Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Saturday Matinee: My Name is Nobody

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By Richard T. Jameson

Source: Parallax View

[Originally published in Movietone News 36, October 1974]

Most people have been writing about My Name Is Nobody as though it were as unequivocally a Sergio Leone film as Once upon a Time in the West, Duck You Sucker, et al.; some reviewers haven’t troubled to mention the existence of Tonino Valerii (who is emphatically given directorial credit twice in the opening titles) while more scrupulous commentators have nodded toward Valerii while acclaiming My Name Is Nobody as “the most producer-directed movie since The Thing.” There’s no mistaking the Leone manner, the Leone themes, and the frequent instances of Leone power and feeling; the protégé has learned the master’s lessons well, and one feels certain he was largely executing Leone’s own detailed plan of the film. I’m sorry I muffed my chance to see Valerii’s own A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die a month or so ago (I loathe drive-ins) because I might have been better prepared to wade in and sort out the fine points of auteurship in the mise-en-scène. There are lapses in the film that mightn’t have occurred—or might have been more decisively compensated for—if Leone’s hand had been at the throttle. But there are also shots, sequences, and literally timeless moments in the movie that do no disservice to the memory of previous Leones—which is to say that My Name Is Nobody contains some of the most extravagantly exciting footage that’s going to appear on movie screens this year.

The greater share of these is concentrated in the opening half hour or so, wherein we encounter Henry Fonda (doing his best and most cinematic work since Once upon a Time in the West) as a legendary gunfighter named Jack Beauregard and Terence Hill as the latest blue-eyed Leone angel with no name whose life-obsession is to see Beauregard top his career with a one-man stand against the Wild Bunch—150 strong. Beauregard, 51 years of age, isn’t interested. He’s engaged in a double-purpose journey: tracking down several men to kill them or save them, we aren’t quite sure for a while—and also aiming himself toward a ship called the Sundowner in New Orleans which will carry him away from his life-and-death career to bookish retirement in Europe. One inevitably becomes aware of career parallels: Ford winding up his cavalry trilogy with Rio Grande—which has the U.S. Cavalry riding out of United States territory to defeat some hostile Indians—and then turning back to the Ould Sod with The Quiet Man; and, of course, Leone himself, who reconstituted the western in the deliriously decadent terms of Italian romanticism and eventually came to America to make his movies, or parts of them: it has been suggested that My Name Is Nobody is his farewell to the genre (it’s at least an arrivederci—he still wants his next picture to be that long-awaited gangster movie Once upon a Time in the United States) and in its verbal explicitness this latest effort is as prosaically academic as Jack Beauregard looks whenever he puts on his wire-templed spectacles.

But if Beauregard/Fonda makes an appropriate “national monument” to build another death-of-the-West-and-western movie around, Terence Hill’s Nobody—despite a splendid introduction—keeps souring the enterprise with his bland blond pretty-boy features and limited, but very insistent, comic repertoire. And, magnificent as some of the visuals are, too many of them lack the elusive but suggestively forceful spatial and spiritual and characterological coordinates of Leone’s own frames. The mesmerizing detail, the comprehensive authority of camera placement and movement in Leone’s own films, inculcates a terrific sense of inevitability, which tends to make a perverse virtue out of his tortuous excuses for plots (all of which—save the one he stole from Kurosawa—boast holes through which the Wild Bunch could ride). When Beauregard refuses to shoot a man whom everyone has expected him to kill, he sardonically apologizes to Nobody for failing to live up to the sterling ideal the younger man believed in: his destiny, he insists, is to quit while he’s still alive. But Nobody says, “Sometimes ya run smack into your destiny on the very road you’re takin’ to get away from it”: Leone/Valerii cuts to a white desertscape through which the Wild Bunch rides like a storm, and we know that, in the space of that cut, Nobody has gone and killed the man Beauregard spared, and the Bunch is riding to avenge him, as dictated by Nobody’s own inscrutable scenario: Jack Beauregard will face those 150 sons-o’-bitches after all.

This had every right to be a throat-clutching moment (and, in fairness, it’s not bad at all), but this happens to be the third time we’ve been treated to such a scene (each set to Morricone’s outrageous version of “The Ride of the Valkyries”) and, unlike the increasingly distinct memory-image that punctuates Once upon a Time or the cumulatively meaningful progression of recollections from Coburn’s past in Duck You Sucker, the effect has diminished through familiarity on our part and a failure on the director’s to make it new again. Similarly, when Beauregard passes a payroll train at sunset a moment later in the film, we recall that a train rather gratuitously wiped a view of Nobody as he attended a western carnival earlier (a scene that is too derivative and too long—the point, indeed, at which the picture breaks down), and this same train will, for no good reason whatsoever, figure in—be present at—Beauregard’s showdown with the Bunch. Such imagistic links have worked beautifully in the past, but here they never resolve into a form with an aesthetic validity in its own right. Indeed, no sequence suffers from failure of formal credibility more crucially than the big shootout, because there is no rational explanation of how Beauregard figures out how to defeat the numerous adversary (not the first time that’s been true in a Leone film—to those films’ glory) and the fatal flaw—the “visual” logic that seeks to stand in for a more conventional rationale—is, in fact, illogical and trivial.

If I’ve gone on too long about some of the shortcomings of My Name Is Nobody, let me assure the reader I’ve deliberately avoided recounting the manifold beauties of those shots and scenes that do work, the breathtaking switches between absurdist comedy and exultant romanticism, the splendors of Morricone’s score (completely integral to the film, as always with Leone-Morricone endeavors) and Ruzzolini’s and Nannuzzi’s cinematography, and the many self-aware allusions to western classics by Leone and others, which possess a resonance that the over-descriptive screenplay occasionally threatens to overwhelm. A hemi-semi-demi-Leone movie is not only better than no Leone movie at all—it’s also better than just about anything else that’s come along lately. Because, after all, who makes films bigger than Sergio Leone’s? Nobody.

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Watch My Name is Nobody on Plex here: https://watch.plex.tv/movie/my-name-is-nobody-1973

Why Journalism is Going Extinct

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By Peter Van Buren

Source: We Meant Well

Is journalism going extinct? asks The Atlantic in an article of roughly the same name. The numbers are deadly: the grimmest news was from the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper outside of the east coast. The paper announced it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom. In June of last year the Times previously dropped 74 people from its newsroom. Some 2,900 newspapers closed or merged since 2005. Sports Illustrated is in trouble. The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NPR, Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed, among others, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past year, including the author of the Atlantic article himself. Job losses among print, digital, and broadcast-news organizations grew by nearly 50 percent during 2023.

The reason for all this professional carnage according to the article? Something something the Internet something something digital advertising revenues blah blah social media.

One proposed solution calls for “direct and muscular government intervention” and legislation forcing Facebook and others to pay for “news” they feature off sources such as the New York Times. Yet, as journalist Glenn Greenwald asked rhetorically, “Will there ever come a moment when liberal journalists who work for corporate outlets, and who are being completely consumed by layoffs and financial failures and audience indifference, ask whether there’s anything they’ve done to contribute to the profession’s failure?”

The answer of course is no, no one is going to ask but Glenn. Somewhere along the way (we’ll tag it as the beginning of the first Trump campaign of the modern era) journalism lost all pretext of objectivity and decided to devote itself fully toward advocacy. It is clear now the public wants accurate reporting, not advocacy, but never you mind, the media elites on each coast know better what you need. As long as the MSM traffics in falsehoods people will disappear from their audiences.

Let’s look at one almost silly example: did Donald Trump says people should drink bleach to kill off Covid?

No, Donald Trump did not suggest that people should drink bleach to kill off Covid. However, during a White House briefing in April 2020, Trump did make comments about the potential use of disinfectants and ultraviolet light to treat the virus. His remarks were widely criticized because they seemed to suggest the possibility of injecting or ingesting disinfectants, which would be extremely harmful. The media, however, would not be stopped, making the bleach thing into a meme, handing it off to Late Night, then picking it up again throughout the 2020 presidential campaign.

Twelve months after the supposed statement, to keep things alive, Politico wrote “One year ago today, President Donald Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid. It was a watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential briefings. It arguably changed the course of political history.” “For me, it was the craziest and most surreal moment I had ever witnessed in a presidential press conference,” said ABC’s chief Washington correspondent.

A year after the “fact” it is bad enough the media could not accurately report what was said but how about some four years later, twice in recent New York Times articles, on January 24 and on January 29, 2024 (“oblivious or worse, peddling bleach as a quack cure.”)

The thing is Trump never said people should drink or inject bleach; knowing what he said is as easy as listening to what he said. Here it is in its entirety: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.” It was obvious Trump was talking via example, hypothetically in that hyperbolic style of his. It takes a selfish media mind to roll all that into an admonishment to the suffering American people to drink a poisonous substance but that’s what happened. Even four years later.

There are so many other example which persist in the media as untruths, exaggerations, or something evil done by other presidents but uniquely ascribed to Trump. Think that he wrenched children from their parents at the border into concentration camps, that he denounced fallen soldiers as suckers, and that he incited a bloody insurrection to overturn an election, and still peddles the Big Lie to the point where he is supposedly Constitutionally ineligible to run for president.

Journalism is at a crossroads at best (it may have already crossed into the abyss.) The old models of reader -supported or advertising-supported media no longer are sturdy and seem still to apply only to a few giants like the New York Times. Americans’ trust in the mass media’s reporting matches its lowest point in Gallup’s trend line, largely because of Democrats’ decreased trust (the Republicans were lost an election or two ago, see Russiagate, though independents still lead the two parties in lost trust.) Just 7 percent of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, and 27 percent have “a fair amount.”

Meanwhile, 28 percent of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 39 percent have none at all in newspapers, TV, and radio. Social media is still the least trustworthy sector, while simultaneously being one of the most read/seen. The declines for the MSM have been steady since peaking in 1977 at about 70 percent trust levels. It has gotten worse since Trump but you can’t blame it all on him. It’s the media’s own fault.

The loss of trust is because of a perception the MSM is biased. Some 78 percent of conservatives think the mass media is biased, as compared with 44 percent of liberals and 50 percent of moderates. Only about 36 percent view mass media reporting as “just about right”. A September 2014 Gallup poll found that a plurality of Americans believe the media is “too liberal.”

Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting. The survey goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive. Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50 percent said they disagreed. Only 25 percent agreed.

The pattern is pretty clear: as long as the MSM is a significant source of misinformation never mind out-and-out lies, the people’s trust in it will continue to fall. We’ve reached a breaking point where many people believe the media intends to deceive. That distrust is entirely a self-own by the media, and finds itself expressed in the most direct terms. People literally are not buying what the MSM is selling.

The Shameful Way that the American Empire Is Ending

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The American empire — which is now the largest empire in history — is ending not only with defeats on every front, but with the historically profound stigma of being one of the two perpetrators (the other and more-publicized one being Israel) of the largest ethnic-cleansing operation (to remove all of the 2.3 million Gazans from Gaza) ever since Hitler’s ethnic-cleansing campaign ended.

That one ended after the Soviet Union defeated the Third Reich (or 3rd German empire) at the battle of Kursk on 23 August 1943 and so made inevitable the defeat of Hitler, and the end of his Third Reich, and the end of their organized extermination program against Jews, Gypsies, and other ‘non-Aryans’ — as well as made inevitable, from that date forward, the ultimate defeat of the Japanese empire, which (from that date forward) was only a matter of when, and no longer of whether, Japan would surrender.

The atomic bombings in August 1945 didn’t determine that victory over Japan; Hitler’s defeat at Kursk in August 1943 did. But, of course, the U.S. regime and its colonies allege that the U.S. and UK defeated Germany, though only Soviet troops entered Berlin and drove Hitler to commit suicide on 30 April 1945, thus conquering Germany. Because FDR had died just 18 days prior to that, and his successor Truman was an unknown and Stalin wanted his relations with Truman to be like his relations with FDR had been — mutually beneficial — Stalin generously allowed U.S., UK, and French, forces in as-if they all had done it, defeated Germany, so as to continue the anti-nazi alliance into the post-WW2 era. That turned out to have been a catastrophic error on Stalin’s part, simply a gamble that turned out to have been wrong.

The U.S. regime now does mainly proxy wars, because its only military victory (with its own troops) in the 130+ military invasions it has carried out ever since WW2, was the small one, 46 years later, and 33 years ago, in America’s 1991 battle for Kuwait; and America’s biggest-ever proxy war is the one that’s been going on ever since 2014 to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine using mainly Ukrainian troops who are being supplied by the U.S. and its colonies, with weapons, intelligence, and training. And this proxy war, like all of America’s other ones, is now almost certainly going down to defeat, after the expenditures of over 600,000 dead already, and perhaps over a trillion dollars of taxpayer expenses ultimately, all in order for the U.S. Government to keep Ukraine, which it grabbed control over in a bloody and barbaric February 2014 coup that it and its allies called a ‘democratic revolution’ though it actually terminated Ukraine’s democracy and turned that nation into the U.S. regime’s springboard into the U.S. empire’s planned ultimate conquest of Russia.

The war in Ukraine culminates the U.S. regime’s plan ever since Russia ended the Cold War on its side in 1991 while America secretly continued its side of that war by expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and especially into Ukraine itself because Ukraine is closer to The Kremlin than any other country is, barely 300 miles away, ideal for a blitz five-minute U.S. missile decapitation of Russia’s central command.

The U.S. regime started privately telling its stooges, first West Germany’s Helmut Kohl on 24 February 1990, but then later Francois Mitterrand and others, that though the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact mirror to America’s anti-Russian NATO military alliance — and the entire Russian side of the Cold War — all would soon end, the Cold War would secretly continue on the U.S.-and-allied side, until Russia itself will be conquered. Consequently, starting on 24 February 1990, America’s stooge regimes began to understand that though the prior excuse for the Cold War on America’s side was ‘anti-communism’, the reality was and is that on the American side, that war’s objective is — by whatever means (subversion, coup, proxy war, sanctions, or otherwise) — to win control over the entire world, and that Russia is America’s main target to grab control over, so as to culminate its empire.

Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Presidency until his death on 12 April 1945 just before WW2 ended, there was no Cold War, despite some U.S. officials, such as J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted it. President Roosevelt had no qualms about accepting the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as an ally so long as both countries would be committed to defeating Hitler: for FDR, no country has any right to interfere in any other country’s domestic affairs; and, so, the Soviet Union’s domestic affairs were irrelevant to U.S.-Soviet relations. U.S. Senator Harry Truman disagreed with FDR about that; and In 1944, the Democratic Party’s megadonors required President Roosevelt to accept Truman as his running-mate for Vice President. That decision by the Democratic Party’s megadonors produced the Cold War when President Truman, upon the advice from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, decided on 25 July 1945 that America must conquer — no longer cooperate with — the Soviet Union. Within just two years, FDR’s entire Cabinet was replaced. Truman was the ultimate anti-FDR.

Today’s America is the one that Truman and his hero Eisenhower created, not the one that FDR had carefully started to plan in August 1941 until he died on 12 April 1945. Truman reversed FDR’s foreign policies. In order to understand how this happened, the reality of WW2 has to be truthfully understood.   

The most masterful summary of how WW2 ended is the 12 May 2015 article by Ronnie Kasrils, his “Op-Ed: Lest we forget the truth about World War Two”, which is 100% truthful and covers all of the historically important points, so that the reader can understand how much the U.S. regime and its post-WW2 colonies (or ‘allies’) lie about that history in order to ‘justify’ their decision (which was made on 25 July 1945) by U.S. President Truman to now go forward by creating and expanding ultimately throughout the world an American empire, the first target of which would be to conquer Russia — the very same country that had actually won WW2 for the Allies. Agents for the U.S. regime lie profusely about history in order to deceive the public that the U.S. and/or Britain was/were mainly responsible for the defeat of Hitler and the Allied victory in WW 2. We’re inundated with that propaganda.

So: the American empire, which began with a plethora of lies, is now ending with a campaign against the Gazans that might ultimately become remembered as being the second-worst genocide in history — #1 being, of course, the Holocaust by Hitler and his German Third Empire (which was carried out not by bombings and a siege like the Israel-U.S. one now is, but instead by search-and-destroy operations against its ‘racial’ targets, plus industrialized mass-murdering “concentration camps”). Though the means of carrying out the genocide aren’t identical, both of those campaigns rightfully earn the world’s contempt and disgust.

Yet the U.S. Government is a full partner with Israel’s Government in carrying out this ethnic cleansing or possibly even full genocide of the Gazans. Biden fully supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing or even genocide against the Gazans, though he speaks against it in order to fool enough voters so as to win a second term. Furthermore, the Washington Post reported on 18 March 2024 that ever since 27 October 2023, Biden has known that Israel’s saying they intending to kill only Hamas is a lie and that they’re bombing and sieging Gaza so as to exterminate or otherwise get rid of all of its residents. So, if Netanyahu gets convicted and hung for this genocide, then Biden ought to get hung too, because he is the person who authorizes all of the weapons, ammunition and guidance, in order for Israel to do it.

And there also are other ways in which the U.S. regime is shamefully behaving while its previously ever-expanding empire is starting to fall apart.

The only country that regularly and always votes in the U.N. General Assembly against Resolutions that condemn racism and bigotry in all of its forms including nazism and Holocaust-denial, is the United States, largely because ever since 1945 the U.S. has brought into this country so many elite Nazis and gave them sanctuary and hid their atrocities from the public. But in recent years, one of the main excuses it gives is that Ukraine is voting against it and so America must do likewise in order to reaffirm its support for Ukraine. (In fact, America’s U.N. Representative that year said the reason for America’s refusing to vote against nazism was America’s opposition to Russia and support for Ukraine. India’s Representative said that the fact that Russia had introduced the Resolution was irrelevant to whether it should be adopted.) The only other country that has often been joining with America’s and Ukraine’s pro-nazi votes at the U.N. has been Canada, which (like America) had brought in and provided sanctuary for many Ukrainian Nazis after WW II. In fact, as I headlined on 24 September 2023, “Canada’s Parliament Gives Standing Ovation to 98-Year-Old Nazi SS Ukrainian”. But, actually, America’s anti-Russian military alliance NATO is simply riddled with nazis. Lies cover this up. And America’s lie-based invasions of Iraq in 2003 and of Libya in 2011 and of Syria ever since 2013, are all nazistic and lie-based, too; so, the evidence that the post-WW-II U.S. Government is nazi is clear and undeniable. All of this comes from Truman, under the advice from both Eisenhower and Churchill.

Anyone who would call this a democracy would have to be either blind or crazy. The only way that the U.S. regime can keep it going is on the basis of lies. And now the empire that is based upon those lies is starting to fall apart. The key event will be when the first NATO member Government will either block a NATO action or else quit the NATO alliance. Or else, if neither of those happens, then the key event will be what will happen because neither of them did happen: WW3. Either the empire will collapse, or else the entire world will self-destruct as a result of the U.S. Government’s actions.

The fundamental crisis of the West

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By Veniamin Popov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

A growing number of media outlets in America and in Europe have recently reached the conclusion that “rules-based international order” long espoused by the West has failed.

In essence, this means that the position of the Western powers in the world has weakened: they have failed to destroy the Russian economy by imposing sanctions, and the war in Gaza has demonstrated that the US and the Western European countries are far from all-powerful.

The media frequently claim that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has changed the international situation, in that it has made clear the limited capabilities of the West and deepened the rift between the West and the Global South.

The Ukrainian conflict and the war in Gaza have demonstrated to the whole world, and above all to ordinary people in the West, that their ruling elites are unable to grasp this reality, lack strategic vision and are generally guided by their own personal interests.

The ruling elites in the West have demonized Russia in every possible way and have come to believe the myth that Russia can be strategically defeated. This is a huge miscalculation and this conclusion will become obvious to all in the very near future. The present author is reminded of the junker Grushnitsky, in Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time,” a fantasist who plays the role of an unworldly romantic for so long that he begins to believe it himself.

As Vladimir Putin has aptly put it, “Russophobia, like any other ideology based on racism, national superiority and exclusivity, blinds the person who subscribes to it and deprives them of reason.”

The state of the “rules-based international order” is becoming increasingly alarming for many Western powers. According to an article published in the weekly journal the Economist on February 15, so-called national conservatives, who “suspect free markets of being rigged by the elites,” are gaining in influence in the US and Europe. They are also hostile to migration, despise pluralism, especially multiculturalism, and are obsessed with dismantling institutions they see as tainted by globalism.

Despite their differences, these national conservatives are united by their hostility to shared enemies, including migrants, especially Muslims, globalists and all their perceived enablers. Donald Trump is leading in the polls in America. The far right is expected to make gains in the European Parliament elections in June. In Germany last December, support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AFD) reached a record high of 23 percent, according to polls. Anticipating Rishi Sunak’s loss in the elections, the right wing of Britain’s Conservative Party are hoping to grab power in the party. In 2027, Marine Le Pen may well become president of France.

According to the Economist, the current authorities need to take people’s legitimate concerns seriously: the public in many Western countries see illegal migration as a source of unrest and a drain on the public purse. They worry that their children will grow up poorer than they are. They are concerned about losing their jobs to new technologies. They believe that institutions such as universities and the press have been hijacked by hostile, illiberal, left-wing elites. They view the globalists who have flourished over the last few decades as members of a self-serving, arrogant caste.

These complaints have real merit and mocking them only confirms how detached from reality the elites have become.

The position of Washington and its hangers-on in Europe in relation to Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza has added significantly to the public’s distrust of the West’s ruling elites. By openly supporting the actions of the Netanyahu government, the governments of the Western powers are convincing everyone, including their own populations, of their own policy of double standards: only the lives of Israelis are valued and massacres of Arabs are allowed.

As the Saudi newspaper Arab News reports, Arab and Muslim Americans, and 60 percent of all other Americans, have for months wanted President Joe Biden to pressure Israel into agreeing to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The White House has, in effect, ignored these pleas.

In response to this stance, Muslim Americans in nine potentially wavering states met in Dearborn, Michigan, in December 2023 under the slogan “Abandon Biden, Truce Now.” They have vowed not to vote for Biden in the presidential election unless he changes the policies that are enabling Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip possible.

The US journal Foreign Affairs, in an article entitled “Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order” quotes one G7 diplomat: “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we did with the Global South (around Ukraine) was lost. … Forget the rules, forget the world order. They will never listen to us again.”

The economic recession, which has become a permanent situation for many European states, also provides little room for optimism. In the US, the high inflation and huge government debt are expected to worsen this spring and summer, according to some analysts. The most closely watched indicator of opinions about the economy, a monthly poll conducted by the University of Michigan, has reported that public confidence is at an exceptionally low ebb, about the same level as during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.

With the presidential election just nine months away, this gloomy mood has become a serious problem for the Democrats. President Joe Biden is already facing a host of challenges to his bid for a second term, starting with concerns about his fitness for office as an 80-year-old man. Another major obstacle to his election bid is the opinion polls that give him low marks for his management of the economy.

The current economic problems are exacerbated by growing inequality, the worsening drug crisis and the proliferation of firearms. The promotion of non-traditional sexual orientation and the encouragement of same-sex couples have cause legitimate outrage to many conservative religious people.

In the European Union between June 6 and 9, more than 400 million voters in 27 countries will elect 720 MEPs to represent them for the next five years. Observers predict an increase in the influence of right-wing conservative parties. One major reason for the heightened interest in the upcoming election is the unprecedented corruption scandal that erupted in the European Parliament in December 2022, when the vice president and several other officials, including three MEPs, were accused of taking bribes. The investigation is ongoing, but it has already revealed instances of illegal activities and immoral behavior on the part of MEPs. Conservatives accuse the EU of being an opaque bureaucracy with vastly overpaid staff, which is disconnected from the reality experienced by ordinary residents of the EU member states, and which spends its vast budgets – totaling hundreds of trillions of euros – not for the common good but for the personal whims and fantasies of its leaders. Inflation and the cost of living are still rising in many European nations, while many blame EU bureaucrats in Brussels for policies such as the Green Deal that have made life more expensive for Europeans by raising the prices of fuel, food and most other essentials. In addition, anti-Russian sanctions, which have led to the rejection of cheap energy from Russia by a number of European countries, have had a negative impact on the well-being of ordinary citizens.

Over the past few weeks, thousands of farmers from across Europe, particularly from Germany, France, Poland, Spain, and Belgium, have taken to the streets to protest against additional spending on Ukraine and against new EU environmental policies that make farming unviable.

The short-sighted policy of the Western elites with regard to the crises in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip is leading to a loss of confidence in the ruling authorities on the part of ordinary citizens. It is easy to imagine their reaction in the event of any further military setbacks by Ukraine or any worsening of the situation within the country.

The position taken by many developing nations with regard to the current international processes is highly symptomatic. In an editorial for the Arabic international newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Editor-in-Chief Grhassan Charbel writes: “Zelensky’s position reminded me of remarks by the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to former Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, that ‘the one who is covered by the Americans is naked.’ The same phrase could be said by Putin to Zelensky.

Putin has the right to be sarcastic. The leaders of the West did not accept that he could not lose… That he went to Ukraine to punish the entire West and to launch a major coup against a world that was born from the collapse of the (Berlin) Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union.”

It is no coincidence that the ruling circles of Western Europe are currently not hiding their anxiety about what they refer to as the “threat posed by Trump and Russia.”

In fact, everything we see happening testifies to the inadequacy of the current ruling elites in the West, who are unable to reasonably and rationally assess the emerging situation, guided as they are solely by short-term personal interests.

It is very possible that they will be swept away by a wave of new unexpected events, and new leaders will come to power.

It is therefore highly likely that 2024 will be a turning point in many respects.

Economic Earthquake Ahead? The Cracks Are Spreading Fast

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By Brandon Smith

Source: The Burning Platform

One of my favorite false narratives floating around corporate media platforms has been the argument that the American people “just don’t seem to understand how good the economy really is right now.” If only they would look at the stats, they would realize that we are in the middle of a financial renaissance, right? It must be that people have been brainwashed by negative press from conservative sources…

I have to laugh at this notion because it’s a very common one throughout history – it’s an assertion made by almost every single political regime right before a major collapse. These people always say the same things, and when you study economics as long as I have you can’t help but throw up your hands and marvel at their dedication to the propaganda.

One example that comes to mind immediately is the delusional optimism of the “roaring” 1920s and the lead up to the Great Depression. At the time around 60% of the U.S. population was living in poverty conditions (according to the metrics of the decade) earning less than $2000 a year. However, in the years after WWI ravaged Europe, America’s economic power was considered unrivaled.

The 1920s was an era of mass production and rampant consumerism but it was all fueled by easy access to debt, a condition which had not really existed before in America. It was this illusion of prosperity created by the unchecked application of credit that eventually led to the massive stock market bubble and the crash of 1929. This implosion, along with the Federal Reserve’s policy of raising interest rates into economic weakness, created a black hole in the U.S. financial system for over a decade.

There are two primary tools that various failing regimes will often use to distort the true conditions of the economy: Debt and inflation. In the case of America today, we are experiencing BOTH problems simultaneously and this has made certain economic indicators appear healthy when they are, in fact, highly unstable. The average American knows this is the case because they see the effects everyday. They see the damage to their wallets, to their buying power, in the jobs market and in their quality of life. This is why public faith in the economy has been stuck in the dregs since 2021.

The establishment can flash out-of-context stats in people’s faces, but they can’t force the populace to see a recovery that simply does not exist. Let’s go through a short list of the most faulty indicators and the real reasons why the fiscal picture is not a rosy as the media would like us to believe…

The “miracle” labor market recovery

In the case of the U.S. labor market, we have a clear example of distortion through inflation. The $8 trillion+ dropped on the economy in the first 18 months of the pandemic response sent the system over the edge into stagflation land. Helicopter money has a habit of doing two things very well: Blowing up a bubble in stock markets and blowing up a bubble in retail. Hence, the massive rush by Americans to go out and buy, followed by the sudden labor shortage and the race to hire (mostly for low wage part-time jobs).

The problem with this “miracle” is that inflation leads to price explosions, which we have already experienced. The average American is spending around 30% more for goods, services and housing compared to what they were spending in 2020. This is what happens when you have too much money chasing too few goods and limited production.

The jobs market looks great on paper, but the majority of jobs generated in the past few years are jobs that returned after the covid lockdowns ended. The rest are jobs created through monetary stimulus and the artificial retail rush. Part time low wage service sector jobs are not going to keep the country rolling for very long in a stagflation environment. The question is, what happens now that the stimulus punch bowl has been removed?

Just as we witnessed in the 1920s, Americans have turned to debt to make up for higher prices and stagnant wages by maxing out their credit cards. With the central bank keeping interest rates high, the credit safety net will soon falter. This condition also goes for businesses; the same businesses that will jump headlong into mass layoffs when they realize the party is over. It happened during the Great Depression and it will happen again today.

Cracks in the foundation

We saw cracks in the narrative of the financial structure in 2023 with the banking crisis, and without the Federal Reserve backstop policy many more small and medium banks would have dropped dead. The weakness of U.S. banks is offset by the relative strength of the U.S. dollar, which lures in foreign investors hoping to protect their wealth using dollar denominated assets.

But something is amiss. Gold and bitcoin have rocketed higher along with economically sensitive assets and the dollar. This is the opposite of what’s supposed to happen. Gold and BTC are supposed to be hedges against a weak dollar and a weak economy, right? If global faith in the dollar and in the U.S. economy is so high, why are investors diving into protective assets like gold?

Again, as noted above, inflation distorts everything.

Tens of trillions of extra dollars printed by the Fed are floating around and it’s no surprise that much of that cash is flooding into the economy which simply pushes higher right along with prices on the shelf. But, gold and bitcoin are telling us a more honest story about what’s really happening.

Right now, the U.S. government is adding around $600 billion per month to the national debt as the Fed holds rates higher to fight inflation. This debt is going to crush America’s financial standing for global investors who will eventually ask HOW the U.S. is going to handle that growing millstone? As I predicted years ago, the Fed has created a perfect Catch-22 scenario in which the U.S. must either return to rampant inflation, or, face a debt crisis. In either case, U.S. dollar-denominated assets will lose their appeal and their prices will plummet.

“Healthy” GDP is a complete farce

GDP is the most common out-of-context stat used by governments to convince the citizenry that all is well. It is yet another stat that is entirely manipulated by inflation. It is also manipulated by the way in which modern governments define “economic activity.”

GDP is primarily driven by spending. Meaning, the higher inflation goes, the higher prices go, and the higher GDP climbs (to a point). Eventually prices go too high, credit cards tap out and spending ceases. But, for a short time inflation makes GDP (as well as retail sales) look good.

Another factor that creates a bubble is the fact that government spending is actually included in the calculation of GDP. That’s right, every dollar of your tax money that the government wastes helps the establishment by propping up GDP numbers. This is why government spending increases will never stop – It’s too valuable for them to spend as a way to make the economy appear healthier than it is.

The REAL economy is eclipsing the fake economy

The bottom line is that Americans used to be able to ignore the warning signs because their bank accounts were not being directly affected. This is over. Now, every person in the country is dealing with a massive decline in buying power and higher prices across the board on everything – from food and fuel to housing and financial assets alike. Even the wealthy are seeing a compression to their profit and many are struggling to keep their businesses in the black.

The unfortunate truth is that the elections of 2024 will probably be the turning point at which the whole edifice comes tumbling down. Even if the public votes for change, the system is already broken and cannot be repaired without a complete overhaul.

We have consistently avoided taking our medicine and our disease has gotten worse and worse.

People have lost faith in the economy because they have not faced this kind of uncertainty since the 1930s. Even the stagflation crisis of the 1970s will likely pale in comparison to what is about to happen. On the bright side, at least a large number of Americans are aware of the threat, as opposed to the 1920s when the vast majority of people were utterly conned by the government, the banks and the media into thinking all was well. Knowing is the first step to preparing.

The second step is securing your own financial future – that’s where physical precious metals can play a role. Diversifying your savings with inflation-resistant, uninflatable assets whose intrinsic value doesn’t rely on a counterparty’s promise to pay adds resilience to your savings. That’s the main reason physical gold and silver have been the safe haven store-of-value assets of choice for centuries (among both the elite and the everyday citizen).

Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States (August 8, 1950)

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the government has become an expert at disregarding constitutional roadblocks intended to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When these end-runs don’t suffice, the government hides behind the covert, clandestine, classified language of national security; or obfuscates, complicates, stymies, and bamboozles; or creates manufactured diversions to keep the citizenry in the dark; or works through private third parties not traditionally bound by the Constitution.

This last tactic is increasingly how the government gets away with butchering our freedoms, by having its corporate partners serve as a front for its nefarious deeds.

This is how the police state has managed to carry out an illegal secret dragnet surveillance program on the American people over the course of multiple presidential administrations.

Relying on a set of privacy loopholes, the White House (under Presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden) has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

The government used a similar playbook to get around the First Amendment, packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security.

As the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed, the Biden administration worked in tandem with social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

Restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

Dare to voice politically incorrect views in anything louder than a whisper on social media and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love is what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners.”

Social media censorship runs the gamut from content blocking, throttling, and filtering to lockouts, shutdowns, shadow banning and de-platforming.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the government.

Yet what those who typically champion the right of corporations to be free from government meddling get wrong about these cases is that there can be no free speech when corporations such as Facebook, Google or YouTube become a front for—or extensions of—government censors.

This is the very definition of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technocensorship is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal: to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

This authoritarian impulse to censor and silence “dangerous” speech masquerading as tolerance, civility and a concern for safety (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.

You see, the government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court can see itself clear to recognizing that censorship by social media companies acting at the behest of the government runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Bottom line: either we believe in free speech or we don’t.

The answer to the political, legal and moral challenges of our day should always be more speech, not less.

Any individual or group—prominent or not—who is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

To ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers the government and its corporate operatives are allowed to claim now will eventually be used against the populace at large.

These social shunning tactics borrow heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”

This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

As Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

The problem is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us, and we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”

What this means is championing the free speech rights of those with whom we might disagree.

That’s why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. He understood that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The government has no tolerance for freedom or free speech of any kind that challenges its chokehold on power.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “disinformation,” “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or speech transgression or other.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

Ultimately, the government’s war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is—is a war that is driven by a government fearful of its people.

As President John F. Kennedy observed, “[A] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Just Keep Bringing Awareness To The Depravity Of The Empire In As Many Ways As Possible

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You never know what could be the one thing that snaps somebody’s eyes open.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

At this point in history the most effective way for westerners to fight the empire and build support for revolutionary change is to undermine public support for western status quo systems and institutions. One does this by using every means at their disposal to help people see that the power structures which rule over us don’t serve our interests, and that they are in fact profoundly evil and destructive.

It takes a flash of insight for a westerner to be able to really see the perniciousness of the US-centralized empire in all its blood-soaked glory. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in empire propaganda from childhood, which has normalized and manufactured their consent for the murderous, exploitative and oppressive power structure we live under. The current status quo is all they’ve ever known, and the idea that something better might be possible is alien to them.

Teachers of spiritual enlightenment point students to the truth of their being in as many ways as possible in an effort to facilitate a flash of insight into reality. The reason they do that rather than saying the same words over and over again from day to day is because everyone’s mind is unique and ever-changing, and what knocks things home for one student one day will just be useless noise to another student who will later pop open at something completely different. The receptivity to insight varies from person to person.

Similarly, a westerner who’s been swimming in empire propaganda their whole life won’t have their moment of insight into the depraved nature of the empire until something lands for them that they are personally receptive to. Someone who isn’t receptive to words about the exploitative and ecocidal nature of global capitalism may be receptive to the threat of rapidly expanding censorship, surveillance, police militarization and other authoritarian measures. Someone who is unbothered by the empire’s nuclear brinkmanship with Russia and looming war with China may have their heart broken and their worldview changed when shown what is happening in Gaza.

What triggers the opening of one pair of eyes may not be what triggers another. A kickboxer doesn’t throw only overhand rights because that happened to be what scored a knockout in his last bout, he throws a diverse array of strikes in varied combinations at all levels to overwhelm the defenses of his opponent and land a fight-ending blow. When fighting the empire, one needs to bring the same approach.

Look for fresh opportunities to show westerners that the mass media are deceiving and propagandizing them to get them questioning their assumptions about what they’ve been told about the world. Look for fresh opportunities to show them evidence that the US war machine is the most murderous and destructive force on this planet. Look for fresh opportunities to show them how status quo systems create a far less beneficial society and a far less healthy world than what we could have under different systems. You never know what could be the one thing that snaps somebody’s eyes open.

Nothing you do on this front is wasted effort. All positive changes in human behavior at any level are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, so anything you can do to help bring awareness to the reality of our situation is energy well spent. Any effort you make to shove human consciousness toward the light of truth in even the tiniest way has a beneficial effect on our species.

So use whatever tools you can to make that happen. Have conversations, attend demonstrations, put up signs and stickers, write, tweet, make podcasts, make videos — whatever you find effective for you. Just make sure you’re coming at this thing from as many angles as possible, because diversifying your attacks on the mind control machine is the best way to get through its defenses.