Category Archives: civil liberties

Assange prosecution relied on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted pedophile

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Intrepid Report

The Icelandic newspaper Stundin reports that a key witness in the US prosecution of Julian Assange has admitted in an interview with the outlet that he fabricated critical accusations in the indictment against the WikiLeaks founder.

“A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder,” Stundin reports. “The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.”

BREAKING: Lead witness in US case against Julian Assange admits to fabricating evidence against him in exchange for a deal with the FBI #Assange https://t.co/kZxsTi62q0

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 26, 2021

This major witness would be Iceland’s Sigurdur “Sigi” Thordarson, a paid FBI informant who after his short-lived association with WikiLeaks has been found guilty of sexually abusing nine boys as well as embezzlement, fraud, and theft in his home country. A court-appointed psychologist has found him to be a sociopath.

“The court found that Sigurður is by all definitions a sociopath, suffering from a severe anti-social personality disorder. However, the court found that he did know the difference between right and wrong and could not be considered insane and could therefore stand trial,” Iceland Magazine reported in 2015 during Thordarson’s child abuse case.

This was all public knowledge when the US government was building its case to extradite Julian Assange to America and try him under the Patriot Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes, a prosecution for which Assange is still locked up in Belmarsh Prison pending Washington’s appeal of a UK court’s denial of the extradition request. And now we know for a fact that the odious person whose testimony formed the basis for much of that prosecution was lying.

“US officials presented an updated version of an indictment against him to a Magistrate court in London last summer,” Stundin says. “The veracity of the information contained therein is now directly contradicted by the main witness, whose testimony it is based on.”

What this means is that the US decided to add more accusations to its previous indictment because charging a journalist for standard journalistic practices was too weak on its own, and now this decision has bitten them in the ass.

The article’s authors explain that contrary to the claims in that indictment, “Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs” and “further admits the claim, that Assange had instructed or asked him to access computers in order to find any such recordings, is false.”

Judge Baraitser: “he also asked [Thordarson] to hack into computers to obtain information including audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials, including members of the Parliament, of the government of “NATO country 1”.”
This is false, says Thordarson https://t.co/oDXLARJuGK

— Kristinn Hrafnsson (@khrafnsson) June 26, 2021

Thordarson’s testimony was cited extensively by British Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser when she was providing her ruling on the extradition request which is currently under appeal, and it looks pretty silly now that we know it was bogus. Her ruling repeats the prosecution’s claim that Assange “asked Teenager to hack into computers to obtain information including audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials, including members of the Parliament,” but Thordarson has now recanted this claim.

While the judgement on the extradition request reads, “It is alleged that Mr. Assange and Teenager failed a joint attempt to decrypt a file stolen from a ‘NATO country 1′ [ code for Iceland] bank”, Thordarson told Stundin that “this actually refers to a well publicised event in which an encrypted file was leaked from an Icelandic bank and assumed to contain information about defaulted loans provided by the Icelandic Landsbanki,” and that “Nothing supports the claim that this file was even ‘stolen’ per se, as it was assumed to have been distributed by whistleblowers from inside the failed bank.”

While the ruling repeats the claim that Assange “used the unauthorized access given to him by a source, to access a government website of NATO country-1 used to track police vehicles,” Thordarson told Stundin that “Assange never asked for any such access.”

It should be. https://t.co/PhTi8PIKLJ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 26, 2021

These revelations are entirely damning.

“This is the end of the case against Julian Assange,” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, adding, “If Biden continues to seek the extradition of a publisher under an indictment poisoned top-to-bottom with false testimony admitted by its own star witness, the damage to the United States’ reputation on press freedom would last for a generation. It’s unavoidable.”

“Now it’s time to have an international inquiry on how Sweden, UK, US, Ecuador and Australia have handled the Julian Assange case. My FOIA provides evidence nothing is normal in this case,” tweeted investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi.

It just says so much that the most powerful government in the world, with all its essentially limitless resources, needed to build its case against Assange on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester. That’s how strong their case was against a journalist whose only “crime” was telling the truth about the powerful.

This after we learned that Assange and his lawyers were spied on by the CIA, that he is being tortured, that his seven-year de facto imprisonment prior to his two-year stay in Belmarsh was arbitrary detention and unjust from the very beginning, and that the pretext for keeping him there was itself fallacious.

This is a farce. The fact that this man remains behind bars is an outrage.

‘Rules-Based International Order’ Means Washington-Based International Order

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with “either disinformation activities or violent organizations” and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.

This would be the same US government that is imprisoning Julian Assange for journalism which exposed US war crimes, the same US government which paid for the weapons used to destroy more than 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza last month, the same US government whose unipolar domination of the planet is made possible by the journalism-destroying propaganda of the media-owning plutocratic class in alliance with sociopathic government agencies.

This would also be the same US government which constantly pays lip service to the need to protect the freedom of the press, as part of the “rules-based international order” it purports to uphold in the world.

The Biden administration has been bleating “rules-based order” so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Times voiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term “international law”. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:

For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”

…

Today, far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about 50 important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything from children’s rights to arms control. Its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are themselves violations of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.

Indeed, US government officials babble endlessly about “rules”, and the “rules” are literally always tools used for the benefit of the US government, and the US government literally always flouts those “rules” exponentially worse than any other government on earth.

What the phrase “rules-based order” actually means is Washington-based order. It means a world order imposed by the US government and its lackey states on pain of devastation and death, which exists solely to keep the US at the head of a unipolar empire. It means do as I say, not as I do. It means rules for thee but not for me. It means we decide what happens based on what suits our interests.

If you peel away all the narrative spin and outward politeness, the US empire just looks like any other tyrannical force that has ever existed throughout human history, except it kills a lot more people than most of the others. In the old days the thugs with the most effective killing force would dominate everyone else using terror, wearing frightening battle costumes adorned with the body parts of their enemies. Nowadays they still dominate everyone else using terror, except they do it while wearing suits, and while waxing self-righteously about the “rules-based international order”. And they are much better at killing.

There is no other government on earth that is less qualified to impose any “order” upon the world. This is the only government on earth which has killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, the only government on earth that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. Yemen alone completely delegitimizes any claim the US may have had to be the arbiter of “order” in the world, to say nothing of Iraq, Vietnam, Libya and all the other innumerable atrocities that this monstrous regime has inflicted upon our species.

The sooner humanity can extract the parasite that is the US empire from its skin, the better off the whole world will be.

US seizes PressTV.com and 32 other Iranian media website domains

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By Kevin Reed

Source: WSWS.org

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DoJ) confirmed on Tuesday that the US had seized 33 websites affiliated with the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three others operated by Kata’ib Hizballah (Hezbollah Brigades), an Iraqi Shia group supported by Iran.

In a press statement, the DoJ stated that the website domains—including the English and French language PressTV.com based in Teheran—were “in violation of US sanctions.” The statement said that the US Office of Foreign Assets and Control (OFAC) had “designated IRTVU as a Specially Designated National (SDN)” during the Trump administration in October 2020 for “being owned or controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC).”

The DoJ also said that organizations labeled as SDNs are “prohibited from obtaining services, including website and domain services, in the United States without an OFAC license” and that IRTVU “and others like it” are not news organizations but are used to launch “disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations.” It also claimed that the 33 website addresses were owned in the US by IRTVU which “did not obtain a license from OFAC prior to utilizing the domain names.”

In the case of Kata’ib Hizballah (KH), the DoJ says that it was both designated an SDN by OFAC and as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the Department of State in July 2009. It claims that KH has “committed, directed, supported or posed a significant risk of committing acts of violence against Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces” and also did not obtain an OFAC license prior to acquiring the domain names.

Whatever the public justifications provided for its aggressive act, the transparent political purpose of the Biden administration’s website seizures is the effort to ratchet up pressure on Iran amid ongoing negotiations in Vienna over the 2015 nuclear agreement and following the June 18 selection of the hardline conservative Ebrahim Raisi as the next Iranian president.

Iran’s foreign ministry on Wednesday called the seizure an example of a “systematic effort to distort freedom of speech on a global level and silence independent voices in media.”

One of the seized sites, Al-Masirah, is not owned by Iran, but by Ansarullah, the movement of the Houthis in Yemen, a faction the US has claimed to be “proxies” of Iran. The news outlet is headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon.

In a statement reported by RT, Al Masirah said it was “not surprised” by the seizure, as it “comes from those that have supervised the most heinous crimes against our people.” The website shutdown , “reveals, once again, the falsehood of the slogans of freedom of expression and all the other headlines promoted by the United States of America, including its inability to confront the truth,” the statement said.

Indicating the broader political aims of the website seizures, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US took over the domain name of the news website Palestine Today, which publishes the views of Gaza-based Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, redirecting the site to the same takedown notice.

Visits to the seized websites bring up a graphic with the headline, “This website has been seized” and a message that says the domain has been taken offline due to a “seizure warrant” issued under the authority of US code involving civil and criminal forfeiture and special powers given to the president during “unusual and extraordinary threat; declaration of national emergency.”

Some of the websites have been operating for many years, such as PressTV.com which was launched in 2007. The Wikipedia entry for the Iranian news and documentary network says that the annual budget of PressTV was $8.3 million and it had 400 employees worldwide as of 2009.

AP reported that most of the seized domains are .net, .com and .tv domains. The .net and .com domains are considered generic “top level domains” (TLDs) and they are controlled by the global provider of the domain name registry, Verisign, based in Reston, Virginia. The contract with Verisign is managed jointly by the US-based non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the US Department of Commerce.

The domain .tv is “owned by the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu but administered by the US company Verisign,” according to AP. Other news and media domains which are owned by Iran, such as the website PressTV.ir which also publishes in English, have not been affected by the seizures.

A similar action was taken by the DoJ under the Trump administration in November 2020, when the FBI seized 27 domain names it claimed were used by Iran’s IRGC to spread a “global covert influence campaign.” Coming from the number one worldwide purveyor of “influence campaigns” involving money, murder and military occupation, the unsubstantiated accusations against the Iran-based media outlets must be completely rejected as part of the preparations for further wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Meanwhile, the use by Biden of designations made by both the Obama and Trump administrations makes clear the fundamental agreement over foreign policy between the two parties of Wall Street and the US military-intelligence apparatus regardless of whether it is the Democrats or Republicans that control the executive or legislative branches of government.

The Culture of Vehicular Attacks

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On the Murder of Deona Marie Erickson

By CrimethInc.

On June 13, a driver attacked a demonstration in Minneapolis, killing Deona Marie Erickson. This is the result of years of right-wing efforts to normalize—and even legalize—vehicular attacks. Now the corporate media has ceased to prioritize covering them, paving the way for more killings. In dialogue with our comrades at It’s Going Down and on the ground in Minneapolis, we have prepared the following reflections on the implications of this.

Shortly before midnight on June 13, while demonstrators gathered at Lake Street and Girard Avenue to protest the murder of Winston Smith by sheriff’s deputies and US Marshals, a man named Nicholas Kraus drove his SUV into the crowd at high speed, killing Deona Marie Erickson. One Black anti-fascist militant who was on the ground at the time of the attack reports that it was clear to those present that it was an intentional attack: “You heard his engine from three blocks away.”

According to Unicorn Riot,

“Deona Erickson’s car was parked on the side of the street in a way that would protect the people who were gathering. She was sitting down on the sidewalk about 15 feet from her car moments before the perpetrator smashed directly against her car at a very high speed. Witnesses say she was then hit by her car and sent flying. Street medics on the scene resuscitated her but she later died at the hospital.”

Deona Marie Erickson had two daughters. She worked as a program manager at a center for disabled adults. Today would have been her 32nd birthday. She gave her life to protect those who protest police murder.

Demonstrators detained the driver, Nicholas Kraus. Eyewitnesses dispute police allegations that he was “pulled from his car”; reportedly, police did not respond until after the attack, sending riot police to threaten the crowd before an ambulance could arrive. Under the circumstances, the demonstrators’ response was measured, to say the least.

https://twitter.com/aishaforward10/status/1404509174516625408

The Culture of Vehicular Attacks

Let’s put this attack in context.

Fox News and the Daily Caller circulated a video encouraging their viewers to carry out vehicular attacks against protesters months ahead of the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville at which a self-identified neo-Nazi did exactly that, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people. Afterwards, leaked chats showed other neo-Nazis also planning to use vehicles to attack protesters.

In summer 2020, vehicular attacks surged in response to protests against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. Over a dozen people were killed in these and other attacks on the movement.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1404699241570705408

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1404699241570705408

Today, legislators around the United States are taking steps to criminalize protest activity, introducing a wide range of anti-protest bills. Foremost among them, Oklahoma and Florida lawmakers have passed laws guaranteeing civil and criminal immunity to drivers who hit demonstrators with vehicles, effectively granting vigilantes the right to crash cars into demonstrators. At the same time, Florida has introduced penalties of up to 15 years imprisonment for blocking traffic.

The message is clear enough. In short, lawmakers and police seek to crack down on pedestrians acting collectively to oppose state violence, while extending additional privileges to drivers who act individually to support state violence via their own attacks. The official institutions of the state have failed to leverage enough violence to suppress movements against police violence and white supremacy, so they are deputizing others to do so—a longstanding counterinsurgency strategy reflective of the colonial heritage of the United States.

On a fundamental level, the form of subjectivity that these lawmakers are promoting is what we might call a motorist subjectivity: consumerist, individualized, invested in the smooth functioning of the existing order, and regarding all other possibilities as threats. Structurally speaking, for the motorist, all other human beings—traffic as well as pedestrians—are obstacles, and the only imaginable journeys are dictated by the routes established by the state and the economy. The motorist wants to see the laws enforced on others, on the premise that it will reduce the ways that others might inconvenience him, but he doesn’t want the laws enforced on himself. Conceiving of our society as an entirely mapped world—the way that Google Maps does—in which all means of locomotion, all forms of agency, are individualized according to financial means, the motorist cannot imagine why people would assemble, off road or not, to challenge law enforcement itself.

As shocking as vehicular attacks are when they occur, they are an extension of the society in which they take place. They are anti-social, but they express and intensify the anti-social premises of our day-to-day relations with each other. Motorist versus pedestrian is a classic class opposition in a society in which transportation and mobility are fundamentally racialized. People who were raised on advertisements depicting jeeps off-roading across the suspiciously vacant landscape of the frontier only to find themselves sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway for an hour every day look around for someone to blame, and—as if by design—blame those with even less power than themselves. Road rage.

Right-wing online chatter in Minneapolis ahead of the attack that took Deona Marie Erickson’s life.

In this context, the chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” asserts another form of life, another way of relating to each other and conceiving of what our lives could be. Rather than framing vehicular attacks as aberrations from an otherwise peaceful social order—to be addressed, for example, by more policing—we have to understand them as one of the ugliest manifestations of a social structure that is fundamentally racist and anti-human, which can only be addressed via new forms of togetherness.

Honoring those whose lives have been taken by police and pro-police vigilantes is a first step towards this, and it is important that people have been doing this through shared presence in particular physical spaces. The internet—the information superhighway—tends to reinforce the motorist mentality of abstract competition and hostility. One of the most basic steps we can take towards creating a new social fabric on egalitarian terms is to encounter each other in person in ways that affirm the specificity of place.

This gives us more perspective on the ongoing efforts of city officials to evict the autonomous zone at the site where George Floyd was murdered, in order to open it up for “the free passage of traffic.” Rhetoric about “culture wars” is usually used to evoke a conflict between those on the fringe of the left and right, but here, we see centrist officials forcibly imposing a particular model for what our lives, relationships, and forms of grieving should be, even as they purport to be neutral.

Far-Right Murderers and Centrist Beneficiaries

Nicholas Kraus, a man with a history of domestic violence and abuse, is representative of the sort of dysfunctional, alienated men that far-right provocateurs aim to weaponize to carry out stochastic attacks on social movements.

This is effectively a watered-down version of the same strategy that ISIS has used in the Mideast in territories it does not control: taking advantage of the desperation, prejudice, and mental health issues of an entitled but disenfranchised population, the far right aims to disrupt popular mobilizations through consistent but deniable terror attacks. Their goal is to raise the risks of public organizing to such an extent that it becomes hard for movements to maintain momentum, in order to support state repression while opening up space for fascist groups to recruit and mobilize. In Turkey, this approach helped the despotic government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to crush what had been powerful social movements. The ultimate beneficiaries of this are not just far-right politicians, but also centrist capitalists who do not wish to see fundamental changes that could threaten their power.

Vigilante attacks are also advantageous for the city officials who would like to present themselves as “neutral” while suppressing the protest movements against the murders that the police they oversee regularly carry out. Vigilante attacks enable these officials to change the subject from the violence of the institutions they represent back to the question of how to “maintain order.”

“Some of these people with the megaphones, I guess their role is to get people riled up and get them in a space and march them around and educate them and tell them what their next big plans are and who they’re backing politics-wise and things like that.

“I like community, organic—no microphones, no megaphones, like right now. It’s about fifty people—but fifty people got Lake and Hennepin shut down right now, you know what I’m saying? We’re moving and grooving right now. As opposed to two or three hundred people holding signs, marching around, and then feeling accomplished, patting themselves on the back and then leaving—ain’t shit get shut down really. Police don’t even monitor the marches no more. No change will come from that.”

-Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, evening of June 15, 2021

But Who’s Paying Attention?

“You protested because it was trendy and ‘everyone was doing it.’ I protest because people are out here dying!”
-Deona Marie Erickson, June 10
In 2021, many liberals and progressives have left the streets, relying on the Biden administration to roll back the policies of the Trump administration. Consequently, the murder of Deona Marie Erickson has attracted considerably less attention than it might have just last year. This withdrawal from social struggles creates the conditions for more attacks like this to take place.
This reminds us of the situation before the murder of Heather Heyer made world news, when the far right carried out a series of murders around the United States without drawing the attention of corporate media. Corporate media outlets were only forced to cover the events in Charlottesville because it was not possible to sweep under the rug the fact that a thousand fascists had gathered in one place and killed a white woman. Because the events took news editors—though not anti-fascists—by surprise, they were not prepared to spin the story according to the preferences of their corporate backers; so for a week, fairly honest coverage of the threat represented by the far right suddenly appeared in a variety of news outlets. Subsequently, although this coverage was tempered by efforts to demonize anti-fascists, centrist media outlets continued to report on far-right attacks in order to associate them with the agenda of Donald Trump’s administration.
But now that centrists can’t leverage Deona Marie’s death against Trump, they are prepared to treat it as simply another sad facet of American life, to sweep it under the rug once more.
This coincides with widespread emotional numbness arising from several years of constant tragedies. The COVID-19 pandemic has already accustomed many people to thinking of human life as expendable. Last weekend saw multiple mass shootings across several states. Poverty has reached the highest levels since the beginning of the pandemic. These are the forces that drive desperate people to adopt far-right politics wherever there are no models for a collective pursuit of liberation, creating a feedback loop that will generate more and more tragedies.
“We keep us safe.” “We protect us.” These slogans spread far and wide in the course of the movements that burst onto the world stage in Ferguson, Missouri because it has become eminently apparent that no one else is going to protect us. Deona Marie died doing her best to keep her companions safe—to open up a space in which people can come to know each other on different terms, as part of a community premised on shared consideration for all human beings, not individualized capitalist competition. We should do the same, so that everyone like her, and like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Winston Smith—might live. We should do the same, because the alternative means isolation, means eventually being treated as expendable ourselves.
“If the fascists would have run over Deona Marie and we would have not been holding space, not erected the barricades that the city just tried to tear down, then Deona Marie’s voice would be in vain. We’ve got to be out here. That fascist wins—that fascist who drove his car right here, he wins. ‘Oh, I got them off the street. They’re gone now. My fellow white supremacists can enjoy Lake Street now, because I got them fuckers off the street,’ you know what I’m saying?
“We’re out here stronger now. We have to be.”
-Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, June 15, 2021

https://twitter.com/TigerWorku/status/1404329351211016192

“Concerning Deona Marie”

From an internationalist anarchist woman in Rojava:
From half a world away, I hear about this sacrifice, this martyrdom. I use the words sacrifice and martyrdom and not the word “tragedy” because I am hearing about a woman comrade who chose to defend her community, and there are few things more beautiful and free in this world than that choice. She thought beyond herself, felt beyond her own personal safety, to defend those who struggled together side by side with her for freedom.
When a life is given and taken in struggle, it’s not an easy thing for those of us left to continue. It would dishonest for me to say this is not something heavy, but we do not have to let the weight of it become a burden—this weight can give us strength and power, and with it, we can continue her struggle.
Every martyr is another reason to continue, another example to hold ourselves up to. For every woman whose life they take, for every comrade, for every person who stands up to defend their community, whose light they try to extinguish, we can make sure that a hundred rise up in their place. The time when we could be separated on the basis of race, class and gender is coming to an end. When we sacrifice for each other in this way, as comrades, as people who share a freedom struggle, the methods of our enemies turn to dust.
This is the time for us to defend our communities like Deona did. Anything else, and we won’t have risen to her standard. Her choice to defend was a sacred act of love—let us all be led by it.
Revolutionary greetings, respect, and love from Rojava.

If the goal of those who seek to encourage vigilante attacks is to discourage movements based in direct action, this dovetails with the goals of city officials who seek to use the Non-Profit Industrial Complex to buy off a layer of activists to oppose and undermine effective strategies from within the movement. In that regard, one of the most important ways to prevent the attackers from achieving their goals is to preserve the horizontal, grassroots structure of movements against police, while continuing to emphasize systemic forms of white supremacist violence alongside vigilante attacks.

Biden Admin Tells Americans to Report Family and Friends Who Have the “Potential” for Radicalization

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By Matt Agorist

Source: Activist Post

Despite Joe Biden running on a platform of unity to bring Americans back together, before he was even sworn in, he reneged on this promise by alienating tens of millions of Trump supporters — essentially declaring them the enemy.

“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said after the largely peaceful march on DC which ended with a few hundred goons out of tens of thousands of peaceful protesters raiding the capitol. “They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”

While some of the folks certainly thought they were part of some coup, the reality of the situation was nothing at all as serious as the media and establishment has reported since.

Just like Trump used Antifa violence to bolster the police state and add stricter penalties for protests, Biden is using the riot at the Capitol to do the same. We predicted this outcome in January, and now it is escalating even further.

In February, using the DHS National Terrorist Advisory System — or NTAS — the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that anger “fueled by false narratives,” including unfounded claims about the 2020 presidential election, could lead some inside the country to launch attacks in the coming weeks.

This was the first time we could find that this warning was issued over a domestic terror threat. And, although that warning was issued in February, four months later, we’ve yet to see anything materialize. There have been no protests, no “attacks” on the Capitol, nothing. In spite of Americans largely returning to normal, the White House is doubling down.

This week, President Joe Biden’s administration announced their plans to create a means for family and friends to snitch on each other — to fight the non-existent threat of domestic terrorism.

In a teleconference on Monday, a senior administration official told reporters of a plan that sounds reminiscent of the Minority Report by attacking “pre-crime.”

“We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs,” the official said.

The official went on to explain how this would work, which involves family members and friends snitching on each other.

We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs.  And on that, I would just note that one of the things we’re talking about is the need to do something in this space, like the “See something” — “If you see something, say something” concept that has been promulgated previously by DHS.  This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.

Notice how they use the word “potentially” to imply that certain completely legal political speech has the ‘potential’ to incite violence. Then, as if big tech censorship and spying wasn’t enough, the official mentioned “increased information sharing” between tech platforms to help combat this potential for radicalization.

“Any particular tech company often knows its own platform very well,” the official noted. “But the government sees things — actually, threats of violence — across platforms. They see the relationship between online recruitment, radicalization, and violence in the physical world.”

Closing out the conference, the official encouraged Americans to come together with their government rulers to combat the non-existent threat in a line that sounded like it was uttered directly from Heinrich Himmler himself.

“We are investing many agencies of the government and resourcing them appropriately and asking our citizens to participate,” the official said. “Because, ultimately, this is really about homeland security being a responsibility of each citizen of our country to help us achieve.”

The state asking family members to snitch on each other is the exact same scheme out of every totalitarian regime throughout history. When you sever the trust between children and their parents or friends and family, you can easily mold the children and other state-dependent shills into obedient pawns of the regime who will have no problem outing their subversive family members and friends to authorities.

In Soviet Russia, there was a famous story used to inspire children to inform on their parents. It was the story of Pavel Trofimovich Morozov — a Soviet youth who was praised by the state run media as a martyr. According to the story, which has very little evidence of actually happening, Pavlik denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family.

Regardless of whether or not the story was true, it became the subject of reading, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies — all which pushed the idea that opposing the state was selfish and reactionary, and state was more important than family. The apotheotic cult had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of children, who were encouraged to inform on their parents.

Those who fail to see history repeating itself are ensuring that it indeed will. Totalitarian regimes thrive off pitting citizens against each other, and this is ultimately the last step before complete despotism. Time to pay attention America.

MSM ADMITS FACT CHECKERS WERE WRONG — TRUTH WILL NEVER BE FOUND THROUGH CENSORSHIP

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By Don Via Jr.

Source: Waking Times

Over the last twelve months, social media’s expurgation of any and all information pertaining to Covid-19, not part-and-parcel to the mainstream status quo, has become ineffaceable.

Everywhere we look now, we see embedded links to the Covid-19 Information Center on any post that dares even utter the words “vaccine” or “covid”. More pervasive still, are the notices of “this content is no longer available”, having been unceremoniously expunged for allegedly violating the ministry of truth’s “community guidelines”. Being so brazen as to even brand one hundred percent authentic facts as “misinformation”.

Facebook is now permeated with warnings pinned upon post after post indicating “this information has been disputed by independent fact-checkers”.

Ahh yes, the same “independent fact-checkers” that only recently had their financial biases uncovered. Confirming the very conflicts of interest many of us had suspected in the first place, along with their counterparts in the mainstream media.

Ironically, just as a recent report has demonstrated how censorship backfires — Indicating excessive “fact-checking” actually contributed to the spread of misinformation.

Now, as the Overton window begins to shift it appears the MSM is left with egg on their face yet again.

On May 26th, as new research alleging the supposed origins of Covid-19 began to surface, Facebook announced that it would no longer be deleting posts claiming that the virus may have been man-made. What the company did not announce, of course, was recompense or at the very least an apology for all of the people whose free-speech it had infringed upon over the last year and a half.

On June 1st reports began to surface calling out the Washington Post for stealthily editing a 15 month old headline in which they had preemptively “debunked” the Wuhan lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.

Now, headlines, pundits, and politicians have done a complete one-eighty and are running amok propagating this as a part of the new mainstream narrative — with zero regard for the civil liberties they spent months trampling by vilifying those who postulated this plausibility.

A recent Bloomberg opinion piece lays out quite concisely the very argument that we and many others have carried for years — Transparency, as opposed to obscurity, is always the best course of action;

The author states at various points —

“Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result.

Social media fact-checkers don’t have any special knowledge or ability to sort fact from misinformation. What they have is extraordinary power to shape what people believe. And stifling ideas can backfire if it leads people to believe there’s a “real story” that is being suppressed” …..

“It’s much better to provide additional information than to censor information” …..

“Even without the power of censorship, social media culture encourages the facile labelling of ideas and people as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy to call people deniers or as anti-science because they question prevailing wisdom.”

Concluding the piece by stating —

“The fiasco was the media’s propagation of the lie that the issue was settled and that anyone questioning it might be deemed an idiot or conspiracy theorist.”…

“What helped was not taking away information but giving people additional information. Censoring information — or what one deems “misinformation” — isn’t as helpful as it seems. The best we can do is keep questioning, and give people the most complete story we can.”

With these facts in mind, there are a few points important to note however. While this may in some ways come as a form of vindication for those that were previously silenced, it is necessary to recognize that this is not a confirmation of the lab origin theory. Nor should a narrative being adopted by the mainstream be seen as a form of validation or legitimacy. Rather, it is a demonstration of their blatant hypocrisy and stifling of discourse and objective critical analysis.

As always, the corporate media–intelligence–apparatus of the United States, who functions as a state disseminator of propaganda have been thoroughly documented in TFTP’s most recent investigative series installment — One should always question the motives of the media when they adopt a story, as almost always they possess an ulterior agenda.

Already, we see the neoliberal and neoconservative talking heads twisting this rhetoric to better fit their aims of demonizing their geopolitical opposition in China.

Fervent warmonger Senator Tom Cotton, who has championed the idea of the Wuhan lab leak against China from the very beginning; has been frothing at the mouth at this revitalized opportunity to capitalize upon these sentiments for his own nefarious incentives, as elaborated in a recent account by journalist and political commentator Caitlin Johnstone.

That’s not to say that if the virus did originate in the Chinese lab, if it were or wasn’t released deliberately, or any of the other yet to be confirmed uncertainties, that any crimes committed by the CCP regime should not be held to account. But the American government, in all of its imperialist machinations and blatant hypocrisies are the last ones that should be doling out recompense to that regard.

In any case, as Miss Johnstone explains, it is because of the US’s imperialist influence over the international community that any truly unbiased and independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19 is likely impossible. And this is largely due to the increasing tempo with which the US State Department is ramping up its new Cold War propaganda against its geopolitical adversaries in the east.

Despite these points, it is evident in this latest flip-flop fiasco that one thing is certain. Suppressing genuinely open public dialogue with regard to this or any other prevailing issue is not only an affront to the right of free speech. It is an affront to intelligence itself.

It should be held among the most basic of principles that for any society to be intellectually competent, and therefore be aptly informed and capable of rendering the most logical decisions; encouraging communication and free expression of ideas throughout the public sector is of the utmost preeminence.

The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth

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Etymology – from Greek, etymos, true, real, actual (the study of roots)

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Life is full of slips.

Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us.  Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us.  Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us.  And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.

Slips are double-edged.

It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control.  Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.”  Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.

Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.

In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide.  They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations.  This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior.  Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories.  It is not just words that have etymologies.

When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today.  Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown.  It slips in when people are asleep.

John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:

Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.

And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control.  For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life.  This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines.  A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign.  In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:

… the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual.  The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything.  Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.

Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively.  Ellul again:

It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary).  Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.

The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds.  This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.

In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses.  This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness.  To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.

Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.”  First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem.  A slippery slope indeed.

But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare.  It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.

In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum.  I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously.  The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality.  Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it.  And it will.  But don’t say this out loud.

So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:

So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.

A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility.  Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion.  Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.

The other day I was going grocery shopping.  My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.”  Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred.  “I prefer whipping,” she said.

I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”

We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she.  She slipped, and I found humor in that.  Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.

But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things.  Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them.  Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.

Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down.  In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies.  We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.

It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many.  A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”

But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate.  To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society.  Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.

So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?

This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.

I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.

We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells.  Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television.  Close the computer.  Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others.  Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away.  Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe.  Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly.  Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite.  Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow.  It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing.  In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:

It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.

I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us.  But without it we are lost.  Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought.  Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.”  Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset.  If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation.  Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.

There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks.  It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness.  Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”

It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.

ARCHITECTS OF POWER: HOW THE GLOBAL ELITE PROFIT FROM EXTREME INEQUALITY & PRE-EMPT THE BACKLASH

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By Dr. Tim Coles

Source: Waking Times

There is a new, mega-rich global elite consisting of a small number of billionaires and multibillionaires. Many of them made their money in the technology sector. Others play financial markets or inherit fortunes. They are wealthier and more powerful than some entire nation-states.

The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) says:

“Whilst there have always been differences between the wealthier, better educated and the less privileged, these differences appear likely to widen in the coming decades.”

The mega-rich deliberately order the world in ways that guarantee their wealth by institutionalising inequality. Occasionally, this is admitted. In 1997, a book published by the Royal Institute for International Affairs in the UK acknowledged:

“The present international order may not be the best of all possible worlds, but for one of the ‘fat cats of the West’ enjoying a privileged position in an international society that is structured and organised in ways which perpetuate those privileges, there are good reasons for not pursuing radical change.”

This is also true of internal policymaking. The third richest man in the world, Warren Buffett (worth over $80bn), confirmed this: “There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won.” This echoes his statement in 2006, just prior to the global financial crisis: “There’s class warfare all right… but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Around the same time, the liquidity firm Citigroup circulated an investor memo, stating: “Society and governments need to be amenable to disproportionately allow/encourage the few to retain that fatter profit share.” More recently, the UK MoD admitted: “In the coming decades, the very highest earners will almost certainly remain rich, entrenching the power of a small elite. Vested interests could reduce the prospect of economic reforms that would benefit the poorest.”

Consider the enormous concentration of wealth and power that results from this imbalance.

Ever-Increasing Power

Global and national inequality is staggering and getting worse. By 2011, a mere 147 – mainly US and European – corporations owned and controlled 40% of world trade and investment. Just four corporations influence the profitability and power of these 147: McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor’s ratings agency; Northwestern Mutual, owner of the indexer Russell Investments; the CME Group, which owns 90% of the Dow Jones market index; and Barclay’s bond fund index. Evaluative decisions by analysts at these firms affect the wealth and performance of each of the 147 giants.

That’s corporate wealth concentration. But what about wealth concentration among individuals?

There are 7.7 billion people in the world. Of those, just 2,153 are billionaires. According to Forbes, their combined wealth totals $8.7 trillion. The list of billionaires reflects where power is most concentrated: in the US. While China and Europe’s number of billionaires declined in the previous 12 months, the US and Brazil gained billionaires. The US is home to 607 billionaires or 0.000001% of the population. It is worth noting that President Donald Trump was a billionaire before he came to power. Trump has cut taxes for his fellow billionaires. As an indication of continued wealth concentration, consider the wealth disparity among the billionaire class itself. He Xiangjian, founder of the Midea Group, is the joint-50th richest person, worth over $19.8bn. Jeff Bezos, by comparison, the founder of Amazon, is the richest man in the world, worth over $131bn – more than six times He Xiangjian.

Part of the problem has been the US-led imposition of an economic dogma called “neoliberalism” (which is neither new nor liberal) on much of the rest of the world.

Neoliberalism can be roughly defined as:

1) Financialisation, i.e., allowing investors to make money from money as opposed to tangible things;

2) Deregulating financial services;

3) Taking out government insurance policies so that working people bail out financial institutions;

4) Cutting taxes for the wealthy;

5) Privatising public services to reduce social mobility;

6) Imposing austerity to make markets more attractive to investors.

Neoliberalism has cut taxes for the super-rich, enabling them to hold onto their wealth at the expense of others. According to Oxfam, the average rate of personal income tax for the wealthy was 62% in 1970. In 2013, it was 38%. In the UK, the poorest 10% pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than the richest 10%. Global GDP, i.e., how much money there is in the world, is $80 trillion. But, of this, $7.6 trillion is untaxed. In the decade since the financial crisis, the number of billionaires doubled. This reveals that the system rewards greed. In 2017, 43 people owned as much wealth as half the world’s poorest. In 2018, the number was 26.

To put all this into perspective, Jeff Bezos owns as much wealth as the poorest fifty countries. When it comes to more ‘developed’ nations, Bezos’s wealth equals the entire GDP of Hungary. Consider how Bezos makes his money. Amazon is a corporation that primarily advertises and delivers products. The innovation, design, and investment in and of those products is the work of others. Amazon treats “workers like robots” by spying on them, discouraging unions, offering insecure contracts, and encouraging long hours. Amazon is also notorious for paying little or no corporation tax. Amazon is an online retailer. The Internet was developed by the US Defense Department in the 1960s as ARPANET, with public money. The satellites that enable online transactions are first and foremost military hardware. Not only did Amazon take advantage of state-funded innovation, but it also rewards government investors by selling the CIA cloud technology and the Pentagon artificial intelligence.

Bezos is far from being the only one. Bill Gates’s Microsoft and the late Steve Jobs’s Apple, which became the first trillion-dollar company, also enjoy low taxes, technologies developed with government grants, and procurement contracts.

Consider also the immoral activities of other hi-tech nouvelle méga riche. Without making it clear to users, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (worth $66bn) has made his money by selling personal data to insurers and advertisers. Scientists have used Facebook in social media experiments without the knowledge or consent of users in an effort to see how memes affect mood.

Other mega-rich, including the hedge fund manager Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies, used Facebook to market political candidates. Other tech billionaires include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google technology was funded by the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Also relying on technologies developed by the Pentagon with workers’ tax dollars, the company cooperates with the National Security Agency to spy on citizens and it has even enabled US assassination programmes.

Consequences

How do the billionaires get away with it, and what are the social and political consequences? The examples below are from the US, but it should be noted that the US exports its mega-wealth model.

A study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page on plutocracy (government by the rich) notes that the rich buy political parties. Politicians draft and/or vote for laws that help the rich. The authors analysed 1,779 policy issues in the US and conclude that “average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” Unlike the public, “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy.” Other research into wealth inequality in the US finds that “[c]ertain policies, such as the decreased support for unions and tax cuts favouring the relatively well-off and corporations, have benefitted a small minority of the population at the expense of the majority and have thus contributed to widening income inequality.”

At the turn of the last century, 9% of American families owned 71% of the nation’s wealth. The elite of the day included familiar names: John D. Rockefeller (oil), J.P. Morgan (banking), W. Averell Harriman (industry), and so on. Things balanced out after the Second World War, with the majority of Americans becoming middle class. Gradually, state controls over the economy were removed, and the situation reverted to the inequality of bygone centuries.

Since the 1970s, the US middle class has been shrinking. Until recently, the middle classes of Asia grew, precisely because strong Asian economies (notably China, South Korea, and Singapore) either retained some state controls or refused to adopt the US neoliberal model.

Alan B. Krueger, a labour economist and key Obama advisor, explains that, “since the 1970s income has grown more for families at the top of the income distribution than in the middle, and it has shrunk for those at the bottom.” Between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% ((multi)millionaires and (multi)billionaires) enjoyed a 278% increase in their after-tax incomes. But 60% of Americans saw their incomes rise by just 40%, which when adjusted for rising living costs means stagnation. Krueger notes that during that period, $1.1 trillion of annual income was moved to the top 1%. “Put another way, the increase in the share of income going to the top 1% over this period exceeds the total amount of income that the entire bottom 40 percent of households receives.”

The exportation of this model means that Australia, Britain, and Canada became what the billionaire-dollar liquidity firm Citigroup calls “plutonomies,” economies in which the rich drive luxury goods markets such as jewellery, fashion, cruises, and sports cars: hence the recent entry of celebrity Kylie Jenner into the billionaire class. The Citigroup document also notes that in plutonomies the top 1% owns 40% as much wealth as the bottom 95%. No matter where you live, you can’t escape the institutional structures that create inequality.

The US military exists, in part, to maintain the unjust status quo. Yet, it acknowledges the dangers of dominance: “A global populace that is increasingly attuned and sensitive to disparities in economic resources and the diffusion of social influence,” thanks in part to the very technologies that enrich the rich, “will lead to further challenges to the status quo and lead to system rattling events,” like Brexit or the Yellow Vest protestors in France.

The mega-rich and international think tanks and forums they sponsor are beginning to reluctantly accept that their status quo political puppets might get voted out of office and give way to so-called far-left or far-right parties unless they address wealth inequality.

New Paradigms of Control

The question, then, is how to deal with the restless and disaffected majority while not radically altering the system and taking away the privileges of the elite. In 1961, US President John F Kennedy said: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” In the 1980s, World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab said: “Economic globalisation has entered a critical phase. A mounting backlash against its effects… is threatening a very disruptive impact on economic activity and social stability in many countries… This can easily turn into revolt.” More recently, he said: “Today, we face a backlash against that system and the elites who are considered to be its unilateral beneficiaries.” Likewise, the billionaire Johann Rupert of Cartier jewellery (one of the many luxury services driving plutonomies) said: “We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us.” Similarly, the British MoD discusses “[m]anagement of societal inequalities,” as opposed to the elimination of social inequality.

Many of the new elites make people redundant by automating the workplace. While Amazon still relies on human shelf-stackers and delivery drivers, it uses an increasing number of physical robots to stack shelves and algorithmic robots to assist online customers. Likewise, Facebook and Google’s content filters rely on heavy automation. This is creating precarious employment conditions. According to the Washington Post (which is owned by Bezos): “…the modern emerging workforce of tech, urbanised professionals, and ‘gig economy’ labourers all represent an entirely new political demographic.” Politicians then “focus more on education, research and entrepreneurship, and less on regulations and the priorities of labour unions.”

But there are many problems. For one thing, the financial services economy, which markets everything, has made “education” a form of unsustainable debt. The quality of US education is notoriously low by world standards, and many young people are “overqualified” for menial jobs, like delivering for Uber or stacking shelves in Amazon warehouses. The UK MoD acknowledges that, “Freelance work is… often low-paid, lacking the benefits and security of formal employment and, therefore, the growth of the gig economy could increase inequality.”

The crisis of what to do with a young, indebted, restless population automated out of steady work by – and competing with – algorithms and physical robots has been considered for at least 50 years.

Traditionally, ‘education’ meant brainwashing children to work in menial jobs for life in adulthood. But as the economy changes and employment becomes less stable, new methods of ‘education’ for re-skilling adults are required. In the late 1960s, future political advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski authored a book in which he advocated for lifelong learning as a way of re-skilling an aging population that finds its employment opportunities diminished, as small-to-medium-sized businesses get overtaken by tech giants. Around the same time, the British Labour Party (when it was a real labour party) introduced the Open University with the aim of providing lifelong learning. Likewise, in the 1980s, futurist Alvin Toffler envisaged an “electronic village” in which flexible working hours and lifelong learning would be required in a hi-tech economy.

To keep the poor from rioting while trapping them in a system that works for those who design it, today’s multibillionaire elites help to privatise public services and education by offering scholarships and infrastructure investments. In doing so, they train poor people to work for their system by developing others’ technology skills while hiding their own taxable wealth in charity foundations.

Howard G. Buffett is the son of Warren. While enjoying largely tax-free wealth that further impoverishes the global poor, the Buffetts, via Howard’s foundation, invest in dams and irrigation in the poorest nations of Africa. Bezos’s foundation awards scholarships for STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Zuckerberg’s foundation seeks “to find new ways to leverage technology, community-driven solutions, and collaboration to accelerate progress in Science, Education, and within our Justice & Opportunity work.”

Conclusion

By using free online services, we have allowed ourselves to be the products that tech giants sell to advertisers. By not organising to raise taxes on the mega-wealthy, we have underfunded our public services. By not keeping an eye on who’s funding what, we’ve allowed our political parties to hoover up donations from elites. By failing to understand the economy, we’ve allowed a new normal of instability and political uncertainty to flourish to the advantage of asset managers and hedge fund investors. As the US pursues global domination, this model will continue to be exported. It’s time to wake up.