The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.
If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.
The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.
Getting people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which function independently from one another, instead of member states within a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international stage.
Getting people believing they control the fate of their nation via the democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.
Getting people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates.
And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.
It’s not the big, famous lies like those which preceded the invasion of Iraq that make up the bulk of the adhesive holding the empire together, it’s the small, mundane lies we’re fed every single day by the plutocratic media. The ones which distort our worldview by half-truths, spins and omissions designed to normalize a status quo of murder, theft and ecocide.
This normalization happens in the way pundits and politicians treat any attempt to end wars or redress income inequality as freakish extremism and unrealistic fantasy, when in reality it’s the most sane and normal thing in the world and the only thing unrealistic about it is the fact that attempts to advance those agendas are always sabotaged by those same pundits and politicians.
The normalization also happens in the way endless wars, starvation deaths by US sanctions, the looming threat of total extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war, rapidly exacerbating income inequality and increasing tyranny at home and abroad are not treated as newsworthy stories, while celebrity gossip and partisan bickering between AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene makes headline news. Every day the news media fail to report on the greatest horrors that the empire has unleashed on our world while focusing on vapid trivialities, they help normalize the horrors.
If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the US-backed genocide in Yemen would be front-page news every day instead of something which gets a marginal mention once every few weeks. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.
If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that Americans are getting poorer and poorer while billionaires multiply their wealth during the pandemic would be brought front and center to everyone’s attention. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.
If the mass media actually existed to share important information about the world, the fact that the US military just spent trillions of dollars on a decades-long occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished nothing besides making horrible people rich would have been a national scandal. Every day it isn’t, this outrageous abuse is normalized.
But the mass media do not exist to share important information about the world. They exist to share important disinformation about the world. If they did not do this, the same US empire which is decrying the spread of disinformation today would collapse into its own footprint.
The US empire is without exception the single most corrupt and destructive force on this planet, and it’s not even close. It is the very last institution on earth that should be in charge of deciding what online content is true and what is “disinformation”. Absolute dead last, without exaggeration.
Depraved institutions which lie constantly and have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century should not be the Ministry of Truth for the world’s online communication systems. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.
You are a Universal Being. Your body is just a vehicle for the manifestation of this Universal Being here on Earth. As a Universal Being your ‘essence’ lives forever. Start identifying your Self as a Universal Being, merged with the source of all existence. The more you live in this Self – the Real You – during this lifetime – the more seamless is the passage onwards at the time of passing.
Say:
“I am a spiritual entity and nothing can harm me, because ‘I’ am not this physical body which carries me through this third density existence experienced here on Earth. ‘I’ am soul, ether, spirit, plasma – and I chose to come back to planet Earth and to be reborn into a human body in order to perform valuable tasks and help realign Earthly existence with Cosmic existence – and thereby create harmony and balance.”
Repeat this – and feel the fear fall away. Feel it dissolve like the sun-burned morning mist.
Fear is a state of mind. A cramped mind. Every part of it is alien to us save that useful bit that warns us not to do some crazy act – like jump over the edge of a cliff under the illusion that one will sprout wings and fly away into the blue horizon!
Yes, the ‘real you’ can fly. The ether/spirit you. But the physical you is a gravity respecting entity here on dear mother Earth. Respect this type of fear, for it is a God given preservation instinct.
So, you are not convinced? You hold onto your fear because it seems ‘real’, doesn’t it? You quite like it, a sort of drug. After all every TV, newspaper, radio and neighbour is telling you ‘to be afraid.’ It’s easier to give in than not to. There are so many things you need to fear, they say, so many that there is almost no room left for anything else to get you going in a positive direction.
We live in a culture of fear, imposed by those we elect and allow to manage our lives. Think about it – so determined are most of us to avoid taking true responsibility for our lives and the lives of other living beings that we allow our minds to say to us “OK, that’s fine, leave it to the politicians, bankers and corporate board members to run our affairs for us.” Then we turn around and curse them for introducing a despotic top-down police-state agenda that makes a misery out of our lives!
How foolish can one get?
All the while ‘the elected ones’ (by us) learn better and better how to manipulate those who elected them, so that they can hold onto the power. They are addicted to power – and use it to make us addicted to fear. So we shrink, while they expand.
How very foolish so much of mankind is. Both parties, the purveyors of fear and the fearful, bogged-down in a rail siding leading to nowhere. Both sides bogged-down in a rail siding completely terminating our natural evolutionary instinct and putting in its place a state of perpetual self-imprisonment.
“Fear not!” say I, for anyone reading this is not heading for the end of the line or the gallows; is not busy constructing a hangman’s noose to stick his/her neck in. Nobody reading this can suffer the delusion that to profit from worldly riches is superior to profiting from the flow of Divine uplift. An ecstatic state which comes from rejecting fear and ceasing to hide in the shadows of a frightened ‘little me’.
This ‘little me’ is a hypnotised being who has convinced himself/herself that one can never step forward and take responsibility for one’s destiny, or make a valuable contribution on the stage of life.
Out you go ’little me’ – and stay out. No place for you in the unfolding age of Truth. For as has been said, You are not a cipher, You are a Divine eminence – and is that a quality to hide away under a cloak of self impoverishment? Well, is it?
After what seems like an interminable pause, an answer emerges: ‘NO’
And immediately, as if shot from a cannon, the Real You bursts upon the scene – soul-burden immeasurably lightened! Yes, I can see this Real You, right now, and I can tell you – you are an outstanding being with enough potential to single-handedly transform both yourself and your community into manifestations of an age of instant enlightenment!
Yes, my friend, I’m not talking about someone else, it’s you who is transformed. ‘Little me’, who was that? Never mind, gone forever.
Now you stand single, strong, proud, all traces of fear banished forever. Maybe for the first time, you are free, out of jail, ready to be intoxicated by the sweet scent of the wild rose, the symphonic triumph of the dawn chorus, the illustrious beauty of awakened nature calls you forth – rejoice in her and act in her defence!
Proudly step forward to defend her precious wealth of vital diversity, so cruelly sterilised by vampires wearing carefully pressed city suits and a fixed smile on their faces. They and their clan scared you once, didn’t they? But no more, you now see the fake smile for exactly what it is.
You are metamorphosed and stand shining, a ray of the living sun. Use your new gifts well, my friend, millions need the support of your awakened powers to themselves be awakened and freed from the hypnosis of fear. These are the builders of the New Society which is our imperative to create – and no one else’s.
My recent posts have focused on the systemic financial risks created by Federal Reserve policies that have elevated moral hazard (risks can be taken without consequence) and speculation to levels so extreme that they threaten the stability of the entire financial system.
These risks are well known, though largely ignored in the current speculative frenzy.
But there is another systemic risk which few if any see: the collapse of social cohesion.
President Carter was prescient in his understanding that a nation’s greatest strength is its social cohesion, a cohesion that America’s unprecedented wealth / income / power inequalities has undermined. Consider this excerpt from his 1981 Farewell Address:
“Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”
In other words, a nation’s strength flows not just from its material wealth but from its social cohesion–a term for something that is intangible but very real, something that doesn’t lend itself to quantification or tidy definitions.
Here is my definition: Social cohesion is the glue binding the social order; it is the willingness of the citizenry to sacrifice individual gains for the common good.
Social cohesion is the result of the citizenry sharing a common purpose and identity and working toward the common good even at personal cost. Social cohesion arises from a national identity based on shared values and sacrifices.
To maintain social cohesion, opportunities to better their circumstances must be open to all (the social contract of social mobility) and sacrifices must be shared by the entire citizenry. If the privileged elites evade their share of sacrifice, social cohesion is lost and the entire social order unravels.
The glue binding the privileged elites to shared sacrifice is civic virtue, a moral code that demands elites devote a greater share of their own resources to the public good in exchange for their political and financial power.
Though no one dares confess this publicly, America is now a moral cesspool. As a result, the moral legitimacy of the nation’s leadership has been lost. Every nook and cranny of institutionalized America is dominated by self-interest, and much of the economy is controlled by profiteering monopolies and cartels which wield far more political power than the citizenry.
Civic virtue has been lost. What remains is elite self-interest masquerading as civic virtue.
In his Farewell Address, President Carter explained that “The national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”
Social cohesion, civic virtue and moral legitimacy are the foundation of every society, but they are especially important in composite states.
America is a composite state, composed of individuals holding a wide range of regional, ethnic, religious and class-based identities. The national identity is only one ingredient in a bubbling stew of local, state and regional identities, ethnic, cultural and religious identities, educational/alumni, professional and tradecraft identities, and elusive but consequential class-based identities.
Composite states are intrinsically trickier to rule, as there is no ethnic or cultural identity that unifies the populace. Lacking a national identity that supersedes all other identities, composite states must tread carefully to avoid fracturing into competing regional, ethnic or cultural identities.
Composite states must establish a purpose-based identity that is understood to demand shared sacrifice, especially in crisis. In the U.S., the national purpose has been redefined by the needs of the era, but never straying too far from these core unifying goals: defending the civil liberties of the citizenry from state interference, defending the nation from external aggressors, and serving the common good by limiting the power of special interests and privileged elites.
We’ve failed to limit the power of privileged elites, failed to demand greater sacrifices of the wealthy in exchange for power, and so the moral legitimacy of the regime has been lost. And with the ascendance of self-interest and the elite’s abandonment of sacrifice, social cohesion has been lost.
This loss is reflected in the bitter partisanship, the increasingly Orwellian attempts to control the mainstream and social media narratives, the debauchery of “expertise” as dueling “experts” vie for control, the fraying of social discourse, the substitution of virtue-signaling for actual civic virtue, the institutionalization of white-collar crime (collusion, fraud, embezzlement, etc.), the increasing reliance on Bread and Circuses (stimulus, Universal Basic Income) as real opportunity dissipates, and the troubling rise in shootings, crime, random violence and plummeting marriage and birth rates.
The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels.
What’s the solution? At the national level, all that has been lost will have to be restored: civic virtue, moral legitimacy, the social contract of opportunity, shared sacrifice that falls most heavily on the wealthiest and most powerful, and a renewed national purpose centered on serving the common good.
Is such a restoration of moral legitimacy and shared purpose even possible? No one knows. If history is any guide, such a renewal is only possible after the empire of rampant self-interest implodes.
So what do we do in the meantime? Nurture our own social cohesion by living purposefully and sharing sacrifices and bounties with those we trust and admire–those in the lifeboat we chose to join.
Beginning this week, the censorship heavy Facebook rolled out a new warning to users alerting them to the possibility that they may have seen “extremist content” or may be friends with extremists. Every member of the Free Thought Project received one of these warnings — despite years of promoting only peace and freedom for all.
“Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?” read one of the messages that some users received. Another read, “you may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently.” Both included links to “get support” where users can report content they deem extremist.
In a teleconference three weeks ago, 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.
The official also announced that the government would be partnering with big tech to achieve “increased information sharing” between tech platforms to help combat this potential for radicalization.
It now appears that it’s here.
On Thursday, Facebook said the extremist warning was a test for a global approach to prevent radicalization on the site.
“This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk,” said a Facebook spokesperson in an emailed statement to Reuters. “We are partnering with NGOs and academic experts in this space and hope to have more to share in the future.”
But exactly what Facebook considers “extremism” or “extremist content” remains unclear. What is perfectly clear, however, is that they will undoubtedly crack down on political speech, vaccine safety speech, and all other legal free speech that may challenge the status quo — as this has been their MO from the start.
As Facebook moves the needle on censorship of free speech to an all time high, last week, they were sued in the Texas Supreme Court for allowing child predators to groom and recruit children for sex-trafficking.
The lawsuit, carried out by a group of children who were recruited on Facebook by their abusers, was successful in moving forward last week. The group sued Facebook for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.
The three victims accused Facebook of “running “an unrestricted platform to stalk, exploit, recruit, groom, and extort children into the sex trade.” One was 15 when an older man contacted her on Facebook, offered her a modeling job, photographed her, posted the pictures on the now-defunct BackPage website, and prostituted her to other men, leading her to be “raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking.” The other two girls were 14, and reported almost identical experiences, with one openly pimped out for “dates” on Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary,” Graham Dockery explained.
Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message.
This should totally be the case, but if Facebook can claim Section 230 on child trafficking, then why do they target and eliminate political speech so viciously? If Facebook does not act as a neutral party and removes peaceful anti-establishment content, they have no legal basis to claim entitlement under Section 230.
The court disagreed with Facebook’s lawyers, ruling, “We do not understand Section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking.”
“Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it,” the opinion said. “Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”
For years, TFTP has reported on this phenomenon of Facebook attacking political speech while child exploitation goes unchecked. In 2018, Facebook and Twitter — without warning or justification — deleted the pages of Free Thought Project and Police the Police which had over 5 million followers.
During this purge, they also removed hundreds of other pages including massive police accountability groups, antiwar activists, alternative media, and libertarian news outlets. Facebook claimed to remove these pages in the name of fighting disinformation online and creating a safer user experience. But this was a farce. Illustrating just how big of an ostentatious sham this was, just weeks after claiming to keep their community safe, a child was openly sold on their platform.
This was no isolated incident either. The Guardian reported a study in 2020 that suggested Facebook is not fully enforcing its own standards banning content that exploits or endangers children.
According to the study, it examined at least 366 cases between January 2013 and December 2019, according to a report from the not-for-profit investigative group Tech Transparency Project (TPP) analyzing Department of Justice news releases.
Of the 366 cases of child sex abuse on Facebook, the social media giant reported just 9% of them to authorities. Investigations initiated by authorities discovered the other 91% of the cases — not Facebook.
As the great purge of anti-establishment views continues, remember that this company who claims they have your best interests in mind, according to the aforementioned lawsuit, is benefiting from the exploitation and trafficking of children.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist
If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayer always gets ripped off.
With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.
Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.
The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command—Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc.—have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.
By the time you factor in the financial blowback from the COVID-19 pandemic with its politicized mandates, lockdowns, and payouts, it becomes quickly apparent that we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.
As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.
When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.
Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.
On the roads: Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax, which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.
In the schools: The security industrial complex with its tracking, spying, and identification devices has set its sights on the schools as “a vast, rich market”—a $20 billion market, no less—just waiting to be conquered. In fact, the public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools—at great taxpayer expense and personal profit—into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws, which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for “unauthorized” absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.
In the endless wars abroad: Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government’s endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour. Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053. Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford. War spending is bankrupting America.
In the form of militarized police: The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.
In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture: Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars’ worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police are actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the “goodies” that are on police departments’ wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to “pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car.”
By the security industrial complex: We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of “precrime,” this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn’t even touch on the government’s bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.
By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.
These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good—against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms—by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.
This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.
Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few
Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.
All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.
It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it’s your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.
Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it’s a police officer arresting someone for filming them in public, or a child being kicked out of school for attending a virtual class while playing with a toy gun, remember that it is your tax dollars that are paying for these injustices.
There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people.
Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.
Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.
Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.
Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.
And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.
But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the government and its emissaries can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.
In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.
The Washington Post’s glaring conflicts of interest have of late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article denouncing a supposed attempt to “soak” billionaires in taxes. Written by star columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued that Walmart’s wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government would “destroy [billionaires’] fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.” Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth, something they have been accusedof onmorethanoneoccasion.
There was considerable speculation online as to whether Bezos himself wrote the piece, so blatantly in his interest it was. Unfortunately, this sort of speculation has raged ever since the Amazon CEO bought the newspaper in 2013 for $250 million.
Being owned by the world’s richest individual does not mean that TheWashington Post and its employees are rolling in dough themselves. Far from it: Bezos’ revolution at the newspaper, which has led to both increased pageviews and company value, has been largely based on simply squeezing workers harder than before. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, management acknowledged that Post reporters are pushed to produce almost four times as many stories as their peers at The New York Times. Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from slightly different angles and with different headlines in order to generate more clicks, and thus more revenue. Thanks to new technology, reporters’ every keystroke is monitored and they are under constant pressure from management not to fall behind. The technique of constant surveillance is not unlike what hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse workers who wear GPS devices or Fitbit watches have to endure.
Bezos is currently worth a shade under $200 billion, with his wealth nearly doubling since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With such a fortune to protect, the obvious solution is to acquire media outlets to control the narrative in the face of rising public disenchantment with rampaging inequality. Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that this is a common tactic among the super wealthy. “Billionaire ownership of major news outlets is but another tool the billionaire class deploys for the purpose of wealth defense. It gives them the power to set the terms of the agenda and influence public opinion in their favor,” Ocampo told MintPress.
But Bezos is far from the only senior figure with questionable connections. The company’s CEO, Frederick Ryan, was a senior member of the Reagan White House, rising to become the 40th president’s assistant and later the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He later became CEO of Politico. In the Post’s announcement of the hiring move, they themselves noted that among Ryan’s biggest achievements at their rival outlet was “helping the news organization win a lucrative advertising deal with Goldman Sachs and host presidential debates before the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.”
Another neoconservative in a key position is Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. Under Hiatt’s tenure, anti-establishment columnists like Dan Froomkin were let go and warmongers like the late Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Ignatius moved in. “After being so wrong on such a huge story as the invasion of Iraq, hawkish ideologue Fred Hiatt should have been terminated as editorial page editor,” Jeff Cohen, former Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College and founder of media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told MintPress, adding:
In a decent media system, someone who has been so inaccurate on so many issues as Hiatt would not be in a powerful media position two decades later. Powerful voices in U.S. media often argue that society should be a ‘meritocracy’ — with advancement based on ability or achievement. Hiatt proves that the U.S. corporate media system is just the opposite — a ‘kakistocracy’ — where the unqualified and unprincipled rise to the top.”
Other highly questionable hires include Jerusalem correspondent Ruth Eglash, who spent seven years putting out content that was often indistinguishable from Israeli government propaganda. At the time of her hire, activists highlighted the conflicts of interest she had, given her husband’s job as a PR rep for the country. In November 2020, Eglash quit the Post to become chief of communications for the Israeli ambassador to the United States and United Nations. “My experiences as a journalist have afforded me a great instinct of how to better tell Israel’s unique story,” she said, adding “a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and showcasing Israel’s successes to the world has [sic] always been a passion of mine.”
At the center of the news cosmos
The Washington Post is among the most powerful, influential, and widely-read media outlets in the United States. Its position as the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital reinforces its place as a thought-leading, agenda-setting publication. Whatever appears in the Post will likely be in the rest of the nation’s media, so authoritative is its reputation.
There are no more important pages than its editorial section, where its board comes together to lay out the collective wisdom of its most senior journalists and editors. Through its editorial page, the senior staff lay out the newspaper’s line to others and broadcast what they see as the correct position on the most pressing issues of the day. Hence, editorials are essentially instructions to their well-heeled and influential readers in D.C. and around the country on what to think about any given subject.
This is particularly troublesome as, despite the fact the newspaper presents itself as a defender of liberty and a champion of the people (its tagline is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”), the editorial board has represented the interests of the powerful over ordinary Americans on issue after issue. The following editorials are examples of this in action.
Could we be any more pro-war?
The Post’s editorial board has generally been extremely supportive of whatever conflicts the U.S. has started, and has consistently warned against ending the violence. In a 2015 editorial entitled “Drone strikes are bad; no drone strikes would be worse,” it balked at the idea of stopping the highly controversial bombing campaigns throughout the Middle East and North Africa. By that time, President Barack Obama was bombing seven countries simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Post argued that drones had successfully defeated Al-Qaeda and that the use of drone strikes “shouldn’t be up for review.”
In recent times, the rising newspaper of record has also been a driver of increased hostilities with China, describing Beijing’s military’s moves in the South China Sea as “provocations” against the U.S., spreadingrumors about the COVID-19 virus’s origin, and demanding American companies like Apple “resist China’s tyranny” and begin to relocate their production facilities elsewhere to punish the Chinese government.
On Latin America too, the editorial board has proven to be extremely hawkish. It immediately endorsed a U.S.-backed far-right coup in Bolivia in 2019, insisting that “there could be little doubt who was ultimately responsible for the chaos: newly resigned President Evo Morales.” The Post condemned him for refusing to “cooperate” with “Bolivia’s more responsible leaders,” who were organizing his overthrow, and chastised him for using the word “coup” for what was going on. Morales, they concluded, was a victim of his own “insatiable appetite for power” and his inability to “accept that a majority of Bolivians wanted him to leave office.”
In 2002, the paper also supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, falsely claiming the Venezuelan president had ordered the shooting of thousands of demonstrators and absurdly asserting that “there’s been no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with [it].
The WaPo editorial board’s less than subtle take on drone warfare
In more recent times, it has demanded more action to unseat Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, including supporting U.S. sanctions that have now killed over 100,000 people, according to a United Nations rapporteur. The Post’s justification in 2017 was that Maduro was on the verge of carrying out his own “coup,” “abolish[ing] the opposition-controlled legislature, cancel[ing] future elections and establish[ing] a regime resembling that of Cuba’s” — none of which has happened. In its efforts to oust the democratically-elected leader, the Post even aligned itself with Donald Trump and endorsed far-right coup leader Juan Guaidó as “Venezuela’s legitimate president,” a position some polls have suggested as little as 3% of Venezuelans hold.
The editorial board has expressed its desire to see regime change in leftist-controlled Nicaragua, too. President Daniel Ortega, it claims, is “taking a sledgehammer” to opposition against him, while it also demands that the U.S., which has done nothing but offer “mild verbal opposition” to his rule, do more. What happened to the U.S. of the 1980s, “which spent so much money and political capital to promote democracy in Nicaragua?” they ask sadly.
In reality, of course, the U.S. is currently trying to strangle Nicaragua’s economy through sanctions. And in the 1980s, Washington’s “democracy promotion” agenda included the funding, training and arming of fascist death squads who wrought havoc across Central America, killing hundreds of thousands in genocides from which the area may never recover. The architects of the violence were found guilty in U.S. courts, while the Reagan administration was tried and convicted by the International Court of Justice on 15 counts that amount to international terrorism. That the Post’s editorial board remembers that history as “promoting democracy” is particularly worrisome.
Fake news, fake newspapers
The Washington Post was the key supporter of fake news detection system “PropOrNot,” which was almostimmediatelyexposed as a fake operation itself, forcing the newspaper to publicly distance itself from its own reporting. Yet it was the Post itself that perpetuated the most notorious and damaging fake news story of the 21st century: the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction hoax and Saddam Hussein’s fictional links to al-Qaeda.
In a highly influential editorial entitled “Irrefutable” the Post wrote that, after watching Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech at the United Nations, “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction… And [Powell] offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al-Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe.”
“No page was more crucial in propelling the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq than the Post‘s editorial page — which beat the drums for war in a couple dozen editorials in the six months leading up to the invasion,” Cohen told MintPress, adding:
The Post’s op-ed page was almost as cartoonishly wrong on Iraq, offering little dissent or corrective to the editorial page’s jingoism — especially in that pivotal media moment following Colin Powell’s error-filled U.N. speech. While the editorial page offered up its ‘Irrefutable’ verdict, the op-ed page’s liberal voice offered an embarrassing column, headlined ‘I’m Persuaded’.”
The Post played a major role in manufacturing consent for the deadliest war since Vietnam, publishing 27 editorials in support of an invasion. As with PropOrNot, it backtracked long after the dust had settled, apologizing for its role in amping the public up to accept that war. Yet to this day it continues to push for others.
Surveillance state champion
Despite telling its readers that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post certainly has a negative opinion about those individuals who work to shine a light on illegal government activities. In 2016, its editorial board demanded “no pardon for Edward Snowden,” condemning his backers like filmmaker Oliver Stone and expressing outrage that Snowden had revealed that the U.S. was spying on Russia and carrying out cyberattacks against China. In its long denunciation, it insisted that the NSA’s massive surveillance operation against the American public resulted in “no specific harm, actual or attempted.” As such, the editorial board made history by becoming the first newspaper ever to call for the imprisonment of its own source, on whose back and information it won a Pulitzer Prize.
If Snowden was not worthy of defending, then it is no surprise that the Post’s editorial team expressed their delight when Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, declaring it a “victory for the rule of law.” “Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long overdue for personal accountability,” they wrote, spreading baseless conspiracy theories that the Australian publisher worked with Russia to hack American democracy.
The Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa, which offered asylum to the Western dissidents, also came under fire. In 2013, the Post (falsely) labeled Correa an “autocrat” and “the hemisphere’s preeminent anti-U.S. demagogue.” They also directly threatened him, writing that, “If Mr. Correa welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate that Yanqui-baiting has its price.”
Of course, the Post is now intimately linked with the national security state after Amazon signed a number of deals to provide intelligence and computing services to several three-letter agencies. In 2020, the Bezos-owned Amazon Web Services signed a new deal with the CIA worth tens of billions of dollars.
The editorial board has also gone up to bat for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) multiple times, insisting that it is “the wrong target for outrage,” presenting the agency as key in the battle against art theft and nuclear proliferation. “Abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal,” the board wrote in 2018, despite the fact that the U.S. survived without the agency perfectly well until its creation in 2003.
Attacking any pro-people policy
The Washington Post has aggressively attempted to beat back any new political movements challenging the establishment. Chief among them has been the one around Bernie Sanders, for whom the newspaper has reserved a special ire. In 2016, it famously ran 16 negative stories on Sanders in the space of 16 hours and has used its fact-checking page to relentlessly undermine him, sometimes to bizarre effect.
“Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own numbers contradict that,” read the headline of one article, which detailed how his average donation was actually $27.89, not $27. It also gave his statement that six men (one of whom is Bezos) hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population “three Pinocchios” — the designation just below the most egregious lie. This was because, they argued, billionaires’ wealth is tied up in stocks, not money itself, and most people own essentially nothing. Why this disproved his assertion they did not explain. Going undisclosed is that both Bezos and the Post’s chief fact-checker Glen Kessler, who is the scion of a fossil fuel baron, would stand to lose a fortune if Sanders were elected.
In 2020, the Post was no less hostile to Sanders, publishing an editorial headlined “We should pay more attention to the Democrats who pay attention to reality,” which stated that “Mr. Sanders promises unlimited free stuff to everyone; other candidates propose smarter, more targeted approaches.”
The Post’s higher-ups have been careful to oppose virtually every piece of progressive or pro-people policy proposals. Chief among them has been healthcare. The United States is alone in the developed world in not offering some kind of universal healthcare to its population. Its privatized system is multiple times more expensive than that of comparable countries and has the worst outcomes in the West. Yet the board has consistently scare-mongered its readers, claiming “Single-payer health care would have an astonishingly high price tag,” and attacking Medicare-For-All proponents running for office. “Why go to the trouble of running for president to promote ideas that can’t work?” it asked rhetorically, before going on to insist that moving towards a healthcare system like that of Canada, Japan or Western Europe does not meet a “baseline degree of factual plausibility.”
On education, it has been just as regressive. “There are consequences to making college free,” it warned readers. Chief among these would be that private universities would make less money, which, apparently should be a major concern. “Forgiving student loans the wrong way will only worsen inequality,” ran the headline of another editorial, in which the board pretended to be ultra-left elite-hating radicals, arguing that we should not make college free because Ivy League graduates would benefit the most (around one-third of the Post’s editorial team attended an Ivy League school). It also feigned a far-left position on charter schools, pretending that essentially privatizing schools and handing them over to businesses to run would solve racial inequality in America, and that anyone who opposed them (like teachers’ unions) was no progressive.
Perhaps the most blatant conflict of interest the Post has displayed is in their committed opposition to a wealth tax. “Elizabeth Warren wants a ‘wealth tax.’ It might backfire,” they wrote, making a series of bizarre and illogical arguments against the plan, such as immigrants will stop wanting to come to the U.S. if such a tax is imposed (the threshold for paying a wealth tax is $50 million). Five months later, the board reaffirmed their position: “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich,” they wrote, claiming that rich people “can afford the best accountants and lawyers,” and so taxing them is presumably impossible.
Of course, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has every reason to go all out to prevent a wealth tax gaining traction. A CNBCstudy calculated that Bezos would be forced to pay $5.7 billion annually if Warren’s tax plans came to fruition.
The Post has also taken a firm stand against serious regulation of monopolies, decrying a supposed “antitrust onslaught” against Google, spearheaded by simplistic “break-them-up” rhetoric from dishonest actors. In 2016, it also lambasted Sanders for his “oversimplified,” “crowd-pleasing” demagoguery on Wall Street regulation, insisting that there has actually been widespread reform of the financial sector since 2008, making another crash unlikely.
Unsurprisingly for an outlet owned by a poverty-wage employer, the Post has also consistently opposed a national $15 minimum wage. In March, it categorically stated that “[a] $15 minimum wage won’t happen” and Democrats should stop trying to make it happen. Instead, they advised, they should “practice the art of the possible.” This, the board explained, meant falling in line behind Arkansas arch-Republican Senator Tom Cotton to support his proposals for a creeping state-by-state rise to $10.
On the climate, too, the Post has pushed extremely regressive positions, opposing a Green New Deal outright and suggesting the atmosphere be turned into a giant free market where polluters can trade credits and speculate. “The left’s opposition to a carbon tax shows there’s something deeply wrong with the left,” they wrote. They also endorsed the highly controversial process of fracking. Seeing as the Post’s editorial board is littered with former employees of the notorious climate-change denyingWall Street Journal, its stance is perhaps not surprising.
On COVID, the Post has consistentlyopposedteachers’ unions calls to keep schools closed, as well as standing against $2,000 checks. A universal payout is a “bad idea” they stated, but one “whose time has come because of politics, not economics.” So committed was the editorial team’s opposition to the idea of helping the poor that it presented Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a voice of sanity in Washington.
This does not mean that the Post was against direct payments to all people. In fact, all Post employees received a $2,021 bonus from management in January as a gesture of appreciation for their work during the pandemic. Two grand for me, not for thee.
Junk-food news
The point of a fourth estate is that it is supposed to shine a light on the powerful and hold them to account. But when corporate media are largely owned and sponsored by the super wealthy themselves, the claim that this is what they do is increasingly hard to maintain. In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.
While The Washington Post presents itself as an adversarial publication standing up to power, the fact that its senior staff constantly comes to such a hardline neoliberal elitist consensus on so many issues shows how little ideological diversity there is among its staff. Democracy dies at The Washington Post editorial board.
What does The New York Times and a majority of other legacy media have in common with Big Pharma? Answer: They’re largely owned by BlackRock and the Vanguard Group, the two largest asset management firms in the world. Moreover, it turns out these two companies form a secret monopoly that own just about everything else you can think of too. As reported in the featured video:1,2
“The stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. They all own each other. This means that ‘competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren’t really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.
The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen …They are Vanguard and BlackRock.
The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.
A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost everything.’”
Who Are the Vanguard?
The word “vanguard” means “the foremost position in an army or fleet advancing into battle,” and/or “the leading position in a trend or movement.” Both are fitting descriptions of this global behemoth, owned by globalists pushing for a Great Reset, the core of which is the transfer of wealth and ownership from the hands of the many into the hands of the very few.
Interestingly, Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock, as of March 2021.3,4 Vanguard itself, on the other hand, has a “unique” corporate structure that makes its ownership more difficult to discern. It’s owned by its various funds, which in turn are owned by the shareholders. Aside from these shareholders, it has no outside investors and is not publicly traded.5 As reported in the featured video:6,7
“The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig. Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.
In other words, these two investment companies, Vanguard and BlackRock hold a monopoly in all industries in the world and they, in turn are owned by the richest families in the world, some of whom are royalty and who have been very rich since before the Industrial Revolution.”
While it would take time to sift through all of Vanguard’s funds to identify individual shareholders, and therefore owners of Vanguard, a quick look-see suggests Rothschild Investment Corp.8 and the Edmond De Rothschild Holding are two such stakeholders.9 Keep the name Rothschild in your mind as you read on, as it will feature again later.
The video above also identifies the Italian Orsini family, the American Bush family, the British Royal family, the du Pont family, the Morgans, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, as Vanguard owners.
BlackRock/Vanguard Own Big Pharma
According to Simply Wall Street, in February 2020, BlackRock and Vanguard were the two largest shareholders of GlaxoSmithKline, at 7% and 3.5% of shares respectively.10 At Pfizer, the ownership is reversed, with Vanguard being the top investor and BlackRock the second-largest stockholder.11
Keep in mind that stock ownership ratios can change at any time, since companies buy and sell on a regular basis, so don’t get hung up on percentages. The bottom line is that BlackRock and Vanguard, individually and combined, own enough shares at any given time that we can say they easily control both Big Pharma and the centralized legacy media — and then some.
Why does this matter? It matters because drug companies are driving COVID-19 responses — all of which, so far, have endangered rather than optimized public health — and mainstream media have been willing accomplices in spreading their propaganda, a false official narrative that has, and still is, leading the public astray and fosters fear based on lies.
To have any chance of righting this situation, we must understand who the central players are, where the harmful dictates are coming from, and why these false narratives are being created in the first place.
As noted in Global Justice Now’s December 2020 report12 “The Horrible History of Big Pharma,” we simply cannot allow drug companies — “which have a long track record of prioritizing corporate profit over people’s health” — to continue to dictate COVID-19 responses.
In it, they review the shameful history of the top seven drug companies in the world that are now developing and manufacturing drugs and gene-based “vaccines” against COVID-19, while mainstream media have helped suppress information about readily available older drugs that have been shown to have a high degree of efficacy against the infection.
BlackRock/Vanguard Own the Media
When it comes to The New York Times, as of May 2021, BlackRock is the second-largest stockholder at 7.43% of total shares, just after The Vanguard Group, which owns the largest portion (8.11%).13,14
In addition to The New York Times, Vanguard and BlackRock are also the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media landscape.15,16
Needless to say, if you have control of this many news outlets, you can control entire nations by way of carefully orchestrated and organized centralized propaganda disguised as journalism.
If your head is spinning already, you’re not alone. It’s difficult to describe circular and tightly interwoven relationships in a linear fashion. The world of corporate ownership is labyrinthine, where everyone seems to own everyone, to some degree.
However, the key take-home message is that two companies stand out head and neck above all others, and that’s BlackRock and Vanguard. Together, they form a hidden monopoly on global asset holdings, and through their influence over our centralized media, they have the power to manipulate and control a great deal of the world’s economy and events, and how the world views it all.
Considering BlackRock in 2018 announced that it has “social expectations” from the companies it invests in,17 its potential role as a central hub in the Great Reset and the “build back better” plan cannot be overlooked.
Add to this information showing it “undermines competition through owning shares in competing companies” and “blurs boundaries between private capital and government affairs by working closely with regulators,” and one would be hard-pressed to not see how BlackRock/Vanguard and their globalist owners might be able to facilitate the Great Reset and the so-called “green” revolution, both of which are part of the same wealth-theft scheme.
BlackRock and Vanguard Own the World
That assertion will become even clearer once you realize that this duo’s influence is not limited to Big Pharma and the media. Importantly, BlackRock also works closely with central banks around the world, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is a private entity, not a federal one.18,19 It lends money to the central bank, acts as an adviser to it, and develops the central bank’s software.20In all, BlackRock and Vanguard have ownership in some 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.
BlackRock/Vanguard also own shares of long list of other companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet Inc.21 As illustrated in the graphic of BlackRock and Vanguard’s ownership network below,22 featured in the 2017 article “These Three Firms Own Corporate America” in The Conversation, it would be near-impossible to list them all.
In all, BlackRock and Vanguard have ownership in some 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.23
A Global Monopoly Few Know Anything About
To tease out the overarching influence of BlackRock and Vanguard in the global marketplace, be sure to watch the 45-minute-long video featured at the top of this article. It provides a wide-view summary of the hidden monopoly network of Vanguard- and BlackRock-owned corporations, and their role in the Great Reset. A second much shorter video (above) offers an additional review of this information.
How can we tie BlackRock/Vanguard — and the globalist families that own them — to the Great Reset? Barring a public confession, we have to look at the relationships between these behemoth globalist-owned corporations and consider the influence they can wield through those relationships. As noted by Lew Rockwell:24
“When Lynn Forester de Rothschild wants the United States to be a one-party country (like China) and doesn’t want voter ID laws passed in the U.S., so that more election fraud can be perpetrated to achieve that end, what does she do?
She holds a conference call with the world’s top 100 CEOs and tells them to publicly decry as ‘Jim Crow’ Georgia’s passing of an anti-corruption law and she orders her dutiful CEOs to boycott the State of Georgia, like we saw with Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball and even Hollywood star, Will Smith.
In this conference call, we see shades of the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, the New World Order. The UN wants to make sure, as does [World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus] Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth.
To achieve this, the UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand-new society. For this project, the UN says we need a world government — namely the UN, itself.”
As I’ve reviewed in many previous articles, it seems quite clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was orchestrated to bring about this New World Order — the Great Reset — and the 45-minute video featured at top of article does a good job of explaining how this was done. And at the heart of it all, the “heart” toward which all global wealth streams flow, we find BlackRock and Vanguard.
Last week CE published this piece that demonstrated the obvious spin The Washington Post used to mislead their readers about the status of the unvaccinated, claiming that their rates of infection, death and hospitalization are significantly higher than vaccinated individuals when in fact they never measured these rates. In this article I will once again focus on the Washington Post and their lack of journalistic integrity. This time their propaganda is more egregious because they are targeting the largest pool of unvaccinated individuals: children.
The Washington Post urges the vaccination of adolescents
On May 10, 2021 the Washington Post published this article titled “FDA authorizes Pfizer Coronavirus vaccine for adolescents 12 to 15 years old”. The article begins with a quote from Kawsar R. Talaat, an assistant professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who says, “A vaccine gives them an extra layer of protection and allows them to go back to being kids.”
This is a fascinating statement. Obviously kids were never not kids during the pandemic. Dr. Talaat is essentially saying that in order to be allowed to enjoy their youth kids must be vaccinated. However the restrictions that have been imposed upon their activity were never based on sound data. Asymptomatic spread could never be quantified or even confirmed. Mask mandates have been empirically demonstrated to have no effect on transmissibility or incidence of infection. The only things preventing kids from going back to being kids are the mandates that remain unsupported by any evidentiary arguments–not their vaccination status.
This statement was then further supported in the article:
”Robert W. Frenck Jr., the researcher who led [an] adolescent trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who said the study was designed to test whether it triggered immune responses, not whether it prevented disease. But because of the number of children who became ill in the placebo arm of the trial, it also became evident the vaccine offered robust protection. He finishes by stating ‘That really points out how much covid there is in the adolescent community.’”
Dr. Frenck admits that the study he conducted was not designed to tell whether the vaccine prevented disease but whether children in the study developed antibodies. The point he is trying to make is that there is a lot of disease in the adolescent community. How much? In his study 16 out of approximately 1150 unvaccinated kids got Covid, all of whom recovered. That is an absolute risk of 1.4%. Compare that to the risk of getting the flu in a flu season: 8%.
The article goes on to claim that the mortality of COVID is greater than the flu in children. The Post correctly states that of the 581,000 deaths from Covid only 300 adolescents have perished from the disease, an admittedly extremely small percentage but tragic nonetheless. However they state that this number is greater than the number of adolescents that die from the flu which justifies universal vaccinations. The article cites this paper from the CDC that they claim confirms this statistic. In it the CDC states that 188 children died from the flu in the 2017-18 season, indeed less than 300. However the paper then states that “CDC estimates the actual number was closer to 600”. We have caught the Post in what can be fairly called a lie that is being used to make their case that the threat of the disease justifies prevention through vaccination.
Vaccination Risks and what we know about the “Spike Protein”
Every medical intervention has a risk/benefit relationship that must be examined closely. The Washington Post never once addresses the potential risk of the vaccine in children. Despite mainstream media’s dogged refusal to pursue any research into potential harm of the Covid vaccines, some very troubling information has recently surfaced if one is willing to look beyond headlines and CDC reports. Unlike the Washington Post, I will also examine the risk aspect of the vaccine with a look at the role of the infamous “spike” protein.
As is well known, the Spike protein on the SARS-COV2 virus is what allows it to enter a human cell and infect it. It is also the target protein of the mRNA “vaccines” that use a novel approach to teach our immune systems to recognize it by stimulating our own cells to produce this protein ourselves, hopefully triggering our immune system to produce antibodies against it.
The vaccine manufacturers and the FDA who grant them authorization to deploy their product have made an enormous assumption: the virus is dangerous, but the spike protein is not. It is becoming clear that this assumption does not hold true. In this short article published on April 30, 2021 (11 days before the WP published their article) Salk News summarizes one of several scientific publications that demonstrate the danger of the spike protein:
“The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research, also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease, demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system on a cellular level. The findings help explain COVID-19’s wide variety of seemingly unconnected complications, and could open the door for new research into more effective therapies.
‘A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.’”
The takeaway from these statements is that Covid-19 is a vascular disease more than just a respiratory illness. This was suspected very early on in the pandemic when many people were injured by bleeding, clots, strokes and organ failure. The authors were able to establish its mechanism by an elegant experiment. They designed a “pseudovirus”, one that had the SARS-COV2 spike protein on its surface but without any viral RNA in it. The pseudovirus damaged the lungs and pulmonary vasculature in animal models. They then isolated the molecular pathway by which spike proteins alter the metabolism of vascular endothelial cells causing injury. Conclusion: the spike protein itself causes harm in animal models.
Though we cannot definitively assert, from this study alone, that the spike protein is directly responsible for injury in humans, we must avail ourselves of the reality that this may take a very long time to prove definitively. If it is shown that an intervention is dangerous to animals there is no justification in assuming that it will be safe in a human being. That is why we use animal models in medical research to begin with.
“Fact Checkers” are Taking Notice
As expected, such statements are getting a lot of attention in the media. PolitiFact quickly responded with two articles (one here) “debunking” the theory that spike proteins are dangerous to humans. They quote Dr. Walter Orenstein (associate director of Emory University’s Emory Vaccine Center) and Dr. Paul Offit (director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) who both summarize that they are not aware of any evidence around the danger of spike proteins. Neither, however commented on the study presented in this essay.
PolitiFact also noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called the spike protein “harmless”. Once again, PolitiFact accepted their blanket statement without asking the CDC for their opinion of the evidence cited here. PolitiFact declined to query the CDC for a different explanation of why hospitalized Covid-19 patients commonly expressed systemic disease often with vascular and clotting disorders.
The Danger of an mRNA vaccine that generates spike proteins
If the spike protein is pathogenic, i.e. capable of causing disease, how do we know that when we create antibodies to it we will be completely protected from it? We don’t. How do we know that every person inoculated will mount an antibody response to them? We don’t. This should be sounding alarms in every institution charged with public health. Why? With traditional vaccines there is very little risk, if any, of contracting disease from the vaccine. For example, if a person inoculated with a Hepatitis B vaccine does not mount an immunological response they do not end up getting Hepatitis B.
The situation we may be in is much more concerning. These mRNA vaccines, if they work as intended, are in fact introducing the disease-inducing component of the virus into our bodies. As with most biological processes there will be a wide distribution of responses to the vaccine from people who have little or no side-effects to others who suffer devastating injury. Is that what we are seeing now? Yes it is.
The vaccines migrate throughout the body after injection
More recently, more disturbing information is coming to light. Bioavailability studies of the vaccine were not made public prior to Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). A Pfizer bioavailability study, obtained through the FOIA from a Japanese regulatory agency by a group of international scientists, demonstrates where the vaccine may go once it has been injected into the muscle tissue of our shoulder. Table 2.6.5.5B in this study indicates that the very same Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) used in the Pfizer vaccine begin to redistribute throughout the bodies of mice. Within 15 minutes after inoculation LNPs show up in the brain, liver, gastrointestinal tract, heart, lungs and especially in the ovaries and spleen. We can infer that where the LNPs go so do the mRNA that codes for spike protein. That was the purpose behind doing this study. We can also safely say that Pfizer and the other Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers never intended for their product to migrate so far from the site of inoculation.
This story is still evolving, however these studies and recently released bioavailability reports help to explain the clinical picture of Covid-19 with its broad effects on the body that are not limited to the respiratory system. Furthermore it may substantiate the numerous reports of injury following vaccinations like strokes, blood clots, bleeding, “brain fog”, Bell’s Palsy, etc.
The spike protein is toxic. The vaccine induces our cells to make spike proteins. The vaccine spreads throughout the body after injection. Until another unifying explanation is found we must assume that these vaccines are potentially far more dangerous than anticipated.
A call to halt vaccinations in the UK
In this advisory letter to Dr. June Raine, chief executive of Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (the UK’s FDA), Dr. Tess Lawrie, the director of an evidence based medicine consulting firm, urges the director to halt the vaccination program in that country after an extensive review of the UK’s adverse reaction data was conducted.
The Takeaway
We know, through the CDC’s own data, that Covid-19 vaccines provide almost no benefit to children and adolescents. The danger of vaccination is yet to be fully understood or quantified. In my opinion, the medical community, the FDA and CDC have no reasonable argument to encourage parents to vaccinate their children at this point. The Washington Post has once again demonstrated sloppy research standards, unbalanced reporting and lack of integrity. In this case adolescents, who are among the least vulnerable to the virus, may be harmed from The Post’s inability or unwillingness to uphold basic journalistic principles.
After the Crash 