Something Twisted Grows in the Big Cities Run by Democrats

[Something Grows in the Big Cities Run by Democrats: An Overwhelming Sense of Lawlessness]

The Coming Civil War

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If Trump wins in November, it is foreseeable that his many enemies will ratchet up their hatred for him to even more destructive extremes. A bloody civil war would become likely, escalating an already violent cultural battle to a new threshold. How this might impact our schools, workplaces and neighborhoods is unpredictable even if the tactical outcome is not. The red states, wide-open spaces where politically conservative Americans tend to live and work, have superior firepower, to put it mildly, and their geographical vastness has rendered them invulnerable to attack.

They also provide most of the food consumed by blue-zone denizens, implying red partisans could lay siege to blue, bringing the color war to a relatively quick end. Political liberals have taken to boycotting the wares of nearly everyone perceived as unfriendly to their cause. It remains to be seen whether conservatives can get sufficiently aroused to return fire, not only by boycotting every product or service associated with liberal ownership, but by disrupting the flow of essentials into the big cities where they live.

Starvation Videos at Six!

It is not hard to imagine the Democrats’ urban strongholds running up the white flag in a month or two, when they’ve come to resemble hell-holes like the ill-fated Chaz in Seattle.  Cities that have been run into the ground over the last 50 years by Democrats would become far worse, virtually unlivable even for the dregs. Who would want to remain in such a place? Even Antifa, when they are done looting and setting businesses ablaze, return to their parents’ basements to quaff beer and watch themselves on television. Watching themselves starve would surely take the fun out of their Visigoth notoriety.

I used to imagine that America’s Second Civil War would begin when a gang of Che wannabes got caught in the middle of the night trying to topple a statue in Boise, Idaho. The local militia would put a quick end to this mischief while the perps’ 911 calls went unanswered for a few critical minutes. They’d become instant martyrs on CNN and MSNBC, but only for the dwindling audience that still tunes to these stations for news. Although this scenario seems likely to play out somewhere in America, and perhaps in many places, a siege is even more likely to decide the coming war’s outcome.

Small-Town Papers Will Save Us

We shouldn’t get our hopes too high that it will make the nation a better place overnight. The culture wars will continue, perhaps for decades, and those who have poisoned Americans’ sense of themselves will be extremely difficult to dislodge. This is notwithstanding the fact that most of us recognize we are not racists, that our history is not deserving of shame, and that we are not the monsters we are portrayed to be by those who foment the news.  Ironically, a revival of small-town newspapers is the best pathway we have for restoring the values that made America great. This will happen because the demand for news at the local level has always been insatiable. It remains for entrepreneurs to find ways to gather and distribute news economically by jettisoning the brick-and-mortar model.  Once revived, small-town papers will allow Americans to come together in ways that we cannot as long as the major purveyors of news act as provocateurs.

Concerning Trump’s odds in November, it’s hard to see how he could lose. The canvassers are even more wrong than they were in the months prior to the 2016 election.  Conservative pollster Karl Rove deserves special opprobrium because he should know better. He’s been so busy splitting electoral hairs in blue-collar states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan that he’s blind to the massive shift of working men and women away from the Democrats that began 50 years  ago. Construction workers were fed up then with sending their sons to Vietnam to die while campus protestors dodged military service. They are even more fed up now, having witnessed the implosion of the nation’s schools, the abysmal failure of a $20 trillion war on poverty, the heightening of racial tensions to a state of war, and now the abandonment of our biggest cities to sociopaths.

Voters’ Deep, Dark Secret

These are the voters that the polls would have us believe are in Biden’s back pocket?  Add in fifteen million centrists who wouldn’t dare confide to a stranger from Harris or Gallup that they plan to vote for the Orange Man, and you can see why Trump is going to win, and not by just a few votes.  His re-election cannot but beget a violent reaction, as noted above, but it will take nothing less to produce a catharsis capable of putting America back on track. As leftists are fond of saying, you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.

America really is screwed

“It’s too late for America to recover. It left it too long. It was arrogant and conceited, paying for things it didn’t need, like wars and mega-mansions, but not those it did. So it didn’t invest when it should have, but now the bill is due, but nobody can pay it. What do you call a society like that? Bankrupt. Just like most Americans are, only they don’t know it. What do you call a whole society of people, after all, who die in debt?America’s broke, my friends. And when you’re broke, what do you have left to invest in yourself?”

I’m not negative, America really is screwed

Nigeria News

Trump supporters in America in support of MAGA

By Umair Haque

A few years ago, I wrote a post called “Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse.” Sadly, I think my predictions have proven to be true — though I suppose you can judge that for yourself. 90,000 dead and counting. A president who calls the death toll a “badge of honor.” A paralysed Congress. 40 million unemployed. Today, I often get the question, “Why are you negative, Umair?” or, “What can be done to fix all this?” These are really the same question, and my answer, which you probably won’t like, goes like this: we’re still underestimating American collapse.

The economics of American collapse say that it’s probably too late to fix America. It’s probable that this is the new normal. Chaos, decline, incompetence, malice, poverty, hopelessness, despair.

Let me explain, as clearly as I can.

You can see, right about now, that America is what political scientists call a failed state. A President who tells people to drink bleach during a pandemic. 90,000 dead, of which 90% are needless. A society that’s not able to provide basics for it’s citizens anymore. A nation in which income, savings, life expectancy, happiness, trust are all in free-fall. This is the stuff of epic social collapse.

Now, the reason that America collapsed is straightforward. Americans never invested in building expansive social systems, unlike Europe. Systems to provide healthcare, retirement, childcare, finance, and so forth.

The result has been twofold. One, the average American now goes without these things. That’s because they’re largely unavailable. For example, the fresh food that I can get on any block in Europe is simply absent in huge chunks of the States. You buy processed food, or you don’t get food. The same is true of many, many things, like, say, education, or income. You don’t have a job with guarantees and protections like in Canada or Europe. You have a lower quality — not just quantity — of income.

Two, the average American pays prices that the rest of the world considers absolutely absurd — because they are — for the very same things. Having a child? That’ll be $50K, thank you. An operation? That’ll be more than a house. Want to educate a kid? There go your life savings. Want a few fresh apples? That’ll be ten times the price Canadians or Europeans pay. These things — the basics of life — are eminently affordable in the rest of the rich world. In America, though, they cost more than the average person can afford.

How do I know that? Because the average American now dies in debt. Their whole life is one long sequence of unpayable debts now. First, there’s “lunch debt” which becomes “student debt” which becomes a mortgage and credit card debt which becomes “medical debt.” The forms of debt in quotes don’t even exist in most other rich countries. In America, though, they define life — precisely because the average American is now a poor person, in the sense that they can’t make ends meet when it comes to paying for the basics of life.

Sure, they might have a big car and big house and a big gun. But the economic truth is this: all those things are had on debt, and the average American now lives like an impoverished person. No savings, no assets, no liquidity. 80% — eighty percent — of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, struggle to pay basic bills, and can’t raise say $500 for an emergency. Those are the statistics of a nation having descended into poverty.

Now. I don’t write all that to make some theoretical point, so let’s come back to the question. Can America save itself from collapse? If you really understand the numbers, then the answer above — sadly — is: probably not. The economics say that America has more or less almost certainly reached a point of no return now, and collapse is nearly inevitable.
To stop collapse, America would have to start investing — massively, suddenly, historically — in functioning systems. To stop longevity and health cratering, it needs a healthcare system. To stop happiness and trust cratering, it needs affordable education and retirement. To stop incomes and savings plummeting, it needs retirement systems and protections for workers. And so forth. Every single facet of American collapse requires massive, large-scale, sustained public investment to be turned around, that goes on for a decade or more.

Many Americans even support that much. They get, by now, that without a new social contract, America is finished. Sure, the American Idiot — Trump and his army of bleach-drinking morons — don’t. But maybe the average American does — sure, let’s allow that much. The tragic wrinkle is that it makes no difference. Even if the majority of Americans want a better America — is it too late to actually build one? Probably.

Why? Well, who’s going to pay for it? Remember those dismal statistics above? The average American lives like a poor person now? So who exactly is going to pay for all these expansive new systems? The average person simply can’t afford the very improvements to society that they need anymore. Bang! What happens then? The answer is: nothing does. More of this does: a slow, shocking collapse and descent. Because there’s no other option, choice, alternative. Nobody much has the money for one. You see, if I say to the average American — “let’s fix America. All you have to do is pay ten percent more in taxes, and you’ll have world-class healthcare, retirement, childcare, and so on” — they might even support it, whole-heartedly. They might genuinely want it.

But the economic truth is that they cannot afford it. That ten percent is now crucial income. That’s what “the average American dies in debt” tells us. The average person can’t give up that ten percent. He or she needs it — usually desperately — to pay off simple everyday bills. They have no real savings to speak of. So where is the money to fund this wonderful new social contract going to come from? The bitter truth is this: Americans are now too poor to afford a better social contract. Even if Americans support a Canadian or European style social contract, the hard economic truth is that are probably now too poor to ever have one. Americans are now so poor they can barely afford to support themselves and their own —80% live at the edge — so how can they afford to support anyone else, let alone everyone else?

That’s not just some idle opinion. You can see stark evidence of these fatal economics already doing their work. Americans just rejected their best chance at reform in generations, Bernie and Liz Warren. That was on the left — the 70% or who say they want decent healthcare, retirement, education, and so on. Only they never, ever vote for it, when it comes down to it. Why? Raising the spectre of higher taxes to fund a functioning society is something that simply can’t be borne by even those who want. Nobody can afford it now. Even Americans who say they want a better society don’t seem able — predictably, consistently — to follow through now. There’s a reason for that, and it’s that America is too poor as a country to afford to be a functioning society anymore.

Even if, as Bernie promised, taxes wouldn’t rise — Americans don’t seem to believe it. Why not? It’s not just they don’t — with good reason — distrust their government. It’s also that they can’t bear any more uncertainty. When your whole life and future seems to be going up in smoke, when you bear all the risk in society — the last thing you can take is even more. So while Bernie and Liz might have championed a functioning society at the same tax rate, the risk of taking having to pay for a functioning society is simply now too much for Americans who already live at the edge. What if taxes do end up rising by five percent? When you’re already perpetually struggling? Bang! Then it’s game over. Americans can’t afford to bear the risks or costs of fundamental reforms to a broken society, and that seals in collapse as the only trajectory left to follow.

On the right, by the way, people are so confused and bewildered that, like the protesters above, they’re willing to give up their lives to keep their livelihoods. That’s how desperate things have gotten. See the point: on the left, people might want a functioning society, but never, ever vote for it, because nobody can afford it, while the right has given up on it altogether, hoping only for the chance to be exploited, just so long as food can still be put on the table. That leaves…nobody much…in society…who both wants a functioning nation, and can afford to pay for it.

Sure, it’s true that corporations and the super rich can be taxed. And they should be, heavily. But that’s not enough. There’s a reason that Europe and Canada ask people to pay higher taxes to support a better social contract, and that reason is that is the only way such a contract is sustainable. You can’t get there from a one-off tax on corporations and the rich alone.

It’s also true that if America were to build a better social contract — with say good healthcare and retirement and so forth — everyone’s bills would decline over time. But that doesn’t solve the problem, which is that Americans can’t afford the costs in the first place. Sure, if American had public healthcare, people wouldn’t have to pay $10K per person per year for it. But they do — and it’s not as if someone’s magically going to raise their incomes by that much if they don’t. Do you think corporate America’s going to give anyone a raise just because it’s paying less in healthcare costs? That’s why all the plans for overhauling America’s broken public healthcare system involve, still, employers paying into some kind of fund — nobody wants to give people more money. But without giving people more money, Americans stay too poor to live in anything but…the collapsing society America’s become.

If that doesn’t make sense, just think about it in your own life. Could you really afford to lose 10% of your income right about now? Ever? More likely, like most Americans, your life is balanced right on the razor’s edge. A few percent either way, and — kaput!! — you lose most or everything you have. There goes the mortgage, school, the credit ratin, and so forth. The plainer economic translation of that is: you’re too poor to afford a functioning society. You can barely support your own — how can you support anyone, everyone, else?

So how was America left too poor to afford anything but collapse? In Europe and Canada, there’s a certain kind of fairness that came to prevail. People pay about half their incomes in taxes. Half for me, half for everyone else. But that also means that society’s surplus is distributed far more equitably in the first place. That half you pay in taxes goes on to employ doctors, nurses, professors, public servants of all kinds that simply don’t exist in America. It’s used to invest in hospitals, schools, universities, parks, libraries — every single year. That’s been happening for something like 50 years by now: a cycle of equitable redistribution that became sustained investment and reinvestment. What happens if you invest in a thing like a park, hospital, library for fifty years? It gets better and better. Its returns grow and grow. There’s more of everything to go around for everyone. The battle for self-preservation doesn’t lock people into poverty, as it has in America. That is what it means to be a truly rich society.

America’s been doing exactly the opposite, for the same fifty years, and longer. See any reinvestment in…anything? Everything’s decrepit, from airports to schools to libraries, precisely because there hasn’t been any. There hasn’t been any — or enough, anyways — because Americans didn’t want to pay those higher taxes Europeans and Canadians did. They believed the strange, foolish, and evidence-free ideologies of trickle-down economics and neoliberalism and all the rest of it — we’ll all be richest if we invest in…precisely nothing together. Nobody should care about anyone else. Nobody should ever support anyone else in the pursuit of anything. Life was to be purely individualistic, adversarial, and acquisitive.

That led Americans straight into a poverty trap. They were paying lower taxes, sure. But their public goods were decaying. Their common wealth was eroding. Their systems and institutions were corroding. What happens to metal that isn’t polished, a street that’s never cleaned, a house that’s never repaired? Well, in the end, you have to pay a bigger bill. But you might not be able to afford it by then. Bang! Then you’re done. You live in that crumbling house until it finally turns to dust, if you can’t pay the roofer, plumber, electrician. That’s where America is now.

Do you know what a poverty trap is? When a poor person spends more than rich people just to have the basics — think of a poor person spending most of their income on low-quality food, transportation, medicine, and so on, because it’s all they can get. That’s where America is now, from a global perspective. In a classic poverty trap. Too poor to ever afford to be rich again, because it doesn’t have the money to invest in it’s own self-improvement or betterment now. Decades of underinvestment mean that there was less and less to go around — until American life became a brutal daily battle for self-preservation. But when all you can do is barely even struggle to preserve yourself, put food on the table, keep your family afloat — what do you have left to give back to a better society? Nothing, is the grim answer, and it’s borne out by America’s spectacularly low — negative — savings rate, aka, everyone but the mega-rich dies in debt.

To achieve European or Canadian living standards, how much would America have to invest now? Think of it: gleaming hospitals for everyone, thriving public squares, expansive childcare, good retirement, jobs that pay the bills, oversight of it all. It would take trillions. Probably dozens of trillions. Much, much more than average Americans all put together can afford to spend now. Those are the brutal economics of collapse. Societies who let themselves become poor can hardly then wave a magic want and become rich.

What it means to be a poor society, which is what America has become, is also the experience of life in it by now: political chaos, economic ruin, emotional paralysis, cultural degeneration. Europe and Canada, again, have been investing in life for decades, while America’s been ignoring it. The result is that they are ahead now — and America probably can’t ever catch up. America let itself become a poor society, and this — the chaos and dislocation of now — is what it means to be one.

I know this is grim reading. It’s terrible and horrific. Is it “negative,” though? Well, I know that it comes across that way. I want to do a job that the typical pundit won’t, though, which is try to tell you simple truths. The one that economics tells me is this.

It’s too late for America to recover. It left it too long. It was arrogant and conceited, paying for things it didn’t need, like wars and mega-mansions, but not those it did. So it didn’t invest when it should have, but now the bill is due, but nobody can pay it. What do you call a society like that? Bankrupt. Just like most Americans are, only they don’t know it. What do you call a whole society of people, after all, who die in debt?America’s broke, my friends. And when you’re broke, what do you have left to invest in yourself?

There’s one way out, by the way, if you’ve followed me closely. Give people money. No strings attached, no questions asked, now, on a large-scale, more or less permanently, forget how much needs to be borrowed to make it happen. So people can fund a working society again. Or else. That’s the big question for America. The rest is noise. Until something along those lines begins to take shape — my answer is simple: Americans made themselves too poor to now afford to have the luxury of a functioning, civilised, modern society. Or is all that a necessity?

*Umair first published this in Medium

The CIA Democrats–Part one

“Candidates from a military-intelligence background are seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 40 percent of the congressional districts targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2018 elections.”– Part three

By Patrick Martin
7 March 2018

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.

A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, “homeland defense” and cyber warfare.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called “Red to Blue” program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats—in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop.

The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle. There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic primary campaigns that, with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call “spy vs. spy.”

The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings. The latter’s website describes him as a former national security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election.

CNN’s “State of the Union” program on March 4 included a profile of Jones as one of many female candidates seeking nomination as a Democrat in Tuesday’s primary in Texas. The network described her discreetly as a “career civil servant.” However, the Jones for Congress website positively shouts about her role as a spy, noting that after graduating from college, “Gina entered the US Air Force as an intelligence officer, where she deployed to Iraq and served under the US military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy” (the last phrase signaling to those interested in such matters that Jones is gay).

According to her campaign biography, Ortiz Jones was subsequently detailed to a position as “senior advisor for trade enforcement,” a post President Obama created by executive order in 2012. She would later be invited to serve as a director for investment at the Office of the US Trade Representative, where she led the portfolio that reviewed foreign investments to ensure they did not pose national security risks. With that background, if she fails to win election, she can surely enlist in the trade war efforts of the Trump administration.

How this article was prepared

The House of Representatives is currently controlled by the Republicans, with a majority of 238 compared to 193 Democrats. There are four vacancies, one previously held by the Democrats. To reach a majority of 218 seats in the next Congress, the Democrats must have a net gain of 24 seats.

The DCCC has designated 102 seats as priority or competitive, including 22 seats where the incumbents are not running again (five Democrats and 17 Republicans), and 80 seats where Republican incumbents could be defeated for reelection in the event that polls predicting a sizeable swing to the Democrats in November prove accurate.

The World Socialist Web Site has reviewed Federal Election Commission reports filed by all the Democratic candidates in these 102 competitive districts, focusing on those candidates who reported by the latest filing date, December 31, 2017, that they had raised at least $100,000 for their campaigns, giving them a financial war chest sufficient to run in a competitive primary contest. In addition, there a few cases where a candidate had less than the $100,000 cutoff, but was unchallenged for the nomination, or where last-minute retirement or resignation has led to late entry of high-profile candidates without an FEC report on file. These have also been included.

The total of such candidates for the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts is 221. Each has a website that gives biographical details, which we have collected and reviewed for this report. It is notable that those candidates with a record in the military-intelligence apparatus, as well as civilian work for the State Department, Pentagon or National Security Council, do not hide their involvement, particularly in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They clearly regard working as a CIA agent in Baghdad, an Army special ops assassin in Afghanistan, or a planner for drone missile warfare in the White House or Pentagon as a star on their résumé, rather than something to conceal.

One quarter of all the Democratic challengers in competitive House districts have military-intelligence, State Department or NSC backgrounds. This is by far the largest subcategory of Democratic candidates. National security operatives (57) outnumber state and local government officials (45), lawyers (35), corporate executives, businessmen and wealthy individuals (30) and other professionals (19) among the candidates for Democratic congressional nominations.

Of the 102 primary elections to choose the Democratic nominees in these competitive districts, 44 involve candidates with a military-intelligence or State Department background, with 11 districts having two such candidates, and one district having three. In the majority of contests, the military-intelligence candidates seem likely to win the Democratic nomination, and, if the Democrats win in the general election, would enter Congress as new members of the House of Representatives.

There are some regional differences. In the Northeast, 21 of the 31 seats targeted by the Democrats have military-intelligence candidates. This area, not the South or Midwest, has the highest proportion of military-intelligence candidates seeking Democratic nominations.

In the West, only 7 of the 23 targeted seats have military-intelligence candidates, while in a half dozen seats the leading candidates are self-funded millionaires, mainly from the IT industry. There has been a wave of Republican retirements in California and wealthy people are bidding for these seats.

The military-intelligence candidates are disproportionately favored by the party apparatus, encouraged to run in districts that are the most likely takeover targets. Military-intelligence candidates account for 10 of the 22 districts selected for the most high-profile attention as part of the “red-to-blue” program, or nearly half. In some cases, military-intelligence candidates have amassed huge campaign war chests that effectively shut out any potential rivals, an indication that the financial backers of the Democratic Party have lined up behind them.

To be continued

Black and White Militia Groups Meet In Louisville

Live updates from weekend protests: Man shot to death at Austin protest, Seattle police declare riot, armed militia in Louisville

“The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year,” NSSF Director of Research and Market Development Jim Curcuruto said in a statement.–Fox News

Gun, ammo sales surging amid coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest: survey

Trump says he could send as many as 75,000 federal agents to US cities

Not F**king Around Coalition

NFAC is in its infancy. The gestation period may have been ten years (probably closer to one year), but they have only had a public presence for less than a month.

Their purposes and goals are very different from BLM and Antifa, but do has some overlap with each of them.

They have virtually no track record to examine, but they strong leadership, who has made clear claims. At this point I have no reason to doubt the grand Master statement of intentions, and many reasons to accept them. He has made some historical claims that are questionable.

John Fitzgerald Johnson is the Grand Master, and only spokesperson. He goes by “Jay”. He ran for President in 2016, prior to NFAC. He appears to be a very noteworthy individual, in a class with Stokely Carmichael, perhaps even Malcolm X.

He is a veteran, as are all members of NFAC. That gives them credibility not shared with BLM and Antifa.

All members are black, and veterans, characteristics not shared by BLM or Antifa.

They openly support violence, and because of this are not aligned with BLM. Unlike Antifa, they claim their violence is defensive, not instigated or offensive. No reason to doubt this at this time. Their purpose is to defend blacks and others against white supremacists.

They are all black, and although not clearly self described as segregationist, do have that appearance, more later.

I would describe them as a black populist militia, and a very reasonable response to white supremist militias. If I were black, I would be seeking them out, to join up.

Here is a quote from Grand Master Jay.

“Black Lives Matter does not represent the sentiments of the black community. We have distanced ourselves from them completely,”

“BLM doesn’t believe in violence, we do. We chose America’s Independence Day to send that message as we were slaves when that happened, we were not members of this country.”

I did not find a detailed explanation for the distancing from BLM. There certainly appears to be more than the violence issue. BLM welcomes woke white support, and seeks full integration with white society, whereas NFAC wants segregated societies. This would certainly be a basis for distancing.

More from Jay:

“We have no identity, they call us African Americans but tell me, where in Africa? There are 55 countries in Africa.”

“My goal is much loftier than that, not only to facilitate the exodus of the black nation here in America but the implementation of what we would call the United State of Africa.”

I take issue with his claim of “they call us African Americans”.

Clearly this refers to the establishment, and it seems to refer to whites.

Until 1966 blacks referred to themselves as “Negros”. Today, this is considered a racial slur, only slightly better than the other N word.

“Colored” was the commonly used adjective until the 1920s, when Booker T Washington and others advocated for “Negro”. Blacks chose “Negro” as their preferred term. Society accepted and agreed. NAACP has retained the use of “colored”, for their own reasons.

In 1966 Stokely Carmichael popularized the call for “Black power”. The shift began from negro, to black.

In 1988, Jessie Jackson started for a push to African-American. This was accepted by government agencies, and came into widespread usage. Today, among blacks, there seems to be no strong preference between black and African-American.

So, historically, colored, negro, black, African-American, are all terms blacks have accepted (in the case of colored) or originated (for the other three), by blacks for self-description.

I remember learning that “negro” was the preferred and respectful term for black people. Today that is a racial slur. I remember switching to “black”, as oppressed blacks in my age group preferred that. I remember being confused and indecisive about “African-American”. I always respected Stokely Carmichael, and had very little respect for Jessie, but it did seem the black establishment preferred African-American. Carmichael was decidedly antiestablishment, which some view as undesirable. Eventually the dust settled, and I accepted that official forms wanted AA, but person to person, black was referred, or at least not objectionable.

For the last 100 years blacks have chosen the term referring to their group, but Grand Master Jay has implied that the AA terminology was thrust on them by whites. My guess is Jay recognizes Jessie is responsible, but JJ is cozy enough with white establishment, to commingle him with whites, rather than find fault with another black. A completely understandable position, and slightly misleading, which I point out.

Jay has the goal for NFAC of establishing an autonomous black Nation, within the boundaries of the USA, or elsewhere. He is expecting prime real estate. Texas has been mentioned as a “for instance”, although he has no particular designs on that particular piece of ground.

It is difficult to consider his wishes without considering how Native Americans faired. Their problem was they lacked unity. One people, but many Nations (tribes). They got rocks and sand. Jay expects much more.

White supremacists have been saying for 100 years ‘Go back where you came from.’ Jay is willing to accept a variation of that. Other blacks before him have as well. Unlike BLM, NFAC wants no part of white society, whereas BLM wants full control of it. There is some middle ground between them, but not much. BLM and Antifa have so much middle ground, they are virtually indistinguishable.

If I were black, I would be embracing NFAC, and avoiding BLM/Antifa like the plague.

SecState Psycho Pompeo Begs the World To Join Our War On China

[ Sec. State Psycho Pompeo Pushes Allies To Join Trump War Against China ]

Communist China and the Free World’s Future

MICHAEL R. POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE

YORBA LINDA, CALIFORNIA

THE RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

JULY 23, 2020

GOVERNOR WILSON: Well, thank you very much, Chris. Most generous. I’m not sure your grandfather would have recognized me.

I have the great pleasure – in addition to welcoming all of you to the Nixon birthplace and library, I have the great pleasure of introducing to you an extraordinary American who is here at an extraordinary time. But the fun of it is in introducing our honored guest, I also am welcoming him not just to the Nixon Library, but I’m welcoming him back home to Orange County. (Applause.) That’s right. Mike Pompeo was born in Orange. (Applause.)

He attended Los Amigos High School in Fountain Valley, where he was an outstanding student and athlete. In fact, I have it on good authority that among the fans of glory days of Lobo basketball, a reverent hush descends upon the crowd whenever the name “Pompeo” is mentioned. (Laughter.)

The Secretary was first in his class at West Point. He won the award as the most distinguished cadet. He won another award for the highest achievement in engineering management. He spent his active duty years, his Army years, in West Germany, and as he put it, patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1988 – excuse me – retiring with a rank of captain, he went on to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review. In 1988, he returned to his mother’s home state of Kansas and began a stunningly successful business career. He was elected to the House of Representatives from Kansas in 2011, where he soon gained great respect for a reputation as one of the most diligent and astute members of the House Arms – excuse me, the House Intelligence Committee.

In 2017, President Trump nominated him to be the director of Central Intelligence. And in 2018, he was confirmed as our 70th Secretary of State.

You have to admit, that’s quite an impressive resume. So it’s sad there’s only one thing missing, prevents it from being perfect. If only Mike had been a Marine. (Laughter.) Don’t worry, he’ll get even.

Mike Pompeo is a man devoted to his family. He is a man of faith, of the greatest patriotism and the highest principle. One of his most important initiatives at the State Department has been the creation of a Commission on Unalienable Rights where academicians, philosophers, and ethicists advise him on human rights grounded in America’s founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Rights.

He is here today for a very special reason. The epitaph on President Nixon’s gravestone is a sentence from his first inaugural address. It says, quote, “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” Richard Nixon received that title. He won that honor not only because he was acknowledged even by his critics to be a brilliant foreign policy strategist, but it was far more because he earned it. He learned as congressman, senator, president, and every day thereafter as a private citizen ambassador that peace is not achieved by signing documents and declaring the job done. To the contrary, he knew that peace is always a work in progress. He knew that peace must be fought for and won anew in every generation.

It was President Nixon’s vision, determination, and courage that opened China to America and to the Western world. As president and for the rest of his life, Richard Nixon worked to build a relationship with China based upon mutual benefits and obligations that respected America’s bedrock national interests.

Today, we in America are obliged to assess whether or not President Nixon’s labors and his hopes for such a relationship have been met or whether they are being undermined.

That is why it is of such great significance that our honored guest, Secretary Pompeo, has chosen the Nixon Library from which to deliver a major China policy statement. It will, I promise you, be a statement of complete clarity delivered with force and with belief because it is of critical importance.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honor and pleasure to welcome to this podium and to this audience our honored guest, the Secretary of State of the United States of America, the honorable and really quite remarkable – honorable Michael R. Pompeo. (Applause.)

SECRETARY POMPEO: Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, Governor, for that very, very generous introduction. It is true: When you walk in that gym and you say the name “Pompeo,” there is a whisper. I had a brother, Mark, who was really good – a really good basketball player.

And how about another round of applause for the Blue Eagles Honor Guard and Senior Airman Kayla Highsmith, and her wonderful rendition of the national anthem? (Applause.)

Thank you, too, to Pastor Laurie for that moving prayer, and I want to thank Hugh Hewitt and the Nixon Foundation for your invitation to speak at this important American institution. It was great to be sung to by an Air Force person, introduced by a Marine, and they let the Army guy in in front of the Navy guy’s house. (Laughter.) It’s all good.

It’s an honor to be here in Yorba Linda, where Nixon’s father built the house in which he was born and raised.

To all the Nixon Center board and staff who made today possible – it’s difficult in these times – thanks for making this day possible for me and for my team.

We are blessed to have some incredibly special people in the audience, including Chris, who I’ve gotten to know – Chris Nixon. I also want to thank Tricia Nixon and Julie Nixon Eisenhower for their support of this visit as well.

I want to recognize several courageous Chinese dissidents who have joined us here today and made a long trip.

And to all the other distinguished guests – (applause) – to all the other distinguished guests, thank you for being here. For those of you who got under the tent, you must have paid extra.

And those of you watching live, thank you for tuning in.

And finally, as the governor mentioned, I was born here in Santa Ana, not very far from here. I’ve got my sister and her husband in the audience today. Thank you all for coming out. I bet you never thought that I’d be standing up here.

My remarks today are the fourth set of remarks in a series of China speeches that I asked National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, FBI Director Chris Wray, and the Attorney General Barr to deliver alongside me.

We had a very clear purpose, a real mission. It was to explain the different facets of America’s relationship with China, the massive imbalances in that relationship that have built up over decades, and the Chinese Communist Party’s designs for hegemony.

Our goal was to make clear that the threats to Americans that President Trump’s China policy aims to address are clear and our strategy for securing those freedoms established.

Ambassador O’Brien spoke about ideology. FBI Director Wray talked about espionage. Attorney General Barr spoke about economics. And now my goal today is to put it all together for the American people and detail what the China threat means for our economy, for our liberty, and indeed for the future of free democracies around the world.

Next year marks half a century since Dr. Kissinger’s secret mission to China, and the 50th anniversary of President Nixon’s trip isn’t too far away in 2022.

The world was much different then.

We imagined engagement with China would produce a future with bright promise of comity and cooperation.

But today – today we’re all still wearing masks and watching the pandemic’s body count rise because the CCP failed in its promises to the world. We’re reading every morning new headlines of repression in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang.

We’re seeing staggering statistics of Chinese trade abuses that cost American jobs and strike enormous blows to the economies all across America, including here in southern California. And we’re watching a Chinese military that grows stronger and stronger, and indeed more menacing.

I’ll echo the questions ringing in the hearts and minds of Americans from here in California to my home state of Kansas and beyond:

What do the American people have to show now 50 years on from engagement with China?

Did the theories of our leaders that proposed a Chinese evolution towards freedom and democracy prove to be true?

Is this China’s definition of a win-win situation?

And indeed, centrally, from the Secretary of State’s perspective, is America safer? Do we have a greater likelihood of peace for ourselves and peace for the generations which will follow us?

Look, we have to admit a hard truth. We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.

As President Trump has made very clear, we need a strategy that protects the American economy, and indeed our way of life. The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.

Now, before I seem too eager to tear down President Nixon’s legacy, I want to be clear that he did what he believed was best for the American people at the time, and he may well have been right.

He was a brilliant student of China, a fierce cold warrior, and a tremendous admirer of the Chinese people, just as I think we all are.

He deserves enormous credit for realizing that China was too important to be ignored, even when the nation was weakened because of its own self-inflicted communist brutality.

In 1967, in a very famous Foreign Affairs article, Nixon explained his future strategy. Here’s what he said:

He said, “Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside of the family of nations…The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus, our aim – to the extent we can, we must influence events. Our goal should be to induce change.”

And I think that’s the key phrase from the entire article: “to induce change.”

So, with that historic trip to Beijing, President Nixon kicked off our engagement strategy. He nobly sought a freer and safer world, and he hoped that the Chinese Communist Party would return that commitment.

As time went on, American policymakers increasingly presumed that as China became more prosperous, it would open up, it would become freer at home, and indeed present less of a threat abroad, it’d be friendlier. It all seemed, I am sure, so inevitable.

But that age of inevitability is over. The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.

The truth is that our policies – and those of other free nations – resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it.

We opened our arms to Chinese citizens, only to see the Chinese Communist Party exploit our free and open society. China sent propagandists into our press conferences, our research centers, our high-schools, our colleges, and even into our PTA meetings.

We marginalized our friends in Taiwan, which later blossomed into a vigorous democracy.

We gave the Chinese Communist Party and the regime itself special economic treatment, only to see the CCP insist on silence over its human rights abuses as the price of admission for Western companies entering China.

Ambassador O’Brien ticked off a few examples just the other day: Marriott, American Airlines, Delta, United all removed references to Taiwan from their corporate websites, so as not to anger Beijing.

In Hollywood, not too far from here – the epicenter of American creative freedom, and self-appointed arbiters of social justice – self-censors even the most mildly unfavorable reference to China.

This corporate acquiescence to the CCP happens all over the world, too.

And how has this corporate fealty worked? Is its flattery rewarded? I’ll give you a quote from the speech that General Barr gave, Attorney General Barr. In a speech last week, he said that “The ultimate ambition of China’s rulers isn’t to trade with the United States. It is to raid the United States.”

China ripped off our prized intellectual property and trade secrets, causing millions of jobs[1] all across America.

It sucked supply chains away from America, and then added a widget made of slave labor.

It made the world’s key waterways less safe for international commerce.

President Nixon once said he feared he had created a “Frankenstein” by opening the world to the CCP, and here we are.

Now, people of good faith can debate why free nations allowed these bad things to happen for all these years. Perhaps we were naive about China’s virulent strain of communism, or triumphalist after our victory in the Cold War, or cravenly capitalist, or hoodwinked by Beijing’s talk of a “peaceful rise.”

Whatever the reason – whatever the reason, today China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else.

And President Trump has said: enough.

I don’t think many people on either side of the aisle dispute the facts that I have laid out today. But even now, some are insisting that we preserve the model of dialogue for dialogue’s sake.

Now, to be clear, we’ll keep on talking. But the conversations are different these days. I traveled to Honolulu now just a few weeks back to meet with Yang Jiechi.

It was the same old story – plenty of words, but literally no offer to change any of the behaviors.

Yang’s promises, like so many the CCP made before him, were empty. His expectations, I surmise, were that I’d cave to their demands, because frankly this is what too many prior administrations have done. I didn’t, and President Trump will not either.

As Ambassador O’Brien explained so well, we have to keep in mind that the CCP regime is a Marxist-Leninist regime. General Secretary Xi Jinping is a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology.

It’s this ideology, it’s this ideology that informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism. America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries, just as the CCP has never ignored them.

My experience in the House Intelligence Committee, and then as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and my now two-plus years as America’s Secretary of State have led me to this central understanding:

That the only way – the only way to truly change communist China is to act not on the basis of what Chinese leaders say, but how they behave. And you can see American policy responding to this conclusion. President Reagan said that he dealt with the Soviet Union on the basis of “trust but verify.” When it comes to the CCP, I say we must distrust and verify. (Applause.)

We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change, just as President Nixon wanted. We must induce China to change in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing’s actions threaten our people and our prosperity.

We must start by changing how our people and our partners perceive the Chinese Communist Party. We have to tell the truth. We can’t treat this incarnation of China as a normal country, just like any other.

We know that trading with China is not like trading with a normal, law-abiding nation. Beijing threatens international agreements as – treats international suggestions as – or agreements as suggestions, as conduits for global dominance.

But by insisting on fair terms, as our trade representative did when he secured our phase one trade deal, we can force China to reckon with its intellectual property theft and policies that harmed American workers.

We know too that doing business with a CCP-backed company is not the same as doing business with, say, a Canadian company. They don’t answer to independent boards, and many of them are state-sponsored and so have no need to pursue profits.

A good example is Huawei. We stopped pretending Huawei is an innocent telecommunications company that’s just showing up to make sure you can talk to your friends. We’ve called it what it is – a true national security threat – and we’ve taken action accordingly.

We know too that if our companies invest in China, they may wittingly or unwittingly support the Communist Party’s gross human rights violations.

Our Departments of Treasury and Commerce have thus sanctioned and blacklisted Chinese leaders and entities that are harming and abusing the most basic rights for people all across the world. Several agencies have worked together on a business advisory to make certain our CEOs are informed of how their supply chains are behaving inside of China.

We know too, we know too that not all Chinese students and employees are just normal students and workers that are coming here to make a little bit of money and to garner themselves some knowledge. Too many of them come here to steal our intellectual property and to take this back to their country.

The Department of Justice and other agencies have vigorously pursued punishment for these crimes.

We know that the People’s Liberation Army is not a normal army, too. Its purpose is to uphold the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party elites and expand a Chinese empire, not to protect the Chinese people.

And so our Department of Defense has ramped up its efforts, freedom of navigation operations out and throughout the East and South China Seas, and in the Taiwan Strait as well. And we’ve created a Space Force to help deter China from aggression on that final frontier.

And so too, frankly, we’ve built out a new set of policies at the State Department dealing with China, pushing President Trump’s goals for fairness and reciprocity, to rewrite the imbalances that have grown over decades.

Just this week, we announced the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston because it was a hub of spying and intellectual property theft. (Applause.)

We reversed, two weeks ago, eight years of cheek-turning with respect to international law in the South China Sea.

We’ve called on China to conform its nuclear capabilities to the strategic realities of our time.

And the State Department – at every level, all across the world – has engaged with our Chinese counterparts simply to demand fairness and reciprocity.

But our approach can’t just be about getting tough. That’s unlikely to achieve the outcome that we desire. We must also engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.

That begins with in-person diplomacy. (Applause.) I’ve met Chinese men and women of great talent and diligence wherever I go.

I’ve met with Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs who escaped Xinjiang’s concentration camps. I’ve talked with Hong Kong’s democracy leaders, from Cardinal Zen to Jimmy Lai. Two days ago in London, I met with Hong Kong freedom fighter Nathan Law.

And last month in my office, I heard the stories of Tiananmen Square survivors. One of them is here today.

Wang Dan was a key student who has never stopped fighting for freedom for the Chinese people. Mr. Wang, will you please stand so that we may recognize you? (Applause.)

Also with us today is the father of the Chinese democracy movement, Wei Jingsheng. He spent decades in Chinese labor camps for his advocacy. Mr. Wei, will you please stand? (Applause.)

I grew up and served my time in the Army during the Cold War. And if there is one thing I learned, communists almost always lie. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.

Quite the contrary. The CCP fears the Chinese people’s honest opinions more than any foe, and save for losing their own grip on power, they have reason – no reason to.

Just think how much better off the world would be – not to mention the people inside of China – if we had been able to hear from the doctors in Wuhan and they’d been allowed to raise the alarm about the outbreak of a new and novel virus.

For too many decades, our leaders have ignored, downplayed the words of brave Chinese dissidents who warned us about the nature of the regime we’re facing.

And we can’t ignore it any longer. They know as well as anyone that we can never go back to the status quo.

But changing the CCP’s behavior cannot be the mission of the Chinese people alone. Free nations have to work to defend freedom. It’s the furthest thing from easy.

But I have faith we can do it. I have faith because we’ve done it before. We know how this goes.

I have faith because the CCP is repeating some of the same mistakes that the Soviet Union made – alienating potential allies, breaking trust at home and abroad, rejecting property rights and predictable rule of law.

I have faith. I have faith because of the awakening I see among other nations that know we can’t go back to the past in the same way that we do here in America. I’ve heard this from Brussels, to Sydney, to Hanoi.

And most of all, I have faith we can defend freedom because of the sweet appeal of freedom itself.

Look at the Hong Kongers clamoring to emigrate abroad as the CCP tightens its grip on that proud city. They wave American flags.

It’s true, there are differences. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is deeply integrated into the global economy. But Beijing is more dependent on us than we are on them. (Applause.)

Look, I reject the notion that we’re living in an age of inevitability, that some trap is pre-ordained, that CCP supremacy is the future. Our approach isn’t destined to fail because America is in decline. As I said in Munich earlier this year, the free world is still winning. We just need to believe it and know it and be proud of it. People from all over the world still want to come to open societies. They come here to study, they come here to work, they come here to build a life for their families. They’re not desperate to settle in China.

It’s time. It’s great to be here today. The timing is perfect. It’s time for free nations to act. Not every nation will approach China in the same way, nor should they. Every nation will have to come to its own understanding of how to protect its own sovereignty, how to protect its own economic prosperity, and how to protect its ideals from the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party.

But I call on every leader of every nation to start by doing what America has done – to simply insist on reciprocity, to insist on transparency and accountability from the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a cadre of rulers that are far from homogeneous.

And these simple and powerful standards will achieve a great deal. For too long we let the CCP set the terms of engagement, but no longer. Free nations must set the tone. We must operate on the same principles.

We have to draw common lines in the sand that cannot be washed away by the CCP’s bargains or their blandishments. Indeed, this is what the United States did recently when we rejected China’s unlawful claims in the South China Sea once and for all, as we have urged countries to become Clean Countries so that their citizens’ private information doesn’t end up in the hand of the Chinese Communist Party. We did it by setting standards.

Now, it’s true, it’s difficult. It’s difficult for some small countries. They fear being picked off. Some of them for that reason simply don’t have the ability, the courage to stand with us for the moment.

Indeed, we have a NATO ally of ours [?] that hasn’t stood up in the way that it needs to with respect to Hong Kong because they fear Beijing will restrict access to China’s market. This is the kind of timidity that will lead to historic failure, and we can’t repeat it.

We cannot repeat the mistakes of these past years. The challenge of China demands exertion, energy from democracies – those in Europe, those in Africa, those in South America, and especially those in the Indo-Pacific region.

And if we don’t act now, ultimately the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build. If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world.

General Secretary Xi is not destined to tyrannize inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it.

Now, this isn’t about containment. Don’t buy that. It’s about a complex new challenge that we’ve never faced before. The USSR was closed off from the free world. Communist China is already within our borders.

So we can’t face this challenge alone. The United Nations, NATO, the G7 countries, the G20, our combined economic, diplomatic, and military power is surely enough to meet this challenge if we direct it clearly and with great courage.

Maybe it’s time for a new grouping of like-minded nations, a new alliance of democracies.

We have the tools. I know we can do it. Now we need the will. To quote scripture, I ask is “our spirit willing but our flesh weak?”

If the free world doesn’t change – doesn’t change, communist China will surely change us. There can’t be a return to the past practices because they’re comfortable or because they’re convenient.

Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time, and America is perfectly positioned to lead it because our founding principles give us that opportunity.

As I explained in Philadelphia last week, standing, staring at Independence Hall, our nation was founded on the premise that all human beings possess certain rights that are unalienable.

And it’s our government’s job to secure those rights. It is a simple and powerful truth. It’s made us a beacon of freedom for people all around the world, including people inside of China.

Indeed, Richard Nixon was right when he wrote in 1967 that “the world cannot be safe until China changes.” Now it’s up to us to heed his words.

Today the danger is clear.

And today the awakening is happening.

Today the free world must respond.

We can never go back to the past.

May God bless each of you.

May God bless the Chinese people.

And may God bless the people of the United States of America.

Thank you all.

(Applause.)

MR HEWITT: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Please be seated. I’m Hugh Hewitt, the president of the library, and Secretary Pompeo graciously invited some questions as I was listening. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Secretary, at the Nixon Library.

My first question has to do with the context of the president’s visit in 1972. You mentioned the Soviet Union was isolated, but it was dangerous. He went to the People’s Republic of China in 1972 to try and ally and combine interests with them against the Soviet Union; it was successful.

Does Russia present an opportunity now to the United States to coax them into the battle to be relentlessly candid about the Chinese Communist Party?

SECRETARY POMPEO: So I do think there’s that opportunity. That opportunity is born of the relationship, the natural relationship between Russia and China, and we can do something as well. There are places where we need to work with Russia. Today – or tomorrow, I guess it is, our teams will be on the ground with the Russians working on a strategic dialogue to hopefully create the next generation of arms control agreements like Reagan did. It’s in our interest, it’s in Russia’s interest. We’ve asked the Chinese to participate. They’ve declined to date. We hope they’ll change their mind.

It’s these kind of things – these proliferation issues, these big strategic challenges – that if we work alongside Russia, I’m convinced we can make the world safer. And so there – I think there is a place for us to work with the Russians to achieve a more likely outcome of peace not only for the United States but for the world.

MR HEWITT: President Nixon also put quite a lot of store in personal relationships over many years with individuals. That can lead wrong. President Bush famously misjudged Vladimir Putin and said so afterwards. You have met President Xi often. Is the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party someone with whom we can deal on a transparent and reliable basis, in your opinion, based on your personal diplomacy with him?

SECRETARY POMPEO: So the meetings that I’ve had and the meeting that the President – we’ve had – they’ve been good, frank conversations. He is the most powerful leader of China since Mao. He has also in many ways deinstitutionalized the Chinese Communist Party, thus giving him even more capacity and more power.

But Hugh, I think the way to think about it is how I spoke about this today: It’s about actions. And so how one evaluates one’s counterparts sitting across the table from them – it’s important to think about how you can find common understandings and make progress. But in the end, it’s not about what someone says or the agreement that they sign, but are they prepared to lead, to do the things that they committed to? Are they prepared to fulfill their promises?

And we’ve watched – we’ve watched this China walk away from their promises to the world on Hong Kong, we watched their – General Secretary Xi promised President Obama in the Rose Garden in 2015 that he wouldn’t militarize the South China Sea. And Google the South China Sea and arms; you’ll see another promise broken.

So in the end, from my perspective, it’s much more important to watch how leaders behave and how they lead than what it is you think when you have a chance to talk to them on the phone or meet them in person.

MR HEWITT: Mr. Secretary, you said this is not containment. I heard that very clearly. I have read the three previous speeches by Ambassador O’Brien, Director Wray, Attorney General Barr, and now listened to you very closely. It isn’t containment, but it is a fairly comprehensive, multidimensional, relentlessly objective candor. Is that dangerous in a world that’s not used to speaking clearly about delicate subjects?

SECRETARY POMPEO: My experience, and I think President Trump’s experience too in his life as a businessman, is the best policy is always true candor, identifying the places that you have a redline, identifying places that you have a real interest, making clear if there’s places where you don’t, and there’s things that you can work on alongside each other.

I think the real danger comes from misunderstandings and miscommunication and the failure to be honest about the things that matter to you, because others will move into that space and then conflict arises. I think the world is a heck of a lot safer when you have leaders who are prepared to be honest about the things that matter and prepared to talk about the things their nation is prepared to do to secure those interests. And you can reduce risk by these conversations so long as you’re honest about it.

So I – no, I don’t think it’s dangerous. I think it’s just the opposite of that.

MR HEWITT: You also said – and I’m sure the speech will be known as the “distrust but verify” speech – when you distrust but verify, that still premises verification is possible. It is still possible to do agreements and to verify them; correct?

SECRETARY POMPEO: It is, yeah, you can still do it. Each nation’s got to be prepared for a certain amount of intrusiveness connected to that. And it is not in the nature of communist regimes to allow transparency inside of their country. And so it’s been done before. We’ve had – we had arms control agreements with the Soviet Union that we got verification that was sufficient to ensure that we protected American interests. I believe we can do it again. I hope that we can do this on these – I mean, the Chinese Communist Party has several hundred nuclear warheads. This is a serious global power. And to the extent we can find common ground, a common set of understandings to reduce risk that there’s ever a really bad day for the world, we ought to do it, and it’s going to require agreement and verification.

MR HEWITT: Ambassador Richard Haass, who is now chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, said very recently – it may have been yesterday, it might have been this morning; I saw it this morning preparing – quote, “Secretary Pompeo doesn’t speak of China but of the Chinese Communist Party as if there were a China apart from the party. This is meant to antagonize and make diplomacy impossible. Quite a stance for America’s chief diplomat to take unless his goal is to ensure diplomacy fails.” Is that your goal?

SECRETARY POMPEO: (Laughter.) Ah, goodness. Hard to begin. Here’s where I’ll begin: It’s a bit patronizing to the people of China to make such an assertion that they are not free-thinking beings, that they’re not rational people who were given – I mean, they too were made in the image of God, right. They have all the capacity that anybody in the world does. So to somehow think that we ought to ignore the voices of the people of China seems to me the wrong approach. It is true the Chinese Communist Party is a one-party rule. And so we will deal with the Chinese Communist Party as the head of state for China, and we need to, and we need to engage in dialogue. But it seems to me we would dishonor ourselves and the people of China if we ignored them.

MR HEWITT: Now, Ambassador O’Brien, whose speech you referenced, put heavy emphasis on the ideology of Marxist-Leninism. It was almost quaint to hear that conversation again; it’s gone from our vocabulary. Does the American people, and especially American media, need to reacquaint itself with what Marxist-Leninists believe, because the CCP genuinely does believe it?

SECRETARY POMPEO: I always get in trouble, Hugh, when I comment on the media. So I’ll say this much: For those of us who have lived and seen and observed, there are other Marxist-Leninist nations today as well – and have seen – they believe – they have an understanding, a central understanding of how people interact and how societies ought to interact. And it is certainly the case today that the leadership in China believes that.

We should acknowledge that, and we should make sure that we don’t for a moment think that they don’t believe it. It’s what Ambassador O’Brien’s speech was about. It was the fact – it was acknowledging that they believe it and recognizing that we have to respond in a way that reflects our understanding of the way they view the world.

MR HEWITT: Let’s not talk about the American media. I want to talk about the Chinese media for a moment. They are aggressive, to say the least, and right now they are aggressively defending, for example, TikTok. A small question within a large question: Is TikTok capable of being weaponized? Is that an example of what’s going on? And generally, Chinese media has become far more aggressive than I’ve seen in 30 years since I was at the library the first time of watching it. Is that something you’ve noticed as well?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yes, they’re very aggressive. Two pieces to this, one you hit upon. One is I’ll describe as their technology medium. Without singling out any particular business, our view of these companies is we’re neither for or against the company; we’re about making sure that we protect the information that belongs to each of you – your health records, your face if it’s a facial recognition software, your address. All the things that you care that you want to make sure the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t have, we have a responsibility to make sure that the systems that you’re using don’t give them access to that. And so whether it’s the efforts we’ve made against Huawei or the work that we’re doing on other software firms, the American task is to protect the American people and their information.

The second piece of this has to do with their – what I’ll call the state-sponsored media of China and their disinformation. You should know – and this is where I am concerned about the American media, too – these are state-sponsored media organizations that take their messaging from the Chinese Communist Party each day. When American institutions pick up those storylines and carry them forward, they are, in fact, propagating Chinese propaganda, and we all ought to be wise to that.

There was an editorial in The New York Times yesterday by someone who had a clear view that was antithetical to the American way of life. The New York Times ran it straight-up without comment, forwarding – although albeit in the opinion section, but propagating Chinese propaganda. That is certainly not instructive when they’re telling senators from Arkansas they can’t simply talk about America and American freedom in that same media outlet.

MR HEWITT: You mentioned that a lot of corporate America – and you mentioned specifically Hollywood – have got deep intertwinement with the Chinese economy. So I don’t want to talk about soft power; I want to talk about soft appeasement. One of my favorite sports figures, LeBron James, falls silent when China comes up. In the new Top Gun movie, the Taiwan and Japanese patches are taken off Maverick’s jacket. They’re not going to be in Top Gun 2; they were in Top Gun 1. What do you say not to those individuals, but to everyone who has an American spotlight about their responsibility to be candid about the People’s Republic of China?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Here’s our ask: Our ask is if you claim that you care about human rights or social justice or these things, if you make that part of your corporate theology, then you ought to be consistent. And you can’t be consistent if you’re operating there in China without talking about and acknowledging what the Chinese Communist Party is doing in certain parts of their country – the oppression that’s taking place. Look, every business leader has got to make decisions for themselves. They’ve got to be able to live with the decisions that they make. You highlighted a few.

I’d simply ask this: If you run an entity and the United States Government were to tell you you couldn’t do something, put a particular symbol in your movie or put a particular name on your menu – if we were to tell you that, you’d say nope, that’s not appropriate, and it, of course, would not be appropriate. It seems to me that if you permit the Chinese Communist Party to limit you in that way, it’s got to be difficult for you to go home at night.

MR HEWITT: Two more questions, Mr. Secretary. (Applause.) Because it is hot and it is warm, and everyone out here has been in the sun for a while. You’re a West Point graduate, and as Governor Wilson noted, number one, so this might be tough for you. But we are an, like Athens was, a naval power. America is a naval power. And as like Sparta is, China is a land power. Do we not have to change how we approach defense spending to put more emphasis on our naval resources than on our Army resources?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Oh, that’s tough for an Army guy to say. (Laughter.)

MR HEWITT: I know.

SECRETARY POMPEO: You’re killing me. Look, I’ll leave to Secretary Esper the details of this, but I can – here’s what I can say. When President Trump set out our National Security Strategy early on in the administration, for the first time we identified China in a way that was fundamentally different than we had done – this isn’t partisan – for decades.

That was important because that was a signal to all of us, whether it’s the State Department or the Defense Department, that we needed to reoriented our – reorient our assets. And so yes, you’ve seen the Department of Defense begin to do that. These are big things to turn. These budgets are multiyear. It takes a while.

But if you look at how Secretary Esper and President Trump are positioning our military capabilities – not just the tactical, operational, and strategic capabilities, but our cyber capabilities, our space capabilities – if you look at how we’re thinking about this and spending resources in year two, three, four, and five, I think you’ll see that our focus has shifted pretty dramatically.

It’s not to say that our efforts to protect America from terrorism are behind us. We still have work to do there. But I think this great power challenge that presents itself is something that we have recognized and we begin to make sure that we allocate your money – our taxpayer resources that we have – to the appropriate ends to achieve American security.

MR HEWITT: My last question has to do with a former secretary of state who was also an Army man, George Marshall. He gave a speech in 1947 at your alma mater, Harvard, in which he called on all the nations of the world to recognize that the world was in crisis and to choose a side. And he assured them in that famous address that if you chose the American side in (inaudible) Europe, you could count on America.

So as you make the appeal you did today, not just to Europe, where it’s relatively easy to be outspoken, though Norway has found it not to be outspoken, but to Taiwan and Japan and Vietnam and all of the – Australia, all of the nations of that region – can they rely on America in the way that people opposing the Soviet Union could rely on George Marshall’s assurance in 1947?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Undoubtedly, undoubtedly, Hugh. The only thing I’ll say is when – this language of “pick a side” does make sense to me, but I think about picking a side differently than picking America or picking China. I think the sides, the division – the shirts and skins, if you will – is between freedom and tyranny. I think that’s the decision that we’re asking each of these nations to make. (Applause.)

And here’s the good news of this. The good news is it does take American leadership often in these cases. To your point, they need to know that America will be there for them. I’ve seen the tide turn. In just – in just these three and half years of our administration, I’ve watched other nations have less timidity, become more prepared to stand up for their freedoms and for the freedoms of their people. We don’t ask them to do this for America. We ask them to do it for their country and for their nation – the freedom and the independence and to protect the rights of their people.

And when we do that and we tell them that America will be there, I am very confident in the end that this is a world that with the hard work applied will become one that is governed by a rules-based order, and the freedom of the American people will be secured.

MR HEWITT: Mr. Secretary, thank you for joining us here today.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Thank you.

MR HEWITT: Please join me in thanking the Secretary. (Applause.)

SECRETARY POMPEO: Thank you all.

The Global Conversation

source

Sec. State Psycho Pompeo Pushes Allies To Join Trump War Against China

Pompeo suggests global coalition against China for ‘exploiting’ coronavirus

The US and UK maintain a ‘special relationship’ in condemning China’s recent actions

By Caitlin McFall 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that he hopes to build an international coalition to counter recent Chinese actions ranging from the global coronavirus to the country’s involvement in the South China Sea.

Speaking from a press conference in London Tuesday, Pompeo said he and British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab discussed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) recent moves to “bully its neighbors, militarize features in the South China Sea, and instigate a deadly confrontation with India.”

“We hope we can build out a coalition that understands this threat, will work collectively to convince the Chinese Communist Party it’s not in their best interest to engage in this kind of behavior,” Pompeo said.

US, INDIAN NAVIES CONDUCT JOINT MILITARY OPERATIONS AS TENSIONS SIMMER WITH CHINA

Pompeo also applauded Prime Minster Borris Johnson’s recent moves to scrap all Huawei products and the country’s involvement in the development of the U.K.’s 5G network — a decision that Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said will likely delay the U.K.’s progress and cost them an additional $2.5 billion.

The secretary of state further accused China of illegal maritime activity in the South China Sea, a critique that the Chinese government has said is none of the United State’s business and further accused U.S. officials of “stirring up tension and inciting confrontation in the region.”

Relations between the U.S. and China have been increasingly tense since the outbreak of the coronavirus, which President Trump refers to as the “Chinese virus.”

U.S. lawmakers have also condemned China’s lack of transparency surrounding the outbreak.

“The CCP’s exploitation of this disaster to further its own interests has been disgraceful,” Pompeo said Tuesday. “Rather than helping the world, General Secretary Xi [Jinping] has shown the world the party’s true face.”

Pompeo did not expand on how China has exploited the coronavirus.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ADDS 11 COMPANIES TO SANCTIONS LIST OVER UIGHUR OPPRESSION, INCLUDING SUPPLIERS FOR US FIRMS

The U.S. has imposed several recent sanctions on China for human rights abuses against Uighurs and for interfering with Hong Kong’s autonomy — a pressure that the U.K. government is now feeling.

U.K.-China relations have become strained with the recent passing of new security laws in Hong Kong, which vastly extended China’s reach into the once semi-autonomous territory. Pompeo’s visit came within hours of the U.K.’s decision to suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

“The U.K.’s erroneous remarks and moves on Hong Kong is a serious breach of international law and basic norms governing international relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a news conference in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.

“Hong Kong affairs are China’s internal affairs that allow no foreign interference.”

The U.K. foreign secretary said Sunday that the decision to enforce sanctions is not a “willy nilly” decision, the Finical Times reported.

“We want to see every nation who understands freedom and democracy… to understand this threat that the Chinese Communist Party is posing to them,” Pompeo said Tuesday.

The Corporate State–vs–the Rights of the Human Race–July 22, 2008

[Blast from the past…highly relevant still today.–ed.]

The Corporate State –vs –the Rights of the Human Race

By: Peter Chamberlin

July 22, 2008

The Secretary of the Ministry of Propaganda, Condolezza Rice, has informed us that we should not be concerned with the frightening rumbling noises coming out of the Middle East –they are merely the sounds of the “birth pangs” of a new order being born. We are supposed to be reassured by the calming words of one of the principle authors of the latest “final solution,” which they dreamed-up in their fevered minds, to turn the human race into a new planet-wide slave class.

The world that the corporate elite has planned for us is a nightmare vision straight out of Dante. The coming big event will bring untold human suffering to the world’s poor and the middle class, dwarfing all ongoing despair by comparison. Even Ron Paul is warning of the coming calamitous event:

“Some Big Events are about to occur. These fast-approaching events will not go unnoticed. They will affect all of us. They will not be limited to just some areas of our country. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed.”

The events Congressman Paul is referring to are the planned escalation of the terror war and the planned economic collapse of the United States. He knows the same facts that the rest of our Congressional leaders know, but only he and Dennis Kucinich have chosen to warn the public about the approaching storm. The other 533 Congressmen and Senators have accepted our Nation’s fate without caring about the rest of us. They are all supporting the elitist plan, which is to treat this disaster as an opportunity for profiteering, without concern for anyone’s constituents, in direct opposition to their legal duties to represent the people.

Our representatives know what the leadership of the elite has known for decades. America has been set on a course leading directly to an era of despair. They have had many opportunities to change that course, but instead, they have chosen to do the opposite, doubling their efforts to reap enormous profits from the coming global catastrophe. Instead of living-up to the oaths they had all taken, to defend the Constitution and their country, they refused to simply give the wheel of the ship of state just a slight turn, to avoid certain destruction. Instead of fixing our morally bankrupt economies and ideologies, they planned to react with massive force, whenever the people reached the breaking point and decided to fight back. This is treason of the highest order. Aiding and abetting hostile foreign forces and traitorous elitist American financiers who have purposely brought-about the destruction of the United States of America is the definition of “treason.”

Once the parasitic elite have finished bleeding-dry the national lifeblood, the empty husk will be discarded. There will then be nothing standing in the way of their planned global conquest. The thunderous sounds you hear are the sounds of the Global Imperium being born. As things now stand, it is to be American power that will be used to reduce the free nations of the world to mere colonies under the imperial dictatorship of the “New World Order.” The caustic irony of America’s new “mission” should not be lost to a nation of sheeple, who have always believed in the iconic national image of destroyer of empires. We have given-up on restraining the forces of evil, to embrace our own evil natures, to join their fight against freedom, democracy and human decency. To use a Biblical reference in a prophetic description of the unfolding tragic epic, when “the one who now restrains is taken out of the way” (America), the Beast will be free to reveal his tyrannical global empire.

A few years ago, I did my best to convince myself that these were not really the “end times” that we were living in, but a simulation of that scenario by evil men who were intent upon replicating the despicable conditions described in that prophecy. Now, I see things differently; the prophet was looking forward to our own era, when darkness was to be allowed to sweep over the face of the Earth. Contrary to popular belief, George Bush is not the “anti-Christ,” but he is the man who volunteered to clear the path before his evil ascension to the global throne.

The prophecies concerning this tragic event foretell of “sudden destruction” coming upon us, with one-third of all human and animal life being destroyed in the melee. This is a reasonable estimate for the death toll from a combination of nuclear war, famine, pestilence and environmental upheaval, the “four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

For those doubters of predictions such as these, think of a combination of nuclear war against Iran and its Russian and Chinese patrons and a fulfillment of the “Global 2000” recommendations (here, here and here). The “2000” is a plan for mass genocide, which describes the poor people of the earth as “useless eaters,” and calls for the elimination of at least half of them by any means necessary. The elitists who write such appalling documents are monsters in human form. What normal human being could even think of such things, let alone write such a report, which seriously contemplates the ways to kill billions of their fellow humans. Is the elitist class some sort of sub-human species, which has taken control of the planet?

The people of the earth have a duty to their ancestors and to posterity to end the reign of terror these alien-like beings have inflicted upon us, by any means necessary. We must shatter the yokes that they have placed around our necks. How is that to be accomplished? By standing together, we can fight our individual slavery.

The human race must find solidarity in common cause, the cause of liberation and outright survival. We must refuse to go along with their evil plans for us. We have to be united in opposition to their “Big Push,” the planned military assault upon the world. The world war will begin with a nuclear attack upon Iran. [More likely, WWIII will be a war with China, probably beginning with an EMP nuclear attack over the United States, leaving most of the country blacked-out, within seconds.–ed.]

The doubters among us, as well as the advocates of violent revolution, scoff at suggestions that mass actions, or passive resistance can have any effect at all. It can alter our present course if we can convince the angry American people to act upon their beliefs. The American majority already opposes the terror war, our task would simply be to motivate them into resisting efforts to escalate the terror war,or to expand it to include China. It is my belief that the unfolding economic situation will drive many people to reconsider their own hesitancy. If we can inspire millions to refuse to cooperate with the parasitic super-wealthy who feed upon our resources and our labor, then how could they continue to gorge themselves upon the US/world economy?

We have to shut this country down, if are to survive as a semi “free” people. We have to reject the new surrogate “presidents” that have been offered to us. The only means we have to preserve democracy and freedom is through democratic actions, anarchy or revolution.

We have an obligation to our Constitution and to the millions of men who have defended it before us, to find a quick, peaceful solution to our problem – democratic action. The inalienable First Amendment rights that flow from our Creator, to speak-up for ourselves, to petition and to assemble, demanding a new course for our ship of state, have to be tried before we resort to the Second Amendment –to keep and bear arms. The elitist authority over us will be brought to an end, it is only the means to that end which remains undetermined, at this time.

SHUT THIS COUNTRY DOWN!

This goes for all those countries that are allied with the US, SHUT THEM ALL DOWN, as well! Nothing less than an absolute international rebellion against the encroaching world order will change the deadly course we are now on. Stop your governments from following America’s deadly lead. I call upon the friends of liberty, wherever you are, to band together and “JUST SAY NO TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER!”

Shut it all down; defend the human race.

peter.chamberlin@hotmail.com

 

The Neoliberal Political Economy of the Organized Crime Syndicate

by Russ Winter

PHOTO: Medium/Christine Roy/Unsplash 

‘Is it really necessary for every economist to be brain-dead apologist for the rich and powerful and predatory, in every damn breath?’ — Bruce Wilder in comments to ‘Clash of Autonomy and Interdependence’

A neglected economic superstar was Professor Susan Strange (1923-1998) of the London School of Economics, one of the founders of the field of international political economy. In a series of groundbreaking books – “Casino Capitalism,” “States and Markets,” “The Retreat of the State” and “Mad Money” – Strange showed how epidemic levels of financial crime were a consequence of specific political decisions based on an ideology.

Professor Susan Strange

It would have hardly been possible to design a system, she said, “that was better suited than the global banking system to the needs of drug dealers and other illicit traders who want to conceal from the police the origin of their large illegal profits.”

Here are four ways she showed how politics and the financial crime epidemic were intimately connected.

1. Money is Global, Regulation is National

There was nothing inevitable about financial globalization, Strange said. It was born out of a series of political decisions. It means that global money can skip freely across borders beyond the reach of national laws and supervision. For smart operators, tax, regulations and compliance become a choice, not an obligation. Strange argued that international organizations lack the power to control global money. Only coordination between the world’s major economies can rein it in.

2. Tax Havens Are an Open Invitation to Embezzlement

Unless you have somewhere to stash the cash, the looting of public money and state enterprises can only go so far.

Tax havens give “open invitations,” Strange said, to corrupt politicians to steal from their people.

Banking secrecy in the havens allows money from tax evasion, drug trafficking and public embezzlement to mix together until they become indistinguishable from legitimate business.

3. Extravagant Banker Bonuses Contaminate Politics

For Strange, the “obscenely large” bonuses paid to those in financial markets leads to a kind of “moral contamination,” she wrote, and has “reinforced and accelerated the growth of the links between finance and politics.”

Strange recognized that corruption and bribery were a problem in London and New York, as well as Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“Bribery and corruption in politics are not new at all,” Strange wrote. “It is the scale and extent of it that have risen, along with the domination of finance over the real economy.”

Winter Watch: Perhaps not even Strange fully realized how deeply organized and systematic (la sistema) kompromat went!

The Bankers on Capitol Hill: Neoliberals love a good crisis

4. Money Is Political Power

Globalization has redefined politics, Strange argued. Political power is not just what happens in governments, but money and markets also have power.

As legitimate and illegitimate private operators grow richer, they increase their power to shape the world system. States starved of tax revenues grow weaker and retreat, and eventually it becomes a reinforcing spiral. National politics becomes captured by global money markets.

Neoliberal Trotskyism

Neoliberalism is essentially Trotskyism refashioned for the needs of the global financial kleptocracy. But instead of “proletarians of all countries unite” we have “neoliberal elites of all countries unite.”

Read: Firebrand Bolshevik Leon Trotsky: Fully Backed by International Banksters and the Pederast British War Party

Note for newer readers: I use the terms kleptocracy and Crime Syndicate interchangeably. CS is employed when I am describing actual acts. I avoid use of the word “elites” to describe organized criminality.

It’s “socialism for corporations, feudalism for everybody” adapted a large part of Trotskyism ideology and, especially, political instruments, carefully hiding the origins.

The key goal of neoliberalism is redistributing and concentrating wealth to the top at the expense of the working class and middle class – and future generations.

Neoliberalism is totally artificially constructed and explicitly planned to be enforced on unsuspecting people via subversive actions of a totalitarian sect. In the same way Bolshevism was the dictatorship of the Communist Party nomenklatura, neoliberalism is the dictatorship of the financial Kleptocracy.

Instead of Communist International we see the formation of the powerful Transnational Kleptocrat International.

The transnational Kleptocrat no longer feels in the same boat as the rest of the society and openly worships on the altar of unlimited, pathological greed. As cosmopolitans, they have little loyalty or offer no support to host nations. The kleptocrats of today are bound to their corporations, and to their in-groups. This overwhelms and decimates all other considerations such as patriotism and moral obligations. Amorality is the norm. People outside the Crime Syndicate in-group are just tools, not compatriots and their standard of living means nothing.

Like Trotskyism in the past, it’s a militant and dogmatic faith that ostracizes heretics and utilizes the full power of propaganda to brainwash the population. Neoliberals have zero tolerance for other social systems or deviations from so-called Washington consensus. The kakistocratic intellectual class demands political correctness and advocates a pseudo-radical wedge agenda.

There is the creation, notably, of neoliberal “newspeak,” which is similar to Marxist newspeak. For example, the word “free” is redefined as “unregulated.” That helps to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for redistributing wealth upward and increasing poverty for the lower 80% or so of the population endemic to the system.

Neoliberals, like Trotskyites, are globalists par excellence who dream about a worldwide neoliberal revolution. Their primary method of doing business (much illegal) is via foundations and so-called non-governmental organizations (NGO). The foundations, in turn, work through captured intelligence agencies.

The neoliberal state always evolves into the national security state.

This doctrine was artificially constructed by bribed intellectuals and a network of foundation-funded neoliberal think tanks. The use of the term “think tank” as the major weapon for unleashing neoliberal tyranny was also a direct borrowing from Bolshevik practice.

For further reading:

• • “William Langer’s ‘Newest History,’ the OSS and the Frankfurt School (aka New School)”
  • Search Winter Watch for foundations

The Clinton Foundation is just the tip of iceberg. And when the curtain is pulled back on the maze of foundation activities, the controlled neoliberal media crushes coverage like a bug.

Neoliberal doctrine is built and enforced by “The Party.” The Party hides behind a contrived left-right dialectic and circus clown world politics. Both the GOP (and especially Trump) and Democrats are hardcore neoliberals and for all practical purposes are “The Party”.

The Party is Machiavellian and uses cult style methods. There is an obsessive preoccupation with getting to power and staying in power, but any means, criminal if necessary. Instincts are psychopathic. There is blatant disregard to fact and truth in order to achieve a political victory. They view political activities as a war and fight to the bitter end.  False flags and bamboozle staged deception operations are the norm. Wedge issues are the centerpiece of policy. There is adherence to big lies.

The Party is too preoccupied with dividing spoils among friends and corporate sponsors to effectively govern. High positions are populated with revolving-door flying monkeys with ideologically correct views — but who have zero, or near-zero, abilities to perform (“subzeros” or negative selection).

Along with fake promises, Machiavellians try to use militarism and jingoism as a unifying force for the nation. This also provides cover for a ragtag collection of lobbyists serving the interests of the military-industrial-surveillance complex, Wall Street and Israel.

The ultimate end outcome of this could very well be Civil War.

As Christopher Hayes noted, the spark is a “national mood of exhaustion, frustration and betrayal at near total failure of each pillar institution of our society.”

The Trump administration is stuffed to the gills with neoliberal brute capitalist Ayn Rand acolytes and predatory Zionists. Trump himself identifies with Fountainhead character Howard Roark; former secretary of state Rex Tillerson listed Atlas Shrugged as his favorite book in a Scouting magazine feature; his replacement Mike Pompeo has been inspired by Rand since his youth. Ayn Rand’s influence is ascendant across broad swaths of our dominant political culture.

Ayn Rand will be the topic of a standalone post.

But the culprit isn’t just “markets.” This is a story of power using theory. The mixed economy was undone by kleptocrats, who revised rules for their own benefit. They invested heavily in friendly theorists to bless this shift as sound and necessary economics and in friendly politicians to put those theories into practice.

This flying-monkey cronyism is in large part due to a revolving door between not only Wall Street and Washington but also the incestuous relationship between Wall Street, Washington and academia.

The leading neoliberal think tanks are American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, Cato and the Manhattan Institute. But there are more insidious investments in academia. Lavishly funded centers and tenured chairs were underwritten by the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and other neoliberal foundations to promote such variants of free-market theory as law and economics, public choice, rational choice, cost-benefit analysis, maximize-shareholder-value and kindred schools of thought. These theories colonized several academic disciplines. All were variations on the claim that markets worked and that government should get out of the way.

The actual realities and results of neoliberal parasite guildism is evident. It’s impossible to make everybody rich, so this is reserved to the top 1% or 0.01%, while the standard of living among “schmucks” deteriorates a lot.

Neoliberals eliminate political agency and responsibility for economic performance and outcomes. Once protections for the 99% are removed, globalization and financialization were “just forces” that “just happened.”

For example, weaponized migration serves the neoliberal kakistocracy in two ways: 1) destabilizes and weakens national sovereignty as a bulwark to protect existing citizens; 2) keeps the wages of the 90% depressed and their costs high.

Neoliberals don’t care about democracy. They care only about “free markets” — which, in actuality, they control primarily through central banking and banksterism.

The key to parasite guild neoliberalism are extractions — not just of the living 99% but of future generations. The ethics of neoliberalism, is heavily tilted toward viewing people as “homo economicus.”

Central banking, as practiced by the kakistocracy, keeps borrowing costs for the kleptocracy very low. Strangely, however, this is never passed on to consumer loans, which remain usurious. Savers are crucified, even subjected to negative yields. Kleptocrats play the arbitrage, or spread, and their takings keep compounding while members of the broader society are like hamsters on a tread mill.

The neoliberal is always on the lookout for some shit storm to roll by or to create. In a country like Libya, the 99% was doing fine under a different kind of system. So the neoliberal hires mercenaries and takes the country down. Not feeling content with just that, it then organizes weaponized migrations whereby most African migrants are looted, killed and enslaved. Then the traffickers have the audacity to cry about “compassion.”

---

Read “Migrations to Libya: An Enslavement Operation from Start to Finish”

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Neoliberals in general, and neocons in particular (aka “neoliberals with guns”), are hell-bent of creating the Global Neoliberal Empire and killing millions people in the process. Since global reach is their goal, destroying the well being of the majority of people in their host country is no obstacle.

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Read “‘The Purge: Election Year’ — Revelation of the Method?”

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Global financial institutions are the bastion of neoliberal ideology, and they can bully most poor countries into adopting neoliberal policies.

The USA as a superpower state is used to support subservient regimes that favor business interests of transnational companies, putting those interests above interest of the country and its people. And if necessary it will remove non-complaint regimes by force. The USA foreign policy now is essentially based on the coercive use of economic, political, and military power to expropriate other nation’s land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets in the interests of the transnationals, not in the interest of the American people.

Neoliberalism, like Marxism in the past, as an ideology has become strongly associated with a specific culture (the U.S. culture, or Anglo-Saxon culture in more general terms) and a specific language (English). In reality, the English language combined with Hollywood culture has created a Satanic plague.

For further reading:

• • “Are Music Performers Selling Their Souls to Satan?”
  • “Culture in De-Klein: Increasingly Disturbing Themes of Occultism, Satanism and Abuse in Fashion, Advertising and Music Videos”
  • “Normalizing Cannibalism and Weaponizing Celebrity Culture”
  • Hollywood Reprobates Attend MOCA Spirit Cooking Gala

When real environmental degradation and threats takes place — such as antibiotic super-bug cesspools or pesticides killing bees en mass, and on and on — the neoliberal kakistocracy diverts attention away and invents Greta climate-change scams. Then, we learn there is an incredible menu of financialization objectives behind the scam.

For further reading:

• • “Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Makes Emotional Appeals for the Social Engineering Schemes of Her Masters”
  • “The Bee Apocalypse: If They Die Off, So Do You”
  • “Hidden (p)Harma Industry Waste Creates Threat of Superbug Plague”

Another nasty manifestation of kleptocrat neoliberal misdirection is the “white privilege” and “deplorable” or “Dear Fellow White Person” scam. This takes aim at lower stratus white people who are barely staying above water.

The faux progressives who fall for this distraction are typically embittered debt slaves from their excessive borrowing for poor educations where they are in turn brainwashed by neoliberal and neoMarxist flying monkeys.

But despite this curated and controlled narrative a series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown that nine out of 10 aged 18 to 35, agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”  But this sentiment is kept hidden as the diversions and black magik run amok.

For further reading:

• • “Out of the Blue: Insertion of Social Engineering Terms into Kakistocratic News Publications”
  • “This $56,199-Per-Year Loyola University Campus Offers ‘Self-Identified White Students’ A Safe Space To Feel Guilty”
  • “White Liberals Hate Their Race More Than Ever Before”
  • “A Who’s-Who List of Anti-White Jewish ‘Pseudo-Intellectual’ Quackery”

The term “neoliberalism” itself is obscured and hidden from the population, and its discussion is a taboo in neoliberal MSM.

They also pervert the idea of the Rule of the Law, which animated so much of modernity. Today, there’s the hollowing out of democratic practices and institutions, while at the same time catalyzing radical, brutal neo-feudal forms of kleptocratic dominance.

They are hard at work with internet censorship and are even beta testing behavioral enforcement against hand gestures and haircuts. This is typical of Trotskyite neoliberals and their fellow travelers Trotskyite Marxists. Political pressure and money create an environment in which intellectually bankrupt and inverted ideas prevail.

Neoliberals or Marxists, it’s all the same Judas Goat paycheck.

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Read “The ADL Tags Benign Things as White Supremacist to Manufacture Boogeymen, Remain Relevant”

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Neoliberal nomenklatura is very similar to communist nomenklatura. In both cases, position in the social hierarchy is, by and large, determined by the position the individual has in government, military or private industry. Winter Watch is uncovering more and more evidence that these players are multi-generational actors.

For further reading:

• • “UK PM David Cameron’s Great Grandfathers Were Rothschild-Connected Bankers Who Financed Russo-Japanese War”
  • “Who is William Pelham Barr?”

In fact, I’m pleased to see more attention being paid (by folks like David Icke) to this ponerology inquiry that has historical family links and cults going back to Sabbattean- Frankism and Illuminism. Once the true believers of these cults infiltrate and take power, it becomes quite easy to identify, recruit, brainwash and train whole legions of other natural psychopathic flying monkeys to carry out their agendas.

For further reading:

• • “Political Ponerology: A Psychological Anatomy of Evil, Politics and Public Trauma“
  • “Illuminism and Freemason Uprising Part I: A Deep Dive into Revolutionary History with Nesta Webster and James Billington”
  • “The Influence of Sabbatean Frankism on the World”

Delusional American Voters Excited To Elect Another Government By the Worst Individuals

American Kakistocracy

There’s a case to be made that the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens.

Norm Ornstein

October 9, 2017

Carlos Barria / Reuters

Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people have never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate).

As I wrote my new book with E.J. Dionne and Tom Mann, One Nation Under Trump, I kept returning to the term. Kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America. The unscrupulous element has come into sharp focus in recent weeks as a string of Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members. While Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign after his serial abuse, others—including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, remain in place.With Pruitt and Price, the problems were evident before they were confirmed. Pruitt told the Senate he had done no official business on a personal email account while serving as Oklahoma attorney general. When a judge ordered Pruitt’s emails to be made public, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rushed through his confirmation before they appeared—and, too late, they showed he had misled the Senate. Tom Price had engaged in a string of stock transactions while in Congress that led to accusations of manipulation and insider trading; McConnell and his Republican Senate colleagues brushed the evidence aside. Similarly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s misleading claims in his confirmation hearing about his own relationships with Russians during the campaign met with no pushback or interest from Republicans on the Judiciary Committee.

The Constitution prohibits anything of value other than a salary going to a president from the federal government or the states. (Trump had also been pushing the District of Columbia for more favorable property taxes.) The failure of GSA top officials to act on Trump’s apparent violation is under investigation by the agency’s inspector general. Foreign-government entities falling over themselves to stay in the hotel and schedule meetings and events there at premium prices may have violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause, just one of a string of in-your-face elements of a president enriching himself via his office. Doubling the initiation fee at Mar-A-Lago to $250,000, and advertising that those putting on weddings there or at his Bedminster, New Jersey, country club might get a photo-op with the president of the United States, are equally outrageous examples.

News that the president’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner had used a private server and private email accounts for official business—multiplying to several accounts, then hurriedly transferred to the Trump business server after the revelations—showed a remarkable indifference to the rules; Kushner’s repeated failure to disclose his foreign contacts on security-clearance forms represented clear violations that underlined that cavalier attitude. And the efforts of Ivanka’s business and the Kushner family business to leverage their White House status parallel the ethical violations of the president. A competent and honest Congress would be all over these issues, with hearings and efforts to clean up the system. The number of hearings on any of these issues of absence of ethics, abuse of power, and misuse of taxpayer money: zero.

Awful as the grifterish mentality and behavior may be, worse is the other part of kakistocracy—inept, corrupt, and disruptive governance. Impulsive, stream-of-consciousness communications from the president by tweet are one thing. Examples like a budget that aims to knock out our weather satellites and cut our ability to respond to a pandemic, along with the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) removing from its website information about the disastrous conditions in Puerto Rico while pumping up the good news, are another.

The misguided and reckless travel bans instituted at the beginning of the administration were a harbinger of indifference to norms and practices of government previously embraced by both parties. The moves undertaken now by Trump and his aides to sabotage Obamacare, after the embarrassing failures to enact a bill to repeal and replace it, are sadistic and outrageous. They include cutting off the funding to notify people about the period for enrollment on the health exchanges, and shortening the time to enroll, along with most recently ordering the head of Medicare and Medicaid Services to deny a critical waiver to Iowa which will result in many losing insurance and skyrocketing premiums for others.

More troublesome still is the danger to world stability reflected in the embarrassing contretemps-triangle involving Secretary of State Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Mattis, and Trump. Within the last week, Trump undercut Tillerson via tweet, taking diplomatic talks with North Korea off the table while his secretary of state was in China (after undercutting our vital ally South Korea by attempting to blow up our joint free-trade agreement). Then NBC reported that Tillerson had privately called the president a “moron.” Mattis then told the Senate that America should continue to certify the Iran-nuclear deal, as it is in our national-security interest—after which the president threatened to decertify the deal, undercutting the credibility of his defense secretary.* While we have seen many instances in the past of presidents and Cabinet members at odds—remember Gerald Ford and James Schlesinger; Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig—we have had nothing like these public disputes and contradictory signals involving the most sensitive trouble spots on earth.

Donald Trump campaigned by promising to run government like a business. Unfortunately, that business is Trump University. There are 602 key policy positions in the executive requiring Senate confirmation. Almost nine months into the Trump presidency, only 142—less than a quarter—have been filled, and nearly half, 289, have not even had a nominee chosen. The record here is starkly worse than under the previous four presidents, from George H. W. Bush through Obama. At the State Department, we have a secretary and two deputy secretaries in place—but only two of the nearly 30 critical undersecretaries or assistant secretaries, with none even nominated for the vast majority of the positions. A slew of key ambassadorships remain vacant, including sensitive spots like South Korea, Congo, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Venezuela—none of which even have a nominee! Rumors have circulated that Tillerson has proposed many experienced Bush hands for some of these posts, which have been blocked by a White House personnel office that screens for early support for Trump, and vetoes those who offered any criticism during the campaign—which eliminates the vast majority of those with any experience in foreign affairs.

John Kelly left his position at Homeland Security for the White House in July; the vacancy at the top of that critical department remains, with no nominee on the horizon. There are still no nominees for undersecretary for national protection, undersecretary for science and technology, or assistant secretaries for policy or immigration. The same pattern holds true for almost every other cabinet department or key agency. At FEMA, there is a director, but the nominee for deputy director was forced to withdraw after a series of stories about his crony behavior in his previous role at FEMA in the Bush administration. Speaking of science, the Trump nominee for chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture, Sam Clovis, is a right-wing talk radio host whose Ph.D. is in public administration.

To be sure, Trump himself suggested that he did not need to fill many of these 602 posts, because there are “hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary jobs.” It is true that we have had, as scholar Paul Light has put it, a “thickening of government,” with multiple layers of management added over the years. Substituting political appointments with career senior managers taking on their responsibilities would make sense.

But at the same time that there are hundreds of key vacancies in presidential appointees, the administration is signaling deep distrust in the bureaucracy and waging war on the Senior Executive Service. Tillerson has moved actively to hollow out the diplomatic corps, purging the department of many distinguished experts in regions and in management. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is under investigation by the inspector general for trying to move a series of senior managers out of their posts and home areas without following the civil-service rules.

The New York Times reported that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has filled his schedule almost exclusively with meetings and fancy dinners with coal-mining and chemical companies and others EPA regulates—often followed by moves to deregulate them—while scheduling almost no meetings with environmental groups. Pruitt has also spent $25,000 in taxpayer money to put a soundproof phone booth in his office, raising red flags about why this was necessary.

The kakistocracy applies as well to Congress. I have already outlined some of the failures of the confirmation process for Cabinet officers and the abysmal lack of oversight of kleptocratic behavior. Add to those the eleventh hour backdoor effort in the House in January to eviscerate its independent Office of Congressional Ethics and the outrageous attempts by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, unchecked by Speaker Paul Ryan, to collude with the Trump White House to mislead about allegations of its own ties to Russian officials during and after the 2016 campaign. Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation—but has continued to try to use his office to influence the process.

Then there is the ineptitude of the policy process in Congress. Despite Speaker Ryan’s boast that this could be the most productive presidency and Congress in our lifetime, the record of Congress in its first nine months is abysmal. Not one of the big goals set by the president or majority congressional leaders—health repeal and replace, infrastructure, a wall on the border with Mexico, major tax reform—has been achieved. While the number of bills enacted is about average for new presidents, the number of significant bills is extremely low, especially compared to George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Except for a series of narrow measures to roll back Obama regulations and a bill to increase sanctions on Russia, most of the enactments are minor.

Moreover, Republican leaders, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have blown up most of the remaining norms about how laws are developed, debated, and enacted. The process used to attempt the single most significant congressional promise, repealing and replacing Obamacare, was an embarrassing jumble of ineptitude, casuistry, irregularity, and abnormality. After eight years of promises to offer an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in Congress only slapped together careless and unworkable plans after they took the White House and both houses of Congress. In the Senate, the plan was crafted behind closed doors by a small group of older, white male senators without the involvement of experts from the two relevant committees, Health and Finance, and with no input from the most savvy health experts, conservative or otherwise, or any of the stakeholders in the health-policy world.

The plan, and its even more embarrassing alternative crafted by Senators Cassidy and Graham after the first one flamed out, were opposed by every major health organization and provider group, and were ripped by Senator John McCain for violating every principle of deliberation and debate. The sponsors lied repeatedly to their colleagues and to journalists and others about what the bills did and did not do, and made ham-handed efforts to throw money or exemptions at individual senators in Maine and Alaska to induce their votes.

The failure to pass any health measure, or to send Trump any significant bills he can use to have lavish Rose Garden victory ceremonies to show how much he is winning, has led to another round of presidential insults aimed at his own party leaders McConnell and Ryan, and at apostates like John McCain and Jeff Flake.

The latest is a round of ridiculous and counterproductive attacks by Trump on Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker, who responded with his own broadsides at an unstable president lacking adult supervision. Many observers are now writing and talking about a Republican civil war, with the latest battle being the Senate primary in Alabama that led to the nomination of radical Roy Moore.

“Can’t anybody here play this game?” was Casey Stengel’s famous lament about his inept 1962 New York Mets. The same lament could apply to the Trump administration and its majority team in Congress—but the problem is deeper and worse when ineptitude joins with venality and recklessness, and when the stakes are far more than baseball pennants.

Norm Ornstein is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Jewish Press Boasts On Jewish Political Domination Of US Homeland Security Funds

GIF: The Daily Trump

[SEE:  Jewish Organizations Continue to Bag Vast Majority of DHS Nonprofit Security Grants as Funding Quadruples ]

Jewish Groups Get 94% of Homeland Security Grants

Image by claudio papapietro

The Department of Homeland Security allocated to Jewish institutions $12 million, or 94 percent, of $13 million in funds for securing nonprofits.

The Jewish Federations of North America’s Washington office director, William Daroff, said Tuesday that the allocation made sense particularly in light of an intensification of threats on Jewish community targets in the United States and overseas.

“In the current environment there are threats to nonprofits and to Jewish institutions,” he told JTA, noting a swell of attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

“We see it clearly in Europe, but we also see it here in the United States in Kansas City, in Seattle and numerous occasions that are not made public or do not come to fruition,” Daroff said. He referred to attacks in recent years on Jewish community centers in Kansas City and Seattle.

The allocations, announced July 25, are based on applications that are then assessed for threat by local and federal law enforcement officials.

The $13 million disbursed last week brings to $151 million the amount disbursed since the program started in 2005, most of it to Jewish institutions.

Leading the lobbying for the program have been the Jewish Federations of North America, the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel of America.

In a statement, the JFNA thanked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson as well as lawmakers for championing the funds, among them Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and Reps. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), John Carter (R-Texas) and David Price (D-N.C.).

Israel Reopens Schools w/10 Cases of Covid Nationally…2 Weeks Later, 28,147 Students and Teachers Are Quarantined

Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains

GRADING ON THE CURVE

Of 1,400 Israelis diagnosed with COVID-19 last month, 657 (47 percent) were infected in schools. Now 2,026 students, teachers, and staff have it, and 28,147 are quarantined.

Noga Tarnopolsky

Xinhua News Agency/Getty

JERUSALEM—Israel’s unchecked resurgence of COVID-19 was propelled by the abrupt May 17 decision to reopen all schools, medical and public-health officials have told The Daily Beast.

“We know Israelis have terrible discipline, but now, it’s the leadership. ”

— Galia Rahav, Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv

The assessment of Israel’s trajectory has direct bearing on the heated debate underway in the United States between President Donald Trump, who is demanding a nationwide reopening of schools for what appear to be largely political reasons, and health authorities who caution it could put the wider population at risk.

Importantly, on May 17 in Israel it appeared the virus not only was under control, but defeated. Israel reported only 10 new cases of COVID-19 in the entire country that day. In the U.S., the debate often is about reopening schools where the disease is not only not in decline, but surging.

On Sunday, for instance, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, “There’s nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous.” But that is not the case in Israel, where the data from June, the last month for which there is a full set of statistics, appear all too clear.

The road from anti-coronavirus paradigm to rampant infection in this country of 9 million people followed two months of almost total lockdown. May 17 also was the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former rival Benny Gantz swore in their “corona emergency government,” whose sole declared purpose is to fight the spread of the virus. Netanyahu’s decree that the nation’s entire school system would reopen was a political flourish to signal everything was under control.

The announcement followed a more cautious experiment of several weeks in which only children in the first, second, and third grades were brought back to classrooms, and taught in small, non-intersecting groups called “capsules.”

• ‘The Second Wave’ of COVID Hits Israel Like a Tsunami

  

Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist at the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians, said: “There was no measurable increase in contagion” while the capsules for young children were being tried out.

The association even offered the government an investigation into school-based infections of COVID-19, but was turned down.

Then, Levine says, “contrary to our advice, the government decided to open the entire system all at once on May 17. What happened next was entirely predictable.”

On June 3, two weeks after schools opened, more than 244 students and staff were found to test positive for COVID-19.

According to the education ministry, 2,026 students, teachers, and staff have contracted COVID-19, and 28,147 are in quarantine due to possible contagion.

Just in the first two weeks of July, 393 kindergartens and schools open for summer programs have been shuttered due to cases of COVID-19.

On July 2, Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist at the Federation of American Scientists, tweeted a chart showing Israel’s rate of infection surging past Europe and fast approaching the disastrous rate in the U.S., noting that it was exactly one month since the reopening of Israeli schools.

The level of school contagion became public last week during testimony provided to Israeli legislators by Udi Kliner, the health ministry’s deputy director of public-health services, whose boss had just quit in protest against the government’s mishandling of the crisis. Israel now surpasses 1,200 new cases of COVID-19 a day.

On Tuesday, Israel reported 1,681 new cases of COVID-19 infection, its worst result since the outbreak began.

The source of the infection explosion can be seen clearly in the numbers from June. As Kliner told the Knesset, 1,400 Israelis were diagnosed with the disease last month. Of those, 185 caught it at events such as weddings, 128 in hospitals, 113 in workplaces, 108 in restaurants, bars, or nightclubs, and 116 in synagogues, according to Kliner, while 657—which is to say 47 percent of the total—were infected by the coronavirus in schools.

“Not a single school was prepared,” says Mohammad Khatib, who teaches public health at the Zefat Academic College and is the epidemiological expert on the health ministry’s newly formed advisory committee on the coronavirus in the Arab sector.

“Adults, including teachers and other employees, brought it into schools, which are, in the end, closed spaces,” he said, underscoring the finding that middle-school children proved to be the most dangerous vectors.

“The younger students were more obedient and easier to control in a classroom setting,” Khatib said, “and had more respect for their teachers. Among high schoolers, there was a greater ability to understand. But it is in the nature of middle-school kids to rebel, not to obey teachers, not to wear masks or keep apart.”

The ministry of health did not respond to questions regarding the breakdown of schools and infections, and accurate, detailed numbers have become harder and harder to come by.

Levine, the Hebrew University epidemiologist, said that in general, “There is no transparency regarding the statistics. The data is not being made available to epidemiologists, so it is impossible to gauge precisely, but we saw many confirmed cases of COVID-19 in middle schools— it is very possible that caused the outbreak.”

The month of June, which began exactly two weeks after Israel’s school system was suddenly and shambolically reopened, “caused the second wave,” Khatib says. “Whatever else we say, the fact is that schools were not prepared to take students back under the necessary conditions to contain the epidemic.”

“The reopening happened too fast. It was undertaken so quickly that it triggered a very sharp spike, and the return to more conservative measures came too little, much too late,” Khatib says, summing up Israel’s dilemma.

Six weeks after forming an emergency government to handle the pandemic, and one week after promising that a “corona czar” would be appointed to take charge of the country’s haphazard response, Israel seems further than ever from its desired goal.

Calls are mounting for a national commission of inquiry to be appointed to investigate the government’s “dereliction of duty,” in the words of former Defense Minister Naftali Bennett.

On Sunday, Roni Numa, a retired army general who was the only known candidate for the czar job, withdrew his name after realizing he would not be given the authority needed to coordinate a national response.

Netanyahu devoted Monday to attempting to fire Yifat Shasha-Biton, chairwoman of the Knesset’s corona committee and a member of his own Likud party, for the crime of defying his directives regarding the reopening of public pools and gyms.

The prime minister, who is struggling to keep ultra-religious coalition parties in line in the face of their demand to allow synagogues to admit up to 50 congregants at a time, ordered Shasha-Biton to keep gyms and pools closed.

But without evidence proving that pools and gyms cause an uptick in contagion, Shasha-Biton allowed her committee to vote for opening.

The health ministry has not released its own epidemiological findings on gyms and pools, if they exist, and the ministry of education indicated it “intends to open schools as usual” on Sept. 1, even though the numbers from June would seem to provide conclusive data about the risks. In any case, no strategy is in place to prevent a second round of school epidemics.

Galia Rahav, who chairs the department of infectious diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, said in an interview that “what happened in schools is just too much gathering, day after day, and kids come home and infect mom and dad. The top numbers of new infections were in kids.”

Due to the large number of infections among children, she noted, “the average age of an Israeli with COVID-19 has gone down to between 20 and 39,” while infections in citizens over 65 have held steady. In Jerusalem, the Israeli city with the highest rate of infection, most of the people with COVID-19 are under the age of 35.

“It is certainly not impossible that the second wave started in schools,” Rahav said, carefully understating the case. “Discipline is at an awful level. We know Israelis have terrible discipline, but now, it’s the leadership that is completely inconstant, with one ‘leader’ saying one thing and another the contrary.”

State-Sponsored Disinformation–every government uses it

State-sponsored disinformation in Western democracies is the elephant in the room

By Sohini Chatterjee and Péter Krekó

Discussions on disinformation mostly focus on the external sources of disinformation: Russia and China. If we focus exclusively on disinformation as a foreign challenge, we are simply ignoring the elephant in the room. Democratically-elected leaders are increasingly fuelling the spread of disinformation.

Contemporary disinformation is distinct from propaganda. It is neither based on ideologies nor facts. In many ways, it is predicated on a much more pessimistic and cynical worldview where, as Peter Pomerantsev writes about the disinformation of the Putin-regime, “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”

The goal of disinformation is not to persuade the audience with one message. Rather, disinformation is intended to confuse people with multiple messages. As a result, it does not need ideology or to be fact-based at all. It can be almost anything, which is why it is so much more dangerous than propaganda.

Without the pesky requirement of being beholden to facts or ideas, one can simply throw out any sort of (false or strange) information to confuse the public. And it is increasingly being exploited for political gain. We live in an era where political campaigns are less focused on winning hearts and minds; rather, campaigns now tend to gain traction by sowing division and engendering tribalism.

Disinformation creates chaos. The public finds itself confused about what is true and reality suddenly becomes murky. Without clear and reliable information, people revert to visceral tribalism based on the narrative they like the most. Cleavages deepen. The mission of the disinformation campaign is accomplished.

Western democratic leaders generally oppose authoritarians who deliberately deceived their citizens to create and sustain a virtual reality… But suddenly, state-sponsored disinformation is no longer reserved for authoritarians and dictators. It has infiltrated the Western democratic world, catching us all off guard.

The pandemic has given a dangerous boost to domestic disinformation narratives in the democratic world.

In Hungary, a NATO and EU member state, Viktor Orbán has created the most centralised media empire ever within the European Union, with more than 400 media outlets all parroting similar political messages. The Hungarian government and its media have also successfully blamed Iranian students in Hungary for the onset of the pandemic, falsely claiming that the primary source of the pandemic is illegal migration. Orban and his media have also blamed George Soros for the tanking Hungarian currency and claimed that a vocal critic of Orban’s anti-democratic tactics was descended from Nazis. These narratives are not only for domestic use: Orbán is spreading them throughout the Ango-Saxon world through his news agency V4NA and throughout the Western Balkans via media acquisitions.

Russia Today, the state-financed disinformation outlet planned to open a branch in Budapest a few years ago. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov announced the plan and the editor-in-chief was selected. Ultimately, RT abandoned the idea. Why? Most probably because they felt there was no need for such an outlet in Hungary, as the state-owned media is misinforming voluntarily for free. As a study by Political Capital – in association with Euronews – found, Euroskeptic narratives representing Moscow’s interests are present in the Hungarian media space without any efforts being made by the Kremlin (for instance, the messaging that “only Russia and China help, the EU does not”).

Meanwhile, in Poland, state-owned media have been claiming that opposition mayors have enacted policies that are contributing to the spread of the virus. At the same time, Central European governments like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria – in order to silence critical voices – have passed harsher criminal punishment for media outlets that they claim are spreading “fake news.”

Even the United States – once a respected global beacon of democratic principles and a trusted ally of other like-minded democratic states – is spearheading massive disinformation campaigns, especially related to COVID-19. During the pandemic, which has seen a hugely disproportionate death toll in the US (relative to its percentage of the global population), we have seen democratically-elected political leaders flood the public discourse with disinformation.

President Trump is attempting to alter the narrative of the pandemic and its effects to achieve particular political ends and kickstart his re-election campaign. Rather than providing the public with clear and digestible facts, he touts wild and unproven medical treatments and puts forward man-made sources of COVID-19 without evidence, often contradicting scientists and American intelligence agencies. Trump lies repeatedly about US testing capabilities, and regularly fabricates data regarding the scope of US infections and deaths. When a journalist deigns to question him on the information he puts forth in his press briefings, he becomes agitated, casts doubt on the credibility of the journalist or media outlet, and cries “fake news!”

Trump also promotes notable conspiracy theorists in his Twitter feed. He recently accused an MSNBC anchor, Joe Scarborough, of murder and has been claiming that young children interfere with mail-in voting in an effort to call into question its efficacy and to discourage voters. Trump has also publicly retweeted conspiracy theories about coronavirus espoused by Diamond & Silk, two celebrities whose Twitter feed was suspended for disinformation, and recently argued that a 75-year old protestor in Buffalo was a member of Antifa.

President Trump will likely continue his disinformation campaign with the purpose of creating chaos and dividing constituents, as tribal politics can always benefit from more division and polarisation. The public confusion and division it breeds may just be enough to save him.

Historically, dictatorships and authoritarians have effectively utilised state-sponsored disinformation tactics and the politically-elected leaders of Western democracies have aggressively condemned them. In fact, the US government and the European Union have proactively opposed the use of such flagrant authoritarian tactics, as they pose a fundamental and profound threat to well-established democratic principles. Western democratic leaders generally oppose authoritarians who deliberately deceived their citizens to create and sustain a virtual reality: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and in the 21st century, Kim Jung-Un and Vladimir Putin.

But suddenly, state-sponsored disinformation is no longer reserved for authoritarians and dictators. It has infiltrated the Western democratic world, catching us all off guard.

In the last general election campaign in the UK, the incumbent Tories deployed a flood of fake news regarding Brexit and their political opponents until tech giants (including Google) had to step in and remove some of their misleading ads.

We must now recognise the painful truth that – even in a Western democracy – there is almost no way to stop disinformation, especially when it comes from the top. Viritually all of the funds and institutions in the Anglo-Saxon world are aimed exclusively at targeting disinformation coming from the outside – from foreign sources.

Because such extensive disinformation campaigns are a relatively new phenomenon in the West, we do not yet have adequate norms and/or institutional practices in place to combat this new challenge. There are no institutions ready to deal with domestic, homegrown politically-charged disinformation – neither in the US, nor in the UK or in the EU. As a result, we are no longer simply ignoring the elephant in the room. We have allowed the elephant to take over the room.

• Sohini Chatterjee is an associate professor at Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs and a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Péter Krekó is the Director of Political Capital Institute in Budapest and a Europe’s Futures Fellow of the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) and Erste Foundation

The Facebook disinformation virus needs a vaccine

Since Zuckerberg won’t limit the spread of conspiracy theories, he should be charged a fee like tobacco companies

(AP Photo/Nick Wass)

 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, above, is trying to have it both ways: Signaling his personal disgust with President Trump’s behavior while allowing Facebook to monetize it.

By TOM COSGROVE |

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that he’s “deeply shaken and disgusted” by President Trump’s incendiary social media posts.

But don’t worry Mr. President, Zuckerberg isn’t actually going to use his power as Facebook’s founder to limit your ability to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation on the platform he invented.

That’s just not his business model.

Instead, Zuckerberg is trying to have it both ways: virtue signaling his personal disgust with Trump’s behavior while allowing Facebook to monetize it. Talk about disgusting.

Facebook is a monopoly, a sprawling, borderless behemoth that needs to be reined in before it destroys the foundation of our democracy: shared truth.

We are suffering through a once-in-a-century pandemic caused by an unseen virus while living with a disinformation virus that we can see — most often on Facebook — that sows deep divisions by erasing the edges of truth.Disinformation, disguised as memes and news, has become so prominent in our public discourse that it is sending us and our democracy to the ICU.

With Facebook, there is no social distancing. Simply logging on means exposure to fake cures, bogus news and foreign agents stoking our country’s divisions.

Some have looked to remedy this by breaking up the social media giant, but that won’t undo the damage already done. Nor will it protect us going forward.

No, we need to immunize ourselves from the disinformation virus, and Facebook should pay for the vaccine.

Facebook should be charged a Disinformation Consumption Fee for each of its U.S. users. For instance, a surcharge of $40 annually would generate at least $6 billion to fight disinformation.

There’s precedent for such an initiative. Under a 1998 settlement agreement with states, major tobacco companies contributed billions of dollars to state budgets and funded anti-smoking public service announcements, helping reduce smoking rates to their lowest levels in almost a century.

Like Big Tobacco, Zuckerberg has chosen to put profits before truth, spreading disease throughout the land and refusing to take responsibility for the damage he’s caused.

We can no longer allow a 36-year-old billionaire to rule over a global town square of 2.5 billion people like a feudal lord selling megaphones to truth-tellers and disinformation agents alike, drawing no distinction between the two.

If Zuckerberg was really disgusted by divisiveness, he would have acted on Facebook’s own research that the social media platform was driving people apart.

The Wall Street Journal reported that a Facebook team’s internal report concluded that “our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. If left unchecked,” Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

Presented with this evidence, Zuckerberg shelved it. All so Facebook can continue to make billions selling disinformation and divisiveness.

He is responsible for helping to tear the country apart and he knows it.

Disinformation, like terrorism, is a mortal threat to our democracy. After 9/11, Congress created a commission to find out what went wrong and to prevent it from ever happening again.

We need Congress to act again, this time creating a bipartisan panel to make recommendations on how to structure a Disinformation Consumption Fee to raise and spend the billions needed to educate Americans on how to fight this insidious threat.

If Zuckerberg won’t do it himself, we need to do it for him. Nothing less than our democracy is at stake.

Tom Cosgrove is the co-creator of the documentary about healing a polarized America, “Divided We Fall: Unity Without Tragedy,” airing nationally on PBS, and the president of the non-profit New Voice Strategies.

Defund the thought police–Put An End To Political Correctness

Defund the thought police

• By CHARLES LIPSON

Due process is not the strong suit of mobs. Neither is nuance, open discussion or disagreement. These inherent defects should be painfully obvious as mobs pull down statues, seize sections of cities and demand the public approach them on bended knee, literally.

Anyone who dares push back faces immediate censure. If the mob is successful, any offenders will lose their jobs. Feckless employers are all too eager to appease the mob and hope it turns on another target.

In this perilous environment, the most frenzied voices do more than dominate the public square. They monopolize it by silencing dissent. They have received full-throated support from the tech giants that control discussion and the media giants determined to shape the narrative rather than report the news.

Twitter and NBC are the poster children for this assault on free discussion. Their suppression in the name of “social justice” betrays the idea, best articulated in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” that competing, divergent views lead to greater understanding.

The idea of an open forum, so basic to democracies, already lies a-moldering in the grave of academia, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Imagine applying for a job in gender studies and saying you oppose abortions after, say, week 38. The term for such a person is “unemployed.”

Imagine merely calling for a discussion on the pros and cons of affirmative action, taking the negative side, and hoping to win tenure. Bad career move.

University administrations are equally rigid. Rejecting affirmative action, questioning the implementation of Title IX or opposing Black Lives Matter would end your chances of being hired at nearly every U.S. university. Yet all of them proudly tout, with no sense of irony, their “office of diversity and inclusion,” fully staffed and generously funded. For them, of course, diversity never includes diverse viewpoints. It’s all about DNA and gender identity.

Modern universities are now well-oiled machines to stamp out dissenting views. That’s been true for decades. What’s new, and disturbing, is seeing this orthodoxy spread to K-12 education, corporate HR departments, churches and newsrooms.

The “thought police” are on patrol, twirling the twin batons of guilt and moral superiority. Dissent from their views is not just considered an error, much less an innocent one. It is considered immoral, illegitimate and unworthy of a public hearing.

Although both left and right have moved steadily toward this abyss, the worst excesses today come from the left, just as they came from the right in the 1950s. Opponents are seen as apostates who deserve to be symbolically burned at the stake.

The last time we saw this frenzy was during the dark days of Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood Blacklist. People flocked to Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” because it likened the moment to the Salem witch trials. Today’s audiences would be appalled to hear the critique applies to them. Alas, it does.

Suppressing free speech is not the same as violence, but the two are invariably intertwined. The threat of violence not only underscores the intensity of particular views — it heightens the danger of voicing disagreement.

Large-scale violence, whatever its source or purpose, undermines social stability and assails democratic procedures. It won’t stand for long because the public won’t tolerate it. They will demand leaders who restore order. The only question is what kind of order and at what cost.

The first duty of any government is to establish order and safety, ideally with popular support. Constitutional democracies have procedures to establish order, enforce it and administer penalties for violating it.

In the U.S., we have one additional constraint, a fundamentally important one: personal rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, cannot be overridden, even by large majorities. This social and political order is not static — it is always evolving — but there are well-established procedures to make those changes, ensure all voices are heard and protect each citizen’s inalienable rights.

Calls to “defund the police” attack the very idea of establishing this peaceful public order. Cities foolish enough to attempt it will unleash violence and predation and meet a predictable backlash from citizens determined to protect their lives and property. They will either stand and fight or flee to safer spaces.

Although mobs are not always violent, rule by mobs is always a threat to constitutional democracy. Even peaceful protests can morph into mob rule when they stamp out dissenting voices or quash democratic procedures.

We are seeing some of that today, where peaceful protests, guaranteed under the First Amendment’s rights to free speech and assembly, attempt to suppress speech, topple symbols they claim to hate and smear anyone bold enough to disagree.

To preserve our democracy, we must resist the mob. That begins with understanding the gravity of the threat. Yielding the public square to this “thought police” is the road to tyranny. It leads away from our hard-won achievement of ordered liberty and constitutional democracy.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago. This article is reprinted with permission from Real Clear Politics, where it first appeared.

Real Democracies Do NOT Cast Votes For “the lesser of two evils”

The Deep State’s Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Is Working

Tyranny Without a Tyrant

by John W. Whitehead

In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

― Hannah Arendt, On Violence

What exactly is going on?

Is this revolution? Is this anarchy? Is this a spectacle engineered to distract us from the machinations of the police state? Is this a sociological means of re-setting our national equilibrium? Is this a Machiavellian scheme designed to further polarize the populace and undermine our efforts to stand unified against government tyranny? Is this so-called populist uprising actually a manufactured race war and election-year referendum on who should occupy the White House?

Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.

Certainly it’s not leading to more freedom.

This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.

It must be said: the Black Lives Matter protests have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests—tinged with mob violence, rampant incivility, intolerance, and an arrogant disdain for how an open marketplace of ideas can advance freedom—have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.

For one brief moment in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it seemed as if finally “we the people” might put aside our differences long enough to stand united in outrage over the government’s brutality.

That sliver of unity didn’t last.

We may be worse off now than we were before.

Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?

You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

It works the same way every time

The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

Having allowed our fears to be codified and our actions criminalized, we now find ourselves in a strange new world where just about everything we do is criminalized, even our ability to choose whether or not to wear a mask in public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government can solve the problems that plague us, whether it be terrorism, an economic depression, an environmental disaster, or a global pandemic.

We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests. Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.

The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.

Nor does it seem to matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.

Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”)

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, and then jails us if we dare step out of line, punishes us unjustly without remorse, and refuses to own up to its failings, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

So where does that leave us?

Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

The pickle we find ourselves in speaks volumes about the nature of the government beast we have been saddled with and how it views the rights and sovereignty of “we the people.”

Now you don’t hear a lot about sovereignty anymore. Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

In other words, in America, “we the people”— sovereign citizens—call the shots.

So when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.” Worst of all, “we the people” have become desensitized to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

How do we reconcile the Founders’ vision of the government as an entity whose only purpose is to serve the people with the police state’s insistence that the government is the supreme authority, that its power trumps that of the people themselves, and that it may exercise that power in any way it sees fit (that includes government agents crashing through doors, mass arrests, ethnic cleansing, racial profiling, indefinite detentions without due process, and internment camps)?

They cannot be reconciled. They are polar opposites.

We are fast approaching a moment of reckoning where we will be forced to choose between the vision of what America was intended to be (a model for self-governance where power is vested in the people) and the reality of what it has become (a police state where power is vested in the government).

This slide into totalitarianism—helped along by overcriminalization, government surveillance, militarized police, neighbors turning in neighbors, privatized prisons, and forced labor camps, to name just a few similarities—is tracking very closely with what happened in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.

We are walking a dangerous path right now.

No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.

Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda that is peddled by the media, the 2020 presidential election is not a populist election for a representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the nation’s archaic electoral college system.

Anyone who believes that this election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naïve, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”

When a country spends close to $10 billion on elections to select what is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or queen to occupy the White House and fill other government seats, while more than 40 million of its people live in poverty, more than 40 million Americans are on unemployment, more than 500,000 Americans are homeless, and analysts forecast it will take a decade to work our way out of the current COVID-induced recession, that’s a country whose priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.

Be warned, however: the Establishment—the Deep State and its corporate partners that really run the show, pull the strings and dictate the policies, no matter who occupies the Oval Office—is not going to allow anyone to take office who will unravel their power structures. Those who have attempted to do so in the past have been effectively put out of commission.

Voting sustains the illusion that we have a democratic republic, but it is merely a dictatorship in disguise, or what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately refer to as an “economic élite domination.”

In such an environment, the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dictate national policy. As the Princeton University oligarchy study indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. As such, the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies of government.

We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty

We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government run by a corporate elite, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.

The powers-that-be want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election Day. They want us to believe that we have no right to complain about the state of the nation unless we’ve cast our vote one way or the other. They want us to remain divided over politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own.

What they don’t want us talking about is the fact that the government is corrupt, the system is rigged, the politicians don’t represent us, the electoral college is a joke, most of the candidates are frauds, and, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we as a nation are repeating the mistakes of history—namely, allowing a totalitarian state to reign over us.

Former concentration camp inmate Hannah Arendt warned against this when she wrote, “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”

As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?

Never forget that the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Read other articles by John W..

Popular Rapper Slams Black Lives Matter As Soros Movement, Hijacked by Gays

Some say ‘Black Lives Matter’ message hijacked by emergence of ‘CHAZ’

Hard left ‘hijacks’ Black Lives Matter movement

From the start, Black Lives Matter has been about LGBTQ lives

VIRAL VIDEO: Rapper Lord Jamar: Black Lives Matter ‘Not Our Movement,’ ‘Given To Us By George Soros’

By  Paul Bois

Johnny Nunez/WireImage via Getty Images

Rapper Lord Jamar, a member of the hip-hop group Brand Nubian, sparked controversy when he rejected the Black Lives Matter organization over its Marxist roots, alleging it was created by far-left philanthropist billionaire George Soros and saying it is robbing Black Americans of their own “organic movement.”

In a video that has quickly gone viral, Lord Jamar (real name Lorenzo Dechalus) said that he is not a “Black Lives Matter” supporter, citing the organization’s radical views that fall outside its original mission statement.

“I’m not a Black Lives Matter supporter,” Jamar said in an interview on SCUM.

“You’re not?” the interviewer asked in surprise.

“No, absolutely not,” responded Jamar. “Because it’s not our movement. This is a movement that was given to us by, you know, George Soros and his f***ing boys. Because they saw how things were going and they didn’t want to go back to the 60s to where we started having our own organic movements. That was a big f***ing problem for them. So let’s give the people a movement that we can control. We’ll provide them the leaders and all this type of s**t. That’s what black lives matter is.”

Lord Jamar then directed people to look at the leaders of Black Lives Matter and their allegiance with the LGBTQ movement to illustrate his point. “Look at the leaders of Black Lives Matter,” he said. “These lesbian women who are trying to incorporate, you know, LG whatever the f*** the letters are, incorporate their concerns into black people’s concerns. Go to the website. Look it up.”

(Warning: Profanity)#BlackLivesMatter#GeorgeSoros https://t.co/DnfDqMsmK1

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) July 2, 2020

Black Lives Matter states on its “What We Believe” page that the organization is a “queer-affirming network” that seeks to “dismantle cisgender privilege” and “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family.”

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.

We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

Black Lives Matter (BLM) founder Patrisse Cullors also emphasized in 2015 that the leaders are “trained Marxists” steeped in ideological theory. “We actually do have an ideological frame, myself and Alicia, in particular, are trained organizers,” said Cullors. “We are trained Marxists.” Many Black Lives Matter rallies have included calls to “abolish capitalism” along with the police.

Dr. Ron Paul Challenges Texas Exaggeration of Covid Virus Numbers

 

SOURCE

Is the Texas Covid ‘Spike’ Fake News?

written by ron paul

On July 2nd, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order mandating the wearing of face masks across the state, whether indoors or outdoors, when six feet cannot be maintained between people. In the governor’s decree, he cited a rise in Covid cases, a rise in test positivity, and a rise in hospitalizations as justification to force people to cover their faces in public.

The move is not only a violation of the civil liberties of all Texans. Abbott may have based his executive order on inaccurate information about a “rise” in Covid cases due to the Texas State Department of Health Services changing the definition of what constitutes a “Covid case.”

Thanks goes to Collin County Judge Chris Hill for blowing the whistle on what appears to be a move in mid-May to redefine what was a “Covid” case to open the door to a massive increase – all to match the mainstream media line that a “second wave” was on the way.

In a Commissioners Court hearing for Collin County on May 18th, it was revealed that while previously the determination of a Covid “case” was a confirmed test result, the definition was suddenly changed to count “probable” cases as “cases.” At the same time, the threshold for determining “probable” was lowered to a ridiculous level.

As Judge Hill said at that May 18th meeting, “If you have a subjective fever and you have a headache and you live in Collin County, you now meet the qualifications to be a probable COVID patient. It is remarkable how low the standard is now.”

Even worse, once a “probable” case was determined based on possibly unrelated subjective criteria, up to 15 people in possible contact with that “probable” case were also listed as “probable cases.” And “probable cases” were considered cases.

Repeat that farce across Texas and is it any wonder there was a “spike” in “cases”?

Also, Governor Abbott’s claim that hospitals were being over-run by Covid patients was refuted by the Houston hospital directors themselves, who said they were nowhere near actual capacity and in fact were about the same level as they were last year.

The basis for Abbott’s unconstitutional “executive order” has been shown to be false. Will he admit his mistake?

It is encouraging to see so many local and county officials across Texas announcing they will refuse to enforce Governor Abbott’s unconstitutional face mask order. Thankfully the spirit of freedom and love of liberty is still alive in Texas.

The “second wave” is driven by propaganda. Across the country, Covid testing increased from about 150,000 to more than 700,000 per day. You can’t drive through Houston without seeing a flurry of signs advertising “Free Covid test! Results in 15 minutes!” Last week Reuters reported that tests shipped around the country by the federal government were contaminated.

Deaths from coronavirus – even the deaths “with” coronavirus rather than deaths “from” coronavirus – are down more than 90 percent since the peak in April. The decline in deaths continues. That means we are closer to the “herd immunity” that will finally kill this virus. Yet Governor Abbott and others across the country see this as a reason to lock the country back down.

The Real Civil War Was the Rich Against Everyone Else, Just Like Now

The True War

At his trial in Nuremberg, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring is recorded as saying, “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,”   In common speech, this is often misquoted as, “History is written by the victor.”  The actual words are, “The victor is always the judge and the loser is the accused.”  Truer words he probably never spoke.

To this I would add that the judge always positions himself as the moral superior.  After all, might makes right, sine qua non?

America is convulsing because its history is a bedtime story told to itself to hide the painful truth.  On all sides of the current mess there, folks are asking, or rather stating that Civil War 2.0 is underway.  In a profound sense, it is just a continuation of the original, much like World War 2 was inevitable because the wrongs of World War 1 where never settled.

After orgies of violence we humans call wars, the winners – and losers – are in a rush to turn away from the horrors that were committed on all sides, and in that rush a convenient narrative is concocted to ease the vivid nightmares.  The winners absolve themselves of the crimes by heaping guilt on the shoulders of the losers, regardless of right or wrong, or the truth.

As any good lawyer will tell you, there are three sides to every story – your side, my side and the truth.

When it comes to the American Civil War of 1860-63, the soothing narrative the winners concocted was that the evil South wanted slavery, and the bright shiny North wanted to abolish it.  Since the North won, their side of the story has dominated the narrative, but that makes it neither right nor the truth.  The real story is much more complex with plenty of guilt to go ’round.  As we proper Southerners know it, it was the War of Northern Aggression.

As the great Greek tragedian Aeschyius reminds us, “The first casualty of war is the Truth.”

The issue of slavery began simmering in the Union before the ink was dry on the Constitution.  Abolitionists wanted to end slavery primarily because it was a vestige of British colonialism, but also because it was antithetical to the ideals of the new nation.

Many abolitionists advocated sending slaves back to Africa, which eventually happened when a US colonial group created the western African nation of Liberia and offered passage to any slaves wanting to emigrate there.  Abraham Lincoln recognized Liberian independence in 1862, and liked the idea of repatriating slaves, as he was not a fan of racial integration.

In 1824, the Democratic Republican Party split into two factions – the Democrats and Republicans – over support for John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.  Among the issues at the core of the split was slavery and abolition.  The Democrats were willing to compromise on slavery, as demonstrated by The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought the free state of Maine and the slave state of Missouri into the Union.

While the compromise placated both sides for  atime by maintaining the balance between free and slave states, it was undone by the Kanas-Nebraska Act of 1858.

Aside from all the idealistic rhetoric, the underlying tensions were primarily economic.  The northern states were dominated by industrial and financial interests, while the southern states were agricultural.  The balance that the politicians sought to maintain was between the suppliers of raw materials and food in the south, and the factories and banks in the north.  This tension was exacerbated by the apportionment of representation using population.  This one fact is the seed from which the Civil War and two centuries of social unrest have sprung.

The north benefitted from cheap raw materials that made its finished products highly competitive in global markets.  This made the industrialists and financiers grossly wealthy.  But they also faced increasing pressure to raise wages and offer benefits to labor, an issue that didn’t affect the slave states.  Furthermore, it was in the best interests of the northern parties to maintain the supply of cheap raw materials.

The south, on the other hand, found that they could fetch much better prices for their goods in Europe, and could buy manufactured goods cheaper than from the north.  More and more of the south’s output was shipping overseas.  The southern plantation owners were also hiking the prices for northern buyers, while buying fewer and fewer finished goods from the north, and their wealth was beginning to rival that of the industrial-financial interests.  Thanks to slavery, the plantation owners didn’t have an expanding middle class to deal with.

The United States enacted Protective Tariffs almost as fast as the nation came into being.  While they were initially intended to be temporary to help fill up the Treasury, they were never lifted and became a tool of northern interests to maintain control over the south.  By making southern goods more expensive overseas, they forced the flow of raw materials to their factories.  Import tariffs were levied to force the south to buy finished goods from the north.

This made the industrial-financial interests happy, and the expanding middle class enjoyed rising wages, who thus threw their support behind the tariffs, as well.  In the election of 1860, the Morill Tariff was a major plank in the Republican party’s platform, and James Buchanan ended up signing the Morill Tariff into law before Abraham Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861.

In November of 1860, frustrated by tariffs, economic shenanigans and the northern dominance of Congress, the southern senators walked out and secession soon followed on 12 April 1861.  The northern bankers and financiers, fearing a middle class uprising and shrinking profits, persuaded Lincoln to set up a blockade.

The blockade was a blatant act of war against sovereign states who were exercising their Ninth Amendment and Tenth Amendment rights.  The blockade covered 3,500 miles of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, cutting off the newly formed Confederacy from their trading partners in Europe.  The same act today is still considered an act of war against a sovereign nation, though the US still uses it as a routine sanction against nations it doesn’t like (i.e. the banking and financial interests disapprove of).

There was and is no law preventing secession from the Union and every foundational document of the united States recognizes this fundamental right.  Thomas Jefferson himself wrote in the Declaration of Independence that a people had the right to sever ties with another when the government of the latter was abusive to their interests and liberty.

We must pause here to note that the abolutionist argument at the time was not about ending slavery, but whether new territories conquered by the federal government in its war on the native population would expand slavery into those regions or not.  We must also note that not a single slave ship ever flew the Confederate flag.  They were either British of Union flagged ships.

Having undermined the Confederate economy and brutally invaded a sovereign state (a common practice of the US), the Union forces decimated the South, which produced raw materials and not the finished goods of the north.  So the north cut off the South’s livelihood, while protecting their interests by purchasing raw materials from colonial powers abroad.

Note well that the Confederate states were exercising their rights, as recognized and memorialized in the US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Also note that the Union invaded the Confederacy, and not the other way around.

The north clearly profited from slavery on all sides and had no intention to end its practice.  On the other side, the cost of purchasing and maintaining slavery was becoming a burden on the southern producers and would have ended one way or another before the end of the century.

On 1 January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  Contrary to the legend propagated by the victors, this document did not “free” any slaves.  It promised escaped slaves that made it past the Mason-Dixon line that they would not be returned to the Confederacy.    It did not grant equal rights or suffrage or even freedom – just that they would not be returned to their owners.  In other words, it was yet another act of deception by the Union, which it was quite adept at even then.

In fact, slavery in the north did not end for several years after the Civil War and emancipation proclamation.  There was a slave market right where Wall Street is today into the 1870s.

The Dred Scott decision, which affirmed the right of property to a human being, was not overturned until the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, a full three years after the end of the Civil War, and even then the practice of slavery in the north tapered off slowly.

That the Fourteenth Amendment destroyed God-given rights in favor of “privileges and immunities” is the topic of many a long and dry essay.  Suffice it to say that the bankers and financiers did not free any slaves, but rather made slaves of every citizen of the “United States,” itself a corporate entity created by the Act of 1871. (note “united States” versus United States)

It may seem like legal hair-splitting, but there is a profound difference between a “right” and  “privilege”.    In Enlightenment philosophy, a right is the sacred property of an individual by virtue of birth.  A privilege is granted by an authority and requires a license or permission to exercise.  Go back and read the Fourteenth Amendment again.  As Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence, rights are “unalienable” or incapable of having a lien placed on them.  In other words, no authority may claim possession of those rights.

The American Civil War was not about slavery as we commonly think of it.  It was in point of fact about expanding slavery to everyone, not ending it for some.  It was a key expansion of the banking and financial interests in the US, and by means of two world wars, expanding that error to the entire world.

Until we recognize the truth of the Civil War, and acknowledge that we are all slaves to the banking class, we will never be truly free.  In many ways, this one Great Lie has caused so much death and destruction in our modern world.  Because we labor under a profound deception, we can never cure the ills that afflict us at this very moment.

Think about how many times you have heard or said, “The Constitution grants us the right to…”  It does no such thing, nor does the government grant rights.  We are born with them as a gift of Nature and Nature’s Creator.

The American Civil War never ended, it only became a global conflict with vile banksters pulling the strings.  We need only look a bit closer at where groups like Black Lives Matter or Antifa get their funding to see the subversive hand of banking and finance.

It is not just American blacks who are owed reparations, it is every human being on this planet born since the banksters took over.

New York Slave Market
Dred Scott decision
Franklin Pierce

Posted by Bernard Grover

Statue War Payback–Black Statues/Memorials Destruction Will Go Much Faster

Frederick Douglass statue removed at Rochester park

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) – A statue of Frederick Douglass was removed from its base during the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

The statue stood at Maplewood Park in Rochester.

A Frederick Douglas statue in Maplewood Park was removed from its base overnight. pic.twitter.com/J43hqxuHTT

— Atyia Collins (@Atyia_Collins) July 5, 2020

The base of a Frederick Douglass statue torn down overnight here in Maplewood Park. Bits of the statue scattered around the area. @News_8 pic.twitter.com/L6qgV7bVH2

— Ben Densieski (@BenDensieski) July 5, 2020

The neoliberal counter-revolution–latest phase in Democrat’s War Against Trump

The neoliberal counter-revolution

We’re witnessing a reaction to the nationalist uprising

Sohrab Ahmari

A demonstrator faces up to police as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest in Seattle is dismantled

America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalization were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options.

This deposition explains the storm of unrest battering American cities from coast to coast and making waves in Europe as well. The storm’s ferocity — the looting, the mobs, the mass lawlessness, the zealous iconoclasm, the deranged slogans like #DefundPolice — terrifies ordinary Americans. Many conservatives, especially, believe they are facing a revolution targeting the very foundations of American order.

But when national institutions bow (or kneel) to the street fighters’ demands, it should tell us that something else is going on. We aren’t dealing with a Maoist or Marxist revolt, even if some protagonists spout hard-leftish rhetoric. Rather, what’s playing out is a counter-revolution of the neoliberal class — academe, media, large corporations, ‘experts’, Big Tech — against the nationalist revolution launched in 2016. The supposed insurgents and the elites are marching in the streets together, taking the knee together.

They do not seek a radically new arrangement, but a return to the pre-Trump, pre-Brexit status quo ante which was working out very well for them. It was, of course, working out less well for the working class of all races, who bore the brunt of their preferred policy mix: open borders, free trade without limits, an aggressive cultural liberalism that corroded tradition and community, technocratic ‘global governance’ that neutered democracy and politics as such.

Conservatives generally don’t tend to pay much attention to class analysis. But in this case, it does help to explain what’s going on. And it helps to illuminate the true nature of social movements that pose as, and can get mistaken for, revolutionary leftism.

Does anyone seriously believe the American establishment — Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, the trustees of Ivy League universities, the major sports leagues, even Brooks Brothers, for God’s sake — would sign on to a movement that genuinely threatened its material interests? And yet these and many other firms and institutions are falling over themselves to express solidarity with the ‘uprising’, some going so far as to donate millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter, an outfit that lists among its objectives the abolition of the nuclear family.

Over the past four years, every trick in the book has been used to end the ‘nightmare’ of national conservatism and populism. The methods deployed by the elite reflect its tendencies and preferences as a class. Just think of recent skirmishes. A decisive majority of British voters resolved to leave the EU and then had to spend three years fighting a political establishment that marshaled all its vast resources to thwart Brexit. It failed. In America the liberal establishment tried harder, failed harder, but learned more. From the minute Trump won the presidential election, Democrats, elements of the security apparatus, and their media allies set out to undo the result. The marquee events were the ‘collusion’ probe and an impeachment push that was perhaps the single biggest insult ever to the intelligence of the American people. There were also countless smaller attempts to unseat Trump and destroy his entourage.

Trump survived it all. Now comes the new wave of rioters and mad iconoclasts, which many corporates and Democratic governors and mayors have actively encouraged, even as they continue to bar children from public parks and families from holding outdoor funerals, citing COVID-19 risks.

But wait: riots and statue-toppling — such things aren’t congenial to establishment figures, are they? The logic becomes apparent when you see it as a form of class struggle. For all its fury, the storm of the riots ends. There is little resembling demands for ongoing redistributive justice of the kind the old left championed. No labor solidarity, nothing to do with wages and job security. Just demands for ‘representation’ or diversity (on corporate boards, in university curricula, etc). And, of course, the firing of those who say the wrong or awkward thing in the digital public square, in workplaces or in classrooms.

The goal isn’t to rectify concrete economic injustices: massive inequalities in wealth, health and job security. The goal is precisely the opposite: to mitigate, to defer, to smooth over, to mask these substantive disagreements and instead have battles on procedural mechanisms for upholding manners.

Which social class most excels at politically correct manners? That would be the professional-managerial class, the laptop class. Its children learn the patois for discussing ‘issues of race, gender and sexuality’ from an early age. They’re expected to have mastered it by the time they take their entry-level jobs. It’s a skill that private schools are doubtless teaching already.

Working-class people, meanwhile, are most likely to struggle with this language. Even when they mean well they don’t always get it right, not least because the rules constantly shift with the vagaries of critical race theory and LGBTQ acronyms. By fortifying the requirements to speak and think correctly — and raising the stakes for failures — the neoliberal class has now built a repressive new mechanism for staying at the top and keeping the oiks down. Especially those who voted the wrong way in 2016.

So whatever you do, don’t call it a leftist revolution. With the flags, the protests, the kneeling and the new language, it’s a counter-revolution. The outcome remains uncertain, but the class war is well and truly under way.

Sohrab Ahmari is op-ed editor of the New York Post. His next book, The Unbroken Thread, will be published in spring 2021. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine

Opposing, Armed Racial Militias, Converge On Stone Mountain, Birthplace of New KKK

Black Militia at Stone Mountain July 2020

Armed Black Demonstrators Challenge White Supremacist Militia in Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park

BY BENJAMIN FEARNOW 

About 1,000 heavily armed militia, all of whom were Black, marched through Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park on Independence Day, challenging white nationalist groups in the area to either come out and fight or join them in demonstrating against the government.

Stone Mountain State Park officials said the Black militia group was peaceful, orderly and escorted by police Saturday as they called for the removal of the country’s largest Confederate monument near Atlanta. Videos posted to social media show the group, the “Not F**king Around Coalition” (NFAC), meeting at the massive nine-story quartz sculpting that depicts Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Southern generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

NFAC Founder Grand Master Jay told Newsweek via phone Sunday that the militia members at Stone Mountain on Saturday were “100 percent black” and they are not affiliated with Black Lives Matter. “We are a black militia. We aren’t protesters, we aren’t demonstrators. We don’t come to sing, we don’t come to chant. That’s not what we do,” he said.

The NFAC head explained why several videos show the militia members alongside demonstrators earlier in the day before heading to Stone Mountain. Grand Master Jay told Newsweek the sister of Rashard Brooks, who was killed outside an Atlanta Wendy’s by police last month, requested the NFAC militia provide her with a security escort to a downtown rally which began at the site of her brother’s death.

“Our initial goal was to have a formation of our militia in Stone Mountain to send a message that as long as you’re abolishing all these statues across the country, what about this one?” Grand Master Jay said, referencing the massive Confederate carving.

He added that he must commend Stone Mountain police for offering the all-black militia support as they exercised their constitutional rights on July 4th.

“It was all black … there were no brown people, no white people… everyone was black. I am not a protester, I am the commanding general of my militia, we were swearing in new members,” he added, highlighting there was a second militia “show of force” Saturday near Phoenix.

In Stone Mountain, Georgia earlier today pic.twitter.com/F2Autd4YtI

— Naomi (@naomiruta) July 4, 2020The coalition of Black militia met at the monument, which is historically tied to the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and has more recently been the site of white nationalist rallies. Leaders of the heavily armed marching protesters frequently halted the protest to challenge local white supremacists and far-right Second Amendment advocates to “stop hiding.”

“I don’t see no white militia, the boogie [boogaloo] boys, the three percenters and all the rest of these scared-ass rednecks. We here, where the f**k you at? We’re in your house,” one protester said into a PA system during the Stone Mountain Park march.

John Bankhead, a spokesman for the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, said the protests were orderly and acknowledged the Confederate monument is frequently used as a meeting place for far right-wing militia.

“It’s a public park, a state park. We have these protests on both sides of the issue from time to time. We respect people’s First Amendment right,” Bankhead told WXIA-TV. “We understand the sensitivities of the issue here at the park … so we respect that and allow them to come in as long as it’s peaceful, which it has been.”

Newsweek reached out to Stone Mountain Park officials for additional remarks.

“Rawhide” As Metaphor for Vaccine Skepticism

Rawhide–Incident at Red River Station, Season 2 Episode 14

The illusion of freedom–The police state is alive and well

(SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

  

“All the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.” — Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Brace yourself.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware. Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

The world has been down this road before.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism — delivered by way of sovereign citizens or radicalized Muslims — but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

We’re in a national state of denial.

Yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

If the team colors have changed from blue to red, that’s just cosmetic.

The playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state is alive and well and continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the American people.

“We the people” are no longer living the American Dream.

We’re living the American Lie.

Indeed, Americans have been lied to so sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long by politicians of all stripes — who lie compulsively and without any seeming remorse — that they’ve almost come to prefer the lies trotted out by those in government over less-palatable truths.

Here’s a truth few Americans want to acknowledge: nothing has changed (at least, not for the better) since Barack Obama passed the reins of the police state to Donald Trump.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, relentless pace under President Trump as it did under President Obama.

• Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
• SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
• The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
• Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
• For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
• Censorship hasn’t stopped.
• The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
• Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
• The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
• The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.
• Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA.
• The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
• The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars.
• The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
• And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.

Here’s the problem as I see it: “We the people” have failed to recognize these warning signs as potential red flags to use as opportunities to ask questions, demand answers, and hold our government officials accountable to respect our rights and abide by the rule of law.

Unfortunately, once a free people allows the government to make inroads into their freedoms, or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is what happens when you ignore the warning signs.

This is what happens when you fail to take alarm at the first experiment on your liberties.

This is what happens when you fail to challenge injustice and government overreach until the prison doors clang shut behind you.

In the American police state that now surrounds us, there are no longer such things as innocence, due process or justice — at least, not in the way we once knew them. We are all potentially guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects waiting to be accused of a crime.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

As the wife of a prominent German historian recalled: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. … And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. … We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Remember, freedom demands responsibility.

Freedom demands that people stop sleep-walking through life, stop cocooning themselves in political fantasies, and stop distracting themselves with escapist entertainment.

Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least Americans.

Freedom demands that we not remain silent in the face of evil or wrongdoing but actively stand against injustice.

Freedom demands that we treat others as we would have them treat us.

In other words, if you don’t want to be locked up in a prison cell or a detention camp — if you don’t want to be discriminated against because of the color of your race, religion, politics or anything else that sets you apart from the rest — if you don’t want your loved ones shot at, strip searched, tasered, beaten and treated like slaves — if you don’t want to have to be constantly on guard against government eyes watching what you do, where you go and what you say — if you don’t want to be tortured, waterboarded or forced to perform degrading acts — if you don’t want your children to grow up in a world without freedom — then don’t allow these evils to be inflicted on anyone else, no matter how tempting the reason or how fervently you believe in your cause.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. 

Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s Female “Judas Goat” For Grooming Girls, Finally Arrested

Ghislaine Maxwell wants to keep court docs about her sex life sealed

Woman who says she was Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slave settles suit

Epstein ‘sex slave’ Virginia Giuffre, Alan Dershowitz both lose in new court ruling

Judge Orders Virginia Giuffre’s Lawyers to ‘Destroy’ Their Jeffrey Epstein Files, Bars Dershowitz from Accessing Them

Virginia Roberts accepts Alan Dershowitz’s dare, tells doc they had sex

Virginia Giuffre can move forward with suit against Alan Dershowitz: judge

Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Maxwell arrested by FBI on charges related to Jeffrey Epstein

• Maxwell arrested in New Hampshire early Thursday morning
• 17-page FBI indictment charges Maxwell with several crimes

Victoria Bekiempis in New York

 Ghislaine Maxwell with Epstein in New York in 2005. Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell last summer. Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite and close friend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has been arrested, an FBI spokesman has said.

Maxwell was accused by many women of recruiting them to give Epstein massages, during which they were pressured into sex. Those accusations, until now, never resulted in criminal charges.

Maxwell had kept a low profile, and her location was unknown since Epstein’s arrest last July on charges that he abused and trafficked in women and girls in Manhattan and Florida between 2002 and 2005. The search for Maxwell has been the subject of intense speculation, with reported sightings and rumors of her whereabouts popping up across the US and even abroad.

She was arrested in the small town of Bradford, New Hampshire at 8.30am.

Epstein, who pleaded not guilty, killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell in August last year.

The 17-page, six-count indictment filed by the FBI charges Maxwell with a host of crimes, including conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and perjury.

The indictment described Maxwell’s relationship to Epstein as “personal and professional” – and that she was “in an intimate relationship” with him from about 1994 to 1997.

Epstein paid Maxwell “to manage their various properties”, the document says.

The court paperwork provides chilling detail into how Maxwell allegedly lured minors into Epstein’s orbit.

According to charging documents, Maxwell “befriended” some of these victims, “including by asking the victims about their lives, their schools, and their families”. She and Epstein spent time forging relationships with these girls, by taking them shopping and to the movies. The alleged grooming happened, according to the documents, at Epstein’s manse on the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, as well as Maxwell’s residence in London.

After developing a rapport, the documents allege, “Maxwell would try to normalize sexual abuse for a minor victim by, among other things, discussing sexual topics, undressing in front of the victim, being present when a minor victim was undressed, and/or being present for sex acts involving the minor victim and Epstein”.

Sometimes, Maxwell would give Epstein massages in front of victims whereas other times, she urged them to give him massages, “including sexualized massage during which a minor victim would be fully or partially nude.” These would often involve Epstein sexually abusing these minors.

On some occasions, Maxwell was “present for and participated in the abuse”.

Maxwell’s father was the British media baron Robert Maxwell. She was was a one-time girlfriend of Epstein’s and key presence at his side in his glittering social life, which often included rich, influential and powerful people from around the world in politics, the arts and science.

Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s alleged victims, has said in a civil lawsuit that Maxwell recruited her into Epstein’s circle, where she claims Epstein forced her to have sex with him and friends including British royal Prince Andrew – who has strongly denied the allegations.

Maxwell has said Giuffre’s allegations are untrue. Giuffre in response filed a defamation suit against Maxwell in 2015.

Capitalism In Meltdown–‘World on fire’

Image: Socialist Appeal

‘World on fire’: capitalism in meltdown

Rob Sewell

As society begins to reopen, the ruling class is hoping for a return to ‘normality’. But the future will look nothing like the past. A deep depression looms, threatening to throw us back to the 1930s. We must fight for revolution.

---

With the easing of the lockdown, we are in a period of apparent calm. But it is a calm before the storm.

In the hurly-burly of events, especially at this time, it is possible to get bewildered. Events are moving so fast that there is hardly enough time to catch one’s breath. It is therefore important to occasionally take a step back in order to see the bigger picture.

The Bank of England has stated that the present crisis is deeper than anything we have witnessed for 300 years. The United States economy – the most powerful capitalist country in the world – fell by a phenomenal 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2020, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve. China’s economy shrank 6.8 percent in the first three months of 2020, the country’s first such contraction on record. The UK economy plunged by 20.4 percent in April alone, following a 5.8 percent fall in March, a previous record.

The capitalist system is in meltdown. Out of sheer desperation, trillions of dollars have been poured into the economy by governments and central banks to prop it up. The US Federal Reserve is expanding its balance sheet by $12 trillion, twice the level of 2008. Others have followed suit. The rise in the ratio of UK government debt to national income is the highest for 57 years – nearly 100 percent of GDP, and rising.

This is completely unprecedented, and nothing short of catastrophic. This represents a decisive turning-point in Britain and the world. The aged Henry Kissinger, a strategist of capital, warned of a “world on fire”.

Cause and effect

This is no ordinary crisis, but an endemic crisis, reflecting the utter exhaustion of the capitalist system / Image: Pixabay

The pandemic was not the cause but the trigger for this downswing. Nevertheless, the scale of the outbreak has certainly aggravated the crisis.

“The pandemic was just the trigger for a recession that was already approaching,” stated the Financial Times (3 June), in an unusually frank admission.

However, there are signs that a second wave will hit in the coming period. Cause has become effect, and effect has become cause.

Marx explained that as soon as a social system is not able to develop the productive forces – namely its economy – it enters into crisis and the era of social revolution opens up. This is precisely the period we have now entered.

This is no ordinary crisis, but an endemic crisis, reflecting the utter exhaustion of the capitalist system. What we have entered is a new world depression, worse than in the 1930s. This will last for years, with no end in sight. A trade war is also looking very likely, as countries try to export their way out of the crisis.

“Unless institutions such as the IMF and IADB [Inter-American Development Bank] sharply step up their lending, a new wave of debt defaults could make it the 1930s all over again,” states the Financial Times. But, in reality, whatever they do will be wrong.

“This is a deeply sobering outlook, with the crisis likely to leave long-lasting scars and pose major global challenges,” said Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, from the World Bank Group.

Class war

In the 1930s, the Great Depression, as it was known, was only ‘solved’ by the devastation of the Second World War / Image: public domain

In the 1930s, the Great Depression, as it was known, was only ‘solved’ by the devastation of the Second World War.

A new depression, deeper than anything we have known, cannot be brought to an end this time by world war. Such a war – in the present epoch of nuclear weapons – is ruled out, as it would obliterate the planet. That being the case, all the contradictions of capitalist crisis will be internalised. Therefore, not war, but class war is on the agenda.

This depression means permanent mass unemployment. Already in the United States, 45 million workers have been ejected from the factories – some 25 percent of the workforce. In Britain, over 9 million workers have been furloughed. Millions everywhere will face the nightmare of unemployment and austerity. But they will not take this lying down.

With this death agony of capitalism, vicious austerity and falling living standards are on the order of the day. As the furlough is run down, the real situation will become increasingly exposed.

Consciousness is being transformed on the basis of these events, especially as people realise there will be no return to ‘normality’, as before. The mass movement in the USA is a case in point. Millions are going to be radicalised, and draw even revolutionary conclusions.

This crisis therefore poses vital questions before the labour and trade union movement. The ‘business as usual’ of the past is utterly out of date. We need to draw all the conclusions from this unprecedented situation.

The ruling class is preparing a massive offensive against the working class, with massive cuts, job losses and attacks on wages and conditions. This means all-out class war, posing a threat to all the gains of the past.

Capitalism’s catastrophe

The choice is clear: either we bow down and accept the capitalist system; or we must fight to overthrow it. There is no middle road. A return to the ‘good old days’ is ruled out. The trade unions and workers’ organisations must either become “labour lieutenants of capital”, or they must transform themselves into revolutionary organisations.

We must tell workers the truth: on a capitalist basis, there will be nothing short of a catastrophe for working people. It is essential that the movement adopts a revolutionary perspective, or it will be ground down.

Faced with this onslaught, we must resist every attack. In the face of mass redundancies, we must fight for work-sharing with no loss of pay. In the face of closures, there should be factory occupations, with a view to them being nationalised under workers’ control. We must oppose all wage cuts, and fight for a real living wage.

Faced with this unprecedented depression, the economy should be taken out of the hands of the capitalists and placed in the hands of the working class. In this way we can rationally plan the economy for our needs, and not the profits of the banks and monopolies.

Seize the moment

The ideas of Marxism have never been more relevant / Image: Socialist Appeal

The fight must also continue to clear out the careerists from the Labour Party and to fight for a bold socialist programme – not to patch up capitalism, but to overthrow it. This may seem unrealistic to many, but we live in unprecedented times. Things that appear unrealisable one day become realisable the next. Above all, we are in a period of sharp and sudden changes.

In 1992, Ted Grant, who helped found Socialist Appeal, explained that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major historical event. But he stated that it would be nothing compared to the collapse of capitalism. This prediction is being realised in front of our very eyes.

The call to rearm the labour movement must go hand-in-hand with the building of the forces of Marxism in Britain and internationally. As a guide to action, the ideas of Marxism have never been more relevant.

The world is on fire. We need to seize the moment and fight to change society.

Originally published at socialist.net

If Christopher Columbus Statue Is Offensive, Then Is Statue of Black Transgender Drag Queen Acceptable?

Christopher Columbus statue removed from city hall

[TO BE REPLACED WITH A STATUE OF THIS?]

Over 75,000 sign petition to have Marsha P. Johnson statue replace Columbus monument

Dead transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson, a.k.a., Malcolm Michaels Jr.

Daily Beast Quotes Dead Taliban Leader Niazi, To Validate Report of Russian Taliban Bounty

[MULLAH ABDUL MANAN NIAZI reported killed late 2018 by drone strike.]

Russian Bounties for Killing Americans Go Back Five Years, Ex-Taliban Claims

THE LONG WAR

Russia has been courting the Taliban at least since 2014 with money and weapons, ostensibly to fight ISIS, certainly to undermine the American effort in Afghanistan.

Sami Yousafzai

Adam Rawnsley

Christopher Dickey

Erin Banco

Wali Sabawoon/NurPhoto/Getty

Taliban veterans like to laugh about the first time, according to their lore, that the Russians dumped a lot of American dollars on them. During the Taliban campaign to take over all of Afghanistan in 1995, they actually had a few fighter planes, and they used one to force a Russian cargo plane—a huge Ilyushin Il-76TD flying for a company called Airstan—to land in Kandahar.

The Taliban held the Russian crew members prisoner for a year until, one day, they supposedly “escaped” and managed to take the plane with them. How many millions of dollars that took to arrange, the Taliban have never said, but after the long, bloody decade of the 1980s throwing off Soviet occupation, squeezing the Russians for money like that remains a source of amusement.

Mullah Manan Niazi [dead], who was the spokesman for Taliban leader Mullah Omar in those days, brought up the incident when The Daily Beast asked him about reports that the Russians have offered—and perhaps paid—bounties to Taliban who kill American soldiers.

“The Russians paying U.S. dollars—it’s not odd for the Taliban,” he said, his voice fraught with irony over the encrypted phone call as he recalled the Airstan incident. As for the current situation, “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.”

“The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.”

— Mullah Manan Niazi

In the world of intelligence gathering, such a statement from such a figure would be worth noting, and just the kind of thing that could lead to what the Trump White House has called “inconclusive” reporting the Russian offer of bounties to kill Americans.

Mullah Manan Niazi was a very senior figure in the Taliban when they were in power, and also when they were driven into exile and underground after 2001. But since the death of Mullah Omar was made public in 2015, he has been a dissident and liable to be killed by the current Taliban leadership if it catches up with him. They have accused him of collaborating with the CIA and the Afghan government’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), which he denies.

So, Niazi speaks as someone who knows the organization and its top people very well, but who also has an agenda very different from theirs, with his own reasons for confirming the bounty story, and he does not offer further specifics on that. But he does offer details about what he says are the longstanding ties between the Taliban and the Russians as well as the Iranians, and U.S. officials have been tracking those developments.

A U.S. intelligence report about Russian assistance to the Taliban has circulated on Capitol Hill and throughout the national security apparatus over the last several days. According to three individuals who have read or who are familiar with the report, the assessment is long and covers the span of several years, focusing generally on how Russia provides support, including financial assistance, to the Taliban. The report also touches on the Russian bounties first reported by The New York Times, though those who read the report say that data point is circumstantial and that the investigation is ongoing. Two individuals who spoke to The Daily Beast, though, said it is clear from the report that there’s an increased risk for U.S. troops in Afghanistan because of Russia’s behavior.

In important ways, this classified report mirrors an unclassified document produced last month by the Congressional Research Service which offered a crisp summation: “In the past two years, multiple U.S. commanders have warned of increased levels of assistance, and perhaps even material support for the Taliban from Russia and Iran, both of which cite IS [Islamic State, ISIS] presence in Afghanistan to justify their activities. Both nations were opposed to the Taliban government of the late 1990s, but reportedly see the Taliban as a useful point of leverage vis-a-vis the United States.”

“Two sources familiar with the intelligence report said it is clear that there’s an increased risk for U.S. troops in Afghanistan because of Russia’s behavior.”

“We introduced two Taliban to the Russians under cover as businessmen,” said Niazai looking back on operations when he was still part of the Taliban insurgent leadership. “They went to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. With Russian-supplied funds, we purchased oil, wheat and flour and imported it to Afghanistan and  then sold it there. That’s how we converted Russians funds to cash in Afghanistan.”

Both men, contacted by The Daily Beast, vehemently denied such activity. “I don’t want to comment—I don’t even want to talk about Niazi,” said one of them who, as a matter of fact, pays frequent visits to Moscow. “Niazi is our enemy and playing into the hands of the NDS.”

Other monies come through the hawala system, which originated in India and is used throughout South Asia and, now, in many other parts of the world. The U.S. treasury notes hawala is distinguished by “trust and the extensive use of connections such as family relationships or regional affiliations. Unlike traditional banking … hawala makes minimal (often no) use of any sort of negotiable instrument. Transfers of money take place based on communications between members of a network of hawaladars, or hawala dealers.”

A senior Afghan security officer told The Daily Beast that he is “not aware of any Russians smuggling money,” but noted that the international Financial Action Task Force combating support for terrorism recently put pressure on the Afghan government to take “practical” action against suspect hawala dealers, “so the Afghan security forces raided some of the money changers.”

Many sources, including Mullah Manan Niazi, note the Russian and Iranian role supporting the Taliban in the fight against the so-called Islamic State in Khorasan (a.k.a.  ISIS-K or ISIL-K).

Early on in the Trump administration, Gen. John Nicholson—then the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan—warned Congress that Russia “has become more assertive over the past year” in Afghanistan and was “overtly lending legitimacy to the Taliban to undermine NATO efforts and bolster belligerents using the false narrative that only the Taliban are fighting ISIL-K.”

Russia reportedly complemented its public rhetorical support for the Taliban with a covert supply program. The Washington Post reported that year that U.S. intelligence believed Russia had sent machine guns to the Taliban. An anonymous military source told the Post that the U.S. had found Russian-provided weapons areas where the group was waging war on coalition forces and ISIS’s Afghan affiliate had little presence.

“We’ve had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders [who] said, ‘this was given by the Russians to the Taliban,’” Nicholson said in a 2018 BBC interview. “We know that the Russians are involved.”

“We’ve had weapons brought to this headquarters by Afghan leaders [who] said, ‘this was given by the Russians to the Taliban.’ We know that the Russians are involved.”

— Gen. John Nicholson

Indeed. Various Taliban have told The Daily Beast they were quite proud of the guns they were given as gifts or rewards—whether for specific acts or simply to cement relationships—is unclear.

In 2018, Russia denied reports that it sent any arms but Russian special envoy Zamir Kabulov admitted that Moscow had established contacts with the Taliban because it was “seriously worried about possible terror threats for the Russian mission and Russian citizens in Afghanistan.”

But in September 2019, Russia elevated its talks with the insurgents to a formal visit by a Taliban delegation in September.

According to a well-placed Taliban source, after some of the group’s representatives made a trip to Moscow they were given 30 state-of-the-art guns, apparently large caliber sniper rifles powerful enough to shoot through walls. “I personally saw three of them in Helmand,” said the source. “They were still full of grease,” which is to say brand new out of the box.

As military scholar David Kilcullen points out in his recent book The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, the U.S. obsession with its “global war on terror” after 9/11 created an opportunity for Russia and other hostile powers. They were “exploiting our exclusive focus on terrorism, seeking to fill the geopolitical, economic, and security vacuum we had left as we became bogged down in the wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

In the present day, it serves Russia’s interests to keep the United States bogged down there, despite official Russian statements to the contrary.

What others call “hybrid warfare” Kilcullen defines somewhat differently as exploitation of situations in flux, which certainly is the case in Afghanistan with a U.S. president determined to declare he’s made a complete exit, even though there are only 8,600 U.S. troops left on the ground at the moment.

“Things that are in limbo, transitioning, or on the periphery, that have ambiguous political, legal, and psychological status—or whose very existence is debated—are liminal,” write Kilcullen. “Liminal warfare exploits this character of ambiguity, operating in the blur, or as some Western military organizations put it, the ‘gray zone.’”

That, precisely, is where the Russians have learned to thrive.

—with additional reporting by Sam Brodey

 

Sami Yousafzai

@Samiyousafzai

 

Adam Rawnsley

adam.rawnsley@thedailybeast.com

 

Christopher Dickey

World News Editor

@csdickeychristopher.dickey@thedailybeast.com

 

Erin Banco

National Security Reporter

Erin.Banco@thedailybeast.com

The Chemical Warmongers Desperation…So Much Excess Product…So Little War

CAPTAGON—Saudi Mind Control Drug of Choice

The Kingdom of Captagon

Dubai Axis of Captagon Mind-Control Drug Network

Italian police seize 14 tonnes of amphetamines allegedly produced by Islamic State

Italian police say the 14 tonnes of the drug labelled “captagon” is the biggest amphetamines haul of all time.(AP)

Italian police are claiming to have made the biggest amphetamines bust of all time after seizing 14 tonnes of drugs allegedly produced in Syria by the Islamic State (IS) group.

• The pills were labelled “Captagon” which is a fenethylline-based drug
• Police say the Camorra crime groups may have been involved
• They say crime organisations may be turning to Syria for drugs after the pandemic hampered production in Europe

Investigators on Wednesday said they impounded three container ships that had docked in the southern Italian port of Salerno and found 84 million pills inside machinery and large paper cylinders.

Customs Police Colonel Domenico Napolitano called the discovery the biggest amphetamine seizure ever made.

Colonel Napolitano said on Italian state radio that investigators believed the drug’s production provided IS with vital revenue for its militant activities.

Investigators hypothesise that amphetamine production in Europe has been hampered by the pandemic lockdown, and so drug traffickers may have turned to Syria-based producers to fill the market.

Italian police released video of heavy machinery being used to pour the drugs from their containers into buckets.(AP) 

“It is possible that the local Camorra crime groups are involved in this business,” Lieutenant Colonel Giordano Natale told Reuters.

The amphetamines were labelled “captagon”, the street name for a drug whose chemical base was originally fenethylline.

However, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drugs Report 2020 what drug organisations call “captagon” these days is usually a mixture of amphetamine, caffeine and other substances.

It’s unclear whether the drugs seized in Italy were fenethylline-based or a substitute.

The ‘drug of the Jihad’

The drugs are believed to have been produced by the Islamic State in Syria.(Reuters) 

Used in the 1960s to treat narcolepsy and depression, Captagon is one of several brand names for fenethylline hydrochloride, a drug compound belonging to a family of amphetamines that can inhibit fear and ward off tiredness.

The imitation captagon is popular in the Middle East, and widespread in war-torn areas such as Syria, where conflict has fuelled demand and created opportunities for producers.

Production was initially concentrated in Lebanon and IS sells it to finance its activities, police said in a statement.

It said captagon was known as the “drug of the Jihad” after being found in militant hideouts, including one used by the Islamists who killed 90 people at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015.

Police say they’re investigating if Naples-based Camorra organised crime clans might have ordered the huge shipment for international sale.

Two weeks earlier, a much smaller shipment of the drug was also seized in Salerno’s port in a shipment of clothing.

The drugs were labelled Captagon, which has been used in the past to treat narcolepsy and depression.(AP) 

Salerno is about 50 kilometres south of Naples in the Campania region, the historic base of the Camorra, where drug trafficking is one of the syndicate’s revenue-makers.

The 14 tonnes of amphetamines would have raked in about 1 billion euros ($1.62 billion) in street sales had they ultimately made it to consumers, customs police said.

Police used electric saws to cut through two-metre high cylinders, made thick enough to try to elude customs’ scanning devices, to remove the pills in the hollow centres.

Video of the bust shows heavy machinery being used to lift the cylinders and pour the pills into huge baskets.

In 2019, Greek authorities claimed to have made the biggest amphetamines bust of all time after seizing 5.25 tonnes of captagon, also produced in Syria.

ABC/wires

Trump Running July 4th Political Rally At Mt. Rushmore

Fireworks: Tensions run high as Trump plans Mount Rushmore visit

  Pierre, SD

As liberal activists vandalize historical monuments across America, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier said he will tear down Mount Rushmore “free of charge.” Photo provided by nativebusinessmag.com

President Donald Trump rallies with supporters during a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this year. Trump is scheduled to attend a fireworks display at Mount Rushmore on Friday.  Photo by Casey Junkins, courtesy of The Telegraph

Gov. Kristi Noem addresses the media from the Governor’s Large Meeting Room in the State Capitol, May 19 in Pierre. Noem said those attending the Mount Rushmore fireworks celebration with President Donald Trump this weekend “won’t be social distancing.”  Joseph Barkoff/ Capital Journal

Despite COVID-19 concerns, Gov. Kristi Noem said the thousands anticipated for the Friday Independence Day fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore, including President Donald Trump, will not practice social distancing.

“We’ve told those folks that have concerns that they can stay home. But, those who want to come and join us, we’ll be giving out free facemasks if they choose to wear one. But, we won’t be practicing social distancing,” Noem told Fox News host Laura Ingraham late Monday.

Meanwhile, as social unrest and racial tension continue throughout America as they have in the month since George Floyd died while in the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, the eyes of the nation will soon be on South Dakota’s famous monument. Not only are protesters expected to show up for the Trump event, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier is offering to tear down the monument.

“Nothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise or a treaty (than) the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States calls Mount Rushmore. We are now being forced to witness the lashing of our land with pomp, arrogance, and fire, hoping our sacred lands will survive,” Frazier wrote in a prepared statement released late Monday.

“This brand on our flesh needs to be removed and I am willing to do it free of charge to the United States, by myself, if I must,” Frazier added.

Throughout the country, liberal activists are working to remove symbols of American history. There is video of them attacking the statue of President Andrew Jackson in Washington, D.C.

“The United States of America wishes for all of us to be citizens and a family of their republic, yet, when they get bored of looking at those faces, we are left looking at our molesters,” Frazier added of the four presidents whose faces are famously carved into the mountainside:

• President George Washington (1789-1797)
• President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)
• President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt (1901-1909)
• President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865)

This is a profoundly different view of Mount Rushmore than the one endorsed last week by U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D.

“These presidents championed the cause of freedom,” Johnson said while introducing the Mount Rushmore Protection Act. “Those seeking to remove these iconic faces are undermining the contributions these leaders made in pursuit of a more perfect union. Removal would do nothing to move our country forward.”

“George Washington was a unifier. He brought this country together to lead us at a time when we needed the birth of the nation to get started. We have Thomas Jefferson who was an author of the Declaration of Independence,” Noem added last week of those represented at Mount Rushmore during one of her frequent Fox News appearances.

Frazier said although he would strip the faces from Mount Rushmore by himself, he does not believe he would be alone.

“Lakota see the faces of men who lied, cheated and murdered innocent people whose only crime was living on the land they wanted to steal,” Frazier added. “When I can remove those faces from our land, I believe I would not be alone.”

All the while, Trump is making moves to attend the Mount Rushmore fireworks on Friday. According to the National Park Service, the event is slated to start at 4 p.m. Friday, with the fireworks set for approximately 9:15 p.m.

The entire event will be livestreamed at: www.TravelSouthDakota.com/RushmoreFireworks.

“We’re asking them to come, be ready to celebrate, to enjoy the freedoms and the liberties that we have in this country, and to talk about our history and what it brought us today — with an opportunity to raise our kids in the greatest country in the world,” Noem added of the Mount Rushmore event during her Monday discussion with Ingraham.

National polls show Trump trailing Democrat Joe Biden by wide margins heading into the November Electoral College. However, on the last day of June, the president showed no signs of stepping aside early.

“This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country! #MAGA2020,” Trump tweeted late Tuesday.

“This brand on our flesh needs to be removed and I am willing to do it free of charge to the United States, by myself, if I must.”

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier on Mount Rushmore

“This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country! #MAGA2020.”

President Donald Trump, via Twitter, on Tuesday