Hollywood and it’s Useful Idiots: Propaganda for the War in Ukraine, Big Pharma, and Every Other Globalist Agenda

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Alistair Cooke, a British-born writer who became a BBC film critic early in his career who worked mainly in the United States as a journalist, television personality, radio broadcaster had expressed his honest point of view on Hollywood’s film industry when he said that “I believe that Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.” Since World War II, Hollywood has been one of the main instruments of propaganda for globalist agendas. It began with US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt who established the US Office of War Information (OWI) from June 1942 until September 1945 whose job was to regulate newspapers, radio broadcasts, Hollywood films and all other forms of media in order to propagandize the public in an effort to gain support for America’s involvement in the war. The OWI launched a global propaganda campaign that oversaw revisions in collaboration with Hollywood producers, and at times, even rejected film scripts that portrayed the US as a negative force on the world stage.  The OWI’s main job was to reject any film that had anti-war material.  There was also the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) which was a division under the OWI that worked with Hollywood executives to decide which movies could benefit the war effort, for example, it authorized several films that had anti-Japanese propaganda, sort of like todays anti-Russia propaganda you find in many Hollywood films. However, over the last 20 years or so, Hollywood propaganda has even become even worse with the help of its Hollywood celebrities who have become mouthpieces for globalist agendas, so let’s call them for what they really are, ‘Useful Idiots.’

It’s amazing that for the last couple of decades many Hollywood celebrities have become self-described experts and spokespeople for US wars, Big Pharma, climate change and other globalist agendas.  Hollywood celebrities act and sing for a living, wear expensive name-brand clothing, and in some cases exploit their children to be part of the new woke culture. The so-called “Hollywood activists” such as George Clooney, U2 lead singer Bono, and the rest of them are phony as they can be. However, in all fairness, there are a handful of celebrities who do not, in any way fall into that category including Mel Gibson who is outspoken critic on Jewish power in Hollywood, comedian and actor George Carlin (R.I.P.), Marlon Brando, John Lennon (R.I.P.) and a handful of others.  When it comes to Israeli occupation and genocide against the Palestinians, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, singer-songwriter and composer Roger Waters, Natalie Portman, and actress Vanessa Redgrave come to mind. In 1978, Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for best supporting actress in the film ‘Julia’ gave an acceptance speech at the 50th Academy Awards which she denounced Israel’s war against the Palestinians.  Redgrave said that “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world.”  The British actress had claimed in the past that far-right Jewish Defense League targeted her for producing the 1977 documentary ‘The Palestinian’. 

Most Hollywood celebrities who toe the line will do and say anything to remain relevant in the film and television industries, so they also follow the mainstream media narratives or listen to their Hollywood bosses, or maybe they are just dumbed-down individuals, just ask outspoken actor and comedian Ricky Gervais who had an iconic opening monologue in the Golden Globe awards ceremony in 2020 that will be remembered for the ages:

So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and fuck off, OK? It’s already three hours long. Right, let’s do the first award

Sean Penn and Ben Stiller: War against Russia

Although talented, two of the most idiotic actors in Hollywood when it comes to the war in Ukraine is Sean Penn and Ben Stiller.  Last month, Sean Penn recently visited and lent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky his Oscar while Zelensky awarded Penn the Order of Merit honor because he is “doing everything to help us gather international support” according to Reuters.  The article ‘Sean Penn visits Ukraine’s Zelensky, loans him an Oscar’ stated that “Hollywood actor and director Sean Penn, sanctioned by Russia for criticizing its war in Ukraine, loaned his Oscar statuette to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday.” 

The other actor is Ben Stiller who played an idiotic model in Zoolander and many other films called Zelensky his hero.  According to NBC News ‘Ben Stiller meets with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, tells Ukrainian leader ‘You’re my hero’ said that “The comedy star praised the Ukrainian president — himself a former comedian and actor — as a hero during the meeting, telling him: “You’re amazing” and that “It’s a great honor for me,” Stiller, who was appointed a UNHCR goodwill ambassador in July 2018, said in video capturing the meeting. “It’s really wonderful, you’re my hero. You’re amazing.”  So Stiller jumps on the Zelensky bandwagon just like most of his Hollywood friends to help the Western narrative that the war in Ukraine is about “freedom and democracy.”

But I want to go back to Sean Penn and his incredible hypocrisy when it comes to US wars and regime change.  In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave US forces and NATO the greenlight to remove Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi from power which destroyed Libya in the process.  Here is the interview with Sean Penn on CNN on his claim that it was all Gaddafi’s fault:

Obviously, the war on Libya was run by the Democratic Party so for Penn it was justified.  Now here is Sean Penn questioning the Bush Administration on WMDs in Iraq on December 15th, 2002.  The war on Iraq was basically a Republican Party affair under the Bush neocons:

Sean Penn’s hypocrisy is clearly staggering. He is a total propagandist for the US war machine.  Although Sean Penn has supported Venezuela’s revolution and other causes such as the Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 where he founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization which operated a 55,000 person tent camp for victims of the earthquake, he is still a mouthpiece for the Democratic party and any regime change operation they deem necessary, so it is fair to say that both, Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are useful idiots.

Celebrities who Proudly Received their Covid-19 Vaccines

I am not going to get into the global lockdown and the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine and the ridiculous enforcement of wearing facemasks or social distancing rules, so here are what several celebrities have posted on Instagram and twitter after they received their shots :

Lady Gaga:

“Double vaxed + boosted…don’t 4get to still wear a mask this sh*ts contagious ,

America Ferrara:

“Boosted for the holidays!  Thankful for the miracle of science and medicine allowing me to be with my loved ones safely this year 

Amber Heard:

 “Did someone say ‘vaccine queen’?! ” 

Sean Penn (No Surprise here!):

“I’m a lucky man. Lucky to work alongside the ⁦@LAFD & our great frontline @CoreResponse staff, our partners at Carbon Health, USC, & Curative Lab,” he tweeted. “We test & vaccinate thousands per day. We need your support to get more people lucky. Text CORE to 707070 to donate.”

*Note: Sean Penn was interviewed by Yahoo Entertainment and said that “My deep belief personally, is that these [vaccines are] no different than having everybody being able to drive 100 miles an hour in a car” he continued “This is one of those things that should be mandatory. That we all get with the exception — the very few exceptions — for those people who, for whatever medical condition, might offset it, but I do think that vaccines need to be mandatory, and I do think that business — all businesses, the movie business, all businesses — need to take the lead and to be not so timid in dealing with their collective bargaining agreement partners.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

 “All right, I just got my vaccine, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone, come with me if you want to live.”

Despite all the evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and that wearing a facemask or social distancing does not work which brings me to the conclusion that these Hollywood celebrities are either brainwashed by the mainstream media, or they are just following the lies of Anthony Fauci who was elevated to celebrity status during the Covid-19 “pandemic”.  These people are not role models, they are just following what the medical establishment has prescribed to the public.  They are propagandizing the public to take Covid-19 killer shots which demonstrates that no one should listen to these people. Once you inject the MRNA technology into your body, its forever, its permanent and you cannot detox to get rid of it.  So in other words, don’t listen to these fools.

The Truth about Hollywood

There is no doubt that Hollywood has produced good films in the past but the Hollywood of today should focus on producing better movies and TV shows because most of their films are made only for propaganda purposes. In fact, many films today have no originality, better yet, there should be an alternative Hollywood that produces films without any form of propaganda that are worth watching. They can produce films that tells us real stories from around the world, like stories that come out of the Palestinian struggle or what is happening in certain parts of Africa as in the Hollywood movie ‘Blood Diamond’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou that tells the story about the Diamond industry and its effects on the African people. Instead they produce propaganda films based on the US Military fighting for democracy or numerous films based on the Jewish Holocaust. When was the last time you saw a film based on the genocide of a Native American tribe on the North American continent?

However, Hollywood is pretty good at producing movies that offend different nationalities and cultures.  As we all know who really runs Hollywood, one documentary that shows some of the most offensive films based on the Muslim world is called ‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People’ by Dr. Jack Shaheen. 

Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are propagandists who support the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 vaccines and other globalist agendas including the concept of eating bugs as recommended by the World Economic Forum.  The bottom line is that Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are a bunch of clowns that should not be taken seriously, so why do people around the world idolize these people in the first place is beyond me.

Why the CIA Attempted a ‘Maidan Uprising’ in Brazil

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.

On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation – which bears visible signs of hasty planning – now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.

That suggests CIA planners are avid readers of Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the New York Fed. In his ground-breaking 27 December report titled War and Commodity Encumbrance, Pozsar states that “the multipolar world order is being built not by G7 heads of state but by the ‘G7 of the East’ (the BRICS heads of state), which is a G5 really but because of ‘BRICSpansion’, I took the liberty to round up.”

He refers here to reports that Algeria, Argentina, Iran have already applied to join the BRICS – or rather its expanded version “BRICS+” – with further interest expressed by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Indonesia.

The US source drew a parallel between the CIA’s Maidan in Brazil and a series of recent street demonstrations in Iran instrumentalized by the agency as part of a new color revolution drive: “These CIA operations in Brazil and Iran parallel the operation in Venezuela in 2002 that was highly successful at the start as rioters managed to seize Hugo Chavez.”

Enter the “G7 of the East”

Straussian neo-cons placed at the top of the CIA, irrespective of their political affiliation, are livid that the “G7 of the East” – as in the BRICS+ configuration of the near future – are fast moving out of the US dollar orbit.

Straussian John Bolton – who has just publicized his interest in running for the US presidency – is now demanding the ouster of Turkey from NATO as the Global South realigns rapidly within new multipolar institutions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his new Chinese counterpart Qin Gang have just announced the merging of the China-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). This means that the largest 21st century trade/connectivity/development project – the Chinese New Silk Roads – is now even more complex, and keeps expanding.

That sets the stage for the introduction, already being designed at various levels, of a new international trading currency aimed at supplanting then replacing the US dollar. Apart from an internal debate among the BRICS, one of the key vectors is the discussion team set up between the EAEU and China. When concluded, these deliberations will be presented to BRI-EAEU partner nations and of course the expanded BRICS+.

Lula at the helm in Brazil, in what is now his third non-successive presidential term, will offer a tremendous boost to BRICS+, In the 2000s, side by side with Russian President Putin and former Chinese President Hu Jintao, Lula was a key conceptualizer of a deeper role for BRICS, including trade in their own currencies.

BRICS as “the new G7 of the East,” as defined by Pozsar, is beyond anathema – as much for Straussian neo-cons as for neoliberal.

The US is being slowly but surely expelled from wider Eurasia by concerted actions of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Ukraine is a black hole – where NATO faces a humiliation that will make Afghanistan look like Alice in Wonderland. A feeble EU being forced by Washington to de-industrialize and buy US Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) at absurdly high cost has no essential resources for the Empire to plunder.

Geoeconomically, that leaves the US-denominated “Western Hemisphere,” especially immense energy-rich Venezuela as the key target. And geopolitically, the key regional actor is Brazil.

The Straussian neo-con play is to pull all stops to prevent Chinese and Russian trade expansion and political influence in Latin America, which Washington – irrespective of international law and the concept of sovereignty, continues to call “our backyard.” In times where neoliberalism is so “inclusive” that Zionists wear swastikas, the Monroe Doctrine is back, on steroids.

All about the ‘strategy of tension’

Clues for Maidan in Brazil can be obtained, for instance, at the US Army Cyber Command at Fort Gordon, where it’s no secret the CIA deployed hundreds of assets across Brazil ahead of the recent presidential election – faithful to the “strategy of tension” playbook.

CIA chatter was intercepted at Fort Gordon since mid-2022. The main theme then was the imposition of the widespread narrative that ‘Lula could only win by cheating.’

A key target of the CIA operation was to discredit by all means the Brazilian electoral process, paving the way for a prepackaged narrative that is now unraveling: a defeated Bolsonaro fleeing Brazil and seeking refuge at former US president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion. Bolsonaro, advised by Steve Bannon, did flee Brazil, skipping Lula’s inauguration, but because he’s terrified he may be facing the slammer sooner rather than later. And by the way, he is in Orlando, not Mar-a-Lago.

The icing on the stale Maidan cake was what happened this past Sunday: fabricating a 8 January in Brasilia mirroring the events of 6 January, 2021 in Washington, and of course imprinting the Bolsonaro-Trump link on people’s minds.

The amateurish nature of 8 January in Brasilia suggests CIA planners got lost in their own plot. The whole farce had to be anticipated because of Pozsar’s report, which everyone-who-matters has read across the New York-Beltway axis.

What is clear, is that for some factions of the powerful US establishment, getting rid of Trump at all costs is even more crucial than crippling Brazil’s role in BRICS+.

When it comes to the internal factors of Maidan in Brazil, borrowing from novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, everything walks and talks like the Chronicle of a Coup Foretold. It is impossible that the security apparatus around Lula could not have foreseen these events, especially considering the tsunami of signs on social networks.

So there must have been a concerted effort to act softly – without any preventive big sticks – while just emitting the usual neoliberal babble.

After all, Lula’s cabinet is a mess, with ministers constantly clashing and some members supporting Bolsonaro even a few months ago. Lula calls it a “national unity government,” but it is more like a tawdry patchwork job.

Brazilian analyst Quantum Bird, a globally respected physics scholar who has returned home after a long stint in NATO lands, notes how there are “too many actors in play and too many antagonistic interests. Among Lula’s ministers, we find Bolsonarists, neoliberal-rentiers, climate interventionism converts, identity politics practitioners and a vast fauna of political neophytes and social climbers, all well aligned with Washington’s imperial interests.”

CIA-stoked ‘militants’ on the prowl

One plausible scenario is that powerful sectors of the Brazilian military – at the service of the usual Straussian neo-con think tanks, plus global finance capital – could not really pull off a real coup, considering massive popular rejection, and had to settle at best for a “soft” farce. That illustrates just how much this self-aggrandizing and highly corrupt military faction is isolated from Brazilian society.

What is deeply worrying, as Quantum Bird notes, is that the unanimity in condemning 8 January from all quarters, while no one took responsibility, “shows how Lula navigates virtually alone in a shallow sea infested by sharpened corals and hungry sharks.”

Lula’s position, he adds, “decreeing a federal intervention all by himself, without strong faces of his own government or relevant authorities, shows an improvised, disorganized and amateurish reaction.”

And all that, once again, after CIA-stoked “militants” had been organizing the “protests” openly on social media for days.

The same old CIA playbook though remains at work. It still boggles the mind how easy it is to subvert Brazil, one of the natural leaders of the Global South. Attempted old school coups cum regime change/color revolution scripts will keep being played – remember Kazakhstan in early 2021, and Iran only a few months ago.

As much as the self-aggrandizing faction of the Brazilian military may believe they control the nation, if Lula’s significant masses hit the streets in full force against the 8 January farce, the army’s impotence will be graphically imprinted. And since this is a CIA operation, the handlers will order their tropical military vassals to behave like ostriches.

The future, unfortunately, is ominous. The US establishment will not allow Brazil, the BRICS economy with the best potential after China, to be back in business with full force and in synch with the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Straussian neo-cons and neoliberals, certified geopolitical jackals and hyenas, will get even more ferocious as the “G7 of the East,” Brazil included, moves to end the suzerainty of the US dollar as imperial control of the world vanishes.

The Americans Started the US War with Russia

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

By Robert Urie

Source: CounterPunch

The ongoing US war against Russia has elevated American-allied Nazis to the international stage as ‘freedom fighters,’ resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, raised the risk of nuclear war, ended any effective international cooperation on environmental issues through rekindling energy geopolitics, assured Europe of one or more Great Depression type winters with limited heating fuel, and more probably than not will soon produce the total annihilation of Ukraine as a modern state by the Russians.

The ‘American view’ towards the war, informed domestically by an absence of the political violence that the US so regularly visits upon innocents around the globe, rank ideology, state propaganda, ignorance of world history, and the narrow economic interests of American oligarchs, imagines that it is fighting Frankenstein’s monster when it is that monster. What is the strategic interest of Ukraine to the US? More importantly, is it worth a potentially world-ending war?

In recent history, the US could have abided by the 1991 promise made by the George H.W. Bush administration to keep NATO away from Russia’s border. The US could have negotiated a security agreement with the Russians— as they have regularly requested over the last three decades. The US could have made Ukraine abide by the Minsk Accord(s) to which the Ukrainians and Russians had in principle agreed. There have been so many requests from the Russians to negotiate a lasting peace with the US that there is no convincing argument that the US didn’t want this war.

And yet the American anti-war left continues to insist, with decades of evidence to the contrary, that German and French guardians of the oligarchs (Scholz, Macron) would / could have overridden the (Joe) Biden administration’s drive to war when, as I predicted here in 2019, Biden was brought to power by the national security state to launch a war against Russia. Biden was up to his eyeballs in the US-led coup in Ukraine in 2014, was subsequently appointed to be the American prefect in Ukraine; and began preparing for war the day he entered office.

The reason why the US wants a war with Russia is first and foremost that the poor policy choices of the US political leadership over the last five decades ended American economic and political dominance somewhere around 2008. Starting in the 1970s, market fundamentalist ideology became the American tool of choice for extracting wealth from poor and working people and nations around the globe. The political class, acting at the behest of industrialists and Wall Street, believed its own fantasy that ‘nature,’ and not imperialist looting, had made rich Americans rich.

The result since the 1970s has been a shift from political leaders governing to the ideological use of government to serve business interests. The logic is that business makes ‘us’ rich, despite the fact that most of ‘us’ aren’t rich. The insight that emerged from the Great Depression— that unhindered capitalism was both unstable and destabilizing, was flipped to the disproven logic that it is government that destabilizes capitalism. In economic terms, this shift placed American liberals well to the political right of the historical American political right.

The response from power was to redefine left and right in terms that flattered power. Capitalism could be made ‘just’ by making it fairer, went the new political project of the liberal – left. This, despite half-a-millennium of capitalism causing the very illiberalism that it is now expected to ameliorate. This imagined flat society, where one ‘equal’ earns a few billion dollars a year scamming widows and orphans while another ‘equal’ begs for money on a highway off-ramp, defines the political project of this new left.

To the social democracy that young liberals eternally call for, the US had that in the 1970s, just before it was abandoned by liberals. The (Ronald) Reaganite effort to shift resources, and with it, power, from the public sphere to the private was matched by liberals using an ideological market fundamentalism to accomplish similarly motivated outcomes from a better-hidden position. Wall Street and the largely privatized US military were re-elevated to be the economic bludgeon / capital allocation device of militarized capitalist-imperialism.

More to the point, social-democratic governments have been the vanguard of neoliberalism since the 1970s. Recall, the Biden administration was going to broaden economic distribution through raising the minimum wage, govern on the side of labor, enact environmental programs that might actually stabilize, or even reverse, environmental decline, and it was going to keep the US out of forever wars. While Democrats may need another twenty or thirty years to acquaint themselves with their actual policies, the other 80% of the country has already come to different conclusions.

In the meantime, the US has two political parties to represent the interests of capital and the radical right, but none to support the interests of ‘the people’ more broadly considered. Quickly, what are the metrics by which quasi-privatized public schools (Charter Schools) are measured? Well, most have been exempted from having to demonstrate that they are successfully educating students for a decade or more. How about healthcare? Since the ACA was implemented in 2015, 3 – 5 million Americans have died who wouldn’t have if the US had a functioning healthcare system.

The point is that, as these metrics suggest, raising profits for ‘American’ corporations has been the singular goal of social-democratic policies in the US, and similarly in Europe. The easiest way to sell ruling class interests as those of ‘the people’ is to claim that they are for the people— while setting them up to benefit only executives and oligarchs. Question: if Americans understood that the American war against Ukraine was provoked by the Americans, would they still support it? If so, why are the Biden administration and the state-affiliated press (NYT, WP) continuing to lie about the causes of the war?

With Ukraine being supplied with weapons by the US; being central to American oil geopolitics in Europe; and key to the neo-colonial wealth extraction from Ukraine that the US imagines it will exert after the conflict ends, US arms and materiel makers started shopping for larger houses the day that Joe Biden was elected president. But again, the cost is being paid by others. Russians and Ukrainians (and Poles, etc.) are dying to raise profits for ‘American’ corporations. And the Ukrainians that manage to survive the war will rue the day that they handed control of Ukraine to the Americans.

An historical analogy: during WWII the OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists- Bandera) had Ukrainian nationalists join with the German Nazis to commit racist / antisemitic atrocities across Eastern Europe and ultimately, to attack the Soviets. These Banderites—followers of Ukrainian nationalist and enthusiastic Nazi Stepan Bandera, imagined that Adolf Hitler would want like-minded Nazis to rule Ukraine as a racialized Nazi state. Surprise: Hitler was using the Banderites to further the Nazi goal of defeating the Soviets. The German Nazis reportedly shot OUN-B leaders when they dared to suggest that they be allowed to rule Ukraine.

This brings us to the current geopolitical predicament. The American war against Russia comes as the US political leadership tries to recover a functioning economy using the same logic and institutions that produced the dysfunction in the first place. Deindustrialization? Check. Financialization? Check. Militarization? Check. The American economic and political leadership spent five decades ending what it was that America ‘does’ without any apparent plan to address the (predictable) consequences that are now upon us.

The American war against Russia has been framed by the Americans in terms of oil geopolitics and humanitarian intervention. A seven-year-old with a map of the world could see easily enough that geography favors the Russians in terms of both prosecuting a major war in Europe and providing oil and gas to Europeans and to European industry. The effort by the American political and military leadership to cleave Europe from Russia faces this insurmountable problem of geography. Add 4,000 miles of supply lines, the distance from the US to Germany, to the Nazi Siege of Leningrad for insight into the nature of the problem.

Moreover, the American plan reeks of desperation. The explanation given by the Biden administration, by CIA linked commercial news outlets like the New York Times, and by what is claimed to be a dissident left in the US, depends on a stopping point in history that few outside of the US find plausible. The Russians were rebuffed by the Americans for three decades as they tried to negotiate security guarantees, including immediately prior to the launch of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) and again in April 2022, when UK PM Boris Johnson told the Ukrainian political leadership that the Americans had refused any negotiations.

(Here is a background history of the US – Russia conflict that I wrote a couple of weeks after the conflict started. Here is where I correctly predicted in 2019 that Joe Biden would be brought to power by the national security state to launch a war against Russia. And here is a history of the American alliance with German and Ukrainian Nazis for purposes of enticing them to commit terrorist attacks against the Soviets, now the Russians, since the mid-1940s).

(Here is American historian and Cold Warrior George Kennan explaining US President Woodrow Wilson’s use of the American Expeditionary Force in 1919 to launch a stealth American war against the Bolsheviks with the goal of reversing the October Revolution. As ideologically and constitutionally inconvenient as this might be for American liberals and ‘the left,’ there is history to the US – Russia relationship that preceded the launch of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) in 2022.

Likewise, American claims of Ukrainian sovereignty are almost too stupid to countenance. Starting in 2013, the US State Department, likely with direct or indirect assistance from the CIA and its stealth cut-outs like NED (National Endowment for Democracy), stoked a burgeoning uprising by the Ukrainian people to turn it into an American regime change operation. Around this same time Ukrainian Nazis from Right Sector and Svoboda committed suspiciously well-timed atrocities against Ukrainian citizens that de-legitimated the democratically elected president of Ukraine to install a government chosen by the American State Department.

The ‘American view’ has it that the Ukrainian people ousted the Ukrainian President, after which Ukraine returned to being the liberal democracy that it never was. In fact, an early act by the US was to retain predatory and potentially extractive loans from the IMF for Ukraine that the Ukrainian people are on the hook to repay. From 2014 forward the US was arming, supplying, and training Ukrainian militias, including significant contingents of self-described Nazis, to fight in the civil war that the US instigated.

At the time of the launch of Russia’s SMO, US-armed Nazis had surrounded Russian ethnic enclaves in Eastern Ukraine and were preparing to ethnically-cleanse Russian-speaking Ukrainians from Eastern Ukraine. This followed eight-years of civil war where the Americans supplied, armed, and trained Ukrainian Nazis to do exactly that. Why Russia’s SMO doesn’t qualify as ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the American view, while far more destructive American interventions in Syria, Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. do, would be a puzzle if it were a puzzle.

For those who missed it, here is the infamous ‘fuck the EU’ call from 2014 where former US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, lays out US plans to install a US-allied puppet government to run Ukraine following the US-led coup there. To my knowledge, this (link above) is the only clip that includes mention of Joe Biden’s future role as the American prefect in Ukraine. Recall: the first Trump impeachment was over Trump halting weapons shipments that the US was sending to Ukraine to commit terrorist attacks against Russia with.

While Joe Biden appears to have played largely a figure-head role in the coup and subsequent CIA / Nazi civil war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians, what he represents to not-Americans is the persistence of an adversarial foreign policy towards Russia that re-emerged when US President Bill Clinton reneged on the George H.W. Bush administration’s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border. Biden’s response has been to censor press accounts that contradict the official storyline while using state propaganda to convince gullible liberals that Nazis doing the bidding of American capital are ‘freedom fighters.’

The question for most of us is: why? What possible interest does American capital have in destroying Ukraine? Well, there is the means— weapons and materiel ‘lent’ to the Ukrainian-Nazi leadership by the Americans that they (the Ukrainians) will spend the next several decades paying for. There is the replacement of Russian oil and gas with more expensive and environmentally-destructive-to-transport ‘American’ oil and gas. There is the rebuilding of Ukraine by American corporations at Ukrainian expense after it has been destroyed. And there is the regional control over Europe currently imagined to accrue to the Americans from the war.

But how realistic is this? If the Americans can blow up the Nord Stream pipeline supplying Russian LNG to Europe, why can’t the Russians blow up LNG transport ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean to deliver ‘American’ oil and gas to Europe? More to the point, how will European industry be affected by rising energy prices that disproportionately affect it? Reminder: Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. Is another Great Depression in Europe really what the Americans want?

The Wall Street meltdown of 2008 raised very basic questions regarding the future role of the US in the world. The child-like / aggressively implausible stage of neoliberal capitalism (1980s – today), where the US abandoned its industrial policy while deindustrializing the nation in order to foster money-manager capitalism where bankers allocate capital— mostly to themselves, raises the question of what it is that Americans ‘do?’ In history, the trajectory ran from manufacturing to service jobs to gig jobs.

Joe Biden has been a part of every bad policy decision that the American political leadership has made from the 1970s to today. The neoliberal turn? Check. Resources wars for ‘American’ business interests? Check. Repressive social policies to create the largest carceral population in world history? Check. Promoting George W. Bush’s lie that Iraq possessed WMDs? Check. Privatizing and cutting Social Security? Check. Funding executive bonus pools under the guise of solving environmental problems? Check.

Biden was elected to start a war with Russia. If you follow the history, he has been in place at critical junctures to do just that. That he was a right-wing, neoliberal, war hawk for forty-eight of his fifty years of public self-service— until he ran for president in 2020, should have been a clue that he was the wrong politician for this time. And while the warm embrace of American liberals with self-described Nazis is no surprise here, the broader political context suggests that those interested in political solutions should stop calling each other names and end the war.

This written, the US is in a bad way. And it will remain so no matter who is president. These problems will be intractable until the existing distribution of wealth and power has been reconsidered (redistributed). As long as Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon rule the nation, ‘public’ policies will be for their benefit, not ours. Younger readers don’t have twenty or thirty years to figure this out. The problem with low and mid-level conflicts that persist is that they can escalate in the blink of an eye. This war has to be ended quickly. The Americans need to end the bullshit and negotiate a peace.

Ransacking the World Economy until ‘You’ll Own Nothing’ (Part 2)

The Coup de Grâce–>The Great Reset

By Robert J. Burrowes

Building on millennia of learning how to structure and manage an economy to accumulate and consolidate control and wealth in particular hands, as explained in Part 1 of this investigation, the Global Elite launched its final coup in January 2020 under cover of the fake Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. Using the health threat supposedly implied by the existence of a pathogenic ‘virus’, the bulk of the world population was terrorized into submitting to an onerous series of violations of their human rights which was tantamount to a declaration of martial law. See ‘The Final Battle For Humanity: It Is “Now or Never” In The Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

Under a barrage of propaganda delivered by Elite agents – including organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, governments, the pharmaceutical industry and corporate media as well as individuals such as Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harari and Bill Gates – people were compelled to wear masks, use QR codes, stay locked down in their homes and, later, submit to a series of experimental but involuntary gene-altering bioweapons to acquire a ‘vaccine passport’, among other measures.

Particularly importantly, these restrictions effectively shut down the mainstream economy with vast sectors of industry either closed outright or unable to function in the absence of locked-down or, later, bioweapon-injured or bioweapon-killed staff. For just one discussion of the vast evidence available of Covid-19 ‘vaccine’ injuries and deaths, watch ‘3.5 BILLION could be injured or killed by the jab. Are YOU ready?’ which is briefly discussed here: ‘Dr. David Martin blasts health authorities for turning roughly 4 billion people into “bioweapons factories”’.

This inevitably adversely impacted the entire supply chain: That is, the process that connects the production of raw materials, such as food grown on farms and minerals mined from the Earth, to factories that produce everything from canned food to computers, and then to outlets that sell these products to the public. All components of this chain were either shut down completely at one or more times, as part of the imposed restrictions or other policy measures – watch, for example, ‘Biden pays farms to STOPEU out of FeedMeat taxes & Chicken permitsUp to you to GROW FOOD!’ – or just substantially curtailed by the unavailability of essential inputs, ranging from replacement parts to competent labour.

To exacerbate matters, the transport industry (trucking, railroads, shipping, airlines) was also effectively shut down, containers became unavailable (because they were in the wrong places) and logistics corporations (that organize the movement of trade goods) were disabled, including by cyber attacks. The airline and tourist industries were just two industries that were profoundly disrupted. But so was much of small business, with many businesses destroyed. As a result, hundreds of millions of people lost employment, many permanently, throughout the industrial economies and millions more were starved to death in Africa, Asia and Central/South America because the day-to-day economy, by which many survive, was shuttered and any ameliorative measures by governments and international organizations were, deliberately, woefully inadequate (or were siphoned into elite wallets). See ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’.

But ‘behind the (obvious) scenes’ outlined above, there has been a great deal more going on that has been deliberately concealed from public view, and this has been considered and discussed by some fine analysts.

According to Catherine Austin Fitts, using ‘national security’ as the justification, the U.S. National Security Act 1947 and the CIA Act 1949 were the basis of a series of Acts and Executive Orders that ‘created a secrecy machinery’ which essentially meant that ‘the most powerful financial interests in the world can keep a whole bunch of money secret’, thus creating a secret black budget. And, starting in 1998, according to US federal government documentation, huge sums of money were not accounted for while private equity firms began exploding and, despite having no capacity to raise such amounts, were suddenly investing huge sums of money in emerging markets. According to Fitts ‘we are now missing over $US21 trillion’, which she calls a ‘financial coup d’etat’ that is clearly in ‘massive violation’ of the US constitution. The financial value of what has transpired under the Covid-19 narrative is that the ‘magic virus’ can be used to explain, for example, why there is no money for healthcare or pension funds cannot pay on retirement those who paid into them throughout their lives. Watch ‘We Need to Talk about Mr Global – Part Two’ with a simple summary here: ‘The Real Game of Missing Money’.

But if $US21 trillion missing already sounds like a lot, it doesn’t end there, as Fitt’s recent discussion with Professor Mark Skidmore makes perfectly clear in ‘The Financial Coup: More Missing Money & FASAB Standard 56’. Fitts observes:

‘We are now over $US100 trillion of undocumentable adjustments if we use their most recent figures and so I would say we are describing a financial system which is completely and utterly out of control…. If any of the allegations about financial fraud in the 2020 [US Presidential] election are true, and I believe that many of them are, we’ve now delinked both the election system and the finances [from] the constitution and the law so we are are now operating both in terms of who governs and how they spend the money completely outside of the law and completely outside of any democratic process. So this is a coup.’

To which Professor Skidmore responds:

‘The reason that I really struggled… watching what was going on during the last financial crisis, [was that] I thought ‘Wow we don’t have the rule of law’. It was so obvious that we didn’t ten years ago and it’s like it’s devolving even more and so I am not sure how much further we can go before we are just completely devoid of the rule of law at least for a subset of the very powerful.’

As an aside, while genuinely appreciative of the research of Fitts and Skidmore, as outlined earlier in this article and previously demonstrated, democracy has always been a sham and the Elite has always operated beyond the rule of law, routinely corrupting national political processes in pursuit of Elite ends. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’ All we are seeing in the current context is Elite corruption being flaunted in a way that reflects the sure knowledge that it can act corruptly, on a global scale, with impunity.

But to return to the subject at hand: In 2019, the central bankers of the G7 countries met for their regular conference at Jackson Hole, Wyoming and agreed to the ‘Going Direct Reset’, a plan devised (and later orchestrated) by BlackRock – see ‘Dealing with the next downturn’ – and, as explained by John Titus, the fundamental purpose of this ‘Reset’ was to orchestrate the largest asset transfer in history under cover of the forthcoming Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. Watch ‘Larry & Carstens’ Excellent Pandemic’ with a summary here: ‘Summary – Going Direct Reset’.

In the words of Titus: ‘In a nutshell, the arrival of the 2020 pandemic was about as accidental as an assassination. The pandemic narrative is nothing but a cover story to conceal from the public what in reality is the biggest asset transfer ever.’ See Summary – Going Direct Reset.

While you can learn the mechanics of how this was conducted in the excellent documents and videos immediately above, as Fitts points out in relation to the central banks: ‘Controlling and having access to data on fiscal and monetary policy is the basis of huge fortunes.’ And, combined with the secrecy that has protected their manipulations from public view – ‘if you look at all the technology and assets that have been transferred, by questionable means, into private and corporate hands, the liability is over the top’ – it has engendered the view that their only way forward is ‘complete, total central control’.

Central Bank Digital Currencies

How will this ‘total control’ be achieved? One key element will be the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). According to Fitts: The fundamental value of digitized systems, from the elite perspective, is that they enable centralized control. So, by creating CBDCs the financial transaction control grid becomes the means by which you enable centralized control; that is, slavery. Watch ‘We Need to Talk about Mr Global – Part Two’.

How does this work? CBDCs allow the Central Bank to determine exactly what products and services your digital currency can be spent on, when it can spent and where it can be spent. It also allows the issuing authority to freeze, reduce or empty your bank account, and to alter its functionality with the latest ‘update’, based on your ‘social credit score’, political allegiance or if you do not comply with certain directives. But it goes beyond this.

According to the Bank for International Settlements:

‘The G20 has made enhancing cross-border payments a global priority and has identified CBDC as a potential way forward to improving such payments. A “holy grail” solution for cross-border payments is one which allows such payments to be immediate, cheap, universally accessible and settled in a secure settlement medium. For wholesale payments, central bank money is the preferred medium for financial

market infrastructures. A multi-CBDC platform upon which multiple central banks can issue and exchange their respective CBDCs is a particularly promising solution for achieving this vision, and mBridge is a wholesale multi-CBDC project that aims to advance towards this goal. It builds on previous work…. Project mBridge tests the hypothesis that an efficient, low-cost, real-time and scalable cross-border multi-CBDC arrangement can provide a network of direct central bank and commercial participant connectivity and greatly increase the potential for international trade flows and cross-border business at large…. All the while safeguarding currency sovereignty and monetary and financial stability by appropriately integrating policy, regulatory and legal compliance, and privacy considerations.’ See ‘Project mBridge: Connecting economies through CBDC’.

Apart from the fact that the G20 governments are distinctly unrepresentative of the world’s people, these words are typical of the type usually chosen when the Elite is intent on sugarcoating their lies to conceal their true agenda.

Fortunately, Agustin Carstens of the Bank for International Settlements has been more forthcoming: ‘We don’t know, for example, who’s using a $100 bill today, we don’t know who is using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.’ Watch ‘Cross-Border Payments: A Vision for the Future’. And here is the Bank of England advising government ministers in the UK on the issue of programming CBDCs: ‘Bank of England tells ministers to intervene on digital currency “programming”’. For a more detailed explanation, see ‘What Is Programmable Money?’ And for an update on progress in your country, see ‘CBDC: A Country-by-Country Guide’.

Before proceeding, however, it is worthwhile noting the conflict that is going on between the central banks and the commercial banks (the traditional actors in the retail banking sector, that is, the part of banking where people interact directly with a bank), as well as that between the commercial banks and the big tech companies, such as PayPal, Alipay, Facebook and Amazon that have developed or are developing their own digital currencies and/or payments systems outside the traditional financial system. While non-bank financial institutions long-ago overtook commercial banks in lending, bank influence generally continues to decline and is accelerating in the face of the competition from the technology giants. Why the conflict? Because a CBDC risks collapsing the commercial banking sector completely by eliminating retail banking and thus destabilizing the long-standing financial system. For some discussion of this, watch Alice Fulwood’s presentation ‘Could digital currencies put banks out of business?’ There is no doubt, of course, that this conflict will be resolved and that it will not be in our favour.

In any case, CBDCs are just one feature of their planned technocracy which includes digitizing your identity, issuing you a social credit score, geofencing you in one of the Elite’s ‘smart cities’ and feeding you insects and processed trash, among many other elements. See ‘Digitizing Your Identity is the Fast-Track to Slavery: How Can You Defend Your Freedom?’ and ‘Digital Currency: The Fed Moves toward Monetary Totalitarianism’.

And to elaborate the significance of imprisoning you in a ‘smart’ city, Patrick Wood points out the evidence both in the literature and in practice: The intention is to force us off the land, as is already happening in China, and at gunpoint if necessary, so that ‘vacated farm land’ can be combined ‘into giant factory farms to be operated by advanced technology such as agricultural robots and automated tractors’. Once relocated into the ‘smart’ city of the government’s choice, everyone will be subject to 24 hour surveillance using a plethora of ‘smart’ technologies such as biometric facial scanning, geospatial tracking and CBDCs, forced onto public transport which will not include the option of leaving the city, and confined to those work and other activities approved by the relevant technocrats. See ‘Day 9: Technocracy And Smart Cities’.

The bottom line, in simple language however, is the same as it has always been: Endlessly acting to consolidate their control over the rest of us, our money is being stolen by the Elite for their own ends and they are not required to report it and they cannot be held accountable, legally or otherwise. The only difference to what has happened historically is that now even the pretense of some form of equity, the rule of law and even the notion of democracy are being abandoned in the final rush to techno-totalitarianism and wealth concentration.

Beyond this, however, other components of the elite program are designed to play a part in destroying human society and the global economy. For a summary of these, see ‘Killing Off Humanity: How The Global Elite Is Using Eugenics And Transhumanism To Shape Our Future’.

Collapsing the Global Economy

Not content with these measures, however, the war in central Asia was precipitated by the Elite to advance key elements of their program. Superficially portrayed by most politicians and corporate media as a war between Russia and Ukraine, many thoughtful analysts perceive some of the deeper strands of what has occurred: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO commitments made at the end of the Cold War, NATO has consistently violated those commitments and there has been routine Ukrainian attacks on Donetsk and Luhansk over the past eight years. These and other events have ensured a long but steady ‘lead time’ in the final build up to the war, precipitating the military response of Russia, as intended. For just four thoughtful analyses, see ‘Understanding The Great Game in Ukraine’, ‘Ukraine, Russia, and the New World Order’, ‘Some of Us Don’t Think the Russian Invasion Was “Aggression.” Here’s Why.’ and ‘The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss’.

Obscured by the war, however, the leaderships of both Russia and Ukraine are heavily involved in the World Economic Forum and both have been heavily committed to imposing the elite agenda on their populations. In short, the Russia-Ukraine war serves elite purposes well with consequences including even greater disruption of food and fuel supply chains than the ‘Great Reset’ was able to achieve alone. See ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’.

Similarly, the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 & 2 gas pipelines – see ‘Ukraine War: New Developments’  – might be seen through various lenses but, again, it serves elite purposes well. As Tom Luongo noted: ‘The important thing I keep trying to point out [is] that thinking in terms of “country” is ultimately the wrong lens to view these people’s actions. Factions are the better lens. Factions cross political borders.’ See ‘The Curious Whodunit of Nordstreams 1 and 2’. Given that the sabotage of these two pipelines is seriously exacerbating the energy crisis in Europe, while displacing people’s anger onto one or other parties in the war, as always the elite forces driving destruction of the world economy escape scrutiny.

Beyond this, on 7 October 2022 the Biden Administration dealt a ‘nuclear’ strike to the hi-tech industry by imposing onerous new export rules that cut off supply of essential technology (advanced semiconductors, chip-making equipment and supercomputer components) to China, immediately and adversely impacting Chinese production. See ‘Implementation of Additional Export Controls: Certain Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items’. But whatever pain this will inflict on the Chinese, it will inflict far more pain on ordinary people who will be required to deal with the outcomes of this latest supply-chain disruption: higher prices, more battered household budgets and fewer families able to scrape by on shrinking wages. See ‘Biden’s Tech-War Goes Nuclear’ and ‘US Economic War on China Threatens Global Microchip Industry’.

In any case, the ongoing destruction of the global economy will continue even while, apparently, considerable effort is being made to restructure key elements of it, such as those in relation to trade relations, trade routes, currencies and international banking being undertaken in various international fora. For one discussion of these ongoing efforts, see ‘Russia, India, China, Iran: the Quad that really matters’.

But, again, how serious are these efforts when all governments are collaborating closely on the fundamental Elite program? At one of these meetings, recently concluded, the G20 Summit in Bali – see ‘G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration’ – Moscow, Beijing, Washington and all other governments present, agreed to ‘the creation of a global health-preserving Pandemic Fund sponsored by the WHO, the World Bank, Bill Gates, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The fund will ensure there is plenty of money for experimental genetic vaccines in the weeks, months, and decades ahead.’ Beyond this, however, the Declaration contains ‘purple prose’ about ‘digital transformation’, ‘interoperability of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) for cross-border payments’, and other elements of the Elite’s technocratic program. As Riley Waggaman observed: ‘It’s truly heart-warming that even amidst ceaseless geopolitical squabbling, Moscow and the Collective West can sit down at the negotiating table, break bread, and agree to cattle-tag the entire world.’ See ‘World leaders agree to cattle-tag the planet’.

And while a recent World Economic Forum report, based on the views of 50 chief economists from around the world, sanitized economic prospects by simply referring to a likely forthcoming ‘recession’ either in 2022 or 2023, spokesperson Saadia Zahidi couldn’t avoid mentioning the heavy consensus that real wages will decline, poverty will increase and ‘social unrest is expected to continue to rise’ in response to rises in the cost of living, particularly due to production and supply chain disruptions in fuel and food supplies. See ‘Special Agenda Dialogue on the Future of the Global Economy’.

Taking a similarly ‘moderate’ stance, in its recent ‘World Economic Outlook’, the International Monetary Fund warned that ‘More than a third of the global economy will contract this year or next, while the three largest economies – the United States, the European Union, and China – will continue to stall. In short, the worst is yet to come, and for many people 2023 will feel like a recession.’ See ‘World Economic Outlook – Countering the Cost-of-Living Crisis’. At the media briefing to launch the report, the Director of the IMF’s Research Department, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, noted that ‘the global economy is headed for stormy waters’ and ‘Too many low-income countries are close to or are already in debt distress. Progress toward orderly debt restructuring… is urgently needed to avert a wave of sovereign debt crises. Time may soon run out.’ See ‘WEO Press Briefing Annual Meetings 2022’.

But other reports suggest something far worse.

Summarizing his own extensive research on the subject over the past three years, in a recent interview Professor Michel Chossudovsky simply explains what triggered the economic collapse, referring to the origin of the crisis with decisions made in early 2020: ‘This is really Economics 101:… the announcement of the lockdown… implies the confinement of the labor force on the one hand and the freezing of the workplace on the other…. What happens? The answer is obvious: Collapse! Economic and social collapse on an unprecedented basis because it was implemented simultaneously in 190 countries.’ Watch ‘The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity’.

Noting the complete failure of authorities to hold even one corporate executive to account for the financial collapse they caused in 2008 – when banking institutions intentionally sold securities they knew were bad to defraud customers and increase their own profits, as carefully reported in a ‘Frontline’ documentary in 2013 – Dr Joseph Mercola argues that the ‘same criminal bankers are now intentionally destroying the global financial system in order to replace it with something even worse – social credit scores, digital identity and Central Banking Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which will give them the ability to control not only your individual finances but also everything else in your life’. Apparently unaware of the extensive lead time on what is happening, he goes on to observe that ‘We’re now at the point where banksters have self-selected themselves to rule the whole world, tossing notions of democracy, freedom and human dignity in the waste bin along the way.’ See ‘Who Is Behind the Economic Collapse?’

As explained above, these ‘banksters’ operate beyond the rule of law too.

According to the Irish economist Philip Pilkington: ‘The Western world today faces a serious risk of slipping into another Great Depression. This risk has arisen… due to global economic relations deteriorating to the point of all out warfare.’ Noting the critical importance of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, leaving Europe with ‘insufficient access to energy, the price of energy in Europe will remain extremely high for years to come. European industry, for which energy is a key input, will become uncompetitive.’ See ‘The next Great Depression? Economic warfare has severe implications’.

According to former BlackRock manager, Edward Dowd, the outcome of what has been happening, which is being accelerated by the corruption that has plagued Wall Street since the 1990s, is that the forthcoming financial collapse is a ‘mathematical certainty’ and will occur within the next six to 24 months. Watch ‘Ex-BlackRock Manager: Global Financial Collapse a “Mathematical Certainty”’.

Or, in the words of strategic risk consultant William Engdahl: What is coming in the months ahead, barring a dramatic policy reversal, ‘is the worst economic depression in history to date’. See ‘Global Planned Financial Tsunami Has Just Begun’.

After listing a sequence of industry shutdowns and other measures in Europe because of energy shortages, Michael Snyder simply observes that ‘This is what an economic collapse looks like’, notes the prospect (also predicted by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and, as we saw above, the World Economic Forum) of ‘civil unrest’ and warns that ‘Europe is going to descend into “the new Dark Ages” this winter, and the entire world will experience extreme pain as a result.’ See ‘This Winter, Europe Plunges Into “The New Dark Ages”’.

According to Irina Slav, countries of the European Union have suffered a consistent decline in gas and electricity consumption this year amid record-breaking prices. Businesses are shutting down factories, downsizing or relocating, while production of such basic products as steel, zinc, aluminium, chemicals, plastics and ceramics has been cut substantially, if not slashed dramatically. Observing that the European Union is heading for a recession that is ‘quite clear to anyone watching the indicators’ she goes on to state that ‘Europe may well be on the way to deindustrialization’. See ‘Europe May See Forced De-Industrialization As Result Of Energy Crisis’.

Dr. Seshadri Kumar agrees. He has offered an intensively detailed critique of the economic fallout from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and events such as the sanctions against Russia and the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 & 2 gas pipelines. Following his careful analysis, he notes a series of conclusions including that ‘The scarcity of oil and gas, combined with the scarcity of commodities, will lead to the De-Industrialization of Europe in short order.’

‘Europe needs what Russia has (and what China has). It cannot do without those things. But Russia (and China) can do without what Europe has. They are self-sufficient. The financial impact of European sanctions on Russia is minimal. Therefore, economic sanctions against Russia (or China) will never work. But, because of the overwhelming dependence of Europe on Russian (and Chinese) goods, sanctions on Russia (or China) will utterly destroy Europe. The only hope for Europe to prevent a total economic catastrophe is to achieve an agreement with Russia that ends the current destructive sanctions as soon as possible, and at whatever political cost, including the abandonment of Ukraine and cession of Ukrainian territory to Russia. The longer this is postponed, the more extensive the permanent economic damage to Europe will be….

‘A New World Order is taking birth before our eyes….

‘The sanctions on Russia will be seen in hindsight as Europe’s Stalingrad as well as its Waterloo.’ See ‘The Coming European Economic Apocalypse’.

Commenting on the banking system, precious metals businessman Stefan Gleason warns that ‘The global fractional-reserve banking system is teetering on the brink of failure. Financial strains are exposing major banks as under-capitalized and ill prepared to weather additional strains from high inflation, rising interest rates, and a weakening economy. Banks operating outside the United States are presently most vulnerable. A spike in interest rates concomitant with a spike in the exchange rate of the Federal Reserve note “dollar” is wreaking havoc in global debt markets and driving capital flight. Many analysts fear bank runs are coming. They are already hitting developing countries.’ See ‘Banks on the Brink: Is Your Money Safe?’

Noting that imposition of technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and the war in Ukraine are impacting the labor force, among a wide variety of other impacts on society as a whole, ‘Winter Oak’ observes that while anticipating future employment trends is not easy, ‘the combined threat of pandemics and wars means the labour force is on the brink of an unprecedented reshuffle with technology reshaping logistics, potentially threatening hundreds of millions of blue and white collar jobs, resulting in the greatest and fastest displacement of jobs in history and foreshadowing a labour market shift which was previously inconceivable.’

Furthermore: the nation state model is being upended ‘by a global technocracy, consisting of an unelected consortium of leaders of industry, central banking oligarchs and private financial institutions, most of which are predominantly non-state corporate actors attempting to restructure global governance and enlist themselves in the global decision-making process.’ See ‘The Great Reset Phase 2: War’.

James Corbett simply observes that ‘the financial order we have known our whole lives is slated for destruction’. The demolition of the economy provides cover to conceal implementation of other key elements of the elite plan in which all fit neatly together: ‘vaccine passports introduce the digital ID. The digital ID provides the infrastructure for the CBDCs. The CBDCs provide a mechanism for enforcement of a social credit system.’ As Corbett notes: ‘To see these events as separate events unfolding haphazardly and coincidentally is to miss the entire point.’ See ‘The Controlled Demolition of the Economy’.

And, according to a source cited by Anviksha Patel, executives at the giant hedge-fund firm Elliott Management Corp. recently sent a letter to investors advising that the world is ‘on the path to hyperinflation’ which could lead to ‘global societal collapse and civil or international strife’. See ‘Hedge-fund giant Elliott warns looming hyperinflation could lead to “global societal collapse”’.

Among many other commentaries offering insight into one or more aspects of what is happening, Oxfam documents the fact that ‘billionaires in the food and energy sectors are increasing their fortunes by $1 billion dollars every two days’ and that a new billionaire is being created every 30 hours while nearly a million people are being pushed into extreme poverty at nearly the same rate. See ‘Pandemic creates new billionaire every 30 hours – now a million people could fall into extreme poverty at same rate in 2022’.

But perhaps the most evocative account of what is transpiring is offered by Egon von Greyerz, founder and managing partner of Matterhorn Asset Management in Switzerland, a company that has ‘always held a deep respect for analysing and managing risk’: By the end of the 1990s, it was clear ‘that global [financial] risk was growing increasingly apparent as debts and derivative levels rapidly rose’. See Matterhorn Asset Management: History.

Noting that laws governing the functioning of modern economies ensure that ‘No banker, no company management or business owner ever has to take the loss personally if he makes a mistake. Losses are socialised and profits are capitalised. Heads I win, Tails I don’t lose!’ Greyerz goes on to note that ‘there are honourable exceptions.’ Some Swiss banks still operate in accordance with the principle of unlimited personal liability for the partners/owners which clearly encourages a responsible, ethical approach to the conduct of business.

He observes: ‘If the global financial system and governments applied that principle, imagine how different the world would look not just financially but also ethically.’ If we had such a system, he contends, then human values would come before adoration of ‘the golden calf’. And evaluation of an investment proposal or a loan would be based on a judgment about its soundness economically and ethically, as well as a judgment that the risk of loss was minimal, rather than just the size of the personal profit it might return.

Instead, since 1971 (when President Nixon unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar into gold, effectively ending the 1944 Bretton Woods system) ‘governments and central banks have contributed to the creation of almost $300 trillion of new money plus quasi money in the form of unfunded liabilities and derivatives [‘the most dangerous and aggressive financial instrument of destruction’] of $2.2 quadrillion making $2.5 [quadrillion] in total. As debt explodes, the world could easily face a debt burden of $3 quadrillion by 2025-2030.’ At the same time, ‘Central banks around the world hold $2 trillion [in gold reserves].’

The outcome is inevitable: ‘with over $2 quadrillion (2 and 15 zeros) of debt and liabilities resting on a foundation of $2 trillion of government-owned gold that makes a gold coverage of 0.1% or a leverage of 1000X!… an inverse pyramid with a very weak foundation.’ Noting that a sound financial system ‘needs a very solid foundation of real money’ it is simply the case that quadrillions of debt and liabilities ‘can not survive resting on this feeble amount of gold. So the $2 quadrillion financial weapon of mass destruction is now on the way to totally destroy the system. This is a global house of cards that will collapse at some point in the not too distant future…. No government and no central bank can solve the problem that they have created. More of the same just won’t work.’ See ‘$2 Quadrillion Debt Precariously Resting on $2 Trillion Gold’.

The most likely outcome, according to Greyerz: ‘The dollar will go to ZERO and the US will default. The same will happen to most countries.’ See ‘In the End the $ Goes to Zero and the US Defaults’.

The fundamental summary then, according to Greyerz, is this: ‘This system will start to implode.’… ‘The whole banking system is rotten. With the problems in Europe now it is actually a critical situation…. We have a two tier economy:… the rich are still rich but the poor are really poor. And you see that in every country in the world now… People haven’t got enough money to live…. This is going to be a human disaster of major proportions: it’s so sad and governments will not have any chance of doing anything about it.’ In the US outside the metropolitan areas, ‘the poverty is incredibly high and people live in boxes… poverty is everywhere and sadly, we are only seeing the beginning and there is no solution…. From a human point of view, we are looking at a major disaster.’ Watch ‘$2.5 Quadrillion Disaster Waiting to Happen’.

Will action be taken to halt the collapse? According to alternative economist Brandon Smith, it won’t. Consider this: ‘What if the goal of the Fed is the destruction of the middle class?… What if they are luring investors into markets with rumors of a pivot, tricking those investors into pumping money back into markets and then triggering losses yet again with more rate hikes and hawkish language? What if this is a wealth destruction steam valve? What if it’s a trap? I present this idea because we have seen this before in the US, from 1929 through the 1930s during the Great Depression. The Fed used very similar tactics to systematically destroy middle class wealth and consolidate power for the international banking elites.’

Smith’s conclusion? ‘This is an engineered crash, not an accidental crash.’ See ‘Markets Are Expecting The Federal Reserve To Save Them – It’s Not Going To Happen’.

And that, of course, is the point: the crash has been engineered. Why?

In summarizing the ongoing collapse of European infrastructure and industry, and energy shortages in the USA, Mike Adams notes that the ‘globalists are decimating the pillars of civilization in order to cause collapse and depopulation…. The overarching goal is to exterminate the vast majority of the human population, then enslave the survivors.’ See ‘Dark Times: Industry and infrastructure collapsing by the day across Europe and the USA’.

But this is no surprise. All that any thoughtful observer needs to do is consider history, listen to what the Global Elite is telling us they are doing, observe them doing it, and then simply inform people what is at hand: The destruction of the global economy, as part of the fundamental reshaping of world order.

After all, the Elite has been crystal clear. It’s fundamental aim is to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and reduce those humans and transhumans left alive to slavery while confined in their technocratic prison; even wealth concentration is anciliary to that, although a product of it. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’ And if you crash the global economy denying people regular food, energy to stay warm and the capacity to communicate effectively, most of those left alive will be inclined to submit to whatever conditions they are offered in order to survive. How bad does your technocratic prison sound now? Even if you are eating insects?

So, to reiterate a vital point, the Elite agenda in relation to the economy is intimately related to its wider agenda in relation to eugenics and technocracy.

In an interview about her recently published book – see One Nation Under Blackmail: The sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein – Whitney Webb simply observes that ‘we are being herded into a technofeudalism, slavery… there’s a lot of different names for it going around but it’s not good and it’s organized crime running the show’…. Elaborating, Webb explained that ‘They’re looking at feudalism and how do you create a class of slaves that cannot even cognitively rebel ever again.’ Watch ‘How Elites Will Create a New Class of Slaves’.

How will this happen? While it will obviously require several of the range of measures being introduced, particularly including the deployment of 5G, the digitization of your identity and the utilization of a range of other technologies such as artificial intelligence and geofencing, here is what Clive Thompson, retired Managing Director of Union Bancaire Privée in Switzerland, believes might happen:

‘I think its quite likely that the CBDC will arrive and it will also be the subject of the currency reset at the same time. At some point the world is going to go into a crisis or a country is going to go into a crisis…. When that happens I think they will close the banks, you will wake up on a Sunday morning and hear the news that they’ve shut the banks, they’re not going to open on Monday. Then by Monday evening or Tuesday you’ll get the announcement that we’re having a new currency – the CBDC – and don’t worry it will be one-to-one against the old currency but there will be some restrictions on your ability to convert your old money into the new money.

‘So if you’re poor and you have a small bank account it will be converted one-to-one straight away, and you’ll probably even find that you get a free gift from the government to kickstart the system, maybe three or five thousand pounds will be given to every citizen gratuitiously to kickstart the new system to the new CBDC. But if you have a hundred thousand or a million in the bank you’re going to be told ‘Yes, it’s one-to-one but you’re going to have to wait to convert it to the new currency.’ Now “wait” means “never”, we all know that. But they won’t tell you that. They’ll say it’s a temporary suspension because we’re in the middle of a crisis, the people are rioting in the street, we need to calm the system so ‘Here’s some free money everybody, go and enjoy yourselves.’…

‘So I think the CBDC will arrive as a consequence of a crisis and when that happens there will be a limitation on how much of your old currency you can convert, at one-to-one, with the new one…. But the advantage of this, from the government’s point of view, is it’s to all intents and purposes wiping the slate clean because all their liabilities will be denominated in a currency that nobody can use, nobody can spend.’ Watch ‘The Currency Reset Will Wipe Out Creditors and Usher in CBDCs. Part 1’.

In preparing to cope with the disruption this must inevitably cause, among other assets that would be critically useful while retaining value, such as open-pollinated (non-hybrid) seeds, Thompson suggests gold and silver (including gold and silver coins), land, property, equities, collectibles (such as art and rarer coins), machine and other tools, electricity generators, useful items, animals, firewood, washing powder, canned food and house extensions. See ‘The Currency Reset Will Wipe Out Creditors and Usher in CBDCs. Part 2.’

Of course, Thompson might be wrong in his prediction of precisely how the technocratic state will ultimately be imposed. But imposed it will be, one way or another, unless we are effectively resisting the foundational components of the Elite program.

Is cryptocurrency part of the answer?

Many people are suggesting cryptocurrencies as one way around some of the problems we face. However, the very basis of sound economy for any world that is unfolding is self-reliance, particularly in relation to essential needs around food, water, clothing, shelter and energy, within a local, sustainable community that is as self-sufficient as possible, and able to nonviolently defend itself.

Complemented by use of local markets and trading schemes – whether using local currencies or goods and services directly – this will maximise economic survival prospects for those participating (and no doubt some others besides).

Anything that is internet-based will become increasingly vulnerable, and there are definitely plans to shut down some/all of it, depending on the scenario. Cyber Polygon makes that crystal clear. See ‘Taking Control by Destroying Cash: Beware Cyber Polygon as Part of the Elite Coup’.

And unless a currency is backed by something with genuine value – as currencies were backed by gold or other metals in earlier eras – or there is widespread confidence in a currency for another reason (as currencies around the world have been backed by their governments until now), it can become valueless very quickly.

Moreover, the big banks are heavily invested in cryptocurrencies: Another reason to be wary. See ‘3 Banks That Have Big Plans for Blockchain and Cryptocurrency’.

But for an extremely succinct warning against crypto, check out this brief statement from Catherine Austin Fitts: ‘If you move to crypto, and I just want to really underscore this, crypto is not a currency, it is a control system.’ See ‘The Dangers Of Cryptocurrencies’.

And, perhaps, the recent bankruptcy of the FTX Group is worth considering. See ‘“This Is Unprecedented”: Enron Liquidator Overseeing FTX Bankruptcy Speechless: “I Have Never Seen Anything Like This”’.

For another of the many critiques of crypto, see retired corporate accountant Lawrence A. Stellato’s ‘The Dangers of Cryptocurrencies’.

Crypto has a high environmental cost too, given the technology it uses and the energy it needs to run.

In essence: Just not part of the future we must work together to build.

The Rothschilds and Transhumanism

Before concluding this investigation, it is worth returning to consideration of the Rothschild family in relation to one final issue: Transhumanism.

Why is this important?

Throughout this investigation, I have endeavoured to document a few basic facts: The Global Elite is intent on reshaping world order by killing off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslaving those left alive as transhuman slaves imprisoned in ‘smart’ cities. As part of achieving this outcome, the global economy is being ransacked and destroyed: This is intended to deprive people of the sustenance necessary to resist the entire Elite program that, among other outcomes, will concentrate virtually all remaining wealth in Elite hands.

This program has been planned in detail by elite agents in organizations like the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization and is being implemented by relevant international organizations and multinational corporations (particularly those in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and the corporate media), as well as national governments and medical organizations.

But, as I have pointed out, every organization, corporation and government is composed of individual human beings who make decisions (consciously or unconsciously) about what they do in any given circumstance. And while structural power is not something that can be ignored, individuals do have agency.

To illustrate this point, I have used the House of Rothschild as one example of a family of individuals who make decisions about how to act in the world and how the decisions of this family exercise enormous influence over world events. Consider another brief example of the decisions made by Rothschild family members and what has transpired as a result.

The Rothschild influence over world banking and the global economy, and thus political systems, is heavily documented and illustrated above. So, given the current Elite push to substantially reduce the human population and introduce a technocratic state populated by transhuman slaves, one question that inevitably suggests itself as worthy of further investigation concerns the possible involvement of the Rothschilds in the research and development of the technologies and biotechnologies that make this all possible.

An investigation soon reveals that Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, the 3rd Baron Rothschild, was born in 1910 and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read physiology, later gaining a PhD. After working for MI5 during World War II, ‘he joined the zoology department at Cambridge University from 1950 to 1970. He served as chairman of the Agricultural Research Council from 1948 to 1958 and as worldwide head of research at Royal Dutch/Shell [as noted above, a family business] from 1963 to 1970.’ See ‘Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild’.

Beyond this, however, articles in ‘The Financial Times’ in 1982-1983 reveal that N.M. Rothschild, of which the biologist Lord Rothschild was head, had established a venture capital fund called Biotechnology Investments in 1981 to attract £25m investments for biotechnology research. However, the fund, registered in the tax haven of Guernsey, had such exacting scientific and financial standards that it was having trouble identifying companies that could meet those standards despite the rapidly growing field. According to one news report in 1982: ‘City [of London] estimates put the number of new technology companies established in the last five years at about 150, mostly in North America. At least 70 are practising genetic engineering.’ See ‘Newsclippings re. Biotechnology Investments Limited (BIL) owned by N.M. Rothschild Asset Management’.

But lest you are concerned that the Rothschilds failed to establish a firm foothold in this fledgling industry, you might be reassured, but no wiser, to read the entry on the CHSL Archives Repository (that focuses on ‘Preserving and promoting the history of molecular biology’) titled ‘Rothschild Asset Management – Rothschild, Lord Victor’.

You will be no wiser because the archive is marked ‘Closed until Jan 2045 – Suppress all images for 60 years’.

As it turns out, however, the Rothschilds, whose business acumen is never questioned, are still raising funds and investing heavily in biotechnology. See ‘Edmond de Rothschild private equity unit to invest in biotech’. It’s just that, as usual, while you are hearing from elite agents (such as Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harari and Elon Musk) who publicly promote transhumanist endeavours, you are hearing very little from those, like the Rothschilds, who prefer control and profit to publicity.

Consequently, the Rothschilds are playing a key role both in the ongoing ransacking of the global economy and in profiting from the control they are helping to make possible through introduction of transhumanist technologies. It goes without saying that the family has heavy investments in many other technologies too, including those that will be critical to the success of the imminent technocratic world order, such as the Internet of Things. See, for example, Rothschild Technology Limited.

Of course, the Rothschilds and other Elite families with whom they are interconnected in various ways are also heavily involved through investments in major asset management corporations such as Vanguard and BlackRock. But again, it is not just about wealth concentration; it is about control and depopulation too. So, for example, the Rockefellers, another family closely connected to the Rothschilds, are also well-known for their longstanding involvement in social engineering and eugenics. See ‘Where Did this “New World Order” Coup Come From? The Rockefeller’s “Social Engineering Project”’ and ‘Killing Off Humanity: How the Global Elite is using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shape Our Future’.

So What Can We Do about This?

Because it controls the political, economic, financial, technological, medical, educational, media and other important levers of society, the Elite profits hugely from daily human activity. But it can also precipitate an ‘extreme event’ (or the delusion of one) – a war, financial crisis (including depression), revolution, ‘natural disaster’, ‘pandemic’ (if you think that the Covid-19 scam was the last of its kind, see ‘Who’s Driving the Pandemic Express?’ and watch the plan for the next one, already available: ‘Catastrophic Contagion’) – and use its control of the political, economic, technological and other levers mentioned to manage how events unfold while simultaneously managing the narrative about what is taking place so that the truth is concealed.

This means that the Elite’s killing and exploitation of the human population at large is hidden behind whatever ‘enemy’ (human or otherwise) that Elite agents in government and the media direct the attention of the public towards at any given time.

It doesn’t matter whether we all end up blaming Hitler, Saddam or ‘the Russians’, ‘the capitalists’ or ‘Wall Street’, ‘the government’, ‘the climate’ or ‘the virus’, we never blame the Elite. So we never take action that is focused on stopping those individuals and their corporations and institutions that are fundamentally responsible for inflicting unending harm on us all, as well as the Earth and all of its other creatures too.

Fortunately, while the Elite is adept at devising an ever-expanding range of tools that can be used to manipulate events while simultaneously concealing this behind a barrage of propaganda, there is still just enough time to finally recognize what is happening and to end it. Otherwise, just as in the board game ‘Monopoly’, where one player finally owns everything and the other players have been forced out of the game, the Elite will win the ‘final battle’ against humanity, capture all wealth and reduce those humans and transhumans left alive to the status of slaves. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

Does this sound insane to you? Of course it is. Do you think the Elite is insane? Of course it is. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with further detail in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

But just because someone is insane and their plan is insane, it doesn’t mean they cannot succeed. Remember Adolf Hitler? Idi Amin in Uganda? Pol Pot in Cambodia? Insane violence of unspeakable magnitude can succeed if too many people either cannot perceive the insanity, are afraid of it or simply believe it is too preposterous – ‘It can’t be true.’ – and do nothing about it. Or, in the cases just mentioned, not until it was too late to prevent vast killing.

So here is the summary: Humanity faces the gravest threat in our history. But because our opponent – the Global Elite – is insane, we cannot rely on reason or thoughtfulness alone to get us out of this mess: You cannot reason with insanity. And because the Global Elite controls international and national political processes, the global economy and legal systems, efforts to seek redress through those channels must fail. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

Hence, if we are going to defeat this long-planned, complex and multifaceted threat, we must defeat its foundational components, not delude ourselves that we can defeat it one threat at a time or even by choosing those threats we think are the worst and addressing those first.

This is because the elite program, whatever its flaws and inconsistencies, as well as its potential for technological failure at times, is deeply integrated so we must direct our efforts at preventing or halting those foundational components of it that make everything else possible. This is why random acts of resistance will achieve nothing. Effective resistance requires the focused exercise of our power. In simple terms, we must be ‘strategic’.

If you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

In addition and more simply, you can download the one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, recently updated and now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.

If this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).

And if you want to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.

If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.

In parallel with our resistance, we must create the political, economic and social structures that serve our needs, not those of the Elite. That is why long-standing efforts to encourage and support people to grow their own food, participate in local trading schemes (involving the exchange of knowledge, skills, services and products with or without a local medium of exchange) and develop structures for cooperation, governance, nonviolent defence and networking with other communities are so important. Of course, indigenous peoples still have many of these capacities – lost to vast numbers of humans as civilization has expanded over the past five millennia – but many people are now engaged in renewed efforts to create local communities, such as ecovillages, and local trading schemes, such as Community Exchange Systems. Obviously, we must initiate/expand these forms of individual and community engagement in city neighbourhoods too.

Moreover, as Catherine Austin Fitts reminds us, if we choose that option, there is nothing to stop us having our own decentralised money system, starting with our own local community central bank and our own local community currency. Watch ‘We Need to Talk about Mr Global – Part Two’.

Finally, as noted by Professor Carroll Quigley in the very last words of his nearly-1,000 page epic Tragedy & Hope:

‘Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults.’ See Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, p. 947.

Fortunately, the passage of time since Quigley wrote these words has revealed an answer to this challenge. So, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.

Conclusion

Since the dawn of human civilization 5,000 years ago, in one context after another, some people who are more terrified than others in their immediate vicinity have sought what they perceived to be increased personal ‘security’ by gaining and exercising greater control over the people and resources around them.

Progressively, over time, this serious psychological dysfunctionality has been compounding until, today, the degree of ‘security’ and control that some people require includes all of us and all of the world’s resources. For want of a better term, we might call them the ‘Global Elite’ but it is important to understand that they are insane, criminal and ruthlessly violent.

This takeover of all of us and everything on Planet Earth is currently being attempted by this Elite through the ‘Great Reset’ and its related fourth industrial revolution, eugenicist and transhumanist agendas.

In essence, the intention is to kill off a substantial proportion of us, as is now happening, enclose the commons forever (and force those who live in regional areas off the land) while imprisoning those left alive as transhuman slaves in their technocratic ‘smart cities’ where we will ‘own nothing’ but provide the compliant workforce necessary to serve Elite ends.

Whether wars or financial crises (including depressions), ‘natural disasters’, revolutions or ‘pandemics’, great events are contrived by the Elite to distract attention from and facilitate profound changes in world order and obscure vast transfers of wealth from ordinary people to this Elite.

And this is done with the active complicity of Elite agents – including international organizations such as the United Nations, national governments and legal systems – which is why redress cannot be found through mainstream political or legal channels.

However, distracted by an endless stream of irrelevant ‘news’, superficial debates such as capitalism vs. socialism, monarchy vs. democracy, this political party vs. that political party, or even which football team is better, virtually all people are oblivious to how the world really works and who is orchestrating how history will be written by elite agents.

Is there conflict between individuals, families and groups within the Elite? Of course! But unlike the conflicts they endlessly throw in our faces to distract and manipulate us, the unifying agenda to which they all subscribe is to perpetually restructure world order to expand Elite control and extract more wealth for Elites. 5,000 years of human history categorically demonstrates that point.

Hence, if humanity is to defeat this Elite program, we must do it ourselves.

And if you want your resistance to this carefully-planned Elite technocratic takeover to be effective, then it must be strategic. Otherwise, your death or technocratic enslavement is now imminent.

I thank Anita McKone for thoughtful suggestions to improve the original draft of this investigation.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Why the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird is Widely Misunderstood

By Alex Constantine

Source: Constantine Report

In November, Newsweek, one of the most trusted news sources in the land, referred to Operation Mockingbird (CIA influence on the media, and, in many cases, infiltration) as “a supposed Cold War-era CIA program that is frequently referenced by QAnon conspiracy theorists.” (Source) Newsweek, of course, and the Washington Post were hubs in the Mockingbird network, so denial and misrepresentation are understandable.

But in the real world of CIA shenanigans …

Sourcewatch: “Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.

“The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis’ 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis’ book, alleging that the media had been recruited (infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions. More evidence of Mockingbird’s existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate “plumber” E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).”

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_CIA_and_journalism

Carl Bernstein wrote about the program at length in Rolling Stone, and he waasn’t a QAnon adherent. Neither were the many journalists who have documented the history of the CIA-media relationship.

A misunderstanding about the code name Mockingbird has led some investigative reporters to dispute the operation’s existence. An FOIA request is submitted to the CIA for any related records. The Agency responds that it has no files under that code name. The journalist does receive documents on a Project Mockingbird, but that was an unrelated media surveillance op, and had nothing to do with Wurlitzers pumping out military-industrial propaganda. The journalist does his research, he finds that the CIA has, in fact, influenced public opinion via the news media, but where is the nomenclature Operation Mockingbird?

The journalist then brow-beats “conspiracy theorists” for falling into rabbit holes.

The fault lies with the reporter who doesn’t do essential homework on the origins of the bird. Officially, there is no  “Operation Mockingbird,” for the simple reason that the CIA didn’t exist when the it was conceived. Truman signed the Agency into existence in 1947. Allen Dulles, who would be appointed as its director, christened Operation Mockingbird the year before the Agency was born. His ambition to control men’s minds was a glint in his eye at the time. Cold war loomed, and he considered propaganda to be a priority. Dulles began lining up publishers, editors and journalists for an undertaking he thought of as mass mind control.

Nearly all of the CIA’s mind control files were destroyed in January, 1973 at the direction of DCI Richard Helms, so it’s possible that OM documents were among them. (Source: “Joint Hearings Before the Select Committee on Intelligence,” August 3, 1977, p. 3.)

By the time the CIA was repurposed from the obsolete postwar OSS, Operation Mockingbird was already well underway. As CIA director, Dulles pressed on with his objective to manipulate the common volk with dodgy news copy and op-ed treatises. It was a Dulles initiative before the CIA took Mockingbird under its wing.

Frank Wisner, the notorious Nazi recruiter, was selected to oversee the program. Wisner was recruited by Dean Acheson 1947 for a slot in the State Department’s Office of Occupied Territories. Shortly thereafter, the CIA created a the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the covert operations division of the Agency,  and Wisner was put in charge of the off-the-books media operation. (“Project Mockingbird,” the CIA journalist surveillance op, may well have been a sub-program.) So Mockingbird was a going concern by 1950, the year given by SourceWatch, among others, for its inception. Another common misunderstanding is the assumption that, because the CIA interacts with the media, all news is “fake news.” It isn’t. The overwhelming majority of journalists are independent of control beyond the editor’s desk. The lion’s share of all news reports are accurate enough — with the exception of the ultra-conservative echo chamber. But “fake news” is planted in the public print. Reader’s Digest, for instance, was a Mockingbird disinformation outlet for decades, and still prints propaganda. But the magazine wasn’t filled cover-to-cover with CIA perception management. One or two articles on Cold War topics were dropped into a mix of compressed books, human interest pieces, recipes, dieting tips, and the usual Digest  mom’s-jowls content. In some instances, paid CIA assets wrote the political articles. It’s the occasional planted story that warps public opinion. It’s not all that heavy-handed, a poison pill not a sledge hammer.

Newsweek was (and is) among the magazines most useful to the Operation. The code name may be unofficial, but infiltration of the media is not hard to prove, and it doesn’t take a complicit news weekly to know which way the wind blows.

“Putin Has Misread the West (And) if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us”

Interview with Paul Craig Roberts

By Mike Whitney and Paul Craig Roberts

Source: The Unz Review

Question 1—You think that Putin should have acted more forcefully from the beginning in order to end the war quickly. Is that an accurate assessment of your view on the war? And—if it is—then what do you think is the downside of allowing the conflict to drag on with no end in sight?

Paul Craig Roberts—Yes, you have correctly stated my position. But as my position can seem “unAmerican” to the indoctrinated and brainwashed many, those who watch CNN, listen to NPR, and read the New York Times, I am going to provide some of my background before going on with my answer.

I was involved in the 20th century Cold War in many ways: As a Wall Street Journal editor; as an appointee to an endowed chair in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, part of Georgetown University at the time of my appointment, where my colleagues were Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor, and James Schlesinger, a Secretary of Defense and CIA director who was one of my professors in graduate school at the University of Virginia; as a member of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger; and as a member of a secret presidential committee with power to investigate the CIA’s opposition to President Reagan’s plan to end the Cold War.

With a history such as mine, I was surprised when I took an objective position on Russian President Putin’s disavowal of US hegemony, and found myself labeled a “Russian dupe/agent” on a website, “PropOrNot,” which may have been financed by the US Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the CIA itself, still harboring old resentments against me for helping President Reagan end the Cold War, which had the potential of reducing the CIA’s budget and power. I still wonder what the CIA might do to me, despite the agency inviting me to address the agency, which I did, and explain why they went wrong in their reasoning.

I will also say that in my articles I am defending truth, not Putin, although Putin is, in my considered opinion, the most honest player, and perhaps the most naive, in the current game that could end in nuclear Armageddon. My purpose is to prevent nuclear Armageddon, not to take sides. I remember well President Reagan’s hatred of “those godawful nuclear weapons” and his directive that the purpose was not to win the Cold War but to end it.

Now to Mike’s question, which is to the point. Perhaps to understand Putin we need to remember life, or how it was presented by the West to the Soviet Union and the American broadcasts into the Soviet Union of the freedom of life in the West where streets were paved with gold and food markets had every conceivable delicacy. Possibly this created in the minds of many Soviets, not all, that life in the Western world was heavenly compared to the hell in which Russians existed. I still remember being on a bus in Uzbekistan in 1961 when a meat delivery truck appeared on the street. All traffic followed the truck to the delivery store where a several block long line already waited. When you compare this life with a visit to an American supermarket, Western superiority stands out. Russian hankerings toward the West have little doubt constrained Putin, but Putin himself has been affected by the differences in life between the US in those times and the Soviet Union.

Putin is a good leader, a human person, perhaps too human for the evil he faces. One way to look at my position that Putin does too little instead of too much is to remember the World War II era when British Prime Minister Chamberlin was accused of encouraging Hitler by accepting provocation after provocation. My own view of this history is that it is false, but it remains widely believed. Putin accepts provocations despite having declared red lines that he does not enforce. Consequently, his red lines are not believed. Here is one report:

RT reported on December 10 that “The US has quietly given Ukraine the go-ahead to launch long-range strikes against targets inside Russian territory, the Times reported on Friday, citing sources. The Pentagon has apparently changed its stance on the matter as it has become less concerned that such attacks could escalate the conflict.”

In other words, by his inaction Putin has convinced Washington and its European puppet states that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations, which have gone from sanctions to Western financial help to Ukraine, weapons supply, training and targeting information, provision of missiles capable of attacking internal Russia, attack on the Crimea bridge, destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, torture of Russian POWs, attacks on Russian parts of Ukraine reincorporated into the Russian Federation, and attacks on internal Russia.

At some point there will be a provocation that is too much. That’s when the SHTF.

Putin’s goal has been to avoid war. Thus, his limited military objective in Ukraine to throw the Ukrainian forces out of Donbass meant a limited operation that left Ukrainian war infrastructure intact, able to receive and deploy advanced weapons from the West, and to force Russian withdrawals to lines more defensible with the very limited forces Putin committed to the conflict. The Ukrainian offensives convinced the West that Russia could be defeated, thus making the war a primary way of undermining Russia as an obstacle to Washington’s hegemony. The British press proclaimed that the Ukrainian Army would be in Crimea by Christmas.

What Putin needed was a quick victory that made it completely clear that Russia had enforceable red lines that Ukraine had violated. A show of Russian military force would have stopped all provocations. The decadent West would have learned that it must leave the bear alone. Instead the Kremlin, misreading the West, wasted eight years on the Minsk Agreement that former German Chancellor Merket said was a deception to keep Russia from acting when Russia could have easily succeeded. Putin now agrees with me that it was his mistake not to have intervened in Donbass before the US created a Ukrainian army.

My last word to Mike’s question is that Putin has misread the West. He still thinks the West has in its “leadership” reasonable people, who no doubt act the role for Putin’s benefit, with whom he can have negotiations. Putin should go read the Wolfowitz Doctrine. If Putin doesn’t soon wake up, Armageddon is upon us, unless Russia surrenders.

Question 2—I agree with much of what you say here, particularly this: “Putin’s inaction has convinced Washington… that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations.”

You’re right, this is a problem. But I’m not sure what Putin can do about it. Take, for example, the drone attacks on airfields on Russian territory. Should Putin have responded tit-for-tat by bombing supplylines in Poland? That seems like a fair response but it also risks NATO retaliation and a broader war which is definitely not in Russia’s interests.

Now, perhaps, Putin would not have faced these flashpoints had he deployed 500,000 combat troops to begin and leveled a number of cities on his way to Kiev, but keep in mind, Russian public opinion about the war was mixed at the beginning, and only grew more supportive as it became apparent that Washington was determined to defeat Russia, topple its government, and weaken it to the point where it could not project power beyond its borders. The vast majority of the Russian people now understand what the US is up-to which explains why Putin’s public approval ratings are presently at 79.4% while support for the war is nearly universal. In my opinion, Putin needs this level of support to sustain the war effort; so, postponing the mobilization of additional troops has actually worked to his benefit.

More importantly, Putin must be perceived to be the rational player in this conflict. This is absolutely essential. He must be seen as a cautious and reasonable actor who operates with restraint and within the confines of international law. This is the only way he will be able to win the continued support of China, India etc. We must not forget that the effort to build a multipolar world order requires coalition building which is undermined by impulsive, violent behavior. In short, I think Putin’s “go-slow” approach (your words) is actually the correct course of action. I think if he had run roughshod across Ukraine like Sherman on his way to the sea, he would have lost critical allies that will help him establish the institutions and economic infrastructure he needs to create a new order.

So, my question to you is this: What does a Russian victory look like? Is it just a matter of pushing the Ukrainian army out of the Donbas or should Russian forces clear the entire region east of the Dnieper River? And what about the west of Ukraine? What if the western region is reduced to rubble but the US and NATO continue to use it as a launching pad for their war against Russia?

I can imagine many scenarios in which the fighting continues for years to come, but hardly any that end in either a diplomatic settlement or an armistice. Your thoughts?

Paul Craig Roberts—I think, Mike, that you have identified the reasoning that explains Putin’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine. But I think Putin is losing confidence in his approach. Caution about approaching war is imperative. But when war begins it must be won quickly, especially if the enemy has prospects of gaining allies and their support. Putin’s caution delayed Russia’s rescue of Donbass for eight years, during which Washington created and equipped an Ukrainian army that turned what would have been an easy rescue in 2014 like Crimea into the current war approaching a year in duration. Putin’s caution in waging the war has given Washington and the Western media plenty of time to create and control the narrative, which is unfavorable to Putin, and to widen the war with US and NATO direct participation, now admitted by Foreign Minister Lavrov. The war has widened into direct attacks on Russia herself.

These attacks on Russia might bring the pro-Western Russian liberals into alignment with Putin, but the ability of a corrupt third world US puppet state to attack Russia is anathema to Russian patriots. The Russians who will do the fighting see in the ability of Ukraine to attack Mother Russia the failure of the Putin government.

As for China and India, the two countries with the largest populations, they have witnessed Washington’s indiscriminate use of force without domestic or international consequence to Washington. They don’t want to ally with a week-kneed Russia.

I will also say that as Washington and NATO were not constrained by public opinion in their two decades of wars in the Middle East and North Africa, based entirely on lies and secret agendas, what reason does Putin have to fear a lack of Russian public support for rescuing Donbass, formerly a part of Russia, from neo-Nazi persecution? If Putin must fear this, it shows his mistake in tolerating US-financed NGOs at work in Russia brainwashing Russians.

No, Putin should not engage in tit-for-tat. There is no need for him to send missiles into Poland, Germany, the UK, or the US. All Putin needs to do is to close down Ukrainian infrastructure so that Ukraine, despite Western help, cannot carry on the war. Putin is starting to do this, but not on a total basis.

The fact of the matter is that Putin never needed to send any troops to the rescue of Donbass. All he needed to do was to send the American puppet, Zelensky, a one hour ultimatum and if surrender was not forthcoming shut down with conventional precision missiles, and air attacks if necessary, the entirety of the power, water, and transportation infrastructure of Ukraine, and send special forces into Kiev to make a public hanging of Zelensky and the US puppet government.

The effect on the degenerate Woke West, which teaches in its own universities and public schools hatred of itself, would have been electric. The cost of messing with Russia would have been clear to all the morons who talk about Ukraine being in Crimea by Christmas. NATO would have dissolved. Washington would have removed all sanctions and shut up the stupid, war-crazy neoconservatives. The world would be at peace.

The question you have asked is, after all of Putin’s mistakes, what does a Russian victory look like? First of all, we don’t know if there is going to be a Russian victory. The cautious way that Putin reasons and acts, as you explained, is likely to deny Russia a victory. Instead, there could be a negotiated demilitarized zone and the conflict will be set on simmer, like the unresolved conflict in Korea.

On the other hand, if Putin is waiting the full deployment of Russia’s hypersonic nuclear missiles that no defense system can intercept and, following Washington, moves to first use of nuclear weapons, Putin will have the power to put the West on notice and be able to use the power of Russian military force to instantly end the conflict.

Question 3—You make some very good points, but I still think that Putin’s slower approach has helped to build public support at home and abroad. But, of course, I could be wrong. I do disagree strongly with your assertion that China and India “don’t want to ally with weak-kneed Russia”. In my opinion, both leaders see Putin as a bright and reliable statesman who is perhaps the greatest defender of sovereign rights in the last century. Both India and China are all-too-familiar with Washington’s coercive diplomacy and I’m sure they appreciate the efforts of a leader who has become the world’s biggest proponent of self-determination and independence. I’m sure the last thing they want, is to become cowering houseboys like the leaders in Europe who are, apparently, unable to decide anything without a ‘nod’ from Washington. (Note: Earlier today Putin said that EU leaders were allowing themselves to be treated like a doormat. Putin: “Today, the EU’s main partner, the US, is pursuing policies leading directly to the de-industrialization of Europe. They even try to complain about that to their American overlord. Sometimes even with resentment they ask ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ I want to ask: ‘What did you expect?’ What else happens to those who allow feet to be wiped on them?”)

Paul Craig Roberts—Mike, I agree that Russia for the reasons you provide is the choice partner of China and India. What I meant is that China and India want to see a powerful Russia that shields them from Washington’s interference. China and India are not reassured by what at times seems to be Putin’s irresolution and hesitancy. The rules that Putin plays by are no longer respected in the West.

Putin is correct that all European, and the Canadian, Australian, Japanese, and New Zealand governments, are doormats for Washington. What escapes Putin is that Washington’s puppets are comfortable in this role. Therefore, how much chance does he have in scolding them for their subservience and promising them independence? A reader recently reminded me about the Asch experiment in the 1950s, which found that people tended to conform to the prevalent narratives, and of the use to which Edward Bernays analysis of propaganda is put. And there is the information given me in the 1970s by a high government official that European governments do what we want because we “give the leaders bags of money. We own them. They report to us.”

In other words, our puppets live in a comfort zone. Putin will have a hard time breaking into this with merely exemplary behavior.

Question 4—For my final question, I’d like to tap into your broader knowledge of the US economy and how economic weakness might be a factor in Washington’s decision to provoke Russia. Over the last 10 months, we’ve heard numerous pundits say that NATO’s expansion to Ukraine creates an “existential crisis” for Russia. I just wonder if the same could be said about the United States? It seems like everyone from Jamie Diamond to Nouriel Roubini has been predicting a bigger financial cataclysm than the full-system meltdown of 2008. In your opinion, is this the reason why the media and virtually the entire political establishment are pushing so hard for a confrontation with Russia? Do they see war as the only way the US can preserve its exalted position in the global order?

Paul Craig Roberts—The idea that governments turn to war to focus attention away from a failing economy is popular, but my answer to your question is that the operating motive is US hegemony. The Wolfowitz Doctrine states it clearly. The doctrine says the principal goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that could serve as a constraint on US unilateralism. At the 2007 Munich security conference Putin made it clear that Russia will not subordinate its interest to the interest of the US.

There are some crazed neoconservatives in Washington who believe nuclear war can be won and who have shaped US nuclear weapons policy into a pre-emptive attack mode focused on reducing the ability of the recipient of a first strike to retaliate. The US is not seeking a war with Russia, but might blunder into one. The operative neoconservative policy is to cause problems for Russia that can cause internal problems, distract the Kremlin from Washington’s power moves, isolate Russia with propaganda, and even possibly pull off a color revolution inside Russia or in a former Russian province, such as Belarus, as was done in Georgia and Ukraine. People have forgot the US-instigated invasion of South Ossetia by the Georgian army that Putin sent in Russian forces to stop, and they have forgot the recent disturbances in Kazakhstan that were calmed by the arrival of Russian troops. The plan is to keep picking away at the Kremlin. Even if Washington doesn’t meet in every case with the success enjoyed in the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, the incidents succeed as distractions that use up Kremlin time and energy, result in dissenting opinions within the government, and that require military contingency planning. As Washington controls the narratives, the incidents also serve to blacken Russia as an aggressor and portray Putin as “the new Hitler.” The propaganda successes are considerable–the exclusion of Russian athletes from competitions, refusals of orchestras to play music of Russian composers, exclusion of Russian literature, and a general refusal to cooperate with Russia in any way. This has a humiliating effect on Russians and might be corrosive of public support for the government. It has to be highly frustrating for Russian athletes, ice skaters, entertainers, and their fans.

Nevertheless, the conflict in Ukraine can turn into a general war intended or not. This is my concern and is the reason I think the Kremlin’s limited go-slow operation is a mistake. It offers too many opportunities for Washington’s provocations to go too far.

There is an economic element. Washington is determined to prevent its European empire from being drawn into closer relations with Russia from energy dependence and business relationships. Indeed, some explain the economic sanctions as de-industrializing Europe in behalf of Washington’s economic and financial hegemony. See: https://www.unz.com/mhudson/german-interview/

Putin’s Sledgehammer

By Mike Whitney

Source: The Unz Review

“The Ukrainians are in bad shape… It won’t be long before the Ukrainians run out of food. It won’t be long before they freeze… They have done all that we can reasonably expect them to do. It’s time to negotiate…. before the offensive begins, because once it begins, there will be no further discussion between Moscow and Kiev until it is over to the satisfaction of the Russians.” Colonel Douglas MacGregor, “War in Ukraine; Quiet Before the Storm”, 15 minute-mark

“Strictly speaking, we haven’t started anything yet.” Russian President Vladimir Putin

The relentless attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid, fuel-storage units, railway hubs, and Command-and-Control centers mark the beginning of a second and more lethal phase of the war. The increased tempo of the high-precision, long-range missile attacks suggests that Moscow is laying the groundwork for a major winter offensive that will be launched as soon as Russia’s 300,000 reservists join their formations in east Ukraine. Kiev’s refusal to negotiate a settlement that addresses Russia’s core security concerns, has left Russian president Vladimir Putin with no other option but to defeat Ukrainian forces on the battlefield and impose a settlement through force-of-arms. The impending winter offensive is designed to deliver the knock-out punch Russia needs to achieve its strategic objectives and bring the war to swift end. This is from Reuters:

Russian missile strikes have crippled almost half of Ukraine’s energy system, the government said on Friday, and authorities in the capital Kyiv warned that the city could face a “complete shutdown” of the power grid as winter sets in.

With temperatures falling and Kyiv seeing its first snow, officials were working to restore power nationwide after some of the heaviest bombardment of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure in nine months of war.

The United Nations says Ukraine’s electricity and water shortages threaten a humanitarian disaster this winter.

“Unfortunately Russia continues to carry out missile strikes on Ukraine’s civilian and critical infrastructure. Almost half of our energy system is disabled,” Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said….

“We are preparing for different scenarios, including a complete shutdown,” Mykola Povoroznyk, deputy head of the Kyiv city administration, said in televised comments.” (“Ukraine says half its energy system crippled by Russian attacks, Kyiv could ‘shutdown’”, Reuters)

Until recently, Russia had avoided targets that would dramatically impact civilian activities, but now military leaders have returned to a more conventional approach. Presently, the military is destroying whatever facilities, transformers, storage units, substations, rail yards and energy depots that allow Ukraine to continue to wage war. Clearly –as the bigger and more powerful state — it was always within Russia’s ability to take a sledgehammer to Ukraine and break it into a million pieces, but Putin chose to hold back hoping that Kiev would come to its senses and see the hopelessness of its cause. And –despite the deluge of western propaganda to the contrary– the outcome of this war has never been in doubt. Russia is going to impose a settlement on Kiev and that settlement will require the government to cut all ties with NATO and to sign a treaty declaring its neutrality into perpetuity. Russia is not going to allow a hostile military alliance to place its missile sites and combat troops on its western flank. That won’t happen.

Unfortunately, Russia’s military operation is going to greatly increase the suffering of the Ukrainian people who find themselves locked in a cage-match between the Washington and Moscow. This is from the World Socialist Web Site:

Poverty in Ukraine has increased more than tenfold since the outbreak of the US/NATO-Russia war, according to the latest data from the World Bank (WB). Officially, 25 percent of the country’s population is now poor, up from supposedly just 2 percent before February 2022… With officials predicting that the poverty rate could rise to as much as 60 percent or more next year, levels of deprivation are emerging in Ukraine that have not been witnessed on the European continent since the end of World War II.

Unemployment is now running at 35 percent, and salaries have fallen by as much as 50 percent over the spring and summer for some categories of workers. … according to the International Monetary Fund, Ukraine’s public debt has now soared to 85 percent of GDP…. A recently released joint study by the World Health Organization and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health found that 22 percent of people in Ukraine cannot access essential medicines. For the country’s 6.9 million internally displaced, that number rises to 33 percent.

The medications that are hardest to get—those that treat blood pressure, heart problems and pain, as well as sedatives and antibiotics—reveal a population struggling to cope with decades of poverty-induced ill health and the physical and psychological trauma of war.

While US and NATO officials are able to dispatch massive amounts of firepower to Ukraine’s front lines within a matter of weeks, the delivery of life-saving humanitarian goods is seemingly an impossible logistical challenge.” (“Poverty skyrockets in Ukraine”, World Socialist Web Site)

Washington’s proxy-war on Moscow has inflicted incalculable suffering on the people of Ukraine who now face plunging temperatures, dwindling food supplies, a crashing economy and a growing shortage of essential medications. And despite the chest-thumping bravado over the recapturing of Kherson, the Ukrainian people will now be forced to flee their battered homeland by the millions seeking refuge in Europe which has already slipped into a post-industrial slump brought on by Uncle Sam’s reckless provocations. How many of these working-class Ukrainians would have preferred that their leaders reach an accommodation with Putin (regarding his legitimate security concerns) rather than engaging the Russian army in a pointless war which has cost them their homes, their jobs, their cities, and (for many) their lives? And do the people outside the country who claim to “Stand With Ukraine” realize that they are actually supporting the impoverishment and immiseration of millions of civilians that are caught in a geopolitical crossfire between Washington and Russia? Anyone who genuinely cares about Ukraine should support Ukrainian neutrality and an end to NATO expansion. That is the only way this war is going to end. Russian security will be achieved by-way of a treaty or an iron-fist. The choice is Ukraine’s. This is from an article titled ‘Russia Is Right: The U.S. Is Waging a Proxy War in Ukraine‘:

“The war in Ukraine isn’t just a conflict between Moscow and Kyiv, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently declared. It is a “proxy war” in which the world’s most powerful military alliance … is using Ukraine as a battering ram against the Russian state … Lavrov is … not wrong. Russia is the target of one of the most ruthlessly effectively proxy wars in modern history.”

The US foreign policy establishment does not care about Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. The country is merely a launching pad for Washington’s war on Russia. That is why the CIA toppled the democratically-elected government in Kiev in 2014 and that is why the CIA armed and trained Ukrainian paramilitaries to fight the Russian military in 2015 (7 years before the invasion!) Here’s some background from a 2015 article at Yahoo News:

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials….

“The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”

…the CIA and other U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian insurgency, should Russia launch a large-scale incursion.

…“We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. …representatives from both countries also believe that Russia won’t be able to hold on to new territory indefinitely because of stiff resistance from Ukrainian insurgents, according to former officials.

If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official…

“All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said the former senior intelligence official, “they can expect to see that in spades with these guys.” (“CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades”, Yahoo News)

There it is in black and white. The plan to use Ukraine as a staging-ground for conducting a proxy-war on Russia preceded the invasion by at least 7 years. The Obama administration and their neocon allies set a trap for Russia in order to drag them into an Afghanistan-like quagmire that would deplete their resources and kill as many Russian servicemen as possible. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently admitted, the US wants to “weaken” Russia so it is unable to project power beyond its borders. Washington seeks unhindered access to Central Asia so it can encircle China with military bases and nuclear missiles. The US intends to control China’s growth while dominating the world’s most populous and prosperous region of the next century, Asia. But first, Washington must crush Russia, collapse its economy, isolate it from the global community, demonize it in its media, and topple its leaders. Ukraine is seen as the first phase in a much broader strategy aimed at regime change (in Moscow) followed by the forced fragmentation of the Russian state. The ultimate objective is the preservation of Washington’s preeminent role in the global order.

Putin’s winter offensive threatens to derail Washington’s plan to drag the conflict out for as long as possible. In the weeks and months ahead, Russia is going to intensify its assault on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Most of the country will be plunged into darkness, fuel supplies will dry up, food and water will become scarcer, communications will be cut off, and all rail-traffic will cease. Millions of civilians will flee to Europe while the entire country slowly grinds to a standstill. At the same time that Russian battalions overtake cities and towns east of the Dnieper, the Russian army will block vital supply-lines from Poland cutting off the flow of lethal weaponry and combat troops headed to the front. This, in turn, will lead to widespread capitulation among Ukrainian fighting units operating in the field which will force Zelensky to the negotiating table. Eventually, Russia will prevail and its legitimate security demands will be met. Here’s how Colonel Douglas MacGregor summed it up in a recent interview:

“What’s coming in the future is a very massive offensive... the kind of offensive that I and many other military analysts expected at the beginning; Very decisive operations, multiple operational axes designed to effectively annihilate the enemy on the ground. And that’s what’s coming now, that’s what lies in the future.” (Colonel Douglas MacGregor, “War in Ukraine; Quiet Before the Storm”, you tube)

When the ground freezes, Russia’s offensive will begin.

Facebook Hired Ex-CIA, FBI Agents to Censor Content That Deviates From Official Narrative

So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: The Defender

Story at a glance:

  • Many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
  • So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
  • In January 1977, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s 25,000-word article was published in Rolling Stone, detailing the close relationship between the CIA and the press.
  • The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying hundreds of journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook’s values are based on the American tradition of free expression. Yet, censorship on social media has gone mainstream as part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality.

In an official Facebook video, a Meta employee identified as “Aaron” states that he’s the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook,” deciding “what is acceptable and what is not.” These gatekeepers effectively dictate what the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see when they’re scrolling their feeds.

In all, 40,000 individuals are part of Facebook’s content moderation staff, yielding incredible power over public information. Writing for MintPress News, journalist Alan Macleod explains:

“It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day.

“Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.”

But according to Macleod’s MintPress investigation, many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI and DOD, to the extent that, he says, “some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.”

‘Aaron is CIA’

Facebook employee Aaron, featured in their marketing video, formerly worked for the CIA, up until July 2019, though this isn’t disclosed by Facebook. According to Macleod:

“In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA.

“For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, ‘wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,’ especially on ‘the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,’ his LinkedIn profile reads.

“None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.”

Meta is teeming with ex-government agents

Berman is not the only ex-CIA agent working at Facebook — far from it. So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.

Macleod’s investigation, for instance, uncovered the following ex-CIA agents at Facebook:

  • Deborah Berman, a trust and safety project manager for Meta, was an intelligence analyst at the CIA for 10 years.
  • Bryan Weisbard, now a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta, worked as a CIA intelligence officer from 2006 to 2010 before becoming a diplomat.

While at the CIA, his job involved leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns.”

  • Cameron Harris, a trust and safety project manager at Meta, was a CIA analyst until 2019.

Former members of other government agencies are also common at Meta. Macleod revealed:

  • Emily Vacher, who Facebook/Meta recruited to be a director of trust and safety, worked at the FBI from 2001 to 2011, becoming a supervisory special agent.
  • Mike Bradow, employed as a misinformation policy manager at Meta since 2020, worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2010 to 2020.

“USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua,” Macleod noted.

  • Neil Potts, Facebook’s vice president of trust and safety, is a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps.
  • Sherif Kamal, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a program manager at the Pentagon until 2020.
  • Joey Chan, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a commanding officer for the U.S. Army until 2021, where he oversaw more than 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.

Ex-intelligence officers in control of what you see

Meta is appearing increasingly like another branch of government put in place to mold the views of society, as with a workforce composed of ex-intelligence agents, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to remain impartial.

Macleod wrote:

“Hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power.

“Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.

“Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, ‘woke’ organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial.

“It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of ‘black sites’ where prisoners are repeatedly tortured.

“Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.”

CIA history of control and corruption

For instance, U.S. intelligence agencies kept watch on Ukrainian nationalist organizations as a source of counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Declassified CIA documents show close ties between U.S. intelligence and Ukrainian nationalists since 1946.

After WWII, Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most radical section of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was founded in 1929 and had the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure, independent Ukraine, and other Ukrainian Nazi leaders fled to Europe, and the CIA helped protect them.

The CIA later informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it had concealed Bandera and other Ukrainians from the Soviets.

While the Nuremberg trials brought justice to the leaders of fascist Germany, “the Ukrainian Nazis were spared the same fate, and some were even granted indulgences by the CIA.”

According to the film “Ukraine on Fire,” “By 1951, the Agency [CIA] excused the illegal activities of OUN’s security branch in the name of Cold War necessity.”

In another disturbing example, one of the first scientists assigned to Fort Detrick’s secret biological warfare laboratory during WWII was bioweapons expert Frank Olson. In 1953, Olson died after plummeting to the ground from a high-rise hotel room window in Manhattan.

Days earlier, he had been secretly drugged by the CIA, which claimed Olson’s death was a suicide. Decades later, however, it was revealed that Olson didn’t jump from the window — he was deliberately murdered after the CIA became concerned that he might reveal disturbing top-secret operations.

This includes the CIA’s top-secret MK-Ultra project, which engaged in mind control experiments, human torture and other medical studies, including how much LSD it would take to “shatter the mind and blast away consciousness.”

Controlling the media is the ‘CIA’s dream’

The collusion of the media with government agencies is nothing new. In January 1977, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s 25,000-word article was published in Rolling Stone, detailing the close relationship between the CIA and the press.

Bernstein described full-time CIA agents who worked as journalists and more than 400 U.S. journalists who secretly carried out assignments for the CIA over a 25-year period.

The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news. Activist Post added:

“Implementing a fact-checking solution that is a centralized mechanism powered by journalists they could easily control is certainly the CIA’s … dream, as a CIA director was once quoted stating that once the public’s perception is confused about what is real and what is propaganda then their mission would be complete.

“Now you might think the CIA owning journalists is conspiratorial, but it happened with MKultra’s Operation Mockingbird.”

As further noted by Monthly Review, the situation has only gotten worse, as evidenced by the steady stream of ex-CIA agents now heading up policy and content moderation at Facebook. “The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media,” the news outlet noted, adding:

“Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world.

“Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.”

Social media infiltrated by government agencies

To be clear, it’s not only Facebook that’s relying on former CIA agents to decide what you can see. Other social media giants are similarly affected, employing individuals from a multitude of government agencies.

“In previous investigations,” Macleod wrote, “this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council.”

However, he says, “the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.”

What does this mean for the information you see on a daily basis, assuming you’re one of the billions who take a peek or two at Facebook during the day? Macleod explained:

“The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.

“In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability.

“The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s.

“And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.”