Fellow Americans, Wake Up & Escape The Matrix

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Where Do Matters Stand?

On the eve of World War II the United States was still mired in the Great Depression and found itself facing war on two fronts with Japan and Germany. However bleak the outlook, it was nothing compared to the outlook today.

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Has anyone in Washington, the presstitute Western media, the EU, or NATO ever considered the consequences of constant military and propaganda provocations against Russia? Is there anyone in any responsible position anywhere in the Western world who has enough sense to ask: “What if the Russians believe us? What if we convince Russia that we are going to attack her?”

The same can be asked about China.

The recklessness of the White House Fool and the media whores has gone far beyond mere danger. What do the Russians think when they see that the Democratic Party intends to elect Hillary Clinton president of the US? Hillary is a person so crazed that she declared the president of Russia to be “the new Hitler” and organized through her underling, neocon monster Victoria Nuland, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine. Nuland installed Washington’s puppet government in a former Russian province that until about 20 years ago was part of Russia for centuries.

I would bet that this tells even the naive pro-western part of the Russian government and population that the United States intends war with Russia.

Ever since Russia stood up to Obama over Syria, the Russians have been experiencing hostile propaganda and military operations on their borders. These provocations are justified by Washington and its NATO vassals as a response to “Russian aggression.” Russian aggression consists of nothing but obviously false assertions that Russia is about to invade the Baltics, Poland, and Romania and recreate the Soviet Empire, the Eastern European part of which, together with the former Russian provinces of Georgia and Ukraine, now belong to the American Empire.

The Russians know that the propaganda about “Russian aggression” is a lie. What is the purpose of the lie other than to prepare the Western peoples for war with Russia?

There is no other explanation.

Even morons such as Obama, Merkel, Hollande, and Cameron should be capable of understanding that it is extremely dangerous to convince a major military power that you are going to attack. To simultaneously also convince China doubles the danger.

Clearly, the West is incapable of producing leadership capable of preserving life on earth.

What can be done when the entire West demonstrates a death wish for Planet Earth?

Until the criminal regimes of Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama, American presidents from John F. Kennedy forward worked to reduce tensions with the Soviets. Kennedy worked with Khrushchev to reduce tensions caused by US missiles in Turkey and Soviet missiles in Cuba. President Nixon negotiated SALT I (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. President Carter negotiated SALT II, which was never ratified by the US Senate but was observed by the executive branch. President Reagan negotiated with Soviet leader Gorbachev the end of the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush in exchange for Gorbachev’s agreement to the reunification of Germany promised that NATO would not move one inch to the East.

All of these achievements were thrown away by the neoconized Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes, each a criminal regime on par with Nazi Germany.

Today life on Planet Earth is far less secure than during the darkest days of the Cold War. Whatever threat global warming poses, it is miniscule compared to the threat of nuclear winter. If the evil that is concentrated in Washington and its vassals perpetrates nuclear war, cockroaches will inherit the earth.

I have been warning about the growing danger of a nuclear war resulting from the arrogance, hubris, ignorance, and evil personified by Washington. Recently, four knowledgable Russian-Americans spelled out the likely consequences of trying to drive Russia to submission with war threats: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/06/03/41522/

See also: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/05/28/as-our-past-wars-are-glorified-this-memorial-day-weekend-give-some-thought-to-our-prospects-against-the-russians-and-chinese-in-world-war-iii/

Don’t expect the brainwashed American population to have the moral conscience and fortitude to prevent nuclear war or even the intelligence to prevent their own vaporization. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino report that 59% of the US population support attacking Iran with nuclear weapons in the event that Iran sank one US Navy ship: http://www.wsj.com/articles/would-the-u-s-drop-the-bomb-again-1463682867

Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to approve attacking Iran with nuclear weapons with 81% of Republicans approving nuclear war compared to 47% of Democrats. Yet, the Democrats are behind Hillary who would be the first to use nuclear weapons. After all, a feminized woman has to prove how tough she is, just as Margaret Thatcher was “the Iron Lady.”

Before it is too late for Americans and all of humanity, arrogant Americans need to recall that “those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

The economic picture is equally dismal and unpromising. The latest payroll jobs report was even more awful than reported. Hardly any new jobs were created, but what largely escaped reporting is the fact that the economy actually lost 59,000 full-time jobs.

Increasingly the US economy consists of part-time jobs that cannot support an independent existence. Thus, more Americans age 19-34 live at home with parents than independently with spouses or partners. Fully half of 25-year old Americans live in their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes.

This is the “New Economy” that the filthy lying neoliberal economists promised would be reward for the American work force giving up their manufacturing and professional skill jobs to foreigners. What a monstrous lie the neoliberal economists told so that corporate executives and shareholders could put into their own pockets the living wage of the American work force. These neoliberal economists, and, alas, libertarian “free market” ones, have not been held accountable for their impoverishment of the American work force deeply buried in debt with no future prospects.

Those few Americans who have any awareness are beginning to realize that the One Percent and the western governments that serve them are re-establishing feudalism. The brilliant and learned economist, Michael Hudson, has labeled our era the era of neo-feudalism.

He is correct. The majority of young Americans come out of university heavily indebted, primed for debtor prison. When half of 25-year olds cannot marry and form households, how can anyone believe that housing sales and prices are rising except as a result of speculative investors banking on rental income from a population that cannot even pay its student loans.

The United States is the sickest place on earth. There is no public or political discussion of any important issue or of the multiple crises that confront America or the crises that America brings to the world.

The American people are so stupid and unaware that they are capable of electing a criminal and a warmonger like Hillary president of the United States and be proud of it.

These “tough” Americans are so frightened of hoax dangers, such as “Muslim terrorists” and “Russian aggression” that they willingly sacrificed their depleted pocketbooks, the Constitution of the United States—an act of treason on the part of the American people who utterly failed their responsibility to protect the Constitution—and their own liberty to a universal police state that has all power over them.

It is extraordinary that once-proud, once-great European peoples look for leadership from a country of moronic non-entities who have pissed away the liberty, security, and prosperity that their Founding Fathers gave to them.

Fellow Americans, if you care to avoid vaporization and, assuming we do avoid it, live a life other than serfdom, you must wake up and realize that your most deadly enemy is Washington, not the hoax of “Russian aggression,” not the hoax of “Muslim terrorism,” not the hoax of “domestic extremism,” not the hoax of welfare bankrupting America, not the hoax of democracy voting away your wealth, which Wall Street and the corporations have already stolen and stuck in their pockets.

If you cannot wake up and escape The Matrix, your doom will bring the doom of the planet.

Saturday Matinee: Megaplex

Megaplex-Spectacle

Source: Smash TV

Megaplex is the most insane double feature the world has ever seen. With a running time of 80 minutes and thousands of cuts from more than 80 movies, Smash TV has spent the past year and a half cramming the most entertainment possible into every second. It’s dense enough to pressurize these diamonds in the rough into gleaming treasures.

Megaplex is the long awaited followup to the critically acclaimed Skinemax, much more fully realized, utilizing myriad editing and layering tricks picked up over the past five years. Deeper, darker, and definitely more bizarre.

Borrowing from the Grindhouse tradition and from Tarantino’s more recent tribute, Megaplex is a double feature that both members of Smash TV worked on independently.

As a palette cleanser in between, Smash TV is proud to present Coming Attractions, a 15 minute collection of vignettes editing together previously unexplored genres and styles.

Please support the original works, these are film makers and musicians that have upheld the values of originality and creativity.

This video is protected under fair use copyright law. It is presented for the purposes of entertainment, education, and criticism/commentary only. No infringement is intended.

TURBO

STARRING MICHAEL JACKSON

Edited by Ben Craw

Rated R

Turbo, Side A of Smash TV’s Megaplex, is the coolest thing you’ve ever seen if you were a late-night-movie-brainwashed 8 year old in 1990. It is the ultimate in-your-face, balls to the wall, no holds barred, over the top, end of the world electric boogaloo dance party, fueled by neon, spandex, ooze, and steroids. So many steroids.

It’s the movie you and your best friends stumble across at the end of the night after frying your brain with nine straight hours of Sonic 2, Streets of Rage 2, and ToeJam & Earl on your Sega Genesis. Or is the whole thing just a Pepsi-induced sugar coma fever dream? It’s impossible to say. But you probably shouldn’t have drunk that fifth two-liter bottle.

Turbo is utterly shameless in its love for the most ridiculous and awesome movies that the 1980s and early 90s had to offer. It’s what would happen if Cannon Films and New Line Cinema got a little crazy at the club and ended up boning in the bathroom. It’s the nights from your childhood that you’ll never forget. Those nights are gone. But Turbo lives on in your dreams forever…and Beyond…

Tracklist
Download Mix: bit.ly/1TSe1sQ

HBO 1983 Intro
Mr. Oizo – Hun
Actress – Image
Stephen Farris – Pepper
Jean Michel Jarre – Zoolookologie
VHS Head – Camera Eyes
Phono Ghosts – Suntan Spies
Harold Faltermeyer – Fletch Theme
Oliver – Light Years Away
Tiger & Woods – Gin Nation
Solar Bears – A Sky Darkly

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Edited by Brendan Shields

Coming Attractions is a collection of vignettes exploring different genres and themes. Comprised of fake trailers, genre retrospectives, and tributes to luminary actors and directors, it acts as a palette cleanser in between the two halves and provides an opportunity to experiment on a smaller scale.

Tracklist:

Intermission
Music: Midnight Television – Commercial Dreams

American Hunk
Music: Sparkles_161244545 – IDEALISMム

Atari Summer
Music: Suzanne Ciani – Atari Summer

Safari Ice
Music: Miki Matsubara – Safari Eyes

Miyazaki
Music: Suzanne Ciani – The First Wave: Birth Of Venus

Sunday Will Never Be The Same
Music: Spanky And Our Gang – Sunday Will Never Be The Same

Odyssey
Music: Autechre – d-sho qub

Inside Story
Music: Suzanne Ciani – Inside Story

BEYOND

STARRING SKELETOR

Edited by Brendan Shields

Rated R

Beyond, Side B of Megaplex, is a psychedelic vision quest for B-movie lovers. Comprised of some of the strangest imagery from the 80s and early 90s, Beyond is a hallucinatory experience designed to amaze, bewilder, and terrify.

Highlighting choice cuts from a strange time in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, Beyond harkens back to late nights of channel surfing, catching out of context glimpses of the bizarre and fascinating. Something unlike anything you’d ever seen before…something you weren’t supposed to see…

Combining the darkest moments of Skinemax with the layering experiments of Memorex, Beyond is a descent into euphoric madness as reality begins to unravel.

It’s the unmarked tape lying in wait at an abandoned Blockbuster, anticipating its next victim.

An Ayahuasca trip at 24 frames per second.

Fantasia meets Videodrome.

Beyond the limits of good taste

Beyond the subconscious

Beyond the stars

Beyond…

Tracklist
Download Mix: bit.ly/1X7AOGU

Franco Micalizzi – Stridulum Theme
VHS Head – Farewell Africa
Gatekeeper – Serpent
VHS Head – Angels Never Sleep
Madlib – Gentle Pilz
ADR – Sidewinder
Public Image Ltd. – The Order Of Death
Fluorescent Grey – Gnoble Door Moo Rig Rig
VHS Head – Frozen
Trust – Bulbform
iamamiwhoami – Goods

https://vimeo.com/167795970

Obama’s Rape of Libya Part II

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: SteveLendmanBlog

In 2011, he and then secretary of state Hillary Clinton bore full responsibility for the rape and destruction of Libya, transforming Africa’s most developed country into a cauldron of endless violence, instability, turmoil and unspeakable human suffering – the aftermath of all US imperial wars.

They flagrantly violated international, constitutional and US statute laws – attacking another country threatening no others, killing tens of thousands of noncombatant men, women, children, the elderly and infirm.

They were warned in advance of chaotic conditions following an attack but went ahead anyway. They knew extremist groups would flourish in its aftermath – ISIS, Al Qaeda and others Washington supports.

Libya today has no central authority. Based in Tripoli, US-installed puppet rule (the so-called Government of National Accord – GNA) controls one small part of the country – a rival Benghazi government, disparate groups and tribes most of it.

Endless violence, disorder, human deprivation and misery reflect daily life – the legacy of America’s “humanitarian intervention” and “responsibility to protect” – code language for naked aggression, war OF terror on humanity, the horror no one can imagine without experiencing it firsthand.

Last year, war correspondent Jon Lee Anderson said “(t)here is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya.” Various elements compete for control. “Armed militias roam the streets…(N)early a third of the country’s population has fled across the border to Tunisia.” Others head for Europe – treated with disdain and internment under concentration camp conditions on arrival.

No country may attack another except in self-defense and only if authorized by Security Council members. In 2007, candidate Obama, a one-time University of Chicago Law School senior lecturer, said the following:

“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

He’s terror-bombed seven countries and used terrorist foot soldiers to do his dirty work since taking office. He repeatedly lied to the public about his actions.

Time and again he’s proved lawless, ruthless and never to be trusted. Raping Libya a second time has nothing to do with protecting America’s “national security interests” or restoring stability to a war-torn country – everything to do with US imperial viciousness.

Obama saying the United States, Europe and other countries “have a great interest in seeing stability in Libya because the absence of stability has helped to fuel some of the challenges that we’ve seen in terms of the migration (sic) crisis in Europe and some of the humanitarian tragedies that we’ve seen in the open seas between Libya and Europe” ignored America’s responsibility for transforming a stable nation under responsible leadership into dystopian hellishness.

He massacred Libyans mercilessly while claiming he “did the right thing (by) preventing what could have been…a bloodbath in Libya…”

On Tuesday, he lied calling indefinite aggression a “30-day mission” – on the phony pretext of combating the scourge of ISIS Washington created and supports.

He’s raped Libya since 2011, new terror-bombing continuing where earlier assaults left off, virtually certain to go on indefinitely, perhaps with varying degrees of intensity, supplemented with US and other NATO special forces on the ground operating covertly.

His tenure ends in January. If Hillary succeeds him, perhaps she’ll turn the entire region and beyond ablaze.

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Related Article: Libya: The US is now bombing a state it has already destroyed

2016 election decides who controls the drug trade

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By Daniel Hopsicker

(Mad Cow Morning News)

In the Presidential Election of 2016, Republican and Democratic insiders are wrestling like two dogs over a bone over who controls the illegal drug trade.

To the victor go the spoils. Who wins the election wins control of America’s vast drug bazaar, largest in the world, whose proceeds prop up lucky bankers and politicians lapping at the trough of  the biggest richest slush fund in the history of the world.

It’s the smart play

It’s the biggest business in the world, and the No. 1 industry on the face of the planet, in terms of foreign trade. And if you didn’t know that about the illegal drug trade, then the vast amounts spent on propaganda and disinformation every year in the so-called “War on Drugs” is working.

The first industry to globalize vertically was the illegal drug business. It’s an open question whether drug trafficking drove globalization, or the other way around.

Negotiated by Bill Clinton, the chief beneficiary of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)—by dollar volume and impact on the economy—was the drug trade.

The Democrats, committed to globalization, will continue to farm out transportation and money laundering to, among others,  minions of Mexico’s President Enrique Nieto Pena, cronies of retired Colombian strongman Alvaro Uribe, and a host of eager bankers from the world’s largest banks.

Will a Republican victory will bring back Oliver North? No, it’ll be a Trump Administration appointee with a certain erect posture and short-but-stylishly-cut hair,  chosen to occupy the Oliver North seat on the National Security Council.

The Enterprise Lives. And prospers.

Why there’s no Global War on Johnnie Walker Red

Although America’s sun is slowly sinking  below the horizon, the country still boasts the biggest and the best illegal drug delivery pipeline on the planet, so efficient it’s sick, the and envy of the world. The UK and Europe may be nipping at our heels, growing bigger vis a vis the U.S. as drug consumers, but the U.S. remains the biggest market.

This market is what we sell to the world; one of a few businesses where we’re still No. 1, along with financial services, which basically means meaning laundering drug money, and movies based on comic books.

Here’s a statistic from the UN’s World Drug Report for 2016:

207,000 drug-related deaths globally.

Compare that with this fact from the UN’s World Health Organization:

“In 2012, 3.3 million deaths, or 5.9 percent of all global deaths, were due to alcohol consumption.”

If the U.S. cares about the health of its citizens we’ll soon have a Liquor Enforcement Administration(an LEA), with approximately sixteen times the funding that the War on Drugs receives every year, which is 40 billion dollars.

That’s within reach of the Pentagon budget; its safe to say it ain’t gonna happen.

It doesn’t happen, becauses of the banks, and also because, as the UN World Drug Report also states, and flatly, worldwide people spend more money on drugs every day than on food.

Yup. You can look it up.

An even bigger reason: Global Too Big to Jail Banks.

London’s Financial Times has warning for global elite

Even when you think you’re talking about something else, you’re talking about drugs, even if you don’t know it. London’s Financial Times briefly surfaced from the 19th Century with a headline reading “Global elites must heed the warning of populist rage’

“The explanation for the prolonged stagnation in real incomes are repeated financial crises and subsequent weak recoveries, which have destroyed popular confidence in the competence and moral principles, honesty, and decency of the elite.”

The greedy parasitic elite that betrayed the middle class, and the country.

The Times continues, “The role of finance is excessive. The financial system remains riddled with perverse incentives.”

Without drug money there is no financialization. Because the banks by themselves don’t have the capital. Some say that sounds like a good thing.

“Air America meets  Traffic meets Pineapple Express”

A steady diet of movies like the upcoming ‘Mena’ starring Tom Cruise playing the supposedly-swashbuckling former Air America  pilot Barry Seal, has given the movie-going public the idea that the real action in the illegal drug trade is in drug trafficking.

That’s not the case. The real action is in money laundering. Because if you can’t wash clean the money you end up with, it quickly becomes useless to anyone with more long-term goals than throwing the biggest party or longest orgy the world has ever seen. And because money weighs more than drugs—and is way more bulky unless you’re smuggling marijuana which is today considered more out of the stone age than old school.

So there’s a problem. Providing a solution are casinos, bodegas, cambios, Western Union, grocery stores, restaurants, even dry cleaners, and banks. Especially banks. In fact it they weren’t for laundering drug money, HSBC, JP Morgan, Barclays and Bank of America would have already gone the way of Mario Brothers or YAHOO, which only makes news anymore when pieces are sold off in foreclosure.

Three brief moments  in time in the drug trade

A Turkish boat carrying a massive 3.2 tonnes of high purity cocaine hidden in a ballast tank at the front of the MV Hamal was busted 100 miles east of the Aberdeenshire coast.

It was a record $673 million (£512 million) cocaine haul.The captain and second in command—Mumin Sahin and Emin Ozmen—were convicted, and sent to prison.

The Captain and the second in command” are the drug trade’s equivalent of David Letterman Show favorites Mujibur and Sirajul, who ran a t-shirt shop in a tiny frontage near the Ed Sullivan Theater. They were ordinary people who Letterman found exceptional just because there were so ordinary.

Is there a shortage of people ready to take a chance smuggling a half-billion cargo?  Is that the plan?

“Operation SCREENPLAY” gets a tentative green light

OPERATION Screenplay will go down as one of the all-time great UK drug busts,” enthused John McGowan, head of border investigations.

“To put it in perspective, the total seizure of cocaine by all police forces in England and Wales in 2014-15 was 3.4 tons. That was for everything.  This single seizure was 3.2 tons.”

In a blatant pitch for more government funding—so that he could presumably really go to town, he added, “And all we had was intelligence from the French that there was a considerable quantity of cocaine on board.”

The paper seemed not so sure. The report ended, “Despite the size of the seizure, anecdotal evidence suggests police did not record a dip in the amount of cocaine on our streets.”

Playing whack-a–mole around the world

An expert who testified at their trial about “recognised trade routes” for shipping cocaine was perhaps a little too candid. He told the jury:

“It is now south of Venezuela and Guyana because of a lot of enforcement activity by the USA patrolling the coast. It’s massive importation – unprecedented in my experience.”

Those sneaky traffickers. Always playing whack-a-mole.

Cocaine production in Colombia increased dramatically—shooting up a staggering 46 percent—last year.  The country now has the resources to produce 712 tons of cocaine annually. Growth exploded in lawless areas in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the north and in the Amazon region, on the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean borders and along the Pacific coast.

But cultivation dropped in central Colombia, where the people running  both Colombia’s government and drug trade of Colombia.

Huh. Imagine that.

The Mexican Navy left with many barrels of zesty condiments

The Mexican navy found 13 tons of cocaine inside barrels of hot sauce in Manzanillo, 500 miles west of Mexico City. The barrels full of zesty condiment and cocaine were believed to belong to the Sinaloa Cartel.

A week earlier, busy Mexican sailors discovered almost a ton of cocaine—more than 900 keys—floating in the open sea off the coast of Chiapas.

A ton of cocaine. Just… floating…100 miles from shore.

The world’s richest industries

How much money an industry makes is the best rule of thumb for how much clout that industry exerts on the countries in which it operates. The illegal drug trade has yearly revenues exceeding the 946 billion in annual revenue of Walmart, Microsoft, Google, Ebay, and British Petroleum, combined.

In the U.S., and almost everywhere else, it’s a cash cow of almost unimaginable proportions.

The richest industries are all based on at assets we use in our lives every day, from computers to entertainment, to oil, to shopping, to drugs. According to therichest.com, “They are industries we give our hard-earned money to out of necessity, desire, or a mix of the two. And they also tend to be the most valuable, and not just from a monetary standpoint.  Their value lies in the fact that they’re needed to help society advance and function smoothly.”

Imagine several hundred million people trying to get through Monday morning with coffee. Luckily, that won’t ever happen.

 

About Daniel Hopsicker

Daniel Hopsicker is an investigative journalist dubious about the self-serving assertion of U.S. officials that there are no American Drug Lords.

Yes, Hillary Clinton Served on the Board of a Company Who Funds ISIS

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By Alice Salles

Source: theAntiMedia.org

As the race for the White House heats up, WikiLeaks continues to unveil sensitive information showing ties between the Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, foreign governments, and corrupt companies.

In a recent tweet, WikiLeaks reported its unveiling of Clinton’s dubious ties to Lafarge, an American company owned by a French conglomerate that, between 2011 and 2013, paid taxes to the Islamic State (ISIS) in order to protect its cement factory 95 miles northeast of Aleppo, Syria. The arrangements were discovered by the French daily, Le Monde. The story became relevant once again after the Office of the Mayor of Paris recently struck a corporate partnership naming Lafarge as its main supplier.

Lafarge bought the cement plant in Syria in 2007, but in 2011, civil war broke out, forcing Lafarge to make the choice of paying the terrorist organization to continue production. The taxes were allegedly paid to ISIS middlemen and other rebel groups in Syria.

Another investigation carried out by Zaman al-Wasl, an independent news organization based in Syria, adds that Lafarge may have also bought oil from ISIS regularly.

On July 13, 2014, Zaman al-Wasl reported, Mamdooh al-Khalid, who served as the manager and sales manager of Lafarge Syria, “wrote to Bruno Pescheux, General Manager of Lafarge warning him about buying [f]uel from non-governmental company in areas out of the regime’s control.” If Bashar al-Assad’s regime discovered the deal, al-Khalid allegedly warned, the regime would not be pleased.

In a reply to al-Khalid, Pescheux “advised him to mention that Lafarge had done its best to get fuel from the government, and wondered about the previous requests for fuel from Homs refinery” before illegally buying fuel from ISIS in case the regime were to find out about the dealings.

According to The Canary, “Al-Wasl reported that the CEO of Lafarge Cement Syria, Frederic Jolibois, had personally instructed his firm to make payments to Isis.”

But the fact a private Western company has allegedly had dealings with ISIS is not the only worrying factor in this story.

According to an article from 2007 published by the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton was the Clinton family’s breadwinner in the early 1990s, when she was “earning more than $100,000 a year from her law firm salary and corporate board fees.” At the time, she served on Lafarge’s board, making about $31,000 a year from the company.

The report added that “[s]hortly before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for pollution violations at its Alabama plant.” As soon as Clinton was elected, however, the administration “reduced that fine to less than $600,000.” Hillary left the board in 1992 after her husband won the Democratic nomination.

According to an investigative report published in the 1980s by the American Spectator and used as a source by The Canary, Hillary Clinton was already involved with the firm when Lafarge helped to facilitate the CIA’s support for Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program. At the time, Clinton “did legal work for Lafarge … [providing] key services for the covert arms export network that supplied Saddam Hussein.” The Canary added that the investigative report unveiled how “the Justice Department was told to bury the investigation” to “prevent exposure of that secret supply line, and collateral damage to Hillary Clinton.”

During the 2013 annual meeting of the Clinton Foundation, Lafarge’s Executive Vice President for Operations, Eric Olson, was a “featured attendee.” In both 2015 and 2016, Lafarge was listed as a donor to the Clinton Foundation.

As Paris accepts a bid from Lafarge to provide sand for this summer’s Paris-Plages event, an international corporate watchdog known as SumOfUs is now urging Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to “immediately cut Paris’ partnership” with the company.

In a petition with nearly 40,000 SumOfUs member signatures, the group claims the partnership with Paris is “scandalous.” According to the SumOfUs campaign manager, Eoin Dubsky, this deal “should have never happened.”

By partnering with Lafarge for this summer’s Paris-Plages event, the City of Paris is whitewashing the company’s obscene show of corporate greed that profits off the war and violence created by terrorists,” the SumofUs announcement reads.

 

Related Article: WikiLeaks Exposes Hillary’s Stunning Connection to ISIS — Mainstream Media Blackout Ensues

‘Stop Drinking the Kool-Aid, America: Political Fiction in an Age of Televised Lies’

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: A Government of Wolves

“We’ve got to face it. Politics have entered a new stage, the television stage. Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans—‘Time for a change’—‘The mess in Washington’—‘More bang for a buck’—punch lines and glamour.”— A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Politics is entertainment.

It is a heavily scripted, tightly choreographed, star-studded, ratings-driven, mass-marketed, costly exercise in how to sell a product—in this case, a presidential candidate—to dazzled consumers who will choose image over substance almost every time.

This year’s presidential election, much like every other election in recent years, is what historian Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “pseudo-event”: manufactured, contrived, confected and devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised. It is the end result of a culture that is moving away from substance toward sensationalism in an era of mass media.

As author Noam Chomsky rightly observed, “It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.” In other words, we’re being sold a carefully crafted product by a monied elite who are masters in the art of making the public believe that they need exactly what is being sold to them, whether it’s the latest high-tech gadget, the hottest toy, or the most charismatic politician.

Tune into a political convention and you will find yourself being sucked into an alternate reality so glossy, star-studded, emotionally charged and entertaining as to make you forget that you live in a police state. The elaborate stage show, the costumes, the actors, the screenplay, the lighting, the music, the drama: all carefully calibrated to appeal to the public’s need for bread and circuses, diversion and entertainment, and pomp and circumstance.

Politics is a reality show, America’s favorite form of entertainment, dominated by money and profit, imagery and spin, hype and personality and guaranteed to ensure that nothing in the way of real truth reaches the populace.

After all, who cares about police shootings, drone killings, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture schemes, private prisons, school-to-prison pipelines, overcriminalization, censorship or any of the other evils that plague our nation when you can listen to the croonings of Paul Simon, laugh along with Sarah Silverman, and get misty-eyed over the First Lady’s vision of progress in America.

But make no mistake: Americans only think they’re choosing the next president.

In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another Blue Pill, a manufactured reality conjured up by the matrix in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

Stop drinking the Kool-Aid, America.

The nation is drowning in debt, crippled by a slowing economy, overrun by militarized police, swarming with surveillance, besieged by endless wars and a military industrial complex intent on starting new ones, and riddled with corrupt politicians at every level of government. All the while, we’re arguing over which corporate puppet will be given the honor of stealing our money, invading our privacy, abusing our trust, undermining our freedoms, and shackling us with debt and misery for years to come.

Nothing taking place on Election Day will alleviate the suffering of the American people.

The government as we have come to know it—corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups—will remain unchanged. And “we the people”—overtaxed, overpoliced, overburdened by big government, underrepresented by those who should speak for us and blissfully ignorant of the prison walls closing in on us—will continue to trudge along a path of misery.

With roughly 22 lobbyists per Congressman, corporate greed will continue to call the shots in the nation’s capital, while our elected representatives will grow richer and the people poorer. And elections will continue to be driven by war chests and corporate benefactors rather than such values as honesty, integrity and public service. Just consider: it’s estimated that more than $5 billion will be spent on the elections this year, yet not a dime of that money will actually help the average American in their day-to-day struggles to just get by.

And the military industrial complex will continue to bleed us dry. Since 2001 Americans have spent $10.5 million every hour for numerous foreign military occupations, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s also the $2.2 million spent every hour on maintaining the United States’ nuclear stockpile, and the $35,000 spent every hour to produce and maintain our collection of Tomahawk missiles. And then there’s the money the government exports to other countries to support their arsenals, at the cost of $1.61 million every hour for the American taxpayers.

Then again, when faced with the grim, seemingly hopeless reality of the American police state, it’s understandable why Americans might opt for escapism. “Humankind cannot bear too much reality,” T. S. Eliot once said. Perhaps that is one reason we are so drawn to the unreality of the American political experience: it is spectacle and fiction and farce all rolled up into one glossy dose of escapism.

Frankly, escapism or not, Americans should be mad as hell.

Many of our politicians live like kings. Chauffeured around in limousines, flying in private jets and eating gourmet meals, all paid for by the American taxpayer, they are far removed from those they represent. Such a luxurious lifestyle makes it difficult to identify with the “little guy”—the roofers, plumbers and blue-collar workers who live from paycheck to paycheck and keep the country running with their hard-earned dollars and the sweat of their brows.

Conveniently, politicians only seem to remember their constituents in the months leading up to an election, and yet “we the people” continue to take the abuse, the neglect, the corruption and the lies. We make excuses for the shoddy treatment, we cover up for them when they cheat on us, and we keep hoping that if we just stick with them long enough, eventually they’ll treat us right.

People get the government they deserve.

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

As political science professor Gene Sharp notes in starker terms, “Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.” As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the Establishment—the shadow government and its corporate partners that really run the show, pull the strings and dictate the policies, no matter who occupies the Oval Office—are 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.

So what is the solution to this blatant display of imperial elitism disguising itself as a populist exercise in representative government?

Stop playing the game. Stop supporting the system. Stop defending the insanity. Just stop.

Washington thrives on money, so stop giving them your money. Stop throwing your hard-earned dollars away on politicians and Super PACs who view you as nothing more than a means to an end. There are countless worthy grassroots organizations and nonprofits working in your community to address real needs like injustice, poverty, homelessness, etc. Support them and you’ll see change you really can believe in in your own backyard.

Politicians depend on votes, so stop giving them your vote unless they have a proven track record of listening to their constituents, abiding by their wishes and working hard to earn and keep their trust.

Stop buying into the lie that your vote matters. Your vote doesn’t elect a president. Despite the fact that there are 218 million eligible voters in this country (only half of whom actually vote), it is the electoral college, made up of 538 individuals handpicked by the candidates’ respective parties, that actually selects the next president. The only thing you’re accomplishing by taking part in the “reassurance ritual” of voting is sustaining the illusion that we have a democratic republic. What we have is a dictatorship, or as political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately term it, we are suffering from an “economic élite domination.”

A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved, whether that means forgoing Monday night football in order to attend a city council meeting or risking arrest by picketing in front of a politician’s office.

It takes a citizenry willing to do more than grouse and complain. We must act—and act responsibly—keeping in mind that the duties of citizenship extend beyond the act of voting.

Most of all, it takes a citizenry that cares enough to get mad and get active. As Howard Beale declares in the 1976 film Network:

“I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it.”

 

Google’s lemmings: Pokémon go where Silicon Valley says

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An analysis of Ingress and Pokémon Go reveals important truths about corporate control and the ability of our mobile phones to organize our desires.

By Alfie Brown

Source: ROAR Magazine

his article has a clickbaity title but a sobering and concerning point to make. In 2010, Google started up what is now a very important subsidiary, Niantic Inc. Google starts up a lot of companies each year and acquires a great many more, so there is nothing special in this. What is important is that whilst most of us see Google’s acquisition of every “start-up” and endless development of “subsidiary” companies with different names as simply an attempt to completely monopolize the market, the case of Niantic shows us that there is more to the extent of Google’s power.

Six years on from its inception with the launch of its biggest game yet, Pokémon Go, Niantic has hit the headlines and people are finally paying attention to the company, with some apparent leftists even claiming we ought to boycott Pokémon Go. In fact, Niantic have been working on mobile phone psychology and social organization for several years. An analysis of the company’s two big games, Ingress and Pokémon Go, shows us some important truths about the world we are living in, about corporate control and about the ability of our mobile phones to organize our desires.

Niantic developed their first major game, Ingress, in 2011. The game, one of the most important of recent years, is a key ideological tool for Google — one that, unlike Pokémon Go, is little publicized. Ingress has seven million or more players and Ingress tattoos show the degree to which people define themselves by the application. Some players even describe Ingress as a “lifestyle” rather than a “game”. The reader can be forgiven for thinking: “I don’t play it, so why would this apply to me?” But the entertainment coming out of Google via Niantic is in line with Google’s wider project of regulating our movements and experiences of the physical world; unless you don’t use Google or any of its applications, many of which come built-it to our phones and cannot be uninstalled, this applies to you.

Ingress reflects a trend of mobile phone application development (which includes Google Maps and Uber, among other well-known apps) designed to regulate and influence our experience of the city, turning the mobile phone into a new kind of unconscious: an ideological force driving our movements while we remain only semi-aware of what propels us and why we are propelled in the directions we are.

I first considered the importance of mobile phone games to be about a kind of “distraction” — an argument I made in my book and related article in The New Inquiry. Later, when playing Ingress for the first time, I realized there was a lot more to it than this. Ingress, rather than simply distracting us from the city around us, actually trains us to become Google’s perfect citizens. In Ingress, the player moves around the real environment capturing “portals” represented by landmarks, monuments and public art, as well as other less-famous features of the city. The player is required to be within physical range of the “portal” to capture it, so the game constantly tracks the player via GPS. Importantly, it not only monitors where we go, but directs us where it wants us to move.

As such it is very much the counterpart of Google Maps, which is also developing the ability not only to track our movements but to direct them. Of course, Google’s algorithms have long since dictated which restaurants we visit, which cafés we are aware of and which paths we take to get to these destinations. Now though, Google is developing new technology that actually predicts where you will want to go based on the time, your GPS location and your habitual history of movement stored in its infinitely powerful recording system. This, like Ingress, shows us a new pattern emerging in which the mobile phone dictates our paths around the city and encourages us, without realizing it, to develop habitual and repetitious patterns of movement. More importantly still, such applications anticipate our very desires, not so much giving us what we want as determining what we desire.

Here again, the connection with the concept of the unconscious is useful. While some have seen the unconscious as a morass of unregulated desires, followers of Freud and later of Lacanian psychoanalysis have been keen to show precisely how structured the unconscious is by outside forces. Our mobile phones pretend to be about fulfilling our every desire, giving us endless entertainment (games), easy transport (Uber) and instant access to food and drink (OpenRice, JustEat) and even near-instantaneous sex and love (Tindr, Grindr). Yet, what is much scarier than the fact that you can get everything you want via your mobile phone is the possibility that what you want is itself set in motion by the phone.

Into precisely this atmosphere enters Pokémon Go, out just days ago, and already the most significant mobile phone release of 2016. The game is, of course, made by none other than Niantic Labs. A series of hysterical events have already arisen from the ethical minefield that is Pokémon Go. In the case of Ingress, academic study has already been dedicated to the fact that the game has sent young children into unlit city parks at 3am. With Pokémon Go, Australian police have had to respond to a bunch of Pokémon trainers trying to get into a police station to capture the Pokémon within and some people found a dead body instead of a Pokémon. It has already been suggested that Pokémon Go is eventually going to kill someone — and since that article was published someone has crashed into a police car and another has been run-over while hunting Pokemon. But, as with Ingress, it is not the occasional mad story to emerge that should concern us, but the psychological and technological effects of every user’s experience.

The premise of Pokémon Go is simply that you use your GPS to find Pokémon in the real environment and then your camera to make the Pokémon visible, so that the world is enriched by looking through the screen at what lies behind it, as in the image below:

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The Pokémon itself is an incredible phenomenon deserving of a book length study. Perhaps for now we can say that the Pokémon is the perfect example of what Jacques Lacan called the objet a, that perfectly cute fetishised but illusive object of desire that would truly make us happy if only we could just get our hands on it. We never do, because there is always a newer, cuter and harder to capture version that we just have to catch!

Dystopian visions of what technology and videogames would lead to seem to have got something completely wrong. Depictions of the dystopian videogame future have always tended to see the future as involving each individual isolated from the rest and sat quietly alone in a small room hooked up into a computer through which their lives are exclusively lived. In other words, the importance of the physical environment recedes in favor of the imaginary electronic world. On the contrary to these predictions of the future, we now live in a dystopia where Google and its subsidiaries send us madly around the city almost non-stop in directions of its choosing in search of the objects of desire, whether that be a lover on Tindr, a bowl of authentic Japanese ramen or that elusive Clefairy or Pikachu.

In the 1990s parents could ask their children to “get outside more” to escape the videogame space, but now it is the games that make us charge around the city capturing portals and collecting Pokémon and going on dates. Putting aside the full access that Google gets to your accounts via Pokémon Go, this shows us something really dangerous. It points to the increasing reality that there really is no escape from Google — and that while we are doing what we think we want, believing that we are just using our phones to help us get it, in fact Google has an even greater power, a truly revolutionary one: the ability to create and organize desire itself.

It is this truly revolutionary power that is important when it comes to Pokémon Go and Ingress. To say that these games are revolutionary is not to say that they are doing any good, nor that they are “radical”, and certainly it is not to say that they are left-wing — on the contrary, the revolution in desire appears to be corporate, hegemonic and centralized. If the left is to have any hope, however, it must not resist Pokémon Go, as Jacobin have now famously suggested, but understand and perhaps even embrace the power of the mobile phone to re-organize desire and look for ways forward from here.

 

Alfie Bown is the author of Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero, 2015) and The PlayStation Dreamworld (Polity, forthcoming 2017). He is the co-editor of the Hong Kong Review of Books and writes on the politics of technology and videogames for many publications.