journalist. He's a democratic party
operative and always has been. He's a warmonger dwarf. He was there for banging interns with cigars. He was there for Vince
Foster...
I would say Rand Paul is one of the few Republicans who is not corrupted. He's not perfect
either, but he seems to be one of a handful who tries to do something he promised to his
voters. As you point out, the problem isn't that there are a few RINOs. The problem is that
there are only a few decent human beings in the Republic leadership who are not entirely in
the pocket of the RNC, which is entirely in the pocket of the globalists.
Wards 1 and 2, all districts, 'normal' results with Trump around 5-15% (he officially won
12% of the black vote and 18% of the black male vote nationwide).
Ward 3 district 1.....and the next few hundred districts in Wards 3, 4, 5, etc.....98%+
D.
Stolen votes. Mostly black men's votes.
Then do Detroit. Same thing, a 'buffer page' or two of normal looking results and then bam
98+% D.
Simple corruption, simple cheating.
NOW we can talk about the chain of custody of the mail-in 'thingies' and the security of
the electronic systems.....but only if you can admit the bald truth in the DNC machine
cities.
The MSM has given up the pretense of being journalists. They are full-fledged propagandist attack dogs and proud of it.
Handful of Dust 2 hours ago (Edited)
One problem Georgie and his Demorat pals have, is the 100 million people who listened to
the State Legislative hearings with Rudy where hundreds of witnesses came forward with
credible evidence of fraud. Then there are the video segments of evidence of fraud. Then you have a dozen of the world's top forensic data people coming from all over
including forensic teams from Wall Street who testified "there is zero probability Biden
could have gotten those numbers."
Inconvenient facts that provide overwhelming proof of fraud. That's why Dems are still in
a tizzy and have 50,000 soldiers and police protecting His Majesty Biden...but this is not
going away from what Rand Paul says.
"Da peeples love me so much I need 15 platoons of soldiers for protection," Pol Pot yelled
to the rabble below his bullet-proof, bomb-proof balcony.
Rattling Bones 2 hours ago
How come Stephanopoulos can't say the words 'there was no Russian collusion'?
Demologos 2 hours ago
He enjoys his nice fat paycheck for looking the other way.
That Old Magic 2 hours ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not
understanding it ." ― Upton Sinclair
philmannwright 2 hours ago
George is not a journalist puhlease everyone knows that. He is the el chapito of the dem
media
FluTangClan 2 hours ago
Thank you. He was on Bill Clinton's staff. He was a happy part of bombing Iraqi babies,
bombing Yugoslavia, bombing phkn Sudan based on internet searches. He has zero credibility.
His credibility is buried with Vince Foster.
adr 2 hours ago (Edited)
They can never allow the evidence to be presented because it is overwhelming proof of
fraud. If there was no fraud, then there would be no harm in having evidence presented in
court. The absolute proof of fraud is the number of adjudicated ballots. Were 68% of people in
Georgia really incompetent enough to not know how to fill out a ballot.
The other irrefutable fact is that the state of PA did not follow an order from the US
supreme court to separate ballots received after election day. Also in Philadelphia election
officials destroyed the envelopes so they could not be matched with ballots.
Even if Biden really did win those two states, which he didn't, the actions of the
election supervisors invalidated the election. The only recourse was to have a new election
in disputed states.
headless blogger 1 hour ago (Edited)
Plus, Paul is not the best person to make the case for the American people on election
integrity, as he isn't even an attorney. He can't debate the issue properly which allows the
Psy-ops operators like Steph to out maneuver him.
People need FACTS, which so far the election integrity researchers are not providing in a
logical and chronological format. The PSY OPS operation that pulled off the Coup, are smooth
operators and are now able to clean up any loose ends with their media.
What needs to happen is an independent investigation that can present the findings in a
way that people understand. As it is, they keep screaming election fraud, but aren't providing details in an orderly
manner so nobody can really get a grip on what happened.....
....which is the hallmark of a psy-ops operation; they don't want you to be able to
process what happened logically and chronologically.
yerfej 43 minutes ago
No, they have implemented a very good long term strategy to take over the positions of
power. Academia is a good example where they own it and now have the ability to pollute minds
rather than get students to look at all sides of the equation. That doesn't do anyone outside
of the elites any good. Reality is its not a left vs. right thing, its the common people vs.
the elites.
rkb100100 2 hours ago
"No election is perfect" - that'll be carved on the countries tombstone.
Lost in translation 1 hour ago
Blows my mind that people forget so quickly how he turned - or just overlook it - and
continue in the foolish belief "Rand is one of the good guys!"
People reveal themselves in a crisis. Rand certainly did...
TruthAbsolute 1 hour ago
of course there was election fraud...and the democrats have set up a system that protects
them well. All the way up to the judicial system and if not their judge then families are
threaten. There is is no integrity in politics, these people are not honest or very, very few
of them! They are not working for the people but ultimately for themselves and their life
treasure chess! USA has become very Evil minded!
Jam 1 hour ago remove link
Nice to see Paul not backing down, someone in politics still has a backbone and can tell
it like it is besides Trump.
"... The perception that this is some sort of exclusively left-wing tactic is untrue. Recall in 2003, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines, uttered this utterly benign political comment at a concert in London: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." In response, millions joined a boycott of their music, radio stations refused to play their songs, Bush supporters burned their albums , and country star Toby Keith performed in front of a gigantic image of Maines standing next to Saddam Hussein, as though her opposition to the war meant she admired the Iraqi dictator. ..."
"... Social media is one of the most powerful generators of group-think ever invented in human history, enabling a small number of people to make decision-makers feel besieged with scorn and threatened with ostracization if they do not obey mob demands. The other is that the liberal-left has gained cultural hegemony in the most significant institutions -- from academia and journalism to entertainment, sports, music and art -- and this weapon, which they most certainly did not invent, is now vested squarely in their hands. ..."
On Wednesday, the night of Joe Biden's inauguration, Wilkinson posted this now-deleted tweet
in which he was obviously not calling for violence. He was instead sardonically noting that
anti-Pence animus became a prevailing sentiment among some MAGA followers over the last month,
including reports that at least a few of those who breached the Capitol were calling for
Pence's hanging on treason grounds, thus ironically enabling liberals and MAGA followers to
"unite" over that desire:
The next morning, a right-wing hedge fund manager and large-money GOP donor ,
Gabe Hoffman, flagged this tweet and claimed to
believe that Wilkinson "call[ed] for former Vice President Mike Pence to be lynched." Hoffman
also tweeted at Wilkinson's New York Times bosses to ask if they have "any comment on your
'contributing opinion writer' calling for violence against a public official?," and then
tweeted
at Wilkinson's other bosses at the think tank to demand the same.
It is unclear whether Hoffman really believed what he was saying or was just trying to make
a point that liberals should be forced to live under these bad faith, repressive "cancel
culture" standards he likely blames them for creating and imposing on others. This is how he
responded when I posed that question:
I was not attempting anything. Numerous major news outlets reported on Wilkinson's tweet,
including Fox News. I simply documented the events on my Twitter feed yesterday. Clearly,
many liberal journalists were outraged at his firing, noticed my documentation, and decided
to inexplicably blame me for his firing. It's ridiculous that many liberal journalists
apparently had nothing better to do on Twitter, than blame a guy with less than 10,000
followers documenting events, for getting Wilkinson fired, considering many major news
outlets reported on Wilkinson's tweet.
When I pressed further on whether he really believed that Wilkinson's tweet was an earnest
call for assassination or whether he was just demanding that perceived "cancel culture"
standards be applied equally, he responded: "I did not take a position either way on the
matter. Wilkinson is perfectly capable of explaining the tweet and his intended meaning, since
he wrote it. Clearly, given the content, the least one can expect is that he should give that
explanation."
Either way, intentional or not, Hoffman's distorted interpretation of Wilkinson's tweet
produced instant results. That afternoon, Wilkinson posted a long and profuse apology to
Twitter in which he made clear that he did not intend to advocate violence, but still said:
"Last night I made an error of judgment and tweeted this. It was sharp sarcasm, but looked like
a call for violence. That's always wrong, even as a joke. It was especially wrong at a moment
when unity and peace are so critical. I'm deeply sorry and vow not to repeat the mistake. . . .
[T]here was no excuse for putting the point the way I did. It was wrong, period."
At least for now, that apology fell on deaf ears. The president and co-founder of the
Niskanen Center, Jerry Taylor, quickly posted a statement ( now deleted without
comment ) announcing Wilkinson's immediate firing, a statement promptly noted by Hoffman
:
Wilkinson's job with The New York Times is also clearly endangered. A spokesperson for the
paper told
Fox News : "Advocating violence of any form, even in jest, is unacceptable and against the
standards of The New York Times. We're reassessing our relationship with Will Wilkinson."
So a completely ordinary and unassuming liberal commentator is in jeopardy of having his
career destroyed because of a tweet that no person in good faith could possibly believe was
actually advocating violence and which, at worst, could be said to be irresponsibly worded. And
this is happening even though everyone knows it is all based on a totally fictitious
understanding of what he said. Why?
It is important to emphasize that Wilkinson's specific plight is the least interesting and
important aspect of this story. Unlike most people subjected to these sorts of bad faith
reputation-wrecking attacks, he has many influential media friends and allies who are already
defending him -- including New York Times columnists Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat --
and I would be unsurprised if this causes the paper to keep him and the Niskanen Center to
reverse its termination of him.
All of this is especially ironic given that the president of this colorless, sleepy think
tank -- last seen hiring the colorless, sleepy Matt Yglesias -- himself has a history of
earnestly and non-ironically advocating actual violence against people. As Aaron Sibarium
documented , Taylor took to
Twitter over the summer to say that he wishes BLM and Antifa marchers had "rushed" the St.
Louis couple which famously displayed guns outside their homes and "beat their brains in,"
adding: "excuse me if I root for antifa to punch these idiots out." So that's the profound,
pious believer in non-violence so deeply offended by Wilkinson's tweet that he quickly fired
him from his think tank.
Whatever else might be true of them, the Niskanen Center's president and The New York Times
editors are not dumb enough to believe that Wilkinson was actually advocating that Mike Pence
be lynched. It takes only a few functional brain cells to recognize what his actual intent with
that tweet was, as poorly expressed or ill-advised as it might have been given the context-free
world of Twitter and the tensions of the moment. So why would they indulge all this by firing a
perfectly inoffensive career technocrat, all to appease the blatant bad faith and
probably-not-even-serious demands of the mob?
Because this is the framework that we all now live with. It does not matter whether the
anger directed at the think tank executives or New York Times editors is in good faith or not.
It is utterly irrelevant whether there is any validity to the complaints against Wilkinson and
the demands that he be fired. The merit of these kinds of grievance campaigns is not a
factor.
All that matters to these decision-makers is societal scorn and ostracization. That is why
the only thing that can save Wilkinson is that he has enough powerful friends to defend him,
enabling them to reverse the cost-benefit calculus: make it so that there is more social scorn
from firing Wilkinson than keeping him. Without the powerful media friends he has assembled
over the years, he would have no chance to salvage his reputation and career no matter how
obvious it was that the complaints against him are baseless.
Humans are social and political animals. We do fundamentally crave and need
privacy . But we also crave and need social integration and approval. That it is why
prolonged
solitary confinement in prison is a form of torture that is almost certain to drive humans
insane. It is why John McCain said far worse than the physical abuse he endured in a North
Vietnamese prison was the long-term isolation to which he was subjected. It is why modern
society's penchant for removing what had been our sense of community -- churches, mosques, and
synagogues; union halls and bowling leagues; small-town life -- has coincided with a
significant increase in mental health pathologies, and it is why the lockdowns and isolation of
the COVID pandemic have made all of those, predictably,
so much worse .
Those who have crafted a society in which mob anger, no matter how invalid, results in
ostracization and reputation-destruction have exploited these impulses. If you are a think tank
executive in Washington or a New York Times editor, why would you want to endure the attacks on
you for "sanctioning violence" or "inciting assassinations" just to save Will Wilkinson? The
prevailing culture vests so much weight in these sorts of outrage mobs that it is almost always
easier to appease them than resist them.
The recent extraordinary removal of the
social media platform Parler from the internet was clearly driven by these dynamics. It is
inconceivable that Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Google executives believe that Parler is some
neo-Nazi site that played anywhere near the role in planning and advocating for the Capitol
riot as Facebook and YouTube did. But they know that significant chunks of liberal elite
culture believe this (or at least claim to), and they thus calculate -- not irrationally, even
if cowardly -- that they will have to endure a large social and reputational hit for refusing
mob demands to destroy Parler. Like the Niskanen and Times bosses with Wilkinson, they had to
decide how much pain they were willing to accept to defend Parler, and -- as is usually the
case -- it turned out the answer was not much. Thus was Parler destroyed, with nowhere near the
number of important liberal friends that Wilkinson has.
The perception that this is some sort of exclusively left-wing tactic is untrue. Recall in
2003, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks,
Natalie Maines, uttered this utterly benign
political comment at a concert in London: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with
y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed the President of the United
States is from Texas." In response, millions joined a boycott of their music, radio stations
refused to
play their songs, Bush supporters burned
their albums , and country star Toby Keith performed in front of a gigantic image of Maines
standing next to Saddam Hussein, as though her opposition to the war meant she admired the
Iraqi dictator.
But two recent trends have greatly intensified this mania. Social media is one of the most
powerful generators of group-think ever invented in human history, enabling a small number of
people to make decision-makers feel besieged with scorn and threatened with ostracization if
they do not obey mob demands. The other is that the liberal-left has gained cultural hegemony
in the most significant institutions -- from academia and journalism to entertainment, sports,
music and art -- and this weapon, which they most certainly did not invent, is now vested
squarely in their hands.
But all weapons, once unleashed onto the world, will be copied and wielded by opposing
tribes. Gabe Hoffman has likely seen powerless workers fired in the wake of the George Floyd
killing for acts as trivial as a Latino truck driver
innocently flashing an "OK" sign at a traffic light or a researcher fired for
posting data about the political effects of violent v. non-violent protests and realized
that he could use, or at least trifle with, this power against liberals instead of watching it
be used by them. So he did it.
It's exactly the same dynamic that led liberals to swoon over Donald Trump's
banning from social media and the mass-banning of his followers only to watch yesterday as
numerous Antifa
accounts were banned for the crime of organizing an anti-Biden march and how, before that,
Palestinian journalists and activists have
been banned en masse whenever Israel claims their rhetoric constitutes "incitement."
Delusion Spotter 14 hours ago (Edited)
If Trump and Conservatives are going to be silenced and kicked off of Social Media, the
Left Wing, like this Clown, should definitely be kicked off Social Media for foolish posts as
well.
Not sure what Glenn's point is or why I should care. Glenn could have focused his article
on the social media censorship of Donald Trump and skipped the irrelevant and unmissed Will
Wilkinson and Dixie Chunks altogether.
Quia Possum 14 hours ago
Maybe Greenwald thinks this will get him in Wilkinson's pants.
spam filter 3 hours ago
Lol, your comment got you an invitation!
cankles' server 13 hours ago
As a leftist, Glenn is trying to explain to leftists what they've unleashed with cancel
culture.
He could have just mentioned Robespierre but socialists can never apply history to
themselves because for them "it's different this time".
After the Coup in Ukraine in 2014 for several years I listened weekly to the John
Batchelor show when he interviewed Russia scholar the late Stephen Cohen.
From those conversations I learned that Ukraine is politically divided EAST (pro European
Union) / WEST (pro Russian) (a bit like the United States is divided RED / BLUE).
Politically by vote Ukraine was close to 50% pro E.U., 50% pro Russia.
After the Coup Crimea voted to return to Russia thus making the political breakdown of
Ukraine more pro E.U.
Forbes Magazine in 2008 republished an interview with Soviet critic Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn, among other things, noted 1) in 1919 Lenin in bringing Ukraine into the
Soviet Union gave Ukraine "several Russian provinces to assuage her feelings," 2) that when
in 1954 Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine Sevastopol was not transferred to Ukraine as
Sevastopol was a military city subject to the Central Government of the U.S.S.R.
I would note that Khrushchev's transfer of Crimea to Ukraine violated Soviet Law /
Constitution as the people of Crimea were not asked if they wanted to be transferred.
At the time I did some searching about the history of Crimea and Ukraine and it turns out
that shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union Crimea wanted to separate from Ukraine and
the Central Government of Ukraine threatened to invade Crimea.
The Central Government of Ukraine in its Constitution gave Crimea a special status not
given other provinces.
I would note that in October 1962 Joe Biden was 19 years 11 months old and likely a
college student. In October 1962 the world came close to ending (at least a good deal of the
so called civilized world) with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
However, in 2014, ignoring the warning of Robert F. Kennedy of the need to put yourself in
the other Country's shoes, Biden supported the violent Coup which essentially included a
violent takeover of the Ukrainian Parliament (Rada) by violent protesters, much akin to the
Trump Taliban taking over the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
It seems that Biden thought that NATO could just move into Sevastopol and take over not
just the port of the Russian navy, but the Russian Navy itself.
"... "You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country why in the name of God don't you have any faith in the system of government you're so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with -- its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don't steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned." -- Seven Days in May (1964) ..."
"... That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump's call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State -- a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State -- to swoop in and take control. ..."
"... It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation's capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned . ..."
"... Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America ..."
"... Seven Days in May ..."
"... Seven Days in May ..."
"... domestic right-wing extremism ..."
"... Battlefield America: The War on the American People ..."
"... This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute . ..."
"You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country why in the name
of God don't you have any faith in the system of government you're so hell-bent to protect? You
want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with
-- its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don't steal it
after midnight, when the country has its back turned." -- Seven Days in May
(1964)
No doubt about it: the coup d'etat was successful.
That January 6
attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real
coup, however. Those who answered
President Trump's call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into
creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State -- a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military
Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State -- to swoop
in and take control.
It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation's capital to be placed
under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or
controversial viewpoints
ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned .
This new order didn't emerge into being this week, or this month, or even this year,
however.
Indeed, the real coup happened when our government "of the people, by the people, for the
people" was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in
cahoots with a government "of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations."
We've been mired in this swamp for decades now.
Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock
and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State's tune.
Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:
a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of
a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to
enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended
or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these
consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment,
the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our
constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread
intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or
military invasion
This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer
Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May ,
a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for
the nation's security.
Incredibly enough, almost 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run
more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the
Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today's
current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May , which
takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.
With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear
disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable
threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the
nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government. When Gen.
Scott's aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the
President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the
clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.
Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is
saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past
half century.
We've been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long -- sold to us in the name of
national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and
order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined
to maintain their powers at all costs -- that it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started
going downhill, but we've been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.
The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by
the military industrial complex. That's a done deal, but martial law disguised as national
security is only one small part of the greater deception we've been fooled into believing is
for our own good.
How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to
accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations,
tanks and military weaponry used by their small town police forces, surveillance cameras in
their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at
drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents
monitoring their communications?
Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find
yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded
alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas,
desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as
being for their best interests.
This is not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.
Still, you can't say we weren't warned.
Back in 2008, an Army
War College report revealed that "widespread civil violence inside the United States would
force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic
order and human security." The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such
civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, "unforeseen economic collapse, loss of
functioning political and legal order , purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency,
pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters."
In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing
and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called
on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance.
Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the
greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism .
Meanwhile, the police have been transformed into extensions of the military while the nation
itself has been transformed into a battlefield. This is what a state of undeclared martial law
looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed merely
for not complying with a government agent's order or not complying fast enough. This hasn't
just been happening in crime-ridden inner cities. It's been happening all across the
country.
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants
(and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the
government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing
and inescapable . It's not just the drones,
fusion centers , license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry
about. You're also being tracked by the black boxes in your
cars , your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media
accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader
accounts.
So you see, January 6 and its aftermath provided the government and its corporate
technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they've been amassing so
assiduously over the years.
Mind you, by "government," I'm not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy
of the Republicans and Democrats.
I'm referring to "government" with a capital "G," the entrenched Deep State that is
unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach
of the law.
I'm referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully
operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and
calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its
citizenry.
Brace yourself.
There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it
doesn't bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class
that they are oblivious to all else, you'd better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force,
and rules by fiat, you'd better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are
never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you'd better beware.
All of those dastardly seeds we have allowed the government to sow under the guise of
national security are bearing demon fruit.
The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a
ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.
*
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The January Sixth events in Washington D.C., depicted in the corporate media as Donald
Trump's criminal "incitement to insurrection", were predictably greeted by Democrats and their
media as the worst tragedy to ever befall American democracy, the heinous plot to establish a
police state -- a coup d'etat, the final desperate act of a deranged tyrant. That might be
considered something akin to surface discourse. Framed differently, those events could not have
made the Dems happier, for by the time the last demonstrator left the Capitol the political
floodgates were opened: total war against an entire nation of seditious Republicans, now
demonized as "domestic terrorists", could finally be adopted as full-fledged strategy. The
perfect Dems scenario for gaining unchallenged power had been laid.
Beyond the moment of Capitol disorder the Dems would find, without much difficulty, that
most precious of all gifts -- a political godsend. Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, national trauma
would give the power elite just what it coveted – in this case the greatest of all
opportunities to frame Trump and much of the Republican party as enemies of the state,
collectively damned to ideological purgatory. January Sixth, like December Seventh before it,
would serve as political code for converting national chaos into its very opposite: relief. The
Dems, already beginning to solidify power in the White House, Congress, the media, and Big
Tech, could now move toward a scorched-earth policy – war of annihilation.
In his book Cultures of Militarism, historian John Dower describes the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor as "political godsend", a moment when humiliating military defeat ("day
of infamy") would allow president Franklin Roosevelt to do what he desperately wanted to do but
could not in the face of an "isolationist" American public opinion -- bring the U.S. into World
War II. Pearl Harbor turned out to be a wonderful blessing in disguise for FDR, whose infamous
eight-point program effectively provoked the Japanese into attacking the Pacific fleet in
Hawaii. In the end, after four difficult years, victory would be heroically wrestled from
defeat.
After what was portrayed as a "sneak attack" (military operations were supposed to be
advertised in advance?), the New York Herald Tribune could exalt: "Since the clash now
appears to have been inevitable, its occurrence brings with it a sense of relief. The air is
clearer. Americans can now get down to their task [of waging war] with the old obstacles
finally removed, forgotten." Public opposition to U.S. entry into the war vanished in two hours
one early Sunday morning. Democratic politicians, joined by a good many Republicans, were now
ready to take military combat to Japan (and then Germany), as the attack had given FDR all the
power, not to mention legitimacy, any president could possibly desire. Since 1941 Pearl Harbor
has been ideological code for unlimited executive freedom, and Roosevelt energetically took
advantage.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, shock turned to resolve, momentary defeat to righteous
commitment. Victim status would be transformed into its opposite. Roughly the same dynamic
would be repeated in the case of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which gave president George W.
Bush "permission" to do what he and the neocons were already hellbent on doing – invading
Iraq and "finishing the job" of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. In both cases – Pearl Harbor
and 9/11 – national humiliation was mobilized to "reset" U.S. foreign policy.
For the present-day ensemble of Democratic elites – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy
Pelosi, et. al. – January Sixth at the Capitol could not have been more timely, more
opportune. Truly another godsend. A jolt to the system, however feeble, partial, and ill-fated,
would justify sustained authoritarian force across the public landscape. Seen as vile agents of
treachery, Republicans would be thrown onto the defensive, immobilized. Pelosi, ready as ever
for vengeful action, would say: "The situation of this unhinged president could not be more
dangerous. He chose to be an insurrectionist." Trump's behavior (in riling up demonstrators)
would demand immediate and harsh retribution. Other Dems quickly followed Pelosi's lead,
amplified by a monolithically frenzied media. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, shrill as ever and
clearly speaking for the "progressive" squad, said: "I do believe we should exercise every
avenue possible because the president has shown that his mental status and his actions are
wildly eroding at a rapid pace." Trump represents a "clear and present danger to our
democracy", she blustered, and must be removed from office as soon as possible.
Not to be overshadowed, Senator Chuck Schumer, reprising "Pearl Harbor" no less, would
state: "I have never lived through or even imagined an experience like the one we have just
witnessed in this Capitol. President Franklin Roosevelt set aside December 7, 1941 as a day
that will live in infamy. Unfortunately, we can now add January 6, 2021 to that very short list
of dates in American history that will live forever in infamy." Oblivious to months of fire
bombings, lootings, beatings, and killings across the streets and buildings of dozens of
American cities (criminality that persists to this day) – all encouraged by the Dems --
Schumer would add, hypocritically: "The temple of democracy was desecrated, its windows
smashed, our offices vandalized."
The authoritarian, virtually fascistic reaction of the media and political establishment was
swift and, well, unhinged: the House would quickly move to impeach the president, again, Trump
was permanently banned from Twitter and other social-media outlets, Republicans (even those far
removed from the Capitol violence) were facing censorship, blacklisting, job loss, and
thoroughly dishonest smears. Within a week the silencing of conservatives across the Internet
had reached new heights. The long-cherished Beltway goal to destroy Trump, his family, and
associates was in sight: any Trump hope for the presidency in 2024 would be smashed. Hysterical
threats of "domestic terrorism" would mean, as always, a drastic Hobbesian response: maximum
state power, strengthened ideological controls, the crushing of political opposition.
As Dower noted, the ideological code emanating from "Pearl Harbor" included yet another
motif: the familiar stereotype of Asians (at that time) as sneaky, backstabbing, and irrational
would be affirmed on December Seventh. Who else could carry out such a dastardly attack? The
same code would naturally apply to millions (tens of millions) of deplorable Trump supporters
– a motley assemblage of gun-toting racists and neo-Nazis. Didn't those sanctimonious CNN
pundits always warn about the backward white-supremacists seduced by the guile of the Orange
Menace? Indeed. The truth was finally illuminated for every Beltway dweller to seize upon and
embellish: Trump followers would now have to pay, their collective guilt revealed beyond doubt
amidst the ashes of January Sixth.
So when all the enlightened Dems repeat their heartfelt sadness over the fate of the
Republic, over Trump's evil subversion of "our democracy", it might be time to look more
closely beneath the surface – or maybe head for the hills. If there were any bars open in
the woke Democratic neighborhoods, that is probably where Pelosi, AOC, Adam Schiff, and other
sad victims of the Orange Menace might be found gathering to celebrate, toasting to their
unbelievably good fortune. Whether such celebrations might be long-lived, however, would be
another matter. Fascistic politics has a tendency to devour its own ruthless protagonists.
Thank you for writing this. I am still trying to figure out why Ashli Babbit, the only
person shot on 1/6, was surrounded by cops at the time, with John Sullivan filming the
incident, along with a Chinese videographer from the CIA's Epoch Times. Sullivan's footage of
the event focuses lovingly on the hand of the shooter, until he steps forward and shoots. The
shooter makes a very exaggerated movement before he fires, despite having his gun trained on
Babbitt already. I believe this movement was a necessary signal to Babbitt, so that could
fall backward in sync with the gunshot. She could have been easily restrained and arrested by
the cops on her side of the window, but instead she was "shot" by a conveniently disembodied
arm. And the only evidence of injury is a very small amount of blood coming out of her
mouth.
@Sue Dunham ng
out of her neck and all over the Capital steps.
After I saw the video of Ashli Babbit's rant on gewtube I came to the conclusion it was
just another manufactured event. I was reminded of the woman Astronaut that drove all the way
from the Johnson Space Center down to the Space Coast in Florida to be with her unrequited
love. All the while wearing diapers the whole time so she wouldn't have to take potty breaks
on the drive down.
If anyone else has seen a video of blood spurting out of Ashli's neck and pooling all over
the floor please provide a link.
You know, I want to see a video where the blood is really spurting out like in the
movies.
1/6 was a nothingburger that is being jewed out of all proportion.
In reality, 1/6 did about ..1/10000000000000 as much damage as the Antifa and BLM
shitheads did in nine months of REAL insurrection.
The jewish owned MSM lies about everything, turns ANY event into an opportunity to SHIT on
innocent white people to demonize them and instill desire in non-whites to MURDER white
people.
The jew media narrative distilled is blood libel against white people.
In his book Cultures of Militarism, historian John Dower describes the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor as "political godsend", a moment when humiliating military defeat ("day of
infamy") would allow president Franklin Roosevelt to do what he desperately wanted to do
but could not in the face of an "isolationist" American public opinion -- bring the U.S.
into World War II. Pearl Harbor turned out to be a wonderful blessing in disguise for FDR,
whose infamous eight-point program effectively provoked the Japanese into attacking the
Pacific fleet in Hawaii.
Roosevelt also knew a Japanese fleet was enroute to attack Pearl Harbor, but withheld this
intel from commanders in Hawaii.
@Beavertales act,
the draconian over-reaction of the elite may prove to be a godsend rallying event for the
oppressed.
Indeed, when I read the title, "January Sixth as Godsend," I thought this article was going
in the direction you indicate.
Events, like arguments, often comprise two, opposing poles. The question is, what will be
the result, the aufheben , this time?
In the near term, clearly it will be further erosion of civil liberties and continued
"American Pravada" fakery. In the long run, however, anything is possible, even things we can't
imagine, because this is now an irrational, complex, disturbed system.
Who will play the role of the Philip Zelikow in the "Insurrection Commission," in the
extension of the 9/11 Commission into the forthcoming 1/6 Commission?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/RFpw-ioM3dk?feature=oembed 44:00
" a shift of the tectonic plates. It is happening before our eyes, this gathering of the elites
."
I forget the name of the incident, but several years ago there was a very obvious fake
female getting shot incident in an attempted color revolution in Iran. It had cia/mi6/Mossad
written all over it, as usual. However, I think they ended up killing the "useful idiot" a few
hours later when the plan failed. This incident is very similar. If someone knows the incident
I am talking about please remind me/us.
Please don't besmirch fascists by mentioning Pelosi as a representative. A better
description of her would be a plutocratic cypriot. No self respecting fascist would be caught
within a stone's throw of her for fear of catching the backdoor trots.
Quite tame, but Schumer, Pelosi and the rest of the gang are going to work it up into The
Reichstag Fire and would, if they could use it to get an enabling act.
Goebbels would be so proud of all the Dems, especially of Schumer.
We can take this Pearl Harbor analogy a little further. The Japanese Americans were also
stripped of their property in a very planned and devious manner immediately after December 7.
Jews picked up most of this property at fire sale prices and benefitted immensely.
The full effects of how this faked January 6 "insurrection" was "good for the jews" will
become clear in the months ahead. But one thing is clear, the take down of Parler directly
benefitted jew owned Facebook (((Zuckerberg))) and the gaggle of jew controlled social media
outfits like Twitter and Instagram.
The Japanese Americans were stripped of thousands of acres of valuable farmland in central
California. Shortly after the January 6 insurrection it came out the Bill Gates is the largest
owner of farmland in the US. Covid and Climate Engineering has impacted farmers across the US
(derechios). I think there may be some correlation here too.
There is also the issue of the 25,000 National Gaurd called in for the innauguration.
Washington mobilized for war.
They can wear tailored suits that cost five or ten thousand. They can get hair colouring
that cost maybe two grand. They can spend as much as they can spend, but the brutal truth is
they are not getting out of this place alive, no matter how much they spend, no matter how much
political power they have, no matter who they know. They are going to be just as dead as the
rest of us. LOL.
The people pictured above, are hands down, the craziest of the crazies. These comrades make
the Trump administration look like boy scouts by comparison.
The problem is, they weren't carrying guns. No one was really threatened. They stayed
between the purple ropes, those folks with canes and walkers and only a few reached the "inner
sanctum", which looks like a library and there ANTIFA members instigated the usual window
breaking and were actually scolded by some of the Trump supporters telling them to stop it,
when finally an unarmed woman, a Trump supporter was murdered by the police. Only the biggest
dupes and people wanting to believe an absurd narrative were shocked. Thinking people were
not.
Interesting that the troops in DC are STAYING, their active duty orders extending AT LEAST
through 16 February which MAY BE EXTENDED military document below on this
Some say these are Trump troops who will still help 'stop the steal', arrest Biden etc LOL
others say that Biden-Harris are preparing martial law scenarios after possible false flag
terror attack, or some kind of new economic or pandemic crisis Given Biden's USA troops invaded
northern Syria on Biden's first full day in office Thursday, it seems the USA war machine is
back in gear and happy to be ridin' wit' Biden
As is widely noted, the new Biden gov seems to be poking ordinary Americans with a
stick:
– Biden's tranny orders destroying women's sports and that all bio-males 'identifying as
female' be welcome in women's locker rooms & rest rooms
– Biden 'critical race theory' order for white-humiliating 'training', all non-Jew whites
to confess to being inherently 'racist' as price to keep gov etc jobs
– Amnesty & citizenship for 11 million & maybe 30-40 million migrants inside US,
end to deportations & border security
Great summary, though the word 'godsent' implies a passivity which seems misapplied in
describing the actions of the beneficiaries of this deep state instigation.
This type of event, perfunctorily (and rather clumsily) tracing a number of transparent
stages, which are then blasted incessantly through propaganda megaphones, is absolutely
standard practice in all foreign coups.
This dynamic is used to give all the partisans a fig leaf to cover their actions and to
provide the next level actors a cue to start their intervention.
"You know, I want to see a video where the blood is really spurting out like in the
movies."
Fair enough.
But -- if she died instantly there'd be very little blood .
I have no idea what really happened, but I'm willing to provisionally accept she was shot dead
by an unidentified shooter.
"The temple of democracy was desecrated, its windows smashed, our offices vandalized."
Most of the Dem' – Establishment reaction to 6.1.21 has been spew inducing, but the above
quote is just perfectly -- funny.
It is SO over the top, SO cynical, self serving & lacking in irony that hilarity is the
only natural response.
There are said to be 2300 Capitol police answerable to Pelosi etc. So when the remarkably
few police actually there conveniently moved the barriers aside to let protestors into the
building, its obvious that the Democrat gerontocracy was still thinking well ahead of the dumb
Trumpstein rabble.
@Sue Dunham staged
"incidents" along the path to Lexington, just like Charlottsville in 2017 was part of the lead
up to the "insurrection" of January 6, 2021.
Samuel Adams and his Masonic Brothers had been planning and inciting the rebellion (Tea
Party, Boston Massacre) from the Green Dragon Tavern.
Boston's Green Dragon Tavern, headquarters of both the Sons of Liberty and St. Andrew's
Lodge
I thought from the title the theme was going to be a far subtler one, not the 'what a gimme
for The Left', the line which everyone still able to publish has taken. I'd argue that 6 Jan
brings peak Democrat hubris forward so pulls nemesis – the revelation of the red tooth
and claw of unhinged, vote-losing socialism – much nearer (say 2022).
Good points. Flip the script tell the truth make it happen.
Yet people still don't believe in Karma?????????
What we need to do is stop tolerating/subsidizing evil.
Easier said than done you say?You're probably right.
Hard to get it out there though,most seem TOO invested in
continuing their blissful expertise .
Looks to me that it's finally beginning to end or not
Yes, and there is also the clear evidence of capitol police standing aside, waving
protestors toward the building, lining the halls to get out of their way as they entered, and
leading them up the correct set of stairs. It was a set up, like what Roosevelt achieved at
Pearl Harbor.
The writer does not say so though it is implied .this 'event' screamed it was STAGED.
Beginning with the most obvious why were the crowd allowed in at all? It's just another of
these 'hoaxes' and with Biden in charge look for many more. Didn't the whole 'hoax' method
(Sandy Hook, Boston Bombing, etc etc) take off during the Obama/Biden years? As Chuck Shumer
said recently "Buckle Up"
1/6 was a false flag attack following the theft of the 2020 election. The purpose? To
establish Chinese style Totalitarianism on behalf of what Pepe Escobar refers to as Techno
Feudalism.
Nothing good can come from Democrats and/or Republicans. Democrats and Republicans have
ruined our Country. Why is Orange Man Bad? Becuase the Deplorables defeated both Parties in
2016. It won't happen again. Nothing good can come from the District of Corruption. Separation
is the ONLY way forward. Why is anyone still talking about future elections?
@Sue Dunham as a
cue to pretend you were shot, if you are, in fact, pretending. So, if the "exaggerated
movement" is your proof that it was "acting," then it was not acting but real. That it was
otherwise a set-up, and "an inside job" by the same people who run Antifa is obvious. That the
police removed the barricades and waved the people to come in, led by bussed in Antifa Judas
goats, is also obvious and well documented. You could say all of America, white and black, was
shot at that moment. Just because all of the fake killings the last few years by white people
are a staged show to incriminate the innocent and create the illusion of "White Supremacy,"
does not mean that the Deep State does not kill when it serves their interest.
Chucky wants to take your guns away, but he knew how to shoot and somewhere on the net is
a
better phrenic matchup than this would suggest, but hairlines do speak as well
"For the present-day ensemble of Democratic elites – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy
Pelosi, et. al. – January Sixth at the Capitol could not have been more timely, more
opportune. Truly another godsend. A jolt to the system, however feeble, partial, and ill-fated,
would justify sustained authoritarian force across the public landscape. Seen as vile agents of
treachery, Republicans would be thrown onto the defensive, immobilized. "
The author does not seem to be aware yet that the whole invasion was a
CIA/FBI/Antifa/BLM/Q-Anon staged, planned false flag event, [complete with a staged shooting],
with the intent to demonize Trump and his supporters [and to arrest some of them on the spot,
eg Alex Jones and Roger Stone].
A set up from the git go.
SWAT teams came to Roger Stones D.C. hotel room [luckily he'd already left town after
smelling something rotten in the air]. Since then his 70 yr old wife was viciously attacked in
FL. by an anonymous bike rider [Antifa?] who deliberately ran over her body at least 3 times
[she's now under intensive care in a FL hospital, and Stone himself has gone into hiding,
apparently].
A SWAT team also came for Jones in DC [apparently], but local police refused to co-operate
with Feds to the best of my knowledge at present, so that take down didn't go as planned for
the Fed goons either.
Ashli died very quickly, You can see her hands going into tetanic contractions within a very
few seconds of her collapse. She was bleeding internally through her esophagus or wind pipe and
the blood was coming out her mouth. As your heart stops, so does the bleeding.
Curiously this is the second time you have posted this exact same comment, even with the
exact same "Thank you for writing this" to start. Even more curious, your first reply and
agreement comes from the exact same person who agreed with you then (Jan. 15). Who curiously
posted the exact same response he posted then. Are you posing as both? Very convenient, if
true.
I think that they are afraid that old Jubal Early is pissed off about all the Confederate
statues being desecrated and that he is going to rise from the dead, whoop those useless
Yankees and threaten Washington once more
General Early and the Army of the Valley Movements Map
I think most of you are missing the point about the events of 1-6. The only really relevant
photos of that day are the ones of US Congress"men" cowering in abject terror under their
desks, or running in abject terror to their precious "safe" location away from the Capitol
building.
This is the very public demonstration of true sniveling cowardice in a manner that cannot be
naysayed or denied in any way. And now the entire world knows it. Having been so publicly outed
as low grade cowards, we can now expect, going forward, that every reaction of the US Congress
will be a grotesque, and violent, overreaction.
There is also the issue of the 25,000 National [Guard] called in for the [inauguration].
They did give cover for the abysmally small crowd attending the inauguration. From the pics,
it hardly looked to be more than a thousand. Trump had more than that lining the streets when he
returned to Mar-a-Lago.
So of course, the "threat" of further horrendous violence from those oh so vicious Trump
supporters still hiding in the city since Jan. 6 deterred a full half million of those
enthusiastic Biden supporters who so wanted to see him take the oath.
@Schuetze Why would
he shoot with Capitol police standing in the line of fire back in the stairwell?
Winter also tries to make the case that John Sullivan was inciting the riot when there is no
footage yet produced of Sullivan doing anything more than recording events as he saw them, which
is what he said he was doing. He published an hour-long video and nothing there shows him doing
anything physical. He did say things like "Let's burn that shit down" but it could not have been
heard by many (if any) people near him and there is no indication anyone else was paying
attention to him. He was, it seems, simply narrating and role-playing.
I only learned in the last 4 to 5 years what despicable old hags Pelosi and Hillary are.
They compete for being the most despicable with Hillary suggesting Trump was in contact with
Russian President Putin on January 6 to keep him updated on the so called "insurrection". For
over 75 years Americans, most often Jews, have called Germany's Josef Goebbels a liar but I
can't recall the last time they said what he supposedly lied about. No one can compete with
Americans like Hillary Clinton and American Jews like Adam Schiff for being the most unabashed
liars in the world. And it's the Lying Jewish media with mini-mes like CNN's head Jeff Zucker
that create these deliberately false narratives for their stooges Pelosi and Clinton to
propagate. As former Congressman Ron Paul suggested yesterday, no country has interfered in
more foreign elections than the USA.
It would be glorious if Trump ran for President again. I don't expect it and I would think
he would not want to become a human punching bag again, but I believe he would win if his
forces could prevent another fraudulent election. There is no force in the USA as powerful as
the media and it's the same in most "democratic" countries. How glorious it would be too if the
old hags had enough of letting themselves be used by people like Zucker and Twitter's Jack
Dorsey and turned on them and had the justice department put those despicables in jail. Oh, how
glorious. One can dream. But that is unlikely and what is more likely is that within the next
ten years the world won't care much what is happening in the USA, for the USA is in for a big
fall which will reduce its power and influence greatly.
That said, Republicans control the legislatures in quite a few states, and the Constitution
gives those states plenary power over election law, particularly for President and the
Congress. Changing the law to mandate paper ballots and voter ID while eliminating the machines
and mail-in ballots would probably expose the fraud and regain the House and Senate in the
mid-terms.
I remember the film of the vc prisoner, who while being held by guards was shot suddenly in
the temple. The amount of blood forcefully streaming from the hole in his head was both
astonishing and gruesome. I don't know if happened because of being shot in the head though, as
opposed to being shot in the body. Or maybe the bullet hit the artery.
That was a concise truthful account of what we are up against again, Mr. Boggs. Thank
you.
Even the pundit Ann Coulter, someone I've appreciated being on my side for more than a
decade, has fallen for some of this bullshit out of the Lyin' Press in their ceaseless
Infotainment. From her latest column (otherwise, one I agree with):
The raid was disgusting, appalling, sickening, but it's not a license for concocting
imaginary accusations. Trump is bad. The thugs who stormed the Capitol are bad. You don't
need to manufacture evidence against them, media.
Peak Stupidity notes that she lied by using the terms "raid", "disgusting",
and "thugs", in the post "Et tu, Ann?"
Will Ann Coulter, even, be suckered into supporting anti-"domestic-terrorism" laws, just as
she went for the "fight them over there " crap after 9/11? There are cooler heads that don't
get emotionally suckered in by the Lyin' Press narrative. We are the ones they are aiming at
with the new round of oppression to come.
" Fascistic politics has a tendency to devour its own ruthless protagonists."
It has already done .Bush or more precisely Cheney to Tea Party to MAGA false prophet of Trump
is linear and traces only a tiny distance.
False hope is entertained because desperation and anger demand it . Obama and Trump are two
sides of the same coin , Both hurt the believers and the faithful most and did
intentionally.
"Since the clash now appears to have been inevitable, its occurrence brings with it a
sense of relief. The air is clearer. Americans can now get down to their task [of waging war]
with the old obstacles finally removed, forgotten."
This would apply equally well to a US civil war . It would clear the air,
people/organizations commit to one side or the other and get on with it.
Agreed. It was truly satisfying to watch uniparty kleptocrat cowards, who torture us daily
with bad laws and invitations for invading hordes, scrambling for their escape choo-choo
train.
@Peripatetic Itch
on in Syria, preceded by waves of Iraeli bombings and missile strikes. Iraq has also been under
the zio-genocide hammer.
Clearly, the next move in the US is going to be the gun grab, and they will try to focus it
on "white supremacists". This is the narrative construction we see going on, of which Babbit
likely was part of. During the Trump administration there seemed to be far fewer false flags. I
would bet that we are about to see a flurry of "white supremacists" shooting up various
synogogues, jewish graveyards, black churches, and I would not be at all surprised if the grand
climax was the bombing of a "holocaust" museum.
Hitler was the only leader in history that knew exactly what must be done with communists.
If you allow even one communist to live in your land, your freedom is at risk. In my view, the
only thing that will remove them now and thus save America is for a Hitlarian type figure to
rise up and ruthlessly deal with the communists in politics, the Judeo media complex, the
courts, and academia. He rounded them up in the 1930's and that is the only way to stop them
now. If that isn't done soon, they will be rounding us up which they are making very clear.
How about all those available resources to fortify the capital since the Big Capital Walk
Thru? Were concrete and metal fence producers considered essential during all our lockdowns?
Did they miraculously have inventory waiting for DC to come beckoning?
@Schuetze every
possible misdemeanor in her life, from accusations of deliberate assault by car to restraining
orders, to adultery, to her "fanatical" propensity to rant, to living in a threesome, as you
say. Her death, on the other hand, is treated matter-of-factly, as if to say, What else would
you expect for such a flaky dumb-ass? No mention that she was not armed.
Compare that to what they did for George Floyd. He came out as a saint who had only wanted
to be president as a kid. Gone to Minneapolis to start a "new life" as I recall. Barely a
mention of his home invasion, holding a gun to the belly of a pregnant woman, possibly raping
her.
__________________
* Hitler and Germans were lucky that Russians/Slavs were not as vengeful as Germans'
Anglo-Saxon kin, who burned about 100,000 or so German civilians – old men, women,
children – just to show what they are capable of. Stalin could have created 100s of
Dresdens, and nobody could have stopped him.
** I understand there is an organized, decades long effort to erase that wonderful
trait.
@GeneralRipper
especially since the servile House democrats don't have the guts to vote her out as Speaker?
And she will continue to be easily re-elected in her far-left district, no matter how senile
and delusional she is.
Think Strom Thurmond in his last years. He lived to be 1oo, dying in office. In fact, since
women live longer than men, Pelosi may finally collapse for the last time when she is 110,
still firmly clutching her gold-plated gavel that she refused to give up. After rigor mortis
sets in, they won't be able to pry it out of her cold dead hand, so she'll be buried with it,
and will lie in State in the Capitol Rotunda for a month.
They should iether explain proven anomalies or shut up Jan 23, 2021
The burden of proof remains upon those claiming the election was honest to provide
irrefutable evidence to support the claim.
Presidential vote fraud is immaterial, anyway, because the US Constitution empowers each
State Legislature to assign Electoral College Electors any way they so choose. If State
Legislatures choose their Electors according to the fake results from fake elections, that is
their Constitutional right to do so. Even if the States pass laws to the contrary, if they
choose not to prosecute their own lawbreaking, the outcome is the same: whatever the State
Legislatures want or tolerate irregardless of votes from the People. Constitutionally,
Presidential elections are decided by votes of the People for their respective State
Legislators, you remember, those nameless, low-paid, locally elected State Representatives and
State Senators. 1 0 Reply
Bill Beeby , Jan 23, 2021 9:41 AM
Trump was the perfect catalyst for this to happen it would seem and he is well out of it.
Old Joe has some tough times ahead and compared to Trump he is a pushover.
@83. The world just witnessed TOTAL collusion between big business and a so called left
government, right here in the USof A. Did u really just come here and say fascism is from the
right only. Wow dude yer seriously bent. Happy to be wrong. If u didnt say that then please
explain what you ment.
The Illusion of Democracy: Government by the Rich for the Even RicherPart 17 of
'Elephants in the room' series By Rod Driver Global Research, January 22,
2021 Region: Europe ,
USA Theme: History
"Democracy has little meaning when big business rules the life of the country through its
control of the means of production, exchange, transportation, and communication, reinforced by
command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda". (US
philosopher John Dewey(1))
Different systems of government have been tried in different countries over the years, but
it is sometimes said that democracy is the least-worst method of running a country.(2)
Democracy is supposed to mean 'rule by the people', where everyone has a say in how their
country is run, and having real influence over decisions that affect their lives. In theory,
everyone has an equal voice in shaping policy. There was a time, between approximately
1950-1970, that democracy in Britain and the US seemed to be working. In Britain the government
created the National Health Service. The US made significant progress with civil rights. The
gap between the rich and the poor (inequality) in both countries decreased tremendously.
However, wealthy people and business leaders did not like the high taxes, which peaked at 98%
in the UK, so they worked hard behind the scenes to change things. In the 1980s US President
Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher began a trend that is still
continuing. They gave more and more power to big companies, and took less and less tax from the
rich. Inequality in both countries has returned to levels that we have not seen since early
last century,(3) and life for poor people has become harder and harder. This post and the next
one will explain the main problems with US and British democracy.
Political Capture
In practice, it is not too difficult for wealthy and powerful people and organisations to
create a system that gives the appearance of democracy but does not really give ordinary people
much say. Having a vote once every few years is not genuine democracy if the candidates are too
similar. In his book entitled 'Tragedy and Hope', Carroll Quigley explained that what America
needed was a system where:
"The two parties should be almost identical so that the American people can 'throw the
rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in
policy"(4)
This has been called 'faux' (false) democracy.(5) The US and Britain are good examples of
this. The US has the Democratic and the Republican parties. Britain has the Labour and the
Conservative parties. For some years now there has been little difference on key policies
between the two main parties in each country.(6) Supposedly left-wing parties have moved
further and further to the right. This means that many of their policies are intended to
benefit big companies and the rich. The British parties became so similar that the former
Labour leader, Tony Blair , and the former Conservative leader, David Cameron , were described
as clones of each other.(7) In the US, Wikileaks released emails showing that the Democrats'
Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton , was paid over $600,000 for 3 speeches to Goldman
Sachs bankers explaining that her true policies, in favour of big business, and her public
statements, are not the same.(8) This is called political capture.
In both countries there have also been few practical differences in foreign policy. In
particular, both parties in each country have committed war crimes. The Russian leader, Stalin,
said after World War Two that the Labour party were more conservative than the Conservatives
when it came to preserving the British ruling class's interests abroad.(9) Iraq was destroyed
when Labour were in power, Libya was destroyed when the Conservatives were in power. In the US,
a former official of the National Security Agency compared US President Bush (Republican) and
his staff to the Corleone mafia family from the movie The Godfather.(10) Obama (Democrat) was
just as criminal and started multiple wars. The same applies to all recent presidents,
whichever party they are from. Even President Carter (Democrat), who was thought to be much
more moderate about foreign intervention, was President when Afghanistan was de-stabilised by
the CIA in 1979, leading to the creation of al-Qaeda (see earlier post on terrorism).
The extent of political capture has recently become clearer, as evidence has shown that the
people who run the UK Labour Party, and the people who run the US Democratic Party,
deliberately worked against politicians who wanted a fairer society. In the US they rigged the
internal elections to make sure that Bernie Sanders did not become their Presidential
candidate. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn successfully became the leader of the Labour Party, but
insiders actively undermined him when he tried to become Prime Minister.
The existing form of government in the US should really be called plutocracy, which means a
country governed by the wealthy. The same is true, to a slightly lesser extent, in Britain.
Various commentators have indicated that the extreme form of capitalism we have today, known as
neoliberalism, where excessive wealth is concentrated into a few hands, and the rich have
significant influence over politics, is incompatible with genuine democracy.(11)
Companies write our laws
Many laws are heavily influenced by big companies. (This was discussed in the previous post
on lobbying). Some laws are even written by corporate lawyers. As one commentator wrote about
the US:
"Monsanto writes agricultural and food policy; ExxonMobil writes energy and foreign policy
and Goldman Sachs writes financial policy for the federal government."(12)
Up until 2016 there was an attempt to create what was known as the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership).(13) This was an immensely powerful set of regulations being made
by, and for the benefit of, big business. This was described as a trade agreement, but it is
more accurate to call it an agreement about the rights of investors. A key part of the TTIP is
that an international company could sue a government because they might lose profits in the
future due to new laws. The system would bypass existing legal systems, and be heard in a
secret court that is heavily biased towards the companies. The effect of this would be to stop
governments introducing new legislation to protect the environment, worker rights, safety
standards or food standards. Public pressure stopped the TTIP, but similar rules already exist
in some trade agreements, and they have seriously affected the ability of governments to
regulate corporations. Corporate lobbyists will continue to pursue this type of agreement,
which is intended to undermine democracy.
Many senior regulators come from the companies that are being regulated. These people see
the world from the point of view of those companies. In 2008 there was a global financial
crisis. It became clear that banks were engaged in widespread fraudulent activity that created
serious instability. The main financial regulators in Britain and the US did not see their role
as 'policing' corrupt financiers. They saw their role as enabling financiers to achieve their
goals. The government had deliberately structured the regulator in this way. Experts from
business helped the government write the laws and regulations in the first place. This is known
as regulatory capture. Following the crisis, it was widely expected that new laws would be
introduced to limit the activities of banks and other financial companies. Whilst there have
been some changes, rules that might seriously limit the ability of banks to defraud everyone
have not been introduced.
In the US, up until 2017, the internet companies were regulated by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). There was regular criticism of the FCC that it had been
captured by the biggest companies that it was supposed to regulate.(14) Those companies
successfully lobbied politicians to change the system so that in future, some parts of their
business will be regulated by a different regulator that has significantly less power, and less
expertise, than the FCC.(15) The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is notorious for failing
to properly regulate pharmaceutical companies,(16) and Donald Trump re-structured the
Environmental Protection Agency (FDA) deliberately to serve corporate interests.(17)
The propaganda role of the media in perpetuating the illusion of democracy
There have been a number of recent scandals in Britain where contributors making generous
political donations were given honours, such as Knighthoods.(18) The media rightly criticised
this. However, this is a good example of how media propaganda works. They criticise a trivial
aspect of the system, but do not discuss the much deeper problems with the whole political
system, which is much more important than the knighthoods.
Any observer of US politics can see that the two parties are extremely similar and that the
elections in the US have become a form of theatre, where the media turn elections into an
immense spectacle lasting for years, knowing that there is little difference between the two
main parties on the key issues. The same is now true in Britain. The mainstream media play an
essential role in 2 main ways. Firstly, they maintain the charade that we live in a genuine
democracy and rarely discuss the problems with the system explained in these posts. Secondly,
they destroy the reputations of anyone who challenges the system, such as Jeremy Corbyn or
Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange, by repeatedly smearing them.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking
modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the seventeenth in a series entitled Elephants In
The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what's really going on
in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream
media.
R ussiagate was an invention to help explain away Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016 and to
undermine the legitimacy of the man who beat her.
Now that that man himself has been defeated, and a Democrat is back in the White House, one
would think it was over. But Russiagate has proved too useful an instrument to discard. It beat
up not only Donald Trump, but riled Russia too. It was an elixir for CNN's and MSNBC's
ratings.
And now Russiagate is poised to be used again against Russia, Trump and Trump voters. The
latter are way more than "deplorable" now. They are "cult members" and a threat.
Democrats are surely sticking to the Russiagate story as sure as it was exposed as pure
opposition research
stitched up to appear as a serious intelligence assessment.
Last Friday Clinton invited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi onto her podcast to discuss the
events at the Capitol. In the middle of it, Clinton, who has no official position in the Biden
administration, revealed the power she has behind the scenes. She brought up the topic by
asking Pelosi:
"We learned a lot about our system of government over the last four years with a president
who disdains democracy and -- as you have said numerous times -- has other agendas. What they
all are, I don't think we yet know. I hope historically we will find out who he's beholden
to, who pulls his strings."
"I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that
the insurgents invaded our Capitol," Clinton went on. "We now know that -- not just him, but
his enablers, his accomplices, his cult members -- have the same disregard for democracy."
As if those words weren't astonishing enough, Clinton made a startling policy proposal. She
wanted to know if Pelosi thought the U.S. needs "a 9/11-type commission to investigate and
report everything that they can pull together." Sounding as if this were pre-arranged, Pelosi
responded, "I do." She added: "I don't know what Putin has on him, politically, financially or
personally."
Normally before any investigation can begin there has to be some prima facie evidence
of wrongdoing. There has to be something to investigate. But in this instance all there is is
wild speculation. Speculation that Trump may have been on the phone with Putin while Trump
supporters marauded through the halls of Congress.
The Usefulness of Russiagate
Repeatedly blaming Russia allows Democrats to deny the role they have played in the
devastation of working and formerly middle class Americans–which helped elect Trump and
fueled the assault on the Capitol.
Rather than enact a social democratic agenda that will repair the damage done to the poor
and working class from 40 years of bi-partisan economic neoliberalism, the Democrats, now in
control of Congress and the White House, continue to smear their enemies as Russian agents,
while
threatening a domestic War on Terror and even more surveillance. (It's not enough that
Trump is gone and led a mostly disastrous
presidency and that many of his followers were duped
by him.)
Russiagate is also too useful to discard because it is a tool for politicians to get out of
sticky situations. In previous years, if a publication revealed a politician's corruption and
it was completely verified, that politician in most cases would eventually resign.
Today that politician can override the truth of the exposure by falsely blaming a hostile
foreign power for being behind it. The corruption story is still true, but now the focus is on
who leaked it, which is irrelevant. (U.S. prosecutors routinely use evidence from criminals
turned informants to nail bigger fish.)
Such of course was the case with WikiLeaks ' publication of the Clinton and Podesta
emails. (Even though Russia was immediately blamed, four DNC officials did resign
, including the
chairwoman -- "sacrificial lambs" from the party's perspective to keep Clinton in
place.)
Beyond that, Russiagate has been a convenient and successful strategy of deflection from
one's own responsibility for America's social and political crises.
The message is that the destruction of American democracy has nothing to do with bipartisan
approval of money's corruption of politics, and vast overspending on the military instead of on
education, health care and infrastructure.
Instead it is all being engineered by an evil genius in the Kremlin -- a virtual James Bond
villain. The adolescent level of political
education in the public, and in much of the
media , creates fertile ground for such a grand deception to flourish.
It is more absurd and transparent to suggest that Moscow had something to do with the
Capitol uprising than it did with the 2016 election.
Despite four years and counting of Democratic Party propaganda about Trump conspiring with
Russia to steal the 2016 election, a $32 million, 22-month investigation by Special Counsel
Robert Mueller found no evidence of any conspiracy.
Shawn Henry, the head of the company CrowdStrike hired by the Democratic Party and Clinton
campaign (while keeping the FBI away) to examine the DNC servers declared under oath to the House
Intelligence Committee that no evidence of a hack was discovered.
Despite this, the Russiagate saga is still believed by millions of Americans, bolstered by
Congressional studies that relied on intelligence briefings. Mueller and Henry were legally
obliged to tell the truth. Intelligence agencies aren't.
And now Clinton and Pelosi will shamelessly reinvigorate the Moscow-menace malarkey (h/t
Biden) into a risky, renewed tension with Russia, which just might work nicely with the hawks
in Joe Biden's cabinet.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief ofConsortium Newsand a former UN
correspondent forThe Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,
and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for theSunday
Timesof London and began his professional career as a stringer forThe
New York Times.He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter
@unjoe
Consortiumnews.com , January 23, 2021 at 19:02
Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated
the data from the DNC? when would that have been?
Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators
that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated
(sic). There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in
this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don't have the evidence
that says it actually left.
Mr. [Chris] Stewart of Utah: Okay. What about the emails that everyone is so, you know,
knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that
they actually were exfiltrated?
Mr. Henry: There's not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There's
circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.
Mr. Stewart: But you have a much lower degree of confidence that this data actually left
than you do, for example, that the Russians were the ones who breached the security?
Mr. Henry: There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the
network.
Mr. Stewart: And circumstantial is less sure than the other evidence you've indicated.
Mr. Henry: "We didn't have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data
left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.
In answer to a follow-up query on this line of questioning, Henry delivered this classic:
"Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn't see the data leave, but we
believe it left, based on what we saw."
Cadogan Parry , January 23, 2021 at 13:25
The late Robert Parry astutely asked "Why Not a Probe of 'Israel-gate'?"
(CN-20-April-2017).
It still seems that no extreme is too extreme for ever-compliant US media to protect the
American people from any critical thinking about Israeli political-influence-and-propaganda
campaigns and the vigorously bi-partisan pro-Israel Lobby.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu personally welcomed convicted spy Pollard (30-Dec-2020) and Sheldon
Adelson's corpse (11-Jan-2021) to Israel. On his last half-day in office, Trump granted full
pardon to Pollard's Israeli handler.
"Well everybody's dancin' in a ring around the sun
Nobody's finished, we ain't even begun."
– Grateful Dead (1967), "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)"
It's amazing. Are Americans so gullible not to see that? But also one wonders,Who Rules
America or USA for that matter?
robert e williamson jr , January 23, 2021 at 12:08
Who rules America? Kamulegeya come closer so I don't have to shout. Not so much gullible
as uncaring, intimidated, and over whelmed.
The CIA calls the shots, the remainder of the intelligence community falls in line with
with CIA, the State Department plays middle man for the intel community throwing their
support behind what ever the caper is and if any problems develop with the process the DOJ
always rules in favor of keeping all the secrets secret, even despite them not knowing the
truth. After the right senators are contacted.
This all starts at the top stays at the top, the part of the Deep State that delivers to
those elites I often talk about, those super wealthy elitist the SWETS.
The President oft times don't know sickem and far too ofte don't want to know what is
going on himself.
Another fine, well-articulated article, nicely debunking once again the risible
"Russiagate" hoax which the establishment, DNC-directed Dems just can't seem to let go of, at
least as long as the general American public has not yet been provided with any thorough
debunking, -- of the type, say, that Bill Binney is STILL unsuccessfully trying to interest
the MSM to cover -- as long, that is, as the still largely uncritical mass of the MSMs'
audiences remain easy "marks" for such ostensibly "official" conspiracy theories, especially
those having the solid support of 17, oops, 1, intelligence agency, oops, 1 former CIA
director, and a couple of other old timers who were dragooned into declaring before a
congressional committee that they too believed that Russian interference in our elections was
at least "highly probable."
Clearly only with a very wide dissemination of the truths about Russiagate, only with a
refutation reaching out well beyond the recipients of the alternative press, only with one
which is easily available to, and comprehensible by the general public are we likely to see
any retraction or diminution of the many spurious reiterated Russiaphobic accusations from
the Dems. Just how to facilitate such a wide-ranging dissemination of a sensible
deconstruction and refutation of the hoax is, of course, a huge remaining problem for all of
us determined to bring the truth to as many of our compatriots as possible.
While I completely agree with all that you have written, Joe, I would like to comment on
two things you mentioned in passing. First, just as you say, the Dems are claiming that the
U.S. needs "a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything" about Russian
interference. Such a demand is quite humorous even just taken upon its literal meaning,
since, if there is one thing that is NOT needed it is precisely something like the
chaotically hobbled together, -- and in the face of great opposition from the Bush
administration, -- intentionally starved of funds, de facto whitewash, produced by the "just
accidentally" amazingly pro-Zionist 9/11 commission, a report that was even quickly disowned
by several of its authors as just such a political whitewash upon its release!
But even if we assume our goodly Dems mean to call for some more serious, fair-minded,
disinterested, inquiry into the actual facts behind the great Russiagate hoax, that too is
something the Dems could hardly be serious about commissioning since it would presumably only
quickly reveal just what so many of us have been arguing for four years now, most
specifically, inter alia, that the DNC emails, including Hillary Clinton's illegally
unsecured emails, could not possibly have been obtained through a Russian, or any other kind
of "hack," but merely through an on-site download of the files onto a thumb drive, something
which can be, and demonstrably was, accomplished in only a fraction of the time any hack
would require, and the subsequently physical delivery of that thumb drive to Wikileaks.
That the emails were indeed leaked to Wikileaks, not provided to Assange by mysterious,
non-existing "Guccifer 2.0" hackers, as still claimed in the official account, has also been
maintained consistently by Julian Assange himself, much to the always deaf ears of the MSM.
Indeed, anyone with more curiosity and intelligence than a grapefruit can easily determine,
both from Assange's own actions apropos the matter, and from other evidence, including a
direct naming of the person, provided by those who were closely associated with Wikileaks at
the time, exactly who it was who hand-delivered the thumb drive in question to Assange. But
this truth of the matter, while easy to obtain, also destroys what little remains of the ONLY
link the Dems have which allegedly ties Trump to the genetically nefarious Russians, which is
why, of course, Mueller declined to interview Assange, even though the latter was quite
willing to set him straight. And so, all the conspiracy seeking Dems can do, aside from
admitting it was a hoax from the git go, which they are certainly unlikely to do, is double
down on their conspiratorial nonsense while hoping that its debunking remains confined to the
easily demonized "alternative" press, as, alas, it has been so far.
And thus, just to coin a new phrase, we can say that; "Russiagate lives on because the
moment for its demise [i.e. public refutation] was missed." Well, mostly missed, that is,
since a few of us, and first among them all of you at Consortium News, didn't miss the
disingenuous legerdemain at all, but spoke out clearly against it, albeit not yet in a manner
that could have finished the employment of such a pack of obvious lies off once and for all
in the minds of the American people.
P.S.: At the risk of displaying my ignorance about such things, what does "h/t Biden"
mean?
Anna , January 22, 2021 at 13:43
The FBI still did not look at Seth Rich's computer.
Meanwhile, the fraudsters at CrowdStrike have been prospering and those who hired a foreign
agent Steele to slander POTUS were not punished as traitors.
What is particularly hard to fathom is not so much the gross dishonesty and malice of
politicians like H. Clinton and Pelosi but the boneheaded stupidity and ignorance of the
broad population that accepts fables like Russiagate as fact.
This is a testament to the immense power of propaganda, when repeated on a daily basis by
the mass media.
Joe Lauria says convincingly, "Russiagate was an invention to help explain away Hillary
Clinton's defeat in 2016 and to undermine the legitimacy of the man who beat her."
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, the "stab in the back legend" in post-World War I
Germany was an invention by the extreme right wing and later Nazis to help explain away
Germany's defeat in that war and to undermine the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, putting
the blame on domestic "enemies" in cahoots with foreign adversaries.
Very much the same thing.
Russiagate was aimed at President Trump and a foreign enemy. Now, following the "new 9/11"
of the Capitol Riot and planned domestic "antiterrorism" legislation, it looks like the state
will mainly go after "domestic enemies". A new Reichstag Fire has occurred. The parallels are
becoming ever more apparent.
Bob In Portland , January 22, 2021 at 18:51
Russiagate was well afoot in the summer of 2016. It wasn't merely to slander Trump. It was
to prepare us for a war against Russia.
If I had access to network time I'd ask: If Russiagate is true, and if you have proof, why
wasn't Trump charged with treason? You had two chances to do it but Democratic leadership
never thought to bring it up. How curious.
DH Fabian , January 22, 2021 at 22:01
Yes. Just one point: Russia wasn't a "foreign enemy" until the Clintonites falsely claimed
that they somehow interfered with the 2016 election. Russia was a solid ally in both world
wars. Since the Perestroika era, united efforts of US and Russian scientists brought
extraordinary progress. There was solid unity from the fall of the Soviet state in the 1990s,
until the Clintonites falsely accused Russia of some sort of "election interference." This is
how the Democrats destroyed decades of diplomatic progress toward nuclear disarmament.
PEG , January 23, 2021 at 05:16
I agree – I didn't mean "enemy" in the literal sense, but rather in the sense you
refer to.
JohnO , January 23, 2021 at 12:43
Russian propaganda from the beginning has always and ever been to secure vast sums of
revenue from the people's' taxes, and to scare the crap out of those same people. When Truman
dropped the first A-bomb on Hiroshima, he remarked that 'this will let the Russians know that
we are serious', or words to that effect. He slaughtered an urban populace to make a point!
And generations of Americans were raised in fear of Russians and nuclear war.
The current state of domestic surveillance is a self-conscious recognition, I believe, of the
wholly irresponsible policies of the two parties. Third-rate healthcare, pathetic public
education, mass incarceration, and massive deregulation in the industrial and financial
sectors. All to pay for wars and control across the globe. It is an arrangement that will
continue to provoke protests, insurrection and conspiracy theorizing.
evelync , January 22, 2021 at 13:43
I find it amusing that the top ranks of the political hacks whose psy-ops that use Russia
as the great threat against "the most powerful country in the world" – these hacks
choose to ignore the real, the relevant investigation that should be in the forefront –
the money trails of Trump's so called financial empire – the banks, the oligarchs, the
money laundering – the sources of his funding over the years who really would have had
the opportunity to push him around ..
Investigating the finances may be too uncomfortable for them to examine .. Even though his
financial schemes hurt real people – wages unpaid, debts unpaid; bankruptcies; students
betrayed.
On another note – Amy Goodman on Democracy Now's 1/21/21 news summary pointed out
that the Biden Administration was sticking with Gaido being the "recognized" leader of
Venezuela ..the democratically elected Maduro remains the target, apparently .
meanwhile FT writes that the "EU dropped its de facto recognition of Juan Guaidó as
Venezuela's interim president, a serious diplomatic setback to the opposition leader's
faltering campaign to oust Nicolás Maduro from power."
wikipedia:
"Venezuela is a major producer and exporter of minerals, notably bauxite, coal, gold, iron
ore, and oil, and the state controls most of the country's vast mineral reserves. In 2003
estimated reserves of bauxite totaled 5.2 million tons."
countries in South America with Lithium ( used in batteries for electric vehicles) and who
have democratic minded politicians who think their people should get some benefit from the
country's resources watch out for other U.S favored Guaidó's ..
Anonymot , January 22, 2021 at 13:11
Thanks for raising the subject, Joe.
It's really to ridiculous to merit a reply. One would think an honest party would have
excreted Hillary Clinton by now, but no, they can't. She still owns the DNC as I've repeated
for years and note that Neither Joe Biden nor Harris nor any member of Biden's cabinet would
be there without the DNC/Hillary stamp of approval. Buttigieg's appearance in a cabinet level
post is solely her doing, for he has zero qualifications for that post. His presence is the
equivalent of hers as Secretary of State- to give credence to his qualifications on hid next
run for President. She failed hers; we'll see about his.
Hillary's handlers are the dangerous ones.
Dorothy Sillman Crouch , January 22, 2021 at 13:01
My greatest fear with Biden was that he would find a place for Hillary in his
administration. My understanding of what happened during the 2016 primary was those emails
downloaded at the DNC revealed what they were doing to take down Bernie as a candidate so
that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate with the niave assumption she could win over
Trump. Big mistake. Hillary has never been a viable candidate. And of course the DNC never
wanted to sponsor a Socialist like Bernie. I was very concerned after the election of Trump
that my Democratic state senators continued to insist Russia was involved. Blame Russia has
been the mantra of the Democratic Party ever since. As suggested Bill Binney tried to
disproved that connection but the party didn't want to hear that. I agree with John Chuckman
in his appraisal of Putin. I would never want to see Biden revive the 'blame Russia' mantra.
Someone suggested we had to feed the military industrial complex so that's why it happened.
Needs to stop.
I wonder how many people picked up Pres. Biden's passing reference to Russia paying
bounties for American scalps (in Afghanistan). It was a 24-hr. story long ago and died
quickly for lack of evidence and logic. But Biden keeps using it, as he did in one of the
'debates' with Trump. Two questions arise. 1. Does Biden really believe the story or does he
use it to score patriotism points? Either way it reflects very badly on him. 2. Is the bounty
myth a distant cousin of Russiagate or is it a signal of a renewed pursuit of the Cold War by
Biden and his hawkish appointees?
Mikhailovich , January 23, 2021 at 00:56
US politicians will carry on with their Russo-phobia anyway. What really is good about the
new administration, they are not so keen for a new nuclear arm race as Trump was. It looks,
the new administration is less subordinate to the military industrial complex.
Why would anyone in a position of power inside the United States government –
Democrat or Republican or Independent – risk the major-league blowback that comes with
holding up the so-called 9/11 Commission as a "shining Gold Standard example" for people to
emulate when seeking hard, harder, and the hardest of truth?
Surely those who offer up unearned praise to that assembled group of "investigators" are
fully aware of the group's conscious omission of crucial evidence related to the
world-changing events of September 11, 2001, of which the following are deserving of more
weighty emphasis than the other near equally disturbing omissions:
-- The 9/11 Commission Report completely & mysteriously omitted the many unimpeachable
accounts by eyewitnesses – including rescue workers, firefighters, law enforcement
officers and civilians – of tremendous explosions on that day.
-- The 9/11 Commission Report completely & mysteriously omitted mention of World Trade
Center Complex Building 7 and the 47-story skyscraper's inexplicable collapse on the
afternoon of September 11th.
Readers of Consortium News and many millions of others Earth-wide aware of these
profoundly disturbing facts choosing to remain silent can only be described as contributive
accessories to these most severe crimes of omission, not to mention the absolutely horrific
harming of innocent human beings subsequent – of which the omissions are to a very
great extent the actionable basis.
The option of stopping the rise of Trumpism by changing the system has been taken off the
table. Instead, people are being asked to debate the pros and cons of giving more powers to
that same corrupt system which created Trump.
The US political/media class have been pushing hard for more authoritarian policies
to stave off the threat of "domestic terrorism" in the wake of the Capitol riot.
President Biden, who was already
working on rolling out new domestic terrorism policies well before January 6, confirmed after the riot
that he is making these new measures a priority. Political internet censorship is becoming
increasingly normalized , anti-protest
bills are being passed , and now we're
seeing liberals encouraged to form "digital
armies" to spy on Trump supporters to report them to the authorities.
And an amazingly large percentage of the US population seems to have no problem with any of
this, even in sectors of the political spectrum that should really know better by now.
"What else can we do?" they reason. "What other solution could there possibly be
to the threat of dangerous fascists and conspiracy theorists continuing to gain power and
influence?"
Well there's a whole lot that can be done, and none of it includes consenting to sweeping
new Patriot Act-like authoritarian measures or encouraging monopolistic Silicon Valley
plutocrats to censor worldwide political speech. There's just a whole lot of mass-scale
narrative manipulation going on to keep it from being obvious to everyone.
The way to stem the tide of Trumpism (or fascism, or white supremacism, or Trump cultism, or
whatever term you use for what you're worried about here) is to eliminate the conditions which
created it.
Trump was only able to launch his successful faux-populist campaign in the first place by
exploiting the widespread pre-existing opinion that there was a swamp that needed draining, a
corrupt political system whose leadership does not promote the interests of the people.
Conspiracy theories only exist because the government often does evil things and lies about
them with the help of the
mass media, forcing people to just guess what's happening behind the opaque wall of government
secrecy.
People only get it in their heads that they need a trustworthy strongman to overhaul the
system if the system has failed them.
People who are actually interested in ending Trumpism would be promoting an end to the
corruption in the political system, an end to the opacity of their government, an end to their
uniquely awful electoral
system , and an end to the neoliberal policies
which have been making Americans poorer and poorer with less and less support from the
government which purports to protect them.
But these changes are not being promoted by the US political/media class, because the US
political/media class speaks for an empire that depends on these things.
Without corruption, the plutocratic class couldn't use campaign donations and corporate
lobbying to install
and maintain politicians who will advance their interests.
Without government secrecy, the oligarchic empire could not conspire in secret to advance
the military and economic agendas which form the glue that holds the empire together.
Without a lying mass media, people's consent could not be manufactured for wars and a system which does not serve
their interests.
Without widespread poverty and domestic austerity, people could not be kept too busy and
politically impotent to challenge the massive political influence of the plutocrats.
So the option of stopping the rise of Trumpism by changing the system is taken off the
table, which is why you never hear it discussed as a possibility in mainstream circles. The
only option people are being offered to debate the pros and cons of is giving more powers to
that same corrupt system which created Trump, powers which will be under the control of the
next Trumpian figure who is elevated by that very system.
You're not going to prevent fascism by creating a big authoritarian monster to stomp it into
silence, and even if you could you would only be stopping the fascism by becoming the fascism.
To stop the rise of fascism you need to actually change. Drastically. Believing you can just
make it go away without changing your situation is like believing you can avert an oncoming
train by putting your hands over your eyes.
There is no valid argument against what I am saying here. Saying the powerful won't allow
any positive change is just confirming everything I'm saying and confirming the need to remove
the powerful from power. Saying that ending corruption, government secrecy and injustice would
just be giving the terrorists what they want would be turning yourself into a bootlicker of
such cartoonish obsequiousness there aren't words in the English language adequate to mock
you.
Yes, change is desperately needed. Yes, the powerful will resist that change with everything
they have. But the alternative is letting them plunge the world into darkness and destruction.
We're going to have to find a way to win this thing .
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her
website is here and you can follow
her on Twitter @caitoz
Paul Ericson 1 day ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:59 PM
Trumpism doesn't really exist, because Trump doesn't really subscribe to all the mythical
traits his enemies claim for him. He did however expose the ground-level Americans' resentment
of corporate USA and radical liberal USA working them over and wanting to make patsies of them.
I'm quite happy to support a real Trumpism if it ever comes along, just as I support Putin.
Neither are ideal but are at least appreciative of the instincts of the worker and the patriot.
jayjm1138 Paul Ericson 13 hours ago 23 Jan, 2021 03:33 PM
Very well stated. The so-called "Trumpism" was just people rallying around one figure who was
outside of the establishment dictatorship. Trump was far from perfect, but he proved that the
establishment will not tolerate anyone who goes even slightly against them. Those who did not
support Trump have no right to complain about authoritarianism now. Trump warned them what was
coming and they did not care.
Jewel Gyn 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 12:44 AM
Politics is about saying what voters want to hear but do otherwise after you won. This is
bipartisan and folks must realise the policies are often not for people but to perpetrate the
narratives disguised as pro US.
Hillary:" I would love to see his phone records to see if he was talking to Putin the day
the insurgents invaded our Capitol"
That has to be the most idiotic thing Hillary Clinton has ever said, and she has said a
great many idiotic things.
First, does she not know that the NSA and CIA and FBI would immediately be on to any such
communication?
Is she really that naïve? No, of course not, she is simply a grotesque liar.
Second, I have studied and written about Putin fairly extensively. He is a calm, pragmatic, and highly intelligent man, one with Russia's best interests
always at heart.
The last thing he would want to see is instability in the United States with all the
immense dangers that would represent.
It is precisely American politicians like Hillary who are a threat to global stability
An academic study carried out by researchers in the US and Germany has concluded that
big-tech elites are completely different to all other people on the planet, and can be placed
in their own class.
"Our research contributes to closing a research gap in societies with rising inequalities,"
note the authors of the study from two German universities and the Ralph Bunche Institute
for International Studies in New York.
The research
centres around analysing language used in close to 50,000 tweets and other online statements by
100 of the richest tech-elites as listed by Forbes.
The researchers conclude that big-tech elites such as Mark
Zuckerberg and
Bill Gates display a 'meritocratic' worldview, meaning they do not see wealth as a source
of their influence or success, but rather believe their innate abilities and more altruistic
beliefs have enabled them to achieve power.
"We find that the 100 richest members of the tech world reveal distinctive attitudes that
set them apart both from the general population and from other wealthy elites," the study
states.
The findings reveal that big-tech elites consistently talk about believing in democracy,
being philanthropic, and helping make the world a better place for other people.
"Yet their position in a democratic system is contradictory – as a result of their
enormous wealth, they have disproportionate influence over how discretionary income is
spent," the researchers note.
The researchers found that language used by the tech-elites regularly includes words such as
'merit', 'distinct', 'excellent', 'value', 'virtue', 'advantage', 'superiority', 'worth',
'perfect', 'important' and 'significant'.
"The tech elite may be thought of as a 'class for itself' in Marx's sense – a social
group that shares particular views of the world, which in this case means meritocratic,
missionary, and inconsistent democratic ideology."
The researchers noted that the study had limitations, ironically owing to the fact that they
were not able to access language used by all the top 100 tech-elites because Twitter is banned
in China.
The Twitter accounts they were able to access could also be managed by PR professionals and
are obviously public projections of how the tech elites want to be thought of by the public at
large, therefore the language used may be 'strategic'.
Nevertheless, the findings go some way to explaining why big-tech elites are so inclined to
censor and
de-platform those who hold world views at odds with their own.
ay_arrow
josie0802 12 hours ago remove link
Big Tech feeds on narcissist tendencies in people. As long as you engage you are part of
the problem. Once you leave you might be part of the solution.
LetThemEatRand 18 hours ago remove link
Ironically, most of history's psychopaths were nerds before they gained power. If you want
a basic psychology lesson, they have an axe to grind.
BluCapitalist PREMIUM 18 hours ago remove link
Also grandiosity. Their wealth is self fulfilling. Hitler thought the same of himself
in4mayshun 17 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Agreed. Deep down they know how pathetic they are. Even more sad is that they aren't even
smart enough to make their own billions; These technologies were entrusted to them in
exchange for selling out humanity.
How
to Buy Politicians: Corruption and LobbyingPart 16 of 'Elephants in the Room'
series By Rod
Driver Global Research, January 21, 2021
"Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been
corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying"(1)
Until recently, the terms Public Relations (PR) and lobbying were used slightly differently.
Lobbying means direct communications with policy-makers. PR is more general and refers to all
communications. The US introduced regulations to restrict the activities of lobbyists, so
lobbyists tried to get around these regulations by labelling their activities as PR. There is
now considerable overlap between the two activities. This post discusses activities that have
traditionally been known as lobbying.
Political Corruption – It's Not A Bribe If You Call It A 'Donation'
The term corruption conjures up images of brown envelopes stuffed full of used notes being
passed furtively under a table as a bribe. However, this is just one type of corruption. In
Britain, Europe and the US, the corruption that really matters is built into the system, in the
forms of donations, favours and influence. (This is sometimes called collusive corruption,
where politicians and business people collude with each other). Big corporations are happy to
spend a few million dollars/euros/pounds on political 'donations' if they get back billions in
extra profits due to laws and regulations biased in their favor,(2) or from existing laws being
weakened. In any other context we would call this bribery.
Politics in the US is expensive. Many US businesses now make large bribes to both of the
major US political parties.(3) The main method is known as a 'fundraiser'. This is an event
where corporations pay large sums to politicians using a lobbyist as an intermediary. The
politicians know where the money has come from, and they know who expects favourable
legislation in return.(4) US politicians are therefore dependent on their most successful
lobbyists, and their wealthiest supporters. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that money
and wealth influence policy.(5) One former insider said of their work :
" the more money you have, the more your voice is heard It was an endless cycle of money
trading hands for votes every fundraiser is a legal bribe" (6)
America is effectively a business-run society. A good example would be the insurance and
drug companies, who make big profits from the existing US healthcare system. Companies spend
hundreds of millions of dollars each year bribing politicians to avoid changes that would
decrease their profits.(7) President Obama introduced some changes, but the final legislation
was so watered down that the US healthcare system is still nowhere near the type of National
Health Service that is commonplace elsewhere. Some of the changes will actually increase the
profits of the health insurance companies.(8) The donations in Britain are smaller than in the
US, but they have been effective in distorting Britain's economy so that it benefits the rich
at the expense of everyone else. European health services, including Britain's, are slowly and
steadily being privatised.(9) This is not about making the health service better or more
efficient. It is to enable corporations to extract profits.
Lobbying is a Huge Industry
The exact scale of lobbying is unknown. It has been a multi-billion dollar industry in the
US for many years, where the official expenditure on lobbying is $7 billion per year, but there
is a great deal of secret lobbying, so the estimated total is believed to be closer to $14
billion. More recently, lobbying in Brussels to manipulate European legislation has reached a
similar scale.(10) It was estimated in 2017 that there were 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels.
Britain has the third biggest lobbying industry in the world, estimated at £2 billion
each year.(11) However, lobbying in Britain is even more secretive than in the US, so whilst
many examples of lobbying have been well-documented, we do not have a clear picture of
everything that goes on.
To make their lobbying even more effective, companies in an industry will get together to
form organisations, such as the European Banking Federation, to lobby on their behalf. There
are more than 1,000 of these in Brussels. Even larger groups, such as Business Europe, will
represent a wide range of businesses. These groups are well-funded and influential. Due to
their expertise they will initiate discussions about legislation, and even draft first
proposals for new laws or regulations. The bank, Citigroup, wrote US legislation in 2014 to
ensure that banks could be bailed out following a future financial crisis. Key politicians who
supported the bill received large contributions from financial companies.(12)
David vs Goliath
In theory, other groups, such as consumer groups, unions, environmentalists and
non-government organisations (NGOs) are also able to lobby, but their spending and influence
add up to a small fraction of corporate lobbying. One researcher concluded that "For every $1
spent by public interest groups and unions corporations spent $34." (13) A US analysis in 2010
found that the financial companies alone employed 5 lobbyists for each member of congress.(14)
In some industries, such as banking, there is no organised opposition to the corporate
lobby.(15)
The nature of lobbying can also be quite personal, involving long-term social and working
relationships, lunches, dinners, and job opportunities for relatives and friends. Billionaires,
such as Richard Branson, can invite Prime Ministers to holiday on their private island. Rupert
Murdoch, owner of multiple media outlets in many countries, was able to have personal meetings
with US President Trump, various Prime Ministers, and their closest advisors. This type of
meeting is considered mutually beneficial to both parties. NGOs and other groups do not
generally have these close connections. Corporate lobbyists spend more money, employ more
people, with more contacts and better insider knowledge, have better access to policymakers and
better information. This undermines democracy, and creates governments that work well for the
rich and powerful, but not for everyone else.(16)
Echo Chambers
Lobbying strategies are more successful if information appears to come from several,
apparently independent, sources. Therefore lobbyists use many of the same strategies as PR
consultants, such as the media, think tanks and academics, as echo chambers to reinforce their
message. This is important because companies are not trusted as honest sources of information.
Their relationship with the media can be quite complex. Lobbyists actively recruit former
journalists because of their political contacts. Lobbyists feed stories to the press, but they
also try to stop negative stories appearing.(17) They are sometimes able to persuade
journalists to drop a story, either by offering an alternative story, or by threatening to cut
access to their clients in future. This works because journalists get so many stories from
lobbyists, so loss of access would have serious consequences for them. If all else fails
lobbyists will threaten legal action. This has been very effective, particularly in the UK.
Lobbying services are also offered by think tanks, lawyers, management consultants and
accountants. This creates serious conflicts of interest, as accountancy firms and consultants
often advise governments on regulations, but then advise clients on how to get around those
same regulations. This has been particularly clear in the banking sector, where accountants
operate lucrative businesses advising their wealthiest clients on activities such as setting up
layers of subsidiaries and holding companies, so that they can hide their assets overseas in
tax havens, or game the system so that their profits appear in the lowest tax
jurisdiction.(18)
Revolving Doors and Conflicts of Interest
The issue of 'revolving doors', where people move from jobs in government to jobs in big
business, and vice versa, was mentioned in an earlier post about the weapons industry. The
problem is extremely widespread and affects the most important business sectors in Britain,
Europe and the US. When former business-people go to work with the government, they will see
the world from the perspective of big business, irrespective of the downsides to the rest of
society. In Britain this is most clear in the Health Service, where former staff of the biggest
US Healthcare companies have been gradually re-structuring the National Health Service (NHS),
and privatizing parts of it, so that shareholders can extract wealth from it. (This will be
discussed in detail in a later post about the NHS).
The problem is also important when people move in the opposite direction, from government to
business. For example, lots of British politicians involved in decisions about the
privatisation of the healthcare system have gone on to take well-paid jobs with private
companies who benefitted from those decisions. A conflict of interest refers to a situation
where a person is making decisions about an issue, but gains personally from those decisions.
In the UK in 2008 there were 30 former government ministers (who were still politicians) who
had jobs with corporations.(19) A later study in 2010 showed there were over 140 members of the
House of Lords with financial connections to healthcare companies.(20) Their main role is to
help the business manipulate government, by utilizing their contacts, or exploiting their
knowledge of weaknesses in existing legislation.
A growing trend is for policymakers to join lobbying companies, and vice versa. Lobbyists
actively headhunt government employees who have been involved in writing legislation. In the
US, "about half of retiring senators and a third of retiring House members register as
lobbyists."(21) The average salary is approximately 10 times as much as in their government
job. The same happens in Europe, where banking regulators go on to earn big salaries working as
bank lobbyists, and former lobbyists get appointed to senior roles with organisations that are
supposed to regulate particular industries(22). In 2019 the chief lobbyist for Santander Bank,
Jose Manuel Campa, became the new head of the European Banking Authority. It is therefore
unlikely that banks will be properly regulated in the near future.
The Most Powerful Lobbying Organisation in the World is the US Government
There is an additional layer of lobbying which is extremely important, but almost never
discussed openly by the mainstream media. Individual governments lobby other governments and
organisations. This is notable in finance, where the British government lobbied hard to avoid
stricter financial regulation by Europe following the 2008 financial crisis. In a later post we
will talk about political and regulatory capture (this is sometimes called ideological
capture), where politicians see the world from the point of view of big companies. Politicians
lobby for regulations that will be profitable for companies, but might have serious
consequences for citizens.(23)
The US government uses a combination of threats and bribes to achieve its goals all over the
world. It lobbies at the UN to create support for its illegal wars; it lobbies other
governments so that its tobacco companies can be allowed to sell and advertise their cigarettes
abroad; it uses its diplomats and trade negotiators to arrange deals that benefit its
exporters. Government lobbying is just as secretive as corporate lobbying, involving backroom
deals, and promises of aid and loans in exchange for votes. Many countries try to do the same,
but the scale of the US's economic threats and bribes, backed up by its willingness to impose
sanctions and overthrow governments using its military, means that it is usually able to get
its way, irrespective of the downsides for people in other countries. This creates huge
advantages for US companies.
Transparency Is Important, But It Won't Change Anything By Itself
One of the big problems with lobbying is that most of it is secret. Greater transparency
might help, but is probably only a small part of any future solution. Many people have argued
for information about what executives are paid. We now have a fairly good idea of executive
pay, but it has not led to serious change.
From 2005-2010 there was an annual award known as the Worst EU Lobby Award, where people
voted for the worst corporate offenders, and the worst conflicts of interest by politicians who
are helping to manipulate laws on behalf of corporations. In 2005, the fake grassroots
organisation, C4C (Campaign for Creativity) lobbied for stronger patents. In 2006 the oil
company ExxonMobil won for paying millions of dollars in order to fund 39 groups of climate
skeptics. This gave the impression that climate change skeptics come from respectable sources,
when many of them are paid to write corporate propaganda.(24) In 2007 BMW, Daimler and Porsche
won for lobbying against carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions. In 2008 agrofuel (crops used as fuel)
lobbyists tried to claim that they are sustainable, when they are not. In 2010, Goldman Sachs
and the derivatives lobby group ISDA lobbied to protect their most complex financial products,
despite the dangers they create, and the energy company, npower, claimed it was green while
trying to keep coal powerplants open. Whilst these awards irritated people in business and the
lobbying industry, they did not receive mainstream media coverage, so few people were aware of
them, and they had little effect in changing anything.
Various ideas have been discussed to make lobbying more transparent, but none of the
measures attempted so far has teeth. Lobbyists don't want their activities to be out in the
open, and governments like having secret connections with the wealthiest parts of society. The
EU and UK have what are known as transparency registers to monitor lobbyists, but they are
ineffective. The UK register has been described as "completely unfit for purpose".(25) At the
same time, corporate lobbyists keep working behind the scenes to actually decrease
transparency.(26) Transparency by itself is not enough. It is just a starting point. The whole
concept of corporate lobbying needs to be challenged much more seriously.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking
modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the sixteenth in a series entitled Elephants In
The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what's really going on
in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream
media.
It should be shocking to Republicans and Democrats alike that the Commander-in-Chief of the
United States is banished from all of the main social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook
and YouTube – denying him the ability to communicate with his 75 million constituents, or
one half of the electorate. This is real and unprecedented violence being committed against the
body politic and far more worrisome than any breach of federal property, as loathsome as such
an act may be.
The Capitol building is, after all, ultimately a mere symbol of our freedoms and liberties,
whereas the rights laid down in the U.S. Constitution –the First Amendment not least of
all – are fragile and coming under sustained assault every single day. Why does the left
refuse to show the same concern for an aging piece of parchment, arguably the greatest
political document ever written, as it does for a piece of architecture? The answer to that
riddle is becoming increasingly obvious.
Big Tech began its slide towards marked fascist tendencies thanks to one of the greatest
hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public, known as Russiagate. One after another, Silicon
Valley overlords were called before Congressional committees to
explain "how and why Russian operatives were given free rein to tamper with 2016 U.S.
election," in favor of the populist Donald Trump, no less.
After this made for television 'dressing down', the Big Tech executives at Google, Facebook,
Twitter and others got busy reconfiguring their software algorithms in such a way that
thousands of internet creators suddenly lost not only a lifetime of hard work and their
sustenance, but their voice as well. This is the moment that Big Tech and the Democrats began
to really march in lockstep. A new dark age of 'McCarthyism' had settled upon the nation,
which gave the left unlimited powers for blocking user accounts they deemed "suspicious," which
meant anyone on the right. Now, getting 'shadow banned,' demonetized and outright banned from
these platforms has become the new dystopian reality for those with a conservative message to
convey. And the fact that the story of 'Russian collusion' was finally exposed as a dirty
little lie did nothing to loosen the corporate screws.
Incidentally, as a very large footnote to this story, Big Tech and Big Business have not
dished out the same amount of medieval-style punishment to other violators of the public peace.
The most obvious example comes courtesy of Black Lives Matter, the Soros-funded social-justice
movement that has wreaked havoc across a broad swath of the heartland following the death of
George Floyd during an arrest by a white police officer.
Both BLM and Trump supporters believe they have a very large grudge to bear. The former
believes they are being unfairly targeted by police due to the color of their skin, while the
latter believes they are not getting fair treatment by the mainstream media due to 'Trump
Derangement Syndrome', and possibly also due in part to their skin color. But at this point the
similarities between BLM and Trump voters come to a screeching halt.
Taking it as gospel that America suffers from 'systemic racism' (it doesn't, although that
is not to say that pockets of racism against all colors and creeds doesn't exist), dozens of
corporations jumped on the woke bandwagon to express their support for Black Lives Matter at
the very same time the latter's members were looting and burning neighborhoods across the
nation. Strangely, violence has never shocked the progressive left, so long as the violence
supported its agenda.
Here are just some of the ways the corporate world responded to charges that America was a
racist cauldron ready to blow, as reported by The Washington Post: "Jamie Dimon, chief
executive of JPMorgan Chase, knelt
alongside employees during his visit to a Chase branch. Bank of America
pledged $1 billion to fight racial inequality in America. Tech companies have
invested big dollars in Black Lives Matter, the Center for Policing Equity, Colin
Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp and other entities engaged in racial justice efforts " And
the list goes on and on.
Of course, private corporations are free to express their solidarity with whatever group
they wish. The problem, however, is that these monopolistic monstrosities have an overwhelming
tendency to pledge allegiance to liberal, progressive values, as opposed to maybe steering
clear of politics altogether. Nowhere was Corporate America's political agenda more obvious
than in the aftermath of the siege of the Capitol building on January 6, which led to the death
of five people.
Corporate America missed a very good opportunity to keep quiet and remain neutral with
regards to an issue of incredible partisan significance. Instead, it unleashed a salvo of
attacks on Trump supporters, even denying them access to basic services.
Aside from the most obvious and alarming 'disappearing act,' that of POTUS being removed
from the major social media platforms, were countless lesser names caught up in the
'purge.'
One such person is conservative commentator and former baseball star Curt Schilling, who
says that AIG terminated his insurance policy over his "social media profile," which was
sympathetic to Donald Trump,
according to Summit News. "We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that
@AIGinsurance canceled our insurance due to my "Social Media profile," tweeted Schilling.
"The agent told us it was a decision made by and with their PR department in conjunction
with management," he added.
While all forms of 'cancel culture' (which seems to be part of a move to build American
society along the lines of the Chinese 'social credit system,' which rewards those who toe the
party line, and punishes those who fall out of favor) are egregious and counterintuitive to
American values, perhaps the most astonishing was the cancellation of Republican Senator Josh
Hawley's book deal with Simon and Shuster.
"We did not come to this decision lightly," Simon & Schuster said in a statement over
Twitter. "As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and
viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens,
and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat."
The so-called "threat" was a photograph of Hawley raising a fist to the crowd that had
assembled outside of the Capitol building before it had breached the security perimeter. It
seems that corporations may now serve as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to how
Americans behave in public. Is it a crime that Hawley acknowledged a crowd of supporters who
were at the time behind the gates of the Capitol building? Apparently it is.
By the way, the name of the Hawley's book? 'The Tyranny of Big Tech'. How's that for
irony?
In conclusion, it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to believe that they are safe
from the same sort of corporate and government behavior that has now dramatically silenced the
conservative voice across the nation. The United States has entered dangerous unchartered
waters, and by all indications it would appear that the American people have inherited a 'soft'
form of fascism.
Although there may not be troops and tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds
from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same: the brutal elimination of
one half of the American population from all of the due protections provided by the U.S.
Constitution due to an unholy alliance between corporate and government power, which is the
very definition of fascism. Democrats, you may very well be next, so enjoy your victory while
you still can.
I've copied this comment from the site below – though it was a good one ..
" Joe Biden: a virtual candidate elected in a virtual election, sworn-in via a virtual
inauguration to preside over a virtual presidency. Virtually no one has physically attended
any public event with him in attendance since 2019. See also 'Wizard of Oz ."
Look how perfectly applicable is the phase "The complaint wants the Ethics Committee to investigate whether Cruz and Hawley failed to
"[p]ut loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party, or Government department," to key
Russiagaters
Notable quotes:
"... they "engaged in criminal conduct, or unethical or improper behavior." ..."
"... The Democratic Senators are also asking the Ethics Committee to "offer recommendations for strong disciplinary action, including up to expulsion or censure, if warranted by the facts uncovered." ..."
"... Its as if democrats didnt spend 4 years and millions of dollars questioning the validity of the prevous election. ..."
The complaint wants the Ethics Committee to investigate whether Cruz and Hawley failed to
"[p]ut loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party,
or Government department," or if they engaged in "improper conduct reflecting on the Senate"
linked to the January 6 Capitol 'riot.'
The Democratic senators also outlined several questions they believed should be probed as
part of an Ethics Committee investigation including if they were in touch with coordinators
for the rally , if they encouraged any "insurrectionist" acts or if they "engaged in criminal
conduct, or unethical or improper behavior."
"While it was within Senators' rights to object to the electors, the conduct of Senators
Cruz and Hawley, and potentially others, went beyond that," they wrote in the letter to
Ethics Committee leadership.
Cruz and Hawley, two potential 2024 presidential contenders, have denounced the mob that
breached the Capitol but they've also stood by their decisions to object to the Electoral
College results from Arizona and Pennsylvania, respectively. -
The Hill
During the counting of electoral votes, Cruz objected to Arizona's results, while Hawley
objected to Pennsylvania's results following the Capitol attack, when a group of Trump
supporters and at least one prominent member of BLM breached the Capitol building and occupied
it for a brief period of time before leaving on their own.
The Democratic Senators are also asking the Ethics Committee to "offer recommendations for
strong disciplinary action, including up to expulsion or censure, if warranted by the facts
uncovered."
Forgero 3 hours ago
Its as if democrats didnt spend 4 years and millions of dollars questioning the validity
of the prevous election.
This is actually not completely true as even regular "dumb" phone can pinpoint your
location, although with less accuracy. But the key is you operations using credit card. That's
probably much more useful information for the surveillance state that maps of where you have
been. Jan 15, 2021 4:29 PM
One of the simplest, quickest ways we could make all Mr Global is doing and wants to do
unworkable is to refuse to own a smart phone. Consequently, we'd have none of those apps
constantly pushed our way. Also – don't cry – we need to refuse to use Big Tech's
spy devices, aka social media. People say to me, But I don't care if they spy. Let 'em, I've
done nothing wrong. And it's true – they haven't. But Big Tech, slave to Mr Global, is
not looking for criminals – Mr Global makes the laws (in most places now) and can
criminalise anything or anyone he wants to. If he wants criminals, he can make you into one.
Ask Judy Mikovits. Telling the truth now is a crime and soon you will see people arrested for
it. Julian Assange's story told us this would happen. And it is. Remember, Mr Global and Big
Tech live by no moral code you or I adhere to.
Everything they intend to do to us needs control, and knowledge is control – who we are,
what we believe, where we are, what we look like, our DNA (now available through the PCR test
– the real reason behind this useless test ), how much money we have or spend and on
what. AND ALL OF THAT – bar the DNA – IS AVAILABLE TO THEM VIA SMART PHONES AND
SOCIAL MEDIA. For example, how will they introduce digital money if we refuse to own a smart
phone? How will they introduce arbitrary daily 'health certificates' if we have no device to
display them? Chaos will ensue. Next thing is a chip inserted in our bodies, then we don't need
the phone. Yes, it will get rough, but we have only a short time when we can act together and
support one another. Soon it will be impossible. Ask the Germans. No one thought these
cultured, educated people would be made to conform to nazism in the 1930's. When covidism
happened, I heard and read people stating that the Spanish wouldn't put up with this. I find it
hard to believe the British have folded so easily. (See: Rule Britannia we never, never shall
be slaves Only if a magic non-existent virus comes along, then we'll slip into the chains.)
Mr Global knows more about us than we do, and so can manipulate or locate or harass or
brainwash or vaccinate or ban or censor. Or remove us, of course.
Mr Global said we would become addicted to the internet, and we have. It's not just porn or
games, it's even worse – smart phones and social media. Defy them! Poke Zuckerberg in the
eye! Get rid of your smart phone and get off social media, support people or groups who are
trying to find another way. We all need friends, especially now.
P.S. I agree smart phones are v useful for videoing such things as police violence! But small
cameras exist! Jan 15, 2021 3:41 PM
But "The Internet" is not just these pre-packaged platforms. Thy are just applications that
are provided free of charge for everyday users because those applications need bait for their
raw material – you. You're the ants in their ant farm who mill around providing grist for
their mill -- analytics to tell advertisers who to target and how to approach them and screen
space to contact that target audience.
There is absolutely nothing stopping Trump or anyone else starting a Wiki like OffG. There's
the issue of hosting but there's no need to use a service like AWS with its attendant Terms and
Conditions, it just convenient. There is always someone, somewhere, that will host you and
people will find you even if your Domain registration is suppresed or seized. A site like
Pirate Bay continues to exist despite the ongoing efforts of law enforcement but the price the
operators pay is that they have to have a deep understanding of what they're doing and a very
serious attitude towards site security. (If you're doing something that's potentially illegal
like Pirate Bay then you have to be serious about precautions. The operators asnd users of
Parler, for example, are learning the hard way about hosting potentially seditious material
without adequate precautions -- they've effectively shopped their entire user base to the
Feds.)(We can argue about their material but its really a case of one persons 'freedom' is
another's 'sedition' -- that's for the courts to decide .but a wise person wouldn't let this
situation arise in the first place.)
Trump got kicked off these sites not just because of a sudden outbreak of social
consciosness by the operators but because he's effectively a 'has been'. His power is fading
fast which has altered the financial risk/reward calculus so there's little downside to
ejecting him and likely a lot of upside. The mistake he and his supporters have made is to take
these platforms for granted, to assume that their use is some kind of God given right rather
than a corporate commercial decision.
Remember -- "If the product is free then you are the product"
"... Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security strategy is committed to global dominance, while berating Russia for "revisionism." ..."
ByGlenn Diesen, Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, and an editor at the Russia in Global
Affairs journal. Follow him on Twitter @glenndiesen
Donald Trump's efforts to reduce the ideologically driven base of US foreign policy fuelled great resentment among those who believed
it betrayed Washington's leadership position in the so-called "liberal international order."
Now that power has changed, will the pendulum swing in the opposite direction, with Joe Biden's administration applying a radical
ideological foreign policy?
A recent article by Michael McFaul, once Barack Obama's ambassador to Russia and a noted 'Russiagate' conspiracy theorist, indicates
what such an ideological foreign policy would look like. McFaul's article, 'How to Contain Putin's Russia', makes a case for a containment
policy.
Containment: learning from the past or living in the past?
To advance his argument, McFaul quotes George Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram and architect of erstwhile US containment
policy against the Soviet Union. McFaul suggests that Kennan's advocacy for a "patient but firm and vigilant containment"
against the revolutionary Bolshevik regime 75 years ago remains as valid as ever.
It would have made more sense to
quote Kennan when
he condemned NATO expansionism and predicted it would trigger another Cold War. As Kennan noted: "there was no reason for this
whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their
graves."
Kennan continued to express disbelief over the rhetoric by the misinformed US leadership, presenting "Russia as a country dying
to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now
we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime."
Kennan then went on to correctly predict that, when Russia would eventually react to US provocations, the NATO expanders would wrongfully
blame Russia.
Ideologues often have nostalgia for the Cold War, when the bipolar power distribution was supported by a clear and comfortable
ideological divide. The Western bloc represented capitalism, Christianity, and democracy, while the Eastern bloc represented communism,
atheism, and authoritarianism. This ideological divide supported internal cohesion within the Western bloc and drew clear borders
with the adversary.
The liberal international order has attempted to recast the former capitalist-communist divide with a liberal-authoritarian divide.
However, the ideological incompatibility between American liberalism and Russian conservatism is less convincing. For example, McFaul
cautions against Putin's nefarious conservative ideology committed to "Christian, traditional family values" that threatens
the liberal international order.
The new ideological divide nonetheless advances neo-McCarthyism in the West. McFaul presents a list of European conservatives
and populists that should be treated as American conservatives, purged from political life as enemies of the liberal international
order and thus possible agents of Russia. Hillary Clinton even suggested that the Capitol Hill riots were possibly coordinated by
Trump and Putin – yes, Russiagate is here to stay. The solution, for McFaul, is for American tech oligarchs to manipulate algorithms
to protect populations from Russian-friendly media.
An American ideological project
McFaul cautions against what he refers to as "Putin's ideological project" as a threat to the liberal international order.
Yet he is reluctant to recognize that the liberal international order is an American ideological project for the post-Cold War era.
After the Cold War, liberal ideologues advanced what was seemingly a benign proposition – suggesting that liberal democracy should
be at the center of security strategies. However, by linking liberal norms to US leadership, liberalism became both a constitutional
principle and an international hegemonic norm.
NATO is presented as a community of liberal values – without mentioning that its second largest member, Turkey, is more conservative
and authoritarian than Russia – and Moscow does not, therefore, have any legitimate reasons to oppose expansionism unless it fears
democracy. If Russia reacts negatively to military encirclement, it is condemned as an enemy of democracy, and NATO has a moral responsibility
to revert to its original mission as a military bloc containing Russia.
Case in point: there was nobody in Moscow advocating for the reunification with Crimea until the West supported the coup in Ukraine.
Yet, as Western "fact checkers" and McFaul inform us, there was a "democratic revolution" and not a coup. Committed
to his ideological prism, McFaul suggests that Russia acted out of a fear of having a democracy on its borders, as it would give
hope to Russians and thus threaten the Kremlin. McFaul's ideological lens masks conflicting national security interests, and it fails
to explain why Russia does not mind democratic neighbors in the east, such as South Korea and Japan, with whom it enjoys good relations.
Defending the peoples
States aspiring for global hegemony have systemic incentives to embrace ideologies that endow them with the right to defend other
peoples. The French National Convention declared in 1792 that France would "come to the aid of all peoples who are seeking to
recover their liberty," and the Bolsheviks proclaimed in 1917 "the duty to render assistance, armed, if necessary, to the
fighting proletariat of the other countries."
The American liberal international order similarly aims to liberate the people of the world with "democracy promotion"
and "humanitarian interventionism" when it conveniently advances US primacy. The American ideological project infers that
democracy is advanced by US interference in the domestic affairs of Russia, while democracy is under attack if Russia interferes
in the domestic affairs of US. The liberal international system is one of sovereign inequality to advance global primacy.
McFaul does not consider himself a Russophobe, as believes his attacks against Russia are merely motivated by the objective of
liberating Russians from their government, which is why he advocates that Biden "distinguish between Russia and Russians – between
Putin and the Russian people." This has been the modus operandi for regime change since the end of the Cold War – the US supposedly
does not attack countries to advance its interests, it only altruistically assists foreign peoples in rival states against their
leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin etc.
McFaul and other liberal ideologues still refer to NATO as a "defensive alliance," which does not make much sense after
the attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999 or Libya in 2011. However, under the auspices of liberal internationalism, NATO is defensive, as
it defends the people of the world. Russia, therefore, doesn't have rational reasons for opposing the liberal international order.
McFaul condemns alleged efforts by Russia to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US, before outlining his strategies for
interfering in the domestic affairs of Russia. McFaul blames Russian paranoia for shutting down American "non-governmental organizations"
that are funded by the US government and staffed by people linked to the US security apparatus. He goes on to explain that the US
government must counter this by establishing new "non-government organizations" to educate the Russian public about the evils
of their government.
The dangerous appeal of ideologues
Ideologues have always been dangerous to international security. Ideologies of human freedom tend to promise perpetual peace.
Yet, instead of transcending power politics, the ideals of human freedom are linked directly to hegemonic power by the self-proclaimed
defender of the ideology. When ideologues firmly believe that the difference between the current volatile world and utopia can be
bridged by defeating its opponents, it legitimizes radical power politics.
Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security strategy is committed to global dominance,
while berating Russia for "revisionism."
Raymond Aaron once wrote: "Idealistic diplomacy slips too often into fanaticism; it divides states into good and evil, into
peace-loving and bellicose. It envisions a permanent peace by the punishment of the latter and the triumph of the former. The idealist,
believing he has broken with power politics, exaggerates its crimes."
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent
those of RT.
"... "Blinken acknowledged that the US must set an example at home on what it preaches abroad. He also stressed the need for "humility". But he insisted nonetheless that the US' global leadership "still matters" since the world is incapable of organising itself "when we're not leading," as some other country may usurp America's lead role impacting "our interests and values", or, simply, chaos may follow! ..."
"... At any rate, Blinken has pledged to "revitalise American diplomacy" and address the challenges of "rising nationalism, reseeding democracy, growing rivalry from China, and Russia and other authoritarian states, mounting threats to a stable and open international system and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives, especially in cyberspace." ..."
I would not set too much store by Plato's political philosophy. For Plato, the political
ideal was a society of three layers: philosopher kings who rule, guardians (the military),
producers / workers.
Ideally philosopher kings would be trained from childhood, adolescence or young adulthood
onwards to be rational and to think in terms of what is best for society as a whole. They
would be trained to be selfless and to shun the pursuit of material wealth.
There are many criticisms that can be made of Plato's ideal society. One such criticism
among others is that philosopher kings / rulers may have a very narrow idea of what is best
for society as a whole and may lead their people into trouble with, erm, "noble lies" (in
whatever form the propaganda and the cultural conditioning take - and when does a "noble" lie
cease to be "noble" and become just plain outright manipulation and falsehood?) if they
confuse their own interests with the interests of society, when the reality is that their
interests as philosopher kings and the interests of the rest of society are far apart.
The irony I've just uncovered is that the present system of government that exists in the
US looks a little too much like Plato's ideal.
@ Jen | Jan 21 2021 0:50 utc | 114... thanks jen... i was waiting to find out from
juliania, but i appreciate your take on this which seems fairly informed... i know nothing
about all of it, but it was an interesting idea cross purposing bidens inaugurations speech
with platos idea of a or the noble lie... the problem with ideals, is they are hard to live
in reality, thus they remain ideals only.. it sems philosopher kings and political leaders
rely heavily on ideals to make a pitch to the public.. not everyone is receptive to them
though... thanks for your input!
"Blinken acknowledged that the US must set an example at home on what it preaches abroad.
He also stressed the need for "humility". But he insisted nonetheless that the US' global
leadership "still matters" since the world is incapable of organising itself "when we're not
leading," as some other country may usurp America's lead role impacting "our interests and
values", or, simply, chaos may follow!
Now, that's an extraordinary boast so soon after the Capitol Riots whose leitmotif was
Chaos in capital "C". Blinken made a laughable claim. But it also betrays delusional
thinking.
At any rate, Blinken has pledged to "revitalise American diplomacy" and address the
challenges of "rising nationalism, reseeding democracy, growing rivalry from China, and
Russia and other authoritarian states, mounting threats to a stable and open international
system and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives, especially
in cyberspace."
@follyofwar
hat Trump did not, and for which Trump deserves credit: NOT attacking Iran; NOT starting a
war in the Donbass region of Ukraine; and NOT escalating the attack on Syria to the point
where Syria collapses and Al-Nusra and ISIS terrorists take over (which is what Israel has
openly said they would prefer to Assad!) And I am NOT a 'Trumper', think he was a disgusting
zionist boot-licker, and that he didn't do diddly squat of what he promised to do for the
average American, but sure kissed Wall Street's bottom. The problem is, Bidet may be worse,
if his past is any indication.
Regardless, the next four years are gonna be ugly, really ugly, foreign policy-wise, I'm
afraid ..
I would not set too much store by Plato's political philosophy. For Plato, the political
ideal was a society of three layers: philosopher kings who rule, guardians (the military),
producers / workers.
Ideally philosopher kings would be trained from childhood, adolescence or young adulthood
onwards to be rational and to think in terms of what is best for society as a whole. They
would be trained to be selfless and to shun the pursuit of material wealth.
There are many criticisms that can be made of Plato's ideal society. One such criticism
among others is that philosopher kings / rulers may have a very narrow idea of what is best
for society as a whole and may lead their people into trouble with, erm, "noble lies" (in
whatever form the propaganda and the cultural conditioning take - and when does a "noble" lie
cease to be "noble" and become just plain outright manipulation and falsehood?) if they
confuse their own interests with the interests of society, when the reality is that their
interests as philosopher kings and the interests of the rest of society are far apart.
The irony I've just uncovered is that the present system of government that exists in the
US looks a little too much like Plato's ideal.
@ Jen | Jan 21 2021 0:50 utc | 114... thanks jen... i was waiting to find out from
juliania, but i appreciate your take on this which seems fairly informed... i know nothing
about all of it, but it was an interesting idea cross purposing bidens inaugurations speech
with platos idea of a or the noble lie... the problem with ideals, is they are hard to live
in reality, thus they remain ideals only.. it sems philosopher kings and political leaders
rely heavily on ideals to make a pitch to the public.. not everyone is receptive to them
though... thanks for your input!
"Blinken acknowledged that the US must set an example at home on what it preaches abroad.
He also stressed the need for "humility". But he insisted nonetheless that the US' global
leadership "still matters" since the world is incapable of organising itself "when we're not
leading," as some other country may usurp America's lead role impacting "our interests and
values", or, simply, chaos may follow!
Now, that's an extraordinary boast so soon after the Capitol Riots whose leitmotif was
Chaos in capital "C". Blinken made a laughable claim. But it also betrays delusional
thinking. At any rate, Blinken has pledged to "revitalise American diplomacy" and address the
challenges of "rising nationalism, reseeding democracy, growing rivalry from China, and
Russia and other authoritarian states, mounting threats to a stable and open international
system and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives, especially
in cyberspace."
"... Oliver Stone told me recently that, in one of his conversations in Russia, Mr. Putin, somewhat exasperated, said something along the lines of, "Now Russians are thought of like Jews before World War II". Think about that. ..."
"... But clearly, Putin is also aware of the parallels between the demonization of him and Russia and how Jews were blamed for just about everything during the Thirties. Evidence-free accusations by the likes of Pelosi and Clinton will make the task of restoring a modicum of trust an uphill battle. ..."
Interviewed by Mrs. Clinton Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi eagerly rose to the bait when
Clinton spoke of "her concerns that the outgoing commander-in-chief was compromised by the
Kremlin". Setting the stage, Clinton expressed the hope that "we'll find out who he [Trump]
is beholden to, "who pulls his strings".
Clinton added ominously: "I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was
talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol". She then asked Pelosi if
the nation needs "a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything they can pull
together." Pelosi agreed on the need for such a commission, and proceeded to burnish her own
anti-Putin credentials:
"As I said to him [Trump] in that picture with my blue suit pointing rudely at him, 'With
you Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin.''
Pelosi conceded that she does not know 'what
Putin has on him politically, financially, or personally, but what happened last week was a
gift to Putin."
Putin's Useful Idiots?
Pelosi added, "And these people, unbeknownst to them, they are Putin puppets. They were
doing Putin's business when they did that at the incitement of an insurrection by the
president so, yes, we should have a 9/11 commission and there is strong support in the
Congress for that."
What leaps out of this Clinton-Pelosi pas de deux is who is leading the dance.
Clinton hints broadly (not, of course, for the first time) that Putin is pulling Trump's
strings. It is Clinton who voices suspicion that Trump and Putin were somehow coordinating on
the phone on Jan. 6; and it is she who suggests that "a 9/11-type commission" might be
needed.
Due largely to the captive "mainstream" media, 'Russia Russia Russia' has proved to be the
gift that keeps giving for the Democrats. Are there limits to the degree of credence
Americans will give to corporate media spinning all the sins attributed to Russian President
Putin? Why the insinuation that he may be partly to blame for the violence at the Capitol on
Jan. 6?
Russia is Convenient
It's a matter of convenience. For the Democrats it has been super-convenient to blame Mrs.
Clinton's defeat in 2016 on Russia, although key aspects of that case (Russian "hacking" of
the DNC, for example)
have been debunked .
But, don't go away, Russia, not just yet. The MICIMATT still finds you convenient as the
kind of "threat" it can cite to justify spending untold billions of dollars on defense,
enriching the already rich. Please see "
Why Russia Must Be
Demonized ."
The way the U.S. system is structured, it matters little in the grand scheme of things on
where the money is spent – whether a Republican or Democrat sits in the Oval Office. In
short, the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex
rules the roost (MEDIA in all caps, as the linchpin). Clinton wonders aloud who Trump "is
beholden to". Well, speaking of beholden, Joe Biden enters office with zero vaccination
against being beholden – to the MICIMATT. It is fair to say that, without that the
MICIMATT's blessing, candidates end up like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.
Uncertainties
There are just enough straws in the wind to make the MICIMATT and its clients and
supporters nervous. What would happen, should Putin and Russia become less demonized? Could
there be a thaw in the unnecessarily chilly relations with Moscow? What could that mean for
bloated defense spending – particularly at a time when those funds are so desperately
and demonstrably needed at home?
It appears likely that strategic arms negotiations with Russia will be high on President
Joe Biden's agenda, as will cooperation with Russia and the other parties to the Iran nuclear
deal from which Trump withdrew. Assuming William Burns, former ambassador to Russia, is
confirmed as CIA director, Biden will have at his beck and call a straight-speaking, highly
experienced expert who has dealt with President Putin. Burns was also one of the chief US
negotiators of the Iran nuclear deal.
In my view, it is also significant that President-elect Biden has held back from explicit
condemnation of Russia by name amid the recent flurry of accusations of Russian
hacking of several US institutions over the past several months. Yes, he has referred to what
Secretary of State Pompeo and Attorney General Barr have said blaming Russia, and it can be
argued that he has indirectly implicated Russia in the context of his sparse statements on
this issue.
In my experience, though, the Kremlin is likely to have taken note of the caution that
Biden has exercised on this neuralgic issue. Nor has this likely escaped the attention of the
MICIMATT and induced some worry about the long-term viability of the portrayal of Putin as
villain.
The Kremlin Is Watching
Oliver Stone told me recently that, in one of his conversations in Russia, Mr. Putin,
somewhat exasperated, said something along the lines of, "Now Russians are thought of like
Jews before World War II". Think about that. Amid the Russia Russia Russia over the past
four-plus years, Putin has kept his voice down – and his powder dry – while
staying open to negotiations to reduce arms competition, cyber warfare, and other facets of
bilateral tension.
If past is precedent, he is likely to see opportunities to take a fresh
look at US intentions under President Biden – especially during the traditional
"honeymoon" period normally accorded a new president.
But clearly, Putin is also aware of the parallels between the demonization of him and
Russia and how Jews were blamed for just about everything during the Thirties. Evidence-free
accusations by the likes of Pelosi and Clinton will make the task of restoring a modicum of
trust an uphill battle.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he led the Soviet Foreign
Policy Branch and prepared/briefed The President's Daily Brief for three presidents.
In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
By 8 January 2021, Mitch McConnell had determined he would not permit the Senate to try
Trump until 19 January 2021 or later. He ruled that the Senate could not convene for special
session unless all 100 Senators formally agreed; he maintained that ruling consistently,
through 19 January 2021. By 10 January 2021, House majority Whip James Clyburn suggested the
House may not deliver articles of impeachment to the Senate until after Biden has been in
Office 100 days.
Not until today, 20 January 2021, did Pelosi deliver articles of impeachment to the Senate.
The same day, McConnell said: (a) the Senate will receive the House managers at noon ET
Thursday, 21 January, when the managers will present and exhibit the articles; (b) at 2:00 PM
21 January, Chief Justice John Roberts will be escorted into the Senate chamber and swear in
all senators; (c) the impeachment articles' trial will begin Tuesday, 26 January.
Until 20 or 21 January, the Senate majority would remain Republican; and a GOP-majority
Senate would not only acquit Trump but also impeach, strongly, the articles of impeachment. So,
why did Mitch McConnell block early Senate trial? Two possible intersecting reasons:
has
said Trump fed the "mob" lies to provoke the mob to use violence to prevent Congress's
certification of Biden's election.] (b) If trial occurs (as it will) when the Democrats
control the Senate, a conviction might seem a Democrat-framed lynching -- not the GOP's
traitorous assassination of Trump's "populism" and his political career.
I do not suggest such reasons are wise, logical, or even rational, but possibly real.
McConnell is a crafty, dissembling, unscrupulous pseudo-aristocrat, but no Socrates or
Aristotle.
"Liberal" and "moderate" Democrats, never-Trump Republicans,"The Squad, " the "Deep State"
-- the nation's whole jumble of psychopathic and otherwise-psychically-ill "Elite," "woke,"
anti-"White"/anti-male/anti-meritocracy/sexually-deviant members -- all share one mantra :
Trump and populism are evil, inimical to "Democracy" and the "culture," "morality," and "public
interests" of the U.S. Populism must be extinguished. Never again may Trump "hold and enjoy any
Office or honor, Trust or Profit under the United States" [U.S. Constitution Article I § 3
clause 7].
Why ought anyone care?
I voted twice for Trump, the second time (2020) merely because he was the lesser evil. In
2016, Trump promised more than a few moves that would have bettered the nation, e.g.
,
Trump meant and honored some promises -- at least partly. But others -- (a), (b), (f), (h),
(i), and (k) -- were bad jokes. His Israel policy was evil. He railed against growing
impairment of free speech. But his concern was mostly his own freedom of expression; and he
failed to do anything substantial toward restoring the general public's freedom of speech. He
continued, and worsened, Obama's persecution of Julian Assange and Bradley ["Chelsea"] Manning.
Edward Snowden remains exiled. Trump has pardoned or commuted sentence of tens of nefarious
criminals, but not Assange, Manning, or Snowden.
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W Bush, and Obama supported the
illegal "state" called Israel. But Trump lifted Israel-support, and, concomitantly, anti-Iran
policy to insane levels. Trump's Israel-related domestic policy included design of blocking or
impeding first-amendment-protected speech and assembly that opposes Israel's genocidal
persecution of Palestinians. Trump rendered formal equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism
and sought to outlaw the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement.
So, why ought we care whether, after Trump is not President, the Senate tries the articles
of impeachment of Trump and rules that Trump shall not "hold and enjoy any Office or honor,
Trust or Profit under the United States"? Why ought we care even whether simply the Senate
tries the articles of impeachment but acquits Trump?
Trump's 2016 election suggested a true populist might become President -- not a closet
"Elite," but one who would resist the Elites and the Deep State, not surround himself with
snakes of the swamp. If the Senate tries Trump and rules that Trump shall not "hold and enjoy
any Office or honor, Trust or Profit under the United States" because Trump and his supporters
exercised their First Amendment freedom of speaking and assembling to support populism and
protest a corrupt election, speech and assembly freedoms will cease and near-certainly no
capable, electable populist will run for the Presidency.
But that consideration is subsumed in another, greater, more vital, fundamental
concern. We have a federal Constitution. Every federal legislator and judge promises, by oath,
not to act contrary to that Constitution. Every federal judge must promise this: "I solemnly
swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right
to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform
all the duties incumbent upon me under the Constitution and laws of the United States."
...You live in a totalitarian state with arbitrary power.
Your government has three branches: CIA, CIA, and CIA. They infest every other corner of
your government with spies. Until you can accept this you will be an irrelevant muppet
writing bullshit.
... ... ...
4. Every jew ever involved in health care fraud over the past 100 years
If you might be a Trump supporter, just stop. Trump was an incompetent fraud. And Biden
(well his handlers really), will be very competent and will soon make you feel the sting of
systemic punishment.
Everyone can claim some African ancestry. Suggest you get familiar with the process real
quick
Back in 1987, as a young political science major, my constitutional law professor made us
attend a lecture by a visiting scholar on the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional
Convention. I cannot remember who the lecturer was, but I do recall one phrase he used that
has stuck in my mind ever since: the Constitution only works if we have a "constitutional
frame of mind." In other words, the Constitution reflected the culture and the attitudes of
its authors. Today, elites in both parties could give a damn about the Constitution. They
simply ignore the Constitution when it suits them -- or, conversely, use it as a club to
bludgeon their enemies when it suits them.
Today we are reduced to parsing the language of the Constitution because nobody is really
committed to the upholding the culture and the attitudes that informed it when it was
written. Therefore it has become meaningless.
The president must dance to the tune of the bankers and assorted oligarchs who actually
control the US. They enjoy confusing the common people with changing rhetoric and theater,
but at the end of the day, the president is little more than a figurehead, and the policies
remain largely the same. Many do not realize that the Obama administration deported some
2,750,000 illegals.. Under Trump it was only 935,000. Foreign wars? Police brutality? the
rich getting richer? Prison industrial complex? decimation of the middle class? endless
currency debasement? these things are consistent regardless, because they represent the
interests of the actual rulers. The red candidate throws a bone to the "conservatives", the
blue candidate throws a bone to the socialists, but the policy makers continue from one
administration to the next. The last president who tried to stand up to the powers that be
was JFK . and look what they did to him.
Tucker Carlson said Monday or Tuesday night on his show that McConnell warned Trump not to
pardon Assange, and he held the impeachment over Trump's head.
Swampington has gone rogue. I have a feeling that during much of Trump's presidency the
threat of impeachment loomed large, and maybe worse.
Look at Sessions, recusing himself and cowering in the corner. Barr comes in and does
diddly squat. The Durham investigation was a very long joke.
Two years of the Mueller Commission (when everybody in the know knew it was a pack of
lies), spying, leaking, abuse of the FISA Court, Kavanaugh, impeachment over Ukraine, Covid,
Antifa, BLM, stolen election ..never-ending chaos.
These corrupt clowns will do whatever the hell they please. They are the law now. If they
do end up following the law, it will only be because the destruction they've caused already
will be deemed to be enough.
With the federal judiciary's corrupt or cowardly treatment of legitimate
election-result challenges, the federal judiciary has shown it has abnegated its
constitutional duty and will incline to commit impeachable offenses to avoid resisting the
Elites' and the Deep State's subjugation of the People. The Supreme Court has shown that
five or more pseudo-aristocrat judges (two Democrats, three or more Republicans) align with
the Elites and the Deep State. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is correct. The People are
suffering a revolution wrought by the "Establishment" (of the Elites and the Deep
State).
I would say that they are more cowardly than corrupt.
They know that if they supported Trump's legitimate (good evidence) questioning of the
election result, they would personally be in big trouble, so the Supreme Court is really not
a Supreme Court at all – it's a piece of establishment window dressing – same as
the rest of the hollowed out US Democratic institutions.
Real power in the US lies with the ZioGlob deep state and their MSM, the military
(whichever way they turn), and the 72 million US gun owners (whatever they decide to do).
There's also the aspect of real military power outside the US (Russia and China) that could
be brought to bear, and would be potentially decisive. Accepted that some of these are
TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) scenarios but that seems to be how it is.
Genuine Democracy isn't coming back to the US any time soon.
@Beavertales at, do you really think Trump will discuss anything that went on in private?
He is not the type to write a memoir.
And some of the most bizarre decisions he made while POTUS were as a result of "advice"
from his favourite daughter Ivanka and her repellant husband. Ann Coulter has an article
where she lists the boneheaded decisions Trump made on "advice" from the two incompetent
rich-kids..
This short video is very indicative of the stupidity of Ivanka: she is so stupid, that she
can't even see the contempt these politicians have for her, and sticks around like a bad
smell:
[French Government Posts Video Of Ivanka Trump At G-20 Summit | NBC News]
McConnell must, not maybe, must be the first person to go if the Republican Senate has any
chance of surviving in a way that serves conservative interests. He has been positively of
Zero support to president Trumps four years in office, only giving lip service to the
interests of the issues the presidents supporters wanted addressed.. For four long years,
McConnell was an expert at bringing every advance, or potential advance in conservative
interests to naught. He however, had no problemo at all in taking advantage of President
Trumps popularity with conservative voters, when his re-election was in doubt. Maybe his
middle name should be Mitt.
@anonymous ChiComs -- from whence In Laws $ all arises . McConnell shows the country is
totally sold out to the ChiComs and in fact "governed" by them -- the rest of Congrassholes
are about the same with various "spies" working them, having sex with them, and screwing us
-- the USA is an occupied country via IsraHell and the Chinese Communists -- very, very bad
days are ahead and most in the USA are moron mask wearers who actually believe the filthy
pieces of cloth do something for their "health" contrary to all actual 41 Medical Studies to
date which state the opposite -- truly Maskholing was an IQ test and the country failed to
reach even the level of "Moron". Easy to steal an election when dealing with Maskhole Morons.
Sad all are being pulled down by them .
@Aardvark you are charged by the Feds you will be railroaded, innocence means zero once
you are charged and all the "Judge" cares about is getting you to plead guilty and move the
case, you will be grossly overcharged to force this to happen and the Judge will glare at you
and let you know he hates you if you go forward -- unless you are a Leftist Political hack or
"activist" then you will be cut loose and probably never even charged ."justice" Roberts is
the "model" -- his rulings in Obamacare etc. show he has no care for the actual "law" at all
-- all the other Federal "judges" follow his example .The best thing that could happen to the
USA is for the end of the Federal Courts, DOJ, and FBI -- all are Enemies Of The People --
get involved with them and find out.
@FoSquare The works of Plato and Aristotle have had much influence on the modern view of
the "sophist" as a greedy instructor who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of
language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning. In this view, the sophist
is not concerned with truth and justice, but instead seeks power.
Societies that value truth but recognize the difficulties involved in discovering it also
put value on freedom of expression. Those interested in power for its own sake, not so much.
Unfortunately the power mongers always have the advantage of moral certainty. For them Alinsky
and the Protocols are the only bibles.
@Anon olling 90% of the mass media of mindfuckery, mesmerization and mass megalomania and
finally, the CIA financed and directed "Social Media", the greatest enemy of our First
Amendment rights;;; those nefarious forces nearing absolute control over the federal regime in
the Di$trict of Corruption have now fully succeeded in driving the last nail into the coffin of
the Constitution AND the Bill of Rights, the enabling precondition for establishment of the
federal system.
Behind the scenes, roaring and howling with fits of schadenfreude laughter; the ultimate
shotcallers, those OWNER$ of the Federal Reserve and most other major international banking
institutions, are rubbing their greasy palm$ with total glee by having pulled off the greatest
heist in world history.
Former President Trump is playing his final scene today, making ready to hand over the
lead part of a government like reality show to the mentally infirm Joe Biden. Biden, with
history of pathological lying and a trail of crimes and associations with other crimes had no
actual chance of winning a real election, but real elections are now only part of America's
history. Trumped & Dumped: The Psychological Operation Scrambles to Survive | Jack Mullen
https://blog.thegovernmentrag.com/2021/01/21/trumped-dumped-psychological-operation-enters-phase-two/
@Old and Grumpy wn individual of blackmail able importance -- was discovered in one of
Ep$tein's logs).
Anyone notice how the Joint Chiefs of $taff for the U$ armed forces put out a notice to all
military personnel that they must not participate in acts of sedition prior to the coronation
of the Kamal's Foote/Biding administration.? Since the days of their attempted Operation
Northwoods false flag scheme to attack Cuba, which was vetoed by JFK (among his other sins
against the Deepe$t $tate); the proof was already in the pudding that the JC$ is dirty and our
military is compromised by their chains of command from the top-down -- which is the way the
enemies of We The People choose to employ their nefarious control system over one and all --
excepting, of course, the Elite$ themselves.
@Mefobills of savvy self-promoter and foil for Hillary. That would explain a lot,
especially Hillary's (and the Democrats) absolute hatred of Trump and his supporters. That his
shtick worked is testament to both his talent for self-promotion and our dislike of Hillary.
Guess she miscalculated
In any case, it became obvious that either the fix was in, when he refused to back Flynn and
appointed swamp creatures to fill his administrations' posts, or Trump was a fool. But that's
not to say he wasn't useful in exposing the media and deep state's contempt, hatred and fear of
us -- deplorables all -- by personifying it in their attacks on him.
The question that matters now, for populists, is how do we avoid the leadership trap?
For the most part, our entire legal profession has been taken over by an overeducated,
inexperienced crowd of people who are not able to deal in "Letter" and "Spirit" of law. They're
prisoners of the letter of the law because their only background is of the spoken and written
word.
while I don't believe in the existence of US domestic terrorists, I do believe that millions
of US citizens are convinced that the vote was stolen. These people are understandably
disgusted and angry. Many might be desperate or even despondent. Let's call them the
"deplorables" and consider it a badge of honor. Well, these deporables won't take DC by force,
but they will never trust a Dem or GOP politician again, and neither will they ever trust the
corporate media. One of the blessings in disguise of this stolen election is that the GOP and
Fox News have shown their true faces, and their faces are evil, stupid and ugly. 4 years ago
millions of US citizens did not so much vote for Trump as much as they voted against Hillary
whom they (correctly) saw as a symbol and metaphor for the entire "deep state", or "swamp" or
"ZOG" or whatever other expression you prefer.
These deplorables first trusted Obama ("change we can believe in") and, later, Trump
(MAGA). Now they know that both sides are equally evil and false.
In the past, both factions of the Big Money Party had safety valves (Tea Party, Occupy
Wall Street, Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, etc.). I think that now the two parties
are literally standing naked and boy is that an ugly sight!
Third, and this point I primarily address to my readers in the USA and that will force me to
make a sidebar primarily directed at them:
[Sidebar: the planet can be divided into 2 rough parts: ZONE A full controlled by the
AngloZionist Empire and, ZONE B, which includes everybody else. The vast majority of Americans
are only really aware of Zone A. Why? For the following reasons:
and speaking
Spanish knows that totally false this belief is, of course. But few non-Hispanic Americans
ever speak in Spanish to the Hispanics in the USA (FYI – I do). Anglos generally seem
to have a hard time with languages Sadly, most Americans are not educated by their parents,
their religious leaders, their communities, or their schools. Most Americans get most of
their education from watching TV. Since all the US TV channels offer almost the exact same
mix of vulgar entertainment, propaganda and commercials, this "education" resulted in a huge
amount of massively dysfunctional families and communities. This addiction to a flickering
screen (be it the Idiot Tube or You Tube – same difference) gives them a very short
attention span and a limited ability to process large amounts of written information, which
is what is needed to be able to analyze a situation]
As a direct consequence of these factors, most Americans live in a "mental space" where Zone
B simply does not exist, and when it is mentioned, it is invariable in the "same old
clichés" mode.
Finally, considering all of the above, it is truly a miracle that the deplorables completely
ignored a massive brainwashing campaign (waaaay worse than anything the Commies or the Nazis
ever came up with!) against "Trump the New Hitler" and still voted for him twice, both in 2016
and 2020! It really goes to show that most Americans quietly but passionately hate the regime
in DC and that they use every opportunity they get to at least to try to change their country
and their lives by means of voting. Makes you wonder what these "disobedient" deplorables will
do the next time around now that voting became clearly a waste of time, don't it?]
Now here is the good news: Zone B does exist! In fact, it is huge, rich, truly diverse and
it has long figured out that both the AngloZionist Empire and even the USA as we knew them have
basically died, all that's left from it is some residual momentum and many bad habits by
ignorant, arrogant and delusional US politicians.
Why is that so important?
Because if we allow the Great Satan (actually a very good and exact expression, I think that
it fits the new regime perfectly, I will use it more often) to convince us that reality is all
contained in Zone A, we could really fall into despair. Yeah, the USA is screwed, and so is all
of the EU. As for US colonies like AUS or NZ, not only are they screwed (say by siding with the
USA against a much, MUCH more powerful China), they also seem to have a morbid desire to
outstupid even the USA in terms of crazy laws and insane ideological positions (say on COVID,
for example). But all this in ONLY true inside Zone A. Very few people in Zone B still believe
that the USA matters a great deal. Most of them already know otherwise, even if this is never
reported by Zone A media.
There is even more good news: neither the (rump) AngloZionist Empire nor the (rump) USA
represent any credible threat to most countries in Zone B . Oh sure, US politicians can call
Russia a "gas station masquerading as a country" or a "regional power", the truth is that the
united West has completely failed to break, or even meaningfully hurt Russia, despite 46
sanction packages (that's just by Trump, not counting the "change we can believe in" crook).
Heck, even COVID only marginally hurt Russia (which, unlike the flag-waving pseudo-patriotic
crap spewed by western politicians took COVID seriously, very seriously in fact, as early as
March and prepared the country for no less than two major outbreaks, both which happened, and
both which Russia successfully dealt with; this is why the EU is now in full COVID-hysteria
mode, while Russia does not bother to impose any lockdowns at all!).
Now let's place two US propaganda items side by side and take a look, ok?
The USA has the
most powerful economy on the planet. Russia is the #1 adversary of the USA (at least according
to the Dems, the GOP places China as #1 and Russia only as #2)
Do you see the problem?
If the USA is so powerful, how is it that it failed to crush Russia? What about Iran? Or,
in extremis , Venezuela? Yet, even the the last case, the "best" this supposed World
Hegemon did was send a few clueless ex-special ops to get caught and give case of hysterical
laughter to the entire Latin American continent!
And these folks want to take on China or Russia?!
Peuhleeze!
So here is the other very good news: Zone A presents no real threat to Zone B!!!
Yes, of course, the USA can still nuke China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela or some other country.
But let's look at the consequences of such a strike:
comprador regime in Bogota will not
survive such a war and Colombia will also "fall". Against any other Zone B country: the US
successfully nukes this/these country/countries only to find itself being treated like a
pariah by the entire planet (including quite a few US colonies), including the real military
powers. NATO and the EU will also collapse is that happens (the US being their cornerstone).
The bottom line is that while the US triad is still fully functional and capable of waging a
full-scale nuclear war against any adversary (including Russia and, even more so, China), the
truth is that all this triad really achieves is making it impossible for another nuclear power
to use nukes against the USA. Which is not minor or irrelevant, the problem here being that the
US nuclear triad provides with with exactly zero help when trying to deal with any adversary
not using nukes (either because this adversary choose not to use nukes due to the effective
deterrence of the US nuclear triad or simply because it has no nukes in the first place).
As I have mentioned in the past, the US submarine force is, along with the nuclear triad,
the other truly effective and powerful force which the US can count on in case of war. However,
other than launching large numbers of outdated and, therefore, easily countered cruise missiles
there is little this force can do to assist a US ground (or, for that matter) air operation
against anything but a very weak adversary. The problem with so-called "sub-peer" adversaries
is that they have relatively few lucrative targets to strike with cruise missiles (think
Venezuela here). Most of these subpeer adversaries do not have the air defenses needed to deal
with any halfway determined US missile and bomb attack and the US can quickly destroy whatever
air defenses such "sub-peer" countries have. So yes, I admit it. If tomorrow the USA wants a
"short and triumphant war", say to boost morale or distract from internal problems, they could
still attack countries like, say, Antigua and Barbuda or Santa Lucia, but such a farce will
hardly would qualify as "brilliant victory" of the "best armed forces in the galaxy", now would
it? Or maybe would, who knows? Ff the united propaganda machine wants to present that as a
triumph for US forces, like they did with the Grenada invasion (one of the worst military
operation in history!) they can do that, of course. But that would only serve to further
ridicule that propaganda machine since 2021 is not 1983, there are now millions of deplorables
out there who will never buy this kind of silly nonsense.
Besides, considering how the joint efforts of the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia (the
"Axis of Kindness") completely failed to deal with the Houthis, my money would not be on any US
invasion force in the Caribbean (with the possible exception of a re-invasion of Haiti or the
Dominican Republic, but these are already US protectorates, what would be the point?!).
Why does all that matter so much?
Because the Dems are clearly up to no good. Next, not only will we see a wave of repression
against free speech internally, but the Dems are already making noises about, you guessed it,
China and Russia (again!) and, when that inevitably yield exactly zero results, they will turn
to "hate on" Iran and Venezuela again. But even these comparatively weaker countries are now
very much capable of making Uncle Shmuel pay an immense price in blood and hell to pay in terms
of political blowback on to many fronts to count.
The "power" of a nation (or a coalition of nations) can be measured using very many
different type of metrics, but the three most common ones would probably be: economic power,
military power and political power. If we use those three to compare Zone A to Zone B, it would
be reasonable to posit the following:
people worldwide have
long switched their support for Zone B countries. The recent triumph of the people of Bolivia
over their oppressors is a very telling sign of this trend.
And here is the key factor to keep in mind: there is nothing, absolutely nothing, the
Biden/Harris Admin can do to change these trends. It is simply too late and when the initiation
of the internal collapse of the USA, these trends will only accelerate .
Yes, the bad guys did win, but only over Trump and his clueless pseudo-allies (did they
betray him faster than he betrayed them, or was it the other way around?), but they only won
one a battle against the deplorables and they have won exactly nothing against Zone B.
The Dems are now busy with vengeance in all its forms. They also relish in humiliating Trump
and those who dared to support him. This is the political equivalent of torturing people in
basements, not winning glorious battles. But they don't realize that, they are too vain, too
ideologically hateful, and too cowardly to understand that.
Still, brainwashing, like torture (including mental torture!), is real. In this case, this
is a battle for the minds of the deplorables who now have to be beaten down into a catatonic
state of total submission and compliance. The Dems are using lies, their favorite weapon, but
their assault is real, nonetheless. And this is the battle which we, those who opposed
imperialism, have to fight – the battle for the minds of the people in Zone A: we need to
show them that the pseudo-reality of Zone A has no real existence outside the Idiot Box and the
vapid rhetoric of US decision makers.
We have to mentally prepare for a sharp increase in the amount and scope of the lies the US
propaganda machine will be telling us (if you thought the last 4 years were bad, prepare for
much, much worse; good example
here ). And, of course, expect LOTS of false flags, especially to demonstrate the reality
of the alleged danger coming from the "domestic terrorists". That will all go down against a
background of a full-spectrum attack on free speech, dissent and any form of actual (as opposed
to pretend) thought, really.
The irony is, of course, that the coming witch hunt (it will be way worse than Salem or
McCarthy) will be waged in the name of diversity and ostensibly against "hate". In reality, of
course, what the regime wants is to crush real diversity because the leaders of the US
Nomenklatura absolutely hate everything besides their sorry selves. Like all ideologues,
what these folks want is 1) total power and 2) total uniformity. All those rejecting these
modern dogmas will be branded has criminals, terrorists, heretics, racist and, of course,
Russian and Chinese agents.
And that is why this regime will also fail.
Conclusion: diversity WILL win. The REAL diversity, of course!
Our planet is wonderfully diverse, especially outside the uniformity sector of Zone A. There
IS a Zone B out there, and the leaders of Zone A will be defeated by our real common and shared
humanity (and their hatred for us!). Somewhere between Obama and Trump, the world has moved on,
and it is now very busy dealing with the immense challenges and opportunities facing it in Zone
B. And no, neither Russia nor China is busy trying to sabotage or undermine the USA – US
leaders are doing that much better job of that than any Russian or Chinese ever could . So why
even bother (and nevermind the risks!)?
We cannot predict what will happen next, there are simply too many variables to do that. But
what we can do is predict with a great degree of confidence that the new regime in power in DC
will do no better than all the other regimes which came to power by means of color revolutions
in the past couple of decades. There is no hope left for the Empire, as for the USA, there will
be plenty of hope left for them, but only after a long and painful process of collapse and
rebirth (both of which are inevitable by now). The truth is that US is not that unique as
empires go, sorry, it is just your typical arrogant and narcissistic empire which will collapse
just as all the other arrogant and narcissistic empires in history have collapsed, mostly under
their own obscene weight . And those poor souls who sincerely believe that China (or Russia)
want to replace the USA simply don't understand that these two countries already have been
empires, it was a disaster, thank you very much, and they have no desire to repeat their past
mistakes. This desire for non-exceptionalism and normalcy will, with time, also become the
object of a large social consensus in the USA. And, with time, the USA will finally be welcomed
into a truly free Zone B or, should I say, a Zone-free world.
The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A
more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds'
software just as the "back door" was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and
intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.
In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies,
major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among
others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout
from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.
The hack , which
affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds , was blamed on Russia on January
5 by the US government's Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the
attackers were "
likely Russian in origin ," but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.
Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no
actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets
began reporting the intelligence community's "likely" conclusion as fact right away, with the
New York Timessubsequently
reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold
by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the "Russian hackers."
Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had
access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the
evidence-free report from US intelligence on "likely" Russian involvement, is said to be the
reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds'
contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.
Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election,
when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails
published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds
quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks
and investigating the hack.
CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and
subsequently it was central in
developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of "Russian hackers" in that
event.
There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was
collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel ,
not Russia. Indeed,
many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed
collusion with Israel , yet those instances received little coverage and generated little
media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was
in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of
SolarWinds' acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore,
Samanage's deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both
intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange's integration with the Orion software at
the time of the back door's insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds'
Czech-based contractor.
Orion's Fall
In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with
the Justice Department
quietly announcing , the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system
had been breached in the hack -- a "major incident" according to the department. This
terminology means that the attack "is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national
security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public
confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,"
per NextGov .
The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach
in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the
Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack,
SolarWinds software is
also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the
Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that "fewer than ten"
US government agencies had been affected, it's likely that some of these agencies were
compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were
affected.
In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds
Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five
US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such
as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds
clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several
mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times .
Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly
sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code
used to conduct the hack, stating that
the hackers "routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote
access was achieved -- implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to
operational security." In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was "
very very carefully
orchestrated ," leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.
FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of
the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its
"red team" suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on
December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft's source code, raising
concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.
FireEye's account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is
one of FireEye's clients , and FireEye
was launched with funding from the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth
being skeptical of the " free tool " FireEye has
made available in the hack's aftermath for "spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of
systems."
In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor
with close ties to Israel's intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of
events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli
cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin , who told Reuters
in a
widely quoted article that he "was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers
were poring over Microsoft's source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive." "To me
the biggest question is, 'Was this recon for the next big operation?'" Slavin stated .
Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on
not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and
Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate
the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs
was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of
election fraud in the 2020 election.
As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US,
with a focus on the health-care industry, to
the CTI League , a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working "for free" and led by
a former Unit 8200 officer. "We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to
assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an
industry leading secure software development company," a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an
email cited by
Reuters.
It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the
attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which
have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen
their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in
2017, CyberArk was the company that "
discovered " one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation
called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at
the time they announced the tactic's existence, released a free tool to identify
systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.
In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was
found by
Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called
Kazuar that was also first discovered by
another Unit 8200-linked company , Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities
only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by
Kazuar and "they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building
their malware." Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the
same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to
have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products,
per Kaspersky employees.
Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed "the attribution at least to Russian
intelligence," only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar
before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been
presented.
Samanage and Sabotage
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of
SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was "compiled, signed
and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," per
reports . This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had
direct access to SolarWinds code as they had "a high degree of familiarity with the software."
While the way the attackers gained access to Orion's code base has yet to be determined, one
possibility
being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a
SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
US investigators
have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that -- in
addition to the above -- the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access
by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern
Europe, allegedly because "Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted" in those
countries.
It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly "deeply rooted" in
eastern European states both before and
after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media
tycoon Robert Maxwell's frequent and
close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the
leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy
ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian
organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also
Mogilevich's
business partner . In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks
which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be
considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has
claimed.
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that
has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in
2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted,
but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with
numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by
the NSA to be one
of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel's list of espionage
scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS
software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry
Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.
Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion
software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as "an
IT Service Desk solution." It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage's products could be added
to SolarWinds' IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and
SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying
that it is an American company, Samanage is actually
an Israeli firm . It was
founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked
for several years at MAMRAM , the Israeli military's central computing unit .
Samanage was SolarWinds' first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli
media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel.
It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using
Samanage's research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed
SolarWinds Service Desk, became
listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of
Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition's announcement in April
of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October
or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access
to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time.
Samanage's automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the
now-compromised software during that period.
Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition
in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed
to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage
component of Orion was
responsible for "ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events
or performance issues [with Orion] are detected," which was meant to allow "service agents to
react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted."
In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the
compromise took place was also responsible for Orion's alert system for critical events or
performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless
went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the "hackers" access to
millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is
this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end
users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by
providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.
Samanage, Salesforce, and the World Economic Forum
Around the time of Samange's acquisition by SolarWinds, it
was reported that one of Samanage's top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce
being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.
Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle.
Oracle was originally created as a
CIA spin-off and has
deep ties to Israel's government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has
a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development
based there . Salesforce also
recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to
"predictively" diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.
Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican's Council for Inclusive Capitalism
alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a
close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who
have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.
Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and
the inaugural
chair of the WEF's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of
the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders,
including the organization's founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks
such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in "even more significant economic and social
implications than COVID-19."
Last year, the WEF's Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a
"digital pandemic" cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon . Cyber Polygon's speakers
in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail
Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore , who previously
held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the
COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that
crippled the world's economy.
In addition to Samanage's ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main
investors behind Samanage's rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the
Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the
WEF's founding " technology pioneers ," Isabel Maxwell
(the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to
Israel's intelligence apparatus and the country's hi-tech sector.
The Bronfmans, the Maxwells, and Viola Ventures
At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage's
top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola's investment
in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also
on Samanage's board before it became part of SolarWinds.
Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse
Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies
such as Cybereason .
Verint has a history of
aggressively spying on US government facilities, including
the White House , and created the backdoors into all US
telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook,
on behalf of the US' NSA.
In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy , having served for thirteen
years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty.
His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC,
which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has
played in several major espionage scandals.
As an aside, Nir has stated that "thought leader" Henry Kissinger is his "favorite
historical character." Notably, Kissinger
was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and
Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national
laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to
connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which
directly enabled this action, part of the larger
PROMIS software scandal .
In addition, Viola's stake was managed through a firm known
as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell , whose father
had previously been
directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US
national laboratories. As noted in
a previous article at Unlimited Hangout , Isabel "inherited" her father's circle of
Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in
building the "bridge" between Israel's intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to
Silicon Valley.
Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at
Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family's private-equity fund, Claridge
Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the
Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles
Bronfman who created Claridge and also
cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.
Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the
Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center's board, stepped down
following the Epstein scandal, though it's not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center
include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber's area of expertise, like that of Isabel
Maxwell, is "structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial
transactions," that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US
companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.
Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given
that she is a "technology pioneer" of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned,
Salesforce -- a major investor in Samanage -- is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great
Reset.
The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is
particularly relevant given the WEF's "prediction" of a coming "pandemic" of cyberattacks and
the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning.
It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government's considerable ties to the WEF over the
years, particularly last year when it joined the
Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled "The Great
Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution."
Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US
firms
set up by Netanyahu's longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist
billionaire Paul Singer,
have asserted that Israel will serve a "key role" globally in the 4 th
Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.
Gemini, the BIRD Foundation, and Jonathan Pollard
In addition to Viola, another of Samange's
leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel's oldest
venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government's 1993 Yozma program.
The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who
Israel's government had chosen specifically for this position. As
previously reported by Unlimited Hangout , Mlavsky was then serving as the executive
director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation,
where "he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects
between US and Israeli high-tech companies."
A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation
became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard
affair.
In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel's behalf, it was noted that
Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was
an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser
to Israel's military, which oversaw Israel's scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem.
US officials
told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz "has detailed knowledge
about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials."
Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD
Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture
by US authorities.
One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded
by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell's leadership, CommTouch
developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell's relationship with its
cofounder Bill Gates.
A Coming "Hack" of Microsoft?
If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it's difficult to understand why
a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the
attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company's
investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel
used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful
investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable
involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy
firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.
There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous
or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies
in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few "winners" from the SolarWinds
hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased
globally.
While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli
intelligence apparatus, numerous
reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel's
hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and
intelligence officials themselves
noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel's intelligence
apparatus is so blurred, it's difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is
also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in
2012 , whereby Israel's intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing
"activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber
technologies."
Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former
IDF officer in the military's central computing unit, but because its main investors include
spies on "reserve duty" and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the
Bronfman and Maxwell families,
both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail
scandals over the years.
Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving
Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere.
PROMIS was covered up
largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard
affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump
allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited
Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the
discovery of "stingray" surveillance devices placed by Israel's government throughout
Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not
investigated by authorities. Israel had
previously wiretapped the White House's phone lines during the Clinton years.
Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in
fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is
different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli
intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much
more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft's products.
On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating
the hack,
claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that
"the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises
servers," meaning that changes to fix Orion's vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker
access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via
Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft's own claims that some of its source
code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised
to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.
Microsoft's cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds
hackers, was largely developed and later managed
by Assaf Rappaport , a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of
Microsoft's Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport
left Microsoft
right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company
called Wiz.
Microsoft, like some of Samanage's main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is
an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab's book " Shaping
the Fourth Industrial Revolution ." With the WEF simulating a cyber "pandemic" and both the
WEF and Israel's head of Israel's National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent "
cyber winter ", SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a
scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on
Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have
economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet,
if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to "reset" and
then rebuild electronic infrastructure.
Regarding the article, certainly one takeaway would be that, though they're good at
acquiring power, they're no good at managing it.
Another way of putting this would be to say that, though they're good at infiltration,
subversion, radical ingratitude, betrayal, insane hatred, vindictive hysteria, denial,
projection, destruction and death, they're just no good at social management.
Case in point: A country they control whose social institutions are all in free fall, The
United States of America. Which, if we were to be perfectly honest, we'd be better off simply
referring to as The United States of Israel. In which case we'd have to replace each of the
50 stars on the flag with stars of David. Who knows? Maybe they will. Stranger things have
happened in history.
But that would draw too much attention to the USA's many, many social failures. Which, of
course, are always – always – the result of self-focused ,
low-character leadership .
And Character is, in this case, How we treat others .
A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global
economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the
WEF has been warning.
A gross exaggeration, but the Western MSM can be relied upon to make such a cyberattack
appear like a massive World crisis – just like they've done with COVID-19, which is
nowhere near as virulent even as Hong Kong Flu.
Gerorge Orwell famously wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the
past."
To which he should have added: Who controls the media controls the present.
For the majority, indoctrinated by the MSM, this seems sadly to be true.
The U.S. military, surveillance state, and government have willingly sold off national
security secrets and have made every American business, institution, and individual
vulnerable as a result of it.
Bill Clinton permitted technology national security secrets developed by the military,
U.S. companies, and universities, all financed by tax payers to be handed over to the CCP by
U.S. tech companies that opened factories in China which required the blue prints to the
technology in exchange for the CCP to allow them to do it.
NYC is now the new Mossad cyber front, after the NSA and US gov permitted them to all open
office in NYC managing day to day operations of US gov., US businesses, and US citizens and
residents communications systems and security.
The Negav Desert is the new home of almost every U.S. Silicon Valley company, all invited
by Israel to open fronts there, after the US gov and tax payers catapulted the Silicon Valley
Titans to unprecedented levels of wealth in world history.
The espionage perpetrated by the US government and survellance state is the primary
problem!
There is no such thing as national security as long as these these foxes are guarding the
hen house.
They really should all be tried for treason!
Cambridge Analytica was used to spy on US citizens during the 2016 election in order to
shift the burden onto another country. They frequently hire intelligence agents from foreign
countries as unofficial but frequently practiced policy.
I have noticed that spies have no loyalty to any country or institution. They often work
together with spies fro other countries. They are thieves. People spy because they are sex
offenders, thieves, intellectual property thieves, or identity thieves. There is no such
thing as an honest spy. Their entire life is a series of lies, and it has to be since what
they are doing is illegal. Then of course there is the Five Eyes apparatus strengthening
bonds in the international surveillance state.
They will sell anything to anyone, and what has happened in Ametica is 100% proof. Nothing
is off the table. Everything and everyone has a price as far they are concerned.
I'm not sure I follow the twenty years interval or the significance of the three towers
(being a 9/11 reference), but you seem to imply it's some eschatological and/or messianic
thing. Could you or someone else explain?
The only question at hand–once the electronically addicted IQistas abandon their
angle of dominating the world by means of interdependence–is that upon examining the
size of whatever as will soon lie in the dust, (be it 911 or Microsoft) whether we should
ever again allow ourselves to become so dependent upon a thing so large and vulnerable.
We did not need the computer to experience the beauty of America prior to abandoning the
gold standard, and we don't need the computer now. Yeah, rave on with all that hype Steve
Jobs gave to John Scully, ie, You want to sell sugar water all your life, or you want to come
with me and change the world?
Jobs had a good mind, yet a monolithically weak objective when it came to change. There is
nothing new under the sun. Let it crash.
"Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to
US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS
software scandal."
You can blame the two Jews for obviously being Jews but John Tower should have been
hanged, quartered and displayed in the four corners of these United States for
disloyalty.
Hope to see more articles like this instead of the good old beaten up concepts. Or
opinionated write up.
Does anyone know what kind of job Jonathan Pollard got in Israel? Chief of intelligence
collection agency.
Many years ago, on the Yahoo News message boards, after I was awakened to some hard truths
about our country , I made a prediction that this day would come – that one day it
would get pretty bad (free speech) in America, with the usual suspects behind it, and that
the closer Americans get to the truth, the worse it will get.
We're here.
This fine article by Whitney Webb indicates what might be next. Pretty scary.
Just a note – Gab is a good alternative in case Unz finally gets taken down. And
vice versa. They have a Dissenter browser that will allow you to comment on anything,
evidently.
I lurk here a lot because the comments are the best I've ever seen anywhere.
The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia
on January 5 by the US government's Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement
asserted that the attackers were "likely Russian in origin," but they failed to provide
evidence to back up that claim.
I wonder when the U.S. government last made a statement that wasn't a lie.
Democrats will never silence America. When you tell people to shut up in this country, it
just makes them MORE angry, study more, take notes, etc. Myabe Twitterbook will be open next
year maybe they won't.
As usual, the narrative being chosen for the proles and plebs involves reducing us to
spectators to the court intrigues of ruling class political fronts, whose primary function is
to (mis)represent, as heroes or villains, the realpolitik of class war. The U$ president, often
mistaken for the most powerful figure on earth, is simply the principal player among the cast
of characters in these propaganda shows for our manufactured consent, routinely produced via
staged conflicts like so many partisan performances, in which we are expected to take sides and
mistake our own supporting roles as democracy in action (Problem-Reaction-Solution).
Trump's ignominious retirement from next season's episodes is a mild reminder of more
dramatic termination with extreme prejudice of such CEOs for the Fortune 500 as JFK. As his
example hardly set up lesser mortals for such methods of disposability, always the commoners'
common lot, so the example now being made of Trump only confirms what has long prevailed as our
systemic silencing and repression as nothing more than exploitable labor resources.
Our preparation for whatever may be planned next, from ratcheting up the Big Brother
censorship of Big Tech and cybersecurity false flags to the further discrediting of established
politics for replacement by more 'efficient' technocratic rule under AI algogarchy (central
bank cashless currency, social credit scores, immunity passes and total digital colonization by
'vaccination' programs, etc.), has been a long time coming. Preceding cancel culture and
antagonistic identity politics certainly have been conditioning people to not only acquiesce
but cheer for 'others' getting their 'just deserts'. And the recruitment of the ordinary
citizen, or consumer, of screen culture into policing practices took off all the more as soon
as people were 'triggered' into such invasions of privacy as 'weaponizing' their cameras to
post proof of others' 'wrongdoing' on 'social' media like some people's tribunal for political
corrections and public pillory.
So called social trends, more than anything the result of changes from the top down in the
forces of production (e.g., cellular technology, and now 5G) leading to changes in human
relations, set the context for habitual attitudes and behaviors which make us accomplices in
our own subjugation and demise. Beyond the evanescent spectacle of political theater, it's the
everyday material conditions of our living which adapt us to whatever new normal the "masters
of mankind" (Adam Smith) have planned for us. Above all, the ranking system of class rule, and
such complementary value hierarchies like those of race and gender, prepare us from earliest
ages of schooling to a lifetime of wage slavery to be more or less passive participants never
really showing up in our own lives, captive to there being no alternative to 'the way things
are'.
Reconstituting the body politic through autonomous organization of relations of egalitarian
direct democracy beyond the authoritarian conditions of existence laid down for us remains the
best if not only form of resistance to the fascist forces ruling over us.
Well said, Niko. Its all a sopa opera and sadly, so many have been fooled into believing
this is 'how it is'. "Reality Television" – an oxymoron indeed.
When I see President Trump, I feel pity, sadness, and grief. I pity him because he has
no future and will be go down in history as America's most hated man.
And in exactly which historical document will he go down as this?
A half a century ago, the media tried to tell us that Richard Nixon was the most warped
and corrupt political leader of the late twentieth century without using those exact words,
of course, because those exact words were a lie, but that was the distinct message it tried
to convey. It sort of worked for a couple of decades, but only with a definable segment of
the population. That's because political pathos can only stay alive for so long. And
historical figures can only be defined solely by their failings and political enemies for so
long.
Despite gaffs and missteps that likely cost him his reelection, Trump wasn't "the guy who
let us down" but instead, the William Jennings Bryan of the 21st century right leaning
populist movement. Like Bryan, he changed the nature of his political party forever. Unlike
Bryan, he at least got to be president once, but -again- like the Democrat game changer out
of Nebraska 100 years ago, he never was the right person to lead the movement to it's
promised land. Instead, he was the tip of a spear that the opposition said it could never be
gored by but was.
Trump's loss has a very bright silver lining in the admittedly dark cloud of looming far
left authoritarianism. Ultimately, the self-aggrandizing Trump could really do little more
than make his opponents really angry, but he also made his supporters aware of just how
numerous and (more importantly) potent they are. The movement now needs leadership that's
more cognizant of the political world they live in and capable of more coherent strategies
that will move it forward hopefully strategies that can offer more than tweets.
But what did President Trump actually do as President? Not much. In 2016, after the most
remarkable, unlikely, and miraculous campaign in American history, President Trump governed
like a normal Republican. He did not deport illegals, make English the official language,
or tax remittances to Mexico. He did not abolish birth-right citizenship. He was not a
"white nationalist." He did not even eliminate race-based discrimination against whites and
Asians.
The establishment's hate for what Trump legitimised saying – that media news is
often fake, it's ok to fight globalism, it's ok to defend your own culture, we should
disentangle from wars – is Trump's enduring badge of honour, despite Trump's flaws
and how he disappointed
There was another aspect to Trump that provides possible inspiration for emerging
political aspirants: he could at any time go 'alarmingly' and sometimes effectively 'off
script', and furthermore, sometimes wield his 'outrageous remarks' repeatedly.
Going 'rogue' is the great heresy within the context of a western (at least) political
establishment that considers remaining 'on message', – sticking to the script, no
matter how dishonest or absurd the message – to be the basic principle of successful
party power politics.
And there was the moon's problem in sunlight: The political establishment near and far,
used to being celebrated in noxious ceremony, trained actors just about all, but trained to
avoid spontaneity like the plague, were suddenly cast into the dismal light of seeming boring
and predictable by comparison.
Trump's forays into rogue utterance sometimes included unmentionable truths that become
memes. Trump's swamp is now far more identifiable, and sometimes more accurately now referred
to as a cesspool. The fake news universe has been hauled out of their previously
self-satisfied abode in the mass media heavens and had their addiction to dishonesty more
fully exposed. In desperation the fallen angels have cobbled together an army of fake fact
checkers, to identify truth tellers as the real fake news, but their audience nevertheless
yawns and dwindles.
From J1234 at comment 129:
[Trump has] also made his supporters aware of just how numerous and (more importantly)
potent they are. The movement now needs leadership that's more cognizant of the political
world they live in and capable of more coherent strategies that will move it forward
hopefully strategies that can offer more than tweets.
The COVID monstrosity has also given countless millions of people opportunity to
re-evaluate a lot in their lives and learn a lot, and so a politically more cognizant
deplorable/independent political confluence may result.
Fascism is opposed to usury and the power of the international banking cartel. Whether
Italy, Spain, or Portugal, the bankers were squeezed. The US "fascism" is a product of the
banks, not an opponent.
For many years, a handful of people have postulated that those who control industry, finance
and governments are essentially the same people – a cabal of sorts that have, over
generations, solidified their relationships in order to gain greater wealth and power, whilst
systematically making things ever more difficult for the free market to exist.
But why should this be? Surely, corporate leaders are more ardently capitalist than anyone
else?
Well, on the surface, that might appear to make sense, but once a significant position of
power has been achieved, those who have achieved it recognize that, since they've already
reached the top, the primary concern changes. From then on, the primary concern becomes the
assurance that no others are able to climb so high as they have.
At that point, they realise that their foremost effort needs to be a push toward corporatism
– the merger of power between government and business. This is a natural marriage. The
political world is a parasitic one. It relies on a continual flow of funding. The world of big
business is a study in exclusivity – the ability to make it impossible for pretenders to
the throne to arise. So, big business provides the cash; government provides protective
legislation that ensures preference for those at the top.
In most cases, this second half of the equation does not mean a monopoly for just one
corporation, but a monopoly for a cabal – an elite group of corporations.
This corporatist relationship has deep roots in the US, going back over one hundred years.
To this day, those elite families who took control of oil, steel, banking, motor vehicles and
other industries a century ago, soon created a takeover of higher learning (universities),
health (Big Pharma) and "Defense" (the military-industrial complex).
Through legislation, the US was then transformed to ensure that all these interests would be
catered to, creating generations of both control and profit.
Of course, "profit" should not be an evil word, but under crony capitalism, it becomes an
abomination – a distortion of the free market and the death of laissez faire
economics.
Certainly, this sort of collectivism is not what Karl Marx had in mind when he daydreamed
about a workers' paradise in which business leaders retained all the risk and responsibility of
creating and building businesses, whilst the workers had the final word as to how the revenue
would be distributed to the workers themselves.
Mister Marx failed in being objective enough to understand that if the business creator took
all the risk and responsibility but gave up the ability to decide what happened to the revenue,
he'd never bother to open a business. Even a shoeshine boy would reject such a notion and elect
to go on the dole, rather than work.
Mister Marx sought more to bring down those who were successful than to raise up those who
were not, yet he unwittingly created a new idea – corporate collectivism – in which
the very people he sought to debase used the appeal of collectivist rhetoric to diminish both
the freedoms and wealth of the average worker.
On the surface, this might appear to be a hard sell – to get the hoi polloi into the
net – but in fact, it's quite easy and has perennially been effective.
Hitler's New Order was such a construct – the promise to return Germany to greatness
and the German people to prosperity through increasingly draconian laws, warfare and an
economic revolving door between government and industry.
Of course, a major influx of capital was required – billions of dollars – and
this was eagerly provided by US industry and banks. Heads of New York banks not only funded
Nazi industry; families such as the Fords, Rockefellers, Morgans, etc., sat on the boards of
German corporations.
The Nazi effort failed, as they underestimated the Russian will to fight to the death.
(Eighty percent of all German Army deaths were due to the Russian campaign.)
But those in New York were able to regroup and be first in the queue for the restructuring
of German industry after the war and, ultimately, profited handsomely.
But most significantly, the idea of corporatist collectivism did not die. Even before the
war, the same group of families and corporations had drawn up the plan for Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal.
Mister Roosevelt was a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Street man and a director of New York banks. In
the 1930s and early 1940s, he created, as president, a revolving door that favoured large
corporations, whilst the average American was consciously kept at the subsistence level through
government entitlements.
The scam worked. Shortsighted Americans not only were grateful; they deified him for it.
Likewise, John Kennedy's New Frontier sought to revitalize the concept, as did Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society: Give the little people entitlements that keep them little. Tax smaller
businesses and create a flow of tax dollars to the elite industries, who, in turn, provide
monetary favours to the political class.
The Green New Deal is merely the latest corporate collectivist scheme on the list.
Corporate collectivism can be defined as a system in which the few who hold the legal
monopolies of finance and industry gain an overriding control over all others, and in so doing,
systematically extract wealth from them.
Today, this system has become so refined that, although the average American has a flat
screen TV and an expensive smartphone, he cannot raise $400 to cover an emergency that occurs
in his life. He is, for all practical purposes, continually bankrupt, but still functioning in
a zombie-like existence of continual dependency.
This, on the surface, may not seem all that dangerous, but those who cannot buy their way
out of a small emergency are easily controlled. Just create an emergency such as an uber-virus
and that fact will be illuminated quickly.
In order to maximise compliance in a population, maximise their dependence.
As stated above, this effort has been in play for generations. But it is now reaching a
crescendo. It's now up to speed in most of the former Free World and those who hold the strings
are ready for a major step forward in corporate collectivism.
In the coming year, we shall see dramatic changes appearing at a dizzying rate. Capital
controls , migration controls, internal movement controls, tax increases, confiscation of
assets and the removal of "inalienable" rights will all be coming into effect – so
quickly that before the populace can even grasp the latest restrictions, new ones will be
heaped on.
As this unfolds, we shall witness the erosion of the nation-state. Controls will come from
global authorities, such as the UN, the IMF and the WEF. Organisations that have no formal
authority over nations will increasingly be calling the shots and people will wonder how this
is possible. Elected officials will increasingly become mere bagmen, doing the bidding of an
unelected ruling class.
The changes that take place will be not unlike a blanket that is thrown over humanity.
The question then will be whether to, a) give in to this force, b) to fight it and most
likely fall victim to it, or c) seek a means to fall outside the perimeter of the blanket.
* * *
Unfortunately most people have no idea what really happens when a government goes out of
control, let alone how to prepare The coming economic and political crisis is going to be much
worse, much longer, and very different than what we've seen in the past. That's exactly why New
York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video.
Click
here to watch it now .
I was watching the Helper-Taibbi Inauguration stream yesterday and one clever viewer
remarked that we are seeing bread and circuses ... but without the bread.
Senator Rand Paul recently challenged the new Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken on
his history of pushing regime change in the Middle East and North Africa:
"Regime change in the Middle East has led to chaos, instability and more terrorism," Sen.
Paul argued.
"Like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton you've been a supporter of military intervention in
the Middle East from the Iraq war to the Libyan war to the Syrian civil war..." he introduced
in his Tuesday questoning of Blinken.
Sen. Paul began his argument by questioning Blinken's role in the NATO intervention of Libya
in 2001 and his support for the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003, which the Kentucky
congressman said was a major disaster that paved the way for a stronger Iran.
The congressman argued that Blinken continued to push regime change in Syria, which he said
was a significant blunder, especially with the amount of money spent training "moderate rebel
forces" .
Sen. Paul said the administration of former President Barack Obama spent $250 million (USD)
on training 60 rebels [as part of the DoD side; the CIA program was much more expansive], which
he said was a waste of money.
He would go on to question why Blinken would support the Syrian opposition groups on the
ground, as he pointed out the most powerful fighters are those from the jihadist groups like
the Al-Nusra Front .
"Even after Libya you guys went on to Syria wanting to do the same thing again... it's a
disaster. The lesson of these wars is that regime change doesn't work!" Paul said.
"You got rid of one 'bad guy' and another 'bad guy' got stronger," Paul added while
lambasting the US strategy of going after Iran while Iraq is still weakened by Bush's regime
change war there.
"Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle East," Paul continued.
Blinken claimed in response that he wasn't supportive of a full-scale 'Iraq-style' regime
change war in Syria while vaguely claiming that he's done "deep thinking" and reflection on the
issue . Blinken never repudiated the policy of regime change in the Middle East, however.
Sen. Paul then shifted his attention to NATO, which he said Blinken was trying to strengthen
for the purpose of combatting Russia. The senator said Blinken's policy on NATO would lead to
war with Russia, which the latter responded would have the opposite effect.
Paul concluded by saying that regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in
long wars that are costly to the military.
The Luftwaffe 8 hours ago
We will see a new major war started by this administration within two years
Cloud9.5 7 hours ago
We have to do something to reduce the population.
Leather-Dog 7 hours ago
You mean in addition to the 103.5% effective covid vaccine?
RiverRoad 7 hours ago
On duckduckgo.com search > "Med
Cram".
On You Tube: Dr. Seheult's med school video lecture "Vitamin D and Covid 19: The Evidence for
Prevention and " (5.3m views)
Vitamin D3 is sold over the counter.
Karma is coming for Covid.
eatapeach 7 hours ago
Hopefully it's also coming for the thieving liars who pushed this cheap PsyOp (Pompeo is
one, Fauci is another).
bigjim 3 hours ago
I guess Bibi mis-spelled Rand's email address on the memo.
boattrash 2 hours ago
103.5%... that sounds like the voter turnout in all the blue cities.
rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago
If one could take all the people in the world and cram them into a city as dense as Tokyo,
it would cover the area of Rhode Island.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN 5 hours ago
BS
Tokyo pop density=16121.8 /sq.mi.
Rhode Island = 1045 sq.mi.
At that density RI would hold 16.8 million people.
At the average annual population growth rate of the last century there will be 1 sq.m. of
land per person in only 750 years. That includes all mountains, frozen tundra, jungles and
deserts... now "get off my lawn".
bearwinkle 6 hours ago
Sure, that's why Xiden is allowing millions of immigrants to invade our borders.
aloha_snakbar 7 hours ago
I thought it might be like today...
Hatterasjohn 7 hours ago
Anyone crazy enough to join ,or be in the military , is out of his friggin mind.
BarnacleBill 7 hours ago
Or likes killing civilians. Don't overlook the psychopaths.
headslapper 7 hours ago
and that will be the end of the US.
RiverRoad 7 hours ago
How about the Regime Change just effected right HERE in the good old USA?
Im1ru12 4 hours ago
Exactly - "Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle East," Paul
continued
That's what they do - they just did it here
starman99 7 hours ago
(((Anthony Blinken)))
USAllDay 7 hours ago
I'd take Assad over Biden.
9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago (Edited)
Assad has more integrity in his shoe than Biden has accumulated in the past 50 years.
Armed Resistance 7 hours ago
If the deep state hates Assad, then I know he must be legitimately a good guy deep down.
9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago
BINGO!
Brutlstrudl 6 hours ago
It seems that after each election, the USA becomes more of a contrarian indicator
SERReal1 7 hours ago
I agree. At least Assad puts his country first and gives the finger to the Deep State.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN 5 hours ago
Plus a secular government that respects the rights of all religious minorites. Sets a bad
example for all the intolerant apartheid states in the region.
Hopefully the "Assad Must Go" curse gets the entire Biden Administration sooner rather than
later.
aloha_snakbar 8 hours ago
Who cares...Uncle Scam lost the tiny bit of credibility he had on 01/20/2021. RIP
America....
eatapeach 7 hours ago
I care. Here's yet another Israel-first douchenozzle getting put in a very, very high
position. And acting like it'd be any different with Trump at the helm is severe folly.
(Pompeo)
FluTangClan 6 hours ago
Sorry bro but anyone with eyes hasn't thought the US credible for more than a century.
4Celts 7 hours ago
Paul concluded by saying that regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in
long wars that are costly to the military.
Pardon , but the " cost " to the military shouldn't be the top/only argument. What happened
to morally/ ethically wrong ?
SwmngwShrks 7 hours ago
"All wars are Bankers' wars." -Smedley Butler
white horse 7 hours ago
Moral is dead long ago, replaced by new fake moral called humanitarianism.
DonGenaro 7 hours ago
You're an astute observer - few detect such "tells"
Feck Weed 5 hours ago
Consider the audience
FringeDweller 5 hours ago
Fair point.
Lord JT 5 hours ago
He mentioned that it creates more terrorism, and that the incoming regime may be even worse
than the previous.
Unknown User 8 hours ago
Biden will start a war, or two, or three...
Why-Am-I-Banned 6 hours ago
Maybe the best thing that could happen to free us all finally is an all out war with
Russia, we aren't going to see a revolution to get rid of the corruption the population is
lazy and scared of doing without.
Maybe forced into mutual assured destruction is truly the only way to get rid of the deep
state...
Russia lost approx 250 million via communism over decades, maybe we need to just swallow
the poison pill and get it over with.
Not all of us will die, and definately no one is going to listen to the deep state leaders
after the dust clears...
FluTangClan 6 hours ago
Cho Bai Den fol peace!
wick7 5 hours ago
It's amazing how Democrats flipped overnight to being pro war once Obama started new wars.
They were mad when Trump was signing peace deals. Lol.
You_Cant_Quit_Me 8 hours ago
He's right. One disaster after another. Who has Assad attacked? If small countries want the
US to back off then they must develop nuclear weapons. When was the last time the US attacked a
country with nuclear capabilities?
JRobby 7 hours ago
Bust Blinken's balls until he quits like a little rat trying to naw through steel cables
gespiri 7 hours ago
The only way to stop these wars is to send the people (and their kids) who are pushing for
it in the first place to the front lines.
rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago
Or make the state obsolete by transitioning to a private law society.
RedDog1 7 hours ago
Remember how Gaddafi surrendered his nukeprogram to Bush, a few years later Obama/HRC
invaded...resulting in Gaddafi being lynched?
eatapeach 7 hours ago
Iran and NK and Syria remember, for sure. Wish we all remembered the USS Liberty when
shaping foreign policy.
LooseLee 4 hours ago
Remember Libya has no central bank?
Pandelis 3 hours ago (Edited)
you really believe that bs ... it is much more than that ... at the end is about the land
and the people ... money can be printed out of thin air and there is nothing libya (or iraq,
iran etc.) central bank can do about it ...
bring on dr. fraucistein to explain it all to us ... maga!!
roach clipper 6 hours ago
Assad placed his country too close to Is ra hell
manofthenorth 8 hours ago
Sorry guys but we have been played like a second hand fiddle.
I assume Paul has figured out by now that being a murderous psychopath is a job requirement
in DC. It's the first question in the job interview. "Do you enjoy death and destruction for
profit and personal power?"
littlewing 7 hours ago
Remember when Trump bombed Syria and all of a sudden everyone in DC loved him for 15
minutes.
Talk about the big reveal.
aloha_snakbar 7 hours ago
The same Rand Paul who was criticizing Trump in the eleventh hour? That one?? They are all
swamp creatures and seriously make me want to vomit...
pro·le·tar·i·at 7 hours ago
The apple rolled away from the tree.
Leather-Dog 7 hours ago
Paul, I like you, you seem to care a little bit. However, if they haven't cared in the last
forever, they are definitely not going to start now. They just regime changed ourselves with
almost no substantial resistance, you think they will care about Syria?
StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago
He puts on a show to care once in a while.
He didn't stand for the truth when it counted.
Goat of Steverino 7 hours ago
GREAT RAND, BUT WHERE WERE YOU ON BIG TECH CENSORSHIP AND ELECTION FRAUD?
Bank_sters 7 hours ago
He's cucked.
Ted Baker 6 hours ago
What is this obsession with Russia? Russia is a peaceful country who defends its people. How
difficult is that to understand?
ReadyForHillary 6 hours ago
Russia isn't down with the NWO.
Dinaric 7 hours ago
(((Blinkin))) is all you need to know.
9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago
Does anyone honestly believe that if Biden was honest and had any degree if integrity that
he would be president at this moment in U.S. history? That boy is a 50 year swamp critter A
thoroughly reliable member of the compromised fraternity. Same for Nancy.
freakscene 7 hours ago
Remember the video of younger Biden telling some voter that he graduated top of his class,
with honors????
None of which were true.
littlewing 7 hours ago
His degree is from University of Phoenix.
Now all colleges are that. haha
Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago
Ironically, he wants to set up a comity for Integrity In Government.
freakscene 7 hours ago
Yeah. Thats hysterical!!
Saturday Night Live material - if they had any spine.
BarnacleBill 7 hours ago
Which they don't. Come on, man!
StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago
Yep. They needed someone with zero integrity.
yeketerina velikaya 7 hours ago
You know who's been right all along?
Tulsi Gabbard.
Right on big tech
Right on Kamala
Right on pardoning Assange and Snowden
Right on the uniparty and false flags in Syria
Right on Queen of Warmongers Hillary and DNC
Right on the MSM
Right on securing the elections/ballot harvesting
She's the real deal and would have delivered on these things but never had a shot.
Armed Resistance 7 hours ago
She was wrong on gun control. Very wrong! And that's a non-negotiable.
Why-Am-I-Banned 6 hours ago
Don't worry real gun control is coming and so much more you didn't ask for...
rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago
She should have been Trump's vp choice.
StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago
You know....I think you're right. I hadn't thought of that.
StanleyTheManly 5 hours ago
I like Tulsi. She seems like a genuine person with integrity that really cares about the
country. BUT I disagree with her on quite a few issues. Maybe she'll come around.
littlewing 7 hours ago
The steal was sealed when the Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas case.
Greasy John Roberts wrecked America.
Max21c 7 hours ago
The steal was sealed when the Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas case.
True.
Vichy John Roberts went full Quisling and brought back Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court
endorsed election fraud, supported the coup d'etat, forced Trump from power, helped usher in a
new era for the banana republic of Jim Crow laws...
phillyla 7 hours ago
John Roberts is compromised 8 ways to Sunday. Trump should have had him impeached and
removed from the bench
El Chapo Read 7 hours ago
If you thought Trump was surrounded by Red Sea Pedestrians with an agenda, research the
ethno-religious background of Biden's cabinet picks.
Shalom!
SassyPants 7 hours ago
Every administration is. Trumps son in law and advisor is as well. Please see the entire
picture for a change.
snatchpounder PREMIUM 7 hours ago
How about closing all military bases overseas and dismantling the MIC and oh **** it an old
demented neocon is playing president for a few months, scratch that.
rastanarchocapitalist 7 hours ago
The crack up boom of the FRNs may force that one day
snatchpounder PREMIUM 7 hours ago
I think it'll happen sooner rather than later, the chances are good based on the demented
old pedophile being selected president and his retards at the fed.
rastanarchocapitalist 4 hours ago
In the long run, that might be a good thing if we return to honest money but you can be sure
they'll try to kick the can for another 50 years with some form of new fiat or erasing a couple
of zeroes of our current notes.
Hopefully the masses will just say know but I wouldn't put much faith in that.
RedNemesis 6 hours ago
Parents, do not let your smart, winning kids into the armed services. The MIC will grind
them out with PTSD, brain injuries, and lost limbs. There is no 'patriotism' or allegience to
the Deep State.
Why-Am-I-Banned 6 hours ago
Maybe the best thing that could happen to free us all finally is an all out war with Russia,
we aren't going to see a revolution to get rid of the corruption the population is lazy and
scared of doing without.
Maybe forced into mutual assured destruction is truly the only way to get rid of the deep
state...
Russia lost approx 250 million via communism over decades, maybe we need to just swallow the
poison pill and get it over with.
Not all of us will die, and definately no one is going to listen to the deep state leaders
after the dust clears...
Max21c 6 hours ago (Edited)
Maybe the best thing that could happen to free us all finally is an all out war with
Russia..
Maybe we should instead just launch a sneak attack on Alpha Centauri instead. Skip the small
fry like Russia and China. In a few generations we shall know whether our Earthling space
torpedoes hit Alpha Centauri. This of course should be debated by the people and approved by a
plebiscite per ballot referendums. Then the space war bill sent to the Earthlings Politburo for
their approval. It'll take around a decade or more to design and build the space torpedoes...
then 100 years plus for travel time and the same to get the data back from the
mothership...
Plus we can have both a Cold War and a Hot War with Alpha Centauri... under the leadership
of an Earthling appointed or elected by the Earthlings Council and elevated to the rank of Don
Quixote with the accompany title of Primal inter Pares
We just need more right thinking smart people to join the cult and become enlightened to the
prospects of a new 100 years war with other planets...and maybe some small wars with
planetoids...asteroids and comets...
We can establish of house of OverLords composed of only the best Astrologers to help pick
out which planets to attack & destroy...based upon whether they have offended our star
charts or the zodiac calls for war... In addition we can establish a lower house of UnderLords
composed of mad scientists and Generalissimos and crazy Spy Chiefs... and maybe some nutty
press types from the official media and puppet press to lead us in the Two Minutes Hate against
the Alpha Centauri folks, the space peoples, and the flying saucer people...
Maghreb2 5 hours ago
CIA already had plans for all this under the Stargate Program. After Ike's treaty with
various alien species the MIC began its descent into madness and universal conquest.
surroundedbyijits 6 hours ago
A war like that might "free" you, because the Russians will kick your ***.
balz 7 hours ago
Each time I see this "Office of the President Elect" picture thing, I get nauseous.
Fake office for a fake president who wasn't elected in the first place.
BLOTTO 8 hours ago
Like nothing happened back here at home.
Max21c 6 hours ago
Blinken may prove out to be more slick and savy than Dumbo Pompeo the flying cartoon
elephant but he's still a fawking neanderthal and a ******. Maybe an elite ****** but he's
still a ******. Blind, deaf, and dumb is still blind, deaf, and dumb even with all the powers
of the secret police at their disposal.
Ms No PREMIUM 7 hours ago
Rand is sick too. He goes on about how these things are bad specifically because they
strengthened Iran? How about liberty crushing mass murder?
"Sen. Paul said the administration of former President Barack Obama spent $250 million (USD)
on training 60 rebels [as part of the DoD side; the CIA program was much more expansive], which
he said was a waste of money."
So your mad they steal money while creating terrorists? Or are you mad that they don't tell
you what they do with the rest? They abduct children from war zones to make them. Maybe the
indoctrination and rape children's homes are expensive. They have screwed the entire
planet.
There is something wrong with him too. He is another limited hangout
silverlinings00 7 hours ago
He's all bark no bite like Elizabeth Warren. Trotted out to show a feigning resistance.
Insert farm animal here 4 hours ago
Poor Rand is going to have a tough and lonely battle over the next few years. Let's wish him
well, he'll be going it alone for sure.
the_pencil 2 hours ago
It seems odd that no one has allied themselves with him in the same manner as McCain &
Graham.
Pareto 6 hours ago
Another life long bureaucrat talking about his resume. And fails to answer a simple
question. Woop there it is. That's why they hated Trump. Because somebody off the street had
better answers than 25 years of experience.
Rand Paul, one of the few good ones left. Good Luck with Biden and his war hawks!
NumbNuts 6 hours ago
These same people are attempting a regime change in the United States too. From Freedom to
Fascism.
Helg Saracen 6 hours ago
The Americans lost perspectives and actually real freedom when Woodrow Wilson sold US to
international banksters in 1913, now this scam just ends and a new scam begins. You haven't
figured it out yet. By the way, fascism is Italian National Socialism. No offense.
frank further 6 hours ago
Then what was German National Socialism, if not fascism?
/
/
BluCapitalist PREMIUM 6 hours ago (Edited)
They are not attempting. They have done it. They have perfected their craft over the last 70
years in other countries and they brought it home to keep their criminal organization
going.
urhotdogs 6 hours ago remove link
They didn't attempt, they did it! Took a little over 4 years but had to stoop to massive
election fraud and changing state laws on the fly. It was coordinated throughout all levels of
government down to states and courts and SCOTUS.
bunkers 5 hours ago
Communism
bunkers 5 hours ago
Maybe not.
WhiteHose 6 hours ago
Russia Russia Russia! They never stop! BTW, wheres scumbag Hunter?
starman99 7 hours ago
(((Anthony Blinken)))
rkb100100 7 hours ago
Yea we know the cabinet is full of heeb's.
brown_hornet 7 hours ago
Is he in the boat with Winken and Nod?
GatorMcClusky 7 hours ago
Good one.
Mount Massive 7 hours ago (Edited)
There is a reason Russia has spent the last 2 months ramping up testing of its mil hardware
including hyper-vel ICBM's and SLBM's. - Xiden
SelectedNotElectedBiden 7 hours ago
Rand will be the only Senator to give the Dems a hard time. Sad since it should be payback
for EVERY Republican Senator.
freakscene 7 hours ago
Cruz will be fun to watch too. They excel being outnumbered.
Ms No PREMIUM 7 hours ago
If they wanted Rand out of that spot he would have been gone a long time ago.
Bob Lidd 5 hours ago
Does anyone think the US policy in the middle east will change with 10 of biden's
appointees being jewish .......??
The "greater israel" will continue no matter the cost to the American tax cattle.......
((((blinken))) ..........
ReadyForHillary 7 hours ago
The neocons are back!
Max21c 7 hours ago
The neocons are back!
Does not matter. They could not win before and they shall not win now. They're ineffective,
inept, and incompetent. They won't be able to fix the messes and disasters they've created for
themselves. At best they might be able to sick the secret police on a few people at home and
drop some bombs or missiles abroad. But for the most part it's some more of the same. Evil is
as evil does. They're not going to be able to work themselves out of the fix they've got
themselves into or figure it out. They're toast. They're bad people and they're toast.
Washingtonians may have absolute power but they've had absolute power all along...and they
still can't fix the disasters they've caused.
Northern Exposure 6 hours ago (Edited)
Oh thank God!
If we're not looking for a new pointless war to start or jumping into an existing one then
this isn't the America that I know and love!
</sarc>
karzai_luver 7 hours ago
Where is the BUFFALOBILL dude storming the Senate to drag this blinken criminal scum out and
do justice for his wanton murder of thousands?
Shut down this freak show.
I would rather have BUFFALOBILL and his idiots running the place than these feckless
people's representatives.
Tony , have you learned your lesson?
Senator - screw you and your people I will think it over.
Alexander 7 hours ago
Silence republicans! Yes we stole the election using widespread mail in ballots, yes your
state governments changed the rules to allow us to count these mail in ballots more quickly,
yes there were far more votes in this election than any other ever. ANDDDD... NO we will not
look into the validity of this election becuase muh capital rioting grandma threatened sweet
little socialist AOC.
Now give us your children to fight a war in syria.
artless 7 hours ago
Barack Obama. Neocon to the core. Biden is no different. Gonna do us some "liberating"
again. And from the left there will be silence as thousands of poor, short brown people are
killed as "collateral damage".
Welcome back America to what you do the best. Destroy lives. Any over/under on how many days
it takes Biden to start killing folks and hence become a war criminal like pretty much all his
predecessors? I might like a piece of that action.
SassyPants 7 hours ago
Republicans are neocons, democrats are neoliberal. You're basically right, just left out
half the problem.
pods 7 hours ago
Can't bitch about foreign actions in our elections when we pick other governments.
Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago
Pick ???? Surely you jest !
pods 7 hours ago
We choose sides right?
We picked the CIA stooge in Venezuela.
Not sure about your question.
Maybe "kinetically pick" would be better?
Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago
Sorry, I didn't read your post properly. I didn't see "other" governments.
rwe2late 7 hours ago
you either forgot the sarc tag
or failed to notice such as V. Nuland hand-picking leadership in Ukraine,
or the Trump picking of Guiado for Venezuela.
Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago
Poor eye sight is my best and only excuse.
SelectedNotElectedBiden 7 hours ago
Where is Hunter?
Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago
The Big Guy made him the Advance Minister of Foreign Extortion.
headslapper 7 hours ago
The faces change but the song remains the same. What a waste of energy this government is.
Resources thrown down the toilet to make the Ruling class more wealthy. Why do we even pay
attention. We all need to have a look in the mirror. Myself included of course.
Armed Resistance 7 hours ago
So now that you've looked in the mirror, what are you going to do about it? Send a
strongly-worded letter? Or are you ready to actually step up. As morally wrong and demented as
the radical left is, at least you have to admire them in the sense they actually step up to the
plate to get sh!t done. It's immoral, but effective.
Canadian Dirtlump 7 hours ago
Lest we forget the same bearded butchers that Chris Stevens flew into ben gazi with (al
Quaeda inter alia aligned ) who were funded and trained by the West were the same ones who flew
from ben gazi to the incirlik nato base to try to do the same thing in syria.
The only reason it didn't work was because of the SAA, Hezbollah and of course the ultimate
backstop Russia. I'm thankful for this.
mikka 7 hours ago
Imagine Russian or Chinese parliament publicly debating regime change in USA.
Uncle_Cuddles 7 hours ago (Edited)
Debating? China has ALREADY done it here.
joew8989 7 hours ago
Rand will continue to fight the good fight, when you live a life based on principal, that's
what you do. We will always need more people like him. That's what built this country, not the
parasites at the helm now.
ItsTooHotForThis 6 hours ago
Paul voted to confirm the electors. His challenge to the new Sec. of State means
nothing.
Garciathinksso 5 hours ago
his argument was based on State's right issue, in case you care
bunkers 5 hours ago
It doesn't matter WHY, he voted with traitors, only, that he did.
SillyTheEnemy 6 hours ago (Edited)
This is literally the only guy we have in the senate who even remotely gives a ****. Yet the
amount of **** that is going to happen to us when biden heats up the war in Syria is
immeasurable. F*ck me
hardright 6 hours ago
Rand Paul is wasting his time.
If he wants to make a difference he should be lobbying Russia to send more troops into
Syria.
surroundedbyijits 6 hours ago
And arranging imports of the Russian vaccine. Less likely to kill you and more effective
than the only 45% effective Pfizer ****.
BluCapitalist PREMIUM 6 hours ago
This guys eyes look exactly like the vampires in the movie 30 days of night. Am I in a
simulation? Why do these people actually look like fictional villains? I mean Whitmer, Newsom,
this new fat, unhealthy, mentally ill assistant "health secretary"? Did I do something really
wrong? Am I in hell and don't know it? No. I am here on earth and psychopaths are real and evil
is real.
duckandcover 1 hour ago
they're just a little scared and overwhelmed. You might be too
WhiteHose 7 hours ago
Look at this Blinken twit! F you pal! And....wheres HUnter??? Diddling his brothers minor
niece? Again? Still?
First Ron and now Rand. I think the club just lets them in as the token Don Quixote. They
have been the only voices of reason for the last 25 years or so, but they are only tilting at
windmills. Nothing is going to change until something forces them to change. The war mongering
and corruption will just roll right along while the MIC and congress get richer by the
minute.
The unrelenting droning of brown people in foreign lands that are ill-equipped to fight back
will commence in 3,2,1...
SassyPants 7 hours ago
Leaving the Republican Party would be the first best step.
ejmoosa 7 hours ago (Edited)
We put too much on one man and one man alone to change things.
Faced with judges and a House and A Senate against him the task before Trump was
Herculean.
Add to that 2/5ths of the states with governors also against Trump and it's even worse.
What you need to do is get involved in your local politics and take control back of your
Cities and County Commissions, as well as your state governments.
Had Trump held control of the House and the Senate and we had sitting on Courts people who
put the Constitution first FOR the people rather than using it against them, things would be a
lot different today.
The choice is yours.
Time to play 7 hours ago
It's good to see that Rand, is starting to think more like his father!
north_hand_demon 7 hours ago
So he's controlled opposition, too?
Lyman54 7 hours ago
Pretty early to be smoking crack isn't it?
otschelnik 7 hours ago
With Cookies Nuland as Blinken's deputy, you've got the neocon family business installed at
Foggy Bottom. Robert (Victoria's huband), Fredrick, and Kim each with their own pro-war think
tank, and a list of supporters which constitute the "A-list" of the USSA's merchants of death.
Northrup-Grumman, UTX, Raytheon, Lockheed....
9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago
Winken, Blinken and Nod.
That's the administration we got now.
silverlinings00 8 hours ago
Careful Rand, we wouldn't want you to get another "visit" from a neighbor while you're
mowing the lawn.
Pdunne 3 hours ago (Edited)
Biden's biggest Cabinet mistake will ultimately be Blinken.
Like Obama picked H Clinton with disasterous consequences Biden picks Blinken.
JackOliver4 4 hours ago
Rand Paul says " Assad is a terrible person " !!!
Dr Assad is a HERO !!
Rand Paul is either completely misinformed or just another useless politician afraid to
speak the TRUTH !
A COWARD !
Hessler 4 hours ago
Assad may be a good person at heart but he is not qualified to run a state. He should be a
doctor or something.
JackOliver4 4 hours ago
And Joe Biden is ??
OR Boris Johnstone ??
Helg Saracen 4 hours ago
It is up to the Syrians to decide, not you. You already paid for the genocide of the Syrian
Christians in the "fight against the tyrant Assad." I've seen all kinds of idiots and
hypocrites, but you are their king.
Hessler 4 hours ago (Edited)
Why did not Assad anticipated the Zionist invasion even though the Snowden document reveled
the CIA/Mossad works in the making in 2006 ??
If he did anticipated an invasion why he did not do anything to safeguard his nation and
it's people ?
Why every men, women and child capable to lift and shoot was not given and an ordinance and
proper training ?? Israel has that. Why can't Syria ?
Syria is a part of Greater Israel. They have been marked for genocide the day Israel was
created, what haste did Mr. Assad showed to safeguard his country against their genocidal
maniacs psychopaths ??
I will never forgive those who inflicted the terrible atrocities on the children and women
and Mr. Assad has a blame to share.
mark3383 3 hours ago
Assad risked his life and continues to do so every day, trump recently bragged he thought
about "taking him out". he's a true hero more than you or I will ever be
steve2241 5 hours ago
Rand Paul doesn't understand. Blinken follows the path that Israel tells him to. Middle East
instability benefits Israel. The fomenting of Sunni-Shia conflict kills Israels' enemies, the
muslims, without Israel having to lift a finger. Syria is no longer a threat to Israel. Mission
accomplished.
Hessler 4 hours ago (Edited)
You're wrong on two accounts. First, there's no ****te/Sunni conflict. What goes in Miiddle
East is entire different than what is portrayed here. The locals know but how many of them get
interviewed on live TV or get a airtime on a prime time desk ? Those are reserved for the
chosenites who spew BS about Arabs and Muslims 24/7.
****te/Sunni fiction as broadcasts in the west is nothing but a ploy to wash the hands of
the responsibility and pin the blame on the victims.
Second, Syria is now a bigger threat to Israel than it was in Pre War era. Battle Hardened
troops, better organization, training with Russian/Iranian Military, better equipment, talented
strategists and when you fight a war like that for that long you tend to grow a bigger set of
balls.
JackOliver4 4 hours ago
Syria wants the GOLAN back - I would say they are a threat to ISRAEL !!
Sick Monkey 5 hours ago
Speaking of war didn't Rand Paul vote to accept the illegitimate electors. I like Paul he
seems to have a level head but you voted to put the commies in power. Like you said in your
speech "there are repercussions". Those who took a stand against this coup must be kept in
power as they put skin in the game. That's a rare and precious gift to us the people. In the
year 2021 it's as good as gold.
Taffer 5 hours ago
Exactly, hence my previous comment below.
mark3383 3 hours ago
trump lost the election because he allowed million of fraud votes to be counted and never
said or did anything about it in the year leading up to it. he 's the one that lost it. no one
else
Sinophile 6 hours ago
"War Pigs"----Black Sabbath
Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death's construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
Oh lord yeah!
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Yeah!
Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait 'til their judgement day comes
Yeah!
Now in darkness world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of judgement, God is calling
On their knees the war pig's crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan laughing spreads his wings
oh lord yeah!
surroundedbyijits 6 hours ago
Circuses. Theatre for the plebes. Not one bit of foreign policy is decided or affected by
debates or hearings in the Legislative branch. They're all following a script, some of them act
like they aren't in on the joke.
Cloudcrusher 6 hours ago
Psychosis the denial of reality. The military industrial complex is make believe. It's
military industrial congress, Congress is in charge they alone are to blame know one else. The
sooner everyone starts living in reality the better off will be. You want to win the war of
words better start with reality. Or your going to get a another kind of war one where only the
strong survive.
Max21c 6 hours ago (Edited)
Watch: Rand Paul Challenges New Secretary Of State Over Regime-Change In Syria
Meaningless inside the beltway for the record drool-n-dribble... Rand Paul just wants to pad
his resume, bio, and gain some street cred claims...
TahoeBilly2012 6 hours ago
When do the new wars start? Dems can't wait. Blame them on Covid or something, they will buy
it.
vspam 7 hours ago
Biden will go to war with Iran and turned thr ME into a fireball. The mainstream media will
cheer him on under the banner of peace and unity
Max21c 7 hours ago
Diablo Corona
Washingtonians are for the most part the spawn of Satan.
DC= the Devil's City... they are evil... Washingtonians are just pure rotten evil...
Washington DC ... Devil's City
Washington DC .... Devil's Crown
The evil ones cannot change their evil ways... they're too far gone... the evil ones cannot
be redeemed...
Max21c 7 hours ago
Paul concluded by saying that regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in
long wars that are costly to the military.
Too late. Washington is toast. It's just a question of when Washingtonians lose in Syria,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, et cetera. They already made a mess of things and they do not
have the brains to fix it. Same with their inabilities as regards nonproliferation, North
Korea, et cetera. They don't have what it takes to figure it out and work it out and nobody is
going to fix it for them because they're assholes regardless of which cabal of Ivy League
assholes or ******* elites are in power.
ThomasEdmonds 7 hours ago
Paul isn't supposed to question a Zionist's motives..
aloha-snackbar 7 hours ago
if the youth said no to war and moms said not my child and burned down the recruitment/death
centers then war would end...
tunEphsh 7 hours ago
Thank goodness that Paul told the idiot Blicken to lay off regime change. Obama-Biden made a
mess of the middle east and caused a refugee crises which is still with us. Instead of being
named secretary of state, me thinks Blicken should be put in jail for acts in the Middle East
which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
moneybots 7 hours ago
The EU has become a mess because of regime change.
freakscene 7 hours ago
Of course he should. But that would require sanity.
yerfej 7 hours ago (Edited)
Simple way to stop all this insane venturism and nation building it to MANDATE that every
aysshole like Blinken have a spouse or child or sibling or relative ON THE GROUND fighting in
one of these shyyytholes. These elites love this crap because THEY never pay a personal price,
no they have farmed that out to the "commoners" who supply the bodies. The filthy elites are
good at leveraging everyone else to fulfill their fantasies while paying no price.
Occams_Razor_Trader 7 hours ago
You've seen the videos of Chelsea and Malia on tour in Kabul? Yeah?
yerfej 7 hours ago
More like Eeyore pontificating from her 20 million dollar penthouse about how she is so not
into money, or Maglia dancing around stoned like a "social justice warrior".
Flynt2142ahh 7 hours ago (Edited)
The senate needs more Rand Paul types - and they dont have to be in the Republican
party...This would force actual accountability of uniparty folks and these appointees. We need
less murkowski and collins
phillyla 7 hours ago
I am going to harp on this
in 2014 Matt Bevin challenged McConnell in a Senate Primary
He was gaining momentum
Then Rand endorsed McConnell
Bevin lost McConnell got re-elected
Bevin was later elected Governor of KY so he had the votes
Rand Paul Broke my heart
Leguran@premium PREMIUM 7 hours ago
We need use the Progressive's signage: He is not my President.
LostMyGunsInABoatingAccident 7 hours ago
You can't necessarily call it an "American" policy.
America lost control of it's policy long ago.....
Mount Massive 7 hours ago
Here comes another war, and this time, it will spiral out of control. In two years or less,
I expect the US to be in a major conflict and/or hit at home. Sigh....Leftist
Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago
Pelosi just took Rand aside and said, wait and see what your neighbor on the other side of
you has to say about this.
9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago
Rand is in the senate. nancy runs the house. That would be Schumer's job.
Invert This, Media Matters Monkeys 7 hours ago
Pelosi seems to be running the show and is the face of the party
WorkingClassMan 8 hours ago (Edited)
Rand Paul, the lone voice of sanity in a rubber-stamp corrupt government.
If you or someone you care about is either in or thinking about joining this nation's
military...please don't. Let these antiwhites fight their own wars. They hate you and don't
trust you because you're White and they hate you owning guns, but they'll put a gun in your
hand and point you at their and Isn'treal's enemies without hesitation.
fudge punch 8 hours ago
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
AVmaster 3 hours ago
"Regime change in the Middle East has led to chaos, instability and more terrorism,"
Uhhh, yea...
... Thats what they WANTED!
Duh!
Scipio Africanuz 3 hours ago
Thank you Senator Paul..
For your candor..
The challenge of US Foreign Policy, is akin to a heroin addiction. It's bad for the country,
but all attempts to cure the country of addiction to imperialism has failed, including our
energetic efforts over the years..
Too many people benefit from the ruination of the country as it engages in squandering
lives, honor, power, reputation, and treasure, in maintaining a facade of illusory power, at
the expense of the true power of the country..
Put simply Senator, at this point, we don't believe any entity on earth can cure the US of
the addiction to depravity save nature, which cure is more preferable to that of the Entity
whose decision is not subject to appeal..
Now Senator, you may not believe in God Almighty and thus, swat away the simple insight but
God does not require your belief to act..
Over His creation..
The only cure, if sense and rationality don't prevail, is exactly what we don't desire to
know and why?
Because we've seen it before, applied to different societies with similar mentality over the
course of human history and Senator, it's never palatable..
Anyhow, probation is till summer, to allow folks do intensive introspective contemplation,
enough to acquire prudent humility and if they don't, well..
Cheers...
Ckierst1 2 hours ago
I believe the Senator is a Christian.
Pdunne 4 hours ago
Blinken is a bald faced liar and is already working with Ms Nuland on more regime
changes.
Venezuela and Syria need to get ready for more robust attacks.
Dzerzhhinsky 2 hours ago
Control the oil, you control the world.
the_pencil 2 hours ago
Oil was the cause of every war for the past century.
Posa 4 hours ago
A ridiculous exchange. Sen Paul seems to take at face value the Liberal-NeoCon claim that
Regime Change is good-intentioned attempt to democratize the Middle East.
Hardly. Regime Change was always designed to a) install Israeli supremacy in the region
("Operation Clean Break"); and b) secure US Global Uni-polar dominance (the Wolfowitz Doctrine)
as part of the Brezezinski "Grand Chessboard". That's the intention... this exchange
demonstrates how out of it Rand Paul is; and what a nasty weasel Blinken is.
Ckierst1 2 hours ago
That's not what Sen. Paul said. He doesn't agree with regime change. That's what he
said.
PaulDF 5 hours ago
To which the Biden appointee replied, "You know, the thing!"
mark3383 3 hours ago
cmon man!
duckandcover 2 hours ago
do your job!
Taffer 5 hours ago
Rand Paul's opinion and $6 will get him a latte at Starbucks.
Hessler 6 hours ago (Edited)
Foreign policy is never gonna change no matter who's in change because the way system is
setup.
The lifestyle (our way of life) pertaining to the western model of civilization (our values)
needs unlimited supply of money to be supported. The money that can't be made by legal means,
hence the continues war that needs to be maintained overseas while also starting new ones as
requirement arise.
And since this is a continues state, so accompanies it continues propaganda, lies, false
flags, deception and manipulation of facts and truth. LYING IS IN VERY GENES OF THE WHITE
CHRISTIAN WEST. They have been doing it for so long that they have almost mastered the "the art
of lying" the zenith of which is to project your own flaws and crimes on to the subjects you
carried it out on. One thing you can always be sure of, they will never admit their crimes
unless there's no other way. And that they will be accusing their opponents of the same things
they would be doing.
War underpins their society, nation and civilization.
steve2241 4 hours ago
The problem is that the U.S. is abusing its position as printer-in-chief of the Reserve
Currency of the world. With that fake money, it can intervene in the affairs of nations
throughout the world - a capability that no other country enjoys. Take away its reserve
currency and watch how quickly middle eastern strife ends - and the nation of Israel, too.
apparently 6 hours ago
will the left and their mindless supporters be comforted to know that their guy promotes
these "endless wars"? will they be happy to sacrifice their sons and daughters for desert
real-estate whose oil we don't want?
Paul was being way too polite. He should simply say: "I'm not voting to confirm this war
monger" then get up and leave the room.
Hessler 6 hours ago
If you think it's about the oil, you really don't understand the world you inhabit.
apparently 6 hours ago (Edited)
I don't think it's about oil but I'm struggling to name a single US interest in sand-wars.
maybe you can? yes, yes, military/industrial complex, blah, blah, but why the middle east?
please enlighten us.
Hessler 5 hours ago (Edited)
It's to rebuild the world in the image of the west and Islam is the biggest hampering in the
way. Like other religions, it can't be altered or dominated so the only way is to completely
destroy it. This is why Israel was setup by the Anglos at a strategic location in the heart of
the Arab world to engage them into perpetual war and destroy them.
That's about it.
And whenever a war on a civilization is waged, there are always monetary benefits. Oil, MIC,
Political donations come into play here. But that's just a sideshow. And with a civilization as
big as Islamic, benefits also tend to be massive.
apparently 5 hours ago
no evidence that the arab spring was against islam. why aren't we doing regime change in
indonesia? why did joe just reverse the Muslim travel ban?
do you understand anything about the world you live in?
Hessler 5 hours ago (Edited)
A lot actually. We are concentrating on the core of the Islamic civilization for when the
core collapses, the outer layers collapses with it. It's the core that holds the entire thing
together, hence we concentrate on Middle East and not on Indonesia.
Arab spring was to sow chaos and turmoil. By the way of deception.....Jewish moto
It is not that Israel establishes America's foreign policy. It is that the basic world view
produced by WASP culture is naturally aligned with Jewish thought in most ways, especially in
terms of Empire: ruling the world.
InflammatoryResponse 5 hours ago
it was not a muslim travel ban. it was a ban on places that didn't have adequate
infrastructure to verify who was travling.
duckandcover 1 hour ago
where is the last place, core or not core, that Islam religion and Muslim culture has been
eradicated by any means? Yugoslavia? India? Not seeing it. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Your argument does not hold.
starman99 5 hours ago
(((THEM)))
Groucho 5 hours ago
No of course not. Nothing to do with what George Kennan called "the greatest strategic
material prize in world history".
Hessler 5 hours ago
And whenever a war on a civilization is waged, there are always monetary benefits. Oil, MIC,
Political donations come into play here. But that's just a sideshow. And with a civilization as
big as Islamic, benefits also tend to be massive.
apparently 2 hours ago
by now, we should be weary (and wary) of "it's all a sideshow" arguments.
it simply asserts greater knowledge (never disclosed) and terminates the thread.
as for the grand anti-islam plan... how's that going in western europe?
Groucho 5 hours ago
No of course not. Nothing to do with what George Kennan called "the greatest strategic
material prize in world history".
JackOliver4 4 hours ago
It is ALWAYS about the OIL - thats why IRAN and VENEZUELA are being weakened by crippling
sanctions !!
THAT"S how the ZIO/US does it - SANCTIONS first - WAR 2nd !
Doesn't work anymore since RUSSIA stepped in !
nocturnal66 7 hours ago
Just ask if this 100 year plus war is to create "greater Israel" . It all documented. Enough
already with the lies. Just admit it.
Occams_Razor_Trader 7 hours ago
WWE- fake fights have begun again in earnest .....................
Paul Ryan could fake a punch as good as John Boehner ............
Max21c 7 hours ago (Edited)
"Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle East," Paul continued.
The Washington establishment imposed their chosen ruler Joe Schmo Biden to rule over
America.
jesus_loves_you 7 hours ago
H a n g t h e m a l l
Aquamaster 7 hours ago
Should we have a contest to see who can pick the first country Biden will send troops
to?
Lyman54 7 hours ago
DC !
SERReal1 7 hours ago
You win!
WTFUD 7 hours ago
Blinken Heck , don't worry ya'll, Nuland (Nudelman's) back to steady the ship with a fab new
chocolate chip cookie recipe that the terrorists will adore.
littlewing 7 hours ago
And they aren't even trying to hide it.
fzrkid 7 hours ago
Rand can say whatever he wants and it changes NOTHING
Armed Resistance 7 hours ago
Who is still planning on filing taxes? At the very least, turn your back on the
system-right? Upvote for not filing, downvote for I just want to avoid conflict-I'm filing.
brown_hornet 7 hours ago
But, we are getting a return.
No paying next year though.
rwe2late 7 hours ago (Edited)
Doesn't matter if it is a disaster for the peoples invaded and for domestic liberty in the
USA.
It's considered "worth it" by those in power
to protect the financial supremacy of the dollar,
promote the regional military supremacy of Israel,
and continue the war profiteering of the MIC.
north_hand_demon 7 hours ago
So what? Your cushy lifestyle and mine is a direct result of hegemony. Get over it.
rwe2late 7 hours ago (Edited)
Celebration of a "cushy lifestyle" gained by plunder and murder is not for everyone.
To revel in it, one requires a special insensibility.
DonGenaro 7 hours ago (Edited)
This fence-sitter did virtually NOTHING to stop the steal.
Now he's whining about having to lie in bed his cowardice helped make.
Many MORE thousands will soon be massacred by these war-mad psychopaths.
This POS is DEAD TO ME.
littlewing 7 hours ago
Rand is smart, he knew no matter what Xiden was going to be installed.
HominyTwin 7 hours ago
He's smart. A bunch of idiots, after a good breakfast at IHOP, were herded into the capital
by govt informants to break stuff for the cameras, and then herded right back out in time for a
hearty dinner at Golden Corral. They did sacrifice their lunch for exactly nothing, though.
Congrats. He stayed away from all that nonsense.
9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago
That's about the size of it, in retrospect.
zulu127 7 hours ago
regime change needs to end because it is involving the US in long wars that are costly to
the military.
Wrong! "regime change needs to continue because it is involving the US in wars that are
profitable to the military.
ableman28 4 hours ago
Part of the problems is that neither the democrats or republicans are primarily in favor of
DEMOCRATIC governments in the middle east. When Egypt FREELY ELECTED the Muslin Brotherhood to
power in Egypt the US fell all over itself to help unseat them, using every technique we
can.....currency debasement, food aid manipulation, tacit encouragement to strongment
(military) that we feel are controllable, etc. etc.
The US was never in favor of one man one vote in South Africa during apartheid and explained
this convenient hypocrisy as an unfortunate necessity.
Supporting regime change is entirely, ENTIRELY, different than supporting democracy. The US
has a very very very long history of supporting the former and claiming it was the latter when
in fact it wasn't. Democracy means letting the chips fall where they may. In countries whose
ruling leadership is oppressive to its people and for which we have a long history of support
its very unlikely that any democratic election would bring us new friends. It would, in every
case, bring to power people who opposed the old government and by association US.
People playing to the stands here in the US are smart enough to know this. But maintaining
the correct political position for domestic consumption also trumps doing the right thing in
anywhere else.
International politics is a pure expression of national interest. Our national interest is
economic outside the US. That part of socialist or marxist theory is spot on.
Hessler 4 hours ago
Insightful, thanks!
LooseLee 4 hours ago
'Disaster' is the MO, Rand. Please, get real or get lost.
Musum 5 hours ago
Senator Rand Paul recently challenged the new Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken
on his history of pushing regime change in the Middle East and North Africa
Pointless and hopeless. The only way to end America's endless wars is to deal with the guys
in small hats.
Hessler 5 hours ago
Small hats were employed by the English speaking protestants for their ulterior motives,
world view, global ambitions which were in alignment with the chosenites.
You can't solve the Jewish problem without solving the problem of western civilization.
Fire_Hog 5 hours ago
The real problems are the 3 letter intelligence agencies, not religion.
Musum 4 hours ago
Are you naive or misdirecting? Offices are occupied by people.
train rider 6 hours ago
Deep thinking and reflection...what about our military personnel and contractors...why are
we putting them in danger with these interventionist kockamamie screw balls coming up with
these strategies...meanwhile innocent civilians keep getting maimed and killed.
We have no business over there, let the countries decide for themselves what they want etc.
we need energy idependence...greta can go fly a kite...keep reducing emissions with tech we
have.
It is very sad that paul's neighbor does not have a more lethal right hook.
TheZeitgeist 7 hours ago
Sen. Paul began his argument by questioning Blinken's role in the NATO intervention of Libya
in 2001
So...only off by a decade. I think ZeroHedge drops these snafus into the copy just to see if
anyone actually reads the stuff.
freakscene 7 hours ago (Edited)
Its skimming material at best. Reading all the way through went out the window when ZH
become a CNN sponsor.
:)
littlewing 7 hours ago
When Ron Paul was calling out Bernanke you would see they were alone in the room.
There is no debate, its all a fraud. Saw the vote on election theft and it was their aides
voting for them.
StanleyTheManly 7 hours ago
Give me a break, Rand Paul. YOU KNOWINGLY voted for this by not standing for our elected
President.
You're a traitor. Shut up and sit down.
TRON Paul 7 hours ago
PRESIDENT PAUL!
PRESIDENT PAUL!
PRESIDENT PAUL!
wmbz 7 hours ago
War is a business, and "we" are big business. Matter no how many completely innocent people
get blown away. What matters are the spoils. We were warned over and over again about the MIC
yet here we are.
Profit always wins over peace, no money in it.
totally unwise 7 hours ago
Today, wars aren't meant to be won
they're meant to bring chaos
Chaos
Calling Maxwell Smart and agent 99
Where's that shoe phone ?
freakscene 7 hours ago
I guess, good for Rand? Thats about all he can do.
Dog Will Hunting 7 hours ago
Oh, that Rand Paul. I wondered where he was hiding this whole time peels back Trump's saggy
*** cheeks to find the good doctor
in_xanadu_did_kubla_khan 8 hours ago
Achoo: Hey, Blinkin
Blinkin: Did you say Abe Lincoln?
Achoo: No! I said, HEY, BLINKIN!
createnewaccount 8 hours ago
If we can't have Giant Meteor maybe a global helter skelter of 'regime change' will be a
good consolation prize.
Lt. Frank Drebin 8 hours ago
I voted for Giant Meteor, but the Dominion voting machines switched my vote to turd
sandwich.
Holding My Breath 7 hours ago
A big upvote for sarcasm (or is it utter stupidity?)
The Military/Industrial Complex needs endless foreign wars and imaginary enemies so that the
money won't be spent at home helping Americans. Such as infrastructure projects. The goal from
within is to destroy the American middle class and turn the United States into a third world
country. Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump all served the crooks.
littlewing 7 hours ago
Uh then why didn't Trump start wars?
Bear 11 minutes ago
Like father like son ... insight and wisdom
Arizona1234 26 minutes ago
China Joe and the mentally ill Marxist that run his crap show already started a multi
Trillion dollar endless war. The War on the weather they call Climate Crisis. It's the one
where we loose and wind up praying to find the small potato to make it through the day, and
then hope to find a few dry sticks for the fire to cook it. Where you will have to make the
small fire at night so that mentally ill #AOC carbon police can't easily see the smoke.
Maltheus 1 hour ago
It's taken less than 24 hours, after Biden's inauguration, for ISIS to magically make an
appearance again. They're not even pretending anymore.
Tom Angle 2 hours ago
I think I had heard all I want to hear from Rand Paul after.
boattrash 2 hours ago
Gawdamit Rand, we like you and everything, but the Coup you should be focused on is HERE,
even if it means you should spit in your hands, hoist the black flag and start slittin
throats.
Sincerely,
The American People
Dzerzhhinsky 3 hours ago
If the US can steal Syria, it means it will be able to build a pipeline, steal Iranian gas
and sell it to Europe.
The US needs something to give its financiers and controlling energy supplies to Europe would
go a long way to paying off the debt.
learnofjesuits 4 hours ago
vatican's wars
Hessler 3 hours ago
Puritans burred the Vatican so deep underground that if even the nuke detonates there, if
won't make a shockwave on the ground
TemporarySecurity 4 hours ago
Perfectly fine for anybody in the executive to lie through their teeth.
Say one thing in the hearing and do what they always do once confirmed. Our post
Constitutional government needs to fail.
tangent 4 hours ago
Ran Paul's ability to talk as if they are not simply being outright bribed for their
positions is impressive. I suppose the new CCP SoS will take the positions of the CCP, which is
the one paying him the most money for those positions.
richnhappy 4 hours ago
Just read confessions of an economic hit man, by john perkins, all you need to know. The
playbook sounds like what china is doing in the us now, distract the masses with the middle
east ****show.
Seditious 4 hours ago
We have had just one president so far this century that has not used American blood and
treasure to destroy a nation. He was a rogue billionaire that got taken out by every other
billionaire that wanted to stay in the club. The American people are going to have to figure
out that they will have better results solving this nations problems at the Bezos, Walton,
Zuckerberg and Dorsey homes than they will going to the Capitol in Washington DC.
The Child sacrifice murders committed by these people don't occur in some hidden room at a
pizza parlor. They occur on public roads under semitrailers marked Amazon Prime and Walmart
that wouldn't be allowed on the roads of nations that we used to call the third world.
I suppose the only big question is, who's child dies tomorrow?
Maghreb2 4 hours ago
You could look it at that way. I'd say he was a hairs breadth from starting world war III
with Iran and China and was removed by a stroke of bad luck from Wuhan and the old
establishment asserting their authority through corruption.
Trump might be remembered fondly for actually lowering the number of small conflicts but the
U.S war machine is bigger than any one president and his closeness to Israel show what camp he
was in. Only God or a few insiders can really judge what his ultimate aim was but he wasn't the
man who pulled the first shot of the first world war. Damn well loaded the gun and gave it to
the Israelis in my opinion.
Seditious 4 hours ago
During Obama's time in office we had a year in which the United States dropped bombs in more
nations than they did in any single year during WW2.
Bezos, Walton's and others spill our blood domestically. Biden will spill our blood overseas
to keep some other billionaires happy.
Based on your comment, I take it you REALLY like Blinken! Yes?
Fire_Hog 5 hours ago
The same thing happened in Egypt when Obama pushed for and got quick elections when the only
organization that could field candidates was the Muslim Brotherhood. The result was very
predictable.
The Brotherhood took over and the result was so bad that the people finally rebelled against
Morsi's government. This lead to Al Sisi who was better than Morsi. I question whether the
situation improved by letting the Muslim Brotherhood take control.
Maghreb2 4 hours ago
People? Thought that was the military?
WatchnSee 5 hours ago
"regime change doesn't work" "Maybe we shouldn't be 'choosing' governments in the Middle
East,".... nor in the USA. Time will tell.
Hessler 6 hours ago (Edited)
Don't worry Mr. Paul, these white men in the suits are the leaders of the terrorists groups.
It's hardcoded in their genes, they don't know any other way of earning a living.
Mancolo 6 hours ago
Lessons? I don't need your stinking lessons. I've got friends to pay off.
Pvt Joker PREMIUM 7 hours ago
I like the US policy of Perma War and Regime change. The more troops over there , the less
troops over here.
Scornd 7 hours ago
I dont understand the complaints.
You voted for this.
MCDirtMigger 6 hours ago
By 'you', do you mean Dominion?
littlewing 7 hours ago
District of Criminals
that's all they are.
I am bailing out forever now.
Just looking at them and their actions is self harm.
Max21c 7 hours ago (Edited)
District of Criminals
Diablo Corona
Washingtonians are for the most part the spawn of Satan.
DC= the Devil's City... they are evil... Washingtonians are just pure rotten evil...
Washington DC ... Devil's City
Washington DC .... Devil's Crown
The evil ones cannot change their evil ways... they're too far gone... the evil ones cannot
be redeemed...
LorDampNuts 7 hours ago
Keep sending your donations to Stop the Steal, Trump has a plan and will be sworn in by
April when it warms up. Free Chumptard hat with every $100 donation.
Occams_Razor_Trader 7 hours ago
I'd donate a hunny for you to flush your head in a toilet ...............
foxenburg 7 hours ago
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Rammbock 7 hours ago
Republicans are great actors
Kotwica 44 7 hours ago
This guy speaks truth, but, no one gives a flying fu<k.
Ajax_USB_Port_Repair_Service_ 7 hours ago
Attention Secret Police: We've got one for you!
freedommusic 7 hours ago (Edited)
Whatever these folks say is irrelevant. They are all sitting on foreign soil. The UNITED
STATES CORPORATION is a foreign Municipal entity owned by China claimed in the recent
bankruptcy settlement. POTUS said when he was leaving. Go ahead, take it. The buildings, the
chairs, statues, it's all yours . Anyone who steps outside of that foreign jurisdiction will be
entering American soil and subject to the Laws of the United States Constitutional Republic and
prosecuted for treason and sedition.
DC is now a Chinese embassy.
I wonder how much food they have stocked up in there? I would presume the military would
uphold a blockade and prevent the exchange of trade from occurring into a surrounded hostile
territory of the enemy.
YOU WANT IT
YOU GOT IT
HAVE A NICE DAY
SERReal1 7 hours ago
Where was Rand in calling out the election fraud?
Now he is acting all tough again on the deep state creatures.
9.1ontherichterscale 7 hours ago (Edited)
He wants to stay in office. No way is going to touch the third rail. None of them will.
rkb100100 7 hours ago
This is part of a Punch and Judy show put on for retards.
leodogma1 7 hours ago
And yet not one peep of this Quislings tie's to the Chinese Communist party of Evil !
Southern Discomfort 7 hours ago
I'm sure it will be blamed on an action taken by Trump and the only cure will be
intervention. Maybe Joetard can set up a new cabinet level position to seek out opportunities
for new wars.
More-Cowbell 8 hours ago
The show must go on. As if these asz clowns ( all of them ) matter.
north_hand_demon 8 hours ago
Whatever. Your cushy lifestyle, and mine, exists because we're the dominant imperial power
on the planet. Might makes right. Paul knows it too; this is just virtue signaling.
artless 7 hours ago (Edited)
And in your statement lies the real problem with the vast majority of people in this
country.
Yeah I edited the lame ad hom line after I read a few comments. But perhaps it is long due
that rather than simply accept things as the way they are and calling any opposition to it the
thoughts of a ten year old, it might be high time to actually try to make a change in how
people think and ultimately behave.
"... "We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved", ..."
"... "We will never give up. We will never concede, it just doesn't happen." ..."
"... " Biden's America Would Be A Dystopian Hellhole ", ..."
"... Trump has not signed the Insurrection Act. ..."
"... 'trust the plan' is a never ending story psyop ..."
"... 'best is yet to come' .. ..."
"... to beam back to the mothership. ..."
"... the humans are out to get them ..."
"... it happening you watch just donate ..."
"... without symptoms. ..."
"... Amnesty run by US State Department representatives, funded by convicted financial criminals, and threatens real human rights advocacy worldwide. ..."
"... Yes yes yes – as if we didn't fucking know! ..."
"... YOU MEAN TO DESTROY THE NHS AND YOU WILL REPEAT THIS OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL IT IS DONE! ..."
The Trump Era is over after the incumbent announced in the day after
Wednesday's storming of the US Capitol that "My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly
and seamless transition of power", which was widely interpreted by friends and foes alike as
the tacit concession that he previously promised never to provide a little more than 24 hours
prior during his speech at the
Save America Rally .
At that event, he literally said that "We will never give up. We will never concede, it
doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved", yet completely changed his
tune following the day's tumultuous events and after mysteriously "going dark" for over 24
hours, during which time some speculate that he was forced by his enemies in the permanent
military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (" deep state ") to give
up the fight.
BETRAYING HIS BASE
This totally devastated his supporters who elected him primarily
for the purpose of executing his chief promise to "drain the swamp" that all of them so
deeply despise. They truly believed that he could irreversibly effect significant long-term
change to the way that America is run, something which Trump himself also sincerely thought he
could do as well, but he ultimately lacked the strength time and again to take the decisive
steps that were necessary in order to do so.
Thus, he ended up getting swallowed by the same "swamp" that he attempted to drain, which is
licking its lips after feasting on the political carcass that he's since become as a result of
his capitulation. For as much hope as he inspired in his supporters and the respect that many
of them still have for him, most of them are profoundly disappointed that he gave up and didn't
go down fighting.
That's not to say that the vast majority of them expected him to forcefully resist Biden's
impending inauguration, but just that they never thought they'd see the day where he publicly
capitulated after carefully cultivating such a convincing reputation among them as a fighter
who literally said a little more than 24 hours prior that "We will never give up. We will
never concede, it just doesn't happen."
This prompted an ongoing soul-searching process among the most sober-minded of them who
aren't indoctrinated with the cultish Q-Anon claims that Trump still has a so-called "master
plan" that he's preparing to implement after this latest "5D chess" move. It's over, the Trump
Era has ended, and the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement that he inspired is now at
risk of being declared a "
domestic terrorist " organization in the coming future.
TRUMP'S MOST FATAL POLITICAL
MISCALCULATION
" Biden's America Would Be A
Dystopian Hellhole ", like the author predicted a few months ago, and all of Trump's
supporters know that. Some had already resigned themselves to its seeming inevitability after
his efforts to legally reverse the contested results of the latest elections failed for a
variety of reasons that most of them attribute to the "swamp's" corruption, but they
nevertheless remained as positive as possible after having believed that their hero would go
down with them to the end.
None ever thought twice about his promise to "never give up, never concede", and they even
expected him to have to be escorted from the White House on 20 January, yet his tacit
concession is forcing many of them to re-evaluate their views about him in hindsight. Not only
is he going out with a whimper on the "deep state's" terms, but he never fully "drained the
swamp".
Trump's most fatal political miscalculation is that he thought that he could change the
system from the "inside-out" after symbolically -- yet importantly, not substantively -- taking
control of it as America's first modern-day "outsider" President. He immediately switched from
an "outsider" to an "insider" shortly after his inauguration by capitulating to the "deep
state's" demands that he fire former National Security Advisor Flynn, which was his "original
sin" that paved the way for all that would later follow.
Trump the self-professed "deal-maker" thought that he could strike a "compromise" with his
enemies through these means, but all that he did was embolden them to intensify their fake
news-driven efforts to oust him and continue sabotaging him from within through many of the
same "swamp" creatures that he naively continued to surround himself with.
RINOS + MSM =
TRUMP'S DEFEAT
The most reviled among them in the eyes of his base is "Javanka", the popular portmanteau of
Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka. He continued listening to these
"Republicans In Name Only", or RINOs as many MAGA members describe them, as well as many others
such as those who still sit in Congress but pretended to be his friend just to win
re-election.
Furthermore, the influence that his former reality TV career had on him resulted in Trump
remaining obsessed with how his enemies might malign him in the Mainstream Media (MSM) for any
decisive moves that he took to smash the "deep state". This weakness of character proved to be
his greatest personal flaw since he should have followed his instincts instead of submitting to
the egoistic desire to be "liked" by his foes.
So influenced was he by the MSM that his enemies were able to employ the most basic
"reverse-psychology" tricks to manipulate him into "playing it safe" in his struggle against
the "deep state". They fearmongered since even before he entered office that he'd turn into a
so-called "dictator", yet he never seriously contemplated any such authoritarian moves in that
direction despite always having the possibility of utilizing the immense powers vested in him
by the Constitution to do so if he sincerely wanted.
His MAGA supporters passionately pleaded that he should have turned into his enemies' worst
nightmare by declaring at least limited martial law in response to the decades-long Hybrid War
of Terror on America finally going kinetic last summer after Antifa and "Black Lives
Matter" (BLM) orchestrated nationwide riots to oust him.
TRUMP'S THREE GREATEST
FAILURES
Bewildering his base, Trump also failed to revoke Article 230 despite now-proven fears that
it would empower Big Tech to censor him and
his supporters , nor did he thwart the Democrats' mail-in ballot and Dominion voting system
schemes which they argue ultimately led to them stealing the election.
Just as concerning was his decision to not stop the Democrat Governors from locking down
their populations for political reasons under the convenient pretext of COVID-19. The author
addressed all of these issues in his analysis published shortly after the election about why "
The Anti-Trump Regime
Change Sequence Is Worthwhile Studying ". Trump could have legally exercised
near-"dictatorial" powers to avert all of this and thus save America as his supporters see it,
yet time and again he failed to gather the strength needed to do so due to his deep personal
flaws.
THE HYBRID WAR ON AMERICA IS OVER
While Trump was unquestionably victimized by the "deep state" during his entire time in
office, he's no longer as much of a martyr as he used to be after suddenly giving up the fight
following Wednesday's storming of the US Capitol. He surrendered to the shock of his base, was
subsequently swallowed by the "swamp", and is now being mercilessly destroyed in an ominous
sign of what awaits the rest of the MAGA movement in the Biden-Kamala era.
Had he gone down fighting to the end and "never gave up" like he promised, then it would be
an altogether different story, but instead his over-hyped "deal-making" instincts got the best
of him at the very last minute and he foolishly thought that he could save himself by
capitulating to their demands. The "deep state" is now showing their "thanks" by censoring him
from social media and pushing for his impeachment.
The MAGA movement always believed that the country has already been at "war" for years even
though most couldn't articulate the hybrid nature of it like the author did in his piece last
summer about how " The Hybrid War Of Terror
On America Was Decades In The Making ".
They truly felt that Trump shared their threat assessment after he was viciously attacked by
the "deep state" from the second that he stepped onto the campaign trail, but it turned out
that he underestimated the threat even though his enemies never did. To the "deep state" and
their public Democrat proxies, this was always a "war" in its own way, which they never shied
away from expressing.
The supreme irony is that while Trump lambasted the "weak Republicans" in his Save America
Rally speech, he himself ultimately epitomized that very same weakness by later
surrendering.
THE "DEEP STATE" WON
His opponents know no limits and believe in classic Machiavellian fashion that "the ends
justify the means", whereas he thought that he could play by the rules -- and not even all of
them as was early explained by pointing out his refusal to employ the near-"dictatorial" powers
vested in him by the Constitution -- and still come out on top.
His naïveté will go down in history since it's what's most directly responsible
for him failing to fully recognize the seriousness of the "deep state's" no-holds-barred war on
him and the rest of America.
As a born-and-raised New Yorker, Trump perfected the art of slick talking, so much so that
he even managed to dupe his base into believing that he shared their threat assessment about
the decades-long Hybrid War of Terror on America. They fell for this charade since they
desperately wanted to believe that there was still some hope left.
There isn't, though, since the war is over and the "deep state" won once and for all. The "
Great Reset "/"
Fourth Industrial Revolution " brought about by
World War C is
barreling forward at full speed ahead, and practically every domestic accomplishment that Trump
has to his name will likely be reversed by Biden-Kamala during their first year in office,
especially since the "deep state's" Democrat proxies control all branches of government now
(remembering that the Supreme Court's supposed "conservative supermajority" really just
consists of RINOs as was proven by their refusal to hear his team's convincing election fraud
cases).
In fact, the only real "master plan" was that of the "deep state", which effectively
thwarted every one of Trump's moves and ultimately turned his supporters' "last hurrah" of a
mostly peaceful rally into the nail that'll now be hammered into the MAGA movement's
coffin.
It's extremely suspicious that the US Capitol was so poorly defended despite there being an
ongoing session of Congress on such an historic day and after weeks of preparation to ensure
the site's safety ahead of Trump's long-planned Save America March.
It's even more baffling that some of the police officers removed
the barricades and even
opened the doors to some of the protesters, which in hindsight suggests that the "deep
state" wanted to tempt the most "overly passionate" among them (to say nothing of suspected
provocateurs) into storming the site as the pretext for what followed.
The whole point in passively facilitating this scenario through the masterful exploitation
of crowd psychology was to lay the basis for a comprehensive nationwide crackdown against the
MAGA movement on the grounds that it's now "proven" to be a "domestic terrorist" group.
That explains the push behind impeaching Trump less than two weeks before he himself
acknowledged just the other day that he'll be leaving office after ensuring the "transition of
power".
Had he not surrendered, then he probably would still be a martyr to most of the MAGA
movement, but now he's just a palace hostage awaiting his highly publicized political execution
as the opening salvo of the "deep state's" Democrat-driven reprisals against his supporters in
the name of "defending against domestic terrorism". That, not whatever Q-Anon imagines, is the
real "master plan", and it succeeded.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Trump was swallowed by the "swamp" because he lacked the strength to drain it. Every MAGA
member needs to accept this harsh truth no matter how painful it might be. Time and again, he
failed to muster up the strength needed to meaningfully fulfill what many sincerely believed to
be his destiny.
This was due to his fatal political miscalculation of transforming from an "outsider" into
an "insider" in a doomed-to-fail attempt to change the system from within. He continued relying
on RINOs despite their proven unreliability. Trump's obsession with how his foes portrayed him
in the MSM also led to him never seriously countenancing the use of the near-"dictatorial"
powers vested in him by the Constitution to save America.
He pathetically surrendered after the "deep state's" "master plan" succeeded, and now he
can't even go down in history as a martyr.
Originally published on One World Press Jan
20, 2021 2:08 PM
Trump was part of the show nothing more nothing less. They had the goods on him for decades.
He made Izzrail grate again. That was about it. Notice Jizzlaid Maxwell, the Mossad kiddy
victim procurer watching her mark in the background of the video below from 92 as the king of
bankruptcy eyes the broads and "struts" his stuff.
Meanwhile Kill Bill Gates gets to poison Planet Sheeple and nobody ever questions his
association with Mossad kiddy porn snuff director, Epstein or Kill Bill's sojourns on Pedovore
Island. Anyone remember the CIA Operation Brownstone"? It's global and it's Satanic.
How could Trum 'drain the swamp' when he lives in the swamp. contributes to the swamp and
essentially is part of the swamp.
This story is sh!te. Trump is a swamp dweller.
Trump is just the same as all the other oligarchs and would be oligarchs. He is a rich,
privileged, white entrepreneur. His propaganda campaign in which he claimed to be on the side
of the poor and unemployed whites is just about the biggest lie which has been swallowed
wholesale since Goebbles was whitewashing the Nazi regime.
How you fools here can fall for this tripe has me absolutely beat.
Aethelred , Jan 13, 2021 10:17 AM
Trump in his political ineptitude resembles Jimmy Carter, an idealist incapable of
wielding power. Neither man had the gumption, nor the charisma (much the same thing) to win
over the apparatchiki. Both vain and selfish men (like all politicians), neither inspired
sufficient love nor fear to gather support, unlike Reagan or Clinton, both of whom exuded
calm confidence. Trump differs from Carter in that Trump's social incapacity manifests in
bombast, and Carter's in staged humility. Neither could convince the ruling classes, and so
were ushered away.
The elevation of Biden, an aged hack, is a signal the republic is finally overturned. The
feds not only can convict but now can elect and govern through a ham sandwich.
Blather , Jan 13, 2021 8:21 AM
Does the author know how to read Trump's speech or is he so BIAS as not to see?
Trump DID NOT capitulate. Read careFOOLY. It can go both waze.
ZenPriest , Jan 12, 2021 8:50 PM
Trump was never going to drain the swamp. He was a clown put in place by America's
masters, to keep an endless supply of material for their media and to stir up hatred among
citizens.
It's funny because citizens should be uniting against the puppeteers. Or they would be if
they knew they even existed, or knew they were being played.
S Cooper , Jan 13, 2021 2:47 AM Reply to
ZenPriest
"Quite a number already know this. That number keeps growing with each passing day. Got
Debs?"
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and
I'm here to help." Remember that line? That was Ronnie Raygun back in 1986, with one of his
(or his ghost writers') versions for 'draining the swamp' then, getting government off our
backs, and blah, blah, blah. Agitprop thrown the masses so the corporate state could get down
to bizzness as usual in dispossessing 'we the people' by rolling back government programs for
social welfare and building up wealth and power for elites via the MIC and Wall Street
(complementary to Iron Bitch Thatcher's neoliberal programs for a greater fascism in
Britain).
Hardly anything original, such marketing ads. Politricking fronts of the ruling class have
been campaigning before and after getting into office with noble lies of populism covering
for their brands of treachery as long as the fraudulence of capitalist democracy and
representative government have been around. In the post-WWII era of Pox Americana, the U$
CEOs for the Fortune 500 routinely have disguised their institutional role in managing the
empire under cover of brands of reform that keep promising power to the people with one hand
while taking it away with the other.
But when it comes to the greatest show on earth, it's the words attributed to P.T. Barnum
that there's a sucker born every minute (or at least every election season) which ring
truest. So now we've got the ringmasters retiring the Donald and installing good ole Creepy
Joe to 'build back better' on behalf of the Great Reset. That's after Swamp Thang has played
his part as dictator of distraction overseeing such achievements as the greatest robbery of
the commons in human history and launch of technofascism under Operation Warp(ed) Speed, all
thanks to a global coup with which he's been entirely complicit. And his manufactured base of
true believers still carry on with the covidiocy as much as the controlled opposition of the
faux left.
The more things change, the more they stay the same (only worse!).
Chris , Jan 12, 2021 5:14 PM
The Q group are patriots with access to a quantum computer able to untangle timelines from
a possibility/probability vortex.
Their movement was designed to awaken many individuals with key roles to play in the real
Operation Warpspeed.
The majority of these folks had some connection to the military or other branches of
government including the police.
In 2012 nearly all technology, ancient or more modern, was suddenly rendered non
functional.
The Mayans were obviously dead right with their calender.
The race was on to gain absolute supremacy in the prediction game.
All major stakeholders have access to quantum computing, but the US has the upper hand.
The true value of quantum computers lies not in the task of pure number crunching, but in its
ability to predict probabilities of complex situations.
The quantum computer exposes the most probable timelines and delivers the results in
numerical form that correspond to actual events and dates/times .
Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:43 PM
"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody
has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do
wins."
― I.F. Stone
Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:42 PM
President Trump has declared a State of Emergency in the District of Columbia.
White House
OW look the fruitcakes and cult follower spent another new moon being juiced , Trump
has not signed the Insurrection Act. BUT BUT BUT
Cult of BIG disclosure keep watching.donate huge Arrests and stay tuned keep watching
it happening – keep watching- it happening soon, BIG disclosure huge Arrests . it
Happening soon psyop AND distraction
Simple simon and Q nonsense told another lie to the sheep
Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:16 PM
President Trump has signed the Insurrection Act.
YouDontCareAboutGrandma , Jan 12, 2021 12:47 PM Reply to
Laurence Howell
Proof? And don't link to Simon Parkes' YouTube channel. He's provided no evidence
whatsoever for his claims. He says he talks to aliens and "Q" on the telephone.
Gosh, evrn more baffling and scarey and reminescent of 1963, never seen footage of the
murder of Ms. BABBIT showing collusion between police and antifa agitators, taken by an
independent Japanese reporter!
Great article but consider how many thousands of people the Islamist extremist, Erdogan of
Turkey, had to fire and imprison, to dismantle the positive Deep State structure Attaturk put
in place to keep that country secular? Functioned admirably for many years.
DimlyGlimpsed , Jan 12, 2021 1:06 AM
Dems enthusiatically voted from Bill Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Biden. All corrupt and
compromised. Repubs voted for Bush Jr., Romney, and Trump. All corrupt and compromised. Both
accuse the other of corruption, dishonesty and hypocrisy. Both are right, of course.
Reality, though, is not possible to perceive when limited to a diet of mainstream news.
Neither is it a trivial task to navigate the rough seas online disinformation.'
Unless one is privy to big-picture high-level (and secret) information, one is left to
attempt to identify and assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle using one's own sleuthing and
intuition skills.
Common people without inside knowledge can still interpret the world, however. War is evil,
and those who advocate war have been seduced by evil. Kindness and generosity are among the
highest values. On the other hand, those who are selish and cruel pollute our world. Etc,,
etc.
Let us keep in mind that the most evil cloak themselves in the garb of peace, kindness and
generosity, in order to dine on sheep who wishfully and willfully refused to judge behavior
rather than be seduced with addictive slogans. Let us also keep in mind that no leaders can
remain in power without the compliance of the rest of us.
Any of should be able to recognize Joe Biden as evil. His "track record" is one of
corruption, budget cutting, war and authoritarian legislation. And Trump? One of the great
mysteries of human civilization is that Trump, the ultimate swap creature, was elected by
promising to "clean the swamp".
That is fairly accurate but Trump did push back against America's China Class and the CCP
-- more than you can say for commies like the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons, Bushes, etc.
Trump's America First Hoax: Trump is an Israeli agent. He put #Mossad asset #JaredKushner
in charge of infiltration of US Intelligence and Defense. Bidens are Chinese agents? Charles
Kushner (Jared's father), is an agent of #AnbangInsurance, a Chinese Communist front
group.
Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:54 PM Reply to
REvail
All US presidents, vice-presidents, chiefs of staff, etc are Israeli agents, or more
accurately, are in effect the same thing.
Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:53 PM Reply to
Sgt_doom
"commies like the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons, Bushes, etc."
If you think that the above mentioned capitalist clowns are "commies", then you really,
REALLY, need to get an education, because clearly you don't know your arse from your
elbow.
Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:46 PM Reply to
DimlyGlimpsed
"Trump, the ultimate swap creature " I do not think you have any idea what the 'swamp' is
to make such a claim.
Otherwise, a great post.
Lost in a dark wood , Jan 12, 2021 12:40 AM
Note: I drafted this as a response, but the person is not worthy of a reply, so I'll post
it here instead.
--
I've always said that Q is a deep-state operation. It's the NSA, military intelligence,
etc. It's just a different deep state to the CIA/MI6 deep state. And I've always said that
people should at least know what "the plan" is. They should know what it is because it's by
far the most coherent explanation for what is happening now, and for what has happened over
the last four years.
A couple of years ago I thought a deal had been struck between the opposing factions, and
it was all going to be wound down. But I changed that view after the Covid911, attempted
colour revolution. The overwhelming view on this site, from contributors and posters, was
that Trump would fall in June 2020. I was one of only a handful of people saying Trump would
survive.
I can't predict the details of what's happening now, but I think Trump will survive this
because:
a) he has the ammunition
b) it would make no sense to go this far and not see it through
c) even though it seems to be going to the precipice, it still fits a coherent plan
I've only recently started following Simon Parkes, but in his latest update he claims to
have spoken to the real Q. Of course, as anybody who's been following Q posts would know,
this would breach the "no outside comms" principle.
I'm not at all impressed. Appeared on the scene coincidental with Gen McInerney and all
the misinformation about "hammer and scorecard" which was a blatant distraction from clear
and convincing evidence of election fraud.
Parkes does far too much, "I could have told you beforehand but then I'd have had to kill
you."
Your on the ball wow from 1 psyop to another Now your following simon charlatan
parkes.
HE gets excepted into the Q nonsense and trump Savior psyop and becames one of there star
leaders over night.
Do you not do basic checks on who you start to worship?? or do they have to say code words
like Q and trump maga and its like there chosen to lead you.
Negative, far too silly and cartoonish and tracks back to a Filipino Maoist group directed
by the CCP!
Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 7:34 PM
We've been manipulated into fighting against each other over trivial differences to divert
us from the fact that we're all in the same boat.
Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 6:33 PM
Andrew Korybko: "That, not whatever Q-Anon imagines, is the real "master plan", and it
succeeded."
Okay, I'm trying to figure this out. With regard specifically to this thread, are we
allowed to post direct links to Q posts? For instance, Q has stated explicitly that there is
no "Qanon" (#4881). Instead, there is Q and there are anons. I personally think this is
debatable, and that Qanon is a collective name for a highly amorphous movement and method of
enquiry. Furthermore, that movement and method predates Q and was to some extent co-opted by
Q. The movement will also outlive Q, though it may retain the name. As a movement, Qanon
stands in opposition to the hierarchical, hive-mind vacuity of the Rationalists and
Neo-Platonists. In short, Qanon is Blakean. Welcome to Jerusalem!
We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own
imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live forever; in Jesus our Lord.
– William Blake https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Milton_(excerpts)/Preface
Q Alerts is back up so I'll try again. The following is a critical part of "the plan".
--
Q (Oct 17, 2020):
I'm going to bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on your head. It's gonna be
Biblical.
Enjoy the show! https://qalerts.app/?n=4884
Please – can we have more of Andrew Karybko. I've seen him on Peter Lavelle. For
such an acutely well informed young chap about international politics, he demonstrates an
equally rigorous understanding about Trumps psyche.
Andrew Korybko is probably one of the best geo-political analysts I've come across and his
depth of knowledge across all continents shines through. A very warm and engaging person.
He runs a site called OneWorld Press. Recently accused by mainstream media and The Daily
Beast of being GRU agents. Well if it is, they are most measured and balanced in the history
of intelligence services.
Your be saying that on the way to the concentration camps!!! 'trust the plan' is a never ending story psyop
Similar to the 'best is yet to come' ..
you trumpsters have your own Down Syndrome language.
WWG1WGA, another bunch of devotees similar to a cult who will not except there guru is a
oppressor
mikael , Jan 11, 2021 1:09 PM
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the
things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."Reinhold Niebuhr
Pardon moi for the lenght.
I dont know whats with people this days, the shere avalange of bollocks is baffling, the
inability to conect the dots to what was, the past, to the present is making me think there
must be something, hehe, with the narrative, or should we say in this uh . conpiracy tinfoil
hat wearing days, in the tap water, and the rethotic, about Trump, I have my issues, and I
have never been quiet about them, but then to whine about things when most of it have been
inplace before Trump came into the WH, incl children in gages to wars, Obamalama started more
wars than any other American president ever, with Hitlary the Beast from Little Rock beside,
after Her husband stole Social sec and now, witch could be massive, is completely eradicated
out of existence, and the sactions, etc, most of them are just continuations of existing
systems, we can always blame Trump for something, but please, do know the difference and dont
just throw bollocks because of the people whom wanted change, when Obamalama said it, you
belived, and what happened, again, he pissed upon you all, and have since laughed all the way
to the bank, the economic crashes, the insane austeritys, the bailins and outs, you name it
to color revolutions.
This isnt to defend Trump, for me, He was more an castrat, singing but otherwise balless, but
also tied, unable to move, and been relentlessly attacked by those that defenses the past
witch in no way was better.
Then we have the eh .. storming?, and if you look at videos, what sticks out is, what
storming, some gass clouds, yea, means what, an Cop throving an gass can, but take an look
for your self, it was never in any way what the MSM wants you to belive, and the army of
people crawling all over the sites wants you to persive, along with profanitys about people
whom did suported Trump, because they hoped for change, you cant attack them, maybe for been
a bit naive, but one thing shal be the thing Trump did, exposed them all, in an way witch is
unpresedented despite His flaws, nobody have done that in this level, He exposed them all,
and if you havent gotten it yet, you have an problem, nobody else, incl the people whom did
their duty as free citizens of the USA, did the protesting.
Rioting, again, what riot, the worst thing I can come up with, after watching some videos, is
minore, a window, probably by the AntiFags/BLMs/eh leftards?, and one man whom ran off with
an piece of the furiture, nothing else, and if I drag that further, maybe the stormers should
have wiped their shoos off before entering the Hill, stepping on the fine carpets on the
floor in the hallway, what an horrible crime, right.
What storming, do you see anything, do enlighten us.
So, I know I am pushing the attention span to the limit.
BUT, I have thru the years found out that Americans, not that I want to call em stupid, but
regarding world poltics, more infantile, naive, brainwashed to such an extent thru the
decades/centurys of propaganda, where the various Gov always have had an enemy, it have
variated, from muslims etc to what it have become to day, domestic terrorism aka
conservatives whatever that means, and not only in the MSM but also thru an army of so called
Alternative MSM, witch have feed upon this narratives and played upon this, but overall, gone
the same erant as the Gov wanted them to go, and witch have resulted in wars upon wars, and
stil some want more wars, like the broad attack line on Iran, just to give you one ex to the
strangling of others, like western sahara to the Palestinians.
Then we have the new enemy, in mainly the so called alternative ugh .. rightwinged? whatever
whom sommehow manages to blame everything on socialism, yea, apart from the weather because
thats Putins fault, despite that, I found Putin to be an scoundrel, the Russian Gov rotten to
its core, that dont mean I hate Russians but there will always be those that cant
differentiate at all.
Whom is the "enemy" Americans, socialism, China, Russia, Iran, huh.
I have saxed this from P. L. Gonzalez.
Social media networks, payment processors, airlines, hotels, streaming services, and online
vendors are strangling people based on ideology but TPUSA is still complaining about
"socialism." Burn your money or donate it to TPUSA, it's the same thing.
Yup, briliantly summarised everything in some few lines, and why, do you refuse to see
them when they are right infront of your very own eyes, and yet, you blame some imaginary
enemy witch have nothing to do with this coup, its an class war, its the oligarcs, the robber
barons, witch have an army of buttspreaders in the capitol Hill to their abuse, and this
bitches do whatever they are told, do notice how the RepubliCONs threw you under the buss, is
that to the Chines fault.
So, I hope the Americans whom stil have some parts of their bran fuctional, can notice the
difference, in Norway we have the same problem, but we are an so called socialistic nation,
but we are held hostages by the same pack of scums that is plundering your nation and
resources, and have nothing but contempt for everyone of us, and an Gov that do whatever they
want and whom are we then to blame, the Hottentots, Maoris, communism is an tool for social
unrest, and when they have done their job, thrown under the buss, because the PTB wants us to
fight each others, as long we do, they will win.
Unite and you have an chanse, if not, well, I am old, and my life span expectanse isnt that
long anymore and I will not have to live in the totalistaian regime that comes, but the sole
reason for me to even bother, is for our children, and their children.
And to all of you whom went to the protest, you have my deepest respect.
It truly is an war, against the dark forces.
You all need to take an stand.
Be the light.
peace
Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:53 PM Reply to
mikael
We have the same problem worldwide. Singling out and scorning the Americans is simply
divisive. It has always been the People against the Oppressors. The Americans are people and
have Oppressors bearing down on them like the rest of us. There is a cancer that needs to be
removed lest it devour us all.
Chris , Jan 11, 2021 10:57 AM
The overtone of Korybko's writing is excessively defeatist. When the "Deep State" applies
such overt tools to steal the U.S. election, imposes censorship, labels millions of American
citizens as potential "domestic terrorists", silences the still incumbent U.S. President,
resorts to provocation, deprives Americans of essential liberties through Covid, curfews or
other bogus emergencies, then it means that the establishment behind the "Deep State" is
scared. Scared not as much of Donald Trump as scared of You – the People. I know it
since I live in a central European country with a very bitter experiences with dicatorship.
When the power starts to resort to an open forgery and uses coercion or force it reveals its
weakness, not strength. Its power derives only from the passive attitude of majority of
population, nothing more. What this so called 'liberal elite' in America hopes for is to
return to the good old days, when the whole Middle America remained voiceless, silent,
isolated, without any leadership or political representation. Now it is their objective to
'legally' separate the 'progressive America' from the 'populist' one and they might even
inspire separation, violence or secessionist moves to achieve it. But MAGA movement must not
play this delusional vision of retreat to entrench in false sense of local security. That's
what the 'Deep State' wants to achieve – to herd the popular opposition into their home
arrests and their privacy soon to be possibly separated by walls, sanitary wards, wired
fences or a new Indian reservation. Americans would never win their Independence by acting in
defense only, by retreating to 'wait and see' tactics as Korybko suggests. What must be done
is to recapture Your state institutions that have been stolen and turned into a travesty of
American political tradition. Before that happens a common awareness is needed that those who
appear to rule as a new 'government' are just a tiny bunch of criminals who try to impress
the whole world that their power has no limits, that they monopolised the mass media and
economy, that they are invincible. Do not let this delusion of 'Deep State' victory to
dominate Your outlook. Yes, I agree that Trump failed as a leader in a time of crisis but
MAGA (or however we call it) but all the people who really care for America need to maintain
representation, authority and leadership. They shouldn't accept a comfortable fantasy that
sooner or later the 'Deep State' would crumble under its own weight and then by some miracle
a new movement would be born. If Trump indicates that 'its only the beginning' then his
supporters should join him in any action he offers. All Republican politicians, conservative
or libertarian societies, local communities, state legislatures or any other active group
must be engaged in this action. Struggle for political freedom always involves risk and
mistakes. Trump certainly made a lot of them. But it is the People who are sovereign, not any
office, institution or technological dicatorship. When the Constitution, the congressional
debate and civil liberties are ruined by 'elite' it is the responsibility of the People to
act in emergency to restore law, order and liberty. The 'Deep State' perfectly understands
that after the four years of Trump and the emergence of trumpism as a social-political fact
there can not be any turning back to the business as usual. Not under normal and peaceful
circumstances. That's why they are so frightened and act in panic. That's why they impose
health and security 'emergencies' to incapacitate the population, to make it superfluous and
useless. We saw it in totalitarian regimes.
The world needs the U.S. not as an imperial power but as an example of well established
social contract, human liberty and hope for a better future. The European 'elites' are in
revolt against their people too but here we won't have a chance for any anti-establishment
president to support us. That's why in Europe we still believe that not all has been lost in
America.
Laurence Howell , Jan 11, 2021 12:17 PM Reply to
Chris
Lt. General Thomas Mcinerney,
"special forces imbedded in Antifa rioters have Nancy Pelosi's laptop"
laptop always the laptop it on the laptop he/she left the laptop at
it etc etc et was found there# etc etc etc bullshit
laptop psyop used as much as the immaculate passport psyop found at the scene of crime in a
burning inferno it aimed at idiots
Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 10:37 AM Reply to
Asylum
Are you saying that Hunter Biden's laptop and the released information that it contains is
of no value?
Conflating 911 with the current conspiracies is not helpful. This would need an article of
longer length and written by an unbiased observer which you are not.
Instead of saying etc. etc. bullshit, why not explain why this is your position?
Or does this not fit in with your soundbite posting?
Jacques , Jan 11, 2021 9:41 AM
Historically speaking, the problem with the "deep state" is essentially that the current
system has corrupted itself to a point where it is so far from what is claimed, or perhaps
appears to be, that there is no way to fix it from within by rebuilding it, by "draining the
swamp".
Klaus "Cockroach" Schwab et al understand this, hence the Great Reset, a new vision for
the future. Of course, they want a future for themselves, but that's another story.
Even if Trump were entirely sincere in his effort to "drain the swamp", he had nothing to
offer apart from some vague anachronistic concept of Making America Great Again. What the
fuck is that supposed to mean anyway, eh? The only thing he had behind him was populism which
in itself is an empty concept.
Like it or not, a change will only come if people formulate a new philosophy, ideology,
and if the new ideology is proposed and embraced on a broad scale. Ideally in a non-violent
fashion.
Right now, there is fuck all, people are still stuck on all sorts of left-right bullshit
dichotomies, (fake) democracy, the games that have been played for decades if not hundreds of
years.
If you ask me, it would be nice if the ideology of the future was loosely based on Hayek's
spontaneous order.
If Trump can pull something off this week or early next, the new plan is already waiting
in the wings. It's called Nesara/Gesara. It's a new economic system not based on a debt based
system.
rechenmacher , Jan 12, 2021 3:45 PM Reply to
Thom1111
Heard that one before. Fraud.
Thom1111 , Jan 12, 2021 7:09 PM Reply to
rechenmacher
It's a real framework plan, it's just whether it can be implemented is the question.
Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:57 PM Reply to
Jacques
"Like it or not, a change will only come if people formulate a new philosophy, ideology,
and if the new ideology is proposed and embraced on a broad scale. Ideally in a non-violent
fashion."
Sure. So we the people have had centuries or more to figure the answer out. Repeating the
dilemma is not enlightening. Idealism has no voice with tyrants.
ZenPriest , Jan 11, 2021 8:53 AM
All this talk of the 'deep state' yet no one can name them. Lol.
Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:04 PM Reply to
ZenPriest
you must have been born yesterday. In America it's the alphabet agencies but obviously all
runs back to Rothschild and the Vatican.
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𝚠𝚠𝚠.𝚓𝚘𝚋𝚜𝟷𝟼.𝚝𝚔
The 6 January protest march clearly shows that the majority of Trump voters had already
given up on Trump so did not join the protest. There was originally talk of a possible one
million people attending, it didn't get anywhere close. If half the nation was still behind
Trump, this was a very puzzling showing.
Trump just did not have what it takes, or was not really trying, to ruthlessly cut out the
cancer of corruption in government. History will show that he was a weak leader who allowed
the deep state to distract him to the extent that he never did anything of note other than to
reveal, through no action of his own, how extreme is the corruption that he had promised to
drain.
The Democrat distractions, paid for by their oligarch owners, showed the world that
extreme corruption is running the USA. Even the most loyal Democrats must be puzzled by the
current purges and threats of extreme centralised thought control, the arrogance of the swamp
now that it has gotten rid of the peoples' man.
To his credit, I am still willing to believe that Trump tried to do the right thing.
Although the author is trying to place Trump as a coward who resigned, going back on his
word, I think this is not how his original supporters see him. From what I can see, the
majority of his original supporters still support him and see him as a figurehead, but they
recognise that he doesn't have the skills to do the job. He is not a coward, he did not cave
in, he recognised, probably because of the low protest numbers, that he did not have what is
takes to continue the fight, he could see that his base had already given up on him. He is
still a figurehead in the patriot movement. He may have lost the far right, but he still has
a lot of centre-ground supporters.
I disagree with your claim that the majority of supporters had already given up on him. It
was the middle of the week. People have jobs. It was a significant turn out. People
understand what is at stake. I would not place the blame for failure on Trump. He is amazing
in so many ways.
I just don't understand here how anybody can believe Trump was sincere in wanting to
change anything: he's a narcissistic bully in it for his own benefit and that of his
offspring. Fighting corruption??? Come on!
Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 4:06 PM Reply to
Carmpat
The mere fact that hundreds and hundreds of treasonous actors throughout government and
business have been clearly and openly revealed through the process started by Trump is a damn
good start.
"What is going in DC right now is like what went on at Jonestown after Jim Jones went
crackers. Except instead of cyanide laced Kool-Aid they are going to use 'Doc' Billy Eugenics
EUTHANASIA DEATH SHOT to off the 'faithful'. If only Billy and they would just off themselves
and leave the rest of the World out of it."
" EUTHANIZE the World! Corporate Fascism and Eugenics forever."
"Time now for Na n zi Pelosi, Chuckie 'Upchuck' Schumer and all the rest of the war
criminal gang of CORPORATE FASCIST FABIAN EUGENICISTS to beam back to the
mothership. They see insurrections, rebellions and conspiracies everywhere. They believe
the humans are out to get them . They are going full Jim Jones. "
"Also Nasty Na n zi should lay off the hooch. It is beginning to have a deleterious and
harmful effect upon the sad thing's cognitive faculties and behavior."
Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:35 PM
I *Hope* they name the next Carrier after him – USS Donald J. Trump – CVN
83
😉
Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:38 PM Reply to
Sgt Oddball
- Nickname: – 'Big Don'
Voxi Pop , Jan 10, 2021 9:57 PM
https://worldchangebrief.webnode.com INSURRECTION
ACT "PROBABLY" SIGNED –
Military In Control of the US, Under Commander In Chief Trump/
Updates Will Follow Throughout The Day
Cal , Jan 10, 2021 9:56 PM
.
Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 9:26 PM
"Captain America's been torn apart,
Now he's a court jester with a broken heart,
He said, "Turn me around and take me back to the start",
"I must be losing my mind!" Are you blind?!
– I've seen it all a *Million Times* "
You are going to be very surprised. See what happens.
David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:08 PM Reply to
Sukma Dyk
I was just about to post a comment saying: It's not over yet, but you beat me to it! Well
done.
John Smith , Jan 11, 2021 6:17 PM Reply to
Sukma Dyk
Why the secrecy? If you know summit then spill.
Jacques , Jan 10, 2021 8:49 PM
I don't know what Trump's intentions were, and I couldn't care less.
From where I'm standing, it appears that he was elected on a wave of populism, which
seemed to be an alternative to the "liberal democracy" fakery, the swamp. An interesting
presentation of that was here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA50BE7d1X8
). IMHO, Bannon kicked Frum's butt in that debate.
It would appear that populism was a big enough threat for the "swamp" to unleash four
years of a hate campaign against Trump, possibly, probably culminating with COVID. Hard to
believe that it was a coincidence.
Be it as it may, and allowing for the possibility that this or that or the other thing has
been staged this way or that way, Trump's presidency has certainly set things in motion,
woken up people. Had somebody more slick been elected, the transition to the dystopia that
seems to be in the pipeline would probably have been less noticeable, perhaps not noticeable
at all. With the shitshow that has been going down since last February, all of a sudden there
is a public debate. Perhaps misinformed, perhaps mislead, but there is a debate nevertheless.
Will it result in something positive? Hard to say, hopefully.
Bottom line, Trump's presidency has been historically a good thing.
YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 11, 2021 10:05 AM Reply to
Jacques
Covid 19 was DECIDED? But of course, yes, it's just a detail .. lol
Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 8:45 PM
Turns out the Viking Guy aka QAnon Shaman aka Jake Angeli aka Jacob Anthony Chansley aka
Actor and self proclaimed "Super Soldier" pals around with Bernard Kerik and Rudy Giuliani
when he takes time off from memorizing the latest NSA script:
Lost in a dark wood , Jan 10, 2021 9:42 PM Reply to
Researcher
Oh look, a photo at some sort of book-signing type event. I'll file it alongside the one
of Oswald and Mother Teresa.
Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 4:37 PM Reply to
Researcher
BTW: if that's what Bernard Kerik looks like when he's "palling around", you definitely
wouldn't want to fall out with him!
James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:10 PM Reply to
Researcher
Haven't you figured out yet that QAnon is an intelligence agency psyop based in the type
of magical thinking that will get you killed and lose the nation? If not, you really aren't
qualified to participate in what is currently hitting us. The enemy has your number. This is
obviously a photo op staged by the security state to feed the false narrative created around
QAnon.
Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 11:23 PM Reply to
James Meeks
Can you read? Read what I wrote again. Read it enough times until you understand.
QAnon = Q Group NSA
Nothing is hitting you except the Democrats and Republicans together against the citizens.
That's not new.
"If there was a non WAR RACKETEER CORPORATE FASCIST in SHAM DEMOCRACY USA for whom to vote
and the REPUBLICRATS did not FAKE the counts and rig the SHAM elections WE THE PEOPLE might.
Where is a Eugene Victor Debs when the world needs one?"
"Soon that is not going to be an issue, however. There will be no need for SHAM ELECTIONS
after Billy EugenIcs and the CORPORATE FASCIST FABIAN EUGENICISTS cull all the untermenschen
and useless eaters with their EUTHANASIA DEATH SHOT."
"Just can not give up the opportunity for a good lead up (segue'). In good faith and in
all seriousness, thanks for providing it."
Cmiller , Jan 12, 2021 5:27 AM Reply to
Researcher
Masonic handshake
Dayne , Jan 10, 2021 8:40 PM
Peasants in 19th-century Russia clung to a notion of the Czar as a benevolent, fatherly
figure. Even when he rained misery and oppression down on them, it was only because he was
"misinformed", "surrounded by bad guys", etc.
It makes sense: Those were desperate, illiterate people living in misery. Hoping against
hope was all they had. But why would anyone in 2021 think of Trump in essentially the same
way is beyond me. An entrenched military-industrial-media-psychiatric-intelligence system,
hundreds of years in the making and with untold trillions in funding, just stood by as a
Robin-Hood-type hero and people's champion rose to take the Oval Office? Sorry. Trump might
as well sprout wings and fly.
Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:10 PM Reply to
Dayne
Thanx for your comment, Dayne – I've been trying to put this into words, and as I'm
autistic, I could frankly, literally *Sperg'-out* over this, right now
- TL:DR version is this, tho': – Ever wonder why 'Populism' is such a dirty word for
the establishment and their MSM bullhorn? – The argument I've heard thus far generally
goes like the South Park underpants gnome's plan for world domination: – Phase 1:
Popular Uprising (aka: 'Civil Unrest') Phase 2: ? . Phase 3: Fascist 'Strongman' Dictatorship
– Why is that?
- Also that we're *Too Stoopid*(/ie: Self-Absorbed) – Like the Mud-Pickin' peasants
in Monty Python' Holy Grail
- I would suggest 2 reasons for this:
- 1.) The Davostanis (Global Banksters/Oligarchs) never *merely* back the *winning horse*
in the race, – In fact they back *every* horse that they *allow* to run (ergo: Trump
was an Establishment-groomed *Stalking Horse* )
- 2.) The Davostanis (again), have *long since* seen to it that *most everyone*, from
birth onwards, is psychologically conditioned, first with childhood myths and fairy-tales
about Charming Princes and Fair Princesses, then with religio-spiritual 'adult' myths and
fairy-tales about (In Judeo-Christian terms) Messianic, White-Knight champion/rescuer types
who, if *we would only* put our lives and our *Utmost Faith* in their holy, heaven-sent
hands, would *Save Us All* from all the terrible, terrible *Mess We've All Made* for
ourselves down here on Earth, by collectively *Shitting The Bed*
*Obviously*, this is *All* just so much *Childish Nonsense*, and, more to the point, a
*Writ-Large Con-Job*
- Cutting to the chase: – The 'Great-Man' theory of history is *Bunk* – Always
*Has Been*, always *Will Be*
If you're still "Holding Out For A Hero", I invite you to stare *Long And Hard* into the
nearest available mirror, *Take A DEEP Breath*, and then go out and *Elect Yourself* to the
office – *Better Yet*, elect your family, elect your friends, elect your neighbors,
elect *Everyone*
- And then let's *Do This Shit* – *Together*!
James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:23 PM Reply to
Dayne
It could have something to do with the fact that Biden is backed by every billionaire
member of the Davos gang of criminals getting ready to use this event, coupled with medical
martial law, to stage the "great reset" scheme. A wet dream of Malthusian eugenecists like
Faucci & Gates, since it includes a drastic reduction in world population aka genocide of
the elderly, vulnerable, poor and non compliant. This Globalist Technocracy will be led by
un-elected bankers and corporate CEO's effectively ending any form of Democracy planet wide.
MSM mockingbirds are completing the programming of the public to make Casey's statement to
Reagan ring true" We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the
American public believes is wrong."
Ow look Simon one trick pony parkes been laughed at and ridiculed and busted for his many
many many many lies and it happening you watch just donate psyop
gets excepted into the Q nonsense and trump Savior psyop and became s one of there
leaders!!!
doesn't anyone go back 5 years and do basic check on thsoes they watch and then make idols
of them.
fools follow fools
Mike , Jan 10, 2021 8:15 PM
Trump was never going to be Ameica's hero. He was played to depict America as a fascist,
racist, neo-nazi country that needs to be saved by the Left aka Joe Biden/Kamala Harris. The
Left can now "save us all" from the "damage" caused by the MAGA movement and Trump. They can
do this through heavily increased mass surveillance and what is essentially imprisonment, to
make sure that we don't fall victim to the "domestic terrorism" that is represented by Trump
and his fan base.
David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:10 PM Reply to
Mike
saved by the left? The left has been selling out the US to the globalist agenda for the
last 20 years (in power or out). Trump is not finished restoring America to a country that
doesn't sell out to China.
"Left-Center-Right" seems that paradigm is a tad askew. It is more like a top to bottom
pyramid [scheme/racket]. The CORPORATE FASCIST OLIGARCH MOBSTER PSYCHOPATH SLAVE MASTERS
sitting on their gold platinum thrones at the very top of the tower/pyramid and all their
prole slave victims, WE THE PEOPLE (HUMANITY) in the mud at the base. The PSYCHOS will say or
do anything to get the prole slaves at each others throats. IF WE ARE FIGHTING AMONG
OURSELVES WE ARE NOT FIGHTING THEM."
Well, being saved by the left was a sarcastic comment. And Trump is clearly done with
"restoring America" because it was never his to restore, let alone him conceding to the left
after the Capitol "riots".
falcemartello , Jan 11, 2021 3:53 AM Reply to
David Meredith
@ David
The left is as left as my right GONAD
Martin Usher , Jan 10, 2021 10:12 PM Reply to
Mike
Biden/Harris "the left"? Surely you're joking? These two are conservatives, in another
timeline they'd be Republicans. What they have going for them is they, like many Americans,
believe in the Constitution of the United States, about what the country is and what its
trying to acheve. It strives to build "a more perfect union".
This the fundamenal error many people made about the Deep State. I've no doubt that
there's a fom of Deep State out there, an ingrained conservative streak in the bureaucracy,
because there is in all bureaucracies. But the real Deep State is all of us, its every last
person who believes in the system, in the American form of democracy and the principles upon
which the nation was founded. There are innumerable personal interpretations of exactly what
this means but the sum total is the United States.
Trump, MAGA and the modern GoP represent 'capture', the idea that the capture of the state
can be turned to personal profit. In doing so Trump and his enablers degraded the notion of
what the US is and why it exists. This is what's caused the backlash, its not 'the left' or
'socialism'.
Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:54 PM Reply to
Martin Usher
"Biden/Harris "the left"? Surely you're joking?"
- The proverbial 'Overton Window' has, at this point, collapsed to a quantum singularity,
about a nothingth of a planck length wide
- Prepare for *Teh Great Suck*!
Peanut butter wolf , Jan 10, 2021 8:11 PM
You seriously think Trump was genuinly elected? All the points you make show obviously he
was a puppet and psy-op of the deepstate from the very beginning.
The deepstate won because they never had an enemy, they created him from the start, with or
without him knowing we dont know, but anyone on that level is on a need to know basis anyway.
It's clear that his every move is steered with the goal to bring down rogue antiestablishment
sentiments.
And it worked very well. Radical left antiestablishment is suddenly prodemocrats and
radical right antiestablishment is totally disillusioned and just became domestic
terrorists.
Trump wasn't supposed to win in 2016. The deep state probably wanted liberal Jeb Bush or
Rubio or Cruz in there. Trump destroyed all the competition in the GOP primaries. Remember,
Trump wasn't picked by the deep state to be their guy. He financed his own campaign. He was a
major burr in their saddle. The Trump phenomenon is real and he proved it with a landslide
victory that was stolen.
Martin Usher , Jan 12, 2021 6:16 PM Reply to
Thom1111
What 'landslide'? The numbers tell a very different story. Trump should have won a second
term but he didn't because of two things, one being the grass roots efforts of Democrats to
motivate voter groups despite systematic road blocks being placed in those groups' path and
the other -- a important one -- being that there's quite a lot of life long Republicans out
there that cannot stand Trump.
Trumpism is like a cult in many ways. One feature is that those who 'believe' find it
difficult to come to grips with the fact that they might hold a minority view. They're used
to being embattled, that's a signature feature of such groups (they're always fighting for
something against an implacable enemy, preferably an unseen one) but its just inconceivable
that they're really a fringe group. The events of last Wednesday have probably done more to
promote Democrat candidates than anything else this cycle; fortunately for the most part the
election was over so all they lost were the two Senate seats.
PS -- May I draw your attention to an old Beatles song -- "Revolution"? (I'd also suggest
an even old song "Trouble Coming" from the Mothers of Invention.)
Voz 0db , Jan 10, 2021 7:58 PM
Under the CURRENT MAIN SYSTEM – The Monetary System – there is no "drain the
swamp"!
James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:29 PM Reply to
Voz 0db
Then you're going to love the technocrats "social credits" scheme such as China currently
imposes on it's population.
Voz 0db , Jan 11, 2021 10:43 AM Reply to
James Meeks
China developed that system with the HELP of the Western Corporations, so that in a near
future the tech will be deployed in the western Plantations. OPERATION COVIDIUS is just the
1st of many operations that will create the FEAR & PANIC conditions among the herds of
modern western moron slaves, that will make it really easy for THEM to deploy that tech.
Why do you think China was the chosen one to practice a "city lockdown" during EVENT 201
planning?
Why do you think China was on the news of western countries while they were executing the
lockdown and then no more China news?
China is also under the Shadow of the SRF & Billionaires at least for now. The only
thing China is trying to achieve is to shift the POWER of the SRF into Chinese Families,
nothing more.
maxine , Jan 10, 2021 7:48 PM
What has Off-G come to? .One must be truly mad to imagine that D. tHRUMP
"SINCERELY" thought ANYTHING EVER, let alone "changing the way America is run" .He's
incapable of comprehending what the word "SINCERITY" means .Sorry the author has lost his
hero.
OffG publishes articles and anybody who wants to can comment on them.
It does not push, or imagine, any group philosophy other than to support us all in a deep
distrust of what the mainstream media ram down our throats every day, and to give us space to
express our personal disgust in our own way.
We are not going to imagine what you would like us to imagine merely on your say-so
either, although you are quite free to tell us what your personal recommendations are.
OffG has never been pro-Trump, and we are all aware that the alternative is far from being
any better.
Perhaps you would like to tell us what is really bugging you, given that you have
never been under any pressure even to show up here At the very least, you could stay on
topic:
So, what about the swamp, and who you think is most likely to succeed in draining it ?
Carol Jones , Jan 10, 2021 8:53 PM Reply to
wardropper
Hear Hear!
Gezzah Potts , Jan 10, 2021 10:26 PM Reply to
wardropper
Spot on W👍
YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 10, 2021 7:40 PM
Trump's racist fan base supported America's bogus War of Terrorism against blameless
Muslim countries, did they not? What goes around, comes around.
I think you are getting fan bases mixed up. Trump inherited these conflicts from Bush,
Iraq 2002 invasion & Obama's 2015 invasion of Syria and it was Trump that threatened to
end the propping up of the endless war industry. In fact that played the major role in why
Trump had to be removed at all costs including selling treason and vote rigging as Democracy
to be defended against "domestic terrorists".
YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 11, 2021 9:45 AM Reply to
James Meeks
Did America's white patriots oppose the demonisation of Muslims as being terrorists who
did 9/11 or did they participate in this US government fiction?
No, at least half of the patriots are and were aware that 9/11 was an inside job.
Geoffrey Skoll , Jan 10, 2021 7:25 PM
Right! The Donald was too weak and too stupid. A smarter president got shot for his
troubles, but the rulers knew they didn't have to resort to that against the Donald. He was
obsessed with his mirror. All those meeting between Ike and JFK, what do you think they were
talking about?
Sounds like you came to Off Guardian thinking it was the Guardian and expected to find a
group of like minded consumers of security state propaganda in a Trump bashing fest.
Do u relly guys think Trump was a hope for all pf us? I am still amazed that
people(including off-guard) still thinks in terms of left vs right, good vs bad, and all that
narrative. I am afraid that nnarrativ has never been true. It is part of the game of "the
matrix" to keep us entertained in shows programmed for tth masses, division, polarizaiomn,
saviours and "heros". In my opinion it is time for a deep shift. Continuing to hope that some
guy will save us all, it is just seeing a tree but not being able to see the woods. While
some keep waiting for somebody to save us, they are moving forward with their plans really
fast. But no problem guys. Sooner or later the rrality will knock on you door, and you will
have to decide if you are going to be a slave or a free human. And it will be all about what
you decide. No american hero or any messiah will do it for you.
Sophie - Admin1 , Jan 10, 2021 9:50 PM Reply to
MANUEL
We have warned against accepting the Left/Right paradigm many times. This is NOT an
editorial and therefore is not 'the voice of OffG'.
Some visitors here need to up their sophistication level to the point they understand we
publish a SPECTRUM of dissident opinion that we consider merits discussion or a wider
audience, without necessarily agreeing with all of it.
"Some visitors here need to up their sophistication level to the point they understand
we publish a SPECTRUM of dissident opinion "
- Yep, well that's as may be, but Andrew Korybko's position is *Lame As All Hell* –
Every establishment talking point *Covered* – just from the 'Contrarian' side
- Trump was an 'Outsider' who 'Became' an 'Insider'?! – Aww Puh-lease! – He
was a *Stalking Horse
- "He didn't have the *'Strength'* to 'Drain The Swamp'(tm)"??!?! – *No-One*
*Indivudal* in all Creation could've
- Do you think we're *Children*?!
Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 3:26 PM Reply to
Sgt Oddball
been on this site a whole while now not seen any articles discussing trump failures
James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 11:06 PM Reply to
MANUEL
We are all aware that we are the playthings of the rich and powerful but all you're doing
is stating what most of us already know. What is your solution? So tell us please what you
are doing to that makes you feel free and not a slave? Are you living off the grid? Not using
currency? What is it you're doing that makes you different from those of us you claim are not
facing reality? I think many people, myself included, who have no love for Trump see that he
is being denounced by every billionaire member of the Davos gang of criminals as a threat to
world order and the economy while they shut down the planet with medical martial law and
create an authoritarian Globalist Technocratic dictatorship ending Democracies worldwide and
targeting "domestic terrorists" who oppose them.
George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:35 PM
The steps on how to destroy all of the services, public and private though
focussing on the NHS:
Seize on a moderate flu variant. Build it up to be the blackest
death since the black death. Seize on all the old people who die anyway and claim their
numbers as an indication of the carnage. For anyone still hesitant, introduce hypocritical
emotional blackmail about "the most vulnerable" in our society to shame everyone into the
game On the basis of those appropriated death figures, endlessly circulate fear porn –
enhanced by the fact that the symptoms of this apocalyptic virus are indistinguishable from
the regular flu or even the common cold. Get everyone to steer clear of everyone else. Close
down all "inessential" work plus communal gathering places to ensure everyone is isolated
before the droning monolithic message you are pumping out. Introduce even more draconian
measures for anyone who "has" the bug – effectively barring them even (especially) from
care work. Prioritise the new bug cases so that they have access to hospital facilities
– while anyone with other (real) illnesses are barred to "protect" them! This fills up
the hospitals with hypochondriacs with the common cold. Introduce the notion that some may
carry the bug without symptoms. Introduce a new test which can determine who has the
symptomless bug. On the basis of those magical symptomless bug test kits, bar the
essential workers from supporting the vulnerable – in order to "protect the
vulnerable"! Constantly report on how the NHS is collapsing – which it is, being filled
up with folks with the cold and turning everyone else away, and also being deprived of
essential workers who tested positive for the symptomless bug. Just stand back and watch it
all collapse whilst continuing to report on it with increasing horror!
George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:41 PM Reply to
George Mc
PS the list is not exhaustive. I didn't even touch on the phony Left/Right divide.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL , Jan 10, 2021 7:18 PM Reply to
George Mc
EXCERPTS FROM THE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORTS INTO COVID-19 AND CARE HOMES.
A must read.
The Department of Health and Social Care . adopted a policy, that led to 25,000 patients,
including those (known to be) infected (with Covid-19, and also those who were) possibly
infected with Covid-19 (but) had not been tested, being discharged from hospital into care
homes between 17 March and 15 April -- exponentially increasing the risk of transmission to
the very population most at risk of severe illness and death from the disease. (This, while
being denied) access to testing, (being denied) personal protective equipment, (while having)
insufficient staff, and limited (and confusing) guidance.
There was and is no great "American democracy" to be restored after Trump. As the
mainstream political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern) had
shown six years into Barack Obama's presidency, the nation had for many decades become
"an oligarchy" where wealthy "elites" and their corporations "rule" and
"ordinary citizens have virtually no
influence over what their government does."
That was clear during Obama's corporatist "Hope" and "Change" presidency,
which gave Americans what commentator William Greider memorably called "a blunt lesson about
power, who has it and who doesn't." Americans, Greider wrote , "watched
Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They
learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. 'Where's my
bailout,' became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sites
nationwide." Then Americans beheld Obama embrace "entitlement reform" (nice-sounding
cover for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits) and pass a health
insurance reform (the so-called Affordable Care Act) that only the big insurance and drug
companies could love.
The Biden team has no more intention of acting sincerely on the Democratic Party's standard
manipulative populist-sounding campaign rhetoric in the wake of the Trump nightmare and the
2020-21 Covid-19 Recession than did the Obama White House in the wake of the George W. Bush
nightmare and the 2007-08 Great Recession.
Biden's cabinet picks are loaded with neoliberal center-right operatives
inherited from the fake-progressive Obama administration. They hail from the same Wall
Street backgrounds and corporate and imperial think tanks that
staffed the George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama
administrations.
The "diversity" that CNN and MSNBC applaud in Biden's cabinet and agency picks is all
about the race, ethnicity, and gender of his elections. It does not extend to ideology to
include genuinely progressive Democrats in the mold of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. Under the faux-transformative cloak of identity, these are ruling-class
personnel trained and doctrinally committed to oppose the decent, humane, progressive,
social-democratic, and environmentally sane policies favored by the nation's silenced progressive
majority -- Single Payer health insurance, seriously progressive taxation, the abolition of
parasitic student debt, free public college, a doubling of the federal minimum wage, the
re-legalization of union organizing, and a planet-saving Green New Deal. As liberals fawn over
the many female, nonwhite, and gay people holding top positions, the Biden administration will
be a monument to the persistent rule of the nation's un-elected and interrelated dictatorships
of money and empire.
This follows in accord with the near-octogenarian Biden's promise to super-wealthy campaign
donors at a posh Manhattan hotel last year. Pledging not to "demonize anybody who has made
money," Biden told a gathering of tuxedo-wearing financial parasites that the rich were not
to blame for the nation's savage inequalities (so extreme that the top tenth of the upper US
One Percent had more wealth than the nation's bottom 90 percent by the end of the Obama years).
"Nothing will fundamentally change" and nobody's wealth or income would have to be
reduced if he became president, Biden
said . "I need you badly," he added.
njab 18 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 08:58 AM
What exactly is "left"? The author doesn't talk about being "anti-war" for example. And
frankly, some of the "left" policies, especially related to LGBQXYZ, I find abhorrent. What
is needed is neither "left" nor "right" but something that benefits the MAJORITY of the
population and not just a few fringe groups.
Ohhho HypoxiaMasks 12 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 03:11 PM
Americans is the most confused nation on Earth! They confuse plutocracy with democracy,
propaganda with news, debt with wealth, individualism with freedom, corruption with
influencing, bullying with leading, war with peace and looting with help!
ColdFacts 1justssayn 4 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 11:22 PM
trump is fake anti-establishment, he had 4 years and did not pardon Assange or Snowden, did
not expose corrupt elites, he did not declassify anything "interesting", even now with
exposed election fraud all he did was to file some pseudo lawsuits which were dismissed by
corrupt establishment owned courts.
rubyvolt 16 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 10:41 AM
'MuriKKKa is run by those who OWN it. Their muscle is the US military. Its fodder, the
citizens. The PEOPLE of this nation have no say and can't get into the streets as most of us
have been so poisoned and brainwashed that independent thought is not possible.
jjikss 13 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 02:03 PM
There is no such thing as "democratic empire". You either believe that majority decides or
you believe that power decides. America is undoubtedly an empire ( over 600 offshore military
bases), so the democracy part is just a form of " double think" that comes straight from
George Orwell's vision.
Vikiiing 19 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 08:08 AM
The election process could be fixed to be fair but neither party wants that. US elections
could be modelled after any scandanavian system to get rid of corruption, but there's big
money to be made keeping it corrupt.
DeadRassputin 8 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 07:05 PM
The working class elected Trump as an outsider in the hope he could curb the corruption that
was becoming apparent in the Federal Government. Second term they tried to elect him again,
however the career politicians were having none of that. MSM propaganda blitz plus social
media censorship added to unverifiable mail in ballots, and rigged counting machines sealed
the deal.
Khanlenin DeadRassputin 7 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 07:42 PM
Even though he never stopped stuffing millions into the pockets of the super rich, he did
offer some improvement to the economic conditions of the working classes which had been
stagnating since the 1970's Obama and Clinton had made sure any improvements in productivity
and technology were all going to benefit the top financial elites. Having an unstable ego, he
kept throwing grenades at everything he didn't understand. In the case of Iranian government
officials, the grenades were real
Khanlenin DeadRassputin 7 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 07:42 PM
Even though he never stopped stuffing millions into the pockets of the super rich, he did
offer some improvement to the economic conditions of the working classes which had been
stagnating since the 1970's Obama and Clinton had made sure any improvements in productivity
and technology were all going to benefit the top financial elites. Having an unstable ego, he
kept throwing grenades at everything he didn't understand. In the case of Iranian government
officials, the grenades were real
Joaquin Montano 12 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 02:54 PM
"There's no great 'American democracy' to be restored after Trump, ..." We used to say
"America is the best democracy money can buy". Not even that anymore. It is so disfunctional
it isn't worth the money ...
westernman 13 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 02:29 PM
Some 40 trillion dollars that the rich are stashing away in offshore fictitious bank accounts
if taxed even at 1% will more than pay for all social services like single payer health
insurance, student loan forgiveness, free college education and much much more. Correct Obama
was a faux progressive, he would take one step forward and two back. I agree that Biden seems
to be painting a diverse race cabinet portfolio but skin color is no guarantee at all of pro
working people ideologies.
Hasse1 14 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 12:59 PM
In reality (with hard evidence) Trump is NO different from his predecessors. In fact, if you
compared him with other U.S. presidents, Trump was less violent and caused the death of less
people than Clinton, Bush, Obama or Biden. Just to mention the latest few.
Khanlenin Bill Spence 6 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 08:57 PM
"general welfare" or "the welfare of the generals" You're correct. When ordinary citizens
opposed the invasion of Iraq, they showed that they did not have the expertise needed to make
the decisions in the best interest of the welfare of the generals (or Standard Oil).
czerenkob 13 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 01:40 PM
In the USA democracy is talked about, but not practiced.
SheepNotHuman 9 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 06:14 PM
Democracy a dreamy concept for children only. There is no such thing as Democracy when money
buys the elections and votes remain secretive. America was never a Democracy, from day one
it's a fraud. The first president old George Washington was a blood relative of the UK Royals
and his 50 secret society brothers set up America for 200 + years of fraud. Guess what, the
royals still run things folks. We on the other hand will only be remembered as man or woman
if we turn a blind eye to truth and care nothing for honesty. Some less than human! Now as
people catch on to the facts that they have been played their whole life long while they
pretend and live in the matrix the Deep State must act to clean us out. It's called Agenda
2030 schemed up by the evil WEF. Don't get tested and don't get vaccinated. Now my awakened
ones it's your turn!
shadow1369 15 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 11:48 AM
The US haas been mythologising its nature from day one, all is fraud and pretence there.
Ohhho 14 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 01:15 PM
All of it is just a bunch of nonsense by a naive American. All that "great republic" and
"democracy" garbage! Their dear POTUSes are just puppets to the Global financial oligarchy
that "bought them all and in the darkness bound them"! So they underestimated Trump and let
him slip by, big deal! Everything is back to normal baby, hallelujah!
athineos Ohhho 13 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 01:50 PM
Correct! US has been an Oligarchy since it's Founding when the theft and rape of the land of
the INDIGENOUS AMERICAN PEOPLE by the European Colonizers was being undertaken to benefit the
few as always. Now it has moved into its advanced cancerous stage where the middle class will
be completely assimilated into the poor class to bring about the New Feudal era of the NEW
WORLD ORDER.
Sovietski 10 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 05:18 PM
Biden's sole election slogan/promise has been: "I'm not Trump" He's a millionaire and
4-decade career political dinosaur. Of course nothing will change!
The_Chosenites 14 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 01:03 PM
Biden will spend most of his time as the Donald did. It will be Biden the Blind lead around
by his Israelis guide dog Bibi. Biden will be consumed with middle east policy and defeating
the enemies of Israel, allowing Israels continued expansionist policies. The American people
may have lost the election but there is always a clear winner!
IslandT 3 hours ago 20 Dec, 2020 11:45 PM
Trump administration is a complete failure, when Trump comes to power he has basically
started war on so many fronts and attacks so many swamp people which is the main reason why
so many top level people hate him and causes him to lost the presidency! The swamp in US
senate is simply too deep and there is nothing Trump can do about it, when he leaves the
office, the swamp people will come back and continue their party, those generals or officials
Trump puts on the important positions will be overthrew by Joe Biden, those rules that set by
Trump will also get overwritten by Joe Biden, basically it is a complete waste of time for
Trump to do all those unproductive works. Also the Mexican-US border wall will also be
stopped under Biden as well. If both the democrat and republican not realize they need to
change then there is nothing much a President can do to change the entire situation. US is in
the ending stage of it's empire and we will see de dollarisation after Trump steps down,
think about this, what will happen if other nations want US to buy their currency with the US
gold reserves so the American can buy their raw material or finished product? How much gold
reserves does the US actually has and how much money does the US owns the foreign countries
and how much gold does the us has to pay to foreign nations if de dollarisation actually
happen? Do you people realize that Mike Pompeo has just turned into Swamp people as well,
there goes the last hope for the American!
William Gruff just ended a comment on the Weekly Open thread with words that accurately
describe one on the symptoms of dystopia that Americans are afflicted with
"Just look around at all of the mouth-breathing chin-maskers in America to see how much
Americans have pitched in to defeat the Fort Detrick Flu."
Americans have been brainwashed to be more in love with their Plato's Cave Displays than
their fellow Americans. They have been taught to consume and not be citizens or members of
community......and everyone is their own gender now....how divide/conquer can you get?
"... attempts to restore "normality," or the "New Normality," or the "Great Normal Reset," or "The New Normal War on Domestic Terror" or whatever they eventually decide to call it. ..."
...going to be quite an exciting year. It is going to be the year in which GloboCap reminds
everyone who is actually in charge and restores "normality" throughout the world.
or at least attempts to restore "normality," or the "New Normality," or the "Great Normal
Reset," or "The New Normal War on Domestic Terror" or whatever they eventually decide to call
it.
"... Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of bison-hat wearing half-naked actors have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap, and now, by God, you will atone! ..."
"... No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a building without permission! The building where America simulates democracy! You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into the Chamber, into people's offices! One of you actually put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi's desk ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand! ..."
So, welcome to 2021! If last week was any indication, it is going to be quite an exciting year. It is going to be the year in
which GloboCap reminds everyone who is actually in charge and restores "normality" throughout the world.
or at least attempts to restore "normality," or the "New Normality," or the "Great Normal Reset," or "The New Normal War on Domestic
Terror" or whatever they eventually decide to call it.
In any event, whatever they call it, GloboCap is done playing grab-ass. They have had it with all this "populism" malarkey that
has been going on for the last four years.
Yes, that's right, the party is over, you Russian-backed white supremacist terrorists! You Trump-loving, anti-mask grandmother
killers! You anti-vax, election-fraud-conspiracy theorists! You deviants who refuse to follow orders, wear your damn masks, vote
for who they tell you, and believe whatever completely nonsensical official propaganda they pour into your heads!
Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of
bison-hat wearing half-naked actors have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap, and now, by God, you will atone!
No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a building without permission! The building where America simulates democracy!
You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into the Chamber, into people's offices! One of you actually
put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi's desk ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand!
OK, before I go any further with this essay, I need to explain to my regular readers (in case it wasn't already clear) that I've
decided to forswear every word I've ever written, and all my principles, and my common sense, and join the remainder of my old leftist
and liberal friends in the orgy of online hate and outrage they are currently mindlessly indulging in.
I'm already in enough trouble as it is for not playing ball with their "
apocalyptic plague ," and whatever else I
am, I am certainly no martyr, and I have a career in the arts to consider, so I have decided to listen to my inner coward and join
the goose-stepping global-capitalist mob, which is why this column sounds slightly out of character.
See, back in the old days, before my conversion, I would have made fun of my liberal friends for calling this "storming" of the
Capitol a "coup," or an "insurrection," and for demanding that the protesters be prosecuted as "domestic terrorists."
I probably would have scolded them a bit for taking to the Internet and spewing their hatred at
the unarmed woman
shot dead by the police like a pack of soulless, totalitarian jackals.
I might have even made a reference to that infamous scene in Schindler's List where the crowd of "normal" German citizens
all laugh and jeer as the Jews are marched away to the ghetto by the Nazi goons.
But, now that I have seen the light, I see how bad and wrong that would have been. Clearly, trespassing in the US Capitol is a
crime that should be punishable by death. And comparing contemporary American liberals to the "good Germans" during the Nazi era
is so outrageous that well, it should probably be censored.
In fact (and I hope my liberal friends are still reading this), the police should have shot the entire lot of them! All these
Russian-backed Nazi insurrectionists should have been gunned down right there on the spot, preferably by muscle-bound corporate mercenaries
and CIA snipers in Black Hawk helicopters with big Facebook and Twitter logos on them!
Actually, anyone who trespassed in the Capitol Building (which is like a cathedral), or just came to the protest wearing a MAGA
hat, should be hunted down by federal authorities, charged as a "domestic white-supremacist terrorist," frog-marched out onto Black
Lives Matter Plaza, and shot, in the face, live, on TV, so that everyone can watch and howl at their screens like the
Two Minutes
Hate in 1984 . That would teach these "insurrectionists" a lesson!
Or they could shoot them in one of those corporate-branded stadiums! We could make it a weekly televised event. It's not like
there is any shortage of Trump-supporting "domestic terrorists." They could use a different stadium every week, deck the place out
with big "New Normal" banners, play music, make speeches, the whole nine yards. Everyone would have to wear masks, of course, and
strictly adhere to social distancing. Folks could bring the kids, make a day of it.
How am I doing so far, leftist and liberal friends? No? Not fanatical and hateful enough?
OK, so what is it going to take to convince you that I have changed my tune, got my mind right, and am totally on board with the
New Normal totalitarianism? Trump? Sure, I can do Trump. I hate him! He's Hitler! He's Russian Hitler! He's Russian White Supremacist
Hitler!
Yes, I know I've spent the last four years pointing out that he isn't actually Hitler, or a Russian agent, and that he's really
just the same ridiculous, narcissistic ass clown that he has always been, but I was wrong. He's definitely Hitler, and a Russian
agent! He is certainly not just a pathetic old huckster without a single powerful ally in Washington who could not stage an actual
coup if Putin nuked every blue state on the map.
No, I soil myself in fear before his awesome power. Never mind that he's just been banned by
Facebook ,
Twitter , and
numerous other corporate platforms , and made a fool of by the corporate media, the international political establishment, the
Intelligence agencies, and the rest of GloboCap since the day he took the oath of office.
Forget the fact that, although he holds the nuclear launch codes in his tiny little hands and is Commander in Chief of the US
military, the most he could do to challenge his removal was file a buttload of hopeless lawsuits and sit around in the Oval Office
eating cheeseburgers and tweeting into the night.
No, none of that means a thing, not when he still has the power to "embolden" a few dozen pissed-off Americans to storm (
or calmly walk ) into the Capitol and
take selfies sitting in the Vice President's Chair!
Look, the point is, I hate him. And I hate his supporters. I hate everyone who doesn't hate him and his supporters. I hate everyone
who won't wear a mask. I hate the Republicans. I hate the Russians. I hate everyone who won't get the vaccine. My God do I hate them!
I am so full of hatred and mindless rage that it is making me crazy. I am so consumed with self-righteous hatred, propaganda, and
manufactured hysteria that, if Rachel Maddow, or Chris Hayes, or whoever, told me that it was time to round them all up, these "domestic
terrorists," these "insurrectionists," these "conspiracy theorists," these "anti-mask extremists" (and anyone else who won't obey
us), and put them on trains and send them to camps, I'd probably be OK with that.
How am I doing, liberals? Am I back in the club? Because, I get it. I swear! I'm cured! Praise God! I'm ready to pitch in and
do my part. I believe in GloboCap's final victory! I'm willing to work, if our leaders order me, ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a
day, and give all I have for GloboCap victory! I am ready for total ideological war an ideological war more total and radical than
anything I can even imagine!
Sure, our imaginary enemies are formidable (and this war will probably last forever or at least until the end of global capitalism),
but, in the words of one our greatest liberal heroes, George W. Bush, "bring it on!"
*
CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published
by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel,
Zone 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his
Consent Factory Essays
is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at
cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org
.
"... The existential contradictions of a multi-polar world, climate change and internal unrest are unresolvable by neoliberals and neoconservatives (they are the cause). Both political parties in the USA have gone crazy because they can't deal with it. The chickens have come home to roost. ..."
The USA has been an Empire since the Mexican War when it annexed California, Texas,
Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Since WWII a World Empire and after the fall of the USSR, a
Hegemon. Basically since 1990 the top 10% of Americans became a global protection racket,
resource extractor and human exploiter.
The existential contradictions of a multi-polar world, climate change and internal
unrest are unresolvable by neoliberals and neoconservatives (they are the cause). Both
political parties in the USA have gone crazy because they can't deal with it. The chickens
have come home to roost.
The Biden/Harris Administration will fail. They cannot hold the North American USA Empire
together; let alone, subjugate Russia, China or Iran. The Pandemic is unlikely to be
controlled by vaccines by themselves, the virus is endemic in the Americas and is
mutating.
Joe Biden will not provide healthcare for all or a functional national public health
service needed to control coronavirus. The pandemic debacle, slow vaccine distribution, the
storming of the Capitol are not solely Donald Trump's fault, they are systemic and can only
be addressed by restoring government by and for the people.
To avoid this, the Elite will force Americans into lockdowns, get tens of trillions of
dollars direct deposited, and Russia will be blamed for everything.
The US postal service can't deliver the mail. The Google Map of DC is a sea of red
closures. The US government has fallen and all the king's men cannot put it back together
again.
Too many people letting their wishful thinking override their wisdom, just like when Obama
was enthroned. I will admit that I was fooled back in 2008 as well, thinking "This time
things are finally different!" , though in my defense I will say that the "Reality
Distortion Field" built around BHO by the mass media was far more believable than the one
they have scraped together for Biden.
Biden being installed will thus buy the empire a "grace period" in which other
countries (EU mostly) will happily buy into America's next war effort. As with the
post-Bushlette era decorated with the Obama figurehead, the empire will take advantage of
this "grace period" to escalate its violence.
After all, that is why they want someone like Biden in the White House in the first place.
If the imperial establishment were at all interested in global de-escalation then they would
have gone forward with it when Trump demanded troops out instead of playing shell games to
keep the empire's wars on a low boil. Trump's belligerent noise-making made it impossible
for the empire to escalate its wars. The empire needs someone who is willing to put a nice
"progressive" spin on mass murder in order to get buy-in for a renewed round of
slaughter.
The empire will not waste this opportunity. They have been waiting four years for it.
There will be more war.
Posted by: William Gruff | Jan 20 2021 21:14 utc | 77
Agree with most of this as well as your other post earlier in the thread.
Biden is an attempt to put the mask back on the monster so that the woke, "resistance"
crowd will continue to not care about the unabated slaughter abroad. I mean, when you really
look at it, they (and the corporate mainstream "liberal" media) rarely criticized Trump's
foreign policy and often cheered it, albeit without ever openly praising him, per se. We saw
the occasional article about the ethnic cleansing in Yemen that Trump greatly aided and
abetted, but everyone including the NYT was completely behind his war on Venezuela and
attempt to create war with Iran. The media got a bit up in arms when Kashoggi was murdered -
because of course he was then a journalist - but even that died down quite quickly while
Trump continued feting the Israelis and Saudis.
The coming hot wars will be fought with all of the record breaking arms that Trump sold in
the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
All of that having been said, I'll repeat a point I've made since we started talking about
the election: Trump didn't "start any new wars" because there wasn't much left to do after
Obama and Bush set the world on fire and the Iranians (and Venezuelans) showed restraint when
attacked - both physically and economically. Trump and his Zionist handlers would have loved
it if the USA had ended up in a war with either of those countries and I have no doubt that
if he was elected to a 2nd term, we'd have seen one or both transpire. With Biden, same thing
as the first thing about Trump - There isn't much left to destroy that the USA could actually
get away with and I suspect he will continue the existing wars for however long he (or
Kopmala) is in office.
It's an Empire with a revolving-door Emperor called a President or Prime Minister. The
facts are fixed around the policy. We're obviously headed back toward a more 'can't we all
get along' empire, after four years of a guy who thought he was an actual emperor, instead of
a bobble-head. The differences between the two monopoly parties in the USA are entirely
domestic and are nothing but the size of the crumbs given to the people who think they are
free.
bottom line kadath.. the usa will be an ongoing slavish servant to israel.. that much is
clear as day... which way it goes - syria or iran - none of the saber rattling will stop..
israel doesn't want it to stop! neither does the american duopoly! the people might, but
they don't get a say and generally are not interested in foreign policy..
IMO Biden will do as he is told. His white house chief of staff is a powerful and
skilled player and is quite experienced in working with Biden. Joe could well be diverted to
give solid focus on the home front while the rats he has appointed continue their global
piracy and belligerence. I figure that is why they ran the old fool.
On January 21, the president-elect will sign a number of executive actions to move
aggressively to change the course of the COVID-19 crisis and safely re-open schools and
businesses, including by taking action to mitigate spread through expanding testing,
protecting workers, and establishing clear public health standards.
On January 22, the president-elect will direct his Cabinet agencies to take immediate
action to deliver economic relief to working families bearing the brunt of this crisis.
Between January 25 and February 1, the president-elect will sign additional executive
actions, memoranda and Cabinet directives. The president-elect will fulfill his promises to
strengthen Buy American provisions so the future of America is made in America. He will
take significant early actions to advance equity and support communities of color and other
underserved communities. He will take action to begin fulfilling campaign promises related
to reforming our criminal justice system. The president-elect will sign additional
executive actions to address the climate crisis with the urgency the science demands and
ensure that science guides the administration's decision making. President-elect Biden will
take first steps to expand access to health care – including for low-income women and
women of color. He will fulfill his promises to restore dignity to our immigration system
and our border policies, and start the difficult but critical work of reuniting families
separated at the border. And, President-elect Biden will demonstrate that America is back
and take action to restore America's place in the world.
As noted above, this list is not comprehensive. More items and more details will be
forthcoming in the days ahead.
Time will tell how the other appointees in the administration align with Klain and the
extent of the savage power struggle that is soon to manifest.
The USA is now the proverbial Whale in a Swimming Pool: it is big, powerful and impressive
- but can't hide its moves anymore and has little to none margin for any maneuver.
The American Center-wing is ossifying, or, in Cold Warrior terminology (Arthur
Schlesinger Jr.), is losing its "vitality". It is entering a stage where it must "burn the
village in order to save it".
... it seems the answer is that Germany plays the role in Europe that the US plays in the
world and both are satisfied with that role even though neo-liberalism, austerity and
war-mongering are leading us to inhumanity and disaster.
Like i said before elsewhere Biden would capitalize on what Trump has put forth and take
the infamy and blame for instead of moving in the opposite directions of whatever Trump
criticized for in foreign policy. That means be it trade war with China, renege on climate
deals, strong arming NATO and EU countries, or giving everything Israel wants nothing stop
Biden from maintaining what has been put in place.
At most they'll just make excuse on why they had to maintain the policies they themselves
criticized Trump for without changing direction.
He said Joe Biden's strong conviction was that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a "bad idea"
and that the administration would use "every persuasive tool" to convince partners,
including Germany, to discard the project.
That is pretty much a declaration of war against countries in Europe. Stay
away,
America's
disarray is its own woes, not other countries' opportunity The Financial Times lives in
a world where the USA doesn't have more than 2,000 operational nukes, doesn't control the
financial system (SWIFT), doesn't issue the universal fiat currency (Dollar Standard),
doesn't have a big fucking navy, doesn't enjoy absolute ideological hegemony etc. etc.
...Tronald's foreign policy has been a disaster, even if he has supposedly not sparked a
new war. Let's not talk about all the secret operations, multiplied drone attacks, state
terrorist assassinations, etc. And the new administration is now continuing this...
They've stopped thinking, become utterly predictable.
They just go through the motions. They know that they can't win-achieve their long held
objectives-but they can't stop repeating themselves, including their past errors. They are
not allowed to. The US ruling caste-servants of the ruling class- are only allowed to
operate within very narrow boundaries. They aren't allowed to take radical measures when
faced with new crises- they are confined within ever diminishing political circles. The
duopoly has become an obvious One Party system. And its politics are those of the Gilded
Age-150 years old and still going strong.
The only solution to America's problems is defeat so complete that it cannot be denied
even by the least perceptive. Anyone with money to spare should be buying popcorn
futures.
...Biden is an elderly figurehead. Trump's mistake was being openly bullying and vulgar
instead of underhanded. Already, the EU ( as cowardly vassals ) are falling into line on
Iran and Russia.
...Paul Craig Roberts is correct. There has not been a regime change, there has been a
revolution and treating policies of this "president" as if he is more than a figurehead
being run by oligarchs is foolish in the extreme.
They've stopped thinking, become utterly predictable.
One could say this about the American people who have been herded into two camps so that
the Center can rule. Here's an example: One of Biden's first executive actions is to
include undocumented residents in the Census. This will please the Left immensely and
outrage the Right. But the Census is conducted every 10 years and it was completed in 2020.
So Biden's action is actually meaningless. How many people will actual notice this? Very
few.
It is funny/sad to see the Post Trump Stress Disorder victims are already rationalizing
and making excuses for the war that the establishment drones they voted for will be
starting, and those drones are not even sworn in to office yet. They know that they voted
for war yet their plastic, Hollywood "identities" are so intertwined with their assumed
self-evident moral superiority that they are compelled to defend the evil they are
responsible for even before it is committed. For them, doing nothing crudely is far worse
than murdering millions accompanied by lofty and emotive platitudes.
Meet the Filthy Rich War Hawks That Make up Biden's New Foreign Policy Team
"I expect the prevailing direction of U.S. foreign policy over these last decades to
continue: more lawless bombing and killing multiple countries under the cover of "limited
engagement," – Biden Biographer Branko Marcetic
by Alan Macleod November 13th, 2020
https://www.mintpressnews.com/filthy-rich-war-hawks-make-joe-biden-foreign-policy-team/273039/
Neera Tanden – Reduce US Deficits by Raiding the Economies of Countries We Have
Destroyed:
Neera Tanden, Biden's Pick for Budget Office: Now Is Not the Time To 'Worry About Raising
Deficits and Debt'
by Robby Soave https://reason.com/2020/11/30/neera-tanden-biden-omb-debt-deficit/
She once suggested that if Americans care about the deficit so much, maybe we should make
Libya pay for it.
| 11/30/2020
( Ariana Ruiz/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom )
Trump ripped the mask off US foreign policy and exposed it for what it is - ugly Zionism
and outrageous Jewish supremacy. Trump did many foreign policy changes previous incumbents
and their handlers wanted to do but were constrained by the optics and international
opinion.
I agree the Biden administration will continue the same tired old foreign policy, only
with the mask back on. Of course the media won't notice the similarities, but the public
will. No matter how fervently the managers tinker with the edges it is events that drive
changes and change people.
I just listened to President Biden's speech. It was a good one, even a great one. Thinking
about what Plato means by the 'noble lie' it was a noble speech, and there wasn't much of a
lie about it.
b finished the posting with
"
While Trump had continued the wars the U.S. waged when he came into office he did not start
any new ones. Since Joe Biden first entered the Senate 47 years ago he has cheered on every
war the U.S. has since waged. It would be astonishing to find four years from now that he
did not start any new ones.
"
Prepare to be astonished. Biden isn't going to start any new wars for the same reason
that Trump didn't......MAD
Humanity has been in the MAD phase of the civilization war we are in since the Obama era
push back in Syria.
Biden's chest beating will not be as "impressive" as Trump's but the trajectory is the
same.
The new chief says to tighten the circle of wagons, but those accused of besieging the
Outlaw US Empire's wagon train stopped attacking and moved on long ago. Meanwhile,
supplying the wagon train continues to take resources away from dealing with very real
domestic problems. The upshot is China will continue to pull away and increase its lead
geoeconomically, and together with Russia will continue to solidify and strengthen the
Eurasian Bloc. Very soon, the EU is going to be faced with a very stark choice--to join the
Eurasian Bloc and thus stave-off economic atrophy or continue to allow its brand of
Neoliberal Parasites to eat and risk rupture, perhaps not in 2021 but before 2030.
The key is that the false narrative that was initiated in 1945 and bolstered in 1979
continues to be treated as gospel despite its path to certain ruin. I noted there were no
questions asked about the international call for a Bretton Woods 2.0 that would end dollar
hegemony and Petrodollar recycling, while removing the one source of coercion behind its
illegal sanctions.
The only possible target of opportunity I see is Venezuela as the frack-patch is about
to fold-up shop and fuel prices cause domestic inflation to soar -- Here in Oregon, gas
prices have gone up 50cents/gal since the first of the year--25%. The oil being the obvious
target now the the lower-48 has definitely peaked.
@ 32 juliania... you are the eternal optimist! there is something admirable about that!..
however you have to contend with a lot of cynical people who think like it's business as
well, as b's post notes..... you might not like to hear this, but nothing is going to
change under biden... big wheels set in motion and biden is not interested in the least in
changing any of it... neither was trump as some of his fanbots are coming to see too...
political speeches are just so much b.s... juliania - as the saying goes, talk is cheap, it
is actions that count.... watch peoples actions, not their talk... biden can talk a good
line, but that has nothing to do with his actions... top of the day to you!
@34 Invading Venezuela and 'taking the oil' won't be easy though there is a possibility
Colombia will help out. Which means the total disruption of South America. More economical
to just buy the stuff.
"It is funny/sad to see the Post Trump Stress Disorder victims are already rationalizing
and making excuses for the war that the establishment drones they voted for will be
starting, and those drones are not even sworn in to office yet. They know that they voted
for war yet their plastic, Hollywood "identities" are so intertwined with their assumed
self-evident moral superiority that they are compelled to defend the evil they are
responsible for even before it is committed. For them, doing nothing crudely is far worse
than murdering millions accompanied by lofty and emotive platitudes."
Posted by: William Gruff | Jan 20 2021 16:16 utc | 26
Tnx for expressing this in a much nicer and polite way then i would have written. And
yes, yes it is sad/amusing to watch NPC`s turn into pretzels to explain away their
cognitive dissonans ,utter foolishness and stupidity.
"... If not for the "new normal" we 100% would guarantee a new war – or a restarted old war – within a year. As it stands, we're only 60% sure they'll be some kind of military intervention sometime soon (Venezuela wouldn't be a surprise). ..."
"... The real crackdowns are going to be domestic. There is a huge push to take "domestic terrorism" seriously , and that will go hand-in-hand with increased purges of social media (again with "Russian disinformation" playing a major role). ..."
"... I wonder if the military occupation was designed to disguise the total lack of support, given the evidence of election fraud. You couldn't get more emptiness and virtual absence of reality if the military conducted the installation in a bunker in the dying days of the Reich. ..."
"... Another poster said it looked like a junta in a minor banana dictatorship. Spot on. It was a military installation visually and in a political sense for there were no people. ..."
This particular inauguration is going to look a lot different from all the others –
the twin bogus narratives of coronavirus and the "attempted
coup" on January 6th have forced, FORCED, capitol city into an almost Martial Law-like
standing.
A heavy troop presence as your leader is sworn in is one of the hallmarks of legitimacy, you
understand. And not even slightly a sign of power being seized illegitimately.
That said, Biden will technically be "President", so it's time to ask ourselves –
what kind of world are we in for?
Internationally it's likely to be business as usual. If you look at his cabinet choices,
from
Victoria Nuland to
Samantha power , we have a LOT of warmongers who bleat about America's "responsibility to
protect". While politicians and pundits are already rebuking Trump & Johnson for failing in
US/UK's
"moral leadership" of the world, or praising Biden for his plans to "counter Russian
disinformation".
If not for the "new normal" we 100% would guarantee a new war – or a restarted old war
– within a year. As it stands, we're only 60% sure they'll be some kind of military
intervention sometime soon (Venezuela wouldn't be a surprise).
The real crackdowns are going to be domestic. There is a huge push to take "domestic
terrorism" seriously , and that will go hand-in-hand with increased purges of social media
(again with "Russian
disinformation" playing a major role).
The big question is whether the inauguration will go off smoothly, or they'll try another
manufactured incident to sell that agenda.
How do you think President Creepy Uncle Joe is going to shape our world? How long before,
for whatever reason, Kamala Harris replaces him? Will the pandemic be "solved"? Will we have a
new war? Discuss below.
Jan 21, 2021 2:24 AM
Washington DC was empty except for the troops. Windblown streets. Jason Goodman did his
walkabout could not even get a distant view of the Capitol. It's as if no one voted for Biden: no supporters even tried to attend the inauguration. You would have expected someone a few diehards who hadn't heard about the military
occupation.
I wonder if the military occupation was designed to disguise the total lack of support,
given the evidence of election fraud. You couldn't get more emptiness and virtual absence of
reality if the military conducted the installation in a bunker in the dying days of the
Reich.
Another poster said it looked like a junta in a minor banana dictatorship. Spot on. It was a
military installation visually and in a political sense for there were no people.
An inauguration of the leader of a nation cannot be legitimate if the people play no part
.
Celebrities cheered with exaggerated leering grins and lockjaw, tongues lolling in a vain
caricature of support from the class of paid actors.
The term 'State Actor' has a new meaning today. The Corporatist Media could not recognise
its own banality. This was like the USSR Actors' Union huddling and fawning around Secretary
General Brezhnev as the Soviet Union teetered to collapse.
Social cretinism is the best one can say about this sorry debacle but I fear it is something
much, much worse.
Disillusioned Peasant , Jan 21, 2021 2:38 AM Reply to theobalt
Agreed, Trump was used as a puppet to shame anybody who questions the narrative or resists
the deep state. He was asked to be a cartoon, a ridiculous exaggeration of a "traditionalist"
or "nationalist" to forever tarnish that stance. He was basically the Alex Jones president
.the ultimate controlled opposition. A clown.
I'm so embarrassed I fell for it in 2016. Of COURSE he was phony. Jan 21, 2021 1:39 AM
The snake as a new head. It's still the same snake. It still crawls on it's belly and it
still spits the same lies on behalf of the masters who stand behind the curtain. We could
still hear Bush Sr when Clinton spoke ; We could still hear Bush Jr when Obama spoke. Red and
Blue are the same colour.
It was refreshing in parts to have an American president who didn't try to contrive a
narrative that would justify invading another country or contrive yet another cell of
'radicalised' terrorists. No explosions on home soil intended to be taken as an attack from
foreign soil. Nothing in four years.
It was all the more surprising as many believed that Trump was and is a great real estate
dealer and TV celebrity who has manufactured his charisma from arrogance and ignorance. He
has never been celebrated for much beyond his business acumen in the real estate area and TV.
This wasn't exactly an erudite man. Former presidents of different ages were and were capable
of putting it on paper in their memoirs. Trump was the sign of the times ; a Twitter
president. His reign was punctuated by the occasional flexing of Uncle Sam's muscles with
threats and a go -ahead-punk-make-our-day approach to public speaking. Yet still no
threats of war. This was an odd four years. That odd = peace says more about the US than
Trump though. So, what was his role ?
In 2001 we had the Twin Towers. The most dramatic mass murder and the destruction of the
laws of Physics and Logic all in one day. Soon after we had the destruction of personal
freedom and the creation of domestic terror. It had been suggested by Philip Zelikow three
years earlier that a 'searing event such as a terror attack' would be a useful and
effective tool in transforming the future by breaking away from the past in no uncertain
terms. It would be the event that nobody dare question, and that would be perfect for
creating a real fear within the people of the west that such a disaster could occur any time
without warning. All they needed was the right salesman to address us.
And so the Patriot Act was born. The surveillance of everyone in their streets, in other
towns and their homes was pushed through as a public health measure and a matter of
national security. If you protested you were a ' 9 /11 denier' and 'unpatriotic'. If
we went too long without evidence of this terror then somewhere would be bombed and the
bomber would be 'neutralised' before we would ever learn who was behind it. It took time to
become a 'new normal' but it became the 'new normal'. Complain- you were a 'dangerous'
conspiracy theorist; in some states it was considered grounds to label you under the mental
health act. Just for asking questions.This was how to protect democracy- by
tyranny.
So, two decades on we were ready and primed.
Gates and his cohort billionaire 'philanderers' had been beavering away for decades
creating more subtle forms of terror. No bangs; no smoke; no mess. These 'missiles'
were microbes and the control groups had been observed closely. From mice, to bats to black
people to gay people. Once the results /data became big enough numbers, the bomb factory went
to work behind the closed doors of 'Cancer Research ' facilities.
We all know now about the hypothetical exercises 'imagined' by the Gates 'Good
Club' ; nightmares of being unprepared etc. They penned in 2030 as target date for the
endgame. . A date that will have seen the human race enslaved or culled by their
terrorism.
Liability would have been taken off the table, giving them free reign. All involved sank
their pennies into the manufacturing of these little bombs. And all Academic Institutions,
MSM platforms, and pharmaceutical industries were funded by Gates and Co. Then
Monsanto and it's subsidiaries were purchased the same way, and the same immunity from
prosecution granted from the damaging synthetic /poison crops and food.
So, 2020, was Trump's last stand. He had his '9 /11'. He had domestic bio
terrorists. Then the rest of the world had it. We had the same threats to national
security and the same 'need' for a new version of a Dystopian Patriot Act.
This wasn't about ISIS or Al -Qaeda and their radicalised lunatics. Trump had found a new
group of Bogeymen. China. He would have sounded a bit paranoid if Russia was blamed for
something again. Besides, everyone knows that all SARS- type or flu-like viruses are made in
China quicker and cheaper. And the US should know that by looking in their many, many
stockpiles in their own Biological War labs they pretend are trying to cure
cancer.
Trump decided to refer to the Covid 19 virus as 'The Chinese disease '. Fang
Ling Fauci had told him to on behalf of Wong Sing Gates.
He went on to call himself a 'war time president' ( there you go- he got one).
He invoked the Defence Production Act, an old Cold War law which allows the Executive
Branch to control and redirect the production and distribution of scarce materials deemed
"essential to the national defense. " In an executive order dated March 18th,
2020.
To add another layer to the movie the troops were brought in and all medics were now
'heroes on the front line'.
The script went global. It began in the country that Gates had composed such a
hypothetical scenario- America. Hence the 'Chinese Disease'. It was the new war on terror
minus the James Bond bad guy Bin Laden.
So Trump ushered it in right on time. It didn't win the election( we were told). Instead,
it won it for Obama's man, Biden.
Biden and Obama were the most vehement advocates of Monsanto, Sterilisation, and Social
Technology ( eugenics ; social cleansing). Obama was made a very wealthy man for his
services to the Gates agenda, pharma and GM / Frankenfood. He was surprisingly racist
as well as elitist. Tom Vilsack was their frontman. Biden has already called him out of
retirement.
So, given the 'war-on-(bio)-terror ' that was born in the USA and sold worldwide,
there was no place for Trump. His job was to let the the 'enemy' in, warn us of the possible
'war ahead' and leave it to Gates. But Trump seemed to have spotted that and didn't
seem too keen on the narrative. So, come on down Barack O Biden. The timing's right.. Jan 20,
2021 11:40 PM Reply to Ben
Do not be bamboozled, in SHAM DEMOCRACY USA there is only one party, THE
REPUBLICRATS (the WAR RACKETEER CORPORATE FASCIST political racket so corrupt it needs two
aliases).
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral
and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never
did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these
will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of
tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
~ Frederick Douglas, 1857
Schmitz Katze , Jan 20, 2021 10:44 PM
„That said, Biden will technically be "President", so it's time to ask ourselves
– what kind of world are we in for? –
The real crackdowns are going to be domestic.-
Will the pandemic be "solved"? „
It will only be solved when people have had enough of it. The deep state got rid of Trump
(for the timebeing-) under the guise of a pandemic. For them and their minions in MSM,
government and academia it´s a gift that keeps on giving, with never ending corona
mutation fearporn.
It´s totalitarianism, it´s dystopia under under the guise of –
domestic-safety.
We begged Trump to get rid of him many months ago. Same with Wray. Without justice you
have no society and no Constitution. Halper came into the CIA by Brennan. Should have gotten
rid of her many months ago. These are Trumps biggest mistakes.
Sessions, Barr, Wray, Haspel, Coates, Krebs... Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett... even
his SC Justice picks are suspect at this point. Honestly, it's pathetic!
But a long list is unnecessary to show that no important institution in America any
longer believes in the liberties and protections guaranteed by the US Constitution or in
democracy itself.
The "important institutions" such as the banks and corporations never believed in the
liberties and protections that most people seem to imagine were guaranteed by the US
Constitution or in democracy itself. In fact, the war of independence was fought for the
liberty of the members of those classes to screw over the yeomen of the nation, and they did.
The constitution, in fact, was a successful effort on their part to consolidate the gains won
thereby and to control, if not eliminate, democracy under the guise of guaranteeing liberty
and democracy to the masses.
The essential effect of the AM Rev or rebellion or whatever you want to call it was not to
remove the chains around our necks but to merely change the owners of the chains and the
constitution codified, legitimized, and even sanctified the act.
There will be no true rebellion until most people realize that the whole thing was a pious
fraud from the start and that the pathetic antics we see today, such as pictured above, are
little more than ridiculous sideshows designed to mock, entertain, and distract us with more
fake drama while our owners wring what little is left out of us before moving on to the next
victims.
As a matter of fact, it was never a "people's Constitution" only about five percent of
the white male population voted as to whether the Constitution should be accepted or
rejected. As it was, it only got by by the skin of its teeth and by some very clever
management on the part of its proponents. The whole thing, in conception, formulation, and
realization, was
the work of a small group of enthusiastic young men of property and position [who] were not
wise enough to foresee the unimaginable -- but inevitable.
-Ralph Adams Cram, Nemesis of Democracy – PDF – , The American Review,
December 1936, pp. 129-141
For details, this is chock full of evidence to support the contentions stated above, and
is darn good work despite the fact that the author was a Libertarian.:
The United States is the Constitution. If the Constitution is set aside and not
followed, the United States is a different entity.
That's true as it goes. However, the US constitution is an objective failure. How so? It
has miserably failed in its own stated goals, which appear in its preamble.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Shall we look at the stated goals one by one?
Forming a more perfect Union
Total failure. This country is badly divided in terms of politics and regional interests.
And that's to say nothing of the civil war in which the northern states used their industrial
might to crush the liberty of the southern states.
Establishing justice
The courts are dominated by utterly ruthless liberal activists, many of whom are hostile
aliens descended from European ghetto dwellers.
Insuring domestic tranquility
Negroes riot at will. Enough said.
Providing for the common defense
The only things the military-industrial complex provides are fabulous profits for the Deep
State, a proxy army for Israel, and low-paid jobs for yahoos stupid enough to believe they
are fighting for "freedom".
Securing the blessings of liberty
There is no liberty except for leftist White haters.
For ourselves and our posterity
Of course, these rather dubious blessings are now being bestowed on everyone but the
actual posterity of the framers. They are to be demonized, dispossessed, and finally
exterminated.
A different but related way to look at the issue is simply this: we have come to our
present dire straits under this constitution. Therefore, it is a failure. Continued belief in
the "genius of world's oldest democratic constitution" and such claptrap is not rational but
religious. And the religion that belief pertains to is not only arrantly stupid but
self-genocidal. Democracy is the god that failed. It failed where it was first tried, ancient
Athens. It failed in pre-imperial Rome. It has failed here and it has failed in every
contemporary country foolish enough to emulate the US. And it will fail when arrogant idiots
of the same ilk as those who came up with the US constitution pay no heed to the lessons of
the past and try it again it in the future.
Democratic erosion has various causes. Some blame power-hungry executives who don't want to
give up power. The question, here, is why democratic institutions aren't able to stop
power-hungry elites who would concentrate power and economic resources.
Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman, in their book " Four Threats ," also highlight excessive
executive power but then add political polarization, racism and nativism, and economic
inequality that prompts the wealthy to mobilize to protect their position.
War and militarism exacerbate all those things. But more than that, war and militarism are
antipodal and undermining of democratic norms, institutions and practices.
At the beginning of the post-9/11 wars, we worried about the effects on our civil liberties
and democracy. But after nearly 20 years, we've almost forgotten about these wars and have
underappreciated their effect on our democratic institutions and values.
The urgency of war is often used to justify the concentration of executive power and
deference to the executive in times of national emergency. In the United States, the trend
toward the concentration of power in the executive was accelerated in the George W. Bush
administration. John Yoo, working for President Bush, argued the legal basis for what he called
the unitary executive theory where, in war, the president's powers are essentially unchecked
. Other officials excused secrecy and torture because the United States was at war. President
Trump has continued in that tradition, acting as if the laws and the rule of law do not apply
to him.
President Dwight Eisenhower is usually given credit for pointing out the dangers of a
military industrial complex. Eisenhower rejected massive conventional forces quite explicitly
because he sought to prevent the United States from becoming a garrison state: If the U.S. were
to do so, Eisenhower said , "we
might as well stop any further talk about preserving a sound U.S. economy and proceed to
transform ourselves forthwith into a garrison state."
Militarization is a perennial concern. James Madison warned in the Federalist Papers in 1795 that "Of all
the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and
develops the germ of every other. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual
warfare." Madison worried that "war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement" that
could increase public debt and lead to a "degeneracy in manners and morals." George Washington,
in his 1796 farewell
address , urged Americans to protect their union and "avoid the necessity of those
overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to
liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."
In war, fear is often part of the equation -- and fear may be deliberately heightened,
threats inflated. We have been living in fear for nearly two decades. When humans are fearful,
they tend to pay more attention to fearful information and think less critically. This can
bolster groupthink dynamics among decision-makers who otherwise might provide horizontal checks
and accountability for leaders. Trump's
Muslim travel ban was, if anything, rooted in fear of another terrorist attack and racial
animus.
Elements of our political culture also have been militarized. And, as Kathleen Belew's
research shows, veterans also
flock to the white power movement and paramilitary organizations. Veterans are often at the
forefront of these movements -- including the Air Force veteran who was killed
trying to get into the chambers of the House of Representatives on Jan. 6 and another
Air
Force veteran who was recently arrested. Active duty
military personnel also were present.
Militarized right-wing extremism emulates the military, even if the actors aren't veterans
themselves. It is no accident that many who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 at the
Unite the Right
rally , who occupied the Michigan State
Capitol in 2020, and who stormed the U.S. Capitol wore military-style uniforms, khaki
camouflage and bulletproof vests.
In sum, we don't just have a right-wing violence problem. We have a democracy problem fueled
by a war problem.
Neta C. Crawford is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston
University and co-director of the Costs of War Project .
And it's not a harmless one, either. Editor ranks are filled with people just like Tim1965. They're unpaid basement dwellers who
have some motive to spend enormous amounts of time "editing," a process that invariably often includes the mass deletion of
useful and accurate information. Look – maybe Tim et. al. would fine if the attribution of my edits were to other primary sources
but, of course, that would cut out other secondary sources.
This happens to be exactly what
monopolists do.
Google at least still links to underlying websites even if, as illustrated above, they push them below a
barrage of pictures.
But Wikipedia is a non-profit with volunteers, huh? Nonsense. Wikipedia's no-pay policy is a bug, not a feature. Facebook,
Google, and Amazon are also monopolists but at least they allow some people to buy food, shelter, and diapers; Wikipedia doesn't.
Wikipedia is not only a monopoly; it is the very worst monopoly, one that saps wealth, erodes knowledge, spreads false or
misleading information, allows anonymous edits, and returns nothing to the economy. It props up Google's ability to circumvent
eyeballs strengthening their own monopoly (again, as illustrated in the screenshot above). Why does anybody think this is a good
thing?
Almost nobody recognizes the problem or calls out Wikipedia as a monopoly despite that it obviously is. There is some unspoken
rule that Wikipedia is good and mustn't be challenged. That tie-in with the high Google ranking? Sure – Wikipedia deserves it,
goes the thought. Why? Because they don't pay people and don't accept advertising so there are no conflicts of interest, right?
Wrong.
Only the very naive believe somebody would bother with 50,000 edits for no gain. A quick search for Wikipedia experts returns
countless people who can help "
manage
"
one's Wikipedia presence to see how plenty of these "editors" are paid. It's the same model as Google or Facebook but a whole lot
less honest. That doesn't mean many people don't volunteer their time: I write plenty for free. But there's a big difference
between releasing a newsletter/blog post once or twice and week and 50,000 edits. There are other ways to profit from an edit
count with none of them adequately disclosed.
Sure, Wikipedia has a
code
of ethics
. Even that's a joke. I'm an American living in France so often surf the web using a VPN to get English-language
pages. I have to turn the VPN off to make Wikipedia edits. They block VPN edits better than any other VPN blocker I've ever seen.
I can watch Netflix as if I'm in the US but can't even login to Wikipedia with the VPN on. This is a minor inconvenience to me
but literally deadly to, say, dissidents of many countries.
Just how common are people like Tim on Wikipedia? Plenty common and plenty of a problem. The way most of them get to those high
number of edits is by reckless deletions -- digital vandalism -- as I've illustrated above. Wikipedia even has a term for them,
deletionists. They used to have their own
Wikipedia
page
when I first came across the term but deletionists deleted it. Instead, in a self-righteous bit of false equivalency,
they merged it in with a
page
of
so-called "inclusionists" who are people that want to actually expand knowledge.
Deletionists define adding information they may not like -- I suppose including links to other well-documented articles in other
places -- as "vandalism" and edit for "appropriateness of content," a vague-standard that sounds like something from the North
Korean Ministry of Truth. Borrowing from
Richard
Stallman
, knowledge should be free as in speech, not free as in beer for those who can afford it. Wikipedia has it exactly
backward.
Monopoly Busting
There's finally some momentum to police "Big Tech" monopolists from both the left and the right. We're used to seeing Bezos,
Zuck, Pichai, and Cook uncomfortably suited up and testifying on Capitol Hill. Lately, the people asking the questions even seem
to be more tuned-in to issues that matter.
Zuck with his
too-tight top-button looking his head looks like it's about to explode.
Ignoring Wikipedia, which is every bit as much a monopoly and a monopolist as the rest, is a dire mistake. There is nothing
positive about sucking away users from high-quality content published by individuals, small blogs, or focused wikis. They're
not providing some type of public service by providing free content for Google to monetize without worries about being sued
for copyright violations (and, surprise,
Google
funds Wikipedia
). Wikipedia
went
dark to prove the point
they're vital and immediately missed. However, by doing that, they simultaneously proved another
point: they're a
monopoly
.
Next time tech execs are
called up to testify, Jimmy Wales should join the gang. Until then, Google and the rest should work to promote some diversity
of information by pushing Wikipedia's rank down or even throwing the site off search results entirely; if people want to
search Wikipedia they can go there directly. In its current state, all Wikipedia does is concentrate, corral, and offer up
eyeballs to their for-profit monopolist cousins while purposefully harming lesser-known sites.
Still not convinced and
think Wikipedia is a cute and cuddly non-profit? Let's keep going. Wikimedia Foundation, the parent of Wikipedia, brought in
$113
million
on their last tax return, filed 2017. They don't pay writers but do pay a lobbyist. Executive Director Katherine
Maher earned $356,641. The CFO and Treasurer (of the non-profit volunteer website) earned $260,519. The lowest-paid executives
are Chief of Community Engagement Angela Reid ($154,707) and Director of Engineering Trevor Parscal ($127,547). Yes, you read
that right: the two people in charge of the community that creates the content and keeping the site lit up -- the only two
things the vast majority of us care about -- are, by far, the lowest-paid.
Wikimedia's
2017 Form 990
There's something poetic about a seemingly insignificant edit on the Archie McCardell page reframing the core brand of
Wikipedia as the monopolist that it is. If any executive could screw up something from the grave, a dozen years after his
death, it's Archie. Still, he also has a history of leaving interesting ideas in his wake of destruction. One of those
ideas is that it's long past time to recognize the value of researchers and writers, to label Wikipedia the monopolist that
it is, and to reorient public perception towards the site to recognize its economically destructive nature on individual
independent researchers and journalists.
I agree wholeheartedly
with this pinned tweet by Katherine Maher but disagree entirely that Wikipedia does this. Enabling creepy anonymous unpaid
editors and providing free content for search engines to bypass independent writers achieves the opposite of this goal.
The plan now, on the part of the Swamp, is to declare every Trump supporter a terrorist and
an insurrectionist.
But we did not tear down statues of American heroes.
Antifa and BLM did that. We did not attack the police and call for them to be defunded or
fried like bacon. Antifa and BLM did that.
We did not burn and loot the business centers of dozens of America's major cities. Antifa
and BLM did that.
And what have Republican leaders done? They condemn you, anyone who dares to continue to
express support for Donald Trump, as a domestic terrorist. And when there was ample cause to
call out the real terrorists–Antifa and BLM–many of the Republican leaders cowered
and kept silent.
Trump the Manchurian Populist
He made a joke of foreign policy restraint (his restraint is worse than Obama's 'war') and he
ruined the career of good people like McGregor. McGregor is now toxic because of Trump.
Trump's domestic policies failed. He gave us $8T of new debt.
Operation Warp speed had a warp core
breach . What happened to the 300M doses we were supposed to have in Jan, we only have
30M doses, where did the reserve go?
Yeah, this "America First" so-called "populist" also weaponized space, doubled-down on
Israel and ME idiocy, supported a coup in Venezuela (including seizing Venezuelan State
assets), cut taxes (yet again), and lied about the seriousness of the virus.
Oh, and no pardon for Assange or Snowden to support whistle-blowers and independent
journalism that keep the Deep State (that Trump supposedly fights) in check.
"... No examination of Neoliberalism's utter failure to deliver benefits to the masses while expropriating the wealth they produced for delivery to the class of Financial Parasites. At least the writers at Global Times get it right: ..."
Global
Times reports on an essay published by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (Check it out b or other German barflies) deeming " China's system, although
'authoritarian,' is 'very successful .'" [My Emphasis]
"It explained that as long as a society can reach the following goals - improving social
welfare, increasing consumption choices, safeguarding domestic security, promoting education,
and providing good healthcare - people will support and trust the system even if their
influence in the decision-making process is limited. Such can 'in part ensure the legitimacy'
of the social system....
"But the authors' introspection stopped from digging problems as they tried to shift blame
to the rise of populism in the US."
No examination of Neoliberalism's utter failure to deliver benefits to the masses
while expropriating the wealth they produced for delivery to the class of Financial
Parasites. At least the writers at Global Times get it right:
"Populism, which helped crown Donald Trump, is being blamed today. Yet it all started
from the widening gap between rich and poor. When German scholars use the US populist
government as a scapegoat, they overlooked the real question - without addressing the
growing inequality in a Western system, will there be a second Trump in the future?" [My
Emphasis]
The fatal thrust is delivered in the two closing paragraphs but still omit naming the
actual culprit, which is the ideology of Neoliberalism:
"The article raised the support and trust of people when it comes to judgment over the
legitimacy of a society. In this regard, data speak louder than words. According to a poll
conducted in 2020 by US-based global public relations and marketing consultancy firm Edelman,
95 percent of Chinese trust their government while the US government only saw an approval of
48 percent .
"What other excuses will the Western world have to question the legitimacy of the Chinese
system? If the West, especially the US, the beacon of democracy, actually senses the crisis
and does not wish to lose the competition, it should stop burying its head in the sand." [My
Emphasis]
The problem isn't heads being buried in sand; rather, it's the design of the ideology to
exploit and degrade a nation's masses so they're left with relatively nothing compared to the
nation's Financial Parasites, all so the latter will always have their Free Unearned
Lunch.
Thanks for the link to the Rostislav Ischenko article. Are you making the translations of
these Russian analyses? I'm grateful to whomever is doing them - the translators are the
heroes of the information war. By the way, I think plenty of people here would recognize
Ischenko's name and would be glad to know about his articles if you link another in future -
it could easily get missed the way you linked it.
~~
Ischenko has some interesting things to say about the US dystopia from a Russian
perspective. He speaks of the oligarchs no longer needing a home country - which we've
discussed here before - and that they may now feel powerful enough to take on any country in
the world.
All of this, Russia should watch with careful interest.
The American oligarchy no longer needs a strong state. They need power over its remnants.
... As I wrote above, the actions already taken and the future actions of the Democrats are
destroying American statehood. However, the American oligarchy felt itself global and
became so insolent that it is no longer afraid of being left without a state behind its
back, hoping that if they had enough of their own resources to seize America, then they
would have enough to defend their interests in a changing world.
Why is it important for us to thoroughly understand what is happening in the United
States? Because the left-liberal (including pseudo-communist) movements around the world
are guided by the financial oligarchy...They really work to destroy the state.
[...]
Whatever they think, de facto they are doing it in the interests of the trans-national
oligarchy, the global financial capital, which is ready to devour the corpses of the USA,
Russia, China, the EU and others, just as it is now devouring the corpse of Ukraine. Strong
bureaucratic republics hinder them in this regard. They don't need strong states. They
want tiny debris.
That is why the internal political struggle in the United States is not just an
interesting spectacle for us, but a scientific experimental base for the struggle for our
statehood against international financial capital (transnational globalist oligarchy) and
its left-liberal mercenaries.
I think this is the overarching view of what's happening in the US and the world today.
Oligarchic power and riches are now so great and so globally mobile that nation-states are
simply getting in the way of the plunder.
~~
In my opinion, the very rich of this world actually do have a solution to climate change
and resource depletion, and they didn't have to think very hard to see what to them is
obvious. As they break up societies to make the plunder easier, they also imperil millions
and ultimately billions of people, who will quickly die and relieve the burden on planetary
resources.
This is why chaos is success for them. There is no plan to save anything except their own
riches. Everything and everyone else can fade away. We spoke of steady-state economies the
other day, and the very rich are now prepared to live in one - their own. New world order is
a red herring anymore. They don't want to rule anything. They just want it all to go
away.
They, the rich, have come up with the obvious, brilliant solution to all recent problems
of this world. We the people are the largest ingredient of these planetary problems.
Obviously, we'll have to go. And as this happens, the rich will exuberantly - with great zest
- increase their own wealth from the very crumbling of former societies.
Hillary Clinton & Nancy Pelosi suggest Putin ORDERED Trump to launch Capitol siege in
unhinged interview
Sad news (for American society), but not surprising.
I can only repeat that democratic elites (although the Republicans are far from ideal either)
are mentally unstable, they have serious brain problems. In the direct/medical sense of the
word. There is no joke or metaphor here.
Their bizarre manic obsession with Putin/Russia is striking. These people have
invented/artificially created for themselves some kind of alternative reality, where Russia
"threatens them", where "Putin wants to undermine world democracy", where "Putin can order
Trump to storm the Capitol" and other such nonsense of a sick imagination. Frankly, I am
somewhat alarmed that the Americans are consistently choosing a leadership suffering from
such a serious mental disorder.
These people created a Big Lie about Russia, believed in it themselves, act (make
political decisions, official statements, etc.) on the basis of this Big Lie, and who can
give a guarantee that one day they will not press the nuclear button when the mass of their
inadequate action (based on a Big Lie) will exceed the critical threshold?
All this wild hysteria with inauguration - an unprecedented 26,000(!) thousand soldiers,
several lines of fences, barbed wire, absolutely insane statements by the Democrats, frenzied
censorship, repression against disloyal - only confirms the illegality of the seizure of
power by the Democrats. They know very well that in reality they would not have won the
elections without falsifications. They have essentially carried out a coup. After the seizure
of power, their regime is unstable and is in danger for several weeks/months. To
strengthen/stabilize their regime, they resort to all these insane actions and statements.
The disagreement of the disloyal must be suppressed in the bud, not to be allowed to grow
into stable resistance.
The very fact that Trump (and millions of his supporters) resisted until the end, refusing
to accept the election results, is, if you will, a moral delegitimization of the power of the
Democrats. Probably, this is one of the reasons for the brutal hatred of the Democrats
towards the outgoing president, expressed in the ridiculous decision on a second impeachment.
And this is the reason for the need for 26,000 soldiers to protect the "elected president"
from essentially his own people.
A good recent
article by a Russian political scientist examines opposition to Trump from the
perspective of the interests of the American oligarchy.
After condemning the pro-Trump invasion of the Capitol, the incoming Biden administration
invited Carlos Vecchio – a coup leader charged in the 2014 torching of the Venezuelan
Attorney General's office – to its inaugural ceremony.
"Neoliberalism and imperialism do not care about the pseudo-fights between the two
parties or the cable TV bickering of the day. They do not like the far left or the far right.
They do not like extremism of any kind. They do not support Communism and they do not support
neo-Nazism or some fascist revolution. They care only about one thing: disempowering and
crushing anyone who dissents from and threatens their hegemony. They care about stopping
dissidents. All the weapons they build and institutions they assemble -- the FBI, the DOJ,
the CIA, the NSA, oligarchical power -- exist for that sole and exclusive purpose, to fortify
their power by rewarding those who accede to their pieties and crushing those who do
not."
the democrats are led by a bunch of international sociopaths, pariahs, billionaire
psychopaths, paranoid schizos, think tank imbeciles, and endless-war mongers - all of this
fully enabled by a sycophantic a**-kissing and biased press which also has lost its common
sense and collective mind. very sad!!!
I particularly like glenn Greenwald's take on some of this insanity...
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
Remember when Mueller spent 18 months and millions of dollars armed with a team of
prosecutors and subpoena power, then closed his investigation after arresting *zero*
Americans for conspiring with Russia?
Let's do it again! Anything to distract from how rotted neoliberalism is:
LOL. In that above clip, Hillary Clinton explicitly suggests that Trump was plotting with
Putin on the day of the Capitol Riots, as if Putin directed it.
These people are the *last* ones with any moral standing to rant about conspiracy theories
& disinformation.
Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar last month took a hard look at rent and rent-seeking at
the Henry George School of Social Science.
Michael Hudson: Well, I'm honored to be here on the same show with Pepe and discuss our
mutual concern. And I think you have to frame the whole issue that China is thriving, and the
West has reached the end of the whole 75-year expansion it had since 1945.
So, there was an illusion that America is de-industrializing because of competition from
China. And the reality is there is no way that America can re-industrialize and regain its
export markets with the way that it's organized today, financialized and privatized and if
China didn't exist. You'd still have the Rust Belt rusting out. You'd still have American
industry not being able to compete abroad simply because the cost structure is so high in the
United States.
Michael Hudson. (Wikimedia Commons)
The wealth is no longer made here by industrializing. It's made financially, mainly by
making capital gains. Rising prices for real estate or for stocks and for bonds. In the last
nine months, since the coronavirus came here, the top 1 percent of the U.S. economy grew by $1
trillion. It's been a windfall for the 1 percent. The stock market is way up, the bond market
is up, the real estate market is up while the rest of the economy is going down. Despite the
tariffs that Trump put on, Chinese imports, trade with China is going up because we're just not
producing materials.
America doesn't make its own shoes. It doesn't make some nuts and bolts or fasteners, it
doesn't make industrial things anymore because if money is to be made off an industrial company
it's to buy and sell the company, not to make loans to increase the company's production. New
York City, where I live, used to be an industrial city and, the industrial buildings, the
mercantile buildings have all been gentrified into high-priced real estate and the result is
that Americans have to pay so much money on education, rent, medical care that if they got all
of their physical needs, their food, their clothing, all the goods and services for nothing,
they still couldn't compete with foreign labor because of all of the costs that they have to
pay that are essentially called rent-seeking.
Housing in the United States now absorbs about 40 percent of the average worker's paycheck.
There's 15 percent taken off the top of paychecks for pensions, Social Security and for
Medicare. Further medical insurance adds more to the paycheck, income taxes and sales taxes add
about another 10 percent. Then you have student loans and bank debt. So basically, the American
worker can only spend about one third of his or her income on buying the goods and services
they produce. All the rest goes into the FIRE sector -- the finance, insurance and real estate
sector -- and other monopolies.
And essentially, we became what's called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy.
So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is
confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?
America used to have industrial capitalism in the 19th century. That's how it got richer
originally but now it's moved away from industrial capitalism towards finance capitalism. And
what that means is that essentially the mixed economy that made America rich -- where the
government would invest in education and infrastructure and transportation and provide these at
low costs so that the employers didn't have to pay labor to afford high costs -- all of this
has been transformed over the last hundred years.
And we've moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism. Before, the
idea of capitalism in the 19th century from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to John Stuart Mill to Marx
was very clear and Marx stated it quite clearly; capitalism was revolutionary. It was to get
rid of the landlord class. It was to get rid of the rentier class. It was to get rid of the
banking class essentially, and just bear all the costs that were unnecessary for production,
because how did England and America and Germany gain their markets?
"We've moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism."
They gained their markets basically by the government picking up a lot of the costs of the
economy. The government in America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided
transportation at subsidized prices. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. And so,
government infrastructure was considered a fourth factor of production.
And if you read what the business schools in the late 19th century taught like Simon Patten
at the Wharton School, it's very much like socialism. In fact, it's very much like what China
is doing. And in fact, China is following in the last 30 or 40 years pretty much the same way
of getting rich that America followed.
It had its government fund basic infrastructure. It provides low-cost education. It invests
in high-speed railroads and airports, in the building of cities. So, the government bears most
of the costs and, that means that employers don't have to pay workers enough to pay a student
loan debt. They don't have to pay workers enough to pay enormous rent such as you have in the
United States. They don't have to pay workers to save for a pension fund, to pay the pension
later on. And most of all the Chinese economy doesn't really have to pay a banking class
because banking is the most important public utility of all. Banking is what China has kept in
the hands of government and Chinese banks don't lend for the same reasons that American banks
lend.
Shanghai's Pudong district from The Bund. (CC0, Wikimedia Commons)
(When I said that China can pay lower wages than the U.S., what I meant was that China
provides as public services many things that American workers have to pay out of their own
pockets – such as health care, free education, subsidized education, and above all, much
lower debt service.
When workers have to go into debt in order to live, they need much higher wages to keep
solvent. When they have to pay for their own health insurance, they have to earn more. The same
is true of education and student debt. So much of what Americans seem to be earning -- more
than workers in other countries -- goes right through their hands to the FIRE sector. So, what
seems to be "low wages" in China go a lot further than higher wages in the United States.)
Eighty percent of American bank loans are mortgage loans to real estate and the effect of
loosening loan standards and increasing the market for real estate is to push up the cost of
living, push up the cost of housing. So, Americans have to pay more and more money for their
housing whether they're renters or they're buyers, in which case the rent is for paying
mortgage interest.
So, all of this cost structure has been built into the economy. China's been able pretty
much, to avoid all of this, because its objective in banking is not to make a profit and
interest, not to make capital gains and speculation. It creates money to fund actual means of
production to build factories, to build research and development, to build transportation
facilities, to build infrastructure. Banks in America don't lend for that kind of thing.
"So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States
and China."
They only lend against collateral that's already in place because they won't make a loan if
it's not backed by collateral. Well, China creates money through its public banks to create
capital, to create the means of production. So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how
to develop between the United States and China.
The United States has decided not to gain wealth by actually investing in means of
production and producing goods and services, but in financial ways. China is gaining wealth the
old-fashioned way, by producing it. And whether you call this, industrial capitalism or a state
capitalism or a state socialism or Marxism, it basically follows the same logic of real
economics, the real economy, not the financial overhead. So, you have China operating as a real
economy, increasing its production, becoming the workshop of the world as England used to be
called and America trying to draw in foreign resources, live off of foreign resources, live by
trying to make money by investing in the Chinese stock market or now, moving investment banks
into China and making loans to China not actual industrial capitalism ways.
"China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it."
So, you could say that America has gone beyond industrial capitalism, and they call it the
post-industrial society, but you could call it the neo-feudal society. You could call it the
neo-rentier society, or you could call it debt peonage but it's not industrial capitalism.
And in that sense, there's no rivalry between China and America. These are different systems
going their own way and I better let Pepe pick it up from there.
Pepe Escobar : Okay. Thank you, Michael, this is brilliant. And you did it in less than 15
minutes. You told the whole story in 15 minutes. Well, my journalistic instinct is immediately
to start questions to Michael. So, this is exactly what I'm gonna do now. I think it is much
better to basically illustrate some points of what Michael just said, comparing the American
system, which is finance capitalism essentially, with industrial capitalism that is in effect
in China. Let me try to start with a very concrete and straight to the point question,
Michael.
Okay. let's says that more or less, if we want to summarize it, basically they try to tax
the nonproductive rentier class. So, this would be the Chinese way to distribute wealth, right?
Sifting through the Chinese economic literature, there is a very interesting concept, which is
relatively new (correct me if I am wrong, Michael) in China, which they call stable investment.
So stable investment, according to the Chinese would be to issue special bonds as extra capital
in fact, to be invested in infrastructure building all across China, and they choose these
projects in what they call weak areas and weak links. So probably in some of the inner
provinces, or probably in some parts of Tibet or Xinjiang for instance. So, this is a way to
invest in the real economy and in real government investment projects.
Right? So, my question in fact, is does this system create extra local debt, coming directly
from this financing from Beijing? Is this a good recipe for sustainable development, the
Chinese way and the recipe that they could expand to other parts of the Global South?
Michael: Well, this is a big problem that they're discussing right now. The localities,
especially rural China, (and China is still largely rural) only cover about half of their
working budget from taxation. So, they have a problem. How are they going to get the balance of
the money? Well, there is no official revenue sharing between the federal government and its
state banks and the localities.
So, the localities can't simply go to central government and say, give us more money. The
government lets the localities be very independent. And it is sort of the "let a hundred
flowers bloom" concept. And so, they've let each locality just go the long way, but the
localities have run a big deficit.
What do they do? Well in the United States they would issue bonds on which New York is about
to default. But in China, the easiest way for the localities to make money, is unfortunately
they will do something like Chicago did. They will sell their tax rights for the next 75 years
for current money now.
So, a real estate developer will come in and say; look we will give you the next 75 years of
tax on this land, because we want to build projects on this (a set of buildings). So, what this
means is that now the cities have given away all their source of rent.
Chicago's Water Tower
and Water Tower Place. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Let me show you the problem by what Indiana and Chicago did. Chicago also was very much like
China's countryside cities. So, it sold parking meters and its sidewalks to a whole series of
Wall Street investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund for seventy-five years. And that
meant that for 75 years, this Wall Street consortium got to control the parking meters.
So, they put up the parking meters all over Chicago, raised the price of parking, raised the
cost of driving to Chicago. And if Chicago would have a parade and interrupt parking, then
Chicago has to pay the Abu Dhabi fund and Wall Street company what it would have made anyway.
And this became such an awful disaster that finally Wall Street had to reverse the deal and
undo it because it was giving privatization a bad name here. The same thing happened in
Indiana.
High School marching band in Chicago's 2008 Bud Billiken Parade. (Curtis Morrow, CC
BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Indiana was running a deficit and it decided to sell its roads to a Wall Street investment
firm to make a toll road. The toll on the Indiana turnpike was so high that drivers began to
take over the side roads. That's the problem if you sell future tax revenues in advance.
Now what China and the localities there are discussing is that we've already given the real
estate tax at very low estimates to the commercial developers, so what do we do? Well, I've
given them my advice. I'm a professor of economics at the Peking University, School of Marxist
studies and I've had discussions with the Central Committee. I also have an official position
at Wuhan University. There, we're discussing how China can put an added tax for all of the
valuable land, that's gone up. How can it be done to let the cities collect this tax? Our claim
is that the cities, in selling these tax rights for 75 years, have sold what in Britain would
be called ground rent (i.e. what's paid to the landed aristocracy).
Over and above that there's the market rent. So, China should pass a market-rent tax over
and above the ground rent tax to reflect the current value. And there they're thinking of,
well, do we say that this is a capital gain on the land? Well, it's not really a capital gain
until you sell the land, but it's value. It's the valuation of the capital. And they're looking
at whether they should just say this is the market rent tax over and above the flat tax that
has been paid in advance, or it's a land tax on the capital gain for land.
Now, all of this requires that there be a land map of the whole country. And they are just
beginning to create such a land map as a basis for how you calculate how much the rent there
is.
What I found in China is something very strange. A few years ago, in Beijing, they had the
first, International Marxist conference where I was the main speaker and I was talking about
Marx's discussion of the history of rent theory in Volume II and Volume III of Capital
where Marx discusses all of the classical economics that led up to his view; Adam Smith,
Ricardo, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Marx's theory of surplus value was really the first
history of economic thought that was written, although it wasn't published until after he died.
Well, you could see that there was a little bit of discomfort with some of the Marxists at the
conference. And so, they invited for the next time my colleague David Harvey to come and talk
about Marxism in the West.
Well, David gave both the leading and the closing speech of the conference and said, you've
got to go beyond volume I of Capital . Volume I was what Marx wrote as his addition to
classical economics, saying that there was exploitation in industrial employment of labor as
well as rent seeking and then he said, now that I've done my introduction here, let me talk
about how capitalism works in Volumes II and III. Volumes II and III are all about rent and
finance and David Harvey has published a book on Volume III of Capital and his message
to Peking University and the second Marxist conference was – you've got to read Volume
II, and III.
Well, you can see that, there's a discussion now over what is Marxism and a friend and
colleague at PKU said Marxism is a Chinese word; It's the Chinese word for politics. That made
everything clear to me. Now I get it! I've been asked by the Academy of Social Sciences in
China to create a syllabus of the history of rent theory and value theory. And essentially in
order to have an idea of how you calculate rent, how do you make a national income analysis
where you show rent, you have to have a theory of value and price and rent is the excess of
price over the actual cost value. Well, for that you need a concept of cost of production and
that's what classical economics is all about. Post-classical economics denied all of this. The
whole idea of classical economics is that not all income is earned.
Landlords don't earn their income for making rent in their sleep as John Stuart Mill said.
Banks don't earn their income by just sitting there and letting debts accrue and interest
compounding and doubling. The classical economists separated actual unearned income from the
production and consumption economy.
Well, around the late 19th century in America, you had economists fighting against not only
Marx, but also even against Henry George, who at that time, was urging a land tax in New York.
And so, at Columbia University, John Bates Clark developed a whole theory that everybody earns
whatever they can get. That there was no such thing as unearned income and that has become the
basis for American national income statistics and thought ever since. So, if you look at
today's GDP figures for the United States, they have a figure for 8 percent of the GDP for the
homeowners' rent. But homeowners wouldn't pay themselves if they had to rent the apartment to
themselves, then you'll have interest at about 12 percent of GDP.
And I thought, well how can interest be so steady? What happens to all of the late fees;
that 29 percent that credit card companies charge? I called up the national income people in
Washington, when I was there. And they said well, late fees and penalties are considered
financial services.
And so, this is what you call a service economy. Well, there's no service in charging a late
fee, but they add all of the late fees. When people can't pay their debts and they owe more and
more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP. When housing becomes more expensive and
prices American labor out of the market, that's called an increase in GDP.
This is not how a country that wants to develop is going to create a national income
account. So, there's a long discussion in China about, just to answer your question, how do you
create an account to distinguish between what's the necessary cost to production and what's an
unnecessary production cost and how do we avoid doing what the United States did. So again, no
rivalry. The United States is an object lesson for China on what to avoid, not only in
industrializing the economy, but in creating a picture of the economy as if everybody earns
everything and there's no exploitation, no earned income, nobody makes money in their sleep and
there's no 1 percent. Well, that's what's really at issue and why the whole world is splitting
apart as you and I are discussing in what we're writing.
"When people can't pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an
addition to GDP."
Pepe: Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. So just to sum it all up, can we say that
Beijing's strategy is to save especially provincial areas from leasing their land, their
infrastructure for 60 years or 75 years? As you just mentioned, can we say that the fulcrum of
their national strategy is what you define as the market rent tax? Is this the No. 1 mechanism
that they are developing?
Michael: Ideally, they want to keep rents as low as possible because rent is a cost of
living and a cost of doing business. They don't have banks that are lending to inflate the real
estate market.
However, in almost every Western country -- the U.S., Germany England -- the value of stocks
and bonds and the value of real estate is just about exactly the same. But for China, the value
of real estate is way, way larger than the value of stocks.
And the reason is not because the Chinese Central bank, the Bank of China lends for real
estate; it's because they lend to intermediaries and the intermediaries have financed a lot of
housing purchases in China. And, this is really the problem for if they levy a land tax, then
you're going to make a lot of these financial intermediaries go bust.
That's what I'm advocating, and I don't think that's a bad thing. These financial
intermediaries shouldn't exist, and this same issue came up in 2009 in the United States. You
had the leading American bank being the most crooked and internally corrupt bank in the
country, Citibank making junk mortgage, and it was broke.
Sheila Bair in 2016. (Matt
Spangler for Washington College, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Its entire net worth was wiped out as a result of its fraudulent junk mortgages. Well,
Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) wanted to close it
down and take it over. Essentially that would have made it into a public bank and that would be
a wonderful thing. She said, look Citibank shouldn't be doing what it's doing. And she wrote
all this up in an autobiography. And, she was overruled by President Obama and Tim Geithner
saying, but wait a minute, those are our campaign contributors. So, they were loyal to the
campaign contributors, but not the voters; and they didn't close Citibank down.
And the result is that the Federal Reserve ended up creating about $7 trillion of
quantitative easing to bail out the banks. The homeowners weren't bailed out. Ten million
American families lost their homes as a result of junk mortgages in excess of what the property
was actually worth.
All of this was left on the books, foreclosed and sold to a private capital companies like
Blackstone. And the result is that home ownership in America declined from 68 percent of the
population down to about 61 percent. Well, right where the Obama administration left off,
you're about to have the Biden administration begin in January with an estimated 5 million
Americans losing their homes. They're going to be evicted because they've been unemployed
during the pandemic. They've been working in restaurants or gyms or other industries that have
been shut down because of the pandemic. They're going to be evicted and many homeowners and,
low-income homeowners have been unable to pay their mortgages.
There's going to be a wave of foreclosures. The question is, who's going to bear the cost?
Should it be 15 million American families who lose their homes just so the banks won't lose
money? Or should we let the banks that have made all of the growth since 2008? Ninety five
percent of American GDP of the population has seen its wealth go down. All the wealth has been
accumulating for the 5 percent in statistics. Now the question is should this 5 percent that's
got all the wealth lose or should the 95 percent lose?
Worker installs security panels over
windows after police evict woman from her foreclosed home in South Minneapolis, 2009. (Tony
Webster, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The Biden administration says the 95 percent should lose basically. And you're going to see
a wave of closures so that the question in China should be that, these intermediate banks
(they're not really banks they are sort of like payday loan lenders), should they come in and,
bear the loss or should Chinese localities and the people bear the loss? Somebody has to lose
when you're charging, you're collecting the land's rent that was paid to the creditors, and
either the creditors have to lose or, the tax collector loses and that's the conflict that
exists in every society of the world today. And, in the West, the idea is the tax collectors
should lose and whatever the tax collector relinquishes should be free for the banks to
collect. In China obviously, they don't want that to happen and they don't want to see a
financial class developing along US lines.
Pepe: Michael, there's a quick question in all this, which is the official position by
Beijing in terms of helping the localities. Their official position is that there won't be any
bailouts of local debt. How do they plan to do that?
Michael: What they're discussing, how are you not going to do it? They think they sort of
let localities go their own way. And they think, well you know which ones are going to succeed,
and which ones aren't, they didn't want to have a one-size-fits all central planning. They
wanted to have flexibility. Well, now they have flexibility. And when you have many different
"let a hundred flowers bloom," not all the flowers are going to bloom at the same rate.
And the question is, if they don't bail out the cities, how are the cities going to operate?
Certainly, China has never let markets steer the economy, the government steers the markets.
That's what socialism is as opposed to finance capitalism. So, the question is, you can let
localities go broke and yet you're not going to destroy any of the physical assets of the
localities, and all of this is going to be in place. The question is how are you going to
arrange the flow of income to all of these roads and buildings and land that's in place? How do
you create a system? Essentially, they're saying well, if we're industrial engineers, how do we
just plan things? Forget credit, forget property claims, forget the rentier claims. How are we
just going to design an economy that operates most efficiently? And that's what they're working
on now to resolve this situation because it's gotten fairly critical.
Pepe: Yes, especially in the countryside. Well, I think, a very good metaphor in terms of
comparing both systems are investment in infrastructure. You travel to China a lot so, you've
seen. You'll travel through high-speed rail. You'll see those fantastic airports, in Pudong or
the new airport in Beijing. And then you'll take the Acela to go from Washington to New York
City, which is something that I used to do years ago. And the comparison is striking. Isn't
it?
Or if you go to France, for instance, when France started development of the TGV, which in
terms of a national infrastructure network, is one of the best networks on the planet. And the
French started doing this 30 years ago, even more. Is there , it's not in terms of way out, but
if we analyze the minutia, it's obvious that following the American finance utilization system,
we could never have something remotely similar happening in United States in terms of building
infrastructure.
So, do you see any realistic bypass mechanism in terms of improving American infrastructure,
especially in the big cities?
TGV 2N2 Lyria train at Paris' Gare de Lyon station. (CC BY-SA
4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Michael: No, and there are two reasons for that. No. 1, let's take a look at the long-term
railroads. The railroads go through the center of town or even in the countryside, all along
the railroads, the railroads brought business and all the businesses had been located as close
to the railroad tracks as they could. Factories with sightings off the railroad, hotels and
especially right through the middle of town where you have the railway gates going up and down.
In order to make a high-speed rail as in China, you need a dedicated roadway without trucks and
cars, imagine a car going through a railway gate at 350 miles an hour.
So, when I would go from Beijing to Tianjin, here's the high-speed rail, there's one highway
on one side, one highway on the other side. There'll be underpasses. But there it goes straight
now. How can you suppose you would have a straight Acela line from Washington up to Boston when
all along the line, there's all this real estate right along the line that has been built up?
There's no way you can get a dedicated roadway without having to tear down all of this real
estate that's on either side and the cost of making the current owners whole would be
prohibitive. And anywhere you would go, that's not in the center of the city, you would also
have to have the problem that there's already private property there.
And there's no legal, constitutional way for such a physical investment to be made. China
was able to make this investment because it was still largely rural. It wasn't as built up
along the railways. It didn't have any particular area that was built up right where the
railroad already was.
President Donald Trump visiting China in 2017. (PAS China via
Wikimedia Commons)
So certainly, any high-speed rail could not go where the current railways would be, and
they'd have to go on somebody's land. And, there's also, what do you do if you want to get to
New York and Long Island from New Jersey?
Sixty years ago, when I went into Wall Street, the cost of getting and transporting goods
from California to Newark, New Jersey, was as large as from Newark right across the Hudson
River to New York, not only because of the mafia and control of the local labor unions, but
because of the tunnels. Right now, the tunnels from New Jersey to New York are broke, they are
leaking, the subways in New York City, which continually break down because there was a
hurricane a few years ago and the switches were made in the 1940s. The switches are 80 years
old. They had water damage and the trains have to go at a crawl. But the city and state,
because it is not collecting the real estate tax and other taxes and because ridership fell on
the subways to about 20 percent, the city's broke. They're talking about 70 percent of city
services being cut back. They're talking about cutting back the subways to 40 percent capacity,
meaning everybody will have to get in -- when there's still a virus and not many people are
wearing masks, and there was no means of enforcing masks here.
Blue Xs mark social
distancing on the platform of a New York City subway station, May 2020. (Marc A. Hermann, MTA,
Wikimedia Commons)
So, there's no way that you can rebuild the infrastructure because, for one thing the
banking system here has subsidized for a hundred years junk economics saying you have to
balance the budget. If the government creates credit it's inflationary as if when banks create
credit, it's not inflationary. Well, the monetary effect is the same, no matter who creates the
money. And so, Biden has already said that President Trump ran a big deficit, we're going to
run a bunch of surpluses or a budget balance. And he was advocating that all along. Essentially
Biden is saying we have to increase unemployment by 20 percent, lower wages by 20 percent,
shrink the economy by about 10 percent in order to, in order for the banks not to lose
money.
"You're going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say
that public investment is socialism."
And, we're going to privatize but we are going to do it by selling the hospitals, the
schools, the parks, the transportation to finance, to Wall Street finance capital groups. And
so, you can imagine what's going to happen if the Wall Street groups buy the infrastructure.
They'll do what happened to Chicago when it sold all the parking meters, they'll say, OK,
instead of 25 cents an hour, it's now charged $3 an hour. Instead of a $2 for the subway, let's
make it $8.
You're going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say
that public investment is socialism. Well, it's not socialism. It's industrial capitalism. It's
industrialization, that's basic economics. The idea of what, and how an economy works is so
twisted academically that it's the antithesis of what Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill and Marx
all talked about. For them a free- market economy was an economy free of rentiers. Free of
rent, it didn't have any rent seeking. But now for the Americans, a free-market economy is free
for the rentiers, free for the landlord, free for the banks to make a killing. And that is
basically the class war back in business with a vengeance. That blocks and is preventing any
kind infrastructure recovery. I don't see how it can possibly take place.
Pepe: Well, based on what you just described, there is a process of turning the United
States into a giant Brazil. In fact, this is what the Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes,
a Pinochetista, as you know Michael, has been doing with the Brazilian economy for the past two
years, privatizing everything and selling everything to big Brazilian interests and with lots
of Wall Street interests involved as well. So, this is a recipe that goes all across the Global
South as well. And it's fully copied all across the Global South with no way out now.
Michael: Yes, and this is promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
And when I was brought down to Brazil to meet with the council of economic advisers under Lula,
[Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil], they said, well the whole
problem is that Lula's been obliged to let the banks do the planning.
So, basically free markets and libertarianism is adopting central planning, but with central
planning by the banks. America is a much more centrally planned economy than China. China is
letting a hundred flowers bloom; America has concentrated the planning and the resource
allocation in Wall Street. And that's the central planning that is much more corrosive than any
government planning, could be. Now the irony is that China's sending its students to America to
study economics. And, most of the Chinese I had talked to say, well we went to America to take
economics courses because that gives us a prestige here in China.
I'm working now, with Chinese groups trying to develop a "reality economics" to be taught in
China as different from American economics.
"America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And
that's the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could
be."
Pepe: Exactly, because of what they study at Beijing University, Renmin or Tsinghua
is not exactly what they would study in big American universities. Probably what they study
in the U.S. is what not to do in China. When they go back to China, what they won't be doing.
It's an object lesson for what to avoid.
Michael, I'd like to go back to what the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa] had been discussing in the 2000s when Lula was still president of Brazil and many of
his ideas deeply impressed, especially Hu Jintao at the time, which is bypassing the U.S.
dollar. Well, at the moment obviously we're still at 87 percent of international transactions
still in U.S. dollars. So, we are very far away from it, but if you have a truly sovereign
economy, which is the case of China, which we can say is the case of Russia to a certain extent
and obviously in a completely different framework, Iran. Iran is a completely sovereign,
independent economy from the West. The only way to try to develop different mechanisms to not
fall into the rentier mind space would be to bypass the U.S. dollar.
Occupy Wall Street
picket of HSBC, midtown Manhattan; Feb. 14, 2013. (Michael Fleshman Via Flickr)
Michael: Yes, for many reasons. For one thing the United States can simply print the dollars
and lend to other countries and then say, now you have to pay us interest. Well, Russia doesn't
need American dollars. It can print its own rubles to provide labor. There's no need for a
foreign currency at all for domestic spending, the only reason you would have to borrow a
foreign currency is to balance your exchange rate, or to finance a trade deficit. But China
doesn't have a trade deficit. And in fact, if China were to work to accept more dollars,
Americans would love to buy into the Chinese market and make a profit there, but that would
push up China's exchange rate and that would make it more difficult for her to make its exports
because the exchange rate would come up not because it's exporting more but because it's
letting American dollars come in and push it up.
Well, fortunately, President Trump as if he works for the Chinese National Committee, said,
look, we don't want to really hurt China by pushing up its currency and we want to keep it
competitive. So, I'm going to prevent American companies from lending money to China, I'm going
to isolate it and so he's helping them protect their economy. And in Russia he said, look
Russia really needs to feed itself. And, there's a real danger that when the Democrats come in,
there are a lot of anti-Russians in the Biden administration. They may go to war. They may do
to Russia what they tried to do to China in the '50s. Stop exporting food and grain. And only
Canada was able to break the embargo. So, we're going to impose sanctions on Russia. So
immediately, what happened is Russia very quickly became the largest grain exporter in the
world. And instead of importing cheese from the Baltics, it created its own cheese industry.
So, Trump said look, I know that Russians followed the American idea of not having protective
tariffs, they need protective tariffs. They're not doing it. We're going to help them out by
just not importing from them and really helping them.
Pepe: Yeah. Michael, what do you think Black Rock wants from the Chinese? You know that they
are making a few inroads at the highest levels? Of course, I'm sure you're aware of that. And
also, JP Morgan, Citybank, etc. What do they really want?
Michael: They'd like to be able to create dollars to begin to buy and make loans to real
estate; let companies grow, let the real estate market grow and make capital gains.
The way people get wealthy today isn't by making an income, it's been by making a capital
gain. Total returns are current income plus the capital gains. As for capital gains each year;
the land value gains alone are larger than the whole GDP growth from year to year. So that's
where the money is, that's where the wealth is. So, they are after speculative capital gains,
they would like to push money into the Chinese stock market and real estate market. See the
prices go up and then inflate the prices by buying in and then sell out at the high price. Pull
the money out, get a capital gain and let the economy crash, I mean that's the business
plan.
Pepe: Exactly. But Beijing will never allow that.
Michael: Well, here's the problem right now, they know that Biden is pushing militarily
aggressive people in his cabinet. There's one kind of overhead that China is really trying to
avoid and that's the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can't
spend it on the real economy. They're very worried about the military and they say, how do we
deter the Biden administration from actually trying a military adventure in the South China Sea
or elsewhere? They said well, fortunately America is multi-layered. They don't think of America
as a group. They realize there's a layer and they say, who's going to represent our
interests?
"There's one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that's the military
overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can't spend it on the real
economy."
Well, Blackstone and Wall Street are going to represent their interests. Then I think one of
the, Chinese officials last week gave a big speech on this very thing, saying look, our best
hope in stopping America's military adventurism in China is to have Wall Street acting as our
support because after all, Wall Street is the main campaign contributor and the president works
for the campaign contributors.
The politician works for the campaign contributors. They're in it for the money! So
fortunately, we have Wall Street on our side, we've got control of the political system and
they're not there to go to war so that helps explain why a month ago they let wholly-owned U.S.
banks and bankers in. On the one hand, they don't like the idea of somebody outside the
government creating credit for reasons that the economy doesn't need. If they needed it, the
Bank of China would do it. They have no need for foreign currency to come in to make loans in
domestic currency, out of China.
The only reason that they could do it is No. 1, it helps meet the World Trade Organization's
principles and, No. 2, especially during this formative few months of the Biden administration,
it helps to have Wall Street saying; we can make a fortune in China, go easy on them and that
essentially counters the military hawks in Washington.
Pepe: So, do you foresee a scenario when Black Rock starts wreaking havoc in the Shanghai
stock exchange for instance?
Wall Street, Nov. 21, 2009. (Dave Center, Flickr)
Michael: It would love to do that. It would love to move things up and down. The money's
made by companies with the stock market going up and down; the zigzag. So of course, it wants
to do a predatory zigzag. The question is whether China will impose a tax to stop this, all
sorts of financial transactions. That's what's under discussion now. They know exactly what
Black Rock wants to do because they have some very savvy billionaire Chinese advisers that are
quite good. I can tell you stories, but I better not.
Pepe: Okay. If it's not okay to tell it all, tell us part of the story then.
Michael: The American banks have been cultivating leading Chinese people by providing them
enough money to make money here, that they think that, okay they will now try to make money in
the same way in China and we can join in. It's a conflict of systems again, between the finance
capital system and industrial socialism. You don't get any of this discussion in the U.S.
press, which is why I read what you write because in the U.S. press, the neocons talk about the
fake idea of Greek history and fake idea of the Thucydides' problem of a country jealous of
another country's development.
There's no jealousy between America and China. They're different, they have their own way.
We are going to destroy them. And if you look at the analogy that the Americans draw -- and
this is how the Pentagon thinks -- with the war between Athens and Sparta. It's hard to tell,
which is which. Here you have Athens, a democracy backing other democracies and having the
military support of the democracies and the military in these democracies all had to pay Athens
protection money for the military support and that's the money that Athens got to ostensibly
support its navy and protection that built up all of the Athenian public buildings and
everything else. So, that's a democracy exploiting its allies, to enrich itself via the
military. Then you have Sparta, which was funding all of the oligarchies, and it was helping
the oligarchies overthrow democracies. Well, that was America too. So, America is both sides of
the Thucydides war if the democracy is exploiting the fellow democracies and is the supporter
of oligarchies in Brazil, Latin America, Africa and everyone else.
So, you could say the Thucydides problem was between two sides, two aspects of America and
has nothing to do with China at all except, for the fact that the whole war was a war between
economic systems. They're acting as if somehow if only China did not export to us, we could be
re-industrialized and somehow export to Europe and the Third World.
And as you and I have described, it's over. We painted ourselves into such a debt corner
that without writing down the debts, we're in the same position that the Eurozone is in.
There's so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there
is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth. And, since 1980 as you know,
real wages in America have been stable. All the growth has been in property owners and
predators and the FIRE sector, the rest of the economy is in stagnation. And now the
coronavirus has simply acted as a catalyst to make it very clear that the game is over; it's
time to move away from the homeowner economy to rentier economy, time for Blackstone to be the
landlord. America wants to recreate the British landlord class and essentially what we're
seeing now is like the Norman invasion of England taking over the land and the infrastructure.
That's what Blackstone would love to do in China.
"There's so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that
there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth."
Pepe: Wow. I'm afraid that they may have a lot of leeway by some members of the Beijing
leadership now, because as you know very well, it's not a consensus in the political arena.
Michael: We're talking about Volume II and III of Capital .
Pepe: Exactly. But you know, you were talking about debt. Coming back to that, in fact I
just checked this morning, apparently global debt as it stands today is $277 trillion, which is
something like 365 percent of global GDP. What does that mean in practice?
Michael: Yeah, well fortunately this is discussed in the 19th century and there was a word
for that -- fictitious capital -- it's a debt that can't be paid, but you'll keep it on the
books anyway. And every country has this. You could say the question now, and The Financial
Times just had an article a few days ago that China's claims on Third World countries on
the Belt and Road Initiative is fictitious capital, because how can it collect?
Well, China's already thought of that. It doesn't want money. It wants the raw materials. It
wants to be paid in real things. But a debt that can't be paid, can only be paid either by
foreclosing on the debtors or by writing down the debts and obviously a debt that can't be paid
won't be paid.
"Fictitious capital -- it's a debt that can't be paid, but you'll keep it on the books
anyway. And every country has this."
And so, you have not only Marx using the word fictitious capital. At the other end of the
spectrum, you had Henry George talking about fictive capital. In other words, these are
property claims that have no real capital behind them. There's no capital that makes profit.
That's just a property claim for payment or a rentier claim for payment.
So, the question is, can you make money somehow without having any production at all,
without having wages, without having profits, without any capital? Can you just have asset
grabbing and buying-and-selling assets? And as long as you have the Federal Reserve in America,
come in, Trump's $10 trillion Covid program gave $2 trillion to the population at large with
these $1,200 checks, that my wife and I got, and $8 trillion all just to buy stocks and bonds.
None of this was to build infrastructure. None of this $8 trillion was to build a single
factory. None of this 8 trillion was to employee a single worker. It was all just to support
the prices of stocks and bonds, and to keep the illusion that the economy had not stopped
growing. Well, it's growing for the 5 percent. So, it's all become fictitious. And if you look
at the GDP as I said, it's fictitious.
Pepe: And the most extraordinary thing is none of that is discussed in American media.
There's not a single word about what you would have been describing.
Michael: It's not even discussed in academia. Our graduates at the university of Missouri at
Kansas City, we're all trained in Modern Monetary Theory. And as hired professors they have to
be able to publish in the refereed journals and the refereed journals are all essentially
controlled by the Chicago School. So, you have a censorship of the kind of ideas that we're
talking about. You can't get it into the economic journals, so you can't get it into the
economics curriculum. So, where on earth are you going to get it? If you didn't have the
internet you wouldn't be discussing at all. Most of my books sell mainly in China, more than in
all the other countries put together so I can discuss these things there. I stopped publishing
in orthodox journals so many years ago because it's talking to the deaf.
"None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory, employee, a single worker."
Pepe: Absolutely. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about Russia, Michael? There is a raging,
debate in Russia for many years now between let's say the Eurasianists and the Atlanticists. It
involves of course, economic policy under Putin, industrial capitalism Russian style. The
Eurasianists basically say that the central problem with Russia is how the Russian central bank
is basically affiliated with all the mechanisms that you know so well, that it is an
Atlanticist Trojan Horse inside the Russian economy. How do you see it?
Michael: Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 . First
of all, the IMF announced in advance that there was a big meeting in Houston with the IMF and
the World Bank. And the IMF published all of its report saying, first you don't want inflation
in Russia so let's wipe out all of the Russian savings with hyperinflation, which they did.
They then said, well now to cure the hyperinflation the Russian central bank needs a stable
currency and you need a backup for the currency. You will need to back it with U.S.
dollars.
"Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991."
So, from the early 1990s, as you know, labor was going unpaid. The Russian central bank
could have created the rubles to pay the domestic labor and to keep the factories in place.
But, the IMF advisers from Harvard said, no you'll have to borrow U.S. dollars. I met with
people from the Hermitage Fund and the Renaissance Fund and others. We had meetings and I met
with the investors. Russia was paying 100 percent interest for years to leading American
financial institutions for money that it didn't need and could have created itself. Russia was
so dispirited with Stalinism that, essentially, it thought the opposite of Stalinism must be
what they have in America.
They thought that America was going to tell it how America got rich, but America didn't want
to tell Russia how it got rich, but instead wanted to make money off Russia. They didn't get
it. They trusted the Americans. They really didn't understand that, industrial capitalism that
Marx described had metamorphosized into finance capitalism and was completely different.
And that's because Russia didn't charge rent, it didn't charge interest. I gave three
speeches before the Duma, urging it to impose a land tax. Some of the people I noticed, Ed
Dodson was there with us and we were all trying to convince Russia, don't let this land be
privatized. If you let it be privatized, then you're going to have such high rents and housing
costs in Russia that you're not going to be able to essentially compete for an industrial
growth. Well, the politician who brought us there, Viatcheslav Zolensky was sort of maneuvered
out of the election by the American advisers.
The Americans put billions of dollars in to essentially finance American propagandists to
destroy Russia, mainly from the Harvard Institute of International Development. And
essentially, they were a bunch of gangsters and the prosecutors in Boston were about to
prosecute them.
The attorney general of Boston was going to bring a big case for Harvard against the looting
of Russia and the corruption of Russia. And I was asked to organize and to bring a number of
Russian politicians and industrialists over to say how this destroyed everything. Well, Harvard
settled out of court and essentially that made the perpetrators the leading university people
up there. (I'm associated with Harvard Anthropology Department, not the Economics
Department.)
So, we never had a chance to bring my witnesses, and have our report on what happened, but I
published for the Russian Academy of Sciences a long study of how all of this destruction of
Russia was laid out in advance at the Houston meetings by the IMF. America went to the leading
bureaucrats and said; look, we can make you rich why don't you register the factories in your
own name, and if you're registered in your own name, you know, then you'll own it. And then you
can cash out. You can essentially sell, but obviously you can't sell to the Russians because
the IMF has just wiped out all of their savings.
You can only cash out by selling to the West. And so, the Russian stock market became the
leading stock market in the world from 1994 with the Norilsk Nickel and the seven bankers in
the bank loans for shares deal through 1997. And, I had worked for a firm Scutter Stevens and,
the head adviser, a former student of mine didn't want to invest in Russia because she said,
this is just a rip off, it's going to crash. She was fired for not investing. They said look,
we know that's going to crash. That's the whole idea it's going to crash. We can make a mint
off it before the crash. And then when it crashes, we can make another mint by selling short
and then all over again . Well, the problem is that the system that was put in with the
privatization that's occurred, how do you have Russia's wealth used to develop its own industry
and its own economy like China was doing. Well, China has rules for all of this, but Russia
doesn't have rules, it's really all centralized, it's President Putin that keeps it this
way.
President Vladimir Putin meeting with German business executives, Nov. 1, 2018. (The
Kremlin)
Well, this was the great fear of the West. When you had Mikhail Gorbachev beginning to plan
to do pretty much what is done today, to restrain private capital, the IMF said hold off. We're
not going to make any loans to stabilize the Russian currency until you remove Mr.
Primakov.
The U.S. said we won't deal with Russia until you remove him. So, he was pushed out and he
was probably the smartest guy at the time there. So, they thought [President Vladimir] Putin
was going to be sort of the patsy. And he almost single-handedly, holding the oligarchs in and
saying, look, you can keep your money as long as you do exactly what the government would do.
You can keep the gains as long as you're serving the public interest.
But none of this resulted into a legal system, a tax system, and a system where the
government actually does get most of the benefits. Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the
most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people instead of
giving Norilsk Nickel and the oil companies to Yukos. It could have given everybody their own
house and their own apartment, the same thing in the Baltics. And instead it didn't give the
land out to the people. And Russians were paying 3 percent of their income for housing in 1990.
And rent is the largest element in every household's budget.
"Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by
giving all of the houses to its people."
So, Russia could have had low-price labor. It could have financed all of its capital
investment for the government by taxing, collecting the rising rental value. Instead, Russian
real estate was privatized on credit and it was even worse in the Baltics.
In Latvia, where I was research director for the Riga Graduate School of Law, Latvia
borrowed primarily from Swedish banks. And so, in order to buy a house, you had to borrow from
Swedish banks. And they said, well, we're not going to lend in the Latvian currency because it
can go down. So, you have a choice; Swiss Francs or German Marks or U.S. Dollars. And so, all
of this rent was paid in foreign currency. There came an outflow that essentially drained all
the Baltic economies. Latvia lost 20 percent of its population. Estonia and Lithuania followed
suit.
And of course, the worst hit by neo-liberalism was Russia. As you know, President Putin said
that neo-liberalism cost Russia more of its population than World War II. And you know that to
destroy a country, you don't need an army anymore. All you have to do is teach it American
economics.
Pepe: Yes, I remember well, I arrived in Russia in the winter of 91 coming from China. So, I
transited from the Chinese miracle. In fact, a few days after Deng Xiaoping's famous Southern
tour when he went to Guangzhou and Shenzhen. And that was the kick for the 1990s boom, in fact
a few years before the handover, and then I took the Trans-Siberian and I arrived in Moscow a
few days after the end, in fact, a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union.
But yeah, I remember the Americans arrived almost at the exact minute, wasn't it, Michael? I
think they already were there in the spring of 1992. If I'm not mistaken.
Michael: The Houston meeting was in 1990. But all before that already in, 1988 and 1989,
there was a huge outflow of embezzlement money via Latvia. The assistant dean of the university
who ended up creating Nordex, essentially the money was all flying out because Ventspils in
Latvia, was where Russian oil was exported and it was all fake invoicing. So, the Russian
kleptocrats basically made their money off false export invoicing, ostensibly selling it for
one price and having the rest paid abroad and, this was all organized through Latvia and the
man who did it later moved to Israel and finally gave a billion dollars back to Russia so that
he went on to live safely for the rest of his life in Israel.
Pepe: Well, the crash of the ruble in 1998 was what, roughly one year after the crash of the
baht and the whole Asian financial crisis, no? It was interlinked of course, but let me see if
I have a question for you, in fact, I'm just thinking out loud now. If the economies of
Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, the case of South Korea and Russia, were more integrated at
the time as they are trying to integrate now, do you think that the Asian financial crisis
would have been preventable in 1997?
Michael: Well, look at what happened in Malaysia with Mohammad Mahathir. Malaysia avoided
it. So of course, it was preventable, and they had the capital controls. All you would have
needed was to do what Malaysia did. But you needed an economic theory for that.
And essentially the current mode of warfare is to conquer the brains of a country to shape
how people think and how they perceive the economy. And if you can twist their view into an
unreality economics, where they think that you're there to help them not to take money out of
them, then you've got them hooked. That was what happened in Asia. Asia thought it was getting
rich off the dollars inflows and then the IMF and all the creditors pulled the plug, crash the
industry. And now that all of a sudden you had a crash, they bought up Korean industry and
other South Asian industries at giveaway prices.
That's what you do. You lend the money; you pull the plug. You then let them go under and
you pick up the pieces . That's what Blackstone did after the Obama depression began, when
Obama saved the banks, not the constituency, the mortgage borrowers. Essentially that's
Blackstone's modus operandi to pick up distressed prices at a bankruptcy sale, but you
need to lend money and then crash it in order to make that work.
Pepe: Michael, I think we have only five minutes left. So, I would expect you to go on a
relatively long answer and I'm really dying for it. It's about debt, it about the debt trap.
And it's about the New Silk Roads, the Belt and Road Initiative, because I think rounding up
our discussion and coming back to the theme of debt and global debt.
The No. 1 criticism apart from the demonization of China that you hear from American media
and a few American academics as well against the Belt and Road is that it's creating a debt
trap for Southeast Asian nations, Central Asian nations and nations in Africa, etc . Obviously,
I expect you to debunk that, but the framework is there is no other global development project
as extensive and as complex as Belt and Road, which as you know very well was initially dreamed
up by the Ministry of Commerce. Then they sold it more or less to Xi Jinping who got the
geopolitical stamp on it, announcing it, simultaneously, (which was a stroke of genius) in
Central Asia in Astana and then in Southeast Asia in Jakarta. So, he was announcing the
overland corridors through the heartland and the Maritime Silk Road at the same time.
At the time people didn't see the reach and depth of all that. And now of course, finally
the Trump administration woke up and saw what was in play, not only across Eurasia but reaching
Africa and even selected parts of Latin America as well. And obviously the only sort of
criticism, and it's not even a fact-based criticism, that I've seen about the Belt and Road is
it's creating a debt trap because as you know Laos is indebted, Sri Lanka is indebted,
Kyrgyzstan is indebted etc. So, how do you view Belt and Road within the large framework of the
West and China, East Asia and Eurasia relations? And how would you debunk misconceptions
created, especially in the U S that this is a debt trap.
Six proposed corridors of Belt and
Road Initiative, showing Italy inside circle, on maritime blue route. (Lommes, CC BY-SA 4.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
Michael: There are two points to answer there. The first is how the Belt and Road began. And
as you pointed out, the Belt and Road began, when China said, what is it we need to grow and
how do we grow within our neighboring countries so we don't have to depend upon the West, and
we don't have to depend on sea trade that can be shut down? How do we get to roads instead of
seas in a way that we can integrate our economy with the neighboring economies so that there
can be mutual growth?
So, this was done pretty much on industrial engineering grounds. Here's where you need the
roads and the railroads. And then how do we finance it? Well, The Financial Times
article, last week, said didn't the Chinese know that [with past] railroad development, they've
all gone broke? The Panama Canal went broke, you know, the first few times there were European
railway investment in Latin America in the 19th century, that all went broke.
Well, what they don't get is China's aim was not to make a profit off the railroads. The
railroads were built to be part of the economy. They don't want to make profit. It was to make
the real economy grow, not to make profits for the owners of the railroad stocks. The Western
press can't imagine that you're building a railroad without trying to make money out of it.
Then you get to the debt issue. Countries only have a debt crisis if their debt is in a
foreign currency. The first way that the United States gained power was to fight against its
allies. The great enemy of America was England and it made the British block their currency in
the 1940s. And so, India and other countries, that had all these currencies holdings in
sterling, were able to convert it all into dollars.
The whole move of the U.S. was to denominate world debt in dollars. So that No. 1, U.S.
banks would end up with the interest in financing the debt. And No. 2, the United States could,
by using the debt leverage, control domestic politics.
Well, as you're seeing right now in Argentina, for instance, Argentina is broke because it
owes foreign-dollar debt. When I started the first Third World bond fund in 1990 at Scutter
Stevens, Brazil and China and Argentina were paying 45 percent interest per year, 45 percent
per year in dollars debt. Yet we tried to sell them in America. No American would buy. We went
to Europe, no European buy this debt. And so, we worked with Merrill Lynch and Merrill Lynch
was able to make an offshore fund in the Dutch West Indies and all of the debt was sold to the
Brazilian ruling class in the central bank and the Argentinian bankers in the ruling class, we
thought oh, that's wonderful.
We know that they're going to pay the foreign Yankee Dollars debt because the Yankee Dollars
debt is owed to themselves. They're the Yankees! They're the client oligarchy. And you know,
from Brazil client oligarchy is, you know, they're cosmopolitan, that's the word. So, the
problem is that on the Belt and Road, how did these other countries pay the debt to China?
Well, the key there again is the de-dollarization, and one way to solve it is since we're
trying to get finance out of the picture, we're doing something very much like, Japan did with
Canada in the 1960s. It made loans to develop Canadian copper mines taking its payment, not in
Canadian dollars, that would have pushed up the yen's exchange rate, but in copper.
So, China says, you know you don't have to pay currency for this debt. We didn't build a
railroad to make a profit and you want, we can print all the currency we want. We don't need to
make a profit. We made the Belt and Road because it's part of our geopolitical attempt to
create what we need to be prosperous and have a prosperous region. So, these are
self-reinforcing mutual gain. Well, so that's what the West doesn't get -- mutual gain? Are we
talking anthropology? What do you mean mutual? This is capitalism! So, the West doesn't
understand what the original aim of the Belt and Road was, and it wasn't to make a profitable
railroad to enable people to buy and sell railway stocks. And it wasn't to make toll roads to
sell off to Goldman Sachs, you know. We're dealing with two different economic systems, and
it's very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that
you get when you get a degree in economics.
"We're dealing with two different economic systems, and it's very hard for one system to
understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in
economics."
Pepe: Belt and Road loans are long-term and at very low interest and they are renegotiable.
They are renegotiating with the Pakistanis all the time for instance.
Michael: China's intention is not to repeat an Asia crisis of 1997. It doesn't gain anything
by forcing a crisis because it's not trying to come in and buying property at a discount at a
distressed sale. It has no desire to create a distressed sale. So obviously, the idea is the
capacity to pay. Now, this whole argument occurred in the 1920s, between [John Maynard] Keynes
and his opponents that wanted to collect German reparations and, Keynes made it very clear.
What is the capacity to pay? It's the ability to export and the ability to obtain foreign
currency. Well, China's not looking for foreign currency. It is looking for economic returns
but the return is to the whole society, the return isn't from a railroad. The return is for the
entire economy because it's looking at the economy as a system.
The way that neoliberalism works, it divides the economy in parts, and it makes every part
trying to make a gain, and if you do that, then you don't have any infrastructure that's
lowering the cost for the other parts. You have every part fighting for itself. You don't look
at in terms of a system the way China's looking at it. That's the great advantage of Marxism,
you'll look at the system, not just the parts.
Pepe: Exactly and this is at the heart of the Chinese concept of a community with a shared
future for mankind, which is the approximate translation from Mandarin. So, we compare
community with a shared future for mankind, which is, let's say the driving force between the
idea of Belt and Road, expanded across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America as well with our good
old friends', "greed is good" concept from the eighties, which is still ruling America
apparently.
Michael: And the corollary is that non-greed is bad.
Pepe: Exactly and non-greed is evil.
Michael: I see. I think we ran out of time. I do. I don't know if Alanna wants to step in to
wrap it up.
Michael: There may be somebody who has a question.
Pepe: Somebody has a question? That'll be fantastic.
Alanna: There is a question from Ed Dodson. He wanted to know why there are these ghost
cities in China? And who's financing all this real estate that's developed, but nobody's living
there? We've all been hearing about that. So, what is happening with that?
Michael: Okay. China had most of its population living in the countryside and it made many
deals with Chinese landholders who have land rights, and they said, if you will give up your
land right to the community, we will give you free apartment in the city that you could rent
out.
So, China has been building apartments in cities and trading these basically in exchange to
support what used to be called a rural exodus. China doesn't need as many farmers on the land
as it now has, and the question is how are you going to get them into cities? So, China began
building these cities and many of these apartments are owned by people who've got them in
exchange for trading their land rights. The deals are part of the rural reconstruction
program.
Alanna: Do you think it was a good deal? Vacant apartments everywhere.
Pepe: You don't have ghost cities in Xinjiang for instance, Xinjiang is under-populated,
it's mostly desert. And it's extremely sensitive to relocate people to Xinjiang. So basically,
they concentrated on expanding Urumqi. When you arrive in Urumqi it is like almost like
arriving in, Guangzhou. It's enormous. It's a huge generic city in the middle of the desert.
And it's also a high-tech Mecca, which is something that very few people in the West know. And
is the direct link between the eastern seaboard via Belt and Road to Central Asia.
Pepe
Escobar at the Khunjerab pass, China-Pak border, on New Silk Road overdrive.
Last year I was on an amazing trip. I went to the three borders, the Tajik-Xinjiang border,
Kyrgiz-Xinjiang border and the Kazakh-Xinjiang border, which is three borders in one. It's a
fascinating area to explore and specially to talk to the local populations, the Kyrgiz, the
Kazakhs and the Tajiks. How do they see the Belt and Road directly affecting their lives from
now on? So, you don't see something spectacular for instance, in the Xinjiang – Kazakh
boarder, there is one border for the trucks, lots of them like in Europe, crossing from all
points, from Central Asia to China and bringing Chinese merchandise to Central Asia.
There's the train border, which is a very simple two tracks and the pedestrian border, which
is very funny because you have people arriving in buses from all parts of Central Asia. They
stop on the Kazakh border. They take a shuttle, they clear customs for one day, they go to a
series of shopping malls on the Chinese side of the border. They buy like crazy, shop till it
drops, I don't know for 12 hours? And then they cross back the same day because the visa is for
one day. They step on their buses and they go back.
So, for the moment it's sort of a pedestrian form of Belt and Road, but in the future, we're
going to have high-speed rail. We're going to have, well the pipelines are already there as
Michael knows, but it's fascinating to see on the spot. You see the closer integration; you see
for instance Uyghurs traveling back and forth. You know, Uyghurs that have families in
Kyrgizstan for instance, I met some Uyghurs in Kyrgyzstan who do the back-and-forth all the
time. And they said, there's no problem. They are seen as businessmen so there's no
interference. There are no concentration camps involved, you know, but you have to go to these
places to see how it works on the ground and with Covid, that's the problem for us journalists
who travel, because for one year we cannot go anywhere and Xinjiang was on my travel list this
year, Afghanistan as well, Mongolia.
These are all parts of Belt and Road or future parts of Belt and Road, like Afghanistan. The
Chinese and the Russians as well; they want to bring Afghanistan in a peace process organized
by Asians themselves without the United States, within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
because they want Afghanistan to be part of the intersection of Belt and Road and Eurasian
Economic Union. This is something Michael knows very well. You don't see this kind of
discussions in the American media for instance, integration of Eurasia on the ground, how it's
actually happening.
Michael : That's called cognitive dissonance.
Alanna: To try to understand it gets you cognitive dissonance.
Pepe: Oh yeah, of course. And obviously you are a Chinese agent, a Russian agent. And so, I
hear that all the time. Well, in our jobs we hear that all the time. Especially, unfortunately
from our American friends.
Alanna: Okay. I know you have other things to do. This has been fabulous. I want to thank
you so much, both of you, uh, with so easy to get attendance for this webinar. There were 20
people in five minutes enrolled and in two days we were at capacity. So, I know there are many
more people who would love to hear you talk another time, whenever you two are so willing. And
I think you both got much out of your first conversation in person. Everybody listening knows
these two wonderful gentlemen, they have written more than 10 books, and they have traveled all
over the world. They are on the top of geopolitical and geoeconomic analysis, and they are
caring, loving people. So, you can see that these are the people we need to be listening to and
understanding all around the world.
So, thank you so much. Ibrahima Drame from the Henry George School is now going to say
goodbye to you and will wrap this up. Thank you again.
Pepe: Michael it was a huge pleasure. Really, it was fantastic. Really nice, we're on the
same website. So, let's have a second version of this.
Ibrahima: So, let's have a second version of this two months from now. Thank you very much
for participating and I really hope you liked this event. And, we also want to ask for your
support by making a tax-deductible donation to the Henry George School. I believe I shared the
link on the chat. Thank you. And see you soon.
Pepe: Thank you very much. Thanks Michael. Bye!
Michael Hudson is an American economist professor of economics at the university of
Missouri Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He's a
former Wall Street analyst political consultant commentator and journalist. He identifies
himself as a classical economist. Michael is the author of J is for Junk Economics, Killing
the Host, The Bubble and Beyond, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire,
Trade Development and Foreign Debt and The Myth of Aid , among others. His books have
been published translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish and Russian.
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and
columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he's lived
and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok.
He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the
wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is
Dissolving into Liquid War;Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge . He was
contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy.
His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030 . Pepe is also associated with
the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris
and Bangkok.
'The Russians did it' has become the mantra of the Democrats for every perceived
indiscretion, even as they take control of the White House again. This baseless nonsense is
only likely to gain in momentum over the next four years.
Once again, and despite major victories at the polls, the Democrats just can't stop
hyperventilating over Russia. Indeed, the Russian people must feel as if they're trapped for
all eternity in a remake of Groundhog Day , where one
dominant theme continually repeats itself: Russia is to blame for absolutely everything that
befalls the Democratic Party. In a radical departure from the original 1993 hit comedy,
however, nobody ever learns any valuable lessons from the previous day so as to secure a better
future. To quote a popular wit, ' same shit, different day .'
Even before Joe Biden has been able to escape from his basement and into the Oval Office,
the hysterical wails and lamentations against Moscow are already being heard. The first '
blame Russia ' barb came from none other than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama's former
Secretary of State, who can't shake the conspiracy theory that she was denied the presidency
because Donald Trump was apparently Vladimir Putin's secret ' Manchurian Candidate ,' or
some such nonsense.
In her podcast, called ' You and Me Both ,' Clinton
interviewed equally unhinged Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi about the 'invasion' of the
Capitol building by Trump supporters on January 6. Without mentioning, of course, that the
majority of Republican voters believe that the presidential election was stolen, Clinton tossed
out yet more conspiracy-theory
nonsense instead.
" I would love to see his phone records to see if he was talking to Putin the day the
insurgents invaded our Capitol ," Clinton said, before asking Pelosi if she thought there
needed to be a " 9/11-type commission " to investigate what happened on January 6.
Without pausing to consider the possible ramifications of dragging a nuclear-powered third
party into a discussion over an 'insurrection' in Washington, DC, Pelosi happily ran with the
insanity.
" These people, unbeknownst to them, they are Putin puppets, " the Speaker crowed. "
They were doing Putin's business when they did that [stormed the Capitol] , at the
incitement of an insurrection by the president of the United States. So, yes, we should have a
9/11 commission, and there is strong support in the Congress to do that ."
It is almost impossible to wrap one's brain around such psycho-babble. More difficult to
comprehend is how so many Americans actually believe it. Somehow the thought never penetrates
their soft skulls that, just maybe, after four years of being completely mocked and ridiculed
by the mainstream media, and brazenly censored by Big Tech, Trump's 75 million supporters
finally reached the end of their patience.
That's not an apology or justification for what transpired on January 6, of course, but
rather a much more plausible explanation than the ridiculous ' Putin did it '
narrative.
In any case, there appears to be a good reason why Clinton and Pelosi are so desperate to
rekindle the legend of the Russian bogeyman. That's because these two women share a common
trait, which is their tendency to do very stupid things with their personal computers.
To briefly rehash ancient history, back in early 2015, it was
discovered that then Secretary of State Clinton had been using her private home computer to
transmit sensitive government documents, a federal offense. This marked the beginning of the
anti-Russiagate juggernaut that has wrecked bilateral relations between Washington and
Moscow.
As the question of Clinton's emails – specifically the 31,000 that were said to have
been deleted – took center stage in the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump quipped
during a rally: " Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails
that are missing ." As Trump went on to learn the hard way, never make a Democrat the butt
end of a joke when they're cornered.
Not only did the Democrats use that offhand remark to say that Russia had hacked Clinton's
email server, but they took the absurdity one step further, spreading the dangerous conspiracy
theory that Russia had colluded with Trump to defeat Clinton in the quest for the White House.
As a result, Trump spent the bulk of his four years in office defending himself from the
fanatic Russiagate inquisition.
Ironically, Nancy Pelosi, whose laptop went missing from her office during the Boomer Selfie
Tour 2021, which the Democrats are at pains to label an ' insurrection ,' finds herself
in a similarly uncomfortable situation. According to retired Lieutenant General Thomas
McInerney, Pelosi, and her fellow Democrats were " terrified " about what might be
discovered on the missing laptop. So frantic, in fact, that, according to McInerney in the
aftermath of the Capitol incident, " Pelosi called the Chairman of the Chiefs General Mark
Milley and they're trying to get him [Donald Trump] out on the 25th Amendment or to
impeach him ."
Whatever the real reason for the Democrats pushing for yet another impeachment, it does seem
very strange that they would waste the time and energy to punish Trump yet again unless they
were motivated by pure fear.
In any case, as fate would have it, it has been reported that Pelosi's laptop has been
found. The suspect has been identified as Riley June Williams, 22, a native of Pennsylvania,
who has since been arrested. For those who may be thinking, 'Wow! No sign of Russian intrigue,'
you would be advised to control your premature ejaculations. According to the FBI affidavit ,
a ' former romantic partner ' of Williams said the woman devised a plan to ship the
laptop to a friend in Russia, who then planned to turn it over to the SVR – Russian
intelligence.
Does that story sound even remotely plausible? If the woman was truly a Trump supporter,
wouldn't the obvious course of action be to simply turn over the device to the nearest
Republican representative office? Why this incessant need to drag Russia into yet another
American political scandal?
The reason, by now, is obvious. In the event that something truly disturbing from Pelosi's
laptop is revealed, the Democrats will pounce on the ' Russia did it ' narrative. Then,
instead of the media focusing on the real story – whatever may or may not be found on the
laptop – the media will provide cover fire for the opening of yet another anti-Russia
witch hunt.
Any future ' Russiagate 2.0 ' scenario, however, may have one major difference from
the original. Following the 'insurrection' at the Capitol building, Democrats are itching to
introduce ' domestic terrorism prevention' legislation, which will, if passed, have a
chilling effect on the most basic freedoms, including the ability to gather in protest without
being labeled ' domestic terrorists .'
The already drafted Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act opens with the
following statement, which shows clearly who will be mostly targeted by such legislation (hint:
not left-wing agitators, such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter): " Recent reports have
demonstrated that White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most
significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States "
Although Russia, surprisingly, is not mentioned in the legislation, it does not take much
imagination to foresee a day when some right-wing supporter, much like Riley June Williams,
will find himself or herself embroiled in a high-profile criminal case involving the Democrats
that has extremely dubious connections to Russia. Suddenly, an act of 'domestic terrorism' will
magically morph into a 'state-sponsored' – i.e. Russia – act of terrorism.
Tragically, what started off as an innocent joke by Donald Trump about Russia and Clinton's
emails has snowballed into the most dangerous scenario for average Americans: being pulled into
a grand conspiracy theory that sees a Russian hand behind everything the Democrats see as a '
crime '.
In a rapidly approaching future, average Americans, portrayed as ' extremist ,' as
well as distant Russia will become the new ' usual suspects ,' albeit with a possible
'terrorist' charge to boot. This descent into sheer madness must end before it reaches peak
insanity.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight
in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying
the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge
One area Biden's team will be challenged is in defending the use of Depleted Uranium
munitions as the Serbian legal
assault vs NATO begins and as Outlaw US Empire Stormtroopers try to get their own compensation
for exposure to various toxins. Both efforts will hopefully aid other nations in their quest
to hold the Outlaw US Empire accountable for the crimes it committed against many millions of
innocents. One outcome is already certain: Opposition to those millions seeking justice will
serve to further degrade the international standing of the Outlaw US Empire and make it
harder for vassals to justify their adherence to such a monster.
@42 I'm sure Maduro would take dollars.....or gold. Of course buying Venezuelan oil from an
evil brutal socialist dictator would be a major climb down.
The USA doesn't pay for oil or gas. It takes over the mining company, demands the project
be funded by local or national borrowing from USA banks with sovereign guarantees, sells the
product to a separate US company that pays peanuts to the miner and then onsells for a major
markup (transfer pricing). Its called modern day stealing of other countries resources.
Look at the report on keystone that you cited at #39 where
The Canadian province that invested $1.1 billion of taxpayers' money in the controversial
Keystone XL project is now considering the sale of pipe and materials to try to recoup some
funds.
"If the project ends, there would be assets that could be sold, such as enormous
quantities of pipe," Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said in a press conference Monday.
Meanwhile the directors and shareholders got their fat checks and dividends from the
municipal loan funds ;)
The USA will not pay in gold until it is on its knees - it simply will not pay. See how
the USA 'bought' Tik Tok: blatant extortion/theft. The same as was done to Japan's high tech
in the 60's 70's or whenever. Thieves.
In the end, it's all about money. And the US has an army that costs more than can be
plundered from the countries it occupies.
The US military costs about a trillion every year. There are no countries left to be
conquered by the US where that kind of treasure can be looted.
"... In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are kept away from being publicized on either side, Eric Zuesse writes. ..."
"... Mission accomplished ..."
"... Nice work, Mr. Putin. ..."
"... According to a US intelligence community report, Russia's chief goal in interfering in the 2016 election in support of Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton was to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process." Four years on, there have been two impeachments and an insurrection against the US legislature. Millions believe Trump's lies that he was illegally ejected from power, and doubt Biden's legitimacy. ..."
"... Conspiracy theorists have seats in Congress. There are serious questions about whether one of the country's great political parties is now anti-democratic. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in a federal system that grants vast power to the states. And America's self-appointed role as an exceptional nation and beacon of democracy is in the gutter. ..."
"... Most of the disorienting events of the last few years can be blamed directly on Trump and his particular skill at tearing at the social, racial and political divides that are just below the nation's surface. So the ex-KGB man in the Kremlin hardly deserves all the credit. But Russia, China and other autocratic nations are gaining much from Washington's agony. They're already using it to promote their own closed and totalitarian societies as models of comparative order and efficiency -- and to beat back brave local voices calling for democracy and human rights. ..."
"... In an effective declaration of victory for Russia's espionage offensive against the US more than four years ago, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian Parliament, slid home the knife. "Following the events that unfolded after the presidential elections, it is meaningless to refer to America as the example of democracy," he said. ..."
"... "We are on the verge of reevaluating the standards that are being promoted by the United States of America, that is exporting its vision of democracy and political systems around the world. Those in our country who love to cite their example as leading will also have to reconsider their views." ..."
In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are kept away from being publicized on
either side, Eric Zuesse writes.
Throughout history, aristocrats, and their flaks such as their 'news'-media, cast blame
downward, away from themselves who collectively control the government, and onto, instead, some
minority or other mass group, who can't even plan or function together so as to be
able to control the government.
The U.S. has a two-Party aristocracy, as is clear from the "Open Secrets" list of the 100
biggest political donors in the 2020 U.S. Presidential and congressional campaigns, the
"2020 Top Donors to Outside Spending Groups" . Those are only these individuals' publicly
acknowledged expenditures, none of the dark political money, which, of course, is donated
secretly. At the top there, of the donors' lists, is Sheldon Adelson (who just died, on January
11th in California, and was buried in Israel), who spent far more than anyone in all of U.S.
history had ever spent in any campaign cycle, $215 million, which amount far exceeded even
the $82 million that he had spent in 2016,
which in 2016 was second only to Thomas Steyer's $92 million (the previous all-time highest
amount donated in any campaign year). Adelson gave exclusively to Republicans, whereas Steyer
gave exclusively to Democrats. Steyer in 2020 gave $67 million, which -- though he was running
for President in 2020, and hadn't been running in 2016 -- was only 73% of his 2016 donations,
in that year, when he had been the nation's top political donor. He was only the 5th-biggest
donor in 2020, instead of #1.
The second-biggest donor in 2020 was the liberal Republican Michael Bloomberg, who ran in
the Democratic Presidential primaries in order to defeat the only progressive in that contest,
who was Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg spent $151 million of his own funds for that purpose. In
2016, he had spent
$24 million in order to help Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and then try to beat
Donald Trump.
The third-biggest in 2020 was Timothy Mellon, the son of Paul Mellon and grandson of
Andrew Mellon .
Timothy Mellon gave $70 million, all to Republicans.
In 2020, the top ten donors, collectively, spent $776 million to own their chunk of the U.S.
Government. The second group of ten (#s 11-20) donated only $187 million; and, so, the top
twenty together donated $963 million, just shy of $1 trillion. All 80 of the other top-100
donors, together, gave around $370 million, so that the total from all 100 was around
one-and-a-third trillion dollars. 47 gave to Republicans; 53 gave to Democrats.
The smallest publicly acknowledged donor among the top 100, Foster Friess , gave $2.4 million, all to
Republicans.
Most of these 100 donors are among America's approximately 700 billionaires; and, even the
ones who aren't are serving and doing business with the billionaires, and therefore are to some
extent dependent upon having good relations with them, not being enemies of any
billionaire. All of these 100 are, obviously, also dependent upon the governmental decisions
that the public officials whom they have purchased will be making, not only regarding
regulations and laws, but also regarding foreign policies. For example, Friess merged his
company into Affiliated Management Group, which "is a global asset management firm"
that "has grown to approximately $730 billion." Virtually all of the top 100 political
donors are internationally invested, and their personal wealth is therefore affected by
American foreign policies, in ways that the personal wealth of the rest of the population is
not.
When the U.S. invades a foreign country, or issues sanctions against a foreign country, it
benefits some American investors, not only in corporations such as Lockheed Martin and
ExxonMobil, but even in some foreign-headquartered corporations. America's spending around half of the entire world's military expenses
gives an enormous competitive boost to America's billionaires, which is paid for by all U.S.
taxpayers. It takes away money that would otherwise go toward the rest of the U.S. population
-- people who might even become crippled or killed by their military service for the benefit of
America's billionaires. Marketing this military service to thepublic, as "national defense" --
even at a time when no nation has invaded or even threatened to invade America after
1945 -- is good PR for America's wealthiest families, regardless of whether it's of any benefit
whatsoever to other Americans. Because of the success of this PR for the military, Americans
consider the U.S. military to
be America's best institution -- far higher than any other part of the U.S. Government or
any non-governmental institution, such as churches, the press, or the medical system. The U.S.
Department of Defense is, also, by far, the
most corrupt of all Departments of the U.S. federal Government . This fact is carefully
hidden from the U.S. public, so as to keep the public admiring the military.
Billionaires use their media, and their scholars, to point the finger of blame, for the
problems that the public does know about, anywhere else than against themselves; and, though
the billionaires have political differences amongst themselves, they are unified against the
public, so as to continue the gravy train that they all are on.
In order for the aristocracy not to be blamed for the many problems that they cause upon the
public, their first trick is to blame some minority or some other vulnerable mass within the
public. Or else to blame some 'enemy' country. But if and when such a strategy fails, then,
they and their media blame the middle class or "bourgeoisie," in order to fool the leftists,
and also they blame the "communists" and the poor, in order to fool the rightists. That's a
two-pronged PR strategy -- one to the left, and the other to the right. Since the aristocracy
is always, itself, fundamentally conservative, they would naturally rather blame the leftists
as being "communists," than to blame the middle class and poor, because to do the latter would
place the public's ideological focus on economic class, which then would threaten to expose the
billionaires themselves as being the actual economic "elite" who are the public's real enemy
(and as being the elite against which the propaganda should instead be focused). Blaming the
middle class and poor might work amongst their fellow-aristocrats, but if tried amongst the
public, it would present the danger of backfiring. Consequently, there is a return to the days
of Joseph R. McCarthy, but this time without communism. Thus, here is how the White House
correspondent for a Democratic Party 'news'-site, CNN, closed his 'news'-analysis, on January
14th, under the headline "Washington's
agony is a win for autocrats and strongmen" :
Mission accomplished
Nice work, Mr. Putin.
According to a US intelligence community report, Russia's chief goal in interfering in
the 2016 election in support of Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton was to "undermine public
faith in the US democratic process." Four years on, there have been two impeachments and an
insurrection against the US legislature. Millions believe Trump's lies that he was illegally
ejected from power, and doubt Biden's legitimacy.
Conspiracy theorists have seats in Congress. There are serious questions about whether
one of the country's great political parties is now anti-democratic. The Covid-19 pandemic
exposed weaknesses in a federal system that grants vast power to the states. And America's
self-appointed role as an exceptional nation and beacon of democracy is in the gutter.
Most of the disorienting events of the last few years can be blamed directly on Trump
and his particular skill at tearing at the social, racial and political divides that are just
below the nation's surface. So the ex-KGB man in the Kremlin hardly deserves all the credit.
But Russia, China and other autocratic nations are gaining much from Washington's agony.
They're already using it to promote their own closed and totalitarian societies as models of
comparative order and efficiency -- and to beat back brave local voices calling for democracy
and human rights.
In an effective declaration of victory for Russia's espionage offensive against the US
more than four years ago, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian
Parliament, slid home the knife. "Following the events that unfolded after the presidential
elections, it is meaningless to refer to America as the example of democracy," he
said.
"We are on the verge of reevaluating the standards that are being promoted by the United
States of America, that is exporting its vision of democracy and political systems around the
world. Those in our country who love to cite their example as leading will also have to
reconsider their views."
That's propaganda from "leftist" (i.e., Democratic Party) billionaires. A good example of an
independent American journalist who has been fooled by Republican Party billionaires to blame
some amorphous mass of "leftists" is Sara A. Carter's 12 January 2021 youtube "Rudy Giuliani talks big
tech censorship" , blaming America's problems on "the government," or "the bureacracy,"
and, of course, especially on Democrats. At 10:15 there, she said "My mother fled from
Cuba." Carter, as a conservative, is so obsessed with her visceral hatred of "communism," that
she interpreted America's dictatorship as being communists, instead of as being billionaires --
of both Parties: actually, fascists. In a two-Party fascist dictatorship , she fears the leftists. This is typical of
propagandists on the conservative side. But propagandists on the liberal side (such as the CNN
correspondent exemplified) are no better, just different.
Both propaganda-operations cast blame away from the real culprits.
In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are kept away from being publicized on
either side. What the public sees and hears, instead, is political theater, merely
tailored to different audiences.
"... Some pointed out that the accusations leveled at Trump supporters could just as easily be lobbed back at their accusers – specifically the part of Hassan's checklist in which the cult member is discouraged from seeking " outside " sources of information and gaslighted with revised versions of the past. ..."
"... Read the soldiers are being vetted to see if they're Trump supporters, resulting in some uploading photos of themselves on social media with red MAGA caps on :-) ..."
Some pointed out that the accusations leveled at Trump supporters could just as easily be
lobbed back at their accusers – specifically the part of Hassan's checklist in which the
cult member is discouraged from seeking " outside " sources of information and
gaslighted with revised versions of the past.
Read the soldiers are being vetted to
see if they're Trump supporters, resulting in some uploading photos of themselves on social
media with red MAGA caps on :-)
"... Some people have become completely delusional + share the Russiagate, which was actually Britishgate, delusion in the wake of the muted reports of it's non-existence. ..."
"... The lengths this woman will go to not look at her own faults is astounding! Russia, Russia, Russia, instead of "hey maybe I'm just a warmonger and the people don't like that"... The disconnect is strong with this one! ..."
Have you heard of #BlueAnon ? Here, two top
members speculate that Trump spoke to Putin before the MAGA riot and call for a 9/11-style
commission on Trump-Putin ties (FBI & Congressional probes were presumably insufficient).
As this cult's mantra goes: "All roads lead to Putin."
Hillary Clinton
@HillaryClinton · Jan 18 .
@SpeakerPelosi and I agree: Congress needs to establish an
investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can
repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency
ever again.
As I wrote last
week, while Trump's movement is uniquely violent & dangerous, it does not hold a monopoly
on xenophobic conspiracy theories in response to election failures.
Some people have become completely delusional + share the Russiagate, which was actually
Britishgate, delusion in the wake of the muted reports of it's non-existence.
The lengths this
woman will go to not look at her own faults is astounding! Russia, Russia, Russia, instead of
"hey maybe I'm just a warmonger and the people don't like that"... The disconnect is strong
with this one!
"... One one hand, this is truly an absolute disaster, because when the US ruling Nomenklatura agrees to drop any past pretenses of objectivity, or even decency, things will definitely get ugly. On the other hand, however, this immense "coming out" of the US Nomenklatura is, of course, unsustainable (just look at history, every time these folks thought that they had crushed the "plebes", the latter ended up rising and showing their supposed "masters" to the door; this will happen here too). ..."
"... Trump really destroyed the USA externally, in terms of world politics. The Dems have done the same thing, only internally. For example, Trump is the one who most arrogantly ignored the rule of law in international affairs, but it was the Dems who destroyed the rule of law inside the USA. It was Trump who with his antics and narcissistic threats urbi et orbi who destroyed any credibility left for the USA as a country (or even of the the AngloZionist Empire as a whole), but it was the Dems who really decided to sabotage the very political system which allowed them to seize power in the first place. ..."
"... What comes next is the illegal rule of an illegitimate regime which came to power by violence (BLM, Antifa, Capitol false flag). This will be a Soviet-style gerontocracy with senile figureheads pretending to be in power (think Biden vs Chernenko here). Looking at the old, Obama-era, names which are circulated now for future Cabinet positions, we can bet on two things: the new rulers will be as evil as they will be grossly incompetent, mostly due to their crass lack of education (even Nuland and Psaki are back, it appears!). The Biden admin will be similar to the rule of Kerensky in "democratic" Russia: chaos, violence, lots and lots of speeches and total social and economic chaos. The next crucial, and even frightening, question now is: what will replace this US version of a Kerensky regime? ..."
"... "domestic terrorism" will, once again, become the boogeyman we will be told to fear. And, as all good boys and girls know, the best way to deal with such a horrible "domestic terrorism" threat is to dismantle the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution. Having corrupt kangaroo courts on all levels, from the small claims level to the Supreme court, will greatly help in this endeavor... ..."
...the US liberals decided that this vote was a slap in their face which, of course, is
quite correct (I still believe that most votes for Trump where not votes for Trump, but votes
against Hillary); it was, so to speak, a gigantic "f**k you!" from the revolting serfs against
their masters. And class consciousness told the US Nomenklatura that this was an
anti-masters pogrom , a US " Jacquerie " if you wish. This "revolt
of the serfs" had to be put down, immediately, and it was: Trump caved to the Neocons in less
than a month (when he betrayed General Flynn) and ever since the US Nomenklatura has
been using Trump as a disposable President who would do all the crazy nonsense
imaginable to please Israel, and who would then be disposed off. And yet it is now quite clear
that the US "deplorables" voted for the "wrong" candidate again! Hence the need for a (very
poorly concealed) "election steal" followed by a "test of loyalty" (you better side with us, or
else ) which eventually resulted in the situation we have today.
What is that situation exactly?
Simply put, this time the USNomenklaturahas truly achieved total
power. Not only do they control all three of the official branches of government, they now
also fully control the 4th one, the "media space", courtesy of the US tech giants which now are
openly silencing anybody who disagrees with the One And Only Official Truth As Represented By
The Propaganda Outlets. This is the very first time in recent US history that a small cabal of
"deep insiders" have achieved such total control of all the real instruments of power. The bad
news is that they know that they are a small minority and they realize that they need to act
fast to secure their hold on power. But for that they needed a pretext.
It is hardly surprising that after successfully pulling off the 9/11 false flag
operation, the USNomenklaturahad no problems whatsoever pulling off the
"Capitol" false flag.
Think about it: the legally organized and scheduled protest of Trump supporters was
announced at least a week before it had to take place. How hard was it for those in charge of
security to make sure that the protesters stay in one specific location? At the very least,
those in charge of security could have done what Lukashenko eventually did in Mink: place
military and police forces around all the important symbolic buildings and monuments and say
"you are welcome to protest, but don't even think of trying to take over any government
property" (that approach worked much better than beating up protesters, which Lukashenko
initially had tried). Yet what we saw was the exact opposite: in DC protesters were invited
across police lines by cops. Not only that, but even those protesters which did enter the
Capitol were, apparently, not violent enough, so it had to be one of the cops to shoot an
unarmed and clearly non-dangerous woman, thereby providing the "sacrificial victim" needed to
justify the hysterics about "violence" and "rule of law".
And the worst part is that it worked, even Trump ended up condemning the "violence" and
denouncing those who, according to Trump, did not represent the people.
The hard truth is much simpler: the "stop the steal" protestors did not commit any real
violence! Yes, they broke some furniture, had some fights with cops (who initially were
inviting people in, only to then violently turn against them with batons, pepper sprays and
flash-bang grenades). Some reports say that one cop was hit by a fire extinguisher. If true,
that would be a case of assault with a deadly weapon (under US law any object capable of being
used to kill can be considered a deadly weapon when used for that purpose). But considering the
nonstop hysteria about guns, the NRA and "armed militias", this was clearly not a planned
murder. Finally, a few people died, apparently from natural causes, possibly made worse by the
people trampling over each other. In other words, the Trump supporters did not kill anybody
deliberately, at most they can be accused of creating the circumstances which resulted in
manslaughter. That was not murder. Not even close. Want to see what a planned murder looks
like? Just look at the footage of the Ashli Babbitt murder by some kind of armed official. That
is real murder, and it was committed by a armed official. So which side is most guilty of
violating laws and regulations?
Furthermore, no moral value can be respected unless it is universally and equally applied.
Which, considering that the US deep state has engaged in a full year of wanton mass violence
against hundreds of innocent US citizens makes it unbelievably hypocritical for the US liberals
to denounce "the mob" now. Frankly, the way I see it, all the US liberals should now "take a
knee" before the pro-Trump protestors and declare that this was a "mostly peaceful" event
which, objectively speaking, it was .
Won't happen. I know.
What will happen next is going to be a vicious crackdown on free speech in all its
forms . In fact, and just to use a Marxist notion, what comes next is class warfare
.
We have all seen Pelosi and the rest of them demanding that Trump either be removed by Pence
and the Cabinet (25th A.), or they will unleash another impeachment. First, if impeached, Trump
won't be able to run in 2024 (which the liberals fully realize is a major risk for them). But
even more important, is to humiliate him, make him pay, show him once and for all "who is
boss"! These people thrive on revenge and victory is never enough to appease them, they simply
hate anybody who dares oppose them and they want to make an example of any and every serf who
dares to disobey them. That is why they always send "messages", no matter how inchoate: they
want to bully all the deplorables on the planet into total subservience.
But they won't stop with just Trump. Oh no! They will also go after all those serfs who
dared defy this Nomenklatura and who objected to the wholesale repudiation of the US
Constitution. For example, in a truly Orwellian move, the NY State Bar now wants to disbar
Giuliani for acting as Trump's lawyer (not a joke, check here ). Which,
considering that Trump already lost several lawyers to such tactics should not come as a
surprise to anybody: apparently, in the "new 2021 Woke-USA", some are more entitled to legal
representation than others.
Don't expect the ACLU to protest, by the way – equal protection under the law is not a
topic of interest to them. Here are a few screenshots take off their website , so see for yourself.
Clearly, the priority for the folks at the ACLU is to destroy Trump and anybody daring to
take up his defense.
One one hand, this is truly an absolute disaster, because when the US ruling
Nomenklatura agrees to drop any past pretenses of objectivity, or even decency, things
will definitely get ugly. On the other hand, however, this immense "coming out" of the US
Nomenklatura is, of course, unsustainable (just look at history, every time these folks
thought that they had crushed the "plebes", the latter ended up rising and showing their
supposed "masters" to the door; this will happen here too).
Last, but not least, let's keep another crucial thing in mind: even if you absolutely hate
Trump, you really should realize that it is not just "the vote" which was stolen, it was the
entire US Constitutional order . While we often focus on the SCOTUS, we should not remember
the many lower courts which showed a total absence of courage or dignity and which caved in to
the hysterical demands of the US Nomenklatura . It is impossible to have a country under
the rule of law when the courts shy away from their obligation to uphold the said rule of law
and, instead, place political expediency above the letter and spirit of the law.
Furthermore, when concepts such as "legal" and "illegal" lose any objective meaning, how can
any action be considered illegal or punishable?
Here is, just as an example, the Oath of Office taken by all Supreme Court Justices:
(emphasis added)
"I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect
to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich , and that I will
faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE]
under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."
And this is what each member of the US Armed Forces swears: (emphasis added)
"I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend
the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ; that
I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the
President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to
regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)."
It does not take a genius to figure out that the SCOTUS is now in the hands of a small cabal
of people who clearly are "domestic enemies" of the US Constitution.
Finally, here is what the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence states: (emphasis
added)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it , and to institute new Government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to
reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
I don't think that there is any need to further beat this dead horse and I will simply
summarize it as so:
The regime which will soon replace the Trump Administration is an illegal occupation
government, with strong ties to foreign interests (and I don't mean China or Russia here!),
which all those who served in the US military have taken an oath to oppose; this is precisely
the kind of occupation regime which the Founding Fathers foresaw in their Declaration of
Independence . Furthermore, the rule of law has clearly collapsed, at least on the
federal level, this should give the states more freedom of movement to resist the decrees of
this new regime (at least those states still willing and able to resist, I think of TX and FL
here). The leaders of this US Nomenklatura understand this, at least on some level, and we
should expect no decency from them; neither should we expect any mercy. Revenge is what
fuels these ideology- and hate-filled people who loathe and fear all the rest of humanity
because nobody is willing to worship them as our "lords and masters ". But this is also
the beginning of their end.
Conclusion: now we are all Palestinians!
True, no "mob" won on the Capitol, unless we refer to the (disgraced, hated and useless)
Congress as "the mob". And, of course, neither did "the people" or the protesters. The only
real winner in this entire operation was the US deep state and the US Nomenklatura . But
they did not win any war, only the opening battle of a war which will be much longer than what
they imagine in their ignorance.
I have said it many times, Trump really destroyed the USA externally, in terms of world
politics. The Dems have done the same thing, only internally. For example, Trump is the one who
most arrogantly ignored the rule of law in international affairs, but it was the Dems who
destroyed the rule of law inside the USA. It was Trump who with his antics and narcissistic
threats urbi et orbi who destroyed any credibility left for the USA as a country (or
even of the the AngloZionist Empire as a whole), but it was the Dems who really decided to
sabotage the very political system which allowed them to seize power in the first
place.
What comes next is the illegal rule of an illegitimate regime which came to power by
violence (BLM, Antifa, Capitol false flag). This will be a Soviet-style gerontocracy with
senile figureheads pretending to be in power (think Biden vs Chernenko here). Looking at the
old, Obama-era, names which are circulated now for future Cabinet positions, we can bet on two
things: the new rulers will be as evil as they will be grossly incompetent, mostly due to their
crass lack of education (even Nuland and Psaki are back, it appears!). The Biden admin will be
similar to the rule of Kerensky in "democratic" Russia: chaos, violence, lots and lots of
speeches and total social and economic chaos. The next crucial, and even frightening, question
now is: what will replace this US version of a Kerensky regime?
It is way too early to reply to this question, but we should at least begin to think about
it, lest we be completely caught off guard.
But until then, "domestic terrorism" will, once again, become the boogeyman we will be
told to fear. And, as all good boys and girls know, the best way to deal with such a horrible
"domestic terrorism" threat is to dismantle the First and Second Amendments of the
Constitution. Having corrupt kangaroo courts on all levels, from the small claims level to the
Supreme court, will greatly help in this endeavor...
"Americans have been brainwashed into calling things they don't like, or don't understand,
as "Socialist" or even "Marxist". The sad reality is that most Americans sincerely believe
that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders are "socialists", and when they see modern
movies ridiculously filled with "minorities" and gender fluid freaks – this is a case
of "cultural Marxism" (a totally meaningless term, by the way!). This is all utter nonsense,
neither Marxism nor Socialism have anything to do with BLM, Antifa, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck
Schumer (in fact, Marxism places a premium on real law and order!)."
"class" has been declared heretical and it has been replaced by identity politics
– the best way for a ruling class to (a) hide behind a fake illusion of pluralism and
(b) to divide the people and rule over them
It's a neat bait and switch scheme, identity being substituted for class. Billionaires can
now be hailed as people's champions by instituting 'gender-fluid' toilets and forcing their
peons to kneel. Who knows how much force they'll be willing to use against the deplorables
but probably it would know no limit. The shock and awe unleashed against foreign countries
could now be instituted domestically with things like the Phoenix Program being tried here,
among other things. Anything but relinquish power.
The old war-lovers are coming back in. Although he was considered belligerent the new regime
will be worse. War is probably part of the future agenda. Solidifying it's grip upon the
domestic population may be the precursor to embarking upon an unpopular and certain to be
costly war against Iran or perhaps even some clash with Russia.
From the I Ching: "Large ambitions coupled with meager talent will seldom escape
disaster."
The fervid machinations of the current crop of "self"-glorifying wannabes will not, as The
Saker reminds us here, be any exception to the rule, either. They're hardly the first bunch
of feckless opportunists to take a run at "full spectrum dominance" .aiming to trap Life
Herownself within the suffocating CONfines of their own little nut'shell.
The rampant insanity symptomatic of their virulent "self"-sickness, as it runs its
inevitable course, looks like being somewhat more than usually trying for the rest of us,
though .given all the electro-mechanical and institutional enhancement available to them, for
intensifying the degenerative effects of their folly. At the same time, our best response
will be just what we all know is always organically and in all Ways imperative for our Kind,
anyhow. All our precious attention is best devoted to taking care of the Earth and each
other. Our unconditional affection is best lavished on this Living Creation, all our
Relations, and The Great Spirit whose gift it is.
Caitlin Johnstone is wrong. It not about the danger of neofascism or "white supremasism" (BTW
can Zionism be classified as a brand of White Supremacism and suppressed ?) per se. And not even
about the new incarnation of the National Security State, which is definitely coming. Even in the
current form the National Security State is able to crush any some movement in no time as there
is not way one can organize such a movement without getting into crosshairs of FBI and other
agencies.
This is actually about the level of fear of neoliberal elite and financial oligarchy
instilled by Dec 6 events, which due to the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 got into "
The king is
naked " situation in 2021. Neoliberal elite lost the legitimacy (aka "mandate from Heavens"
in Chinese terminology) much like Soviet nomenklatura before the dissolution of the USSR.
Neoliberal was unable to raise the standard of living of the population. Instead it provided the
redistribution of wealth up ("accumulation by dispossession") and the decline of the standard of
living for the majority of population (aka "deplorables"). That created the crisis of legitimacy
and Dec 6 events should probably be viewed mainly under this angle. It looks like the majority of
the crowd were from lower middle class (small business owners and such)
A new viral video calling on liberals to form "an army of citizen detectives" to gather
information on Trump supporters and report their activities to the authorities has racked up
thousands of shares and millions of views in just a few hours.
The hashtag #TrumpsNewArmy is trending on Twitter as of this
writing due to the release of a horrifying video with that
title from successful author and virulent Russiagater Don Winslow. As of this writing it has
some 20 thousand shares and 2.6 million views, and the comments and quote-retweets are
predominantly supportive.
"On or before January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief: he will
lose control of the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Special Forces and America's nuclear
arsenal," Winslow's voice begins ominously. "On January 20th Donald Trump will become
Commander-in-Chief of a different army: this army."
Viewers are then shown footage from Trump rallies while being told that they are looking at
"radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic terrorists".
"They are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs," Winslow warns.
"They are your children's teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls, doctor's offices,
and many are police officers and soldiers."
Winslow talks about white supremacists and the Capitol riot, warning that Trump will
continue escalating violence and fomenting a civil war in America.
"We have to fight back," Winslow declares.
"In this new war, the battlefield has changes. Computers can be more valuable than guns.
And this is what we need now more than ever: an army of citizen detectives. I'm proposing we
form a citizen army. Our weapons will be computers and cellphones. We, who are monitoring
extremists on the internet and reporting our findings to authorities. Remember, before the
Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden, he had to be found. He was found by a CIA analyst working
on a computer thousands of miles away. It's up to you."
The viral video is being loudly amplified by popular #Resistance accounts like Majid M
Padellan (better known as Brooklyn Dad Defiant) with frighteningly paranoid and HUAC-like
rhetoric.
"#TrumpsNewArmy is VILE," one of Padellan's Twitter shares of the
video reads. "And we KNOW who they are. They are our teachers. They are our neighbors. They are
our police officers. They are EVERYWHERE. EXPOSE THEIR TREASON."
"Good riddance. But his 'army' is still here, hiding amongst us. They are traitors. They
are evil. And they MUST be rooted OUT."
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America," reads yet another . "But
SOME people they pledged their allegiance ONLY to trump. These are dangerous traitors."
"After 9/11, we were told: If you see something, say something," reads still another .
"We have TERRORISTS in our midst. Some of us KNOW these people. It is our patriotic DUTY
to expose them."
So if you were hoping that maybe liberals would chill out and get a little less crazy with
Trump out of the White House, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
This is as insane and scary as I have ever seen these people get, and I was in the thick of
peak Russiagate hysteria. An aggressively manufactured push to get an army of citizens spying
on each other calls to mind the
Stasi informants of East Germany , the patriotism-fueled digital "digging" of the QAnon
psyop, and the NatSec LARPing of Louise Mensch Twitter, all rolled into one great big ball of
crazy.
This comes out as we are being bombarded with mass media punditry from literal CIA veterans
like Sue
Gordon and Elissa Slotkin forcefully
hammering home the message that domestic terror is the new frontier for combating violent
extremism, meaning of course that new Patriot
Act-like solutions will be needed .
Winslow himself spent six years traveling and doing
research for a novel about a former CIA operative ,
and if some government agency didn't recruit him during that period they clearly should
have.
This will get frightening if it keeps up. Just as a relatively low-profile lefty blogger I
routinely get liberals online falsely claiming I'm a Russian agent and saying they'll report me
to the FBI, and that's without an aggressive campaign urging them to join a powerful digital
army. The fact that Winslow stays very vague about what he means by "Trump's new army" and
constantly conflates rank-and-file Trump supporters with white supremacist terrorists means
people are effectively being pointed at all Trump supporters, especially when normal Trump
rallies are what he points to in the video. If this takes off it can very quickly lead to a
volunteer army of power-worshipping snitches against literally anyone who is critical of US
foreign policy or the Democratic Party, whether they actually support Trump or not.
In fact just following the trending hashtag I'm noticing Twitter users saying this
means targeting all Trump supporters, so clearly that is the message that's being absorbed.
"Trumpers are pushing back so hard against this video because so many of them live in the
dark, cloaked behind normal jobs and seemingly normal lives," Winslow tweeted in
promotion of his project.
Well maybe that's because they are half the voting public, Don?
Winslow mixes in these generic comments about "Trumpers" with comments about "white
supremacists" , about whom he tweets "1. We expose
them. 2. We identify them. 3. We notify law enforcement. 4. We notify their employers."
Their employers.
This is just liberals being pushed toward targeting anyone who isn't ideologically aligned
with them for destruction. I really, really hope it doesn't take off, because it is profoundly
ugly. Please don't let the manipulators trick you into ripping each other to pieces, America.
They're only pointing you at each other so you don't look at them.
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Hopefully things will settle down after the inauguration. There are a lot of normal people
in the US who just want to get on with fixing their lives after all the economic damage done
by the lock downs. This extreme political crap is getting really exhausting for everyone in
the center. The number of people who are centrists well exceed the the polar extremes.
Unfortunately the extremists get the lion's share of news coverage, so it makes it appear the
country is filled with lunatics. If Biden is smart he won't alienate the center or he will
lose a lot of support going into the mid-terms. A quiet period where people can actually
start rebuilding their lives and the economy is desperately needed. I remain cautiously
hopeful that once the political circus dies down, that could actually happen.
cankles' server 35 minutes ago
As Greenwald said, it's easy for the neocons to switch because the D's are now the party
of "militarism, imperialism, and corporatism."
This comes at a time when Americans are now
reporting that they trust corporations more than they trust their own government or media,
when pundits are gleefully proclaiming in The New
York Times that "CEOs have become the fourth branch of government" as they pressure the
entire political system to smoothly install Biden, when the leading contender for the
Department of Justice's Antitrust Division is an Obama holdover who went from the
administration to working for both Amazon and Google, and when Americans are being
paced into accepting an increasing amount of authoritarian changes for their own good.
And this manic celebration and increasing brazenness of corporate power are of course
overlaid atop an unceasing river of human blood as the globe-spanning empire continues to smash
any nation which disobeys it into compliance so as to ensure lasting uncontested planetary
hegemony.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of
Consortium News.
DH Fabian , January 18, 2021 at 12:03
Yes, nervous middle classers pray Joe Biden will be their salvation. The rest of us know
why "business as usual" will continue. The only real difference between Biden and Trump is
that Biden is more likely to start a catastrophic war (as his record clearly indicates).
Jeff Harrison , January 17, 2021 at 23:17
Good points. Since Americans don't see any consequence to their government's outrageous
behavior, everything's outstanding (there are real benefits to those two oceans)! And it will
remain outstanding until someone shoves our bad behavior in our faces (which could really
happen. The Russians and Chinese are arming themselves to defend themselves from the US.
That's a lot cheaper than having to support a major offensive capability) or our brokeness
blows our economy to hell. You might want to read up on what happened to Sparta ..
No, I am not excited for the inauguration of a man who: Wrote the crime and bankruptcy
bills, voted for the Iraq War, took more money from Wall Street than Trump, and told a room of
rich donors that "nothing will fundamentally change." Democrats are part of the problem
too.
"... Here we are in Weirdsville, USA where most people, whether of the left, right, or center, are hypnotized by the flickering screens. That's what movies do. That's what long planned psychological operations do. That's what digital technology allows corrupt rulers and the national security state with its Silicon Valley partners in crime to do. ..."
"... We now live in a screen world where written words and logic are beside the point. Facts don't matter. Personal physical experience doesn't matter. Clear thinking doesn't matter. Hysterical reactions are what matter. Manipulated emotions are what matter. Saying "Fuck You" is now de rigueur, as if that were the answer to an argument. ..."
"... It's all a movie now with the latest theatrical performance having been the January 6, 2021 stage show filmed at the U.S. Capitol. A performance so obvious that it isn't obvious for those hypnotized by propaganda, even when the movie clearly shows that the producers arranged for the "domestic terrorists" to be ushered into the Capitol. They let the "Nazis" in on Dr. Goebbels orders. Thank God Almighty they were beaten back before they seized power in their Halloween costumes. ..."
"... Now who could have given that order to the Capitol and D.C. police, Secret Service, National Guard, and the vast array of militarized Homeland Security forces that knew well in advance of the January 6 demonstration? Who gave the stand-down orders on September 11, 2001, events that were clearly anticipated and afterwards were described by so many as if they were a movie? Surreal. Dreamlike. ..."
"... To accept that Trump and Biden are scripted actors in a highly sophisticated reality TV movie is a bit of "reality" too hard to bear. Exposing them and their minions doesn't hurt at all. There's no business but show business. ..."
"... "A magician is only an actor," ..."
"... "an actor pretending to be a magician." ..."
"... "Will wonders ever cease," ..."
"... On a conscious level, however, many people continue to rationalize their grasp of what is going on in the United States as if ..."
"... The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy .My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation ..."
"... still cling to the belief that he is the man they believe in and was going to "clean the swamp" but was sabotaged by the "deep state." Biden supporters, driven by their obsessive hatred for Trump and the ongoing delusions that the Democratic Party, like the Republican, is not thoroughly corrupt, look forward to the Biden presidency and the new normal when he can "build back better." For both groups' true faith never dies. It's very touching. ..."
"... As I have written before, if the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger share of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the end. ..."
"... But if that is so, why, despite Trump and Biden's superficial differences – and Obama's, Hillary Clinton's and George W. Bush's for that matter – have the super-rich gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else? These are a few facts that can't be disputed. There are many more. So what's changed under Trump? We are talking about nuances, small changes. A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, "dignified" con men. ..."
...Life today seems like a dream, doesn't it? Surreal to the point where everything seems
haunted and betwixt and between, or this against that, or that and this against us... Or a Luis
Buñuel film. The logic of the irrational. Surrealistic. A film made to draw us into an
ongoing nightmare. Hitchcock with no resolution. Total weirdness, as Hunter Thompson said was coming
before he blew his brains out. A life movie made to hypnotize in this darkening world where
reality is created on screens, as Buñuel said of watching movies:
This kind of cinematographic hypnosis is no doubt due to the darkness of the theatre and
to the rapidly changing scenes, lights, and camera movements, which weaken the spectator's
critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination.
Here we are in Weirdsville, USA where most people, whether of the left, right, or
center, are hypnotized by the flickering screens. That's what movies do. That's what long
planned psychological operations do. That's what digital technology allows corrupt rulers and
the national security state with its Silicon Valley partners in crime to do.
We now live in a screen world where written words and logic are beside the point. Facts
don't matter. Personal physical experience doesn't matter. Clear thinking doesn't matter.
Hysterical reactions are what matter. Manipulated emotions are what matter. Saying "Fuck You"
is now de rigueur, as if that were the answer to an argument.
It's all a movie now with the latest theatrical performance having been the January 6,
2021 stage show filmed at the U.S. Capitol. A performance so obvious that it isn't obvious for
those hypnotized by propaganda, even when the movie clearly shows that the producers arranged
for the "domestic terrorists" to be ushered into the Capitol. They let the "Nazis" in on Dr.
Goebbels orders. Thank God Almighty they were beaten back before they seized power in their
Halloween costumes.
Now who could have given that order to the Capitol and D.C. police, Secret Service,
National Guard, and the vast array of militarized Homeland Security forces that knew well in
advance of the January 6 demonstration? Who gave the stand-down orders on September 11, 2001,
events that were clearly anticipated and afterwards were described by so many as if they were a
movie? Surreal. Dreamlike.
As with the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the recently
staged show at the Capitol that the mainstream media laughingly call an attempted coup
d'état will result in a new "Patriot Act" aimed at the new terrorists – domestic
ones – i.e. anyone who dissents from the authoritarian crackdown long planned and
underway; anyone who questions the vast new censorship and the assault on the First Amendment;
anyone who questions the official narrative of Covid-19 and the lockdowns; anyone who suggests
that there are linkages between these events, etc.
Who, after all, introduced the Omnibus
Counterterrorism Act in 1995 that became the template for the Patriot Act in 2001 that was
passed into law after September 11, 2001? None other than former Senator Joseph Biden .
Remember Joe? He has a new plan.
Of course, the massive Patriot Act had been written well before that fateful September day
and was ready to be implemented by a Senate vote of 98-1, the sole holdout being Democratic
Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. In the House of Representatives the vote was 357-66.
For those familiar (or unfamiliar) with history and fabricated false flags, they might want
also to meditate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 that gave Lyndon Johnson his seal of
approval to escalate the war against Vietnam that killed so many millions. The vote for that
fake crisis was 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate.
In the words of Mark Twain:
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat
myself.
Harry Houdini, the magical performer who was able to escape from any trap, any nightmarish
enclosure, any lockdown, once said,
It's still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really hurts a
performer.
The question has been answered. It doesn't hurt at all, for phoney events still mesmerize
millions who are eager to suspend their disbelief for the sake of a sad strand of hope that
their chosen leaders – whether Biden or Trump – are levelling with them and are not
playing them for fools. To accept that Trump and Biden are scripted actors in a highly
sophisticated reality TV movie is a bit of "reality" too hard to bear. Exposing them and their
minions doesn't hurt at all. There's no business but show business.
Houdini knew well the tricks used to deceive a gullible audience hypnotized by theatrics.
"A magician is only an actor," he said, "an actor pretending to be a
magician." This is a perfect description of the charlatans who serve as presidents of the
United States.
Life today seems like a dream, doesn't it? "Will wonders ever cease," said Houdini,
as he closed his shows.
When I was a child I had a repetitive dream that I was trapped in a maze. Trying to escape,
all I could hear as I tried desperately to find an exit was a droning sound. Droning without
end. The only way I could escape the maze was to wake up – literally. But this dream
would repeat for many years to the point where I realized my dreams were connected to my actual
family and life in the U.S.A.
Then, when I was later in the Marines and felt imprisoned and was attempting to get out as a
conscientious objector, the dream changed to being trapped in the Marines, or the prison I was
expecting if they didn't let me go. Even when I got out of the Marines and was not in prison,
the dreams that I was continued.
It took me years to learn how to escape.
I mention such dreams since they seem to encapsulate the feelings so many people have today.
A sense of being trapped in a senseless social nightmare. Prisoners. Lost in a horror movie
like Kafka's novel The Castle in which the
protagonist K futilely seeks to gain access to the rulers who control the world from their
castle but can never reach his goal. But these are dreams and The Castle is
fiction.
On a conscious level, however, many people continue to rationalize their grasp of what
is going on in the United States as if what they take to be reality is not fiction.
Trump supporters – despite what are seen by them as his betrayals when he said on January
7 that
The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American
democracy .My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.
This moment calls for healing and reconciliation
still cling to the belief that he is the man they believe in and was going to "clean the
swamp" but was sabotaged by the "deep state." Biden supporters, driven by their obsessive
hatred for Trump and the ongoing delusions that the Democratic Party, like the Republican, is
not thoroughly corrupt, look forward to the Biden presidency and the new normal when he can
"build back better." For both groups' true faith never dies. It's very touching.
As I have written before, if the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often
claimed, it is only over who gets the larger share of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the
same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their
intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many
Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the
end.
It might seem as if I am wrong and that because the Democrats and their accomplices have
spent years attempting to oust Trump through Russia-gate, impeachment, etc. that what seems
true is true and Trump is simply a crazy aberration who somehow slipped through the net of
establishment control to rule for four years. A Neo-Nazi billionaire who emerged from a TV
screen and a golden tower high above the streets of New York.
This seems self-evident to the Democrats and the supporters of Joseph Biden, and even to
many Republicans.
For Trump's supporters, he seems to be a true Godsend, a real patriot who emerged out of
political nowhere to restore America to its former greatness and deliver economic justice to
the forgotten middle-Americans whose livelihoods have been devastated by neo-liberal economic
policies and the outsourcing of jobs.
Two diametrically opposed perspectives.
But if that is so, why, despite Trump and Biden's superficial differences – and
Obama's, Hillary Clinton's and George W. Bush's for that matter – have the super-rich
gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military
budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued
to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else? These are a few facts that can't be
disputed. There are many more. So what's changed under Trump? We are talking about nuances,
small changes. A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, "dignified" con men.
Trump's followers were betrayed the day he was sworn in, as Biden's will be shortly unless
they support a crackdown on civil rights, the squelching of the First Amendment, and laws
against dissent under the aegis of a war against domestic terrorism.
I'm afraid that is so. Censorship of dissent that is happening now will increase
dramatically under the Biden administration.
Now we have the "insurrection," also known as an attempted "coup d'état," with
barbarians breaching the gates of the sacred abode of the politicians of both parties who have
supported bloody U.S. coups throughout the world for the past seventy plus years. Here is
another example of history beginning as tragedy and ending as farce.
But who is laughing?
If you were writing this script as part of long-term planning, and average people were
getting disgusted from decades of being screwed and were sick of politicians and their lying
ways, wouldn't you stop the reruns and create a new show?
Come on, this is Hollywood where creative showmen can dazzle our minds with plots so twisted
that when you leave the theater you keep wondering what it was all about and arguing with your
friends about the ending. So create a throwback film where the good guy versus the bad guy was
seemingly very clear, and while the system ground on, people would be at each other's throats
over the obvious differences, even while they were fabricated or were minor. This being the
simple and successful age-old strategy of divide and conquer.
I realize that it is very hard for many to entertain the thought that Trump and Biden are
not arch-enemies but are players in a spectacle created to confound at the deepest
psychological levels. I am not arguing that the Democrats didn't want Hillary Clinton to win in
2016. I am saying they knew Trump was a better opponent, not only because they could probably
defeat him and garner more of the spoils, but because if he possibly won he was easily
controlled because he was compromised. By whom? Not the Democrats, but the "Deep State" forces
that control Hillary Clinton and all the presidents. A compromised and corrupt lot.
The Democrats and Republicans were not in charge in 2016 or in 2020. Their bosses were. The
Umbrella people. Biden will carry out their orders, and while everyone will conveniently forget
what actually happened during Trump's tenure, as I previously mentioned, they will only
remember how the Democrats "tried" to oust this man in the black hat, while Biden will carry on
Trump's legacy with minor changes and a lot of PR. He will seem like a breath of fresh air as
he continues and expands the toxic policies of all presidents. So it goes.
Looks like Trump is elevated well beyond his standing and abilities. He proved to be mediocre politician who got into
the prepared trap and endangered and then betrayed his supporters.
Notable quotes:
"... Four years ago the Anglo-American deep state concluded that liberal democracy is no longer guaranteed to keep them in power. The new threat comes from populist like Trump. Instead of democracy they decided to turn to totalitarianism. The first step was a totalitarian media regime . ..."
"... LMFAO. Trump is no threat. Listen to his farewell speech . Summary: bend over and salute the flag. ..."
Four years ago the Anglo-American deep state concluded that liberal democracy is no longer
guaranteed to keep them in power. The new threat comes from populist like Trump. Instead of democracy they decided to turn to totalitarianism. The first step was a
totalitarian media regime .
"Unfortunately, not everywhere and not always has this quest for solidarity and joint work
manifested itself during the pandemic. Some of our Western colleagues, primarily the United
States and its closest allies, tried to take advantage of the situation and to ratchet up
pressure, blackmail, ultimatums and illegitimate actions while introducing unilateral
restrictions and other forms of interference in the internal affairs of many countries,
including our closest neighbour Belarus.
"The West unanimously ignored the calls by the UN Secretary General and the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights to suspend, at least for the duration of the pandemic,
unilateral and illegitimate sanctions regarding the supply of medications, food and equipment
needed to fight the virus while Russia was ready to back up this approach. President Putin
put forward a parallel initiative during the G20 summit to create green corridors in the
economy that are free from sanctions and other artificial barriers. Unfortunately, these
sensible appeals - both ours and those of the UN leaders - were left hanging in the air.
"Last year we observed the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII, the birth of the United
Nations and the entry into force of its Charter. Against the backdrop of these anniversaries,
we are very concerned about the continuous arrogant actions of the United States and most of
its Western allies, which are aimed at undermining international security, which is based on
the UN, its Charter and its agencies and replacing the traditional norms and standards of
international law with a "rules-based international order.'"
Lavrov then proceeds to indict the EU for promoting "multilateralism" outside the
framework of the UN in a manner meant to replace the UN with EU diktats: "The EU views the
establishment of specific rules as its exclusive right in the belief that all others must
follow these standards. Examples are many." Thus the EU follows the Outlaw US Empire's lead.
Lavrov then shares his own analysis:
"[T]hese are apprehensions of competition and the understanding that in today's world the
West can no longer dictate its own orders to others as it has over the last five centuries.
History is moving forward, it is developing. This has nothing to do with ideology. This is
just a statement of fact. It is necessary to consider the views of the countries that now
have a much greater weight in the world arena (completely incomparable with that of the
colonial era) and the countries that want to preserve their civilisational identity and that
do not see in the West the ideals for their societies. Tolerance of diversity is another
characteristic that the West is losing very quickly."
And all that is connected to other related developments:
"There are situations where half a dozen people that have created their own technological
empires do not even want to know what rights they have in their own states. They determine
their rights themselves proceeding from so-called corporate standards and completely ignore
the constitutions of their states. We have seen this clearly in the US and this is a source
of deep concern . Much has been said about this recently in television reports and
special analytical materials. We are not pleased by the attempts of the Western elites to
find external enemies to resolve their internal political problems. They find these enemies
in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. The list of these countries is well
known. [Yet, Lavrov insists there's no ideology involved, a point of contention I have with
him.]
"We all see the response to the news of Alexey Navalny's return to the Russian Federation.
Carbon-copy comments on this event are coming in one after another. They are full of joy
because they allow Western politicians to think that in this way they can divert public
attention away from the deepest crisis of the liberal development model.
"I am convinced that it is necessary not to seek outside excuses to justify one's own
actions or sidetrack attention from one's deepest problems and crises. On the contrary, it is
essential to play an honest game and look for opportunities to resolve domestic problems via
fair and equitable international cooperation. No one can expect to resolve its own problems
outside multilateral formats any longer."
Unfortunately, they do exhibit just that expectation. Yet, the most insidious, factual
accusation made against the West in Russia's defense is this:
" They just don't provide the facts, which is what decent people always do in order to
justify their discussions ." [My Emphasis]
Thus my very heavy critique of Cynthia Chung who invented facts to fit her ideological
hypothesis.
Lavrov closes his peroration by directly addressing those foreign reporters in the
audience:
"We are interested in addressing problems through a dialogue. However, 'forcing a
closed door' that the West keeps 'under lock and key' is beneath our dignity . Your
governments are well aware of our proposals that we have made repeatedly, starting with the
dialogue on strategic offensive arms, arms control and nonproliferation to interaction on
cybersecurity and non-deployment of weapons in space. There are many such areas. For each of
them, Russia has proposals for establishing honest cooperation on key threats that are common
to all countries around the world instead of using these threats to achieve unilateral
geopolitical advantages by means of unscrupulous competition. President Putin's initiative to
hold a summit of the five UN Security Council permanent members is a manifestation of such a
desire to start a dialogue. All other leaders of the Group of Five responded positively to
this proposal." [My Emphasis]
Lavrov closes by reminding his audience that Russia is hardly alone or isolated, that it's
in combination with over 1/3 of the planet's people; and that instead of an unhealthy
competition, Russia has openly asked all Eurasian nations to join together with its partners
who "share our common philosophy: to say no to confrontation and to address existing
problems on a balance of interests ." [My Emphasis]
In his presser, Lavrov referred to Russia's Main Foreign Policy Results in
2020 , the document available at the link. There's so much to read! Lavrov's response to
the question about Latvia's recent behavior IMO best encapsulates the depth of Western
immorality and blatant double-standards for its behavior. When it comes to the Outlaw U
Empire:
"The most important thing is that our proposals on cybersecurity and on investigations
into our alleged interference in US affairs, as well as on space projects and arms control,
are on the table. As recently as in September 2020, President Putin publicly invited the
United States – not President Trump or anyone else, but the United States as a power
which, we hope, has retained at least a degree of respect for continuity and compliance with
foreign policy agreements – to reboot our relations in the sphere of cybersecurity and
non-intervention into internal affairs of each other."
Russia simply would like to hear an answer, even no is better than being ignored. There's
so much more, particularly on the Freedom of Speech topic where Lavrov again remined people
of their nations's responsibilities under the treaties they've signed and ratified. Lavrov
made the effort to highlight this:
"I have already mentioned the topic of states' obligations and now want to remind you
about them. The US is a member of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Interestingly (however, this issue is often omitted) there have been two international
treaties, one for civil and political rights, and the other the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Having signed the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (it was in the 1960s), the US flatly refused to sign the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as the Convention on the Rights of
the Child [just as it refused to ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was
the product of Eleanor Roosevelt's doggedly determined efforts].
" This is a refusal to take any responsibilities related to providing adequate quality
of life to its population and solving social and economic problems ." [my Emphasis]
My point is the same as Lavrov's: The Outlaw US Empire has on several occasions not to
sign and ratify a treaty that it's Constitution says it ought to in order to form a more
perfect union and to advance the general Welfare, which is quite telling when we discuss the
reasons for the rise in Populism and the reasons someone like Trump is elevated well beyond
his standing and abilities.
And since no English language media source published anything about Lavrov's very
important presser, how should we rate its Information Hygiene while Pompeo's illegal antics
get reported no matter their outrageousness? Gross failure is my verdict.
As Paco said, reporting on Lavrov's presser would be rather long, and he was quite
correct! I left quite a lot on the cutting room floor.
Better to be a conspiracy theorist than a bootlicking fantasist who thinks a bunch of
eugenicist billionaire parasites are just 'incompetently' trying to save pensioners from a media-inflated flu, but 'mistakenly' imprisoning & fleecing the population in the
process.
We warned these people relentlessly that the despotic 'public health' policies they
demanded from the regime would immiserate millions more workers, they laughed and mocked us,
now they cry crocodile tears at the obvious consequences which they enabled.
What a lie. The bombs being dropped from the U.S. made jets the Saudi pilots fly over Yemen
killing civilians leaves blood all over his hands not to mention shaking the hand of the
Saudi that murdered a journalist before selling him weapons to kill Yemen's civilians.
Waryaa Moxamad 48 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 05:36 PM
1) False flag chemical attack on Syria. 2) killing Soleimani in a sovereign country he was
invited to 3) Guaido 4) Bolivia. 5) continuing the wars predecessors started.
Who is being fooled that U.S. presidency has any say in America's imperialism?
Who really pushed for General Soleimani to be killed and has the most personal and intense
vendetta against Soleimani? Mike Pompeo. Trump did not give the Pentagon and CIA all the wars
they wanted, especially in Syria. Now the Pentagon and the CIA have their puppet, Corrupt
Biden, who will do what they command him to do. I would expect in one year to see another
massive war. Where? Syria. The US mothers will cry when their sons come home in coffins. The
Hez in Lebanon will not back down, and they will enter Syria again. Trump did not want young
American boys coming back in coffins!!!!!!!
While it's true that #1984 can't be used as a hashtag, this has nothing to do with
censorship, politics, Trump, or the Capitol riot. Twitter does not let users create hashtags
solely from numbers. You can't make a hashtag for #1234, #2021, or any other string of numbers.
But humorists and neoliberal MSM are elible to exaggerate things ;-)
Rabid fighter for gender nutral terms, the Speaker of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, is
eighty years old. It's time to think about something eternal. And what could be more eternal
than the great and mighty English language. Known for its vast vocabulary. Which the Democratic
congressional caucus decided to slightly reduce by voting on Monday for new rules for official
record-keeping.
Instead of the words "he" or "she", it is now recommended to use the gender-neutral terms.
Instead of "father", "mother", "son", "daughter", "brother", "sister", "uncle", "aunt" --
generalized "parent" or " child". And instead of "brother" and "sister", it is better to use
the word "sibling". And so on.
Which means Joseph Biden got very unlucky. Because every one of the forty-five presidents
before him was called " Mr. President." And "mister" is no longer allowed. Because this word
has a clear gender connotation.
And there's nothing he can do about it: the law is the law.
For ten years, humanity has been preparing to meet the coronavirus pandemic prepared, if not
from a medical point of view, then at least from the technological point of view. And maybe
with the medical one, too -- after all, we do not encounter the achievements of genetic
modeling in everyday life as often as with the achievements of digital technologies. But the
minimum time frame for the development of a coronavirus vaccine seems to tell us that in this
area, too, the past ten years have not been lost for all of us.
And here we are faced with a dialectical contradiction. On the one hand, technology has
enabled us to withstand the pandemic and adapt to to working from home for those who can allow
it. On the other hand, if it were not for technology, there would be no pandemic.
It would be
no air travel, no places of the big congestion of people, without a developed industry of
tourism and travelling. And-who knows-maybe the virus itself would not exist without
technology. Although here I am entering on a slippery slope of unsubstantiated assumptions.
By 2016 the concept of "liberal democracy," once bright with promise, had dulled into a
neoliberal politics that was neither liberal nor democratic. The Democratic Party's turn toward
market-driven policies, the bipartisan dismantling of the public sphere, the inflight marriage
of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in the cockpit of globalization -- these interventions
constituted the long con of neoliberal governance, which enriched a small minority of Americans
while ravaging most of the rest.
Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers,
Editor in Chief of Raritan, and the author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern
America, 1877–1920, among other books. (January 2021)
If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.
William Burns in 2014 as U.S. deputy secretary of state. (State Department)
By John Kiriakou Special to Consortium News
P resident-elect Joe Biden has finally named a new CIA director, one of the final
senior-level appointees for his new administration. Much to the surprise of many of us who
follow these things, he named senior diplomat Williams Burns to the position. Burns is one of
the most highly-respected senior U.S. diplomats of the past three decades. He has ably served
presidents of both parties and is known as both a reformer and as a supporter of human
rights.
Burns is currently the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an
important Washington-based international affairs think tank. He served as deputy secretary of
state under President Barack Obama and was ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush
and ambassador to Jordan under President Bill Clinton. He was instrumental in the negotiations
that led to the Iran Nuclear Deal and spent much of his career focused on the Middle East Peace
Process. Burns joined the Foreign Service in 1982.
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"Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the word stage keeping
our people and our country safe and secure. He shares my profound belief that intelligence
must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation
deserve our gratitude and respect. The American people will sleep soundly with him as our
next CIA Director."
The message from Biden is clear: The CIA will not be led by a political hack like Mike
Pompeo, a CIA insider like John Brennan, or someone associated with the CIA's crimes of
torture, secret prisons, or international renditions like Gina Haspel. Instead, the
organization will be led by someone with experience engaging across a negotiating table with
America's enemies, someone experienced in solving problems, rather than creating new ones,
someone who has dedicated much of his career to promoting peace, rather than to creating
war.
Rank & File Response
The question, though, is what will be the response from the CIA's rank-and-file to Burns'
appointment? I can tell you from my 15 years of experience at the CIA that there will be two
reactions. At the working level, analysts, operators, and others will continue their same level
of work no matter who the director is. Most working level officers don't even care who the
director is. It doesn't matter to them. They never encounter the director and policies made at
that top level generally don't impact them on a day-to-day basis.
At the senior levels, the leadership levels, CIA officers will be of two minds. Some will
welcome Burns and his professionalism. They'll welcome a director who doesn't attract adverse
press because of a past history of committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. (Even if
they supported those crimes when they were being committed, press attention is always
unwelcome.) They'll welcome a director who didn't head secret prisons overseas. They'll
welcome a director who wasn't in charge of Guantanamo. They'll welcome a director who
wasn't in charge of maintaining a secret "kill list."
Others will resent Burns, though, as they resented an earlier outsider, Admiral Stansfield
Turner. Turner had been appointed by President Jimmy Carter to "clean up" the CIA. Turner then
fired fully a third of the CIA's operations officers, some just months away from qualifying for
retirement. He was universally reviled after that, and he never regained the trust of agency
personnel.
That's not Burns' style. He's not a military officer who demands fealty. He's a diplomat, a
negotiator. The CIA has to be cleaned up. Its policies have to be reformed. If there must be a
CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it. At the very least, we should give him
enough time to at least get started.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the
Obama administration under the Espionage Act -- a law designed to punish spies. He served 23
months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture
program.
As a top-level State Department official through the administrations of Reagan, Bush I,
Clinton, Bush II and Obama, Burns is implicated in virtually every crime of US imperialism
over the past three decades, including the war in Iraq, the US-NATO attack on Libya, the
military coup that drowned the Egyptian Revolution in blood, and the US intervention in
Syria.
After such a career, as the saying goes, Burns knows where all the bodies are buried. Now
he is assigned to head an agency that is probably responsible for more killing, torture and
mass suffering than any other on the planet: the CIA.
A preview of what to expect from a Burns-led CIA was given during an interview with
National Public Radio's Mary Louise Kelly on "US Global Leadership" held June 19, 2019 at the
Truman Center for National Policy in Washington, DC. In the extended conversation, Burns
defended the US and NATO-led coup in Libya which ended with the grisly murder of Muammar
Gaddafi, followed by an ongoing civil war, the torture and killing of refugees and the return
of slave-markets.
"It was right to act in Libya in the way that we did," Burns said. While the US government
might have "got some assumptions wrong," he expressed no regrets, saying that he still
thought Obama's "decision to act was unavoidable."
Anne , January 12, 2021 at 14:15
I would agree with your estimation some one, anyone who can think, believe, say etc that
what we did in Iraq, Libya (I don't doubt Serbia), Syria is "rightful" has a heinously
distorted mind (pretty much everyone in DC, in the MICIMATT) And Biden has revealed himself
– again – as a subject of the corporate-capitalist-imperialist plutocratic ruling
elites (and one with his hand forever stuck out)
was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows
(including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on Twitter
@georgegalloway
19 Jan,
2021 18:23 It's hard not to wonder if Joe Biden will even last his first 100 days in office...
but those arguing his mind isn't sound enough shouldn't expect a swift exit, because since when
was that a disqualifier?
... ... ...
The madness of Donald Trump had nothing on his Republican predecessor and fellow-impeachee
Richard Nixon. So disturbing were the last days of Tricky Dicky, it came as a relief to America
and the world when he resigned – even though it was famously said his successor Gerald
Ford couldn't chew gum and walk in a straight line at the same time. Bovine he may have been,
but a mad-cow he wasn't.
The Raging Bull Donald J Trump – grotesque, bizarre, unbelievable – had the
misfortune to go quite mad in the age of cable news and social media. His narcissistic
predilections always bordered on personality disorder. But his natural braggadocio stormed him
to victory in 2016 in a backlash against the super-smooth professorial presidency of Barack
Obama, with Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton riding shotgun.
Under Obama, the Clintonite deindustrialisation of America became almost complete .
China was presented with America's lunch. And in no less than nine conflicts across the
globe Obama was 'nation-building' in other people's countries while his own country was falling
apart. But a dark storm was gathering
If only the Democrats had not started out by trying to steal Trump's election in a flurry of
pussy-hats and fake Russiagate hoaxes. If only they hadn't striven might and main to railroad
the Electoral College into betraying their mandate and – in the case of
Nancy Pelosi – make a thinly disguised call for "uprisings throughout the country."
If only they hadn't spent countless millions and two whole years of a four year-term with the
Mueller Inquiry and the cockamaney theorem that the man who confronted Russia from Ukraine and
the Baltics through the wrecked INF and Open Skies treaties to the killing fields of the Levant
was, in fact, an agent of Vladimir Putin. If only, if only
As it happened, the descent into madness of Trump was complete by the end. The coronavirus
he derided at first, before predicting it would disappear in the warm weather of spring, before
pondering whether bleach up the bahookie might not be an option as a cure. The Tammany Hall
skullduggery of election day, practiced over a century in places like New York, rolled out
across the country. The political suicide of only half-making a revolution on January 6 dug
his own grave. Nobody ever beat a candidate who polled over 75 million votes before. But
Sleepy Joe Biden did.
And he did it hardly ever leaving his basement home studio, where he painfully struggled to
read an autocue even with an earpiece shrieking the words to him. When he did speak, it was
often gibberish that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. He oftentimes plainly didn't know
where he was, what office he was running for, which woman was his sister and which was his
wife.
When Boris Yeltsin was rattling down, the world endlessly amused itself at the sight of
Russia on its back, legs akimbo with thieves picking its pocket. With Joe Biden, though, the
political class and its media echo-chamber merely look the other way.
Despite Democratic Party control of all levels of Federal power, it seems unlikely we are
about to witness an FDR or a JFK barnstorming 100 days. It seems fair to wonder if Sleepy
Joe will even see out a hundred days in office. It is, however, certain that if he is in office
he will not be in power. Because power has already passed to the cavernous uncertainty of Vice
President Kamala Harris.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Mark Conley 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:44 PM
Thanks for reminding the world that the president of the USA including his puppet elected
office bearers has absolutely no power whatsoever. Well said. Thus you have answered your own
observation at the end. The future is indeed dark and uncertain with the only certainty that
nothing good can be expected from any USA government. Thus the onus is on the peaceful
majority to do what is necessary.
Atilla863 42 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:15 PM
One thing is certain in the new leadership - the debt will go on growing, perhaps reaching
40+ T dollars before the next elections. While this trend continues - the Chinese will be
laughing all the way running to their banks as their economy records fortune after fortune
proportional only inversely to the rate at which America recedes into superpower sunset.
JJ_Rousseau 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:18 PM
I'm surprised at George Galloway's comments, as he is a former MP in British politics. Kamala
in charge? Don't make me laugh. The cabal is in charge, as they have been since Woodrow
Wilson. Before actually, as Garfield was assassinated for shedding light on the banker
machinations. Garfield knew that control of the nation's money was control of the nation. The
coup of America is complete. The POTUS is only the spokesman for the cabal, nothing else
Biden will be much easier to control and manipulate by the Jewish Banking Cartel, which
ultimately controls the US government and Wall Street. Trump was too unpredictable and would
have made it difficult for them to achieve their historical hope. "The Jews energetically
reject the idea of fusion with other nationalities and cling firmly to their historical hope
of World Empire." - Dr. Max Mandelstamm ***We should always listen to the doctors.
Not stolen.....50 states certified, 60 plus courts found nothing fraudulent, and the
electoral votes were confirmed by the House and Senate, with the Senate led by Pence. So, as
the world knows and anyone who knows election laws, the election was one of the most
legitimate ever held in the US.
KarlthePoet 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:10 PM
The Jewish Banking Cartel is ultimately in control of the US government and Wall Street.
They've been in control for decades. Now they've obviously teamed up with the Jewish Big Tech
companies like Facebook and Google in order to gain even more control. Controlling the money,
money system, and the minds of the masses has been their goal. Two Jewish controlled
companies control over $9Trillion of American's wealth. (BlackRock Inc. & Goldman Sachs)
They've finally achieved their goal. The cartel is now in control of a country that is
completely out of control. Karma!
Daffyduck011 KarlthePoet 38 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:18 PM
Ashkenasty banking cartel.
JJ_Rousseau KarlthePoet 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:29 PM
It's not only the banking cabal, it's the media (which the same gang own, of course). This
cannot happen without a complicit media. This is a very old strategy
Blackace180 7 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:49 PM
He'll be impeached multiple times, along with his family. Removed and jailed. People need a
reminder of just how messed up Obama/Biden was and it is coming. The caravans are already on
the way and gas has jumped 55 cents a gallon since the election, for no reason other than it
is Biden. People will run the nutcracker right out of office, hopefully before the country
collapses from his nutcracker policies.
White Elk 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:45 PM
The press-elected.
Xilla White Elk 33 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:23 PM
How did the press elect him?
Franc 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:28 PM
Xilla/Herrbifi, you're not welcome here. We all know what your goals are, and we all know
you're just here to make a pointless mess.
5th Eye 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:18 PM
An Italian bureaucrat once said, "Everything is changed, so that it remains the same." It
will be exactly like that under Biden to legitimate his regime.
The_Chosenites 51 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:06 PM
Since both Trump and Biden are proud zionists, the only thing I am certain of is Israel and
the Jewish community have won another election and we'll see many jewish politicians elevated
to positions of power in the Biden administration. Biden best do what's best for Israel if he
knows whats good for him and his health.
KarlthePoet The_Chosenites 16 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:40 PM
Maybe when Kamala becomes President she can get advice from her Jewish husband, who is a
lawyer. What a coincidence.
Enki14 9 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:48 PM
That Henry Kissinger, long time shadow government puppet endorsed demented biden is a clue as
to what might happen as they know in 2 years the masses will reinstate conservatives and in 4
years another trumpster. We may see sweeping changes, with some huge blowback.
The_Chosenites Enki14 4 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:53 PM
Kissinger has had a bed in the oval office for many a President, he must have been installed
by the Chosennites to stay in office forever. Presidents come and go, but Kissinger remains
to pull the strings. Goldman Sach's et al rule the roost.
Daniel Fernald 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:42 PM
Biden's 100 days are interesting. It's exactly 100 days from January 20 to May 1, which is
the communist May Day.
Skeptic076 Daniel Fernald 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:44 PM
Used to be the American May Day as well, you know? Interesting if you research why it is not
anymore.
Michael Knight 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:46 PM
Impossible to believe he'll be in charge????? That's probably because he won't be!
RCBreakenridge Mike Freeman 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:28 PM
Mike, seriously? What echo chamber are you living in? How can you look at Biden and not
understand that he's little more than a life-size cardboard cutout of the man that used to be
Obama's puppet? He'll be in office as long as they can continue to stand him up for photo ops
and he continues to do exactly what he is told. As soon as either of those conditions falter,
Nancy and friends will roll out the 25th amendment, show him the door and lead KH to the
presidents chair. But make no mistake, the only choices Sleepy Joe will be making are to do
as he is told.
>>Today, the Trump administration filed an appeal against the UK decision not to
extradite Assange. I must imagine that means that Trump has no intention of pardoning
Assange.
Trump was a desperate "Murica must have the biggest dick" imperialist massively triggered
by the US decline and trying to save the US Empire. Like a rabid dog that is wounded, he
attacked anything that moves, including those who helped him get into power.
Anyone who thought that he will help the likes of Russia or Assange does not understand
the psychology of elite US WASPs.
These people thought that they and the US should rule the world and that they are the
cream of the cream. Anything denying them that would lead to crazed reactions, hysteria,
rabid animalistic behavior, and snarling and gnashing of teeth at anything that moves.
Simply put, their decline caused them to go rabid. A rabid dog attacks anything that
moves, whether friendly or not. Unfortunately for the likes of Russia and Assange.
Predictably, conservative publications like Fox Newsdecried the
measures as a power grab by Big Tech and protestations came as far away from Europe, where
German Chancellor, Angela Merkel – whose disdain for Donald Trump has never been a secret
– called the decision to deplatform a head of state " problematic ," an
opinion shared by France's Finance Minister Bruno Le Marie, who warned of a "digital oligarchy"
usurping the powers of the state.
Missing in the salacious back-and-forth conversation between ideological factions and absent
from the argument that they are private corporations, which have the legal authority to ban or
deplatform anybody they wish, is the fact that Twitter, Facebook, and all the other major
social media platforms are organs of the state to begin with, and that nothing they do falls
outside of the ultimate designs of the powers they serve.
Examples abound of how these platforms regularly engage in cyber reconnaissance missions for
American and Atlanticist interests in violation of their own terms of service, such as when
NATO commanders made use of coordinates provided
by Twitter users in order to select missile strike targets in their war against Libya in
2011.
Facebook's recently created oversight
board includes Emi Palmor, who was directly responsible for the removal of thousands of
Palestinian posts from the social media giant during her tenure as Director of Israel's
Ministry of Justice. She, along with other individuals with clear sympathies to American
interests, now sit on an official body tasked with emitting the last word on any disputes
regarding issues of deplatforming on the global social network.
Following you since
1972
In Yasha Levine's seminal
work , "Surveillance Valley," the military origins of the Internet and the close
relationship of social media companies to federal and local law enforcement are made patently
clear. Since their creation, Twitter, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley behemoths have worked
hand in hand with law enforcement agencies to augment their capacity for mass tracking and
surveillance.
From facial recognition technologies to aggregated user post history, these platforms have
been a crucial component in the development of the pervasive surveillance state we now live in.
In the book's prologue, Levine details the attempted creation of a citywide police surveillance
hub in Oakland, California called the "Domain Awareness Center" (DAC), which drew intense
opposition from the local citizenry and privacy advocates who were quick to undress city
officials who were trying to hide the proposed center's insidious links to the NSA, CIA and
military contractors.
Among other capabilities, the control hub would be able to "plug in" social media feeds to
track individuals or groups that posed any kind of threat to the establishment. While the DAC
project was successfully
defeated by an engaged public, similar initiatives were quickly implemented throughout law
enforcement agencies across the country and continue to be perfected in order to not only
track, but infiltrate political groups deemed problematic.
The Antrim County Clerk and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson have stated that the
election night error (detailed above by the vote "flip" from Trump to Biden, was the result
of human error caused by the failure to update the Mancelona Township tabulator prior to
election night for a down ballot race. We disagree and conclude that the vote flip occurred
because of machine error built into the voting software designed to create error.
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's statement on November 6, 2020 that "[t]the correct
results always were and continue to be reflected on the tabulator totals tape .. . ." was
false.
The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission
guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This
demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.
The results of the Antrim County 2020 election are not certifiable. This is a result of
machine and/or software error, not human error.
The tabulation log for the forensic examination of the server for Antrim County from
December 6, 2020consists of 15,676 individual events, of which 10,667 or 68.05% of the events
were recorded errors. These errors resulted in overall tabulation errors or ballots being
sent to adjudication. This high error rates proves the Dominion Voting System is flawed and
does not meet state or federal election laws.
These errors occurred after The Antrim County Clerk provided a re-provisioned CF card
with uploaded software for the Central Lake Precinct on November 6, 2020. This means the
statement by Secretary Benson was false. The Dominion Voting System produced systemic errors
and high error rates both prior to the update and after the update; meaning the update (or
lack of update) is not the cause of errors.
In Central Lake Township there were 1,222 ballots reversed out of 1,491 total ballots
cast, resulting in an 81.96% rejection rate. All reversed ballots are sent to adjudication
for a decision by election personnel.
It is critical to understand that the Dominion system classifies ballots into two
categories, 1) normal ballots and 2) adjudicated ballots. Ballots sent to adjudication can be
altered by administrators, and adjudication files can be moved between different Results
Tally and Reporting (RTR) terminals with no audit trail of which administrator actually
adjudicates (i.e. votes) the ballot batch. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in
security and election integrity because it provides no meaningful observation of the
adjudication process or audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicated the
ballots.
A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in
previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in
the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no
transparency or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high
error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these
issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more
correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors. The systemic errors are intentionally
designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulk
adjudication.
Antrim County failed to properly update its system. A purposeful lack of providing basic
computer security updates in the system software and hardware demonstrates incompetence,
gross negligence, bad faith, and/or willful non- compliance in providing the fundamental
system security required by federal and state law. There is no way this election management
system could have passed tests or have been legally certified to conduct the 2020 elections
in Michigan under the current laws. According to the National Conference of State
Legislatures - Michigan requires full compliance with federal standards as determined by a
federally accredited voting system laboratory.
Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all
adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is
the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of records prevents any form of audit
accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist
for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and
prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must
conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed.
Likewise, all server security logs prior to 11:03 pm on November 4, 2020 are missing.
This means that all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior
to election day are gone. Security logs are very important to an audit trail, forensics, and
for detecting advanced persistent threats and outside attacks, especially on systems with
outdated system files. These logs would contain domain controls, authentication failures,
error codes, times users logged on and off, network connections to file servers between file
accesses, internet connections, times, and data transfers. Other server logs before November
4, 2020 are present; therefore, there is no reasonable explanation for the security logs to
be missing.
On November 21, 2020, an unauthorized user unsuccessfully attempted to zero out election
results. This demonstrates additional tampering with data.
The Election Event Designer Log shows that Dominion ImageCast Precinct Cards were
programmed with new ballot programming on 10/23/2020 and then again after the election on
11/05/2020. These system changes affect how ballots are read and tabulated, and our
examination demonstrated a significant change in voter results using the two different
programs. In accordance with the Help America Vote Act, this violates the 90-day Safe Harbor
Period which prohibits changes to election systems, registries, hardware/software updates
without undergoing re-certification. According to the National Conference of State
Legislatures - Michigan requires full compliance with federal standards as determined by a
federally accredited voting system laboratory.
The only reason to change software after the election would be to obfuscate evidence of
fraud and/or to correct program errors that would de-certify the election. Our findings show
that the Central Lake Township tabulator tape totals were significantly altered by utilizing
two different program versions (10/23/2020 and 11/05/2020), both of which were software
changes during an election which violates election law, and not just human error associated
with the Dominion Election Management System. This is clear evidence of software generated
movement of votes. The claims made on the Office of the Secretary of State website are
false.
The Dominion ImageCast Precinct (ICP) machines have the ability to be connected to the
internet (see Image 11). By connecting a network scanner to the ethernet port on the ICP
machine and creating Packet Capture logs from the machines we examined show the ability to
connect to the network, Application Programming Interface (API) (a data exchange between two
different systems) calls and web (http) connections to the Election Management System server.
Best practice is to disable the network interface card to avoid connection to the internet.
This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity. Because
certain files have been deleted, we have not yet found origin or destination; but our
research continues.
Because the intentional high error rate generates large numbers of ballots to be
adjudicated by election personnel, we must deduce that bulk adjudication occurred. However,
because files and adjudication logs are missing, we have not yet determined where the bulk
adjudication occurred or who was responsible for it. Our research continues.
Research is ongoing. However, based on the preliminary results, we conclude that the
errors are so significant that they call into question the integrity and legitimacy of the
results in the Antrim County 2020 election to the point that the results are not certifiable.
Because the same machines and software are used in 48 other counties in Michigan, this casts
doubt on the integrity of the entire election in the state of Michigan.
I see this article is quite relevant to another one on a different blog that I have been
fruitlessly attempting to comment upon. It keeps getting disappeared immediately and not even
sent to moderation where normally all submissions first go. Have had that trouble two days
running on two different articles about i) the impending crackdowns on free speech and ii)
the planned purge of Republican officeholders by the triumphalist Clinton/Obama/Biden mob.
I'll go with my remarks on the coming attempt at a purge since it is closer to the Saker's
treatment of the Nomenklatura (cognate to "nomenclature" specifying ordered classes of
things, including people or their offices, in English) or in American street language simply
identifying who is a "made man," i.e., an untouchable in the mafia. Yeah, the Dem hierarchy
are sure feeling they are all made men (and women) following the set to in the Capitol which
they most possibly facilitated and have certainly exploited to the limit.
The U.S. seems to have gone completely crazy these day.
Mutazione dello Stato.
We were born and raised in the 20th Century or the 21st Century, so we're accustomed with
the idea that deep changes in society can only happen through revolutions. That's not true:
Marx delineated in which conditions change happens through revolution, but he never stated
all societal changes are revolutions.
A society can change positively or negatively. Positively when it is in an ascendant phase
of its mode of production. Negatively when it is in a declining phase of its mode of
production (every mode of production has an entropy, so this is always the case).
When it is changing negatively, it can do so mainly in two ways: sectarianism (decay
through division and fragmentation) and/or withering (decay through shrinking of economic
base and the rise of better systems).
In my opinion the USA is decaying through sectarianism.
We can observe today collapsed by sectarianism in the Middle East (Shia vs. Sunni;
destruction of Iraq; destruction of Libya etc. etc.).
A famous example of collapse by withering is Ancient Sparta, which refused to reform and
successfully crushed all the revolution attempts that rose against it. But in the end its own
system reached its logical conclusion and, by the time the Roman Legions arrived to conquer
it, it already was an insignificant village.
So, yes: even societies that successfully crush the revolution attempts against it are
condemned to change and eventually disappear. Conservatives from all around the globe should
not feed themselves the illusion they can live in their little worlds forever.
The American empire is massive and cannot really be compared with Sparta. It is entirely
reasonable to assume that its demise involves both withering and fragmentation. That said I
had previously assumed that the empire's vassal states would fragment away while the core
withered, but given how unhinged America and its leadership have become we could see the
cracks in the USA become chasms surprisingly soon. The empire's vassal states could be left
orbiting around a debris field.
"Everything has an end, so do empires, both the United States and the Soviet Union.
Washington has outrageously favoured a small camarilla of ultra-billionaires. Now it has to
face its old demons, prepare for secession and civil war..."
"...Part of the power has already tipped democratic institutions into the hands of a few
ultra-billionaires. The United States that we knew no longer exists. Their agony has
begun." https://www.voltairenet.org/article211982.html
Casino magnate and Israeli patriot multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, one of the world's
richest men, died in Las Vegas on January 11 th at age 87. He had been suffering
from cancer and has been buried at the
Mount of Olives Cemetery in Israel . When his body arrived in Israel it was met by Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Jonathan Pollard, the most damaging spy in United States
history. Tributes to the fallen "hero" poured in from the political class in both the United
States and Israel and it has even been reported that President Donald Trump was intending to
hoist the American flag at half mast over federal buildings to honor the "great humanitarian
philanthropist." Unfortunately, the flag was already at half mast honoring the death of Capitol
Police Force officer Brian Sicknick, who was murdered in the Capitol building last
Wednesday.
Trump has not mentioned the service unto death of Sicknick and the flag lowering itself was
apparently a bit of an afterthought on behalf of the White House, but he had plenty to say
about his good buddy Adelson, who has been the principal funder of the Republican Party over
the past five years. As he can no longer use Twitter, the president's
condolences were posted on the White House site: "Melania and I mourn the passing of
Sheldon Adelson, and send our heartfelt condolences to his wife Miriam, his children and
grandchildren. Sheldon lived the true American dream. His ingenuity, genius, and creativity
earned him immense wealth, but his character and philanthropic generosity his great name.
Sheldon was also a staunch supporter of our great ally the State of Israel. He tirelessly
advocated for the relocation of the United States embassy to Jerusalem, the recognition of
Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and the pursuit of peace between Israel and its
neighbors. Sheldon was true to his family, his country, and all those that knew him. The world
has lost a great man. He will be missed."
Missing from the Trump eulogy is any mention of what Adelson did for the United States,
which is his country of birth and where he made his fortune engaging in activity that many
would consider to be a vice. In fact, Adelson was all about the Jewish state, positioning
himself as the principal funder of the Republican Party under Donald Trump and receiving in
return as a quid pro quo the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA),
the move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the recognition of Israeli annexation of
the Syrian Golan Heights, and a virtual concession that the Jewish state could do whatever it
wants vis-à-vis the Palestinians, to include expelling them from Palestine. Adelson once
commented that Israel does not have to pretend to be a democracy but it must be Jewish,
presumably to help the process of Arab genocide move along.
Adelson's mechanism, initiated under George W. Bush, is familiar to how the Israel Lobby
operates more generally. It consisted of the exploitation of the incessant need of campaign
money by the GOP, which Adelson provided with strings attached. He worked with the Republicans
to completely derail the admittedly faux peace process begun under Bill Clinton, which
depended on a two-state solution, and instead give the Jewish state a free hand to implement
its own unilateral Greater Israel Project extending from "the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean." As part of that expansion, Israel has been building illegal settlements while
also bombing and killing Lebanese, Syrians, and Iranians and assassinating scientists and
technicians throughout the region.
All of the interventions against Israel's neighbors took place even though the Jewish state
was not technically at war with anyone. The U.S. meanwhile funded Israeli aggression and
watched the spectacle without any complaint, providing political cover as necessary, while also
maintaining a major military presence in the Middle East to "protect Israel," as Trump recently
admitted.
In short, Sheldon Adelson committed as much as half a billion dollars from his vast fortune
to buy control over a major element of U.S. foreign policy and subordinated American interests
to those of Israel. In addition to direct donations to both major political parties, he also
paid for Congressional "fact finding" trips to Israel and funded a number of pro-Israel
lobbies, so-called charities and other related Jewish projects. It is indisputable that he
wielded an incredible degree of power to shape Washington's actions in the Middle East. In
her own tribute to her dead husband, Miriam Adelson, an Israeli, described how he "crafted
the course of nations."
Adelson was actively engaged on Israel's behalf until the week before his death. He provided
his casino's private 737 luxury executive jet to transport Jonathan Pollard "home" to Israel.
Pollard has served 30 years in prison after being convicted of espionage and was on parole,
which restricted his travel. As yet another a gift to Israel, Donald Trump lifted that
restriction, allowing him to fly to Israel where he received a hero's welcome. It is generally
agreed that Pollard was the most damaging spy in American history, having stolen the keys to
accessing U.S. communications and information gathering systems. A month after Pollard's arrest
in 1985, C.I.A director William Casey stated: "The Israelis used Pollard to obtain our war
plans against the USSR – all of it: the co-ordinates, the firing locations, the
sequences, and Israel sold that information to Moscow for more exit visas for Soviet Jews."
Sheldon Adelson used his wealth and political connections to shield himself from any
criticism due to his openly expressed preference for Israel over the land of his birth. He
famously publicly
stated that he wished he had worn the Israeli Army uniform instead of that of the U.S.
Army, where he served briefly as a draftee. He also expressed his desire that his son would
serve as an Israeli army sniper, presumably allowing him to blow the heads off of Palestinians.
In 2013
Adelson advocated ending nuclear negotiations with Iran and instead detonating a nuclear weapon
in "the middle of the [Iranian] desert," followed by a threat to annihilate the capital city
Tehran, home to 8.6 million, to force Iran to surrender its essentially non-existent nuclear
program.
Other acknowledgements of the impact of Adelson came from officials in
the Trump Administration. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commented how his "efforts to
strengthen the alliance between Israel and the United States the world, Israel and the United
States are safer because of his work." Yeah, right Mike.
So, the world is definitely a better place due to the passing of Sheldon Adelson. Or is it?
His Israeli wife Miriam owns more than 40% of Las Vegas Sands Corp Casinos Inc.,
estimated to be worth in excess of $17 billion. She has proposed that a new chapter be
included in the Jewish bible, the Book of Trump, and has pledged herself to continue her
husband's work. Trump had previously given her the highest award that a president can bestow,
the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Freedom, of course, does not apply to Palestinians. And if
one is concerned that the Democrats will not be cooperative, they too have their own major
donor similar to Adelson. He is an Israeli film producer named Haim Saban, who, echoing a
similar statement by Adelson, said that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website ishttps://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
It is difficult to agree that the "values" spoken of by Pompeo equate with the Washington Post report on January 14
that the National Mall in Washington will have to be closed on the day of Mr Biden's inauguration as 46 th President
of his nation.
"The extraordinary closure is the latest in a series of security measures to harden the city against
the type of violence that rocked the Capitol on January 6. Local and federal officials had already established a downtown security
zone and called up more than 20,000 National Guard troops to protect the presidential swearing in on January 20. The move is significant
because the Mall has been the traditional site where much of the general public has gathered to view the inauguration at the Capitol
in person."
It would not be surprising if a similar paragraph had appeared in the media concerning such cities as Baghdad, Tripoli or Kabul,
which have suffered grievously from U.S. attacks, simply because these places are unstable to the point of collapse.
But for this sort of military action to be necessary in the national capital of "the greatest country on earth" is a sad
indication of the depth to which Trump has taken America.
... within just 72 hours of this ban madness starting, Russian Social Media/Messenger
Platform "Telegram"
gained 25 million new users . This is unlikely to be a fluke or coincidence. Furthermore,
this new member surge brings the total user base to healthy 500 million.
This means that the majority of Telegram's audience are now not
connected to Russia in any way. The platform has reached the critical mass needed to become a
mainstay of daily life across the globe.
... During the Cold War, thanks to the dismal state of Soviet media, the youth of the USSR
was listening to Radio Freedom and doing anything that it could to jump into the Western media
sphere of influence.
It was simply the better alternative that gave them breathing room to
think about life without a framed Lenin picture in the background
The stuff about the NY consulate really sets me off, Sputnik said the phones are down for
two days running and internet intermittent.
It's hard to guess at the reason for any of it since it could be almost anything (and
pretty much entirely stupid no matter what) but what's much more noticeable is the apparent
lack of interest in truly clarifying what the hell the point is/was supposed to be (instead
of bs) from anyone inside anywhere in the US government structures, or intelligence services,
or armed forces.
Dystopian and dysfunctional become synonyms at some point.
Other than that I'm only waiting to see if anything within the Pentagon will get a move on
to clear up all the mess (rather than "worrying" about National Guards who will do whatever
they're told). If anything happens I expect it to be clean and orderly and then after the
fact maybe the NG troops will be told something or the other a little before everyone else,
and that's about it. They don't have any need to know about anything in advance or as it
happens.
That's just me, at least a little bit more realistic in my "if-so" than the FBI and Pelosi
gang? :)
"... "A month after the election, Biden's nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to fulfill his ..."
"... to donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden's cabinet appointments ..."
"... What little organized left political infrastructure exists in Washington is largely valorizing or publicly defending swamp creatures who at minimum deserve a loyal opposition. The ..."
"... being done by a small handful of under-resourced groups to mount a real opposition is getting trampled by a culture of obsequiousness. This culture of acquiescence gives swamp creatures a free pass ..."
"... Despite Tanden's ..."
"... push for Social Security cuts ..."
"... , Beltway liberal groups whose mission is to defend Social Security ..."
"... . Despite Tanden having her organization ..."
"... rake in cash ..."
"... from Wall Street, Amazon, billionaires and ( ..."
"... ) foreign governments, a Ralph Nader-founded, all-purpose consumer advocacy group ..."
"... CAP as "one of our key partners in the fight to tax corporations and the rich, rein in monopoly power, tackle government corruption, and much more." Despite Tanden ..."
"... a union at CAP, ..."
"... union leaders ..."
"... in Washington lauded her. ..."
"... American Prospect ..."
"... "a President Biden would be in the business of confronting Mr. Putin for his aggressions, not embracing him. Not trashing NATO, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Ukraine, Georgia, the Western Balkans ..."
"... "a President Putin would be in the business of confronting Mr. Biden for his aggressions (in Syria, or elsewhere), not embracing them. Not trashing the Warsaw Pact, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Canada, Mexico, and other nations that are near the U.S. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Bernard Schwartz, ..."
"... a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin ..."
"... (which is by far the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America's allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden's top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th, ..."
"... "Biden allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter" ..."
"... , and reported that, "Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president's campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just that." It's not for nothing that throughout Biden's long Senate career, he has voted in favor of every U.S. invasion that has been placed before the U.S. Senate. ..."
That didn't take long. He's not even in office, and he has already surrounded himself, as
the incoming President, with individuals who derive their wealth from (and will be serving)
America's top defense contractors and Wall Street. The likelihood that these Government
officials will be biting the hands that feed them is approximately zero. Great investigative
journalists have already exposed how corrupt they are. For that to be the case so early (even
before taking office) is remarkable, and only a summary of those reports will be provided here,
with links to them, all of which reports are themselves linking to the incriminating evidence,
so that everything can easily be tracked back to the documentation by the reader here, even
before there are any 'Special Prosecutors' (as if those were serving anyone other than the
opposite Party's political campaigns, and, ultimately, the opposite Party's billionaires).
First up, is the independent investigative team of David Sirota and Andrew Perez. On
December 4th, they bannered "The Beltway
Left Is Normalizing Corruption And Corporatism" , and reported that "A month after the
election, Biden's nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to
fulfill hispromiseto donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit
admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in
Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden's cabinet
appointments ."
Liberal (that's to say Democratic Party) U.S. media hide the corruptness of Democratic
politicians, and conservative (that's to say Republican Party) U.S. media hide the corruptness
of Republican politicians; and, so, the public today are getting corrupt leaders whichever side
they vote for. No mainstream 'news' media report what independent investigative journalists
such as Sirota and Perez report. Authentically good journalists use as sources -- and link to
in their articles -- neither Democratic nor Republican allegations, but instead are on the
margins, outside of the major media, and so rely on whistleblowers and other trustworthy
outsiders, not on people who are somebody's paid PR flacks, individuals who are being paid to
deceive. As Sirota and Perez state: " What little organized left political infrastructure
exists in Washington is largely valorizing or publicly defending swamp creatures who at minimum
deserve a loyal opposition. Thegood workbeing done by a small handful of under-resourced groups to mount a real opposition is
getting trampled by a culture of obsequiousness. This culture of acquiescence gives swamp
creatures a free pass ." It's all some sort of mega-corporate propaganda -- 100%
billionaire-supported on the conservative side, 100% billionaire-supported also on the liberal
side, and 0% billionaire-supported for anything that is authentically progressive (not
dependent, at all, upon the aristocracy).
That independent reporting team focused on Biden's having chosen an economic team which will
start his Administration already offering to congressional Republicans an initial Democratic
Party negotiating position that accepts Republicans' basic proposals to cut middle class Social
Security and health care benefits in order for the Government to be able to continue expanding
the military budgets and purchases from the billionaire-controlled firms, such as Northrop
Grumman -- firms whose entire sales (or close to it) are to the U.S. Government and to the
governments (U.S. 'allies') that constitute these firms' secondary markets. (In other words:
those budget-cuts aren't going to be an issue between the two Parties and used by Biden's team
as a bargaining chip to moderate the Republicans' position that favors more for 'defense' and
less for the poor, but are actually accepted by both Parties, even before the new
Administration will take office.) Obviously, anything that both sides to a negotiation accept
at the very start of a negotiation will be included in the final product from that negotiation;
and this means that during a Biden Presidency there will be reductions in middle-class Social
security and health care benefits in order to continue, at the present level -- if not to
increase yet further -- Government spending on the products and services of such firms as
Lockheed Martin and the Rand Corporation (firms that control their market by controlling their
Government, which is their main or entire market).
Sirota and Perez focus especially upon one example: Neera Tanden, whom Biden chose on
November 30th to be the White House Budget Director, and who therefore will set the priorities
which determine how much federal money the President will be trying to get the Congress to
allocate to what recipients:
Despite Tanden'spush for Social Security cuts, Beltway liberal groups whose mission is to
defend Social Securitylauded
herthink
tank. Despite Tanden having her organizationrake in
cashfrom Wall Street, Amazon, billionaires and (previously) foreign governments, a Ralph Nader-founded, all-purpose consumer
advocacy group
praisedCAP as "one of our key partners in the fight to tax corporations and the
rich, rein in monopoly power, tackle government corruption, and much more." Despite Tandenbustinga union at CAP,twonationalunion
leadersin Washington lauded her.
Next up: One of the rare honest non-profits in the field of journalism is the Project on
Government Oversight, POGO, which refuses to accept donations from "anyone who stands to
benefit financially from our work," and which states in its unique "Donation Acceptance Policy" that,
"POGO reviews all contributions exceeding $100 in order to maintain this standard." In other
words: they refuse to be corrupt. Virtually all public-policy or think-tank nonprofits are
profoundly corrupt, but POGO is the most determined exception to that general
rule.
On 20 November 2020, POGO headlined "Should
Michèle Flournoy Be Secretary of Defense?" and their terrific investigative team of
Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey delivered a scorching portrayal of Flournoy as irredeemably
corrupt -- it ought to be read by everybody. It's essential reading throughout, and its links
to the evidence are to the very best sources. So, I won't summarize it, because all Americans
need to know what it reports, and to be able to verify, on their own (by clicking onto any link
in it that interests them), any allegation that the given reader has any question about.
However, I shall point out here the sheer hypocrisy of the following which that article quotes
Flournoy as asserting: "It will be imperative for the next secretary to appoint a team of
senior officials who meet the following criteria: deep expertise and competence in their areas
of responsibility; proven leadership in empowering teams, listening to diverse views, making
tough decisions, and delivering results." (Of course, that assertion presumes the
given 'expert' to be not only authentically expert but also honest and trustworthy,
authentically representing the public's interest and no special interests whatsoever -- not at
all corrupt -- which is certainly a false allegation in her own case.) She had urged the 2003
invasion of Iraq, and had participated in planning and overseeing both the war against Syria,
and the coup that destroyed Ukraine (and none of those countries had ever invaded, or even
threatened to invade, the United States); and, so, for her to brag about her
"delivering results" is not merely hypocritical, it is downright evil, because she is obviously
proud, there, of her vicious, outright voracious, record.
Her business-partner, Tony Blinken, has already received Biden's approval to become his
Secretary of State, and the first really good investigative journalist that American
Prospect magazine has had, Jonathan Guyer, headlined on November 23rd, "What You Need to Know About Tony Blinken" , and what Guyer
reports is just what any well informed reader would expect to see for a business
partner of Flournoy's.
Guyer's report closes by making passing reference to a CBS 'news' puff-piece for Blinken. In
that CBS
puff-piece , Blinken says, "a President Biden would be in the business of confronting
Mr. Putin for his aggressions, not embracing him. Not trashing NATO, but strengthening its
deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer
space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to
countries like Ukraine, Georgia, the Western Balkans ." What would Americans think if
Russia were to have retained its Warsaw Pact, and "a President Putin would be in the
business of confronting Mr. Biden for his aggressions (in Syria, or elsewhere), not embracing
them. Not trashing the Warsaw Pact, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new
capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I.,
electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Canada, Mexico, and
other nations that are near the U.S. "? Guyer pointedly noted that "The [CBS News] podcast
was sponsored by a major weapons maker. 'At Lockheed Martin, your mission is ours,' read an
announcer." Tony Blinken's mission is theirs. These people get the money both coming and going
-- on both sides of the "revolving door." Today's American Government is for sale to
the highest bidders, on any policy, domestic or foreign. 'Government service' is just a
sabbatical to boost their value to the firms that will be paying them the vast majority of
their lifetime 'earnings'. This is the reality that mainstream U.S.-and-allied 'news' media
refuse to publish (or, especially , to make clear). Only an electorate which
is ignorant of this reality can accept such a government.
Back on 26 January 2020, I had headlined "Joe Biden Is as Corrupt as They
Come" and documented the reality of this, but America's mainstream media were hiding that
fact so as to decrease the likelihood that the only Democratic Party Presidential candidate whom no billionaire
supported , Bernie Sanders, might win the nomination. Perhaps now that it's too late, even
those 'news' organizations (such as CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, New York Times ,
Washington Post , PBS, and NPR) will start reporting the fact of Biden's corruptness.
Where billionaires control all of the mainstream media, there is no democracy -- it's not even
possible , in such a country
Bernard Schwartz,a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin(which is by far
the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America's
allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden's top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th,"Biden
allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter", and
reported that, "Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president's
campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just
that." It's not for nothing that throughout Biden's long Senate career, he has voted in favor
of every U.S. invasion that has been placed before the U.S. Senate.
Near the end of the Democratic Party's primaries, on 16 March 2020, CNBC headlined
"Megadonors pull plug on plan for anti-Sanders super PAC as Biden racks up wins" , and
reported that Bernard Schwartz had become persuaded by other billionaires that, by this time,
"Biden could handle Sanders on his own." They had done their job; they would therefore control
the U.S. Government regardless of which Party's nominee would head it.
Biden -- like Trump, and like Obama and Bush and Clinton before him -- doesn't represent the
American people. He represents his mega-donors. And he is staffing his Administration
accordingly. He repays favors: he delivers the services that they buy from him. This is today's
America. And that is the way it functions.
On the massive military buildup = another drift towards fascism under the democrats, they
have the media, military, police on top of congress, house and president. GOP will be so weak
coming years, and they have themselves to blame for being so passive past years, in fact any
dissent will not be heard coming years with Biden.
The first such hurdle was the longstanding American- exceptionalist conceit that, in the
ironic title of Sinclair Lewis's dystopian 1935 novel, "It Can't Happen Here." The "it" in
Lewis's title was authoritarian fascism, falsely deemed impossible in the United States during
and since Lewis' time because of the supposedly strong hold here of democratic and
constitutional principles and institutions. Such authoritarianism has long been falsely
portrayed as beyond the pale of possibility in a nation whose media and political authorities
regularly and absurdly call the "world's greatest democracy."
Apathy/Demobilization/"Inverted Totalitarianism"
A third barrier was a critical ingredient of what the late left political scientist Sheldon
Wolin considered to be America's distinctive authoritarian "inverted totalitarianism" –
the atomized demobilization of the populace. While what Wolin called the "classical
totalitarian regimes" of fascist German and Soviet Russia aimed at the constant political
mobilization of the populace, "inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the populace to be
in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or
desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an
indication that the bulk of the populace has given up hope that the government will ever
significantly help them." The second most common response to pleas to join popular movements
against Trumpism-fascism (after "I'll vote/I voted against him") in my experience was a
shrugging indifference to and/or disgust with any and all politics often combined with a sense
that American political life is too ugly, boring, and/or impenetrable to merit attention.
No Real Left
Eighth, the continuing and longtime absence of any sophisticated, powerful, and relevant,
many-sided Left of significance in late Neoliberal America is a significant part of the tragic
equation. No such movement would have met the rise of Trump and Trumpism-fascism with four
years of avoidance, denial, passivity, and diversion. There are many factors in play behind
this pathetic portside weakness but two that have struck this writer and activist as
particularly relevant alongside excessive localism and excessive identitarianism in the last
four years are (i) the crippling holds of sectarianism (an almost pathological refusal to reach
across tribal-ideological and organizational lines to form a united anti-fascist front) and
(ii) single-issue silo politics whereby group A cares about the climate, group B cares about
reproductive rights, group C cares about a higher minimum wages, group D cares about teachers'
working conditions and so on.
46 Follow RT on Outgoing US
President Donald Trump has delivered his "parting gift" to the Moscow-led Nord Stream 2 gas
pipeline, with newly announced sanctions targeting a pipe-laying vessel and companies involved
in the multinational project.
The specialist ship concerned, named, 'Fortuna,' and oil tanker 'Maksim Gorky', as well as
two Russian firms, KVT-Rus and Rustanker, were blacklisted on Tuesday under CAATSA (Countering
America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) as part of Washington's economic war on Moscow.
The same legislation had been previously used by the US to target numerous Russian officials
and enterprises.
Russian energy giant Gazprom warned its investors earlier on Tuesday that Nord Stream 2
could be suspended or even canceled if more US restrictions are introduced.
However, Moscow has assured its partners that it intends to complete the project despite
"harsh pressure on the part of Washington," according to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry
Peskov. Reacting to the new package of sanctions on Tuesday, Peskov called them
"unlawful."
Meanwhile, the EU said it is in no rush to join the Washington-led sanction war on Nord
Stream 2. EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said that the bloc is not going to resist
the construction of the project.
"Because we're talking about a private project, we can't hamper the operations of those
companies if the German government agrees to it," Borrell said Tuesday.
Nord Stream 2 is an offshore gas pipeline, linking Russia and Germany with aim of providing
cheaper energy to Central European customers. Under the agreement between Moscow and Berlin, it
was to be launched in mid-2020, but the construction has been delayed due to strong opposition
from Washington.
The US, which is hoping to sell its Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe, has hit the
project with several rounds of sanctions over scarcely credible claims that it could undermine
European energy security. Critics say the real intent is to force EU members to buy from
American companies.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
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Fatback33 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:20 AM
The group that owns Washington makes the foreign policy. That policy is not for the benefit
of the people.
DukeLeo Fatback33 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:06 PM
That is correct. The private banks and corporations in the US are very upset about Nord
Stream - 2, as they want Europe to buy US gas at double price. Washington thus introduces
additional political gangsterism in the shape of new unilateral sanctions which have no merit
in international law.
noremedy 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:22 AM
Is the U.S. so stupid that they do not realize that they are isolating themselves? Russia has
developed SPFS, China CIPS, together with Iran, China and Russia are further developing a
payment transfer system. Once in place and functioning this system will replace the western
SWIFT system for international payment transfers. It will be the death knell for the US
dollar. 327 million Americans are no match for the rest of the billions of the world's
population. The next decade will see the total debasement of the US monetary system and the
fall from power of the decaying and crumbling in every way U.S.A.
Hanonymouse noremedy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:37 PM
They don't care. They have the most advanced military in the world. Might makes right, even
today.
Shelbouy 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:25 PM
Russia currently supplies over 50% of the natural gas consumed by The EU. Germany and Italy
are the largest importers of Russian natural gas. What is the issue of sanctions stemming
from and why are the Americans doing this? A no brainer question I suppose. It's to make more
money than the other supplier, and exert political pressure and demand obedience from its
lackey. Germany.
David R. Evans Shelbouy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:58 PM
Russia and Iran challenge perpetual US wars for Israel's Oded Yinon Plan. Washington is
Israel-controlled territory.
Jewel Gyn 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:34 AM
Sanctions work both ways. With the outgoing Trump administration desperately laying mines for
Biden, we await how sleepy Joe is going to mend strayed ties with EU.
Count_Cash 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:20 AM
The US mafia state continues with the same practices. The dog is barking but the caravan is
going. The counter productiveness of sanctions always shows through in the end! I am sure
with active efforts of Germany and Russia against US mafia oppression that a blowback will be
felt by the US over time!
Dachaguy 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:24 AM
This is an act of war against Germany. NATO should respond and act against the aggressor,
America.
xyz47 Dachaguy 42 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:20 PM
NATO is run by the US...
lovethy Dachaguy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:04 PM
NATO has no separate existence. It's the USA's arm of aggression, suppression and domination.
Germany after WWII is an occupied country of USA. Thousand of armed personnel stationed in
Germany enforcing that occupation.
Chaz Dadkhah 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:19 PM
Further proof that Trump is no friend of Russia and is in a rush to punish them while he
still has power. If it was the swamp telling him to do that, like his supporters suggest,
then they would have waited till their man Biden came in to power in less than 24 hours to do
it. Wake up!
Mac Kio 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:34 PM
USA hates fair competition. USA ignores all WTO rules.
Russkiy09 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:33 PM
By whining and not completing in the face of US, Russia is losing credibility. They should
not have delayed to mobilize the pipe laying vessel and other equipment for one whole year.
They should have mobilized in three months and finished by now. Same happens when Jewtin does
not shoot down Zio air force bombing Syria everyday. But best option should have been to tell
European vassals that "if you can, take our gas. But we will charge the highest amount and
sell as much as we want, exclude Russophobic Baltic countries and Poland and neo-vassal
Ukraine. Pay us not in your ponzi paper money but real goods and services or precious metals
or other commodities or our own currency Ruble." I so wish I could be the President of
Russia. Russians deserve to be as wealthy as the Swiss or SIngapore etc., not what they are
getting. Their leaders should stand up for their interest. And stop empowering the greedy
merchantalist Chinese and brotherhood Erdogan.
BlackIntel 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:27 PM
America i captured by private interest; this project threatens American private companies
hence the government is forced to protect capitalism. This is illegal
Ohhho 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:15 PM
That project was a mistake from the start: Russia should distance itself from the Evil
empire, EU included! Stop wasting time and resources on trying to please the haters and
keeping them more competitive with cheaper Russian natural gas: focus on real partners and
potential allies elsewhere!
butterfly123 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:58 PM
I have said it before that part of the problem is at the door of the policy-makers and
politicians in Russia. Pipeline project didn't spring up in the minds of politicians in
Russia one morning, presumably. There should have been foresight, detailed planning, and
opportunity creation for firms in Russia to acquire the skill-set and resources to advance
this project. Not doing so has come to bite Russia hard and painful. Lessons learnt I hope Mr
President!
jakro 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:37 AM
Good news. The swamp is getting deeper and bigger.
hermaflorissen 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:49 AM
Trump finally severed my expectations for the past 4 years. He should indeed perish.
ariadnatheo 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:06 PM
That is one Trump measure that will not be overturned by the Senile One. They will need to
amplify the RussiaRussiaRussia barking and scratching to divert attention from their dealings
with China
Neville52 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:01 PM
Its time the other nations of the world turned their backs on the US. Its too risky if you
are an international corporation to suddenly have large portions of your income cancelled due
to some crazy politician in the US
5th Eye 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:03 PM
From empire to the collapse of empire, US follows UK to the letters. Soon it will be
irrelevant. The only thing that remains for UK is the language. Probably hotdog for the US.
VonnDuff1 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:10 PM
The USA Congress and its corrupt foreign policy dictates work to the detriment of Europe and
Russia, while providing no tangible benefits to US states or citizens. So globalist demands
wrapped in the stars & stripes, should be laughed at, by all freedom loving nations.
"... After winning the 2016 election Trump caved early and caved often and governed like a neocon, while Sanders let himself get cucked by the DNC in 2016 and folded like a cheap suit during his 2020 campaign. ..."
"... So both of these clowns proved they are no threat to the establishment but it's in the establishment's interest to portray them as dangerous interlopers who threaten the stability of the nation. Why? Because it keeps the "rebellion" in house. As long as the electorate believes a Democrat or Republican POTUS can address their grievances the establishment can sigh in relief knowing that they are still in control. ..."
...Fact is, Trump was never the savior you wanted him to be. Had president Trump respected
candidate Trump's promises he'd at least be a man of his word. But he didn't do that of
course. Trump is a rhetorician (or a windbag, take your pick) and if you focus intently on
his words only while downplaying his actions, you might be able to convince yourself into
believing he is more than a prolific bullshitter.
Fox News is the "conservative" MSNBC. It swings from the GOP's nutsack (as you have
apparently just discovered) and in fact pioneered that style of outrage "journalism." The
American elite need to keep people believing in the two-party duopoly. Fox plays its roll by
keeping its viewers in the Republican fold. Hate the Democrats? Vote GOP! is the message. If
you think MSNBC is trash, why would you cut Fox News any slack? They perform the same
function.
Here's a conspiracy theory for you. What if Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both
controlled opposition? Start with their affiliation. The supposedly "independent" Sanders is
effectively a Democrat and the supposedly "insurgent" Trump is effectively a Republican. The
media has been in TDS mode for four years and when it looked like Sanders might have some
bipartisan appeal he was quickly slapped down by liberal pundits and commentators.
But what if all that outage is mostly theater designed to get voters believing that
Trump/Sanders are antiestablishment insurgents who present a "real difference" from stale
Democrat/Republican politics? The outrage and slap downs gives the impression that the
establishment really really hates these guys and lets the people who support them think that
they are supporting principled antiestablishmentarians.
The establishment may not like Trump or Sanders very much but as long as they are
controllable they are preferable to a strong third party candidate or a mass revolt against
the duopoly. After winning the 2016 election Trump caved early and caved often and
governed like a neocon, while Sanders let himself get cucked by the DNC in 2016 and folded
like a cheap suit during his 2020 campaign.
So both of these clowns proved they are no threat to the establishment but it's in the
establishment's interest to portray them as dangerous interlopers who threaten the stability
of the nation. Why? Because it keeps the "rebellion" in house. As long as the electorate
believes a Democrat or Republican POTUS can address their grievances the establishment can
sigh in relief knowing that they are still in control.
I don't know if Trump and Sanders are deliberately controlled opposition. But as a theory
it's more plausible than The Saker's undying trust in Trump as a principled POTUS who was
derailed by crafty internal and liberal opposition. If only Trump had been left alone to
govern without undue interference he would be a real hero and America would be saved. Give me
a break, The Saker, you can't have it both ways. Either the Empire and everything it stands
for is rotten, in which case supporting anyone running on a GOP/Democrat ticket is a fool's
errand, or it's not, in which case you can trust the system, roll up your blog and find a new
hobby.
What The Saker and other commentators that serve up predictable and unchallenging opinions
tailored for a specific audience do is provide entertainment. It's stuff for the faithful to
read and collectively reaffirm their beliefs while tsk-tsking at all the fools who "just
don't get it." Occasionally they provide comedic interludes like this piece where The Saker
discovers that Fox News is actually a corporate outlet that supports an established political
party and promotes the sanctity of the American duopoly. lol Thanks for the midweek chuckle,
my dude.
The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagence,
they have two of them.
– Julius Nyerere (former socialist president of Tanzania)
Biden is clearly an enforcer for a faction of what we might call the permanent
establishment, the hidden real government that runs on automatic imperial pilot regardless
who is nominal US President.
That "permanent establishment" is currently becoming "dis-established" everywhere in the
world. It sees with horror that its grip on the entire world is crumbling.
It does only what it has always tried in such cases -- war, war, war. Only of late, those
wars -- war against Russia over Ukraine, war against Assad's Syria, an attempted war against
Erdogan in Turkey, a war against the growing economic muscle in the world of China -- have
been impotent flops.
Biden, a dutiful servant of those interests, carries the flag of war to where he is sent,
much like the character in Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.
It is an Oligarchy of bond holders. I'm using the word bond as an stand-in for debt
instruments, or any sort of claim on productivity. Bond/Bondage/Debt are all closely related
concepts.
The entire Western World is inter-connected double-entry balance sheets.
One side of the balance sheet is "assets" and the other is "liabilities." One person's
liability is another persons asset.
It is best to view the western world as a balance sheet, especially as private bank credit
is the dominant money type of the west. Private banking and debt spreading has metastasized
like a cancer, and is now consuming the host. Debt instruments and finance paper are being
serviced in the finance sector with QE and 'CARES' act shenanigan's, which pays these finance
"assets."
If you want to call the bond holders in finance and elsewhere as a nomenklatura, go ahead
– but it obscures reality. These people are a class, a class of usurers, who are
"taking" wealth in sordid ways by gaming the system.
All through history, plutocracy has arisen out of the population because debts were not
annulled, or land was enclosed.
Oligarchs of various types are harvesting the world through various means, including the
growth of debt claims. These claims grow exponentially, and outside of nature's ability to
pay. The derivative bubble wants to be paid. What cannot go on, will not.
The balance sheet is not really balanced, one side (the debt instrument holder) is making
exponential claims on debtors.
I have, for some time, been mis-naming the Nomenklatura as the Politburo, with the commune
being the many tentacled international banking cartel. It's the same crowd that funded the
original Bolsheviks.
IMO they are only "Neo" by virtue of the old ones having died, but I'm not going to split
hairs. We all know it is those whose loyalty is to a shitty little country on the
Mediterranean.
Below is a list of which House Republicans voted to impeach Trump on Wednesday.
Rep. John Katko
(N.Y.) : "To allow the President of the United States to incite this attack without
consequence is a direct threat to the future of our democracy. For that reason, I cannot
sit by without taking action. I will vote to impeach this President."
Rep. Liz
Cheney (Wyo.) : " There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United
States of his office and his oath to the Constitution. I will vote to impeach the
President. "
Rep. Adam
Kinzinger (Ill.) : "There is no doubt in my mind that the President of the United
States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection I will vote in favor of
impeachment."
Rep. Fred Upton
(Mich.) : "Enough is enough. The Congress must hold President Trump to account and send
a clear message that our country cannot and will not tolerate any effort by any President
to impede the peaceful transfer of power from one President to the next. Thus, I will vote
to impeach."
Rep. Dan Newhouse
(Wash.) : "A vote against this impeachment is a vote to validate the unacceptable
violence we witnessed in our nation's capital. ... I will vote yes on the articles of
impeachment."
Rep.
Peter Meijer (Mich.) : "With the facts at hand, I believe the article of impeachment to
be accurate. The President betrayed his oath of office by seeking to undermine our
constitutional process, and he bears responsibility for inciting the violent acts of
insurrection last week."
Rep. Anthony Gonzalez
(Ohio) : "When I consider the full scope of events leading up to January 6th including
the President's lack of response as the United States Capitol was under attack, I am
compelled to support impeachment."
Rep. Tom Rice (S.C.) : "I
have backed this President through thick and thin for four years. I campaigned for him and
voted for him twice. But, this utter failure is inexcusable."
Rep. David Valadao
(Calif.) : "Based on the facts before me, I have to go with my gut and vote my
conscience. I voted to impeach President Trump. His inciting rhetoric was un-American,
abhorrent, and absolutely an impeachable offense. It's time to put country over
politics."
There is a better chance of Joe Biden remembering his own name tomorrow than the Blue Team
admitting that the impeachment was bogus, no matter how strong the evidence.
"... As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish. ..."
"... "The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. " ..."
I have a poorly researched theory on the Guardian to share here if i may... a mix of
interesting events reconstructed into a theoretical conspiracy of sorts... here it goes.. I
won't take any reasoned or better informed debunking personally i assure you.
-Since the Edward Snowden scandal, it appears the Guardian has experienced a
transformation of sorts. From rogue investigative journalism, to MSM / Intel Services
propaganda mouthpiece... a la WaPo, NY Times etc...
-To my knowledge, the Guardian's original independence and journalistic integrity was
facilitated by a Trust Fund of sorts which allowed it some form of editorial independence
and objectivity based on finances not entirely reliant on ad revenue/sponsorship and
various other corporate partnership/ownership deals
-I am not particularly sure about the exact timings, but in recent years this Trust Fund of
sorts began to underperform and The Guardian started running into financial trouble
-The Guardian's financial misadventures roughly coincided with significant changes in its
editorial content, key departures including Glen Greenwald himself and various other legal
disputes and misfortunes
My amateurish thesis..
Could it be that this Trust Fund of sorts was deliberately sabotaged, through toxic
Board infiltrations or deliberate bad financial advice, aimed at eroding The Guardian's
financial independence and thus its editorial independence and promotion of dissenting
narratives? Given the extent of integration between Intel/Weapons/Finance industries, a
congruence of mutual interests is not unexpected, and if this Fund was advised or run by
members of major Wall St et al. firms, it doesn't seem too far fetched to conceive of such
a possibility.
Please feel free to post any relative info or comment.
As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag
BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time
during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of
the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish.
Guardian changed after 2014 when they published the Edward Snowden leaks. Cameron
threatened to take over the newspapers for revealing the Five Eyes' global
surveillance.
The Guardian was once a comparatively good newspaper. The Snowden episode changed
everything.
Nowadays it's just another pseudo-liberal, post-feminist, opinionated propaganda outlet. In
some way a Daily Mail for "intellectuals".
Basically half of their articles are "opinion" pieces. The only thing worth reading is the
football section (and even that gets more and more opinionated).
So the evil-doers carry out a complicated mission with many moving parts, plus a huge
monetary outlay. They wait seven years before finishing the dastardly deed, just to thicken
the plot. The Guardian says yeah, that sounds plausible. Because they know their readers
have been groomed for years to believe BS.
Reminds me of the Skripal nutty shifting narratives, or better yet Jonathon Chait's New
York Magazine piece (Trump a Russian asset since 1987).
Martin Chulov should be scolded by his Minders for not linking Russia to the plot (the
three were "joint Russian-Syrian citizens"). Maybe that will be written into the script in
the next Guardian article.
My understanding is that for years the bulk of The Fraudian's funding was subsidised by
revenues from sales of Manchester-based tabloid newspapers. I believe this continued into
the 1990s and maybe the first decade of this century. A major part of The Fraudian's income
also used to come from government employment advertisements in the pre-Internet age.
Once the connections with Manchester-based newspapers were cut by the Trust that runs
The Fraudian, and other traditional sources of funding dried up, the newspaper started
sacking editorial and other office staff. This was about the same time The Fraudian opened
offices in the US and Australia in an effort to get more readers (and more subscribers),
and also coincides with Julian Assange working with The Fraudian and other MSM papers on
releasing Wikileaks email revelations. The sackings were disguised as voluntary
redundancies or retirements and the scale was quite huge, a fair few hundred jobs were
cut.
This of course led to The Fraudian having to partner with various "media agencies" in
the Middle East, eastern Europe and other parts of the world. You can guess who funds these
other agencies The Fraudian calls its "partners".
That Martin Chulov writes an article linking the Syrian govt to last year's bomb blast
is no surprise. The news comes just before Joe Biden's inauguration. I had expected that
one of his first priorities as POTUS would be resuming the US invasion of Syria, using any
excuse. The Chulov article smacks of the same devious cherry-picking that Bellingcat
engaged in to finger and "identify" two Russian tourists in Salisbury in 2018 as GRU
agents. I would not be surprised if Chulov, like Higgins, had been told what to write and
by the same people.
Ahem... refreshing to see some content that isn't about the whole Trump
situation in the USSA.
As with other things, including, in part, the Trump thing, we're witnessing full "1984"
level shit from the media and governments. Everyone knows that the CIA and other Pentagram
offices (and MI6) have full control over what Western media publishes, but it's like they
aren't even trying anymore. Just full-on lie mode with zero accountability even when what
they print is refuted beyond any doubt.
Of course they were going to blame Syria, Iran or Venezuela. If any external government
was involved and it wasn't simply negligence by Lebanon's, then it was Israel. Period.
Jesus F*cking Christ, it's so obvious.
Guardian did a good job reporting on the Iraq War II...it was after that (2008), and in
response to its halfway decent reporting of Iraq that the ownership mechanism was
changed.
The new Guardian ownership enacted a "constitution" guaranteeing it would retain its
earlier journalistic integrity, but that was pure horseshit, as it went down hill rapidly
after the ownership change and became just another mouthpiece for
neoliberal/neoconservative propaganda.
Why Martin Chulov, the Guardian's Middle East correspondent and author of the piece, did
not do the basic diligence of checking the records or chose not to tell his readers that
such address sharing is extremely common and does not prove anything is beyond me.
If the Guardian had a proper fact checker that would defeat the purpose of the Guardian
in the first place. I'm not sure if that counts as a circular argument.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Jan 15 2021 16:41 utc | 23
And you can get your nails and a (bikini) waxing done next door. I guess it's safer that
doing it at home.
... I recall a story how The Guardian was tamed. In the aftermath of Snowden
revelations, The Guardian was raided and the people who run it were seriously threatened.
Ever since, they diligently follow the orders which are given to them with some
sophistication (this is England after all, not Zimbabwe), hence preserving some shreds of
"leftists credibility". Apparently, unlikely as it may seem, some people still read it.
Just before I stopped reading them, they had an actually interesting series about police
shootings in USA. Criticizing local governments in USA is still allowed.
@Et Tu #8
You're thinking too hard.
Matt Taibbi has nailed it on the head: Facebook and Google's ongoing strangulation of news
via monopolization of the channel and demonetization of classified ads has forced
newspapers (and other media) to become ever more click-bait focused. This in turn has
caused them to focus ever more narrowly on "engaged" (read: made angry) groups.
The Guardian's turn is directly linked with Russiagate, not Snowden.
... my real important point about the fascist aristocrat dictatorship of the USSA. The
ruling class aristocracy is certainly not at all in the business of increasing their
profits by acquiring yet more money. That's just a very stupid notion. For all relevant
purposes they already possess all the money. Let's get real. Their sole real business is
simply to retain power. Period. And how do they do that? Easy.
They establish and constantly maintain a churnatistic society. They just keep the
commonalty spinning around in circles by constantly churning 'current events'.
They start a war, or an obviously fake election, or an economic depression, or a mass
shooting, or any outlandish disaster they can churn up to keep the masses in a constant
state of bewilderment.
And then they drop the cherry on top by publishing narratives in media such as the
Guardian that the poor serfs always know deep down make no sense at all.
Therefor no revolt is possible because the serfs are in a perpetual state of
disorientation. All fascist societies are ultimately based on churnatism.
It is unclear whether it was Russians or this is another false flag. Anatol Lieven has zero
credentials to discuss this complex subject as he has zero training in computer security and it
looks like he has zero understanding of how easy you can create a false flag in this area. Looks
like Lieven in not only incompetent but also a neocon. For example "The second entirely
appropriate response is for Washington to intensify its own existing cyber-intelligence
operations against Russia. " If this London professor thinks that GB can benefit for this, he is
deeply mistaken.
Notable quotes:
"... the only countries that have to date carried out a truly successful and destructive act of cyber-sabotage are the U.S. and Israel, through the " Stuxnet " virus, which as introduced into the Iranian nuclear system and first uncovered in 2010. ..."
The most important thing to remember in this regard is the difference between an "attack"
and an act of espionage. The SolarWinds hack has been generally described in the United States
as the former (including by incoming national security adviser
Jake Sullivan , and Biden ), but was in fact the latter.
Nobody is suggesting that the hackers in this case introduced viruses to paralyze U.S. state
systems or damage domestic infrastructure and services. This was purely an
information-gathering exercise.
This distinction is crucial. An attack on the citizens or infrastructure of another state
has traditionally been considered an act of war. Actions by the United States, Russia, Israel
and other countries in recent decades have somewhat blurred this distinction. But no one can
doubt that if another country carried out a major act of sabotage on American soil, (especially
one threatening the lives of citizens), then Washington's response would -- rightly -- be a
ferocious one.
As a matter of fact, while Russia has engaged in limited operations against Estonia and
Ukraine, the only countries that have to date carried out a truly successful and
destructive act of cyber-sabotage are the U.S. and Israel, through the " Stuxnet " virus, which as introduced into the
Iranian nuclear system and first uncovered in 2010.
Espionage by contrast is something that all states do all the time -- often to friends as
well as adversaries. We may remember the scandal under the Obama administration when U.S.
intelligence was found to have hacked
into the communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior leaders of NATO
countries. The hacking of a Belgian telecom company by British intelligence (" Operation Socialist ") is
another example. And I would be both shocked and deeply disappointed to learn that U.S.
intelligence is not trying to penetrate the state information systems of Russia and China.
And for each revealed act of espionage there is a well-established and calibrated set of
responses. The aggrieved country issues a formal protest and expels a given number of
"diplomats" from the country responsible. That country expels an equal number of diplomats. The
media and the writers of spy thriller writers have a party. Then everything goes back to
normal. For after all, everybody knows that there is no chance whatsoever that states will ever
give up spying.
There are, however, three aspects of cyber-espionage that make it different from and more
dangerous than traditional espionage.
Firstly, as Jake Sullivan has pointed out, unlike most forms of espionage, hacking can be
used both for spying and for sabotage, and one can form the basis for the other. A key goal of
responsible statecraft should be to establish a clear line between the two when it comes to
cyberspace: to develop a set of calibrated and limited responses to cyber-espionage, and to
make clear that cyber-sabotage will lead to a much fiercer and more damaging
retaliation.
Secondly, unlike traditional espionage, the cyber variety is an area where third parties,
uncontrolled by either side, can play a major role and cause serious damage to relations (and
of course this also gives all sides plausible deniability -- as with U.S. moves against
Iran).
For example, those behind the authors of the 2011 cyber-attack on the G20 summit in Paris
have never been identified. Several major hacks have been conducted by independent
cyber-anarchists, or even by clever teenagers, sometimes it seems simply for fun. In the
present atmosphere, however, all such hacks against the United States are likely to be blamed
on Russia and to lead to a further deterioration of relations.
Thirdly, and in part because of these blurred lines, no clear and understood international
traditions are in place concerning the response to cyber-espionage, and there is a serious risk
of overreaction leading to a spiraling escalation of tension and retaliation.
This is what the Biden administration must avoid. Apart from the immediate damage to
relations, overreaction would mean that when -- as is bound to happen someday -- Russia or
China eventually discover a cyber-espionage operation against them by U.S. intelligence, they
will not only look justified in a disproportionate and escalatory response -- they will
actually be justified.
One thing that Biden must definitely not do is to follow the suggestion that the United
States should shut Russia out of the SWIFT international bank transfer system which -- the most
damaging of all U.S. sanctions against Iran, and one that would have a disastrous effect on
Russian trade.
Last year, then Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia would regard such a
move as equivalent to an act of war and would respond accordingly. Various Russian responses
would be possible, including a definitive move into the Chinese geopolitical camp and massive
military aid to Iran. Without doubt however, one of them would be to move from cyber-espionage
to cyber-sabotage against the United States.
The most sensible response would in fact be to follow literally President-elect Biden's
statement that his administration will "respond in kind" to the attack is the most sensible --
that is to say in the cyber-field. The first step (as after any counter-intelligence failure)
must obviously be to strengthen U.S. cyber-defenses which. Amongst other things, this requires
using presidential orders to combine, streamline, and rationalize the competing plethora of
U.S. agencies currently responsible for cyber-security.
The second entirely appropriate response is for Washington to intensify its own existing
cyber-intelligence operations against Russia. That, however, is another reason not to engage in
overblown moral outrage over the latest hack. The American pot already has quite a global
reputation for calling kettles black, and there is no need to blacken it further.
Finally, the Biden administration should do everything possible to develop agreed
international restraints on state cyber-operations, including an absolute ban on
cyber-sabotage. This should involve opening new negotiations with Moscow on longstanding
Russian proposals for an international "arms control" treaty in the area of cyber-warfare, and
for a joint U.S.-Russian working group to establish mutual ground rules and confidence building
measures.
These Russian proposals cannot be accepted as they stand (above all because of Moscow's
desire to limit free flows of information); however, more than a decade ago, then- National
Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said
that "I do think that we have to establish the rules, and I think what Russia has put
forward is, perhaps, the starting point for international debate." This remains true today, and
the danger of a failure to reach international agreement has grown vastly since then.
One of the worst things about hysterical statements in the United States about
"cyber-attacks" is that unwary readers might mistakenly conclude from them that things can't
get any worse. They can get much, much worse.
Knowing an extremely low quality (and it continues to deteriorate steadily) of the
American historiography of WW II, if I would be you--I would be very cautious with what I
read. The whole title of the book you proposed is already a typical sensationalist
revisionist fantasy, which shows clearly that the author is in historical falsification
business, most likely whitewashing Nazis. There is plenty of "scholar" literature like that
to go around in the Anglo-sphere and it is not a real history, but propaganda. Not to mention
the fact that Morgenthau Plan was never really implemented, to start with. Most of what was
written about USSR in the US after the WW II, with some rare, however important, exceptions,
is garbage along the lines of Ziemke's war fantasies.
"... Although there may not be tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same. ..."
"... it is important to put aside the notion that fascism is a purely right-wing phenomenon, complete with a chauvinistic demagogue haranguing a frenzied crowd. The new dictator on the block is not some fanatical Fuhrer, but rather Silicon Valley, the fountainhead of technological advancement and the formidable fortress of liberal ideology. In other words, fascism is an ideology that moves fluidly along the political spectrum, although some say the ideology grew out of European progressivism. ..."
"... Liberal Fascism ..."
"... Many years earlier, the late political theorist Hannah Arendt described the Nazi Party (which stands for, lest we forget, the 'National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party') as nothing more than "the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad basing itself on the intoxication of destruction as an actual experience." That sounds like a pretty accurate description of the cancel culture mentality that has now gripped the 'progressive' left with an almost demonic possession. ..."
"... We are living Orwell's 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and what's left is only there for a chosen few. ..."
"... Big Tech began its slide towards marked fascist tendencies thanks to one of the greatest hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public, known as Russiagate. One after another, Silicon Valley overlords were called before Congressional committees to explain "how and why Russian operatives were given free rein to tamper with 2016 U.S. election," in favor of the populist Donald Trump, no less. ..."
"... Strangely, violence has never shocked the progressive left, so long as the violence supported its agenda. ..."
"... While all forms of 'cancel culture' (which seems to be part of a move to build American society along the lines of the Chinese 'social credit system,' which rewards those who toe the party line, and punishes those who fall out of favor) are egregious and counterintuitive to American values, perhaps the most astonishing was the cancellation of Republican Senator Josh Hawley's book deal with Simon and Shuster. ..."
"... In conclusion, it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to believe that they are safe from the same sort of corporate and government behavior that has now dramatically silenced the conservative voice across the nation. The United States has entered dangerous unchartered waters, and by all indications it would appear that the American people have inherited a 'soft' form of fascism. ..."
Although there may not be tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds from his
bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same.
Most Americans can probably still remember a time when U.S. companies were in business with
one goal in mind – providing a product or service for profit. It was a noble idea, the
bedrock of capitalism, in which everyone stood to gain in the process.
Today, the monopolistic powers now enjoyed by a handful of mighty corporations, which are no
longer shy about declaring their political bent, have tempted them to wade into the deep end of
the political pool with deleterious effects on democracy. Indeed, corporate power wedded to
government is nothing less than fascism.
In presenting such a case, it is important to put aside the notion that fascism is a
purely right-wing phenomenon, complete with a chauvinistic demagogue haranguing a frenzied
crowd. The new dictator on the block is not some fanatical Fuhrer, but rather Silicon Valley,
the fountainhead of technological advancement and the formidable fortress of liberal ideology.
In other words, fascism is an ideology that moves fluidly along the political spectrum,
although some say the ideology grew out of European progressivism.
Jonah Goldberg argued in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism , that even before World
War II "fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and
left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States." Many years earlier, the late
political theorist Hannah Arendt described the Nazi Party (which stands for, lest we forget,
the 'National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party') as nothing more than "the breakdown of all
German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad basing itself on the intoxication
of destruction as an actual experience." That sounds like a pretty accurate description of the
cancel culture mentality that has now gripped the 'progressive' left with an almost demonic
possession.
It should be shocking to Republicans and Democrats alike that the Commander-in-Chief of the
United States is banished from all of the main social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook
and YouTube – denying him the ability to communicate with his 75 million constituents, or
one half of the electorate. This is real and unprecedented violence being committed against the
body politic and far more worrisome than any breach of federal property, as loathsome as such
an act may be.
The Capitol building is, after all, ultimately a mere symbol of our freedoms and liberties,
whereas the rights laid down in the U.S. Constitution – the First Amendment not least of
all – are fragile and coming under sustained assault every single day. Why does the left
refuse to show the same concern for an aging piece of parchment, arguably the greatest
political document ever written, as it does for a piece of architecture? The answer to that
riddle is becoming increasingly obvious.
We are living Orwell's 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big
tech and what's left is only there for a chosen few.
Big Tech began its slide towards marked fascist tendencies thanks to one of the greatest
hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public, known as Russiagate. One after another, Silicon
Valley overlords were called before Congressional committees to
explain "how and why Russian operatives were given free rein to tamper with 2016 U.S.
election," in favor of the populist Donald Trump, no less.
After this made for television 'dressing down', the Big Tech executives at Google, Facebook,
Twitter and others got busy reconfiguring their software algorithms in such a way that
thousands of internet creators suddenly lost not only a lifetime of hard work and their
sustenance, but their voice as well. This is the moment that Big Tech and the Democrats began
to really march in lockstep. A new dark age of 'McCarthyism' had settled upon the nation, which
gave the left unlimited powers for blocking user accounts they deemed "suspicious," which meant
anyone on the right. Now, getting 'shadow banned,' demonetized and outright banned from these
platforms has become the new dystopian reality for those with a conservative message to convey.
And the fact that the story of 'Russian collusion' was finally exposed as a dirty little lie
did nothing to loosen the corporate screws.
Incidentally, as a very large footnote to this story, Big Tech and Big Business have not
dished out the same amount of medieval-style punishment to other violators of the public peace.
The most obvious example comes courtesy of Black Lives Matter, the Soros-funded social-justice
movement that has wreaked havoc across a broad swath of the heartland following the death of
George Floyd during an arrest by a white police officer.
Both BLM and Trump supporters believe they have a very large grudge to bear. The former
believes they are being unfairly targeted by police due to the color of their skin, while the
latter believes they are not getting fair treatment by the mainstream media due to 'Trump
Derangement Syndrome', and possibly also due in part to their skin color. But at this point the
similarities between BLM and Trump voters come to a screeching halt.
Taking it as gospel that America suffers from 'systemic racism' (it doesn't, although that
is not to say that pockets of racism against all colors and creeds doesn't exist), dozens of
corporations jumped on the woke bandwagon to express their support for Black Lives Matter at
the very same time the latter's members were looting and burning neighborhoods across the
nation. Strangely, violence has never shocked the progressive left, so long as the violence
supported its agenda.
Here are just some of the ways the corporate world responded to charges that America was a
racist cauldron ready to blow, as reported by The Washington Post: "Jamie Dimon, chief
executive of JPMorgan Chase, knelt
alongside employees during his visit to a Chase branch. Bank of America
pledged $1 billion to fight racial inequality in America. Tech companies have
invested big dollars in Black Lives Matter, the Center for Policing Equity, Colin
Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp and other entities engaged in racial justice efforts " And
the list goes on and on.
Of course, private corporations are free to express their solidarity with whatever group
they wish. The problem, however, is that these monopolistic monstrosities have an overwhelming
tendency to pledge allegiance to liberal, progressive values, as opposed to maybe steering
clear of politics altogether. Nowhere was Corporate America's political agenda more obvious
than in the aftermath of the siege of the Capitol building on January 6, which led to the death
of five people.
Corporate America missed a very good opportunity to keep quiet and remain neutral with
regards to an issue of incredible partisan significance. Instead, it unleashed a salvo of
attacks on Trump supporters, even denying them access to basic services.
Aside from the most obvious and alarming 'disappearing act,' that of POTUS being removed
from the major social media platforms, were countless lesser names caught up in the
'purge.'
One such person is conservative commentator and former baseball star Curt Schilling, who
says that AIG terminated his insurance policy over his "social media profile," which was
sympathetic to Donald Trump,
according to Summit News.
"We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that @AIGinsurance canceled our
insurance due to my "Social Media profile," tweeted Schilling.
"The agent told us it was a decision made by and with their PR department in conjunction
with management," he added.
While all forms of 'cancel culture' (which seems to be part of a move to build American
society along the lines of the Chinese 'social credit system,' which rewards those who toe the
party line, and punishes those who fall out of favor) are egregious and counterintuitive to
American values, perhaps the most astonishing was the cancellation of Republican Senator Josh
Hawley's book deal with Simon and Shuster.
"We did not come to this decision lightly," Simon & Schuster said in a statement over
Twitter. "As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and
viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens,
and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat."
The so-called "threat" was a photograph of Hawley raising a fist to the crowd that had
assembled outside of the Capitol building before it had breached the security perimeter. It
seems that corporations may now serve as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to how
Americans behave in public. Is it a crime that Hawley acknowledged a crowd of supporters who
were at the time behind the gates of the Capitol building? Apparently it is.
By the way, the name of the Hawley's book? 'The Tyranny of Big Tech'. How's that for
irony?
In conclusion, it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to believe that they are
safe from the same sort of corporate and government behavior that has now dramatically silenced
the conservative voice across the nation. The United States has entered dangerous unchartered
waters, and by all indications it would appear that the American people have inherited a 'soft'
form of fascism.
Although there may not be troops and tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds
from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same: the brutal elimination of
one half of the American population from all of the due protections provided by the U.S.
Constitution due to an unholy alliance between corporate and government power, which is the
very definition of fascism. Democrats, you may very well be next, so enjoy your victory while
you still can.
"... Since you like Hitler analogies so much, dear Steven, why don't you contemplate the 'reactionary' aspect of those Germans who resisted, in the 1930s, the 'progress' of the National-Socialist movement. ..."
"... 'Reactionary' simply means 'opposing the change', and the changes instituted by global finance, aided by their faithful servants, your liberal comrades, -- those changes should be opposed by all decent citizens. ..."
Since you like Hitler analogies so much, dear Steven, why don't you contemplate the
'reactionary' aspect of those Germans who resisted, in the 1930s, the 'progress' of the
National-Socialist movement.
'Reactionary' simply means 'opposing the change', and the changes instituted by global
finance, aided by their faithful servants, your liberal comrades, -- those changes should be
opposed by all decent citizens.
And they are opposed by all decent citizens, and especially by the American working
class, which is why your liberal comrades have to resort to fascist methods: goebbelsian
propaganda, censorship, blacklisting, police repression.
"... In the case of this Ukrainian nazi – of course they knew. They just hoped no one would notice. The reason she was given this appointment was because she is who she is. Ukraine is to be the anti-Russian state with an indoctrinated population – people like this young woman are part of that policy. ..."
"Yale historian Timothy Snyder" In light of his opinions the appellation "historian" to this person can only be considered satire.
"The term 'fascist' is far too easily abused."
It is today used – like the term anti-semite, white supremacist, racist – to smear and or discredit anybody from the left or right
one disagrees with or tries to disempower.
Jonathan Cook lays out how this works with regards to the left:
I have no problem arguing conservatives, if they actually clearly define what they mean by this term and find some points I agree
with someone like Peter Hitchens:
"His view is that conservatism should embody a Burkean sense of public duty, conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as
the best guarantee of liberty. Furthermore, this view holds a general hostility to hasty reforms and adventurism .
Hitchens takes a critical stance on many wars. He was opposed to the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq War, on the grounds that neither was
in the interests of either Britain or the United States,[66] and opposes the war in Afghanistan.[67] He believes that the UK should
never have joined in World War I, and is very critical of the view that World War II was "The Good War".
Synchronization. Just beforehand, Rachel Maddow propped Snyder's book on fascism.
Dmitry Babich made an excellent point about how the Biden crowd cheered the storming of the Ukrainian parliament which include
some folks who qualify as fascists. In comparison, last week's DC protesting MAGA group didn't appear to be so fascist. I saw
an Israeli flag among these protestors as well as some African-Americans.
A related great shot at establishment politico Ian Bremmer:
Mark Sleboda @MarkSleboda1 ·
Jan 10 "Calling for an insurrection
to overthrow the legitimate outcome of a free and fair election is crime against the nation." - Unless the nation in question
is #Ukraine in 2014 or some other state
& govt not aligned with US hegemony. Then calling for an insurrection is kosher.
Quote Tweet ian bremmer @ianbremmer · Jan 10
Calling for an insurrection to overthrow the legitimate outcome of a free and fair election is crime against the nation.
Yes, Trump only has another week in office. But he should still be impeached and convicted.
There are plenty of poseurs, blow-hards about. To be dangerous, there must be a leadership, an apparatus, discipline, and a
substantial rank and file. And most importantly, all motivated by a creed, common beliefs that weld all into a force. Nothing
like that exists.
But the good news is that behind the shrill loud-mouths of the Woke censorship bullies, fake news media, liberals, Democrats,
burned out 'progressives – the On Duty paid for apparatchiks. Behind them is – nothing. No Party, no organizers, no apparatus
at all. No store fronts for meetings, no stand by printers, no trained marshals. No seething masses burning with righteous fury
ready to hit the streets. Nothing.
Sure, people are mad. But when you're mad at everything then that power is dissipated. And when you're not united by being
For something then you don't amount to a hill of beans. The liberals are afraid that when their 'lockdown pandemic racket' runs
out of gas, the public will turn on them with a vengeance. And they can expect no organized part of population to defend them.
For a while, folks will be united on venting their fury at those that ride high now. Wait till the wheel turns. Grigory MatyuninJANUARY 11, 2021 AT
9:51 PM
It's like the misuse of the term 'conspiracy theorist' by people like Snyder, Harding and Applebaum. Anyone who merely points
to the impropriety of Nuland/McCain's actions on the Maidan is pre-emptively dismissed by them as a conspiracy theorist. Yet the
notion that Russia controls Trump through a pee tape, bewitched the Brits into voting for Brexit and was the sole force behind
the Catalan independence movement is now axiomatic for worshippers of received wisdom. GuestJANUARY 12, 2021 AT
12:51 AM
In the case of this Ukrainian nazi – of course they knew. They just hoped no one would notice.
The reason she was given this appointment was because she is who she is.
Ukraine is to be the anti-Russian state with an indoctrinated population – people like this young woman are part of that policy.
Look around the world!
We have seen that the west has no problem funding and supporting all sorts of disgusting groups and individuals if it meets their
objectives.
Nice job, Professor! It's always good to see somebody point out these hacks egregious double standards.
I want people to start scientifically as possible defining their terms for political ideologies. Like, there is actually a
legitimate use for the word "fascist". From what I understand, fascism is an actual political ideology and movement and should
not be used simply as a derogatory. From what I understand, fascism does not necessarily include a racialist component, although
it usually does (being based on nationalism).
Mussolini was a fascist. Hitler was a fascist too. (Nazism being a subset of the broader movement fascism?)
Franco was a fascist.
That Ukrainian lady you mentioned is an ideological fascist, more specifically a fucking Nazi.
Donald Trump -- is NOT a fascist. He is just a right-wing conservative, Murican-style!
I have for years tried to find a concise definition of "Fascism", but only found a lot of disagreement.
Fascism is by some defined as a corporatism where the state and the industrial and financial capitalist elite have come to
a complete nexus where the state protects within a framework of "ultra" nationalism those elites who in return follow and as well
directly influence the policies. By this definition the USA could be called not a fascist state, but one with fascists tendencies
as the nexus has been established to a great extend.
Some conservatives and libertarians find intellectual solace in pointing out that especially in Germany fascism developed as
a "national socialism". A version that opposed the internationalism of the Marxist version espoused the German Communist party,
and propagated an economic based antisemitism.
They are not wrong there, as socialism is not just the socialism or communism as defined by Marx, but as Marx himself pointed
out in his critiques there are various kind of socialisms. (
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
)
What they however ignore is Hitlers move under the guise of "socialism" to establish close ties with the German financial and
Industrial leadership and the attempt of a "true" National Socialism came to an end with the Strasser Brothers breaking away and
one being murdered in the Night of the Long Knives when Hitler destroyed any leftwing faction within the NSDAP.
Fascism is not the only ideology which lacks clear definition. Try looking at the literature on liberalism – it's a mess (with
good reason – many modern day 'liberals' are entirely at odds with classical liberals, neoliberals, etc, but they're all called
liberal). The best recent scholarship can come up with is the idea that liberalism is a 'family of resemblances' or even that
it's just whatever people who call themselves liberal happen to say it is at any given time and place. Conservatism is similarly
poorly defined.
"I have for years tried to find a concise definition of "Fascism", but only found a lot of disagreement."
There's still definition provided by G. Dimitrov:
"Fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of the
finance capital
Fascism is not a supra-class power and not the power of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen proletariat over finance
capital. Fascism*is* the rule of finance capital itself .
This is the organization of terrorist reprisals against the working class and the revolutionary part of the peasantry
and intelligentsia. Fascism in foreign policy is chauvinism in its crudest form, cultivating zoological hatred of other peoples."
Defenders of Google, Twitter, Amazon et al saying "they CAN do that – they are PrIVaTe CoMpaNIeS!" – ha-ha!
Absolutely, Paul. Comparing the neoconservative and paleoconservative traditions, for instance, reveals extraordinary divergences
in conservative intellectual thought. Your recent book presents plenty of such contradictions.
Yet the lack of definitional clarity does not mean that any particular term can be thrown around as a polemical device or a
catch-all form of abuse. Fascist ideologies differ between themselves, but they do have a relatively ubiquitous common denominator
in being mass movements set upon utopian mass transformation relying upon extreme violence, as per the scholarship of Roger Griffin.
It's like right-of-centre political commentators who misuse the term 'Marxist' to describe modern identity politics, notwithstanding
how clearly inappropriate that label is when analyzing a movement which has little commitment to class struggle.
Equally, while we may lack a one-size-fits-all definition of any given ideology, we can usually say with some confidence what
it is not. In other words, while the fascism of OUN-B may differ remarkably from the fascism of Mussolini, it is sufficiently
clear that these movements lack any ideological likeness with modern Russia.
From what I understand, one common denominator of genuine fascist movements is a cult of a national leader (Hitler, Mussolini,
Franco, Bandera). However, I am not sure that this factor is REQUIRED in order to be fascist. I imagine it is theoretically possible
to have a fascist nation run by a committee or collegial leadership.
And the "Leader" factor is also not definitive in and of itself, because the Stalin period in the Soviet Union was also defined
by a cult of a leader; and yet the Soviet Union was definitely not fascist, it was socialist.
In this case, I would say, two different systems (capitalistic fascism and Soviet-style socialism) showed, what evolutionary
biologists call "convergent" traits.
For example, in the natural world, fishes and whales both have fins and live in the water; yet these two types of animals are
not related to each other genetically (except going way back). This is "convergent" evolution.
Which leads me to another thought: Perhaps ideological movements can be classified by their historical genetics rather than
a static "structuralist" definition. The difference between a Darwinian vs a Linnaeus approach? I think this method is also used
to categorize religions, so might be appropriate also for political ideologies.
"Outside of a particular time period (1920s to 1940s), I don't think that the term 'fascism' has a lot of meaning. "
What about:
– Spain under Franko.
– Greece under "black colonels"
– Genuine, NATO approved fascist parties working diligently and openly in the "Western democracies" throughout the period?
Remember VICE's breathless coverage of the "Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity" that propelled certain Ostrovsky to the upper
echelons of the journalism and punditry? From their linked article:
"She also addressed a photo that was circulated of her online, showing her as one of a group of four women holding a flag
emblazoned with a swastika while giving a Nazi salute. She claimed the image was an ironic Halloween photo, mocking the Kremlin
narrative that Ukrainian nationalists were neo-Nazis."
No surprise to see PC Bulgarian Ivan Kravtsev involved with that establishment org accepting her. At the Brit based openDemocracy
venue, Kravtsev felt compelled to write an article on why China (in his opinion) is freer than Russia. Tom de Waal is a Kravstev
fan.
There're better academics posting at this threads. By academic, I'm referring to those who intellectually and knowledge wise
aren't inferior to the aforementioned folks getting the accolades.
If she says it was just a Halloween costume, that means she is disowning or denying having Nazi views? That seems cowardly
to me. I personally have more respect for Nazis who just come out and admit, "Yeah, I'm a Nazi." Of course, in that case, they
would have to be willing to sacrifice the money and income from "respectable" bourgeois institutions.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder – more like Yale historian – propagandist Timothy Snyder.. i figured this out on my own without
having to be an academic to know this, but thank you paul for this article and confirming my viewpoint
Snyder is such a fraud. His book Bloodlands is utter drivel filled with complete falsities – none of which substantiated with
sources. "Yale historian" is clearly a meaningless title. But of course he gets called on for propaganda hit pieces like this or
that ridiculous Agents of Chaos series on HBO.
It seems political appointees have transformed Hoover's FBI into an operation engaged in
the manufacture of "boogeyman" groups to sustain budgets and political narritaves.
Meanwhile BLM and Antifa did hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage this
summer, COVID-19 gets released (by whom?), and presidential elections get millions of
fraudulent votes in plain sight. But dont worry, the fibs have two drunken, meth-addled
hillbillys at a trailer park under surveillance and might get a collar if they can get the
pair to illegally obtain a used swiss army knife or something similar.
Well, it's like they say, in the Internet, if you're sex chatting with a man, it's
probably a man. If if you're sex chatting with a woman, it's probably also a man. And if
you're sex chatting with a child or teen, it's probably the FBI.
Well, here it's the same thing. If you're chatting with a "Nazi" or a "terrorist", it's
probably the FBI.
Federal Bureau of Instigation. That's all it is. The modern KKK is their thing, and I
often thought the Nazis is as well.. Adding the Satanic to the recipe is probably an inside
joke since they think we are all stupid.
In my personal experience, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will protect an individual,
who livestreams child pornography from a Third World Country in order to protect Wall Street
millionaires.
Do you honestly believe that Jeffrey Epstein was not protected by the FBI?
... the US citizens themselves have called into question their country's conformity with the
main criterion of democracy – the ability of the state to ensure fair and transparent
expression of the people's will in general.
This is an urgent issue the United States has to deal with. The nation is divided, the fault
line running between people of different value orientations, which reflect on the electoral
choice between Republicans and Democrats. There is a clear "value divide" between conservative
Americans and those who promote change in traditionalist attitudes, between "law-abiding"
Americans and those who support active street protest, between those employed in high-tech
industry and those left out of the technological revolution. Besides, the election race laid
bare the tensions between the federal government and state and local governments. Accusations
against the federal government of exceeding its authority in using force to suppress riots have
exposed cracks in American federalism, which the central government (regardless of party
affiliation) prefers to conceal as far as possible.
There have also been large-scale violations of the election law. The United States still has
no standard procedures for voter registration, voter identification, ballot issuance and
submission. According to the nonprofit organization Judicial Watch, by September 2020, 29
out of 37 states had 1.8 million more registered voters than actual eligible voting-age
citizens. This is largely due to the fact that there is no such concept as a domestic
passport or some kind of residence registration in the US, so when shifting their place of
residence, people often fail to remove themselves from the voter list. In addition, there were
occasions of people who had long since died having voted for one of the candidates. However,
courts found no evidence that such cases had been widespread – they were often down to
the fact that other family members have similar names, which led to errors in the voter
records. Statistics show that there were 153 million registered voters in the US in 2018,
with more than 20 million entries in the voter rolls being out of date. According to the
California Globe, an NGO, there were nearly half a million such entries in California alone in
2020. In this context, a large-scale campaign was launched urging voters to update their data
in the voter lists.
The most acute situation arose as a result of the mass postal voting, which brought Joe
Biden a reported majority during the counting of ballots. It is not even that Democrats created
a controversial opportunity to gain votes from a passive part of their electorate, using the
pandemic as an excuse. They encouraged a more active use of the mail-in voting procedure, which
had been widely used only in some states during previous campaigns. According to Donald Trump,
this paved the way to uncontrolled machinations.
Thus, on the eve of voting day, the Democratic Party allegedly attempted to change the
procedure for counting postal ballots in the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, North Carolina,
Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Alabama in order to considerably lengthen the
period of their acceptance. This made it possible to relax the monitoring requirements for
vote-counting. Consequently, once the voting was over, the Republicans almost immediately
announced that they were filing lawsuits in connection with violations registered in 40
states.
Lawyers representing the Republicans found it unsound that so many states had continued
to count the votes for several days after voting day. They had some serious questions as to the
legitimacy of accepting the late ballots. Nevertheless, courts rejected most of the filed
lawsuits even in Republican states.
All of this is hardly consistent with those norms of democracy that Washington arrogantly
imposes on other countries. For instance, US officials in the OSCE constantly point to the need
for the OSCE participating states to comply with the recommendations by the OSCE Office for
Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) drawn up based on the results of its election
observation activities. In the meantime, the US itself fails to act on the relevant
recommendations, blatantly violating the provisions of para. 8 of the 1990 Document of the
Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE and para. 25 of the
1999 Charter for European Security stipulating the obligation to invite observers for
monitoring national elections.
Since 2002, the ODIHR election observation missions in the US have recommended in their
final reports that international observers be provided with access to all states at the federal
level. However, that is not what we see in reality. Besides, the archaic US electoral system is
such that the US federal government has no powers to establish procedures even for federal
elections as this is the prerogative of the states. Just as when America was a farmers'
republic with a population of 3.5 million, the president is still elected by the states, which
inform the Congress of their decisions through the electoral college.
During the popular vote in 2016, the ODIHR did not have access to polling stations in 17
states. The international observers, who showed legitimate interest in the elections on the
voting day, faced threats of arrest and indictment. In the 2020 popular vote, the number of
"inhospitable" states reached 18. Only five states and the District of Columbia have legal
provisions in place ensuring international election observation. In all other states, it
remains at the discretion of the local authorities and is quite unpopular.
The lengthy disputes over the election results in courts (and, at the end of the day,
electing a new president there) is yet another fact demonstrating how inefficient and outdated
this voting system is. In the 2000 campaign, the votes cast for George W. Bush and his
Democratic opponent, Al Gore, in Florida were recounted multiple times. It was the Supreme
Court that had the last word, ruling that the vote recounting should stop, which meant the
victory of George W. Bush – even though many Americans still doubt the validity of that
decision. But at the time, such a timely consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats
was exactly what was needed to quickly stabilize the situation.
The enormous costs associated with such a voting system have by now practically erased
the word "consensus" from the vocabulary of the American political elite. Just recently, no
one could imagine – not even in their worst nightmares – that all these partisan
differences would lead to the storming of the Capitol, whose first foundation stone was laid by
the first US president, George Washington. The attack carried out by pro-Trump protesters while
the Congress was counting votes not only appalled national governments all over the world but
provoked bloodshed in the country, which was only recently seen by many as the gold standard of
democracy. It was hard to believe that the events resembling so much Ukraine's Maidan and other
color revolutions that unfolded in recent years across a wide range of countries, including
those in the post-Soviet space, were broadcasted live from the United States all over the
world.
The techniques previously used by Washington for democratization of other countries
backfired. The cold civil war that had been raging in the US for a few months reached its
climax. And while the world is condemning the attack on the Capitol, anxiously waiting for what
is to come next, it is as yet unclear how the Republicans and the Democrats are supposed to
find common ground. The social polarization keeps growing. The long-forgotten spirit of
McCarthyism is again felt in the air. And there is no one who could answer the question:
are there a person and a timeless value that could unite the nation. The situation that has
been brought about by a chain of events predetermined by the archaic voting system can lead to
new waves of violence and unrest. On the other hand, the American political system has proved
its flexibility over the course of centuries. I am sure this time it will cope, too.
There is one more critical issue which, in the context of the outdated American electoral
system, has moved extremely high up the agenda. I am talking about the unprecedented role in
public politics of social networks and new media, and, accordingly, of private IT companies
that own those platforms. Conventional American media, whose activities are regulated by laws
and fall within the First Amendment, have traditionally – and always officially –
taken the side of a certain candidate and yet deemed it necessary to give coverage to
statements made by the opponent during election and post-election campaigns. The social
media, however, are beyond any special regulations and work on the basis of user agreements.
And it was them that unleashed the media war without rules! And that war is waged against one
single person.
During the vote counting, Trump's posts on Twitter, where he has over 85 million followers,
were flagged as potentially misleading and later even hidden. The events in the Capitol
resulted in the unprecedented and permanent suspension of Trump's accounts on all social media
– where he has a total of about 200 million followers. Noteworthy is that the tone of the
posts that provoked the suspension of Trump's accounts was not much different from his
narrative of the preceding weeks. Next, they blocked tens of thousands of supporters of the
incumbent president across all kinds of platforms which used to be viewed as forums for a
full-fledged discussion.
For America, just as for the rest of the world, this level of corporate censorship is a
truly extraordinary phenomenon. A question arises: who are those supreme judges that decided
that they, of their own volition and based on their own rules – but, in fact, guided by
their political preferences, can deprive the country's president of the opportunity to
communicate with an audience of many millions? Whether Trump is good or bad, he is his
country's national, and, furthermore, an official who enjoys the trust of nearly half of
Americans. Thus, it turns out that several technological corporations located in California got
an appetite for power and thought it possible to juggle with news and facts to suit their own
political preferences. This is but a blatant censorship!
Dictating their own terms, they have sought to substitute for state institutions,
encroaching on their mandates, aggressively imposing their views on a great number of people,
leaving them no other choice; while the 75 million of Trump's voters and hundreds of millions
of his subscribers were left out of their "choice." These were simply labeled as insecure.
Isn't it, indeed, a spectre of cyber totalitarianism that is gradually overwhelming society,
taking away from it (and potentially the entire world) the opportunity to see the reality for
what it is? But even if Donald Trump leaves politics for good and the tech giants wipe out his
digital footprint, the minds will remain hugely polarized. This is yet another problem stemming
from the US's outdated voting system, and it will push governments of different countries into
action to prevent the same scenario in their own states.
Given the special place of the US in the architecture of international relations, all this
makes us try and guess the impact of the elections on the "classical" world politics as well as
economy. It is crystal clear that the elections influence direct trends in global development.
Everything else, with certain reservations, can be regarded as an internal affair of the US
itself. Yet outward effects are our common issue. Let me remind you that George W. Bush's
victory back in 2000 caused significant, though short-term, volatility on stock markets. It is
equally possible after the current shock, which of course provides considerable grounds for
concern. But the long-term stability of the US dollar will be largely determined by the
resilience of institutions for the protection of property rights, the demand for American goods
and services in the global market, as well as the predictability and independence of the
Federal Reserve System (FRS), which underpins the confidence in the US dollar. US dollar
volatility will abruptly increase only if US manufacturers lose a considerable share of the
world market or investors doubt the existing safeguards for the protection of assets, the
relevance and soundness of the FRS's long-term policy. Since this is impossible in the near
future, it seems of much more interest to us what Joe Biden's economic policy will look like.
And this is often shaped based on the thesis "just not the way Trump would have it." It's some
sort of a tradition: the same way, the 45th president without hesitation reversed the 44th
President Barack Obama's directives on all tracks.
It is obvious that the development of a national legal and political system is the sovereign
choice of a state itself, though many countries (and first of all the US) are seeking to impose
their model of development on the world as the most effective. Certainly, there is no legal and
political system that can be called the monument of "classical" democracy. It is constantly
developing and improving. The question is, how relevant and timely the models that are offered
as a replacement for those that have lost their progressive potential are. And here what we
need is a combination of sound conservatism and well-timed new laws. Both artificial
preservation of and constant experimentation with political and legal realities pose a danger.
The post-Soviet nations have the examples of both, state regimes sometimes transiting from the
presidential system to parliamentary and back once every two or three years.
Governments in many countries are posing questions about the policy continuity of such an
important actor in world affairs as the US. The 2016 elections shattered the century-long
tradition of continuity of the administrations, particularly in foreign policy issues. This
time, again, the US' stance on a range of key issues depends on the election results. Where
shall we witness a reverse in policy, a getting-around to approaches adopted by Barack Obama
and his predecessors' administrations? Let us take a look at the critical issue of fighting
against the coronavirus. The 2020 candidates' opposing viewpoints regarding the danger of
Covid-19 will lead to an expanded scope and increased stringency of pandemic-related measures
implemented in the US as one of the main short-term effects of the election outcomes. This will
influence the lives and health of Americans as well as the well-being of citizens in
neighboring countries and the US' allies. The polarization among citizens themselves, when you
could tell with great certainty by the presence or absence of a mask which party the voter has
voted for, was grotesque indeed.
The two candidates have adopted very different approaches when addressing relevant economic
issues inside the country, which have a direct influence on the entire world. One should note,
among many other things, that Donald Trump repeatedly commented on the FRS' activities that lay
outside the mandate of the head of state. This caused a certain dollar skepticism in view of a
possible loss by the FRS of its actual independence of the executive power, which triggered a
discussion on the excessive dependence of trade on the US dollar even among the US' allies in
the EU. The reaction of American markets and the actual recognition by Donald Trump of his
defeat was clearly reflected, for example, in the S&P 500. November 2020 turned out the
best November for the main US stock market index. And for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the
month was the best since 1987. The indices were undoubtedly influenced by the positive news
about vaccines against Covid-19, but the growth began immediately after the election results
were announced.
Support for international organizations (WHO, WTO, and others) turned into a bargaining chip
in the presidential election results issue. For decades, the US has increased its weight in
these organizations. And until recently, the attitude toward them has not depended on a certain
administration in the White House. These elections will inevitably lead to the restoration of
the US' full membership and the development of cooperation within international organizations
such as the WHO and the WTO. The outgoing administration has been notorious for its abrupt and
hardly predictable demarches regarding its participation in such associations, which certainly
destabilized their work. Yet the US's financial support is crucial and very significant for
them.
Even more important is the US' participation in international arms agreements, such as the
Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START III)
and the Treaty on Open Skies (OST), as well as in different integration alliances, climate
accords and many others. As in the case of international organizations, the US is trying to
restore to a certain extent its image as a reliable strategic partner. Election pledges to
extend the START III treaty with Russia which Biden called "an anchor of strategic stability
between the United States and Russia," sound very optimistic. The president-elect is an
advocate of arms reduction and has been involved in drafting the INF Treaty since the Soviet
era. One of the election campaign themes was that the US should not withdraw from the Open
Skies Treaty, the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement – processes
that have been set in motion in recent years.
By the way, the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement and its expected new accession
to it is one of the clearest and most recent examples of political turmoil. There is now a
tectonic change in the very basis of economic activity. A new economic order is taking shape.
States and individual companies are reshaping their models to be carbon neutral, carrying out
rigorous assessment of their business chains starting from suppliers in some countries to
consumers in others. Global investors are rethinking their strategies. International
organizations are shaping new reporting standards that will obviously apply globally. Finally,
most recently the UN Secretary General called on all nations to rethink their tax strategies by
cutting taxes on income while raising taxes on carbon. All of these factors are of global
importance. And the US position, or rather its floundering, can obviously create new global
imbalances. Although everyone will adapt to them after a while, because, as T. Dreiser wrote,
"you have to take things as they are and use them to your best advantage."
Building relations with their allies, especially in NATO, is another basic factor that
directly influences the trajectory of international development. The Biden administration which
is largely made up of the key figures from the Obama administration has already assured its
European partners that full cooperation within the North Atlantic Alliance will be restored.
The US is expected to drop its claims about the disproportionately small contribution of
Europeans to NATO funding and the imbalance in military budgets, which have been repeatedly
voiced by the Trump administration. Time will show to what extent the trust of the US European
allies will be regained. But it is clear that the US foreign policy somersaults over a
relatively short period of time will not go unnoticed.
Even on the issue of interaction with China the candidates have managed to take generally
opposing positions. Although both share the opinion that China is America's main competitor. As
part of the election campaign, Biden's rhetoric toward China was significantly more peaceful in
comparison to Trump's promises and actions. However, trade restrictions imposed by the Trump
administration may remain in place in the new circumstances if the situation requires so. The
experience of the Jackson-Vanik amendment and other sanctions laws shows that such restrictions
can persist for a long time, even after the reason for their imposition has disappeared.
We expect it is highly likely that the United States will consistently pursue an
anti-Russian policy. In recent years, the trajectory of relations between Washington and Moscow
has been steadily going downhill, no matter who was at the helm in the White House. There was
indeed some hope of reversing the negative dynamics during the Trump presidency. After all,
back in 2016, it seemed that relations between the two countries could not be any worse than
those under B. Obama. However, the following years have dispelled this illusion. The Trump
administration consistently strengthened the systemic confrontation between Washington and
Moscow, continued its sanctions policy against our country wishing, inter alia, to force it out
of the energy markets, and reduced our diplomatic contacts to a minimum. And this was done
against the background of D. Trump constantly speaking about the desire to "get along with
Russia." His words did not matter much, however, as numerous restrictive measures in
Congress were supported by both Democrats and Republicans.
Biden has not yet said anything positive about Russia. On the contrary, his rhetoric has
always been openly unfriendly, harsh, even aggressive. He has repeatedly stated that "Russia
is the biggest threat to the United States in terms of undermining our security and
alliances." Nothing more, nothing less. Moreover, the Democrats' team includes politicians
who hold similar views and have no interest whatsoever in improving relations between Moscow
and Washington.
Russia, on the contrary, is ready to work with any US president, ready to restore
cooperation in a wide range of areas. However, we can hardly expect any reciprocal steps from
the new American administration. Our relations are likely to remain extremely cold in the
coming years. And right now we do not expect anything but the continuation of a tough
anti-Russian policy. But perhaps Biden will revisit the issues still on our joint agenda, for
example arms control.
I have listed only a few areas which will obviously be among those deserving special
attention. Most importantly: the unpredictability of further US actions in the international
arena, a kind of toxicity of this country even for its allies and partners is a result of
serious social upheavals that American society faces. This internal and external instability is
largely due to a clumsy, hopelessly outdated voting system that has seen no major changes since
the 18th century up to the present. And the last election turned out to be not a political
competition of ideas that the US had always prided itself on, but rather a confrontation
between two campaigns of hatred.
We do not want the US to have problems. And for practical reasons: such problems create
waves of instability all around that overflow us as well. The problems of the United States can
only be solved by the Americans themselves along with the good governance of the country. One
of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, rightly noted that "the
whole art of government consists in the art of being honest." Any election is the most
important test of such honesty. Of course, only Americans themselves can decide whether to put
aside their national selfishness and launch the voting system reform, and, consequently, the
reform of political life, or not. So far, there has been no real move toward this. Nor even the
slightest hint of a desire to change anything. And the international community is already
paying too high a price for the US' reluctance to change.
Dmitry Medvedev served as Russia's president from 2008 to 2012 and prime minister from
2012 to 2020. He has been deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation
since January 2020.
apothqowejh 8 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 09:04 AM
An interesting underlying premise of the article is that government is actually about
enacting policy. It appears to me, living in the cheap seats, that the purpose of government,
while ostensibly about policy, is really to rob its subjects blind while concealing the theft
and crushing dissent.
jake234 15 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 02:31 AM
The former president of Russia is able to write an essay. Whether you agree with him or not,
the sentences in this article have weight; and you have to mull what he says over in your
mind. Compare this with the soundbites of US presidents.
Observatory jake234 6 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 11:10 AM
President Medvedev has been and apparently somehow remains an idealist/naive man as confirmed
by the essay above. Just a babe in the woods of politics.
TheFishh jake234 9 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 08:01 AM
The rhetoric of US presidents has deg
Ligov 10 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 07:23 AM
Given that America is the most influential state in the world, that is, it practically
influences everything that happens in the world, then obviously everyone around the world is
not indifferent to what is happening in America, especially in its dominant group, the
aspen's nest. And what happens there, as all honest people in the world, including the
Americans, guess, are clearly dubious things. To stir up this hornet's nest is a noble cause.
And the success of this business will determine the well-being of the whole world. May honest
Americans striving to clean up their homes feel the support of the world.
Hassam275 16 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 01:32 AM
Its been said that American elected officials are like passengers on a train who come and go,
yet the conductor is the non elected establishment politicians loyal to foreign agendas who
are extensions of special interest lobbies. That is why policy never changes, though the
illusion of democracy is maintained. Now that a large number of citizens caught on to this
scheme, the propaganda arm of the establishment, the media, attempts to brand these citizens
racists or traitors in an attempt to use fear and shame as thought control. This only makes
the masses more enraged and the unfortunate ones are the law enforcement officers who are
stuck protecting the establishment. Also unfortunate are the politicians who actually care
about their constituents whose lives are also endangered. So violence isnt the way out. The
deep state must be exposed.
MotorSlug conformista 5 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 12:10 PM
the US has never been a democracy, that's the last thing the rich, white, land and
slave-owning framers wanted. they were scared to death of equality and human rights. France
and Russia today have a better grasp on reality than you do
costelmagik 15 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 02:14 AM
America 2.0, after election and before it is just suggest the fast approaching the end of the
Empire ,a lot worse then before the election considering the division between Americans , the
fraud through the election and the economic and financial collapse which in his last legs.
Jonathan E 9 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 07:41 AM
The American population has an 'uphill battle' to acquire a functional democracy because they
are under the 'heel' of a powerful Plutocracy which has firm control of a powerful Media.
GottaBeMe 6 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 11:19 AM
"According to the nonprofit organization Judicial Watch, by September 2020, 29 out of 37
states had 1.8 million more registered voters than actual eligible voting-age citizens." US
democracy is a sham.
MiloDiddlbomb Andy0 2 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 02:52 PM
Actually I lived just outside NYC during 9/11 I had to go to NYC the week after and what
struck me was the absolute silence. NYC is normally crazy noisy but for a couple months you
didn't even hear a car horn. The actual divide openly happened when Trump looked like he
actually had a shot at winning. And in my opinion it wasn't Trump himself but the fact that
an outsider might get let in. Then the political machine started to create this insanity we
now have. In a way you are right. What Trump brought into the sunlight was the hate middle
America had for 20+ years of war. The people on the coast as a rule have nothing to do with
the military since the draft ended - The majority of military people have been coming from
Middle America. Plus the fact that any of the wars could have been easily won - except where
the future in that? More money is made just dragging them out in stalemate. A lesson learned
in Vietnam where it became obvious the money was in keeping the conflict going. Generals
don't care. Most have never seen one day of combat.
Ibmekon 13 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 04:11 AM
"We do not want the US to have problems." Oh yes we bloody well do ! They will not dismantle
their empire witout the collapse of the dollar. Even today the gravy boat of Democrats are
fighting to keep thousands of their army of occupation in Afghanistan - against the wishes of
their own electorate and President.
Bjarne Örn Hansen 17 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 12:33 AM
First of all, americans aren't too smart. That the US had a backup system to put a finger on
the election scale, should have been obvious to anyone with an iq above 0. No power, let's
the mob decide it's future. It will always have an ace up its sleeve ... but using this
system, should be done in emergency only and should one time deal, done at the peril of the
politicians using it. What americans do from here, should be restore the union and remove all
politicians and parties that were involved ...
9/11 Truther Bjarne Örn Hansen 15 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 02:32 AM
The majority of American schools, colleges, and mainstream media are specifically designed to
result in people who "aren't too smart". The " thumb on the election scale" is phase #2.
Gio Con 1 hour ago 16 Jan, 2021 04:36 PM
So basically, the US needs to update its method of screwing the people.
In fact, the strengths and shortcomings of the US voting system could be regarded as a
purely domestic issue. But there is one problem. Elections in this country, especially when
there is a transfer of power from one political force to the other, can trigger significant
changes in the global economic development, seriously affecting the existing institutions of
international law and global security system.
Many US leaders have at various times admitted, including to me personally, " It is true
that our system is not perfect, but we are used to it and it is convenient for us ." The
problem is that the rest of the world finds it increasingly "inconvenient" to work with
such a country, as the US becomes an unpredictable partner. This unpredictability gives other
states, regional associations and military political organizations cause for concern. It would
be nice if the US political establishment realized this responsibility.
Let us take a closer look. At first, everything seems quite presentable: alternative
candidates, primary elections, and live TV debates. But this is a façade, a nice stage
set which determines the spectacularity of the event and, naturally, the preferences of the
voters. In the US electoral system, a candidate who wins a relative majority in a particular
state – even by a slight margin – almost always gets all the electoral votes for
that state. Therefore, in traditionally liberal or conservative states, votes cast by those who
support the other party virtually disappear, being reduced to zero. As far as recent history is
concerned, Democratic nominees Albert Gore (2000) and Hillary Clinton (2016) lost the election,
despite having won the most votes.
Since the existing system awards all the electoral votes to the winner, a candidate who won
by a small margin in states with a total of 271 electoral votes may win an election, despite
having lost by a landslide in other states. In theory, even a candidate who won the popular
vote by more than 100 million ballots may still lose the election in the electoral vote.
On top of that, there is another significant shortcoming in the Electoral College system,
where an elector has a right to cast their vote – sometimes without any serious
consequences – for someone other than the candidate they have pledged to represent in
accordance with the will of the voters. Instances of faithless voting by electors have occurred
with regular frequency. For example, in 2016 two Texas electors refused to cast their vote for
Donald Trump, although such incidents have never changed the outcome of a presidential
election. Now, pending the official results of the election, the winner-take-all principle
– rather fairly – has come under a new wave of criticism. Even Hillary Clinton, who
ran against Donald Trump in the 2016 election, has called for abolishing the Electoral College
and selecting a president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office.
Otherwise, there is a difficult situation where tens of millions of voters do not believe that
the outcome of the election reflects the actual will of the people.
Sites and people who posted Hugo Chavez nonsense should pay the price. Which is good.
Also capabilities to produce weighted votes does not mean that it was deployed. But if it is
present it serve as a Damocles sword over the integtiry of election, as you never can be sure
whther is was somehow activated or not. And so far there is no convincing facts that it was
deployed. Looks like most common method was staffing of mail-in ballots by corrupt staff.
But Dominion tabulators do create concentration of ballots in one place, which automatically,
completely by the fact of creating the "critical mass" of ballots in one place facilitates larger
scale fraud . From this point of view they can be regarded as catalysts. That' is
undisputable.
The way sysadmin roles were assigned by Dominion, how such activity is controlled, and what
people are selected is open to review as those people automatically become powerful players in
the election process and are outside usual safeguards, which were developed for traditional
systems. In no way they can be controlled by election observers. That's the fact.
In case the machines were internet connected all Dominion employees with access to them also
become election players. As well as all interested intelligence agencies.
Conservative
blog American Thinker has issued an apology in response to Dominion Voting Systems' lawyers
accusing them and others of defamation for pushing claims their technology helped rig the
presidential election.
In a Friday statement written by editor
and publisher Thomas Lifson, American Thinker admitted their stories on conspiracy theories
surrounding Dominion machines being rigged in Joe Biden's favor were based on "discredited
sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion's supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud
on Dominion's machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other
claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted
fraudulently."
Lifson called the statements "completely false" and added that "Industry experts
and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself
appropriately."
The company went on to apologize for any "harm" their stories caused the company
and their employees.
"We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and
misrepresenting Dominion's track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the
November 2020 election. We regret this grave error," they added.
The apology also names Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan as
specific contributors who have covered conspiracy theories surrounding Dominion.
On the same day as the apology, the conservative blog also shut down its comment section,
but provided no solid reason as to why.
Pieces published by American Thinker presented theories that the machines deleted
pro-Trump votes and that it was tied to outside foreign and political groups, common theories
that have been pushed by President Trump, his legal team, and supporters.
Dominion has taken more aggressive action recently against accusations against them, even
suing Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation to the tune of $1.3 billion.
The company's legal team has also targeted other right-wing media, warning Fox News
recently that action is "imminent" in response to numerous statements made on the
network by anchors and guests like Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani. They also sent letters to
individual anchors for Fox and Newsmax demanding they "cease and desist" making
defamatory statements about the company and its alleged role in rigging the presidential
election, an act they say has no proof to back it up.
In response to the threatened litigation, Fox News aired a segment multiple times shooting
down voter fraud claims linked to Dominion.
Newsmax, meanwhile, released a statement clarifying many conspiracy theories linked to
Dominion and Smartmatic, another vote counting system threatening legal action.
How one defines systemic fraud? Actually the role on Internet giants in 2020 election
represent systemic fraud. Also is not "simple fraud" not enough for DOJ to take a look. Or
"simple, one time fraud" now is welcomed by DOJ?
Main-in ballot fraud looks systemic to me with documented well coordinated efforts to weaken
protections on the part of DNC lawyers.
The situation with the observers suppression is a real scandal painting the USA as a banana
republic.
US
Attorney General Bill Barr told AP that the Department of Justice has not seen evidence of
fraud on a scale that could change the outcome of the election, but President Donald Trump's
attorneys claims it never even looked.
"To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different
outcome in the election," the agency quoted Barr as saying on Tuesday. He said both
federal prosecutors and the FBI have been looking into specific complaints but found nothing
that would change the media consensus that Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump earlier this
month.
Trump's lawyers, led by Rudy Giuliani, have launched a series of legal challenges in
places like Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, challenging large amounts of
mail-in ballots they say weren't properly verified. They've also claimed votes were cast by
dead people, observers weren't allowed to observe the counts, and other
irregularities.
Barr said there was only one claim of systemic fraud – that voting machines were
programmed to shift millions of votes – "and the DHS and DOJ have looked into that,
and so far, we haven't seen anything to substantiate that." While he did not name any
names, this was a claim made by Sidney Powell, an attorney not directly affiliated with the
president's legal team, in her lawsuit in Georgia.
"With all due respect to the attorney general, there hasn't been any semblance of a
Department of Justice investigation," Giuliani responded on Tuesday, accusing the DOJ of not
interviewing any of their sworn witnesses and refusing to audit voting machines or subpoena
officials.
Barr did tell AP that most of the complaints about the election ought to be handled by
state and local officials conducting audits, rather than making a federal case out of
everything.
"There's a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default
fix-all, and people don't like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and
'investigate,'" he said.
Within days of the election, Barr had authorized the DOJ to follow up on "substantial
allegations" of irregularities with the vote, arguing it was "imperative that the
American people can trust that our elections were conducted in such a way that the outcomes
accurately reflect the will of the voters."
Democrats, US mainstream media and social media platforms have been united in insisting
there had been no "widespread" voter or election fraud, labeling all of Trump's claims
to the contrary as "baseless" or "disputed."
Twitter has banned the
sitting president from its platform indefinitely.
Facebook and Instagram have banished Trump until at least after Joe Biden's inauguration.
After Twitter began cancelling Trump followers, Amazon Web Services, Apple Store, and Google
Play cancelled an entire corporation, Twitter competitor
Parler . Other social media platforms could face a similar fate at the hands of the leftist
authoritarian Big Tech cartel.
Tens of thousands, if not millions, of Trump supporters have either been purged from
mainstream social media platforms or have fled in protest. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has recently
promised more censorship and
purges . Even the libertarian leader of an earlier populist movement, Ron Paul, has faced a
Facebook ban (although this was subsequently claimed to be "an error" ). Guilt by
association seems to the rule, no matter how distant or strained the association.
The purges extend well beyond social media. Trump has been cancelled by former business
associates, including by one of his former financiers, Deutsche
Bank .
Blacklists of Trump supporters are being compiled. Congress members have
called for the resignation of senators and House members who questioned the election
results. If they refuse to resign, say the totalitarian wannabes about to seize complete
control, they should be removed from office. ABC News contributor Rick Klein called for the
" cleansing
" of Trump supporters from the political landscape in a now-deleted tweet.
Khanlenin 1 day ago 15 Jan, 2021 11:34 PM
Always been 99.99% vs 0.01%. The 0.01% determine what wars the military will start, the
minimum wage, security of employment, how affordable to make health care, the tax system etc
even the school curriculum. The freest country with the most controls.
Ronj14848 ceshawn 1 day ago 15 Jan, 2021 07:36 PM
True...the media support the military industrial complex. Their friends own the miltary
industrial complex . See who they support politically and avoid them like the plague.
Democrats are cheering for censorship as a means to root out "fascism," even as they serve
corporate interests that continue to exacerbate the social and economic issues that gave rise
to Donald Trump, Glenn Greenwald told RT.
The acclaimed American journalist issued a scathing critique of the American Left during a
conversation with Chris Hedges, host of RT's On Contact. The interview will air in full on
Sunday.
Pointing to Donald Trump's indefinite Twitter suspension, Greenwald accused Democrats of
appealing to Big Tech to police speech that could undermine their hold on power, using the
pretext of fighting far-right extremism to quash dissent.
They're on their knees pleading with billionaires and oligarchs and monopolists and
Silicon Valley to censor in a way that they believe is politically advantageous.
He added that the crackdown on free speech was particularly egregious because it was
being carried out by a "tiny number of Silicon Valley oligarchs" who operate outside of the
realm of democratic accountability.
Greenwald argued that the profoundly illiberal cheerleading for corporate speech-policing
should come as no surprise to anyone, noting that the Democratic Party is funded by and
"believes in" corporate power, despite whatever claims it makes to the contrary.
The Democrats are very good at creating a brand that is radically different from their
reality. But essentially the Democratic Party serves militarism, imperialism, and
corporatism.
There should also be no illusions about whether the incoming Biden administration will be
able to mend the deep political divide in the country, the American journalist warned. He
agreed with Hedges' premise that Trump won the White House in 2016 by capitalizing on
widespread frustration over Barack Obama, and his VP Joe Biden's, ineffectual eight years in
office.
Greenwald said Americans should expect more of the same under Biden, meaning more
outsourcing and other devastating economic policies that will continue to destroy the middle
class. He predicted that the despair created by the new administration would set the stage for
a "smarter, more stable version" of Trump.
In the reality the USA is not falling apart. It is neoliberalism that is falling apart and
this is just how common people feel during the collapse of neliberalism.
"79% of Americans think the US is falling apart" those not accounted for are possibly
homeless or illiterate and don't have the opportunity of putting their view forward.
RTaccount 1 day ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:22 PM
There will be no peace, no unity, and no prosperity. And there shouldn't be.
TheFishh RTaccount 1 day ago 15 Jan, 2021 03:38 PM
The US regimes past and present have worn out their bag of tricks. A magician is a con-man.
And the only way they can entertain and spellbind the crowd with their routines is if
everyone just ignores the sleight of hand. But people are starting to call the US out for the
tricks it is pulling, and that's where the magician's career ends.
SJMan333 23 hours ago 16 Jan, 2021 01:02 AM
America as a whole is now reaping the fruits of its decades of exceptionalism complex.
Through its propaganda machine, Americans as individuals and collectively as a society, have
been brainwashed into believing that laws, rules and basic human decency do not apply to
themselves. These are only sweetened poisons for them to shove down the throats of other
lesser countries, especially those in Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Asia ((bluntly
put, non-white countries)) when it suited America's global resource thievery and daylight
wealth grabbing. Habitualized into bullying every other countries with no resistance,
Americans are now showing their ugly faces on each other. The same exceptionalism delusion
"the laws apply to you, not me'' is driving every American (except the colored Americans
probably) to blame all the ills of the country on everyone else except himself. Nancy Pelosi
advocated total lock-down but treated herself to a total grooming in a hair saloon is just
one example. For the sins it has committed over the decades, I guess the time is right for
USA to have a dose of its own medicine. Except in this case, America never thought it
necessary to develop an antidote.
"These leaders are trusted at home and respected around the world, and their nominations
signal that America is back and ready to lead the world, not retreat from it,"
Biden said on Saturday in a statement announcing his picks to fill top positions under his
nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken.
Like Blinken, the five latest State Department picks are veterans of the Obama-Biden
administration. Nuland , a
neoconservative who was named undersecretary for political affairs, goes all the way back to
former President Ronald Reagan's administration and was a foreign policy adviser to former Vice
President Dick Cheney.
Other new re-hires include: Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state, who led the
Obama-Biden administration's negotiating team on peace talks with Iran; Brian McKeon, deputy
secretary for management and resources, who was a national security adviser to then-Vice
President Biden; Bonnie Jenkins, undersecretary for arms control and international security,
who previously coordinated nonproliferation programs; and Uzra Zeha, undersecretary for
civilian security, who formerly was charge d'affaires at the US Embassy in Paris.
After four years of President Donald Trump's 'America First' policy, including efforts to
wind down foreign interventions and broker peace deals, Biden's declaration of "America is
back" portends a sharp contrast in foreign policy. He said his latest nominees will "use
their diplomatic experience and skill to restore America's global and moral
leadership."
Nuland, who studied Russian literature at Brown University, wrote last summer in Foreign
Affairs of how "a confident America should deal
with Russia " with a more "activist" policy, including "speaking directly to
the Russian people about the benefits of working together and the price they have paid for
(President Vladimir) Putin's hard turn away from liberalism." She added, "Washington and
its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results
for many years after."
Nuland perhaps was using such "statecraft" when, as assistant secretary of state in
December 2013, she handed out cookies
to protesters at Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti square who were demanding the resignation of
President Viktor Yanukovich. An audiotape leaked in February 2014 showed that
her involvement in the uprising went well beyond cookies, as she spoke with US Ambassador
Geoffrey Pyatt about plotting to replace Yanukovich with Washington's chosen opposition leader,
Arseny Yatseniuk, and about involving the UN to "f**k the EU" by pushing through a
US-preferred Ukraine policy.
Ironically, Nuland's appointment comes just as politicians in Washington fret over this
month's storming of the US Capitol by pro-Trump protesters, which some called a
coup attempt.
"I knew it wasn't a real coup because Victoria Nuland wasn't handing out cookies,"
Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow said of the Capitol assault. "She'll be back
overthrowing governments in the Biden administration, so it remains a valid standard."
In light of Nuland's hawkish history, 25
anti-war groups have jointly called for the Senate to
reject confirmation of her nomination as undersecretary for political affairs.
"Victoria Nuland is returning to the State Department," one commenter wrote on
Twitter. "The United States is returning to the former Soviet republics with great strides.
A fierce struggle with Russia begins."
Cancel culture is
now rampant in the entertainment industry, which wants to edit Trump from Hollywood history.
Stalin would be proud, but this kind of thinking is dangerous and could have devastating
consequences for the US.
If you blinked, you'd have missed it – a brief cameo appearance by Donald Trump
speaking to child actor Macaulay Culkin in the 1992 film ' Home Alone 2: Lost in
New York' .
The now notorious scene takes place inside the iconic Plaza Hotel where Trump tells Culkin,
playing the role of Kevin McCallister in the popular Christmas film, " down the hall and to
the left ." Not exactly R-rated material. Fast forward to these touchy times and Culkin
says he is " sold " on the idea of having Trump digitally replaced from the John Hughes
film.
So it's not enough to vote out Donald Trump after four tumultuous years in the White House;
it's not enough to impeach him, twice; it's not enough to remove him from every major social
media platform, effectively alienating him from his 75 million supporters. Now the insatiable
woke wolves must work retroactively to delete from the public mind any positive associations it
may still have with the real estate magnate turned American president.
But this little harangue is not really about Donald Trump, nor is it about Hollywood, where
the annual Academy Award ceremonies have become blood-curdling 1984-style Trump hate-fests.
Even less is this about Macaulay Culkin, who, like many other famous child actors, has
struggled throughout adulthood to prove he's just as lovable as his former pintsize self.
Instead, this is about the dangers of forgetting history and being " condemned to repeat
it. "
Whether Hollywood has forgotten or not, there have been other attempts throughout history to
erase the historical record. One famous case involved that of Nikolay Yezhov, the head of the
feared NKVD under Joseph Stalin, who presided over trials and executions (1936-1938) during the
Great Purge, a rather joyless period when hundreds of thousands perished without a trace.
British Security Service's Involvement In Combat 18
While the FBI's COINTELPRO program in the 1960s is well-documented, the British government
has engaged in similar intelligence operations more recently.
When the British National Party (BNP), under the leadership of John Tyndall, began making
inroads in local elections during the early 1990s, a parallel and initially friendly
organization, Combat 18, emerged around the same time.
C18, as it came to be known, was founded by a man named Charlie Sargeant with help from
American Harold Covington.
Initially, Tyndall enjoyed the enthusiasm of C18 members, who promised to help defend
against "antifa" groups that were attacking BNP events.
The relationship quickly soured when C18 began attacking the BNP for its parliamentary
approach, which they saw as inferior to C18's open avowal of terrorism -- "direct action" -- to
achieve political ends. Later, C18 members launched a campaign of ruthless beatings of lone BNP
members and became a source of gossip and slander against other nationalist leaders in the
British scene.
In 1995, Tyndall wrote an editorial
in the BNP's newspaper Spearhead outlining C18's irrational
and violent war to destroy the BNP , despite both sharing similar goals and enemies. In it,
he states his belief that C18 was being influenced by MI5 and the Special Branch, with help
from the FBI in America, in a ploy to disrupt and discredit the British nationalist
movement.
A year and a half later, C18 leader Charlie Sargeant murdered Christopher Castle during a
power struggle for control of the group with Wilf Browning.
According to an investigative
piece on the incident, Sargeant and Browning told police during their interrogations that
they had friends in high places and wanted to speak to the Special Branch (a British
counter-terrorism agency). They tried to use their service to the unit as a way to get out of
trouble. Tyndall's suspicions were confirmed: Sargeant and Browning were indeed state assets
and had special license to commit crimes.
A chapter in researcher Larry O'Hara's 1994 book Turning Up the Heat: Mi5 After the Cold
War suggests that Combat 18 was partially organic, but then was taken over by MI5 agents
and informants as both a counter-intelligence project to undermine and divide the BNP, as well
as a honeypot to peel away the most violent outliers in the National Front and BNP with the
intention of later entrapping them in bogus terror plots to justify their crackdowns.
As for C18's other "founder," Harold Covington, nationalists such as William Pierce have for
decades suspected he was himself an FBI asset and agent provocateur. Covington was known for
inventing lies from whole cloth about high profile nationalists in America and loudly
broadcasting them, including that they were police informants, thieves, homosexuals,
pedophiles, secret Jews, and other baseless gossip.
Left-wing activist Nick Martin filed a FOIA request to see the FBI's files on Covington in
December 2018, but the government continues to
drag its feet in providing them according to Martin's most recent update last month on
MuckRock.
If Covington is confirmed to have been an intelligence operative, then MI5 and the FBI have
recently collaborated in these nefarious conspiracies against nationalist dissidents.
Questionable advice (especially the recommendation of Signal). It is actually impossible to avoid surveillance... You
need to change your behaviour and rely on internet less to avoid constant monitoring. If you have switched on smartphone in your
pocket you are monitored and no choice of browser or other gargets can help. Switching your phone off when you do not need it
helps and is easily implementable.
Notable quotes:
"... [Questionable advice] ..."
"... remove photos, and limit topics to recipes and pets! ..."
Change your default search engine to DuckDuckGo (do NOT use google!)
Use the Brave Browser (esp avoid FireFox, as the Mozilla corp has gone FULL-ON commie)
Use Signal for any/all "sensitive" communications [Questionable advice]
Donate to independent sources that you value/trust (for me, that'd be ZeroHedge, Reclaim The Net, Andy Gno, Lew Rockwell, Mises Institute, Tom
Luongo, AntiWar.com )
QUIT SOCIAL MEDIA (or at least remove photos, and limit topics to recipes and pets!)
I am strongly against balkanization of the country. The example of the USSR shows where it
leads -- misery of common pople and dramatic drop of the standard of living, while new gand of
ruthless oligarchs emerge from the ruins.
Pushing the Trump-inspired populist movement underground may only cause it to resort to more
drastic measures. As the leftist libertarian reporter Glenn Greenwald observes ,
"these people know they are scorned and looked down upon... and the more you humiliate
and make them feel powerless, the more you take away their ability to organize and express
that rage, it's gonna find an outlet in more destructive ways."
As a former professor at a top-ranking university, I favored a Trump re-election, not
because I support Trump so much as abhor what the opposition represents and is proving itself
to be. In response to the social media threat to expression, I have inaugurated a new group on
Telegram called 'Thought Criminals'. There, fellow 'thought deviationists' like me are able to
express views that are effectively proscribed on mainstream social media platforms. No one
among us advocates violence or the overthrow of the government. None of us is 'racist'. We
advocate only the rights enshrined in the US Constitution.
But some groups, no doubt, are intent on violence. Yet the violent extremists consist mostly
of Antifa and related 'activists', who will unfortunately trick Trump supporters into another
error during the inauguration, like some appeared to do when involved
in the Capitol siege. It's not as if violent extremists among the Trump base were always there,
ready to pounce on any opportunity to express their "racist," "white nationalist"
views.
Rather, as the rising party has already demonstrated, these people stand to lose the most
under a Biden-Harris regime, whose Big Tech and mainstream media allies act as governmental
enforcement apparatuses.
Trump supporters have been hated and demonized simply for wanting to live without being
reprimanded and punished for their whiteness, their middle-Americanness, or their values. They
face an anti-white, anti-native, anti-middle-America extremism that is set to silence and crush
them into submission.
These and others will form a new underground under the prevailing ideological and political
hegemony. This banishment of millions, and not Trump, is why the nation will fall apart, if
indeed it does.
JJ_Rousseau 5 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:58 PM
The best thing that could happen is for USA to "balkanize". For the rest of the world, and
for Americans too. The founding fathers intentionally put restraints on the federal
government's power to prevent the situation we now face. Both parties (actually the duopoly)
are guilty of breaching the constitution, on so many levels we have lost count
Ronj14848 JJ_Rousseau 1 hour ago 15 Jan, 2021 07:23 PM
The USA have more American in uniform outside America than civilian Americans inside America.
You bleed yourself dry trying to be the boss of the world.
chert JJ_Rousseau 3 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 04:52 PM
Right, states should have more power than the federal government. Case in point: North Dakota
is trying to pass a law to sue Facebook and Twitter for those who have been censored on those
platforms. But federal law under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act will supersede
because federal law wins.
apothqowejh 4 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 04:17 PM
As an American, I can't say a reckoning hasn't been overdue. The myopia in this country, and
the tolerance for evil, was bound to rebound. From a refusal to honestly look at 9/11, a
refusal to accept responsibility for Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and a host of other
insanely brutal blunders, to an acceptance of such horrors as the USAPatriot Act and the
COVID scam, everyday Americans have obliviously sleepwalked into a totalitarian dystopia.
Tyranny abroad inevitably leads to tyranny at home, and we have well-earned it by refusing to
vote for peace and non-interventionism; for limited government, for responsible spending. Now
our votes no longer matter, and we are caught helpless in the whirlwind of our own
destruction.
newagerage apothqowejh 4 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 04:33 PM
The CIA, NSA, Pentagon... all these corporations lead to disaster as the employees have to
keep causing trouble to justify their jobs and spend, spend like crazy, the Army and
intelligence agencies spending the hard worked money from Silicon Valley and other sectors.
The country just doesn't make sense, first outsource jobs to China and then when they see
that Chinese people are smarter than them outsource those to India? are Indians idiots? I
don't think so... both countries will rule the World by the end of the century. And the most
important of all... where is your public education system? you can live without a proper
health system, China does, but without a decent public education system? most Americans don't
know where Portugal or Belgium is placed, no matter black or white...
ceshawn 6 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:31 PM
Trump didn't do this. The irrational reaction to Trump did this. It started with the
now-fully mythological Russia-gate nonsense (that started with an almost ridiculously made up
FISA warrant application). Continued through constant over-the-top challenges by Democrats of
Trump following Obama-era laws (separation of children and adults for illegal border
crossings) and the clear obstruction used by opponents during his entire Presidency. Trump
was a disaster, Biden will be a nightmare (or a complete liar), but the left shouldn't be
complaining when the reaction to their candidate is equally as disturbing as their reaction
to the right (and yes, the circus that was the "raid" at the Capitol is just as bad as the
intel community doing shady things against a sitting President).
Ronj14848 ceshawn 1 hour ago 15 Jan, 2021 07:27 PM
Trump didnt start new wars......but he has created a situation that foriegn wars will spring
from his actions. He has created hate for a country that during the second world war was a
much loved country.
billy brown ceshawn 4 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 03:36 PM
What could the 'rioters' do? We aren't going to let them poison us anymore. This election
will not be stolen and the new patriot act isn't going to get passed quietly. They are going
to have to crush us or allow a partition of the country
ceshawn 5 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:36 PM
If I were Russia or China, I would be watching carefully. Biden almost HAS to go after Russia
over the Crimean disaster of Obama and China will be his easy-out enemy if things are
complicated otherwise. North Korea will somehow become a big deal again as well. Let those
missiles fly, because the incoming administration has a proven track record of blowing up
innocent women and children for "funsies" (drone strikes on "suspected" terrorists...oh and
their families) without any form of due process or care for the safety of collateral damage.
Ronj14848 ceshawn 58 minutes ago 15 Jan, 2021 07:36 PM
True...the media support the military industrial complex. Their friends own the miltary
industrial complex . See who they support politically and avoid them like the plague.
Ronnie Spelbos ceshawn 2 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 06:04 PM
if I was Russia or an Eastern European nation I would offer asylum to white heterosexual men
and their families who want to leave the US. Take advantage of the brain capital and work
ethic of this group. The US is no country for white men.
Ohhho 6 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 01:41 PM
The Evil empire felt vulnerable so it lashed out with vengeance! None if it helps to fix the
issues behind the problem so I expect to see more of it in the near future!
TheFishh Ohhho 5 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 03:32 PM
There are literally just a few things the US can do to rebound as a decent country, but the
establishment doesn't want to make those moves. They rather see everything collapse than see
their wealth and power decreased by any amount.
OneHorseGuy 6 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:17 PM
"79% of Americans think the US is falling apart" those not accounted for are possibly
homeless or illiterate and don't have the opportunity of putting their view forward.
Ronnie Spelbos OneHorseGuy 2 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 06:02 PM
102% think the US is falling apart - cites Dominion.
newswithoutbord OneHorseGuy 6 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:31 PM
Spot on, mate!
RTaccount 6 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:22 PM
There will be no peace, no unity, and no prosperity. And there shouldn't be.
TheFishh RTaccount 4 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 03:38 PM
The US regimes past and present have worn out their bag of tricks. A magician is a con-man.
And the only way they can entertain and spellbind the crowd with their routines is if
everyone just ignores the sleight of hand. But people are starting to call the US out for the
tricks it is pulling, and that's where the magician's career ends.
omyomy RTaccount 5 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:54 PM
We the sane people know who is picking a fight. No matter what the propaganda outlets decree.
Tor Gjesdal 6 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:18 PM
79%,sure? OK. Very soon 85% of Westerners will understand their Countries are heading for
failures. They have been deceived for way too long.
Twenty Tor Gjesdal 5 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 03:23 PM
The alternative to western governments is dictators, one party rule. Yes, most western
governmental concepts are idealistic, but we wouldn't trade for anything else because we know
better.
JIMI JAMES Tor Gjesdal 6 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 02:31 PM
0 covid cases,i dont think so.
soumalinna1 4 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 03:36 PM
Correct. America will never be the same again. Democrats and CNN destroyed a once great
nation.
Ronnie Spelbos soumalinna1 2 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 06:06 PM
The 1965 Immigration Act destroyed the US. A country too diverse with little in common was
always bound the fall apart.
Drayk soumalinna1 3 hours ago 15 Jan, 2021 04:42 PM
So now that BLM and ANTIFA have been implicated with the events of Jan 6th in DC, can we
just say it was a mostly peaceful protest and everyone can go on to the next manufactured
crisis?
The key reson of the protest, which was later hijacked and used against Trump and his supporters, was disputed election. Navaro report
https://navarroreport.com/ suggests that the signs of election fraud committed
are very plausible. As Ron Unz said "Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the
election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous."
If those allegations are true, that
makes installation of Biden a coup d'état. The fact that the protest was turned into false
flag used to depose and silence Trump does not change that fact.
Notable quotes:
"... The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential election history and Biden's official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous. ..."
"... Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially true when all of America's most powerful corporations and ruling elites unite to essentially steal a reelection ..."
"... this confused tableau of chaos and popular anger, which recalls scenes from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests, has been portrayed as a "coup attempt" incited by President Trump, and therefore justifying his second impeachment. ..."
"... Expanded mail in voting FRAUD, you mean. Most European countries do not accept voting by mail. Because of fraud issues. ..."
"... This is one more typical coup, CIA installing its chosen presidential puppet ruler. It's a wholly routine occurrence ..."
"... Trump would have won despite the hostility of the media and big tech, and despite electoral corruption in Democrat-controlled big cities, if he had spent the previous 4 years making a good faith effort to implement the policies he ran on in 2016. ..."
"... He ran as a populist, yet ruled as a plutocrat. ..."
"... Candidate Trump promised a non-interventionist foreign policy. President Trump dug us deeper into the Middle East quagmire, intensifying hostilities against Russia, Syria, Yemen and Iran while being cartoonishly subservient to Israel. ..."
"... He ran on an immigration platform written by Jeff Sessions. As president he prioritized the immigration policies of Sheldon Adelson and Jared Kushner – calling for "more immigration than ever before" in his State of the Union address, and lecturing his dumbfounded rally-goers on the need for increased immigration because "my friends in the business world say we need it". ..."
"... Candidate Trump promised to drain the swamp. President Trump pardoned a menagerie of grotesque swamp creatures. ..."
"... Candidate Trump promised to close the carried interest loophole and make Wall Street pay its fair share. President Trump gave massive tax cuts to the very media moguls and tech oligarchs who would subsequently doom his 2020 campaign. ..."
In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities -- Detroit, Milwaukee,
Philadelphia, and Atlanta -- that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also
notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins
they provided may have been heavily "padded" to ensure the candidate's defeat.
Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen election seems
almost airtight. I don't know or care anything about Dominion voting machines, whether they are
controlled by Venezuelan Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant
election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.
Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden's son
Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the
candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and
boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once they story was finally published
in the pages of the New York Post , America's oldest newspaper, all links to the
Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social
media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their
ballots.
Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became
outraged that the editors of the Intercept , the $100 million publication he himself had
co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he
angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America's media and tech giants formed a united
front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish
line.
The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential
election history and Biden's official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters
had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite
possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny
that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.
Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially true when all of America's most powerful corporations
and ruling elites unite to essentially steal a reelection from a populist incumbent, hero-worshiped by many tens of
millions of Americans. And when despite all that blatant unfairness and theft, the final margin of defeat is just one vote in
7,000, an explosion of popular outrage should only be expected.
Solid estimates appear unavailable, but it seems that hundreds of thousands of grass-roots
Trump supporters traveled to our nation's capital to protest against what they regarded as a
stolen election, and then peacefully assembled to listen to their hero's speech.
Afterwards, a tiny sliver of this vast multitude of angry individuals -- perhaps less than
one in a thousand -- barged their way into the strangely-undefended Capitol building of
Congress, took souvenir selfies, livesteamed their antics, and generally played the role of
tourist-protesters while the lawmakers they so despised as corrupt mostly fled or hid.
These Trumpists and some of their colorful costumes brought to mind the radical Yippies of the
late 1960s.
The previous year had seen an unprecedented wave of violent riots, arson, and looting across
some 200 American cities, which our entirely corrupt and dishonest media had generally
characterized as "mostly peaceful protests." In previous years, angry mobs of
organized Democratic activists had repeatedly invaded and occupied the Wisconsin
Legislature , sometimes winning praise from the media. But when unarmed Trump supporters
now did something similar for a few hours in Washington, they were quickly branded "domestic
terrorists" seeking to overthrow our democracy.
A video shows Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed female protester, being shot dead by a security
guard as she tried to climb through a window, an incident not dissimilar to the famous Kent
State shootings of a 1960s campus protest, but hardly treated by the media in a similar
manner.
A couple of other Trump protesters, probably elderly, overweight, or in poor health, died of
strokes or heart-attacks during all the excitement, and one Capitol police officer later died
as well, allegedly struck in the head with a fire-extinguisher although there has been no solid
account of the incident. Yet this confused tableau of chaos and popular anger, which recalls
scenes from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests, has been portrayed as a "coup
attempt" incited by President Trump, and therefore justifying his second impeachment.
Even more importantly, the incoming Biden/Harris Administration may be considering the most
sweeping domestic crackdown upon traditional American civil liberties since the Patriot Act was
passed in the hurried aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks twenty years ago. This has been
justified by the need to suppress "domestic extremism."
Even without any new governmental legislation, a remarkable Internet crackdown has already
begun. In an absolutely unprecedented development, the sitting president of the United States
-- who had just lost his reelection by 0.01% of the vote -- has been summarily banned by
Twitter, Facebook, and all other major social media outlets, preventing him from communicating
with his followers, and with many of his leading supporters suffering the same fate.
Famed
libertarian Ron Paul criticized Twitter for banning Trump, and
he was immediately locked out of his own Facebook page . Parler, a young but rapidly
growing Twitter competitor, refused to ban Trump, and was immediately driven off the Internet
by a combined attack from Apple, Google, and Amazon, possibly never to return. Our Information
Age has entered a truly Orwellian period.
Another unprecedented aspect of the election is the change of rules implemented due to
COVID. I expected Trump vs. Biden to be the lowest turnout ever. Instead it was the
highest. This must be a consequence of expanded mail in voting.
Expanded mail in voting FRAUD, you mean. Most European countries do not accept voting by
mail. Because of fraud issues. Anyway, probably in the future we will be able to vote with an app, from the safety of our
homes, as we will be locked inside forever due to the "new variations" of Covid.
It will all be safe from fraud, of course, Dorsey and Zuck and Cook and Gates and Brin
guarantee.
Right. This is one more typical coup, CIA installing its chosen presidential puppet ruler.
It's a wholly routine occurrence, although the tactics and staging change a bit:
1. Preemptively quashing the candidacy of Robert Taft
2. Murder of John Kennedy
3. Preemptive murder of candidate Robert Kennedy
4. "Watergate" purge of Richard Nixon
5. Iran-hostage "October surprise" ratfuck of Jimmy Carter
6. Botched murder of Ronald Reagan
7. Suspending the vote count for candidate Al Gore
8. Ballot-stuffing in Ohio to stop John Kerry
9. Multi state ballot-stuffing to purge Donald Trump
By the way, it's a hoot to see the censorship hysteria in CIA's Mockingbird social
networks, while arch-subversive Ron Unz sits here with his infuriating little grin,
permitting the manifest foreign treason of GC34-standard freedom of expression.
Given that all rational human beings understand, as a matter of objective proven fact,
that the election was stolen Where do we go from here?
The slender & extreme, authoritarian, Leftoid margin in the House is certain to be a
circular firing squad of internecine discontent. What little they pass will contain more pork
than an industrial pig farm. It will be a matter of months before the U.S. Economy is tanked
by SJW illegitimacy and misrule.
Much like the GOP beat Gerrymandering, with lead time the GOP will beat Fultoning (named
after the Atlanta County). The GOP is sure to take the House in the 2022 elections.
How many times will Biden & Harris be Impeached, shamed, and forced to undergo public
trial in the Senate? There will have to be multiple trials to establish for the historical
record that Biden/Harris Coup plot was vastly more criminal than Nixon, Clinton, and
Trump.
PEACE
P.S.
Theft By A Thousand Cuts’ Report Conclusive On Election Fraud, Slams Media Cover Up
I read an interesting article by a Sri Lankan who lived through the recent Sri Lanka Civil
War. He made an interesting point that in a civil war, most people just go about their daily
routines, not aware they are in a war. They experience the war as a constant drumbeat of
negative news, with outbreaks of violence that don't directly affect themselves. He said
America is in a civil war, but Americans don't realize it. You know you are in a civil war or
insurrection when the news is constantly negative with frequent reports of violence.
Trump would have won despite the hostility of the media and big tech, and
despite electoral corruption in Democrat-controlled big cities, if he had spent the
previous 4 years making a good faith effort to implement the policies he ran on in 2016.
He ran as a populist, yet ruled as a plutocrat.
Candidate Trump promised a non-interventionist foreign policy. President Trump dug us
deeper into the Middle East quagmire, intensifying hostilities against Russia, Syria, Yemen
and Iran while being cartoonishly subservient to Israel.
The troops didn't come home.
He ran on an immigration platform written by Jeff Sessions. As president he prioritized
the immigration policies of Sheldon Adelson and Jared Kushner – calling for "more
immigration than ever before" in his State of the Union address, and lecturing his
dumbfounded rally-goers on the need for increased immigration because "my friends in the
business world say we need it".
A tight labor market and rising real wages remained in the world of might-have-been.
Candidate Trump promised to drain the swamp. President Trump pardoned a menagerie of
grotesque swamp creatures.
Candidate Trump promised to close the carried interest loophole and make Wall Street pay
its fair share. President Trump gave massive tax cuts to the very media moguls and tech
oligarchs who would subsequently doom his 2020 campaign.
The most passionate supporters of candidate Trump were stabbed in the back by President
Trump – Chris Christie, Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter, the Dissident Right,
etc. in a pattern that has continued to the bitter end with his denunciations of the Capitol
Hill protesters and scapegoating of Rudy Giuliani. At the same time, a whole series of
Never-Trump personalities were promoted within the Trump White House (Rod Rosenstein, Anthony
"the Mooch" Scaramucci, John Bolton, etc.).
Trump's most intelligent and active supporters were utterly demoralized, while his enemies
were given ample opportunity for sabotage and espionage.
Candidate Trump promised law and order. President Trump did absolutely nothing while his
supporters were terrorized by Antifa and BLM.
Thousands of Antifa terrorists and BLM rioters broke federal laws. Why weren't they
arrested, charged, indicted and tried?
President Trump didn't support $2,000 stimulus checks until after the election.
He didn't lift a finger against electoral corruption in Democrat-controlled big cities, or
big tech censorship, until after the election.
Without all these own-goals, the score wouldn't have even been close, and the biased
referees wouldn't have mattered.
Here's the link to the full Navaro report https://navarroreport.com/ This election wasn't "close". It was a blowout for Trump. It was OBVIOUS. It was also EASY to find, if anyone bothered looked just a little bit.
Ron put a "I'm a reasonable man" spin on this (and changed his tune from beginning to end,
glad I read it before firing off an angry response), but I'm not sure there's a lot gained
anymore by trying to reason with thieves and liars. Let's pray this turns around peacefully.
But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by
virtually every mainstream media outlet.
Re: Hunter Biden scandal. A survey of Biden's voters – unaware of his son's
corruption – is suggesting that estimated 4.6% would've not voted for Biden, sufficient
for Trump victory.
Mr. Dershowitz, strong defender of constitution and who opposed Trump first impeachment is
suggesting (BBC Hard Talk) that vindictive Dems lead by Pelosi and Schumer violated 5
articles of constitution in one day during the 2nd not even investigated impeachment. Denying
freedom of speech is a violation of constitution.
"... "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself." ..."
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason
from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner
openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling
through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) is a shadowy group of government, military and media
elites who have concocted a plan to spread mayhem and disinformation following the November 3
presidential elections. The strategy takes advantage of the presumed delay in determining the
winner of the upcoming election. (due to the deluge of mail-in votes.) The interim period is
expected to intensify partisan warfare creating the perfect environment for disseminating
propaganda and inciting street violence. The leaders of TIP believe that a mass mobilization
will help them to achieve what Russiagate could not, that is, the removal Donald Trump via an
illicit coup conjured up by behind-the-scenes powerbrokers and their Democrat allies. Here's a
little more background from an article by Chris Farrell at the Gatestone Institute:
"In one of the greatest public disinformation campaigns in American history -- the Left
and their NeverTrumper allies (under the nom de guerre: "Transition Integrity Project")
released a 22-page report in August 2020 "war gaming" four election crisis scenarios: .The
outcome of each TIP scenario results in street violence and political impasse.
Is it possible that the leadership of the American Left, along with their NeverTrumper
allies, are busy talking themselves into advocating and promoting street violence as a
response to a presidential election?
The answer is: Yes . expect violence in the aftermath of the election, because now
that is the new 'normal." (" How to Steal an
Election",Gatestone Institute )
Farrell is right. As we can see from the many articles that have recently popped up in the
media, the American people are being prepared for a contested election that will fuel public
anxiety and revolt. This all fits with the overall strategy of the TIP. Selected journalists
will be used to provide bits of information that serve the interests of the group while the
people will be told to expect a long and drawn-out constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, the media,
the Democrat leadership, trusted elites and elements in the Intelligence Community will put
pressure on Trump to step down while firing up their political base to take to the streets.
TIP's 22-page manifesto makes it clear that mass mobilization will be key to any electoral
victory. Here's an excerpt from the text:
"A show of numbers in the streets-and actions in the streets-may be decisive factors in
determining what the public perceives as a just and legitimate outcome." (
"Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition"The Transition
Integrity Project )
In other words, the authors fully support demonstrations and political upheaval to achieve
their goal of removing Trump. Clearly, this scorched earth approach did not originate with Joe
Biden, but with the cynical and bloodthirsty puppetmasters who operate behind the curtain and
who will do anything to advance their agenda.
This is a full-blown color revolution authored and supported by the same oligarchs and
deep-state honchoes that have opposed Trump from the very beginning. They're not going to back
down or call off the dogs until the job is done and Trump is gone. And when the dust settles,
Trump will likely be charged, tried, sentenced and imprisoned. His fortune will be seized, his
family will be financially ruined, and his closest advisors and allies will be prosecuted on
fabricated charges. There's not going to be a "graceful transition" of power if Trump loses. He
will face the full wrath of the scheming mandarins he has frustrated for the last 4 years.
These are the men who applauded when Saddam and Ghaddafi were savagely butchered. Will Trump
face the same fate as them?
Trump has less than two months to rally his supporters, draw attention to the conspiracy
that has is presently underway, and figure out a way to defend himself against the coup
plotters. If he is unable to derail the impending junta, his goose is cooked.
It's worth noting, that the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) has no legal authority to
meddle in the upcoming election. They were not appointed by any congressional committee nor did
any government entity approve their intrusive activities. This is entirely a "lone wolf"
operation designed to exploit loopholes in campaign laws in order to undermine public
confidence in our elections and to express their unbridled hostility towards Donald Trump. That
said, there analysis will probably influence those who share their views. In the first page of
their "Executive Summary" they say:
"We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November's elections will be marked by a
chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that the President Trump is likely
to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto
power. "
(Ibid )
This short statement provides the basic justification for the group's existence. It presents
the participants as impartial observers performing their civic duty by objectively analyzing
exercises (war games?) that indicate that Trump will challenge the election results in a
desperate attempt to hold on to power. Not surprisingly, the group provides no evidence that
the president would react the way they think he would. In fact, their hypothesis seems
extremely far-fetched given the fact that Trump has no militia, no private army, and very few
allies among the political class, the Intelligence Community, the FBI, the military or the deep
state. Who exactly does the group think would help Trump hold on to power: Bill Barr, Larry
Kudlow, Melania??
There is nothing "impartial" about this analysis. It is partisan gibberish aimed at
discrediting Trump while creating a pretext for launching a coup against him. Here is another
sample of TIP's "objective analysis" from page 1 of the manuscript:
"The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) was launched in late 2019 out of concern that the
Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020
presidential election and transition process. TIP takes no position on how Americans
should cast their votes, or on the likely winner of the upcoming election; either major
party candidate could prevail at the polls in November without resorting to "dirty tricks."
However, the administration of President Donald Trump has steadily undermined core norms
of democracy and the rule of law and embraced numerous corrupt and authoritarian
practices. This presents a profound challenge for those –from either party
–who are committed to ensuring free and fair elections, peaceful transitions of power,
and stable administrative continuity in the United States."
(Ibid )
Got that? In other words (to paraphrase) "Trump is a corrupt dictator who hates democracy
and the rule of law, but that is just our unbiased opinion. Please, don't let that influence
your vote. We just want to make sure the election goes smoothly."
As we noted, the hatred for Trump permeates the entire 22-page document and that, in turn,
undermines the credibility of the author to portray his project as an impartial examination of
potential problems in the upcoming election. There is nothing evenhanded in the approach to
these issues or in the remedies that are recommended. This is a partisan project concocted by
malicious elites who despise Trump and who plan to remove him from office by hook or crook.
So, do we know who the leaders of this (TIP) group are?
Well, we know who their two main spokesmen are: Rosa Brooks– Georgetown law professor
and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, and Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson,
Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William &
Mary, and chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to an article by
Whitney Webb:
" (Rosa) Brooks was an advisor to the Pentagon and the Hillary Clinton-led State
Department during the Obama administration. She was also previously the general counsel to
the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a
controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros.Zoe Hudson, who is
TIP's director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving as senior policy analyst and
liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years .
OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that
OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called
"color revolutions" to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama
administration. Examples of OSF's ties to these manufactured "revolutions" include Ukraine in
2014 and the "Arab Spring" ..
In addition to her ties to the Obama administration and OSF, Brooks is currently a scholar
at West Point's Modern War Institute, where she focuses on "the relationship between the
military and domestic policing" and also Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program. She is
a currently a key player in the documented OSF-led push to "capitalize" off of legitimate
calls for police reform to justify the creation of a federalized police force under the guise
of defunding and/or eliminating local police departments. Brooks' interest in the
"blurring line" between military and police is notable given her past advocacy of a military
coup to remove Trump from office and the TIP's subsequent conclusion that the military "may"
have to step in if Trump manages to win the 2020 election, per the group's "war games"
described above.
Brooks is also a senior fellow at the think tank New America . New America's
mission statement notes that the organization is focused on "honestly confronting the
challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities
those changes create." It is largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Bill
Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jeffrey Skoll and Pierre
Omidyar (eBay) . In addition, it has received millions directly from the U.S. State
Department to research "ranking digital rights." Notably, of these funders, Reid Hoffman was
caught "meddling" in the most recent Democratic primary to undercut Bernie Sanders' candidacy
during the Iowa caucus and while others, such as Eric Schmidt and Pierre Omidyar, are known
for their cozy ties to the Clinton family and even ties to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign."
("
"Bipartisan" Washington Insiders Reveal Their Plan for Chaos if Trump Wins the Election
", Unlimited Hangout )
Is it safe to say that Rosa Brooks is a Soros stooge overseeing a color revolution in the
United States aimed at toppling Trump and replacing him with a dementia-addled, meat-puppet
named Joe Biden?
Political analyst Paul Craig Roberts seems to think so. Here's what he said in a recent post
at his website:
"I have provided evidence that the military/security complex, using the media and the
Democrats, intends to turn the November election into a color revolution The evidence of
a color revolution in the works is abundantly supplied by CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, NPR,
Washington Post and numerous Internet sites funded by the CIA and the foundations and
corporations through which it operates.. All of these media organizations are establishing
the story in the mind of Americans that Trump will not leave office when he loses or steals
the election and must be driven out.
With Antifa and Black Lives Matter now experienced in violent protests, they will be
unleashed anew on American cities when there is news of a Trump election victory. The media
will explain the violence as necessary to free us from a tyrant and egg on the violence, as
will the Democrat Party. The CIA will be certain that the violence is well funded .
What is a reelected President Trump going to do when the Secret Service refuses to repel
Antifa and Black Lives Matter when they breach White House Security?
American Democracy is on the verge of being ended for all times, and the world media
will herald the event as the successful overthrowing of a tyrant." ( "America's
Color Revolution" , Paul Craig Roberts )
Another of the leading spokesmen for TIP is Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who
made this revealing statement in a recent interview:
"Let me just say some of the things that we're putting out there. Among those things, one
that is very important is the media, particularly the mainstream media. They cannot act as
they usually act with regard to elections. They have to play a coup on election night. They
can't be declaring some state like Pennsylvania for one candidate or the other. When
Pennsylvania probably has thousands upon thousands of votes yet to come in and count. So,
the media has to get its act in order and it has to act very differently than it normally
does."
(NOTE: In other words, Wilkerson does not want the media to follow the normal protocols for
covering an election, but to adjust their reporting to accommodate the aims of the
coup-plotters. Does that sound like someone who is committed to evenhanded coverage of events,
or someone who wants reporters to shape the news to meet the specifications of his own
particular agenda? Here's more from Wilkerson:)
"Second, .we also have learned that poll workers have to be younger. And we've started
a movement all across the country to train young people. And we've had really good luck with
the volunteers to do so , to be poll workers. Because we found out in Wisconsin, for
example, poll workers are mostly over 60. And many of them didn't show up because they were
afraid of COVID-19. And so Wisconsin went from about one 188 polling places, to about 15.
That's disastrous." (" This 'War Game'
Maps out what happens if the President contests the Election" , WBUR )
Why is Wilkerson so encouraged by the young people he's trained to act as poll workers?
Doesn't that sound a bit fishy, especially from a dyed-in-the-wool partisan who's mixed up with
a group whose sole aim is to beat Trump? And why are the authors of the TIP manifesto so eager
to reveal their true intentions. Take a look:
"There will likely not be an "election night" this year; unprecedented numbers of voters
are expected to use mail-in ballots, which will almost certainly delay the certified result
for days or weeks. A delay provides a window for campaigns, the media, and others to cast
doubt on the integrity of the process and for escalating tensions between competing camps. As
a legal matter, a candidate unwilling to concede can contest the election into January.
.."(
Ibid)
So, that's the GamePlan, eh? The coup plotters want a contested election that drags on for
weeks, deepens divisions among the population, undermines confidence in the electoral system,
instigates ferocious street fighting in cities across the country, and gives the Biden camp
time to mobilize its political resources in Congress to mount a Constitutional attack on
Trump.
Can we at least call this treachery by its proper name: Treason– "the crime of
betraying one's country by trying to overthrow the government?"
"... They all laughed and Schummer said " What qualifications do you have to join us" the old man said. " I am old, sick and suffer from dementia" ..."
An old man went to Congress and ask to see Pelosi, Schummer and Biden, at first they refused
but he insisted and they felt sorry for him and took him in. Pelosi ask him "Why did you come
to Washington". He said " I want to join you in Congress".
They all laughed and Schummer said "
What qualifications do you have to join us" the old man said. " I am old, sick and suffer from
dementia"
In their efforts to expunge the Trump movement from memory let alone existence, these
neo-Stalinists are hellbent on nullifying constitutionally guaranteed rights – freedom of
speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to bear arms are under assault.
In place of the Bill of Rights, they would impose a Bill of Don'ts:
Don't say what we don't want to hear.
Don't gather where we don't allow, especially if you are a 'deplorable'.
Don't bother petitioning for grievances, because we don't care. Don't own weapons and don't
defend yourself when you or your property are attacked, even as the police are defunded.
Don't tell us about your right to privacy because our right to surveil you supersedes
it.
Don't tell us you have the right to confront the witnesses aligned against you, or see the
evidence alleged against you, or to present evidence and witnesses in your own defense. That's
your white privilege speaking, and we will not tolerate hate speech.
Don't expect us to be bound by due process or the rule of law. Feelings and desired outcomes
trump facts and rules, both of which are tools of oppression, relics of the fascist
patriarchy.
Don't object, or we will cancel you entirely from these Disunited States of Woketopia.
And first and foremost, don't dare have the temerity to question election results that have
handed us uncontested power.
Only authoritarians sanction this state of affairs. The harm they will do, as they neglect
and inflict further pain on the Republic, will be immeasurable. The nation is failing, not
merely because it is divided, but because a contingent has rejected its foundational
principles. That contingent is now in control.
Strategic-Culture 's Editorial is the best journalistic reporting on the political
split within the Outlaw US Empire I've come across. One short telling excerpt:
"This [blaming all its problems on foreign actors] is the ultimate scapegoating and
destructive denial over endemic U.S. problems. Those problems are topped by the vast
social and economic inequality that has been presaged by decades of neoliberal capitalism
overseen by both Republicans and Democrats. Both parties seem unwilling or incapable of
understanding what needs to be fixed in a fundamentally broken system . The rise of Trump
was something of a diversion from addressing the root problem. And blaming Russia for ongoing
problems is also another futile diversion. This systemic denial of reality by the American
political class is why the U.S. crisis will continue to deteriorate because blaming everyone
else but itself avoids the necessary ways and means to fix it ." [My Emphasis]
At least we're informed as to why there're no attempts to fix the problems as the
Neoliberal Parasites don't want them fixed as they profit greatly as the turmoil
shrouds their activities. The Editors agree with most of us at MoA in their prescription for
a solution:
"The solution will require mass popular mobilization for democratic rights."
But that's just the sort of action that will be resisted by the Neoliberal Parasites. Will
it take a reenactment of the Kent State shootings to galvanize the public? Unfortunately, I
think that's very much the case, and there'll be more than one massacre.
In the old ages in Greece Sparta oppressed the Helots with brute force during more than
400 years. This historical exmaple proves that rule through violent oppression can be quite
stable. I doubt the elites in the USA have enough 'Spartan qualities' to organize the same
violent oppression that long, my point is however that it is a proven possibillity
"I don't know or care anything about Dominion voting machines"
Why not? Take a look at Patrick Byrne's summary of evidence for massive election fraud
involving the Dominion machines, on his blog over at DeepCapture.
It will explain how a man who sheltered in his house, did not campaign, drew no more than
six or seven or twenty-five people to his events, got seven million more votes than a man who
drew up to thirty thousand people at his rallies.
...An expert witness in Georgia was able to hack into Dominion in front of the legislative
committee in less than a minute. "We're in." In Dominion, and on the internet.
Dominion machines can do anything! They can assign a weight of 1.5 per single vote to
one candidate, and .75 per vote to the other, and can adjust as necessary. They can assign
batches of "adjudicated" ballots to the candidate of your choice. They can just switch votes
from one candidate to the other in increments of several thousand, let's subtract 29,000
votes from candidate a and add them to b's column. They can allow access by a third party to
the administrator's identity and password so the third party can enter and participate
directly in tabulation of the votes.
And more. If your disfavored candidate is winning by a landslide and your 1.5/.75 ratio
isn't working, you can put in a USB card and adjust accordingly.
If you're desperate you can upload tens of thousands of votes in a single drop which all,
every one, go to your preferred candidate. And you can do it in one hour on a machine which
can only handle a few thousand votes per hour, fed in manually.
For anybody who listened to state hearings in one or more state if is clear that there was widespread fraud. And its importance
is much larger then the question who won the elections
Notable quotes:
"... Multiple methods of attack on the election outcome have been prepared, all methods well planned, tried and perfected in the string of color revolutions around the World. Because those attacking Trump are the same as those who have been doing the "regime changes" in the vulnerable countries over the past 30 years. ..."
"... The playbook/manual is fully symmetrical – it always addresses both possible outcomes – if their side does not manage to steal the election then they incite an insurrection and oust the winner (the Viktor Yanukovych outcome). ..."
"... It is funny how few people appear to understand that Hunter's laptop was not just a suppressed election decider then an important reason for Biden's suitability – the insurance of ensurance, the media ready Kompromat. ..."
"... Finally, it is very important to keep in mind that none of what transpired would have been possible in a healthy country ..."
"... Maybe it was hostility towards Trump's supporters rather than hostility towards Trump. Trump is a reliable pro-immigration ultra-Zionist rabidly pro-LGBT liberal. The views of a large proportion of Trump's supporters are diametrically opposed to Trump's own views, but his supporters aren't smart enough to figure that out. ..."
"... whatever else Trump may be, he's no white nationalist. But again his supporters can't figure stuff like that out. ..."
"... In extreme situations, it's more important to win than to play by the rules. – This is the moral reasoning **** of the fraudsters. The basic equation they applied is so simple that it hurts (and therefore: worked perfectly well – in all of the West) ..."
"... In the Art of Winning Elections it did not take a genius to develop this solution – the lowest number of night-suitcases (filled with ballots) for the highest number of elector votes . ..."
"... In my mind the election was already unfair when you have the entire MSM and the Internet social media companies rooting for one candidate while attacking the other and banning/censoring the voices of his supporters under various pretexts. Both candidates and their supporters, should have been given equal exposure but I don't know how that could be achieved in practice. ..."
"... At a minimum the circumstantial evidence of vote counts being stopped in swing states along with gerrymandered rules was highly suspicious. To claim a mandate on such a close election while losing house seats is absurd but the Republicans bungling the Georgia Senate run off over $2K checks and a sycophantic MSM ensures they will. ..."
"... We are to believe Biden won 507 counties, the least EVER, but won the most votes ever. Trump won 74 million votes, beating Obama's 69 million in 2008, the previous all-time high. Trump won over 2500 counties. ..."
"... Strange that all these presidential elections are always neck and neck. Just because there are two parties does not mean that election after election the vote will boil down to one or two "swing states" and a few thousand votes. Statistically, it just doesn't make sense. ..."
"... This is strong evidence, if not proof, that these elections are scripted from beginning to end ..."
"... The convenient thing about postal votes is that they make it possible to wait until the opponent's votes are all in and counted – then send in just enough postal votes to tip the balance. It's rather like an auction in which one bidder gets only the one bid, and then a rival can offer $1 more. ..."
"... Well said. I'm sure that it's no coincidence that DJT has been involved with televised wrestling over the years. Every great contest requires a memorable "heel" to engage the spectators. In televised snooker in the UK, final matches often are over best of 35 frames. It's unusual for them not to go to the last ball of the final frame. Got to have a little drama. ..."
"... The point is, it is the average intellect, moral and civic weight of the involved constituencies that allows or doesn't allow what shouldn't be allowed in a real democracy. You don't have actual democracy below a lower threshold of intellect and moral and civic worth of all the main involved parties. ..."
"... When you consider Donald Trump's grotesque antics, his entirely unpresidential behavior, evident falsehoods and blatantly corrupt actions – together with the systematic media blitz taking every opportunity to show him in the worst possible light; it is quite astounding that he received as many votes as he did. Far, far more than could be accounted for by simply ascribing them to his 'deplorables'. ..."
"... I think Trump's greatest legacy will be that he ripped away the curtain and the masks fell and we all got to see just how nefarious and rigged the system is, from federal judges to our intelligence community to the FBI/DOJ to Congress to the media ..."
"... Dominion machines can do anything! They can assign a weight of 1.5 per single vote to one candidate, and .75 per vote to the other, and can adjust as necessary. They can assign batches of "adjudicated" ballots to the candidate of your choice. They can just switch votes from one candidate to the other in increments of several thousand, let's subtract 29,000 votes from candidate a and add them to b's column. They can allow access by a third party to the administrator's identity and password so the third party can enter and participate directly in tabulation of the votes. ..."
"... They won the election the old way: they stole it fair and square. ..."
"... If you like your bourgeois job and want to keep it, you will support the narrative. ..."
"... All of the comments on here that analyze DJT's strengths and weaknesses miss the point. I personally think he made some very poor choices; but, to inappropriately paraphrase Carville, it's the fraud, stupid. ..."
"... Occam's Razor should be applied- instead of the nonsense of Chavez having an interest in voting software; voting machines being manipulated; truckloads of paper ballots being moved across state lines- my favorite; etc. ..."
"... t would be very easy to have individuals in a nursing home or even an adult day care center for mentally (dementia) incapacitated adults sign ballots. There are numerous day care centers in New York City, federally funded, where individuals could be coaxed to sign ballots. Just say Trump will close the day care center -- especially where interpreters must be provided because the individuals cannot understand English due to varying stages of mental incapacity. ..."
"... I wonder how many people have watched the twenty hours or so of state legislature hearings related to the election. Can people just not be bothered? These were historic hearings of huge importance, but I assume they didn't get much coverage in the MSM. I think most of them were livestreamed only by small right-wing networks. ..."
"... What were the results of the 2016 election? Billary received 65 million to Trumps 62 million. Gotcha. So we have roughly 127 million who showed up to vote that time. (Wonder how many of those were legit.) So ONLY 4 years later, Joe "I Look Like I'm Drugged" Biden ALLEGEDLY received 80 million and Trump received 74 million. Okay, that is a turnout of 154 million votes. So if I believe in this fairy tale, I was supposed to believe that in ONLY 4 years the vote count increased by an alleged 27 million. Hell, a lot of our most populous states do not even have that many people. ..."
"... Laws don't say a little bit of fraud is OK, because the fraud committed on or by a business didn't cause bankruptcy. Either there was fraud, or there wasn't. ..."
"... That several courts refused to hear cases for lack of standing, is patently ridiculous. If a candidate has no standing, who does? In an election, everybody has standing because they are affected by the result, and by virtue of Citizens United , corporations do as well. ..."
"... Watch this recent interview of Chris Hedges by Jimmy Dore about the root causes of our current woes. Hedges speaks off the cuff in words that sound as polished, powerful and precise as the language in tracts considered to be classics. His Pulitzer clearly was not found in a Cracker Jack box. ..."
Before the election I polled all my friends who would win. The majority of both left and right oriented said that it would
be Trump. I said, yes Trump would win a fair election, but he will lose on who is counting. Multiple methods of attack on
the election outcome have been prepared, all methods well planned, tried and perfected in the string of color revolutions around
the World. Because those attacking Trump are the same as those who have been doing the "regime changes" in the vulnerable countries
over the past 30 years. Trump never had a grain of chance against this mighty machinery. Corrupt local governors and blackmailed
and co-opted all levels of judiciary, targeted lawlessness, threats and examples of violence and future civil war if the other
side wins, censorship, eviction of election observers, night-time suitcases of ballots, one-sided main sewerage media.
All pure déjà vu – this is exactly how the color revolutions work – the art of winning elections. The US bombers arrive
only if the "peaceful transition of power" (aka the stealing of election and post-election) fails. In the color revolution manual,
there is also a chapter on prevention of resistance to the stolen election – thus the msm and congress screeching like castrated
pigs against Trump's imaginary incitement of insurrection (pure psychological projection). I was always sure that Trump is too
much of a cheap demagogue and hot air filled balloon to be able to initiate a real insurrection.
The playbook/manual is fully symmetrical – it always addresses both possible outcomes – if their side does not manage to steal
the election then they incite an insurrection and oust the winner (the Viktor Yanukovych outcome).
... ... ...
In political terms, in the 2016 election a quasi-populist candidate slipped through. This will never happen again because state
laws will be enacted with built-in mail voting and electronic voting machines. Competent or incompetent populists will never get
through again. This will ensure that the choice will always be only between the approved, controllable candidates with plenty
of skeletons in wardrobes and dirty laptops in their closets. It is funny how few people appear to understand that Hunter's laptop
was not just a suppressed election decider then an important reason for Biden's suitability – the insurance of ensurance, the
media ready Kompromat.
Finally, it is very important to keep in mind that none of what transpired would have been possible in a healthy country
: election of Trump without enough Kompromat to have to invent the dumbest Putin's puppet meme and the consequent exposure
of the manipulative Deep State, the sulfuric acid for the brain MSM and the high-techs fakers. These are all the Hegels' seeds
of destruction in action.
One thing to ask is why was this huge effort made to oust Trump?
Maybe it was hostility towards Trump's supporters rather than hostility towards Trump. Trump is a reliable pro-immigration
ultra-Zionist rabidly pro-LGBT liberal. The views of a large proportion of Trump's supporters are diametrically opposed to Trump's
own views, but his supporters aren't smart enough to figure that out.
In extreme situations, it's more important to win than to play by the rules. – This is the moral reasoning **** of the
fraudsters. The basic equation they applied is so simple that it hurts (and therefore: worked perfectly well – in all of the West):
Trump = Hitler.
**** If I might go with Sigmund Freud here, I'd say: – Their rationalizations instead of "their moral reasoning".
I prefer this model, and it's not being discussed: Someone was making BIG money off of those programs and policies leftover
from Obama. Trade with China? Care to mention one BIG company who peddles Chinese wares? Maybe two or three of them, perhaps?
"Follow the money", is what Deep Throat told Woodward. If we do that with our darling Deep State? Just ask yourself, who stood
to benefit from four years of Hillary, pray tell? There's your answer.
The Deep State regime stole this election in exactly the same states where Trump successfully campaigned in 2016 to win against
Clinton. In the Art of Winning Elections it did not take a genius to develop this solution – the lowest number of night-suitcases
(filled with ballots) for the highest number of elector votes .
Thanks for a balanced assessment. In my mind the election was already unfair when you have the entire MSM and the Internet
social media companies rooting for one candidate while attacking the other and banning/censoring the voices of his supporters
under various pretexts. Both candidates and their supporters, should have been given equal exposure but I don't know how that
could be achieved in practice.
Trump was severely hamstrung by the role played by the MSM and the social media. In a real democracy this state of affairs
should not be allowed: where the rich and powerful who control the media have an unequal say and overwhelming influence compared
to the ordinary voters.
Now we have Ruby Freeman, heretofore only on video rolling out suitcases in Fulton County, now on AUDIO discussing her $100
an hour election heist gig and the "Secretary of State" is mentioned at 2:02 by her boss Ralph Jones:
There is a small element of illogic in the numbers part of the argument, namely in using 2 different metrics to make that argument.
(I agree with the corruption part of the argument covered by Glenn Greenwald. It's censorship in action).
As I've done before, I'll reiterate, I'm no fan of Biden or Trump. In fact I'm worried about the war cabinet Biden already
seems to be assembling just as I still worry about the crazed maniac Pompeo for the next few days left in the current administration.
But here's the point and it is a very subtle one: to say it was a tight race and only 1 in 7,000 Americans had to change their
vote is a bit misleading. In the absurd Electoral College, winner take all the state system (which is far more scandalous in my
view), we take one state at a time. If we accept the vote count, Biden won over 7,000,000 more votes more than Trump, a margin
of victory of 4.4%. Not very close.
Therefore, if it were a one person one vote nationwide system, 2.2% would have to change their minds, meaning 1 out of every
45 Americans.
But it's a state by state margin that we're after. Thus more to the point would be to take each individual state and its margin.
So if we took Georgia as one example, the margin of Biden's lead was 11,779 votes out of 4,935,487 votes cast for Biden and Trump
(we disregard all the third party votes in this argument). 5,890 voters would have to "change their minds". Out of the Biden/Trump
overall vote, that's 1 out of 838 Georgian voters.
To apply a different system, overall US vote count, to one state, Georgia, is using which system you prefer to come up with
an illusionary 1 out of 7000 Americans, not applying the same metric down the line. It's a separate state by state system, not
a nationwide vote. You have to stay consistent to be accurate in this method of argumentation.
Very technical, yes. What about mail-in voting? What is the evidence that this is by definition rigged or manipulated? Mailed
ballots have a paper trail like in-person ballots. Presumably someone could steal your ballot from your home and vote on your
behalf, but this can be traced and found out. At least one state, Washington, doesn't even have in-person voting at all. Does
that mean all of their votes are fraudulent?
What about voter suppression? Shouldn't that be factored in? That seems to happen a lot more often in red states than blue
states. What about Trumps attempts to sabotage the US Postal System? Doesn't that bother anybody who supports him? What about
his refusal to commit to the results prior to Election Day? (He did the same in 2016 by the way). This only added to his
opponents concern about his dictatorial tendencies.
Finally, in all the arguments I've seen anywhere, I haven't seen anyone lay out which states use those ridiculous electronic
voting machines which leave no paper trail. That should be the other real scandal and those should be immediately banned in every
state. Get rid of those and the Electoral College and we might have a fair system.
Oh, and get rid of a system that is eternally dominated by 2 parties as well, whether through run off elections or even better,
proportional representation. The latter that would be truly more democratic.
why was this huge effort made to oust Trump? What did they want him to do that he wouldn't do? Was he an impediment to the
increase of control over the average person? Did not want to start up another action against Syria? Would not attack Iran without
having a coalition of NATO countries lined up? Was against total outsourcing to China? Not confrontational enough against Russia?
Perhaps he gave the deplorables dangerous ideas about them having some rights. If that question could be answered then we'd
know what is coming.
He humiliated the upper echelons of society so thoroughly via his 2016 campaign and victory.
@anon Because Trump
inflames white nationalism, which is anathema to the Jews.
There is evidence that Trump himself is a Jew, and a fanatic Zionist at that, so his self-serving incitement of white nationalism
(whose causes he did little to implement, unlike his steady support for every imaginable Israeli cause, tbe more outrageous the better,
short of war with the "usable" nukes he had had developed for the purpose, that Russia warned him away from) was especially galling
to the top Jews such as the Rothschilds for whom Israel is nothing sentimental, just one more piece in their chess game for world
power.
And thank you for this site which is a beacon of free speech and dissent against our vile, corrupt, incompetent ruling class.
In all the post election rancor little attention has been brought to how razor thin the margin actually was. And with you being
a vociferous critic of Trumps boorish antics and insane foreign policy the candor on this issue is appreciated.
At a minimum the circumstantial evidence of vote counts being stopped in swing states along with gerrymandered rules was highly
suspicious. To claim a mandate on such a close election while losing house seats is absurd but the Republicans bungling the Georgia
Senate run off over $2K checks and a sycophantic MSM ensures they will.
And after abetting barbaric violence and anarchy for months the Democrats will now use trespassing in their "Sacred Temple"
to unleash a crackdown by the national security state and unprecedented censorship and social-credit run by woke-corporate oligarchs.
Interestingly (And as many predicted) it appears they will reopen the economy and declare "victory" over Covid shortly after
Bidens inauguration. Clearly the bizarre excesses of the lockdowns and dynamiting of the economy were calculated to undermine
Trump and consolidate wealth and power from the start.
The question is what exactly this "new normal" will be and how far they're willing to go in order to purge the Trumpists and
populist right. It will be easy to garner support for the latter but if the daily disruptions and financial shocks continue the
system will collapse.
A new, large scale war would be a useful distraction but it's hard to imagine the U.S sustaining one in its current state much
less against capable adversaries like China and Russia.
Then again, arrogant, idiotic, catastrophic policy blunders are the defining feature of this ruling class for the last 30 years
so I wouldn't put it past them given the madness we've seen already.
In effect, America's media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris
ticket across the finish line.
adjustment
via a plastic bag put over their heads. If they were lucky.
There was no real contest. Because? A. Control of the mainstream media was so one sided. And that is where we are at now here
in USA. Imagine, a standing President of the USA has been banned and censored by all the "American" mainstream media giants. Actually,
you do not have to imagine. It just happened: Big Tech and MSM has openly torpedoed the First Amendment and US Constitution. So
we know where they are coming from. It's also kind of disappointing how most of our "representatives" are dealing with this.
The only cause other than himself on which Trump has been consistent is serving Israel. One of the only two major policies
of Obama's that he didn't reverse was support of Israel, though he took it to yet another level. The other one was
increasing military spendings. Obama never cut military spending. My money is on Biden never doing it either, and also
that he will take support of Israel to yet another level. I hope I'm wrong.
On the election night I was listening to two of our New Zealand reporters who were reporting the incoming results. I remember
quite clearly after results had been coming in for a while they remarked: "well that's it another four years of the same". That
were their exact words. That must have been before the postal votes came in, which suddenly changed the picture completely to
Biden's advantage. Postal votes I believe were introduced for the first time in 2020 because of the Corona pandemic. It's believed
that postal votes can be more easily tampered with. Postal votes are expected to remain during future elections I believe.
We are to believe Biden won 507 counties, the least EVER, but won the most votes ever. Trump won 74 million votes, beating Obama's 69 million in 2008, the previous all-time high. Trump won over 2500 counties.
Clarice Feldman at the Americanthinker.com noted that many residences
had multiple votes from the current occupants plus previous occupants (apartment complexes) in this election, because old voter
rolls aren't purged in a timely manner. The same addy might have 3 previous residents voting, plus the same individual voters
legitimately voting at their new addresses.
My advice for whites is this .we will probably be getting in new wars for neocons now, so you might wanna think twice before
signing up for the military. You may find your twenties being used up in multiple deployments in foreign miserable places.
Strange that all these presidential
elections are always neck and neck. Just because there are two parties does not mean that election after election the vote will
boil down to one or two "swing states" and a few thousand votes. Statistically, it just doesn't make sense.
Of course the media loves these nail-biter elections because it drives up their viewership. Every election we get the same
old farcical "debates", scandals and continual ridiculous sound bites. This is strong evidence, if not proof,
that these elections are scripted from beginning to end, even up to and including the "march to the Capitol" and the
ensuing "insurrection".
Exactly. "Spin". He also appears to be entirely ignorant of the fact that the constitution states that each states electors,
and the procedure for choosing them, must be accomplished via the state[s] legislatures, and that in all 6[?] swing states that
recorded early morning, miraculous turn-around votes from Trump to Biden, that that particular constitutional procedure had been
entirely , and very conveniently, ignored:
The Lobby wants Syria by any means, up to a direct confrontation with the Russian Federation. The Jewish hatred for Iran is boundless
(same for Russia – take note, Americans). Zionists care not about human lives.
"I don't know or care anything about Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan Marxists, Chinese
Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight".
Cui bono? Obviously the main group profiting from the fraudulent election was the Democratic Party and its supporters. So why drag in foreign governments? Most of them are all too well aware that it's very dangerous to attract the attention of
the USA for good or bad. Like trying to save a drowning whale.
So their sensible strategy is to stand back at a safe distance and watch the monster perish in its own poisons, hoping it doesn't
lash out and harm them in its dying struggles.
The convenient thing about postal votes is that they make it possible to wait until the opponent's votes are all in and counted
– then send in just enough postal votes to tip the balance. It's rather like an auction in which one bidder gets only the one
bid, and then a rival can offer $1 more.
Ridiculous if you want a fair election. But nobody who matters wants or expects anything of that kind. A proper political machine
gets everything cut and dried well in advance.
Trump was unpredictable and, to a degree, uncontrollable. He had to go.
Well said. I'm sure that it's no coincidence that DJT has been involved with televised wrestling over the years. Every great contest requires
a memorable "heel" to engage the spectators. In televised snooker in the UK, final matches often are over best of 35 frames. It's unusual for them not to go to the last
ball of the final frame. Got to have a little drama.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch the rancher counts the silver dollars.
...If ego or narcissism can explain it, so be it. I'll go with insane or suffering from dementia. Any 'drain the swamp' or 'fix
the system', MAGA or "build back better" argument would appeal only to retards. Re-visit Carroll Quigly's succinct description
of political parties in the USA in Tragedy and Hope, pages 1247-1248 (hardcover) or Google same.
I'm beginning to believe that a different species is holding sway and we are the proverbial Eloi.
The point is, it is the average intellect, moral and civic weight of the involved constituencies that allows or doesn't allow
what shouldn't be allowed in a real democracy.
You don't have actual democracy below a lower threshold of intellect and moral and civic worth of all the main involved
parties.
We could in other words say: there will be as much real democracy as is desired by the average citizen, where to desire it
is not to blandly say "I agree with democracy".
It is funny how few people appear to understand that Hunter's laptop was not just a suppressed election decider then an
important reason for Biden's suitability
Yes, few people understand that all regime-approved candidates are people able to be blackmailed for a precise reason, and
not at all by chance. What about Hegel though?
@obvious Globalist
NWO creeps stole the election, they spent 4 years trying to overthrow the 2016 election by coups aided and abetted by the Globalist
Mainslime Media, FBI etc. -- you missed all that of course? .
They also PUBlICLY previewed, as they did the COVID Agenda, stealing
the election a couple months before, gamed and planned it in various outcomes .Anyone who can't see what is up is either willfully
ignorant, lying, or "stupid" as you say.
No decent person is in favor of the Agenda of Harris/Biden serving the NWO "Great
Reset" to crush the Peons -- you must see yourself as above the coming carnage -- I have news for you -- your not.
We'll know we're in an actual civil war when different branches of the military, or units within a branch are fighting each
other or when the police are fighting the military. Don't hold your breath of course because every cop and soldier in America is a traitor and they're all on the same team.
What I still find unfathomable is the fact that the steal was so obvious: so in your face but yet the big media, big tech,
federal and state law enforcements, spooks, judges, big GOP politicians etc still behave like nothing ever happened. Trump and
his supporters are now labeled domestic terrorists and lawfare is about to be unleashed on them. It's surreal.
Had the Orange heeded his MAGA base rather than his (((rat-in-law))) he'd still be President. There was certainly
election fraud; enough of the betrayed base stayed home to make it effective. Trump was a p -- y all four years and got what
he deserved. He was always a stop-gap time-buying non-solution...
...issues can no longer be discussed openly, the reliability of elections in the USA is the most important issue that faces us. The
people will accept an honest winner in a serious election. Nothing is as cleansing to our natural divisions as the result of a
well-contested election, in the knowledge that, in a reasonable interval, the same offices will be up for new contests.
Nothing is as damaging to our peace of mind as knowing that one side won fairly, but was robbed of governing. I thank Ron Unz for writing and publishing such a reasonably argued essay on the matter. It is the gold standard for 2020 election
analyses.
This is sad people. Was talking to a friend and even his 80 something year old mother commented on how decrepit Sleazy Joe
looks and walks. I was watching him deliver "his speech" last night and the guy had a hard time reading a few sentences off the
teleprompter without stammering and stuttering.
After an embarrassing and truly cringe worthy "speech" Biden is seen walking off. The dude can barely walk...
For eighty million who cast their ballots for the old geezer, it's mostly out of economic necessity; however, for the seventy
plus million people who are Trump supporters, it's a fight for their country and more importantly, culture.
Brought to you by the same people who gave us the Weimar Republic, only twice as vicious and vindictive this time because they
know what they did wrong last time -- they weren't vicious and vindictive enough.
When you consider Donald Trump's grotesque antics, his entirely unpresidential behavior, evident falsehoods and blatantly corrupt
actions – together with the systematic media blitz taking every opportunity to show him in the worst possible light; it is quite
astounding that he received as many votes as he did. Far, far more than could be accounted for by simply ascribing them to his
'deplorables'.
And, even if Biden did, in fact, just manage to win – presenting himself as a force of reason, stability and sanity – a great
mass of voters sensed something in him that they distrusted even more than in Trump. That was a stunning rejection – of almost
the same magnitude as Hillary's in 2016!
You're right, and Ron Unz is right. Had Trump retained his white male voters of 2016, the Democrats likely couldn't have pulled
off the steal. But in the end Donald Trump was a mere salesmen selling a con.
...If you had told people in France in 1785 or Russia in 1913 that within a few short years about a quarter of their population
would be slaughtered in revolutionary turmoil and many more displaced, they would have dismissively laughed in your face believing
– as do we – that their civilizations were far too advanced for such nonsense.
Let us hope such a horrific fate is not in store for all of us as the Great Reset is imposed on us all given how western civilization
has clearly failed to the point where some sort of profound, substantive reform is inevitable.
Given that the foundation of this Reset comprises so much ill-will, deception, theft and coercion, it is unlikely that this
new paradigm will benefit the millions of people it will soon dominate.
Another
can of worms, there would be additional Congressional hearings over it, etc. At the time Trump was still in the middle of the
Muller investigation. That special prosecutor investigation tied up Trump until March 2019.
I firmly believe that no man in human history could have taken on and fought Deep State, the Swamp, the Establishment, media,
GOPe, et al., as valiantly as Trump. Even in his 70's the man has superhuman energy, fortitude, and strategizing. I think Trump's
greatest legacy will be that he ripped away the curtain and the masks fell and we all got to see just how nefarious and rigged
the system is, from federal judges to our intelligence community to the FBI/DOJ to Congress to the media
"I don't know or care anything about Dominion voting machines"
Why not? Take a look at Patrick Byrne's summary of evidence for massive election fraud involving the Dominion machines, on
his blog over at DeepCapture.
It will explain how a man who sheltered in his house, did not campaign, drew no more than six or seven or twenty-five people
to his events, got seven million more votes than a man who drew up to thirty thousand people at his rallies.
...An expert witness in Georgia was able to hack into Dominion in front of the legislative committee in less than a minute. "We're
in." In Dominion, and on the internet.
Dominion machines can do anything! They can assign a weight of 1.5 per single vote to one candidate, and .75 per vote to the
other, and can adjust as necessary. They can assign batches of "adjudicated" ballots to the candidate of your choice. They can
just switch votes from one candidate to the other in increments of several thousand, let's subtract 29,000 votes from candidate
a and add them to b's column. They can allow access by a third party to the administrator's identity and password so the third
party can enter and participate directly in tabulation of the votes.
And more. If your disfavored candidate is winning by a landslide and your 1.5/.75 ratio isn't working, you can put in a USB
card and adjust accordingly.
If you're desperate you can upload tens of thousands of votes in a single drop which all, every one, go to your preferred candidate.
And you can do it in one hour on a machine which can only handle a few thousand votes per hour, fed in manually.
If things get out of control you can call a halt to the vote count, send the observers home, and haul out the extra ballots
stashed under the table skirt. But it's best to be mindful of the video cameras. Which they were not.
Really, read about it: Patrick Byrne, DeepCapture, "Evidence That The 2020 Election Was Rigged." Lays out the various ways
by which it was done, then appends evidence using graphs, memos from election administrators, and statistical analysis.
He's no Trump supporter either, is a committed libertarian, and has never voted for either a Democrat or Republican presidential
candidate in his life. He thinks Barack Obama graced the presidency and that Michelle Obama was a class act as First Lady.
Also: The Chinese government acquired Dominion for $400 million in the fall of 2020.
Finally, does anyone think the Dominion case against Sydney Powell potentially offers an opportunity for the evidence of electoral
fraud to be aired in public?
While it's an effective rhetorical tactic by our fearless leader Unz, there's no reason to be agnostic about CIA ballot-stuffing.
That's as blindingly obvious as their censorship.
The ballot-stuffing shows only the most cursory measures to conceal it, consistent with a command structure that exercises
precision control over media attention. CIA can censor adverse information on their candidate's trading in influence and abuse
of function. So naturally CIA dumped votes in statistically absurd proportions, trusting to their Mockingbird media to short-circuit
public inquiry. When you have arbitrary Nazi-grade life-and-death power, as CIA does, it's hard not to get sloppy. They don't
give a fuck that you saw what they did there, cause shut up.
Spot on about postal votes; it's my only slight disagreement with Ron's take on the affair.
These votes were being received for days, if not weeks before the deadline and could have been (and probably were) counted as
they came in. The gross imbalance between Trump and Biden votes in these after-hours counts, along with the sudden spikes obvious
on many graphs, is proof, imo, of the cheat. In order to get ahead of the narrative, the 'rats said it would happen, and, lo,
it did.
If the regime can't provide for trustworthy elections, it can't expect to be regarded as legitimate. Probably by design; they
don't need us.
Navarro's three reports do a good job of summarizing most of the possible vote fraud. He's a Harvard PhD so more than qualified
to pull all the date together etc. They use many graphics and are easy and fast to read.
In this post-Republic new reality, no Court will take a case in which Discovery reveals any sort of election fraud. The election is over and it's now verboten to revisit it. Don't be surprised if
archive.org is forced to delete thousands of articles about it. Orwellian times
Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000
votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a
victory margin of around 0.01% . So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received
another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000
Margins of general vote do not matter. Biden won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by much higher margins than 0.01%. In Arizona
Biden won by 0.3% of all votes in Arizona and in Georgia by 0.2%. These are small margins but probably comparable to margins in
swing states in 2016 where Trump won.
@Garliv It's for
your own good, of course. I once read an article written by someone who had a chance to hang out with the rich, powerful, famous,
etc. and gain some perspective on their thinking. They really do believe that it's their role to shape the future for the
proles. I know someone who's just like that.
If you like your bourgeois job and want to keep it, you will support the narrative.
All of the comments on here that analyze DJT's strengths and weaknesses miss the point. I personally think he made some very
poor choices; but, to inappropriately paraphrase Carville, it's the fraud, stupid.
Occam's Razor should be applied- instead of the nonsense of Chavez having an interest in voting software; voting machines being
manipulated; truckloads of paper ballots being moved across state lines- my favorite; etc.
The mail in ballots could be sent to a nursing home or to individuals, who are very old, and these individuals could be instructed
by a relative to sign their name.
I frequently explain to individuals, whose first language is not English, the papers, which they are signing. I explain their
401K and retirement plan withdrawals.
It would be very easy to have individuals in a nursing home or even an adult day care center for mentally (dementia) incapacitated
adults sign ballots. There are numerous day care centers in New York City, federally funded, where individuals could be coaxed
to sign ballots. Just say Trump will close the day care center -- especially where interpreters must be provided because the individuals
cannot understand English due to varying stages of mental incapacity.
The day care center is a racket. I believe the reimbursement rate under Medicaid-Medicare is $120 per day. Plus, the transportation
fee - approximately $40 per person each way. These centers flourish in cities, such as New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, etc. I have yet to hear anyone mention that Nancy Pelosi's father was Mayor of Baltimore, Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. And Baltimore is
one city that it totally devastated by drugs, prostitution, crime, etc.
Now for the important question. Did Nancy Pelosi have $12 pints of ice cream in her office?
But I wonder how many people have watched the twenty hours or so of state legislature hearings related to the election. Can
people just not be bothered? These were historic hearings of huge importance, but I assume they didn't get much coverage in the
MSM. I think most of them were livestreamed only by small right-wing networks.
Servant of Gla'aki 39, Hapalong 101 anent Willke: Willke sold a million books in less than two months. He was more of a media
phenom than Trump, much hotter at the time of the election. They were going to make a movie of One World. And his message was
more populist, too – basically, fuck your US national interest, we want peace and freedom. He just came out and said what everybody
thought, Oh boy, now that we won the war, we'll get the peace and freedom that we fought for! So he didn't need a Sheldon or a
Gina to rig elections and install him.
Dulles was squirming around under rocks at that time (he cut his teeth at the League of Nations founding,) even before he and
his ultras got their Gestapo in Foggy Bottom, and they arranged Hillary-style party machinations to push Willke aside.
Now of course there's a second line of defense, the CIA proprietaries that steal the election directly:
Diebold and its brass-plate acquirers. CIA set them up to ratfuck Kerry and Maduro and sheep-dipped them to ratfuck Trump.
The whole world knows the USA is a ridiculous fake democracy, a totalitarian CIA pariah state voting alone against peace, development
and human rights. (Just look at the 2nd Committee vote on A/C.2/75/L.4/Rev.1) The USA is North Korea with an ugly leisure squad.
It's the beltway that deserves our fire and fury. Just wipe it out with WMD and start again.
What were the results of the 2016 election? Billary received 65 million to Trumps 62 million. Gotcha. So we have roughly 127
million who showed up to vote that time. (Wonder how many of those were legit.) So ONLY 4 years later, Joe "I Look Like I'm Drugged"
Biden ALLEGEDLY received 80 million and Trump received 74 million. Okay, that is a turnout of 154 million votes. So if I believe
in this fairy tale, I was supposed to believe that in ONLY 4 years the vote count increased by an alleged 27 million. Hell, a
lot of our most populous states do not even have that many people.
Like I say, I concede that Biden might have had about 60-65 million LEGIT votes to Trump's MINIMUM of 74 million. Hmm, so that
means that total vote count would be 134-139 million. Hmm, sounds more reasonable to me. Numbers are not adding up folks.
...Laws don't say a little bit of fraud is OK, because the fraud committed on or by a business
didn't cause bankruptcy. Either there was fraud, or there wasn't. If there was, then the results of the election in those areas
are null and void. The certification of those results expands the fraud to the state level.
That several courts refused to hear cases for lack of standing, is patently ridiculous. If a candidate has no standing, who does?
In an election, everybody has standing because they are affected by the result, and by virtue of Citizens United , corporations
do as well.
In an ideal world, we would be discussing how we can ensure the integrity of our elections, so that both substantively and
the appearance of integrity is upheld. Instead, we are trying to get citizens jailed (right & left) for protesting the sanctity
of a system in which both sides know is corrupt. There is no question in Dems mind that Bush stole the election in 2000, so why
is it any different now that the shoe is on the other foot.
Our oligarch rulers know very well that they rig elections, it has been documented under LBJ, not to mention the long list
of coups all over the world organized by the intelligence agencies over the past 50 years, these are historical facts. But rather
than citizens being able to focus on the real problem, we are beating the crap out of our fellow citizens for something we know
all know is real; and pointing to the other side as the source of the corruption. This is exactly why the rich stay rich and the
poor stay poor.
Mr. Unz, who is always well informed, highly organized and impeccably lucid, gives a credible and succinct analysis of the
dumpster fire that is American politics, indeed of this country's leadership across the board. It creates mostly chaos and suffering
every time it meddles in our affairs these days, certainly over the long run but especially in its current crash program to impose
tyranny over the many so the few can take whatever they want whether they require it or not.
Watch this recent interview of Chris Hedges by Jimmy Dore about the root causes of our current woes. Hedges speaks off the
cuff in words that sound as polished, powerful and precise as the language in tracts considered to be classics. His Pulitzer clearly
was not found in a Cracker Jack box.
He ain't buying that Trump alone was the fount of all our sorrows or that a deceiving sycophantic
grifter like Joe Biden is the fix for anything. There were many bad actors, both GOPers and Dems, both office holders and offstage
string-pullers, who have contributed to the coming collapse of this country, which decapitating Trump will not prevent. Joe just
happens to be the useful idiot who will be left holding the bag when the end comes, which won't be long now. Factoring in Kamala's
possible ascension to the throne will change nothing. Like Joe, she's just a cluck there to take the same orders.
@Carroll Price
...Trump also flew on the Lolita express. If after all the broken promises that Trump made
to his Maga followers anyone still thinks that he is an outsider is, frankly, an idiot.
Trump is a lifetime actor and the entire election was just one big show.
One way we will know if Trump really was a threat to the swamp and an outsider will be what happens after Jan 20. If Trump
ends up dead or impoverished and in prison then we will know that he was a real threat. If he flies off into the sunset, perhaps
even starting a media company, then we will know that it was all one big vaudeville act.
The Navarro report provides detailed proof on how elections in multiple states were
stolen. (1)
Open the [MORE] Tab for additional detail.
Given that all rational human beings understand, as a matter of objective proven fact,
that the election was stolen Where do we go from here?
The slender & extreme, authoritarian, Leftoid margin in the House is certain to be a
circular firing squad of internecine discontent. What little they pass will contain more pork
than an industrial pig farm. It will be a matter of months before the U.S. Economy is tanked
by SJW illegitimacy and misrule.
Much like the GOP beat Gerrymandering, with lead time the GOP will beat Fultoning (named
after the Atlanta County). The GOP is sure to take the House in the 2022 elections.
How many times will Biden & Harris be Impeached, shamed, and forced to undergo public
trial in the Senate? There will have to be multiple trials to establish for the historical
record that Biden/Harris Coup plot was vastly more criminal than Nixon, Clinton, and
Trump.
PEACE [Hide MORE]
Theft By A Thousand Cuts' Report Conclusive On Election Fraud, Slams Media Cover
Up
BLM instigator and overall shit disturber John Sullivan has been arrested by FBI for
participating in the "riot" on the 6th. Shocked I am, just Shocked. All those posers saying
BLM, ANTIFA are good little boys and girls, check your pants cause they are on fire.
Here is Jack laying out the big picture for the censorship role he plans for the
punters.
v direction="left">
Fazila Sheriff Uddin All these neocons the elite 1 % dumbing us down.Agenda 2021 destroy human
life .
Like ·
Reply · 4 ·
1dRandy
Stevens This is government censorship because Twitter is doing the bidding of the U.S.
government. And it's not just QANON they are deleting accounts from leftists, socialists,
communists, animal activists, anti-war activists and anyone else who dares to speak ugly truths
about U.S. empire and industry. Soph Lotus Twitter is a private
company. Just like the Bakery that refused to sell a cake to a gay couple. Republicans made
sure that if you didn't want to do business with anyone you don't have to. So there's that....
and really he has a whole Press Room if he has something to say. He's not being censored at
all. He violated TOS. PERIOD.
Like ·
Reply · 1 ·
23h ·
Edited Chris Young Explain how he violated terms of service.
Like ·
Reply · 23h
Fazila Sheriff Uddin All these neocons the elite 1 % dumbing us down.Agenda 2021 destroy
human life .
Like ·
Reply · 4 ·
1dRandy
Stevens This is government censorship because Twitter is doing the bidding of the U.S.
government. And it's not just QANON they are deleting accounts from leftists, socialists,
communists, animal activists, anti-war activists and anyone else who dares to speak ugly
truths about U.S. empire and industry. Soph Lotus Twitter is a
private company. Just like the Bakery that refused to sell a cake to a gay couple.
Republicans made sure that if you didn't want to do business with anyone you don't have to.
So there's that.... and really he has a whole Press Room if he has something to say. He's not
being censored at all. He violated TOS. PERIOD.
Like ·
Reply · 1 ·
23h ·
Edited Chris Young Explain how he violated terms of service.
Like ·
Reply · 23h Joe Maga Twitter is a monopoly. The baker down the street is anything but. You
fuckin Liberal snowflake /div
Greenwald was making a claim with no factual basis, talking out of his ass. Posts scraped
from Parler show not only that planning for the protests was occurring on Parler (as well as
Facebook and Twitter), but that Parler users were posting videos to the platform of
themselves at the Capitol.
But Greenwald also misses the point: Facebook and Twitter have content moderation
policies. Parler, because of their fanatical devotion to their interpretation of the first
amendment, didn't even have one for illegal content (one of the head honchos at the
company told kirtaner as much). They were on the path to making their platform liveleak with
a far right-wing bent, and any sane tech company would refuse to do business with them (for
the same reason most advertisers avoid advertising on pornographic websites).
What's pathetic about the Parler situation is that they had no back up plans. They fully
depended on the "establishment" they bloviate so much against, even when they didn't have to.
Sometimes your passion exceeds your expertise. This was really obvious with Parler.
Suppression by the state is expensive and it undercuts productivity. Cyril @59 is
correct that state suppression cannot be maintained long term without significant external
support; say being backed up by a global hegemon with drones and nukes and control over
global finance. No state, no matter how suppressive or oppressive, can exist without the
economic wherewithal to support itself. The more suppression the state employs the more
personnel it needs to buy off to do the suppressing. The people doing the suppressing must be
more generously compensated than the people they are suppressing (usually the working class)
to buy their loyalty. Practically all value in capitalist society is created by the working
class, but the working class is also the labor pool that the elites have to recruit their
enforcers/suppressors from. More suppression personnel means more expense while also meaning
less actual productivity.
It is better for big business if you can train the population to suppress themselves.
Religion has historically worked pretty good for this with its admonitions to "Give unto
Caesar..." and "The meek shall inherit the dirt, probably from some boss's boot
grinding their face into it" , but in modern societies religion is losing its
effectiveness. That's where Identity Politics is intended to take over. The question
is can the establishment force that into the heads of 80+ million people?
Well, not if those 80+ million people see themselves as members of a huge demographic. If
they see themselves as isolated individuals on the fringes of society, then they can be
bullied and gaslit into shouldering the modern equivalent of original sin and learn to
identify with their personalized victim status and rely upon "Identity Politics" for
solace.
Will this work for the elites? I am thinking probably not. To enforce the isolation
necessary social media must be very tightly controlled to eliminate all disagreement with
"Identity Politics" and establishment narratives. This will be more difficult than the
elites imagine as it is cheap and easy to set up alternatives to Twitter and Facebook. In
fact, Mexico is currently making moves towards setting up a national
alternative to Facebook/Twitter . Such national infrastructure would be impossible for
the business elites to take over or shut down like TikTok or Parler.
"What happens if Twitter says tomorrow that AMLO is publishing things that it doesn't like?
What happens if the president of Twitter censors the democratically elected president of
Mexico? As we've relinquished our technological sovereignty and left our communication
tools, even our information systems, in the hands of multinationals with private interests,
we've relinquished our [right to] freedom of speech," Sánchez said.
If Mexico goes forward with this then there will be no technological reason why Americans
couldn't also use such a social platform.
Ultimately I think the elites will lose this war they are waging, but they will likely win
some battles in the near term. Spicy times ahead!
VK is a Russian version of FB and welcomes one and all and lacks the personal invasion FB
pursues, which is one of the main reasons why I joined. I have no second thoughts of being
censored there unlike with FB. It seems WeChat is also a worthy platform, but I haven't done
any real investigation. Wife uses FB to connect with her family back East, which I use mainly
to stay abreast with Pepe Escobar and comment at his site. IMO, it's clear the lessons from
previous attempts at suppression within the Outlaw US Empire weren't learned by those seeking
control, and they've already blown up in their face and have shown more of their Fascistic
nature than Trump could ever do, which in turn will hamper anything Biden tries.
"... , and author of several books, including ..."
"... Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran ..."
"... . @medeabenjamin; Nicolas J. S. Davies, an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of ..."
"... Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq ..."
"... . @NicolasJSDavies; and Marcy Winograd of Progressive Democrats of America served as a 2020 Democratic delegate for Bernie Sanders,and is Coordinator of ..."
Yves here. Biden's nominees have skewed towards the awful, particularly on the foreign
policy front. But his plan to install Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland at State is a standout. For
those of you new to this site and not familiar with Nuland's sorry history, this post gives an
overview of her role in fomenting the coup in Ukraine and in putting relations with Russia on a
Cold War footing. The authors encourage readers to call their Senators and urge them to vote
against her nomination.
And before you get unduly excited by Biden nominating Gary Gensler to the SEC, I would much
rather have seem Gensler at Treasury. Gensler demonstrated at the CFTC that he's effective and
dedicated to combatting abuses by Big Finance. However, his best shot at making the SEC feared
and respected again is to appoint a tough head of enforcement, so keep an eye out for that
pick.
The problem that Gensler will have at the SEC is that it is the only Federal financial
services industry regulator that is subject to Congressional appropriations, rather that living
off its fees and fines (the SEC collects far more than Congress allows it). And Democrats, like
Joe Lieberman, then the Senator from Hedgistan, have been if anything more aggressive than
Republicans in threatening the SEC and in keeping it budget-starved.
I had said to Lambert that if Biden wanted to be Machiavellian, the way to pretend to reward
Elizabeth Warren while actually sandbagging her would be to make her SEC chair. Let's hope that
isn't his logic for appointing Gensler.
Photo Credit: thetruthseeker.co.uk Nuland and Pyatt planning regime change in Kiev
Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her because the U.S. corporate
media's foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that
President-elect Biden's pick for Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs is stuck in
the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an
arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.
Nor do they know that from 2003-2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq,
Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush
administration.
You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even
heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying "Fuck the EU" during a 2014 phone call with
the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.
During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt plotted to replace the elected Ukrainian
President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust with the European
Union for grooming former heavyweight boxer and austerity champ Vitali Klitschko instead of
U.S. puppet and NATO booklicker Artseniy Yatseniuk to replace Russia-friendly Yanukovych.
The "Fuck the EU" call went viral, as an embarrassed State Department, never denying the
call's authenticity, blamed the Russians for tapping the phone, much as the NSA has tapped the
phones of European allies.
Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Markel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty
mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to overthrow Ukraine's elected government
and America's responsibility for a civil war that has killed at least 13,000 people and left
Ukraine the poorest
country in Europe.
In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan, the co-founder of The Project for a New
American Century , and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations
into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.
Nuland accomplished this from a relatively junior position as Assistant Secretary of State
for European and Eurasian Affairs. How much more trouble could she stir up as the #3 official
at Biden's State Department? We'll find out soon enough, if the Senate confirms her
nomination.
Joe Biden should have learned from Obama's mistakes that appointments like this matter.
In his first
term , Obama allowed his hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates, and military and CIA leaders held over from the Bush administration to
ensure that endless war trumped his message of hope and change.
Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, ended up presiding over indefinite detentions without
charges or trials at Guantanamo Bay; an escalation of drone strikes that killed innocent
civilians; a deepening of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan; a self-reinforcing
cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism; and disastrous new wars in
Libya and Syria
.
With Clinton out and new personnel in top spots in his second term, Obama began
to take charge of his own foreign policy. He started working directly with Russia's President
Putin to resolve crises in Syria and other hotspots. Putin helped avert an escalation of the
war in Syria in September 2013 by negotiating the removal and destruction of Syria's chemical
weapons stockpiles, and helped Obama negotiate an interim agreement with Iran that led to the
JCPOA nuclear deal.
But the neocons were apoplectic that they failed to convince Obama to order a massive
bombing campaign and escalate his covert,
proxy war in Syria and at the receding prospect of a war with Iran. Fearing their control
of U.S. foreign policy was slipping, the neocons launched a
campaign to brand Obama as "weak" on foreign policy and remind him of their power.
With
editorial help from Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan penned a 2014 New Republic
article entitled "Superpowers Don't Get To Retire," proclaiming that "there is no democratic
superpower waiting in the wings to save the world if this democratic superpower falters." Kagan
called for an even more aggressive foreign policy to exorcise American fears of a multipolar
world it can no longer dominate.
Obama invited Kagan to a private lunch at the White House, and the neocons' muscle-flexing
pressured him to scale back his diplomacy with Russia, even as he quietly pushed ahead on
Iran.
The neocons' coup de grace against Obama's better angels was Nuland's 2014 coup
in debt-ridden Ukraine, a valuable imperial possession for its wealth of natural gas and a
strategic candidate for NATO membership right on Russia's border.
When Ukraine's Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with
the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia, the State Department threw a
tantrum.
Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.
The EU trade
agreement was to open Ukraine's economy to imports from the EU, but without a reciprocal
opening of EU markets to Ukraine, it was a lopsided deal Yanukovich could not accept. The deal
was approved by the post-coup government, and has only added to Ukraine's economic woes.
The muscle for Nuland's $5 billion coup was Oleh
Tyahnybok's neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the shadowy new Right Sector militia. During her leaked
phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the "big three" opposition leaders on the
outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same
Tyanhnybok who once
delivered a speec h applauding Ukrainians for fighting Jews and "other scum" during World
War II.
After protests in Kiev's Euromaidan square turned into battles with police in February 2014,
Yanukovych and the Western-backed opposition
signed an agreement brokered by France, Germany and Poland to form a national unity
government and hold new elections by the end of the year.
But that was not good enough for the neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing forces the U.S. had
helped to unleash. A violent mob led by the Right Sector militia marched on and invaded the
parliament building , a scene no longer difficult for Americans to imagine. Yanukovych and
his members of parliament fled for their lives.
Facing the loss of its most vital strategic naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, Russia
accepted the overwhelming result (a 97% majority, with an 83% turnout) of a referendum in which
Crimea voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which it had been a part of from 1783 to
1954.
The majority Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine
unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine, triggering a bloody civil war between U.S.-
and Russian-backed forces that still rages in 2021.
U.S.-Russian relations have never recovered, even as U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals still
pose the greatest single
threat to our existence. Whatever Americans believe about the civil war in Ukraine and
allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, we must not allow the neocons
and the military-industrial complex they serve to deter Biden from conducting vital diplomacy
with Russia to steer us off our suicidal path toward nuclear war.
Nuland and the neocons, however, remain committed to an ever-more debilitating and dangerous
Cold War with Russia and China to justify a militarist foreign policy and record Pentagon
budgets. In a July 2020 Foreign Affairs article entitled "Pinning Down Putin," Nuland
absurdly
claimed that Russia presents a greater threat to "the liberal world" than the U.S.S.R.
posed during the old Cold War.
Nuland's
narrative rests on an utterly mythical, ahistorical narrative of Russian aggression and
U.S. good intentions. She pretends that Russia's military budget, which is one-tenth of
America's, is evidence of "Russian confrontation and militarization" and calls
on the U.S. and its allies to counter Russia by "maintaining robust defense budgets,
continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional
missiles and missile defenses to protect against Russia's new weapons systems "
Nuland also wants to confront Russia with an aggressive NATO. Since her days as U.S.
Ambassador to NATO during President George W. Bush's second term, she has been a supporter of
NATO's expansion all the way up to Russia's border. She calls
for "permanent bases along NATO's eastern border." We have pored over a map of Europe, but
we can't find a country called NATO with any borders at all. Nuland sees Russia's commitment to
defending itself after successive 20th century Western invasions as an intolerable obstacle to
NATO's expansionist ambitions.
Nuland's militaristic worldview represents exactly the folly the U.S. has been pursuing
since the 1990s under the influence of the neocons and "liberal interventionists," which has
resulted in a systematic underinvestment in the American people while escalating tensions with
Russia, China, Iran and other countries.
As Obama learned too late, the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time can, with a
shove in the wrong direction, unleash years of intractable violence, chaos and international
discord. Victoria Nuland would be a ticking time-bomb in Biden's State Department, waiting to
sabotage his better angels much as she undermined Obama's second-term diplomacy.
So let's do Biden and the world a favor. Join World Beyond War , CODEPINK and dozens of other
organizations opposing neocon Nuland's confirmation as a threat to peace and diplomacy. Call
202-224-3121 and tell your Senator to oppose Nuland's installation at the State Department.
Nuland has also been declared persona non grata by Russia, so she would not be able to go
with Biden, were he to visit Moscow. Russian foreign minister Lavrov, actually refused to
shake her hand when she attended a US-Russia meeting with Kerry. She is poison to any attempt
to peaceful relationships.
Yes, I remember that meeting clearly. Can't cite the network, but it covered her closely
– body language only. I wonder where Biden stood on that act of diplomacy given his own
corruption, and also what John Kerry's thinking is about now. John Kerry's stepson was in
cahoots with Hunter Biden. It looked like Kerry brought her along for some rehabilitation and
Lavrov was having none of it. Instead he went directly to the delegation from Ukraine and
they stood in a circle all with their backs turned to Vicky who had no choice but to wander
over to the coffee table and pretend she wasn't totally uncomfortable. Totally excluded. How
can she recover from that?
If there is one thing that Russia hates it is fascists and that is because of the enormous
damage caused by them in WW2. We call those invaders Nazis but the Russians seem to call them
fascists. I sometimes wonder if it is part of their mother's milk this hatred. For people
like Nuland to help topple the government of a large, bordering country like the Ukraine and
install people that were literally fascists was too much for the Russians. These were fascist
of a very low order that had the old 1930s routines down pat, including the torchlight
parades. And there was Nuland, handing out cookies to the rioters, many of whom had been
trained in rioting tactics in Poland and were being paid about $100 a day by the US if I
recall correctly. Of course Nuland was not alone as there was also a Representative from the
EU also handing out cookies. The only equivalent that comes to mind is a violent revolution
in Canada using professional rioters and having diplomatic representatives from the Russian
Federation and China handing out donuts to the rioter. I wonder what Washington would say
about a stunt like that.
Nuland is a disgusting human being. Since she is a right winger, regardless of what party
may be listed on her voter ID, I don't think Bettridge's law applies here at all.
So glad all these 'woke' people put good old Uncle Joe back in office. Wonder how many
realized they were supporting people being burned alive by actual Nazis in doing so?
Thanks for this. Our "learned nothing/forgot nothing" Bourbon restoration will be led by
one of the dimmer Bourbons who couldn't even set up a good grift in Ukraine without boasting
about it and then angrily denying it. Should the press finally, improbably turn on him it
should make for some fun news conferences. But perhaps he'll merely be moving to the White
House basement from his Delaware basement.
CFTC's budgets are also set through congressional authorization and appropriations. Yes,
the CFPB is not subject to Congressional appropriations, but for good reasons. However, all
financial regulation can be overturned by the Congressional Review Act.
As for the article, citation needed. Sort of a laundry heap of questionable material. Make
no mistake, the Russo-Ukrainian War is a real war. Uniformed Russian armored infantry of
331st regiment of the 98th Svirsk airborne division dropped into Ukraine territory on 24
August 2014. From 25 to 27 August, Russian troops in civilian clothing, backed up by an
armored column [not in disguise] took Novoazovsk. This is about Russia not being able to
station 25,000 troops in Crimea as they had under Yanukovych. US troop levels in Europe have
been at their lowest for the last 20 years. The US would like to [nay, needs to] keep it that
way. However, the erosion of territorial integrity is a touchy subject in Europe given the
lasting peace of the post-war period in a place where the wars have a pre-fix like "Hundred
Years".
President Arseniy Yatsenyuk is of Jewish origin so the claims of coordination with Nazi
sympathizers is dubious. Not even going to get the boycotted unconstitutional Crimean
referendum.
As for WW III, Obama's defense department made it a priority to recover all the MANPADS,
such as the Chinese-made FN-6 [via Qatar], Russian-made Strela-2's and Igla-S's [via Libya]
from the FSA without so much as a thank you from the Russian Air Force. [Turkey, on the other
hand, armed the FSA with Stinger's.] It should be noted that the Syrian conflict's death
toll, in just four years, surpassed the 19-year death toll in all the Afghanistan, Pakistan,
and Iraq war theatres combined.
Think about this way: who needs NATO and the EU more to maintain his power structure, Joe
Biden or Vladimir Putin. Isn't it clear Americans don't care, and American business does not
look to compete in Russian anytime soon. The geography is wrong. But Putin must find a way to
engender ethnicities who do not like the Russian Empire, who had been cleansed by Stalin. One
way is to sell energy below cost to the republics and buy in back from political allies in
the form of electricity. Something upon which the EU frowns. [Personally, I did not care for
the way Putin early on systematically and indiscriminately starved Chechen civilians for
years. It was cruel on a level unseen outside of the Rwandan genocide. More importantly, it
was the Russian Federation abdicating its authority by not providing for its own citizens and
not letting NGO's fill the calorie gap. I'd like to think had Putin's admin not been so
wobbly the first few years, he might've let the Red Cross feed the children.]
Russia was never going to permit a US orchestrated coup in Ukraine without resistance. The
idea that Putin needs NATO more than Biden does seems unreasonable.
Talking about "citations", perhaps you could supply the readership of this site with some
credible citations and links for a few of the far fetched claims you're making here. Most of
this comment reads like pro-Ukrainian propaganda.
I heard about Gary Gensler, Samantha Power, and Victoria Nuland, and I immediately
thought, "The good, the bad, and the ugly."
Gensler surprised everyone when he was at the CFTC by doing his job, and doing it well,
and his running the SEC is a good thing.
Samantha Power is an aggressive war monger, and in her position at USAID, she will likely
have her fingers in regime change pie, since USAID is part of the deep state regime change
apparatus..
I've long suspected that NATO has existed since 1991 to allow the US/EU axis to control
Middle-Eastern and African resources. For example, the Rammstein military hospital is where
every Gulf War soldier was airlifted for major treatment and convalescence.
Also, there is a huge international trade in opium. It's grown in Afpak and shipped out in
every direction. I suspect that a fair amount of that flows through Ukraine and Crimea. If
you look at a topo map of Crimea, there's a lot of seashore that could be good "smuggler's
coves". Following this line of argument, Russia grabbing it from Ukraine was a gimme to
Russia's gangsters. This, as well as the "Pipeline Wars", gives Russia a strong reason to
encircle Ukraine.
Those are not students. Those are young neoliberals ;-) Or may be intensive studies exhausted them so that they are reaching a point of mental
stupification.
I feel like I'm in the book "The Giver" and I'm just now seeing how brain washed we all are. We're spoon fed shit by pretty
people on tv and are expected to accept it as the only truth we'll ever need.
Pelosi is an epitome of America - exceptionalism, incompetence, vindictiveness and total lack
of self awareness. It's like looking at yourself in the mirror and hating what you see.
Cop shoots lady in the back. Lady who is no threat to him at all. She is entering a small
hallway where there are three or more cops with rifles. The situation is completely under
control and a lady gets shot in the back.
And still no one is nervous, no one takes cover. They all just stand there. Cop who flouts
all rules has just discharged his firearm for no good reason ...
Posted by: oldhippie | Jan 15 2021 11:42 utc | 94
On the basis of other video of police shootings, fatal and found blameless by prosecutors
and/or grand juries, the cop action was more justified than most. For example, it is more
typical that the deceased citizen is shot in the back while trying to escape, frontally in
the chest while immobilized etc. The lady was advancing at the cop, momentarily with her
behind first, and looked quite a bit more fit. She was squeezing through a window in a door
panel that was cleared from glass mostly by others. Perhaps she took the initiative being
slimmer then the majority of the crowd -- the crowd and the cops "looked like America", i.e.
mostly chubby. Yea, that meant that most of them would not repeat what she was doing.
What I am trying to say is that the shooting was FULLY within de-facto norms in U.S.A.
Cops have an absolute right to be panicking beyond reason in a wide variety of situation, and
I never read about cops being instructed to shoot first at body parts that do not cause death
and to stop shooting once the target cannot move. For example, the target tries to open the
door of his own dwelling while keeping in the other hand a dangerously looking sandwich. I
bet he was shot in the back, but we are not suppose to second guess split second decisions
motivated by the defense of lives of common people.
"Shame, shame on the ten Republicans who joined with Speaker Pelosi & the House
Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday," Graham tweeted on Thursday.
"After all that he has done for our country, you would turn your back & betray him so
quickly? What was done yesterday only further divides our nation."
In a separate Facebook post, Graham, a longtime influential supporter of the president,
further elaborated on his disappointment.
House Democrats impeached him because they "hate him and want to do as much damage as
they can," he wrote. "And these ten, from [Trump's] own party, joined in the feeding
frenzy. It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that [Democratic House]
Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi promised for this betrayal."
The Putsch Govt and Tech & Media Oligarchs are "Riding the Tiger"
The reason I'm laughing, is because Joe and the deep state are exposing themselves for
who they are, a bunch of corrupt government officials who don't have the support of the
citizens.
Joe is going to have a really hard time unless they institutionalize the election
fraud and continue it, which is my biggest fear because it means we've become a corrupt
banana republic, and poverty will quickly ensue.
Big government brings poverty to the
public (and riches to the deep state) while freedom (i.e., small government that just
protects our freedoms, rather than socialism that promises to provide for us but instead
brings government forcing us to work) brings prosperity to the people.
At his press conference on July 8, Joe Biden offered a rather bizarre interpretation of
history, in which he likened Ted Cruz and his challenge to some electoral votes to Nazi
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the "Big Lie." Biden illustrated his point by referring
to the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 in which, he said, "250 or 2,500 people" were
killed. And yet Joseph Goebbels inflated the number to 25,000, even 250,000, thus perpetrating
"The Big Lie." Biden added, "like Goebbels and the Great Lie. You keep repeating the lie,
repeating the lie."
As an historian I am flummoxed at Biden's illustration of Dresden as a Big Lie. In fact, the
best estimate is that 28,000 people died in the bombing of Dresden. In a bizarre way, however,
Joe Biden has accurately linked the Allied bombing campaign of Germany to the Big Lie of Nazi
propaganda. Except the Nazi Big Lie was not about Dresden. Rather it was about the British and
American bombing of Hamburg in 1943. From July 24 through August 2, 1943, the Allied air
forces, mainly the RAF, unleashed a series of massive bomber raids against Hamburg involving as
many as 700+ planes at a time.
Hamburg, one of Germany's greatest industrial centers, was struck in a way no previous city
had been. The raids were especially devastating, inflicting an estimated 34,000 to 38,000 dead.
The raid of 27 July 1943 alone, in which atmospheric conditions created a firestorm, killed
more than 18,000 Hamburg residents. The Allied attack on Hamburg destroyed or damaged more than
60% of the housing in the city and wrecked more than half the factories, a serious blow to
German industrial production. The Hamburg raids came as a gigantic shock to the Nazi leadership
and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels admitted to his diary that Germany was losing the
war.
The Big Lie about Hamburg was the official position of the Nazi government put through the
German news media: Hamburg had been bombed but casualties were not heavy, damage was not
severe, and the city was carrying on. Indeed, it sounded plausible at first. Up to summer 1943,
Germany was coping well with RAF bombing raids. The German civil defense system was
well-organized and able to quickly repair infrastructure, put damaged factories back into
operation, and efficiently feed and rehouse civilians made homeless.
But in Hamburg the German government and military were simply overwhelmed. More than half
the city's inhabitants lost their housing and possessions, and the streets were choked with the
dead. A million civilians were immediately evacuated from Hamburg, broken into groups and
dispatched from suburban train stations to towns all across Germany so that no single area
would be overwhelmed by the mass of refugees who needed food and housing. Thousands of
concentration camp prisoners (unable to communicate the horrors they saw) were brought into
Hamburg to collect and bury the tens of thousands of dead in mass graves and to clear streets
of rubble. The destruction was so severe that Hamburg never recovered during the war.
The shell-shocked survivors of the Hamburg bombing were warned by the Gestapo not to speak
of what they had experienced -- or else. Every effort was made by the Nazis to insist that
Hamburg was still a functioning city. In 1943 Germans who listened to the news from British
radio (which provided accurate accounts of the scale of casualties and damage of the Hamburg
raids) could be arrested and even executed. Hamburg survivors who told their new neighbors
about the devastation they witnessed invited arrest by the Gestapo. Every effort was made to
keep the truth of Hamburg from the German public.
Yet survivors still talked. One cannot go through such a horrific experience and keep
silent. A million witnesses saw the inability of the Reich government to prevent a major city
from becoming a literal Hell. The stories all rang true, and the common people of Germany
believed the survivors. Only diehard Nazis believed the official German government line after
Hamburg and increasing numbers of Germans turned to listening to forbidden British radio rather
than the state propaganda. German civilian morale plummeted when people realized that if the
Allies could totally devastate one of Germany's greatest cities in a few days, then the war was
truly lost.
The big lie failed. Still, the Gestapo made sure that Germans carried on the war effort to
the end.
It's interesting to watch the Democrats constantly making historical analogies to Naziism
because, at every attempt, they display their astounding ignorance of history. From the
historical context, a Big Lie is a demand by political leaders that the public believe
something highly improbable. This belief is repeated by a government-controlled media and its
public acceptance is coerced by government agencies and a co-opted judicial system. Ted Cruz
and a handful of minority senators and congressmen publicly contesting corrupt and illegal
actions of state and local governments does not fit the historical definition of the Big Lie.
For Biden's charge to work we must accept, as an article of faith, that election fraud is
virtually nonexistent, that one-party Democrat machine cities in the swing states are devoted
to serving the public, and that the humble and devoted leaders and civil servants of these
cities would never, ever break the law for political and personal gain.
The Big Lie of 2020 is that it was a clean and honest election. Like the Big Lie of Hamburg
raids, the Big Lie will fail. Like Hamburg in 1943, there are simply too many witnesses. There
are the videos of election observers being blocked in several cities and videos in Atlanta of
observers sent away, and in their absence election workers piling ballots into the counting
machines. There is sworn testimony from hundreds of election workers detailing illegal actions.
There are the Dominion machines in Michigan that were set up to create ballot errors which were
"adjudicated" (flipped) in favor of Democrats. There is hard documentary evidence of the dead
voting by mail, or of (supposedly) living voters receiving and returning their ballots by the
postal service within a day. There are thousands of Georgia voters who illegally provided post
office box numbers as their place of residence. There is the analysis of highly respected IT
experts and statisticians who have spotted statistically implausible vote spikes, unusual local
turnout, and voting patterns not seen in previous elections. The evidence presented at state
legislative hearings (I watched some on One America News) is thorough, well-documented and
plausible.
Joe Biden is beginning his presidency with one of the biggest lies in the history of
American politics. On top of the "honest election" lie, he will have to maintain lies about his
family's Chinese and Ukrainian business connections, as well as his involvement in illegal deep
state surveillance of political opponents. With so many lies, we'll have an interesting time
seeing the Democrats defending Biden over the next four years. Still, the historical pattern is
consistent. Even the most coercive states cannot maintain the Big Lie.
I guess he is correct in that. Good luck USAians, I trust you will stay healthy and find a
third or fourth party because at this rate the turnout will be so low that the duopoly might
have to rig the elections to make it seem credible.
"... In The Transparency Project v. Department of Justice, et al., my client asked to see records indicating whether the CIA or its Directorate of Digital Innovation, its contractors, etc. inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the metadata of the emails that were released publicly. (You can review the entire request by clicking here and reading Paragraph 11). ..."
"... In a joint report filed today , the CIA informed the court that it intends to assert a Glomar response to the request, i.e., that it "cannot confirm or deny" the existence of such records. . . . [In other words], The Central Intelligence Agency will neither confirm nor deny that it fabricated the Russian "fingerprints" in Democratic National Committee emails published in 2016 by Wikileaks and "Guccifer 2.0.", and the FBI implicitly acknowledged today that it never reviewed the contents of DNC employee Seth Rich's laptop despite gaining custody of the laptop after his murder. ..."
In The Transparency Project v. Department of Justice, et al., my client asked to see
records indicating whether the CIA or its Directorate of Digital Innovation, its contractors,
etc. inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the metadata of the emails that were released
publicly. (You can review the entire request by
clicking here and reading Paragraph 11).
In a joint
report filed today , the CIA informed the court that it intends to assert a Glomar
response to the request, i.e., that it "cannot confirm or deny" the existence of such
records. . . . [In other words], The Central Intelligence Agency will neither confirm nor
deny that it fabricated the Russian "fingerprints" in Democratic National Committee emails
published in 2016 by Wikileaks and "Guccifer 2.0.", and the FBI implicitly acknowledged today
that it never reviewed the contents of DNC employee Seth Rich's laptop despite gaining
custody of the laptop after his murder.
Full disclosure--Mr. Clevenger is a friend of mine. He writes in his article that he reached
out to me and I made some phone calls to retired friends who held senior positions at the CIA.
My friends and I agreed that a GLOMAR response to the basic question, Did you spy on Mr.
Butowsky and/or Mr. Couch was a tacit admission-yes! Ty explains this point clearly and
succinctly:
Allow me to illustrate the point. If I asked the CIA for intercepted emails from the
president of another country, the CIA would rightly issue a Glomar response, because
it would not want to confirm or deny that it has been spying on the foreign president. That's
what Glomar is for, because the CIA is in the business of secretly spying
on foreign presidents, officials, agents, etc.
My client's request, on the other hand, is more akin to asking the CIA for records showing
whether it helped Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate President John F. Kennedy. We would expect
the CIA to declare that it has no such records because it would never do such a thing.
Why would the CIA spy on Mr. Butowsky, for example. Ed Butowsky was brought into the Seth
Rich saga in December 2016 by Ellen Ratner, the sister-in-law of Julian Assange's former
lawyer. Ellen spoke with Julian in November 2016 and asked Mr. Butowsky to reach out to the
parents of Seth Rich and get them some help investigating who murdered their son.
It should come as no surprise that the CIA, the NSA and Britain's GCHQ were monitoring every
communication going in and out of Wikileaks, including all communications of all personnel
working at or associated with Wikileaks.
We know this thanks to the evidence and writings of Mr. Edward Snowden. Once Snowden made
his escape to Russia with the help of Wikileaks, Wikileaks became a number one intelligence
target.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom had ample cause to ensure that no new secrets
leaked out of Wiki and caught them unawares. In light of the comprehensive monitoring of all
Wiki communications, I believe the intel folks knew exactly the contents of Ratner's chat with
Assange, which ultimately led them to Ed (i.e, Ellen Ratner talked to Julian and then talked to
Ed to relay a request from Julian to help the Rich family).
Now that
Donald Trump has finally released FBI documents on Russiagate (I do not know if there are
any CIA documents in the pile), we shall see what the FBI had to say about Mr. Rich. Too bad
the President waited so long to do this. If he had forced the issue last year the plot to steal
the 2020 election might have been disrupted.
JOKES. Just heard this one: I can make anti-Putin jokes on Russian social media. So, what, I
can make anti-Putin jokes on Western social media. (A re-tread of a Soviet-era joke). Or this:
Due to travel restrictions abroad, Americans have done a coup at home.
A major scandal is unfolding in the US naval community. It turned out that a whole class
of ships, on which America had pinned great hopes a couple of decades ago, turned out to be
utterly incapable of combat. What exactly are the problems with these ships? Why did they
only show up now? What does the massive corruption in the United States have to do with what
is happening?
Political events in the United States have overshadowed everything that happens in this
country. Including one event related to the Navy, which would indeed have exploded.
We are talking about a whole type of warships, both already delivered to the US Navy, and
those still under construction – the so-called Littoral combat ship (LCS) of the
Freedom type. And it's not that they're useless. And not at the prohibitive cost. And not
even that the gearboxes of the ship's main power plant (GEM) do not withstand the maximum
stroke, and with the speed of 47 knots, which was the ridge of this project, he will never be
able to walk – they also resigned themselves to this.
But at the end of 2020, it turned out that they generally cannot move faster than a dry
cargo ship for more or less a long time. That is, it is not just scrapping metal; it is also
almost stationary scrap metal.
I'm not sure about that. Seems to me you can always count on them to overplay their hand.
They lack the true artist's sense of when to quit, and they don't trust anyone to draw their
own conclusions. So you get these apocalyptic remarks about 'assaulting the very temple of
Democracy!' or similar nonsense, when everyone can see it was a bunch of hooligans acting out
in a demonstration that got too rowdy.
The smart thing would be to just let it slide - ignore him, treat him as something humorous
and irrelevant - and just move on. Treat it like 'this was unpleasant, but we've got more
important things to worry about'. In other words, defuse things. The one thing Trump has
always tried to be is the center of attention - so the best way of punishing him is to
relegate him to obscurity.
It is especially stupid to let the impeachment trial continue past the inauguration - it will
compete for attention with Biden's legislative agenda and you can count on Trump to drag it
out as long as possible. It is also open to challenge on constitutional grounds.
RESERVES. The Central Bank of Russia has published its account of Russia
reserves as of 30 June 2020 . The total was 561.1 billion USD (up $44.3 billion since a
year before). Euro holdings accounted for 29.5% . For the first time ever gold (22.9%) was a
bigger proportion than USD (22.2%). Renminbi was 12.2%. Russia's economy –
failing always failing .
JOKES. Just heard this one: I can make anti-Putin jokes on Russian social media. So, what,
I can make anti-Putin jokes on Western social media. (A re-tread of a Soviet-era joke). Or
this: Due to travel restrictions abroad, Americans have done a coup at home.
MOON. Moscow considering manned
moon mission .
Hmmmm . Russian/Chinese base on the Moon in ten years?
SURVEILLANCE. Moscow City has revealed a plan to spend
money on a database containing information about every resident, including passport
numbers, insurance policies, salaries, car registrations. Much of it appears to already
exist. For safety, security and convenience, of course. Mind you, we all volunteered: we all
carry smartphones around broadcasting everything we do.
ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN. Putin chaired a
meeting of the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan . They signed a statement on development
of Karabakh region. Here are the official statements after
the meeting. Its another step in resolving the difficult problem which has deep roots. I note
a reference to the OSCE Minsk Group but I don't expect it
to get much involved. It's done nothing much in 28 years and who wants the West meddling in
the area anyway?
A central rule of a color revolution is to avoid an "orderly transition". The new regime
must have a revolutionary mandate instead of a democratic one. Only then can it operate
outside the constitution and outside the law.
The plan here is to declare not only Trump illegitimate but his whole administration
illegitimate. The new regime can then undo all of Trump's executive decisions. There is no
need to "stuff" the Supreme Court with extra judges. Simply declare Trump's appointments null
and void.
Thanks to the following website I am reminded of something I hardly remember today. Back on
November 7, 1983 the Senate was BOMBED !!!!
"[M19 member Susan] Rosenberg, sentenced to 58 years on explosives charges, was pardoned
by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office. [M19 member] Judith Clark, convicted of
murder in the Brinks case, had her sentence commuted by Gov. Andrew Cuomo "
"Susan Rosenberg [long after Bill Clinton pardoned her] has served as vice chair of the
board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and
fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement ."
"... "There is an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop in being bought and paid for by Chinese communist energy companies," she continued ..."
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to Newsmax TV: Filing to Impeach Joe Biden
"I would like to announce on behalf of the American people, we have to make sure that our
leaders are held accountable. We cannot have a president of the United States that is willing
to abuse the power of the office of the presidency and be easily bought off by foreign
governments, Chinese energy companies, Ukrainian energy companies."
"We don't need a man serving in the presidency of the United States who is guilty of
committing the crime of abuse of power and is under investigation with Hunter Biden's laptop,
his very own son."
"There is an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop in being bought and paid for
by Chinese communist energy companies," she continued
Anyone who thought voting in Biden was going to end the circus is sadly mistaken. The refusal
of a large section of the population to recognize Trump as President has merely set the tone
for a large portion of the population to think of Biden as illegitimate. If Biden uses
domestic terrorism legislation to try to control the opposition it won't end well. Bring on
the lions and Christians and any other unpopular section of the country.
A half century of downward mobility -- crippling of the real economy in which productivity
was rewarded -- and neglect causing deterioration of infrastructure (including meeting basic
human needs like health care), have brought the U.S. to a state of collapse.
Almost everyone seems to sense this and we feel powerless to rectify the situation through
accepted channels, thus some people believe they have a 'patriotic' duty to use other means.
The combination of disenfranchised minorities and disgruntled middle class becomes dangerous
(to the established order) as soon as both groups realize they can't win by blaming and
fighting each other.
We haven't reached that stage yet, judging from the comments I've read in the mainstream
media, however it's just a matter of time until they do. The divide-and-rule political game
keeps people attached to ideology of left vs right until it becomes clear that we all lose by
adhering to this mode of thinking.
The war racket and a whole range of other exploitative financial policies are driven by
the top echelon of elites, who also control the narratives through media propaganda.
Their game is failing and they're resorting to draconian control measures to prop it up,
but this can't continue much longer.
As I see it, the collapse of the Western financial system could happen suddenly or
gradually, or it could bring the ultimate destruction of human civilization. In any case, I
believe our degradation of the natural world will be the real catalyst leading either to
human extinction; or else if we're lucky and smart enough, will induce us to massively
downsize our population and industrial activity in order to let the ecosystem heal
itself.
Giraldi's current essay hits on numerous points already brought forth by b and barflies,
and IMO is a very well balanced look at the outcome and possible road that lies ahead.
The citation he opens with IMO gets to the heart of the matter of what's been building
since the 2000 election and its Judicial Coup:
"In a recent article Catholic University professor Claes G. Ryn wrote [Link at
original]
"Few people are really open to persuasion in any case -- not just on political subjects
but on any subject about which they care and on which they have adopted certain views.
Diehard partisans for a certain outlook will refuse to have their beliefs questioned, and
so will many others. They will be no less dismissive of a document challenging their
opinions if it is full of footnotes and appendixes. Such a document will, indeed, make them
resist it even more. As for the relatively few people who are truly open-minded, they will
not find another person's observations dispositive. They will, as they should, want to
consider the evidence on a contested matter for themselves."
We experience the above daily here at MoA. IMO, economic reality will alter the equation
once the eviction and foreclosure restrictions end unless some very enlightened legislation
is proposed and enacted.
Rep Jason Crow (Dem Colo) "I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. ...
A couple of them broke down in tears ... saying that they are afraid for their lives if they
vote for this impeachment."
The only thing they (RINO's, the non Trumpers) are afraid of loosing is their seat on the
gravy train express. They are afraid of loosing their seat at the sleaziest brothel in the
world, totally bought and controlled by powerful interest groups and foreign governments with
Israel being by far the biggest one that controls that chamber. There, fixed it for you Mr.
Crow. Rep Crow could well end up eating crow when this is all over.
IMO a large number of his supporters like Pat Lang don't care much for him or his policies
specially his Israel first policies, majority are America first conservative nationalist they
will look for someone else to lead and reorganize, that's when this divide will become
dangerous and scary. IMO that is the only reason they really didn't damage the building or
even hide themselves behind mask they are not afraid of being identified.
That is even more scary for those who hope there wouldn't be a civil uprising challenge the
establishment .
"The hostility the Democrats have show will create a huge backlash. Do they really
believe that can suppress 74 million Trump voters?"
They don't have to suppress 74 million Trump voters. They don't have to suppress
any of the Trump voters. They just have to hold on to the 81 million Democratic
voters, and will probably be joined by a relative handful of Republicans who, out of disgust
and anger at Trump, will cross over and join the Democrats.
Of course, if the mass of everyday, relatively uninvolved Democratic voters finds out the
truth about the true past and about the true intents and purposes of the Biden-Harris
wrecking crew, it's possible that some small percentage of them will stop voting and/or
switch to minor parties, but it's unlikely that such a small desertion will swing any
election to the Republicans, especially if the Biden administration is smart enough and
loose-fisted enough to toss a few financial crumbs to the mass of unfortunates who are
staring homelessness and starvation in the face.
One result of the eight-year Obama administration was a small group of Democrats who did
exactly that -- they walked away while the vast majority of registered Democrats ignored
Obama's long list of crimes and misdemeanors and pretended not to see or to know of his lies
and betrayals of the working class. So the principled deserters are already gone, and those
left in the party are hard-core, thick-headed party-above-principle-in-all-things grifters
and groupies who will stick to the party through all manner of thick and thin circumstances.
They're not going to participate in any "backlash."
The Democrats have proven themselves complete idiots for years and years and years. The
Republicans are batshit crazy. The last election from the Democratic POV was to remove what
they perceive as an existential threat to 'democracy' which is another word for 'deep state.'
It is no wonder the rush to judgment to confirm what they already believe about DJT. Critical
thinking and common sense are not attributes the elite political class possess. They are all
vainglorious grifters.
The USA is FUBAR and none of the king's horses and none of the king's men etc. etc.
etc.
The Trump supporters do not care that he is a murderer and a scoundrel as well as yet
another US President that started yet another war against a Muslim country.
They think that US can survive a centuries-long war against Islam.
That is a major flaw in their estimation of US power and fragility of what they have in
the United States.
1.2 billion Muslims, 1.2 billion Chinese, and a 130 million Russians believing that the
United States is their enemy.
No amount of domestic political change in the United States can address this.
In 1976, a 17-year old American boy could travel alone in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
etc. without any fear; he would be welcome because of the correct foreign policy of the
United States.
Americans have lost that and are discussing the deck arrangements on Titanic.
In 1976, a 17-year old American boy could travel alone in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.
without any fear; he would be welcome because of the correct foreign policy of the United
States.
In Laos, Vietnam or Cambodia the "correct foreign policy of the United States" was in full
display. The US was always a murderous monster. The only difference is that it has turned on
itself.
"The Trump supporters do not care that he is a murderer and a scoundrel as well as yet
another US President that started yet another war against a Muslim country."
As you know this is not unique to trump supporters for as long as I have experienced this
a fundamental group think in America. Americans from early school days are thought the you
are "special" and "indispensable "
And "exceptional" they are thought never to accept or believe defeat never agree or accept
"mistake" never agree or accept "lack of knowledge " this not just Trump is the entire
nation' by now this group think is injected in sole of the nation on hourly bases. This
people are just beginning to doubt or question their government' sincerity and its design
while middle easterners never trust the government. It will eventually become more difficult
for US governments to govern under the mistrust that is building up. New honest deal will be
needed.
Not so. The presidents team only filed 7 cases. the rest were third parties.
Of the 7 2 found rule changes should not have been done (PA, WI) but no judge was going to
overturn results.
The dems weaponized mail in voting to benefit Biden. Were signatures checked in GA, PA,
WI, MI?
One researcher found Fulton County, GA did 106,000 adjudications with a staff so small at
an average rate of 30 seconds per adjudication they would have taken until jan 5 to do HALF
of them.
When pressed on how this could be possible the GA secretary of State and Fulton County had
no answers.
The Supreme Court also refused to hear both an original jurisdiction case AND a case by
the President's own team in December which would have ruled on the constitutionality of PA's
mail in ballots done without amending the state constitution.
...More importantly the rest of the world clearly sees the hypocrisy of what the US says
and does. Take note that it is just not US voters that will turn away, it will be other
countries.
Outside the USA, the first things that will be done is that everyone will have to have
control over their own social media and internet. NO MORE trust in the USA Big Tech to play
fair - that is gone!
Fragmentation will gather speed and ultimately lead to greater chaos as no one can trust
what anyone says anymore and voting is just about who counts the vote - not the votes
themselves.
Russia was correct in saying the USA is "agreement incapable". Agreements will be
meaningless and we will have to go back to the system of "Exchanging Hostages or Family
Members" to ensure agreements are kept.
In the USA it is probable that the Republicans will split, with most joining the Dems to
form a one party state. This will last for some time until a revolutionary leader comes along
to challenge the Emperors of the repressive one party state.
In the interlude there will certainly be individual and isolated acts of rebellion, which
will just create new edicts, greater cooperation with big tech to identify suspects and ever
more repression.
Vengeance does not make peace, and Nancy & Hillary will have their vengeance!
"Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Facebook page:
"The decision by US Internet platforms to block the accounts of the head of state can be
likened to a nuclear explosion in cyberspace. The aftereffects are worse than destruction. A
blow has been dealt to the democratic values professed by Western society. Both darknet
apologists and the advocates of harsh censorship have instantly gained a substantial
argument. The media market has begun to be reshaped and a massive digital migration is
afoot."
That's a very fair observation of the facts that avoids politics and skillfully stated by
Ms. Zakharova.
"Free speech in America will become as dead at the Dodo and the United States would
become effectively two nations with the increasingly impoverished helot "deplorables" under
the heel of the empowered social justice warriors.
It won't be pretty, and it won't be stable."
like you say @ 27... you can see it happening even here on the moa channel....
@ william gruff...
i would like to 2nd your recommendation - "You should probably turn off your TV." i wonder
if these people are not bright enough to consider that??
Over the past week, President Trump has been kicked off of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat, and was blocked from e-commerce platform Shopify - all because of a pair of
relatively benign tweets on January 8th, two days after the Capitol 'riot' in which a small
group of Trump supporters and a
BLM activist were allowed into the Capitol Building through an opened door .
Twitter, likely realizing the 'last straw' used to justify banning a sitting US president
was extremely weak sauce (a move which has
shocked the world ), said the tweets "must
be read in the context of broader events in the country."
Furious Trump supporters immediately began to abandon Twitter for so-called 'alt-tech'
conservative-friendly alternatives, Parler and Gab.
Over the weekend, however, Amazon and Google banned Parler from their app stores, while
Amazon Web Services dealt the death-blow by kicking them off their AWS cloud hosting service ,
rending the site 'homeless' and inaccessible until they find another host. Thanks to a flood of
'cancel culture' activists targeting all things Trump, Parler continues to be 'dead' for all
intents and purposes.
Gab CEO Andrew Torba, meanwhile, backed up Trump's entire Twitter account despite the fact
that Trump hasn't yet joined the network ( thanks to Jared
Kushner , apparently). Torba has been aggressively lobbying for the
president to join. The network says it saw a 750% boost in traffic, adding 600,000 new users in
a 24-hour period on Monday alone.
"The traffic just keeps growing. Hang tight, even more servers on the way today," Torba
wrote on Saturday.
Where else are Trump supporters flocking?
With Parler currently unpersoned by big tech, and Gab's servers running a little slow thanks
to the influx of Twitter and Parler refugees, several other social media apps and platforms are
seeing record traffic .
Telegram : Before Parler was taken to
the woodshed by Amazon, influential users began calling on users to move to messaging app
Telegram, where Donald Trump Jr. actively posts in a public channel. The service offers
end-to-end encryption outside of Big Tech's grasp, according to the
Wall Street Journal .
One Telegram channel had over 16,000 "Parler refugees" as of Jan. 11, while the service
announced on Tuesday that it had attracted 25 million new users globally in the preceding 72
hours , bringing its total active user base to 500 million.
The platform supports up to 200,000 members in a group, which is why it's a favorite go-to
for protesters in Hong Kong, Iran and Belarus .
Signal : Widely regarded as the most
'private' app, Signal's encryption is open source. It also offers encrypted calling and viceo
chat. Between last Thursday and Sunday, the app saw around 7.5 million installations from the
App Store and Google Play , around 43x more than it received the previous week, according to
CNN .
The flood of new users has caused some glitches, however, with the company tweeting on
Thursday that verification codes for new sign-ups may be delayed "because so many new people
are trying to join Signal right now (we can barely register our excitement)."
" We are currently having a record level of downloads for the Signal app around the world ,"
the company said in a
Friday Reddit post .
Last week, Signal received some high profile endorsements after Elon Musk, currently the
richest man on the planet, tweeted "Use Signal." Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey retweeted it - later
posting an image of Signal at the top of the App Store chart after it displaced Parler as the
#1 download.
Other platforms receiving attention of late include; video sharing sites Rumble and
BitChute, livestreaming service DLive, along
with CloutHub , MeWe and Minds.com .
What's out? WhatsApp ...
After the Facebook-owned 'secure' messaging app announced a new privacy policy which states
that the company may share user data with other Facebook companies "to help operate, provide,
improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings," users
began abandoning the app .
In Hong Kong, users have been leaving WhatsApp left and right , according to
nikkei.com .
It is an indication that people in the city have joined social media users around the
globe in a shift to other messaging platforms because of concerns over privacy, after
WhatsApp dismayed many users by rewriting its terms of use on Jan. 6.
The new terms will essentially allow Facebook, WhatsApp's owner, to gain access to certain
personal information, such as contact lists, location, financial information and usage data
.
Since then, WhatsApp's rivals have seen a record-breaking amount of downloads. -
nikkei
One thing is for sure; with Trump kicked off Twitter, Parler currently dead, and ensuing
refugees flocking to a bevy of alternative social media platforms that are siloed from each
other, the conservative social media ecosystem has never been more fractured . Mission
accomplished, we can only assume.
PGR88 3 hours ago (Edited)
Big Tech social-media made a deal with the deep-state-devil. Now they will pay
Not from Americans switching, but rather, the world knows that American Tech is an arm of
the NSA. the likes of Zuckercock and Google have outed themselves as total puppets, the world
will take this national-security threat much more seriously.
Land Lapper 1 hour ago remove link
CIA/NSA will go to any new tech company and give them the ultimatum... "we get a back door
and the ability to monitor, or we will shut you down and destroy you and your business for
not being a patriot".
Sorry people, nothing will change unless we remove TPTB.
Lucius Septimius Pertinax 31 minutes ago
You are correct that Big Tech made a huge mistake. FB, Twitter, and youtube (google) will
now be shutdown in many foreign countries, as they are too dangerous.
All last year we were hearing how Huawei is a threat to US national security. Chinese
state operatives would insert spyware into Huawei networking equipment. The software that
runs on Huawei equipment is open source and open to inspections. It is unlikely to contain
hidden threats. But similar backdoors and spy gates are sure to exist on Western
equipment.
The real threat to US "security" comes from the US not being able to install their spyware
on European networks.
It seems that a massive US spy operation has just been exposed. The US presidential
elections have overshadowed this from the news, but at the end of December this was the top
story in the US. Allegedly "Russian hackers" had infiltrated US government organizations.
According to Lou Dobbs on Fox News this was a new Pearl Harbor.
The story broke out in mid December when the cyber security company FireEye noticed that
their servers had been attacked and the code for their Red Team assessment tools had been
stolen. They soon discovered that the attack had utilized a backdoor in SolarWind's Orion IT
monitoring and management software. FireEye called it a supply-chain attack.
There are several layers of misinformation in the way the Western media reported this.
Supposedly 18,000 organizations were attacked. This is the number of users of the
SolarWinds network management software. No evidence has been presented that any of these
organizations were actually attacked.
The attackers were supposedly Russian. Cyber attribution is usually impossible. It
could as well have been the NSA or CIA acting as "Russians". Actually no technical analysis
has ever been presented that points the attack to Russia. The whole Russia story was
invented by the media or by their masters in the US Intelligence Community.
The real story not in how US government organizations were possibly attacked, but in
how the spyware found its way into the SolarWinds source code in the first place.
The spyware was part of the source code for the "BusinessLayer.dll" shared library. I find
it impossible that the spyware code was somehow inserted from Russia. It is likewise far
fetched to assume that some Russian mole was working for SolarWinds and secretly inserting
spyware into the source code. No such mole has been arrested. It is more likely that the
malware was inserted by US actors.
This "sophisticated supply chain attack" would have been impossible without US insiders in
the company. Most likely the whole software team was compromised. The attack vector must have
been part of the specification of the software. Proof of this comes from the fact that it has
taken several weeks and SolarWinds still has not fixed the problem. The spyware must be so
embedded and intertwined with the rest of the software that they would not know what to
remove. Instead, they said their "investigations are early and ongoing". They have the source
code, yet they have not published any part of it.
No links in this post. I have collected some links and
sources on my wiki.
The Trump administration denounced or threatened trade agreements and "jaw-boned" particular
manufacturers without tangible or lasting results for young workers. It continued drone warfare
and bombing runs, exacerbating refugee problems. Its ham-handed actions relating to visa and
green card holders with vested rights partially wasted its "trump card" on immigration. Its
deregulatory and tax proposals had little appeal to its three new constituencies, and in its
kindness to fund managers, it forgot Bernard De Jouvenel's maxim that "the wealth of merchants
is resented more than the pomp of rulers."
There are still available, either to a Republican Party cleansed of Trump or to the Biden
administration, my 11 proposals of a populist nature, none very expensive. Since the Trump
administration was a milder version of what Hermann Rauschning in the 1930s called "A
Revolution of Nihilism," any effort to enlarge its constituency of malcontents was forsworn.
Accordingly, these ideas are re-tendered:
1. Completely relieving workers under the age of 25 of payroll taxation, as in Germany and
Holland. Over the long term, this would render them the most employed, rather than the most
unemployed, age cohort. Because they make up at most 10 percent of the labor force, and
typically enjoy barely half of average earnings, relieving them of 12.4 percent payroll taxes
would require an increase in general payroll tax rates of, at most, 5 to 10 percent of one
percent.
2. A revived Civilian Conservation Corps, a cause promoted only by Senator Bernie Sanders,
with its focus on low-tech infrastructure projects and services, including such neglected
fields of activity as soil conservation, reforestation, disaster relief, reclamation of
abandoned mine sites, creation of new national parks in Appalachia, hydrology, desert
agriculture, creation of footpaths and youth hostels, and training as practical nurses and
nursing assistants.
3. Making the services of the United States Employment Service, a largely moribund adjunct
of the unemployment system, available to all workers under the age of 25.
4. Tax credits, like those in Germany, Finland, and Japan, to encourage the installation of
second kitchens in owner-occupied housing, thereby fostering the creation of low-cost housing
in the form of accessory apartments, duplex houses, and mother-in-law flats. This is a far more
economical method of generating new low-cost small units than subsidized housing, and
restrictions to owner-occupied homes would eliminate the fears and controversies accompanying
public housing proposals.
5. Limited incentives, in the form of handbooks and nominal tax credits, to foster the
creation of cooperative old-age clubs on the Japanese pattern to assist the elderly in
remaining in their own homes, removing pressures on Medicaid.
6. Promotion of model state and local legislation and tax incentives for the creation of
land readjustment and land assembly districts on the postwar Japanese, Korean, and German
pattern, to foster private redevelopment of blighted urban and inner-suburban areas.
7. Support for a revived TEAM Act providing for the organization of single-plant works
councils, with the authority to negotiate local pay and productivity deals, work rules, and
employee grievances. Legislation to this effect sponsored by the Dunlap Commission appointed by
Labor Secretary Robert Reich and including several former Democratic secretaries of labor was
vetoed by President Clinton at the behest of the United Auto Workers. Since private-sector
union membership has declined by 60 percent since Clinton's veto, even Democratic congressmen
might now support it, to the great benefit of the low-income work force in non-union chain
establishments.
8. An orderly de-criminalization of marijuana on the Canadian pattern, accompanied by an
educational campaign stressing its de-motivating characteristics and enlisting schools and
colleges in its discouragement through selective drug testing, as in the military and adult
work force. This will eliminate nearly a million arrests a year and defund much of the
underworld that is the youth employer of first resort in depressed areas.
9. An effort to revive depressed downtown areas in small towns and cities with incentives
for the creation of Business Improvement Districts, together with enhanced enforcement of
antitrust, predatory pricing, and bribery laws against offending large retailers.
10. Relief for credit unions and community banks from the more oppressive Sarbanes-Oxley and
Dodd-Frank regulations without holding them hostage to secure unjustified deregulation for
larger banks.
11. Grant of work permits to undocumented workers without criminal records and with long
records of American employment upon payment by them, their families, employers, or
philanthropies of large ($5,000) application fees, the proceeds to be dedicated to a fund for
law enforcement, housing, and nurse practitioner programs addressing migration in its Central
American and other source countries. As with women's suffrage prior to 1920, the question of
enfranchisement should be left to the States, pursuant to Article I, Sections 2 and 4 of the
Constitution.
It may be objected that measures to relieve the young are of limited political appeal, since
they do not vote in large numbers. They do not, but their mothers do. And many of the other
measures will provide citizens with a greater sense of control over their own lives.
While much of this agenda may not appeal to gradgrind Republicans who appreciate the price
of everything and the value of nothing, nor to those whose idea of an infrastructure program is
aid to a contracting class and its representatives on K Street, some might be led to follow a
vagrant thought of former speaker Paul Ryan. It will be recalled that he uttered the only
memorable words of the 2012 Republican Convention when he declared that "college graduates
should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at faded Obama
posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life."
George W. Liebmann, a Baltimore lawyer, is the author of various books on public policy and
history, including Solving Problems Without Large Government: Devolution, Fairness, and
Equality (Praeger, 1999), reprinted as Neighborhood Futures (Transaction Books, 2003).
I would modify Item#1 and Item#3 to not just encourage employment for those under 25 but I
would:
1) exclude all (legal, illegal or visa workers from programs to encourage their
employment.
2) such programs should also include the difficult to employ like the disabled
3) such programs should also include the difficult to employ over 50 job seeker.
I especially support Item 4 (small studio apartments or granny flats)
I oppose Item#7 It is much to dangerous for such worker councils to be usurped by our
leftist Marxist woke culture, political activist, social justice, cancel culture, diversity,
inclusivity, cross sectional race theorists, etc. which will translate into a hostile
anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian, anti-marriage, anti-family, anti-chrildren,
anti-American corporate enforced ideology. If you thought the left's false accusations of
rape on campus and the lefts false accusations of race hatred on campus, it you thought false
accusations of Jesse Smollett in Chicago were an example of ruining an individuals life on
hearsay then wake until these work councils get taken over by leftist activists and watch
what they do to innocent working class employees who just want to do their job but don't
follow the leftist narrative.
I oppose Item#11. We lost 250,000 jobs due to COVID (the chinese bat flu stew). Our
unemployment rate is 6.7%. At the same time we are losing jobs our legal immigration rate is
steady at 1 million per year. No, I do not support illegal immigration, legal immigration,
refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, temporary work or education visas. No western
nation can continue to relieve the problems of over population by mass immigration. It is not
fair to the citizens of the US or any other western/westernized country.
I don't disagree with very much here though as a practical matter I will point out a
mistaken assumption that seems to underlie #5:
Re: Limited incentives, in the form of handbooks and nominal tax credits, to foster the
creation of cooperative old-age clubs on the Japanese pattern to assist the elderly in
remaining in their own homes, removing pressures on Medicaid.
I assume that is about nursing homes, but those are almost always a last resort when the
patient is so seriously disabled that they cannot possibly live independently and their
medical needs surpass the abilities of family members to care for them.
Also, I don't think that youth unemployment is the big bugaboo with deindustrialization.
Young people are a good deal more flexible, and have fewer financial commitments, than older
people after all. Rather the disemployment of middle aged (and older) blue collar workers is
the larger problem. These people expected to be in the same job (or type of job) for life and
they had the rug pulled out from under them and found themselves with few prospects. Some of
them ended up in low paying service jobs, some lived off a still-employed spouse, some went
on SSDI, and some few even ended up homeless.
Most of these barely sound conservative. One-company workers' councils violate NLRB rules,
for reasons probably having to do with Clinton's veto; these days they would vastly increase
the number of workers in organized setting.
The marijuana suggestion contains bits of the old War on Drugs: forced drug testing of
workers, and propaganda that focuses on marijuana rather than the dangers of any kind of
excess substance use/addiction. *Free employers to pursue a drug-free work place
rather than a drug-free work force. *Any govt-sponsored statements on drugs should be
based on facts and even-handed research, not the whoring that scientists have done for the
last 50 years, and should include the tonic effects of both a mild buzz and deep psychedelic
experience.
As a moderate Democrat, most of these ideas appeal to me. As someone who has paid
attention for decades, I see no chance in hell of any of these things happening [during Biden
administration], especially if proposed by a Democrat. As an optimist, I wish moderate
Republicans could join moderate Democrats in making such things a possibility. As a realist,
I don't think America is capable of solving any problems right now, especially tough ones. As
an American, it saddens me.
Most of the ideas are excellent. I would add much greater funding for vocational education
at the secondary and post-secondary level. Our public schools are far too focused on
preparing students for college with insufficient training for those ill suited for or
uninterested in seeking a university education.
The lack of affordable housing is a major obstacle for twenty somethings to get out of
their childhood home and begin the process of family formation. We need tax incentives to
build limited equity cooperative apartment buildings, resident-owned mobile/modular home
parks and small bungalow-style houses.
I like the proposal for worker councils but employee ownership is an even better idea.
Workers owning a share in their business should be strongly encouraged by public policy at
all levels.
Victoria Nuland, former foreign policy adviser to vice president Dick Cheney, should not be
nominated for undersecretary of state [for political affairs], and if nominated should be
rejected by the Senate.
Nuland played a key role in facilitating a coup in Ukraine that created a civil war costing
10,000 lives and displacing over a million people. She played a key role in arming Ukraine as
well. She advocates radically increased military spending, NATO expansion, hostility toward
Russia, and efforts to overthrow the Russian government.
The United States invested $5 billion in shaping Ukrainian politics, including overthrowing
a democratically elected president who had refused to join NATO. Then-Assistant Secretary of
State Nuland is on
video talking about the U.S. investment and on
audiotape planning to install Ukraine's next leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was
subsequently installed.
The Maidan protests, at which Nuland handed out cookies to protesters, were violently
escalated by neo-Nazis and by snipers who opened fire on police. When Poland, Germany, and
France negotiated a deal for the Maidan demands and an early election, neo-Nazis instead
attacked the government and took over. The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the
coup government, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister.
Nuland has
worked with the openly pro-Nazi Svoboda Party in Ukraine. She was long a leading
proponent of arming Ukraine. She was also an advocate for removing from office the
prosecutor general of Ukraine, whom then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed the president to
remove.
Nuland
wrote this past year that "The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the
democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia - one that builds on
their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own
citizens."
She added:
" Moscow should also see that Washington and its allies are taking concrete steps to shore
up their security and raise the cost of Russian confrontation and militarization. That
includes maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear
weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses, . . .
establish permanent bases along NATO's eastern border, and increase the pace and visibility
of joint training exercises."
The United States walked out of the ABM Treaty and later the INF Treaty, began putting
missiles into Romania and Poland, expanded NATO to Russia's border, facilitated a coup in
Ukraine, began arming Ukraine, and started holding massive war rehearsal exercises in Eastern
Europe. But to read Victoria Nuland's account, Russia is simply an irrationally evil and
aggressive force that must be countered by yet more military spending, bases, and hostility.
Some U.S.
military officials say this demonizing of Russia is all about weapons profits and
bureaucratic power, no more fact-based than the Steele Dossier that was
given to the FBI by Victoria Nuland.
SIGNED BY:
Alaska Peace Center
Center for Encounter and Active Non-Violence
CODEPINK
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
Greater Brunswick PeaceWorks
Jemez Peacemakers
Knowdrones.com
Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Nukewatch
Peace Action Maine
PEACEWORKERS
Physicians for Social Responsibility – Kansas City
Progressive Democrats of America
Peace Fresno
Peace, Justice, Sustainability NOW!
The Resistance Center for Peace and Justice
RootsAction.org
Veterans For Peace Chapter 001
Veterans For Peace Chapter 63
Veterans For Peace Chapter 113
Veterans For Peace Chapter 115
Veterans For Peace Chapter 132
Wage Peace
World BEYOND War
TimeTraveller 36 minutes ago (Edited)
The funny thing about appointment of Nuland, is that basically every European government
hates her.
Those idiots in the EU complained about Trump. Well the American Empire war machine is
about to ratchet up a notch or three, btches.
Max21c 50 minutes ago
The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Arseniy
Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister.
The Washington establishment immediately recognized the coup government, and Joe Schmoe
Biden was installed as ruler.
replaceme 52 minutes ago
Why wouldn't they appoint a murderer?
TimeTraveller 50 minutes ago (Edited)
It is funny that they oppose that. After all, every single person in the Democrat party
was in agreement with those foreign coup and wars. If we're going to all of a sudden start
pointing the finger, then there would be no Democrats left in congress
aspnaz again 38 minutes ago
Nationalist, extremist, exceptionalist, white supremicists are okay if they are
democrats.
eatapeach 13 minutes ago
She's an Israel-firster, thus has a pass?
TimeTraveller 51 minutes ago
Those 25 organizations are about to be cancelled. Social Media thought police will be
working overtime tonight.
You_Cant_Quit_Me 52 minutes ago
So we go around the world interfering with every country's internal affairs but when they
do it to the US is meddling in US elections.
does nooner know how hypocritical Washington sounds?
Ms No PREMIUM 36 minutes ago
"pro-Nazi Svoboda party"
That is a headfake there. They are definitely tyrannical and Bolshevik, but not targeting
Jewish people.
As a matter of fact Nuland's Council on Foreign Relations huband-brother (whatever they
really are) is a Kagan, like Kagan-ovich, and that ain't a coincidence.
So you can see what the mob did there. It helps with plausible deniability down the road
when they get charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, terrorism, aggression,
etc
xious 37 minutes ago
They don't care what you think. You will watch child molesters on TV and like it.
TryingSomethingNew 38 minutes ago
But she's Jewish and a woman, right? Those 25 organizations are clearly Anti-Semitic and
sexist.
Ms No PREMIUM 35 minutes ago
Why would a Jewish Mobster set up a Nazi like color revolutionary group and coup the
Ukraine with it?
Already looking at plausible deniability down the road. Nobody's *** is covered anywhere
but theirs. Their apparatchiks should ponder that.
Pliskin 43 minutes ago
Amurikans should keep the fcuk out of other countries affairs...!
Sad-sacks!
Dzerzhhinsky 48 minutes ago
People think Zionists are anti Nazi, but Zionism is the non Christian version of Nazism.
Herzl the founder of the Zionist party was enamoured with the Nazis, but they rejected him on
religious grounds.
It's natural for Nuland and the other Kaganites to be in bed with Ukrainian Nazis.
Ms No PREMIUM 22 minutes ago remove link
I remember Lavrov getting grilled by angry journalists about why Russia wasn't bombing the
**** out of the color revolutionaries that took the Ukraine with US money.
He basically said, What would you have us do, cause countless deaths of our own Russian
speaking people? They don't care about their deaths but we have to.
Then the first thing the US did was put in illegal bioweapons labs in the Ukraine. There
was a super weird outbreak prior to the color revolution takeover too..Then Russians were
really pissed off. So Putin drew red line in Syria
Russia will get the Ukraine back someday. They have to. It was their bread basket during
last grand minimum.
bluskyes 14 minutes ago
perhaps, when the western threat become stronger than ethnic bias. Though it will probably
split first.
Anthraxed 38 minutes ago
Victoria Noodlebrain should be on Interpol's top 10 most wanted list.
Cautiously Pessimistic 49 minutes ago
Man....I had all but forgotten about many of these scumbags that are resurfacing now in
the Biden administration. This woman should be waterboarded until deceased.
Dzerzhhinsky 46 minutes ago
It's always the same people, the front men change, but behind the scenes it's always the
same people.
RKKA 6 minutes ago
Again, all these demons of the Obama era are striving for power. During the Trump
presidency, we have already forgotten about these devils.
Victoria Nuland, her real Jewish surname is Nudelman, her parents are Moldovan ****. The
parents of the former Ukrainian President Poroshenko, who seized power as a result of the
Maidan and the coup d'etat, are also Moldovan **** by the name of Valtsman. Already in
adulthood, Petr Valtsman took the name of his wife and became - Poroshenko. They are the
father and mother of the war in Ukraine, and Joe Biden blessed them for this.
Another Ukrainian oligarch, also a ***, Igor Kolomoisky, financed the Ukrainian
nationalist battalions of Azov, Dnepr and Aydar. Tell me, what are these Nazis who are
financed and serve the ****? Adolf spins tirelessly in his coffin!
And you probably thought that the **** are such poor and offended children of the
Holocaust and the Nazis are their enemies? No, **** and Nazis merged in violent ecstasy and
it is time to introduce the term - Jewish Nazism into the lexicon!
de tocqueville's ghost 28 minutes ago
that was a good four years...no new wars. Good going liberals, you voted for a war
monger.
Lt. Shicekopf 14 minutes ago
Yes! Maybe we can do to all kinds of countries what we did to Libya. The continuing
calamity that has been going on in Libya since Obama and Hillary got done with them has been
studiously ignored by all the Western media. Anarchy, chaos, death, an open slave market in
which black Africans are bought and sold by Arab traders. All good stuff to the American
left.
David Q. Little 45 minutes ago
Joe and Hunter owe her a favor.
Musum 19 minutes ago
Neocons are returning with a vengeance.
Death2Fiat 28 minutes ago
Her job is to destroy the US and do the bidding of the Globalists.
tbone654 28 minutes ago
none of it matters... with the dems controlling everything the [M]ilitary [I]ndustrial
[I]ntelligence [C]omplex is gonna ramp up and spend a crap-ton on wars all over the globe...
it's how it works when they have the throttle... everyone was worried about Trump, but he
de-escalated everywhere...
The people have spoken (I mean cheated) and now they must be punished... Ed Koch
Lyman54 34 minutes ago
Yatsenyuk, Nulands pick, was given a Canadian passport. Likely hiding in Manitoba.
ThomasEdmonds 36 minutes ago
Some things in this life don't matter and Biden cares squat. Perhaps these groups can
express their contempt for Samantha Power as well. Let's extend that to his foreign policy
team.
WTFUD 13 minutes ago remove link
Joseph Biden reminds me of Hedley Lamar in Blazing Saddles, forming a posse of the biggest
wackjobs available.
As long as he doesn't put Hunter in charge of the Afghani Poppy Crop Investment Fund then
his Middle-East and Central Asian policy could prove fruitful.
"Diesen takes on and brings together two large phenomena, namely the revolution in
technology and the change in global power relations."
My continual question: Will the Western world's morality evolve quickly enough to keep
pace with technological progress? I have no worries about Eurasian morality. Rather, it's the
West's loss of its 500 years of domination and what it will do to recoup that immoral
position that's most troublesome.
What deterrent has Mr. Bandow on his mind for Europeans? One that goes against the NPT?
The type that Iran has been pummeled economically for the past 20 years? And for which North
Korea has been practically cordoned and now lives in quasi-autarchy? I have read this type of
idiocy that encouraged S. Korea and Japan to acquire nuclear weapons. How is this supposed to
work and be explained to the world at large? Oh, we need to all acquire nuclear weapons now
because...? But we'll continue to sanction Iran and N Korea for the same things
because...?
I guess that is the corollary of 20 years of repeating the mantra "rules based
international order". Mr. Bandow, in terms of nuclear proliferation (which the US presently
breaches by bringing its nukes on the territory of other states, plus other shenanigans done
in conjunction with Japan concerning plutonium), it is the NPT that is the rule... Stick with
it, and don't pretend that it doesn't apply to you and your allies.
Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, etc. are enemies because they do not open their economies
to be under the control of the West or where the West can get a greater share of profits
(most for the elites and some for the battered pension plans that were for years betting on
7% return on investment). Therefore military is another instrument to open that oyster up.
All the rest is BS created to have people marshalling under the flag...
Interesting article. As Trump has once proposed. The US leave NATO and withdraw their
troops from Europe and take their nukes with them. That would lead to disbanding NATO . Many
Germans would be glad. The transatlanticists in the German government don't represent the
majority of the German people. Germany could have her own nukes. Trump was all for it. I have
never understood the agression against Russia. If a country doesn't intend to invade and
conquer another country a blown up military isn't necessary in my opinion. To deter other
countries from attacking a country needs a few nukes and it's safe. Isn't it? North Korea is
the best example. Libya, Syria and Iraq who gave up their nuclear weapons program were all
invaded and destroyed. But NATO being disbanded remains wishful thinking. The MIC needs the
proceeds.
The US presence in NATO and Europe has been detrimental to Europe for atleast 10 years
possibly 20 or longer. It has allowed European nations to indulge in follies that prudent,
self aware nations responsible for their own defense and their own future would take very
seriously and both national interests and security/defense interests. Lets take a few
examples of Europes follies:
1) France wants all EU nations to federal their militaries into a continental military.
Federalize means that individual EU nations would lose sovereignty over their militaries. It
also means that the most powerful nations in the EU (ie France and Germany) would have
overwhelming influence/control over Brussels decisions regarding its continental armies just
as France and Britain have overwhelming control over regulation, immigration, trade, finance,
etc.
2) European nations do not consider open borders and uncontrolled migration as continental -
domestic security issues. Brussels-Germany-France-Sweden overwhelmingly support open borders
and mass immigration plus they use Brussels to bully less powerful poorer nations to accept
immigrants without any compensation, as well as threatening to take EU voting rights from
countries like Hungary or Poland.
3) In another issue concerning open borders and mass immigration,
Brussels-Germany-France-Sweden completely ignore terrorist acts, car bombings, infiltration
of radical islam, infiltration of radical subversive anarchistic individuals and groups,
honor killings, human trafficking/child brides, knifings, grooming gangs, assaults, violent
crime, murder, etc.
4) Europe follows the US in still engaging Russia as a cold war enemy.
5) Europe has gone full fledged gender neutral / gender equal society. Everyone believes in
equality of opportunity but with Equality of Opportunity comes Equality of Responsibilities.
If men must serve in the military then so much women or there is no Gender Equality.
Furthermore, radical subversive leftist belief is that men must be made weaker and less
masculine to make women appear stronger. Sorry but you cannot defend a continent on
Feminist-Cultural Marxist Theory.
6) Europe has allowed its birthrate to fall drastically below replacement (2.1). In many
European countries their birth replacement rate is close to 1.0, 1.2, 1.5 etc. Europe cannot
defend itself if it has no people to staff a military. I will not judge Europe. Europe must plan for its own future but many EU nations and
NATO members think they can indulge in any utopian theory because the US will come to save
them from the responsibilities of their ill conceived societal experiments. The US should be
an invisible partner and force every nation to take responsibility for how much sovereignty
they are willing to relinquish to Brussels and take responsibility for their nations culture,
its progeny, its defense and its national interest.
In the end it all comes down to China. If the Europeans are not willing to move towards
cutting off China, and were I in Europe's position I'm not sure if I would be, NATO is
worthless to the US. You really would be better off thinking more about security integration
with Latin America or an alliance with a remilitarized Japan.
Europe's day as the prime concern for the US has passed and rather than dinking around in
some Latvian forest we need to be practicing naval exercises in the Western Pacific.
This criminal organization should be disbanded and it's leader, the U.S., should be
dragged into world courts and tried for continuing crimes against humanity.
Nothing good ever came from these creeps, the Europeans and the American ones across the
world, unless y'all think world 1 and the other fun one, 2 and...oh, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya and other places these mobsters caused so much misery and death are cool.
Meanwhile, Russia and China laugh.
I'm laughing with 'em.
celebrating the return of the consensus that Americans must forever pay for the continent's
defense.
Wrong, Americans must forever pay for occupying foreing lands. Go home, and take with you
those traitor burecrats that sigh with relief to the fact of being occupied, then you might
be able to take care of your people and spend your ridiculous "defense" budget to renew your
degraded infrastructure.
"Many of us are altering our routines, working to get body armor, which is a reimbursable
purchase that we can make," Meijer told MSNBC in a Thursday interview.
Dennis Wayne Pennenga 3 hours ago 14 Jan, 2021 06:05 PM
Better wear helmets too.
Paulino Avina Dennis Wayne Pennenga 1 hour ago 14 Jan, 2021 08:29 PM
It wasn't a single speech by Trump just before events unfolded that led to the violence of
January 6 during which five people died. Many of the same people now pointing fingers at Trump
bear responsibility for the tragedy themselves. So, in the spirit of Zola
I accuse the Washington establishment of reducing the concept of democracy itself to little
more than a convenient pretext for foreign invasion of countries that don't align with
America's interests. You've perverted the concept for the average foreigner of target countries
that have seen little more than enduring chaos and destruction borne of ' democracy '.
So why should the average American trust in the notion when you cry about 'democracy' itself
being attacked by a mob?
I accuse the Democratic Party of spending the past four years since Trump was legitimately
elected trying to disenfranchise the near-63 million Americans who cast their ballot in his
favor by portraying them as useful idiots of a foreign power (namely Russia), rather than
people who simply wanted someone in charge who wasn't going to kowtow to the insidious
corruption in Washington.
I accuse the Republican Party of placing its own personal interests over those of the
citizens by enabling – or even cheerleading – Trump's behavior when it risked
becoming a liability for his presidency, for the party, and for the hopes of millions of
average Americans who voted for him.
I accuse Big Tech – specifically, social media giants – of rank hypocrisy. The
more extreme and buzzworthy the comments on your platforms by Trump and his most fervent
supporters, the more money it has made you. And now you have the gall to admonish and blacklist
Trump and his supporters while pretending that it's all such a shock. You played just as much a
role in all of this as they did. Own it. And to clarify, are you in favor of free speech, or
strictly speech that squares with the prevailing political winds and social pressures at any
given time?
I accuse right-leaning ideological talking heads of self-serving pandering to your audience
of consumers – by screaming about unproven 'election fraud', for example – rather
than providing rational analysis and credible information that might have helped to make your
case to a wider audience beyond the handful of radical extremists who didn't exactly need
convincing in the first place.
I accuse left-leaning pundits of hysteria rather than constructive opposition, and reducing
any pushback against your agenda or positions to some form of bigotry.
I accuse the mainstream media of obvious and inherent bias against President Trump from the
very outset of his presidency, which has ultimately served to radicalize his base and further
erode the average American's faith in the important work of the free press.
I accuse the sanitary fascists who emerged over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and who
acted like anyone prioritizing their own solvency and ability to feed their families over
various, ever-changing restrictions of questionable effectiveness was some kind of terrorist.
Many members of the mob that showed up on Capitol Hill felt that they had little left to lose.
And it's in part because of you.
I accuse Wall Street, and the politicians whom it has purchased through lobbying efforts, of
failing to see how globalization would ultimately disenfranchise the average American worker by
exporting jobs and driving down wages. You, too, contributed to the frustration seen in that
mob that congregated in Washington from the four corners of America.
Finally, I accuse President Donald Trump of failing to grow into his presidency, of allowing
his own ego to get in the way of his promises, of seemingly prioritizing the interests of
friends and associates, and of failing to convert his considerable rhetorical power into
lasting achievements and a legacy in which his voters and supporters could take pride.
Every one of these people hold responsibility for catalyzing the events of January 6. Unless
those who remain standing when the dust settles on this fiasco change their ways, America is in
for a long, rough ride.
This is about the consolidation of power after questionable election; Capitol ransacking is
just a pretext for represssions. If it did not occur they would find another one.
Notable quotes:
"... (5) the term "domestic terrorism" means activities that -- (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended -- (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. ..."
"... Why all the talk about "domestic terrorism"? I suspect it's because people can't stand the idea that the Trump mob could be guilty of nothing more than trespassing. Time reports sadly that there are no laws against domestic terrorism, but lists the charges it wants brought: seditious conspiracy, which carries a 20-year maximum sentence, homicide, assault, interstate travel in aid of racketeering, restricted-area violations, vandalism, and trespassing. ..."
"... The authorities promise to hunt the rioters -- many of whom just walked through an open door -- to the ends of the earth as if they were Osama bin Laden. The contrast with the handling of BLM and antifa rioters is stark. ..."
Joe Biden has the people who took over the Capitol on Jan. 6 figured out. In just two days,
he had them pegged for "a bunch of thugs, insurrectionists, white supremacists, and
anti-Semites, and it's not enough." Not enough? He also said they were "domestic terrorists."
Curiously, there is a federal definition of domestic terrorism, but it isn't a crime. There
is now tremendous pressure to change that, and depending on what kind of law takes shape, there
could be huge implications for dissidents.
For now, this
definition from 18 U.S. Code § 2331 is worth studying:
(5) the term "domestic terrorism" means activities that -- (A) involve acts dangerous to
human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -- (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to
influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the
conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur
primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.
Does this apply to the Capitol takeover? Domestic terrorism must be an illegal act
"dangerous to human life" and meant to influence policy. The Trump supporters wanted to
influence policy alright, but what does "dangerous to human life" mean? The
Michigan Penal Code says it is "that which causes a substantial likelihood of death or
serious injury."
That wouldn't include trespassing, breaking and entering, or even scuffling with the police.
Anyone who may have
killed Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick would meet the definition of a "domestic
terrorist," but the circumstances of his death are still not clear. It may be there wasn't a
single "textbook" domestic terrorist at the Capitol that day. Lefties are gloating
over the death of Ashli Babbitt, but the only thing she did that was "dangerous to human life"
was stop a bullet.
Why all the talk about "domestic terrorism"? I suspect it's because people can't stand the
idea that the Trump mob could be guilty of nothing more than trespassing. Time reports
sadly that there are no laws against domestic terrorism, but lists the charges it wants brought:
seditious conspiracy, which carries a 20-year maximum sentence, homicide, assault, interstate
travel in aid of racketeering, restricted-area violations, vandalism, and trespassing.
Sure enough, the Justice Department has set up a task force
to file sedition and conspiracy charges . The investigation is said to be "one of the most
expansive criminal investigations in the history of the Justice Department." The authorities
promise to hunt the rioters -- many of whom just walked through an open door -- to the ends of
the earth as if they were Osama bin Laden. The contrast with the
handling of BLM and
antifa rioters is stark.
Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security,
has another idea . "Given the heinous domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol," he
wants everyone involved put on the No-Fly List. Rep. Jason Crow, a member of the House Armed
Services Committee, wants the US Army Secretary to track down and
court martial every soldier who entered the Capitol. A court
martial requires a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, usually for a serious
felony. Police departments in
Virginia ,
Washington , and
Pennsylvania are
scouring their rosters , looking for officers who went to the rally, whether they entered
the Capitol or not. Will they be fired?
Wikipedia describes John McCain's daughter Meghan as a
"columnist, author, and television personality." She wants the rioters sent to Guantanamo :
"They should be treated the same way we treat Al-Qaeda" -- yet another American frustrated by
the lack of a law against domestic terrorism.
... ... ...
... [neoliberal] Lefties were of course
pleased that "white supremacists" can
now officially be "terrorists." This is very important for any potential new law because
the occupation of the Capitol has unleashed a wave of vitriol against "white supremacy," even
though there is no evidence the Trump supporters had the slightest racial motivation. NBC News
ran this
headline : "'Vintage white rage': Why the riots were about the perceived loss of white
power." Politico
tells us "there's a term for what happened at the Capitol this week: 'whitelash'." The
Atlantic
explained that "the Capitol riot was an attack on multiracial democracy." The
Guardian 's
headline was "Insurrection Day: When White Supremacist Terror Came to the US Capitol."
Black Congressman Hank Johnson
told Al Sharpton that the black Capitol policeman who killed Ashli Babbitt had
singlehandedly put down a lynch mob: If he hadn't shot her, "I have no doubt that some of us
who look like me would've been hanging from the railings of the 3rd floor, onto the House
floor, swinging like . . . strange fruit." Nancy Pelosi said that
the people who entered the Capitol "have chosen their whiteness over democracy," whatever that
means.
This perfectly matches the views of Richard Durbin, ranking member on the Senate
Subcommittees for Defense and for the Constitution. In 2019, he introduced the Domestic Terrorism
Prevention Act , which called white supremacy "the most significant domestic terrorism
threat facing the United States." The act was only about 3,000 words but used "white
supremacist" 12 times, "neo-Nazi" six times, "far-right" eight times, and "hate crime" 10
times. It was silent on any other kind of domestic terrorism. Sen. Durbin says he will
reintroduce the bill right away in light of the Capitol takeover.
There is no telling what laws could pass in this fevered environment, but it's important to
note what Mr. Durbin's 2019 bill did and did not do. It did not make domestic terrorism a crime
or authorize the designation of "domestic terrorism organizations," which would mean jailing
Americans as if they were Al-Qaeda members and seizing assets without notice. What it
did
do was set up special offices in the FBI, Justice Department, and Homeland Security "to
analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and . . . take steps to prevent domestic
terrorism." It's anyone's guess what those "steps" were supposed to be.
The bill also required the three agencies to "review each hate crime incident reported
during the preceding year to determine whether the incident also constitutes a domestic
terrorism-related incident," though it didn't say to what end.
Sen. Durbin loves to quote FBI Director Christopher A. Wray's testimony
before Congress in 2019: "A majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we've investigated
are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacy . . . ."
However, the bill used the definition of "domestic terrorism" from 18 U.S. Code § 2331
cited above, which is ideologically neutral. That means Black Lives Matter and antifa commit
vastly more "domestic terrorism" than all the "white supremacists," "neo-Nazis," and "far-right
extremists" combined. Anyone who shouts "Defund the police," "Justice for Breonna Taylor,"
"Black lives matter," or even "I can't breathe" is trying to "influence the policy of a
government." If, in that context, someone commits an illegal act "dangerous to human life," he
is a domestic terrorist. Since the
death of George Floyd , there have been countless dangerous-to-human-life acts of arson and
aggravated assault; even attempts to
stop ambulances from bringing wounded officers to emergency rooms. If "white supremacists"
were organizing freeway shutdowns, they would surely count as "dangerous to human
life."
The levels of hypocritical hysteria dominating the corporate airwaves and most electronic
media, together with an even more amplified level among the pro$titicians in the Di$trict of
Corruption means they are scared.
They suddenly feel vulnerable. Are they as vulnerable as the people of Yemen who are being
bombed daily and starvation blockaded by the $audi crime clan with the full. assistance of
those D.C. Pro$titician$? Are they as vulnerable as those half million!!! deliberately
starved Iraqi children whom Madelein Albrietstein declared to be "worth it" in forwarding the
I$raeli agenda?
Could it just simply be that they are themselves guilty of crimes against humanity and in
violation of their oaths to protect the Constitution of the United States from all enemies
foreign and DOMESTIC? The little gal under the streetlight with high heels, short skirt and
low-hanging purse in the midnight hour at least provides a desired service. Can the same be
said for the Pro$titicians on the Hill overlooking Urination'$ Capitol?
As for the media whores and pre$$titute$, being myself a recovering journalist; there is
good reason to believe that I have correctly identified them.
I don't see how it can't be recognized that Trump set-up his own supporters by luring them
to DC.
Going to Wash DC to protest wasn't going to change the vote outcome in Congress and any
fool could anticipate Antifa types would show up (apparently Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell and
DC Mayor were advised they were planning to come and riot. So Trump had to have known
too.)
Now, neither POTUS or Congress members will publicly identify the organized Antifa thug
element. So, Trump supporters, and by extension Repubs, are being widely labeled as "domestic
terrorists'. While Trump releases another video today lecturing about violence which
implicates HIS supporters by no mention of the other elements there.
Congressman Hank Johnson told Al Sharpton that the black Capitol policeman who killed
Ashli Babbitt had singlehandedly put down a lynch mob: If he hadn't shot her, "I have no
doubt that some of us who look like me would've been hanging from the railings of the 3rd
floor, onto the House floor, swinging like . . . strange fruit.
This statement is quite stupid but Johnson has said worse in the past:
During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on March 25, 2010[40] concerning the
U.S. military installation on the island of Guam, Johnson said to Admiral Robert F.
Willard, Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, "My fear is that the whole island will become
so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize", to which Admiral Willard replied,
"We don't anticipate that."
The great thing about language in the 21st century is it means whatever you want it to
mean, sort of like Alice in wonderland. A terrorist is whatever they deem to be a terrorist;
anyone who does not go along with their agenda. "building back better" means repression and
censorship. "the new normal" means global corporate government and the great reset agenda.
"global pandemic" means a plandemic that kills one in a million healthy young people. etc.
Facts and information do not matter to these people; it is 1984. This struggle will be
decided by force, as logical arguments are useless to those who deny the basic axioms of
reality and existence (almost all libtards and most rinos). I think in a way it is a good
thing that things are getting worse for the average middle american. Things will need to get
much worse before they get better as more than half the people are still totally asleep. Of
the minority that are awake, most of us have too much to lose right now . But we need to
organize and prepare to take action soon or we will be bled to death by a thousand cuts as
they have been doing for a while now. What kind of a world will our children inherit if we
stay silent and apathetic?
O MY GOD!
All the discussions around Trump reminded me of Hitler after Stalingrad.
After the defeat at Stalingrad, the Germans waited 2 years for Hitler to use the secret
weapon and win the war. The German army suffered defeat after defeat, the Russian communists
were searching for Hitler's body through Bunkers and the Germans still waited for the
super-secret weapon to save them.
Two months after the election, Trump's team suffered defeat after defeat. Trump is waiting
for jail, but his supporters are convinced that Trump still has a secret weapon with which
will win the election.When you wake up to reality. Trump is a false Messiah and he he doesn't
have a super-secret-weapon.
You have to fight your self for justice and truth and not wait for someoneelse to fight for
you while you button porn, tiktok or chat smalltalk on Facebook.
I can't forget what Mother Teresa said 30 years ago: "Don't wait for a leader because he
won't come. Be your own leaders."
You all are for sure. I just changed my party registration and I'm now a proud Democrat. I
don't want to be denied jobs, loans, transportation, and possibly freedom and life itself for
the sake of a country that has collectively decided to destroy itself.
And that's what false flag with Capitol ransacking accomplished. It fives Clinton/Obama/Biden
clique card blank for suppressing the dissent
This false flag operation like shooting protesters by snipers during Ukrainian Maydan is a
logical end of American Maidan and pursued the same goals -- deposing the current president,
hijacking political power and consolidating it via repressions.
Notable quotes:
"... That is why we are witnessing the fussy, aggressive actions of the Democrats - a ridiculous re-impeachment of the president, who will leave the White House in a week, the most severe censorship and suppression of dissent. There is no need for the real winners of fair elections to behave like that, as they are aware of their legitimacy and are confident in themselves (relying on the real, not imaginary, support of the majority of the population). ..."
From the "Biden Exploits His Capitol Gains" article:
Joe Biden's own language certainly sounded less like a magnanimous winner uniting his
people than like that used by autocrats and dictators to hold onto power, argues Diana
Johnstone.
Diana Johnstone's opinion is quite reasonable. In fact, a "creeping"/"bureaucratic" coup
d'etat took place in the United States. And it wasn't Trump at all, but Biden & Co. The
fact that "Joe Biden's own language sounded like that used by autocrats and dictators to hold
onto power" is further confirmation of this.
If you are in the majority and you win the election honestly, then there is no need to act
the way the Democrats did. The current aggressive rhetoric of Biden (and other Democrats) is
evidence that the elections were stolen/falsified. Biden knows this very well, and therefore
his language is as cruel, irreconcilable and repressive as possible. After the illegitimate
elections, the task is to consolidate own's power and suppress all those who reject what
happened. In fact, this is what happened in Ukraine after the Maidan 2014.
That is why we are witnessing the fussy, aggressive actions of the Democrats - a
ridiculous re-impeachment of the president, who will leave the White House in a week, the
most severe censorship and suppression of dissent. There is no need for the real winners of
fair elections to behave like that, as they are aware of their legitimacy and are confident
in themselves (relying on the real, not imaginary, support of the majority of the
population).
Globalization has made the United States a hollow giant. It has produced an enormous
wealth gap, and this inequality is producing a breakdown in social cohesion. They have faced
crisis before in the form of political polarization, economic hardship and racial tensions,
but the situation now is a combination of every one of the mentioned before amplified by
orders of magnitude by the pandemic.
The power of the MIC, Wall Street and Big Tech along with their MSM minions acting in a
concerted way is the only thing preventing an implosion of the country. Either that or the
notion of "American Exceptionalism" is truly implanted in the hearts and minds of the people,
whether they realize it or not.
There will be a wipe out of Trumpists and one party Dem state ala California. The Rep
party will divide itself into Trumpists and establishment fighting each other.
The clear changes in the culture of the US population, which is found by numerous surveys,
back up this assessment of the situation.
Trump's biggest fault is that he managed to corrupt many naturally isolationist rank and
file republicans into "I have the biggest dick" imperialism and China/Iran hysteria. He tried
to save the US Empire, corrupted MAGA into Make America Rule the World Again, and for that he
paid the price.
He was triggered by the US decline in the world (Murica is no longer number 1, how can
this be!) and tried to prop up the Empire that will eat him later.
If he tried to run on anti-imperial isolationit platform he still had a chance. But that
required better relations with China, Russia, Iran and others, something impossible for a US
rightoid massively triggered about Murica not being "number 1".
Too many people believe what they choose to read. The constantly reinforced world view of
us vs them. I remember when Obama had a real mandate and both houses of Congress his first
two years. His big 'socialist' victory - a corporate run for-profit healthcare system which
is the laughing stock of the world and oh yeah he expanded the 911 Forever War.
What did Trump do in four years? Nothing. The government of the USA is failed. The
dissatisfaction with the Establishment goes way beyond the QAnon crowd.
The idea that there are actually two opposing political ideologies in the USA is Big Lie
101.
The 16th big press conference of Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn a line. In the
history of the "concentration of Russia", a thirty-year period has come to an end,
characterized by successively advancing: fascination with the West, doubt in the West, and
disillusionment with Western "values". Russia has entered a new period.
During the final press conference of Putin, an incident occurred that caused a lot of funny
comments in Russian society and in the Russian press. BBC journalist Steven Rosenberg asked the
Russian President: "Is Vladimir Putin personally responsible for the deterioration of relations
with Western countries? Or is Russia all these 20 years of Putin's rule "white and fluffy"?
And, in addition, as expected, [he asked] "how is it going with the investigation into the
poisoning of Navalny?"
A dialogue ensued, during which the British journalist looked rather pathetic, to which
everyone paid attention. But the result of this conversation, although everyone quoted it, was
not appreciated by anyone. In the end [of the dialogue], it was said that Putin is responsible
for the people of Russia and before the people of Russia, and that yes, we are white and
fluffy, especially compared to you.
I can understand how the British journalist felt at this time. The world collapsed around
him. From his point of view, such an end to the conversation was simply impossible. He was not
taught this.
Recollection of the present
I know very well what I am saying. In 1993, together with another three dozen diplomats
representing all post-Soviet republics (including Russia) and all post-socialist countries of
Eastern Europe (then none of them were members of either NATO or the EU, although everyone
already dreamed of), I was at diplomatic internship in the UK. Among other things, we were
offered an educational format for communicating with the Western press, which (what a
coincidence) was represented by a rather elderly lady from the BBC. She explained to us for a
long time and tediously that we, as government officials, would have to listen carefully to the
position of journalists and if the journalist himself (especially a Western one) became
interested in some information or pointed out some political error, then the information should
be provided immediately, and the error should be corrected with an apology.
She talked for about forty minutes. I waited until she was exhausted and asked: "Why?" I
waited on purpose. Usually, in such cases, our Western friends simply repeat their monologue.
But the journalist was already quite second-hand, she had fizzled out over the previous hour
and, losing her guard, missed a hit. She answered with a question to the question: "What do you
mean why?".
It was then that I explained to her that in any country, Great Britain is no exception,
there are a lot of journalists from mass media. And each of them will be happy to interview a
government official and receive exclusive information on his (official's) terms. And such
"smart" ones as she won't even get into the waiting room. There are many ways to avoid
accreditation under a plausible pretext. And after her publication is given to understand that
no one will ever speak to this journalist in this country, she will simply be fired for
incompetence or sent to the Papuans, from where one report is published every ten years.
This dialogue took place in the summer of 1993. I was 27 then. I think that Steven Rosenberg
was then at the same (plus or minus a couple of years) age. I have long forgotten the name of
the BBC lady, but I will never forget her face. She looked at me as if the gates of hell had
opened behind me and the entire infernal army was about to rush at her. Rosenberg's face was
half hidden by a mask, but it could not hide his confusion, further emphasized by a stampede
from the press conference.
Let me stress again that I understand him well and sympathize with him. 27 years ago, when
the incident I described above happened, journalists already liked to speculate about the
"fourth power", but most of them themselves did not really believe in this thesis.
Nevertheless, open disregard for the "rights of the press" was not comme il faut even then.
Like "homophobia" about ten years later.
Since then, the young and then seasoned BBC journalist Steven Rosenberg was taught for 27
years that he was not just a "fourth power", but a representative of Western civilizers in a
semi-primitive world that dreams of becoming like the West. Stephen is the bearer of
civilization. Any of his statements is a priori true, and the authorities of the "wild tribes"
to whom he brings civilization must justify themselves to him and immediately rush to eliminate
the shortcomings he has noticed.
"Russia is disappointed with Europe's inability to defend its interests on its own"
And after all, for a long time it was so. Including in Russia. Not that the Kremlin believed
in the Western "mission of good offices", but they proceeded from the fact that compromise is
better than enmity and were ready to make reasonable concessions in anticipation of reciprocal
steps. It cannot be said that this strategy has completely failed to justify itself. Part of
the Western world, especially in the EU and especially in Germany and Italy, really strives to
build equal pragmatic relations with Russia on the basis of a mutually acceptable
compromise.
But the part is not the whole, and on the whole, the Western world retains its hostility
towards Russia, poorly hidden by unfounded arrogance. Moreover, it is clear that despite the
strengthening of the Western political circles sympathetic to our country, this trend will not
be broken in the coming years. But then it will be too late. The window of opportunity will
close.
Any political decision is possible and expedient within a certain time frame. If someone
does not have time to meet these deadlines, then they have to implement a different version of
the future. That is why not a single serious state works according to the principle of no
alternative. There are always fallbacks, maybe not as good, but not disastrous, usually just
less profitable. But those who are late for the joint train to the future remain at a broken
trough.
2020 was the year of summing up the results in Russian-European relations. At the level of
statements by politicians and press materials, at the level of visits, agreements and active
events, the fading of Russia's interest in the European vector and the redirection of the
dominant of its foreign policy to the Far and Middle East became noticeable.
The last warning was the autumn speeches of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in which
it was stated openly that Russia is disappointed with Europe's inability to defend its
interests on its own and, given this factor, does not expect anything else from cooperation
with the West and does not plan to unilaterally take into account the opinion and the interests
of the West.
Perhaps in the UK or specifically on the BBC, being immersed in their Brexit, Lavrov was not
heard. But that's their problem. Russia is not doing anything out of the blue. Before openly
telling the West that "We didn't actually want to work with them" a long-term (stretching over
a decade and a half) work was carried out to search for alternative markets, to import
substitution of critical products imported from the West, to strengthen the army, to recreate
the ocean-going fleet, gaining allies, creating military bases controlling trade routes that
are critical for Russia.
The West missed this entire era of "concentration of Russia" (the expression of Chancellor
Gorchakov). Already the second time the West misses (the first "concentration" in the XXI
century ended in 2008). In Europe and the United States they consoled themselves with the fact
that Russia is a "colossus with feet of clay", that it does not have sufficient resources even
to intervene in the situation in the post-Soviet space, that "Moscow is bluffing", that the
West is indispensable because it is a "civilizational choice" etc.
And suddenly, in 2020, the collective West saw that Russia's positioning towards it had
changed dramatically. If earlier [the West's] claims were heard, explanations were given,
Russia was trying to prove something, now Europe began to be ignored as an annoying mistress.
With some countries, the Kremlin has stopped talking altogether, with some it talks, but
"without respect."
"Yes, we are white and fluffy"! -- But only for ourselves. So what will you do to us?
Western journalists, especially BBC journalists, do not ask random questions at press
conferences of heads of state. BBC is a state corporation, its activities are aimed at
realizing the state interests of Great Britain, including collecting information using the
possibilities of journalism. By asking the question "Are you white and fluffy?" -- the leading
circles of the West probed the soil and were ready to hear anything in response, except what
sounded: "Yes, we are white and fluffy" -- and your opinion on this issue interests us least of
all.
This is the point, the end of the long-term flirtation between Russia and the West, which
the West hoped to start up in an absolute moral and material gain, and suddenly sees itself in
the role of "Ariadne abandoned." Given the Western vindictiveness, such public humiliation of
it became possible only following the results of a decade and a half of well-coordinated,
albeit invisible, work of all Russian state structures, including state-owned companies.
In 2014, the West was surprised to learn that Russia is able to ensure its food security
(over the next six years, Moscow has been steadily increasing its food exports). In 2015, the
West became convinced of the stability of the Russian financial system, which it never managed
to break. In 2016, the West still laughed at the "cartoons" and argued that in reality Russia
did not have demonstrated weapons systems, because it could never be. Since 2018, he has been
forced to admit his critical lag in the military sphere. In 2017-2018 the West suddenly learned
that Russia concentrates on itself the supply of liquefied gas, for which the West was a de
facto monopoly, one by one introducing the corresponding terminals in the North and the Far
East (which makes the fight against Nord Stream 2 and other flows senseless, since Russian gas
will come to Europe by a route alternative to the Ukrainian one, if not through gas pipelines,
then with the help of gas carriers). By 2020, the West learned that Russia is also able to
build gas carriers on its own (as well as other ships and vessels of any class).
In parallel, international systems of cooperation between Russia and China, Iran, Turkey and
Egypt were being built. If, until about 2014, Russia's priority was to ensure internal
stability and security in the context of a likely break with the West, then the emphasis in
domestic policy shifted to disavowing the ideological expansion of the West, and in foreign
policy to building alternative trade and economic ties, securing promising markets. and
partners.
All this, of course, is not as beautiful as the even ranks of the royal grenadiers, bravely
breaking the enemy's resistance under a hail of grapeshot. But for the latter to become
possible, many years of routine work are needed to create an independent economy capable of
meeting the needs of the army and the people in any conditions, for a period of time of any
length, as well as to provide the rear with reliable military-political alliances.
And only after many years of efforts of millions of people, someone alone can smile and say
to the unfortunate journalist, turning over his head to the collective West: "Yes, we are white
and fluffy!" -- So what will you do to us?
In the history of Russia, a thirty-year period has come to an end, characterized by
successively advancing: fascination with the West, doubt in the West, and disillusionment with
Western "values." The line has been drawn. Russia has entered a new period characterized by
indifference towards the West and a lack of illusions about all of its current partners and
allies. We leave ideals for home use, for external use we have only interests. Russia itself
has built its own well-being and is going to use it itself. And whoever doesn't like it, can
cry, or gnaw the earth, or bite his elbows. We are "white and fluffy", but only for
ourselves.
Is there anything more pathetic than competition between two political mafias hiding as some
sort of disagreement over principle?
Notable quotes:
"... Absolutely his instinct to rebalance the economic relationship with China was correct. But he's too stupid to do it in a way that actually benefits or improves the US long term. Every once in a while with him there was hint of a good instinct but he never followed through because his base instincts always win out. ..."
"... The cries of censorship are asinine. Real censorship of diverging opinions was accomplished decades ago. Banning Donald trump from twitter isn't censorship. They didn't ban the POTUS account (they did delete tweets when he tried to use it), they banned his personal account because he's an asshole who broke the rules. Republicans have been telling me about the sanctity of property my whole life. Now they change their minds? ..."
It's all just farts in a jar. The trajectory was set decades ago and the political
oligarchy and gerontocracy aren't going to let go of that trajectory. Trump was only a
"populist" insofar as it was a means for him to be popular. In reality, he's a dishonest,
craven asshole. If he was a populist he would have responded to Covid way differently. What
he is, however, is a nationalist. Those are dangerous because they don't think clearly.
Absolutely his instinct to rebalance the economic relationship with China was correct.
But he's too stupid to do it in a way that actually benefits or improves the US long term.
Every once in a while with him there was hint of a good instinct but he never followed
through because his base instincts always win out.
The cries of censorship are asinine. Real censorship of diverging opinions was
accomplished decades ago. Banning Donald trump from twitter isn't censorship. They didn't ban
the POTUS account (they did delete tweets when he tried to use it), they banned his personal
account because he's an asshole who broke the rules. Republicans have been telling me about
the sanctity of property my whole life. Now they change their minds?
The empire is in terminal decline. Trump doesn't change it. Biden doesn't change it. Who
controls Congress doesn't change it. Because all of them are beholden to the declining empire
and/or they believe in America's myths (they are nationalists). A failed color revolution run
by people who don't want to accept an election result just says real loud that the empire is
falling.
@pretzelattack "alaff, there's no evidence the election was stolen"
Why do people treat this like a court of law with a presumption of innocence? - "if there
is no proof of wrongdoing, it must have been fair and honest".
Suppose someone demanded that you prove the election was honest? Could you do it? I know I
couldn't.
It's not hard to imagine a system where you could prove that, however. It would require voter
ID's, much stricter chain of custody for ballots and the ability for a voter to check how
their vote was recorded and challenge it, if necessary. This is all perfectly possible
technologically. If I can return something to a store 6 months after I bought it without a
receipt and have them look up the visa purchase, we should be able to do this. The reason, of
course, is that the political parties don't really want honest elections.
The whole thing reminds me a bit of that line in "The Sting" - "what do you expect me to
do? challenge him in front of everyone for cheating better than me?"
Where I'm going is this: why _should_ I believe the election was honest? I simply don't
know if it was, or wasn't. There won't be real confidence in elections until we provide
better means of validating the results that are available to everyone. Simply saying "there
was no evidence of fraud" won't be enough.
How does that work after Trump has already resigned? This is just childish idiocy, in fact
much worse. Does this mean that Biden/Harris have no other policies than being anti Trump? So
now they want to make him a martyr? This looks like it is going to blow up in their faces,
figuratively or literally.
Trump's 2nd impeachment: what it reminds me of is the impeachment of Andrew Johnson during
reconstruction, a lot of historical resonance there, the bitterness, the desire to undo as
much as possible, and I'd say that this now is in some sense unfinished business from back
then.
"...Fellow-Satanists, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen! The year 2020 has been a
banner year for our society and for His Satanic Majesty! [Applause]
Our major success of 2020, of course, was in locking down half the planet by hyping a
not-too-dangerous respiratory virus that's mostly dangerous for the old and the sick with the
help of Satanic Minion Tedros Adhanom Boutros-Boutros-Boutros Ghebreyesus at our affiliate
World Health Organization. This has allowed us to proactively set in motion a controlled
demolition of the global economy. It stands to greatly enrich our members, whereas the
inevitable spontaneous collapse would have wiped us out. [Enthusiastic applause, shouts of
"Bravo!"]
Still, we must not grow complacent; the virus ploy will stop working for us at some point.
We do not want to find ourselves in the situation of a Boutros-Boutros-Boutros who cried wolf
one time too many! The hype is wearing off already. The use of the term "lockdown" was
unfortunate; after all, it is US prison slang for locking inmates in their cells. Plus those
damnable Russians seem to have developed their Sputnik-V, a vaccine that actually works. Now
everybody seems to want it instead of our preferred toxic, fertility-destroying potions.
Still, it brought tears of joy to many a Satanist's face watching millions of people wear
face masks and stand 1,5 meters apart just as shown in Stanley Kubrik's excellent film "Eyes
Wide Shut" starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. [Confused looks; some stifled guffaws, a
smattering of applause]..." http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2020/12/world-satanic-society-2020-year-end.html#more
Across the nation, Americans are peacefully protesting to demand an end to the pattern of
racial injustice and police brutality that has killed so many innocent Americans, as we saw
most recently in the murder of George Floyd.
It is alarming that here in our nation's capital, the thousands who have turned out
peacefully have been confronted with the deployment of various security officers from
multiple jurisdictions, including unidentified federal law enforcement personnel.
We have seen soldiers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We have witnessed Bureau of
Prisons officers in Lafayette Square. We have seen National Park Service officers hassling
peaceful protestors. Several states have deployed members of their National Guard to D.C.
This is in addition to the FBI and other security forces operating in our nation's
capital.
We are concerned about the increased militarization and lack of clarity that may increase
chaos. I am writing to request a full list of the agencies involved and clarifications of the
roles and responsibilities of the troops and federal law enforcement resources operating in
the city. Congress and the American people need to know who is in charge, what is the chain
of command, what is the mission, and by what authority is the National Guard from other
states operating in the capital.
To make matters worse, some officers have refused to provide identification and have been
deployed without identifying insignias, badges and name plates. The practice of officers
operating with full anonymity undermines accountability, ignites government distrust and
suspicion, and is counter to the principle of procedural justice and legitimacy during this
precarious moment in our nation's history.
The Department of Justice itself in the past has stated that allowing officers to work
anonymously creates "mistrust and undermines accountability" and "conveys a message to
community members that, through anonymity, officers may seek to act with impunity." In recent
days, many former high-level DOJ officials have echoed these concerns and warned that
allowing federal law enforcement officers to operate without identification can fatally
weaken oversight efforts and fails to send the message that abuse will not be tolerated.
As peaceful people all over the country turn out to honor the memory of George Floyd and
protest for change, we must ensure that their safety and their constitutional rights are
being respected.
Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.
Sincerely,
NANCY PELOSI
Speaker of the House
Besides the obvious irony, the funniest part of this letter is that Pelosi calls crowds
that took control over parts of cities, caused over $1bn in damage, and cost the lives of
over a dozen people "peaceful"...
The DemonRats still have a week and could impeach him for a 3rd time! Like a hat trick in
hockey!
MongoStraight 4 hours ago remove link
Look! Orange Man bad! Stop looking at those pesky election irregularities!
Art_Vandelay 4 hours ago remove link
I'm glad everyone is enjoying the theater. They have to keep the masses focused on this
soap opera. Double the homelessness is not good optics during this great depression.
Speaker Pelosi names Rep. Eric Swalwell among Trump impeachment managers
boyplunger7777 1 hour ago (Edited)
Eric "Fang Fang" Swalwell leading the impeachment committee. If this doesn't say it all
about how Dems have betrayed the average American I do not know what does. Americans will not
forget this.
Mass protests generally have two distinct but intertwined goals: 1) to "make a statement,"
and 2) to inflict a cost. To state the obvious, mass protests occur because a group of people
are unhappy about something, and they want something to change. Change only occurs, in a large
bureaucratic nation like ours, if a loud "message" is conveyed, or if the price of non-change
becomes too high. If thousands of Trump voters are mad as hell because they believe the
election was stolen, and if they want to protest, they can either make their message heard and
then hope for the best (not much hope there), or they can attempt to punish the thieves
-- that is, make them incur some cost for their malfeasance.
What did the mob achieve on Wednesday? We already knew their message -- Trump won the
election, and it was stolen. We know they have support across the country; even our biased
media admit to some 74 million Trump voters, of whom 70% to 80% (depending on the poll) think
the election was stolen. But then what? "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it." And
then what? The message is impotent. It has no consequence.
If 'the message' was doomed to impotence, inflicting 'a cost' was much more tangible, and
much more achievable. By forcing their way into the Capitol building, a motivated and
reasonably prepared mob could have caused tremendous damage. If -- and I stress the conditional
here -- if they wanted to inflict damage, they had a golden opportunity. They had guns,
presumably hidden, and far outnumbered the handful of guards. Any firefight would have been
over quickly, with the mob victorious. Security guards, staffers, even congressmen would have
been easy prey, for kidnapping, injury, or worse. But this did not happen.
... ... ...
Notice how congressmen, left and right, responded to the event. All were indignant. All were
outraged. All condemned the "senseless violence" of the crazed mob and the "attempted
overthrow" of American democracy. All of them: left, right, and center; Democrat and
Republican; Trump supporter or not. All of them condemned it.
Again: Why? The answer here is clear: All congressmen, of all stripes, have a vested
interest in sustaining the system, more or less in its current form . This is obvious. They
are all 'winners' in the system. It has made them all rich, famous, and powerful. Yes, they
fight for relative power and relative influence, but this is largely a sham. The
Republican-Democrat battles are only there to give the impression of real competition. Instead,
in reality, we have a deep and radical monopoly -- a monopoly of pro-corporate, pro-capitalist,
pro-war, pro-Israel, and pro-Jewish individuals. On these things, they all agree. I've been
saying as much for many years: We should focus not on what divides the two parties, but on
what unites them . This is far more revealing.
... More than anything, Trump was a symbol: a symbol of resistance, of defiance, and of an
'in your face' attitude. But nothing more. The Trump presidency was all show, no substance. It
was, and is, hardly worth dying over.
And by 'media,' I mean all media. Consider what our beloved Tucker Carlson had
to say , speaking at the beginning of his show on the very first day after the protest:
Political violence begets political violence. That is an iron law that never changes. We
have to be against that, no matter who commits the violence or under what pretext, no matter
how many self-interested demagogues assure us the violence is justified or necessary. We have
a duty to oppose all of this, not simply because political violence kills other people's
children, but because in the end it doesn't work.
No good person will live a happier life because [Ashli Babbitt] was killed in a hallway of
the Capitol today. So our only option, as a practical matter, is to fix what is causing this
in the first place. You may have nothing in common with the people on the other side of the
country -- increasingly, you probably don't -- but you're stuck with them. The idea that
groups of Americans will somehow break off into separate peaceful nations of like-minded
citizens is a fantasy. That will not happen. There is no such thing as 'peaceful separation';
there never has been, and there won't be.
The two hemispheres of this country are inseparably intertwined, like conjoined twins.
Neither can leave without killing the other. As horrifying as this moment is, we have no
option but to make it better, to gut it out.
The entry of the Capitol building was spontaneous. Nobody saw it coming.
In the immediate aftermath, the media didn't know whether to promote it or bury it. It
took hours and days for the narrative to coalesce on orders from the top.
As it was happening, the media was gob-smacked. The 'insurrection' narrative didn't truly
get going until the protest was long over.
It's real tiresome to do this but people need to be reminded that Ziocorporate conman
fraud Trump and his MAGA brand are a product of the same lot that governs the Democrats, and
that he was never on his constituency's side:
And it's necessary because if there's a chance to unite even a small group of people after
realising how they're being had, then there's a chance for a small change to snowball into
something larger. And it should not stay on the white side of the divide, it's not like the
plandemic's been killing the economy for whites only. No "populist anti-Deep State patriot"
or national leader goes around endorsing other countries' politicians, much less Israel's,
the purest manifestation of corporate bankster power acting in unison with neocolonial
globalism, a trait shared by Biden and Trump.
Actions should be peaceful, because entities like the Pentagon and CIA have an absolute
monopoly on violent repression...
One Christian fellow I listened to said that Antifa were definitely there. He took video
of them walking down the street. That just proves to me that even Antifa knew they were no
threat, otherwise they wouldn't have been mingling among thousands and thousands of Trump
supporters.
The fellow said that from what he could see, the Trump protesters were unarmed, well
behaved, smiling, and content with waving their flags. He said they are proud patriots and
would never think of destroying art work or smashing up the Capitol Building.
He said on the 15 to 20 previous trips he's made to the Capitol Building, the pop-up metal
barriers have always been up, but no barriers were up on January 6th. He said on a previous
trip he had stepped onto the grass to take a picture and was quickly told by an officer to
"get off the grass". But on January 6th, the sidewalks were blocked off, forcing people onto
the grass.
We've seen the video of what looks to be an Antifa member breaking a window, only to be
stopped by a Trump supporter.
No, these were salt of the earth people who were no threat to Antifa OR the spineless
politicians. They knew this, but they've played it up for all it's worth.
Amazon includes a couple accurate blurbs on the product description page:
This short book is wicked, truthful, and entertaining. The author, after outlining a
step-by-step procedure for bringing about a coup, analyzes modern (post–Second World
War) coups, and points out why some succeeded and others failed. ( New Yorker )
An extraordinarily competent and well-written work, displaying very wide knowledge of
the ways in which coups, both successful and unsuccessful, have actually been organized. (
Times Literary Supplement )
You don't do a "coup" by invading the congressional discussion bunker in a nominal
democracy. You do a "coup" by ordering up CIA-organized troops to take over communication
centers as checkpoints secured by APCs go up everywhere as congresscritters are frogmarched
to a nearby stadium. The CEOs and salaried Wokers of the social meedja companies would swear
enthusiastic allegiance to the new powers. Antifa would be issued clean shirts, ties and
government-approved truncheons. Then a grand proclamation that there will be a convention to
work towards national unity. Ooops, that last part actually happened.
If there had been a coup, it would 100% evident.
If there had been fair elections, it would 100% evident.
The event was, variously, a "coup," an "insurrection," or at minimum, "a riot." Protesters
were "right-wing extremists" and even "domestic terrorists" who were attacking "the very
basis of American democracy."
A coup?
An insurrection?
Attacking the very basis of American democracy?
The only reason the crowd was there in the first place was to protest against the people
committing those crimes through election fraud. Hopefully at least the crowd has figured out
that the Republicans and Trump are not on their side...
Jazzhand McFeels of https://therightstuff.biz/ has written a very interesting
article on Dissident Mag about some sudden changes in the administration that could explain
this thing.
If the attack on the Capitol was already so clumsy and ineffective, how could those same
people succeed in the much more difficult task of seccession?
You're assuming that the phony attack was planned by the people who would be involved in a
secession movement. I haven't seen any evidence that it was.
Cui Bono? The Key to 6 January is what did NOT happen. The two houses of congress had gone
off to hear, separately, in public broadcast, evidence from objecting congressmen that there
was massive electoral fraud to criminally deliver the election to Biden. MSM transmitted the
opening statements to the debate by McConnell and Schumer. These two said that there was no
election fraud. MSM then pulled away when the other congressmen started presenting the view
that there WAS fraud. Although MSM was not going to carry what the people are not supposed to
know, and filled in instead with their own propagandists and the Party Line, the proceedings
examining election fraud would have been seen by some of the public through the internet
streams and C-Span. This was clear evidence which the courts should have heard, but refused to
hear. BUT, instead of Congress publicly hearing evidence, the hearings abruptly STOPPED. Why?
The Capitol police, following instructions, opened the barricades and waved the demonstrators
to come in. The demonstrators were guided to the spot where the Deep State assassin was
waiting. A person was shot. After that, there were NO MORE discussions of election fraud. Biden
was confirmed without the airing of evidence of fraud. 6 January was a simple, but elegant,
Deep State SETUP. A psyop. The American people have been, once again, deceived. Once everybody
submits to vaccination there will never again be disputed elections, just like in the third
world.
Correction: The media said that the policeman "collapsed when he got back to the Precinct.
.that he MAY have been hit with a fire extinguisher." It was not reported as fact. No other
subsequent report abouthow he died albeit it should have been established by now.
The second poilce officer who the media says was "killed" by the "riots" was a man who we
heard nothing about on the date of the event, but who, five days later, committed suicide. The
suicide story is not speculation. It was given as a fact. They call this suicide a "killing"
because of the riots. It is more likely a police officer shooting his mouth off about these
lies,who, five days later was suicided.
This summer and fall at least a dozen police officers were killed. Many more were injured.
One got his eye knocked out. Many were very gravely injured. The government officials applauded
their killers, posted bail for them, and every step of the way government officials "incited
the violence".
Trump made a speech in front of his supporters laying out the evidence of the election
fraud. He was complaining about the election fraud, a fraud that was never scutinized or
investigated by anyone except his own lawyers and a few other lawyers, like Sidney Powell. They
want to impeach him for publicly complaining about their stealing the election from him. It's
like someone getting their home stolen, and when the victim publicly complains, he is
threatened with arrest.
Again, they fundament their impeachment grounds on the "insurrection" of January 6, but
again, like the election fraud, no one has scrutinized or conducted the most cursory
investigation of it The fact that we still don't know how that policeman died is telling. The
speculations made about him getting hit by a fire extinguisher are still floating around when
at this point, it should be an established fact how he died. The dopiest doctor in this country
would be able to diagnose a trauma to the head or body, if there were any physical trauma of
that kind.
Two people died from natural causes. Yet, no details are given. One woman, age 34 and
overweight was said to have been "trampled by the mob." Minutes after her death her family and
closest friends were bad mouthing her, saying that she was mentally unstable, a conspiracy
theorist, and "had problems in the past." She just died shortly before, and that was their
public statements about their dearest friend and family member.
Ashli Babbits death was a provocative act that would have encouraged Trump supporters to
turn on the police. It is no coincidence that those around her breaking windows, and screaming
that she was dead when she was not, also provoked the crowds of Trump supporters. They are seen
clearly on the video near Ashli not only breaking windows but changing their clothes after they
had done so to hide their identification. This is clearly seen on the video. One guy provoking
the crowds, breaking windows and screaming that Ashli was dead when she was not, was clearly
Antifa, proven to be Antifa by video evidence. Yet, after January 6, he was interviewed by CNN.
Clearly, the Antifa provocateur was not arrested by the Washington police or the FBI, but at
least 6 Trump supporters were arrested for breaking curfew after 6 p.m. when all that happened
at the Capitol was over. Those six were the first arrested – for breaking curfew. I do
not find it a coincidence that both Ashli Babbitt and those breaking the windows around her,
and screaming that she was dead when she was not, all acted to provoke the crowds and were all
proven to be Antifa members. Was it coincidence that Ashli Babbitt's getting shot also acted as
an unwitting provocateur, along with the Antifa members around her in the Capitol that day? Or
was both Ashli and Antifa working for our security agencies that day, all playing their roles
as agents provocateurs.
Why wouldn't the DOJ and FBI investigate the election fraud? Was it because the government
did it? That would be a good reason not to investigate. Sidney Powell has produced an affidavit
from a Serb who said it was the CIA who oversaw the manipulation of the US voting machines from
Serbia, a country completely taken over by the CIA. He also writes about Hunter Biden's
clandestine trip there in August 2020 to meet with these people.
Whoever didn't develop a sense of humor with your Ziocorporate fraud reality TV show
president posing as patriot anti-deep maverick ain't gonna do it now.
Yes, the coup and insurrection had ALREADY happened.
The coup and insurrection happened when the Democrats AND Republicans rigged the election.
Democratic state courts and election officials changed voting laws, and Republican state
legislatures looked the other way.
You are wrong on so many counts. The event was not spontaneous, that is quite clear when the
guards let the protesters in and they mostly went inside peacefully while a handful of rioters
did minimal damage. Some Antifas, yeah, for sure. But someone stole Pelosi's computer or did
they? That smacks of a plan. It achieved the objectives of the groups on the inside. The
marchers that went inside had to have been, for the most part, surprised that they were
welcomed. Did you see how they walked in between the purple ropes? Took photographs and
selfies, some of these with the guards? Did you see the videos of some of the protesters
stopping the people trying to break the glass windows? ...
I see "anti-Semitism" has made it to the floor during these impeachment hearings. LMAO. I
would guess that 97% of Trump's base is the muh Israel crowd and Trump is as pro-Israel,
pro-Jewish as it gets.
Even more laughable is Maxine Waters standing up and decrying violence. I guess Maxine has a
very selective memory. All these demsheviks and the gay guys over at CNN who had no problem
with Antifa/BLM are now staunch advocates for the Constitution and have a problem with riots.
How in the hell do these cretins live with themselves? Have these hypocrites no shame? It can't
be said enuff that Antifa/BLM's and (((the leftoids))) fingerprints are all over these riots.
This is the new 9-11, folks, don't believe your lying eyes. Look at some of those scraggly
people busting windows and attacking cops? Do they look like the average Trump voter? Do these
young punks scaling the walls look like the average Trump voter?
The democratic party is now pretending to "call out" the "white supremacists" in Congress.
Even if there were "white supremacists" in Congress, they would be not one bit different from
"brown supremacists", "black supremacists","yellow supremaicsts", if by "supremacists" is meant
politicians that belong to the Hispanic caucus, Black caucus or Asian caucus , ALL of whom
claim to be looking out for the welfare of their respective group.
This is of course what is going on here. The democratic party politicians, Pelosi, Schumer,
Biden and the whole left has been race baiting against white people as a default manner of
doing politics for over sixty years now. It is the fault of the FAUX REPUBLICAN PARTY, that has
been posing as conservatives who many whites believe "have their backs", against the hate and
shenanigans the anti-white left perpetrates. THEY ARE WRONG. We see plainly now, that what the
U.S. has is a uni-party, that is left and far left and includes good old Republican RINO's, but
the left and far left is used by the elite to keep and gain control of the U.S. for their own
agenda. The idea now operating is to belittle, denigrate and cow white folks as never before,
because many of the protesters at the recent "event", scared the living bleep out of the
politicians who have simply not been representing them. The corporations and tech moguls,etc.
are not taking the side of the left because they are "better" citizens or politicians than
people on the right side of the political spectrum. They take the side of the left because that
is where these corporations know that the radical Americans are, the ones that burn, loot and
murder and therefore can be used to divide the nation for the big corporations and tech
moguls,etc. Any honest person that considers what happened at the so called violent
demonstration in D.C. knows that compared to the violence that ANTIFA, BLM and other groups
perpertrated on innocent Americans last summer, knows perfectly well that there is no
comparison. The anti-white left, enabled by the democratic party and the news media, IN SERVICE
OF THE U.S. ELITE. BURNED, LOOTED AND MURDERED THE CITIZENS OF AMERICA for months, WITHOUT A
SINGLE WORD FROM PELOSI, SCHUMER, BIDEN HARRIS, ETC.
The simple fact is that these D.C. politicians were scared shitless by some plain American
citizens, who finally felt they needed to meet these representatives that keep ignoring and
abusing them. The wrong people are being blamed here.
Before reading this article, the reader might consider the fact that there was NO COUP, by
the accepted meaning that the word "coup" denotes. Now, if the fake news media and the
democratic party want to explain the event by bending the facts and actual events to fit their
own interpretation of it, that's a problem due to their dishonesty.
The apartheid settler gang is beneath contempt. It blocks supply of vaccines for covid to
the Palestinian people and blockades their trade and freedom of travel and navigation. Like
the USA they have totally filled up with hubris and lost their way in the world.
Biden has surrounded himself with dual allegiance appointees in the critical security
agencies so that he cannot achieve peace or make progress with any of his (foolishly)
perceived enemy nations. He will find it almost impossible to negotiate in any meaningful way
with Iran or China or Russia or Iraq or Syria or pretty much any other nation that is invaded
by his armies or sanctioned by his idiot decisions or threatened by Israel's
belligerence.
The tensions have been incredibly heightened in many nations due to the coronavirus
transmission within their populations and the persistent suspicion that it has a USA origin.
Any USAi pretense of negotiating in good faith in these circumstances is virtually
impossible. All the more so when reactionaries lead both Israel and USA.
Biden is right when he says nothing will change. His ally in the middle east, Israel, has
an arsenal of formidable power sufficient to command an uncomfortable peace in any
circumstance. Yet it has no integrity to clinch a deal with anybody such is the universal
distrust of their intentions. Time and again this illegal settler state has mauled every
neighbor in a most grievous way. Every week they attack Syria with missiles! The aggrieved
neighbors will not forget or forgive the treachery. That is just how it is.
There are no statesmen in the USA or Israel with the nous or capacity to find a way
out.
Few observations on Biden, Iran and the nuclear deal.
I don't know if US will or will not return to implement it's obligations under the UNSC 2231,
nor I know if US Jewish lobby will allow that. But for sure Iran will not renegotiate for new
terms or a new deal on nuclear program secondly under no circumstances Iran will negotiate
(with anyone) her conventional military capabilities or her policies and alliances toward her
allies in the region since these are real matter of national security for Iran. But also
there are signs from Biden that should be considered. Firstly almost all Biden's national
security team are diplomats with experience negotiating with Iran that could be a signal on
policy change, secondly I believe due to strategic failure of maximum pressure to subdue Iran
and more importantly due to US' own strategic necessity to keep China and Russia away from
ME, US and EU will want to decouple or even prevent Iran from a mutual strategic necessity or
alliance with China or and Russia for that reason IMO it might be possible US will adopt a
new posture toward Iran. I also believe Iran's foreign policy in ME is basically based on her
long term interests and security with her regional alliances, multipolarity, and stability in
her region, therefore any proposal by US or EU to agitate this policy will be rejected or not
adopted by Iran.
The apartheid settler gang is beneath contempt. It blocks supply of vaccines for covid to
the Palestinian people and blockades their trade and freedom of travel and navigation. Like
the USA they have totally filled up with hubris and lost their way in the world.
Biden has surrounded himself with dual allegiance appointees in the critical security
agencies so that he cannot achieve peace or make progress with any of his (foolishly)
perceived enemy nations. He will find it almost impossible to negotiate in any meaningful way
with Iran or China or Russia or Iraq or Syria or pretty much any other nation that is invaded
by his armies or sanctioned by his idiot decisions or threatened by Israel's
belligerence.
The tensions have been incredibly heightened in many nations due to the coronavirus
transmission within their populations and the persistent suspicion that it has a USA origin.
Any USAi pretense of negotiating in good faith in these circumstances is virtually
impossible. All the more so when reactionaries lead both Israel and USA.
Biden is right when he says nothing will change. His ally in the middle east, Israel, has
an arsenal of formidable power sufficient to command an uncomfortable peace in any
circumstance. Yet it has no integrity to clinch a deal with anybody such is the universal
distrust of their intentions. Time and again this illegal settler state has mauled every
neighbor in a most grievous way. Every week they attack Syria with missiles! The aggrieved
neighbors will not forget or forgive the treachery. That is just how it is.
There are no statesmen in the USA or Israel with the nous or capacity to find a way
out.
A new JCPOA will obviously have to eliminate all sanctions. But that might not be
enough. Iran might want compensation for the economic damage done, compensation from the UK,
France, and Germany as well as the US. Moreover, Iran will want to keep its now much larger
stockpile of low-enriched uranium. It might want an even larger stockpile, and the right to
enrich to 20%, which it is now doing. A breeder reactor and a plutonium stockpile would be
nice, too.
But there are even other demands that might be made: reduction or removal of
US/NATO/Israeli forces in the Gulf; reduction or elimination of Israeli nuclear
weapons.
That train left the station.
In the past 5 years Iran re-configured it's economy into an autarcic fully industrialized,
food secure, and diversified economy. It now earns more from the sale of manufactures and
foods than from petroleum. It now manufactures AfraMax tankers, general cargo vessels, and
naval vessels. It manufactures cars and trucks, and railroad rolling stock. It built hydro
and irrigation schemes. It launches satellites into orbit.
Iran is now pressing ahead with the Arak heavy water reactor.
Khameni just banned import of NATO vaccines, and ordered the country to be vaccinated with
Iran's own vaccine.
Khameni and the hard liners will not permit Iran to rejoin or to negotiate any agreements
with the "Great Satan". Their line will be the US must show itself to be agreement capable by
rejoining the JCPOA and removing any and all sanctions while paying damages too.
Iran will increase the amount of assistance given the Houthis. Trump's declaration of the
Houthis as terrorists, benefits the resistance by solidifying their adherence to it. The
Houthis must now "go for broke" or surrender. They will not surrender.
The harsh reality is Biden/Harris will be occupied at home suppressing the MAGA crowd.
Since this group is 74 million strong, and mostly white, in a country trying to make them
second class citizens, will be quite a challenge that. The jury is still out on that one.
Then there is the not so small matter of US oil production dropping like a stone from 12
mmBbl/day to 7 by July with further drops in the following 12 months. This coupled with and
likely due to bankruptcies of a large number of producers going forward.
This is the very first time in recent US history that a small cabal of "deep insiders"
have achieved such total control of all the real instruments of power. The bad news is that
they know that they are a small minority and they realize that they need to act fast to
secure their hold on power.
I would take this as the key phrase.
When the small minority if Bolshevik radicals forced their way into power in Russia 1917,
they were also very aware that they were a small cabal of "deep insiders" and immediately set
out to arrest or simply shoot their opponents (ethnic Russians) to fortify their
dictatorship. Plus ASAP they turned this into a process of mass transportation and
imprisonment .
I would expect the new Woke US ZioGob regime to do exactly the same, and move fast against
the "deplorables".
@anarchyst hen made
public utilities available for all (obviously without compensation to the owners). No more of
the sad "private company" excuse, and no more billions into the pockets of criminals who hate
us.
Also, make Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Pichai et al. serve serious jail time for election
tampering if nothing else. Both to send out a clear warning to others, and for the simple
decency to see justice served.
Of course this will not happen short of a French Revolution-style regime shift. But since
(sadly) the same is equally true even for your extremely generous and modest proposal, I see
no harm in dreaming a little bigger.
FoxNews finally showed its true face during the election steal when it declared that
Trump had lost the election long before any evidence in support of this thesis
materialized.
For those that paid attention to Fox News, especially daytime and weekend Fox News its
true face has been obvious for some time.
It is now abundantly clear that with a few exceptions (notably Tucker Carlson), FoxNews
is very much on the same page as CNN and the rest of them.
While Carlson is not the worst on Fox News he is not a friend. His obsession with the
China bad narrative is over the top. He is playing the GOP Inc side of the Deep State
coin.
The A block last night was Carlson reiterating over and over, that he and Fox News were
against violence like that at the Capitol. He stated that violence from the left was also
wrong but that violence from the right was not the answer of course like most articles on
this blog, he didn't say what the answer was.
I've come back to salute this essay as the compendium of truth that it is. Several of the
essays here this week have been intelligent and deserving of the Unz readership.
You are most correct when you say that the current set of Nomenklatura are too weak to
sustain rule. I'd call the Big Tech oligarchy the Nickelodeon class. They have digits, which
are really nothing to be afraid of, but any small farmer in the Midwest is more powerful than
they are.
Big changes are coming and it won't take violence to effect them, just a patriotic week or
two off of the social media.
"... I have, for some time, been mis-naming the Nomenklatura as the Politburo, with the commune being the many tentacled international banking cartel. ..."
FoxNews finally showed its true face during the election steal when it declared that Trump
had lost the election long before any evidence in support of this thesis materialized. It is
now abundantly clear that with a few exceptions (notably Tucker Carlson), FoxNews is very much
on the same page as CNN and the rest of them. So what just happened and what is taking place
now?
Americans have been brainwashed into calling things they don't like, or don't understand, as
"Socialist" or even "Marxist". The sad reality is that most Americans sincerely believe that
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders are "socialists", and when they see modern movies
ridiculously filled with "minorities" and gender fluid freaks – this is a case of
"cultural Marxism" (a totally meaningless term, by the way!). This is all utter nonsense,
neither Marxism nor Socialism have anything to do with BLM, Antifa, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck
Schumer (in fact, Marxism places a premium on real law and order!). I can't take the time and
space here to discuss Marxism, but I do believe that there is one analytical tool which we can
borrow from Marxist thought to try to make sense of what just happened in the USA. Let's begin
by asking a simple question:
If "the mob" did not win, who did?
Most certainly not the abstract concept of "law and order". For one thing, it is now
abundantly clear that some cops deliberately let a (rather small) subset of protestors not only
across police lines but even inside the Capitol Building itself. That is not exactly law and
order, now is it? Furthermore, it is now also clear that Ashli Babbitt was very deliberately
shot by an (apparently black) cop who was then quickly hidden away from sight by the
authorities. Not exactly law and order either.
Neither did the abstract concept of "democracy" win anything that day. Many protesters were
recorded saying that the Capitol building belonged to the people, not to the people working in
it on behalf of the people. They are right. But even if we accept the notion that those who
entered the building were trespassing, the massive crackdown on free speech which immediately
followed the events at the Capitol is a clear sign that "democracy" did not win that day. More
about that later.
So who won?
Well, look who is celebrating and who is now demanding that punitive and even repressive
measures be taken against Trump supporters:
here
and
here ) The Russia-hating Lobby Antifa/BLM/etc The many freaks of nature leading
various "minorities" Big Tech megacorporations a la Google and Amazon
The list is longer, of course, and it includes pretty much all the folks afflicted with the
now famous Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
Our list looks like a cocktail of very different actors, but is that really the case?
I submit that if we look closely at this list of possible "winners" we can quickly see that
we are dealing with a single social category /group whose "diversity" is only apparent.
Here is what all these groups have in common:
They are numerically small, definitely a
minority They are very wealthy They are very close to the real centers of power They share the
same narcissistic (Neocon) ideology of self-worship They are driven by the same hate-based
ideology of revenge They don't care about the people of the USA They want to dismantle the US
Constitutional order
On the basis of these common characteristics, I believe that we can speak about a social
class united by a common ideology .
Now, of course, in the plutocratic oligarchy (which the United States in reality is), the
notion of "class" has been declared heretical and it has been replaced by identity politics
– the best way for a ruling class to (a) hide behind a fake illusion of pluralism and (b)
to divide the people and rule over them.
I have already written about what I consider to be a US version of the Soviet Nomenklatura , a
special ruling class which was official in the (comparatively much more honest) Soviet system
but which is always hidden from sight by the rulers of the United States.
The actual word we use are not that important: Nomenklatura , class, caste,
establishment, powers that be, deep state, etc. – they all approximate the reality of a
small gang of self-declared "elites" (as opposed to the "deplorables") ruling with total
impunity and no checks and balances mitigating their de facto dictatorship. Some
well-intentioned people began speaking about the "1%" – which is not bad, even if the
actual figure is even smaller than just one percent. Others used "Wall Street" (as in the
"occupy WS" movement), again – not a bad attempt to describe the problem. Whatever the
terms you chose, what is certain is that this entity has what Marx would call a " class
consciousness " which produces a single " class ideology " characterized by an
extremely strong sense of "us versus them" .
By the way, while I disagree with any notion that the US Nomenklatura is Marxist or
Socialist in any way, I very much agree that these "elites" are displaying an ideological
zeal very similar to what Trotskysts or Nazis typically exhibit, especially when confronted
with the "deplorables" or, like FoxNews says, the "mob" (the Polish word " bydło " – cattle
– very accurately renders this contempt for the masses).
In fact, they see us all as their "class enemy" . And they are quite correct, by the
way.
Their ideology is messianic, racist, violent and hate filled while the members of this US
Nomenklatura see themselves as the cream of the crop, the "chosen people", whose
"destiny" is to rule over the "dark and primitive" "mob".
This contempt for the "mob" is something which self-described "liberals" always try to
conceal, but which always comes out, be it in 1917 Russia or in 2021 USA. There is a weird
logic to this, by the way. It goes something like this: " we are clearly superior to the
plebes, yet these plebes seem to reject that notion, these plebes are therefore a "dark mob"
which absolutely needs to be strictly ruled by us ". The underlying assumption is that
plebes are dangerous, they can always riot and threaten "us". Hence the need for a police
state. QED.
We all remember how the Clinton gang was mega-super-sure that Hillary would easily defeat
Trump. And just to make darn sure that the US "plebes" don't do anything stupid, the US legacy
corporate ziomedia engaged in probably the most hysterical candidate bashing propaganda
operation in history only to find out that the "deplorables" did not vote as they were told to,
they voted for "Trump The New Hitler" instead.
What a truly unforgivable affront of these serfs against the masters which God, or Manifest
Destiny, placed above them!
And just as their pseudo-liberal colleagues from the past, the US liberals decided that this
vote was a slap in their face which, of course, is quite correct (I still believe that most
votes for Trump where not votes for Trump, but votes against Hillary); it was, so to speak, a
gigantic "f**k you!" from the revolting serfs against their masters. And class consciousness
told the US Nomenklatura that this was an anti-masters pogrom , a US "
Jacquerie "
if you wish. This "revolt of the serfs" had to be put down, immediately, and it was: Trump
caved to the Neocons in less than a month (when he betrayed General Flynn) and ever since the
US Nomenklatura has been using Trump as a disposable President who would do all
the crazy nonsense imaginable to please Israel, and who would then be disposed off. And yet it
is now quite clear that the US "deplorables" voted for the "wrong" candidate again! Hence the
need for a (very poorly concealed) "election steal" followed by a "test of loyalty" (you better
side with us, or else ) which eventually resulted in the situation we have today.
What is that situation exactly?
Simply put, this time the USNomenklaturahas truly achieved total
power. Not only do they control all three of the official branches of government, they now
also fully control the 4th one, the "media space", courtesy of the US tech giants which now are
openly silencing anybody who disagrees with the One And Only Official Truth As Represented By
The Propaganda Outlets. This is the very first time in recent US history that a small cabal of
"deep insiders" have achieved such total control of all the real instruments of power. The bad
news is that they know that they are a small minority and they realize that they need to act
fast to secure their hold on power. But for that they needed a pretext.
It is hardly surprising that after successfully pulling off the 9/11 false flag
operation, the USNomenklaturahad no problems whatsoever pulling off the
"Capitol" false flag.
Think about it: the legally organized and scheduled protest of Trump supporters was
announced at least a week before it had to take place. How hard was it for those in charge of
security to make sure that the protesters stay in one specific location? At the very least,
those in charge of security could have done what Lukashenko eventually did in Mink: place
military and police forces around all the important symbolic buildings and monuments and say
"you are welcome to protest, but don't even think of trying to take over any government
property" (that approach worked much better than beating up protesters, which Lukashenko
initially had tried). Yet what we saw was the exact opposite: in DC protesters were invited
across police lines by cops. Not only that, but even those protesters which did enter the
Capitol were, apparently, not violent enough, so it had to be one of the cops to shoot an
unarmed and clearly non-dangerous woman, thereby providing the "sacrificial victim" needed to
justify the hysterics about "violence" and "rule of law".
And the worst part is that it worked, even Trump ended up condemning the "violence" and
denouncing those who, according to Trump, did not represent the people.
The hard truth is much simpler: the "stop the steal" protestors did not commit any real
violence! Yes, they broke some furniture, had some fights with cops (who initially were
inviting people in, only to then violently turn against them with batons, pepper sprays and
flash-bang grenades). Some reports say that one cop was hit by a fire extinguisher. If true,
that would be a case of assault with a deadly weapon (under US law any object capable of being
used to kill can be considered a deadly weapon when used for that purpose). But considering the
nonstop hysteria about guns, the NRA and "armed militias", this was clearly not a planned
murder. Finally, a few people died, apparently from natural causes, possibly made worse by the
people trampling over each other. In other words, the Trump supporters did not kill anybody
deliberately, at most they can be accused of creating the circumstances which resulted in
manslaughter. That was not murder. Not even close. Want to see what a planned murder looks
like? Just look at the footage of the Ashli Babbitt murder by some kind of armed official. That
is real murder, and it was committed by a armed official. So which side is most guilty of
violating laws and regulations?
Furthermore, no moral value can be respected unless it is universally and equally applied.
Which, considering that the US deep state has engaged in a full year of wanton mass violence
against hundreds of innocent US citizens makes it unbelievably hypocritical for the US liberals
to denounce "the mob" now. Frankly, the way I see it, all the US liberals should now "take a
knee" before the pro-Trump protestors and declare that this was a "mostly peaceful" event
which, objectively speaking, it was .
Won't happen. I know.
What will happen next is going to be a vicious crackdown on free speech in all its
forms . In fact, and just to use a Marxist notion, what comes next is class warfare
.
We have all seen Pelosi and the rest of them demanding that Trump either be removed by Pence
and the Cabinet (25th A.), or they will unleash another impeachment. First, if impeached, Trump
won't be able to run in 2024 (which the liberals fully realize is a major risk for them). But
even more important, is to humiliate him, make him pay, show him once and for all "who is
boss"! These people thrive on revenge and victory is never enough to appease them, they simply
hate anybody who dares oppose them and they want to make an example of any and every serf who
dares to disobey them. That is why they always send "messages", no matter how inchoate: they
want to bully all the deplorables on the planet into total subservience.
But they won't stop with just Trump. Oh no! They will also go after all those serfs who
dared defy this Nomenklatura and who objected to the wholesale repudiation of the US
Constitution. For example, in a truly Orwellian move, the NY State Bar now wants to disbar
Giuliani for acting as Trump's lawyer (not a joke, check here ). Which,
considering that Trump already lost several lawyers to such tactics should not come as a
surprise to anybody: apparently, in the "new 2021 Woke-USA", some are more entitled to legal
representation than others.
Don't expect the ACLU to protest, by the way – equal protection under the law is not a
topic of interest to them. Here are a few screenshots take off their website , so see for yourself.
Clearly, the priority for the folks at the ACLU is to destroy Trump and anybody daring to
take up his defense.
One one hand, this is truly an absolute disaster, because when the US ruling
Nomenklatura agrees to drop any past pretenses of objectivity, or even decency, things
will definitely get ugly. On the other hand, however, this immense "coming out" of the US
Nomenklatura is, of course, unsustainable (just look at history, every time these folks
thought that they had crushed the "plebes", the latter ended up rising and showing their
supposed "masters" to the door; this will happen here too).
Last, but not least, let's keep another crucial thing in mind: even if you absolutely hate
Trump, you really should realize that it is not just "the vote" which was stolen, it was the
entire US Constitutional order . While we often focus on the SCOTUS, we should not remember
the many lower courts which showed a total absence of courage or dignity and which caved in to
the hysterical demands of the US Nomenklatura . It is impossible to have a country under
the rule of law when the courts shy away from their obligation to uphold the said rule of law
and, instead, place political expediency above the letter and spirit of the law.
Furthermore, when concepts such as "legal" and "illegal" lose any objective meaning, how can
any action be considered illegal or punishable?
Here is, just as an example, the Oath of Office taken by all Supreme Court Justices:
(emphasis added)
"I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect
to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich , and that I will
faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE]
under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."
And this is what each member of the US Armed Forces swears: (emphasis added)
"I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend
the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ; that
I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the
President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to
regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)."
It does not take a genius to figure out that the SCOTUS is now in the hands of a small cabal
of people who clearly are "domestic enemies" of the US Constitution.
Finally, here is what the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence states: (emphasis
added)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it , and to institute new Government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to
reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
I don't think that there is any need to further beat this dead horse and I will simply
summarize it as so:
The regime which will soon replace the Trump Administration is an illegal occupation
government, with strong ties to foreign interests (and I don't mean China or Russia here!),
which all those who served in the US military have taken an oath to oppose; this is precisely
the kind of occupation regime which the Founding Fathers foresaw in their Declaration of
Independence . Furthermore, the rule of law has clearly collapsed, at least on the
federal level, this should give the states more freedom of movement to resist the decrees of
this new regime (at least those states still willing and able to resist, I think of TX and FL
here). The leaders of this US Nomenklatura understand this, at least on some level, and we
should expect no decency from them; neither should we expect any mercy. Revenge is what
fuels these ideology- and hate-filled people who loathe and fear all the rest of humanity
because nobody is willing to worship them as our "lords and masters ". But this is also
the beginning of their end.
Conclusion: now we are all Palestinians!
True, no "mob" won on the Capitol, unless we refer to the (disgraced, hated and useless)
Congress as "the mob". And, of course, neither did "the people" or the protesters. The only
real winner in this entire operation was the US deep state and the US Nomenklatura . But
they did not win any war, only the opening battle of a war which will be much longer than what
they imagine in their ignorance.
I have said it many times, Trump really destroyed the USA externally, in terms of world
politics. The Dems have done the same thing, only internally. For example, Trump is the one who
most arrogantly ignored the rule of law in international affairs, but it was the Dems who
destroyed the rule of law inside the USA. It was Trump who with his antics and narcissistic
threats urbi et orbi who destroyed any credibility left for the USA as a country (or
even of the the AngloZionist Empire as a whole), but it was the Dems who really decided to
sabotage the very political system which allowed them to seize power in the first place.
What comes next is the illegal rule of an illegitimate regime which came to power by
violence (BLM, Antifa, Capitol false flag). This will be a Soviet-style gerontocracy with
senile figureheads pretending to be in power (think Biden vs Chernenko here). Looking at the
old, Obama-era, names which are circulated now for future Cabinet positions, we can bet on two
things: the new rulers will be as evil as they will be grossly incompetent, mostly due to their
crass lack of education (even Nuland and Psaki are back, it appears!). The Biden admin will be
similar to the rule of Kerensky in "democratic" Russia: chaos, violence, lots and lots of
speeches and total social and economic chaos. The next crucial, and even frightening, question
now is: what will replace this US version of a Kerensky regime?
It is way too early to reply to this question, but we should at least begin to think about
it, lest we be completely caught off guard.
But until then, "domestic terrorism" will, once again, become the boogeyman we will be told
to fear. And, as all good boys and girls know, the best way to deal with such a horrible
"domestic terrorism" threat is to dismantle the First and Second Amendments of the
Constitution. Having corrupt kangaroo courts on all levels, from the small claims level to the
Supreme court, will greatly help in this endeavor. Of course, there will be resistance from the
deplorables who still love their country and their Constitution.
But no matter how long this takes (might be decades) and how violent this confrontation
becomes (and, it will, if only because the regime vitally needs more false flags to survive!),
what will happen with this occupation regime is what happened to all of them throughout history
(could that be the reason why history is not taught anymore?).
As the Russian poet and bard, Vladimir Vissotski, wrote " it is impossible to trample
upon souls with boots " (сапогами
не вытоптать
душу). Now we are all Palestinians. And we, like they, will win!
"Americans have been brainwashed into calling things they don't like, or don't understand,
as "Socialist" or even "Marxist". The sad reality is that most Americans sincerely believe
that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders are "socialists", and when they see modern
movies ridiculously filled with "minorities" and gender fluid freaks – this is a case
of "cultural Marxism" (a totally meaningless term, by the way!). This is all utter nonsense,
neither Marxism nor Socialism have anything to do with BLM, Antifa, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck
Schumer (in fact, Marxism places a premium on real law and order!)."
"class" has been declared heretical and it has been replaced by identity politics
– the best way for a ruling class to (a) hide behind a fake illusion of pluralism and
(b) to divide the people and rule over them
It's a neat bait and switch scheme, identity being substituted for class. Billionaires can
now be hailed as people's champions by instituting 'gender-fluid' toilets and forcing their
peons to kneel. Who knows how much force they'll be willing to use against the deplorables
but probably it would know no limit. The shock and awe unleashed against foreign countries
could now be instituted domestically with things like the Phoenix Program being tried here,
among other things. Anything but relinquish power.
The old war-lovers are coming back in. Although he was considered belligerent the new
regime will be worse. War is probably part of the future agenda. Solidifying it's grip upon
the domestic population may be the precursor to embarking upon an unpopular and certain to be
costly war against Iran or perhaps even some clash with Russia.
From the I Ching: "Large ambitions coupled with meager talent will seldom escape
disaster."
The fervid machinations of the current crop of "self"-glorifying wannabes will not, as The
Saker reminds us here, be any exception to the rule, either. They're hardly the first bunch
of feckless opportunists to take a run at "full spectrum dominance" .aiming to trap Life
Herownself within the suffocating CONfines of their own little nut'shell.
The rampant insanity symptomatic of their virulent "self"-sickness, as it runs its
inevitable course, looks like being somewhat more than usually trying for the rest of us,
though .given all the electro-mechanical and institutional enhancement available to them, for
intensifying the degenerative effects of their folly. At the same time, our best response
will be just what we all know is always organically and in all Ways imperative for our Kind,
anyhow. All our precious attention is best devoted to taking care of the Earth and each
other. Our unconditional affection is best lavished on this Living Creation, all our
Relations, and The Great Spirit whose gift it is.
It is an Oligarchy of bond holders. I'm using the word bond as an stand-in for debt
instruments, or any sort of claim on productivity. Bond/Bondage/Debt are all closely related
concepts.
The entire Western World is inter-connected double-entry balance sheets.
One side of the balance sheet is "assets" and the other is "liabilities." One person's
liability is another persons asset.
It is best to view the western world as a balance sheet, especially as private bank credit
is the dominant money type of the west. Private banking and debt spreading has metastasized
like a cancer, and is now consuming the host. Debt instruments and finance paper are being
serviced in the finance sector with QE and 'CARES' act shenanigan's, which pays these finance
"assets."
If you want to call the bond holders in finance and elsewhere as a nomenklatura, go ahead
– but it obscures reality. These people are a class, a class of usurers, who are
"taking" wealth in sordid ways by gaming the system.
All through history, plutocracy has arisen out of the population because debts were not
annulled, or land was enclosed.
Oligarchs of various types are harvesting the world through various means, including the
growth of debt claims. These claims grow exponentially, and outside of nature's ability to
pay. The derivative bubble wants to be paid. What cannot go on, will not.
The balance sheet is not really balanced, one side (the debt instrument holder) is making
exponential claims on debtors.
Moritz Hinsch from Berlin collected what Socrates (470-399 BC) and other Athenians wrote
about debt, and the conference's organizer, Prof. John Weisweiler, presented the new view
of late imperial Rome as being still a long way from outright serfdom. The 99 Percent
were squeezed, but "the economy" grew – in a way that concentrated growth in the
hands of the One Percent . In due course this bred popular resentment that spread in
the form of debtor revolts, not only in the Roman Empire but that of Iran as well, leading
to religious reforms to limit the charging of interest and self-indulgent greed in
general.
By now Nazi references are getting thread-bare. We actually need to examine how the
national socialists operated because their situation is analogous to today.
I very much agree that these "elites" are displaying an ideological zeal very similar to
what Trotskysts or Nazis typically exhibit
National Socialism arose as a reaction to finance capitalism's excesses. The very things
we are seeing today, were present in Weimar Germany. The country was being bought up, and the
people were being denied their birthright. Self-indulgent greed of an arising Oligarchy was
smashed by the National Socialists to then re-balance German civilization.
Nazi zeal restoring civilizational balance is quite something different than leftist
bolshevism.
I have, for some time, been mis-naming the Nomenklatura as the Politburo, with the
commune being the many tentacled international banking cartel. It's the same crowd that
funded the original Bolsheviks.
IMO they are only "Neo" by virtue of the old ones having died, but I'm not going to split
hairs. We all know it is those whose loyalty is to a shitty little country on the
Mediterranean.
@Anonymous ties
extract, which makes politicians whores for their donor class. The donor class is the
"holders of debt instruments" as I explained earlier. Or, they can be part of the military
industrial complex, to then whore for more taxpayer dollars. In all cases it is for self
aggrandizement. By the same reasoning, press-titutes are whores for their paymasters.
The easy money is taken in by usury or other sordid schemes; then donated/recycled into
politicians, to then keep the game going. Average laboring people don't have this surplus
wealth to donate.
Thierry Meyssan:
...Blinded, the rest of the world did not see that the United States has reverted to what it
was in the first four years of its foundation: an oligarchic system, this time in the service
of a class of international billionaires. https://www.voltairenet.org/article211917.html
re: "Many protesters were recorded saying that the Capitol building belonged to the
people, not to the people working in it on behalf of the people. They are right."
The Clintonites touted (Trump) "not my president" . Well it's our turn now,
"Biden-not our President!' and like a wedding and marriage, the biblical phrase, "the two
become one" applies therefor, Harris isn't either!
Did I hear someone say, nuclear codes? Hello, America you've just muscled into office a
senile old dote who can't put two sentences together he's got his shaky finger the button
now
The Saker is capable of superb writing when he chains his inner imp and refuses to indulge
his adolescent GI Joe fantasies.
The essential question is: can Americans who do not understand Marxism or socialism
– and who seem in self-conscious refusal to understand – to be in a persistent,
calorie-burning state of willful ignorance and stupidity – can such Americans
self-govern?
@obwandiyag tol false
flag). This will be a Soviet-style gerontocracy with senile figureheads pretending to be in
power (think Biden vs Chernenko here). Looking at the old, Obama-era, names which are
circulated now for future Cabinet positions, we can bet on two things: the new rulers will be
as evil as they will be grossly incompetent, mostly due to their crass lack of education
(even Nuland and Psaki are back, it appears!). The Biden admin will be similar to the rule of
Kerensky in "democratic" Russia: chaos, violence, lots and lots of speeches and total social
and economic chaos. The next crucial, and even frightening, question now is: what will
replace this US version of a Kerensky regime?
The best we can hope for from President Biden's administration, is possibly a UBI of
$1,200/month granted to the legacy white populace. That guaranteed income would allow those
racists a modest diet, heat in the winter, some gasoline to drive their vehicles and some
basic medical care.
Joseph Biden has been in public service now for nearly 60 years. He's seen the
inequalities, the systemic racism throughout his career. The nation is fortunate that he's
still alive and possesses the energy and conviction to finally change things.
He's a wonderful man, with a gigantic heart and the will to put this country right. Also,
his spouse, Dr. Jill Biden, along with their son, Hunter (an heroic figure himself) will
guide the nation forward.
Pompeo's last shouts before he competes with Condie Rice on making conferences about
'evil' and 'nefarious' Iran.
Trump and Pompeo are now deflated balloons...
@Observator the state
legislatures. They mandated that election law be set by those same legislatures. They set up
the whole rigmarole of the Electoral College with multiple stages of certification, and set
the inauguration for March to leave enough time to sort out election controversies. All of
these have of course been either eliminated, ignored or watered down enough to make the
certification process simply pro forma . Apparently no one has standing to challenge
anything.
The founders could do little about secret societies. They were already a staple of 18th
Century society and subverting everything. Right across the political spectrum.
@Jake of usurping the
Catholic Church's lands within England which made them fabulously rich, only to apply the
same strategy to any tribe or nation to be subdued into the British Empire. This same class,
by confiscating most of the lands in England, pushed the pleb into utmost poverty. Since the
US government is only nominally independent from the 'city' in London, the term Anglo Zionist
is the best abbreviation to a stark reality. And BTW, I do not implicate most Jews as
Zionists even though many of them think wrongly that they belong to the club. Anyone
remembers Joe Biden's pleading to Netanyahu ' you don't have to be Jewish to be a Zionist".
"... I hate virtually all of Trump's policies. I hate his stupidity in continually hiring people who hated him. He could have turned to members of the genuine left -- men such as Stephen Cohen -- for advice. ..."
"... n a classic act of projection, woke Dems accuse Trump of not conceding, whereas in fact they are the ones who never conceded the presidency in 2016. This is so obvious, and yet it has apparently become invisible to most!!! Memory hole opened up like a crack in the earth behind each step. ..."
"... The gullibility of Trump is astounding. He did everything to keep the swamp happy, to keep Israel happy, flipped on Nato and on Russia, had hawks left and right and at the end he will be discarded like a used condom. ..."
"... can't help but think that Donald Trump is a man with no common sense, lacking the real conviction of his words and just not very bright or he was to some degree willfully complicit in this now obviously dire state the U.S. finds itself. ..."
"... If anyone thinks there is some good news because this murderous, warring empire is coming to an end, I suggest you think again. The war machine is still fully intact and funded. The international bankers who are in complete control are buying up everything and are planning on a 'reset' dictated by them. To the world! Understandably, there will likely be a few countries who do not feel inclined to agree with this reset and it's terms. There will have to be war to correct this thinking, even if a billion or more are killed. The more the merrier. Less 'useless eaters' to deal with. ..."
Mr. Roberts is right on point when he says that Trump will be locked up.
The people running the United States are going to make an example of Trump. They will send
a message that no "outsider" should ever again dare to run for President.
Trump will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
I fear you are right. In this case it might be better if he weren't such a street fighter,
because standing up for himself to me isn't worth the price he will pay. He should get
himself and his family post haste to a country with no extradition and simply live the rest
of his life in peace. No one needs the vitriol that has been and will continue to be heaped
on him.
Trump _should_ spend the rest of his life behind bars -- for contributing to the deaths of
tens of thousands of human beings. Ordinary Syrians, Iranians, Cubans, and Venezuelans died
because of the murderous sanctions Washington put on their countries, and Pres. Trump did
nothing to help -- and in fact, intensified them.
Very similar to his indifference to the plight of Edward Snowden & Julian Assange.
Trump is a monster of self-centredness. In fact, in the words of his own former White House
Chief of Staff, he is 'the most damaged human being I have ever met.' Just the sort of
creature we would expect to find as head of the US empire
I'm afraid you are spot on -- Trump lies to the World when he was running for President
& then broke almost all of his promises -especially to drain the Swamp. He also
unforgivably allowed the Jews to take over Palistinian land etc. He has alot to answer for
even if he wasn't as War like as the 3 Presidents before him.
YOu re problably right, Jimmy.
But it turns out differently when one gets the point where Trump locked up prospect here is
not him but a whole lot of american people trying to get rid of globalism and the need for
wars
Who might be buried up along with him.
But not a word about the crimes of those who preceded him, which included the ultimate
crime, that of engaging in unjustified warfare?
Your post implies you have a standard of behaviour you are judging Trump by. By definition
it must be universally applied, otherwise all you are seeking is the selective imposition of
your view.
I agree. If Trump deserves lockup, so do Obama, Bush, and the Clintons.
I hate virtually all of Trump's policies. I hate his stupidity in continually hiring
people who hated him. He could have turned to members of the genuine left -- men such as
Stephen Cohen -- for advice.
But that is not the point. Since 2016 those who tried to eliminate Trump did so not for
his real crimes but for made-up. Basically his crime of being president in the first
place.
I n a classic act of projection, woke Dems accuse Trump of not conceding, whereas in
fact they are the ones who never conceded the presidency in 2016. This is so obvious, and yet
it has apparently become invisible to most!!! Memory hole opened up like a crack in the earth
behind each step.
Trump's crime, for which he may actually be locked up, was in truth just winning the
presidency in 2016 and humiliating Hillary (whom everyone hated anyhow). I am becoming quite
terrified of people I have known all my my life and even am related to.
Corrected assessment. His wealth and his 5 children (and their future) are too much of a
liability for him to do the necessary. His policy of appeasement will not work though with
the rabid bolshevik kabal.
I think he and his family will be persecuted and likely prosecuted unless the has the
foresight to move to Russia and save his skin.
The gullibility of Trump is astounding. He did everything to keep the swamp happy, to
keep Israel happy, flipped on Nato and on Russia, had hawks left and right and at the end he
will be discarded like a used condom.
Russia saw it from the get go, at the end he will have the full weight of both parties
against him, and instead of locking her up it will be the other way around. The cowards have
no sense of decency, they will not show any good will like he did.
Trump betrayed his base, failed to organize again and again, put his trust in all the
wrong people and now is done. I'll be surprised if he doesn't face jailtime on some trumped
up charges.
For all his charisma and good intentions he turned out a clueless clown, sad clown at the
end. History will not be kind, and neither will the victors.
True Americans have seen their last train leave the station, it will take time to realize
that there are no more trains. Game over.
I thought this was a good summation by Dr. Roberts. I can't help but think that Donald
Trump is a man with no common sense, lacking the real conviction of his words and just not
very bright or he was to some degree willfully complicit in this now obviously dire state the
U.S. finds itself. Maybe he owed the Rothschild clan a favour.
If anyone thinks there is some good news because this murderous, warring empire is
coming to an end, I suggest you think again. The war machine is still fully intact and
funded. The international bankers who are in complete control are buying up everything and
are planning on a 'reset' dictated by them. To the world! Understandably, there will likely
be a few countries who do not feel inclined to agree with this reset and it's terms. There
will have to be war to correct this thinking, even if a billion or more are killed. The more
the merrier. Less 'useless eaters' to deal with.
Try to see something good in creation every day. Try to do good every day. This world as
it is does not have much time. Someone said that what cannot go on forever won't! At some
point, the One who gives life to all will say it is enough. Some of us just celebrated his
most blessed nativity.
This guy biden is king of promises, and as every year goes by and so many promises are not
met, don't think these people wont show up on D.C.'s doorstep looking for revenge.
Who better to preside over the collapse of the empire? The usual rules will apply: the
feckless Dems – always at their abysmal worst when they assume power – will blame
the "evil Reps" for everything that goes wrong (and there will be plenty – although
none of it will ever be discussed publicly!), and the Reps will be at their sterling
obstructionist best. Talk of impeachment for Biden – who will be nowhere in sight for
most of his term – will linger throughout his term, while Trump will soon be prosecuted
and jailed, his entire administration canceled from the official histories, with Queen
Hillary named "Presidentess in Exile" for 2016-2020 due to alleged Russian interference with
her rightful coronation. The Empire will trumpet from on high for all to hear that this
signals the glorious victory of US Democracy (angelic chorus sounds here) over the forces of
darkness, or some such agitprop; and the skies will clear, the birds will sing, and a rosy
glow will return to the cheeks of all the fair maidens and indeterminant gendered of our
great land. The masks, of course, will remain firmly in place, as the "new normal" slowly
becomes merely business as usual, and the sheeple graze contentedly in their prison stalls,
content in the knowledge that Big Brother is looking out for their health and welfare, at
least until the ritual sacrificial slaughter of the lambs should be deemed necessary. For the
good of all, of course. Should all make for some excellent reality TV.
Well the empire is going to collapse the citizens before it collapses, and even before the
empire collapse comes a global scare of epic proportions to shake and rattle the cage for
those whom are not prepared.
Trump isn't going anywhere. I was at the rally in DC and listened to his
entire speech on the ellipse. He stated that he would not concede. With
this assurance why would the demonstrators have any reason to aggressively
breach the Capitol building? The whole thing was a staged provocation by antifa.
There are videos of how this was staged all over the internet. Let us all
hope and pray that the Scarlet(Whore) color revolution against Trump is finally
eradiated and extirpated now that all the Deep Satanists have been exposed for
their participation in the coup and election fraud.
The question has been asked – what is the US military going to do? Will they just
stay put and watch the theft unfold?
Whilst many commentators were soiling themselves in phantasies of a pro trump military coup
to end the charade, drain the swamp and burn down DC, PCR had a very clear view (expressed
elsewhere): why would the military object to a new leadership if it promises more war, more
blood, more money? It won't, it will welcome it in fact.
Be it as it may, and despite all the stinkin' lies about the election I would think it is
too tall an order for a non-murrican to mourn the self-destruction of the most evil, ghastly,
ruthless hegemon the world has seen in the last 100 years.
I second the sentiment. It's not even that. The media are full of Muricans' moaning about
their fate. It's everywhere – and on top of that, the scumbags are accusing China and
Russia for their "tribulations".
We don't care and we don't want to hear about how hard the life is for Billy Bob who would
die for the very criminals that have condemned him to a life of meth, moonshine and
malingering – while telling him that he is solely responsible for his own miserable
existence.
There is a huge big world elsewhere that is currently booming – thousand flowers are
blooming despite the oppression by the parasitical cancerous sub-empire – and yet, we
obsess over whether Trump is a fraud or not.
I suppose it provides a great platform for ranting :-)
Hi Ah,
That the US deep state has been terrorising parts of the world for many years my reaction
before the election was to hope that Biden would win as I believed that would be the quickest
destruction of the terrorist deep state rather than with Trump where I believed it would
survive some time longer. It is inconceivable that any political party can survive in the US
without the backing of the 'deep state'.
Of course this makes the nuclear option more likely yet democrats are more attached to
their lives than many others since the profit motive looms larger.
Secondly the US owes the pension and social security systems so much money they do not
have unless they print, print and more print and hope someone will buy their bonds (over 100
trillion for the next 'x' years). That is not going to happen. That is why both political
parties will not endorse medicare for all or any further social security programmes. Those
with money insurance industries et al will run away to Australia that has more gold than it
knows what to do with the Chinese are now trying to buy Aussie gold mines. Wonder why?
To sum up the US population will experience some of the same terrorism tacticts the deep
state exported to the rest of the world while the same population will wonder why it is
happening to them just like some of the middle east countries wondered the same for the last
20 years. That the deep state and the army offer pensions and heathcare will not matter if
the funds are not there.
What are the options for the citizens that always believed in capitalism and Jesus and were
the single moral compass for the rest of humanity? After living in a Buddist country for many
years I am not so certain.
"... The military would support whomever pays their salary and their pensions, i.e. the Establishment. However, as Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, the U.S. military, while possessing remarkable firepower when taken on directly and openly, is quite vulnerable. The U.S. military is essentially mercenaries. Mercenaries work for pay. Mercenaries are not willing to die for a cause. You can't spend money if you're dead. ..."
As a person who grew up in the glorious aftermath of World War II, it never occurred to me
that in my later years I would be pondering whether the United States would end in civil war or
a police state. In the aftermath of the stolen presidential election, it seems a 50-50 toss
up.
There is abundant evidence of a police state. One feature of a police state is controlled
explanations and the suppression of dissent. We certainly have that in abundance.
Experts are not permitted forums in which to challenge the official position on Covid.
Teachers are suspended for giving offense by using gender pronouns.
Recording stars are dropped by their recording studios for attending the Trump rally.
Parents ratted on by their own children are fired from their jobs for attending the Trump
rally. https://www.rt.com/usa/512048-capitol-riot-employees-fired/
Antifa is free to riot, loot, intimidate and hassle, but Trump supporters are
insurrectionists.
White people are racists who use hateful words and concepts, but those who demonize whites
are righting wrongs.
Suppression of dissent and controlling behavior are police state characteristics. It might
be less clear to some why dictating permissible use of language is police state control. Think
about it this way. If your use of pronouns can be controlled, so can your use of all other
words. As concepts involve words, they also can be controlled. In this way inconvenient
thoughts and expressions along with accurate descriptions find their way into the Memory
Hole.
With the First Amendment gone, or restricted to the demonization of targeted persons, such
as "the Trump Deplorables," "white supremacists," "Southern racists," the Second Amendment
can't have much life left. As guns are associated with red states, that is, with Trump
supporters, outlawing guns is a way to criminalize the red half of the American population that
the Establishment considers "deplorable." Those who stand on their Constitutional right will be
imprisoned and become cheap prison labor for America's global corporations.
Could all this lead to a civil war or are Americans too beat down to effectively resist?
That we won't know until it is put to the test.
Are there clear frontlines? Identity Politics has divided the people across the entire
country. The red states are only majority red. It is tempting to see the frontiers as the red
center against the blue Northeast and West coasts, but that is misleading. Georgia is a red
state with a red governor and legislature, but there were enough Democrats in power locally to
steal the presidential and US senate elections.
Another problem for reds is that large cities -- the distribution centers -- such as
Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los
Angeles -- are in blue hands as are ports and international airports. Effectively, this cuts
reds off from outside resources.
What would the US military do? Clearly, the Joint Chiefs and the military/security complex
are establishment and not anti-establishment Trumpers. With the soldiers themselves now a
racial and gender mix, the soldiers would be as divided as the country. Those not with the
Establishment would lack upper level support.
Where are the youth and younger adults? They are in both camps depending on their education.
Many of the whites who went to university have been brainwashed against themselves, and regard
white Americans as "systemic racists" or "white supremacists" and feel guilt. Those who did not
go to university for the most part have experienced to their disadvantage the favoritism given
to people of color and have resentment.
What about weapons? How can the reds lose when guns are a household item and blues would
never dirty themselves by owning one? The answer is that unlike the War of Northern Aggression
in the 1860s, today the weapons in the hands of the military are devastating compared to those
in the hands of the public. Unlike in the past, it is impossible for a citizens' militia to
stand against the weapons and body armor that the military has. So, unless the military splits,
the reds are outgunned. Never believe that the Establishment would not release chemical and
biological agents against red forces. Or for that matter nuclear weapons.
What about communications? We know for an absolute fact that the tech monopolies are aligned
with the Establishment against the people. So much so that President Trump, in the process of
being set-up for prosecution, has been cut off from communicating with his supporters both in
social media and email.
The American Establishment is doing to President Trump exactly what it did to Ukrainian
President Yanukovych in Washington's orchestrated "Maidan Revolution," called "the Revolution
of Dignity" by the liars at Wikipedia, and precisely what it did to Chavez, Maduro, and would
like to do to Putin.
Suppose an American civil war occurs. How is it likely to play out? Before investigating
this, first consider how the Establishment could prevent it by bringing the red states to its
defense. The Trump supporters are the only patriots in the American population. They tend to
wear the flag on their sleeve. In contrast, blue state denizens define patriotism as
acknowledging America's evils and taking retribution on those white racists/imperialists who
committed the evils. In blue states, riots against the "racist system" result in defunding the
police. If the Antifa and Black Lives Matter militias were sicced on the Biden regime, red
state patriots might see "their country" under attack. It is possible that the "Proud Boys"
would come to Biden's defense, not because they believe in Biden but because America is under
attack and he is "our president." Alternatively, an Antifa attack on the Biden regime could be
portrayed as an unpatriotic attack on America and be used to discourage red state opposition to
the police state, just as "Insurrection" has resulted in many Trump supporters declaring their
opposition to violence. In other words, it is entirely possible that the patriotism of the
"Trump Deplorables" would split the red state opposition and lead to defeat.
Assuming that the Establishment is too arrogant and sure of itself or too stupid to think of
this ploy, how would a civil war play out? The Establishment would do everything possible to
discredit the case of the "rebels." The true rebels, of course, would be the Establishment
which has overthrown the Constitutional order, but no media would make that point. Controlling
the media, the Establishment, knowing of the patriotism of its opponents, would portray the
"rebels" as foreign agents seeking to overthrow American Democracy.
The "foreign threat" always captures the patriot's attention. We see it right now with Trump
supporters falling for the disinformation that Switzerland and Italy are behind the stolen
election. Previously, it was Dominion servers in Germany and Serbia that did the deed.
On whose head will the Establishment place the blame for "the War Against America"? There
are three candidates: Iran, China, and Russia. Which will the Establishment choose?
To give Iran credit conveys too much power to a relatively small country over America. To
blame Iran for our civil war would be belittling.
To blame China won't work, because Trump blamed China for economically undermining America
and Trump supporters are generally anti-China. So accusing the red opposition with being China
agents would not work.
The blame will be placed on Russia.
This is the easy one. Russia has been the black hat ever since Churchill's Iron Curtain
speech in 1946. Americans are accustomed to this enemy. The Cold War reigned from the end of
World War II until the Soviet Collapse in 1991. Many, including retired American generals,
maintain that the Soviet collapse was faked to put us off guard for conquest.
When the Establishment decided to frame President Trump, the Establishment chose Russia as
Trump's co-conspirator against American Democracy. Russiagate, orchestrated by the CIA and FBI,
ensured for three years that Trump was accused in the Western media of being in cahoots with
Russia. Despite the lack of any evidence, a large percentage of the American and world
population was convinced that Trump was put into office by Putin somehow manipulating the
vote.
The brainwashing was so successful that three years of Trump sanctions against Russia could
not shake the Western peoples back into factual reality.
With Russia as the historic and orchestrated enemy, whatever happens in the United States
that can be blamed elsewhere will be blamed on Russia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former US
Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes
have already associated "Trump's insurrection" with Russia. https://www.rt.com/russia/512071-capitol-violence-consequences-fear/
Suppose that an American civil war becomes intense. Suppose that the Establishment's
propaganda against Russia becomes the reigning belief as propaganda almost always becomes, how
can the Establishment not finish the insurrection threat by attacking the country responsible?
The Establishment would be trapped in its own propaganda. Emotions would run away. Russia would
hear threats that would have to be taken seriously.
You can bet that Biden's neocon government will be egging this on. American exceptionalism.
American hegemony. Russia's fifth column, the Atlanticist Integrationists, who wish absorption
into the degenerate and failing Western World, will echo the charges against Russia. This would
make the situation a serious international incident with Russia as the threatened villain.
What would the Kremlin do? Would Russia's leaders accept yet another humiliation and false
accusation? Or will the anger of the Russian people forever accused and never stood up for by
their own government force the Kremlin into awareness that Russia could be attacked at any
moment.
Even if the Kremlin is reluctant to acknowledge the threat of war, what if another of the
numerous false warnings of incoming ICBMs is received. Unlike the past, is it believed this
time?
The stolen election in America, the emerging American Police State, more vicious and better
armed than any in the past, could result in American chaos that could be a dire threat to the
Russian Federation.
What Trump and his supporters, and perhaps the Kremlin, do not understand is that real
evidence no longer counts . The Establishment makes up the evidence that it needs for its
agendas. Consider how easy it was for the Capitol Police to remove barriers and allow some
Antifa mixed in with Trump supporters into the Capitol. This was all that was required to
create a "Trump led insurrection" that terminated the presentation of evidence of electoral
fraud and turned the massive rally of support for Trump into a liability. Trump now leaves the
presidency as an "insurrectionist" and is set up for continued harassment and prosecution.
As I previously wrote, the stolen election and its acceptance abroad signifies the failure
of Western democracy. The collapse of the Western world and its values will affect the entire
world.
No member of the State wants to be picked off one by one, be it military, cops, leadership
or functionaries.
What has been overlooked in the debate over the combat potential of violent extremists
is the diffusion of something much more rudimentary and potentially more lethal: basic
infantry skills. These include coordinated small-team tactical maneuvers supported by
elementary marksmanship. The diffusion of such tactics seems to be underway, and it may
generate serious concerns for U.S. security policy in the future if ignored.
Imagine if fuel pipe lines to urban areas were hit, railroad tracks hit, water processing
facilities hit; the vision of an easy victory over Red America would quickly come home to the
city dwellers.
Elections in the US are not about picking winners. They are about making voters complicit
in governance by their having voted. The most recent election failed to make the Red voters
"complict" because there was no transparency and everyone believes there was fraud. No
election with mail in voting in the US will every work because everyone will assume
fraud.
In a nation as large as the US with as much concentrated city living, logistics are a
nightmare. The next time the lights go out, you may wonder. When your grocery chain runs out
of meat, you may wonder. When sewers in your city keep breaking, you may wonder. Thus truly
scares me.
today the weapons in the hands of the military are devastating compared to those in the
hands of the public
True enough. However, the weapons and the ammunition don't magically appear; they need to
be manufactured somewhere, and those places (and/or their suppliers) can be destroyed.
I must disagree. There will be no "civil war" in the United States. The establishment
controls the levers of power and all communications and all organized structures. There may
be a bunch of disaffected citizens, but they will remain a disorganized mob. Any apparent
emergent rival for power will be ruthlessly suppressed, deplatformed, villified, or co-opted.
The working class has been effectively divided and will waste its energy fighting itself over
crumbs ('diversity').
Disorganized mobs do not fight civil wars.
No, the fate of the United States will be the sort of chaotic autocracy we see in places
like Mexico and Brazil. Verging on being a failed state, the rich will nonetheless live lives
of great luxury secure in their walled estates. Meanwhile the average person will be crushed
into poverty, criminal gangs will flourish, and there will be a tension between the central
police and local gangs, but gangs are rarely organized enough to truly challenge centralized
states, and life will muddle on. There will be little social cohesion and no real trust of
central authorities, but that only matters if you want a strong and unified society. The rich
will do fine.
On the other hand, the overall national power will decline, and other powers like China
(which for all its flaws has not declared war on the working class, nor does it routinely
excuse or celebrate incompetence in leadership) will rise and take its place both on the
world stage and as the cutting edge of science and culture.
to me the biggest outcome of this faux coup/insurrection is the splintering of the
republican party. with this schism the trump "populists" have been cleanly pared off of the
party and thrown overboard and the remaining party will meekly do the bidding of the neocon
deep state that now totally controls both of these sock puppet parties. we will now see both
parties calling for a unification of our "indispensable nation". more than likely some false
flag will provide the necessary impetus to bury the hatchet and focus us all on our new/old
enemy. the only hope i see is an outside chance that so many republicans have been redpilled
that the party becomes the new whigs and fades into obscurity, leaving room for new parties
to rise from the ash. the dems are ripe for a schism themselves with aoc champing at the bit
to kick the boomers to the curb and the bernie bros finally realizing that three card monty
is a rigged game. i would love to see the destruction of both of these hopelessly corrupt
parties but the deep state cthulhu has its tentacles thoroughly wrapped around our poor
planet and anything emerging out of this toxic mess would most likely be even worse. the
situation reminds me of voltaire's candide and his sage advice to cultivate your garden.
I'd advise the young to develop a "plan B". Pick another country you find bearable amd
study it. Find out what jobs are in demand there. Develop those skills in your spare time
(computers, electricians, mechanics, etc.). Practice their language an hour or two per week
with online resources/dvd's/books. Research their immigration laws and perhaps contact their
embassy.
If it gets really awful for whites here, you may be able to take your family some place
more hospitable. Hopefully none of this will be neccessary and the rhetoric will tone down.
Trump personally really got under the left's skin. Don't umderestimate Hillary's supporters
influence here. They were ticked off. The Obama's too. Perhaps they will calm down a notch
now. Have a plan B though young whites.
Another insightful article by PCR. However, I must somewhat disagree on some points.
What would the US military do?
The military would support whomever pays their salary and their pensions, i.e. the
Establishment. However, as Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, the U.S. military, while
possessing remarkable firepower when taken on directly and openly, is quite vulnerable. The
U.S. military is essentially mercenaries. Mercenaries work for pay. Mercenaries are not
willing to die for a cause. You can't spend money if you're dead.
Think of the Troubles in Ireland.
The Establishment absolutely can deliver a punch to an identifiable opponent, but it can't
take a punch. Low level violence directed at officers and politicians would bring them to
their knees.
Controlling the media, the Establishment, knowing of the patriotism of its opponents,
would portray the "rebels" as foreign agents seeking to overthrow American Democracy.
I agree that they will try. However, I suspect that PCR is underestimating how little
faith many whites have in the media.
The Establishment will never be more powerful than it is today. They have inherited
institutions, the people to man those institutions and a generally functioning economy.
Basically, they stole the keys to car that they didn't create. But the Establishment run
those institutions and economy into ground. They will slowly start to show cracks.
Whites need to stay low, start forming small groups and begin preparing for the openings
that will come.
The racial right has been fantasizing about a civil war since forever, but I can't see it.
Too many people have too much to lose, there's no real desire for blood, and the people are
anyway too soft to initiate or withstand the violence real war would unleash upon them.
Further, and in stark contrast to the SJWs and antifa, the few racially conscious whites who
fantasize about this are mostly too old to make good soldiers. Also, just like the "God
emperor" himself, Trumpers are some of the stupidest people on the face of the earth, largely
down with their own enslavement, nauseatingly fond of "law and order", sporting "Blue Lives
Matter" badges, etc. Despite being preyed upon by blacks and browns for decades now, they
still refuse to become racist. Most of them are Bible thumpers who really believe that race
is just skin color, that all are equal before their imaginary friend called God, and that
Israel is America's greatest ally. Then too, vast numbers of whites work for the government
or its many offshoots such as education, law enforcement, the military, and the defense
industry. Civil war would mean they'd be revolting against themselves.
Will America become a police state? In case you haven't noticed, Americans already
live in a police state, and have for decades. PCR should know this as well as anyone, as he
was part of it during the Reagan years. America is an open-air prison Americans built
themselves, and they rat each other out and betray each other to keep themselves
ideologically in line. When someone white is doxxed and fired for having bad thoughts, who do
you think does the enforcing? For the most part, it's other white people. Fake president and
China asset Biden is just the new warden.
As a person who grew up in the glorious aftermath of World War II, it never occurred to
me that in my later years I would be pondering whether the United States would end in civil
war or a police state. In the aftermath of the stolen presidential election, it seems a
50-50 toss up.
In a very meaningful sense we already have a "police state." Why do we have a police
state? Because our masters realize that they can't run the whole world from anything
resembling a constitutional republic (as the Founders and Framers envisioned it). It's the
agenda for complete world domination and control that's driving the domestic oppression. As
they continue to squander everything of value on the agenda and take more risks, etc., while
the corruption and rot continue to take a toll and the country crumbles, the boot will need
to come down ever harder on the neck.
And please stop kidding yourself about Trump. It wasn't for the benefit of Joe and Jill
Sixpack that he seized Syrian oilfields, tried to start a war with Iran, tried to overthrow
the Maduro government in Venezuela, tried to stop Nord Stream 2, started a trade war with
China, pulled out of all the nuclear treaties, etc. Trump wasn't just fully onboard with the
agenda, he pursued it enthusiastically.
If Trump's nuclear brinkmanship and aggressive foreign policies aren't promptly reversed,
the U.S. may end as a pile of nuclear ash. Comments coming out of Moscow recently seem to
suggest that Russia is finally losing its patience with interminable U.S. hostility and may
soon start responding more forcefully to U.S./NATO provocations (and Biden's tough talk on
Russia isn't helping matters any).
Neither Russia, China nor Iran are going to surrender to the USraeli empire and start
taking orders, so either the U.S. "government" must back off and accept a multipolar world or
WW3 is still on the table, even by accident.
From Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.
The Civil War in Corcyra
"So savage was the progress of this revolution, and it seemed all the more so because it
was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the
Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state – democratic leaders
trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans. In peacetime
there would have been no excuse and no desire for calling them in, but in time of war, when
each party could always count upon an alliance which would do harm to its opponents and at
the same time strengthen its own position, it became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a
change of government to call in help from outside.
So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred
late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new
extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing
power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words,
too, had to change their usual meanings . What used to be described as a thoughtless act
of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to
think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea
of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character ; ability to
understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.
Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back
was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be
trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of
intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to
provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out
of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first
against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of
doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership ,
since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These
parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power
by overthrowing the existing regime ; and the members of these parties felt confidence in
each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were
partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from
giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical
effect.
As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character
throughout the Greek world . The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the
mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist.
Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps , and each side viewed
the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given
that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to
the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead
of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against
being injured themselves."
Whether civil war as we may imagine it, or something equally unappealing to our every day
lives, something bad is about to happen.
I'm curious though, regarding what I do believe was unprecedented election fraud. How is
it possible, after watching the Georgia State Farm arena video, that the President of the
United States, with all the power that office should hold, could not force the woman
identified in that video, one Ruby Freeman, to answer questions about what we saw? Ruby
Freeman was never questioned as far as I can find. How is this possible? Nothing makes sense.
Before we begin killing one another, can we do two things; 1. Interrogate Ruby Freeman and 2.
Interrogate the killer of Ashli Babbit?
Little bit feverish article. And I do have to say no.
Civil war can happen only after hyperinflation accompanied with lawlessness.
And that will happen only if US looses its international position.
Everything depend now on Germany.
If Germany joins China Russia camp than US as a world leader will not mean anything
anymore.
China now is courting Europe intensively. Particularly is courting Germany.
Nothing is set yet.
So everybody can relax.
.
Biden is out of his mind. In his speech he said that he wants to increase minimum wage and
reestablish unions. That could be a little help also.
People living in the core areas of Ziocorporate globalism, like the US/EU, remain mostly
oblivious about the nature of their ruling regime than those living in the direct periphery
of globalist power. Take Colombia for an example, like Mexico's, all its presidents are
subservient to US Ziocorporate power. Last one, a Nobel peace prize winner under whose
pre-presidential stint as "Defense" minister oversaw the US-serving Colombian military's
systematic massacre of tens of thousands of lower class Colombian youths who were then
disguised as guerrillas to cash in rewards paid US Plan Colombia dollars, proceeded, now as
president, to negotiate the disarmament of the actual guerrillas under the Obama/Biden
regime's orders. Massmurder and massacres maintained an average level.
Then, in 2018, right after the Trumpet, a shamelessly pro-US regime, even for Colombian
standards, took over and massacres and massmurder picked right up again, to an average of 2
or 3 per week, with exploding cocaine production even for Colombia standards as well, and
extreme political polarisation, and all the while the Ziocorporate mother ship in Washington,
with its Qtard and MAGA bullshit, looked the other way except to accuse Venezuela of being
undemocratic and of human rights violations.
If Americans weren't so stupid and daydreaming like fucktards that they live in "muh
democracy/republic" instead of the Ziocorporate conglomerate regime that rules over them,
they could take a clue or two from their own regime's foreign policy, not only did Trumpet do
things like transferring $400 billion in weapons to ISIS/al-Qaeda royal Salafi patrons in
Ziodi Wahhabia, he doubled-down on the Obama/Biden policy of Venezuela "is a national
security threat to muh democracy and freedom"; to start pondering about the kind of
manipulation and radicalisation Ziocorporate agents Trump/Republicans and Biden/Democrats
have in store for them. Cointelpro certainly mutates far faster than Covid-1984.
What do Qtarts and the like need to realise this simple, evident facts? That the Trumpet
himself comes on national TV telling you all "I and the Democrats have been playing divide
and conquer with you dumbfucks for 4 years"?
The American Establishment is doing to President Trump exactly what it did to Ukrainian
President Yanukovych in Washington's orchestrated "Maidan Revolution," called "the
Revolution of Dignity" by the liars at Wikipedia, and precisely what it did to Chavez,
Maduro, and would like to do to Putin.
What Trump and his supporters, and perhaps the Kremlin, do not understand is that
real evidence no longer counts . The Establishment makes up the evidence that it
needs for its agendas.
Their playbook "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals" by Saul D.
Alinsky, makes it clear that it's necessary to play dirty. This covers all aspects of their
Regime Change projects and the current US project surely isn't any different.
It's a cocktail of lies, fabrications, subversion, threats, blackmail, false friendships
– in fact any means to advance themselves.
For example: From Alinsky – "Means and Ends" His take on morality:
Rule 10) You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.
Rule 11) Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", "Of
the Common Welfare, "Pursuit of Happiness" or "Bread and Peace".
So yes, this is why the most unpatriotic Patriot Act is called the Patriot Act and they
operate from patriotic sounding places like the American Enterprise Institute.
If traditional America is going to get anywhere in the upcoming conflict they have to get
used to playing by the same rules – difficult for them – but they have to do it.
It's inevitably going to be a dirty war.
Point of order- Russia is not the historic enemy, but the orchestrated one, rather it was
the Soviet Union which is the historic enemy, as the sponsors of the destruction of Russia
are behind the destruction of America.
We are already in a police state and you can kiss goodbye to the 1st and 2nd amendment
soon as free speech becomes hate speech just like they did in Europe.
So this site and many others in the alt news universe will soon be gone.
There's not going to be a civil war as the current generation of young people are too weak
and distracted and have been brainwashed into hating themselves.
There's a big elephant in the room and wild card that's been missed too and that's the new
covid vaccines who's long term effects on health are unknown.
Vaccines need to be studied for about 10 years before their safety can be guaranteed.
If tens / hundreds of millions are willing to be injected with a new untested genetic
engineered substance that could make them disabled or kill them in 5 years to save them
against something with a 99% survival rate what does that tell you about the mental state of
the Population?
The US as you once knew it is finished it's just that many are still in denial or haven't
realized it yet.
I see no civil war in the USA. I see no organisation amongst the people in order to carry
it out. They have no leader, they have no Hannibal, Boadicea or Adolf to rally them together
for a major insurrection against The Beast Empire. Unless of course something is brewing
secretly.
A French style form of resistance, as previously mentioned in these comments, also takes a
lot of planning and organisational skills, and I see no inkling of that taking place amongst
American patriots.
I also believe many do not realise how serious the matter is, they still, being bogged
down in irrelevant party politics.
If however a large swathe of the police and US Military including officers were to desert
their corrupt masters, things would look very different and a civil war could happen.
The civil was has been on since Crossfire Hurricane, the usurpers of the constitution
simply kept it cold because they thought they could enforce their tyranny silently.
And if Trump surrenders then they would have been proven right, at least for the
leadership fight.
Biden will likely launch a war because he already has his bay of pigs with his graft, and
will need a moonshot for the misdirection.
I don't think they can fight half the nation (and the military will split), and Russia at
the same time, so the only question is on whom the war will be launched. I still think the
odds are higher that it will be a civil war, but the Russia option looms strong for sure.
The US military is the most "woke" diverse incompetent organization in America.
Remember- contractors do all the heavy lifting "in theater"- from cooking to plumbing to
firefighting to IT to combat.
This knowledge is hidden from view- kept on the down low.I only know because my brother
has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan for KBR for the past 15 years. I have seen him accumulate
well over Half a million in cash. What does he do? He makes sure the troops have water and
food. He is in logistics. For the past decade I have heard hundreds if not thousands of
stories of the jaw dropping incompetence, insouciance and laziness of the American
military.
Rank-and-file Americans, indeed no one, talks about this very real infrastructure that
props up every dumb, overweight enlisted. About 4 contractors to every enlisted.
Most of the contractors in theater are from Eastern Europe and sub Sahara Africa. If they
were given orders to release biological or chemical weapons on the American populace, as long
as the huge checks were hitting their account they would do it in a heartbeat
More than the military- fear the shadow military that knows the systems, does the work ..
And will do whatever it is asked as long as they are paid.
Their mother doesn't live here.
Everywhere we turn, diversity and hiring people from the "other" never works out.
*** Side note: My brother revealed that when blacks came back from their R&R after the
George Floyd insanity, most of them became more aggressive and entitled. Unable to do their
work because they could not stop going to report others for incidence of racism.
This includes the American black contractors and enlisted.
These are dumb young black men and women who are making $92,000 a year to move pallets
around. If they were asked to stop calling in sick every day, they would run to report their
supervisor for-
Racism.
Many whites have lost their lucrative positions or been subject to discipline for having
the audacity to ask blacks to come to work.
Pictures are self-explanatory. Google translation of texts under them follows Pictures are self-explanatory. Google translation of texts under them follows
"... Anyone now seeking national redemption by claiming to no longer support Trump must acknowledge how wrong it was... ..."
"... This narrative was intended for November 9, 2016, but Trump's upset victory foiled it. All corporate mass media in the US was primed to go all in on "Deplorable" shaming on that day in order to crush and demoralize the biggest threat to the imperial elites. Having to cross their legs and hold their shit for four years drove them mad, and now they are going to get their revenge. ..."
"... There are posters (you know who I am talking about) who insist that Trump's win in 2016 was all part of the elites' grand plan, but what have the elites gained over the last four years? Their "Project for a New American Century" has gone even more than four additional years behind schedule, on top of which the US (Elon Musk) lost Bolivia. Worse still for the elites, all of the empire's preparations for regime changes in Venezuela, Hong Kong, and Belarus have gone to waste and will likely take at least a decade to reestablish. These things take years and $billions to set up. Things have gone so poorly for the elites these last four years that many of them are now placing all of their hopes in the ridiculous fantasy of a "Great Reset" . ..."
"... As crime boss Brennan's rant makes clear the establishment's herculean task is to somehow gaslight four score millions of Americans into believing themselves to be fringe bad people in order to get them to behave as the establishment wants. Though there is some crossover, that largely doesn't include the scores of millions more who would have voted for Sanders if given the chance and who also need to be beaten into submission. ..."
A note from exCIA MobBoss John "Struggle Sessions" Brennan
https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/1348051973174652928
John O. Brennan
@JohnBrennan
Anyone now seeking national redemption by claiming to no longer support Trump must
acknowledge how wrong it was to ignore & enable his corrupt, dishonest, & divisive
agenda.
Total denunciation of a despot's legacy is necessary to eradicate any remaining
malignancy
-------
When John Brennan's got yer back you just know you're on the right side of history!!
"We've all had indiscretions in our past," he said, adding neither some drug
experimentation nor activism was a non-starter. "I would not be up here if that was
disqualifying."
He proceeded to tell the story of his test.
"I froze, because I was getting so close to coming into CIA and said, 'OK, here's the
choice, John. You can deny that, and the machine is probably going to go, you know, wacko,
or I can acknowledge it and see what happens,'" Brennan said.
He said he chose to be forthcoming.
"I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to
college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I'm
not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, 'OK,' and
when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, 'Well, I'm screwed.'"
But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that
though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities,
even then it recognized the importance of freedom.
"So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, 'I voted for the Communist Party
with Gus Hall' ... and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your
expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that's not going to be
disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government."
Well what else can you say to that other than "Gawd bless America!"
Triden @107 re: Twit by CIA crime boss " Anyone now seeking national redemption by
claiming to no longer support Trump must acknowledge how wrong it was... "
This narrative was intended for November 9, 2016, but Trump's upset victory foiled it.
All corporate mass media in the US was primed to go all in on "Deplorable" shaming on
that day in order to crush and demoralize the biggest threat to the imperial elites. Having
to cross their legs and hold their shit for four years drove them mad, and now they are going
to get their revenge.
There are posters (you know who I am talking about) who insist that Trump's win in
2016 was all part of the elites' grand plan, but what have the elites gained over the last
four years? Their "Project for a New American Century" has gone even more than four
additional years behind schedule, on top of which the US (Elon Musk) lost Bolivia. Worse
still for the elites, all of the empire's preparations for regime changes in Venezuela, Hong
Kong, and Belarus have gone to waste and will likely take at least a decade to reestablish.
These things take years and $billions to set up. Things have gone so poorly for the elites
these last four years that many of them are now placing all of their hopes in the ridiculous
fantasy of a "Great Reset" .
As crime boss Brennan's rant makes clear the establishment's herculean task is to
somehow gaslight four score millions of Americans into believing themselves to be fringe bad
people in order to get them to behave as the establishment wants. Though there is some
crossover, that largely doesn't include the scores of millions more who would have voted for
Sanders if given the chance and who also need to be beaten into submission.
The empire is losing it. When things get this dicey the elites will act like cornered dogs
and resort to the unthinkable.
The history books might portray 2020 as the calm before the storm. No matter how the
pieces land we are in interesting times.
There is nothing special about Dominion. The key question is whether computer based voting
machines have the right to exist or not. Do they do any good or they are just unnessery and ripe
with potential of new forms of fraud overhead, driven by unscrupulous lobbists? That is the
question.
The ides of using consumer (or small business office, if you wish) class software and
hardware in those machines is also open to review. Military class Sever have special OS (Trusted
Solaris, OpenBSD, etc), special mechanism to prevent manipulation of binaries (md5 checksums,
mirroring on non violate media, etc), special means to prevent abuse by rogue sysadmins (dual
sysadmin mode necessary to become root, special access rules excluding areas that should not be
manipulated (AppArmor), etc. Windows based servers an, desktops and tables are consumer class
devices that can't be secured on public network to say nothing about election network where
multiple powerful actors (including intelligence agencies; both foreign and domestic ) have
strong stimulus to interfere. This is a struggle for power and it is typically dirty.
Venezuela is a weak point for Powell. As for "there was no widespread fraud in the election"
your mileage may vary. Mail-in fraud almost certainly was "widespread" as in practiced in many
battleground states. Weakening mail-in voting laws was a part of the scheme. What role direct
manipulation of votes by appointed administrators (several at each precept and counting center
(centralize counting is ripe area for fraud, especially good, old injection of votes, just due to
total amount of votes processed), If they can act along without and external control this created
several interesting questions, which needs to be answered by relevant tech investigations.
Ability to scan the same batch of ballots several times, as several election observers
complained, also needs to be blocked, and this is not an easy thing to do.
I have impression that when invalid ballot is adjudicated by the administrator a new ballot
is printed. It looks like adjudication does not leave any paper trial or set of images to
compare. That means that recount will not detect any manipulation. If true, that opens a wide
field for manipulation of votes by rogue administrators including setting scanner to jekect more
votes then nessesary creaing a pool of votes to manipulate. .
She has claimed that the company was created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late
leader Hugo Chavez and that it has the ability to switch votes.
There was no widespread fraud in the election, which a range of election officials across
the country including Trump's former attorney general, William Barr, have confirmed. Republican
governors in Arizona and Georgia, key battleground states crucial to Biden's victory, also
vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges
from Trump and his allies have been dismissed by judges, including two tossed by the Supreme
Court, which includes three Trump-nominated justices.
The company said there "there are mountains of direct evidence that conclusively disprove
Powell's vote manipulation claims against Dominion -- namely, the millions of paper ballots
that were audited and recounted by bipartisan officials and volunteers in Georgia and other
swing states, which confirmed that Dominion accurately counted votes on paper ballots."
Dominion said that when it formally told Powell her claims were false and asked her to
retract them, she "doubled down," using her Twitter account with more than 1 million followers
to amplify the claims.
US
President Donald Trump has been banned from most social media platforms, supposedly for
inciting riots at the Capitol. But with no one capable of holding the tech behemoths to
account, even fervent Trump-haters should worry.
Twitter permanently banned the president from its platform on Friday, following in the
footsteps of Facebook, Snapchat, Twitch, and other platforms that used Wednesday's riot at the
Capitol as an excuse to do what much of Silicon Valley has wanted to do for years.
But it wasn't Trump's on-platform conduct that was the problem, according to Twitter –
it was "how [his tweets] are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter," a post
on the company's blog declared on Friday. The platform then interpreted two seemingly innocuous
tweets – regarding not attending Democrat President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration and
giving his fans a "GIANT VOICE long into the future" – as a call to arms directed
at his supporters, far out-crazying the so-called "conspiracy theorists" Twitter has
also sought to deplatform.
Logically speaking, it's impossible for anyone – especially a public figure like Trump
– to control how his words are being interpreted, or even who's reading them to begin
with. For Twitter to translate the president's praise of his supporters and promise not to
attend his successor's inauguration into a call for violence requires a full-on break with
reality.
But platforms like Twitter, and especially Facebook, have been declaring all-out war on
reality for years now, merely ramping up hostilities in the wake of the Capitol riot. On
Facebook, even just sharing footage of Wednesday's riot was off-limits, as was posting Trump's
speech to his supporters. Any call for further protests, no matter how peaceful, was also
targeted for removal.
These platforms' notorious echo chambers have no room for dissenting narratives, whether it
concerns the Capitol protests or the growing contingent of Covid-19 dissenters crying foul as
lockdowns drag on (and cases go up) with no end in sight. And while a Trump-scale individual
may be able to create their own means of addressing the people, thousands of others have been
wiped out over the past year for political or public-health wrongthink.
The narrative managers are unlikely to stop at wiping their ideological nemeses off the
internet, either.
Perhaps emboldened by social media's iron-fisted approach to building its own alternate
reality, New Jersey assemblyman Paul Moriarty has been lobbying cable TV providers to stop
carrying conservative channels like Newsmax, OANN, and Fox News.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley (R) had a book deal revoked for
challenging the results of November's elections.
Social media, once sold as a tool for promoting democracy and giving ordinary people a voice
they previously lacked, revealed its true identity over the course of 2020. Whether attempting
to delete records of an entire event, as Facebook has done with the Capitol protests, or
memory-holing inconvenient
facts about the Covid-19 pandemic, the 'new and improved' reality crafted by the media
establishment provides the ideal foundation for the police state being constructed around the
human mind.
The average person might go through life unaware this invisible thought-barrier is even
there – but anyone who steps out of line is quickly zapped back into obedience. And if
they refuse to cooperate even then? Deplatforming, in an age where face-to-face contact has
gone the way of the dodo, is the modern equivalent of 'disappearing' dissidents in broad
daylight.
Indeed, these platforms have merged with government in too many ways to count here. Those
who express political 'wrongthink' online aren't just disappeared from the digital public
square – they can be barred from supposedly apolitical apps like AirBnB, or even
denied the use
of their bank accounts.
The US constitution does not permit the government to punish individuals who aren't even
suspected of committing a crime. Nor does it permit the suppression of lawful speech or allow
authorities to paw through private citizens' lives in the hope of turning up something
incriminating. But private corporations – as the neoliberal center never tires of
reminding us – can do what they like, including depriving Americans of their First and
Fourth Amendment rights. Such capabilities explain why Washington has looked the other way for
so many years while Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon became preposterously huge, insanely
profitable monopolies.
But the joke's on the government, in this case. With hundreds of billions of dollars at
their disposal, and a user-base trained to embrace their mental slavery with a positively
Pavlovian response, Big Tech seems to have realized it no longer has to pretend to play nice
with Big Government.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies
began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in
American media.
Media firms work backward. They first ask, "How does our target demographic want to
understand what's just unfolded?" Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to
emphasize.
What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc . era, when
this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population.
For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the
development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox -led
discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas,
the concept of a "Just the facts" newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.
News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal,
funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring
back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland
Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for "
economic
reasons. " The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as
a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.
Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none
other than Mitch McConnell
put it last week , a country:
Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate
realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for
the few national institutions that we all still share.
The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the
assumption that at least half their potential audience isn't listening. This leads to all sorts
of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it
negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into
inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.
Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start,
abandoning its supposed fealty to "family values" from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without a
thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of pseudo-respectability Fox had
always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers started to bail in
horror, as they did with Glenn Beck ). He
reinvented Fox as a platform for Trump's conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than
let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the
ads to Trump's voters for four years.
In between its titillating quasi-porn headlines ("
Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting To Get Hands on Lindsay Lohan, Inmate Says " is one from years
ago that stuck in my mind), Fox 's business model has long been based on scaring the crap out
of aging Silent Majority viewers with a parade of anything-but-the-truth explanations for
America's decline. It villainized immigrants, Muslims, the new Black Panthers,
environmentalists -- anyone but ADM, Wal-Mart, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, and other sponsors
of Fortress America. Donald Trump was one of the people who got hooked on Fox's narrative.
The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to the last
election by looking harder at the tensions they didn't see coming in Trump's America, which
might have meant a more intense examination of the problems that gave Trump his opening: the
jobs that never came back after bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor
zones in places like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous contradiction
of an expanding international military garrison manned by a population fast losing belief in
the mission, etc., etc.
Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of
shoving Trump's agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point
where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story
-- which didn't need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic -- was more or less constantly
distorted.
Trump began to be described as a cause of America's problems, rather than a symptom, and his
followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in caricatures that tickled the
urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made conservatives want to reach for something sharp.
This technique was borrowed from Fox , which learned in the Bush years that you could boost
ratings by selling audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors.
Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy was closer,
making the hate more real.
I came into the news business convinced that the traditional "objective" style of reporting
was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at the parade of "above the
fray" columnists and stone-dull house editorials that took no position on anything and always
ended, "Only one thing's for sure: time will tell." As a teenager I was struck by a passage in
Tim Crouse's book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing the
work of Hunter Thompson:
Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the
crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the
agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless
fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, "What was it really like?"
Thompson's wife knew from reading his pieces.
What Rolling Stone did in giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the
banalities of the system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a
sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases end up in media
anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull "objective" format.
The problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of politicized
hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite direction, i.e. the freedom to
mitigate.
If you work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all November to
stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If you work in the other
ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even suggesting what happened last Wednesday was
not a coup in the literal sense of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual
chance of success) not only wouldn't clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the eyes of
co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.
We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial
pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:
not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;
employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages groupthink and requires at
least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;
embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;
operating on a distribution model that as much as possible doesn't depend upon the
indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.
Innovations like Substack are great for opinionated individual voices like me, but what's
desperately needed is an institutional reporting mechanism that has credibility with the whole
population. That means a channel that sees its mission as something separate from politics, or
at least as separate from politics as possible.
The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness.
Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences
perceived them as neutral arbiters.
Now there are no major commercial outlets not firmly associated with one or the other
political party. Criticism of Republicans is as baked into New York Times coverage as the
lambasting of Democrats is at Fox, and politicians don't fear them as much because they know
their constituents do not consider rival media sources credible. Probably, they don't even read
them. Echo chambers have limited utility in changing minds.
Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the
politics business. They'd then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about
elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a
much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems
based on stamping out access to "wrong" information.
What we've been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a
political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a
factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict
happens. It's time to admit this is a failed system. You can't sell hatred and seriously expect
it to end.
" By all means the question of when to deplatform a head of state is a critical one,
among many that must be addressed. When should platforms make these decisions? Is that
decision-making power theirs alone?"
I wonder what other heads of state are thinking regarding their ability to communicate with
their own citizens and if that ability should be in the hands of an American company listed on
the NYSE/NASDAQ; one that employs thousands of H1B visa holders whose loyalty is
unquestioned by corporate management. No word on how loyal they are to the USA, or any other
country; or if any of that is going to affect shareholder valuations either.
" Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or
permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms.Additional precise and
specific actions must also be taken: Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are
paying and who is being targeted."
Find your own way over to their blog, no need for me to help them.
Yes, it's a question of loyalty. Like when multiple news organizations and social media
companies suppressed news about Hunter's Ukraine income and his family's China connections.
None of those who suppressed that news have been deplatformed.
Breaking news:
Parler has not only been deplatformed from the App store, it was deplatformed by Google
(AWS), and their email provider, and their lawyers. " Additional precise and specific
actions must also be taken:Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how....." said Mozilla,
and it looks like a number of people followed instructions .
That'll keep them in line. Notice the narrative of the media that kept us informed of the
mostly peaceful blah, blah, blah all summer long?
With the current media purge of conservative, libertarian,
independent, and non-establishment voices in high gear, we thought it would be beneficial to list some of the alternatives to
each globalist media platform. This does not constitute official endorsements and this list is by no means exhaustive. So please
do check back to this article for additional sources from time to time.
The great news is, there are many amazing options to stay
connected to each other and to the news. They aren't all as evolved as the multi-billion dollar corporations you are used to,
but most are competent technically and already have many users. Also, you may find that some of the platforms provide better
functionality than the legacy media you are leaving.
We believe this list is a good start to get the message out
as rational free-thinking Americans on all sides of the aisle sever their ties to authoritarian anti-speech platforms.
But,
please leave your favorite additional media sources in the comments so others can stay connected.
Parler
: Parler is a Twitter clone run by free-speech advocates. Last night, Amazon removed Parler from its servers. They are
now being sued by Parler who claims their decision to remove the free speech company from their servers was politically
motivated. Dan Bongino, an investor in Parler, says it will be up again within a day on different servers.
Here's a message from Parler CEO John Matze about how big
tech bullies are trying to "squash" free speech alternatives.
Clouthub
: It is owned by a conservative. According to its website, CloutHub is a non-biased platform. We support free speech
and protect your privacy. We don't data-mine, track, or sell user data. We don't suppress your reach or manipulate what you get
to see. We empower our members to influence the issues they care about.
FACEBOOK MESSENGER:
Telegram Messenger
: Telegram offers end-to-end encryption of chats and a range of features beyond that of Facebook Messenger
that foster community growth and large file uploads. However, it must be noted that some people believe it has connections to
Russia. Also, Telegram's best encryption is opt-in and not automatic, meaning you must specifically select 'secret encrypted
chat' in order to get the most secure communication. It also has a desktop version to make texting easy from pc to phone.
Signal
: Signal is highly recommended and is considered the safest texting app. In addition, it has some other functionality
and seems to allow larger file transfers than normal texts. It also has a desktop version to make texting easy from pc to phone.
Discord: Is not especially encrypted, but offers communities
and servers that are not part of Facebook. It also has a desktop version to make texting easy from pc to phone.
Duck Duck Go
: A search engine that does not seem to censor or manipulate search engine results like Google. Unlike Google,
it also says it doesn't store your data, as Google does. Try searching for political stories on DuckDuckGo vs. Google. You will
see a difference in them, as well as non-political stories which are also manipulated by google.
WEB BROWSER:
Brave Browser
: Brave boasts that it is "three times faster than Chrome. Better privacy by default than Firefox. Uses 35% less
battery on mobile." It also supports Tor browser on its desktop app, which helps protect you from the prying eyes of the sites
you visit. Its Brave content community is funded via Basic Attention crypto tokens and opt-in ads. These tokens can be
purchased on crypto exchanges or gained by choosing to view ads. This is what sustains the Brave business rather than harvesting
and theft of all your user data. These tokens can also be given, if the user chooses, to content creators on websites they
like. Unlike Google, Brave also says it doesn't store any of your data.
It seems even more relevant today than it did then. It's longish, so hang in there if you're
able. In these post-'Capitol' social media de-platforming days, remember that (Chrome) Google
algorithms suppress websites from the conservative and religious right to the 'subversive left
(wsws and popular resistance, for instance). And Google bought Youtube in Oct. of 2006 for a
paltry $1.65 billion.
If you haven't read it and seen the captioned photos, you'll love ' Google Is Not What It
Seems' by Julian Assange, an extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks,
wikileaks.org
Also see Scott Ritter's 'By banning Trump and his supporters, Google and Twitter are turning
the US into a facsimile of the regimes we once condemned', RT.com, Jan. 9, 2021 Two excerpts:
"Digital democracy became privatized when its primary architect, Jared Cohen, left the State
Department in September 2010 to take a new position with internet giant Google as the head of
'Google Ideas' now known as 'Jigsaw'. Jigsaw is a global initiative 'think tank' intended to
"spearhead initiatives to apply technology solutions to problems faced by the developing
world." This was the same job Cohen was doing while at the State Department.
Cohen promoted the notion of a "digital democracy contagion" based upon his belief
that the "young people in the Middle East are just a mouse click away, they're just a
Facebook connection away, they're just an instant message away, they're just a text message
away" from sufficiently organizing to effect regime change. Cohen and Google were heavily
involved the January 2011 demonstrations in Egypt, using social networking sites to call for
demonstrations and political reform; the "Egyptian contagion" version of 'digital democracy'
phenomena was fueled by social networking internet sites run by Egyptian youth groups which
took a very public stance opposing the Mubarak regime and calling for political reform."
*************************************
On Sept. 18 , Julian Assange's new book of that name was published. The material was largely
fashioned by conversations he'd had with Google's Eric Schmidt in 2011 at Ellingham Hall in
Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest. The ostensible purpose of the
requested meeting was to discuss idea for a book that Schmidt and Jared Cohen (advisor to both
Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton) were going to write, and in fact did: ' The New Digital
Age ' (2013). They were accompanied by the book's editor Scott Malcomson, former senior
advisor for the UN and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who eventually worked at the
US State Department, plus Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations,
closely tied to the State Department, who was Schmidt's partner at the time. Hmmm. The plot, as
they say, thickens. From the book's blurb :
'For several hours the besieged leader of the world's most famous insurgent publishing
organization and the billionaire head of the world's largest information empire locked horns.
The two men debated the political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions
engendered by the global network -- from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically
opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its
freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy
objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to American companies and markets.
These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet's future that has only gathered force
subsequently.'
Some background that will hopefully entice you to listen to the 42-minute Telesur video
(sorry, no transcript) I'll embed below; this is the short version: ' Assange claims Google is
in bed with US government'
Note that in other interviews Assange names 'other private and public security agencies' as
well, and names the figures showing how deep Google is into smartphones and almost every nation
on the planet. 'Do not be evil'.
If your appetite hasn't been sufficiently whetted to watch the 38-minute Telesur interview,
you might at a minimum read 'When Google Met WikiLeaks: Battle for a New Digital Age' by
Nozomi Hayase . An excerpt or three, after reminding us that in his earlier 2012 book
Cypherpunks, Assange had said that " the internet, our greatest tool for emancipation,
has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen
":
'Assange unveils how, contrary to Google's efforts to create a positive public image by
giving away free storage, making it appear not like a corporation driven solely by profit
motives, this seemingly philanthropic company is a willing participant in its own government
co-optation. Indeed, he argues, Google Ideas was birthed as a brainchild of a Washington
think-tank.
Assange described how "Google's bosses
genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they
see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment
of the 'benevolent superpower.'" (p. 35). This process is so gradual and discrete that it is
hardly conscious on the part of the actors. This digital mega-corporation, through getting too
close to the US State Department and NSA, began to incorporate their ambitions and come to see
no evil. This internalization of imperial values created what Assange called " the impenetrable
banality of 'don't be evil' " (p. 35). It appears that bosses at Google genuinely think they
are doing good, while they are quickly becoming part of a power structure that Assange
described as a " capricious
global system of secret loyalties , owed favors, and false consensus, of saying one thing in
public and the opposite in private" (p. 7). Allegiance creates obedience and an unspoken
alliance creates a web of self-deception through which one comes to believe one's own lies and
becomes entangled in them. [snip]
' Assange pointed to how "the hidden fist
that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army,
Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps" (p. 43).
Google does not see evil in itself. By embedding with U.S. central authority, this global
tech company not only fails to see the invisible fist of "American strategic and economic
hegemony" that dictates the market, but moreover aspires "to adorn the hidden
fist like a velvet glove" (p. 43). By advancing the force of monopoly, they subordinate civic
values to economic and U.S. hegemonic interests and escape any real accountability. They no
longer recognize the unmediated market that responds to people's demands, a true market that
functions as a space of democratic accountability. This normalization of control leads to a
subversion of law, creating a rogue state where a ripple effect of corruption is created, as
individuals, companies and the state each betray their own stated principles.'
'In a sense, one might conclude that Assange's new book is in itself another leak . In
publishing what one might call the "GoogleFiles", Assange conducts his usual job of publishing
in the public interest with due diligence by providing the verbatim transcript and audio of the
secret meeting. This time, the source of the material was Google themselves who sought out
Assange for their publication.'
How wonderful it is that he's rocking Google's Very Large Boat. Hayase also writes that
Cohen and Schmidt engage in their own 'statist' version of the 'good whistleblower/bad
whistleblower meme we're familiar with. Pfffft.
Google used its front page to back
the US government's campaign to bomb Syria: snapshot
More if you'd like it:
From HuffPo's : Julian Assange Fires Back At Eric Schmidt and Google's 'Digital
Colonialism', one exchange that's significant:
' HP : What about the substance of Schmidt's defense, that Google is pretty much at war with
the U.S. government and that they don't cooperate? He claims that they're working to encrypt
everything so that neither the NSA nor anyone else can get in. What would you say to that?
JA : It's a duplicitous statement. It's a lawyerly statement. Eric Schmidt did not say that
Google encrypts everything so that the US government can't get at them. He said quite
deliberately that Google has started to encrypt exchanges of information -- and that's hardly
true, but it has increased amount of encrypted exchanges. But Google has not been encrypting
their storage information. Google's whole business model is predicated on Google being able to
access the vast reservoir of private information collected from billions of people each day.
And if Google can access it, then of course the U.S. government has the legal right to access
it, and that's what's been going on.
As a result of the Snowden revelation, Google was caught out. It tried to pretend that those
revelations were not valid, and when that failed, it started to engage in a public relations
campaign to try and say that it wasn't happy with what the National Security Agency was doing,
and was fighting against it. Now, I'm sure that many people in Google are not happy with what
has been occurring. But that doesn't stop it happening, because Google's business model is to
collect as much information as possible and people store it, index and turn it into predictive
profiles. Similarly, at Eric Schmidt's level, Google is very closely related to the U.S.
government and there's a revolving door between the State Department and Google . '
For the Pffft factor plus some history of WikiLeaks' betrayal by both Daniel
Domscheit-Berg ( his Wiki ), and the Guardian,
the
Daily Dot's : ' When WikiLeaks cold-called Hillary Clinton',
including:
'Within hours, Harrison's call was answered via State Department backchannels. Lisa Shields,
then- Google Executive Eric
Schmidt's girlfriend and vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, reached out
through one of WikiLeak's own, Joseph Farrell, to confirm it was indeed WikiLeaks calling to
speak with Clinton. [snip]
'But in an act of gross negligence the Guardian newspaper -- our former partner -- had
published the confidential decryption
password to all 251,000 cables in a chapter heading in its book, rushed out hastily in
February 2011.(1) By mid-August we discovered that a former German employee -- whom I had
suspended in 2010 -- was cultivating business relationships with a variety of organizations and
individuals by shopping around the location of the encrypted file, paired with the password's
whereabouts in the book. At the rate the information was spreading, we estimated that within
two weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors, and middlemen would have all the cables, but
the public would not.'
Background on
the Rassmussen story to make sure he was elected head of NATO by shutting down Roj TV:
Interview: Roj TV, ECHR and Wikileaks by Naila Bozo
Note: Easy Copying from the Café to the Café didn't go well. Everything
doubled up, and not in the same order, and none of the quotation font colors hopped aboard. But
it is what it is, and trying to repair it further seems Quixotic.
Parler has not only been deplatformed from the App store, it was deplatformed by Google,
amazon (AWS), and their email provider, and their lawyers.
" Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken: Reveal who is paying for
advertisements, how....." said Mozilla, and it looks like a number of people followed
instructions .
That'll keep them in line. Notice the narrative of the media that kept us informed of the
mostly peaceful blah, blah, blah all summer long?
We are about to participate in "The Great Experiment V. 2.0" in my opinion. This decides
which of the Georges, Washington and Orwell, is right. My money is on Orwell for a reason I
will tell you later.
...The checks and balances have been replaced with (Bank) checks and (Bank) balances. The
richest men in the world are overseeing this experiment which is going global quicker than you
can say"Google". They are enabled by the University academics who as Raymond Asquith once
observed are always prepared to provide an intellectual justification for vile acts if the
price is right and journalists will laud said acts to the heavens as decent, moral doings if
they want a paycheck next week from their masters.
The Legislature is bought. The Executive is bought. The Supreme Court are ninnies...
... And you enabled all this yourselves. When you applauded the Patriot Act. When you
cheered at the vilification of muslims, "sand niggers", "rag heads". When you justified the use
of torture. When you masturbated watching targeting videos of drone strikes on Afghans. When
you credulously watched fantasies on television about "Irans nuclear threat". When you listened
and watched uncritically (or perhaps with secret pleasure) as the media lied to you
breathlessly about the President disporting himself on a urine soaked bed with Russian hookers.
Where was your sense of outrage then? Every time you deny the humanity and human rights of
anyone, no matter how vile they be, you are destroying your own rights.
Investigators at the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the "backdoor" used to
compromise up to 18,000 customers of the US software maker SolarWinds closely
resembled malware tied to a hacking group known as Turla, which Estonian
authorities have said operates on behalf of Russia's FSB security service.
So, the backdoor "resembles" a tool that is only "tied to" a hacking group which "Estonian
authorities" "have said" (i.e. claim without evidence) serves the FSB.
This is not the first time The Guardian uses absurd extrapolations to create a big fat
lie. Last week, it put a criminal headline - with potentially grave consequences on public
opinion and geopolitics - stating China had refused to receive a WHO team to investigate the
origins of the SARS-CoV-2. China defused the fake news by releasing on its own MSM that they
were still making the arrangements of the visit - which will happen this Thursday -, not that
it had blocked the WHO.
What did The Guardian want to achieved with that headline? Prepare the British people for
war against China? Are they insane?
Mentioning Estonia at any time would indicate pure unmitigated BS. But mentioning BOTH
Estonia and the Grauniad in the one post is just painfully obvious that the entire story is
bollocks.
Unfortunately, the deeper point is being missed. The Transnational Financiers, who control
the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the military industrial complex,
Silicon Valley, Academia, Education, think tanks, politicians plus political parties, don't
care about the US of the Western world. Their goal is a NWO as described by the insider
Professor Carol Quigley's book, Tragedy and Hope. Rule by a small nucleus of central bankers
ie The Bank of International Settlements and controlled via technocrats. They have no
allegiance to countries, nations, ideology but themselves. Paul is spot on one point it's not
democrat via republican or left via right but them against the rest of humanity!
What is noticeable here is a bit of a contrast between those who live in the US and those
who don't. The former group is naturally very attached to the country and are getting very
emotional over its fate. This is understandable but not defensible. The United States has no
right to a divine appeal or special treatment. It is a witch's cauldron into which the poor
and benighted of the world were thrown only to be turned into tormentors of others by means
of some strange black alchemy. We are now witnessing the weakening of the spell and awakening
of the enchanted masses.
The exhibition of high emotion doesn't seem appropriate here because simply, there is
nothing to mourn. The golden 1950s? That was a fluke based entirely on the outcome of WWII
– the world had been devastated, the US cocooned and protected – and it gave us
the Dulles brothers. 1960s and 1970s? A conservative's nightmare – legions of
long-haired parasites, jangly guitars, LSD, womens' lib and the ultimate humiliation of
NAM!
So when was this golden age? Under Reagan? Well, this is when the dismantling of the inner
core of the empire began. Would Dr Roberts still advocate Reaganomics and dark cold war
threats combined with the destruction of the American working class?
In the end, a number of people have remarked that after decades of ballooning into a
malignant quasi-empire, the US is painfully finding its true level. The "rebellion" being
discussed here was a farce (as confirmed by the stock market) and these are just dummy moves
orchestrated to placate the proles (look, this is just the beginning – since 2016).
Dr Roberts confirms something I said yesterday – what kind of rebellion is possible
in a country with two dozen super-endowed and powerful spying organisations and a super
well-armed internal suppression apparatus? The libertarians over at ZH ask these questions
– but the curse of the CIA is completely self-inflicted and richly deserved. One does
not create a modern unholy inquisition and expect to be able to escape its tentacles.
People talk about hope and optimism. This is the view of an outsider who has been affected
by American global criminality. There cannot be any hope or optimism for the USA until it
fully renounces its collective psychopathy which has cost the world millions of lives and
billions of dollars (not for long) in value.
The notion "presstitute" is likely far off, in that it is still too flattering.
What kind of promiscuous garden tool variety would you deem appropriate, if I may
enquire?
There is reason for some optimism for the future of White Americans, if not for the USA.
Yesterday was the proudest day of my entire life! When I saw those patriots, a great many of
them middle aged people just like myself, march on the capitol and demand entry, I saw that
the survival instinct of my fellow Americans may have been dormant, but it is not dead. It is
now awakened and nothing will put it back to sleep now.
We embark now upon an epic struggle against powerful dark forces but at least now we will
play on a field where our numbers can be brought to bear. We are the many, they the few. We
will win this war, though I fear the cost is going to be greater than any struggle this
nation has ever had to grapple with.
This will be my last post online. It is not safe to do this any longer. But please,
continue with your work so long as you can do so in safety Dr. Roberts. It is more important
now than ever. Thank you and Goodbye.
They have converted this into a sort of Reichstag fire characteristic of fascist regimes
consolidating power. Now they are labelling all opponents terrorists. They must be hoping to
incite a civil war before the opposition can adequately organize and mobilize and consolidate a
21st century version of politically correct fascism where the prejudice is against the normal
and the traditional majority.
I think the Nobel Prize for medicine should go to the Canadian scientist who just isolated
Covid by discovering it's most dangerous outside from 8pm to 5am. Thus the current curfew in
Quebec, with Ontario joining shortly.
Second nominee: to the medical staff that discovered there's no Covid in big box
stores.
"... Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough in my opinion. ..."
"... Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a bedraggled starving bear. ..."
"So when was this golden age? Under Reagan? Well, this is when the dismantling of the
inner core of the empire began."
Beg to differ. Reagan understood how to administer the US empire. He knew the risks of
overstretching it. He made the promise to the Soviets not to encroach on their sphere of
influence. He defended the high interest rates which strengthened the USD and which kept the
banking sector in check.
All of that went to hell with Bill Clinton:
He broke Reagan's promise and expanded NATO eastwards, he dismantled the Glass Steagall act
which led to a malignant hypergrowth of the banking sector, and he was the who introduced the
telecommunications act in 1996 which allowed for the concentration of corporate media in the
hands of the few.
Bill Clinton basically turned the empire into a rapacious and uncontrollable animal.
(Funny how noone here is talking about imprisoning him )
There is a silver lining to Bill C's blood-soaked administration. It was while he was in
power, that the Russians finally awoke from their 1990s stupor. They began to understand the
mortal danger they were facing, and they patriotically chose Putin to lead them in 1999.
– Reagan was a disgusting Russophobe and Serbophobe who proclaimed 10th April (the
founding of the Independent State of Croatia) a national holiday in California as governor.
Not surprising given that his was the most RC government ever – he also colluded with
the Polish anti-Christ to destroy the USSR. In the process he encouraged the German Nazis
(see visit to Bitburg) who then destroyed Yugoslavia.
– He brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust that was prevented by a
vigilant Russian officer (in 1983?).
– He turbo-charged the power of corporations and decimated social structures and the
rights of the working class (the Americans are paying for this now).
This is not to say that the scumbag Clinton was good – after all he was trained at
Georgetown – that seminary for American murderers.
Thanks for this Ken. Good to know who Reagan really was!
To get back to your point about the "dismantling of the empire" Reagan, for all his
personal awfulness and recklessness (and subversiveness) was still more restrained than
Clinton. Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all
constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough
in my opinion. I guess it's personal, after what he did to us.
Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong
USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a
bedraggled starving bear. Never again!
@84:
As sometimes said: don't sweat the small stuff.
This "We are all Taiwanese now" stunt is Pompeo's act of petty spite for getting outfoxed in
the Hong Kong colour revolution play.
Empire's useful idiots were let loose to trash the hapless city, fired up by the Western
propaganda machinery.
Now Beijing is putting the stock on those pompous minions with the National Security Law, and
their foreign masters can't do nuffin' except squeal human rights and apply some nuisance
sanctions.
The West fails because it looks at China through ideological lenses and sees Communists, who
can fall back on 5000 years of statecraft to push back at interlopers.
Beijing's moves can be likened to two classic strategies.
1. Zhuge Liang fools the enemy to fire all their arrows at straw men, which become ammunition
against them.
2. The Empty City strategy. Invaders take over an ostensibly abandoned city, only to be
trapped inside.
Global Times is cantankerous and sometimes risible, but even a broken clock is right, twice a
day.
So when it says that crossing Beijing's red line on the Taiwan issue is not in the island's
best interests, the incoming BiMala administration should take note.
'It has been an epiphany for the world to see that there are people in our country led by
this president, for the moment, who have chosen their whiteness over democracy,' Pelosi
said."
I don't think people around the world think what happened at the capital was about
whiteness. It's really too bad the Democratic Party leadership has such a simplistic view. It
also shows how anti-white some white people can be and why they want so much immigration we
don't need.
"... Mrs. Pelosi's call to Gen. Milley is itself a violation of the separation of powers by seeking to inject herself into an executive-branch military decision. She can offer advice all she wants, but this call at this time has the sound of an order. It might even be construed by some as its own little coup -- conniving with the military to relieve of command the person who remains the elected President. ..."
Mrs. Pelosi's call to Gen. Milley is itself a violation of the separation of powers by
seeking to inject herself into an executive-branch military decision. She can offer advice all
she wants, but this call at this time has the sound of an order. It might even be construed by
some as its own little coup -- conniving with the military to relieve of command the person who
remains the elected President.
What if an adversary leaps on the news and decides this is the moment to stage some military
action when the U.S. is consumed with internal conflict? Does Gen. Milley now have to consult
with the Speaker before he acts in America's defense? How anyone thinks her intervention would
restore good constitutional order to government or some modicum of sanity to politics is a
mystery.
Mr. Trump failed his constitutional test on Wednesday. But Mrs. Pelosi showed awful judgment
with her grandstanding over the nuclear launch codes. Late Friday she announced that she's also
revving up the impeachment machinery. So much for calming political tempers.
"... What struck me was the behavior of most of the House's invaders: they for the most were pranksters. For them it was Halloween; not the storming of the Bastille! ..."
"... This is all pretty mild stuff. Useful to see that Washington is not so different to Kiev. With the Biden presidency you can certainly add the USA to the list of countries ruled by governments put in place by colour revolutions ..."
"... The images that arise from this event will remain iconic. It possibly was a shaperoned event, but the plan, that anger would be wide-spread and destruction abundant did not materialize. This is evident in the bizarre, concocted, pre-written M5M media reports. It was a trap, but it backfired. ..."
"... The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex; the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures for security of the facility. ..."
"... someone interfered with the proper deployment of officers around Congress ..."
"... I was surprised but pleased to see Americans demonstrating their contempt for the hostile elite government we live under. Assault against Democracy? BS. ..."
"... But nobody should delude themselves into thinking that Donald Trump is a patriot who will die for the cause. Hell, he already threw the people risking their lives and liberty protesting the fraudulent election under the bus. It is long past time the whores in Washington become acutely aware of the contempt sane Americans have for them. I do not support violent protests, but I do support a mass demonstration of people expressing their total and absolute contempt for the traitorous whores who rule over us. ..."
But for me, I was no less happy to see the Republicans on the run. After all, it is they who
have been stoking the anger and resentment of populist Americans, secure in their belief that
they had conjured a monster they completely controlled and that they could endlessly exploit
for their own purposes no matter what they did. Well, that monster turned around and bit them
on their fleeing asses on Wednesday. The "people," whom they love to claim they represent, went
from being an ideological abstraction to an angry mob after they felt cheated and decided to
take matters into their own hands. It's important to remember that,
according to reports , what first inspired the protesters to descend on the Capitol was
when word reached them that Pence had refused to challenge the certification of the Electoral
College result. They weren't just angry at the Democrats; they were angry at the whole lot of
them.
... For me, the Capitol occupation was a spontaneous and dramatic expression of the white
working class' frustration with the Washington establishment and an indication that they won't
tolerate a return to business as usual. The Democrats -- and more than a few Republicans --
blocked and worked against Trump's agenda from the day he took office. Stealing the election
was merely the final prong in their assault on him and on the wishes of ordinary Americans. If
Washington doesn't begin to take populist demands seriously, violence is inevitable.
... This means they have to stop attributing the fact that working-class whites aren't on
board with their agenda to the influence of scapegoats like Trump or conspiracy theories and
instead finally recognize that our nation's yeomanry have legitimate grievances that won't go
away just because Trump does.
For its part, the American Left, which now has Biden as its figurehead, really has no moral
authority whatsoever to condemn the Capitol occupation given that they've been bending over
backward to excuse the violence of BLM and Antifa for years now. Remember "punch a Nazi"?
Not that these are in any way comparable to what happened in the Capitol; BLM and Antifa
violence has resulted in
dozens of deaths , rapes, other violence, and untold billions in property damage across the
United States. The Capitol protesters, by contrast, were mostly peaceful and caused very little
serious damage (if there had been extensive damage it seems unlikely the House would have been
able to reconvene so quickly). Most importantly, they were not attacking innocent bystanders'
private property. There also doesn't seem to have been much looting apart from a few items
taken as pranks; compare this to the scenes we witnessed from Minneapolis last
spring , when we saw black rioters stripping entire shopping centers down to their
frames.
The Left, of course, will never accept this logic; for them, the occupation was the next
Charlottesville, if not the next 9/11 -- but we have to never cease from reminding them of
their hypocrisy. In looking at the photos of politicians scurrying for cover as the protesters
began to break into the House chamber, I was reminded of the mockery that Trump took from
Democratic politicians back in May when word got out that he had been briefly sent to the
emergency
bunker beneath the White House after it had been besieged by BLM rioters . There's also a
delicious irony in the fact that some of the politicians who have been calling for police
departments to be defunded were hiding behind these very same police when their constituents
came calling.
On Wednesday, the world heard the voice of American populism. It wasn't Trump's voice; it
was that of the American people. And perhaps, just perhaps, the people are beginning to rule.
This isn't about Trump anymore -- it didn't start with Trump and it certainly won't end with
him. As for myself, all I can say is that, for the first time in a while, on that day I
actually felt proud to be an American.
Mostly some good and correct points in this article. Yes, Antifa was there, and Capital
police expected them. Yes, Washington's corrupt Capital police also did welcome surprised
Trump supporters into the building and even to the area where Ashli was assassinated. How do
you think there were no less than 5 videos of the murder from 4 angles? Trump supporters were
flabbergasted, nonviolent and wondering for the most part how they got so far.
But the END RESULT was a bizarre attempt to REMOVE TRUMP IMMEDIATELY – by any means
(25th or impeach – neither will succeed). Do you really think that end result is the
product of chance or circumstance? Do you really think Pelosi is foaming at the teeth because
she truly believes Trump is ready to enter the launch codes (give me a break)?
In point of fact, because the civilized legal process has been completely exhausted, we
now reach the military option, as in executive order on foreign interference in US elections.
This means, in the end, a military tribunal convened to prosecute treason. This is the reason
certain conspirators are soiling their Depends undergarments.
But how it will end when you have the global banking interests of "the Guardians" as a
foe, with their 10 trillion in play? This is a 5th generation world war unlike any before it.
Humanity is at stake.
Congress hasn't had any clothes for years. It was difficult to imagine anything that could
make Americans despise congress more. But look at this.
(You need Tor Browser Bundle to see it, and if you don't have it, Why the fuck not?)
Physically cowering in fear of the people they've fucked for all these years.
This is the single most compelling evidence for CIA LIHOP. This quirky peasant uprising
and its public happiness scared congress much more than CIA's anthrax attacks. Now congress
will do what they're told, take their AIPAC bribes and hide behind high walls.
It's the USA [neoliberlaism] that has no clothes...
Congress has no clothes because it's the best little whorehouse in America.
By the way, Twitter banning Trump is a great thing. Mass purge is actually better for
us.
The problem with limited purges was that most cons and patriots still stuck with Big Tech
because there was still enough freedom and conservative material available. But when Big Tech
goes whole hog and censors so many people, it will force a Techession(tech-secession or
techxodus) among millions and millions of people, and this will make Alt Tech far more
viable. Indeed, Alt Tech can turn into counter-tech and the Big Other Tech.
People who were too lazy to get off their butts and join Alt Tech will now have no
choice.
Big Tech could maintain monopoly as long as they just banned people like Alex Jones. But
when they ban the president and so many of his followers, they are forcing the creation of
the Big Other Tech, and that will end the monopoly.
The people's anger is real. Trump is a false prophet. He's nothing but a Jew loving
blowhard, a con man with a below average IQ. He campaigned on draining the swamp but staffed
his entire cabinet with nothing but swamp creatures, because he *is* the swamp. He's just
been cast aside because the puppet masters have found an even more corrupt puppet that they
can extort. The patriots who have been protesting the election deserve someone better, a real
deal like Kris Kobach.
This election exposes just how corrupt this country has become, from top to bottom, not
just the Executive branch and the legislative branch, but even the judiciary branch is now
completely corrupt from the very top, the Chief Justice of SCOTUS. Jews now have firm control
on every institution of import in this country, from Wall Street to Hollywood, DC to SV and
everywhere in between, media, academia, publishing industry, healthcare, everything. Patriots
now have our backs against the Wall. There's no place else to turn to. We either fight our
way out or die.
The Roman empire lasted 1,000 years, from 500BC to 500AD. In the first half, Rome was
ruled by elected emperors, and in the second half, by unelected emperors. Rome ruled for 500
years, peaked for 200, and fell for 300 years. It was a long, slow death. America was on the
ascendance for 300 years, peaked for 50 years (1945-1995), and has been on a decline the last
25 years. The next 75 will be a long, slow, increasingly painful death as we eventually get
swallowed whole by huns and visigoths.
"But the END RESULT was a bizarre attempt to REMOVE TRUMP IMMEDIATELY – by any
means (25th or impeach – neither will succeed). Do you really think that end result is
the product of chance or circumstance? Do you really think Pelosi is foaming at the teeth
because she truly believes Trump is ready to enter the launch codes (give me a
break)?"
Strange they are unable to wait for less than two weeks for inauguration. These people are
truly evil. It's like what did Trump ever do to them that is so personal?
What struck me was the behavior of most of the House's invaders: they for the most
were pranksters. For them it was Halloween; not the storming of the Bastille!
Were I an investor I'd be buying up stocks in private security firms. Just today I viewed
a video of that hideous old quean, Lindsay Graham plodding and plunging through an airport
passageway on the way (presumably) to his home in South Carolina. All the way he was being
harassed, shouted at and called a "traitor" for his RINO collusion in the takedown of the
Trumpster.
Then there is the case of Mike Pence. After his refusal to call the question on the
Constitutional approach to denying any confirmation of electors from either party, making way
for either a compromise (as was reached in a similar kerfuffle in the 1876 showdown between
Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherfraud Hayes) or to call for new elections in the
challenged and conflicted swing states; Pence has been broadly excoriated as a traitor who
weaseled his way out of supporting the president's back-up plan.
Next, we fast-forward to those photos of Congressional prostiticians cowering behind their
seats as the "deplorables" streamed into the sacred chambers of the people's house. A lot of
guilty consciences in that zoo. They well know they either sold out for hefty campaign
contributions and money under the table or are being blackmailed through the workings of
Epstein, Maxwell and Wexner on behalf I$rael's Mo$$ad or maybe a dozen other intel agencies,
most specifically Britain's MI-6 and the shot-callers (think 11-22-63 in Dallas) who rule
through other deep state organs, the CIA.
Private security agencies will be getting a.lot of calls from terrified prostiticians and
many others who have been working for the enemies of WE THE PEOPLE. Consider those talking
heads on boobtoob noose who are paid handsomely for constant repetition of a false reality
paradigm which has entrapped all those suburban soccer moms who were mind-controlled into
voting for the Kamala's Foote/Biden ticket. Awakeners by the millions have been curing
themselves of the boobtoob noose habit. Do you think the teevee presenters are sleeping
peacefully these days and soon about to enjoy high times at fancy resorts and pricey
restaurants?
How about professors and other academics who get the call to appear as talking-heads on
PB$ and spread erudite sounding barf and garbage as fast as they spread their legs for all
those shekels and the public recognition?
Are gated communities with patrolling guards and cameras galore, places where powerful
movers and shakers tend to live will those havens (or those high-rise apartment suites
surrounding Central Park -- or placid neighborhoods in Georgetown or Bel-Air–) likely
to feel safe from now on?
Private Security services. That's where I'd invest. The "Deplorables" are pissed off at
the stolen election and even more so at the political duopoly constituting government of the
prostiticians, by the deep $tate bureaucratic Administrators and for the plutocratic
oligarchs.
As of January 6th, 2021 the status of our country devolved into a totally ruptured
republic. Democracy? Fuggidaboutit.
About 95% of the US media, and about 70% of US politicians are corrupt deep-state
globalists (which makes them implicitly treasonous). The source of their deep-state globalist
power is central banking, usury, and enslaving us goyim with debt and "the love of money".
The last president who was not a treasonous globalist was Reagan (although most of his
cabinet were globalists including VP Bush). President Trump has been constantly under attack
by this deep-state globalist cult because he is not an obedient member of their club and has
been irreverently exposing their hand.
Nothing will change: the US and the rest of the western civilization will eventually
succumb to this cancerous globalist corruption unless the cancer is removed. This is not
about politics: it's about removing the cancerous corruption before the cancer destroys its
host.
Thank God President Trump has exposed their hand and has got the ball rolling. Now it is
up to us: to step up and continue the populist movement that he started.
This truly is the end of the Banana Empire. I say "God bless Trump" only because he set
into motion the end of this tyranny; like Kerensky he was largely clueless as to the extent
of the rot.
This is the beginning of the end. Best case scenario the United States returns to
democracy.
No matter what the cause, there was evidence of agents provocateurs present who inflamed
the violence, and the reaction, calling those who opposed the regime candidate "terrorists"
is going to lead to more serious unrest, particularly if as appears likely, kangaroo courts
begin rounding up people for trial. The thing is, close to a majority already suspect that
the fix was in in November, and the fact the same methods of fraud were successfully employed
in Georgia's senate races inflamed the anger. Proof of agents provocateurs is abundant. Even
the guy dressed up in a viking suit whose photograph is run with the article apparently was
an antifa figure.
Since the regime's coordinated reaction is attempting to turn this into a sort of
Reichstag fire to eliminate opposition to a consolidated deep state fascist regime, we are in
for turbulent times. I suspect the tacticians, despite what the author says, actually are
hoping for a serious response before the opposition can effectively organize, and the regime
operatives are too arrogant to care about the economic consequences, and the likelihood that
the numerous vassal states may use the instability as a means of securing a greater degree of
independence from the yankee imperium.
This is all pretty mild stuff. Useful to see that Washington is not so different to
Kiev. With the Biden presidency you can certainly add the USA to the list of countries ruled
by governments put in place by colour revolutions
The best way for Trumps place in history to be magnified and consolidated would be for
them to imprison him and take away all of his assets (he'd become like a mini Jesus), though
I am guessing this is the only reason he has not been assassinated, yet.
The images that arise from this event will remain iconic. It possibly was a shaperoned
event, but the plan, that anger would be wide-spread and destruction abundant did not
materialize. This is evident in the bizarre, concocted, pre-written M5M media reports. It was
a trap, but it backfired. I for one likely would have ransacked the place. I must admit
I am impressed with their disinterest in marauding. It was an important event, cherish its
iconic imagery, for darkness, subversion and false flags will take our guns away and reduce
the flame of patriotism to pilot size soon.
I've seen at least two videos of the Capitol police opening steel fences at one point and
doors at another point only two stand aside and calmly allow protesters to pour in. Looked
more like an invitation than an invasion. Obviously they had orders to stand back at those
points.
What a wonderful moment to see all the Congressional rabble hitting the decks.
Next time the protesters should bring a guillotine!
Key word, there, "dramatic." And it apparently makes no difference how corny it is
(goofball with the horns and even Trump himself) or how idiotic, (the masked moron response
to COVID and installing senile Joe on the throne).
Drama is a force that gives empty heads meaning, or at least a bit of entertainment while
our owners mock and manipulate us at their adolescent pleasure.
I would have enjoyed it more – had 2 million armed Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians,
Libyans, Yemenis, Ukrainians, and others , that have had their countries wasted by the USA ,
storm the Capital and get even with those that voted and supported those murderous
invasions.
If he's out in 11 days anyway, why the push to impeach? Pure spite?
It has been suggested that if the Dems could get DT impeached before his time is up then
they could attach legislation to his verdict stating that he could never run for any office
again.
Some on the Left are terrified that he will come back in 2024 and the same 75M Maga people
will be waiting to sweep him back in office.
IMO in 2024 KH as Prez is a sure thing -- -people will be shamed into voting for her to
avoid being called a racist AND a sexist.
Realizing that not only his political but also his personal future might be in jeopardy,
Trump was quick to concede the election and promise a peaceful transition of power --
showing that when things get tough, it's his own hide that he's thinking of.
"Trump was quick to concede the election" -- That's the part I somehow missed hearing over
here in central Europe, perhaps because not all the relevant news is reported here. Would the
author quote the words the president used to do that?
Conceding the election, as I understand it, is something he could have done any time since
Nov. 3, making our shadow government very happy. Since mainstream media spent the next two
months loudly demanding that he "concede the election", they must also have missed those
magic words.
Conceding the election not only acknowledges a valid election was held but also makes
monkeys out of the skeptical people who voted for Trump and answered his call to rally in
Washington Jan. 6. Are you saying that?
Or does conceding a U.S. election now equate to saying the election was rigged and it
looks like not a damned thing we can do about it?
A fitting end to the Trump movement, seeing as there was never anything in terms of a
structure to organise the political base except for a ludicrous conspiracy prank (i.e.
'Qanon'). The whole thing has been a diversionary venture to corral dissent and neutralise
it. It might 'feel good to see patriots in the Capitol Building' but -shorn of any genuine
movement, all that really amounts to is .well feelings .
Real populism looks quite different surely, and so do real insurrections. There was no
'invasion', the security was stepped down and they opened the doors for the crowd to walk in.
A spectacle to advance an agenda.
I must admit as an American abroad that I felt a little Schadenfreude -- having watched
the left burn America through the summer, it was about time the populists got a crack at it
-- but I had this nagging feeling this would end very unpleasantly for all; there's an old
adage that if you take a shot at the crown, you'd better not miss. That feeling was confirmed
as CNN started trumpeting this as being an insurrection, which was picked up by the politicos
in short order. It's hard to dismiss out of hand that this was a false flag because the
leftists almost immediately had the language and narrative and an action plan in hand to
finally put the populist genie back in the bottle. Then again, maybe they're just quick on
their feet.
If this was planned, as some above suggest, then I'm really disappointed at the lack of
thought given to this. Taking the Capitol was never going to seriously result in a change of
government in a country that has been practising Continuity of Government exercises for
three-quarters of a century, and at best would only be a symbolic protest. Having taken the
Capitol, this was never going to end well for those participating in the frolic, as we will
see in the coming weeks as more average Joes and Janes are dragged into court (do you think
Buffalo-boy will stand in the dock?). So why not make the best of what was going to be a shit
sandwich anyway?
Instead of walking through the halls of the Capitol, taking selfies, and then going home
when "asked" to leave, they should have taken a page out of Occupy Wall Street and settled in
for the long hall. The left would have shown up with pre-printed signs, some of which would
have looked amateurish enough to seem authentic. Where were these guys' signs?
They should have filled every seat in "the Peoples' House" with real people holding signs
saying "We are the People" with a few thousand more people sitting peacefully in all the
corridors and steps and waiting passively for the the police or military to carry them away.
That would have taken days, if not weeks, and would have put a serious damper on the
inevitable inauguration.
Politicians and their fellow bureaucrats have opened the door to the real barbarians;
corporate fascism, influence of special interest lobbies in Congress, foreign entanglements
(Israel) , endless war, unaccountable government within the ever expanding sixteen
Intelligence Agencies, secrecy in place of democracy, the authority to print currency handed
over to oligarchs at the Federal Reserve Board, who are, in reality a collection of banksters
and financiers- not an agency of the federal government as the organizations' name would have
all of us believe.
If there ever was a time for revolution and dissolution of a thoroughly corrupted
government (for every western Occident country) the time is now.
The corporate-fascist infection began under Ford the stumbler, he opened the door to The
NeoCons followed by Reagan the Union buster who did everything he could to dismantle FDR's
social democracy programs such as the CCC (infrastructure support), the social security
safety net. Reagan had a close association with the barbarism of Thatcher, she had a set of
horns much larger than that, so called "insurrectionist" buffoon who's face was plastered all
over newsprint today. Chavez was correct and I add, that a waft of sulfurous odor behind
Thatcher was shared by both Bushes. Strategies dedicated to endless war, endless predation(s)
for dwindling resources rather than embracing a philosophy that nourishes support for human
ingenuity and mutual trust between nations. Instead, adopting long range and global
domination plans outlined by Admiral Cebrowski and his assistant, Thomas P. M. Barnett, who
announced a new map of our world-according to the Pentagon that is. Visit Dr Henry Gaffney Jr
of the CNA Corporation.
ASIDE: This is what happens when an entire people allowed a post World War II dream to
die. The Kennedy Brothers dream of a new demilitarized era, and Western European style
Marshal Plan for third world countries who desired to attach themselves to the tail of our
kite (voluntarily) -Rest in peace John and Robert, I'll never let their guilt, control
freakishness or rapacity to go free !
Rusting bridges, potholed autobahns, with an emphasis on who owns them, not when
maintenance or repairs will be forthcoming-by extortion no doubt. Gaunt, vitamin deficient
citizenry, homelessness, epidemic drug addictions, who needs "society" haven't you heard?
Thatcher said there's no such thing as society!
Thus it seems improbable to me that the Deep State was willing to sacrifice the sense
of American invulnerability it projects across the globe simply in order to discredit the
populist movement when there are many other, less self-harming methods it could use
instead.
America's aura of invulnerability has been gone since September 11th 2001. Civil airliners
flown by a ragtag crew of "Islamists", if you believe the official story, smashed into the
WTC and the Pentagon. No fighter aircraft made any attempts to intercept them: they were
completely unhindered in their actions. The Deep State were willing to let thousands of
civilians die in order to achieve its own purposes.
Letting a couple of hundred people occupy the Capitol building for a short period of time
seems very minor in comparison.
Surely one of the first rules of the exercise of Power is to scrupulously avoid
demonstrating that you are a low grade coward. Now that the entire US Congress has been
videoed cowering in craven fear before an unarmed crowd, whose only "crime" is to seek
redress for a stolen election, there are going to be serious consequences.
How many foreign agents, and foreign powers, are now coming to the realization "hey, these
guys are bunch of pussies?" How many criminal organizations, in the USA or abroad, formerly
operating with some restraint, will now be freed from any restraint? And how many citizens of
the Republic, formerly circumspect to the Public Offices in our country, will now proceed to
operate with complete contempt of sniveling cowards in Public Office who seek to rule us?
The absolute lowest level of Degeneracy demonstrated by the Political Class is not in
their systematic sexual degeneracy, nor their relentless and despicable Negroaltry, nor their
thievery of anything they can steal, nor their relentless, pervasive, and relentless
dishonesty even when they would be much better served by the truth, but precisely in their
pervasive fear of everything Decent, including decent Americans.
So here we are, in the land of the Zoo Monkey Shit-eaters, faced with the only choice that
will ever have any real meaning for the rest of our lives:
What struck me was the behavior of most of the House's invaders: they for the most were
pranksters. For them it was Halloween; not the storming of the Bastille!
True.
Just another PR stunt that benefits nobody except the globalists.
The US have no clothes After decades and decades of warmongering & murdering innocent
people around the globe in the name of "democracy" (what a hypocritical sick joke!!!) to
steal and loot other nation's territories and resources now the true face of the USA is
visible to All: the face of a horrendous tyrannical evil monster serving not the american
people but the interests of a few billionnaires, master puppeteers in the dark. We knew it
all along: u are not a democracy and you are not an example to anyone.
All the contrary, you are an example of what not to be or what not to become.
You are and always have been a kleptocracy or something worse.
(wikypedia: Kleptocracy (from Greek κλέπτης
kléptēs, "thief", κλέπτω kléptō, "I
steal", and -κρατία -kratía from
κράτος krátos, "power, rule") is a government whose
corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to appropriate the wealth of their nation,
typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider
population.)
One of the few among us who still is in possession of a functioning brain..
What should we expect in 2021?
So far, it looks like this year is going to be plagued by more of the same brand of
madness, mayhem, manipulation and tyranny that dominated 2020.
Frankly, I'm sick of it: the hypocrisy, the double standards, the delusional belief by
Americans at every point along the political spectrum that politics and politicians are the
answer to what ails the country, when for most of our nation's history, politics and
politicians have been the cause of our woes.
Consider: for years now, Americans, with sheeplike placidity, have tolerated all manner
of injustices and abuses meted out upon them by the government (police shootings of unarmed
individuals, brutality, corruption, graft, outright theft, occupations and invasions of
their homes by militarized police, roadside strip searches, profit-driven incarcerations,
profit-driven wars, egregious surveillance, taxation without any real representation, a
nanny state that dictates every aspect of their lives, lockdowns, overcriminalization,
etc.) without ever saying "enough is enough."
@Realist black
shirt thugs never went to prison. Antifa/blm are the shock troops for elitists like George
Soros, who are seeking to impose a new order, a global, neo-feudal system run solely by them
and solely for their benefit.
Antifa/blm are part of the machinery for achieving this neo-feudal vision, as are the
USA's Democrat-Republican establishment, DSMIC, and MSM. They will be dealt with when the new
order is achieved, just as Hitler dealt with the SA when they had served their purpose. All
populists, especially Trump supporters are an immediate threat to our would-be feudal
masters. Their eradication is a compelling necessity. There will be no mercy.
The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that
someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the
perimeter of the Capitol complex; the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures
for security of the facility.
someone interfered with the proper deployment of officers around Congress
It is routine for the Capitol Police to coordinate with the federal Secret Service and the
Park Police and local police in Washington, DC, before large demonstrations. The National
Guard, commanded by the Department of Defense, is often on standby too.
On Wednesday, however, that coordination was late or absent.
The National Guard, which was deployed heavily to quell the Black Lives Matter protests in
2020, did not show up to assist the police until two hours after the action started on
Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.
This is coordinated among different levels . ( think of 911 and lack of responses
preparedness and abuses of the drill )
Trump is a psycho who has convinced the low IQ white of him being a savior facing off deep
state which is against the poor white and which doesn't want Trump get elected . So the
election must be stolen .
And what's not good about fighting a thief or stealing ?
I was surprised but pleased to see Americans demonstrating their contempt for the
hostile elite government we live under. Assault against Democracy? BS. Perhaps there is
some fight left in the American people?
But nobody should delude themselves into thinking that Donald Trump is a patriot who
will die for the cause. Hell, he already threw the people risking their lives and liberty
protesting the fraudulent election under the bus. It is long past time the whores in
Washington become acutely aware of the contempt sane Americans have for them. I do not
support violent protests, but I do support a mass demonstration of people expressing their
total and absolute contempt for the traitorous whores who rule over us.
Pelosi, Schumer et al. want to pretend this was the burning of the Reichstag, so they can
take "appropriate" measures. They want to act with haste.
Pelosi and Schumer fear that people will realize, after looking at how for years Obama and
the left stoked racial hatred, which resulted in riots, murder and arson causing billions in
damage, this is, by comparison, a nothing-burger. Thus, haste is the order of the day.
Trump run his election complain of 2016 as champion of common Americans. After he won the
office the betrayed them all and governed like Bush III with his own cabal of neocons and
neoliberals. \
He betrayed his followed again on Dec 6, when he first incited them for the action but did not provide organization, security
and the plan needed to press Congress to appoint the commission for investigation of election "irregularities" for then days
before Biden inauguration. He is now completely spent politically and his enemies and first of all, Ms Pelosi, are after him.
Moreover he gave a shot in the arm for the gang of Russiagaters who were pursuing him
since his inauguration.
The fact that Trump leaves the political scene is good. While useful as a wrecking ball for
the neoliberal empire and neoliberal establishment he proved to be completely inept as
a politician and lack courage necessary for the national leader. Which he proved again on Dec 6. Famous quote from
Friedrich Schiller's play Fiesco "The Moor has done his duty. The Moor can go." is probably applicable. What is interesting
is that Zionists betrayed Trump.
But the fact hat he will be replaced by neocon warmonger and staunch neoliberal Biden means
that there is no light at the and of tunnel for the common people.
Like Trump, Biden was never Presidential material. He a a mediocre politician, by all
accounts. And extremely corrupt in addition to that.
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump denounced the people whom he personally called to protest. His close political allies withdrew their support. ..."
"... The deck was stacked against President Trump from Day One. His orders were ignored. The US courts, judges, police, the whole system of law enforcement was against him; his orders were blocked or overturned, while the media made fun of him and the opposition relentlessly delegitimised him. ..."
"... On January 6, a massive demonstration in his support gathered in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands Americans came to the capital to demand justice after the election fraud became obvious. They hoped that the Republican representatives would refuse to certify the fraud and appoint a commission to check and recount the votes. ..."
"... The horror and outrage of the Dem politicians and media were as faked as their news. During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings. ..."
"... For them, it was an honest and funny way to express their indignation. But the real gambit plotters intended to frame them. They even murdered four protesters hoping they would respond with violence, but in vain. ..."
"... White American protesters are exceptionally non-violent lot; as with Occupy Wall Street a few years back the January 6 Capitol protesters were timid and obedient as lambs. For this reason, BLM was invented, for Blacks are able to riot violently, as opposed to well-trained whites. It is not a race thing: lily-white French Yellow Vests and Ukrainian nationalists have fought the police all right. But US whites are not prone to riot, not since the Civil War. ..."
"... Anyway, their non-violence didn't help them. The president-elect Biden begrudged them even the name of protesters: "Don't dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists." Indeed, the name should be preserved for Deep State-authorised looters and their brethren all over the world, whether in Hong Kong or Minsk, in Seattle or Portland. ..."
"... researchers will argue whether duplicitous Biden's minions organised it or just capitalised on the Trumpers' sincere protest. ..."
"... There is no doubt that to an objective observer the 2020 elections were profoundly unfair. I won't trouble you with too many published details about the statistically impossible results, but here is one example of fraud. The city of Detroit gave 95 per cent of its vote to Biden/Kamala, a number that Mr Kim Jong-un would view with slight envy, while Mr Lukashenko would murmur, "How can it be done?" It is highly likely this mind-boggling result was achieved in the following way. ..."
"... The problem is, Trump was a poor organiser. He could win elections, if he could prevent Cynthia Stephens's kind of legislation, outlaw postal ballots, enforce obligatory IDs for voting, mobilise his people for election control. A formidable task, but not impossible, while dealing with a prone-to-cheat adversary. He could even do a revolution on January 6, tasking the right people to act, forming a revolutionary HQ, planning a strategy of takeover, but he didn't do anything of the sort. He probably thought Congress would see the vast crowds and allow for the checking of election results. ..."
"... Alternatively, he was so naïve that he believed revolutions just happen by themselves, as in the movies. They do not. Behind every successful revolution, there is a lot of planning, armed force, weapons ready for use, supply lines, logistics, media support, and communications. Trump had none of that. It was enough to turn off Twitter to make him deaf and dumb. ..."
"... There was no coup attempt, as correctly stated by Tyler Durden : "Trump has never had the concentration, organizational acumen, or ideological coherence to mount a bona fide "coup," and a mob intrusion which was swiftly dispersed by armed agents of the state doesn't change that. ..."
"... Many Trumpists believed in the QAnon and Kayfabe conspiracies; they posted reports of bad guys being arrested, of servers snatched by the FBI, of Clinton and Biden waiting for rough justice behind bars. This belief disarmed people who would otherwise have fought to achieve this very result. That is the problem with conspiracies: imaginary conspiracies prevent real action. ..."
"... He succeeded against enormous odds in improving the lot of American workers: for the first time since the 1970s, their incomes rose in relation to the other classes. He stopped mass migration to the US: legal immigration went down to a trickle. He avoided new wars; he tried to make peace with Russia. He refused to bomb Iran even in the last days of his presidency, though some pro-Israel supporters promised him a second term if he would. ..."
"... His fight against the corona madness was his great achievement. He was against the lockdowns that are about to destroy our world so completely that few things will survive. The last great US ruler who didn't wear the cowardly mask will be remembered. He could not defeat the mighty medical complex, or FAGMA, or the Masters of Discourse, but he tried. ..."
President Trump was decisively beaten, if not fair and square. The hopes of millions of
American voters were squashed and extinguished. The saga of the Orange Man is over. The victors
used a gambit: they sacrificed the sanctity and security of the Capitol, allowed intruders in,
permitted them to take selfies in the Speaker's office, and then faked horror and outrage. The
attempted calls for electoral transparency were deflated in real time as huge crowds were
dispersed, electors were confirmed, and the ascendancy of Biden was assured, while Trump
followers were branded 'domestic terrorists'.
Donald Trump denounced the people whom he personally called to protest. His close political
allies withdrew their support. Within hours, or even minutes, this ruler of the world admired
by millions became a non-person. Like a boy who posted an obscenity, he was banned by Twitter
and Facebook. Time will tell whether he will go to prison, as so many Dems pray for, but his
political life seems to have ended, even if his cause may live.
The deck was stacked against President Trump from Day One. His orders were ignored. The US
courts, judges, police, the whole system of law enforcement was against him; his orders were
blocked or overturned, while the media made fun of him and the opposition relentlessly
delegitimised him. He was blocked even by Fox News. Dem-run states adjusted their laws to
assure the elections' result. Trump was a lame duck from the very beginning of his presidency
to its bitter end. He was kept on a short leash by the almighty Deep State, and when he tried
to free himself, they pulled the leash.
On January 6, a massive demonstration in his support gathered in Washington, DC. Hundreds of
thousands Americans came to the capital to demand justice after the election fraud became
obvious. They hoped that the Republican representatives would refuse to certify the fraud and
appoint a commission to check and recount the votes. Some of the protesters managed to break
into the Capitol, or were let in by the police. This peaceful Occupy Capitol action, the
exercise of a natural right to protest, was met with lethal fire, and a young female protester
from San Diego, Ashli Babbitt, was murdered by the plainclothes police. The Republican
representatives were cowed and surrendered; Biden was confirmed to take office.
The horror and outrage of the Dem politicians and media were as faked as their news. During
last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not
one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings.
"Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King
Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting "Break down the door!" and "General strike!" Moments
later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside,
joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes. The area
outside the Assembly, which is scheduled to take the bill up at 11 a.m. today, was crowded
with protesters who chanted, "We're not leaving. Not this time."
Department of Administration spokesman Tim Donovan said although protesters were being
encouraged to leave, no one would be forcibly removed. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he had
instructed Police Chief Noble Wray not to allow his officers to participate in removing
demonstrators from the building."
This was what happened in Madison, Wisconsin in March 2011, as
Steve Sailer reminded us. Indeed, this is what the protesters expected; some were dressed
in flamboyant carnival attire; they behaved well and peacefully, within acceptable limits. It
was not an insurrection; they didn't try to take over the Congress in any meaningful sense.
For them, it was an honest and funny way to express their indignation. But the real gambit
plotters intended to frame them. They even murdered four protesters hoping they would respond
with violence, but in vain.
White American protesters are exceptionally non-violent lot; as with Occupy Wall Street
a few years back the January 6 Capitol protesters were timid and obedient as lambs. For this
reason, BLM was invented, for Blacks are able to riot violently, as opposed to well-trained
whites. It is not a race thing: lily-white French Yellow Vests and Ukrainian nationalists have
fought the police all right. But US whites are not prone to riot, not since the Civil War.
Being a foreigner, I do not understand why the Americans want to keep their guns if they never
use them, but that's the way they are.
Anyway, their non-violence didn't help them. The president-elect
Biden begrudged them even the name of protesters: "Don't dare call them protesters. They
were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists." Indeed, the name should be
preserved for Deep State-authorised looters and their brethren all over the world, whether in
Hong Kong or Minsk, in Seattle or Portland.
Russian social networks were comparing the Washington DC events with those nearer to home
and complained of 'double standards'. The US media expressed no indignation when their
appointee Boris Yeltsin shelled the Russian Parliament in 1993. The New York Times and
the State Department had encouraged the nationalist mob to storm Ukrainian government offices
in 2014. They cheered on the opposition in Minsk in taking over their parliament after failing
to win elections. The Belarus protesters claimed their country's election results were rigged,
just like Trump supporters did for the US elections, but Biden didn't call them "domestic
terrorists". (Actually, neither did President Lukashenko: he called them 'protesters', and
their violent demos were dispersed without a single shot fired.) In such cases, Jews respond
with "How can you compare?!"
The Russians compared the Capitol 'coup attempt' with their own semi-staged 'coup' of 1991,
a partly pre-planned provocation. In 1991, the feeble coup organisers could not detain Yeltsin
and surrendered as if on cue; the wave of indignation removed Gorbachev and the Communist party
from power. In the Capitol, too, police waved the 'invaders' in, as you can see on this video
forwarded by the BBC. More videos suggesting Capitol police involvement in the ostensible
provocation are presented
here . The orchestrated indignation allowed the victors to censor and purge the defeated
Trump and his followers. Just as the USSR went down in August 1991, Trump's America went down
in January 2021, and the liberal elites representing the big corporations came to power. It was
achieved by a provocation, but ordinary Trump followers were really angry with the Election
Steal. Likewise, 1991 was a provocation, but ordinary Russian citizens were angry at
Gorbachev's perestroika, while the liberal elites used it to dismantle the Soviet state and
transfer all assets to their oligarchs.
People with a good knowledge of history refer to the Reichstag Fire of February 1933, the
arson contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its
opponents and to assume emergency powers. Alternatively, other researchers have contended that
there was no proof of Nazi complicity in the crime, but that Hitler merely capitalised on the
Dutch Communist van der Lubbe's independent act. The fire is the subject of continued debate
and research, says
the Encycopaedia Britannica . Probably the same will be said about the Capitol "invasion",
and researchers will argue whether duplicitous Biden's minions organised it or just
capitalised on the Trumpers' sincere protest.
There is no doubt that to an objective observer the 2020 elections were profoundly
unfair. I won't trouble you with too many published details about the statistically impossible
results, but here is one example of fraud. The city of Detroit gave 95 per cent of its vote to
Biden/Kamala, a number that Mr Kim Jong-un would view with slight envy, while Mr Lukashenko
would murmur, "How can it be done?" It is highly likely this mind-boggling result was achieved
in the following way.
Detroit Dems outsourced ballot
harvesting to local drug lords, offering them as a prize – recreational marijuana
business licenses. These licences are the best thing sincea licence to print
money . Having such licenses is like having your own ATM. Here
you can read about their profitability and the lengths criminals will go to obtain them.
Detroit Dems had
changed local laws allowing the sale of marijuana in their fine city (it was forbidden
until November 2020). They changed local laws prescribing the
issuing of marijuana licences to drug dealers with previous convictions for drug dealing.
They let drug lords out of
jail . They changed local laws to allow ballot harvesting; that is, collecting postal votes
and assisting with the filling in of ballots. After that, the drug dealers went around
collecting postal ballots and filling them in immediately, if they were conscientious, or just
filling them in at their leisure, if feeling lazy. They had a judge at their disposal,
Cynthia Stephens , who
single-handedly
changed Michigan election laws, and then
rejected Trump's claims of fraud.
Yes, Virginia, there was election fraud in many American states. They are used to
gambling; they aren't surprised by a beautiful hand of four aces, as Mark Twain suggested.
Usually the two parties deal in turns, and cheat in turns. Only this time, Trump convinced many
people that it is different; that this is their last chance.
The problem is, Trump was a poor organiser. He could win elections, if he could prevent
Cynthia Stephens's kind of legislation, outlaw postal ballots, enforce obligatory IDs for
voting, mobilise his people for election control. A formidable task, but not impossible, while
dealing with a prone-to-cheat adversary. He could even do a revolution on January 6, tasking
the right people to act, forming a revolutionary HQ, planning a strategy of takeover, but he
didn't do anything of the sort. He probably thought Congress would see the vast crowds and
allow for the checking of election results.
Alternatively, he was so naïve that he believed revolutions just happen by
themselves, as in the movies. They do not. Behind every successful revolution, there is a lot
of planning, armed force, weapons ready for use, supply lines, logistics, media support, and
communications. Trump had none of that. It was enough to turn off Twitter to make him deaf and
dumb.
There was no coup attempt, as correctly stated by Tyler
Durden : "Trump has never had the concentration, organizational acumen, or ideological
coherence to mount a bona fide "coup," and a mob intrusion which was swiftly dispersed
by armed agents of the state doesn't change that. Shortly after the breach, he released a
video instructing his followers not to take Senators hostage or imprison Mike Pence, but to "go
home." No factions of the federal government joined the mob on Trump's orders, because he
didn't bother issuing any. The whole episode never stood the remotest chance of preventing the
certification of Joe Biden, much less overthrowing the government. It was just another goofball
charade, and in that sense, a fitting end to the Trump presidency."
Conspiracy theories played their disappointing part in the debacle. Many Trumpists
believed in the QAnon and Kayfabe conspiracies; they posted reports of bad guys being arrested,
of servers snatched by the FBI, of Clinton and Biden waiting for rough justice behind bars.
This belief disarmed people who would otherwise have fought to achieve this very result. That
is the problem with conspiracies: imaginary conspiracies prevent real action.
Still, I do not want to finish this piece on such a sad and disappointing note. President
Trump was a great leader. He succeeded against enormous odds in improving the lot of
American workers: for the first time since the 1970s, their incomes rose in relation to the
other classes. He stopped mass migration to the US: legal immigration went down to a trickle.
He avoided new wars; he tried to make peace with Russia. He refused to bomb Iran even in the
last days of his presidency, though some pro-Israel supporters promised
him a second term if he would.
His fight against the corona madness was his great achievement. He was against the
lockdowns that are about to destroy our world so completely that few things will survive. The
last great US ruler who didn't wear the cowardly mask will be remembered. He could not defeat
the mighty medical complex, or FAGMA, or the Masters of Discourse, but he tried.
The day of his defeat, January 6, was the Epiphany, or Adoration of the Magi, of the Three
Wise Men who came to worship Jesus in his cave. It was also Christmas Eve for the Eastern
Church. It is the darkest time of the year; from now on, the day will increase and so will our
hopes.
"... During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings. ..."
During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM
activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters
out of buildings.
"Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King
Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting "Break down the door!" and "General strike!" Moments
later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside,
joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes. The area
outside the Assembly, which is scheduled to take the bill up at 11 a.m. today, was crowded
with protesters who chanted, "We're not leaving. Not this time."
Department of Administration spokesman Tim Donovan said although protesters were being
encouraged to leave, no one would be forcibly removed. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he had
instructed Police Chief Noble Wray not to allow his officers to participate in removing
demonstrators from the building."
Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek - 10:33 UTC · Jan 10, 2021
Entrusting Silicon Valley oligarchs to police speech on the social media platforms that
dominate the exchange of information is gonna turn out great for the left for sure. No
concerns here
-----
There are several types of dangerous fanatics. The mob visited upon Capitol was
potentially dangerous, matches that can lit a serious fire in the hands of a child with no
knowledge (or will?) to use them "properly". But fanatical centrists, while lacking deeper
wisdom, are quite dangerous, Silicon oligarchs (and other oligarchs) have a mutual
relationship.
The left is always being censored, directly or indirectly, online, including Twitter.
The issue with Trump is whether an elite, one of the ruling class, can be "censored." Given
that Trump can get a press conference televised whenever he wants, he is not being censored
at all, not in the usual sense of the word. Trump has no right to a medium where he can't be
questioned, which is what this hysteria is about. Hysteria about the privileges of the
wealthy and powerful is servile, not shrewd.
"It's the height of hypocrisy for people who claim to be the champions of rights for women
to deny the very biological existence of women," former Democratic presidential candidate
Tulsi Gabbard, who just might be the last Democrat in DC with a functioning brain, told
Tucker Carlson. "Instead of doing something that could actually help save people's lives,
they are choosing instead to say 'You can't say mother or father.'"
I would ask for an 'Amen!' at this point, but, thanks to the clown work of lawmaker
Emanuel Cleaver, who ended his congressional prayer opening of the very unsexy 117th
Congress with the words "amen and awoman," even that simple gender-free term (which simply
means 'so be it') is now tainted with foul political intrigue.
With these sort of unforgivable stunts under the belt, the Democrats should be very
grateful they have perfected the art of 'winning' elections, otherwise they would probably
vanish from the political landscape simply out of lack of doing anything positive for the
nation. Indeed, the term 'Democrat' may be on the way out faster than that of 'male' and
'female.'
Voice of America CEO Accused Of Fraud, Misuse Of Office All In One Week
Fresh crises and fresh challenges confront the Trump-appointed CEO of the parent of Voice
of America, even with less than two weeks left of the Trump presidency.
To start, the Attorney General of the District of Columbia this week accused U.S. Agency
for Global Media CEO Michael Pack of illegally funneling more than $4 million to his private
documentary company through a not-for-profit that he also controls.
"The city of Detroit gave 95 per cent of its vote to Biden/Kamala, a number that Mr Kim
Jong-un would view with slight envy, while Mr Lukashenko would murmur, "How can it be done?"
It is highly likely this mind-boggling result was achieved in the following way.
Detroit Dems outsourced ballot harvesting to local drug lords, offering them as a prize
– recreational marijuana business licenses. These licences are the best thing since a
licence to print money. Having such licenses is like having your own ATM. Here you can read
about their profitability and the lengths criminals will go to obtain them. Detroit Dems had
changed local laws allowing the sale of marijuana in their fine city (it was forbidden until
November 2020). They changed local laws prescribing the issuing of marijuana licences to drug
dealers with previous convictions for drug dealing.
They let drug lords out of jail. They changed local laws to allow ballot harvesting; that
is, collecting postal votes and assisting with the filling in of ballots.
After that, the drug dealers went around collecting postal ballots and filling them in
immediately, if they were conscientious, or just filling them in at their leisure, if feeling
lazy. They had a judge at their disposal, Cynthia Stephens, who single-handedly changed
Michigan election laws, and then rejected Trump's claims of fraud."
Georgi Dimitrov. The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the
Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism
Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the
Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the
most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
...
Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty
bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist
Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the
petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of
finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working
class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy,
fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.
A Republic is, by definition, an oligarchy. We just refuse to acknowledge what it truly
is. Put some lipstick on the pig.
But ours is not a pure Republic because we do have democratic referendums all of the time
where the people get to make laws that a majority want. We need more of them.
We don't have any at the federal level but there is nothing that prohibits them. Under
Amendment 10 all powers not granted to the federal government are granted to the states and
the people . The implication is that powers left to the people can be exercised by
referendum. Referendums are really the only check on oligarchy.
As the people who supported the censoring and the eventual de-platforming the President on
social media are about to find out , if you can censor the President you can censor anyone or any
group.
It's all been allowed to happen for an obvious agenda of compliance and control. From 'riots'
of BLM/Antifa to the 'insurrection' of Trumpeteers, the point is to narrow accepted thought - to
manufacture consent, which is much easier with an un or misinformed populace. A social credit
system is coming to the west - call it the Karen Revolution. There will be some kind of
unexpected blowback, as many "deplorable" are technically savy
Notable quotes:
"... Definitely staged event, whether the protestors knew or didn't. Going forward, I'm switching to Signal from WhatsApp and viber, have to rethink my use of Gmail as well. Don't use faceborg or Jill Dorsey's twat. Enough is enough! ..."
As the people who supported the censoring and the eventual de-platforming the President on
social media are about to find out , if you can censor the President you can censor anyone or
any group.
But they were so caught up in the hysteria of the #OrangeManBad that they didn't take the
actions of Big Tech , that they were supporting, and to its logical conclusion:
Definitely staged event, whether the protestors knew or didn't. Going forward, I'm
switching to Signal from WhatsApp and viber, have to rethink my use of Gmail as well. Don't
use faceborg or Jill Dorsey's twat. Enough is enough!
Nothing in this year's elections surprises me. I predicted all this over four years ago in
August 2016. The only thing that surprised me was that Trump was sworn in on January 20,
2017. For a short time I believed that the United States was a democracy where elections
could change policy. It is not!
(I originally
wrote this as comment to Andrew Korybko's Facebook post on August 15, 2016.)
Why Trump can't win
Even if Trump gets a majority of the votes the chances of him actually becoming
President are slim. Here are some of the tactics and tricks the Hillary camp could use to
block his election. I cannot say what is the probability of these options, but they have
all been tested in previous US sponsored color revolutions.
Massive propaganda campaign will pressure the electorate to vote against their
favorite candidate.
If Trump still gets over 50% of the vote, the vote count will be falsified.
(Something similar seems to have happened in the Austrian presidential election.)
If the election results actually show a victory for Trump, the results will be
annulled. DNC will claim that "Putin" hacked the voting machines. The Supreme Court will
declare Hillary the winner.
If all else fails, Hillary will call for a Maidan-style occupation of Washington DC.
The revolutionaries will take over the Capitol and the White House -- with the support of
pro-Hillary officials.
I continued in the original post on August 16, 2016.
Trump cannot be allowed to win precisely because -- as you say on the video -- he
represents the non-system opposition. He does not even have the support of his own party.
This is not a simple question of counting votes. For him to actually become president, he
has to win by a large margin.
Andrew, you are an expert on hybrid war. Why would Hillary not unleash the full array of
hybrid war weapons on Trump? In fact they are doing it already. Trump has been labeled the
"Manchurian Candidate". Ukraine fell to Maidan because no one in Ukraine was willing to
defend the institution of the presidency or the Ukrainian constitution. Why would the US be
any different.
You write: "4 wouldn't fully succeed because of the counter-Color Revolution technology
that the Trump supporters could organize in their own demonstrations and movements" You are
wrong. These are not "Trump supporters" but "Putin Trolls". Why would any mainstream media
give any voice to these people?
For an anti-Trump Maidan or coup to fail, Trump would personally have to lead the
opposition. In doing so he would be putting his life, liberty and fortune at risk. He can
be pressured or "advised" to give up the fight. In fact it would be easiest to just
assassinate him.
Many things can happen before we are at scenario 4. The simplest option is to escalate a
crisis or war with Russia, Hillary's anti-Trump strategy is already framing the election as
between her and Putin. In a crisis scenario Trump would simply be dismissed as a Russian
enemy agent.
***
Why am I writing all this delusional stuff about a coup in the US or even of potential
civil war?
Democracy requires a free press. That no longer exist in the West. Instead the Powers
that Be have created an enormously powerful hybrid war machine that they have turned on
Libya, Syria, Russia (and on European democracy). They are able to manipulate reality like
never before. They are a huge danger to any state or any democracy.
I am just trying to imagine what would happen if these tools were turned on the USA.
Different topic but, this is good. Normally, I'm too impatient for videos however, this
former CIA station chief does a great job explaining how the electronic election theft
flowed.
I deleted my FB account years ago. Good riddance. There was no other alternative because
they had "first mover advantage". Perhaps the purge will disgust enough people to provide a
critical mass now.
For the moment, various user-friendly technologies will ease the transition. Many
traditional Americans are using
parler.com
which requires personal info to sign up, and
ruqqus.com
which does not require personal info.
In the medium term,
8kun.top
serves a specialized purpose of guaranteeing freedom of speech to people like Lin Wood.
8kun is certainly not suitable for most users. Similarly, tor is probably not suitable for
most users, but it is a proven technology and is available at
will eventually become user-friendly, highly resilient platforms for American speech.
In Chinese-speaking antiCommunist countries such as Taiwan, the current solutions are not
yet user-friendly enough. Some Taiwanese people and some Japanese people will rely on
American free speech platforms. Although such nonAmerican antiCommunists mostly have no
personal loyalty to President Trump, they understand that the swamp must be drained.
As strange as it may sound coming from me--but these are all private platforms and their
policies, however screwed up, are their policies. The United States has Antitrust Laws and
DJT had full four years to deal with this issue of social platforms' monopolies. He didn't do
a thing, as he didn't in many other fields--he was too busy twitting and being a door mat for
Israel. Now, he suddenly, woke up? The guy is a NYC real estate hustler and media
personality, I abandoned any hope to see anything done from him after he appointed John
Bolton. Everything became very clear then.
I suppose when Chinese communists are openly permitted to buy their way into our media,
educational system, economy, political class, etc., censorship of the scale and breadth we're
witnessing is inevitable sooner or later. When I was a little girl, in spite of the legacy of
the 1950s Red Scare, the idea of Russian communists openly buying influence and stakes
in our economy was nevertheless unheard of. No doubt it happened on the sly, but stealthily
because of the sense that it was wrong and counter to our country's principles. Not so today.
The Chinese throw a lot of money around, and there seems to be no shortage of Americans eager
to take what they can get of it.
Thank you colonel for providing this venue during such a sad time for America.
Might I suggest that you get in touch with the folks at Conservative Tree House? They
recently faced a sudden, ginned-up suspension of hosting, purportedly because of violations
of the ever flexible "Terms of Service". They got to gittin', and with the help of some
technical experts sympathetic to the cause of freedom of speech, they got re-hosted, moving
years of posts_AND_comments before the drop dead date to a new and independent hosting.
Advice, and maybe even a helping hand might be available. Can't hurt.
BTW, I have had in storage an IBM AS400 computer (long story) for some time. Only had
initial "burn in", but was never used beyond that. I offer it to you if this could be in any
way helpful if any tech folks think that it might be an ace in the hole for you.
Yes. I have done some research and have decided where to go, but was distracted by the
roll-out of my book (not yet ended). Now I will have to get busy.
While many of them call themselves private platforms, a good portion were created by U.S.
Government 'seed money'. Which means that it was the U.S. Taxpayer who helped them get
started and funded their platforms, which makes U.S. Taxpayers their true 'owners'.
It's true, he had four years to straighten out that mess and didn't.
One now has to wonder when will the Israelis wake up and realize that the expanding Censor
GODS of Silicon Valley hate them just as much as they hate Americans who dare speak out, and
will eventually come after them just like they're doing to the American citizen.
Here, interference in email communication with supporters.
To all of you hyperlibertarians, well, a few audacious operators put the lie to your
belief system. Mr. Martyanov is correct in his critique. But in Trump's defense, when you are
ass deep in a swamp full of snapping alligators, all of whom would in unison resist a law
making these offenders considered to be obligated to act as common carriers, realistically
what could be done?
They are moving quickly, and our liberties are under direct threat.
Does this 'private property' right extend only to political speach or does that now mean
bakeries don't have to bake cakes for gays getting married and businesses can keep people the
owner thinks are the wrong color out again?
Parler is till going strong, despite some hiccups from increased users and traffic. Parler
can be accessed via webpage, you do not have to have the app. I have read that you can
download the app directly from their website and don't need to go thru the stores.
Reading Twitters justification was pretty chilling if you are worried about thought crimes
now deemed to be criminal. The two offending posts were pretty neutral, including Trump's
announcement he would not attend the Inauguration.
But Twitter decided what Trump really meant and Twitter decided based upon their own
unilateral judgement how people would react to what Twitter alone claimed Trump in fact
meant.
So yes, thought crimes are now punished. If you can call getting banned by Twitter
punishment. I would call it an escape for more wasted time and shallow thinking.
Basically OrangeManBad ...... regardless. Because we say so.
Reminder- there is a handy "Donate" button at the top of this page- right hand side -
PayPal too to show appreciation for any time and effort necessary the host may need to expend
that keep this forum going, free and uncensored.
Or to pay for the bird seed to get the flock through the dark days of the Biden winter to
come. Whatever. Angrybirds are hungry in my neck of the woods.
A lot's been happening really fast. It's a white noise saturation day and it's impossible to
keep track of everything going on, so I'm just going to post my thoughts on a few of the things
that have happened.
Biden has announced plans to roll out
new domestic terrorism laws in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.
"Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic
terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against
ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them," Wall Street
Journal reports.
Did you know that Biden has often boasted
about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?
The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA
PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11
attacks . Legislators later
admitted that they hadn't even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the
history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to
gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.
This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET
reported the following back in 2008:
"Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced
another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of
1995 . It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in
prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating
a new federal crime of 'terrorism' that could be invoked based on political beliefs,
permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent
detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security
Studies said the bill
would erode 'constitutional and statutory due process protections' and would 'authorize
the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on
political beliefs and associations.'
Biden's bill was never put to a
vote , but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with
the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.
"Civil libertarians were opposed to it," Biden said in 2002 of
his bill.
"Right after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he
introduced the Patriot Act. He said, 'Joe, I'm introducing the act basically as you wrote it
in 1994.'"
A recent Morning Joe appearance by CIA analyst-turned House Representative Elissa Slotkin
eagerly informed us that the real battle against terrorism is now inside America's borders.
"The post 9/11 era is over," Slotkin tweeted while sharing a clip
of her appearance.
"The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The
threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens our democracy. If we don't
reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside."
"Before Congress, Elissa worked for the CIA and the Pentagon and helped destabilize the
Middle East during the Bush and Obama admins," tweeted journalist
Whitney Webb in response.
"What she says here is essentially an open announcement that the US has moved from the
'War on [foreign] terror' to the 'War on domestic terror'."
* * *
In response to pressures
from all directions including
its own staff , Twitter has followed Facebook's lead and removed Donald Trump's
account.
And it wasn't just Trump. Accounts are vanishing quickly, including some popular Trump supporter
accounts . I myself have lost hundreds of followers on Twitter in the last few hours, and
I've seen people saying they lost a lot more.
It also wasn't just Trump supporters; leftist accounts are getting suspended too . The online
left is hopefully learning that cheering for Twitter "banning fascists" irrationally assumes
that (A) their purges are only banning fascists and (B) they are limiting their bans to your
personal definition of fascists. There is no basis whatsoever for either of these
assumptions.
Google has ratcheted things up even further by removing
Parler from its app store, and Apple will likely soon
follow . This push to marginalize even the already fringey social media sites is making the
libertarian/shitlib argument of "If you don't like censorship just go to another platform" look
pretty ridiculous.
This is all happening just in time for the Biden administration, about which critics had
already been
voicing grave concerns regarding the future of internet censorship.
The censorship of a political faction at the hands of a few liberal Silicon Valley
billionaires will do the exact opposite of eliminating right-wing paranoia and conspiracy
theories, and everyone knows it. You're not trying to make things better, you're trying to make
them worse. You're not trying to restore peace and order, you're trying to force a
confrontation so your political enemies can be crushed. You're accelerationist.
A Venn diagram of people who support the latest social media purges and people who secretly
hope Trumpers freak out and attempt a violent uprising would look like the Japanese flag.
The correct response to a huge section of the citizenry doubting an electoral system we've
known for years is garbage would have been more transparency, not shoving the process through
and silencing people who voice doubts and making that entire faction more paranoid and
crazy.
* * *
Supporting the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech
oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your
attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is
suicidal.
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see
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has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else
I've written) in any way they like free of charge.
Many people stopped using Google search after Prism was revealed. If did not make a dent on
Google profits, though. Now probably many will stop using Twitter.
Definitely staged event, whether the protestors knew or didn't. Going forward, I'm
switching to Signal from WhatsApp and viber, have to rethink my use of Gmail as well. Don't
use faceborg or Jill Dorsey's twat. Enough is enough!
He already joined VK recently, so the alternatives are in place. And if these fall there
will be others. As juliania reminded us, we have samizdat . And as NemesisCalling
reminds us above, we have our mouths. They are indeed sowing the wind, and when things get
bad enough to invoke the whirlwind, the people will know what they know, even without
Facebook etc.
Good riddance to Facebook. Good riddance to Twitter. They themselves will force us to the
next platforms, the better things, for a time. And then the next better things after those.
One day maybe, a Huawei platform with quantum encryption, which is already being trialed in
China.
How did these social media platforms become so filled with political content anyway? Oh,
because people are interested in political content. They're not just sheep. They're vitally
interested in the society they live in.
And the powers that want to be everything have finally noticed and, acting as always to
close the barn door after the horses have fled, they want to throttle down these
platforms.
Talk about trying to contain water by closing your fist around it. Evil is always the most
stupid choice in this entire universe of possibilities. It is the mark of stupid. And it can
be known by its stupidity. And it will act in stupid ways. And it will fail for stupid
reasons, pushing down against what is rising up.
The intelligence of every living being is something that always seeks to rise, to ascend.
Stupidity goes the other way.
Trump is still president for a few days. It's about time he does something useful and goes
straight against Twitter and Facebook, with all available means. A president probably has a
degree of special powers he can use. I don't know, maybe ship Zuckerberg to Gitmo because
he's been way too slow to root out jihadis from his network and is de facto an
accomplice.
When neoliberal ideology is crumbling and the US neoliberal empire is in trouble, more tight
censorship is logical step for neoliberal elite, who does not care and never believed in
democracy for prols in any case. They are Trotskyites and their ideology is neoliberalism aka
"Trotskyism for the rich". Which like was the case with Bolshevism in the USSR means that it is
neo-feudalism for everybody else.
I never heard that feudal were concerned about freedom of speech for "deplorable". Only for
their own narrow circle.
Also the stability of the society is often more important then individual freedoms. That's
why in time of war, the press is forced to publish only official propaganda. So it is naive to
expect that in crisis, and the US society is currently in crisis, freedom of speech would be
respected. It will not. And Trump ban while cynical and illogical makes perfect sence for
neoliberal oligarchy.
The problem is that the US elite has not plan other the kicking the neoliberal can down the
road. And they intentionally polarized the society by promoting identity politics as a way to
preserve thier power and split masses into warring ethic or other groups.
Tech companies were once the primary tools of US "soft power" used to overthrow
authoritarian regimes by exporting 'digital democracy'. Now they employ the same tactics of
suppression as those regimes to silence dissent at home.
The permanent suspension of President Trump's Twitter account, carried out unilaterally and
devoid of any pretense of due process or appreciation of the First Amendment rights of Donald
Trump, represents a low moment in American history. Trump's ban was followed by a decision by
Google to de-platform Parler.com, a social media alternative to Twitter favored by many of
Trump's supporters. Apple also gave Parler a "24 hour warning" asking it to provide a
detailed moderation plan. Twitter, Google, Facebook (who also banned Trump) and the political
supporters of President-elect Joe Biden cite concerns that the content of the president's
Twitter account, along with exchanges among pro-Trump users of Parler, constituted an
"incitement of violence" risk that justified the actions taken.
In the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol by protesters seemingly motivated by the
words of President Trump, there is legitimate justification for concern over the link between
political violence and social media. But if history has taught us anything, the cure can be
worse than the disease, especially when it comes to the issue of constitutionally protected
freedom of speech.
This danger is illustrated by the actions of the former First Lady Michelle Obama who
has
publicly called for tech companies like Twitter and Facebook to permanently ban Trump from
their platforms and enact policies designed "to prevent their technology from being used by the
nation's leaders to fuel insurrection." The irony of the wife of the last American President
Barack Obama, who weaponized so-called digital democracy to export "Western democratic values"
in the struggle against authoritarian regimes, to turn to Twitter to release her message of
internet suppression, is striking. The fact that neither Michelle Obama nor those who extoll
her message see this irony is disturbing.
The Obama administration first sought to use 'digital democracy', the name given to policies
which aim to use web-based social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as vehicles to
enhance the organization and activism of young people in repressive regimes to achieve American
policy objectives of regime change, during the 2009 Iranian presidential election. US 'digital
democracy' efforts anchored a carefully orchestrated campaign to promote the candidacy of Mir
Hossein Mousavi. These efforts included a phone call from a US State Department official, Jared
Cohen, to executives at Twitter to forgo a scheduled maintenance period and keep the lines in
and out of Iran open, under the premise that it was essential to make sure that digital
messages sent by Iranian dissidents got out to an international audience. Digital democracy
became privatized when its primary architect, Jared Cohen, left the State Department in
September 2010 to take a new position with internet giant Google as the head of 'Google Ideas'
now known as 'Jigsaw'. Jigsaw is a global initiative 'think tank' intended to "spearhead
initiatives to apply technology solutions to problems faced by the developing world." This
was the same job Cohen was doing while at the State Department.
Cohen promoted the notion of a "digital democracy contagion" based upon his belief that
the "young people in the Middle East are just a mouse click away, they're just a Facebook
connection away, they're just an instant message away, they're just a text message away" from
sufficiently organizing to effect regime change. Cohen and Google were heavily involved the
January 2011 demonstrations in Egypt, using social networking sites to call for demonstrations
and political reform; the "Egyptian contagion" version of 'digital democracy' phenomena was
fueled by social networking internet sites run by Egyptian youth groups which took a very
public stance opposing the Mubarak regime and calling for political reform.
The Iranian and Egyptian experiences in digital democracy-inspired regime change represent
the nexus of the weaponization of social media by tech giants such as Twitter and Google, and
the US government, which at the time was under the stewardship of Barack Obama and then-Vice
President Joe Biden. The fact that both the Iranian and Egyptian efforts failed only
underscores the nefarious nature of this relationship. The very tools and methodologies used by
Iranian and Egyptian authorities to counter US-sponsored "digital democracy" –
suppression through de-platforming – have now been taken up by Twitter, Google, and the
political allies of Joe Biden to silence Donald Trump and his supporters from protesting an
election they believe was every bit as "stolen" as the 2009 Iranian presidential election that
gave birth to 'digital democracy' in the first place.
In a recently published
report addressing the issue of internet freedom, Freedom House, a US government-funded
non-profit, non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on democracy,
political freedom, and human rights, observed that internet connectivity "is not a
convenience, but a necessity." Virtually all human activities, including political
socialization, have moved online. This new 'digital world', the report noted, "presents
distinct challenges for human rights and democratic governance" with "State and nonstate
actors shape online narratives, censor critical speech, and build new technological systems of
social control."
Freedom House was one of the supporters of 'digital democracy' in Iran and has been highly critical of
the actions by Iranian authorities to shut down and otherwise control internet connectivity
inside Iran. It noted that such tactics are indicative of a system that is "fearful of their
own people and worr[ies] that they cannot control the information space." In its report,
Freedom House wrote that "when civic organizing and political dissent overflow from the
realm of social media onto the streets dictators shut down networks to choke off any calls for
greater democracy and human rights."
In July 2019, the US 2nd District Court of Appeals ruling on Knight
First Amendment Institute v. Trump determined that President Trump's Twitter account
"bear[s] all the trappings of an official, state-run account," meaning that the First Amendment
governed the conduct of the account. As such, "the First Amendment does not permit a public
official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude
persons from an otherwise open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the
official disagrees."
By banning Trump from their platform, the unelected employees of Twitter have done to the
president of the United States what he was accused of doing in Knight First Amendment Institute
v. Trump. If it was a violation of First Amendment-protected free speech for Trump to exclude
persons from an otherwise open online dialogue, then the converse is obviously also
true.
The notion that Trump's tweets somehow represented a "clear and present danger" that
required suppression is not supported by the law. In 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
wrote the majority opinion in Schenck v. United
States , a case which examined the limits of free speech protections under the First
Amendment, and famously observed that "The most stringent protection of free speech would
not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic [t]he question in
every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as
to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that
Congress has a right to prevent."
Holmes' opinion in Schenck was later limited by the Supreme Court in its 1969 decision in
Brandenburg v. Ohio ,
which replaced the "clear and present danger" standard with what is known as
"imminent lawless action," which holds that speech is not protected if it is likely to
cause violation of the law "more quickly than an officer of the law reasonably can be
summoned." By suppressing the social media expressions of Donald Trump and his supporters,
Twitter, Facebook, and Google – egged on by the political supporters of Joe Biden –
appear to have unilaterally adopted the "clear and present danger" standard which
deviates from the constitutionally-mandated norms, as established by Supreme Court precedent,
that govern the protection of speech in America.
Political speech is not just a human right – in America, it is an essential
constitutionally guaranteed freedom. When the political supporters of Joe Biden, along with the
unelected heads of media giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, actively collaborate to
silence the ability of Donald Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who support him to
express themselves on social media, they become no better than the authoritarian regimes they
once sought to remove from power.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of '
SCORPION
KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the
Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during
the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
I have tried to explain over the past while, that what we are seeing in the US is an
ongoing coup, This is a coup against the US people by the US corporate and financial
oligarchs. Clearly, they are benefiting by not simply enriching themselves at taxpayers
expense, but securing their own criminal amoral behaviour through the supression of human
rights and what is left of the freedom of speech in the US. This is accelaerating
exponentially and has been going on long before Trump came on the scene.
Avoid paying attention to the distractions, and keep your eye on the ball.
Trump was right on the big tech, he tried to warn about their power for many years, now
big-tech crack down on him and his supporters.
The leftwingers at Big tech really proved his point, they are a enormous threat.
Liberals and leftwingers cheer today, they are people that pick tribalism before freedom
of speeech, so disgusting.
Don't take my word for it, though. "If the post-American era has a start date, it is
almost certainly today," argued none other than the head of the Council on Foreign
Relations – the foremost think tank advocating for the Empire in Washington – after
Wednesday's storming of the Capitol by several hundred Trump supporters protesting the
certification of the election for Biden.
"No one in the world is likely to see, respect, fear, or depend on us in the same way
again," lamented CFR president Richard Haas.
Sure enough, as Haas was saying this the NATO secretary-general tweeted about the
"shocking scenes" in Washington and demanded that Joe Biden's election "must be
respected." British and French leaders followed suit , as did the
Organization of American States. Turkey "expressed concern." Canada and India chimed
in.
Even Venezuela got into the act, condemning "acts of violence" in Washington and
"political polarization" in the US, while expressing hope that Americans "can blaze a
new path toward stability and social justice."
Keep in mind that the US has refused to recognize Venezuela's elected president or
parliament, attempting for the past two years to install an unelected 'interim president'
instead and call it democracy. While the Trump administration has led this effort, the
Democrats – now poised to have absolute power in the US – have been fully on
board.
Likewise, the only time the Republican establishment and the Democrat 'Resistance' banded
together in near-unison was to override Trump's
veto of the NDAA military funding bill, which contained a provision that would block him or
any future president from withdrawing troops from overseas endless wars without prior
congressional approval. The commitment to the Empire runs deep in the Washington 'swamp', as
Trump used to call it.
"We are seeing images that I never imagined we would see in this country – in some
other capital yes, but not here," said Haas.
This unwitting admission of 'American exceptionalism' basically says it's fine for US-backed
activists to storm parliaments in "regimes" that Washington dislikes and wants to
change, but when Americans rebel against their own government they believe is acting
illegitimately, that's beyond the pale.
While what happened Wednesday was not actually a "color revolution," the visuals were
certainly similar enough for the world to take notice. It would be wrong, however, to blame the
Capitol "insurrection" for the demise of the American Empire, when it was merely the
last domino to fall.
Again, don't take my word for it – here's Ishan Tharoor, a columnist for the
notoriously pro-establishment Washington Post, declaring on Thursday that for "many
abroad," the vision of the US as a shining city on a hill with global moral influence and
authority "has already died a thousand deaths."
For some of these people, Tharoor argued, this narrative was "always an illusion to
obscure the Washington-engineered coups and client military regimes." Indeed.
Democrats and their neocon allies have spent the past four years blaming Trump's 'America
First' policy, lamenting that he was acting unilaterally, antagonizing "allies" and
creating a "leadership vacuum" in the world. Those are the talking points of the
incoming administration as well.
Except they've clearly forgotten the events of January 2020, when Trump ordered the drone
assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. There were no protests from US
"allies" – or should we say vassals? Instead, they fell in line with amazing
alacrity.
Trump actually embraced the American Empire, he simply dispensed with the polite fictions it
had used to dress up as something else over the years.
Ironically, it was the mobilization of the entire US political establishment to get rid
of Trump – starting with 'Russiagate' and the impeachment circus over the phone call
to Ukraine, with nationwide riots about "racial justice" and the politically weaponized
coronavirus lockdowns along the way – that did the lion's share of exploding the myths
that maintained US hegemony, both at home and abroad.
Remember the 'Deep State' that was supposedly a Trumpian conspiracy theory? Yet its
existence was confirmed in the
impeachment hearings, a former CIA director openly praised it, and the eventual
revelations of a FBI plot to frame General
Flynn removed any vestiges of doubt.
The mainstream media's war on Trump, later joined by social media platforms –
censorship of the legitimate and accurate Hunter Biden laptop story just before the election
being just the most egregious example – also played out for the world to see.
In the end, they banned Trump from every social
media platform while he was still in office, even as he said he would leave
peacefully.
Basically, the entire US establishment was so consumed by the desire to burn Trump at the
proverbial stake, they chopped up the scaffolding that held up the Empire to use as
firewood.
In a speech recently, Joe Biden vowed to "rebuild,
reclaim America's place in the world" as a country that will "champion liberty and
democracy once more." That's a daunting task, on par with putting the genie back into the
bottle, un-spilling milk, or putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Ironically, the only thing that could repair American prestige in the world might be to
patch up the American Republic, almost broken by the four years of 'Resistance' to Trump. But
as that would entail some self-awareness and soul-searching, it remains, shall we say, highly
unlikely.
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The United States has by far the largest military in the world, but Vietnam proved that
sometimes that's not enough. An empire needs other nations submit or at least cooperate.
That becomes difficult when you're extremely
unpopular . That's where America is today.
In 20 of the 29 countries and areas that Gallup has results for so far in 2020, approval
ratings of U.S. leadership are at new lows or they tie the previous lows.
Median approval across the 29 countries and areas stood at 18% in 2020, down from 22% for
this same group in 2017. On its face, this decline is not good news for the next U.S.
administration, but even worse news is the number of allies on the list of countries where
approval dropped to historic lows: Ireland (20%), the United Kingdom (15%), Denmark (14%),
Switzerland (10%), Germany (6%) and Iceland (5%).
This doesn't necessarily mean anything to the American Empire if the leadership of those
nations are still in our pockets. However it does create a window of opportunity to get out
from under our thumb.
Judging by what happened this week, that appears to be exactly what's going on.
First there was the judge in the UK ruling against extraditing
Assange .
In Germany, the Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation approved by the parliament of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will take risks of the U.S. sanctions against contractors of Nord
Stream 2 as Deutsche Welle reported.
The foundation will deal with the purchase of equipment and construction materials to
carve out other contractors from the possible U.S. sanctions.
This is a big deal because it allows Russia access to hard currency, and ensures their
ability to withstand our sanctions. While at the same time it weakens the right-wing
governments in Poland and Ukraine. The American Empire loses its leverage in Eastern
Europe.
This isn't the first time Europe stood up to US sanctions. Europe created Instex a few
years ago to avoid sanctions on Iran. However they were never truly serious about using it.
This time it appears Europe is serious, it's not just a symbolic act.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hg-XE9wgXjc
But the big surprise was when the EU decided to part ways with our
Venezuela policy .
The European Union has dropped its recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's interim
president after he lost his position as head of its parliament.
Josep Borrell, the EU's foreign affairs chief, referred to him in his latest statement as
one of the "political and civil society actors striving to bring back democracy to
Venezuela", after controversial incumbent Nicolás Maduro took control of the
Venezuelan National Assembly at last December's disputed elections.
But the European Commission explained that it was a decision taken collectively by EU
governments.
This isn't exactly a bold brave stand. It's more like a reluctant admission of reality.
But what it does do is it opens the door to diplomacy with the actual government of
Venezuela.
The reality is that the members of the Coalition For A Coup have been quietly slipping out the backdoor for
months.
However, the press statement issued by the US State Department and GAC is notable because of
the dwindling number of ally countries that are now "committed to the restoration of
democracy in Venezuela." What used to be a long list of more than 50 nations is now down to
just 19
As for Guaido, it's just embarrassing that the governments of the world continue to
recognize him as anything but a grifter , fraud ,
and imperialist
puppet .
I'm starting to think the government of Venezuela might actually survive. It's hard to say
because the American media lies so much about the situation there. Remember about six years ago
the right-wing media said Venezuelans were eating rats and zoo animals? If that was true they'd
all be dead by now.
Going forward we could be looking at virtually the entire continent of South America (except
for Brazil) shifting to the left and outside the reach of the American Empire.
Next month the Ecuador
election in which the Socialist candidate is leading in the polls.
The following month Peru gets their chance to elect someone good.
And later in the year it's Chile's turn , where a communist
mayor is leading in the polls.
Fyodor Lukyanov, the
editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on
Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion
Club How could something like this happen in Washington? It was assumed that, despite all
its social and political problems that have worsened in recent years, America was different and
far more robust than we are now seeing. A habit of being special
The rule of thumb was, 'there is America and there are others'. With the others,
shortcomings are natural and to be expected, even if many of them are well-established
democracies. But America is a different story, because by default, the US is a role model that
was supposed to remain the democratic icon forever.
Exceptionalism is foundational for America's political culture. This type of
self-identification was the cornerstone on which the nation and society were built a couple of
hundred years ago. That's how Americans are raised. And you will run into this phenomenon
everywhere.
When asking his supporters gathered by the Capitol building to go home, President Donald
Trump said, "You are special." People from the more liberal political camp have even
deeper convictions about the US being exceptional and therefore under an obligation to bring
light into the world, as they see it.
That's why everybody is shocked – how could this have happened? The reaction was
followed by a wave of explanations as to why the clashes near and inside the Capitol building
only looked like similar events in other countries, but in reality, they were something
entirely different. Here is a comment from the CNN website, "Sure there are superficial
similarities... but what's happening in America is uniquely American. It is that country's
monster."
Such restlessness is understandable. If we look at exceptionalism in the context of the
world order that we've had in recent decades, we see that after the end of the Cold War, the US
has held the unique position of the sole global hegemon. No other power in world history has
ever reached this level of dominance.
Besides massive military and economic resources, America's exceptionalism has also been
relying on the idea that this nation sets the tone for the global worldview. This authorized
America to certify systems of government in other countries and exert influence in situations
that it believed required certain adjustments. As we all know, this influence took different
forms, including direct military intervention.
We are not going to list the pros and cons of such a world order in this article. What's
important is that one of the key aspects of this order is the belief in the infallibility of
the global leader. That's why American commentators and experts are so worried about the
Capitol Building events and Trump's presidency in general hurting the international status of
the US.
Boomerang effect
Generally speaking, post-election turmoil is not a rare occurrence. After all, the US itself
has encouraged the new political tradition that has emerged in the 21st century. In recent
times, in certain places, election campaigns haven't ended after the votes were counted and the
winner is announced. Instead, Washington often encouraged the losing side to at least try to
challenge the results by taking to the streets. Indeed, resistance was part of the US
Declaration of Independence after all.
Western capitals consistently emphasized the legitimacy of such actions in situations when
people believed that their votes had been 'stolen'. Washington was usually the lead voice in
these declarations. Granted, this mostly applied to immature democracies with unstable
institutions, but where are all those unshakable, solid democratic countries today? The world
is experiencing so much instability that nobody is exempt from major shocks and
crises.
Information overload
There is another reason why traditional institutions are losing their footing. They were
effective in a solidified informational environment. The sources of information were either
controlled or perceived as trustworthy by the majority.
Today there are problems with both. Technological advances boost transparency, but they also
create multiple realities and countless opportunities for manipulation. Institutions must be
above reproach if they are to survive in the new conditions. It would be wrong to say that they
are all crumbling. They are, however, experiencing tremendous pressure, and we can't expect
them to be perfect.
Looking for a scapegoat
The US is not better or worse at facing the new challenges. Or, rather, it is better in some
areas and worse in others. This would all be very normal if America's exceptionalism didn't
always need affirmation.
Situations in which the US appears to be just like any other country, albeit with some
unique characteristics, are a shock to the system. In order to stay special, America looks
where to place the blame. Ideally, the guilty party should be someone acting in the interests
of an outside power, someone un-American.
This mechanism is not unknown to Russians from the experience in our country – for a
long time now, Russian elites have been keen to blame outsiders for their own failures. But
America's motivation today is even stronger; there is more passion, because simply covering up
the failures is no longer enough – America wants to prove that it is still perfect.
Russia says American system 'archaic' & not up to 'modern democratic standards' after
rioters raid Washington's Capitol building
Democrats are taking back the American political landscape. For the next two years (until
the 2022 mid-term elections), they will have all the power – in the White House and
Congress. Trump's supporters have seriously scared the ruling class, and the Capitol building
debacle during the last days of his presidency has created a perfect pretext for cleaning
house. Big Tech companies are at their disposal (so far).
Internal targets
Target number one is Trump himself. They want to make an example out of him, so that others
wouldn't dare challenge the sanctity of the political establishment. But Trump will not be
enough, something must be done about his numerous supporters. The awkward finale of his
presidency opens the door for labeling his fans as enemies of the republic and democracy.
The Democrats will do everything within their power to demoralize their earnest opponents.
This won't be hard, since the Republican Party itself is a hot mess right now. Trump has
alienated almost all his supporters from the party leadership, but he is still popular among
regular voters.
Demonstrative restoration of order and democratic fundamentals will also be used to reclaim
the role model status. The reasoning is clear – we successfully neutralized the terrible
external and internal threats to our democracy, so now we have regained the right to show the
world how one should deal with the enemies of said democracy. The 'summit of democracies' idea
proposed by Joseph Biden is starting to look like an emergency meeting for closing the ranks in
a fight against enemies of progress.
Foreign targets
And this brings us back to the foreign policy issue, because it's not difficult to predict
who will be enemy number one. Putin as an almighty puppeteer of all undemocratic forces in the
world (including Trump) has been part of the rhetoric for a few years now. Hillary Clinton said
it when giving a campaign speech in Nevada in August 2016, and Nancy Pelosi echoed the
sentiment after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building. Of course, China is a close
second on the enemy list created by the Democratic leadership, but there are some economic
restraints there.
America's inevitable strife to reclaim its exceptionalism will clash with the current
tendencies in global development. All aspects of international affairs, from economy to
security, to ideology and ethics, are diversifying. Attempts to divide the world along the old
democracy vs. autocracy lines, i.e. go back to the agenda prevalent at the end of the 20th to
the beginning of the 21st century, are doomed, because this is not the way the world is
structured now.
But attempts will be made nevertheless, and we can't rule out some aggressive 'democracy
promotion'. Even if it's just to prove that the embarrassing Trump episode was nothing more
than an unfortunate accident. This, by the way, could become a short-term unifying factor for
the diverse members of the Democratic Party, some of whom represent the old generation, while
others are energetic young proponents of left-wing politics.
We can conclude that the world will not really benefit from the new presidency, even if
respected foreign policy professionals return to the White House now that Trump is leaving. It
might stabilize America's frenzy in international affairs that we are all used to by now, but a
new wave of ideology will neutralize the potential advantage (if it even existed, which is
debatable).
America's resolve to prove to the world that it's not like others will encounter the
large-scale 'material resistance', which will make a dangerous situation even worse. At least
with Trump we knew that he didn't like wars, and he didn't start any new ones. Biden's credit
history is very different.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
"Biden: "No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting
yesterday, they wouldn't have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that
stormed the Capitol. We all know that's true, and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.""
foxnews
Mr. Biden is not off to a very credible start on his campaign promise to "heal the soul of
our nation."
Are you aware that long before dirty commoners violating the sanctity, back on Jan 5th,
Apple Maps stopped navigating to Washington DC? Apparently, one couldn't get directions to DC
for driving, public transport, or walking.
Hmm....I read that Pelosi is coming unhinged because several laptops with incriminating
information are now in Trump's posession....thanks to this stunt
Obamanism666 3 hours ago
Naw they just contained her Luxury Ice cream orders..... apparently the flavors have
alcohol in them
journey80 34 minutes ago
COMING unhinged? That happened a couple of decades ago.
"... "There was no transition because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign. They started from the day I won and even before I won. From the day I came down the escalator with our First Lady. They were a disaster. They were a disgrace to our country. And we've caught 'em. We've caught 'em all. We've got it all on tape. We've caught 'em all." ..."
"There was no transition because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign. They
started from the day I won and even before I won.
From the day I came down the escalator with our First Lady. They were a disaster.
They were a disgrace to our country. And we've caught 'em. We've caught 'em all. We've got it all on tape. We've caught 'em all."
"... Monitors, equipped with distinguishing "uniforms", bullhorns and an array of communications devices, along with a set of security personnel, should have been front and center at the capitol to make sure that agents provocateurs, contract hired by the intel agencies of the Deep $tate, would not be able to fool a number of genuine Trump supporters into entering the building at the behest of these highly organized and ultimately protected Cointelpro types. ..."
Was Trump for real, or was he an actor following a predetermined script? There were many
occasions where he could have used the presidential powers to disarm the corporate state,
the deep state and even the ruling banksters. Yet he did not act. Perhaps the most telling
of all his "failures" was the fact that he called a rally in the Di$trict of Corruption
without setting up an organization (or even having one) that would have been specifically
instructed to make certain there would be no "riotous" disruptions in the process.
Monitors, equipped with distinguishing "uniforms", bullhorns and an array of
communications devices, along with a set of security personnel, should have been front and
center at the capitol to make sure that agents provocateurs, contract hired by the intel
agencies of the Deep $tate, would not be able to fool a number of genuine Trump supporters
into entering the building at the behest of these highly organized and ultimately protected
Cointelpro types.
It was a setup, folks. That should be obvious to any informed observer. Did Trump play a
role, whether passive or active, in creating the media spectacle which is now being used to
once again convince the terminally deluded boobtoob noose addicts that the Kamala's Foote
and Biden nominees were the "good guys" who actually won the election fair and square and
that the bedizened patriots who showed up in DC in huge numbers were actually the foes of
"democracy"?
@Majority of
One ut the Insurrection Act and how he should have used this or that presidential power,
but unfortunately he didn't know enough about what he COULD do. I'm sure he had lousy
counsel. He was surrounded by people like Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich who would have
strung Trump along, saying, "No, you can't do that, we are a democracy," etc. Blah, blah,
blah.
Hard to govern when you're surrounded with knives. The White House should be called "The
House of Knives".
But Trump did do something very important. He awakened the country to what's really going
on. I don't see that as failure. The elite don't either; that's why they're fighting him so
hard.
What people do not understand, is that he was screwed before he got the nomination.
Republican Inc. would have fixed the convention to deprive him of the nomination, had he not
agreed to take Pence and Priebus.
"... Unlike most democracies, the USA is dominated by just two parties that use propaganda to fight for control of the power that Government provides. Republicans stand firmly by Milton Friedman, openly and honestly promoting the best interests of the ruling class and against FDR's New Deal that had transformed the quality of life for hundreds of millions of workers. Republicans are a minority but well organized, well funded and speak with a disciplined message. ..."
"... The Democrat Party leadership has the same agenda because both parties operate in a completely privatized communication system which demands enormous sums of cash to participate. Like everything else in America the two parties can be characterized as businesses that use BS to collect money to give to the mass media, in their endless struggle for political power. Although there are many regional variations across time and geographic regions, Democrats tend to hold a 5% advantage over Republicans, but both parties are rightly held in distain by the 40% of voters who consider themselves to be "independent". Independent or not most elections force American voters back into a choice between Democrat or Republican. ..."
I first became aware of Paul Craig Roberts (PCR) during the depression of 2008 when events
led to my armchair education in economics. PCR contributed to my education along with Michael
Hudson, Steven Keen, Jospeph Stiglitz and others. I learned that economics is an inexact
science full of falsehoods that serve the ruling class in their war against the working
class. A primary falsehood promoted by the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman is
that unregulated free markets produce the greatest prosperity for the greatest number of
people. Friedman's Chicago School of economics, which dominates US policy under the guise of
freedom and democracy, has actually spread poverty, death and destruction for hundreds of
millions of people throughout the world. Friedman's logic seemingly justifies exploitation of
the working class by the ruling class in the great class war defined by Marx. Most Americans
have benefited from these policies in so far as they were imposed on third world countries
even though they are currently suffering as they have been incrementally imposed on our
domestic population, leading to a growing popularity for political outliers like Donald Trump
and Bernie Sanders.
Unlike most democracies, the USA is dominated by just two parties that use propaganda
to fight for control of the power that Government provides. Republicans stand firmly by
Milton Friedman, openly and honestly promoting the best interests of the ruling class and
against FDR's New Deal that had transformed the quality of life for hundreds of millions of
workers. Republicans are a minority but well organized, well funded and speak with a
disciplined message.
The Democrat Party leadership has the same agenda because both parties operate in a
completely privatized communication system which demands enormous sums of cash to
participate. Like everything else in America the two parties can be characterized as
businesses that use BS to collect money to give to the mass media, in their endless struggle
for political power. Although there are many regional variations across time and geographic
regions, Democrats tend to hold a 5% advantage over Republicans, but both parties are rightly
held in distain by the 40% of voters who consider themselves to be "independent". Independent
or not most elections force American voters back into a choice between Democrat or
Republican.
Trump is not a leader, populist or intellectual thinker. His only concern is himself and
his immediate family. He spends his time tweeting, golfing while eating and promoting junk
food. He seeks immediate profits for himself and his donors in a political system which pays
out 10:1 on investments in successful political candidates, where pay back is realized in tax
benefits. Trump is a successful self promoter who has a few good ideas and the most
substantial following of any Republican politician. But his behavior is too erratic to ever
bring his good ideas to fruition, or you could simply say ge is too lazy to bother.
ump used populist issues, Republican gerrymandering, Republican voter caging and purging
to overcome popular vote losses in 2016 but not 2020. Since 2000 American democratic voting
systems have rightly suffered a credibility gap, which Greg Pallast has documented but is
largely ignored by the mass media and Government which prefers to imagine us as the greatest
democracy ever. Trump has been able to use these problems to sow doubts about the credibility
of the 2020 outcome, even though our voting systems have been much improved on since
2000.
A Princeton Study documented that the USA operates more like an Oligarchy than a Democracy
by studying who benefited from 2000 pieces of legislation. The exclusive beneficiaries of all
that legislation by Democrats and Republicans are the wealthiest Americans that fund the
majority of duopoly activity. This fact helps to explain how wealth is being concentrated
into fewer and fewer hands..
You have to look back as far as Eisenhower and Kennedy to find Presidents dedicated to
promoting the general welfare, one of our constitutional mandates. Since that period,
election results have trapped the US population in a neoliberal economic system where the
vast majority of elected officials are mere figureheads. Biden and Harriss's record is no
exception to that rule. The "establishment" can be characterized as the military industrial
complex, ruling class, .001% or in a variety of other ways. I am not sure how PCR defines
that term, but they write and enforce the laws we all live by:
The use of money, the mass media and propaganda to vilify individuals and wage class war
is a great American past time. That is how Johnson attacked Goldwater and Bush 41 attacked
Dukakis. It is hardly unique to Trump's situation and if anything Trump is a master media
manipulator and name caller.
The history of man is the history of man's enslavement of other men usually under some
form of capitalism. When white people gained certain technological advantages over other
people, they used that technology ruthlessly to gain wealth. This is not unique to white
western culture, but it is an undeniable aprt of human history. Abraham Lincoln said that
capital cannot be accumulated without the contribution of labor, and therefore labor deserves
the first consideration. But we live in a world controlled by capitalists and the only thing
worse than being exploited by capitalists is not being exploited by them
Since the New Deal, the US has been on a path determined by the Friedman school of
economics. This has included the shuttering of mental health hospitals. As a result there are
many white psychotic males running around in a country with more individual guns than the
Chinese Army possesses. There is a real need to control access to these weapons, regardless
of the meaning of the original intent of the second amendment. One legitimate interpretation
of the term "militia" was white armed conscripts used to persistently intimidate and lynch
black slaves which far outnumber wealthy plantation owners. That said hunting is a legitimate
use of firearms even if slavery and war are impossible to justify.
Like Reagan, Trump has fomented racial and gender conflict as a successful political
strategy in a country which still is largely white, even though that proportion is
unsustainable. Whether the Covid-19 epidemic serves a similar political function can be
debated. However, as long as the US and other major powers operate bio-weapons and nuclear
weapons labs life on earth faces unnecessary risks. This website has documented that the 1918
"Spanish Flu" epidemic was most likely started in Kansas from a Rockefeller funded biological
research lab. The post 9-11 anthrax attack through the SU mail was almost certainly a
deliberate attack by a misguided rogue scientist in one of our labs. Bio-weapons and Nuclear
labs should be shut down through international agreements, the initiation of which began
during the Kennedy Presidency. But, unfortunately, the reverse is happening. Trump has even
suggested we should be more willing to use nuclear weapons to get our way, as long as we are
building them.
Overpopulation of the world is a serious problem. Global warming and US war mongering has
created tens of millions of refugees which must immigrate or die. Increases in population
densities everywhere decreases the quality of our lives and needs to be controlled. But to do
so effectively we must attempt to address the underlying causes of mass immigration. Most
people would prefer to live in te culture they were raised in as long as they can make a
decent living.
Under J Edgar Hoover, blacks, liberals, socialists and communists were enemy number one.
Our country has a long history of using the police to contain unrest in the working class.
While Hoover was the most extreme, you are still far more likely to suffer death or other
injury promulgated by the State if you are poor and considered to be part of any of the
groups Hoover vilified. Occupy Wall Street and Black lives Matter protestors were treated
much more brutally than any right wing extremists in support of Trump. Compare the caution
exercised by police during the Ted Bundy grazing conflict standoff and its aftermath with the
Black Panthers and PCR's assertions do not hold up.
Maarten "merethan" , Jan 8, 2021 11:43 AM Reply to
Leo Washington
Election fraud is more of a tradition than incident. Remember how we used to joke about
"This presidency is brought to you by Diebold"? That was around the 2000's referring to Bush
Jr., and Diebold is the vote machine manufacturer. That's just 20 years ago mate.
Calling election fraud a hilarious idea shows a good lack of historical perspective.
Yeah, fair enough. Can we see some proof of this election fraud, then? And by 'proof', I
don't mean 'someone said'. Because I can't help thinking that if there had been any proof,
then every single 'lawsuit' would not have been laughed out of court. Or are the judges
involved in this massive left-wing conspiracy, too? Jan 8, 2021 7:27 PM Reply to
Leo Washington
Proof is all the problem: There's no proof of a fair election either. The current system
was, in the old days, the only way to ensure votes were anonymous which is a requirement for
having everyone express their true beliefs and allegiances, absent of any group pressure.
I'm all for enhancing this with cryptographic signatures and a public ledger. Such that
everyone can validate their own vote and totals but not the one made by their spouse or
neighbor specifically.
That would bring us a lot closer to the proof you are asking for, because right now we got
none in either direction. Other than the media saying so and twitter banning you for daring
to post any questions.
Two trailing democract candidates brought to the lead at the same time and in the same
proprtion by mail-in votes that are 100% democrat – what are the odds? (~0% in a
straight election, ~100% in a bent election).
I would have the same view if the R and D attributions were reversed. The election was
fixed.
The main point is that the fraud is so evident. Multiple witnesses. Examination of two
machines. Not just a smoking gun with no witnesses. The government is too afraid to confront
it out of fear of backlash. The backlash from not doing anything will be worse. Democrats
keep wanting to unify now that Trump is out. They have done nothing but hinder him and our
country because of lies being levied against him. No doubt the man has flaws but that is not
justification for what they did during his presidency. And now the evidence of the steal.
Combine that with trying to remove him to keep him from running again The shit just keeps
getting deeper and deeper while they beg for unity. All of the sudden mayors across the
country are vowing to bring back law and order now that Trump is out. I could go on and on. I
cannot express how deeply the anger goes and it is not getting any better as Democratic
leaders continue with derogatory statements all of which are lies. This is classic bullying
and kicking someone who is down. It is truly a recipe for disaster.
A lawyer for Dominion held a press conference on Friday claiming that claims that the
allegations against them are "false."
"These false allegations have caused catastrophic damage to this company. They have
branded Dominion, a voting company, as perpetrating a massive fraud," Tom Clare, the attorney
representing Dominion, said in a press conference over Zoom. "Those allegations triggered a
media firestorm that promoted those same false claims to a global audience. They've made the
company radioactive and destroyed the value of its once thriving business and has put
Dominion's multiyear contracts in jeopardy."
Smartmatic has also said that they will be filing lawsuits against people who questioned
their technology and the "media outlets that gave them a platform."
To win the lawsuit, Dominion must prove that Powell was acting in "actual malice," and not
sincere belief that they helped to rig the election against the president.
I read the filing and THIS looks like read trouble for Powell. Unlike her incoherent
filings, Dominion methodically rips apart Powell's false claims and more importantly
establishes a timeline showing malicious intent which is the key in defamation. They show how
she knowingly repeated falsehoods when it would benefit her financially.
@SolontoCroesus
exercise -- [is] a man by the name of Norm Eisen. . . .
". . .a key architect of nearly every attempt to delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and
remove the democratically elected 45th President of the United States – is a tale that
winds through nearly every facet of the color revolution playbook. There is no purer
embodiment of Revolver's thesis that the very same regime change professionals who run Color
Revolutions on behalf of the US Government in order to undermine or overthrow alleged
"authoritarian" governments overseas, are running the very same playbook to overturn Trump's
2016 victory and to pre-empt a repeat in 2020. "
@Nisbe hey
made out okay rail about the elite now that they've been given the bum's rush as a function
of the global speculative rentier economy.
Your closing emission encapsulates the deluded mentality of Drumpfers.
I'll grant that Trump Derangement Syndrom is real, but that was the whole point of Drumpf.
He's such an odious cretin that sentiment replaced all reason in a US electorate that exists
on a political spectrum running from the right to the far-right, with ginned-up "moral"
issues creating the divide, rather than quarelling over the dominance of economic equality or
economic freedom in society.
Does it matter that a few people know what the score is? It's nearly fifty years since
Operation Nickel Grass, when the US flew A-4 and F-4 aircraft right to Israel to shore up the
colonial project, along with C-5 loads of TOW missiles, M60 tanks, etc., and people still
think there is a representative democracy in the US.
This was a good article, nice job. Yes, the powers-that-be run with the "democracy" rhetoric
while in reality we are facing full on fascism; the danger zone.
skizex Freedom4185 2 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 08:00 PM
And Parler now is to be deplatformed from apple phones I hear. Full on fascism is unfolding
before our eyes. And the techs continue to align themselves with antifa. Why anyone continues
to support FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc when they are scrubbing any opposing discourse is
beyond me.
Eviscerate 5 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 05:19 PM
This makes me so happy I have stayed completely away from social media. I understood early on
what they really were.
Katnip302 Eviscerate 40 minutes ago 8 Jan, 2021 10:11 PM
Yes, and to say they are more powerful than any government, means nothing. All they do is sit
there and push a button, boom credibility and trust gone. Cannot be undo the damage. Big tech
is effectively dead. People will move on to other platforms.
Gerald Newton 7 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 03:31 PM
Today I find better independent news at rt than at most US sites. Journalism in the USA has
gone to heck. News mangers run stories for profit in the US. It is all about ratings,
professionalism be darned.
butterfly123 8 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 02:44 PM
Big Tec is indeed part of the Deep...
RonThePatriot 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:27 PM
Parler is being threatened with a shutdown and Twitter actually banned our President from
using their app. Facebook is worse. We are in a police state set up by Dorsey and Zuckerberg
at the request of the democratic party. They are FRIGHTENED of the organization that we have
built that is called the Patriot Party. They are trying to impeach Trump at this late stage
because if he is impeached, he cannot run again. He is not the only person the PATRIOTS favor
so they are foolish. The american people were hoping that our soldiers would come home, but
now you will see an escalation in fighting due to the warmongers and war profiteers in
Washington on both sides of the aisle who are reaping rewards from war. Biden will be perfect
for this. Our children are sent to fight...not their children. So now we depend on RT, since
I do not believe that big tech and our govt can silence you. Fingers crossed. Thank you.
AMstone 4 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 06:30 PM
The 🇺🇸 has always been an ultra-immoral country. Hence, they are addicted to
fabricating ultra-demoralizing social constructs. All efforts toward morality and decency are
anathema and to be ridiculed and crushed with extreme prejudice. Big tech is only the latest
iteration of this abstract practice.
athineos 2 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 08:49 PM
The big tech is already a branch of the "Shadow Government/Deep state" that has complete
control of Congress overall. The big tech social media have been infiltrated by the CIA just
like the major corporate news have been for some time now. Read the book "Press-titutes
Embedded in the Pay of the CIA"(2019), by Udo Ulfkoette. Stay away from Facebook, Twitter and
such. I have never used them. Find other alternatives. We cannot allow freedom to perish.
Yarskiy 8 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 03:01 PM
A conglomerate of ultra-wealthy capitalist have more power then the State that they corrupt.
Why is RT acting like this is some kind of unknown revelation
Babb123 6 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 04:48 PM
And this will not last! Facebook, Twitter, Google and others are acting as publishers. Nobody
elected these people! The chickens will come home to roost! Bank on it!
steve1135117 47 minutes ago 8 Jan, 2021 10:14 PM
Nonsense, Trump has only 13 days left in his term and he is terribly isolated. Far weaker
than a "normal" president. This is more the behavior of a pack of predators who hunt very
large prey, like lions on water buffalo. Once the victim is weakened and wounded, all the
predators feel safe in moving in more closely for the final attack. Of course, Trump is most
definitely NOT deserving of any sympathy. He does nothing but betray and abandon everyone who
first helps him. Find someone else to go weep over, please.
leman_russ 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:40 PM
Why do Americans have this wierd block in their world view. Facebook and Twitter are PRIVATE
COMPANIES as long as they follow the law they can do whatever the hell they want. Yes they
are huge companies but they have the same rights and obligations as every other company.
Among those rights.."championed by the Republicans doing the whining" is the right to choose
their customers. Remember how you celebrated the bakery that was found to be legally allowed
to discriminate...this is the flip side. Not much fun when you are on the recieving end is
it?
PolitcsInc leman_russ 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:57 PM
None of these companies are private, they were created by DARPA and are staffed by DARPA.
They are government owned and run entities masquerading as private to fool the people into
believing that the government has co control over them.
JIMI JAMES 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:26 PM
You could look at it this way,cia tech to trump 1-0 next!
Gaius_Marius JIMI JAMES 1 hour ago 8 Jan, 2021 09:29 PM
Try 1% oligarchy are succeeding in decimating the rest.
JollyGoodShow JIMI JAMES 1 hour ago 8 Jan, 2021 09:26 PM
You could look at it this way: If Trumps' concern for truth and transparency was that
important why not pardon the emmisaries of truth and transparency, Snowden & Assange?
(just sayin......from a friend)
The smug, palpable air of 'mission accomplished' emanating from Facebook, Twitter and Google
in the weeks after the media called November's election for Democrat Joe Biden has been hard to
ignore. Thanks to an iron grip on the political narrative and the heavy-handed suppression of
any influential dissenting voices, these insanely wealthy companies and their partners in the
media establishment have managed to successfully upend what was left of the US' democratic
process.
In short, they have reason to celebrate, having pulled off the first successful
national-level coup-by-media in US history. And better yet -- for them at least -- having
helped the 'right' guy win, they won't have to answer to any bogus charges of Russian collusion
this time around. Indeed, no less than the Department of Homeland Security came forward to
declare the vote the
most secure in US history -- a baffling claim at best, given the same officials have spent
months insisting foreign infiltration supposedly had democracy hanging by a
thread.
The epic pearl-clutching that followed Wednesday's march on the Capitol is almost guaranteed
to result in further restrictions on online speech -- and as many observers noted , that's just
how Big Tech and Big Brother want it. No explanations have been forthcoming as to why the
Capitol was largely unguarded during the protests, even though Trump had for weeks been calling
on his followers to stage " wild " demonstrations on that day. Nor was it clear why
Mayor Muriel Bowser waited so long before sending in police and the military to rein in the
chaos.
The stage seemed to have been deliberately set for disaster, just the sort of spectacle a
clever Big Business-Big Tech axis needs to terrify the masses into believing a full-on
insurrection is afoot. The only real surprise in Wednesday's events is that more people weren't
killed -- but that's where the media came in, wielding luridly detailed descriptions and
photographing the most bizarrely-attired figures in the group.
By distracting the public, attributing the violence that claimed five lives to the
ubiquitous Radicalized Domestic Extremists™ and banning an ever-growing number of
discussion topics, Facebook, Twitter, and Google can dodge a total repeal of Section 230
liability protections and live to blanket the nation in propaganda another day. Never mind the
absence of visible 'white supremacists,' Nazis, and other undesirables supposedly leading the
pro-Trump contingent -- it's always possible to Photoshop in a Nazi insignia or 12 in
post.
Ultimately, the narrative diverges from reality just enough to make its point, fingering
social media as the culprit, and duping the average American into supporting further incursions
on their First Amendment freedoms. The moral of the story becomes " Stop thinking, before
someone gets hurt. "
And should the relationship sour, and politicians want their power back? Big Tech can easily
scuttle any legislative attempts to break up its monopoly merely by threatening to expose the
secrets of the dozens of government agencies that have their data stored in the cloud.
Companies like Facebook and Twitter, Amazon and Google have what's left of American 'democracy'
by the proverbial balls, and should some crusading politician attempt to disrupt their cozy
relationship, they'd almost certainly live to regret it.
it would take just one inconvenient 'leak' to turn the public against any Luddite savior
attempting to pry Big Tech's boot off American necks. These firms' control of the media is so
airtight that a manufactured 'scandal' could be cooked up and launched into cyberspace in a
matter of hours. Such retaliation would serve the dual purpose of destroying the political
crusader's career and reminding other would-be do-gooders not to do anything foolish -- like
fighting to defend one's own country against the megacorporations holding it hostage.
By blocking Trump from even posting on Facebook and live-streaming platform Twitch - and
only recently allowed back into his Twitter account with a " final warning " after a 12-hour
lockout - Big Tech has made it clear they're no longer satisfied with a mere monopoly over one
of the few profitable industries left in the US. They won't stop accumulating power until they
run politics, from the presidency to the smallest local election. With Wednesday's riots, the
carefully-choreographed dance between tech execs and the politicians who do their bidding has
been given the green light to ascend to the next level. Deplatforming Trump is only the
beginning of a megalomaniacal crusade against all those who would question a government by the
algorithms, of the algorithms, and for the algorithms.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
TWOFilms 5 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 05:11 PM
We were banned from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in 2012 because of a documentary we
produced. At first it was devastating, we had been unilaterally silenced just as this
documentary was becoming very popular. We tried to get new accounts but soon we're banned
again. So, we started hosting ourselves and then PayPal banned us and Stripe too. Needless to
say, it took about 12 months or pain and disappointment until we realised something uncanny.
We were free. We had more time. People still found our documentaries and Bitcoin works a
treat. The upshot is this. You don't need these platforms. They need you and want to
manipulate and fine tune the information they want you to see. You don't need social media to
be sociable. Try it, delete your accounts. You won't regret it.
thespearofdestiny 5 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 05:36 PM
Big Tech, (along with all other multinationals) are now entangled with government to such a
degree that they are an extension of it.
GottaBeMe 8 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 02:17 PM
Anyone who doesn't see the danger in allowing Facebook, Twitter, and Google to decide what
people get to see and what must be censored is living in a fantasy world. With this power,
they can -- and have -- influenced the outcomes of elections, changed people's perspectives
on matters of importance, and further divided the population.
Actually Tucker Carlson is one of those people and props to the guy for telling us working
class Whites what "our elite white leader trash" have always thought about us. Of course
Tucker won't dare mention the Jew, but at least he clues us in on white traitor trash that
claim to be superior by avoid being seen near chain restaurants and hotels.
Of course we KNOW that the Jew and his elite shabbos goy only think of the common Black
and Brown foot soldiers as pets as well, these cats are the real Supremacists. These
(((elitists))) will dump the Black and Brown grunts for the Yellow ones, believe that as
well.
Can the hysterical little girls freaking out about tourists in the Capitol building do me
one little favor? I just want to see one video clip of rioting in DC back on the 6th.
All of these posts and we don't have a single link to evidence of rioting or mob-like
behavior. This is important because years from now people reading this thread may not clearly
remember what you imagined you saw and need some visual reminders of this imaginary rioting
that you are talking about. Please include some links or people of tomorrow will suspect that
what you little girls are wailing about didn't happen. In particular I want to see some
imagery of "baseball bats and metal pipes" on the scene in DC. Is this too much to ask
for?
This event is a confirmation that everything is a great show. From the election to the fight
between Trump and Biden. It is all settled long time ago. Seems that all this stuff is just
distraction, enterteniment for the masses with the old same purpose. There is no saviours
amigos. All the guys work for the same "master". So if you still have some hope that trump or
whatever the hero is gonna sace the world, i guess you are lost and u will have a big surprise.
The plan is still on. Nobody is gonna save u. Just u uniting with people and once amd for all
understand that the future is in your hands and your will.
tike , Jan 8, 2021 4:49 AM
Great coverage. Loved the expansion of the four points. What a clown show, complete with
silly costumes. Do people really fall for this sh!t? Sadly, too many do.
Here's a refreshing and insightful discussion between Ryan Cristian and Whitney Webb on
The Last American Vagabond channel:
I know! And realistically, would you even have had time from the announcement of the new
variant until now, also keeping in mind public holidays in between, that this was
scientifically tested, published and peer reviewed by people who had this as their job? NO,
there is not enough time, so what the hell is this statement based on?
It's like they are adjusting the narrative to the stupidity of the masses – they see
that most people just accept it anyway, so why bother even doing it properly when you can
make it up as you go along?
Too late for Gregory Michael MD of Mount Sinai Medical Centre, who died 'due to a strong
reaction to the COVID vaccine' (Heidi Neckelmann, his widow). RIP
President-elect likens Cruz, Hawley to Nazi propagandist Goebbels, says they share blame for
inciting violence
... Speaking to reporters on Friday, Biden said Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley
(R-Missouri) share responsibility with President Donald Trump for inciting the violent
protesters who breached the US Capitol on Wednesday. Rather than being forced to resign, he
said the two senators should be voted out of office when they come up for re-election.
Cruz and Hawley led opposition to certifying results of the November 3 presidential election
– at least not before an investigation – citing allegations that Biden won based on
hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes in Georgia and other swing states. "If he's the
only one saying it, that's one thing," Biden said of Trump. "But the acolytes that
follow him, like Cruz and others, they are as responsible as he is."
Biden's comments were not unlike the Nazi-invoking rhetoric that was used against Trump and
his supporters for the past four years. And the comments came one day after he leaned on
another anti-Trump theme, racism,
suggesting police failed to protect the Capitol because they responded more leniently to
Wednesday's rioters than if the protest had been a Black Lives Matter event.
"By using the 'terrorist' moniker Biden, and the media, are taking this thing into the
wrong direction. It creates more extremism and will likely have bloody consequences."
INTENTIONAL
Now half the country believes the government is fraudulent.
As someone commented on this site, Americans fall into two categories. One believes that
the election was fraudulent and it is good, the other believes that the election was
fraudulent and it is bad.
Except for the Coast Guard, which is a purely defensive military, any White American who
would want to join the other military branches has to be incurably stupid.
The "patriotism" of the previous establishment was bound up with their economic interests.
Once the USA dropped protectionism, the allure of cheap foreign labor (via immigration or
outsourcing) became too much for them and they abandoned the interests of their fellow
Americans to follow the profits.
Thanks for the Tralfamidor perspective. Those of us here on earth know that the US was
never a democracy and always existed as a mechanism for exploitation of everyone else by an
oligarchy.
The USSR was collapsed by traitors as a function of the US imperial drive to destroy them
economically, not because the people were enraged at the "hostile elite". The US henchmen in
the Kingdom in Riyadh pitched in to break the Soviet economy by destroying the Soviet
capacity to obtain foreign exchange.
"... You do know a guy name Milton Friedman was the architect for Reagan economics? For the record we are currently living thru long term dystopia effects of Reagan economics. ..."
Biden and Kamala are mere figureheads put in office by a stolen election. Any agenda they
think that they have is irrelevant. Here is the Establishment's agenda:
First: Prevent any political organization of the "Trump Deplorables." Any who attempt to
form a real opposition party will be made an example of. In America it is child's play to frame
up anyone. We saw the show in Russiagate, and Trump will now be exhausted with endless frameups
as the Establishment pursues him into oblivion. If the President of the United States can be so
easily framed up, an unknown political organizer in the red states can be disposed of at
will.
... ... ...
Fourth: The Establishment will increase its fomenting of racial and gender conflict in order
to keep Americans too divided to resist its increasingly odious control measures, whether they
be the use of Covid to suppress freedom of movement and association, charges of being a foreign
agent in order to suppress free speech as in the Assange case, or round up and internment of
Trump Americans trying to organize a political party that represents the people instead of the
Establishment.
Modern weapons in the hands of the state are devastating. Mass spying and control techniques
that exist today go beyond those in dystopian novels such as Orwell's 1984 . Free speech
is a thing of the past. Free speech no longer even exists in universities. As I write Twitter,
Facebook and the presstitutes are suppressing the free speech of the President of the United
States, and the President of the United States is powerless to do anything about it.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/533027-twitter-locks-trumps-account-for-at-least-12-hours?rnd=1609978506
The Establishment's control over the media means that no charge against President Trump is
too extreme to cause a protest. The enormous support shown for Trump in Washington on January 6
with estimates of participants ranging from 200,000 to 2,000,000 was easy for the Establishment
to turn into a liability by infiltrating the rally.
It was naive for President Trump and his supporters not to realize that infiltration was
guaranteed as it was necessary for the Establishment to turn massive support into a massive
liability. This would achieve two purposes. One purpose was to terminate the challenge to the
electors in the Senate, and it succeeded. Here, for example, is Republican Senator Mike Braun
from Indiana dropping his intent to object to the electors from the swing states where the
election was stolen: "I think that today change things drastically. Yeah, whatever point you
made before that should suffice. Get this ugly day behind us," he said. Even Rand Paul was
intimidated: "I just don't think there's going to be another objection. I think it's over at
that point."
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533033-gop-senators-hopeful-theyve-quashed-additional-election-challenges?rnd=1609980353
Here is Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler whose reelection to the Senate was stolen from her
acquiescing in Trump's and her own stolen elections: "When I arrived in Washington this
morning, I fully intended to object to the certification of the electoral votes. However, the
events that have transpired today have forced me to reconsider and I cannot now, in good
conscience, object," Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.).
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/533052-congress-affirms-biden-win-after-rioters-terrorize-capitol
The other purpose served was to insure that Trump would not go out as a president whose
reelection was stolen but as an insurrectionist. And it has succeeded.
Internationally Trump was denounced by NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg for not
respecting democracy. "The outcome of this democratic election must be respected," declared
Stoltenberg. Stolen or not it is democracy to be rid of Trump. https://www.rt.com/usa/511743-uk-france-nato-condemn-capitol/
British prime minister Boris Johnson declared that the US is the world symbol of Democracy
and that it is vital there is a peaceful and ordered transfer of power, as if there was an
actual insurrection taking place and an election not stolen.
The French President Macron declared: "What happened today in Washington, DC today is not
American, definitely." In other words, it is unamerican to protest a stolen election that the
Establishment refuses to address. [I watched presentations by independent experts to the
Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan legislatures that proved beyond all doubt the presidential
election was stolen. Half of the professional presenters were people of color.]
Republican senators themselves, former members of Trump's cabinet, and a former chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff jumped on Trump with both feet. The no longer Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell said that Trump's "unhinged thugs" "tried to disrupt our democracy. They
failed. This failed insurrection underscores how crucial the task before us is" to restore
Establishment control.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533039-mcconnell-after-rioters-storm-capitol-they-tried-to-disrupt-our-democracy
Republican Senator Richard Burr from North Carolina said: "The President bears
responsibility for today's events by promoting the unfounded conspiracy theories that have led
to this point."
Trump's Secretary of Defense James Mattis told the presstitutes that "Today's violent
assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by
Mr. Trump. His use of the presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect
for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in
infamy as profiles in cowardice."
General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Trump administration
said Republicans "who have continued to undermine a peaceful transition in accordance with our
Constitution have set the conditions for today's violence."
The presstitutes had a field day with misleading and lying headlines. One of the worst
offenders was The Hill , formerly a source of real news on what was going on in
Congress, but today a highly partisan Trump-hating source of Establishment propaganda.
With the American Establishment's foreign puppets, Republicans, Trump's own cabinet members,
military leaders, and the presstitutes speaking with one voice setting up President Trump as an
insurrectionist threat to democracy, the Democrats' wild charges seemed credible.
Democrat Senator Schumer from New York, the new Senate Majority Leader, Democrat House
Speaker Pelosi, and a large number of Democrat members of Congress, together with the New York
Times, have called for Trump's impeachment or his removal from office by invoking the 25th
Amendment. Here is the new Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) making the case:
"What happened at the U.S. Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the United States,
incited by the president. This president should not hold office one day longer," Schumer said
in a statement.
Here is Adam Smith, Democrat from Washington state and chairman of the House Committee on
Armed Services, calling for Trump's removal from office: "President Trump incited &
encouraged this riot. He & his enablers are responsible for the despicable attack at the
Capitol. VP Pence and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump, otherwise
Senate Republicans must work with the House to impeach & remove him.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/533136-house-armed-services-chair-calls-for-removing-trump-from-office
For the New York Times , it doesn't not suffice to remove Trump from office. He must
be prosecuted as well.
To understand the extraordinary hatred of President Trump by the Establishment, listen to
his inaugural address. He described the Establishment accurately as a force arraigned against
the American people, a force that he intended to dismantle and restore America to the American
people. This was a revolutionary challenge, a reckless one as Trump is a populist, not a
revolutionary leading a determined movement. Moreover, Trump was so uninformed about Washington
that he never succeeded in appointing anyone to his government, other than General Flynn (an
immediate casualty of the Establishment) who agreed with his agenda of normalizing relations
with Russia, bringing the troops home from the Middle East, ending NATO, and bringing the jobs
home that American corporations had exported to China. Here was Trump unarmed taking on the
American Establishment. This was an act of suicide as it has turned out to be.
People who think in terms of party politics have no likelihood of understanding the
situation. The struggle is not Democrats vs. Republicans. or red states vs. blue states. It is
the Establishment against the people. If you have any doubt about this, note that the US
National Association of Manufacturers, always a throughly Republican organization, agrees with
Schumer and Pelosi that Trump must be removed from office. Here is the organization's
statement: "Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider
working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy."
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/532988-democratic-lawmakers-call-for-pence-to-invoke-25th-amendment-remove
The National Association of Manufacturers want Trump out because they are the ones responsible
for China's rise, the US trade deficit and the destruction of half of the US middle class. All
the goods and services imported from offshored production count as imports. It is the offshored
production that is responsible for America's trade deficit, not China.
The presstitutes throughout the Western world have intentionally misrepresented the January
6 rally in Washington in support of Trump. The rally had to be misrepresented, because no one
in politics today anywhere in the Western World can demonstrate such massive support other than
Donald Trump. No one turned out for Biden or Kamala during the presidential campaign. Their
events, soon cancelled, had no attendees. Yet, they won the election? What saps people are. Who
turns out for Merkel, Macron, Boris Johnson. No one even knows who the leaders are in the rest
of the Western World.
Trump could not be permitted to leave office with such a massive showing of support -- a
terrible embarrassment to the corrupt scum who "speak for the people." So the support had to be
discredited by turning it into an insurrection ordered by Trump against Democracy, a holy word
that is observed nowhere in the Western World.
Here is a description of agitators who suddenly appeared and provoked the entrance into the
Capitol by a few Trump supporters who, unlike the rioters in Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit,
Seattle, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere, did not behave as rioters and did no damage. The
report is from a person present not as a Trump supporter but as a person to film the event. The
report was sent to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller. I have left the person's name off so that
he doesn't get investigated by the FBI:
"I was in Washington, D.C. today filming the Trump rally and related events. I also ran
across your post concerning the Capitol demonstration tonight. Perhaps this short account
will help you assess what others are saying in a small way.
"I was also at the Capitol before the crowd appeared setting-up my camera on a stone wall
around the perimeter of the back of the capitol (the rear facing Constitution Avenue). Then I
waited for President Trump's speech to end and for supporters to walk-up Constitution Avenue
to the Capitol. I was located at the precise location where supporters first rushed up the
slope towards the back of the Capitol after casting aside a section of the first Capitol
perimeter barrier. Supporters gathered roughly at the center of the back of the capitol, but
a circle began to grow around the perimeter as the crowd grew larger. I had no sense that the
growing crowd intended to rush the Capitol.
"After a large crowd emerged at the perimeter a man in perhaps his late 30's or early 40's
showed-up, pacing quickly to his left then to his right before the crowd, and essentially
began hurling insults at the crowd challenging their political wisdom. He excoriated the
crowd for thinking that their attendance would be taken seriously by members of congress.
(Hard to say that he was wrong about that, whoever he was). I cannot recall his precise
words, but for a very short period he engaged in a shouting exchange with supporters, and
suddenly supporters pushed aside the first barrier and rushed towards the back of the
Capitol. Others on the northern edge of the perimeter followed suit. But the first rush was
right at the center of the back of the Capitol. I followed the rush to the bottom of the
Capitol back steps, and began filming again from atop an inner perimeter stone wall.
"The police, so it appeared, were a little surprised by the rush, and this gave supporters
an opportunity to race up the steps. One or two men even made it as far as the steps leading
up to the scaffolds on the south side of the Capitol before police arrested them. By this
time, five or ten men had climbed to the top of the tall steel tower structure facing the
Capitol. Then the police erected and lined-up behind a new barrier perimeter at the foot of
the Capitol steps. Police at the top of the Capitol steps aimed rifles down on the crowd
(perhaps rubber bullet rifles, I could not tell). The crowd began arguing with police and
pressing hard against the new barrier. The police sprayed men pressing directly against the
barrier with tear gas from time to time causing them to retreat. "Meanwhile, the men at the
top of the tower began rallying the crowd to challenge the new barrier (over bull horns) by
filling any gaps between the barrier and the stone wall that I was using as a filming vantage
point. Another man worked the crowd with a bull horn immediately in front of me and also
encouraged supporters to climb over the inner perimeter stone wall (my filming vantage point)
and create a wall of pressure on the new barrier at the bottom of the Capitol back steps.
"After about 30 minutes to an hour I dropped to the bottom of the stone wall to reload my
camera when suddenly the barrier gave way and police attempted to fortify it by blasting tear
gas into the area between the stone wall and the barrier. I was hit by the gas myself and
struggled back over the stone wall in order to breathe. The gas threw many crowd members into
a panic. And I was nearly trampled as I struggled to lift my camera and heavy gear bag over
the wall after two women began pulling desperately on the back of my coat to pull themselves
up and over the moderately high wall in retreat.
"After the second perimeter barrier gave way, the men with the bull horns began working
the crowd very hard to fill-up with Trump supporters the steps of the Capitol and the
scaffolding on both sides of it. At this point one of the calls, which the men with bull
horns repeated from time to time in order to encourage people to climb the Capitol steps was
"this is not a rally; it's the real thing." Another frequent call was "its now or never."
After about a two hour effort peppered with bull horn calls of this nature the entire back of
the Capitol was filled with Trump supporters and the entire face of the Capitol was covered
with brilliant small and very large Trump banners, American flags, and various other types of
flags and banners.
"Sometime after the rush on the back of the Capitol, people were apparently able to enter
the Capitol itself through the front. But I was not witness to anything at the front or
inside the Capitol.
"One clearly bona fide Trump supporter who had apparently entered the Capitol himself was
telling others emotionally and angrily (including press representatives of some sort, even a
foreign newsman) that he witnessed someone inside the Capitol encouraging violence whom he
strongly suspected was not a legitimate Trump supporter (apparently on the basis that the man
showed no signs at all of Trump support on his apparel). I did not pay that close attention
to his claims (for example the precise claim of the violence encouraged) because, naturally,
I had not yet read your post and it had not occurred to me that professional outsiders might
play a role in instigating particular violent acts in order to discredit the event.
"I overheard one Trump supporter (who followed the rush on the Capitol himself) say aloud,
"I brought many others to this rally, but we did not sign on for this" as he watched matters
escalate.
"Still, from my seat, I would say that large numbers of very legitimate Trump supporters
felt that it was their patriotic duty to occupy the Capitol in light of their unshakable
beliefs that (1) the 2020 election was a fraud, (2) that the vast majority of the members of
congress are corrupt and compromised, and (3) that the country is in the throes of what they
consider a "communist" takeover (although many use the expression "communism" as a synonym
for "totalitarianism"). They are also convinced that the virus narrative is a fraud and an
essential part of an effort to undermine the Constitution –in particular the Bill of
Rights. They have a very real fear that the country and the very conception of any culture of
liberty is on the verge of an irreparable collapse. For most (if not a very large majority)
rushing the Capitol was a desperate eleventh hour act of partiotism –even of the order
of the revolution that created our nation. Some Trump supporters sang the Star Spangled
Banner and other patriotic songs as others climbed the Capitol steps. They also demonstrated
a measure of respect for the Capitol itself. I saw no attempt by anyone to deface the Capitol
simply for the sake of defacing it.
"The incontrovertibly compromised press has called this event a riot. But from what I saw
and heard this would indeed be a gross and intentionally misleading oversimplification at
best. At least from the standpoint of supporters, if their Capitol event was a riot, then so
was the Boston Tea Party. It also seems to me that some professional help (very aware of deep
sentiments) might have come from somewhere to make sure that the party happened."
When I was on the Stanford University faculty, I remember rich and pampered Stanford
students occupying the university president's office in a protest either against the Vietnam
war or the name of the Stanford Football Team (Stanford Indians) and destroying the papers in
the president's files of his life's work. Despite the liberalism of the university president,
the presstitutes regarded the protest justified and well intentioned.
The rioters and looters who rampaged through many of America's major cities suffered no
media condemnation, only support and encouragement. This is because, unlike Trump, Antifa and
Black Lives Matter are financed by and controlled by the Establishment and thus represent no
threat.There is no FBI investigation or intended prosecution of any of the rioters who
destroyed billions of dollars of property in America's cities.
But the Trump supporters provoked into entering the Capitol are in for it says the
Establishment figure Trump, in yet another of his mistakes, put in charge of the FBI.
It is difficult to defend Trump when he consistently puts in charge of his security agencies
and Department of Justice members of the Establishment who hate his guts.
Here is Trump's appointee describing the people who elected the man who appointed him:
"The violence and destruction of property at the U.S. Capitol building yesterday showed a
blatant and appalling disregard for our institutions of government and the orderly
administration of the democratic process," Wray said in a statement.
"As we've said consistently, we do not tolerate violent agitators and extremists who use
the guise of First Amendment-protected activity to incite violence and wreak havoc," he
continued. "Such behavior betrays the values of our democracy. Make no mistake: With our
partners, we will hold accountable those who participated in yesterday's siege of the
Capitol."
Wray announced that the bureau "has deployed our full investigative resources" and is
working with law enforcement partners "to aggressively pursue those involved in criminal
activity" on Wednesday.
"Our agents and analysts have been hard at work through the night gathering evidence,
sharing intelligence, and working with federal prosecutors to bring charges," he said.
He requested the public send in any information about Wednesday's events to the FBI, noting
"We are determined to find those responsible and ensure justice is served."
Notice that Wray, the Establishment's servant, not the servant of the rule of law, aligns
the First Amendment with "violent agitators and extremists" and thus discredits the First
Amendment as a tool of insurrection.
Everyone who was not at the US Capitol building on January 6, which is the entire world
except the Trump supporters, has been brainwashed, by a corrupt, despicable collection of media
whores serving an Establishment of Oligarchs, that Donald Trump intended an insurrection, but
it was defeated. By Whom?
It was Trump who called out the National Guard and who told his supporters to leave the
Capitol and to go home.
What kind of people can present this as an insurrection that requires Trump's removal from
office and prosecution? The answer is totally evil people who have not only the United States
but the entire Western World in their clutches.
The Western World is dead. It is now Mordor.
Trump appointees realize that, unless they add to his orchestrated embarrassment and setup
by resigning, they are targeted for reprisals. Seeing permanent unemployment facing him, US
Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger has resigned in response to Donald Trump's
handling of the crisis on Capitol Hill. "Other people named as likely to abandon the sinking
Trump ship are National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien and Deputy Chief of Staff Chris
Liddell." https://www.rt.com/usa/511769-white-house-officials-resign/
Everyone everywhere is participating in Trump's destruction. The English language Russian
press loves embarrassing America. The fun and games leaves the world in ignorance of the
extraordinary consequences of what the stolen election and demonization of Trump and his
supporters means. The end of the Western World is a big event, and it will affect everyone.
Addendum: Here is an example of the lies the presstitutes constantly deliver. Every
prestitute organization reports that Trump incited a mob of his supporters this week to storm
the U.S. Capitol: "House Democrats are racing toward impeaching President Trump for a second
time after he incited a mob of his supporters this week to storm the U.S. Capitol and halt
Congress's constitutional duty to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory." https://thehill.com/homenews/house/533340-democrats-poised-to-impeach-trump-again
Clearly, the dumbshits at The Hill, Bloomberg, and everywhere else let their hatred of Trump
run away with them. What would be the point of halting the certification process? It could only
be a temporary halt. The National Guard ordered in by Trump would clear the Capitol and the
process would go forward, as it did. If Trump intended to halt the certification by having
supporters occupy the Capitol, why did he call in the National Guard and tell his supporters to
leave the Capitol? Clearly The Hill's presstitutes are devoid of reasoning ability. What Trump
wanted to happen was to have the electors from the stolen swing states rejected by Congress on
the basis of the evience. It was an unlikely thing to happen, but Trump had no choice but to
exhaust the legal means available.
Trump was too conflicted to lead a populist revolt. He was too mobbed up with wealthy
Zionists and right-leaning factions of the Jewish establishment. Now they'll quickly throw
him under the bus. He's finished, and politically homeless. Not even the Deplorables will
want anything to do with him, given the fact that he betrayed them time and again.
Trump might have been a populist leader had he immediately abandoned his Jewish handlers,
fully adopted the white right, the military and veterans, Christians, Constitutionalists,
small business, Main Street, America First industry and working class, etc. and oriented his
entire administration in their direction. But given that New York Jews were part of his
family, that wasn't going to happen.
A true populist will eventually emerge from the People, and do what Trump should have done
but lacked the guts and integrity to do. And the Deep State will do all it can to strangle
him in the cradle, but will fail, because like Golden Calf Hebrews from the Bible, or like
Cyclops if you prefer Greek fables, it and its sycophants are sick, blind and insane now
beyond any possibility for redemption, intoxicated by their own narcissism.
How long the white knight will take to emerge is hard to say, but he's eventually coming.
Count on it.
The US always had an establishment. So does every country. And in the past, there were
patriotic American establishments that cared about the people. What happened? Jews took over
as the new masters and severed the ties between white elites and white masses. White elites
now exist to serve Jews than to represent the American People.
Elites are formed by social selection. Fish rots from the head. As Jews at the top favor
the most craven and venal goy cucks for promotion, the result is that the elites get filled
up more and more with venal and craven people. And as people don't want to admit they're
craven and venal, they convince themselves that they're on the side of angels and 'liberal
democracy' even though all they do is serve Wall Street, spread worship of sodomy, and push
for Wars for Israel.
When social selection to the top is predicated on patriotism and national unity, a better
kind of people make it to the top. But when selection is based on obeisance to Jews and all
their agendas(anti-white politics, globo-homo degeneracy, magic negro worship, and etc), then
the result is the elites that the US has today.
There was a time when someone like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts could serve in the
US government or work in elite industries. But today, even the most 'right-wing' Republican
would rather be dead than be seen anywhere near such individuals.
The Trumpet hasn't been a victim of any "color revolution", he's been the catalyst for the
US Ziocorporate regime's new phase of "democratic" government:
What's so populist about the Trumpet besides his speechwriters' style? He barely repealed
Bombamacare's forced payment of premiums to corporate health peddlers, but not before
doubling down on the Obama/Biden-backed war on Yemen and giving Ziodi Arabia's royal Salafi
headchoppers $400 billion more in weapons, among other pearls of "populist anti-swamp"
policies.
People had to occupy their local and state capitols, not the federal Ziocorporatists'
temple of corporate governance masquerading as public office. Why even leave your own
property unguarded to go fight for some billionaire with a tad too much fake tan, or for his
walking corpse president-elect "rival" for the other side of that same coin, though I doubt
anyone would fight for Kameltoe Biden without being paid in advance.
Great Reset was coming with Trump as it is with Biden either way, there wasn't any time to
be an ignorant partisan tool. Things won't be getting any easier now. Even Mexico with its
CIA/DEA-managed druglord wars is looking tame in comparison.
Trump is a moderate and inherently self-contradictory populist, not a phony populist, but
a flawed populist, and in terms of complete program a meager populist. But give him credit,
his tepid, flawed brand of populism has been spectacularly – popular – with tens
of millions of Americans, and countless others around the planet.
One of his advantages has been that the political leadership stage in not just the United
States but in the 'West' is occupied largely by corrupt pathetic figures who do political
theater, scripted, banal, dishonest political puppetry on behalf of transnational agendas and
powers that be, and their personal advantage. Trump populist program has included giving
priority voice to the 'outdated' concepts of national sovereignty and national interest. He
has been an implicit and explicit critic of the global 'full spectrum domination' American
establishment agenda.
In the land of political midgets a person of even modest stature seems a giant.
But more importantly, Trump is actually a great and singular revolutionary, not in normal
terms, of political ideology, or political program, but in terms of the ability to change and
animate public perceptions. His has been a needed revolution in terms of style and substance:
he has been by far the most effective critic on Earth of and enemy of the mass media mind
control system, a system indispensable to establishment power and agenda.
To the political class and the politically minded who demand and depend upon and find
their comfort in adherence to normal ritualistic banality and bromides, Trump's bombastic out
of bounds style is outrageous, he tossing shocking mental hand grenades like confetti on the
nation, his ejaculations sometimes truthful sometimes false, but often refreshing
entertainment for some and outrageous for others.
Recall for example when he merely stated the obvious about the annual joint military
exercises at the borders of North Korea: he described them as provocative. Howls of foreign
policy outrage over this lapse from scripted normality. How dare Trump utter a simple truth
contradicting our investment of decades of on message propaganda on the subject.
And truth – even little bites of truth – is the great nemesis – the
forbidden fruit that must not be allowed to be shown let alone bitten by the public –
of the corrupt system of public mind control and public exploitation and subjugation.
As response to his fundamental, effective if not outright deadly attack on the mind
control system, and for his espousal of national sovereignty over transnational hegemony, he
has been under continual establishment attack since – actually even before – his
2016 inauguration. Public belief in the veracity of mass media's reliability when it comes to
fairness and accuracy has never been as low.
And something else has happened during the last four years: the public perception of the
ethical rot, the stench, of the cesspool that the establishment occupies has grown greatly.
Beyond Pizza gate and Jeffrey Epstein, there is a greatly increased public opinion and
suspicion and perception that elite power is dependent upon and suffused with and tainted
with that which goes beyond mere typical variations of corruption: that there exists
widespread hitherto unthinkable unspeakable evil that preys on children and innocence.
But now, with the obvious massive coordinated election fraud that was engineered against
what was in fact one of the – if not the – greatest landslide presidential
victories in American history, another great service has been rendered by Trump. And this
service goes far beyond his particular case: The legitimacy of all US elections since the
advent of electronic voting machines is now cast into doubt. That is, the entire US political
class, state, local and federal, has had their legitimacy appropriately undermined. And the
call for election procedures which ensure reasonably fair elections will now be ongoing.
Funny how the MSM apparently missed Trump commuting Jonathan Pollard's sentence and
allowed him to fly back to Israel where he disembarked from his plane and kissed the
ground.
I think it might have been George W. Bush who was considering pardoning Pollard and the
various intelligence agencies told him there would be a mutiny if he did. And he didn't.
But now ..crickets?
Pollard should have been in federal prison for life with no parole or executed.
But Trump won't pardon Assange for being a journalist or Snowden for alerting the American
people we are all being surveilled 24/7?
"People who think in terms of party politics have no likelihood of understanding the
situation. The struggle is not Democrats vs. Republicans. or red states vs. blue states. It
is the Establishment against the people."
My dear Mr. Roberts, you hit the nail on the head.
Thanks PCR. My exact thoughts. Definitely DC rally was infiltrated with sole intention of
discrediting Trump and his supporters. And the chorus of "leaders" from US vassals like UK,
Germany, France and others is proof of well choreographed scheme. Where were they when
BLM/Antifa with clear support of Dem politicians rampaged through US cities including DC
itself?
I wonder whether people of the US would still consider voting as one of the most important
civic duties. This election steal has shown that even with a landslide win, the establishment
will get its way. Sad.
I watched presentations by independent experts to the Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan
legislatures that proved beyond all doubt the presidential election was stolen.
That the counting was manipulated electronically was proven for me by Shiva Ayyadurai
(MIT) in his interesting video showing the statistically impossible change in voting trend in
the early morning counting.
It is difficult to defend Trump when he consistently puts in charge of his security
agencies and Department of Justice members of the Establishment who hate his guts.
This is a real oddity. At the outset he had a good selection of very loyal people to
choose from – but he dumped them all in favour of Establishment people who have
predictably backstabbed him – even his own Vice President. The only explanation that I
can find is that he doesn't really sympathize with the Deplorables at all (certainly never
spends any time with them) and was just using them as an alternative route to a top
Establishment position. The surprise was that the Establishment then rejected him, despite
his best efforts to ingratiate himself.
What's undeniable, is that the ZioGlob US is starting to look, socially and economically,
like an international basket case. Much of the ROW (Rest Of the World) is moving to separate
from it as fast as possible – ref. trade agreements/international payments/currencies
etc.
The filthy old swindler could have easily won re-election if he had done even one tiny
thing for the vast demographic making under $34k per year (the median wage) i.e. the working
poor. He could have pushed for a federally mandated $15/ hour minimum wage. He could have
pushed for a universal basic subsidized medical plan instead of trying to take one away. How
about federal money for a new system of trade schools and vocational training institutes?
Instead, he signed off on massive tax cuts for himself and his wealthy jew sponsors. He
signed off on trillions of dollars for his wall street pals, goosing the stock market into
the stratosphere. The old coot played golf while half the nursing home population was wiped
out by the wu-wu. He started a pointless trade war with China after listening to three of the
dumbest jews on the planet: Munchkin, Krudlow, Koshner jews so stupid they couldn't figure
out how to cheat rubes at a corner furniture store. Endless demagoguery, fake religiosity,
phony nationalism, counterproductive race baiting, shameless nepotism, constant lying .but
then what else would you expect from a former WWE wrestling promoter?
This was a "False Flag" as evidenced by Speaker's Pelosi's 'Purple" dress as she elbow
bump's Pence after he did his dirty deed for the Coup.
Look the whole 'Kabuki' was a set up with Capitol Building guards opening the way for
crowds to mill forward after the professional black block antifa gang made the first assault
on police lines and subsequently forced entry
Trump had told people at the rally to be peaceful and we know that message has been
censored.
The Republican Party has been exposed, and all seems like all is lost as it appears, as is
the case that the whole fraud has been accomplished in the open, but I think the wrestling
match is not over, which is why impeachment and or 25th Amendment is what seals the coup, or
unseals sealed indictments, full disclosure and the Seals.
As a lawyer, I am convinced the election was stolen from Trump. I am absolutely stunned at
the total denial of this fact by all and sundry in the Establishment and by the citizenry in
both the USA as well as the West who believe the weaponized press and media. In addition the
Roman Catholic Church has now officially joined this political Establishment.
Post-modernism and multiculturalism have come home to roost.
Truth has been banished from the Western Establishment. What an achievement!
Whether they realize it fully or not, there is nowhere else but Hell that bids them on.
From the real God-fearing understandings of Reality, the anti-Christ/Dajjal now rule the
world.
MAGA couldn't be allowed to Continue.
MAGA had to be cut down.
MIGA couldn't Persist with MAGA. Unfortunately, Trump was a MIGA Player First before being a
MAGA Leader.
Catholics couldn't Persist with MAGA – they gained a POTUS and a SCOTUS Seat this Round
– with a mostly Catholic SCOTUS refusing to hear Electioneering Case Arguments.
OpenBorders wouldn't happen with MAGA.
DNC couldn't Persist with MAGA.
GOP_NeverTrumperz couldn't Persist with MAGA.
McConnell+Chao couldn't Persist with MAGA.
MSM couldn't Persist with MAGA
OffShoring couldn't Persist with MAGA.
FB/TWTR couldn't Persist with MAGA.
This article is above brilliant. Nobody can see the situation as clearly as PCR.
I am glad that Trump is gone. There will be no more somebody for MSM to serve as punching
bag.
It is unbelievable to me that Trump did withstand such a deluge of abuse from MSM and
Democrats and deep state. Trump did not have any real support from his coworkers. he was
standing alone.
I agree with Mr. Roberts; a bit of anger increased by the repeat of the "steal" in
Georgia, and a large dollop of agents provocateurs, including the famous viking with an
American flag, created an incident being blown up by the real fascisti, the establishment, as
a new Reichstag fire to set up a permanent dictatorial regime based in Washington. They are
in your face and probably hope for unrest because its suppression will consolidate this
odious regime. The only hope is that temporary instability will instigate a loss of control
over the vassal states and/or economic collapse caused by the authoritarian lockdown policies
will weaken the yankee state enough so that it loses influence. Otherwise, unfortunately, Dr.
Roberts' view of the future unfortunately looks accurate to me.
@Abdul
Alhazred the Capitol Police. She told him that a lot of people feel the police didn't do
enough the day before. He told her that at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning he was told to go
home, along with his fellow policemen. He thought this odd, considering there was going to be
a huge rally taking place that day, but off he went home. After hearing of the breach on the
news, he subsequently returned, but he did this on his own; he hadn't been asked to return.
Makes you wonder if they didn't intentionally short-staff the Capitol Police that day in
order to ensure the outcome they got. Made it much easier for the agent provocateurs to get
through.
The leftwing, or the fraud that passes for one, thinks it is now in the money. This is a
naive expectation. The Establishment is in charge, and there will be no leftist agendas
unless they serve the Establishment. If Antifa and BLM cut up, their funding will be cut
off, and the presstitutes will be sicced on them.
I don't believe this is quite true. The attempt by establishment in the US to use
non-Whites and radical leftists for their own ends brings to mind the attempt by the
establishment of the Weimar Republic to use the Nazis in the same way. When you put
power-hungry people in charge of the levers of power, you shouldn't expect them to pull those
levers according to your instructions.
Trump was so uninformed about Washington that he never succeeded in appointing anyone to
his government, other than General Flynn (an immediate casualty of the Establishment) who
agreed with his agenda of normalizing relations with Russia, bringing the troops home from
the Middle East
I was totally opposed to the railroading of Flynn, and while it is true that he
represented a breath of fresh air on Syrian and Russian issues, unfortunately, he–like
pretty much everyone else in Washington–is an Iran-hawk. Thus, I doubt he was actually
in favor of a total ME pull-out, though it is probably true that he would have pulled us out
from Syria if he could have.
Because of his brash, entertaining style of hitting back against the entire
MSM, it seems so much easier now to spot the stringpullers and start connecting the dots. Why
does the media speak with one voice always in support of the Establishment? Why is everything
portrayed by them so falsely and one-sidededly? Who is benefitting from the trajectory being
so relentlessly pushed by them? I see Trump's legacy as having awakened a sleeping giant,
despite the many ways he betrayed the ideals of his moving inauguration speech. How will the
Establishment's coming suppression of free speech for the purpose of attempting to put this
genie back in the bottle be resisted?
Schulosi know that the 25th Amendment move could easily be foiled by Trump long enough to
run out the clock. What they really want and it is being loudly telegraphed in the media is
for Congress to go the Impeachment/removal/bar from future Federal office route as a
dubiously legal Bill of Attainder to prevent Trump from ever again ascending to the pinnacle
of power. Mr. Biden's remarks yesterday seem to suggest Mr. Trump is not going to get the
same professional courtesy that Mr. Trump showed to the Obama regime saboteurs who worked
from well before the 2016 and well into the Trump administration to bring it down.
Trump has been entertaining, much like the old train wreck shows in days of old, but now
he has to accept that his brand has been thoroughly derailed...
The mainstream media and the Harris/Biden gang won't leave Donald Trump and his family
peace until he is destroyed. Craig Roberts described in his excellent article that the script
transforms the US into a "benign" dictatorship. There won't ever be fair and democratic
elections in the so-called beacon of democracy. The Democrats, their Billionaire instigators,
and their storm troopers such as BLM and ANTIFA will transform the US into a living hell for
whites. The brainwashing of the public and the President's framing has been started with
Trump's victory over a corrupt and criminal Hillary Clinton in 2016. In retrospect, it will
look like a child's play what's in the offing for the country in the future.
What happened on Capitol Hill was people power. The phony US political class supported
people power in Georgia, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, Venezuela, Moldova, Iran, Hong Kong, to
name a few, not to forget the so-called color revolutions and the Arab spring that were
instigated and organized by George Soros' "Open Society," the CIA and their Western
intelligence supporters.
On every American, Gender ideology will be forced on them. If it doesn't work, reeducation
camps such as in North Korea will be welcome them.
Don't be naïve. Israel's self-proclaimed 'guardian,' Chuck Shumer, is now Senate
Majority Leader. The zio-state will do just fine. Wish I could say the same about my own
country.
I am not surprised by this. In fact, nothing that happens surprises me anymore. I expect
bad things to happen in a world like this.
Perhaps I can understand the thinking of Trump supporters such as the ones in the above
image. They believe that the electoral process has been subverted and that an election that
should have been Trump's has gone to Biden instead. They are outraged. They are rioting and
revolting in response. Unfortunately, these people are misguided.
1, Trump is a Snake and has been a HORRIBLE President. Why fight to defend him? I could
see defending him if he actually did something for America but he did nothing but Tweet. He
does not deserve another four years of the same.
2. The entire American political process is owned by Jewish interests. It was this way
long ago and it is certainly this way now. Whoever wins serves Jewish interests and the Jews
make damn well sure of it. Nobody who is hostile towards Jews stands of chance of getting in
the White House. Only Jewish puppets become President. So stop crying Trump supporters and
wake the fuck up.
3. There are reasons to Revolt against the System but this is not one of them. If you are
going to revolt, revolt for the right reason, not in defense of a lying Jewish scumbag like
Trump.
4. Trump is directly to blame for this violence. He incited his followers to do this and
then he accepts no blame for it afterwards. Very typical behavior for a lying narcissist like
Trump who wraps himself in the American Flag when he is really just a selfish Bastard who
wants to remain in the White House for his own Egotistical reasons.
5. As a former Trump supporter, all I can tell current Trump supporters is that you have
to wise up and realize that the man you are supporting is not worthy of being supported. You
have to wake up to Trump as I had to wake up. He is not who he says he is. He is a liar and
deceiver who plays on your ignorance and uses your Patriotism to get you to support him
personally. See through his con game.
6. I suspect that this rioting in Washington D.C. is not spontaneous but has been
carefully planned in advance by the Jews who use Trump Supporters the same way as they use
Antifa. Its all controlled opposition being used to sway the opinion of the American public
in a direction that the Jews will use in their favor to further divide Americans from each
other. IMO the above image was Staged meaning that these riots were planned and executed in
the same way as the George Floyd riots were. Never trust a lying scheming Jew not to be
one.
I agree with the writer of this comment and his criticism of Coulter. US subservience to
Israel began under harry Truman, who recognized Israel in 1948 with this comment: "I have
600,000 Jews and no Arabs." We have seen academia, politics, and industry all become
pro-Zionist despite Washington's comment in his Farewell Address that the US should not
became attached to any foreign nation or permanently hate any foreign nation. The hated
nation has become Russia, and the Democrats have blamed Russia for Trump. But it was
Americans who voted for Trump, and fortunately the EC went in his favor. No wonder Hillary
wants to abolish it.
After all of Trump's promises to "drain the swamp" and "make America great again" he's
managed only to usher in a post-democratic America. In typical Trump style he incited his
supporters and after promising to lead them not only abandoned them but disavowed them and
sent in the troops to quell them.
On the 20th Joe Biden will be inaugurated as president of the corpse of America.
Considering the shameful circumstances of his "victory" it will be fitting that he wears a
mask for the occasion.
@SamwiseGamgee
roy (the ones that, until recently, were independent and therefore a threat).
So, obviously from my last point, I'm not denying their destructive power. Not at all.
It's only too easy to see. I'm denying their ability to manage themselves now that there is
absolutely no obstacle to that power. No obstacle in the West, that is.
They might be partners in crime with The CCP. But it's a dependent relationship and in no
way a friendly one. No one kisses the ass of a friend. Say what you want about The CCP, it
does not, unlike the now completely defeated host populations of the West, strike one as
being all that into power-sharing.
As a final going away present Agent Orange turns on his own supporters. This fraud has no
right to complain about stolen elections or how Pence let him down. None of our problems will
be solved by voting.
You do know a guy name Milton Friedman was the architect for Reagan economics? For the
record we are currently living thru long term dystopia effects of Reagan economics.
Well I'm now depressed, and I voted for the color flag revolution. I didn't predict this
milquetoast one. The storming of the capital was kinda lame, although it did make me laugh.
Guess when you control both sides you really don't need to go hot. The deep staters must be
thrilled they could protect their left wing assets with this one by using Qtards instead.
However there are a lot of things that make you "hmm?". My favorite being the black cop and a
Maga protester doing a slow walk up some stairs with a guy above them taping everything. Odd
but hilarious. Speaking of odd, where were all the Proud Boys? Seems they went poof to live
another day.
Sadly the peculiar and unnecessary murder of Ashli Babbit seems to give Qanon life after
Trump with a martyr. Give the deep state credit they do think ahead. Guess I have cheered
myself up, apparently they aren't done with us yet. My guess is they still need us to keep
the lights on and sewer systems running. Also burly white dudes seem to be the preferred
choice for private security.
So CIA wins again. They stole the election and stuck Biden's reanimated corpse in there.
And now they'll shake him around like a Barbie and make him talk while they blow shit up.
All Trump did was tease them about killing JFK and knocking down the WTC, which everybody
already knows. And Trump wouldn't sit still for their brainwashing briefings, at first. Trump
was no Nixon, turning CIA inside out with Schlesinger at DCI. Trump had no one in congress
like Pike or even Church.
Back then CIA purged Nixon. Don Gregg threatened congress with martial law. And that was
nothing. Look what the ratfuckers at Langley were willing to do to get Trump out. They framed
Flynn to cut him off from Turmp. They took SARS-COV-2 off the shelf and used it on us,
destroyed the economy and killed us, 300 thousand of us and counting. They infected the whole
world to cover their tracks, killed 1.7 million human beings so far. CIA did everything they
could to start a war with Russia and called Trump a Russian agent, making shit up to frame
him too.
Now we see how CIA controls us. We know now that there is nothing CIA won't do to stay in
power. It's like Zappa said: when they were ready, they took away the stage set and left us
looking at a blank brick wall. It's like Rockefeller said: They Control it. All of it.
At this point, anybody who won't face this totalitarian state is not worth listening to
for a second, they're not worth a pound of warm shit. Prouty told you fifty years ago, the
whole world knows who runs this country. CIA.
So just cut the shit. Face facts. They stormed the wrong capitol. We can't escape. We need
the outside world to free us.
...Trump is a populist, not a revolutionary. And when faced with a revolution moment he
had no clue what else to do. I believe Trump supporters, the Deplorables, are the real
substantive patriots. They are sensible and want a stable America. Unfortunately their
opponents the Dems/Leftists and all other assorted groupings just want to win even if they
burn the whole of US. These people worship god of mammon and nothing else...
It seems to me the intent of the Trump supporters was merely to occupy the Capitol and
according to those who were interviewed "make their voices heard". I think those were the
words of Ashli Babbitt about an hour before she was gunned down by a black cop as well as a
few other interviews I came across.
That's neither intent to commit treason nor sedition. At most they are guilty of
trespassing on federal grounds which apparently is now a grievous federal offense if you hold
right of center political opinions. The person who killed a Capitol police officer and those
who destroyed property have some additional legal problems but that's still a far cry from
sedition.
But let's reverse all this and say that Trump was accused of stealing the election from
Joe Biden because of the suspicious and massive ballot dumps 95-100% for Trump in all
battleground states between 1am and 6:34am after election day along with other
irregularities. Then when legal remedies were sought the corrupt state and federal courts
refused to hear or allow discovery in the vast majority of them using "laches", standing and
other pretexts.
Radical left mobs would have stormed the capitol building and it would be encouraged and
supported by the media and all Democrats. Chris Cuomo or some other leftist shitlord would be
telling us that "this is what happens when Republicans steal an election." Republicans would
be so intimidated that they would probably overturn the election in favor of Joe Biden.
If a female black Biden protester was shot by a white Capitol cop then it would be "say
her name" and the white cop would be immediately fired and probably in FBI custody for a hate
crime. Blacks would destroy D.C. again while authorities did little.
@Katrinka PCR
thinks Trump is the victim of a color revolution when in fact Trump is leading a color
revolution.
The basis of a color revolution is a claim of a fraudulent election, this was the case in
Ukraine, Venezuela, and Belarus. It is Trump who claimed the election was fraudulent, and if
you follow StormFront you'll know that the Trumpers are now claiming that the entire voting
process in the US is a fraud and worthless.
In the US it is Trump and Trumpers like PCR who are now ripping apart the fabric of US
society, on the basis of endless allegations of a fraudulent election that evaporate with a
moments scrutiny.
The owners of America have decided. You plebes will do as you are told and the owners will
do what they want.
Trump's owners, the military industrial complex and the zionist lobby, have thrown him
under the bus. Bummer dude but you don't get to be "the one". It is so easy to manipulate ego
maniacs.
What deal did they cut with Biden's owners (media (all 6), med-mafia (pharma on top), tech
and CIA+lawfare (DOJ, FBI, IRS))?
1) Biden will NOT end the sanctions against Iran. He may say "we'll negotiate" but it will
drag on forever.
2) The MIC gets to keep the "civilian special forces" and most importantly control of the
NSA.
So after doing all the dirty work Trump gets thrown under the bus. LMAO. Will he be a
broken man like LBJ or Nixon or will he drift off into irrelevance like most of the rest?
transformation of the United States from a democracy accountable to the people to an
oligarchy of entrenched vested interests.
That transformation happened decades ago. The only difference is, in 2020 (both before the
elections and in November massive fraud) the beast showed its ugly mug more clearly than
before.
"... As the duly selected leader of Binomo, I will be having serious words with my Head of Intelligence over this embarrassing political imbroglio. ..."
Oh noes, I am totally gutted. It turns out the Viking Man is a GRU agent all along, and
this is all a last ditch effort by Russia to keep their man in place.
How do pacify 72 million voters, many of whom are convinced that they have been cheated?.
How do you stop them ALL from marching on the White house?
Answer; You stage a psyop . You let in a number of colourful figures disguised as
"Manhatten-cowboy style trappers " - add a bit of shoving and pushing, lots of
shouting. Cameramen(or women) at the ready. and bingo... everyone can go home afterwards
saying "we tried" or "we did our bit".
Item one, a clip: Notice the two cameramen, one following the "break-in+, and the other at
the top of the stairs. All filmed in glorious technicolour and HD by professionals)
I love the first demonstrator signaling the cop to retreat, small hand signal.
The MSM and "Governments" can all now play the " we support Democracy, look how we are
above all this mayhem ". Visible moral fibre on tap and statements prewritten?
Zuckerberg and mass media can silence any comment including Trumps or those that come from
the "deplorables". Which is what they have done to silence any revision of the narrative,
before it gains traction. (Zuckie rules, he must do as he wasn't elected, probably got
there by hereditary means )
The bit-parts were played by members of the house who had their masks ready under their
seats.
The unfortunate lady was probably an accident as the Police there just can't resist
shooting someone.
Read Trump's earlier stuff from Reuters
"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The chaos in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday unfolded after President
Donald Trump spent weeks whipping up his supporters with false allegations of fraud in the
Nov. 3 election, culminating in a call to march to the building that represents U.S.
democracy.
The real question is was the election stolen? On balance, I would guess that
it was and that is why the courts all refused to examine the evidence, instead of allowing
the evidence to be presented and refuted. Trumps case was never answered only trashed
and ridiculed.
Turka #125
I also find it incredibly disingenuous that protestors/"rioters" made it into the Capitol
building despite sturdy doors, and the police couldn't stave it off.
just another addition to the "both sides are assholes" exhibit: the first comment on the
NPR tweet about the unarmed woman killed by a cop is "coups have consequences".
even putting aside the whole (valid) "if it was a black woman killed by a cop" argument,
i've loved seeing the past 4 years of so called "liberals" slowly losing their mask of
humanity. they complain about the MAGA types as if they're the barbarians at the gate but
they're ALL americans and therefore have violence and hatred of the "other" baked in from
birth.
also, if that shitbag thinks this was a "coup" then they're even less informed than their
idiotic comment would suggest.
Very well said. It's amazing how much you can tell about the agenda of the deep state just
by careful reading and noticing the words chosen--especially when you keep seeing the same
words repeated incessantly.
And incidentally, at first I was a bit curious about all this over-the-top sudden calls to
impeach Trump and that sort of nonsense...I was thinking it was just a matter of continued
venting of hatred at him for his "gift" of exposing the hypocrisy and duplicity of the deep
state, and the US in general. But it just occurred to me that no, it's because it has dawned
on them that a Trump drummed out of office by a clearly fraudulent election (i.e.,
righteously indignant) could be quite a rallying point for the disenfranchised regular
citizens of the US. So, they're hoping to spend these last two weeks doing everything they
can to tarnish his reputation and try to destroy his ability to rally the troops, so to
speak. I don't think it will work, but then again who knows to what depths they will sink to
permanently sink Trump. Expect a lot more craziness these last two weeks.
By allowing the protesters into the Capital Building, the chance to challenge the certification of the various states' electors
was lost. This was Trump's and his supporters' last chance. They have been played like a piano. Quite brilliant, in its way. Game over.
There was a curious
lack of resistance from the relevant authority. While Trump proved to be an incompetent and a coward, this looks like another Pelosi
dirty trick similar to Ukrainegate ? Russiagate and Ukrainegate taught him nothing.
That the incoming president declares a number of activist from the opposing party to be 'terrorists' demonstrates how unqualified
he is for that job.
Is this a terrorist? These were not terrorists but tourists who came from all over the states to Washington for fun and to register
their disagreement with the 'elites'.
Those rabbles were in no way terrorists. They were not even a mob. Most of them were out-of-town rednecks who felt that they had
been wronged. They wanted to express that. They were surprised when they found how easy it was to enter the Capitol and they apparently
took more time to take pictures than to rearrange the furniture.
[L]et's be clear about what did not take place at the Capitol Building last night. This was not a fascist coup, as so many shrill,
supposedly liberal commentators are claiming. Their flagrant use of the word 'fascist' to describe every political movement they
disapprove of is an insult to reason and history. This wasn't a coup full stop. The National Guard suppressed the morons, the
barricades were put back up, and even their hero Donald Trump told them to go home. A coup is a conscious effort to illegally
seize power from the government. These people couldn't even believe they made it into the Capitol Building. They were like children
finding a candy store unguarded.
A children's game. Indeed.
Yet Biden and others are furious about the stunt because it lifted the veil off their vaunted U.S. 'democracy' and its empty rituals:
Nicholas J. Fuentes @NickJFuentes - 21:01
UTC · Jan 7, 2021
The US Capitol is hardly a "sacred temple of democracy," it's the sleaziest brothel in the world, totally bought and controlled
by powerful interest groups and foreign governments. Who are they kidding?
Congressional processes are dirty fights about the distribution of the loot. There is nothing sacred about it. Just consider the
massive
bribes that were taken during the Georgia Senate races. Those hundreds of millions of 'donations' will have to be paid back in
kind.
The threat inflation, the wild claims about a fascist coup, are transparent efforts by the cosseted political and cultural elites
to endow their project with moral importance; to give their restoration of managerial, technocratic power after the four-year
populist experiment – which is fundamentally the project that Biden and his influential supporters are currently engaged in –
the gloss of historical urgency. It is mission creation.
Worse, this narrative-building will allow the elites to circumscribe even more forms of political thought and speech than they
already desire to do , on the basis that the latent fascism among the American rabble is likely to be stirred up by inflammatory
ideas and commentary. Indeed, we've already been given a chilling glimpse of this post-incursion clampdown on 'violent' speech
in Twitter's extraordinary decision to ban, outright, three of Trump's tweets last night and to lock him out of his account for
12 hours.
It strikes me that this unilateral use of corporate power by Silicon Valley to prevent the democratically elected president
of the United States from engaging with millions of his voters and supporters, to physically forbid him from partaking in online
discussion, is a grave assault on democracy, too. More grave, I would say, than the immoral and anti-democratic incursion of the
Capitol Building. Already, right away, we are seeing that the threat-inflating response to last night's events will likely have
longer-lasting negative consequences for open debate and democratic norms than the thing itself.
Biden is famous for mixing his words up. He meant to say that the protesters were "domestic tourists" . I'm sure he meant
to thank them for doing their part to revitalize America's service economy.
I haven't heard much about this charge being made by Maria Zack that an affidavit was
delivered yesterday concerning a whistleblower that allegedly was delivered to Kemp, Meadows.
It's about frankfurt and dominion software shenangians. I figured Lin Wood would know about
it if theres' anything here, but he's suspended from twitter.
"...the election wasn't "stolen". Down ballot republicans outperformed Trump. That's a
really, really difficult way to steal an election..." Lex@85
The Republicans steal elections regularly. They do so by suppressing votes from poor and
black areas, by disenfranchising millions of 'felons' (few of whom are actually guilty of
felony) and gerrymandering House seats. Of course they also gerrymander electoral districts
in the States too, which allows them to keep control.
The Democrats are no better. In fact they wrote the book on the arts of
disenfranchisement, from Gerry to Daley. Their specialty is ballot box stuffing.
The big difference is that this year the Republicans were confident that the usual
measures, which in the South include suppression of the black vote by intimidation,
(something that shows in the low level of black participation in rural areas and small
towns-where everyone knows what everyone else is doing and most employers are white) would do
the trick. It generally does because the Democrats are not really interested in taking power
at the State level or, for that matter, in Congress where-as the stimulus cheque and defence
budget votes showed- they find it embarrassing when they have to choose their oligarch
sponsors over their 'base. Obama was obviously relieved when in 2010 the Republicans swept
the mid term elections and took the "Change" he had been elected on off the agenda. After
that he just cruised through his last six years governing like his hero Reagan.
It is one of the most potent myths being manufactured by the media that the election this
year was fair. It wasn't. The need for reform, beginning with the re-empowerment of the Civil
Rights Act enforcement mechanisms, is something that must be imposed on the Democrats, who
will fight against it because their control over the southern black vote depends on the
maintenance of the current system.
And then there are the obvious and major Constitutional changes needed- the closing of the
Electoral College system; the Senate, where it is possible for something like 20% of the
electorate to control the majority of the 100 seats, has to be changed. Its current position
is that of the British House of Lords in 1832.
All the sound and the fury of this very suspicious looking 'riot' shouldn't be allowed to
block out the reality which is that, Trump or Biden, nothing is changed. The Biden
administration is likely to be every bit as bad as Trump's, only the media will love it.
In the real world there is frustration. And it is entirely justified-living standards are
plummeting and pessimism about the future is prevalent. But revolutions don't come from anger
they come from reform movements stymied: when people realise that the only hope of any change
is complete change-revolution- and feel ready to take the reins of power into their own
hands, that is when revolutions occur.
"Realise" is the key word. Political consciousness means understanding of reality, not belief
in weird and unsupportable theories whether they involve God or The Jews or oligarchical
cabals intent on buying up small businesses by inventing pandemics or secret moves to smuggle
microchips into brains to turn humanity into zombies. And the reality is that we live in a
capitalist empire dominated by the determination of the exploiting class to protect its
system from the threat, long understood but only ever realised episodically, of democracy. Of
equality. Of liberty and treating each other as the siblings, parents and children that we
all are.
I mean, how many times do they have to say things like "totally unproven" and
"unsubstantiated" in every sentence before people start to think that they're being treated
like idiots?
High treason, where, what? Did I miss something then ? I think not. The Soviet Union was
doomed,
virtually bankrupt, its population queuing for almost everything, DDR likewise and Poland
too, I have seen it in all three places. Oh, you could get everything if you had dollars!
Poland 1975: 1 kg of Russian Caviar and 4 bottles of the best Crimean Champagne :$10 !
Russia: Brand new Makarow, 9 mm, and 100 shots $20 including nice shoulder holster too in
leather $30
But ordinary people did not have $, only the nomenclature had $. A totally corrupt and failed
system in all the Eastern block. I was there then, saw it, and I have not forgotten.
So it was high time for change, and yes it would be tough, but the eastern people are tough
people ( and hospitable, very indeed)so they stood it out.
Abe, take a trip to Russia and speak to some older people, so you may stop posting
nonsense!
Him and his underlings, along with its successor Yeltsin (died too soon, unfortunately)
are directly responsible for millions of dead and destroyed lives in Russia in the `90-ties.
But I sense you are from countries that now grow unhealthy and pathological hate towards
Russian people, so as far you are concerned, it was great period, right?
Blame the Soviets for the economy of places ravaged by war and sabotaged by the West?
Remember the Eastern Front suffered the majority of action. Russia itself suffered the worst
and had to rebuild more than anybody, whereas USA factories easily re-supplied Western
Europe.
Eastern Europeans better guard against being played by the West into fighting Russia
again. They allied with Western-financed Hitler the last time. So, I'm a little worried
they'll be conned again.
It is curious that in one of the articles MoA wrote that, in his opinion (which I share),
there are now two superpowers - the United States and Russia, while China is only on the way
to this.
But Chinese journalists think differently - for example, in this article (very controversial,
btw) the author asks the question "Russia has the potential to become a superpower,
what are the factors preventing it from doing this?" At the same time, apparently, the
journalist believes that the current superpowers are China and the United States, while
"something prevents" Russia from becoming such.
Funny.
Just one quote from the article:
The distance between Russia and the superpower is still very large, and not only because of
the country's "internal problems" - the United States is also constraining and restraining
Russia by all means. It is not easy to become a superpower.
"If you talk to older people in Russia they'll tell you how deeply they despise the
"marked one" as they call him."
I know there are multiple perspectives when assessing Gorbachev's legacy, but I also
encountered that reaction often during my time there by old and young alike. It was a
surprise to me as I had assumed he would be universally accepted in a positive light as he is
in the west.
Asking them why they felt that way, a common response was that he had been too trusting of
the US promises, which ushered in the looting and manipulation of the 90's. Many mentioned
Baker's promise to Gorbachev that if East Germany went to the west, NATO would not move "one
inch to the east", and Gorbachev's failure to get that in writing. (Not to say the US would
have honored it even then, of course, but at least some proof to show the west's
duplicity).
vk@8 "The USSR could've reformed and opened up like China did, and would be in a much better
situation than what really happened (Yeltsin's neoliberal genocide)."
This is nonsense. That's exactly what Gorbachev did. The relative stagnation of the USSR
turned into an economic catastrophe under Gorbachev who dismantled a still-functional
economy. Yeltsin's neoliberalism was a continuation of Gorbachev's economics. Yeltsin's
revolution was not to impose a new policy but to smash the opposition to the new policy, to
carry it out ruthlessly, to concentrate the theft of public property in Great Russian hands.
China's opening up was deliberately fostered by the western powers as a way of separating the
socialist powers. There was never going to be any such opening up with Europe, not for the
USSR. There wasn't in NEP in the Twenties. This absurd counterfactual misreads what happened
with the capitalist roaders in China.
There also seems to be some nonsense lurking about how the Cultural Revolution was a
gigantic catastrophe. Of course, though no one cares to notice, if this was true, then India
would have had all those years to race ahead of China, not being cursed with such a
nightmare. In truth, the Cultural Revolution brought many benefits to the countryside in
particular, and still progressed the economy as a whole. Then after the murderous Deng took
over, there wasn't any magical Great Leap Forward on IOUs to Imperialism as he promised. For
years and years, the wonders of reform and opening up delivered not much faster (at all?)
than the previous system. Not even the notorious Southern Tour was so miraculous. The failure
to deliver on his overblown promises is why the students at Tien An Men square were so
worried about getting good jobs commensurate with their higher elite status, reaffirmed by
Deng. Only after decades did the economic conjuncture finally lead to rapid growth...but at a
tremendous social cost still denied by too many. The iron rice bowl was broken long before
the privilege of working for a capitalist firm started to really pay.
Peaceful protesters only want democracy, freedom, and the realization of their civil rights.
The totalitarian American machine suppresses them, one citizen was even shot in the chest.
Monstrous barbarism and encroachment on the rights of people to peacefully protest! So awful.
It is the duty of the free world to support civic activists and sternly condemn the American
oppression machine of freedom!
I think it would be nice for the Russian Foreign Ministry to make a corresponding
statement. It would be very appropriate to troll the "western partners" well. The most
splendid trolling would be to try to call an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council
because of the events in the United States and discuss the oppression of peaceful protesters
and the repression of the American totalitarian power machine.
A resolution is also absolutely necessary urging the American authorities to immediately
end the harassment of peaceful protesters and to release the detainees. Of course, sanctions
are also needed in connection with the oppression of civil liberties by the American
authorities.
Well, the boomerang returned to those who threw it. That's wonderful.
You can't believe anything those days as false flag operation are so commonplace that you
should suspect any event being a false flag. A real "empire of illusions"
My new drinking game includes a sip every time somebody on CNN or MSNBC says the words "a
threat to our democracy". Yesterday I passed out at noon.
SelectedNotElectedBiden 7 hours ago remove link
"Either the U.S. Congress has the worst security personnel that any of us have ever seen,
or this was allowed to happen on purpose."
My immediate thought yesterday.
Democrycy 7 hours ago remove link
They were let in by the security. There's plenty of video evidence. They even removed the
statutes in the hallway for them.
wasd 7 hours ago
'security' 'tour guide' same diff
walküre 5 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Which public building that was just "stormed" and evacuated gets reopened, lawmakers
resuming the most important session of all?
No sweep for hidden toxins, viral exposure (Covid !!!!), booby traps and so on?
Even the grocery store needs to close min. 24 hours for a deep clean under Covid
rules!
How many hours before someone gave the 'all clear' and resume the process?
Do you believe this?
Smedley of Tarsus 6 hours ago remove link
This was entirely false flag.
GoldenDebt PREMIUM 5 hours ago
Remarkable how even Fox News used yesterday's even to trash and throw Trump under the
bus.
The Capitol Building event is being used as cover so that investigations of voter fraud
are brushed away as if voting fraud never happenned.
mrjinx007 7 hours ago
Like I said, it was all planned so the Con-men could certify it without hearing the
objections. The Reps are in it as much as Dems. It gave them the easy way out.
"... This is our reward for heckling the 'intelligence agencies' after Trump's vanguard bought Hillary's Broom for display purposes only, nothing to see there. Biden is now mayor of munchkinland. Still can't figure out who is 'Great Oz'. ..."
"... It's too late now, but a "win-win" solution might have been for Congress to certify Juan Guaido as President. ..."
"... That way, Trump would be replaced by his (or maybe it's Pence's) protégé, and the wokesters would have their first latino head of state. And of course in politics, other than one's identity, what the hell else matters? ..."
"... Who says there isn't a way to reconcile red and blue America? ..."
This is our reward for heckling the 'intelligence agencies' after Trump's vanguard bought
Hillary's Broom for display purposes only, nothing to see there. Biden is now mayor of
munchkinland. Still can't figure out who is 'Great Oz'.
When the going gets tuff, I listen to Frank Zappa and George Carlin, in that order while
chopping onions. Sleep well my pretties, I know I will.
It's too late now, but a "win-win" solution might have been for Congress to certify Juan
Guaido as President.
That way, Trump would be replaced by his (or maybe it's Pence's) protégé, and the
wokesters would have their first latino head of state. And of course in politics, other than
one's identity, what the hell else matters?
Who says there isn't a way to reconcile red and blue America?
In Dmitry Orlov's irreverent style addressing a very serious topic:
And this brings us to the final traditional part of the year-end report: the forecast.
According to our Satanist friends at Deagel.com (lovely understated Satanic logo, by the
way, kudos to the designers!) by 2025 the United States will lose 70% of its population,
92% of its real GDP and its economy will be slightly smaller than that of Mexico.
Meanwhile, China will remain the world's largest economy, growing slightly, while Russia
and India will skyrocket to rank second and third. The world rankings will look quite
different. Germany will find itself somewhere between Chile and South Africa. Switzerland
and the United Kingdom (should this silly anachronism still exist) will rank somewhere
between Slovakia and Greece. The Swedes will be poorer than the Romanians... and so on. The
world is changing before our eyes and nothing will ever be the same.
They aren't that organized in the US to set up a revolution. We lack a US embassy.
I agree with Grieved that Orange Man Bad will experience his peripeteia. He was only some
half rate shegetz in their opinion.
With so many anti orange man people who have shown up lately, I am surprised Woody
Guthrie's song about Orange Man's father hasn't been posted. This one's for you Mark2, you
muppet tosser! Work on your spelling, too. ( or grow a pear )
"... Thanks b for reminding us of how the Western mainstream media all presented Hong Kong rioters and thugs as "peaceful pro-democracy protesters," despite months upon months of ample violent video evidence to the contrary (which they of course never aired because it didn't fit their narrative directives.) ..."
"... Yet the Western mainstream media now somehow characterize these relatively far more peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Washington as "thugs" and "mobs", and of course their protests about election fraud concerns are all labeled by the media (again, as if by directive,) as "baseless" and "unsubstantiated" without any investigations into them. ..."
"... Meanwhile, our media has repeatedly demonstrated that it has absolutely no problem with reporting unsubstantiated claims as fact when it fits their directed narratives. (ex. White Helmets, Navalny, Uighurs, etc.) ..."
Thanks b for reminding us of how the Western mainstream media all presented Hong Kong
rioters and thugs as "peaceful pro-democracy protesters," despite months upon months of ample
violent video evidence to the contrary (which they of course never aired because it didn't
fit their narrative directives.)
Yet the Western mainstream media now somehow characterize these relatively far more
peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Washington as "thugs" and "mobs", and of course their
protests about election fraud concerns are all labeled by the media (again, as if by
directive,) as "baseless" and "unsubstantiated" without any investigations into them.
Meanwhile, our media has repeatedly demonstrated that it has absolutely no problem with
reporting unsubstantiated claims as fact when it fits their directed narratives. (ex. White
Helmets, Navalny, Uighurs, etc.)
Belarus was another example of our media's blatant double standards.
Thanks too for the reminder that Pelosi gushed "It is a beautiful sight to behold."
This line from Biden probably provoked a guffaw from most the world: "An assault on the
citadel of liberty".
Nuland will be nominated for the position of under secretary of state for political affairs,
the US media said on Tuesday with Politico being the first to
drop the scoop. It's the highest-ranking post in the department after the secretary and deputy
secretary. During the Obama administration, Nuland served as assistant secretary of state for
European and Eurasian Affairs, and was a key official in formulating and implementing his
Russia policies. She also served as US envoy to the UN under George W. Bush and advised Vice
President Dick Cheney on foreign policy.
The news that the vocal Russia hawk was returning to the White House was understandably met
with loud cheering by the fans of Pax American on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics were
dismayed and somewhat horrified, considering her record.
Arguably the most publicly known episode of Nuland's Obama tenure came in 2014, when a tape
of her conversation with then-ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked. It happened
shortly after Ukraine's democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in a wave
of street protests culminating in an armed coup, which happened with much encouragement from
Washington.
Nuland and Pyatt were discussing who among the coup leaders should be in the upcoming
Ukrainian government, which indicated that Washington played a much bigger role in the crisis
than it publicly admitted. The infamous " F**k the EU" remark came as Nuland expressed
frustration with European nations, who were reluctant to lend legitimacy to the benefactors of
the events, and said UN officials could be called in to help "glue this thing"
instead.
The EU's skepticism at the time could have been due to the fact that President Yanukovich
was expelled under a threat of violence just hours after Germany and Poland helped seal a power
sharing
agreement between him and the opposition leaders, serving as guarantors of the deal. Her
return as a senior diplomatic official is likely to get on a few people's nerves in Europe,
which is ironic considering how the Biden administration is supposed to rebuild alliances
damaged by the Trump presidency.
While flying private in the world of academia and think tanks during the Trump years, Nuland
maintained her confrontational attitude to anyone challenging US dominance. Her recipe for
dealing with Russia, as outlined
in Foreign Policy magazine last summer, is more sophisticated weapons, permanent NATO bases on
the Russian border (which will require abolishing a key Russia-NATO agreement) and deniable
cyber operations against Moscow.
Nuland also played a
peculiar part in US domestic affairs, possibly having a hand in the promotion of the
notorious Steele dossier. The collection of opposition research and rumors was used by the FBI
to justify surveillance of the Trump campaign and fueled the endless flood of claims that the
incumbent president was somehow a Russian stooge.
An FBI memo released last
year revealed that Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson "and others were talking to Victoria Nuland
at the US State Department" about the file. The firm looked into Donald Trump for the
Hillary Clinton campaign and retained retired British intelligence agent Christopher Steele for
the job.
In multiple interviews, Nuland insisted that her role with the dossier was very limited
because it dealt with domestic politics. "[Steele] passed two to four pages of short points
of what he was finding, and our immediate reaction to that was, 'This is not in our
purview,'" she
told CBS News in 2018, adding that she advised him to go to the FBI. Some skeptics believe
her role in launching the Steele dossier may have been much more significant.
Nuland is one of many Obama-era officials tapped by Biden to serve again with him at the
helm. In addition to her, the latest reported batch includes Wendy Sherman, the former under
secretary of state for political affairs, Jon Finer, who had various roles under Obama, and
Amanda Sloat, ex-deputy assistant secretary for Southern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean
affairs.
People feel attacked, unite, rally around the flag. Internal problems are blamed on the
external enemy. The sanctions, the sort the West likes to impose, help develop domestic
industries. Etc. Yeah, favors.
So, according to your logic, a hostile or unfriendly policy [towards Russia] will be when
the United States abolishes its discriminatory measures (they call them sanctions), withdraws
its troops from Europe, agree to North Stream-2, apologize for the coup in Ukraine etc.?
And then Russians will not be able "to justify" their problems with some kind of external
enemy?
I did not hear any more absurdity.
Btw, I am from Russia and I don't know of internal problems that the authorities would try
to "justify" by some external enemy/threat. In Russia, there are fires, there are cases of
corruption of officials, somewhere there is a break in power lines (ice on the wires), in
some places there are no necessary medicines in pharmacies, floods occur in summer... - a lot
of problems, like in any other country. All these are internal problems. And there has never
been such a thing that the Russian authorities said "this is all because of the American
sanctions!".
Yes, as Putin has said, Russia remains a developing nation, and such nations have such
problems and need to resolve them as best they can. In many respects, Russia is still
recovering from the destruction of WW2 and then the rapine it was subjected to from
1990-2000. Putin and his team know there's much to do. IMO, the new Eurasian Bloc will become
far more powerful and vastly improved over the USSR and its Warsaw Pact Bloc. But
improvements don't happen instantly, so people need to remain patient. Thanks much for your
input!
"... Democrats decisively outraised their opponents, giving them a critical edge. Ossoff outraised Perdue by $138 million to $89 million while Warnock received $124 million to Loeffler's $92 million. With over 98% of the votes counted, Warnock has been declared the winner, with 50.6% of the vote. Ossoff, meanwhile, is all but assured of winning as well, and has already declared victory. ..."
"... Thus, both contests have conformed to political scientist Thomas Ferguson's "Golden Rule" of politics: that the party that spends the most almost always wins the election. Ferguson's 1995 thesis , "The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems," argued that elections are essentially contests between rival big businesses and that the two political parties compete to serve those who pay them, not the public. Nearly 20 years later, a University of Princeton study of 1,779 policy issues found that, ..."
"... Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." ..."
"... Data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that, since 2000, the candidate spending the most money has won between 70% and 98% of their races in the House or Senate ..."
"... the real winners in this election were corporate America, who could not lose, whoever won. ..."
In order to beat GOP incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the Georgia Senate
elections, Democrats had to spend big, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the
process.
The two Georgia Senate elections -- called today for the Democrats -- were easily the most
costly in history, amounting to nearly $830 million in total ($468 million for the race between
Democrat Joey Ossoff and Republican David Perdue and more than $361 million for the special
election between Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock and Republican Kelly Loeffler.
The Democrats' massive war chest came in no small part from hefty contributions from
corporate America. According to data from the Center for
Responsive Politics , tech companies rallied around the Democratic challengers, plying the
two campaigns with millions of dollars. Alphabet Inc., Google's parent organization, was the
largest single source of funds, their PACs, shareholders, or employees donating almost $1
million to Ossoff's campaign alone with other big tech companies cracking his top ten, all with
hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donations from the like of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon,
Facebook, and AT&T. The rest of the top ten were made up by universities.
The Republican candidates also relied on large corporations for much of their funding.
Perdue's biggest donors included Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of
America, while Loeffler was generously supported by oil and chemical giant Koch Industries as
well as a number of financial institutions like Ryan LLC and Blackstone Group.
However, Democrats decisively outraised their opponents, giving them a critical edge.
Ossoff outraised Perdue by $138 million to $89 million while Warnock received $124 million to
Loeffler's $92 million. With over 98% of the votes counted, Warnock has been declared the
winner, with 50.6% of the vote. Ossoff, meanwhile, is all but assured of winning as well, and
has
already declared victory.
Thus, both contests have conformed to political scientist Thomas Ferguson's "Golden
Rule" of politics: that the party that spends the most almost always wins the election.
Ferguson's 1995 thesis , "The Golden
Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political
Systems," argued that elections are essentially contests between rival big businesses and that
the two political parties compete to serve those who pay them, not the public. Nearly 20 years
later, a University of Princeton
study of 1,779 policy issues found that,
Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest
groups have little or no independent influence."
https://cdn.iframe.ly/oNuYTi0?v=1&app=1
Empirical evidence seems to support this notion. Data from the Center for
Responsive Politics shows that, since 2000, the candidate spending the most money has won
between 70% and 98% of their races in the House or Senate
The 2020 election was already by far the most expensive in history, even before the Georgia
numbers were added into the mix. The sums of $468 million and $361 million are comfortably
higher than any of those from two months ago, the most expensive of which was the $299 million
contest in North Carolina between Thom Tillis (Republican) and Cal Cunningham (Democrat).
Many were heralding the Democratic upset in Georgia as the start of a new era and a victory
against racism and hate. "The votes of Black people have been suppressed in this nation for a
very long time. This is the dawning of a new day," said Bernice King, daughter of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Warnock, who will become the state's first black senator, agreed.
"Tonight we proved that with hope, hard work, and the people by our side, anything is possible
All of us have a choice to make; will we continue to divide, distract and dishonor one another,
or will we love our neighbors as we love ourselves?" he said in his victory speech.
Yet while corporations continue to have such an outsized role in funding both major
political parties, it is unclear whether substantive change is even possible. The debate over
whether this represents a victory for racial justice can be had, but what seems unmistakable is
that the real winners in this election were corporate America, who could not lose, whoever
won.
Feature photo | Senate candidate Jon Ossoff introduces President-elect Joe Biden in Atlanta,
Jan. 4, 2021, as he campaigns for Raphael Warnock and Ossoff. Carolyn Kaster | AP
"... A Twitter user named Joe Oltmann had tweeted a few screenshots of a Facebook user posting Antifa manifestos and songs about killing police. The Facebook account belonged to Eric Coomer, and Oltmann claimed it was the same Eric Coomer who is the Director of Product Strategy and Security for Dominion Voting Systems. Within hours of Oltmann posting the information, however, the Facebook page of Eric Coomer was taken down, so I was unable to verify that Antifa Coomer and Dominion Coomer were the same person. By the end of the day, Joe Oltmann's Twitter account was suspended as well. I had followed his feed throughout the day. I can say with certainty that he posted nothing remotely offensive or provocative. I have no doubt whatsoever that Twitter suspended him for posting the screenshots of Coomer's Facebook page. Interesting. ..."
"... Of course none of this proves any fraud took place, but we deserve some answers ..."
"... Having potentially tens of millions of people doubting results in a half-dozen different states thanks to the same company running machines in all of them is an unprecedentedly serious problem, whether or not their doubts are well-founded. ..."
"... platforms like Twitter and WordPress would do well to consider that censorship of people discussing Dominion and its employees is likely to have the opposite effect that they think it will ..."
"... in Georgia the voter signature validation was usurped for mail in ballots, allowing anyone with a mail in ballot to vote. ..."
"... There are ample undercover videos of union postal workers selling mail in ballots. ..."
"... The secretary of state usurped the law in Georgia, telling polling places to ignore the requirement to verify signatures of mail in ballots. The signatures are compared to the drivers license database. The democrats (Stacey Abrams) worked with the secretary of state to have such voting controls removed so the system could be easily frauded. ..."
"... if you think the cost of recounts is high, wait till you get a load of the cost of the electorate's lack of confidence in the election process. That cost will be measured in human lives. ..."
"... But the Russians! Not my President. Resistance. Years of investigations into gossip columnist Steele's paid report to the Democrats. ..."
Whether or not the company's machines were misused, it poses structural risks, and
suppressing criticism will make Trump supporters even more dubious
t is unlikely that many of the 73 million people who cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2020
will ever accept the legitimacy of his loss. Who could convince them? If the media sources
demanding Trump's concession held any sway with Trump's voters, they would not have been his
voters. They do not know for sure that the election was stolen, but they do know with apodictic
certainty that the media would lie to them if it was. So if Donald Trump says the election was
stolen, that's good enough for the Deplorables.
Yet even the President's most faithful must have flinched at his recent tweet accusing a
leading manufacturer of voting machines of committing election fraud on a mass scale.
It is hard to overstate the irresponsibility of broadcasting such a serious accusation
without proof. It shocked me, and my startle response has become pretty desensitized over the
last four years. Sure, it turned out Trump was right when he accused the Obama administration
of spying on his 2016 campaign, but this is different. Dominion Voting Systems is not staffed
with Obama appointees, after all. I decided to poke around a bit to see what, if anything,
could possibly be behind Trump's wild accusation.
A Twitter user named Joe Oltmann had tweeted a few screenshots of a Facebook user posting
Antifa manifestos and songs about killing police. The Facebook account belonged to Eric Coomer,
and Oltmann claimed it was the same Eric Coomer who is the Director of Product Strategy and
Security for Dominion Voting Systems. Within hours of Oltmann posting the information, however,
the Facebook page of Eric Coomer was taken down, so I was unable to verify that Antifa Coomer
and Dominion Coomer were the same person. By the end of the day, Joe Oltmann's Twitter account
was suspended as well. I had followed his feed throughout the day. I can say with certainty
that he posted nothing remotely offensive or provocative. I have no doubt whatsoever that
Twitter suspended him for posting the screenshots of Coomer's Facebook page. Interesting.
Searching around some more, I found that Dominion Coomer is an avid climber who used to post
frequently on climbing message boards under his own name. He confirmed it himself in a post
where he mentioned getting his nuclear physics Ph.D from Berkeley in 1997. Dominion's Eric
Coomer received his nuclear physics Ph.D from Berkeley in 1997. In another post on the same
message board, Coomer gave out his email address. It was his old campus address from the
Berkeley nuclear physics department. I plugged that email address into the Google machine, and
things got weird.
I found Eric Coomer had a long history of posting on websites for skinheads. He was a heavy
user of a Google Group for skinheads, and seems to have possibly been a content moderator for
papaskin.com. Only these aren't the neo-Nazis our mothers warned us about. These skinheads call
themselves SHARPs, or Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. Think of them as a sort of punk rock
Antifa. In 2012, roughly 18 SHARPs attacked a smaller group of suspected racists in a Chicago
restaurant with bats and batons. That same year, three neo-Nazis were charged for the 1998
double murder of two SHARPs in Nevada.
Given that Dominion's Director of Security and Strategy, Eric Coomer, was an enthusiast of a
street fighting anti-racist skinhead culture going back at least into the 1990s, it seems very
likely that Joe Oltmann was correct in identifying him as the Facebook user recently endorsing
Antifa and posting anti-police rhetoric. I shared this information on a few message boards to
let other people run with it. Within hours, Papa Skin, a skinhead website which had been up for
over 20 years, was taken offline. (Whoever took it down missed the FAQ page, you can find it
here http://www.papaskin.com/faq/faqs.html ).
Of course none of this proves any fraud took place, but we deserve some answers. One need
only imagine if it was Joe Biden contesting the election results, and the Director for Strategy
& Security at a major voting machine provider turned out to be a Proud Boy with decades of
involvement in extremist, even violent, right wing political groups. Democrats would rightly
point out that this person endorses engaging in illegal behavior to achieve political goals.
They would ask how such a person ended up in such an important position of public trust, and
what it might say about the procedures in place to ensure Dominion's responsibilities are
handled in good faith.
Another reality of the Dominion fiasco, whether or not there was any fraud using its
machines, is the structural risk created by having the same company run machines in more than
two dozen states. If there were glitchy machines causing a dispute in one state, like
Democrats' claims about Diebold machines in Ohio in 2004, and even if that dispute led to
competing slates of electors, that is something the American political system has seen and
withstood before. Having potentially tens of millions of people doubting results in a
half-dozen different states thanks to the same company running machines in all of them is an
unprecedentedly serious problem, whether or not their doubts are well-founded.
Moreover, platforms like Twitter and WordPress would do well to consider that censorship of
people discussing Dominion and its employees is likely to have the opposite effect that they
think it will: Twitter bans, site removals, and wiping of bios from websites are only going to
make Trump's hardcore supporters think Dominion has something to hide. You can't make
disagreements go away by banning one side and pretending there is unanimity.
Darryl Cooper is the host of the MartyrMade podcast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
You may have to work on your awareness. And a full audit of the whole process is definitely a
lot more than some random spot.
The list you just linked showed that most states conduct routine audits of races.
The only states that don't seem to are deep red ones.
Spot audits are a valid way of discovering errors. If every state had to do full recounts for
every single race, the cost to taxpayers would be enormous and wasteful.
...Places like Georgia where Ds destroyed the system by actually eliminating audit... they just
run exactly the same fake ballots through they ran the first time... & they had a
'signature verification' & they didn't even turn the machine on.
There are three obvious methods of election fraud occurring in 2020
1) canvasing, where those canvasing voters holding mail in ballots are convincing them to
change their vote from republican to democrat, then paying them with what amounts to
trinkets. (flash light, pocket knife, tee shirt, those sorts of things)
2) Voting machine weighted votes, which occurs in republican heavy precincts using the Banzhaf Power Index. This system counts votes in decimals less than and greater than one for
each vote. An example would be weighting republican votes where each republican vote would
count 0.75, meaning 4 voters are necessary to achieve a vote of 3. (1.5 + 1.5 = 3), the
weighted scale increases as the number of votes increase. This is known as vote
redistribution. In essence a system such as this cold require(at 0.25) 200k republican votes
to equal 50k democrat votes
3) Mail in ballots which are rife with fraud of many types
That's not reality for SCOTUS. They don't make those kinds of rulings. What I would expect
from a majority opinion if they believed there was substantive fraud that was sufficient to
overturn the election results, would go like this: "Based upon the quantity and quality of
indicia for illegal ballots being counted, it is the opinion of the court that states X,Y,Z,
etc., cannot certify their election results based upon the election held on 3 NOV 20.
Accordingly, this case is remanded to the respective state legislatures for cure."
So what can the state legislatures do in accordance with Article II and the 12th
Amendment? They can try to do a revote, but that is nearly impossible given the time
constraints required by law. They can in many of these states appoint electors independently
of the vote held on 3 NOV 20. Keep in mind, not every state permits such a role for the
legislature. I don't see that happening, since the **perception** will be that they
disenfranchised all of the state's voters. The only logical outcome is all of those
respective states will not be able to certify their elections. As such, the 12th Amendment is
instructive here. At that point, Congress will decide who becomes president. This also
happened in the 1801 and 1825. Each state delegation gets exactly **one** vote. Since
republicans control 26 of the 50 state delegations, you can guess how that vote might
tilt.
Isn't that preciously what your radical Dem brothers and sisters are up to hoping to snag
the Senate via Georgia on Jan 4th so that a one party America exists indefinitely? You are
"projecting" what your ilk is actually hoping to accomplish. 'Jeepers', yeah jeepers is
right. Nice try though.
You may want to read the complaint and resulting law suit filed by Lin Wood related to
Georgia mail in ballots. It eliminates your assumptions with fact. Yes, in Georgia the voter
signature validation was usurped for mail in ballots, allowing anyone with a mail in ballot
to vote.There are ample undercover videos of union postal workers selling mail in ballots.
Further there are many cases where mail in ballots were requested then the voter showed up at
the polls to physically vote. The voter indicating they had never requested a mail in ballot.
Plenty of documented cases, all you need do is look past you keyboard and tater chip
bag...
The secretary of state usurped the law in Georgia, telling polling places to ignore the
requirement to verify signatures of mail in ballots. The signatures are compared to the
drivers license database. The democrats (Stacey Abrams) worked with the secretary of state to
have such voting controls removed so the system could be easily frauded.
Audits will work if cross auditing is randomly performed and auditors have the authority
to either close the polls or invalidate the poll count based upon their discoveries.
Austin Texas = Kelly Reagan Brunner who was working at a Supported Living Center for
senior citizens has been arrested and charged with more than 100 counts of voter fraud. (She
was canvassing and changing votes).
Erie county elections, Poll worker posts on twitter about him throwing out Trump
votes.
7 Wards in Milwaukee report more votes than actual registered voters
Republican poll watchers prevented from entering Detroit poll counting center. official
states COVID 19 as their reason.
MIT scientists find objective evidence of vote tallies being forced negatively away for
the statistical mean by vote software. This was discovered in several states.
And on and on and on .........a landslide of objective evidence.
I'll tell you what Prof., if you think the cost of recounts is high, wait till you get a
load of the cost of the electorate's lack of confidence in the election process. That cost
will be measured in human lives.
But the Russians! Not my President. Resistance. Years of investigations into gossip
columnist Steele's paid report to the Democrats.
How could anybody with a brain in their head have ever taken Steele seriously? OK, he did
speak to a Yank who was once a Russian.
There was also a news aggregator run by Russians just as there are others run by other
humans. Only racists think that free speech should be restricted to Yanks.
[email protected]
Have you not been paying attention? The Dems states threw all election safeguards/checks
and balances in the garbage like the USPS workers did, and some claim poll workers did. Experts have done audits of the voting in swing states/counties and found highly
improbable vote counts......So.......
The one and only difference between Democrats and Republicans is that one or the other, depending on the circumstance, prefers
to drive the handcart to hell we are riding on a little slower, or faster if you prefer. The destination remains the same. They
both use the same gang of armed goons to enforce their insanity.
"... So, IMO, as far as swamps go, Trump only wants a straight orange one, ..."
"... People who wrote the 'Verschärfte Vernehmung' rules in nazi Germany were, if caught, sent to jail or hanged. Yoo and Gonzales, in contrast, got well paid academic jobs, no prosecution at all - instead they advise Trump. It's a nightmare to think that such people now train (and worse than that - influence) students today. ..."
IMO that's an ugly and likely criminal demand. But then, Trump has a coat of arms, with the
motto "Numquam concedere" (Never concede). Obviously.
Mr. Raffensperger said that the votes, as counted, liked by Trump or not, are correct and
have been counted three times already. Well, living in alternate reality, Trump doesn't
care.
Given Trump's personal of style, he's in for being insulted as a swamp RINO, disloyal to
Trump personally and ... (if he was a woman) also ugly, facelift wreck, fat and stupid. Also,
Trump is likely to support any competitor to him, as long as he, she or it has one head and can
breathe.
Good luck for him. He'll need it since as a result of such enthusiastic trumperey
Raffensperger now needs body guards, police protection and had a number of death threats. Some
nut encouraged by stuff like that may just kill him.
As for Assange, those who would like vengeance on him can live easy with that since the UK
prison conditions are about as comfortable as Guantanamo, though without wall slamming,
waterboarding and that other physical and psychological desruction enhanced
interrogation-ery.
People who wrote the 'Verschärfte Vernehmung' rules in nazi Germany were, if caught,
sent to jail or hanged. Yoo and Gonzales, in contrast, got well paid academic jobs, no
prosecution at all - instead they advise Trump. It's a nightmare to think that such people now
train (and worse than that - influence) students today.
Scenes from the US Capitol on Wednesday, as protesters backing President Donald Trump
disrupted the joint session of Congress meeting to certify the election of Democrat Joe Biden,
looked very much like Belgrade in October 2000
.
The sight was later repeated in Ukraine – twice, in 2004 and 2014 – Georgia,
Moldova, Belarus, and several Central Asian former Soviet republics. On every occasion, the US
backed the "people power," because American NGOs and embassies were supporting what
became known as "color revolutions."
Same thing happened in 2011 with the "Arab Spring" that started in Tunisia and then
burned its way across North Africa to the Persian Gulf. In some places it "succeeded,"
overthrowing decades-old governments. In others it failed, setting off wars in Libya and Syria
and blood on the streets of Bahrain. Again, the US cheered this on as democracy – except
for Bahrain, which hosts a major naval base.
More recently, the US denounced as illegitimate the presidential elections in Belarus,
Bolivia and Venezuela. While Minsk and Caracas managed to resist – and got sanctioned for
it – the "democrats" in La Paz were successful for a while, but ended up losing the vote
last year.
Way back in 2004, the Guardian wrote approvingly about how the
US has created a "slick" operation of "engineering democracy through the ballot box and
civil disobedience," developing since Belgrade a "template for winning other people's
elections."
Now the same mainstream media that slavishly followed the State Department line in
denouncing elections elsewhere as "rigged" and color revolutions as spontaneous
democracy are clutching their pearls when Americans who believe their election was stolen take
to the streets and storm their Capitol.
Ah, but this election wasn't stolen, they'd say – it was pure as driven snow, "most
secure ever," all the experts who told us for four years the previous one was "hacked by
Russia" tell us so! And Joe Biden won the most votes in history while hardly leaving his
basement. Whether you believe this official narrative about the US election or not doesn't
really matter, however. Partisan myopia simply won't let people understand the magnitude of
what is on display here: utter moral bankruptcy of the entire US political and media
establishment.
Republicans and Democrats alike used "color revolutions" as a political weapon for
years, preaching democracy even as their astroturfed coups snuffed out any vestiges of it that
might have developed organically. Over the past year, they've done so at home as well, using
Covid-19 lockdowns to abolish elementary constitutional rights, culminating with changing the
electoral rules to better serve "our democracy," defined as whatever gets them
power.
What did they think people would do when all avenues of airing their grievances were closed
off? Meekly submit – or take a page out of the same playbook the politicians and the
media spent 20 years celebrating?
Don't go "but Trump," either. The supposed Nazi fascist dictator himself ordered
National Guard and police to clear out the protesters who sided with him, and protect the
establishment that did not. He's a real Hitler, right? No matter, expect the media to paint him
as such anyway.
Perhaps the US ought to take a long, hard look at its own house before it continues calling
out, sanctioning, regime-changing or bombing other countries over their supposed lack of
"democracy." Maybe actually answer the question Russian President Vladimir Putin asked at
the UN back in 2015, addressing the consequences of the 'Arab Spring': "Do you realize now
what you have done?"
But we all know that's not going to happen, don't we?
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to
counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the
headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of
Russian influence over him is surely justified.
There followed 34 headlines and links to stories about Trump actions, from closing Russian
consulates to U.S. attacks on Russian troops, that were hostile to Russia.
In fact no other U.S. administration since the cold war has been more aggressive towards
Russia than Trump's.
But some U.S. media continue to claim that Trump's behavior towards Russia has not been
hostile at all. Consider this line
in Politico about anti-Russian hawks in the incoming Biden administration:
Nuland and Sherman, who entered academia and the think tank world after leaving the Obama
administration, have been outspoken critics of President Donald Trump's foreign policy --
particularly his appeasement of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Where please has Trump 'appeased' Vladimir Putin?
Here are a number of headlines which appeared in U.S. media since we published our first
list two years ago. Which of the described actions were designed to 'appease' Putin or
Russia?
When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia,
than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence,
knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.
Why, you certainly could view most (if not all) of those actions as favors.
People feel attacked, unite, rally around the flag. Internal problems are blamed on the
external enemy. The sanctions, the sort the West likes to impose, help develop domestic
industries. Etc. Yeah, favors.
Point on! Trump was never 'the Russians' bitch'. He was the whore of the Russian
émigré mafia that had relocated to the US in south Queens in New York City. A
major difference!
Well, the logic is to destroy or ad least severely weaken Russia. Yet damn Russia is
getting stronger and stronger, hence what ever happened under Trump's watch must have been a
favor to Russia.
Competent government would look itself in the mirror and admit it is their own fault and
stupidity, but that ship sailed long time ago for US.
"... From 4 November 2020, the day after the election, until he left office on 23 December, Attorney General William Barr did nothing about electoral problems. The DOJ could have started grand juries in multiple suspect states when anamolies began to appear the week of the election, but did zero. When President Trump nominated Barr on 7 December 2018, I was very surprised, because of some of Barr's prior legal positions and associations. But that is another story. ..."
"... At the time of the 2020 election, mail-in and absentee voting had been greatly expanded, which has led to massive problems and some discussion. But the biggest danger which has received little exposure in mass media is in electronic voting and counting machines. In an electronic voting machine, the hidden electronic processes become the ballot -- not "your ballot" -- and the tabulation of ballots is also done by hidden electronic processes. No audit trail is possible. If a machine prints out a receipt with a bar code on it, that is not a ballot and it cannot be part of an audit. An audit requires original documents and items for every step in a process. ..."
"... The voting machine companies like to say their computer software code is "proprietary" and cannot be made public, and the stupid state and local governments seem to go along with it. Even if software source code is revealed in secret to a state agency, it can be changed later to permit fraud, and the governments will not know it. ..."
"... The problem of electronic voting machines was started and promoted nationwide in 2002 by Congress in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) [3]. It promised states federal tax money if the states would implement some of its laughable "standards". Around 2004 or so, a group in San Antonio talked to me about the machines and a legal case, and I drafted a lawsuit paper to file and obtained an expert witness. But then the county's governing body offered them some money to educate voters about electronic voting machines, and they decided to not proceed with a case. At that time, the county election administration had electronic machines, and a maintenance contract that was expensive, but nothing remotely like the racket that exists today. Electronic voting machines are big business. Georgia paid at least $100 million for the Dominion voting machines it used in the 2020 elections, and New Jersey may pay from $60 to $80 million dollars or more to update its voting machines [4]. ..."
"... Peter Navarro is an Assistant to President Trump and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, where he has consistently tried to rebuild domestic manufacturing and jobs, and cancel existing bad policies that favored China over U.S. jobs and industry. He has written two excellent booklets about problems with the 2020 presidential election. "The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities", and "The Art of the Steal: Volume 2 of the Navarro Report" [5] ..."
"... Election management systems, starting with Diebold, were it appears, specifically designed to do just that; manage elections. That this started in the export market as a foreign policy tool and has now come home to roost is all too symptomatic of other such dark practices, such as the information warfare and PSYOPS we are seeing much in evidence in what is left of politics in America. The resultant corrosive effect on democracy is near terminal - how many Trump supporters will believe a Warnock win was fair? ..."
"... As of this writing it looks like the election theft system put in place in Georgia is working as planned to ensure a Uniparty victory for the Democrats. The GOP will of course blame Trump and his supporters and go back to rolling in the grift over to Landslide Joe and the woman who couldn't win a single delegate. ..."
When using electronic voting machines you do not vote. Election workers do not count the votes.
Everybody knows that a valid election has three parts: qualified, eligible voters are listed; an eligible voter expresses a legal
vote on a ballot; and the votes are counted accurately. For a small organization or club, this is easy. All the candidates and voters
are in one room and everybody knows everyone else. Each member writes the name of their choice on a piece of paper and folds it over,
the votes are put in a box, and then the votes are opened and counted in front of everybody. Everything is done in the same room.
A local, state, or national election has the same parts, but with many more voters, and voting and counting locations, it is spread
out over a much bigger area. Many things are a system, including your cardiovascular system [1]. But since an election as a system
is created by people, it is amateurish and simple compared to the sophisticated cardiovascular system. Despite its simplicity, there
is little or no "transparency", today's trendy term. Because of human nature and the money and authority available through a government,
an enormous incentive is created to rig and cheat in an election.
Documents attached to various lawsuits, other information, and the blocking of public examination of ballots and electronic voting
and counting machines are showing huge problems and fraud in the November 2020 general election in an amount that can affect the
result. But those with the authority to do the most the fastest are so far doing nothing, from the federal Department That Calls
Itself Justice (DOJ), to local District Attorneys.
The Attorney General and the U.S. Attorneys in the 94 federal districts have a lightening bolt in their hands. Federal grand jury
subpoenas are nationwide in scope. A grand jury does not just issue formal criminal charges, it can also investigate, under the age-old
rationale that "the public is entitled to every man's evidence". Unlike the FBI, which is required by policy to have a factual "predicate"
before it can open an investigation, a grand jury is in no way limited. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1992 made clear that "the grand
jury can investigate merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even because it wants assurance that it is not" [2]--
"The grand jury's functional independence from the Judicial Branch is evident both in the scope of its power to investigate criminal
wrongdoing and in the manner in which that power is exercised. Unlike [a] [c]ourt, whose jurisdiction is predicated upon a specific
case or controversy, the grand jury can investigate merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even because it wants
assurance that it is not. It need not identify the offender it suspects, or even the precise nature of the offense it is investigating.
The grand jury requires no authorization from its constituting court to initiate an investigation, nor does the prosecutor require
leave of court to seek a grand jury indictment. And in its day-to-day functioning, the grand jury generally operates without the
interference of a presiding judge. It swears in its own witnesses, and deliberates in total secrecy" [citations in this passage are
omitted].
From 4 November 2020, the day after the election, until he left office on 23 December, Attorney General William Barr did nothing
about electoral problems. The DOJ could have started grand juries in multiple suspect states when anamolies began to appear the week
of the election, but did zero. When President Trump nominated Barr on 7 December 2018, I was very surprised, because of some of Barr's
prior legal positions and associations. But that is another story.
At the time of the 2020 election, mail-in and absentee voting had been greatly expanded, which has led to massive problems
and some discussion. But the biggest danger which has received little exposure in mass media is in electronic voting and counting
machines. In an electronic voting machine, the hidden electronic processes become the ballot -- not "your ballot" -- and the tabulation
of ballots is also done by hidden electronic processes. No audit trail is possible. If a machine prints out a receipt with a bar
code on it, that is not a ballot and it cannot be part of an audit. An audit requires original documents and items for every step
in a process.
The voting machine companies like to say their computer software code is "proprietary" and cannot be made public, and the
stupid state and local governments seem to go along with it. Even if software source code is revealed in secret to a state agency,
it can be changed later to permit fraud, and the governments will not know it.
The problem of electronic voting machines was started and promoted nationwide in 2002 by Congress in the Help America Vote
Act (HAVA) [3]. It promised states federal tax money if the states would implement some of its laughable "standards". Around 2004
or so, a group in San Antonio talked to me about the machines and a legal case, and I drafted a lawsuit paper to file and obtained
an expert witness. But then the county's governing body offered them some money to educate voters about electronic voting machines,
and they decided to not proceed with a case. At that time, the county election administration had electronic machines, and a maintenance
contract that was expensive, but nothing remotely like the racket that exists today. Electronic voting machines are big business.
Georgia paid at least $100 million for the Dominion voting machines it used in the 2020 elections, and New Jersey may pay from $60
to $80 million dollars or more to update its voting machines [4].
Before the 2008 general election, I wrote an editorial about problems with electronic voting machines to the main newspaper in
Bexar County, Texas, which had a population at that time of about 1,622,899. It was accepted for publication, but then I was told
that a person higher up at the paper ordered it killed and that it not be published, because it was "too controversial".
Two years ago I wrote an article on the issue, emphasizing that the electronic machines were more of a problem than the hot issue
of the day, voter identification cards. But since then, I have changed my opinion because absentee and mail-in voting have greatly
expanded to the point where voter ID and verification is now just as big a problem as the electronic voting and counting machines
are.
Peter Navarro is an Assistant to President Trump and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, where he has
consistently tried to rebuild domestic manufacturing and jobs, and cancel existing bad policies that favored China over U.S. jobs
and industry. He has written two excellent booklets about problems with the 2020 presidential election. "The Immaculate Deception:
Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities", and "The Art of the Steal: Volume 2 of the Navarro Report" [5]:
Congress is to meet on Wednesday, 6 January 2021 to count electoral votes from the meetings of the Electoral College on 14 December
2020. The National Archives is involved first [6]
"The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) is a part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and, on behalf
of the Archivist of the United States, coordinates certain functions of the Electoral College between the States and Congress.
Acting as an intermediary, it reviews the Certificates of Ascertainment and Vote before Congress accepts them as evidence of official
State action in preparation for the counting of electoral votes in Congress".
The National Archives Internet website also has information from its work on the 2020 election, and links to the certificates
of each Electoral College meeting from the states [7].
Some members of Congress are posturing or squirming as problems with the election have not gone away in favor of business as usual.
But resistance on the big day of 6 January to voting fraud requires that the member put his or her name to a writing objecting to
the electoral votes from the six most problematic states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.
But under the cover provided by media publicity, the vapid statements of 12 Senators are loaded with mushy language. Senator Josh
Hawley (Repub. Missouri) says he will:
"... object to highlight the failure of some states, including notably Pennsylvania [but not others?], to follow their own
election laws .... He will call for Congress to launch a full investigation of potential fraud and election irregularities and
enact election integrity measures" [8].
Republican Senators Ted Cruz (Texas), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy
(Louisiana), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), and Mike Braun (Indiana), and Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall
(Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), and Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) in their statement bloviate for 12 paragraphs before saying--
"Accordingly, we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not 'regularly given' and 'lawfully
certified' (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed" [9].
They then say,
"We are not naive. We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise".
Yes, you are not naive, but you are con-men and con-women. You declare that:
"Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct
an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the
Commission's findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed".
So, Senator Ted Cruz et. al. You think you are going to set up a commission, after detailing in writing its "investigatory and
fact-finding authority", and carefully audit the "election returns" in the form of millions of votes. All in 10 days, by the 20th
of January.
And you 12 bulls**t artists said an audit would be only of "election returns", and would not include a forensic examination of
thousands of electronic voting machines, when so far their manufacturers, along with governors and state election officials, have
constantly worked to block any examination or monitoring of them. In case you Senators do not know it, computer software on an electronic
voting machine operates secretly with zero transparency.
U.S. Representative Mo Brooks (Repub. Alabama) stepped up to the plate and has been in the forefront challenging the election
results and the resulting Electoral College votes. He has said that more than 36 members of the House have signed to dispute the
voting results in the six states in question.
Brooks then exposed the 12 strutting senators plus Senator Kelly Loeffler (Repub. Georgia) as snakes in the grass, since as of
the time of his writing, only three have actually signed onto an objection, and that was to only one state apiece and not to all
six states: Cruz has objected to Arizona, Hawley has objected to Pennsylvania, and Loeffler has objected to Georgia [10].
The only solution is for all votes to be on paper ballots that are counted by hand, and for Congress to repeal the Help America
Vote Act.
The subject known as industrial engineering deals with designing the physical actions that are to be used to do a particular task.
The military and intelligence agencies have developed procedures to create, handle, and transmit information in a secure way. High
resolution cameras are now inexpensive with multiple features and can be used in vehicles [11]. You can carefully select a print
shop to print the ballots, with controls and cameras to monitor their placement at polling places.
These resources can create a legitimate paper-based election system, and will not cost $100 million or more for electronic machines
for one state.
The German Constitutional Court declared electronic voting machines illegal in March 2009 [12].
Congress is the culprit pushing and providing money to promote electronic voting machines starting with the HAVA law in 2002.
Politicians and bureaucracies do not want to admit they were wrong or made a mistake.
When electronic voting machines are used, voters no longer mark their ballots. Local election officials no longer count them.
Devices created and programmed out of public view do it. No genuine recount or audit is possible. Any fraud is undetectable, or almost
so after a time-consuming examination.
The perfect crime, except it is not a crime.
It is all legal, or so the U.S. Congress has tried to say.
And no voting procedures -- including the use of electronic voting and counting machines -- were changed before the runoff elections
for two U.S. Senators in Georgia on 5 January.
A few things still trouble me that don't appear in any later dicussions of this topic, including this very good one:
The fact just about every other European country and other industrialized nations now prohibit 'electronic voting" in their
federal elections, due to inherent ability to corrupt outcomes. Claims "electronic voting" undermines election integrity and thereby voter trust. Which they seem to value more than the US.
Hilary Clinton's recovered email around the time of the Haiti earthquake where she touts the use of Dominion Voting Systems
to someone else, because she assured them they provide "very happy results".
An excellent post Mr Willmann. I wholeheartedly agree with your views on electronic vote counting, the words "voting" and "machine"
must be separated, for good.
Election management systems, starting with Diebold, were it appears, specifically designed to do just that; manage elections.
That this started in the export market as a foreign policy tool and has now come home to roost is all too symptomatic of other
such dark practices, such as the information warfare and PSYOPS we are seeing much in evidence in what is left of politics in
America. The resultant corrosive effect on democracy is near terminal - how many Trump supporters will believe a Warnock win was
fair?
As your personal experience attests, interest in free and fair elections can be trumped by cold hard cash. And rather than
be innocently unaware of the implications of introducing electronic voting, at least some state authorities seem to have been
suspiciously desperate to get systems put in with no regard for conducting the appropriate due diligence.
The "much bigger area" you describe is a logistical headache, but last I checked liberty wasn't easily achieved. In the recent
Federal elections I am reading that this area may extend out all the way to Rome. More on that will come out soon perhaps.
I too was puzzled by Barr & the DOJ's inaction wrt evident widespread election fraud...
As of this writing it looks like the election theft system put in place in Georgia is working as planned to ensure a
Uniparty victory for the Democrats. The GOP will of course blame Trump and his supporters and go back to rolling in the
grift over to Landslide Joe and the woman who couldn't win a single delegate.
The Capitol building was placed on lockdown, with senators and members of the House locked
inside their chambers, as Congress began debating President-elect Joe Biden's victory. President
Trump addressed supporters near the White House before protesters marched to Capitol Hill.
...the action hardens the bitter partisanship in Congress and is bound to leave millions of
voters questioning the legitimacy of Biden's victory in the November presidential election.
... More than a thousand people gathered at a park south of the White House before dawn on
Wednesday. At least three separate pro-Trump rallies are expected in Washington. Lawmakers have
been given security instructions, including using underground tunnels between chambers in the
Capitol and to nearby office buildings. The city of Washington has activated the National
Guard, and many local businesses boarded up their doors and windows in anticipation of possible
violence
The lawmakers objecting on Wednesday are poised to form the core of the anti-Biden group in
the new Congress, where they will likely urge GOP leaders to refuse any deals with a president
they consider illegitimate.
... Josh Hawley, a Republican of Missouri, was the first senator to indicate that he would
join the effort to challenge the results. Since then, several other senators, including Ted
Cruz of Texas and GOP Republicans elected to the chamber for the first time in November, have
indicated they would support the effort unless there is an investigation of the voting
process.
Point on! Trump was never 'the Russians' bitch'. He was the whore of the Russian
émigrés mafia that had relocated to the US in south Queens in New York City. A
major difference!
Of course the whole point of US and Western MSM obsession with demonising Russia and
China, and castigating those like Trump (for not going far enough to oppose either one or the
other nation, or both), is to divert public attention away from govt failings at home and to
push the public into supporting regime change against both Russia and China.
B's post should be read as a companion piece to his previous post on China as an
existential threat to the US, as an example of a nation that achieved stability, peace and
enough prosperity for most of its people by pursuing an alternate political and economic
ideology in the space of 40 years. An ideology that moreover challenges the ideology that the
West has followed for the past 500 years, and the assumptions on which that ideology is
based. Despite Western attempts to destabilise, break up and impoverish Russia in the 1990s,
in order to steal its energy and mineral resources, that nation managed to bounce back to
some level of stability and economic security. In addition Russia and China signed a
friendship treaty in 2001 and are committing to a closer political ans economic
relationship.
All this serves to marginalise the Anglosphere nations and to deny the US, the UK and
their elites the opportunity to plunder these nations and their allies for their natural
resources.
Point on! Trump was never 'the Russians' bitch'. He was the whore of the russian
emigrée mafia that had relocatet to the US in south Quens in New York City. A maijor
difference!
Exactly that, thank you. The mafia that manages the D party are of Mediterranean roots and
are totally pi$$ed of with the Russians.
Enough of this polite avoidance of the reality of the USAi gangland - it is a mafia state.
The D 'reformist' squad just blew their best chance to start the reformation. They will be
neutered well before another chance arises.
AFAICT Russiagate's neo-McCarthyism and Trump's supposed friendliness toward Putin was a
set up prior to Trump negotiations with Putin at Helsinki.
"I'm your only friend ... and your last best hope ..." is a powerful pitch -
especially when it is accompanied by generous offers of aid and support. And perhaps it
would've worked if it had come years before.
So now we have a new Cold War - with both Russia and China.
Victoria Nuland, wife of neoconservative Robert Kagan, is expected be nominated for under
secretary of state for political affairs
According to a report from
Politico , Joe Biden's transition team is expected to nominate Victoria Nuland to
be the under secretary of state for political affairs for the incoming administration's State
Department.
Nuland, who is married to neoconservative Robert Kagan, is known for her role in
orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine while she was the assistant secretary of state for
Europe and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration.
A recording of a phone call between Nuland and then-US
Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked and released on YouTube on February 4th,
2014 . In the call, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should replace the government of former
Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced to step down on February 22nd,
2014.
The US-backed coup sparked the war in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region and led to the Russian
annexation of Crimea. Both regions have a majority ethnic-Russian population who rejected the
nationalist, anti-Russian post-coup government that even had
neo-Nazis in its midst .
In a
2020 column for Foreign Affairs titled, "Pinning Down Putin," Nuland said Russian
President Vladimir Putin "seized" on the 2014 coup and other "democratic struggles" to "fuel
the perception at home of Russian interests under siege by external enemies." She also cited
the war in the Donbas and annexation of Crimea as examples of Russian aggression, as most in
Washington do.
Nuland worked in the Bush administration from 2005 to 2008 as the US ambassador to NATO.
From 2011 to 2013, she served as the spokesperson for Barack Obama's State Department, and from
2013 to 2017, Nuland was the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs.
Politico also reported that the Biden administration is tapping Wendy Sherman to
work directly under Secretary of State-designee Anthony Blinken. Sherman worked in the Obama
administration's State Department and played
a crucial role in negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Ever since November third the American political/media class have been keeping Democrats fixated on Trump's post-election shenanigans
with garment-rending urgency, now going so far as to
call for yet another oxygen-sucking impeachment
as he's on his way out the door while millions of Americans are struggling just to meet their basic needs.
You wouldn't know it from the dominant chatter, but Trump's impotent attempts to reverse the election results don't rank anywhere
remotely near the top ten worst things this president has done while in office,
which include vetoing attempts to end
the world's worst mass atrocity in Yemen, escalating world-threatening cold wars with both Russia and China, murdering untold tens
of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, pushing Iran to the brink of war by assassinating its top military commander,
expanding the "war on terror" and rolling back airstrike regulations designed to protect civilians.
US political discourse hasn't reflected the fact that Trump's foreign policy has been far more atrocious than anything he's done
domestically–and certainly anything he's done since November–because news media coverage does not reflect this fact. News media coverage
does not reflect this fact because western news media regard imperialism and mass military slaughter as normal US presidential stuff,
and do not regard brown-skinned foreigners as human.
I point this out because it's good to note, as Trump leaves office, that he spent his entire administration
advancing murderous imperialist
agendas which spilled very real blood from very real human beings while mainstream America barely even noticed. Their attention
was drawn instead to endless narrative theater which had no impact whatsoever on the concrete actions taken by the US government's
executive branch. Their gaze was kept fixated on meaningless political drama while the war machine marched on unseen.
Americans are famously uninterested in the rest of the world, to such an extent that you can only get them to watch a British
sitcom if it's remade with American actors and they don't know that having your nation's flag flying all over your neighborhood isn't
normal. The story of Kanye and Kim's divorce is going to generate more news media views than the entirety of the Yemen war since
it began. This lack of interest in war and foreign policy is mighty peculiar, seeing how the people who run their country make it
their primary focus.
Americans only care about America while their rulers only care about the rest of the world. This is entirely by design.
Americans fixate on America while ignoring the rest of the world not because they are genetically prone to self-obsessed navel
gazing, but because their attention is being constantly and deliberately manipulated away from the stage upon which their government
is perpetrating monstrous acts.
The nationless alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who drive the US government's foreign policy cannot have the common
riff raff interfering in their affairs. Immense amounts of energy have gone into preventing the rise of an antiwar movement in the
hub of the empire like the one which began shaking the earth in the sixties and seventies, with propaganda playing a leading role
in this suppression. The US is far too important in the operation of the empire-like power alliance which sprawls across the earth
to permit its inhabitants to interfere in its operations by using the power of their numbers to force their nation's wealth and resources
to be used at home. So propaganda is used to hold their attention inside America's borders.
"The danger for American elites is not that the U.S.
may become less able to accomplish geopolitical objectives. Rather, it is that more Americans might begin to question
the logic of U.S. global hegemony," writes
@RichardHanania>
China's
Real Threat Is to America's Ruling Ideology", Richard Hanania argues that the example China sets as a nation rising to superpower
status by relatively peaceful and lawful means is deeply threatening to the orthodoxy promoted by western imperialists. If the world
in general and Americans in particular were to become more conscious of how a civilization can succeed and thrive without waging
endless wars in the name of "freedom" and "democracy", they might begin calling for such an order themselves.
"While most Americans will never experience a ride on a Chinese bullet train and remain oblivious in differences in areas like
infrastructure quality, major accomplishments in highly visible frontiers like space travel or cancer treatment could drive home
the extent to which the U.S. has fallen behind," Hanania concludes.
"Under such conditions, the best case scenario for most Americans
would be a nightmare for many national security and bureaucratic elites: for the U.S. to give up on policing the world and instead
turn inward and focus on finding out where exactly our institutions have gone wrong."
In other words, China's rise threatens to reverse the carefully-engineered dynamic which has Americans looking inward while their
government points its attention outward. If Americans begin turning their gaze internationally and use the power of their numbers
to force their government to heal and nurture their crumbling nation, it would spell the end for the imperialists. But it could also
be the beginning of a peaceful and harmonious world.
CAROLYN L ZAREMBA / JANUARY 6, 2021
It is an erroneous generalization to say "Americans only care about America". Which Americans? If you are talking about the
ruling class of the United States, even they don't care much about America, only their bank accounts and their stock portfolios.
Witness their indifference to the thousands of deaths from Covid-19 through a lack of lockdowns, testing and contact tracing.
Witness their demanding that schools and factories remain open, probably to kill as many of the working class as possible while
these wealthy goniffs drink champagne on their private islands.
I am born and reared in the United States, and I hate the government of my country of birth. I have hated them since the 1960s.
I am an internationalist. Nationalism is a 19th century idea that is past its prime. Ultra nationalism is fascism. All Americans
do not support fascism. Many of us are Marxists.
And when you use the term "American", you should be clear that you mean the United States, and not Canada, Mexico, Panama,
Brazil or Ecuador, among others.
STANLEY N LAHAM / JANUARY 6, 2021
When Vladimir Putin said that the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of post WWII was the dissolution of the USSR, he was right
on the button. What unraveled next was story of unparalleled greed and hubris in the United States in believing the world was
its spoils for winning the Cold War.
From Eastern Europe to Asia and South America it went on a rampage like an elephant in a tea house making and breaking governments,
bombing and dismembering viable states, creating chaos in order to come in and establishing its new Pax Americana. From Yugoslavia
to Libya to Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Honduras etc, it either promoted downright Coup d'États or mercilessly bombed destroying people
and infrastructure to achieve its agenda unopposed by a weak Russia and a Warsaw Pact that had gone to its grave. And in so doing
caused the greatest mass migration of refugees to Europe the likes of which the world had never seen since WWII.
Yet all this was conceived and effectuated not in secret rooms but openly declared as official policy. In the mid nineties
a new political doctrine that would guide policy was announced in the form of "Project for a New American Century" which is nothing
less than Manifest Destiny on steroids and on a global scale. This was soon followed by its military doctrine of "Full Spectrum
Dominance" over all countries of the earth. Well when the drunk Boris Yeltsin realized belatedly what was afoot, he literally
ceded control of the Russian Federation to Putin in 2000 who went about repairing the social, economic and military disaster his
country had become,
Starting in Syria in 2014, Vladimir Putin started challenging the American Empire that can no longer project the military supremacy
it enjoyed for nearly two decades and this has enraged its planners. The demonizing of Russia is for having stopped dead in its
tract the military supremacy of the US and the demonizing of China for having stopped its economic one and challenging the supremacy
of the dollar.
CAROLYN L ZAREMBA / JANUARY 6, 2021
Putin was quite right. The only brake on the brazen greed for power of the United States was the huge land mass of the Soviet
Union. That brake was removed when Gorbachev waved the white hankie and surrendered. The rest is nightmare.
ROUNDBALL SHAMAN / JANUARY 6, 2021
"Americans are famously uninterested in the rest of the world Americans only care about America while their rulers only care
about the rest of the world. This is entirely by design."
In a sense, you can't blame Americans for being so shallow-visioned. From birth, Americans are taught that they belong to "The
Exceptional Nation". Well, if you are Exceptional, that must mean everyone else ISN'T Exceptional. So why in the world would Americans
care about those unimportant outsiders?
Add to that the fact that most people are innately selfish anyway and just naturally don't care about anyone or anything much
but themselves. The World beyond USA borders is just some kind of unimportant black hole that doesn't count for anything. Or so
the belief goes. Generation to generation.
And add to that fact what does any of this have to do with big shiny pickup trucks, cold beer, and American football? Those are
the three dominant religions in America and have been for a long time. Why would Americans care about anything else? There's only
so many hours in the day, you know?
"The nationless alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who drive the US government's foreign policy cannot have the common
riff raff interfering in their affairs."
Where things seem to headed the nationless alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who drive the US government's foreign
policy cannot have the common riff raff AROUND AT ALL. Various scenarios in play for that outcome.
We need to live each day as if it is our last. Because one way or another, The Last One is getting closer. Do cattle at the stockyards
realize that they are in a stockyards and their brothers and sisters go into that big building and don't seem to come out? Will
we?
EDWARD HACKETT / JANUARY 6, 2021
You have completely summed up the central points of American thinking. Don't wear a mask or social distance because that interferes
with my right to be an idiot.
We get the best government money can buy. When will we stop electing celebrities and old white men? Someday there will be a
book called "The Decline and Fall of America". I hope someone is around to read it.
S.A. HOGAN / JANUARY 6, 2021
Dear Caitlin (with typos fixed),
I'm afraid I must take offense when you paint things with a broad brush–which is almost invariably a no-no, the stuff of which
prejudice is made–and say "Americans care only about America."
While our media may encourage an ethnocentric, myopic viewpoint
of the world, the cure is to A. explore the viewpoints of other countries, and B. get out there...
NEWTON FINN / JANUARY 6, 2021
"Americans fixate on America while ignoring the rest of the world not because they are genetically prone to self-obsessed navel
gazing, but because their attention is being constantly and deliberately manipulated away from the stage upon which their government
is perpetrating monstrous acts." Not entirely correct. Because of the basic decency of the American people, their imperial government
is compelled to use its MSM mouthpiece to sell wars to them in explicitly moral terms.
First, their attention is relentlessly
focused ON a specific foreign stage. Then, the leader of that foreign country is demonized as a new Hitler. Finally, the responsibility
of the exceptional nation is asserted to protect the citizens of that foreign country from their demonic leader. This longstanding
propaganda strategy of R2P (responsibility to protect), previously described by Caitlin and Diana (the other Johnstone), provides
strong evidence that the character of the American people, as Caitlin indicates, is no worse than that of other nations.
Indeed,
is it not precisely the morality and decency of American citizens which are manipulated by their government and MSM to provide
sanction and support for evil deeds?
America got shot with an animal tranquilizer dart in November 1963.
I'm praying for her to wake up and stand.
JWK / JANUARY 6, 2021
As is always the case, governments being the ideal environment for psychopaths, they eventually are saturated with them. The
longer they are around, and the more resources they have, the worse they get. America is peaking, I wonder what nation takes their
place?
FRED GROSSO / JANUARY 6, 2021
Good discussion Caitlin. I only add that America could never do the things you suggest it needs to do with Trump and his goons
in charge. With the Democrats we have a slim chance. I did not support Clinton in 2016 as I saw her a a hawk, and I found Biden
to be a weak choice, but at least one we could work with, just barely. We have a lot of work ahead of us.
KHATIKA / JANUARY 6, 2021
How could things be any worse than the US coming in and bomb you back to the stone age killing millions. Let people take care
of their own problems or at least have them solved regionally. The number one problem today is people determined on telling others
how to live their lives.
EDWARD HACKETT / JANUARY 6, 2021
Much of what you say about America's lack of involvement with foreign affairs is correct. If you asked the average American
citizen where is Yemen? You would get a blank stare...
SOLLY / JANUARY 6, 2021
No need for a long essay on the subject. Americans are violent, egotistic, egoistic, ignorant and greedy.
EDWARD HACKETT / JANUARY 6, 2021
In many cases you are correct, but I think that analysis applies more to our governing class than to the man in the street.
The average American is consumed with earning a living and watching TV. They have little knowledge of the world at large nor do
they have any interest in learning about the greater world.
Many of your criticisms could be directed to people around the world. We Americans don't have a corner on your listed qualities
but we are certainly in the top 10 of those that share our worst qualities.
MR OBVIOUS / JANUARY 6, 2021
We are a empire in decline riding on power and might derived from the WW2 victory and addicted to a system that is totally
inadequate for the present. Like any dying behemoth do not get close as the thrashing around is extremely dangerous. We will change
if modern civilization is so fortunate to survive.
ZARD / JANUARY 6, 2021
'A nation with a collective, room-temp IQ' :
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" ~ H.L. Mencken
left（ZOG）right =Divide and Conquer
STEPHEN MORRELL / JANUARY 6, 2021
Here is one of the most insightful recent conversations on the rise of China and the decline of the US empire which will never
reach the mainstream, between Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar:
I think Caitlin's post on the current state of American society was a Curate's egg : good in parts only. She is absolutely
correct to draw attention to US capitalism's desire to impose its dominion over the entire world by ANY means, including war,
if necessary.
Trump has confined himself to launching trade wars against US capitalism's rivals – Russia, China, and the EU trading bloc.
But the US military has kept up its murderous blood-letting in the Middle East and in Yemen, where the prize is control over the
region's oil and gas reserves.
Caitlin is, however, way off beam in her assessment of the "average" American, who, she believes, is only interested in American
affairs, flag-waving, and TV. This pessimism simply does not correspond with reality. American cities have been ablaze with revolt
for the last 2 years, in response to US police murders of innocent people, and especially black people. These mass demonstrations
reflect a revolutionary state of mind amongst wide layers of American working class people, especially the youth of America who
correctly see no future for themselves in capitalist America.
... ... ...
A Stalinist China is most definitely not to be admired, or emulated. I can assure Caitlin that she would not be allowed to
run her platform in Beijing. On the contrary, she would probably be put in jail for "deviationism," which is Stalinist doublespeak
for refusing to repeat, parrot fashion, every word that emanates from the mouths of the Chinese billionaire, fake "Communist"
leaders...
ROBERT L PHILLIPS / JANUARY 6, 2021
I very much agree with most of what the author states, but I agree that holding China and it's authoritarian regime up as anything
to emulate is wrong. But that nation is indeed racing past the United States in many technological areas.
I tend to agree with her assessment of 'most Americans,' however, as the vast majority could not pass a basic current events
quiz, don't know who Julian Assange is, and readily welcome ever stricter controls over the populace due to their fears of – anything
and everything, including CV19. Not all, but the majority.
Americans I am one but do you think I have a choice? Most of the people I know. Ok to be honest, all of them, consider themselves
well informed... Dissing people who live in a cultural wasteland is not a good use of time. As a great man once said: 'Forgive them father, they know not what they do.
I made it clear that Americans are the victims of imperialist propaganda brainwashing. My American husband who co-wrote this
article says stop being so precious about your nationality.
ANNA QUAY / JANUARY 6, 2021
As a Brit I hear you. This political ignorance is certainly not confined to America. I would go as far as to say it extends
to all of the English speaking countries of the world. Oh, I would also suggest that you can throw in most of Europe, then add
Asia into the mix. It is an affliction that affects humanity.
It is borne from years of being ruled by a hierarchy. We have a
slave mentality and it is only individuals who are awake. Collective groups of people usually belong to some organisation and
therefore by the nature of their organisation simply follow the doctrine/dogma or ideology of that organisation.
Once again Ms Johnstone hits it out of the park with an article that brings goosebumps to this old man. The United States government
is completely corrupt and its world-wide killing sprees are way worse than anything that Mr. Hitler ever did. No morals and no
ethics and no empathy are the hallmarks of its nature that need to be done away with ASAP. Thank You Ms Johnstone for you honest
assessment of the United States Monster.
The author says that China, even as it is growing and has passed the U.S. economically, is
not an enemy of the U.S. and no danger to U.S. or others' security:
While China is not blameless, one could reasonably make the argument that, from an
international perspective, it has had easily the most peaceful rise to great power status of
any nation of the last several hundred years.
...
Perhaps, as the McMasters of the world claim, this is all because Beijing is biding its time
in hopes of world domination. Alternatively, China may be an inwardly focused civilization
that, while it may have disputes with its neighbors, is not on a mission to fundamentally
remake the world. While it would naturally prefer rules that favor it and resists any
principles that would legitimize regime change supported from abroad, Beijing does not seek
to fundamentally replace the U.N. or rewrite international law. Its strategy has mostly
sought stability and growth within the rules of the system developed by Western democracies
in the aftermath of the Second World War. While its current position of strength is recent,
it has not yet broken from this precedent.
Nor does it, as far as is known, plan to do so.
Various U.S. influenced political scientists have claimed that democratization and
liberalization is a necessary precursor for peace and economic growth. That ideological
argument was used to seek and kill various 'dictator' dragons abroad. China has proved them to
be wrong. And therein lies the real danger to the U.S. establishment.
China's development over the last 40 years proves that it is not necessary to wage wars in
foreign countries to be secure and to prosper. For U.S. ideologues that is a bad example that
should not exist:
If universal democratization is not the ultimate endpoint of history -- or even an imperative
for development, peace, and prosperity -- how can the American role in the world be
justified? What will it say about the American system if the U.S. is no longer the wealthiest
and most powerful nation in the world, having been surpassed by a country that became the
dominant power in East Asia without even paying lip service to democratic ideals?
Ultimately, Americans themselves might begin asking themselves difficult questions about
how well they have been served by their own system, including the sacrifices in blood and
treasure they are regularly asked to make abroad.
That would be really bad as the monetary fodder in the trough the national security
establishment is feasting from would suddenly be seen as an unnecessary waste. That is the real
danger to the blob:
Ultimately, the danger for American elites is not that the U.S. may become less able to
accomplish geopolitical objectives. Rather, it is that more Americans might begin to question
the logic of U.S. global hegemony . Perhaps not every state is destined to become a liberal
democracy, and nations with very different political systems can coexist peacefully, as many
countries in East Asia do. Maybe the U.S. will not always be at the frontier of military and
economic power, and the country that overtakes it may have completely different attitudes
about the nature of the relationship between government and its citizens.
While most Americans will never experience a ride on a Chinese bullet train and remain
oblivious in differences in areas like infrastructure quality, major accomplishments in
highly visible frontiers like space travel or cancer treatment could drive home the extent to
which the U.S. has fallen behind. Under such conditions, the best case scenario for most
Americans would be a nightmare for many national security and bureaucratic elites: for the
U.S. to give up on policing the world and instead turn inward and focus on finding out where
exactly our institutions have gone wrong.
What then is the U.S. establishment going to do?
The U.S. rose to global supremacy on the back of two world wars which destroyed the
industrial capacities of its main competitors while the wars hardly touched its own country.
Could it arrange for a comparable event, by maybe instigating a conflict between Japan and
China, that would again lead to a major destruction of global production capabilities while the
U.S. stays on the sidelines?
Letting Japan, South Korea and Taiwan(!) have
their own nuclear weapons , as another writer proposes, may be a way to get there:
What to do [about China]? There is one way to square the circle. The Biden administration
should reconsider reflexive U.S. opposition to "friendly proliferation."
...
Taiwan is in greatest need of such a weapon, but developing one would be highly
destabilizing, since Beijing would be tempted to preempt the process. The alternative would
be for Washington to fill Taiwan's need, with a profound impact on Sino-American relations.
Proliferation would not be a good solution -- but it might be the least bad one.
No doubt, a nuclear-armed China would react badly to better-armed neighbors, but it is no
happier with a more involved United States.
...
It is easier to know what not to do with China than what to do. Don't go to war. Don't stage
a new cold war. Don't sacrifice core values and basic interests. Don't make the issue all
about Washington. Don't waste money and credibility on overambitious, unsustainable attempts
at containment. Don't attempt to dictate to the PRC.
But what to do? The United States should think creatively about new approaches to old
problems. One way to do so is to stop hectoring partners and preventing them from doing what
they want to do. Including, perhaps, developing nuclear weapons.
I expect that this and other such ideas will soon proliferate.
Posted by b on January 5, 2021 at 19:19 UTC |
Permalink
Fortunately the Taiwanese are smart enough not to use nuclear weapons.
Seems to me that China threatens mostly Big American companies - Google Facebook etc, and
therefore the US stock market valuations that depend on huge growth expectations remaining
credible.
thanks b... the idea to stop when digging a ditch for yourself is not something the usa has
ever demonstrated in my memory.. it would be nice if the usa could change its approach on the
world stage, but at this point i give it very low odds.. instead the usa will be forced to
adjust to a different reality, much like all the innocent people in the usa left behind by a
system that is broken.... the usa is becoming what it has failed to address and becoming a
failed state... it seems like it is now on one of those china bullet trains to reach this
failed state destination, as no other options are likely to be explored here forward...
i am presently reading a book by linda mcquaig given to me for christmas - the sport and
prey of capitalists - .... essentially the capitalist template used in the usa the past 40 or
more years is being pushed onto canada - privatization and allowing big finance firms like
blackrock into the halls of canuck political power to decide the direction that we have to
privatize our public institutions... again - we are back to the conversation that
@pshycohistorian likes to focus on - public, verses private finance... these financial
monoliths are dominating the landscape of the west... i don't know how we move forward and
put them to rest... i suspect a financial collapse is the only way, and i am not convinced
that the new system will be better then the last... the predators, although a small
percentage on the planet, are especially focused on there desire for financial power and
dominance.... is china headed in the same direction?? or russia?? i can't tell... as for
canada, the future looks grim if one was to just read this book i refer to...
Agree 100%. We can't expect the USA to suffer its own Shock Doctrine can we? The American
Fantasy of World Savior is too engrained in Establishment thought to give up its American
Exceptionalist, Unitary Super Power, Plunder for Profit, in the name of FREEDOM all while
doing Blankfein's God's Work without a fight.
Imagine the horror, the horror I tell you, of American Introspection at the nation's utter
failure at everything it pretended at.
As for China, I believe it's conclusively demonstrated the superiority of its
sociopolitical model. Growing economy, growing prosperity, growing influence in the world, no
wars.
Just ideas? Or maybe they have plans that they are already implementing?
Seems like the latter to me. But then I've been saying (repeatedly) that everything
changed in 2013-14 when USA realized that the Russia-China Alliance had teeth.
Some Chinese commenter here please help me, but, if I'm not mistaken, China has a doctrine
that in the US thinktankland they call "China's Peaceful Development Doctrine". In Chinese
the call it the "Celestial Ascension" [Doctrine] or something like that. And yes, it requires
socialism in order to make sense (the demonstration as to why the doctrine is socialist is
too long to put it here, but it is).
So, the author from the Paladium Magazine is reinventing the wheel here, as China makes no
secret of its global doctrine.
I maintain my opinion that nukes eliminate the prospect of another Kondratiev Cycle being
forced on a world war. Nukes not only destroy infrastructure - it also destroy land and air
themselves. It subtracts space from capitalism.
"If universal democratization is not the ultimate endpoint of history -- or even an
imperative for development, peace, and prosperity -- how can the American role in the world
be justified?"
Good question; but note that the question itself assumes that "universal democratization"
HAS in fact been the point of our imperial endeavors around the world. As can be seen from
our close and personal relationships with the Gulf monarchies, the Egyptian tyrant, the SE
Asia wars, and many many other examples to mention over the decades past, this is manifestly
not true.
The truth is that "universal democratization" and the so-called "rules-based order" post
ww2 have ever only been a narrative justifying (first) imperial anti-socialism and (now)
anti-localism. The truth is that what they are deathly afraid of is losing the all-important
NARRATIVE. Because, as the article points out, once the narrative of the savior nation is
lost, how can the expense in lives and treasure and thereby the feeding of the Mil-Sec-Think
Tan Complex) possibly be justified.
Given the gigantic problems facing the Outlaw US Empire that are detailed in the links I've
posted today on the week-in-review thread, I'll add
this interview that mostly covers its current domestic turmoil. Furthermore, given the
massive skewing of economic data over the past 30 years, those sitting in DC haven't a clue
as to the severity of the domestic crisis. From the interview:
"Colin Cavell: Failing to address the massive problems of unemployment and lack of jobs,
failing to address the massive wealth gap between rich and poor, failing to ensure adequate
healthcare to millions, failing to protect the American public during the course of the
current Covid-19 pandemic, failing to address the festering racial divisions, especially with
regards to the criminal justice system, and failing to instill a unified trust in the
governing apparatus and ruling economic class, then, yes, Biden will preside over a
collapsing economy, a divided country, and a distrustful citizenry, and thus open the door to
either another term for an older Trump or some other demagogue or outright fascist to
'restore order'."
And all that's primed to worsen more before it improves any. And the international
situation vastly differs from that of the Great Depression years with Fascism rising in
Europe and Asia. Hudson in his talk and the Keiser's guest both mention the chasm opening
economically between China and the Empire--they're heading in opposite directions as we've
been discussing here for months. If the mainland got any inkling that Taiwan was going to be
given nukes, it would be occupied the next day. Japan and RoK both want to be rid of their
occupier which is preventing them from gaining economically by further engaging with China.
And the same can be said for the EU. The bottom line is no nation shares the interests of the
Outlaw US Empire excepting perhaps Poland and Ukraine--not even Occupied Palestine.
The Parasite has almost devoured its Host, and in the process has disarmed it. Those
sitting in DC can't see that fact because the Parasite controls their collective brains, so
we get treated to idiotic essays like the one at Foreign Policy b linked above. Obama
chose to feed the Parasite in 2009 instead of having it executed. And that's why we are in
deep bantha pudu today.
I think the main problem are the two different approaches taken by the US or Chinese, which
are diametrically different. The Chinese seem to use a " Cumulative " approach, while
the US is based on what I call " Winnowing " as a state. Take their respective
attitudes towards the poor.
First the Chinese; Cumulative , we are all in this together . If everyone
has a "job" be it ever-so lowly, selling food on a street corner for example, then for the
Chinese this is a "plus". The person is more or less responsible for his own well being, is
not a burden on the State for handouts, and could be (potentially) taxable etc. The object
being that ALL Chinese then become positive factors in the society. They are also more
motivated because they have a "place" in society. The recent case of Jack Ma and an IPO is
not the opposite, but he was trying to get ahead by means that would have led to more
unemployment - on the back of the Chinese Government. He was not adding to the cumulative
good of the country. Only his own riches. (The Chinese do have billionaires and riches - but
are constrained by Corporate credit ratings as explained on a previous - very interesting -
thread. Thanks to: psychohistorian | Jan 5 2021 2:08 utc | 162. The MoA Week In Review - OT
2021-001)
The US. The attitude is to beat out the chaff leaving only the "kernel ". To "
Winnow " the population leaving only the top. ie the poor are sidelined, they become a
problem for the Government (needing support, food etc.). A net negative value to US society.
(The Rich also get handouts from the Fed. as free money has become an habitude, but that is
an another way of winnowing out the chaff - as others do NOT get the trillion dollar
handouts) The poor have no "place" in a society that has rejected them and so are less
motivated. They must fend for themselves and are expected to obey. If they do not there are
always the police to enforce obedience.
"Cumulative = win-win", and "Winnowing = Only the top win".
Your "Winnowing" differs little from Zero-sum. The big problem is the Outlaw US Empire's
initial storyline is greatly at odds with Zero-sum. As I've written many times at MoA, The
Constitution's Preamble that's taught to all citizens says the government's purpose is to
"form a more perfect Union...," and what's happening now--for several decades in reality--is
the exact opposite. US politicians and business magnates from the Guilded Age knew very well
that the way to keep the peace was for everyone to perceive they had a stake in the system.
Neoliberalism's Zero-sum throws that rationale under the bus, which in turn has generated the
current domestic turmoil. The one thing Trump failed to do was to promise to all Americans
they'd have a stake in the system, which is essentially what Hitler and Mussolini told their
masses. Trump intoned and shouted MAGA, but did nothing to show that he was serious about
doing so. That's why he failed. And that's why the D leg of the Duopoly will also break. It's
that break we must act upon when it occurs.
I think the oligarchic death cult that manages USAi affairs is not the slightest bit
interested in "universal democratization": just scan the homeland to see that. The death cult
is only interested in wealth accumulating their way. Every year they go into a demented
trance screaming about the evil of taxes. Whenever a crisis emerges or a bill goes to the
House they scramble to append as many 'tax relief measures' as they can.
The USAi oligarchy and their death cult regulate as many US political candidates as
possible to destroy any chance of a government introducing a universal education or universal
health system that will need taxes to supply it. Look at what just happened with the
#forcethevote attempt to get medicare for all to commence in the USAi. It was the best
opportunity in a century to implement it and the only possible advocates totally ignored the
initiative.
They became the FraudSquad instead: they used the M4All advocacy to get elected and then
ignored their electorate.
Something like %70+ of the people approve of this and the best advocates bowed to the
oligarchy death cult and have been since the day they were elected.
So what might the oligarchs think of Chinese people with their resounding support for the
Communist Party of China? They will hate them with every bone in their body, they will be
furious that this country resists and denies them a chance to plunder it - yet again. The
oligarchic death cult will be extremely angry that a single country presents an excellent and
achievable system of government and financial management and community betterment to all the
other nations on earth.
The oligarchy death cult will do anything to destroy them. And they have the perfect
compliant tool in the Biden Harris Presidency.
b - insightful perspectives.
But while I'd agree that China's threat to US ruling ideologies features foreign relations as
the leading edge of conflict, the danger of a good alternative may be even greater as it
concerns domestic policies.
If a reckoning comes for US ruling elites, the prosecution may begin with the offshoring
of US jobs, broad-based prosperity, manufacturing and strategic infrastructure development.
Indeed Trump's greatest threat might have been drawing a dotted line if not a solid one to
the culprits.
Exhibit B becomes the Chinese model's successes in poverty eradication, general rises in
broad-based prosperity, stunning growth in STEM capacities and jobs with futures and now,
obviously, competence in public-health crisis management.
The next phase may be litigating the hollowing out of the MIC itself through the
corruption of the national defense by a revolving door of staff officers, lobbyists, tankies,
bureaucrats and legislators for-profit, for-show, for-corruption.
An additional phase, should the human race survive it, may be tribunals -- such as those
of the Reign of Terror, in the event of revolution, or, in the event of war, along the lines
of war-crimes tribunals under Chinese / Russian direction, once a suitable city in the
smoldering ruins of the continental US equivalent to Nuremberg in German can be found.
It's not so much the American people but the people of the "blob" themselves who increasingly
question American exceptionalism. That's why they become ever more crazy and aggressive. They
compensate their (unconscious) self-doubts with fanatism.
The empire may be considering arming and provoking its vassals near China into nuclear war,
but America would never consider anything so terrible as trying to cripple China with
biological weapons! That would be just crazy!
There are several levels of analysis here that are being muddled by theoretical ignorance.
The liberal theory says that political democracy and free markets create economic growth,
responsible government, mutual gains from trade, economic interdependence, and a zone of
peace, reinforced and cemented by multilateral institutions. The liberal zone of peace is
threatened, though, by authoritarian regimes with state-run economies, and the former need to
contain and overthrow the latter.
Realist theory starts with the state and the state-system, which is anarchic and thus
produces conflicts over the balance of power. Defensive realists say that a prudent grand
strategy would focus solely on territorial integrity and sovereignty, because any aggressive
actions only produce balancing. Offensive realists say that hegemony is the only source of
security and that great powers should go to war and wage the arms race to achieve it.
Marxists say that none of these dynamics are distant from the class relationships and
competitive dynamics of capitalism and so both liberal and realist arguments turn out to be a
crude apologia for imperialism -- for the class-based strategies of dominant states.
With this in mind, we can turn the US' China problem. As the article says, China poses no
threat to the US state, nation and territory, so the defensive realist argument for
containing China is groundless. Likewise, China's economic growth and stability in the
absence of liberal democracy also undermines liberal arguments about the conditions of war
and peace in the world. Finally, the balancing of China and Russia against US primacy
strategies has undermined offensive realist fantasies of hegemony.
So, what is actually driving US aggression vis-a-vis China?
The only answer is that the long-term material interests of the American capitalist class
are threatened by the emergence of a superior competitor, namely, China.
This is true in several respects, most of which I can't cover here.
But, China is building dense global relationships, and positioning itself as a central
node of economic growth, technological prowess, social stability, manufacturing power,
consumer demand, green innovation, and multilateral reliability.
The US is in deep trouble as a result. As the world becomes more China-centric, the major
economic powers will stop funding US trade and government deficits. This will reduce the
value of the dollar and diminish the global roles of the Treasury Dept and Federal Reserve,
and of Wall Street. The US will fail to meet its debt obligations and the standard of living
will plummet as debt-financed consumption winds down. The USG will face fiscal dilemmas, all
of which pose serious problems: cut social programs and risk riots; cut the military and risk
the empire; raise taxes and risk capital flight and economic stagnation. Given the dynamics
of American domestic politics, these dilemmas will not be solved.
These are the underlying material fears of the US ruling class and they EXPLAIN the real
drive to containment and war with China.
In short, Marxism is a better science of world politics than are liberalism and
realism.
Nuclear Japan? Maybe. Nuclear South Korea? Maybe. It could be argued that both already are by
virtue of the U.S. occupation of both.
Nuclear Taiwan? I don't see that happening, and any attempt to do so would offer China the
perfect excuse to formally reabsorb that Chinese island.
American paranoia over China (and Russia) seeking to usurp the US and take over as world
hegemon is pure paranoia and projection. It's the western model of the world that considers
it normal and desirable to have one country or ideology ruling the entire globe.
China has no history of using its power to force the world to accept it as sole ruler. The
reason the US and the west are so paranoid about China et al is because they give
themselves the "divine" right to force their ideology onto others, first with Christianity, a
monotheistic religion that has converting the heathens, savages and infidels to its screed at
the center of its philosophy, and then with liberalism + capitalism (now neoliberal rentier
capitalism) and they, falsely, assume every country and ideology is like that.
American and western European foreign policy is a study in Psychological Projection 101.
When imperialists like Porcine Pompeo and Lurch Kerry accuse other states of aggressive
behavior, violating sovereignty and so forth, they are actually talking about their own
country's actions.
In the US, now that corporations are people, and since the corporations and tools of finance
are privately owned, the concept of democracy is a lie or myth if that offends you.
That is why I keep dragging the ideology discussion to the reality of public/private
finance.
It comes down to risk management decisions about the allocation of scarce resources. In
the West now those risk management decisions have a ROI skew which includes a profit
component that does not exist in China risk management decisions.
We are in a civilization war because the West will not show well in a social system merit
comparison...and the elite know this....hence the ongoing shit show to control the
narrative.
First off all....there is a difference between WAR and PIRACY
I did not see any bomb landing on US ground or soldier.
Second....free trade agreement is responsible for China economic succes.
Finally...bring back the production on US GROUND...that will kill China
Prof K@18 has a very optimistic scenario where China becomes the safe haven for capital and
then other countries stop using the dollar as the world currency and t-bills are passed over
in favor of the RMB and investors will prefer investing in Shanghai stock market because
their money will be more liquid thereand something something will happen so that they (whoc?)
won't finance US trade deficits. I don't understand this last, as it is entirely unclear in
what sense US trade deficits are being financed. In fact, actual trade deficits aren't being
financed. But then the balance of payments isn't just trade in goods, but financial services
and US stock markets and yes, government treasuries are also part of that.
It is entirely unclear to me how socialist China, where as of now the ren min bi is not
freely convertible, where the government has enormous influence on import and export of
capital and capitalists are not only not guaranteed bailing out by the Reserve Bank but
regulations are much more onerous than in the US especially with enforcement by prison
sentences even for the wealthy...it is unclear to me how this China can replace the US as
safe haven, at least while remaining some sort of socialist country at all, even in a
NEP-is-the-road-to-socialism kind of way. Further, the US role as the safe haven was not just
historically due to it's relative victory (as compared to its capitalist rivals,) in WWI and
WWII, but due to its military power. The US pursues a policy of rule or ruin, and ruins
selected easy targets on a regular basis (since Bush the senior at the latest,) just to keep
the point vivid in everyone's minds. The dollar is not founded on US economic
production/productivity but on blood. It is impossible to imagine today's China becoming a
capitalist policeman guarding the gates of the bazaar and collecting backsheesh, so to speak.
The Chinese capitalists would have to really take over and seriously re-organize Chinese
society to do this.
This all sounds pie-in-the-sky at best, I think. Except that's prettifying the ideal, I
think. I don't believe a reformed capitalist world system is even possible. Capitalists
ultimately depend on their states in their rivalries. There inevitably comes a point when the
states must resolve conflicts with wars. The pursuit of a multipolar world is a pursuit of a
world safe for war, not a pursuit of peace.
The link is to an article by Doug Bandow, titled "America's Asian Allies Need Their Own
Nukes". Bandow recommends "friendly nuclear proliferation".
This is how far the US has decayed: that a respected journal like Foreign Policy should
publish such insanity.
And yes, it's totally insane. The US is not the only country capable of proliferation. The
day after Taiwan gets nuclear weapons, so will Mexico and Hezbollah. The day after
that , so will many other countries. It's impossible to foresee all the consequences
of irresponsible proliferation, but one outcome is the most likely: doomsday for
humanity.
-// Another veteran diplomat, Victoria Nuland, will be nominated [by Biden] for the role of
under secretary of State for political affairs, one of the people said. //-
Lets look at what
China plans to do over the next 5 years . The article provides a very broad explanation
then links to some specifics at the bottom, the item about the Yangtze River Economic Belt
being most important. I found this bit of reporting highly important:
"More specifically, these days the government uses the five-year plans to reinforce and
complement the market dynamic by providing regulation and guidance. That includes providing
the legal and social framework, such as issuing monetary and fiscal policies, providing
public goods and services, such as building high-speed rails, and correcting for market
failures like pollution."
There's a vast difference in focus between China and the West--China's sharply focused on
its development in ways the West isn't whatsoever, and it makes certain its citizenry knows
that and everyone's working as a team--every job has its own value and is important. The best
explanation I have is that China is doing while the West is watching and not doing;
therefore, China continues to grow ahead of those standing watching with their jaws
agape.
China outnumbers the Outlaw US Empire by more than one billion people. That's a huge team
working together to advance their nation and themselves. Within the Empire, at least 30% of
the labor force is idle and not even counted for unemployment purposes since they aren't
actively looking for non-existent jobs while about 24% of the active labor force is
unemployed. That's 54% of your human capital that's not being used at all to better
themselves and their nation. Honestly, which one has the better outlook?
The enemies of the USA reside within it. Yeah, I've said that before and the evidence
continues to prove I'm correct.
All of this makes me think about the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century
according to Vladimir Putin: The fall of the Soviet Union. Not because of the shrink of the
Russian Empire, but for the loss of an equal to the USA in the international stage. That
would make the remaining superpower to have some sort of delusional sense of destiny, as seen
in Fukuyama's 'End of History'.
How the situation evolves in a timeframe of 5-10 years in the future is hard to evaluate
given the many factors that will influence the outcome but IMO, the only thing that can be
taken for granted is the further the USA gets weaker, the more dangerous it becomes for the
future of Humanity.
My first post at MoA, keep on with the good work :)
I would add that the threat China poses isn't just ideological - it is operational.
The US derives enormous benefit from the US dollar as reserve currency; from the USD as
alternative savings vehicle of choice by foreigners against their own currency; by all manner
of favorable international institutions like the World Bank and IMF.
Secondly, China isn't some bare assed Middle Eastern terrorists or Central Asian mountain
tribes. It has more people, it will or already has a larger economy and it is proceeding
apace with technology development.
This is very different than Russia or even the Soviet Union, for example.
The West was always far bigger, wealthier and productive than the Soviet Union - this enabled
all sorts of strategies like outspending on defense, buying job lots of puppet politicians in
vassal states, etc.
This won't work with a China that is a bigger supplier as well as all of the other
size-related advantages already noted.
Can the American oligarchs stand being 2nd fiddle in the medium term? Certainly in the long
term? Would their domestic and foreign empires hold up?
Sputnik publishes its own analysis , which relies rather heavily on Beijing-based
American commentator Thomas Pauken who has his own credibility issues as readers will
discover at the article's conclusion.
"democratization and liberalization is a necessary precursor for peace and economic
growth"
Well, anyone with any notion of history before 1800 knows this is absolute bullshit and those
aren't linked at all.
The affairs of humans are paltry compared to the vast changes that are taking place in
nature: the Sixth Mass Extinction resulting from our destruction of habitat and the stability
of the climate system. As methane has begun erupting from the enormous stores in the Arctic,
accelerating the forcing and ice melt, we continue on our merry way oblivious to the fate
that awaits us in the near future. Faster than expected, abrupt climate disruption is
nature's revolution to clear the earth of the invasive species -- humans.
The United States should think creatively about new approaches to old problems. One way to
do so is to stop hectoring partners and preventing them from doing what they want to do.
Unless, of course, they want to become friends with China -- this should be prevented at
all costs!
amerika's corrupt and undemocratic system of government will bring itself undone long before
it could succeed in any attempt to disrupt China's system.
The stupid two party both the same just tell different lies farce is tearing the population
apart, that's not going to get better it will get much much worse. In fact I suspect the
'prez-elect' is desperately hoping that the rethugs win both senate seats in Georgia as that
provides him with a way to avoid following up on his vague minutely left of center campaign
promises.
He may be outta luck cos at
this stage with about 25% counted the Dems have a lead in both races. Still that's mostly
urban electorates and as I understand 'urban' has become amerikan code for unwhite, so if the
dems are trying to fluff this contest it will be by Dems failing to turn out the rural
african american vote that saves creepy joe from embarrassment. We shall see cos the state
dems may not agree to that.
Anyway the lack of a shared dialog between amerikans is getting worse as we see even here
at moa where some of these fools come over all hysterical about quite minor issues. You get
that when it is barely possible to pull a cigarette paper between dem & rethug policies
on the big stuff, so all that is left are the same deliberately selected emotive issues such
as abortion & capital punishment that both parties have been encouraging the citizens to
obsess over for the last 60 years.
Those fools will go into a civil war over the emotive, totally irrelevant to living in a
functioning society, issues which have been beaten up & propagandised for so long, and
that will be the end of the threat to the rest of the world amerika poses.
I don't believe a reformed capitalist world system is even possible. Capitalists ultimately
depend on their states in their rivalries. There inevitably comes a point when the states
must resolve conflicts with wars. The pursuit of a multipolar world is a pursuit of a world
safe for war, not a pursuit of peace.
Ergo, we must pursue a socialist multipolar world.
An USA wich is not leader of the world is not possible. This is the central myth. Growing
toward that or beeing it. But without that there is no imaginable USA. I come for myself to
the conclusion, a multipolar world will cause breakup. As unit of one country it is just not
agreement capable.
In 1941, during WWII, Harry Truman wanted a brutal and prolonged conflict in order to inflict
as much death and destruction in Europe as possible, declaring:
"If we see Germany winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to
help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible."
The US - or at least its ruling elite as expressed by one of its key leaders and
subsequent president - wanted the brutal war to continue for as long as possible, so that as
many Russians and Germans as possible would be killed, (with other Europeans, including Jews,
as inevitable collateral casualties in that process,) so that the US could then step in at
the very end to dominate war-destroyed Europe.
Following the same playbook, the US warmongering/plundering elite would love it if they
could pit Russia vs. China, Europe vs Russia, India vs. China, Japan vs. China, etc. So long
as Eurasia is divided instead of cooperating with itself, the US remains the hegemon. Even
better if a destructive war breaks out over there, that the US would sustain from over here,
and step in as the noble saviours at the last minute to plunder the spoils.
-
The threat of the example that China happens to provide is not just about preserving
America's ruling ideology ("universal democratization", "democracy", "freedom", etc.,) but
also about preserving US-led geopolitical hegemony and US-led plutocracy.
The US-spouted ideology is a tool for its hegemony that in turn is a tool for its
plutocracy to continue to enrich itself through plunder.
Any example of a country that serves its people, let alone one that does so without
foreign wars and regime change subversion, cannot be allowed by a plutocracy that sustains
itself through wars, subversion, parasitism, and plunder.
That means, unfortunately, we in the West will continue to be force-fed a barrage of
propaganda from our establishment media so that people can't perceive that example, (and are
even made to reject it as evil,) lest they start questioning the corrupt, plutocratic system
they live in.
Been thinking about what u said, rr 39..
Canada waits with baited breath... the burned out remains of empire's creche, negotiating for
commerlcial union with their long traditional north-south continental neighbors. Perhaps the
midwest could share in monopolizing grains ...
Or the sea coasts with the fisheries..... otherwise, i don't see it.
I think we are going to collapse to local economy, and maybe build bacl to anational economy,
after some time. I don't know when.
Your Brainwashing is complete, you have swallowed the green pill and happily pay your
carbon taxes and live in the fear artificially inserted into your sub/conscious having
trusted proven liars and and having failed to verify things for yourself or trust your own
senses. All thinking is filtered through your gree-coloured glasses.
You have swallowed wholly the manufactured-for-the-masses groupthink propaganda and
espouse it from the core of your very soul, shout it from the mountaintops. Be the
chickenlittle that you are and just come out and say, it will be cathartic and will feel good
- THE SKY IS FALLING!
You and your ilk are fools, and are dangerously fascistic, climate fatalist totalitarians
and you will not be satisfied until any and all opposing views/data/freedom of thought are
outlawed.
many comments mention "oligarchs" - and their power, nationally and internationally. I see a
serious danger of the "Oligarchic Internationale" (a wordplay on the marxist 19th. century
"Workers Internationale" with their slogan "Workers of the world, Unite! I say that for the
very few MoA readers who are too young or not educated in history or economy, apology to the
most MoA readers). The Oligarchs of the world (be it USA, China, Russia, Israel, and from
wherever they may creep) are de facto already in an "Internationale" type organization - they
say silently "Oligarchs of the World - Unite!" and they don't want a big war , which would
upset the status quo. They will try to keep it for themselves and their offspring with very
forceful means - Internationally enforced. Smaller proxi-wars may happen, but no WW 3, in my
laymen's opinion.
I've been pondering lately this one question: what is the point of even having a country
if the advantages to the ordinary citizen of having a country are no longer maintained?
In the US, if we can't get the federal government to act on behalf of the people, maybe
the only answer is to discard that government. In the USA, this can be done, lawfully and
peacefully (although with high drama, for sure) by the States acting in agreement to dissolve
the Union.
The United States acts under a certain hindrance by having two levels of government, but
this is also a great treasure as well. The top layer of government can go away, and the
people will still have a sovereignty-based government to live under, and to be represented
by, and to engage with.
So here's a proposal from each State to the Federal establishment: you discorporate, we
keep all our monies, and all federal properties within our borders convey to us. You fuck
off: we'll get by without you somehow; don't worry about us - and adios .
~~
And rico rose, your point about the multi polar world is very important I think. When you
say "a multipolar world will cause breakup" , I suggest that a multipolar world will
better allow breakup. It's kind of the same thing, the same result from two different
ends: from one end, the Demonstration Effect from the rest of the world including China
showing to the US populace that there is a much better way to live, and from the US end, the
general dissatisfaction growing among that populace as the federal government continues to be
useless.
It could take a short decade at most, I reckon, for the rest of the world to be so
impressive that US media can't hide it from the people any longer, and for US oligarchy to be
so lawless and ravaging that the people simply can't take it anymore.
In a softer world that follows the example of Asia, and especially given the natural
borders of North America anyway, there is no great threat from armed invasion to any of the
States, even if each one were to stand alone. Many states would form new unions, but even so,
the citizenry in place in each state possesses the firepower to resist any invasion, I
suggest.
So if there's no defense to be provided for, all that's left is the welfare of the
citizens to be provided for. And 2020 has shown dramatically that, while the federal
government has abandoned that sense of provisioning, the States and their people still care
passionately about this very thing.
~~
Apparently the calls for "secession" are arising again in the US, or so I've heard. It's a
crude concept at the moment, and there is no right of secession. But there is every right to
amend the Constitution, by a 3/4 majority of the States, and to dissolve the present Union,
in order to create a "more perfect" arrangement.
China has many billionaires, but I don't think they have the degree of power over the
Chinese government and society implied by the term "oligarch". Jack Ma may be the richest man
in China, but that hasn't stopped the Chinese government from quite effectively cutting him
down to size.
The pandemic is the final nail into the coffin of the Western Empire. Asia and South Pacific
nations functioned as they should and their public health systems are controlling the virus
but must enforce quarantines on the infected world to continue their ascension.
It is now a multi-polar world. The exploitative capitalism of the West intentionally
destroyed democracy and good governance to increase profits. Reality has bitten back. The
remains of the former public health system are corrupt and incompetent as exemplified by Dr.
Anthony Fauci. The virus basically spread unhindered in the USA and UK. The difficulty is
that in times of stress human being revert to tribal beliefs. The reality of the change in
power dynamics will be denied by Western decision makers. The truth is that if the West
cannot control a virus, it will never address the existential crises; climate change, rising
inequality and perpetual war.
Mankind will only survive if it learns how to live on a finite planet in peace.
No worry, Nature will take care of itself after we humans have disposed of ourselves. I
deplore our general destruction of the environment we live in and the misuse/abuse of
resources, but humans are not as strong as we think we are. We may cause considerable damage
to the mega fauna and flora, and severely damage ecosystems, but our current war against the
planet is one we cannot win and should not even be trying to (capitalism and its God Mammon,
again). Life will go on with or without us. Evolution is a fact of life, whether our
religions, corporate board rooms, genetics manipulation corps or biological weapons
departments understand that or not.
Faster than expected, abrupt climate disruption is nature's revolution to clear the earth
of the invasive species -- humans.
We're not an invasive species, but I broadly agree. The best thing to happen to the
beautiful planet in the last million years would be the extinction of the smart pest, Homo S.
Too bad I won't be around to enjoy a people free Earth.
I usually read MoA in the morning, yet today it late pm. Your article reminded me of an
earlier article read this morning re USA and China Wages comparison. Here is the article pay
particular attention to the graph. Pretty much sums it up in that China have an expansionist
economy while the USA has (with exception to the Financial rubbish posing as assets) a
contraction economy. Globalisation and Austerity from Reagan_nomics/Thatcher_nomics from the
"70's have lead the west into the debt ridden marsh we are in now. Yet the lesson of an
expansionist economy (which all western economies have done in the past) escapes the thinking
of those who supposedly matter. Personally I think the world needs a lot more "Musk's
(creating massive employment in making new tech cars and rockets plus solar) and a lot less
Bezios's and Jack Maa's (Alibaba china) (Using others products and screwing them on margins
to increase his wealth) https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2021/01/05/michael-pascoe-wages-graph-globalisation/
I agreee that the US is almost easier to define. Zero-sum or winnowing, both are reductive
traits. ie the population gets sidelined.
However, I also think that part of "our" problem is that the comments and viewpoint, are
generally all "western-centric" and not enough attention is paid to the fundamental
differences in attitudes. Chinese are being "gifted" with US preoccupations to show
that they are basically the same as those of the US itself. ie. The US is right-superior in
its attitudes and so others STILL try to copy-steal-follow it. Something that is becoming
visibly not true. Which is why my comment also mentioned the "cumulative" Chinese attitude.
It being probably more important to understand why China is on the ascendant.
Note that "Democracy", "communism" or whatever, all have the same stated object of
population input and therefore good for the masses. It is when their lofty ideals are no
longer seen to be true, (and are not true in practice?) that the edifice cracks. (Ie, part of
the USSR collapse corresponds with the rise of the Nomenklatura of only 750'000 people with
the right to vote etc. It worked as long as it worked, but fell through when the mass
realised they were NOT getting their part somewhere)
Sorry, Very short reply, as I have problems with internet to resolve, with a bit of luck
and perseverance I may be able to continue later today.
Exactly right. The second largest problem in the world just now is the Government of the
US. Breaking up the US would effectively get rid of the problem. Then we could deal with
climate change more effectively.
The current hatred and division between red and blue, the lack of effective health
services, the deterioration of infrastructure, the future demise of dollar power and thus
lack of funding for the military all give me cause to hope that break up will happen. Lets
all do our best to make it so.
@Canadian Cents #42
It shouldn't surprise you; Truman was closely associated with the Pendergast political
machine (Kansas City mob).
His Attorney General was closely involved in serious corruption in the IRS and DOJ-Tax
division.
He dropped the bomb and was a nasty person in general.
Meanwhile, Assange is denied bail. Something tells me that, even if not extradite,
they plan to hold him in prison indefinitely - if not American, British would do just as
well.
Wow! When did MoA give up all rationality? The US has long since dug its own grave and long
since guaranteed its unviability as a superpower. Everything from here is downward, as long
as it clings to the mad idea of supremacy. And the longer it continues to deny reality the
bigger and more brutal the bang when it finally collapses - or it disappears in its own
nuclear conflagration.
The US produces virtually nothing, except over-priced and disfunctional weapons.
Everything else that it has is stolen. It does not have the capability to reverse that trend
- that horse has long since bolted and disappeared over the horizon. Unlike the US, countries
like China and Russia create genuine wealth through their own productive efforts, and they
have the military and economic means to ensure that the US cannot strangle them. The economic
advantages of China and Russia will only increase compared to the US, and everything the US
is doing to sabotage their efforts only makes them stronger and the US weaker.
Nuclear weapons to Taiwan??? Only SuperMorons could entertain the notion for more than 2
seconds (and there are plenty such supermorons at the Foreign Policy Institute, that's part
of what got the US to this status in the first place). If the US gives nuclear weapons to
Taiwan they will be giving nuclear weapons directly to China. China would know about it
before it happens, and long before they could be operational Taiwan would cease to be Taiwan
and would be a province of Mainland China. Not to see that China has that capability - and
the resolution to carry it out - is sheer idiotic blindness.
Even if Taiwan could install such nuclear weapons before China takes over, where would
they hide them? The stupidity of thinking a tiny one-point nation on China's borders can
seriously threaten the entirety of nuclear-armed China - in alliance with Russia - defies
fantasy. Doing so requires not "superior weapons" (which the US does not have anyway, that
prize belongs to China's ally Russia) but superior idiocy and superior self-deception.
The US is on a bullet train to self-destruction. Stopping that train is impossible without
making changes in the past that were not made - unless it gives up 100% of its ambitions to
supremacy and becomes a minor self-sufficient village minding its own business. That is its
only chance.
Instead of waffling about and navel-gazing over such tiresome fantasies of the US
exceptionalists, MoA would do much better to concentrate on the serious issues that confront
the world today - like confronting the damage wreaked on society worldwide by the
hyper-unbalanced madness of covid policies; the direction of political changes in Europe; the
ever continuing instability in the Middle East; signs of latent possible resurgence of
society in Latin America (cf Bolivia etc); containment of the US madness; etc.
So here's a proposal from each State to the Federal establishment: you discorporate, we
keep all our monies, and all federal properties within our borders convey to us. You fuck
off: we'll get by without you somehow; don't worry about us - and adios.
Posted by: Grieved | Jan 6 2021 4:42 utc | 47
Sounds good to me! One specific form of the "village" alternative I mentioned above, in
another name.
I have wondered how we can go to war with actual bombing and stuff like that with China
because many many items that we use every day are purchased from factories in China, having
been manufactured there by, it seems to me, "American" (now, of course, multinational)
companies. Think apple. Or Ralph Loren. Or any item at the Dollar Store. Have you looked at
the labels on your purchases? In addition, we buy all kinds of medicinal products from China.
And socks. The US and China are intertwined in many ways.
I thought the MAGA theme of Pres. Trump was to lessen the immense difference in trade
amounts - we buy tons of stuff from China but they do not buy that much from us - by imposing
tariffs on good imported from China and demanding that "American" companies agree to
manufacture in the US again. I thought, well, fat chance.
It is a problem. I am not a "better red than dead or dead than red" or whatever it is, but
I cannot see the point of blowing up the world because we can't be the king of it.
Pres. Trump never struck me as a war monger although he has been surrounded by
them.
The big 'domino' has fallen: Red America; and Brexit is a second. Does anyone believe
that this American epiphany; this exploding of American delusions, will leave Europe
untouched? Or, that other states will not observe it too, and understand from it that the
past need to submit their own cultures to European moral scrutiny is over?
We claim our enemies fear us for the same reason that we actually fear China.
Experts say, Russia 'invaded' Ukraine because Putin was terrified about having an example of
a free and prosperous country on their border and Russians would ask themselves, why can't we
have that?'
Talk about projection.
Even so, why can't we coexist?
Most Americans don't travel, Neocons can do what they do best, just lie about other countries
and say that China is a starving mess and we are #1. Who in the U.S. would know, who in the
MSM would bother to find out otherwise. No set of facts would convince us otherwise.
China could voluntarily decide to go to their own graduate schools and stop going to the
U.S. because it's a waste of time and money.
Neocons: 'we banned Communist Chinese students protect our valuable IP'
China could surpass our economy to the point where hovercraft is commonplace.
Neocons: 'Communist China is destroying their environment, our kerosene scooters and trucks
are the best thing in the world'
The average fool in the U.S. would never know how backward we had become (or maybe are, I
don't travel either)
I guess that is too passive, Neocons have to justify their paycheck.
The Degradation of American Democracy -- And the Court
Foreword by Michael J. Klarman
[...] Freedom House, which researches and advocates for democracy around the world,
lowered the United States on the organization's scale of zero to 100 measuring political
rights and civil liberties from ninety-four in 2010 to eighty-six in 2017. The decline in the
United States' rating exceeded that of other Western democracies.
...
More than thirty years ago, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, reflecting on a wave of
democratization that had swept the world beginning in the 1970s, concluded that liberal
democracy had become inevitable -- the logical endpoint in the evolutionary trajectory of the
modern state. However, over roughly the last fifteen years, Freedom House has recorded
erosion in levels of freedom in once-strong democracies such as Hungary, India, the
Philippines, Poland, and Turkey. Governments in these countries have shut down independent
media, assailed and incarcerated independent journalists, packed courts and bureaucracies
with their supporters, dismantled independent institutions of civil society, and vilified
racial and religious minorities to distract attention from problems they cannot solve.
Many Americans cannot imagine the erosion of their own democracy. The United States has
the longest-standing constitution in the world, a strong middle class, high levels of wealth
and education, and deeply entrenched democratic institutions and mores. Yet the United States
is not immune from world trends of declining democratization. In addition to the developments
already noted, research shows that younger Americans are much less committed to democracy
than their elders are. Among Americans born in the 1980s, only twenty-nine percent believe
that living in a democracy is "essential," as compared with seventy-one percent of those born
in the 1930s.
This Foreword examines the recent degradation of American democracy, seeks explanations
for it, and canvasses the Supreme Court's contribution to it.
In Chinese the call it the "Celestial Ascension" [Doctrine] or something like that. And
yes, it requires socialism in order to make sense (the demonstration as to why the doctrine
is socialist is too long to put it here, but it is).
Having studied Chinese language and history in Europe and China for years since 1972 and
practiced as a teacher, interpreter and guide, I have never come accross any Mainland or
Táiwan Chinese text or person who have used the expression "Celestial Ascention" in
the Chinese language to describe what's been goin on the last fourty years. WHere have You
picked up this belief, Herr Jan?
@ Posted by: Tollef Ås/秋涛乐 | Jan 6 2021 16:11 utc | 66
Heard it from a Brazilian scholar who once told me, a long time ago (don't even remember
the exact term). Never heard it ever since.
But my point is: China's geopolitical doctrine is not secret/cryptic. You only have to
know where to find it (and, preferably, know how to read Chinese). China never hid the fact
it is socialist (Market Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is the official name of the
system) and never hid the fact that it has a geopolitical doctrine that is in accordance with
its system (i.e. also a socialist geopolitical doctrine).
Dear Jan ;
As for the expression "Celestial ascention" (vk | Jan 5 2021 20:00 utc | 7), this mai be av
mistranslation of various chinese expressions for "natural rise" ('tiānrán
shēngqilai' or 'qiántiān-dìngde shēngzhǎng' both meaning
"coming naturally". Many other possibilities, byt the semi.religious or semi-imperial
associatons of "celestial" are definitely never heard in CHina nowadays. s
@Tolled As #68
You should be aware that black has many views which are literally unique.
It is also clear that few, if any, of them are based on first hand knowledge or
experience.
"Socialism with market characteristics" is something Deng brought in - it certainly was not
CCP ideology before that.
Having visited China many times as a fluent speaker starting in the early '80s, the
difference between the present day ideology and the past is stark.
But not to someone who has never been there and doesn't have good discernment in secondary
sources to boot.
@ Posted by: Tollef Ås/秋涛乐 | Jan 6 2021 16:23 utc | 68
Maybe the Brazilian scholar was too creative.
Either way, the consecrated term in English is a surprisingly good translation ("China's
Peaceful Development/Rise/Development Doctrine"), which is also colloquially called
"win-win". But the doctrine is actually much more complex than that term suggests.
One should google the background of that Richard Hanania person.
Supposedly he is currently a postdoc fellow at Columbia University, and alredy serves as
President of some 4 letter institute/stink tank tere that was just set up in 2020[!!].
Before that he got a PhD (political sci) from UCLA (2017-2019?);
before that he got a JD from U. Chicago.
Quite the pedigree. Three top private or out-of-state high tuition schools in expensive
cost of living places. Likely his education was *state-sponsored*.
But which State? CIA? Mossad? Who's paying his bills?
@47 grieved yes, I like federalism as the basic concept because it works in booth directions
if needed. Towards unity but keeping the option of separation. Why not having California as
member of the Paris declaration alone. It opens the door for development for problems to
early to call. The negotiation process staying open for undecided parts. That is what
multipolar means in the core and I guess the only hope for the USA as a nation.
Germany is similar structured. The central government is only allowed to work from own power
in defence and foreign relations. For almost everything else it have to use the organs of 15
strong states. Also the source of statehood is coming from them. It is a bit covered right
now by EU and covid but there are deep contradiction inside of Germany. If EU, also because
of German influence a federation, fails maybe not the old country come up again. I see big
chance of totally different structures.
Global
Times article , "US politics in reality 'more interesting than House of Cards
,' entertains Chinese amid pandemic," is absolutely fascinating and revealing--essentially,
Chinese are roaring with laughter at the Emperor without clothing. This long excerpt helps
explain:
"'Nobody knows more about trending on Weibo better than me,' an internet user mocked Trump
via a Weibo comment, adding that 'Weibo would face huge losses after Trump steps down' since
the entertainment will largely subside .
"Chinese experts said Americans or other Westerners might not understand why Chinese
people are just curious about but don't admire US democracy, but instead treat it as a
variety show which is much more interesting than House of Cards . In fact, Chinese
people are pretty familiar with the US election and most of them can objectively observe and
compare it with the Chinese national conditions.
" House of Cards is the most famous US TV series viewed in China that has helped
many Chinese people learn about how US politicians struggle and vie for power. Now Chinese
people might learn that the scriptwriters of this TV series have actually underestimated how
much drama really occurs in US politics.
"Some experts of US studies said that in House of Cards , Chinese audiences have
learned that US politicians have a very vague bottom line. As long as they can make gains,
they will betray anyone. In reality, Trump has just proven that there is no bottom line at
all, as he empowers his family members in the White House as much as he wants, and uses
presidential authority to pardon many people with close connections to him.
" House of Cards tells the audience that mainstream media outlets are influential
and can impact politics, but in reality, Trump shows that he can use social media networks to
undermine the influence of mainstream media and the conservative new media can even
consolidate Trump's base by selling anti-intellectual information or conspiracy
theories."
"Some experts of US studies said that in House of Cards , Chinese audiences have
learned that US politicians have a very vague bottom line. As long as they can make gains,
they will betray anyone. In reality, Trump has just proven that there is no bottom line at
all, as he empowers his family members in the White House as much as he wants, and uses
presidential authority to pardon many people with close connections to him.
" House of Cards tells the audience that mainstream media outlets are influential
and can impact politics, but in reality, Trump shows that he can use social media networks to
undermine the influence of mainstream media and the conservative new media can even
consolidate Trump's base by selling anti-intellectual information or conspiracy theories."
[My Emphasis]
So the longstanding rule that Truth is Stranger than Fiction is again being proven true in
China. Most importantly, the chaos within the Outlaw US Empire is serving as education for
Chinese and other people globally showing quite graphically the absolute dysfunction of its
political system.
I haven't watched House of Cards or Game of Thrones , but I did just
recently watch a considerable portion of The Hunger Games . Combine reality with their
stories and we'll need to adjust our evaluation of Hollywood propaganda. Add the persecution
of Julian Assange for revealing capital crimes--something he'd be rewarded for doing in
China--into this mix and there's no way the Neoliberal West is ever going to win Chinese
hearts and minds; rather, the opposite's occurring at a rapid pace.
c1ue @56, thanks, knew that Truman unnecessarily dropped the atomic bomb on civilians twice,
but didn't know those other details about him. The point is, given the foreignpolicy.com
writer that suggests "creatively" encouraging seeding "friendly proliferation" of nuclear
arms to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan with the expecation that that would induce China to "react
badly to," it seems that the same sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies as Truman expressed are
still very much present in the US ruling foreign policy elite.
Along with the WWII example, the US induced and sustained a brutal war in Afghanistan in
1979 for its own hegemonic/plutocratic interests:
In 1979, the US began to covertly foster Wahhabi extremism in Afghanistan (another case of
"friendly proliferation") to, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, "induce" a brutal war in
order to inflict on "the USSR its Vietnam war," at the casual expense of thoroughly
destroying the country and society of the people of Afghanistan for decades.
Robert Gates, the former Defense Secretary under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and
former CIA director under George H. Bush and Ronald Reagan, stated in his 1996 memoirs "From
the Shadows" that American intelligence services began to aid the opposing factions in
Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet deployment in 1979.
That confirms what Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter
and also an adviser to Barack Obama, stated in a 1988 interview:
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during
1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979."
"But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July
3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of
the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I
explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military
intervention."
"That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians
into the Afghan trap [..] The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to
President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed,
for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war [..]"
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, foreign policy
advisor to Barack Obama, in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
There's a country run by sociopathic/psychopathic elements that has a pattern of inducing
conflicts and brutally destructive wars to disrupt constructive cooperation and
development.
The truth is out - Hollywood only makes "tele-reality shows" with a bit of extra gloss on
them for export. The Chinese have the right idea.
I should have realised that since we have been living the "Twitter era", that variety has
become our spice of life, and Shakespeare's "all the worlds a stage" was just a realistic
appraisal that we would become a comedy skit. I like the idea, I never did appreciate
melodramas or horror films either....
PS. Biden apparently doesn't "tweet", so will we regress to "silent movies"? He can at
least do some of the actions. Keystone cops anyone?
So it doesn't occur to this idiot that if the USA engages in "friendly proliferation" then
both Russia and China will do the same?
This is the central problem with American foreign policy "experts" - they are so shallow
that they never consider that every action they propose will lead to a reaction from those
that they target.
Here, consider this vapid statement: "No doubt, a nuclear-armed China would react badly to
better-armed neighbors, but it is no happier with a more involved United States."
F**k me.
Look, dude, this is very simple: if the USA gave nukes to (say) Taiwan then China would
consider that all niceties are out the window and will look to give nukes to some country on
the USA's doorstep.
You know: Cuba, or Venezuela. Or both.
How smart would that "least bad solution" look then?
Super militarized super equipped police essentially did not put much resistance and
allowed protesters into the building.
Kalen , Jan 6, 2021 11:06 PM
Choreographed Protesters orderly following Capitol Hill visitors lines even wiped their
feet before entering House and Senate chambers making sure not to disturb nothing so usual
spectacle of anointing a new stooge of oligarchy May proceed shortly after a photo op with a
Getty Images hired photographers and live transmitting via FB MSM correspondents that happens
to be there. All fake, badly choreographed and directed with no shred of credibility
if their goal was to stop or disrupt the debate or to stop rotten political charade of
lies and deceit they did really nothing to achieve that, likely as planned. They did nothing
to prevent voting Biden in ...
. ...Corruption is embedded feature of American electoral system for over 230 years where
every election have been stolen by oligarchy from the people and where they could be no shred
of democracy existing where routinely 75% or more US citizen opposed or did not support
installed POTUS and where opinions of 95% of population are ignored or directly contradict US
congress actually enacted policies.
Although a little shitting in pants by congressmen and senators is never bad, the
existence of this abhorrent imperial regime cannot be threatened this way...
"The aphorism that in SHAM DEMOCRACY USA every "election" above that of local dog catcher
is rigged is not far from the truth. WE THE PEOPLE do not choices, we have owners."
@ v | Jan 6 2021 21:18 utc | 37 who wrote
"
Some MAGA nutter has just announced that the Kansas State Capitol has been taken over.
"
The interesting thing to me has always been that if you get the nutters on both sides of
the mythological left/right to say how they feel about the private bankers, you know, the
top/bottom reality we live in, they both agree that private banking is bad. But we can't have
that coming to the fore especially in the face of the China example of public banking.
So its MAGA, USA, MAGA, USA, MAGA, USA forever, or until another narrative gripping
opportunity comes along or is manufactured.
I see that "cookie monster" Nuland is supposed to become Deputy secretary of State under
Biden. As a new of version of Pompeo she will obviously be sending tins of fresh home baking
to Putin.
Maybe she will use her Maidan experience and let Joe sniff a bit first.
Ex-AG Barr Reportedly Met With Jeffrey Epstein's Last Cellmate Attorney General William Barr speaks at the
National Religious Broadcasters Convention Feb. 26, 2020, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark
Humphrey)
By Charlie McCarthy | Tuesday, 05 January 2021 07:06 PM
Former Attorney General William Barr investigated the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, reportedly
even meeting with the multimillionaire sex offender's last cellmate.
Epstein was found hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower
Manhattan early on Aug. 10, 2019. Efrain "Stone" Reyes had shared the cell with Epstein until
being transferred a day before the suicide.
Epstein's death rattled the highest levels of the Justice Department, according
to the New York Daily News on Monday.
Following Epstein's death, Reyes was pulled from a privately run jail in Queens to meet
frequently with authorities, once with the attorney general himself.
"Barr wanted to know about what was going on in [the Metropolitan Correctional Center]," a
source told the Daily News. "Barr told him, 'I owe you a favor, thank you for telling us the
truth.'
"He said [Barr] was a good guy. Barr was nice about it. He just wanted to know if [inmates]
were being mistreated. What [Reyes] believed happened. Just basically that. He told them
everything. He cooperated with Barr."
The Daily News source said he befriended Reyes when both were being held at the Queens jail,
per the Daily Mail .
A Justice Department spokesman declined comment to the Daily News.
The New York Times reported previously that a "livid" Barr was personally overseeing four
inquiries into Epstein's suicide.
Reyes caught coronavirus at the Queens Detention Facility earlier this year, was released in
April and died last month. He was 51.
The source said he and Reyes watched a documentary about Epstein, who associated with some
of the world's most powerful men while allegedly running an international child sex trafficking
scheme.
"[Reyes] was like, 'I just didn't see that from him. I didn't see that side of him. I never
pictured him being with young girls. Some guys like that are creepy,'" the source recalled. "He
said he never really got that side of Epstein -- like he was someone who took advantage of
girls. But we all have our secrets, you know? You never know."
US intelligence and
security agencies declared that the SolarWinds hack was 'likely Russian in origin,' echoing
evidence-free mainstream media claims as well as their own language in the 'assessments' about
the 2016 election.
In a joint
statement on Tuesday, the FBI, NSA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said that their investigative
work "indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in
origin" was behind the compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, first revealed three weeks
ago.
"At this time, we believe this was, and continues to be, an intelligence gathering
effort. We are taking all necessary steps to understand the full scope of this campaign and
respond accordingly," the statement added.
What does "likely of Russian origin" even mean? Don't expect the mainstream media
outlets to ask – they've all been accusing Moscow for weeks, using unverifiable
assertions by anonymous sources instead of any actual evidence.
Several things in the statement jump out. One, that CISA was put in charge of "asset
response" and mitigation. This is the same agency that on November 13 hosted a statement
– attributed to it by the media, but in reality coming from two advisory committees
– declaring the 2020 US election "the most secure in American history," hastening
to add that "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed
votes, or was in any way compromised."
That was a remarkable rush to judgment, given the subsequent claims to the contrary that
seem far more credible than any assessments of "likely" Russian hacking.
Americans can surely sleep easy knowing the FBI is the "lead agency for threat
response," which is presently still collecting evidence, and analyzing it "to determine
further attribution."
This is the agency once run by James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who discussed an "insurance
policy" in case Donald Trump gets elected with senior staff like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page
and framed General Michael
Flynn over a perfectly legal and legitimate conversation with a Russian ambassador.
This is the same FBI that hastened to send 15 agents to investigate a
garage rope pulley in Talladega, but sat on Hunter Biden's laptop
for a year and did nothing with tips about the suspected Nashville RV bomber.
Again, the mainstream media will not point any of this out, but will parse the
"likely" as "definitely" and claim the statement somehow proves their claim
Russia was behind the SolarWinds breach. Just watch.
That's precisely what happened with the infamous "Intelligence Community Assessment"
published in January 2017. A handpicked group of FBI, CIA, ODNI and NSA staff was first
conflated with "all 17 US intelligence agencies" and then their "assessment"
treated as established fact. Only in November 2018, after the midterm elections, did the source
material the ICA was based on see the light of day.
It was quickly forgotten, however, as it made clear that the assessment was based on wishful
thinking about what the US spies believed was "consistent with the methods and motivations
of Russian-directed efforts." Couldn't have this frank admission interfere with the fantasy
political interests in Washington needed to believe, after all.
Note also that no one involved in the exercise in dissembling that was Russiagate ever faced
any consequences. Only one person – a FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith – has been
prosecuted for altering evidence in the Flynn case, and he got a slap on the wrist .
Meanwhile DNI James Clapper and CIA chief John Brennan got cable news sinecures, while FBI
director Comey landed lucrative book and TV deals.
McCabe, Strzok and Page went on to become media darlings and heroes of the #Resistance.
With all that in mind, it's curious that the "likely" and "believe" are doing
a lot of heavy lifting in that joining statement about the SolarWinds hack. Why should US spies
couch their claims in bureaucratic language, designed to shield the author from consequences of
being wrong, when impunity is the order of the day in Washington? Policy is based on
assessments anyway, and it's pretty obvious at this point that evidence – or lack thereof
– is an irrelevant detail to the US establishment.
But again, that's a question one shouldn't expect the mainstream media to ask.
Forget what Vice President Pence has suggested he might do this week regarding counting
the votes for president and forget President Trump's ominous military buildup near Iran, the
Sunday New York Times two-column, above-the-fold lede tells us what we should really
be worried about: "Scope of Russian Hacking Far Exceeds Initial Fears." The on-line title was
" As
Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm ."
Forget, too, that this latest NYT indictment of Russia, does not substantially
advance the story beyond the information available two weeks ago, when
"neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done [was] known for certain in this
latest scare story." Although no evidence is adduced to show that Russia is behind this
latest flurry of hacking – Russia no doubt sits toward the top of a long list of
suspects. The Times ominously quotes Suzanne Spaulding, a senior cyber official during
the Obama administration, saying Russia is the foregone conclusion:
"We still don't know what Russia's strategic objectives were," she said "But we
should be concerned that part of this may go beyond reconnaissance. Their goal may be to
put themselves in a position to have leverage over the new administration, like holding a
gun to our head to deter us from acting to counter Putin."
The Sanger Sewing Machine
NYT Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger is listed first on the byline for Sunday's
story together with Nicole Perlroth and Julian Barnes. That should give us a clue, given
Sanger's record for sewing things out of whole cloth. In a word, Sanger enjoys an unenviably
checkered record for reliability. Until we are shown more in the way of evidence attributing
the recently discovered hacking to the Russians, we would do well to review his record.
Sanger's reporting on Iraq before the war was as wrong as it was consequential. Those who
were alert at the time may remember that Sanger was second only to Judith Miller in spreading
the party line on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Seldom do historians obtain documentary evidence of plans for a war of aggression, but on
May 1, 2005 the London Times published a paper (now known as the "Downing Street
Memos") that recorded what Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the UK counterpart to the CIA)
relayed to Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002 about what he was told by George Tenet
at CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002. (No one has challenged the authenticity of the
minutes.)
"C (Dearlove) reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift
in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. There was little discussion
in Washington of the aftermath after military action." [Emphasis added.]
With David Sanger and his colleague Judith Miller having cried wolf on WMD so many times
over the prior two years, the Times decided it would be best to suppress the
embarrassing revelation that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
So the Times ignored it for more than six weeks, when Sanger wrote an article to put
the whole thing in perspective, so to speak.
The title of Sanger's June 13, 2005 article was "Postwar British Memo Says War Decision
Wasn't Made." Those looking for a measure of Sanger's credibility could do no better than
read this masterpiece of deceptive circumlocution. Here's the lead paragraph:
WASHINGTON, June 12 – A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet
office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no
political decisions" to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility
was advanced. "
And those asking how Sanger could write that with a straight face need only to read the
Downing Street Memos , which are quite succinct and clear.
One could almost sympathize with Sanger, who had co-authored a piece with Thom Shanker, on
July 29, 2002 in which WMD were flat-facted into Iraq no fewer than seven times. See: "
U.S.
Exploring Baghdad Strike As Iraq Option of July 29, 2002 ." That was about a week after
CIA Director Tenet had briefed Dearlove on the fixing of the intelligence and the facts. It
is a safe bet that Sanger's sources in the intelligence community briefed him on what line to
take on those (non-existent) WMD.
Years Later Still Drinking at the Government Trough
On July 26, 2016 , Candidate Clinton reportedly approved a "blame-Russia" plan.
According to
a letter from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to Sen. Lindsey Graham on
Sept. 29, 2020, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on "Russian intelligence
analysis" regarding "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton of a proposal from one of her
foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference
by Russian security services."
The Russian intelligence analysis report was deemed important enough that on Sept. 7,
2016, US intelligence officials forwarded an "investigative referral" to FBI Director James
Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding it. ( Such
a referral usually indicates that a leak has occurred about a particularly sensitive issue or
program. Thus, it is possible that the putative leaker wished to get the information out into
the open.)
But it is one thing to leak; quite another to get an Establishment journalist to write
about it without checking beforehand with the intelligence community for a nihil
obstat . There has been no additional reporting about the "investigative referral." But
if it was about a leak, the information never saw the light of day at the time.
July 26, 2016 : The exact date timing may be coincidence, but on the same day Mrs.
Clinton was alleged to have given the go-ahead for Russia-gate, Sanger co-authored
an article with Eric Schmitt titled: "Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked
D.N.C.":
"WASHINGTON – American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now
have 'high confidence' that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and
documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have
been briefed on the evidence."
There is much more that can be said about Sanger's reporting on very consequential issues.
On Iran, for example, taking Sanger's reporting at face value, one would think he never read
the National Intelligence Estimate that helped prevent a war planned by Cheney/Bush for 2008.
I refer to the November
2007 NIE the unanimous, "high-confidence" key judgment of which was that Iran had stopped
working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and had not resumed such work. That key
judgment stands, but you would never know that from Sanger's reporting.
Beware chief Washington correspondents; or at least look at their record.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as
Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
US Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is calling out her party for pushing through a
new code of conduct that essentially denies women exist by requiring gender-neutral language in
Congressional rules.
"It's the height of hypocrisy for people who claim to be the champions of rights for
women to deny the very biological existence of women," Gabbard said on Monday night in an
interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
New guidelines introduced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday and passed Monday by
Congress in a party-line vote endeavor to "honor all gender identities" by making all
pronouns and references to familial relationships gender-neutral. For instance, "seamen"
has been changed to "seafarers," and House rules have been scrubbed of such words as
"father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister.""Aunt" and "uncle" will be
replaced by "parent's sibling." Lawmakers also must inculcate such words as
"parent-in-law,""stepsibling" and "sibling's child" to replace
"mother-in-law,""stepsister" and "niece.""He" or "she" references to House
members are instead "such member,""delegate" or "resident commissioner."
"It's mind-blowing because it shows just how out of touch with reality and the struggles
of everyday Americans people in Congress are," Gabbard said. "Also, their first act as
this new Congress could have been to make sure that elderly Americans are able to get the COVID
vaccine now , but instead of doing something that could actually help save people's lives,
they're choosing instead to say, 'Well, you can't say mother of father in any of this
congressional language.' It's astounding."
Congress also has made permanent its Office of Diversity and now requires all committees to
discuss in their oversight plans how they will address "inequities on the basis of race,
color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age or
national origin." Committees also must "survey the diversity of witness panels at
committee hearings to ensure we are hearing from diverse groups of experts as we craft
legislation."
Gabbard has run afoul of Democratic Party orthodoxy repeatedly in the past two years,
opposing the impeachment of President Donald Trump, speaking out against election fraud,
opposing regime-change wars and blasting the controversial Netflix movie 'Cuties' as "
child porn ." She
embarrassed party favorite Kamala Harris, now vice president-elect, in a Democrat presidential
debate in 2019, and the Iraq War veteran called former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the
" queen of warmongers
" after Clinton suggested that she's a Russian asset.
Gabbard, who didn't seek a new term in Congress, was attacked as a "transphobe" and
"bigot" after introducing a bill last month to limit participation in women's sports to
biological females. The movement to "deny the existence of biological women – it
defies common sense, it defies basic, established science, it just doesn't make any sense,"
she told Carlson on Monday.
"No wonder they called you a Russian spy," Carlson replied. "It's dangerous to
have you in the Democratic Party. I'm sorry you're leaving [Congress]."
Republicans praised Gabbard's latest contradiction of Democrat talking points. "Can we
please trade Mitt Romney for her?" one Twitter user asked. Brazilian entrepreneur Daniel
Gonzalez called her "the best Democrat since JFK."
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was among the many Republicans who
opposed Pelosi's rules changes. "This is stupid," he said. "Signed, a father, son and
brother."
Why the protégé of Cheney Nuland? Why now? Did Biden completely succumbs to
Alzheimer? Does Biden administration strive to be as dysfunctional, neocon-dominated and
destructive as Obama administration?
Politico reports Tuesday that President-elect Joe Biden is tapping former senior Obama
administration foreign affairs officials to serve in his cabinet.
Most notably among them is neocon Victoria Nuland, who has just been tapped as Biden's state
department undersecretary for political affairs.
Writes Politico :
"Another veteran diplomat, Victoria Nuland, will be nominated for the role of under secretary
of State for political affairs, one of the people said. Nuland also previously served in the
Obama administration, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs."
Recall that in this capacity she ran point for Obama's regime change "democracy
promotion" efforts in Ukraine . In 2014 leaked audio clip posted to YouTube caused deep
embarrassment for the State Department amid accusations the US was coordinating coup efforts
using the ongoing "Maidan Revolution" to oust then President Viktor Yanukovych.
In that leaked
phone call Nuland told US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt "F*ck the EU" - for which
she was later forced to apologize. Here's some of the audio for a little trip down memory
lane.
She had also been instrumental in her prior postings at the State Department in Obama's
disastrous Libya intervention.
After the Obama administration she's been part of various think
tanks, including the hawkish Brookings Institution, where she's been a fierce critic of Trump's
supposed "appeasement" of Putin. She's also argued for deeper military intervention in Syria
.
Politico in its description of the incoming Obama-era officials underscores they are
hawks on
Russia :
Nuland and [Wendy] Sherman, who entered academia and the think tank world after leaving
the Obama administration, have been outspoken critics of President Donald Trump's foreign
policy -- particularly his appeasement of Russian President Vladimir Putin .
On the National Security Council, former State Department official Jon Finer will be named
deputy national security adviser, the people said, reporting up to incoming national security
adviser Jake Sullivan. Finer, a former journalist, joined the Obama White House as a fellow
in 2009 and served in various roles throughout Obama's tenure, including as a foreign policy
speechwriter for Biden and a senior adviser to then-deputy national security adviser Blinken.
Finer had been working in political risk and public policy at the private equity firm Warburg
Pincus, which was co-founded by Blinken's father, since leaving government in 2017.
The key NSC role of senior director for European Affairs will go to Amanda Sloat, a
Brookings Institution fellow ...
... ... ...
As is the unfortunate norm in the Washington beltway, the Liberal hawks under Obama simply
went to who's who of neocon think tanks like Brookings, and have now been called back in
revolving door fashion for pretty much a return to Obama era foreign policy (and its
disasters ).
Robert Farley
explains why the U.S. can't end endless wars if it pursues an aggressive China policy:
The problem is straightforward: Any effort to characterize China as an existential threat
to the United States necessarily implies a level of conflict that will (as it did during the
Cold War) provide justification for US intervention anywhere in the world. The solution for a
less interventionist foreign policy is not to play up the threat of Beijing in the hopes the US
will stop intervening elsewhere, but rather to carefully rethink what constitutes a threat to
US core values, and what the United States must sacrifice to meet that threat.
The open-ended wars that the US has been fighting for the last two decades were the result
of exaggerating a relatively small, manageable threat (i.e., terrorist attacks) into a major
global menace that required massive resources and frequent military interventions in many
different countries. One can only imagine how much worse things will be if the US replaces its
militarized overreaction to terrorism with a militarized overreaction to the Chinese
government. A hard-line China policy not only increases the likelihood of conflict between the
US and China in East Asia, but it is also likely to encourage more interference in the affairs
of other countries that have close relations with China.
If a U.S.-China rivalry follows the pattern of other great power rivalries, that would
involve trying to subvert client governments through proxy wars and coups and sometimes
intervening directly to overthrow those clients. Policymakers would predictably claim that
peripheral countries are actually vitally important and must be "defended" or pulled into our
orbit. Hawkish pundits would write articles about "who lost Malawi" and explain why it was
absolutely "crucial" to American security that we prop up a dictator in Uzbekistan. The US
would wage wars for "credibility" and refuse to end them for the same reason.
One could argue that rivalry with China need not be global and could be confined to East and
Southeast Asia, but the tendency with these sorts of policies is towards expansion. Kennan's
original idea of containment was never intended to justify waging wars of choice in Asia, but
it was almost immediately expanded to apply everywhere even when no real U.S. interests were at
stake. A China policy that sought to "contain" China would almost certainly expand in the same
way. If someone thinks there can be an intense rivalry with another major power but that it
won't become heavily militarized, I refer you to the record of U.S. foreign policy for the last
seventy years. All of this has happened before, but it doesn't have to keep happening.
Constant meddling and interventionism are driven by an overly expansive definition of U.S.
interests, threat inflation, and a strategy of pursuing global dominance. The meddling and
interventionism won't lessen if Washington identifies a different adversary to obsess over. The
only things that might change will be the names of the countries that the U.S. sanctions and
bombs.
If we want a more peaceful and less interventionist foreign policy, we have to challenge and
reject the assumptions that lead the U.S. to interfere in conflicts that have little or nothing
to do with us. The first steps in doing that involve rightly identifying what our vital
interests are and accurately assessing the threats to those interests. If we do that, we will
recognize that China poses much less of a threat to the U.S. than China hawks claim, and we
will see that increasing hostility towards China is not in the interests of our country or the
interests of our major allies.
Shocking how so few realize that the same people on the right and left think confronting
China via a zero-sum approach can be consistent with their support for reducing U.S. military
and foreign interventionism. These folks preaching withdrawal from Middle East, Pivot to Asia,
or "Rebalancing" crowds are active foreign interventionists by any other definition.
On that note I'm curious which sources of foreign policy information/podcast/writers out
their have a sensible approach to China. I do follow some leftist anti-imperialist voices for
perspective, but unfortunately they are far too forgiving of Beijing (think Grayzone or the
Qiao Collective), but everyone else to the right of these avowed Marxists are even worse,
parroting the same hawkish anti-China narrative as Washington's foreign policy blob.
From my reading of things, China is a nationalist country with a formal communist ideology
and the facto regular economy, with private and state ownership, but with a relatively muscular
regulatory state (not captured by the Ownership class) that ultimately has the decisive power
on things. Massive problems with corruption, which is a constant through Chinese history. The
corruption is so apparent because the state actually tries to do something about it, whereas in
the US the corruption is legalized and formalized.
As any country, China has its problems that should not be dismissed. Also not exaggerated
either. If one dreams of democracy in China, one needs to be very realistic about it. The
extremely long tradition (2000 years) of a bureaucratic/meritocratic state in China, from the
beginning can take the air from any democratic attempts, never mind half backed ones like the
US Polity). It is not the Communist Party Rule that is necessarily the biggest problem standing
in the path of a more democratic China.
Another great problem on a greater opening and relaxing of China is the US imperialist
attacks. China is under greater attacks and not because of Trump. That was coming. China is
developing more and more and is reaching escape velocity. Also, it has consistently refused to
relinquish a greater share of its economy profits to the US Oligarchy and US pension funds that
will be tanking in the foreseeable future given the gap between their outlays and their
returns... In the current climate, with the US the far greater evil, I am more than willing to
cheer for China and its president (2019 saw about 140,000 corruption cases in China acted upon,
from confiscations, firings, imprisonment, to the occasional death sentence... Go China! What
is the tally in the US? just check on the suffering of whistleblowers...)
Polls close at 7:00pm. Republican votes shredded at 8:00pm. Boxes of Democratic votes
brought out from under the tables at 9:00pm. Dems declared winners at 10:00pm.
Zeroscum 4 hours ago
I love the smell of shredded Republican votes in the morning...
1. If your preferred party loses, the whole thing was rigged. If your preferred party
wins, it was a legitimate and fair election.
2. There are a lot of good songs about Georgia. " Midnight Train to Georgia", "The Devil
Went Down to Georgia" -- lots of great songs.
... ... ...
5. Before you read any information on the election, call Mark Zuckerberg's cell to make
sure it's legit. He's there for you. Always. In every corner of your house. Watching you.
6. Pay no attention to the briefcases under the vote-counting tables. They are there for
decoration, OK?
7. This election is a clear choice between vegan Communist baby-killers and racist
Klansmen who want to kill grandma. Choose wisely. The choice is clear. We don't want vegans
in office, do we?
8. Remember to wear a poncho just in case pipes start bursting as soon as Republicans
start winning. Plumbing tends to explode at opportune times.
9. No matter what happens, Jesus is still king. Hey, I thought this was supposed to be
satire!
In that same article I posted above, Assange compared Clinton to cholera. Or maybe it was
the opposite, Trump is cholera and Clinton is gonorrhea? I forget.
In any case Politico is kind of evenhanded and has articles by both lefties and righties.
Even our host Colonel Lang has sourced Politico in the past.
If someone that President Trump knows and trusts were to convince President Trump that a
total pardon for Assange would drive the PKKK ( Pink Kitty Kap Klintonite) Democrats to a new
height of frenzied rage and hate, he might consider it worth doing.
To pardon Assange would
be to fling a drippy bag of burning snot right straight into the face of Hillary herself.
If President Trump were to see it that way himself, how could he resist the temptation to
do it?
Was this a US/UK deal to sidestep what had become an increasingly embarrassing question or
did public pressure have an effect? If the latter then it was sad that the public concern
expressed on the continent, Germany in particular, seemed to be stronger than in England.
This seems to be the pattern generally. When looking at reports in the German media on the
Ukraine, and on the Syrian poison gas incidents, I noticed that the German media allowed much
more through than did ours. I particularly remember the sturdy figure of General Kujat
rebutting the stories of a Russian invasion of the Ukraine on mainstream German TV. Such
rebuttal would not, I believe, have got such prominent coverage here. Similarly Michael
Lüders got prominent coverage on the Syrian gas incidents and I don't recollect seeing
anything like that in the mainstream media here.
So our media in England seems to be under more control. The picture is of an establishment
digging in. It's only recently that one saw Christopher Steele appearing before a Commons
Select Committee and being treated by the Committee as a respected authority on the "Russian
threat". And way back Sir Richard Dearlove was saying confidently on mainstream English TV
that Trump would only be there for four years.
In these circumstances I reckon Assange was lucky. Unless it was the case that President
Trump was contemplating a pardon and they decided to forestall that.
Hallelujah! UK Judge rules Assange to be mentally unstable and at risk for suicide. I guess
years of imprisonment in a foreign embassy will do that to some. Unlike a Presidential pardon
for alleged crimes this ruling can be overturned later by a different judge. Hallelujah!
"I find that Mr Assange's risk of committing suicide, if an extradition order were to be
made, to be substantial," Judge Baraitser said in her ruling at London's Old Bailey.
Truly Kafkaesque - imprison a man in solitary confinement until he contemplates
suicide and then use this as the excuse to extend his incarceration indefinitely, lest he
harm himself upon release.
"Assange is at risk of suicide," the compassionate magistrate opines.
A mental state undoubtedly attributable to months of confinement in isolation and
egregious unjust treatment in Magistrate Bariatser's court. With unassailable logic,
Baraitser decrees that Assange should remain in isolation and under her control.
Is she hoping Assange will succeed in his suicidal wish?
Sounds good, but as others have advanced, a little judge-shopping could overturn this ruling.
Isn't there some sort of fake supreme court that's been thrown up in the UK in recent years
suitable for just that end? With so many of "Our Elites" asses in a sling, the wheels are
probably already in motion. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.
I regret being such a downer, but have you not seen "Our Justice System" at work lately?
No, a Presidential pardon would be the only certain protection for Mr. Assange.
William Gruff # 97
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Dec 18 2020 21:36 utc | 113
The 70s was when they started selling the good redwood saw logs to Japan instead of
cutting them up here because they could get more profit that way. At the time I do not think
it was considered that the Japanese would be able to compete with us as well as they did, and
I think the same applies to the other sellouts of our working class to foreign cheap
manufacturing centers. You have to remember these people really do think they are better.
They do think in class terms even if they avoid that rhetoric in public. The problem is they
thought they could control China like they did Japan. That was dumb then and it looks even
dumber now. You can see similar dumbness in their lack of grip on any realisitic view of
Russia. Provincials really. Rich peasants.
Thanks for the redfish video suggestion. Worth watching not only to get insight about the
current developments in India but also understanding the global Zeitgeist.
I couldn't avoid to identify the exact same type of developments and problems that working
class and increasingly also middle class facing in other parts of the world.
The globalization of capitalism since the fall of USSR and Warsaw pact, has caused
accelerated monopolization of political and economic power everywhere in the world,
this was achieved by enforcing the same neoliberal agenda globally. No matter if you look at
the USA, Germany, Iran or India, you discover the same type of "reforms". Reforms that result
in increased poverty, more and more middle class families are losing their socioeconomic
position and becoming part of working class.
One come to the understanding that the "Great Reset" we are talking about recently, is not
something new in the beginning and making, it's only the continuation of an agenda which has
been in implementation since 30 years ago.
have you noticed that terms like "Imperialism" and "Capitalist government" which were
natural parts of the political discourse in 20th century have been increasingly replaced by
"Nepotism" and "Oligarchy" in 21st century?
Thank you and I have noticed the shift in terminology. I try to avoid it as I believe in
the need to be extremely clear about socialism and capitalism. I prefer to avid CCP and
prefer Chinese Communist Party. I take care to compare western issues with how Cuba is
actually doing. Keep making it clear there is a range of alternatives to private finance
capitalism and IMF usury.
The weavers of deceit and theft that are private finance capitalists are indeed oligarchs
and they attempt to crush any discussion of repossessing their wealth and redistributing it
so that more people can do more work with it and generate stronger societies. The private
finance vultures live in dread of a Tobin tax so I say bring it on. Wherever cash is locked
away and idle - take it and give it to the people as it is they who know how to put it back
to work and generate security and peace within communities.
Wherever power is monopolised in industry then force a devolution of shares to workers and
unions and pay shares as taxes to the state so that dividends go to all including the state.
As it is now in many countries mega corporations extort tax holidays to set up production
units in the counties and dump the entire cost of infrastructure expansion onto those
counties as part of their extortion. Information monopolies are the most critical to
dismantle. Look at the west where critical journalism has been reduced to mediocre
stenography and those with integrity are entirely reliant on other monopolies to squeeze
their digital content between the pillars of censorious monopolies like twitter and facebook
etc. These monopolies are managing public content and creativity and should be in public
ownership - NOT just shareholder public but the entire public.
There is this ruse of oligarchs today just as in Venice in the 16th and 17th century where
the Doges in their magnificence spy on the citizens and reward citizens for spying on each
other, where social cohesion and solidarity is corroded and rots within. That is what the neo
liberal and private finance agenda is - to monopolise $$$ and power and decision making
within the hands of decrepit gerontocrats like Pelosi, Lord Rothschild, Rupert Murdoch, Queen
Elisabeth etc, etc.
Enough of this rant... thank you Framarz. Long live those countries that have for decades
repelled the evil that would crush their freedom and socialism. May Russia find its way to
reintegrate socialism within its future.
by: steven t johnson @ 13 says "the Presidency is essentially unchecked: Article II and
amendment 12 clearly state
that no one can challenge the president.." <= I add "unless congress can find something
they themselves are all
guilty of, and are collectively willing to accept the risk that they themselves might be
removed for the same crime
for which the Congress might impeach the President .. from elected Office impeachment is
impossible.
It is this improbability of removing the President from office that makes the control of
the content allowed or
pushed on the public by the main stream media so important to the stability of the government
and the ability of
the President to lead.
The only way a President can be impeached is to do to the President what the Lenin and
Tolstoy Bolshevik regime
change team accomplished to bring down the Czar of Russia. The media began its attacks on
Christian Czar led
Russia in 1875 by 1919 if the Czar had said it was raining outside the entire nation of
Russia wanting to know if
it were raining would go outside to see for themselves.
Tolstoy, a public hero, blamed the Czar for the problems caused by a pandemic and a famine
of 1891. The peasants
of Russia were trained by media content to distrust any and everything the Czar or any member
of his staff said or
did. Propaganda said there was evil behind every act of the Czar. Tolstoy's famous propaganda
undermined the
Christian faith held by millions of people.
"The Minister for the Interior told the Emperor Czar that Tolstoy's letter to the English
press 'must be considered
tantamount to a most shocking revolutionary proclamation': not a judgement that can often
have been made of a letter
to The Daily Telegraph. Czar Alexander III began to believe that it was all part of an
English plot and the Moscow
Gazette, which was fed from the Government, denounced Tolstoy's letters as 'frank propaganda
for the overthrow of
the whole social and economic structure of the world'." see destroys
Christain Russian government
Norecovery @ 22 says and I have added to what he said to make this list.
1. "The .. criminals have ..take[n] over foreign policy in the U.S.,
these criminals you are talking about are not part of the government, they are private
persons and corporations.
Allow me to remind you that Article II of the Constitution of the USA only concerns two
persons, The President
and the VP.. to them all power to act domestic and foreign is given, Congress has no power
that it cannot get
into law, and no power to govern the office of the President and that has been true since the
original constitution
was ratified in 1788. To conduct war around the world, it is necessary only to won the
president.
2. leveraging money power .. the oligarch network employees highly motivated highly-paid
promoters to force President control onto the world.
3. The Oligarch and their corporations control Congress, Intelligence Agencies, and the
content that MSM presents...
4. the MSM distributed content expresses total censorship as does Google, and social
media
5. Corona virus is bio-warfare designed to undermine small-scale economies and to
establish Oligarch autonomy
6. Using rule of law (generated by nation state power) oligarch owned corporations own all
non taxable property (copyrights and patents) and the right to use all technology (copyright
and patents).
7. Worldwide compliance is the goal of the oligarch. owning the nation state allows
military, financial, and media to be used to crush dissent and to extract wealth.
8. The pharma-promoted questionable gene editing vaccinations are questionable at
best.
9. Humanity is witnessing a worldwide COUPS, UBER-Fascism that exceeds all historical
examples.
10. WWI was a war to take control of the Ottoman owned oil rich land and to tame German
competitive strength.
11. Hilter return Germany to its former power, so WWII was to take German competition
completely out of the equation.
12. The wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, are about pipeline and
control of oil production, transport and profit
13. the wars in Belarus, Ukraine, Modldova, Bulgaria Romania, Hunary, Slovakia Cezech
Republic Poland are about getting Western Europe access into Russia.
14. Last week the House passed a bill designed to deny the president any authority to
reduce the US troops in Foreign land.
so your question at norecovery @ 22 will it succeed is relevant. I don't think it will, I
was told the Governor of Florida
has refused to take the vaccine, word is getting around; people everywhere in USA governed
America, in UK governed
Britain, in Republic of France governed France ( riots every weekend for over two years) ,
and Zionist governed
Israel (riots all over the place all of the time).. everyone is skeptical of the nation state
system.
I think the take over would have succeeded if the Oligarchs had not tried to force a
vaccination on people that
genetic engineers (changes the way their body works) the bodies those vaccinated were born
with.
Snake @ 36
You must have spent a lot of time and consideration on that far reaching summary !
That's MOA at its very best !!
I could only add -- - the disfunctional mindset that blights America right now is having an
immediate impact on all corners of the world.
I see it even in my tiny peaceful backwater.
If they create a fascist monster unleash it on the world -- it will consume everything and
everyone in its path.
Whithin a decade.
Sir,
Pretty sure you're trolling us a little with this post. That said, it is 2020.
I am 100% convinced that covid is a political conspiracy based on personal knowledge and
other info. Tonight Tucker Carlson reports that blood samples taken in early Jan 2020 tested
positive for covid - all of the samples. In other countries there is evidence of covid in the
population going back to Fall 2019; yet no overwhelmed hospitals and spiking death counts
from those early months. The internet fact checkers are clearly arrayed against information
seekers and forcing conformity to the state's message.
Clearly there was malfeasance in the election as well as a general Charlie Foxtrot created
by implementing mail in voting without sufficient time and resources for infrastructure
development; a no brainer that everyone should have foreseen and avoided - except for the
covid hysteria.
We saw the the Russia collusion hoax, Steele Dossier nonsense, idiotic impeachment and
slandering filthy lie campaign against of Justice Kavanaugh.
The list goes on. However, it stretches my credulity that the US military (Army SOF unit?)
would be shooting it out with the CIA in Germany and that Haskel would be there to be wounded
in the action; or was arrested and whisked off to some secret detention facility.
Would you please consider sharing what you really think?
Vaccine against coronaviruses is a very tricky business as the virus tend to mutate with
time. Still it looks like Russian found some nw avenue to tackle this problem which might be more
efficient then alternatives.
Western reporters to not like to correct their own false reporting. They rather reinforce it
as much as possible. Only when overwhelmed by the facts will they silently admit that they were
wrong in the first place. Here is a prime example of how that's done.
In mid-August we exposed how 'western' media lied about the approval for phase-3 testing of
the Russian Sputnik vaccine against Covid-19. They said that Russia claimed the vaccine was
ready to go population wide. That never was the case.
Russia has not approved a vaccine against Covid-19 and it is not skipping large-scale
clinical trials. The Russia regulator gave a preliminary approval for a vaccine candidate to
start the large-scale clinical trial. [...]
Science Magazine is one of the few media who
got it right : ...
One of the false reports we pointed out was by the New York Times Moscow
correspondent Andrew E. Kramer:
Russia has become the first country in the world to approve a vaccine for the coronavirus,
President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Tuesday, though global health authorities say the
vaccine has yet to complete critical, late-stage clinical trials to determine its safety and
effectiveness.
...
By skipping large-scale clinical trials, the Russian dash for a vaccine has raised widespread
concern that it is circumventing vital steps -- and potentially endangering people -- in
order to score global propaganda points.
Russia had, as we and Science Magazine reported, never the intent to skip
large-scale clinical trials. Kramer made that up.
In new report today Kramer reinforces his previous false and disproven claims to lament
about an alleged slow distribution of the Sputnik vaccine in Russia:
More than a month after becoming the first country to approve a coronavirus vaccine, Russia
has yet to administer it to a large population outside a clinical trial, health officials and
outside experts say.
The approval, which came with much fanfare, occurred before Russia had tested the vaccine
in late-stage trials for possible side effects and for its disease-fighting ability. It was
seen as a political gesture by President Vladimir V. Putin to assert victory in the global
race for a vaccine.
It is not clear whether the slow start to the vaccination campaign is a result of limited
production capacity or second thoughts about inoculating the population with an unproven
product.
The Times author reinforces his own lie that Russia had declared its vaccine ready
for population wide application. It had never done that. The official registration of the
vaccine by the relevant authorities was only a necessary precondition to start the large scale
phase-3 testing of the vaccine. There never was a Russian intent to distribute the vaccine to a
large population without phase-3 testing.
In the bottom third of his long piece Kramer comes near to admitting that. There he
describes that the Sputnik phase-3 testing is now ongoing. That contradicts all of his previous
reporting on the issues though he himself never says that. But even now he is getting the
details wrong:
The trial in Russia began on Sept. 9, and Russian officials have said they expect early
results before the end of the year, though the Gamaleya Institute, the scientific body that
developed the vaccine, has scheduled the trial to continue until May.
That timeline is similar to the testing schedules announced by the three pharmaceutical
companies testing potential vaccines in the United States, AstraZeneca, Moderna and
Pfizer.
...
The Russian late-stage, or Phase 3, clinical trial is being carried out entirely in Moscow,
where 30,000 people will receive the vaccine and 10,000 will get a placebo.
Yevgenia Zubova, a spokeswoman for the Moscow city health department, said in an interview
that the vaccine was available only to trial participants.
Those last two paragraphs, which completely debunk Kramer's original reporting, should have
been at the very top of the piece. They are buried down in paragraph 23 and 24 of a 29
paragraphs story that starts out with an epic repeat of the previously made false claims.
Post-registration clinical trials involving more than 40,000 people in Russia will be
launched in a week starting from August, 24. A number of countries, such as UAE, Saudi
Arabia, Philippines and possibly India or Brazil will join the clinical trials of Sputnik V
locally. [...] Mass production of the vaccine is expected to start in September 2020.
That testing of Sputnik V will also happen outside of Moscow has been confirmed
by recent reports :
Russia's sovereign wealth fund will supply 100 million doses of its potential coronavirus
vaccine to Indian drug company Dr Reddy's Laboratories, the fund said on Wednesday, as Moscow
speeds up plans to distribute its shot abroad.
...
Dr Reddy's, one of India's top pharmaceutical companies, will carry out Phase III clinical
trials of Sputnik-V in India, RDIF said.
It is not Russia that is fudging the testing of its vaccine. It is the Trump administration
that is
planning to do so out of political reasons:
We have the protocols. Now we know how there will very likely be an Emergency Use Approval
(EUA) for a vaccine prior to November 3. The company and political motivations are fully
aligned.
In contrast to the U.S. the Russian testing of its Sputnik vaccine will be -as usual- of
high integrity and will strictly follow the protocols such trials are supposed to follow. In
paragraph 29, the very last one in today's NYT story, the author at last admits as
much :
[W]hen medicines are tested, Russia has an exceptionally good track record on managing
clinical trials , according to a database of U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspections of
clinical trials around the world. The F.D.A. found a lower percentage of trials with problems
in Russia than in any other European country or the United States.
If I get the chance to chose a vaccine for myself I will rather take the one which was
developed by a highly qualified state financed research institution and approved in Russia than
one developed by some profit oriented pharmaceutic conglomerate that is in cahoots with a
politicized regulator under the Trump administration.
Posted by b on September 20, 2020 at 12:12 UTC |
Permalink
If I get the chance to chose a vaccine for myself I will rather take the one which was
developed by a highly qualified state financed research institution and approved in Russia
than one developed by some profit oriented pharmaceutic conglomerate that is in cahoots
with a politicized regulator under the Trump administration.
To top it off, Gamaleya's vaccine simply has the better science behind it. It uses two
human adenoviruses, in opposition to the single chimpanzee adenovirus used by the AstraZeneca
one (the Chinese one also uses only one adenovirus, but I don't remember if it is human or
chimpanzee).
No other laboratory in the world is using Gamaleya's technology - which it already
dominates. Two American laboratories (Moderna and one more that I forgot the name) are
testing the untried and dangerous mRNA technology. It is very unlikely those two mRNA
vaccines will ever come out to the public; those two labs probably just cashed in their USD 2
billion checks they received from the USG.
This gives force to my original hypothesis: the Anglo-Saxon laboratories are exploiting
exotic technologies for their vaccines because they want something the can patent, thus
charging astronomical prices to the national governments and thus emerge from this pandemic
even richer.
--//--
Speaking of AstraZeneca (Oxford), it released its blueprints yesterday after "public
pressure":
The USG is, behind the scenes (I already posted the link here in the open thread),
extremely worried about this vaccine.
AstraZeneca will try to get what it can get, but the fact is it's game over for them. The
thing here is that the Gamaleya alternative is better and if the USA (where the vaccine
makers will really make money) wants to get political, it will simply opt for one of the many
American vaccines that will come out - ready or not, satisfactory or not - next year. As a
British vaccine, AstraZeneca-Oxford will, at best, have to do with the British market, which
is very tiny for a big pharmaceutical company.
It is better if they just cancel the trials and abandon production.
If I had money I'd fly to Russia for their vaccine. They made theirs for the people and in
Amerika we make it for profits and protect the makes from lawsuits.
To be frank, at this point, ironically, it's Big Pharma's own self-interest that might help
us to counter Trump's lunacy. There are enough anti-vaxxers around for them not to want a
screwed up vaccine and a big scandal that would only comfort the vaxxers and sow mistrust
among the population. They need people to assume vaccines are well done and mostly harmless
if they want to keep making profit with them. Trump is only interested in a victory in the
next few weeks, Pharma business is interested in making profits for the next decades.
That's quite a damning indictment of our Western system, but then 2020 is a milestone, the
threshold beyond which it won't be possible to consider the Western liberal capitalistic
system as the superior one, if not the best one possible - quite the opposite.
The Kramer reporting is highly unusual. Normally the important information should be in the
third paragraph from the end and now it's in the sixth and seventh last.
Anyway, while I agree that this vaccine should be treated as an entirely legitimate effort
I want to add:
- phase 1/2 testing did appear a too lightweight and the article on it in the Lancet has been
criticized by russian scientists (
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/09/08/leading-scientists-question-highly-improbable-russian-vaccine-results-published-in-lancet-a71384).
- one family of vaccines can be more controversial and experimental than another and the
judgement of the testers can take this in account when considering shortcuts.
- One should distinguish what the makers of the vaccine claim with the political
(exaggerated) statements from Putin about it .
- The statements on testing on the Sputnikvaccine have changed over time. In the beginning it
said 2000 people in Russia and it listed 4 more countries(UAE, KSA, Brazil,Mexico). That was
insufficient. Several of these countries have been omitted since, and others have been added.
One can say that the intent to do decent testing was always there but the confirmed planning
was not.
- rollout to large population was impossible anyway at an early stage because the production
capacity was limited.
Kramer is not wrong, he simply lies. In the Relotius media this is standard practice when
covering politically sensitive topics, combined with omissions.
Of course, many well-researched and truthful articles are published in the nyt, faz, nzz etc.
That is exactly what makes these media so refined and what they base their claim to be
quality media on. One lies and distort as little and as targeted as possible.
The Europena and Australian vassals of the USA would not be given a choice to choose the more
authetic option of the vaccine. But Israel would probably opt for the Russian version without
consequence. It's over for the West!
Nobody is saying the Gamaleya vaccine will be the second coming of the polio vaccine.
Whichever COVID-19 vaccine comes out will inevitably be imperfect (in relation to the already
tested and tried vaccines everybody takes nowadays).
Your worries are all legitimate. Indeed, Gamaleya publicly admitted phases 1 and 2 of its
trials has small samples of subjects.
However, you also have to take into account that the science is solid (two human
adenoviruses, a tested and tried technology) and that Gamaleya is the center of excellence in
adenovirus vaccine technology. That's why - and not because it is Russian - we can trust
Gamaleya's vaccine is, given the circumstances (pandemic), reliable. The fact Gamaleya
already dominated the adenovirus technology also explains why it was the first laboratory to
come out with a solution - it simply used a tested and tried method it already dominated,
while the other pharmaceuticals are basically having to relearn how to develop a vaccine
and/or are adventuring in uncharted territory because they want something they can
patent.
So yes, we can search and find defects in Gamaleya's trials - but the strongest argument
in its favor is not the trials, it's the solid science and technology behind it.
Vk and the wabbit - right on. And Thanks to you, B, for this clear and straightforwardly
informative piece (as usual).
Is it any surprise that the NYT uses the usual propaganda format of truth (when it accords
with the ruling elites perspective) and lies (when "reporting on" what is happening in those
"bad hat" countries)? And might I add that NPR and the BBC World Service do exactly the same
thing, boosting the US-UK-NATO worldview (which equals the western
corporate-captitalist-imperialist, oh so exceptional, ruling elites world position) while
denigrating Russia, China, Iran (and now Lukashenko - indeed the Beeb refuses to pronounce
his name properly, always reducing it to the feminine form, and believe me, as born and
raised Brit, that's deliberate) via lies, lies and more lies. And via those weasely words:
"likely," "Highly likely" and so on and on ....
All that this latest vaccine competition (western) will produce is more anti-vaxxers. And
this time round, sensibly so.
Tuyzefot (5): it is common for the NYT to lead with propaganda and bury the facts at the end
of the article.
I noticed it decades ago in articles covering Palestine. I learned to skip whatever was
printed on the front page and immediately jump to the final five paragraphs found deep within
the paper. I guess they print the facts at all there only as a bizarre way of covering their
asses in a feeble attempt at integrity.
The vaccine uses a unique two-vector human adenovirus technology which no-one else in
the world currently has for COVID-19.
[...]
On the surface the Sputnik V trial with 76 participants seems smaller in size compared
to 1,077 people that, for example, AstraZeneca had in its Phase 1-2 studies. However,
the design of the Sputnik V trial was much more efficient and based on better
assumptions.
[...]
The post-registration studies involving more than 40,000 people started in Russia on
August 26, before AstraZeneca has started its Phase 3 trial in the U.S. with 30,000
participants. Clinical trials in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Philippines,
India and Brazil will begin this month. The preliminary results of the Phase 3 trial will
be published in October-November 2020.
[...]
Q.: Why has the Sputnik V vaccine already become eligible for emergency use
registration?
Because of the very positive results of the Phase 1-2 trials and because the human
adenoviral vector-based delivery platform has been proven the safest vaccine delivery
platform over decades including through 75 international scientific publications and in
more than 250 clinical trials.
[...]
Some other companies are using human adenoviral vector-based platforms for their
COVID-19 vaccines. For example, Johnson & Johnson uses only Ad26 vector and China's
CanSino only Ad5 while Sputnik V uses both of these vectors. The work of Johnson &
Johnson and CanSino not only validates the Russian approach but also shows Sputnik V's
advantage as studies have demonstrated that two different vectors produce better
results than one.
[...]
The monkey adenovirus and mRNA vaccines have never been used and approved before and
their research is lagging the proven human adenoviral vector-based platform by at least 20
years. However, their developers have already secured supply contracts worth billions of
dollars from Western governments and may potentially apply for fast-track registration --
while receiving full indemnity at the same time.
At the end of the Q&A, Dmitriev counters his Western colleagues:
Question 1: Are there any long-term studies of mRNA and monkey adenovirus vector-based
technologies for carcinogenic effects and impact on fertility? (Hint: there are none)
Question 2: Could their absence be the reason why some of the leading pharmaceutical
firms making COVID-19 vaccines based on these technologies pushed the countries buying
their vaccines for full indemnification from lawsuits if something goes wrong?
Question 3: Why is Western media not reporting a lack of long term studies for mRNA and
monkey adenoviral vector-based vaccines?
The constant Russia bashing is a disconnect from the truth and the real world.
It is annoying to wade through.
Far more important, it is crippling for a nation if its leadership actually does
disconnect from reality and believe its own fantasy.
Disconnect from reality, belief in convenient fantasy, is exactly how the Democrats went
from losing with Hillary to running again with Hillary II, the same donors and advisers and
influence peddlers pushing the same right wing triangulation by the Democratic Party.
Maybe they can squeak out a win this time. It should not be close.
Far more important, there are things that need doing, things that would win like health
care for all, that they simply won't offer or run on. We are not going to get from them what
we need, we know that, and that is why they again have a squeaker election even against a
joke like Trump.
Perfect example of the free and unfettered press at work. What do you mean we're just a
propaganda rag? See, right down at the bottom, the bit you didn't bother to read down to,
right next to the denture ad, we told the truth. So there! Balanced and accurate reporting!
Trump's "national security" state has managed to kill 200000 by him the autocrat in chief to
come out and tell the truth as he admitted so to Woodward. This fucking American national
security phobia is costing American lives more than all past 70 years of national security
wars.
@JohnH 13 , it was hm, a joke. There is indeed rule of thumb that you have to look fore the
third to last paragraph. I upgraded it into something of a law, which is then violated in
this case.
@vk 10, I wouldn't call it my worries, just that I think B. posted a version which was too
simple and rosy. In the meantime I saw your post 14 which I roughly expected but hadn't read
about yet.
Andrew Kramer's reporting on the Sputnik V vaccine is deliberately written to discredit the
Russians and anything and everything they do, which includes the way they conduct scientific
and medical research (because it's govt-funded, not funded by global pharmaceutical
corporations) and the way they run their healthcare system (not privatised).
First, Kramer says the Kremlin approved the vaccine: this is to set up Moscow and Putin in
particular as rash, so that the supposed "roll-out" of the vaccine can be (secondly)
portrayed as inefficient.
Kramer knows he is lying which is why his piece is long (he knows most NYT readers are
time-poor and want the celebrity news and baseball results) and the most important
information is squeezed into the last two paragraphs of his article.
I tried linking to that Moscow Times article at your link and either I hit a dead end or
the newspaper removed the article, which does not surprise me since that newspaper is as
credible as The New York Times. It used to be given away f o r free in Moscow but I believe
it now exists only as an online paper.
@Jen, you have to remove the last two characters ').' because I omitted a space. The article
in the moscow times is ok and not too alarming. It is also not discrediting the lancet
article. Just raising concerns.
I will go back to an approach that served me well with regard to the Iraq WMD story. I have
no way of evaluating Yan's claims, but there are a fair number of people and organizations that
do have the resources to evaluate. I rejected WMD claims in 2003 simply because none of the
other players with relevant competence acted in ways that indicated serious concern. What is
Yan Li-meng's evidence that others do not have? This issue of origin has to have been pursued
by at least a couple dozen organizations with the necessary competence. None of those has made
any such claims. That doesn't mean that the claims are false. But if the claims are true, then
there must be very strong motives for keeping silent. So what would be the common interest
between, say, the intelligence agencies of Germany and those of India?
Without such evidence this turns into a she-said-he-said story. Now that does not mean that
it is wrong. Suppression and intimidation would not be out of character for the Chinese
government. But again the world is loaded with very paranoid people who are capable of
evaluating that. And who are pretty much immune to Chinese intimidation. They don't have to
face off against the Chinese state. There are plenty of more roundabout ways to get the word
out if you want to do so and have government-level resources to put into the effort.
The obvious alternative to publication of the logic for detecting human agency is to engage
in simple human retaliation. Are the Chinese the only ones capable of such producing such a
catastrophe? Pretty unlikely. Would such a counterstroke catch the Chinese by surprise? Again
unlikely if they are aware of having stepped over the line. The measures they are taking
against virus outbreaks are more extreme than what western countries have imposed, but not
(yet) indicating panic. If somebody let some 1918 swine flu loose in Shanghai, would their
measures be able to counter it? (Five times as contagious as what we seeing in covid-19.)
Red State raises additional skepticism about this "scientist's interview", as well as the
oddities of the very original days of reporting about the Chinese t "flu" coming out of
China. Remembering also one of the very first ways we even started hearing about this "new
Chinese virus" in the US were reports about the Great Toilet Paper panic, even though people
here did not know why they were supposed to be hoarding it. https://www.redstate.com/michael_thau/2020/09/17/920958/
Best I could trace was to an earlier Australian toilet paper panic they claimed was hawked
by Yahoo News in Australia, and then spread via social media to the US. And our Great Toilet
Paper Hoax began in earnest here too. China was allegedly the source for all Australian TP,
so it was claimed with so many people sick in China with this "flu" there would be no more
toilet paper Down Under for their down unders.
But the US did not rely on China for TP, so the TP panic was not warrented to be set in
motion here. But it did capture attention and did trigger panic before we even knew what to
be afraid of. Greasing the skids in some manipulative way could be one jaundiced
conclusion.
Hope someone with better skills can really trace the origins of the Great Toilet Paper
Hoax, because it did wipe us out in the US. No sheet. Was that the covid panic transmission
route; and not really on a flight from Wuhan to Seattle?
No - but she may be another in a long line of useful idiots.
"Independent fact checkers?" 25 year old Humanities and Social Sciences grads working
for Facebook? Independent of what? Independent of their mommies and daddies at long
last?
Countervailing research goes light-years beyond "Independent fact checkers?".
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from nature.com a report titled:
The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and
SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with
mild symptoms6. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from
comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the
SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly
show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated
virus.
The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and
transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not
a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other
theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2
features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses
in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is
plausible.
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and
Hygiene a report titled:
The Origin of COVID-19 and Why It Matters
In 2007, scientists studying coronaviruses warned: "The presence of a large
reservoir of SARS-CoV–like viruses in horseshoe bats is a time bomb. The possibility of
the re-emergence of SARS and other novel viruses should not be ignored."1
Studying animal viruses that have previously spilled over into humans provides clues
about host-switching determinants. A well-understood example is influenza virus emergence
into humans and other mammals.2 Human pandemic and seasonal influenza viruses arise from
enzootic viruses of wild waterfowl and shore birds. From within this natural reservoir, the
1918 pandemic "founder" virus somehow host-switched into humans. We know this from genetic
studies comparing avian viruses, the 1918 virus, and its descendants, which have caused three
subsequent pandemics, as well as annual seasonal influenza in each of the 102 years since
1918. Similarly, other avian influenza viruses have host-switched into horses, dogs, pigs,
seals, and other vertebrates, with as yet unknown pandemic potential.2,10,11 Although some
molecular host-switching events remain unobserved, phylogenetic analyses of influenza viruses
allow us to readily characterize evolution and host-switching as it occurs in
nature.2
It should be clarified that theories about a hypothetical man-made origin of
SARS-CoV-2 have been thoroughly discredited by multiple coronavirus experts.21,28,29
SARS-CoV-2 contains neither the genetic fingerprints of any of the reverse genetics systems
that have been used to engineer coronaviruses nor does it contain genetic sequences that
would have been "forward engineered" from preexisting viruses, including the genetically
closest sarbecoviruses. That is, SARS-CoV-2 is unlike any previously identified coronavirus
from which it could have been engineered. Moreover, the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain,
which has affinity for cells of various mammals, binds to human ACE2 receptors via a novel
mechanism.
Engineering such a virus would have required 1) published or otherwise available
scientific knowledge that did not exist until after COVID-19 recognition; 2) a failure to
follow obvious engineering pathways, resulting in an imperfectly constructed virus; and 3) an
ability to genetically engineer a new virus without leaving fingerprints of the engineering.
Furthermore, the 12 amino acid furin-cleavage site insertion between the SARS-CoV-2 spike
protein's S1 and S2 domains, which some have alleged to be a sign of genetic engineering, is
found in other bat and human coronaviruses in nature, probably arising via naturally
occurring recombination.24
It is also highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a laboratory by
accident because no laboratory had the virus nor did its genetic sequence exist in any
sequence database before its initial GenBank deposition (early January 2020). China's
laboratory safety practices, policies, training, and engineering are equivalent to those of
the United States and other developed countries,32 making viral "escape" extremely unlikely,
and of course impossible without a viral isolate present. SARS-CoV-2 shares genetic
properties with many other sarbecoviruses, lies fully within their genetic cluster, and is
thus a virus that emerged naturally.
Italicized/bold text was excerpted from nature.com a report titled:
Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the
COVID-19 pandemic
There are outstanding evolutionary questions on the recent emergence of human
coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 including the role of reservoir species, the role of recombination and
its time of divergence from animal viruses. We find that the sarbecoviruses -- the viral
subgenus containing SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 -- undergo frequent recombination and exhibit
spatially structured genetic diversity on a regional scale in China. SARS-CoV-2 itself is not
a recombinant of any sarbecoviruses detected to date, and its receptor-binding motif,
important for specificity to human ACE2 receptors, appears to be an ancestral trait shared
with bat viruses and not one acquired recently via recombination. To employ phylogenetic
dating methods, recombinant regions of a 68-genome sarbecovirus alignment were removed with
three independent methods. Bayesian evolutionary rate and divergence date estimates were
shown to be consistent for these three approaches and for two different prior specifications
of evolutionary rates based on HCoV-OC43 and MERS-CoV. Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2
and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density
(HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009),
indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats
for decades.
With horseshoe bats currently the most plausible origin of SARS-CoV-2, it is
important to consider that sarbecoviruses circulate in a variety of horseshoe bat species
with widely overlapping species ranges57. Nevertheless, the viral population is largely
spatially structured according to provinces in the south and southeast on one lineage, and
provinces in the centre, east and northeast on another (Fig. 3). This boundary appears to be
rarely crossed. Two exceptions can be seen in the relatively close relationship of Hong Kong
viruses to those from Zhejiang Province (with two of the latter, CoVZC45 and CoVZXC21,
identified as recombinants) and a recombinant virus from Sichuan for which part of the genome
(region B of SC2018 in Fig. 3) clusters with viruses from provinces in the centre,
east and northeast of China. SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 are also exceptions because they were
sampled from Hubei and Yunnan, respectively.
It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been
circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the
SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist
properties -- with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells -- that
facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again. Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD
was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to
SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses.
Furthermore, the other key feature thought to be instrumental in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to
infect humans -- a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the S protein -- has not yet
been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
As if on cue Li-Meng Yan appears like manna from heaven aiding/abetting in foisting
forth the current dominant Western government/media narrative that China is bad.
"... Before this new outbreak, Beijing had been virus-free for nearly 60 days, meaning there were no local viruses and that this new pathogen was definitely an import (or an American export). On June 19, China's CDC experts, after intensive investigations of the Xinfadi market, announced what they termed "a groundbreaking virus tracing discovery", which was that the strain of the new virus in Beijing was the same as that in much of Europe – but much older than those in Europe, and "had been around for quite some time" – and that can mean only that it came from the US because that was the source of all the original varieties many months ago. [4] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192146.shtml ..."
"... For a long time, Russia had only a few infections, rising steadily by only five or ten per day, then suddenly it exploded, rising by 5,000, then 10,000 and 20,000 per day. Virus outbreaks don't normally manifest that way. The normal process upon an outbreak is a rapid acceleration in the number of infections until it peaks, as happened with all other countries. ..."
"... And on June 20, 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) revealed that they had discovered that COVID-19 was present in water samples dating back to mid-December of 2019 ..."
"... And it wasn't only Italy. Dutch researchers discovered COVID-19 RNA in a wastewater plant in the Utrecht, Netherlands, city of Amersfoort. French scientists detected "high concentrations" of COVID-19 RNA in samples of sewage water from greater Paris that were obtained before Paris first recorded any deaths. ..."
"... The Irish Mirror reported on June 19 that "many countries are beginning to use wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease", scientists claiming these detections were "consistent with evidence emerging in other countries" that COVID-19 was circulating around the world long before China reported its first cases ..."
"... Covid's here to stay – irrespective of the fact that it has never and will never satisfy Koch's Postulates. Why? Two reasons. First, because it has proved itself to be a highly effective means of controlling first world populations. Second, because now that it's been rolled out, it'll be impossible to roll it back without waking up the normies. You don't turn off the gas before the frog's been boiled. ..."
"... The Chinese analyzed the new outbreak and determined the genome was that of a strain that existed only in the US & Europe, but not heretofore in China. The Chinese have identified many different strains of this virus, seven or more. ..."
"... This covid19 with its growing number of strains seems likely to have escaped from a lab and it is most probably a product of US ingenuity, with cleverly engineered gain of function, but to leap to the conclusion that the US has deployed this bioweapon against China and Russia goes too far. Why would the US target its own population in the process? ..."
From the date of the initial outbreak in Wuhan I watched carefully on a daily basis the
dispersion and progression of the coronavirus in China and then abroad, collecting as much data
as were available on each location. By late May of 2020, China had been infection-free for many
weeks, the concern turning to the identification and quarantine of imported cases. At the same
time, the US became once again 'the leader of the world', this time in virus infections and
deaths, producing 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and around 1,000 deaths per day. At the time,
American hostility toward China's success in stopping the virus was palpable, with many nasty
media articles and White House accusations about China's false statistics and blaming China for
"spreading the virus" to the US. CNN stated, "Chinese state media has repeatedly touted
China's effective measures in containing the virus as the number of infections and deaths
surged abroad, contrasting its success with the failures of Western governments, especially the
United States." [1]
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-...x.html Clearly there was much
surprise and bitterness at China's success and America's failure, this coated in a sticky layer
of resentment based partly on a justified suspicion that the Chinese were not overly distressed
at the Americans enjoying the fruits of their own labor.
But even then I had a sense of an apparition, a version of Dickens' 'ghost of coronavirus
past', accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling the Americans were sufficiently bitter (and
vicious) to deny the Chinese their apparently easy victory. My fear was that the Americans
would try to reseed China as they did Russia, and it would seem my fears were not unjustified.
The new virus that broke out at the Xinfadi market in Beijing was a different strain than any
previously existing in China, one that existed only in the US and Europe and could only have
been brought in from the outside. And once again at a seafood market with no identifiable
patient zero, no clear epidemiology (source and distribution) of a virus that did not exist in
China. It almost had to be deliberately seeded, the odds against being infinitesimally
small.
In terms of what I am calling COVID-20 (to differentiate it from the initial outbreak),
China may have been fortunate to detect and corral this new pathogen before it could spread.
The outbreak did expand to three other provinces but in single digits and the medical
authorities have taken extreme action to prevent further spread since this variety –
which again did not exist in China and had to be seeded from another country, appears to be
much more contagious than the original COVID-19. [2]
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1191598.shtml In response, Beijing has locked down
everything and sent a group of experts to guide the fight against this new potential epidemic,
so far with good success. Nucleic acid testing has been initiated on a massive scale, already
many millions of people tested, and all those in contact with the Xinfadi market being in
quarantine. Many residential compounds in the city strictly prohibit anyone from entering or
leaving, with residents having their temperatures checked and reported on a daily basis, and
their food and daily necessities delivered. [3]
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-beij...x.html
Before this new outbreak, Beijing had been virus-free for nearly 60 days, meaning there were
no local viruses and that this new pathogen was definitely an import (or an American export).
On June 19, China's CDC experts, after intensive investigations of the Xinfadi market,
announced what they termed "a groundbreaking virus tracing discovery", which was that the
strain of the new virus in Beijing was the same as that in much of Europe – but much
older than those in Europe, and "had been around for quite some time" – and that can mean
only that it came from the US because that was the source of all the original varieties many
months ago. [4]
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192146.shtml
The investigators said they obtained so many positive samples that the entire market was
"severely contaminated by the virus", but also that no one should form the conclusion that the
market was the origin merely because the outbreak took place there. More importantly, they also
said "Beijing's outbreak gives us the opportunity to re-examine our previous speculation that
the virus originated from wildlife", because unlike Wuhan, "the possibility of wildlife causing
Beijing's latest outbreak is slim." Their conclusion was that "an infected individual or object
contaminated with the virus entered the wet market, and the market only gave it an environment
to multiply". [3]
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-beij...x.html The authorities have already
produced the genome sequence and are now establishing when and how the virus was likely
imported into China, and how long was the transmission chain. There is no question this
pathogen was brought into China "by people", the question being the identity of those people
and their purpose. [5]
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202006/15/WS5ee6b33d...9.html And, what better way to "teach
those smug Chinese a lesson" and attempt to derail China's rapid economic recovery.
Russia Re-seeded
There is something equally strange about the virus in Russia. For a long time, Russia had
only a few infections, rising steadily by only five or ten per day, then suddenly it exploded,
rising by 5,000, then 10,000 and 20,000 per day. Virus outbreaks don't normally manifest that
way. The normal process upon an outbreak is a rapid acceleration in the number of infections
until it peaks, as happened with all other countries.
But with Russia, the infections were
minor for a long time, steady at very low numbers, with all the indications of an unsuccessful
epidemic, and the Russian government took strict measures to control the spread. The US
government was clearly resentful at the failure of the virus to devastate Russia and the US
media bemoaned the fact that Russia's death rate was so low.
I would be very interested to see
the genome sequences from the first infections in January and February, and for those happening
in April and May. I haven't any definitive proof, but I am certain Russia, as China, was seeded
again with another variety for a second attempt.
Virus Distribution
But to return to our main point, it isn't necessary for us to determine the physical origin
of the virus. We know the virus originated in bats; that much is confirmed, but the more
important issue is the epidemiology, particularly the incidence and distribution. First of all,
for China and most other nations originally infected, there were so many multiple and
simultaneous sources that locating a patient zero was a hopeless task. Virus outbreaks, left to
their own natural devices, do not behave in this fashion, but begin with one person in a
tightly localised situation and provably spreading from that point. Equally distressing is that
we have the truly unprecedented "two waves" of worldwide infections. For this, let's review my
observations from an earlier article [6] COVID-19 – Two
Major 'Waves' of Global Infection;
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/05/covid-19-two-...l.html and take a quick look at
those two waves of infections that circled the globe.
The First Wave simultaneously infected 25 nations within a few days centered on January 25.
One month later, the Second Wave simultaneously infected 85 nations within a few days centered
on February 25. A natural virus hasn't the ability to simultaneously (within three days) infect
85 different countries on all continents of the world. More peculiar is that these countries
were not all infected with the same variety of the virus, and that most reported simultaneous
outbreaks in multiple locations. Considering the above information in light of the basics of
virus transmission, the only theory that fits all the known facts is that these waves resulted
from many people leaving Fort Detrick on the same day carrying a pail of different live
viruses, because those multiple varieties at the time existed only in the US. It could not
possibly have resulted from air travel because that timing would have been scattered. When 85
countries experience a virus outbreak on virtually the same day, this can happen only with
human assistance. The Americans have steadfastly refused to address this point.
Experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human
population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear
idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen
deliberately released, since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location
and one patient zero. But with COVID-19 (or COVID-20), not one country out of 200 has been able
to do this.
It should be firmly noted that this new infection in Beijing is not a "second wave" as
termed by the Western media. This is an entirely new and different infection by a new virus and
totally unrelated to anything prior, a strain of a new and different virus that was
deliberately carried to Beijing and flooded in the Xinfadi Market. This infection is not
related to COVID-19 but is the seeding of yet another biological pathogen in China, making that
now seven different biological attacks on China in two years. And China has suffered others
similar. One of the most notable was the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic –
and which was extinct for decades – but which suddenly appeared in 1977 in both China and
Russia causing a global pandemic, prompting immediate claims by the Americans that it "escaped
from a Chinese lab". But the only sensible explanation is that the H1N1 virus 'escaped' from
the Americans because there were persistent reports that the US military had found or saved
samples of the original 'Spanish Flu' virus and were attempting to re-activate it. There was
never a shred of evidence that either China or Russia had anything to do with this, and both
were taken entirely by surprise.
It is my view that the world needs to stop pretending that COVID-19 was an accident of
nature. Consider China's recent experience. In addition to SARS – which was indisputably
man-made, China has suffered repeated viral pandemics in the past two years. February 15, 2018:
H7N4 bird flu. June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu. August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu. May 24,
2019: massive infestation of armyworms. December, 2019: COVID-19. January, 2020: A "highly
pathogenic" strain of bird flu. June, 2020: China is hit with COVID-20. Are we to tell
ourselves it was merely a run of bad luck that China was the only nation in the world to be hit
repeatedly with so many different biological pathogens in such a short time? And merely more
'bad luck' that China became the only country in the world that was domestically virus-free and
was suddenly hit again with a foreign strain in another wet market? This assumption is too
ridiculous to bother refuting.
It is unfortunate that so much of our information today comes to us in a passive receptance
from the mass media because one result is the loss of our ability to examine information
critically and use our minds to assess the presentation. As an example, it was very clever for
the Americans to use a wet market as a distribution point for a virus and for the media to give
this point massive air time, because we instinctively associate such markets with at least a
possibility of germs and bacteria and thus passively accept the claims as true without the
necessary evidence and thus avoid using our brains as intended. Our assessment of wet markets
as unsanitary may be correct, but common germs and bacteria are a very different thing from a
coronavirus that makes its home in bats and has no business being in a vegetable market. It
isn't important for our purposes to decide if COVID-19 was created in a lab; the important
point is that a coronavirus has no means of transportation from bat caves in Sichuan to a
market in Wuhan, nor the ability to mutate itself in such a way as to be energetically
contagious to humans, and much less the conscious intelligence to choose China's largest
passenger transportation hub as the distribution point and the Eve of the Chinese New Year as
the best time to attack. For these, the coronavirus required a helping 'black hand'.
The Noose Tightens on the US
There is almost daily an increase in the volume of evidence that COVID-19 was circulating in
the US far earlier than admitted, and serving as incriminating proof that the CDC's deliberate
(and threatening) forbidding of testing was to bury this evidence. The most recent example is
headlines in the US media on June 21, 2020, stating, "Over 40 mysterious respiratory deaths in
California could dramatically rewrite narrative of COVID-19" in the US. [7]
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192389.shtml The LA Times reported on "a cluster
of mysterious respiratory deaths" beginning in December of 2019. The local news website
www.bakersfield.com stated this meant that COVID-19 was circulating in California "way
earlier than we knew". And let's not forget too quickly that Japanese tourists were infected in
Hawaii in September of 2019.
And on June 20, 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) revealed that they had
discovered that COVID-19 was present in water samples dating back to mid-December of 2019. The
results were confirmed by two separate labs that used two entirely different testing methods,
and also showed that environmental wastewater from Milan, Turin and Bologna returned positive
traces of the virus dating back to December if not earlier. Apparently, the RNA from COVID-19
does not readily dissolve or disintegrate in water and polymerase chain reaction testing allows
scientists to identify the RNA after many months. [8]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronaviru...23Q1J9 [9]
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/ita...5a35e3
And it wasn't only Italy. Dutch researchers discovered COVID-19 RNA in a wastewater plant in
the Utrecht, Netherlands, city of Amersfoort. French scientists detected "high concentrations"
of COVID-19 RNA in samples of sewage water from greater Paris that were obtained before Paris
first recorded any deaths.Sputnik News reported in May that a Paris hospital confirmed
it had treated Amirouche Hammar, the country's first COVID-19 patient, on December 27, 2019
– one month before France's first announcement of infections and four days before the WHO
China bureau was informed of a "pneumonia of unknown etiology" on December 31. [10]
https://sputniknews.com/europe/202006191079667103-sc...break/
The Irish Mirror reported on June 19 that "many countries are beginning to use
wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease", scientists claiming these detections
were "consistent with evidence emerging in other countries" that COVID-19 was circulating
around the world long before China reported its first cases, all of which would of necessity
have had to have originated in the US and transported around the world. It is now beginning to
appear that many countries were seeded at approximately the same time, perhaps in their water
distribution systems. Following these discoveries, the ISS told Reuters it intends to
launch a new study of the wastewater of Italian tourist resorts. I suspect other nations will
follow.
And it would seem the NYT, WSJ, WP, CNN, ABC, NBC, National Post, Globe & Mail ,
have no knowledge of this. The Chinese and Europeans know, but the Americans and Canadians
don't know because the owners of their major newspapers and TV networks don't want them to
know.
A Brief Update
If you look at the graph (courtesy of CNN ), you can see the European infection
pattern (in pink) and the American (in green). The Europeans followed China's protocols in
varying degrees, and thus with varying degrees of success. Europe's infections peaked at around
30,000 per day then descended to around 2,000 near the end of June, while the Americans, led by
a man who is living proof that democracy is the worst possible form of government, saw their
infections peak at the same level, slightly decrease, then revert to 30,000 infections and
around 1,000 deaths per day where they will now remain until the virus surges through the
entire population. Twenty-six states are already experiencing dramatic spikes reaching new
records each day, so Trump ordered the CDC to "stop testing" because it makes him look bad.
The next graphic is a list of the top ten nations for COVID-19 infections. Missing from this
picture is a comparison I want to make about leadership and competence, to say nothing of
intelligence. Shanghai is a city only two hours from Wuhan and, when the infections exploded,
had no warning and almost no time to prepare, but acted so quickly and decisively that the city
had only 26 infections and 7 deaths. Missing from the graphic is Canada, with a population very
similar to Shanghai, and who, with months to plan and prepare, had 101,000 infections and 8,400
deaths. Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau is also living proof of democracy's vast
failings.
The Americans elected a pathetic buffoon who lives in outer space, while the Canadians
elected a bullied child so painfully unintelligent and indecisive his wife would have to tell
him to call the fire department if his house were burning down. I would include here the
Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans, elected an arrogant sociopath who
said famously, "It's not my fault. What do you want me to do about it?"
In all three countries the leaderless pandemic results are the same, with infections and
deaths likely increasing until at least the end of the year. China, with a population of more
than 1.4 billion people, had about 80,000 infections and little more than 4,000 deaths, and
stopped the virus cold in about three months. But according to the NYT, WSJ, WP, and
Canada's terminally-obnoxious National Post , the "free-market capitalist" countries are
God's first choice while "socialist authoritarian" China should incur yet more sanctions for
all its mistakes.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior
executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export
business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case
studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is
currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be
contacted at: [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
This flu like outbreak in July '19 in VA that killed two and sent 18 to the hospital in a
nursing home in Springfield, VA, should be fully investigate, it could explain the origin of
the virus:
Springfield, VA, where this nursing home was located, is about an hour south east of Ft.
Detrick, the bioweapons lab that was shut down by CDC at around the same time after it failed
a safety inspection in June, 2019.
To think the evil geniuses that would create such nasty pathogens would not have a whole
panoply of similar bugs to release would seem naive. I suspect the future strains will only
become more virulent, thus insuring a very complacent and fearful populace for unlimited
vaccinating, microchipping and contact tracing, all to the PTB's delight and profits. Not to
mention the ease with which the American populace will have their anger, fears and
frustrations twisted into hatred for all things Chinese. How convenient!
What is currently amusing is watching how deftly the Chinese government is dealing with
these assaults, both biological and economic, and how impotent and visibly frustrated the US
powerbrokers are with the efficiency and effectiveness of the Chinese responses.
If the Chinese continue to effectively fend off the future attacks, whether they be
biological or financial/trade, one can expect that these same evil geniuses, having been
frustrated over and over, will only continue their escalations. Expect the anti-China
rhetoric from the West's political puppets and the MSM to reach fever pitch just before
things turn 'hot' in the new cold war against Chinese ascendancy. Whether it will eventually
(or inevitably) go nuclear is the real $64,000 question that leaves many of us concerned
observers awake at night ..
So what we have here, if we accept the basic discourse of this highly interesting article, is
therefore likely the following:
China got hit by various "flu weapons" and "livestock diseases" over the last twenty
years, to keep the "dirty commies" from "getting too uppity", but, not counting SARS, only
became capable of keeping an accurate tally of the different jabs and pokes over the last
five years.
At some point, the Chinese government decided that enough is enough. Their think-tanks
recommended the following strategy as the only feasible one: the next time they get seeded,
the instantly pounce on the new pathogen, and blow it out of all proportion, causing a) the
whole world to panic, and b) the whole world to start paying attention to the issue of new
and old pathogens floating around.
In this sense, the "it's just the flu bro" people are correct, meaning that this is not
really some apocalyptic plague that justifies shutting down the world. But on the other hand,
it was used by Beijing as an example to point out that this crap is happening, and that they
know it's happening, and that this game can't be played like this anymore.
In effect they "pulled a Trump". Through their bombastic overreaction, they forced the
whole world to notice and discuss the issue they wanted noticed and discussed.
So from now on, the whole world -- except the Anglospherical powers completely taken over
by the GloboHomo alliance of corporations, deep state, and baizuo (and where the heritage
white demographic replacement has gone farthest) -- will also be super careful about these
things, and evidence will begin to accumulate through this "forced crowd-sourcing".
authorities have taken extreme action to prevent further spread since this variety
– which again did not exist in China and had to be seeded from another country,
appears to be much more contagious than the original COVID-19.[2] In response
( )
Many residential compounds in the city strictly prohibit anyone from entering or leaving,
with residents having their temperatures checked and reported on a daily basis, and their
food and daily necessities delivered.[3]
So this is how the new shamdemic of COVID-20 will cement and perfect the destruction of
freedom across the world?
We will have discussion on fictious body counts and false statistics here at UR for ever more
with COVID-20, -21, -22 and so on?
This pattern makes sense, because the victory over the populace who have given up their
freedom to lead anything that can be called a life worth living is just to great to be
allowed to be ephimeral.
The total destruction of freedom only makes sense, if there is a follow up until all the
deluded hoaxers who believe that their is a life beyond feeling sick kill themselves. Then it
will be lockdowns and quarantines for ever more and families will have online celebrations
when the newborns will get their masks sealed on their seventh day on earth, before they are
handed over to the overlords.
As for this authorities conclusions: It should be known by now that when you interpret
bogus data, above all when you do so with bad intentions, you will find any conclusions that
suite your purpose. Of course, COVID-19 has been found in older samples, as by now the
testing has been so well established that they can find it anywhere. Next, they will find it
in eghiptian mumies.
This author is a management consultant. He has done missinterpreting statistics for a living
and should know how to reasonably sell bad advice.
Covid's here to stay – irrespective of the fact that it has never and will never
satisfy Koch's Postulates.
Why? Two reasons. First, because it has proved itself to be a highly effective means of
controlling first world populations. Second, because now that it's been rolled out, it'll be
impossible to roll it back without waking up the normies. You don't turn off the gas before
the frog's been boiled.
Ditto the assault on 'white privilege'. Like Covid, it's only going to get worse –
not better.
Ten citations, and three are from "The Global Times", one from "China Daily", and one is an
article penned by the author himself. Impressive scholarship, Mr Romanoff, very impressive
scholarship.
Virus outbreaks don't normally manifest that way. The normal process upon an outbreak is
a rapid acceleration in the number of infections until it peaks
Occams Razor. It's a hoax or else the virus is violating the laws of Nature.
I would include here the Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans,
elected an arrogant sociopath who said famously, "It's not my fault. What do you want me to
do about it?"
In Brazil, the Supreme Court has decided that governors don't have to obey the federal
government on local health policies. So, it really makes no difference whether the President
is Mother Theresa or Jason Voorhees. It's true that Bolsonaro tries once in a while to enact
some federal regulations, but he seems to fail every time. It's odd that you don't know that
fact, seeing as in the U.S. I hear things are quite similar. As for Brazilian governors, they
oddly don't get the same international flak as Bolsonaro does, despite many of them being
suspected of using the pandemic as an opportunity for stealing.
This kind of inexactitude immediately throws the rest of the article under heavy
suspicion. When people start spewing words like 'sociopath', it is clear to me that they have
an agenda.
It is unfortunate that so much of our information today comes to us in a passive
receptance from the mass media because one result is the loss of our ability to examine
information critically and use our minds to assess the presentation. As an example, it was
very clever for the Americans to use a wet market as a distribution point for a virus and
for the media to give this point massive air time, because we instinctively associate such
markets with at least a possibility of germs and bacteria and thus passively accept the
claims as true without the necessary evidence and thus avoid using our brains as
intended.
Rewrite: "it is unfortunate that alternative media distill their take on the news, based
on data fed into the public domain. As much as MSM do. Garbage in, garbage out. Sorting
garbage, no avail. This article is just another layer of meaningless deft. If any statement
here is true, it would be by accident.
In that, of course, it follows the enforcing of the media rule: keep a grasp on the
surplus population by manipulating the frequency and number of tainted information. All data
in the public domain are probably useless by now. All data on Covid are willfully
manipulated. The author of course knows this, and his dump is intentional. The immediate
reason, middle class making a living, book pushing, bread-writing, self-promotion, retirement
gig, no more. Summer months in the media year, another step-in. Jewish by hazard?
We know the virus originated in bats; that much is confirmed
then it'd only be fair for you to inform us of your alternate explanation, giving
convincing proof [assuming you'd have some?]
FYI there exists a bat-coronavirus genetic sequence RaTG13 which agrees with 96.2% of
Covid-19, and an even closer match in RmYN02 at 93.3% agreement. Thesis: That someone took
RaTG13 [see 1st and 3rd parts in image below; the RaTG13 spike is so far a 'best fit'] and
force-evolved it by infecting cultures of human cells in an evolution-enabling environment,
collecting any 'survivors' then repeating this process [a possible proof being the Covid-19
attack disabling victims' sense of smell, indicating 'force-evolving' in cultures of human
nerve cells]. In addition, I've seen suggested, that infecting animals with some
human-similar traits [here, ferrets with ACE2, say] could have evolved the virus to attack
via ACE2 in humans. Then, there's the *unique* inclusion of RPPA in the Covid-19 spike, both
enabling infection and that with greatly enhanced pathogenicity [compared to SARS-1, say].
rgds PS An interesting extension to some ideas in the article, is that since the virus
infections have gone global, IF it was human-made [my best tip] THEN whoever made it [=
clearly rogue-state operatives] contributed to killing 100s of 1000s, *including their own
people* ! brrr
{The Americans elected a pathetic buffoon who lives in outer space,}
He may or may not be a pathetic buffoon*, but he is smart enough to parlay inherited
wealth to become a Billionaire, he is POTUS, he lives in the White House or Mar-a-Lago with a
model-wife, and will be remembered as such long after you are forgotten.
Aside from that, who would you have Americans elect? The Hildabeast?
But it's not too late: if enough Americans lose their minds and elect The DementiaMan, we
will be subjected to the non-buffoon experience of Hildabeast 2.0.
Biden will be a near complete vegetable in a year or two, and the chosen female radical
left, Antifa (sic) ** embracing VP will run the show. America as it was founded will be no
more.
_____________________
* Lookup Scott Adams' discussions on how Trump manipulates and influences.
Scott predicted way back that Trump would be POTUS.
Note: Scott is a trained hypnotist, and recognizes classic 'tells' of hypnosis in
Trump's seemingly "buffoonish" behaviour.
** Despite their cleverly chosen moniker, these violent thugs are the real Fascists: their
behaviour and tactics are an exact copy of Mussolini's Blackshirts.
Don't viruses mutate anyway? See science direct.com ~ covid in France in December. Also an acquaintance of
mine had a horrible virus in December in England.
The Chinese analyzed the new outbreak and determined the genome was that of a strain that
existed only in the US & Europe, but not heretofore in China. The Chinese have identified
many different strains of this virus, seven or more.
But the author goes on to say later in his diatribe: " This is an entirely new and
different infection by a new virus and totally unrelated to anything prior, a strain of a new
and different virus that was deliberately carried to Beijing and flooded in the Xinfadi
Market. "
This covid19 with its growing number of strains seems likely to have escaped from a lab
and it is most probably a product of US ingenuity, with cleverly engineered gain of function,
but to leap to the conclusion that the US has deployed this bioweapon against China and
Russia goes too far. Why would the US target its own population in the process?
If, as Ron Unz speculates, this virus is a botched attack on China and other enemies by
stupid people in a stupid administration that has had unanticipated blowback hitting the US,
then these same stupid perps would not launch another such aggression!
This notion of a secret biological aggression does not hold water, but the Chinese
probably appreciate Larry Romanoff's efforts.
Where have you been? The examples of massive cheating and common reckless are
decades long. The melamine-milk scandals and falling down buildings were not merely "one-off"
but a commonplace for the Chinese themselves.
I myself have examples of deal-breaking cheating that cost them bigger opportunities, and
shake my head. Yes, they can do world class, sometimes.
We will probably never know how much has been copied. It's been so pervasive at all
scales.
With borg like eavesdropping and acquisition systems gobbling everything up, 4x our
population, with our declining high quality population, we may yet see how much they can or
can't innovate.
They have a lot of stripped assets and resources now to command impoverished Americas'
hopes and attention, against prior experiences.
Even Chinese are skeptical of anything "Made In China". Last year, in a Canadian
Tire store I saw a Chinese couple. Hubby had selected an item for possible purchase. His wife
tore into him, speaking rapidly and scornfully in Chinese. I do not understand Chinese, but
didn't need to, as she repeatedly dropped in the English phrase "Made In China", in a
sarcastic tone of voice. Hubby put the item back on the shelf and they walked away. China is
a deeply cracked culture. My friend Meng(female), who was born in China and married to a
Chinese guy, put it to me bluntly: "In China, 90% of marriages are without love".
Here's a novel solution do nothing. It works for Belarus. Some 80-year-olds die and society
goes on as usual problem solved. Spoken by someone getting closer to 80.
Jun 22, 2020 CELEBRATED SCIENTIST: '80% NOT SUSCEPTIBLE TO COVID"
Named the "most influential" brain scientist of our time, Dr. Karl Friston, made waves
when he published his study mapping the real susceptibility of contracting Coronavirus. His
results are staggering and challenge the rationale for a lockdown like no other.
Jun 15, 2020 The Collapse of the COVID-1984 Narrative
Now that the major institutions pushing the COVID panic are now admitting that the virus
is not an existential threat and the lockdowns were not necessary, what does this mean for
the future of the COVID-1984 police state and the ushering in of the new "biosecurity"
paradigm?
@Mustapha
Mond In any complex, highly planned operation such as you describe, where motives of such
depth and perception are necessary, there are going to have to be real persons with real
names. You can't go on saying that "evil geniuses" at Fort Deitrich or wherever engineered
and executed so deftly these multilayered "seedings" without getting orders or authorization
from someone we all know. Is it Trump, Pompeo, Hilary, Biden, Obama or Amy Semple McPherson?
It's like the Germans and the Holocaust. You'd have to have so many evil players with
superhuman capacity to hold onto their secret motives and actions that we still can't pin
them down. I don't think there are so many such people in our stupid federal government. Even
our brave and feared John Bolton, when he reveals himself, is just an oversensitive
weeny.
This article suffers from many fundamental misunderstandings of government weenies. Those
people in Northern Virginia who are "seeding" foreign nations with new strains of virus every
sixty days on some diabolically precise motivational dynamic live in boring suburbs and fix
awful chicken on their barbecues. They drink watery beer and watch "Wheel of Fortune". Give
me a break!
@Bombercommand
If they are Chinese travellers exploring Canada and Canadian culture it would be silly of
them to buy something made in China as though it was Canadian. Your reasoning does not hold
up.
@Emslander
Hannah Arendt noted the 'banality of evil' long ago. It's pretty common, sad to say.
The military is filled with 'ordinary' people who apparently have no qualms about
murdering anyone their 'superiors' point to and say, "Kill!" They are just following orders,
after all.
The number of 'evil players' is simply staggering, whether we want to admit it or not. And
yes, they DO drink watery beer and watch "Wheel of Fortune" and have bar-b-ques. John Wayne
Gacy comes to mind immediately. Who knows who our neighbors really are, deep down inside?
As for naming names, gosh, I seem to have lost my DARPA personnel directory of evil
geniuses, and my CIA directory of same as well.
(But as for who REALLY controls things and gives the orders, I think you may have nailed
it with Sister Aimee. And she was HOT in her day, and apparently knew how to have a good
time. Hallelujah, brother ..)
@Anon So the
"flu like outbreak" skipped Frederick, Maryland, the town Fort Detrick is located in to
strike Springfield, Virginia which is very close to Washington DC, as well as not striking
other communities between Frederick, Maryland and Springfield, Virginia including Washington
DC. I like how your brain works, you should be working at The Global Times or perhaps you
already are .
Considering that you've been targeting residential area, market places, wedding dinner,
mosques, churches, you've prolly vaporised 20-30M dogs and cats, those are the lucky
ones, many more were left maimed and paralyzed.
"I would include here the Brazilians who, with excessive assistance from the Americans,
elected an arrogant sociopath who said famously, "It's not my fault. What do you want me to
do about it?""
"In Brazil, the Supreme Court has decided that governors don't have to obey the federal
government on local health policies. So, it really makes no difference whether the President
is Mother Theresa or Jason Voorhees. It's true that Bolsonaro tries once in a while to enact
some federal regulations, but he seems to fail every time. It's odd that you don't know that
fact, seeing as in the U.S. I hear things are quite similar. As for Brazilian governors, they
oddly don't get the same international flak as Bolsonaro does, despite many of them being
suspected of using the pandemic as an opportunity for stealing."
"This kind of inexactitude immediately throws the rest of the article under heavy
suspicion. When people start spewing words like 'sociopath', it is clear to me that they have
an agenda."
.
I don't normally respond to rubbish, but readers might care to look at this one because
it's a classic of dishonest misrepresentation.
First, M. Cubas quotes from the article about Bolsonaro being a sociopath. He (or she, or
it) then turns the subject to Brazilian governors not having to obey the federal government.
Who cares? Where did that come from? Relevant to what?
Then, the author is chastised for "not knowing this fact", although we have no idea if he
does or doesn't know, because this was never discussed.
M. Cubas then converts the author's supposed 'lack of knowledge' of this irrelevant bit of
information, to claim that "This kind of inexactitude immediately throws the rest of the
article under heavy suspicion." That is to say that if I fail to mention the process for
deep-frying chicken in a conversation about bridge construction, you should assume I know
nothing about deep-frying chicken, and furthermore that my failure to mention deep-frying
chicken in a conversation about bridge construction should make you suspect everything I say.
You got that?
Then, the word sociopath is 'spewed', and anyone who uses that word must have an
'agenda'.
But, with Bolsonaro in Brazil, when the man offers no leadership, trivialises a pandemic,
takes no action to protect the population, watches more than one million citizens become
infected and more than 50,000 of them die, and then says, "It's not my fault. What do you
want me to do about it?", I think we have a sociopath on our hands.
This covid19 with its growing number of strains seems likely to have escaped from a lab
and it is most probably a product of US ingenuity, with cleverly engineered gain of
function, but to leap to the conclusion that the US has deployed this bioweapon against
China and Russia goes too far. Why would the US target its own population in the
process?
To answer the last bit 1st, the rogue-state operators did not expect USA to get bitten,
due to a) already having a mild form active there, and b) SARS-CoV-1 was largely contained in
Asia (84% of all deaths in Mainland China and Hong Kong).
Note that Forster found only a few occurrences of the A-strain, closest may have been 50km
SE of Wuhan; the overwhelming majority of Chinese infections being B-strain. Now a
new-to-China strain has somehow 'arrived' in Beijing (termed 'older' in headline article).
The people who 'built' the Covid-19 causing virus = SARS-CoV-2 know exactly what they've
done, and it is my thesis that when the PRRA insert was recognised in Wuhan, that was the
moment the Chinese knew they were under attack, and the rest of the chaos ensued. Any
alleging 'scam' must explain why Russia and Iran, say, play along. rgds
The banality of evil is often not known until revisionist historians are able to make
connections post facto. In the moment people do not have enough information to make informed
decisions.
"That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now,
and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do."
For example, during the French Revolution most of the participants had no idea of what a
Jacobian was.
Or, during the Bolshevik Revolution, most participants had no idea of who Kuhn and Loeb
was.
Or, before WW1 was the machinations of the Milner Group known?
Or, before WW2, the machinations of Zionists to get Balfour.
Or, how Focus group had gotten to Churchill with loans.
Why the evil? It is usually hidden string pullers who are afraid of losing their vaunted
position in ruling hierarchy. They may actually think they are doing good, because doing good
is defined as "what is good for me, or my in-group."
@Nikola
Zrinski The ADL and SPLC always raise funds by paying people, virtually all of them Jews,
to write or orate things like your comment. They then send the 'anti-Semitic' outburst to the
hordes of gullible Jews and white liberals and ask for money that is required to fight
anti-Semitism.
If we or the Chinese are going to stop this we're going to have to get rid of the
Jews. The Jews are the only people that profit from this. If this or one of their other
viruses kills one of your family then the Jews have directly killed your family.
A vast amount of the problems we have could be sewed up in very quick order if we got rid
of the Jews.
@mike99588
I'm not keen on a lot of stuff from China, but your comment lacks perspective.
What happened with the melamine milk scandal that killed 6 and damaged approximately 300k?
The perp was tried and executed. What has happened in the US with oxyContin which has caused
tens of thousands of deaths and ruined up to a million more? Nothing of consequence. The lead
paint in/on Marx toys? China – people responsible committed suicide knowing they would
be executed. US – Gee we didn't know, why would we test products to ensure they were
being made properly?
China today is where Japan was in the late 60s and Korea in the late 80s. Huge capacity
not so good quality. Japanese and Korean cars used to be crap, now they are the most
reliable. US cars used to be the most reliable, now they are crap. The same goes for
electronics and even washing machines today.
China will only get better, just as the Japanese and Koreans did. The orientals have a better
sense of "the whole" of the population benefiting. The US, and most of (((the West))) lost
that concept long ago.
With the 24/7 media circus coverage of Covid-19 I find it particularly interesting that
there is an obvious glaring omission of some extremely important facts relative to dealing with
a virus, especially one that is allegedly so virulent like this one. Yes, I read all about the
critical need to shelter in place, stay inside away from other people, wash your hands
constantly, avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth, wear your face mask and by all means
observe social distancing if you MUST venture outside for food!
Then it's repeated ad infinitum that the ONLY hope we have of ever returning to a semblance
of normalcy is to have a vaccine to protect us! Then to add some drama to this narrative the
media highlights their death-o-meter scoreboard with the implied threat that you'll be next IF
you don't obey the rules as dictated by the "experts".
But what is assiduously avoided at all cost is any reference to our most potent defense
against any virus; our body's natural immune system. Try as I might I couldn't find anything
about this first line of defense on the World Health Organizations (WHO) website or Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) website. It's as if it doesn't exist and is completely irrelevant.
If these organizations were genuinely concerned about the health of citizens they would
obviously discuss the vital role a healthy immune system plays in protecting us from illnesses.
But since they don't its obvious some other motive is at work, at least to me, and I strongly
suspect to other critical thinkers as well.
We now know from the science and data that over 90% of the people exposed to Covid-19 have
no symptoms at all or at worst a mild cold. The flu vaccines we have are only effective 30% to
60% of the time and the bugs change regularly so a vaccine that worked OK last year may barely
work at all this year. Let's learn some more about our body's immune system.
Virus
protection without a vaccine
There is an enlightening article on Web MD titled: "How to use Your Immune System to Stay
Healthy". That's a pretty straight forward title now isn't it? Early on Bruce Polsky, MD,
interim chairman department of medicine and chief division of infectious disease at St.
Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City says:
"We are endowed with a great immune system that has been designed evolutionarily to keep
us healthy."
The article goes on. . .
"The immune system is your body's natural defense system. It's an intricate network of
cells, tissues and organs that band together to defend your body against invaders. Those
invaders can include bacteria, viruses, parasites, even fungus, all with the potential to
make us sick. They are everywhere-in our homes, offices and backyards. . . "
The truth is no amount of social distancing, hand washing or face mask wearing is going to
eliminate our exposure to these various bugs. That's why we were created with this amazing
first line of natural defense.
Here's more from Web MD . . .
"The immune system can recognize millions of different antigens. And it can produce what
it needs to eradicate nearly all of them. When it's working properly, this elaborate defense
system can keep health problems ranging from cancer to the common cold at bay. . . "
Wow! That's pretty amazing stuff isn't it! According to Web MD a properly functioning immune
system can "keep health problems ranging from cancer to the common cold at bay." So why isn't
this "science" being included in all the other health recommendations we're being bombarded
with daily? It seems to me that any "expert" worth their salt would be talking about the
importance of a healthy immune system to stay healthy.
But there's more . . .
The Web MD article noted that failure to eat a healthy diet, sitting around not exercising,
not getting enough sleep and chronic stress can all lead to a compromised immune system. To
quote Dr. Polsky again:
". . . Lifestyle aspects are very, very important."
So if our lifestyle is very, very important to staying healthy as the good doctor says ask
yourself this question? Based on the Web M.D. article virtually all the results of the lockdown
serve to weaken our immune systems. The stress of unemployment, constant harping about
infections and rising death rates, lack of exercise and now a crack in our food distribution
system all are known to weaken the human immune system.
I also find it quite interesting that large groups of people can shop at Walmart, Home Depot
or other big box stores but they can't attend their local church even if it's a "drive through"
service?
Web M.D. says:
"Research shows that people with close friendships and strong support systems tend to be
healthier than those who lack such supports."
During times of crisis people need encouragement and their faith built up more than ever
before. Mandating people huddle in fear in their homes with constant media reports of
infections and death bombarding them continually is there any wonder peoples immune systems are
under severe stress?
One very plausible hypothesis is that coronavirus will probably "militarizes the United States even more than 9/11" So the escape
from a lab could be orgnized by the same forces which did 9/11 and anthrax attack.
Notable quotes:
"... Well, let me just say two of them I would call spooks with Ph.Ds, who have come out and done research on a whole very odd collection of subjects, all of which the US government has tried to cover up in the past. So I'll just name some of those things: Gulf War Syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, anthrax vaccine induced illnesses, autism, Ebola, and coronavirus ..."
"... And there were very effective biological weapons made and used in the period around World War 2 and subsequent to it that are documented in the literature. There are no books telling you what's been made in the last 10 years. But we know a lot about what was made 50 to 80 years ago. ..."
"... in my understanding of biological warfare, no country used a biological agent against another country if they didn't think they could control it. If they thought it might blow back onto their country, it wouldn't be used. So historically, I don't think this is the kind of agent that would deliberately be used at a nation level. ..."
"... As long as there is no huge history-changing event that radically ends this trajectory that we're on and that there's no obvious way off of, the US essentially will acquiesce to Chinese global hegemony. And that is 100 percent unacceptable, even to sensible realists like Mearsheimer, much less the neocon fanatical crazies at places like PNAC looking for a new American century. ..."
"... And those people did 9/11-anthrax and they're back in power in the Trump administration. So Mearsheimer says that the only way to stop China's rise is essentially to destroy the global economy. He says even wrecking the U.S. economy along with the global economy would would be worth it because security is more important than prosperity. And this is a relatively sensible guy writing back in 2015. ..."
"... I don't see why they would be particularly averse to it escaping, going global and doing precisely what it's doing, because it is doing exactly what they want, which is destroying the global(ized) economy, which ultimately in the long run stops China's displacing the U.S. And number two, it militarizes the United States even more than 9/11 did. And they want to bring us back to the thirties and head towards a World War 2 situation to stop China, although they hope it may not be necessary to go that far. So basically, if the neocons didn't invent coronavirus, they would have had to invent some (similar) virus or its equivalent. This is precisely what one would have predicted five years ago would happen. ..."
"... first we could go to the neocon philosophy, which is that human flourishing only occurs during extreme situations of stress, suffering, struggle and strife epitomized by warfare. So for them, the only real purpose of human life is all out war to the death. And that's where heroic qualities emerge from human beings who are otherwise lazy and worthless. That's their basic philosophy of life. And then secondly -- ..."
"... No, wait a minute. If that's the neocon philosophy of life, why were they all chickenhawks? Have any of them gone to war? ..."
"... Well, that's the point. They're projecting these fantasies in the privacy of their studies and their twisted, warped imaginations. But yeah, they're happy to inflict this suffering and struggle and death on everybody else. And they want the other guy to be the one to die, of course. And so I assume that they're planning to not be casualties of this disaster that they're setting off. But setting the philosophical thing aside, I think that strategically they are really planning for this to take down the current globalized economy, to force countries to go back to more localized manufacturing, certainly to follow Trump's and Kissinger's neocon agenda, the anti-China agenda of bringing back manufacturing to the US. ..."
Kevin Barrett:
Truth Jihad Radio
is often
the best place to go for the most important stories that the mainstream won't cover. Today I'm talking to
Meryl Nass
. She's an expert who has written a very important article
about how the propaganda push by very suspicious scientists to claim that Covid-19 couldn't possibly be bioweaponized is a red flag
that everybody should be paying attention to.
But you won't see anything about this in the corporate controlled mainstream Mockingbird media. So please help this kind of material
continue to come to light, by subscribing to
DrKevinBarrett at Patreon.com
.
Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. I'm Kevin Barrett searching fearlessly for truth in all of the most forbidden places, bringing on people
who are also going to those kinds of places. And sometimes I find genuine experts on various subjects. And we have one of those with
us today, Meryl Nass. She is definitely one of the go-to experts on biological warfare related topics. Yet for some reason, the mainstream
media isn't going to her. I wonder why that would be. Maybe because the things she wrote about the anthrax attacks back in 2001 were
a little bit too truthful. Anyway, she's got some very interesting posts up now at
her anthrax vaccine blog
. But first, before we jump into that, let
me just say that when I say she's an expert: She has consulted for the World Bank. She's testified to Congress. She diagnosed Zimbabwe's
1978 anthrax epidemic as an episode of biological warfare. She's consulted for Cuba's Ministry of Health on its optic and peripheral
neuropathy epidemic, and on and on. So she has a pretty good, solid basis for her views.
And she recently posted what I thought was a critically important piece "
Why are some of the
US' top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?
" pointing out, why is this that the top
U.S. scientists are being trumpeted all over the media, making a specious argument about the natural origin of Sars CoV-2. So why are
they, Meryl? Why is it that they're telling us this could not possibly be a bioweapon, and yet obviously it could?
Meryl Nass:
Well, that's the $64,000 question, isn't it? Maybe we should go back and explain what I'm aware of that happened.
Sometime in late February, a group of scientists, which included the former head of the National Science Foundation and a former top
person at CDC, as well as a bunch of other people, many of whom had worked in the biological defense / biological warfare area -- possibly
all of them had -- published
a very short statement
in
The Lancet
saying they wanted to stand with the Chinese public health officials and scientists and point out that rumors
about the unnatural origin of coronavirus were a conspiracy theory and should be dismissed.
They didn't provide evidence, but they made this very strong statement in the top medical journal in the world,
The Lancet
. And so, OK. I have to say that the first author -- and it was alphabetical, so this is the first author alphabetically who signed
that -- is someone that I was told about 27 years ago when I consulted in Cuba, when they had a very severe epidemic of blindness and
other neurologic symptoms. And it turned out it was due to cyanide.
There were two. They were the first in 100 years, I think, in the Western Hemisphere. And if I remember correctly, this was a long
time ago, about 150 or more Cubans died, mostly small children, as a result of the Dengue epidemics. So I thought, that's interesting
that this bio-warrior is signing a statement saying that the core idea that the coronavirus might be due to a biological warfare construct
should be dismissed outright as a conspiracy theory.
Kevin Barrett:
Wow. What a coincidence, that that would be the guy who would do that. You say he's the first author alphabetically?
Meryl Nass:
Yes.
Kevin Barrett:
Well, we can figure out who that is then.
Meryl Nass:
A group of five scientists, and I knew of several of them. I've been in contact with at least one of them in the
past, and they too were sort of biological defense, biological warfare people.
Well, let me just say two of them I would call spooks
with Ph.Ds, who have come out and done research on a whole very odd collection of subjects, all of which the US government has tried
to cover up in the past. So I'll just name some of those things: Gulf War Syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, anthrax vaccine induced
illnesses, autism, Ebola, and coronavirus
.
So that's an odd group of different things that you might be researching and writing about. But oddly enough, a couple of these scientists
have chosen that obscure group of things that are somewhat unrelated to each other to comment about. And so these five scientists wrote
a piece in Nature Medicine which claimed to have found the scientific linchpin to be able to make the argument that the new coronavirus
is a natural occurrence. And the argument they made was that had it been constructed in the lab, it would have used the particular backbone
that laboratorians know about. But because it didn't have that backbone, it couldn't possibly be a lab construct.
The problem with that argument is basically it was a straw man argument. They said, well, if I were going to make the novel coronavirus,
I would have made it this way. But because it isn't made that way, it's not a lab construct. Of course, you can make the novel coronavirus
a lot of different ways. And I pointed out three different ways one might have come up with a novel coronavirus that weren't using the
method they suggested.
And I've gotten confirmation. I'm a physician, I'm not a scientist, but I did work in a lab. I went to M.I.T.. So I do know biology,
although I am not well versed in modern genetic engineering. But I do know a lot about how biological weapons used to be made, how they
were made before and during World War 2 and afterwards.
And there were very effective biological weapons made and used in the period
around World War 2 and subsequent to it that are documented in the literature. There are no books telling you what's been made in the
last 10 years. But we know a lot about what was made 50 to 80 years ago.
So I then looked at the connections between the first group of scientists who had published in
The Lancet
and the second group
that had published in
Nature Medicine
and found that well, for example, that the person I mentioned before who had been to Cuba
and looked at the Aedes mosquitoes, even though that person is now of the retirement age, is a member of the institute of one of the
second authors. And I saw other connections between these two groups.
Kevin Barrett:
Sounds like the usual suspects.
Meryl Nass:
Yes, exactly. It seemed that the second group, anyway, the guys who were trotted out to provide the last word
on all these other controversial medical subjects had been again trotted out to provide the last word. Then I thought, who else is talking
about this? And when I looked that up, I found the head of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, an MD-Ph.D, cited the work of these five scientists
to say basically now we've proven that this is a natural occurrence and everyone can forget about the conspiracy theory. And he further
said if you're if you're concerned about what you read about coronavirus, just go to the FEMA website where they are telling you what
is a rumor and what isn't. So I thought, well, that's interesting that the policy makers or the people who pull the strings are able
to pull Francis Collins' strings and get him to comment on this, again agreeing with an argument that he must have known to be specious.
Kevin Barrett:
You don't have to comment on this, but this sure reminds me of what's been going on post-9/11, with first the
ridiculous FEMA report on the so-called collapses of the Trade Center towers and then the NIST reports culminating in the most absurd
one of all, the NIST report on Building 7. Throughout that whole process, the usual suspect so-called scientists were putting out utter
baloney and rubber stamping it, and all the officials were rubber stamping it mindlessly, and any independent voices speaking common
sense and truth were marginalized.
Meryl Nass:
Yes. So that is of course what's happening here. And it's very helpful, it seems, to be able to identify them
as this same group, the same group who can be used over and over and over again over decades to whitewash what the system wants whitewashed.
And then you look at their grants. Ugh! Some of these people are making unbelievable grants.
Kevin Barrett:
They're probably flying on Epstein's Lolita Express and things like that, too.
Meryl Nass:
That I did not look up.
Kevin Barrett:
I wouldn't be surprised, anyway.
Meryl Nass:
There is a lot of money flowing through their laboratories. So anyway, the final point I made was that every scientist
who signed these two documents and then Francis Collins has had something to do with biological defense. If you're a top scientist in
the U.S. government, you are asked to look into pandemics and the risk that they could be due to a biological weapon. And so as far
as I could tell, virtually all these people have had some background in looking at these things. And they're all old. They all remember
the days before the last three decades of genetic engineering and they all must realize, if they have any competence as scientists,
that there are other ways to create biological agents, microorganisms. And so for them to all have signed this, knowing that, just makes
you wonder -- why did they do this?
They presumably did it because they had some sense that it was a lab organism. Perhaps it was a lab escape and perhaps they were
trying to protect the whole enterprise of biological defense, which is a multibillion dollar yearly industry that feeds many, many people,
including themselves.
Kevin Barrett:
I would argue that's a relatively innocent explanation. There are worse ones than that.
Meryl Nass:
The interesting thing is that all these countries do research together. So China, US, (former) Soviet Union, Ukraine
All different countries send people to labs in other countries to work on micro-organisms. So you can put your finger on people from
many different countries who were working on bat coronaviruses in labs around the world. And this could have been a lab escape from
many different places. I mean, it could have been a deliberate attack. But
in my understanding of biological warfare, no country
used a biological agent against another country if they didn't think they could control it. If they thought it might blow back onto
their country, it wouldn't be used. So historically, I don't think this is the kind of agent that would deliberately be used at a nation
level.
Kevin Barrett:
Let me just give you a possible opposing argument. John Mearsheimer wrote in, I believe 2015, in
a very famous article about China's
unpeaceful rise
that said, in so many words, the US is stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of trying to contain China's
rise, which is based on its double digit growth averaging out since 1980 or so. And that that growth inevitably is pushing China to
break out of U.S. containment in Asia and become a regional hegemon, which is unacceptable to U.S. decision makers. And more likely,
it will actually "pose global challenges" meaning displace the U.S. as global hegemon as well, simply based on its economic growth,
which now has supposedly slowed to maybe 8 percent. But still, the differential between that and the U.S. and its Western allies is
such that within a decade or two, at the very most, it's a done deal.
As long as there is no huge history-changing event that radically
ends this trajectory that we're on and that there's no obvious way off of, the US essentially will acquiesce to Chinese global hegemony.
And that is 100 percent unacceptable, even to sensible realists like Mearsheimer, much less the neocon fanatical crazies at places like
PNAC looking for a new American century.
And those people did 9/11-anthrax and they're back in power in the Trump administration. So Mearsheimer says that the only way
to stop China's rise is essentially to destroy the global economy. He says even wrecking the U.S. economy along with the global economy
would would be worth it because security is more important than prosperity. And this is a relatively sensible guy writing back in 2015.
I've argued with Ron Unz about this. He he thinks it would have been a U.S. attack designed not to escape China, like previous U.S.
(bio-)attacks on China. But
I don't see why they would be particularly averse to it escaping, going global and doing precisely what
it's doing, because it is doing exactly what they want, which is destroying the global(ized) economy, which ultimately in the long run
stops China's displacing the U.S. And number two, it militarizes the United States even more than 9/11 did. And they want to bring us
back to the thirties and head towards a World War 2 situation to stop China, although they hope it may not be necessary to go that far.
So basically, if the neocons didn't invent coronavirus, they would have had to invent some (similar) virus or its equivalent. This is
precisely what one would have predicted five years ago would happen.
Meryl Nass:
That's a reasonable argument. But the economy is not being totally destroyed. It's just that factories are, closed,
people aren't going to work. Nothing's been destroyed. When we come out of this, China will still have all the factories and we will
have all the monetarists and all the play money. So it seems like China could get its engines going a lot quicker than we can when we
come out of it.
Kevin Barrett:
We won't come out of it.
Meryl Nass:
So if we don't come out of it, then it's not what the neocons chose.
Kevin Barrett:
They don't want to come out of it. They want to wreck global prosperity while the U.S. still has most of the
military hardware.
Meryl Nass:
I'm sorry. I guess I don't understand that.
Kevin Barrett
: Well, OK,
first we could go to the neocon philosophy, which is that human flourishing only occurs during extreme
situations of stress, suffering, struggle and strife epitomized by warfare. So for them, the only real purpose of human life is all
out war to the death. And that's where heroic qualities emerge from human beings who are otherwise lazy and worthless. That's their
basic philosophy of life. And then secondly --
Meryl Nass:
No, wait a minute. If that's the neocon philosophy of life, why were they all chickenhawks? Have any of them gone
to war?
Kevin Barrett
:
Well, that's the point. They're projecting these fantasies in the privacy of their studies and their twisted,
warped imaginations. But yeah, they're happy to inflict this suffering and struggle and death on everybody else. And they want the other
guy to be the one to die, of course. And so I assume that they're planning to not be casualties of this disaster that they're setting
off. But setting the philosophical thing aside, I think that strategically they are really planning for this to take down the current
globalized economy, to force countries to go back to more localized manufacturing, certainly to follow Trump's and Kissinger's neocon
agenda, the anti-China agenda of bringing back manufacturing to the US.
Meryl Nass:
And is there anything wrong with that? That seems to me a worthy goal.
Kevin Barrett:
Well, actually, yes, I would support bringing back manufacturing. I would support never having sent it to China
in the first place. However, it's in the context of their plan to stop China's rise. And China is just as committed to its rise as these
guys are to stopping it. Which means a lot of danger of war and unpleasantness. And I think this is just the first shot of what's going
to be a long round of war and unpleasantness through the next decade.
Meryl Nass:
Perhaps. Right. We don't know. Another thing I've written is that the whole reason this (pandemic) is (being)
stopped. My theory is that, I've tried to think like a politician -- and I did write this before the lockdown -- which is that what
would have happened once this coronavirus had spread widely in the US, is that had it not been halted, we would have gotten to a point
where the coronavirus had required way more medical facilities, personnel, equipment, etc. than we had, and there would be people dying
without access to any medical care. And I thought that given that in America, based on polls, the one thing Americans want from their
government is a health care system, and that the idea of people dying in the street without being able to get into a hospital was so
beyond the pale for politicians who saw that they would never be re-elected under those circumstances, that they then did everything
they could to stop that from happening. And by the point they decided to do something, the only thing that could be done was a lockdown.
And then finally attempting to get more equipment, supplies and personnel.
Kevin Barrett:
So, yeah, I agree, that's plausible.
Meryl Nass
: That's what happened. And I'm sure everybody is trying to now use this very extraordinary circumstance to their
own benefit in the near and far future.
Kevin Barrett:
Yeah, I agree. We'll see. The thing is, if if you were planning this thing, assuming that my scenario and your
scenario are both true, a very small group of people would have unleashed it, and then everybody else would be reacting according to
their own self-interest, including the politicians doing precisely what you described.
Meryl Nass:
Yeah, that's certainly possible.
Kevin Barrett:
Yeah. And I'm using as my model for this 9/11, which is what I've studied quite a lot over the past nearly
two decades. And I see parallels here between the two events in that 9/11 was about going to war with Islamic civilization, just as
this seems to be a strike against Chinese civilization -- both occurring in the wake of the Samuel Huntington -- Bernard Lewis claim
that "the clash of civilizations will be the new paradigm for us." And if it hadn't been for 9/11, that probably wouldn't have happened.
There would've been no clash of civilizations per se.
Meryl Nass:
I think, yes, you're right. And yet it looks like China is going to get out of this way more unscathed than we
are.
Kevin Barrett:
That's possible. Of course, you know, "they plot and Allah plots and Allah is the best of plotters." Ron Unz
may be right that some of this may have been unforeseen. And it's also possible that I could be wrong. It could be a coincidence. Sometimes
the coincidence theorists, even the craziest coincidence theorists, can be right once in awhile.
Meryl Nass:
Well, yes, given the fact that there are documented many hundreds of lab escapes of different organisms, going
by what's most likely, that seems to be the most likely explanation.
Kevin Barrett:
Do you think that's what happened with Lyme disease? Willy Burgdorfer, whose name was applied to the spirochete
organism that causes Lyme, is on record, filmed and recorded by Timothy Grey, confessing that he, Burgdorfer not only provided a name
for the organism, but he unleashed it on the world as a U.S. biodefense guy. So a lot of people think Lyme was an external escape. Others
hypothesize there may have been some U.S. versus Soviet element there, because Burgdorfer had a lot of money he was getting from somebody,
and he was flying to places where he might have been meeting with Russians, et cetera. So have you looked into the Lyme issue?
"Barking up a tree is more superstition then evidence unless you are a hunting dog. What about names,
fingerprints, DNA evidence, contact with someone who was actually there and willing to talk? This is the
real world, not superstitious nonsense."
They're exploring hypotheses here, not going to trial. (BTW, the U.S. "government" would tell you you're
full of shit. Things like DNA evidence, fingerprints, etc. are for suckers).
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Harold Smith
says:
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Comment
May 30, 2020 at 4:53 am GMT
Is Francis Boyle still insisting – without any kind of evidence whatsoever – that SARS-CoV-2 came from the
Wuhan lab? If so he's just a moron whose nonsense doesn't deserve any exposure, IMO.
Is Francis Boyle still insisting – without any kind of evidence whatsoever – that SARS-CoV-2 came from
the Wuhan lab? If so he's just a moron whose nonsense doesn't deserve any exposure, IMO.
He's a lawyer, therefore he'll play the devil's advocate – an useful role to validate a legitimate
conclusion.
@ Kevin Barrett
Good on you, Ron Unz and all the cast to pursue the quest for the source of the Cv-19 pandemic and keep the
question of biowarfare alive. An event unequal in human history in its sudden appearance, global reach, social
and economic consequences, with attendant officially approved and orchestrated propaganda and a long chain of
tell-tale "coincidences", must necessarily arouse the suspicion in every thinking person that the Masters of
the Universe are up with their usual tricks of attempting to re-shape the world according to their designs and
goals.
All major historical events have arisen, apart from the rare natural cataclysms, from Man's actions, mostly
the result of a single conspiracy from which, in turn, originate predictable and unpredictable reactions and
other conspiracies. Any plan or scheme to alter the existing status quo starts as a conspiracy whether a band
of professional robbers or politicians; it is in the nature of things that any organizational project or task
involves the co-operation of individuals as a group to achieve a particular aim and, if in the prosecution of
that aim a certain amount of discretion is necessary to have an advantage over the potential opposing side, a
conspiracy takes place. Most of governments' actions are conspiracies and their legitimacy and propriety should
be probed and investigated. To counter that, most (perhaps all) governments erect "official secrets acts" walls
to hide their conspiracies and set up counter-information departments.
This pandemic has risen a conspirational stench because it stinks of malodorous human interference with the
natural order for a purpose unknown, the first characteristic of a conspiracy. The same could be said about the
World Trade Centre incident because the official explanation is at variance with the physics natural order,
hence its conspiracy credentials because the government is openly hiding the true facts, as a conspirator does.
As Barrett has noted (and so have other commenters here at UR) the US is at a cross-roads in its history
where it must set a course of its own making to counter the rise of China as an economic superpower. The US
official policy is to prevent the emergence of any rival power, even a regional one in places where the US has
no legitimate concerns, and China must be hindered, blocked and neutralized. So far, nothing has worked to stop
the Chinese economic juggernaut and the usual solution of going to war is fraught with danger. Yes, the US
could nuke China (as the only military advantage it may have over China) but at a huge cost to itself, both
militarily and reputationally. Besides, facing the opprobrium of the world and a resurgent Russia (which would
not let the opportunity to be wasted) the US would be doomed. Even the clowns and puppets that masquerade as
government in Washington know that the "military solution" is out. Meanwhile, every year China is getting
bigger and better and time is of the essence, as Barrett noted.
What can be done to stop China then? Hybrid warfare (sanctions, blockades, threats, propaganda) is not
working either, but China, for the time being, has an Achilles heel: international trade, in which it depends
for continuing its economic development. If sanctions and threats against China's trading partners don't work,
how about bringing the whole international trade edifice down a la World Trade Centre? If the world global
economy is seriously disrupted, countries won't be able to trade and there goes the Chinese trump card. Enter
Covid-19.
"Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already
pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or
branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected. "
" and examine the environmental samples from the Wuhan Huanan seafood market. Importantly, the market
samples are genetically identical to human SARS-CoV-2 isolates and were therefore most likely from human
sources."
Where did RaTG13 come from?
Was Shi Zhengli engaging in some cover up, alibi [for whom?] constructing when she published her January
23, 2020 paper:
" on January 23, Shi Zhengli released a paper indicating that CoV2 is 96% identical to RaTG13, a strain
which her laboratory had previously isolated from Yunnan bats in 2013. However, outside of her lab, no one
knew about that strain until January 2020." – Yuri Deigin,
medium.com
The fact she revealed RaTG13 as her deus ex machina is somewhat odd, that RaTG13 which was sequenced and
analyzed was not published and not cataloged soon after its discovery in 2013 is, I would think, strange.
And supposedly there is no samples of RaTG13 in the lab. All they have is its sequence in the computer,
though, this perhaps might be normal for lab procedures, which I know nothing about.
RaTG13 is not that close to SARS-CoV-2.
https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
Reports show that pangolins are potentially the intermediate host, but pangolin viruses are 88–98% identical
to SARS-CoV-2. In comparison, civet and racoon dog strains of SARS coronaviruses were 99.8% identical to
SARS-CoV from 2003. In other words, we are talking about a handful of mutations between civet strains,
racoon dog strains and human strains in 2003. Pangolins [strains of CoV2] have over 3000 nucleotide changes,
no way they are the reservoir species.
Alfred
says:
Show
Comment
May 30, 2020 at 10:30 am GMT
• 200 Words
@Morton's toes
Before inventing a hypothesis about powers and forces and geopolitics forming current events, you really
need a historical analog. If it has never happened before, anywhere, any time, then you are making an argument
which has a form of this time it is different.
How about Lyme Disease? Just look at a map of how it is
spreading and where it started. Humans have lived in this area for many thousands of years – without any such
infection. Don't you think that it is a little suspicious that it should start in the USA and in the 1980's?
TPTB are trying to blame it on "Climate Change". Well, the climate has changed many times in the past.
Anyway, there are areas of the USA that are warmer than New England so why did it not start there?
It is pretty obvious to anyone with the ability to think critically that Lyme Disease was created in the USA
and in a laboratory in New England – a leading research area.
There are two ways viruses mutate, replication and recombination. It seems highly unlikely that Covid 19 was
a naturally occurring replication, hence the support for some kind of man-made virus.
However, it does seem quite possible, even highly probable that this was a mutation by recombination, the
most likely candidate being a mix of bat corona virus and pangolin corona virus.
Until we get the virology nailed down, blaming governments or labs is just politics and not science.
Corvinus
says:
Show
Comment
May 30, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMT
• 700 Words
@SBaker
"Can we blame it on the virus, even if it was manufactured in the evil labs of the US or China, as has been
convincingly suggested by Ron Unz?"
Suggested, yes. Convincingly? No.
The Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel
#coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.
January 14, 2020, World Health Organization
There is no evidence that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory.
April 20, 2020, The Conversation
The World Health Organization reiterated that the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 is "natural in
origin." Scientists who are examining the genetic sequences of the virus have assured "again and again that
this virus is natural in origin."
May 1, 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a renowned U.S. infectious disease expert, has said that there is no scientific
evidence to back the theory that the coronavirus was made in a Chinese laboratory. "If you look at the
evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, the scientific evidence is very, very strongly
leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," he said.
May 4, 2020, National Geographic
WHO says it has no evidence to support 'speculative' Covid-19 lab theory
May 5, 2020, The Guardian
The British government has not seen any evidence to suggest that the novel coronavirus that causes
COVID-19 was man-made.
May 9, 2020, UK Health Minister Matt Hancock
Scientists: 'Exactly zero' evidence COVID-19 came from a lab.
May 12, 2020, Center for Infections Disease Research and Policy
Evidence of COVID's natural origin mounts even as conspiracy theory about Chinese lab refuses to die
May 13, 2020, Cornell Alliance for Science
Mr. Unz can't have his cake and eat it, too. On one hand, he tacitly encourages readers to peddle this "Fake
News" mantra. On the other hand, he latches on to MSM stories that seemingly support his conclusions. He
inferred that we ought to trust ABC News, which cited four separate intelligence sources that a government
report
*existed*
that Covid-19 is a bioweapon. Of course that report "exists". Whether or not
that report constitutes a "smoking gun" in an entirely different matter. But I thought that ANYTHING that comes
from U.S. intelligence ought not to be trusted. Because Deep State. It would appear that those stories which
supports his predisposed narrative, he takes stock in, and for other stories that go against his truth grain,
he vigorously questions their veracity, at best, or totally discards.
Ultimately, a fine number of readers here believe the source he used is part of FAKE NEWS. I would like to
know how Mr. Unz would respond to their repeated accusation that ALL of the mainstream media reporting are
lies. Here is Anon 223 stating that we ought NOT to trust ABC News.
I wouldn't take the ABC news report at face value. Essentially, most of the Federal Government despises
Trump, and want an excuse to make him look bad. Stating that the coronavirus was known since November would
make Trump look bad since he didn't do anything(though he does look bad ). This the same organization that
states continuously that Trump had allied with Russia and that he had a hooker pee on him in a Russian
hotel.
Now, if we go by the assumption that Mr. Unz "carefully reads" several MSM publications, then would it not
be probable that other people also carry out this same course of action? Would not those people be properly
equipped to counter his line of thinking if they underwent a similar process? Or does Mr. Unz possess a unique
skillset they ultimately lack?
"The Global Lockdown is a massive worldwide reset mechanism, deliberately engineered, designed to knock over
the chessboard and scatter the pieces, forcing the players to either start over or to create new, invented
positions on the board"
This statement here personifies the descent into modern anti-intellectualism. This insistence that a
Globalist cabal will destroy the white race once and for all is predicated on the notion that the Deep State is
pulling the strings through a series of coordinated false flags, with high IQ whites being duped along the way
by a complicit media. Proof? Not required. But anyone dare to question this general Alt-Right, Q-driven
narrative, and (whallah) one is deemed a purveyor of Fake News. Hey, no need to critically think when under the
impression that ANY and ALL news from the MSM is doctored, altered, or outright lies.
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Desert Fox
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May 30, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMT
• 100 Words
The coronavirus scam was unleashed to provide trillions to bail out wall street and at the same time bring in
UN Agenda 2030 draconian, diabolical, demonic controls over humanity, using the fake coronavirus scare , which
it a total scam.
Gates and Fauci and all involved in this scam should be arrested for crimes against
humanity!
This virus is man-made, but it is not a bioweapon.
The real weapon was the fake media that is controlled by a handful of people. All the countries that went
into a national lockdown, including Russia, have a media controlled by Zionists.
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2020crazzetrain
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May 30, 2020 at 2:38 pm GMT
• 100 Words
Great article, Mr. Unz. The US is the consummate propaganda machine!
Mr. Romanoff's
3 part series on Bio-Weapons
, among other things, such as
'The Untold History of the
United States'
on Netflix; opened my eyes to just how diabolical these global technocratic, psychos have
been for as long as I've been alive.
Fort Detrick was likely place of origin for
'the engineered virus'.
"Until we get the virology nailed down, blaming governments or labs is just politics and not science."
Well that makes sense, but you're preaching to the choir.
As we would expect, the problem is the corrupt U.S. "government," which is already publicly blaming the
enemy du jour, China, without any evidence to back up its claims. And the U.S. "government" is making threats
and already taking some action based on those unsupported claims.
It may be of benefit to humanity if some doubt can be immediately cast on the specious claims of the U.S.
"government."
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May 30, 2020 at 3:10 pm GMT
• 400 Words
Real Probability of SARS-2-nCoV-19 being a bioweaponized nCoronavirus imbued with Gain-ofFunction properties,
and Dual Use applications is in fact P=1 given pathogenicity, asymptomatic & undetectable spread, and aged
cohort fatalities in Long Term Care environments.
Epidemiologically, a Six Sigma collapse of the entirety of
all Long Term Care facilities in the world would devastate the infrastructure for Tertiary Care Hospitals
worldwide via spread & vectoring of this deadly man made Pandemic Pathogen.
To assert that SARS-2-nCoV-19 is merely yet another nCoronavirus that has manifested naturally whilst
asserting on the other hand that it could not possibly be a man made bioweaponized nCoronavirus is a lesson in
doublespeak when evidence is not forthcoming for the assertions.
Real scientists are evidenced based via Empiricism proper. Propagandists don't utilize evidenced based
argumentation as that would undermine their task to win hearts & minds one step at a time.
NIST manufactured so-called 'evidence' that was NOT peer-reviewed whatsoever. The bioweaponized SARS-2-nCoV-19
will undergo the same propagandization process utilized for the CIA Controlled Demolition of the Trade Centers
in NYC.
Most researchers continue to neglect mention of the 2014 Cambridge Working Group Call to Action on
Gain-of-Function Dual Use Pandemic Pathogen manufacturing in USA Biosafety Level Four laboratories, but it is
key to the historical patterns & USA finance of the global industry of Pandemic Pathogen manufacturing in
global BSL-4 laboratories that are primarily funded by USA taxpayers the world over.
Most researchers also fail to mention that the United States of America is a culture of death & extreme text
book Psychopathy via Central Intelligence Agency acts of genocide on a global basis.
The historiography is replete with evidence that the United States of America is funding the lion's share of
Pandemic Pathogen research in BSL-4 labs worldwide, and they are also the most likely & probable culprits for
any & all Pandemic Pathogen outbreaks whether accidental or otherwise intentional.
American is a continent of liars, thieves, and text book Psychopaths helming the political sphere and
obviously lost hegemonic status worldwide 2020. In 2016 we were led to believe that if the USA voted in a true
text book Psychopath like Trump and facilitated a bogus meme to run on like Make America Great Again-MAGA, we
would all live happily ever after until the next round of elections manifested that produced a Democrat
replacement.
Neocons & Republicans always utilize threats of war to finagle their way through terms of corruption whilst
pillaging the financial system globally. Today is no different politically from any other Republican term of
office whereby violence & threats of violence are their only tools of choice.
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May 30, 2020 at 4:05 pm GMT
• 400 Words
'American neoconservatives' can only mean the crypto Zionist Jews of the Israel Lobby, and as they are far more
worried about Israel than America, to credibly propose US neocons as the authors of a bioweapon attack on
China, it is necessary to explain how that would benefit Israel. Or, at least how it might have been calculated
by US neocons to be in the interests of Jewish American Zionist aspirations for Israel. A continuing close
relationship between Israel and America is the prerequisite for all Zionist hopes for the future. I think the
only scenario for neocons attacking China with a bioweapon is they thought it necessary to save Israel from its
own leadership. Last December Netanyahu's son said British diplomats should be "kicked out" of Israel because
of their reference to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Israel has clearly no fear of anything the
international community says about the West Bank Palestinians. American support is a given and while Trump is
in office Israel formally annexing the West Bank and penning its Palestinian population up in Bantustans is
something American neoconservatives can and will bring about. Unless there is something else Israel is doing
that makes sustaining the pro Israel stance geopolitically impossible.
There is such an obstacle to Trump acquicing in the annexation of the occupied territories: a burgeoning
collaboration between China and Israel. China running the Israeli port that US Navy warships dock at and China
building the world's biggest desalination plant in Israel (supposedly a key ME ally of the US) is not something
that any US president could or would accept. Trump is absolutely going to have to act to counter it, and
because the Netanyahu family will be handsomely paid off by the Chinese (valuing the Israel Lobby as a wedge
against Trump's China trade policy) there is a possibility that Israel annexing the West Bank will be the
begining of the end of the US-Israel, special relationship. It sort of makes sense for the US neoconservatives
worried about Israel to attack China in order to separate it from Israel. However from what I have read the
Israel Lobby is subservient to Israeli politicians.
One very plausible hypothesis is that coronavirus will probably "militarizes the United States even more than 9/11" So the escape
from a lab could be orgnized by the same forces which did 9/11 and anthrax attack.
Notable quotes:
"... Well, let me just say two of them I would call spooks with Ph.Ds, who have come out and done research on a whole very odd collection of subjects, all of which the US government has tried to cover up in the past. So I'll just name some of those things: Gulf War Syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, anthrax vaccine induced illnesses, autism, Ebola, and coronavirus ..."
"... And there were very effective biological weapons made and used in the period around World War 2 and subsequent to it that are documented in the literature. There are no books telling you what's been made in the last 10 years. But we know a lot about what was made 50 to 80 years ago. ..."
"... in my understanding of biological warfare, no country used a biological agent against another country if they didn't think they could control it. If they thought it might blow back onto their country, it wouldn't be used. So historically, I don't think this is the kind of agent that would deliberately be used at a nation level. ..."
"... As long as there is no huge history-changing event that radically ends this trajectory that we're on and that there's no obvious way off of, the US essentially will acquiesce to Chinese global hegemony. And that is 100 percent unacceptable, even to sensible realists like Mearsheimer, much less the neocon fanatical crazies at places like PNAC looking for a new American century. ..."
"... And those people did 9/11-anthrax and they're back in power in the Trump administration. So Mearsheimer says that the only way to stop China's rise is essentially to destroy the global economy. He says even wrecking the U.S. economy along with the global economy would would be worth it because security is more important than prosperity. And this is a relatively sensible guy writing back in 2015. ..."
"... I don't see why they would be particularly averse to it escaping, going global and doing precisely what it's doing, because it is doing exactly what they want, which is destroying the global(ized) economy, which ultimately in the long run stops China's displacing the U.S. And number two, it militarizes the United States even more than 9/11 did. And they want to bring us back to the thirties and head towards a World War 2 situation to stop China, although they hope it may not be necessary to go that far. So basically, if the neocons didn't invent coronavirus, they would have had to invent some (similar) virus or its equivalent. This is precisely what one would have predicted five years ago would happen. ..."
"... first we could go to the neocon philosophy, which is that human flourishing only occurs during extreme situations of stress, suffering, struggle and strife epitomized by warfare. So for them, the only real purpose of human life is all out war to the death. And that's where heroic qualities emerge from human beings who are otherwise lazy and worthless. That's their basic philosophy of life. And then secondly -- ..."
"... No, wait a minute. If that's the neocon philosophy of life, why were they all chickenhawks? Have any of them gone to war? ..."
"... Well, that's the point. They're projecting these fantasies in the privacy of their studies and their twisted, warped imaginations. But yeah, they're happy to inflict this suffering and struggle and death on everybody else. And they want the other guy to be the one to die, of course. And so I assume that they're planning to not be casualties of this disaster that they're setting off. But setting the philosophical thing aside, I think that strategically they are really planning for this to take down the current globalized economy, to force countries to go back to more localized manufacturing, certainly to follow Trump's and Kissinger's neocon agenda, the anti-China agenda of bringing back manufacturing to the US. ..."
Kevin Barrett:
Truth Jihad Radio
is often
the best place to go for the most important stories that the mainstream won't cover. Today I'm talking to
Meryl Nass
. She's an expert who has written a very important article
about how the propaganda push by very suspicious scientists to claim that Covid-19 couldn't possibly be bioweaponized is a red flag
that everybody should be paying attention to.
But you won't see anything about this in the corporate controlled mainstream Mockingbird media. So please help this kind of material
continue to come to light, by subscribing to
DrKevinBarrett at Patreon.com
.
Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. I'm Kevin Barrett searching fearlessly for truth in all of the most forbidden places, bringing on people
who are also going to those kinds of places. And sometimes I find genuine experts on various subjects. And we have one of those with
us today, Meryl Nass. She is definitely one of the go-to experts on biological warfare related topics. Yet for some reason, the mainstream
media isn't going to her. I wonder why that would be. Maybe because the things she wrote about the anthrax attacks back in 2001 were
a little bit too truthful. Anyway, she's got some very interesting posts up now at
her anthrax vaccine blog
. But first, before we jump into that, let
me just say that when I say she's an expert: She has consulted for the World Bank. She's testified to Congress. She diagnosed Zimbabwe's
1978 anthrax epidemic as an episode of biological warfare. She's consulted for Cuba's Ministry of Health on its optic and peripheral
neuropathy epidemic, and on and on. So she has a pretty good, solid basis for her views.
And she recently posted what I thought was a critically important piece "
Why are some of the
US' top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?
" pointing out, why is this that the top
U.S. scientists are being trumpeted all over the media, making a specious argument about the natural origin of Sars CoV-2. So why are
they, Meryl? Why is it that they're telling us this could not possibly be a bioweapon, and yet obviously it could?
Meryl Nass:
Well, that's the $64,000 question, isn't it? Maybe we should go back and explain what I'm aware of that happened.
Sometime in late February, a group of scientists, which included the former head of the National Science Foundation and a former top
person at CDC, as well as a bunch of other people, many of whom had worked in the biological defense / biological warfare area -- possibly
all of them had -- published
a very short statement
in
The Lancet
saying they wanted to stand with the Chinese public health officials and scientists and point out that rumors
about the unnatural origin of coronavirus were a conspiracy theory and should be dismissed.
They didn't provide evidence, but they made this very strong statement in the top medical journal in the world,
The Lancet
. And so, OK. I have to say that the first author -- and it was alphabetical, so this is the first author alphabetically who signed
that -- is someone that I was told about 27 years ago when I consulted in Cuba, when they had a very severe epidemic of blindness and
other neurologic symptoms. And it turned out it was due to cyanide.
There were two. They were the first in 100 years, I think, in the Western Hemisphere. And if I remember correctly, this was a long
time ago, about 150 or more Cubans died, mostly small children, as a result of the Dengue epidemics. So I thought, that's interesting
that this bio-warrior is signing a statement saying that the core idea that the coronavirus might be due to a biological warfare construct
should be dismissed outright as a conspiracy theory.
Kevin Barrett:
Wow. What a coincidence, that that would be the guy who would do that. You say he's the first author alphabetically?
Meryl Nass:
Yes.
Kevin Barrett:
Well, we can figure out who that is then.
Meryl Nass:
A group of five scientists, and I knew of several of them. I've been in contact with at least one of them in the
past, and they too were sort of biological defense, biological warfare people.
Well, let me just say two of them I would call spooks
with Ph.Ds, who have come out and done research on a whole very odd collection of subjects, all of which the US government has tried
to cover up in the past. So I'll just name some of those things: Gulf War Syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, anthrax vaccine induced
illnesses, autism, Ebola, and coronavirus
.
So that's an odd group of different things that you might be researching and writing about. But oddly enough, a couple of these scientists
have chosen that obscure group of things that are somewhat unrelated to each other to comment about. And so these five scientists wrote
a piece in Nature Medicine which claimed to have found the scientific linchpin to be able to make the argument that the new coronavirus
is a natural occurrence. And the argument they made was that had it been constructed in the lab, it would have used the particular backbone
that laboratorians know about. But because it didn't have that backbone, it couldn't possibly be a lab construct.
The problem with that argument is basically it was a straw man argument. They said, well, if I were going to make the novel coronavirus,
I would have made it this way. But because it isn't made that way, it's not a lab construct. Of course, you can make the novel coronavirus
a lot of different ways. And I pointed out three different ways one might have come up with a novel coronavirus that weren't using the
method they suggested.
And I've gotten confirmation. I'm a physician, I'm not a scientist, but I did work in a lab. I went to M.I.T.. So I do know biology,
although I am not well versed in modern genetic engineering. But I do know a lot about how biological weapons used to be made, how they
were made before and during World War 2 and afterwards.
And there were very effective biological weapons made and used in the period
around World War 2 and subsequent to it that are documented in the literature. There are no books telling you what's been made in the
last 10 years. But we know a lot about what was made 50 to 80 years ago.
So I then looked at the connections between the first group of scientists who had published in
The Lancet
and the second group
that had published in
Nature Medicine
and found that well, for example, that the person I mentioned before who had been to Cuba
and looked at the Aedes mosquitoes, even though that person is now of the retirement age, is a member of the institute of one of the
second authors. And I saw other connections between these two groups.
Kevin Barrett:
Sounds like the usual suspects.
Meryl Nass:
Yes, exactly. It seemed that the second group, anyway, the guys who were trotted out to provide the last word
on all these other controversial medical subjects had been again trotted out to provide the last word. Then I thought, who else is talking
about this? And when I looked that up, I found the head of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, an MD-Ph.D, cited the work of these five scientists
to say basically now we've proven that this is a natural occurrence and everyone can forget about the conspiracy theory. And he further
said if you're if you're concerned about what you read about coronavirus, just go to the FEMA website where they are telling you what
is a rumor and what isn't. So I thought, well, that's interesting that the policy makers or the people who pull the strings are able
to pull Francis Collins' strings and get him to comment on this, again agreeing with an argument that he must have known to be specious.
Kevin Barrett:
You don't have to comment on this, but this sure reminds me of what's been going on post-9/11, with first the
ridiculous FEMA report on the so-called collapses of the Trade Center towers and then the NIST reports culminating in the most absurd
one of all, the NIST report on Building 7. Throughout that whole process, the usual suspect so-called scientists were putting out utter
baloney and rubber stamping it, and all the officials were rubber stamping it mindlessly, and any independent voices speaking common
sense and truth were marginalized.
Meryl Nass:
Yes. So that is of course what's happening here. And it's very helpful, it seems, to be able to identify them
as this same group, the same group who can be used over and over and over again over decades to whitewash what the system wants whitewashed.
And then you look at their grants. Ugh! Some of these people are making unbelievable grants.
Kevin Barrett:
They're probably flying on Epstein's Lolita Express and things like that, too.
Meryl Nass:
That I did not look up.
Kevin Barrett:
I wouldn't be surprised, anyway.
Meryl Nass:
There is a lot of money flowing through their laboratories. So anyway, the final point I made was that every scientist
who signed these two documents and then Francis Collins has had something to do with biological defense. If you're a top scientist in
the U.S. government, you are asked to look into pandemics and the risk that they could be due to a biological weapon. And so as far
as I could tell, virtually all these people have had some background in looking at these things. And they're all old. They all remember
the days before the last three decades of genetic engineering and they all must realize, if they have any competence as scientists,
that there are other ways to create biological agents, microorganisms. And so for them to all have signed this, knowing that, just makes
you wonder -- why did they do this?
They presumably did it because they had some sense that it was a lab organism. Perhaps it was a lab escape and perhaps they were
trying to protect the whole enterprise of biological defense, which is a multibillion dollar yearly industry that feeds many, many people,
including themselves.
Kevin Barrett:
I would argue that's a relatively innocent explanation. There are worse ones than that.
Meryl Nass:
The interesting thing is that all these countries do research together. So China, US, (former) Soviet Union, Ukraine
All different countries send people to labs in other countries to work on micro-organisms. So you can put your finger on people from
many different countries who were working on bat coronaviruses in labs around the world. And this could have been a lab escape from
many different places. I mean, it could have been a deliberate attack. But
in my understanding of biological warfare, no country
used a biological agent against another country if they didn't think they could control it. If they thought it might blow back onto
their country, it wouldn't be used. So historically, I don't think this is the kind of agent that would deliberately be used at a nation
level.
Kevin Barrett:
Let me just give you a possible opposing argument. John Mearsheimer wrote in, I believe 2015, in
a very famous article about China's
unpeaceful rise
that said, in so many words, the US is stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of trying to contain China's
rise, which is based on its double digit growth averaging out since 1980 or so. And that that growth inevitably is pushing China to
break out of U.S. containment in Asia and become a regional hegemon, which is unacceptable to U.S. decision makers. And more likely,
it will actually "pose global challenges" meaning displace the U.S. as global hegemon as well, simply based on its economic growth,
which now has supposedly slowed to maybe 8 percent. But still, the differential between that and the U.S. and its Western allies is
such that within a decade or two, at the very most, it's a done deal.
As long as there is no huge history-changing event that radically
ends this trajectory that we're on and that there's no obvious way off of, the US essentially will acquiesce to Chinese global hegemony.
And that is 100 percent unacceptable, even to sensible realists like Mearsheimer, much less the neocon fanatical crazies at places like
PNAC looking for a new American century.
And those people did 9/11-anthrax and they're back in power in the Trump administration. So Mearsheimer says that the only way
to stop China's rise is essentially to destroy the global economy. He says even wrecking the U.S. economy along with the global economy
would would be worth it because security is more important than prosperity. And this is a relatively sensible guy writing back in 2015.
I've argued with Ron Unz about this. He he thinks it would have been a U.S. attack designed not to escape China, like previous U.S.
(bio-)attacks on China. But
I don't see why they would be particularly averse to it escaping, going global and doing precisely what
it's doing, because it is doing exactly what they want, which is destroying the global(ized) economy, which ultimately in the long run
stops China's displacing the U.S. And number two, it militarizes the United States even more than 9/11 did. And they want to bring us
back to the thirties and head towards a World War 2 situation to stop China, although they hope it may not be necessary to go that far.
So basically, if the neocons didn't invent coronavirus, they would have had to invent some (similar) virus or its equivalent. This is
precisely what one would have predicted five years ago would happen.
Meryl Nass:
That's a reasonable argument. But the economy is not being totally destroyed. It's just that factories are, closed,
people aren't going to work. Nothing's been destroyed. When we come out of this, China will still have all the factories and we will
have all the monetarists and all the play money. So it seems like China could get its engines going a lot quicker than we can when we
come out of it.
Kevin Barrett:
We won't come out of it.
Meryl Nass:
So if we don't come out of it, then it's not what the neocons chose.
Kevin Barrett:
They don't want to come out of it. They want to wreck global prosperity while the U.S. still has most of the
military hardware.
Meryl Nass:
I'm sorry. I guess I don't understand that.
Kevin Barrett
: Well, OK,
first we could go to the neocon philosophy, which is that human flourishing only occurs during extreme
situations of stress, suffering, struggle and strife epitomized by warfare. So for them, the only real purpose of human life is all
out war to the death. And that's where heroic qualities emerge from human beings who are otherwise lazy and worthless. That's their
basic philosophy of life. And then secondly --
Meryl Nass:
No, wait a minute. If that's the neocon philosophy of life, why were they all chickenhawks? Have any of them gone
to war?
Kevin Barrett
:
Well, that's the point. They're projecting these fantasies in the privacy of their studies and their twisted,
warped imaginations. But yeah, they're happy to inflict this suffering and struggle and death on everybody else. And they want the other
guy to be the one to die, of course. And so I assume that they're planning to not be casualties of this disaster that they're setting
off. But setting the philosophical thing aside, I think that strategically they are really planning for this to take down the current
globalized economy, to force countries to go back to more localized manufacturing, certainly to follow Trump's and Kissinger's neocon
agenda, the anti-China agenda of bringing back manufacturing to the US.
Meryl Nass:
And is there anything wrong with that? That seems to me a worthy goal.
Kevin Barrett:
Well, actually, yes, I would support bringing back manufacturing. I would support never having sent it to China
in the first place. However, it's in the context of their plan to stop China's rise. And China is just as committed to its rise as these
guys are to stopping it. Which means a lot of danger of war and unpleasantness. And I think this is just the first shot of what's going
to be a long round of war and unpleasantness through the next decade.
Meryl Nass:
Perhaps. Right. We don't know. Another thing I've written is that the whole reason this (pandemic) is (being)
stopped. My theory is that, I've tried to think like a politician -- and I did write this before the lockdown -- which is that what
would have happened once this coronavirus had spread widely in the US, is that had it not been halted, we would have gotten to a point
where the coronavirus had required way more medical facilities, personnel, equipment, etc. than we had, and there would be people dying
without access to any medical care. And I thought that given that in America, based on polls, the one thing Americans want from their
government is a health care system, and that the idea of people dying in the street without being able to get into a hospital was so
beyond the pale for politicians who saw that they would never be re-elected under those circumstances, that they then did everything
they could to stop that from happening. And by the point they decided to do something, the only thing that could be done was a lockdown.
And then finally attempting to get more equipment, supplies and personnel.
Kevin Barrett:
So, yeah, I agree, that's plausible.
Meryl Nass
: That's what happened. And I'm sure everybody is trying to now use this very extraordinary circumstance to their
own benefit in the near and far future.
Kevin Barrett:
Yeah, I agree. We'll see. The thing is, if if you were planning this thing, assuming that my scenario and your
scenario are both true, a very small group of people would have unleashed it, and then everybody else would be reacting according to
their own self-interest, including the politicians doing precisely what you described.
Meryl Nass:
Yeah, that's certainly possible.
Kevin Barrett:
Yeah. And I'm using as my model for this 9/11, which is what I've studied quite a lot over the past nearly
two decades. And I see parallels here between the two events in that 9/11 was about going to war with Islamic civilization, just as
this seems to be a strike against Chinese civilization -- both occurring in the wake of the Samuel Huntington -- Bernard Lewis claim
that "the clash of civilizations will be the new paradigm for us." And if it hadn't been for 9/11, that probably wouldn't have happened.
There would've been no clash of civilizations per se.
Meryl Nass:
I think, yes, you're right. And yet it looks like China is going to get out of this way more unscathed than we
are.
Kevin Barrett:
That's possible. Of course, you know, "they plot and Allah plots and Allah is the best of plotters." Ron Unz
may be right that some of this may have been unforeseen. And it's also possible that I could be wrong. It could be a coincidence. Sometimes
the coincidence theorists, even the craziest coincidence theorists, can be right once in awhile.
Meryl Nass:
Well, yes, given the fact that there are documented many hundreds of lab escapes of different organisms, going
by what's most likely, that seems to be the most likely explanation.
Kevin Barrett:
Do you think that's what happened with Lyme disease? Willy Burgdorfer, whose name was applied to the spirochete
organism that causes Lyme, is on record, filmed and recorded by Timothy Grey, confessing that he, Burgdorfer not only provided a name
for the organism, but he unleashed it on the world as a U.S. biodefense guy. So a lot of people think Lyme was an external escape. Others
hypothesize there may have been some U.S. versus Soviet element there, because Burgdorfer had a lot of money he was getting from somebody,
and he was flying to places where he might have been meeting with Russians, et cetera. So have you looked into the Lyme issue?
"Barking up a tree is more superstition then evidence unless you are a hunting dog. What about names,
fingerprints, DNA evidence, contact with someone who was actually there and willing to talk? This is the
real world, not superstitious nonsense."
They're exploring hypotheses here, not going to trial. (BTW, the U.S. "government" would tell you you're
full of shit. Things like DNA evidence, fingerprints, etc. are for suckers).
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Harold Smith
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May 30, 2020 at 4:53 am GMT
Is Francis Boyle still insisting – without any kind of evidence whatsoever – that SARS-CoV-2 came from the
Wuhan lab? If so he's just a moron whose nonsense doesn't deserve any exposure, IMO.
Is Francis Boyle still insisting – without any kind of evidence whatsoever – that SARS-CoV-2 came from
the Wuhan lab? If so he's just a moron whose nonsense doesn't deserve any exposure, IMO.
He's a lawyer, therefore he'll play the devil's advocate – an useful role to validate a legitimate
conclusion.
@ Kevin Barrett
Good on you, Ron Unz and all the cast to pursue the quest for the source of the Cv-19 pandemic and keep the
question of biowarfare alive. An event unequal in human history in its sudden appearance, global reach, social
and economic consequences, with attendant officially approved and orchestrated propaganda and a long chain of
tell-tale "coincidences", must necessarily arouse the suspicion in every thinking person that the Masters of
the Universe are up with their usual tricks of attempting to re-shape the world according to their designs and
goals.
All major historical events have arisen, apart from the rare natural cataclysms, from Man's actions, mostly
the result of a single conspiracy from which, in turn, originate predictable and unpredictable reactions and
other conspiracies. Any plan or scheme to alter the existing status quo starts as a conspiracy whether a band
of professional robbers or politicians; it is in the nature of things that any organizational project or task
involves the co-operation of individuals as a group to achieve a particular aim and, if in the prosecution of
that aim a certain amount of discretion is necessary to have an advantage over the potential opposing side, a
conspiracy takes place. Most of governments' actions are conspiracies and their legitimacy and propriety should
be probed and investigated. To counter that, most (perhaps all) governments erect "official secrets acts" walls
to hide their conspiracies and set up counter-information departments.
This pandemic has risen a conspirational stench because it stinks of malodorous human interference with the
natural order for a purpose unknown, the first characteristic of a conspiracy. The same could be said about the
World Trade Centre incident because the official explanation is at variance with the physics natural order,
hence its conspiracy credentials because the government is openly hiding the true facts, as a conspirator does.
As Barrett has noted (and so have other commenters here at UR) the US is at a cross-roads in its history
where it must set a course of its own making to counter the rise of China as an economic superpower. The US
official policy is to prevent the emergence of any rival power, even a regional one in places where the US has
no legitimate concerns, and China must be hindered, blocked and neutralized. So far, nothing has worked to stop
the Chinese economic juggernaut and the usual solution of going to war is fraught with danger. Yes, the US
could nuke China (as the only military advantage it may have over China) but at a huge cost to itself, both
militarily and reputationally. Besides, facing the opprobrium of the world and a resurgent Russia (which would
not let the opportunity to be wasted) the US would be doomed. Even the clowns and puppets that masquerade as
government in Washington know that the "military solution" is out. Meanwhile, every year China is getting
bigger and better and time is of the essence, as Barrett noted.
What can be done to stop China then? Hybrid warfare (sanctions, blockades, threats, propaganda) is not
working either, but China, for the time being, has an Achilles heel: international trade, in which it depends
for continuing its economic development. If sanctions and threats against China's trading partners don't work,
how about bringing the whole international trade edifice down a la World Trade Centre? If the world global
economy is seriously disrupted, countries won't be able to trade and there goes the Chinese trump card. Enter
Covid-19.
"Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already
pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or
branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected. "
" and examine the environmental samples from the Wuhan Huanan seafood market. Importantly, the market
samples are genetically identical to human SARS-CoV-2 isolates and were therefore most likely from human
sources."
Where did RaTG13 come from?
Was Shi Zhengli engaging in some cover up, alibi [for whom?] constructing when she published her January
23, 2020 paper:
" on January 23, Shi Zhengli released a paper indicating that CoV2 is 96% identical to RaTG13, a strain
which her laboratory had previously isolated from Yunnan bats in 2013. However, outside of her lab, no one
knew about that strain until January 2020." – Yuri Deigin,
medium.com
The fact she revealed RaTG13 as her deus ex machina is somewhat odd, that RaTG13 which was sequenced and
analyzed was not published and not cataloged soon after its discovery in 2013 is, I would think, strange.
And supposedly there is no samples of RaTG13 in the lab. All they have is its sequence in the computer,
though, this perhaps might be normal for lab procedures, which I know nothing about.
RaTG13 is not that close to SARS-CoV-2.
https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
Reports show that pangolins are potentially the intermediate host, but pangolin viruses are 88–98% identical
to SARS-CoV-2. In comparison, civet and racoon dog strains of SARS coronaviruses were 99.8% identical to
SARS-CoV from 2003. In other words, we are talking about a handful of mutations between civet strains,
racoon dog strains and human strains in 2003. Pangolins [strains of CoV2] have over 3000 nucleotide changes,
no way they are the reservoir species.
Alfred
says:
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May 30, 2020 at 10:30 am GMT
• 200 Words
@Morton's toes
Before inventing a hypothesis about powers and forces and geopolitics forming current events, you really
need a historical analog. If it has never happened before, anywhere, any time, then you are making an argument
which has a form of this time it is different.
How about Lyme Disease? Just look at a map of how it is
spreading and where it started. Humans have lived in this area for many thousands of years – without any such
infection. Don't you think that it is a little suspicious that it should start in the USA and in the 1980's?
TPTB are trying to blame it on "Climate Change". Well, the climate has changed many times in the past.
Anyway, there are areas of the USA that are warmer than New England so why did it not start there?
It is pretty obvious to anyone with the ability to think critically that Lyme Disease was created in the USA
and in a laboratory in New England – a leading research area.
There are two ways viruses mutate, replication and recombination. It seems highly unlikely that Covid 19 was
a naturally occurring replication, hence the support for some kind of man-made virus.
However, it does seem quite possible, even highly probable that this was a mutation by recombination, the
most likely candidate being a mix of bat corona virus and pangolin corona virus.
Until we get the virology nailed down, blaming governments or labs is just politics and not science.
Corvinus
says:
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May 30, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMT
• 700 Words
@SBaker
"Can we blame it on the virus, even if it was manufactured in the evil labs of the US or China, as has been
convincingly suggested by Ron Unz?"
Suggested, yes. Convincingly? No.
The Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel
#coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.
January 14, 2020, World Health Organization
There is no evidence that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory.
April 20, 2020, The Conversation
The World Health Organization reiterated that the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 is "natural in
origin." Scientists who are examining the genetic sequences of the virus have assured "again and again that
this virus is natural in origin."
May 1, 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a renowned U.S. infectious disease expert, has said that there is no scientific
evidence to back the theory that the coronavirus was made in a Chinese laboratory. "If you look at the
evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, the scientific evidence is very, very strongly
leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," he said.
May 4, 2020, National Geographic
WHO says it has no evidence to support 'speculative' Covid-19 lab theory
May 5, 2020, The Guardian
The British government has not seen any evidence to suggest that the novel coronavirus that causes
COVID-19 was man-made.
May 9, 2020, UK Health Minister Matt Hancock
Scientists: 'Exactly zero' evidence COVID-19 came from a lab.
May 12, 2020, Center for Infections Disease Research and Policy
Evidence of COVID's natural origin mounts even as conspiracy theory about Chinese lab refuses to die
May 13, 2020, Cornell Alliance for Science
Mr. Unz can't have his cake and eat it, too. On one hand, he tacitly encourages readers to peddle this "Fake
News" mantra. On the other hand, he latches on to MSM stories that seemingly support his conclusions. He
inferred that we ought to trust ABC News, which cited four separate intelligence sources that a government
report
*existed*
that Covid-19 is a bioweapon. Of course that report "exists". Whether or not
that report constitutes a "smoking gun" in an entirely different matter. But I thought that ANYTHING that comes
from U.S. intelligence ought not to be trusted. Because Deep State. It would appear that those stories which
supports his predisposed narrative, he takes stock in, and for other stories that go against his truth grain,
he vigorously questions their veracity, at best, or totally discards.
Ultimately, a fine number of readers here believe the source he used is part of FAKE NEWS. I would like to
know how Mr. Unz would respond to their repeated accusation that ALL of the mainstream media reporting are
lies. Here is Anon 223 stating that we ought NOT to trust ABC News.
I wouldn't take the ABC news report at face value. Essentially, most of the Federal Government despises
Trump, and want an excuse to make him look bad. Stating that the coronavirus was known since November would
make Trump look bad since he didn't do anything(though he does look bad ). This the same organization that
states continuously that Trump had allied with Russia and that he had a hooker pee on him in a Russian
hotel.
Now, if we go by the assumption that Mr. Unz "carefully reads" several MSM publications, then would it not
be probable that other people also carry out this same course of action? Would not those people be properly
equipped to counter his line of thinking if they underwent a similar process? Or does Mr. Unz possess a unique
skillset they ultimately lack?
"The Global Lockdown is a massive worldwide reset mechanism, deliberately engineered, designed to knock over
the chessboard and scatter the pieces, forcing the players to either start over or to create new, invented
positions on the board"
This statement here personifies the descent into modern anti-intellectualism. This insistence that a
Globalist cabal will destroy the white race once and for all is predicated on the notion that the Deep State is
pulling the strings through a series of coordinated false flags, with high IQ whites being duped along the way
by a complicit media. Proof? Not required. But anyone dare to question this general Alt-Right, Q-driven
narrative, and (whallah) one is deemed a purveyor of Fake News. Hey, no need to critically think when under the
impression that ANY and ALL news from the MSM is doctored, altered, or outright lies.
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Desert Fox
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May 30, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMT
• 100 Words
The coronavirus scam was unleashed to provide trillions to bail out wall street and at the same time bring in
UN Agenda 2030 draconian, diabolical, demonic controls over humanity, using the fake coronavirus scare , which
it a total scam.
Gates and Fauci and all involved in this scam should be arrested for crimes against
humanity!
This virus is man-made, but it is not a bioweapon.
The real weapon was the fake media that is controlled by a handful of people. All the countries that went
into a national lockdown, including Russia, have a media controlled by Zionists.
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2020crazzetrain
says:
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May 30, 2020 at 2:38 pm GMT
• 100 Words
Great article, Mr. Unz. The US is the consummate propaganda machine!
Mr. Romanoff's
3 part series on Bio-Weapons
, among other things, such as
'The Untold History of the
United States'
on Netflix; opened my eyes to just how diabolical these global technocratic, psychos have
been for as long as I've been alive.
Fort Detrick was likely place of origin for
'the engineered virus'.
"Until we get the virology nailed down, blaming governments or labs is just politics and not science."
Well that makes sense, but you're preaching to the choir.
As we would expect, the problem is the corrupt U.S. "government," which is already publicly blaming the
enemy du jour, China, without any evidence to back up its claims. And the U.S. "government" is making threats
and already taking some action based on those unsupported claims.
It may be of benefit to humanity if some doubt can be immediately cast on the specious claims of the U.S.
"government."
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Robert White
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May 30, 2020 at 3:10 pm GMT
• 400 Words
Real Probability of SARS-2-nCoV-19 being a bioweaponized nCoronavirus imbued with Gain-ofFunction properties,
and Dual Use applications is in fact P=1 given pathogenicity, asymptomatic & undetectable spread, and aged
cohort fatalities in Long Term Care environments.
Epidemiologically, a Six Sigma collapse of the entirety of
all Long Term Care facilities in the world would devastate the infrastructure for Tertiary Care Hospitals
worldwide via spread & vectoring of this deadly man made Pandemic Pathogen.
To assert that SARS-2-nCoV-19 is merely yet another nCoronavirus that has manifested naturally whilst
asserting on the other hand that it could not possibly be a man made bioweaponized nCoronavirus is a lesson in
doublespeak when evidence is not forthcoming for the assertions.
Real scientists are evidenced based via Empiricism proper. Propagandists don't utilize evidenced based
argumentation as that would undermine their task to win hearts & minds one step at a time.
NIST manufactured so-called 'evidence' that was NOT peer-reviewed whatsoever. The bioweaponized SARS-2-nCoV-19
will undergo the same propagandization process utilized for the CIA Controlled Demolition of the Trade Centers
in NYC.
Most researchers continue to neglect mention of the 2014 Cambridge Working Group Call to Action on
Gain-of-Function Dual Use Pandemic Pathogen manufacturing in USA Biosafety Level Four laboratories, but it is
key to the historical patterns & USA finance of the global industry of Pandemic Pathogen manufacturing in
global BSL-4 laboratories that are primarily funded by USA taxpayers the world over.
Most researchers also fail to mention that the United States of America is a culture of death & extreme text
book Psychopathy via Central Intelligence Agency acts of genocide on a global basis.
The historiography is replete with evidence that the United States of America is funding the lion's share of
Pandemic Pathogen research in BSL-4 labs worldwide, and they are also the most likely & probable culprits for
any & all Pandemic Pathogen outbreaks whether accidental or otherwise intentional.
American is a continent of liars, thieves, and text book Psychopaths helming the political sphere and
obviously lost hegemonic status worldwide 2020. In 2016 we were led to believe that if the USA voted in a true
text book Psychopath like Trump and facilitated a bogus meme to run on like Make America Great Again-MAGA, we
would all live happily ever after until the next round of elections manifested that produced a Democrat
replacement.
Neocons & Republicans always utilize threats of war to finagle their way through terms of corruption whilst
pillaging the financial system globally. Today is no different politically from any other Republican term of
office whereby violence & threats of violence are their only tools of choice.
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Sean
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May 30, 2020 at 4:05 pm GMT
• 400 Words
'American neoconservatives' can only mean the crypto Zionist Jews of the Israel Lobby, and as they are far more
worried about Israel than America, to credibly propose US neocons as the authors of a bioweapon attack on
China, it is necessary to explain how that would benefit Israel. Or, at least how it might have been calculated
by US neocons to be in the interests of Jewish American Zionist aspirations for Israel. A continuing close
relationship between Israel and America is the prerequisite for all Zionist hopes for the future. I think the
only scenario for neocons attacking China with a bioweapon is they thought it necessary to save Israel from its
own leadership. Last December Netanyahu's son said British diplomats should be "kicked out" of Israel because
of their reference to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Israel has clearly no fear of anything the
international community says about the West Bank Palestinians. American support is a given and while Trump is
in office Israel formally annexing the West Bank and penning its Palestinian population up in Bantustans is
something American neoconservatives can and will bring about. Unless there is something else Israel is doing
that makes sustaining the pro Israel stance geopolitically impossible.
There is such an obstacle to Trump acquicing in the annexation of the occupied territories: a burgeoning
collaboration between China and Israel. China running the Israeli port that US Navy warships dock at and China
building the world's biggest desalination plant in Israel (supposedly a key ME ally of the US) is not something
that any US president could or would accept. Trump is absolutely going to have to act to counter it, and
because the Netanyahu family will be handsomely paid off by the Chinese (valuing the Israel Lobby as a wedge
against Trump's China trade policy) there is a possibility that Israel annexing the West Bank will be the
begining of the end of the US-Israel, special relationship. It sort of makes sense for the US neoconservatives
worried about Israel to attack China in order to separate it from Israel. However from what I have read the
Israel Lobby is subservient to Israeli politicians.
Former CIA director John Brennan suppressed intelligence which indicated that Russia wanted
Hillary Clinton to win because "she was a known quantity," vs. the unpredictable Donald
Trump, according to Fox News' Ed Henry.[.]
==========
Never mind the prosecutorial misdeeds - FBI Can't prove guilt. Judge Sullivan is delaying
DOJ's move to drop the case against General Flynn.
LINK and LINK
Softpanorama
2019
2020
+43
MintPress News | Alexander Rubinstein | Mar 6, 2019 Opposing some dictatorships, supporting others
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© Haaretz When Donadio began searching for documentation of Eitan's role, he found a memo and contract draft with an Israeli security firm called "Ktalav Promotion and Investment Ltd" in the files of Barco's legal secretary, Fernán Bejarano Arias, who is today the vice president of legal affairs at Ecopetrol. The document valued the deal at almost $1 million, including a fee of $535,714, which covered "up to 50 tickets for air transport purposes, round trip, on the Tel Aviv-Bogotá route," among other expenses. The memo indicates that portions of the contract were agreed upon with the lawyer Ernesto Villamizar Cajiao.
© Rachamim Shaul/The National Library of Israel
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Joe Biden speaks on the Colonial Pipeline attack as Vice President Kamala Harris stands by at the White House in Washington, DC, May 10, 2021 © Reuters / Kevin Lamarque 14 Follow RT on
A cyberattack that crippled the US fuel supply wasn't the work of Russia, President Joe Biden said. Confusingly, Biden then said that Russia bears "some responsibility" for the attack.
Scott Ritter
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines speaks during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about worldwide threats © Reuters The Director of National Intelligence has ostensibly created a new “center†for the sharing and analysis of information and intelligence about foreign interference in US elections. Its real focus is much more nefarious.
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"The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of "Hulk" (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive," Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress .
Google uses data about your behavior and preferences to deliver better or more personalized services.
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