Capitalism, Empire, and the Infernal Gloom Machine

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Jason Holland

Depression is built into this machine and the evidence is plastered on the morose faces of people caught in the clutches of its business as usual activities. Depression is found in the insurmountable debts we owe for spending a lifetime of preparation and labor to serve the machine. In addition to debt, the machine awards us for our servitude with trinkets, gadgets, doodads and gizmos that provide a moment of hollow amusement and then sit on shelves in garages and decay. They represent the planned obsolescence of the human heart. The sacrifice paid for our fetish with materialism is the actual quality of our lives.

The gloom machine tells us the quality of our lives is defined by the machine in the driveway, and the machine that flushes away our excrement, and the machine that chills the tortured slaughtered animal flesh for later consumption, and the machine that flashes pornographic images and supplies numbers detailing how much we are liked by our so called friends. But to us humans it seems that quality of life is more appropriately measured in the amount of disposable time we have to pursue that which we want, and the quality of the community around us, and living without being chronically stressed with threats of being displaced from the land upon which we live for not working hard enough for the machine.

Depression is waking up at 6 in the morning in darkness to sit in traffic for an hour to arrive at a job that we don’t want to be at, only to serve the machinations of people with nothing but greed in their overstuffed bellies. And we go to these jobs so that we can pay rents that are unaffordable, and to service debt we’ll never escape, and we go home in darkness to our lonely lives in places where community is absent with a view of an equally lonely tree or a man-made retention pond which is an upgrade over the view of staring directly at your neighbor’s domicile. Depression is the realization there is no vacation on the horizon, no respite, just more of the same. Depression is knowing that such a life is better than many others have it.

Depression is recognizing the cynics were right about this society, that Cohen spoke truth when he sullenly moaned:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Depression is watching art die. The surrealist, the bohemian, the rock ’n roll, and the anti-authoritarian soul has lain down and pledged fealty to the dollar. For money, they’re now all willing to become ready made predictable cubes to be packaged and sold in plastic wrap placed in cleverly designed boxes which deliver to the depressed public what they want, more of something that’s pretty on the outside and vacant within. We are left with monthly subscriptions of more tales of self aggrandizement for the throngs of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Depression is watching the worst of us rise to legitimacy and awarded iniquitous riches for it. The popular is depressive, musical hack Cardi B sings about her money money money and she is loved. Jordan Peterson sells cheap self help stolen from better written material decades ago amalgamated with misogyny and dictates of hierarchal subjugation and becomes wildly popular. Trump purveys hatred of people of color and a love of authoritarianism and the depressive people, oh do they eat it up. This is sickness, depressive sickness.

Depression is acceptance of the violent now. The grossly unhappy men with their armaments spread their gloom and horror across the planet and claim righteousness for doing so. Depression is watching society applaud murderous hearts for their crimes who don badges and camouflage and have holidays to celebrate their violent history, while villains are made of those who simply don’t want to stand up for songs of oppression. Thank you for your service to the machine.

Depression is watching notions of resistance and revolution take form in slightly altered subservience. The great reformation desired now is for a “green new deal” that doesn’t come close to mitigating the impending culling of humanity from soon to be ecological catastrophes. Their plans offer only more endless work at the behest of the gloom machine while promising healthcare that will never happen, less debt it will also never deliver, and affordable housing that still won’t solve homelessness. They don’t want to break the machine, just tweak it, and they lack the ability to do that even. Never have I borne witness to such eager slaves and such depressive aspirations. The people seem to adore their cubicle lives, their environmental destruction, their corporations, their debts, their corrupt leaders, their prisons, their banks, and their taxes.

They want to continue to be put to work under the thumb of the status quo western civilization authoritarian mind and this is all the depressed mentally dominated masses can think of as a possible improvement. Instead of wanting to taste real liberty and be actual equals, their dreams are limited to being better treated servants. The gloom machine chugs along fueled with dimwitted ideas sold by boxed-in thinkers without any possibility of escaping the darkness, rather simply offering a more cushy seat for viewing the end of everything.

The machine bellows out demanding more, more, you owe me more, and somehow those wearing red, white, and blue agree and celebrate the demands of the machine. These debts we owe are servitude. The numbers held in digital machines are immoral which demand one must wake up to a dreary existence to do more of what is killing our souls along with the flora and fauna around us.

Depression is the downtrodden plebs who celebrate their corrupt democracy, which is in reality a thinly veiled oligarchy that should be obvious to all. They prop up a system of voting that allows the election of the presidency, a position that shouldn’t exist in the first place in an egalitarian society, to be awarded to candidates who don’t capture the most votes. What little democracy there is in a representative system is lost in totality when the winner of elections need not win the majority of votes. The gloom machine is straight up tyranny.

A non-depressed society would reject being served faux democracy. They’d reject a system absent of reason or compassion and disdain would be for ideas of continuing to support such a destructive way of being. But instead, within the gloom machine shame is reserved for those who don’t want to take part in the busted system, and it venerates those who cast votes for imperialist conquerers and planet destroyers, and those voters are lauded as doing their civic duty for taking part in open public corruption.

Depression is the insincere know it all crowd who are incapable of honest debate and have rarely endeavored to open a book of substance or engage in critical thought, but they know trivialities which they mistake as facts and wisdom. They know arrogance well and emanate it with aplomb. They know how to believe all they see in the corporatized media, but thinking without boundaries or limitations is beyond their capacity. This is not even depression, this is tragedy.

Depression is watching the trees be plowed down for more tract housing, a portion of which will sit empty for years because no one can afford to move there, and even if they could it’s a heinous boring life that awaits which is only significantly better compared to being homeless. Depression is knowing this is the reason why we are rapidly destroying our habitable environment and commencing a 6th mass extinction event which is now accelerating.

Depression is to know there is nothing we can do to stop the country we live in from mercilessly killing innocent people all over the world for no reason other than more economic expansion and our sadistic ideas of exceptionalism that entail spreading pain and hardship so a few elites can have more of what they already have more than enough of.

Depression is the powerlessness to change anything of significance. There is no other way they say other than the desolate gloom machine, they say this is how it must be. And so we remain here waiting for the horror that is soon to approach us all as the gloom descends in ever quickening waves.

A zombified indoctrinated populace can see no other way than capitalism and beating each other over the heads to satiate egos in needless competition that is unnecessary for survival and deleterious to the common good. Capitalism is the primary tool of empire, and a word that should be synonymous with depression. It’s the accumulation of resources in an effort to gain more power in man-made markets to leverage that power over other people and get them to do what the person with the most power desires. Capitalism’s depressing ideology is defined by the lecherous desire for more for the sake of it so the winner can pound their simian chest in victorious celebration of the devastation they’ve created.

Capitalism is inherently unsustainable due the way it allows power to coalesce via the leveraging abilities given to money to buy land, the means of production, elections, and advertising. It allows the whims of the few to overrun the needs of the many where those with the worst intentions aspire to gain more than others because they will attempt to fill the void in their hearts with self importance expressed via power over others. This is why it cannot be used.

If there is no central currency or advantage to collecting huge amounts of resources then the motivation to hoard would evaporate, as those resources would simply rot or become a burden to maintain. There’s no fun in that kind of hoarding. The “fun” comes to the simpleton power seeker when they acquire power to make others do what they want and thus gain the ephemeral validation they so desperately seek.

If one runs the math on players competing for money at different rates of gain over a certain amount of time, there will be a doubling effect which becomes exponential. And this effect will accelerate as it plunders along due to gains in leverage which allows for ever greater amounts of money to be made at faster rates. Eventually it always ends the way a game of monopoly ends, someone has all the power and everyone else is subservient to that entity/person.

These dour thoughts manifest from the recognition of the stranglehold empire has over our lives. The depression is the result of the myriad of expectations I can’t let go of that wants to see a kinder more egalitarian and sustainable world emerge while knowing how unlikely it is. Our collective depression is rooted in the foundations of social hierarchy and its economic tools of control, and understanding what a perfect trap it is, and so it goes, and everyone doesn’t know, but they feel it, though.

Why only fools trust America’s mainstream ‘news’

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: CounterCurrents.org

Here will be yet another current example to demonstrate that all U.S. mainstream ’news’ media hide from their respective public that the U.S. government is lying, when the U.S. government lies—i.e., that all of the mainstream ’news’ media in America hide the truth, when the government itself is lying. In other words: the U.S. mainstream ’news’ media are propaganda organs for the U.S. government.

While some American news media are Democratic Party propagandists, and others are Republican Party propagandists, and therefore all of them eagerly expose lies that are of only a partisan nature, none of them will expose lies that both parties share—such as, in 2002 and 2003, the central fact at that time. They hid that George W. Bush and his administration were outright lying to the public in each and every instance in which they said they possessed conclusive evidence that, as Bush himself put it on 7 September 2002 (and no mainstream and only one alt-news medium exposed as being a lie): “a report came out of the Atomic—the IAEA that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need [before invading].” That was his answer when he was asked at a press conference on 7 September 2002, “Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear—new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?” Immediately, the IAEA said then that there was no such “new report,” and that the last they were able to find, there was nothing at all left of WMD, nor of an ability to make any, in Iraq. The American news media simply ignored the IAEA’s denial that they had issued any new report at all such as Bush had alleged they had issued. Republican ‘news’ media hid that Bush’s allegation was a lie, and Democratic ‘news’ media likewise hid it. And, so, the American people trusted Bush, and destroyed Iraq. (Anyone who says that America’s invasion didn’t vastly harm the Iraqi people is either a liar or else ignorant of the realities, such as the last two links document.)

The example this time will be taken from The Week magazine, which is a compendium of summaries of the week’s ’news’ from America’s major ‘news’-media. The 1 March 2019 issue had this, on its page 8:

“Aid for Venezuela: U.S. military planes delivered more than 180 tons of humanitarian aid for Venezuela to the Colombian border city of Cucuta this week, setting up a showdown with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who has vowed to block the supplies. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made a surprise visit to Cucuta and told Venezuelan troops stationed at the border that it was their patriotic duty to let aid through. ‘Will you prevent the food and medicine from reaching your own people?’”

The presumption there is that readers are simply too stupid to wonder, “Why should I trust that this military plane doesn’t also carry weapons for supporters of a coup to overthrow Venezuela’s president and to replace him with Trump’s choice, Juan Guaido—trust that weapons aren’t included in the cargo of ‘food and medicine’? Is Trump really so kind a person as to care about the Venezuelan people? Or is this instead yet another U.S. set-up for a brutal coup, such as the U.S. did in 1953 to Iran, and in 1954 to Guatemala, and in 1973 to Chile, and, more recently, in 2014, to Ukraine?”

That ‘news’ report, since it’s from The Week, is about what other U.S. propaganda agencies are saying, and it’s true about that (they actually are saying this), but it’s summarizing from two very untrustworthy ‘news’ media, one being a tweet from Senator Rubio on 18 February 2019 that was immediately posted at sites such as ABC News, and the other being a ‘news’ report from the Miami Herald, which added that this shipment came from USAID—and yet they ignored that USAID is a major part of almost every U.S. coup.

Here’s more context about this incident of ‘aid’ shipments: On 6 February 2019, Britain’s Daily Mail, which is less dishonest about the U.S. government than U.S. ‘news’ media are, headlined “Venezuelan officials accuse the US of sending a cache of high-powered rifles on a commercial cargo flight from Miami so they would get into the hands of ‘extreme right fascist’ groups looking to undermine Maduro’s regime”, and reported that:

Officials in Venezuela have accused the US of sending a cache of high-powered rifles and ammunition on a commercial cargo flight from Miami so they would get into the hands of President Nicolás Maduro’s opponents.

Members with the Venezuelan National Guard [GNB] and the National Integrated Service of Customs and Tax Administration [SENIAT] made the shocking discovery just two days after the plane arrived at Arturo Michelena International Airport in Valencia.

Inspectors found 19 rifles, 118 magazines and 90 wireless radios while investigating the flight which they said arrived Sunday afternoon.

Monday’s bust also netted four rifle stands, three rifle scopes and six iPhones.

And here’s yet more context: the independent American journalist Aaron Mate, tweeted on 18 February 2019:

Aaron Mate

Page 136 [near end of Ch. 4] of [Andrew G.] McCabe’s new [and only] book [THE THREAT, which was published on 19 February 2019], recounting a [July] 2017 Oval Office meeting: “Then the president talked about Venezuela. That’s the country we should be going to war with, he said. They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” [Stated there by the authoritarian McCabe, in order to prove how crude Trump is, and McCabe was not condemnatory of such international thefts of Venezuela’s natural resources, but only of Trump’s crudity.]

12:59 PM – 18 Feb 2019

Furthermore, yet another independent journalist, Ben Norton, at “The GrayZone Project,” headlined on 29 January 2019, “Corporate Interests—Militarist John Bolton Spills the Beans”, and he provided a complete transcript of a brief interview that John Bolton had done with Fox Business Channel five days before, on January 24. That interview wasn’t publicized by Fox, and its headline was as dull as possible, “Venezuela regime change big business opportunity: John Bolton”, and the ‘news’ report posted below it was empty of anything important, but Ben Norton captured the entire interview, and on January 29 he posted it to YouTube and to The GrayZone Project as a news report, with the full interview-segment also being transcribed there by Norton. In it, Bolton had said, on January 24:

We’re looking at the oil assets. That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that. … We’re in conversation with major American companies now that are either in Venezuela, or in the case of Citgo here in the United States. … It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.

Of course, that’s an attempt at theft of the property of another sovereign nation—theft of natural resources assets of Venezuela, from the people who live in Venezuela—it’s a huge theft attempt, which is being bragged about by the U.S. regime. Though they’ve done this type of heist in many instances during the past few decades (including in Iraq, where U.S. oil companies now extract), Bolton’s outright bragging about it is certainly extraordinary, and thus is major news. This was major news that however hasn’t been focused upon except in the few honest sites, all of which are non-mainstream (most non-mainstream sites are just as dishonest as America’s mainstream ones are—they’re fake ‘alt-news’ instead of authentically against false ‘news’, but all mainstream national news sites routinely report lies stenographically, as if what the government says is always true, and so they’re propaganda). The GrayZone Project is one of the few honest sites, and Norton luckily discovered this huge news-break from the blunder by Fox Business Channel to have aired it—that revelation having been a freak event by America’s major media, a rare slip-up.

And, finally, the great investigative journalist Wayne Madsen headlined sarcastically but truthfully on 4 March 2019, “Military Intervention and Mercenaries, Inc. (MIAMI)”, and he (a journalist whose trustworthiness I have checked and verified for many years—he’s really one of the best) opened with:

The city of Miami, Florida may have started out as a retirement mecca for winter-worn pensioners from northern climes. However, after the beginning of the Cold War and US military and Central Intelligence Agency intervention in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guyana, the Bahamas, and other Western Hemisphere nations, Miami became a refuge for exiled wealthy businessmen escaping populist revolutions and elections in South and Central America and spies. The retirement and vacation capital of the United States quickly became the “Tropical Casablanca.”

Now home to thousands of limited liability corporations linked to the CIA, as well as private military contractors, sketchy airlines flying from remote Florida airports, the interventionist US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), and exiled oligarchs running destabilization operations in their native countries, Miami—or MIAMI, “Military Intervention and Mercenaries, Inc.”—serves as the nexus for current Trump administration “regime change” efforts. …

Earlier, on February 18, President Trump had delivered a lengthy speech in Miami, titled “Remarks by President Trump to the Venezuelan American Community”, and this was obviously aimed at passionate enemies of Venezuela’s government. Here is a typical passage, with accompanying documentations of the actual truth regarding his lies as stated there. Trump’s allegations are in boldface italics, and my commentaries are in regular type within brackets, and linked there to my sources:

Not long ago, Venezuela was the wealthiest nation, by far, in South America. [The allegation that Venezuela’s economy has done less well since Hugo Chavez became President on 2 February 1999 is disconfirmed by World Bank data showing that Venezuela reached its all-time-high economic-growth rate in 2004, 5 years after Hugo Chavez became democratically elected and took office as the country’s President. The economy rapidly declined as soon as the U.S. started its coup-attempts. Furthermore, a scientific study of the data showed in 2017 that: “Mexico’s and Venezuela’s numbers on this question [[of ‘Where would you place our country ten years ago?’”]] with a 1 to 10 scale, from absolutely democratic, to not democratic, throughout the period of 2013-2017, compared to those of other countries in the region, clearly show Venezuela as the country where the highest percentage of people believed that democracy had increased during the 2003-2013 decade. Mexico ranked in twelfth place, out of eighteen surveyed countries. “This comparison helps to dimension the solid sense that Venezuelans had about the strength of their democracy during the Chávez administration, and the weak one that Mexicans had.”] But years of socialist rule have brought this once-thriving nation to the brink of ruin. [That too is false—socialism wasn’t the cause of Venezuela’s economic come-down. Venezuela’s boom-time was the period of massive public-debt buildup prior to the exceptionally high oil prices in 1973-1985, as shown in “Figure 4: Venezuela Real GDP per Capita”. Moreover, as the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia says about Venezuela: ”The election in 1973 of Carlos Andrés Pérez coincided with an oil crisis [[the OPEC oil-embargo]], in which Venezuela’s income exploded as oil prices soared; oil industries were nationalized in 1976. This [oil-nationalization and oil-production investment all at the worst possible time] led to massive increases in public spending, but also increases in external debts, which continued into the 1980s when the collapse of oil prices during the 1980s crippled the Venezuelan economy.“ That “oil crisis” was actually the period of exceptionally high oil prices resulting from Israel’s 1973 invasions and OPEC embargoes, but it was actually hell for Venezuela because Venezuela was losing money on each barrel of oil sold because only the Arabic countries and Iran were able to sell profitably their oil after the period of OPEC”s oil-embargo. Venezuela, seller of the world’ dirtiest oil, after 1976 was losing money on each barrel, when they had to repay all those foreign loans amassed during the boom-period.] That’s where it is today.

The tyrannical socialist government nationalized private industries and took over private businesses. They engaged in massive wealth confiscation, shut down free markets, suppressed free speech, and set up a relentless propaganda machine, rigged elections, used the government to persecute their political opponents, and destroyed the impartial rule of law.

In other words, the socialists have done in Venezuela all of the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done everywhere that they’ve had a chance to rule. The results have been catastrophic.

In conclusion, then, no country in the world has a press that’s more dishonest than the United States of America does. “More dishonest” than this press would even be a ludicrous concept. Though the particular lies that are being promoted elsewhere might happen to be different, they can’t be worse. America’s having destroyed Iran and Libya, etc., is proof of this.

Consequently: Only people who possess a thoroughly scientific orientation toward confirming and disconfirming allegations, are capable of extracting from such ‘news’ a realistic understanding of what’s actually happening. The vast majority of people can be fooled, and they can be fooled constantly and even for (as in the instance of America, since at least 2003) decades, and yet still trust the institutions that have deceived them so mercilessly through all of those decades. This is the major reason why the United States is a dictatorship, not a democracy—and why any ‘news’ site which calls the U.S. a ‘democracy’ is thereby clearly demonstrating its untrustworthiness. But, of course, only honest news reporting organizations are publishing this report. And there will probably be very few that will do that, though all are receiving it for publication.

US Regime Change Blueprint Proposed Venezuelan Electricity Blackouts as ‘Watershed Event’ for ‘Galvanizing Public Unrest’

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Reid Mukai

The US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the opposition “to take advantage of the situation…towards their needs”

By Max Blumenthal

Source: Grayzone

A September 2010 memo by a US-funded soft power organization that helped train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido and his allies identifies the potential collapse of the country’s electrical sector as “a watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”

The memo has special relevance today as Guaido moves to exploit nationwide blackouts caused by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri dam – a crisis that Venezuela’s government blames on US sabotage.

It was authored by Srdja Popovic of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a Belgrade-based “democracy promotion” organization funded by the US government that has trained thousands of US-aligned youth activists in countries where the West seeks regime change.

This group reportedly hosted Guaido and the key leaders of his Popular Will party for a series of training sessions, fashioning them into a “Generation 2007” determined to foment resistance to then-President Hugo Chavez and sabotage his plans to implement “21st century socialism” in Venezuela.

In the 2010 memo, CANVAS’s Popovic declared, “A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector.” Popovic explicitly identified the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant as a friction point, emphasizing that “water levels at the Guri dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry.”

Speculating on a “grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010,” the CANVAS leader stated that “an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

Flash forward to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost exactly as he had imagined.

On March 7, just days after Guaido’s return from Colombia, where he participated in the failed and demonstrably violent February 23 attempt to ram a shipment of US aid across the Venezuelan border, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a major and still unexplained collapse.

Days later, electricity remains sporadic across the country. Meanwhile, Guaido has done everything he can “to take advantage of the situation and spin it” against President Nicolas Maduro – just as his allies were urged to do over eight years before by CANVAS.

Rubio vows “a period of suffering” for Venezuela hours before the blackout

The Venezuelan government has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key players in the US-directed coup attempt have done little to dispel the accusation.

In a tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal stage in US plans for regime change:

No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) March 8, 2019

At noon on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the US to stir “widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs to happen” in order to achieve regime change.

“Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed.

Around 5 PM, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still unexplained collapse. Residents of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness.

At 5:18 PM, a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout and claim that “backup generators have failed.” It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s tweet.

Back in Caracas, Guaido immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaido declared, “the light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.” Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error.

Two days later, Guaido was at the center of opposition rally he convened in affluent eastern Caracas, bellowing into a megaphone: “Article 187 when the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It depends on us, not on anybody else.”

Article 187 establishes the right of the National Assembly “to authorize the use of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the country.”

Upon his mention of the constitutional article, Guaido’s supporters responded, “Intervention! Intervention!”

Exploiting crisis to “get back into a position of power”

As Dan Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaido’s rise to prominence – and the coup plot that he has been appointed to oversee – is the product of a decade-long project overseen by the Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit.

CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that worked alongside US soft power organizations to mobilize the protests that eventually toppled the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

CANVAS has been funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change. According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

A leaked email from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they ousted Milosevic, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Stratfor subsequently revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.

In September 2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election, CANVAS produced a series of memos outlining the plans they had hatched with “non-formal actors” like Guaido and his cadre of student activists to bring down Chavez. “This is the first opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,” Popovic wrote at the time.

In his memo on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of the Venezuelan military in achieving regime change. “Alliances with the military could be critical because in such a situation of massive public unrest and rejection of the presidency,” the CANVAS founder wrote, “malcontent sectors of the military will likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient support.”

While the scenario Popovic envisioned failed to materialize in 2010, it perfectly describes the situation gripping Venezuela today as an opposition leader cultivated by CANVAS seeks to spin the crisis against Maduro while calling on the military to break ranks.

Since the Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaido’s Popular Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance himself from his record of training Venezuela’s opposition.

Today, however, Popovic’s 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages reads like a blueprint for the strategy that Guaido and his patrons in Washington have actively implemented. Whether or not the blackout is the result of external sabotage, it represents the “watershed event” that CANVAS has prepared its Venezuelan cadres for.

Government to Facebook Pipeline Reveals a Corrupt Mix of Social Media and the State

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Reid Mukai

The next time someone tells you that “Facebook is a private company” ask them if they know about the dozens of government employees who fill its ranks.

By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, the phrase “Facebook is a private company” is not accurate as they have formed a partnership with an insidious neoconservative “think tank” known as the Atlantic Council which is directly funded and made up of groups tied to the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, and even government itself. The Atlantic Council dictates to Facebook who is allowed on the platform and who is purged.

Because the Atlantic Council is funded in part by the United States government—and they are making decisions for Facebook—this negates the claim that the company is private. Since our six million followers and years of hard work were wiped off the platform during the October purge, TFTP has consistently reported on the Atlantic Council and their ties to the social media giant. This week, however, we’ve discovered something just as ominous—the government to Facebook pipeline and revolving door.

It is a telltale sign of a corrupt industry or company when they create a revolving door between themselves and the state. Just like Monsanto has former employees on the Supreme Court and Pharmaceutical industry insiders move back and fourth from the FDA to their companies, we found that Facebook is doing the same thing.

Below are just a few of corrupt connections we’ve discovered while digging through the list of current and former employees within Facebook.

Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy—aka, the man who doles out the ban hammer to anyone he wishes—is Nathaniel Gleicher. Before Gleicher was censoring people at Facebook, he prosecuted cybercrime at the U.S. Department of Justice, and served as Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the National Security Council (NSC) in the Obama White House.

While Facebook may have an interest in seeking out Gleicher’s expertise, this man is an outspoken advocate of tyranny.

After deleting the pages of hundreds of antiwar and pro-peace media and activist outlets in October, last month, Facebook made another giant move to silence. This time, they had no problem noting that they went after pages whose specific missions were “anti-corruption” or “protest” movements. And it was all headed up by Gleicher.

“Some of the Pages frequently posted about topics like anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption,” Gleicher wrote in a blog post. “We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people.”

Seems totally legit, right?

The list goes on.

In 2017, as the Russian/Trump propaganda ramped up, Facebook hired Joel Benenson, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant.

While filling team Zuck with Obama and Clinton advisers, Facebook hired Aneesh Raman, a former Obama speechwriter who now heads up Facebook’s “economic impact programming.”

Highlighting the revolving door aspect of Facebook and the US government is Sarah Feinberg who left the Obama train in 2011 to join Facebook as the director of corporate and strategic communications. She then moved on after and went back to Obama in 2015 to act as the administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).

David Recordon also highlights the revolving door between Facebook and the government. Recordon was the former Director of IT for Obama’s White House. He was also Engineering Director at Facebook prior to his role at the White House, and returned to the position after the 2016 election. He is currently Engineering Director for the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative.

Starting to see a pattern of political influence here? You should. But just in case you don’t, the list goes on.

Meredith Carden—who, you guessed, came from the Obama administration — joined the Facebook clan last year to be a part of Facebook’s “News Integrity Team.” Now, she’s battling fake news on the platform and as we’ve shown, there is a ridiculous amount of selective enforcement of these so-called “standards.”

In fact, there are dozens of former Obama staffers, advisers, and campaign associates who quite literally fill Facebook’s ranks. It is no wonder the platform has taken such a political shift over the past few years. David Ploufe, Josh W. Higgins, Lauryn Ogbechie, Danielle Cwirko-Godycki, Sarah Pollack, Ben Forer, Bonnie Calvin, and Juliane Sun, are just some of the many Facebook execs hailing out of the Obama era White House.

But fret not right wingers, Facebook likes their neocons too.

Jamie Fly, who was a top adviser to neocon Florida Senator Marco Rubio and who started his career in US political circles as an adviser to the George W. Bush administration, actually took credit for the massive purge of peaceful antiwar pages that took place last October.

“They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning,” Fly said in December.

Fly backs up his words with the fact that he works with Facebook’s arm of the Atlantic Council to ensure those dangerous antiwar folks don’t keep pushing their propaganda of peace and community.

And yes, this list goes on.

Joel David Kaplan is Facebook’s vice president of global public policy. Prior to his major role within Facebook, Kaplan took the place of neocon extraordinaire Karl Rove as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for George W. Bush. Before that, from 2001 to 2003 he was Special Assistant to the President for Policy within the White House Chief of Staff’s office. Then he served as Deputy Director of the Office of Management And Budget (OMB).

Myriah Jordan was a special policy assistant in the Bush White House, who was hired on as a policy manager for Facebook’s congressional relations team—aka, a lobbyist. Jordan has moved back and forth between the private sector and the US government multiple times over his career as he’s made millions greasing the skids of the state for his corrupt employers.

So there you have it. Facebook, who claims to be a private entity, is quite literally made up of and advised by dozens of members of government. We’re ready for a change, are you?

The Age of Tyrannical Surveillance: We’re Being Branded, Bought and Sold for Our Data

Posted on March 11, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”—Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Uncle Sam wants you.

Correction: Big Brother wants you.

To be technically accurate, Big Brother—aided and abetted by his corporate partners in crime—wants your data.

That’s what we have been reduced to in the eyes of the government and Corporate America: data bits and economic units to be bought, bartered and sold to the highest bidder.

Those highest bidders include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

This is the age of surveillance capitalism.

Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

“Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.

No one is spared.

In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.

This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—makes the NSA’s surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.

What’s worse, this for-profit surveillance capitalism scheme is made possible with our cooperation.

All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.

Think about it.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.

If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.

Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.

It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.

The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.

We’ve made it so easy for the government to watch us.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

If you’re an activist and you simply like or share this article on Facebook or retweet it on Twitter, you’re most likely flagging yourself as a potential renegade, revolutionary or anti-government extremist—a.k.a. terrorist.

Yet whether or not you like or share this particular article, simply by reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties is enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities. The corporate state must watch and keep tabs on you if it is to keep you in line.

Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

The government has the know-how.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

It’s happening already in China.

Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have now been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

Get ready, because all signs point to China serving as the role model for our dystopian future.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters.

Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare.

This is the kind of oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick.

Remember, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

In the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

Oh, how right he was.

Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.

Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.

As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.

Indeed, George Orwell’s description of the world of 1984 is as apt a description of today’s world as I’ve ever seen: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

8 VENEZUELA LIES THE US GOVERNMENT & MAINSTREAM MEDIA WANT YOU TO BELIEVE

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Makia Freeman

Source: Waking Times

Venezuela lies abound. Both the USG (United States Government) and its lapdog MSM (Mainstream Media) have been going into overdrive, exaggerating or just plain lying about the state of affairs in Venezuela. Truth is always a casualty of war, and it’s also a casualty of pre-war, as the NWO prepares the ground for military intervention by demonization and propaganda. Here are 8 lies about Venezuela which are being used to justify yet another coup in a long, long history of US coups in foreign lands.

Venezuela Lies #1: The Venezuelan People Have No Food and the Shelves Are Bare

In these videos (here and here) on the ground in Caracas, Max Blumenthal exposed one of the lies about Venezuela that is constantly repeated, i.e. that the people have no food and the supermarket shelves are bare.

Venezuela Lies #2: The US Only Wants to Send Aid

If by “aid” you mean “weapons and barbed wire for radical opposition forces,” then yes, the US only wants to send aid. However, if by “aid” you mean actual medicine, then no. This VenezuelaAnalysis report quotes a NYT reporter and USAID itself. They either don’t have medicine as part of the inventory or state outright that there was no medicine:

“According to New York Times reporter Anatoly Kurmanaev, the trucks that the opposition tried to force across the border contained “no medicine” at all, with reports that a “small” amount of medicine was being stockpiled in Cucuta not confirmed by USAID. Initial inventories from USAID made no mention of medicine, listing only basic food and personal hygiene products amongst the “aid”.”

The Venezuelan Government is accepting aid from Russia and other countries it can trust, just not the US, since US “aid” may just “accidentally” happen to contain weapons for anti-Maduro agitators (or, as the Spanish say, compradores). Hmm, wonder how those arms got in the food truck?

As I covered in the article NGOs: Choice Tool of Subversion for the New World Order, NGOs have become a weaponized tool of soft power through which the NWO expands its empire – meddling, destabilizing, toppling and installing, all the while using the NGO as a humanitarian pretext. USAID is just another in a long-line of NGOs loyal to the US Government and NWO, willing to put a nice PR happy face on their agenda of subversion.

Venezuela Lies #3: Juan Guaido Has Legitimacy in Declaring Himself President

As I covered in my previous article Is This the Most Blatant US Coup Ever?, Juan Guaido is a US-CIA stooge through and through. He’s an agent-provocateur “opposition leader” who has been carefully groomed to play his role in the coup. His claim to be interim president of Venezuela under Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution is, legally, utter nonsense, since Maduro has not abandoned the presidency and Maduro held free, open and fair elections as adjudged by outside independent parties.

Venezuela Lies #4: Many Countries Support Guaido

The US claims many nations and groups support its efforts to topple Maduro and install Guaido. In reality, these countries are basically vassal states or other nations controlled by the US that don’t want to upset the apple cart. Notice the strategy of the US: try to co-opt the United Nations HRC (Human Right Council) into following US coup efforts, and try to strong-arm groups like the OAS (Organization of American States) and the Lima Group into betraying their brother nation Venezuela.

The US tried this same trick with the Syrian War by creating and controlling a group called “Friends of Syria.” Here is what Venezuela’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador Jorge Valero said:

“the self-proclaimed “Lima Group” is a cartel made up of satellite governments of the imperial government to break Latin American and Caribbean unity, and, due to the failure of using the Ministry of the Colonies, which is the OAS to isolate Venezuela in this organization. The empire and its minions couldn’t approve Article 20 of Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Permanent Council of the OAS and resort to the United Nations Security Council, where they also failed. The creation of puppet governments by the US is not new.”

Venezuela Lies #5: The US Cares about the Venezuelan People (Just Like It Cares about the Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Iranian People)

The NWO uses the US to bring all nations into its fold, but it like to do so with the veneer of democracy so as to gain more public support and engender less resistance. Subversion, NGO soft power and covert operations are more palatable than overt control and boot-in-the-face oppression. In this vein, the USG likes to pretend it truly cares and has deep compassion for the people of nations like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and any other place it plans to subvert, invade or bomb … even though it has never professed such care in the past and will probably never again profess it in the future once its new puppet leader is installed.

Just look at the kind of lies, hypocrisy and nonsense Pence and a “deeply concerned” Pompeo tweeted about Iran when the USG set it sights on igniting a coup there in 2018:

Venezuela Lies #6: Venezuela is Only in the Condition It is Because of Chavez, Maduro and Socialism (They’re the Bad Guys)

Nothing is black and white. It is possible to look at the unfolding Venezuelan crisis and acknowledge that Maduro has mismanaged things while at the same time seeing the gross foreign interference he and his government have been subjected to. As I covered in other articles such as Venezuelan Economic Crisis: The Real Cause is Not Socialism, US-NWO foreign meddling is by far the biggest factor here. For instance, did you know that Bank of England has effectively stolen USD$1.2 billion from Venezuela by toeing the NWO line and blocking Venezuela from accessing it? Did you know that the US has effectively stolen USD$11 billion from Venezuela by freezing its US accounts? How is a small nation supposed to function as normal when such massive amounts are stolen from it?

Venezuela Lies #7: Yes, the US Has Toppled Governments Worldwide, But “This Time It’s Different”

Once you study enough history, you begin to see the lies of tyrants and empires. The lie remains the same. The US wants Venezuela’s gold and mineral reserves. It’s only 5 days from the US, whereas the Middle East is around 20 days from the US and in a very volatile part of the world. There is also the strategic acquisition of the mineral coltan. They also want to teach the successive government to Hugo Chavez a lesson after he thumbed his nose at the US-NWO Empire. This isn’t any different from other subversions and invasions. It fits the pattern exactly.

Venezuela Lies #8: It’s a “Grassroots Uprising” against a “Brutal Dictator”

This entire coup has been planned, orchestrated and executed from Washington. Period. There is no “grassroots uprising.” Ever wondered why Assad and Maduro are “brutal dictators” but bin Salman, El Sisi and other US-CIA stooges are not? It’s all about branding the enemy, marketing foreign interference and controlling perception. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. Al-Qaeda is bad and now Al-Qaeda is good. Were we fighting Eastasia or was it Eurasia?

Who is the brutal dictator? Who is imposing economic warfare and deprivation, starvation and misery by sanction? Who is fomenting regime change on innocent nations? Who is funding and supporting terrorists to topple any government they don’t like?

Final Thoughts: The US vs. Russia/China Proxy War Continues

Both Russia and China have invested a lot in Venezuela, including actual investments in their oil, military assistance and financial loans. They are not about to let the US get away with this – even if Venezuela is in the USA’s backyard, geographically speaking. The Monroe Doctrine, which started out in the 1800s as a policy by which the US would protect fellow American nations from European invasion, has now been turned on its head. Raving warmonger John Bolton recently mentioned the term as yet another excuse for the US to dominate whomever it wants on the 2 American continents. However, despite all the Venezuela lies emanating from Washington DC and the MSM, Venezuela is going to be a tough nut to crack, and many American and Westerners are already aware of the propaganda being used to foment war.

Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia Merger: Global Empire of Dystopia?

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The nature of reality in times of universal confusion

The world and our interpretation of it are often at best an idea and, at worse, a figment of our imagination. In our full-blown Orwellian construct, the truths of some are the fake news of others. Invisible forces and undisclosed interests rule the world and its so-called leaders, who are mostly actor-puppets directed from scripted narratives. They largely live in an alternate universe where, if you repeat outlandish lies often and loudly enough, the disinformation becomes the unquestionable reality for countless people. Reality has become stranger than fiction because the conflicting narratives about what is supposed to be real are, by and large, fictional. They are cleverly crafted propaganda that manipulate by maximizing confusion. The masters of this craft have gutted familiar words of all meaning.

For example, at the heart of Oceania, the white-orange clown emperor, obsessed with walls to protect his subjects from southern brown invaders, told his adoring patrons and sycophants, “we renew our resolve that Oceania shall never be socialist!” The aging patricians gathered for the obligatory annual feast gave him a standing ovation, and loudly chanted “Oceania, Oceania, Oceania!…” This enthusiastic chanting from Oceania’s Patricians, except for the more dignified Supreme Elders and Commanders of the Praetorian Guard, repeated itself on cue at least four of five times, to celebrate the great universal superiority of the invincible mighty empire of the free and the brave! The egotistical emperor’s writers must have laughed as he served up their outstanding fictions to the empire’s docile subjects!

Schopenhauer’s relevant pessimism

In his essential book, The World as Will and Idea, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) contested the rationalist notion that reason alone gave humans the universal key to an infinitely complex, and often irrational, reality. He took the assessments Immanuel Kant had made in his Critique of Pure Reason a step further by adding the fundamental notion of sufficient reason. This was a less absolute concept of the relation of cause to effect, which he anchored in what he deemed to be four categories of human knowledge: science, morality, logic, and metaphysics. Schopenhauer’s work was in part a reaction to the overly optimistic vision of the rationalists, with Rene Descartes in the lead.

In his inherent pessimism, Schopenhauer turned out to be more realistic about the limitations of humans to grasp, not only the full elusive scope of reality, but also their own frailty and insignificance as a self. In these gloomy times of uncertainty and of a general dumbing-down effect in our impoverished global culture, Schopenhauer’s work helps to explain why most aspects of our existence, including our relationship with nature, are beyond most people’s comprehension. For most humans, the absolute reality is an extremely fragmented knowledge filtered through the prism of their perceptions.

Global empire of dystopia?

In other words, whether one lives in Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia, the definitions of reality and information have been tailored in these different places to different needs, but almost all the narratives fulfill opaque agendas whose main objectives are to keep people on edge and in despair. The brainwashing from most media makes nearly everybody thoroughly dazed and confused. The goal is to break the will of populations and beat their souls into submission. For this to work, dissent must be eradicated. Let’s face it, if we stay on course, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia could soon merge into the global Empire of Dystopia where 2+2=5. For example, Oceania claims that, with its satellite-vassals, the empire defeated ISIS, which it had worked to create, although it is the leader of sovereign Syria (with the help of Eurasia and the former empire of Persia) who defeated both Oceania and ISIS after seven years of war.

From one manufactured crisis to another, always in what my esteemed colleague Dady Chery calls “other people’s countries,” the mad circus goes on and on like a merry-go-round. And it works, so long as the big lies are salted with a little truth for seasoning. As world citizens, we are tasked with dismantling this monstrous global Orwellian Empire of many faces that is tightening its grip everywhere.

Empires of the past and present, which are in flux, have always extended their powers through satellite provinces and spheres of influence. Empires dislike dissent from within, as well as nearby states that are eager to stay independent and sovereign. During the simpler times of the Cold War when the United States and USSR tried to divide the world in two, some independently minded head of states, such as Tito, Nasser and Castro, refused to submit to this bipolarity and initiated the nonaligned movement. This notion must be urgently revisited, for the sake of the little that is left of smaller nations’ sovereignty.

Of course, Orwell’s cartography of the three entities of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia no longer reflects the geopolitical reality, but his principle of mass indoctrination is at play on a global scale. The narratives appear to be in conflict, but the nitty-gritty mechanics below the radar are similar. Under the surface, and despite the veneers of ideological or religious clashes, a global scheme of wealth and power concentration has been unleashed. Worldwide, the super-rich, and the corporate entities they control, are getting richer while the middle-class is vanishing and the poor are becoming enslaved. Merciless capitalism is the true god of the Orwellian Empire’s three subdivisions. Capitalism demands daily sacrifices of sweat, tears and blood. The system’s blatant contradictions do not trouble its ruling class. On one hand, pseudo nationalist-populists are the servants of a supra-national corporatism, and on the other, the so-called liberals and neoliberals can, on short notice, adopt the worst methods of authoritarian repression.

Two examples of this are unfolding that serve as valuable case studies. First, there is Oceania’s effort to grab a critical piece of what it views as its birthright continent. This is, of course, Venezuela. Secondly, in La Macronie, an eastern asset of Oceania that used to be an empire in its own right, there is the intent to create an authoritarian neoliberal regime with a metrosexual humanitarian touch, to curtail widespread popular protests.

Venezuela: Revolution is imperialism

Oceania has in its crosshair the sovereign state of Venezuela, founded by Simon Bolivar. All empires have precepts or doctrines that conveniently serve to expand their territories and influence by various means, including military invasions, organization of coups and, lately, severe economic sanctions to engineer failed states that become ripe for orchestrated revolutions. The nervous system of Oceania, in Washington DC, views Venezuela as a natural appendage, based on one of the oldest formative tenets of the empire: the Monroe Doctrine, concocted in 1823. It came about using the seemingly altruistic but false notion that the newly independent countries of Central and South America had to be protected from their old colonial masters. In time, it became a claim to all the Americas as the United States’ domain and backyard.

To topple the legitimately elected Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, whom Washington does not like, the empire is again trying to manufacture a revolution led by someone it handpicked and groomed. The name of the man who currently aspires to be Oceania’s Governor in Venezuela hardly matters. Through the years, the strategy of fake revolution following economic sanctions has had mixed results: it failed in Iran in 2009; it worked against Qaddafi in Libya, combined with a small military intervention; it partially worked in Ukraine until Eurasia stepped in; it failed entirely in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad remains in power. With Venezuela’s military still firmly on his side, this strategy is unlikely to work with the heir of Hugo Chavez.

So far the aggression against Venezuela has served as a thorough head count of Oceania’s vassals and enemies. In the Americas, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay have defied the with-or-against-us litmus test. The rest, including Canada, have aligned themselves with the imperial diktat that Maduro must go. It is the same with most of the European imperial colonies of Oceania, except for Italy and Greece. This is a clear demonstration that the leaders of most states in the European Union lack a foreign policy independent from Oceania and operate largely as governors for Oceania rather than heads of state.

Indeed, according to Mr. Temir Porras, who has worked as Nicolas Maduro’s chief-of-staff and a foreign-policy advisor to Hugo Chavez, the position of most EU countries in supporting Guaido reeks of “neocolonialist interference.” The eight-day “ultimatum to hold presidential elections before recognizing Juan Guaido is a schizophrenic and incomprehensible position.” Porras elaborates that it is “absurd to say that Juan Guaido represents a consensus with Maduro’s opposition in Venezuela,” and that Guaido from the far-right populist party, Voluntad Popular, was almost unknown in Venezuela two weeks ago.

On the opposite side, to go back to Orwell’s cartography lexicon, those that claim so far that “Maduro must stay,” besides the four Latin American countries named above, involve an interesting alliance of Eurasia, Eastasia, and the former Persian and Ottoman empires.

Gilets Jaunes: rays of sunshine on a bleak horizon

Meanwhile, in La Macronie, a beautiful land with a soil rich in its bounty of bread, wine and revolution, a real revolution is brewing from the streets. A little light flickers at the end of the tunnel of our gloomy path, it is like countless little rays of sunshine that try to brighten our dark days, it is the Gilets Jaunes movement. The little governor for Oceania, an arrogant and imperious man who might have liked to be king in a parallel universe, is trying to stop the flow of a tempestuous Gilets Jaunes river with rubber-bullet guns, riot-police shields, and repressive legislation. The disparity between his actions and his almost humanitarian discourse have lost him all credibility. In La Macronie, the governor, by curtailing the freedom to protest and freedom of the press, is testing a brand new form of oppression. It is a young elegant authoritarian regime, with a smile, that caters to the global elite of murderous capitalism. This is an important test, and many worldwide are counting on the Gilets Jaunes to prevail.

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, five, six, seven and eight from the archives of Jakob Reimann; two from the archive of Wackystuff; three from the archive of Philip Pacemaker; four by Daryn Moffitt; nine by Nicholas J. Potter; ten and eleven by Joka Madruga; and fourteen by Urban Nauth.

Israel Lobby Rebuts Omar’s Claims About Its Immense Influence By Exerting Its Immense Influence

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In response to criticisms made by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar that US political leaders have too much allegiance to Israel and its lobbying groups, House Democrats have put forward an entire House resolution in accordance with demands made by AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League.

“The backlash [over Omar’s comments] continued on Monday, as the Anti-Defamation League wrote a letter to Pelosi calling for a House resolution to specifically reject what the organization calls Omar’s ‘latest slur,’” Politico reports. “‘We urge you and your colleagues to send the unambiguous message that the United States Congress is no place for hate,’ the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a letter.”

“The charge of dual loyalty not only raises the ominous specter of classic anti-Semitism, but it is also deeply insulting to the millions upon millions of patriotic Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who stand by our democratic ally, Israel,” tweeted the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Friday in response to Omar’s comments.

“I hope @AIPAC isn’t too angry that it took Democratic House leaders almost 48 whole hours to do what they’re told to condemn their own member and will instead be understanding that it was a weekend and that’s what caused the delay,” snarked journalist Glenn Greenwald in response to the news of the House resolution.

I hope @AIPAC isn't too angry that it took Democratic House leaders almost 48 whole hours to do what they're told to condem their own member and will instead be understanding that it was a weekend and that's what caused the delay. They're very sorry: pic.twitter.com/uPBnef7H1b

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 4, 2019

US politicians of all faiths and in both parties have indeed been falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell the freshman congresswoman that she is wrong and evil for suggesting that there is undue loyalty to Israel among US politicians.

“It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community,” tweeted California Congressman Juan Vargas, who is not Jewish. “Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable,” Vargas continued, inadvertently re-stating Omar’s original argument.

“But serious question: How is it anti-Semitic to question Christian Republican allegiance to Israel?” asked journalist Rania Khalek in response to the controversy. “Because it’s people like Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Marco Rubio who Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were initially called anti-Semitic for challenging on loyalty to Israel.”

It is indeed interesting that the label “antisemitism” is being pinned on an argument directed at mostly non-Jewish lawmakers and not at Jews at all. It is also interesting that the House resolution’s current text twists that reality on its head by falsely implying that the comments were directed at Jewish politicians. The most Omar-specific parts of the resolution read as follows:

Whereas the definition further includes ‘‘accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations’’;

Whereas the myth of dual loyalty, including allegations that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens, has been used to marginalize and persecute the Jewish people for centuries for being a stateless minority;

Whereas accusing Jews of dual loyalty because they support Israel, whether out of a religious connection, a commitment to Jewish self-determination after millennia of persecution, or an appreciation for shared values and interests, suggests that Jews cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors, when Jews have served our Nation since its founding, whether in public life or military service;

Whereas accusations of dual loyalty generally have an insidious, bigoted history, including (1) the discriminatory internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II on the basis of race; (2) the Dreyfuss affair; when Alfred Dreyfuss, a Jewish French artillery captain was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background; (3) when the loyalty of President John F. Kennedy was questioned because of his Catholic faith; and (4) the post-9/11 conditions faced by Muslim-Americans in the United States, including unfounded, vicious attacks on and threats to Muslim-American Members of Congress;

Omar’s comments have nothing to do with Jews, Judaism or Jewishness, but with the geopolitical entanglements between the US and a nation which currently serves as an outpost for US military agendas in the Middle East. It’s a basic, unassailable fact that the agenda to maintain this relationship holds immense sway in America’s capitol, which is why the only arguments you see against it are fallacious, dishonest, irrelevant, or even prove it to be true.

“It is so disingenuous of some of these members of Congress who are lining up to condemn these questioning voices as if they have no campaign finance interest in the outcome,” former congressman Brian Baird told the New York Times today. “If one dares to criticize Israel or dares to criticize AIPAC, one gets branded anti-Semitic, and that’s a danger to a democratic republic.”

Ilhan Omar has sparked one of the most interesting conversations happening in America today, and the smear campaign against her has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism, but with silencing that conversation. The social engineers are not interested in fighting religious bigotry, they are interested in shutting her up.

In an increasingly neoliberalism-weary world, the old smear tactics of labeling a dissident voice a “communist” or a “socialist” don’t pack the kind of punching power they used to, so new ones are needed. The propagandists have been field testing them for a while now, and whenever a successful prototype rolls off the conveyor belt you quickly see it shipped around the world. Smears of Kremlin servitude found purchase in the US, and it wasn’t long before we saw the BBC posing an image of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn against the backdrop of the Kremlin wearing what was made to resemble a Soviet-era hat. Antisemitism smears found purchase against Corbyn in the UK, and it wasn’t long before we saw those same smear tactics used across the pond against Ilhan Omar. If an imperial smear field tests well in our new political climate, you can be certain you’ll see it used elsewhere within the empire before long.

https://twitter.com/PrettyBadLefty/status/1102748288309231618

This bogus concern trolling about antisemitism has always been about smearing, and the smearing has always been about narrative control. If they can manipulate the public into distrusting someone who voices a dissenting narrative, they can keep that dissenting narrative from entering the bloodstream of mainstream consciousness. The need to keep a nuclear-armed branch of the US-centralized empire in the heart of the most crucial strategic location on earth is too important for our rulers to allow its fate to be left in the hands of the democratic process, so they control the narrative about it with extreme aggression and smear anyone who questions it. That’s all this has ever been.

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Category Archives: Authoritarianism