Category Archives: corporate news

Russia-gate and the Crisis of American Exceptionalism

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By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Indications of deep unrest that occurred under Obama, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Sanders phenomena, have all been blamed on Russia.”

The era of Trump has been just as frustrating as the era of Obama. Over the last six months, I have channeled some of this frustration into the co-writing of a book with Professor of Liberation Theology Roberto Sirvent titled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: The Fake News of US Empire. The book will consist of twenty-one chapters detailing just how important the ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence are to the promotion of US empire, racism, and capitalist exploitation. Russia-gate was a catalyst for the work and has its own chapter in the book. The psychotic narrative has dominated political discourse in the United States for over two years with no end in sight. There was no way to avoid it.

Russia-gate is a manifestation of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism posits that the American way of life is the most superior way of life. It is the white man’s burden personified in the nation-state. The ideology burdens Americans, defined as white and preferably capitalist, with the duty to civilize those outside of their class and racial affiliation. The twin evils of white rule and capitalist plunder reign supreme and are expanded and protected by a third evil: militarism. American exceptionalism says that war redeems the uncivilized from the perils of ungovernability, capitalist plunder leads the uncivilized to prosperity, and white rule bestows humanity itself upon the non-white world.

“American way of life is ‘white man’s burden’ personified in the nation-state.”

Russia-gate has profoundly challenged the logic of American exceptionalism in a period of American decline. Unlike the first Cold War, Russia has been labeled a threat not for its socialist political economy but because it has been accused of helping elect Donald Trump. The imaginary Russian threat to America is not terrorism or communism, but Russia as a state itself. Russia-gate is predicated upon the notion that the Russian Federation possesses both the will and the power to shape politics in America. This assumes that the American nation-state is neither invincible nor its political system exceptional. A contradiction to say the least.

Russia-gate is another myth of American exceptionalism made for and by the American oligarchy. It follows a long history of the American oligarchy’s need to create an “enemy” to vanquish as proof of its racial and economic superiority. Russian meddling in the 2016 elections has not been proven and will never be proven. The mental gymnastics that the US ruling class has performed to prove their own lie are truly astounding to watch. We have heard everything from Russian President Vladimir Putin conspiring with WikiLeaks and Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton to Trump benefitting from $100,000 worth in supposedly Russian purchased advertisements on social media to promote efforts of Black Lives Matter activists and white nationalists alike. It seems that with each passing day, examples of Russian meddling in US politics become only more absurd and detached from reality. That is, unless one could conceive of $100,000 worth in social media ads superseding the most militarized and high-tech surveillance apparatus in human history or the most corporately-controlled, war-thirsty political system in human history.

“The imaginary Russian threat to America is not terrorism or communism, but Russia as a state itself.”

Russia-gate has buried all truth underneath the lie that the US is under attack from Russia. Putin is under every bed and in every wireless router in America. Untold numbers of Russians are hacking into social media accounts and turning the “alt-left” into Russian trolls. Russia has been conveniently positioned as the most dangerous and heinous nation in the world to instill fear and pro-American chauvinism into the minds of struggling workers and poor people. Who better to promote the lies of American exceptionalism than the spooks in the American intelligence services that have been at the vanguard of Russia-gate since day one?

All seventeen intelligence agencies led by the likes of James Clapper and John Brennan coalesced with Hillary Clinton and her big tent of Wall Street donors to spread the Russia-gate lie back in 2016. Russia-gate’s intelligence objectives were always numerous. The first objective was to make Trump’s campaign promise to ease relations with Russia a political impossibility regardless of the orange billionaire’s actual intentions. The second was to politically neuter the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the DNC’s theft of the primary. And the third was to demonize radical and revolutionary forces capable of moving struggling workers and poor people, especially Black people, in the United States away from the two-party system and toward efforts to imagine independent political alternatives. These goals ultimately explain why publications like yours truly have been labeled dupes of Russia and subsequently censored on social media and why the Green Party’s Jill Stein was subject to federal investigation for ties to Russia.

“The mental gymnastics that the US ruling class has performed to prove their own lie are truly astounding to watch.”

American exceptionalism is a potently racist and diseased ideological force that has prevented a public discussion on the consequences of Russia-gate from taking place. We have the Democratic Party and their allies in the intelligence services to thank for this. One can find banners and signs condemning Trump as Putin’s puppet or, homophobically, as “his bitch” at Democratic Party-led demonstrations. Hardline Democrats have expressed outrage over Trump’s mythical connections to Russia but have directed none toward the professional liars leading the campaign. American intelligence agencies are responsible for the COINTELPRO operations that assassinated scores of liberation fighters like Fred Hampton and sent many others like Mumia Abu-Jamal to a life of imprisonment. They are the same liars who told us there were Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq and Gaddafi-led genocidal crimes in Libya. These professional liars have led US operations to overthrow over fifty foreign governments around the world in the same number of years, killing millions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to enrich monopoly capital.

American exceptionalism requires that people in the US forget the atrocities of its government to be truly believed, especially in this time of crisis. The architects of Russia-gate have attempted to place the entirety of what calls itself the left in the US into a permanent political coma by blaming Russia for Trump. Under the spell of Russia-Trump fever, the racist and capitalist rulers of US imperialism can rest comfortably knowing that eight years of Obama-led imperialism — let alone, the genocidal foundations of the US — have been forgotten. Indications of deep unrest that occurred under Obama, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Sanders phenomena, have all been blamed on Russia. Trump has been vilified as a product of Russian-backed “alt-left” and “alt-right” insurgency when the reality is that the blame for Trump falls at the feet of the hobbling imperialist system.

“Russia has been conveniently positioned as the most dangerous and heinous nation in the world to instill fear and pro-American chauvinism into the minds of struggling workers and poor people.”

Russia-gate personifies everything that is wrong with narrow, Democratic Party-led anti-Trumpism. Trump has been made into a larger than life character in part because US imperialism needs him in the spotlight. If you can’t get rid of him, use him. Criminalizing Trump as a “Manchurian candidate” of Russia has given US imperialism room to continue its NATO-led war provocations in Eastern Europe, its imperial ventures in Syria, and its incessant war maneuvers toward Iran and Korea. It has also given the ruling class a convenient scapegoat to avoid accountability in the rapid decline in living standards across world. Millions are living half-lives under the threat of racist state-sponsored terror and mass unemployment and underemployment. Billions have no wealth at all. All of this is just fine so long as those pesky Russians stop meddling in US affairs.

Russia-gate is what American exceptionalism looks like in its most desperate state. The ideology makes it easy to fall into the trap of blaming Trump for everything, into calling him a fascist or worse, a Russian, as nearly the entire ruling class has pushed us into doing. It is easy to turn a blind-eye to the bi-partisan consensus on endless war and austerity when you have Putin on the brain. Trump can be labeled a fascist for scapegoating immigrants and blamed for Obama’s immigration policies, as prominent CNN and New York Times journalists were caught doing late last month. We can forget the hundreds of years of racist, capitalist oppression inherent to US empire and betray the impoverished masses whose lives are only becoming more imperiled by a system that has nothing to offer but worsening degrees of poverty and war.

“It is easy to turn a blind-eye to the bi-partisan consensus on endless war and austerity when you have Putin on the brain.”

Our commitment must be to the truth. There is no truth to Russia-gate. Russia-gate has muzzled the Black left and pushed the entire left into an even more conservative position than it was prior. Russia-gate has villainized Russia in a period when the world needs the people of the US to align with Russia and China and whoever else is willing stop endless US wars abroad. Russia-gate has once again exposed why it is so difficult for workers in the US to view themselves as an exploited class even when the system has so obviously failed them. That the ruling class can so easily criminalize Russia as it kills Syrians and lynches Black Americans with impunity only amplifies the urgency of the moment. We must vigilantly struggle to expose Russia-gate as a farce, a farce rooted in the mythology of American exceptionalism. We need more to reject this mythology if we are to participate in the global class war with any hope for victory.

 

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He is currently writing a book with Roberto Sirvent entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: The Fake News of US Empire. He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

The Coming Collapse

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By Chris Hedges

Source: Occupy.com

The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.

The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars.

It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.

This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.

Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at least cathartic.

Trump, like all despots, has no ethical core. He chooses his allies and appointees based on their personal loyalty and fawning obsequiousness to him. He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect us from corporate totalitarianism.

But the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against creeping fascism, Madeleine Albright among them, are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from the zeitgeist. None of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies, deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly disintegrates.

The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly like 18th-century courtiers at the court of Versailles about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history.

The corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and access, committed cultural suicide. And when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again, the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency. The press, especially the cable news shows, keeps the lights on and the cameras rolling so viewers will be glued to a 21st-century version of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” It is good for ratings. It is good for profits. But it accelerates the decline.

All this will soon be compounded by financial collapse. Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations alone got a $670 million tax break under the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1.

This circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital.” The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead, as Nomi Prins writes, to “a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.”

An economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free ourselves from debt.

However, the next financial crash, as Prins points out in her book “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,” won’t be like the last one. This is because, as she says, “there is no Plan B.” Interest rates can’t go any lower. There has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be no way out. Once the economy crashes and the rage across the country explodes into a firestorm, the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.

And so, to quote Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?

We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town. The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties.

Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition, a process that will soon be accelerated given the expected ruling in a case before the Supreme Court that will cripple the ability of public-sector unions to represent workers. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so patently fictitious it will, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from reality. The media outlets will all sound as fatuous as Trump. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”

As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.

Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is.

1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.

In the quest to understand why governments move in such irrational ways, why expensive, senseless wars are fought while homeless people die of exposure on the streets, why millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer while everyone else struggles to pay rent, why we destroy the ecosystem we depend on for our survival, why one elected official tends to advance more or less the same harmful policies and agendas as his or her predecessor, people often come up with explanations which don’t really hold water.

The most common of these is probably the notion that all of these problems are due to the malignant influence of one of two mainstream political parties, and if the other party could just get in control of the situation all the problems would go away. Other explanations include the belief that humans are just intrinsically awful, blaming minorities like Jews or immigrants, blaming racism and white supremacy, or going all the way down wild and twisted rabbit holes into theories about reptilian secret societies and baby-eating pedophile cabals. But really all of mankind’s irrational behavior can be explained by the basic human impulse to amass power and influence over one’s fellow humans, combined with the fact that sociopaths tend to rise to positions of power.

Our evolutionary ancestors were pack animals, and the ability to rise in social standing in one’s pack determined crucial matters like whether one got first or last dibs on food or got to reproduce. This impulse to rise in our pack is hardwired deeply into our evolutionary heritage, but when left unchecked due to a lack of empathy, and when expanded into the globe-spanning 7.6 billion human pack we now find ourselves in due to ease of transportation and communication, it can lead to individuals who will keep amassing more and more power until they wield immense influence over entire clusters of nations.

2. Money rewards sociopathy.

The willingness to do anything to get ahead, to claw your way to the top, to betray whomever you need to, to throw anyone under the bus, to step on anyone to pass them in the rat race, will be rewarded in our current system. Being willing to underpay employees, cheat the legal system, and influence legislators will be rewarded exponentially more. People with a sense of empathy are often unwilling to do such things, whereas sociopaths and psychopaths are. About four percent of the population are sociopaths, and about one percent are psychopaths, with some five to fifteen percent falling somewhere along the borderline. The less empathy you have, the further you are willing to go, and the further up the ladder you can climb.

3. Wealth kills empathy.

If that weren’t bad enough, studies have shown that controlling large amounts of wealth actually destroys one’s sense of compassion for one’s fellow man. When you are able to use wealth to obtain everything from security to loyalty to personal relationships, you no longer have to be tuned in to the brain’s empathy center the rest of humanity depends on to get an accurate reading on what’s going on with the people we’re surrounded by. Most people need to be constantly feeling around their families, coworkers, employers, friends and acquaintances in order to ensure their own safety, social standing and security, whereas a wealthy person can simply purchase those things. Being born into wealth or having it for a long time can prevent that sense of empathy from being as strong as it is in the rest of the population.

4. Money is power.

A 2014 Princeton study showed that ordinary Americans have essentially zero influence over their nation’s policy and behavior regardless of how they vote, while wealthy Americans have a great deal of influence. This is because the ability to use corporate lobbying and campaign donations effectively amounts to the legalized bribery of elected officials, which means that money translates directly into political power. This creates a ruling class which is naturally incentivized to use their influence to increase their own wealth while decreasing everyone else’s, because since power is relative, the less money everyone else has the more power the ruling class has.

This is why billionaires keep hoarding more and more wealth while using legalized bribery to stifle economic justice legislation. It isn’t because they want to be able to buy thousands of luxury cars or dozens of private jets; they can only use one at a time the same as everyone else. They hoard wealth to keep the rest of the population from having it. Because money equals power, spreading wealth around would be tantamount to making everyone king, and because power is relative, making everyone king would mean that no one is king.

Rulers, historically, do not give up power easily, and this elite wealthy class is no exception. Hence all their aggressive attempts to suppress any movement against the status quo from the unwashed masses.

5. This same ruling class controls the media.

It’s common knowledge that most media is controlled by plutocrats, whether it’s the old money plutocrats who control the legacy media or the new money Silicon Valley plutocrats who control much of the new media. Media control is an essential component of rule; this has always been the case, since the days when kings would order dissident books burned and bishops would torture dissident orators to death. This is why the first thing a new plutocrat does as soon as rising to a certain level of wealth is start buying up media influence, like Jeff Bezos did when he bought the Washington Post in 2013. Bezos bought WaPo not because he is a stupid businessman who thought newspapers were about to make a lucrative resurgence, but because he is a brilliant businessman who knows that the status quo he is building his empire upon requires a propaganda firm that the public will trust and believe.

6. People are always manipulating each other.

Cultivating an acute awareness of when you are being manipulated, and considering whether someone might have a motive to do so, is an essential component to making sense of the world.

It is very rare to encounter someone who won’t try to manipulate you in any way. Generally people you’ll encounter in your life will try to influence the way you perceive them and your relationship to them, they’ll try to pull you in in some ways and push you out in others, try to hook you up to their personal agendas and goals and shape you in a way that fits with their shape. There’s nothing inherently malevolent in such behavior, it’s just what people do and what they always have done. Again, humans are social creatures, and we do what we can to increase our standing within our social circles.

The big problem is when skillful manipulators find their way into positions of large-scale influence like government or media. Unfortunately, these are the types who tend to get elevated into such positions, because they can manipulate their way in, and generally they do so for reasons of personal ambition rather than altruism. These skillful manipulators form an essential echelon of the ruling class’ loyal servants, and are the minds behind the pro-establishment narratives you’ll suddenly see circulated from think tanks to media platforms to the establishment lackeys on Capitol Hill.

7. Society is made of narrative.

Most of human experience is filtered through our mental stories about it, from our sense of self, to our ideas about who we are, to our beliefs about how we’re supposed to behave in society, to what money is and how it works, to where power exists and who we’re supposed to obey. All of these things are purely conceptual constructs which only exist in the realm of thought; a “dollar” exists to the extent that we’ve all agreed to pretend it’s a real thing and that it has a certain amount of purchasing power. At any time we could collectively decide to change the rules about how power functions or what money is and how it operates, and then instantly the rule of the elite class would be over without anyone firing a shot. It really would be that simple.

That’s how powerful a force narrative is, which is why the ruling plutocrats fight so hard to keep us from seizing control of it. This is why whistleblowers and outlets like WikiLeaks are aggressively and constantly smeared and demonized in the corporate media; if they can create suspicion of truth-tellers then they can keep them from being trusted, and thus keep them from being believed. This tool has been used to minimize the impact of everything from on the ground reports of what’s happening in Syria to leak drops from Edward Snowden; if you can create enough suspicion of someone it doesn’t matter if they’re speaking 100 percent truth; nobody will believe them, and thus the dominant narrative will remain the same.

Maintaining an awareness that there is always an unending battle to control the narrative and manipulate it to advance plutocratic interests is an essential part of understanding the world.

8. The lines between nations are imaginary.

Those lines drawn on the map between countries are pure narrative as well; they’re only as real as the collective public agrees to pretend they are. The ruling elites know this and exploit this. They don’t think in terms of nations and governments, they think in terms of individuals and groups of individuals.

Key strategic region in the Middle East? No need to take over the whole country, just flood it with extremist groups who are loyal to your agendas and control its oil fields. Primo naval real estate in the southern hemisphere? No need to annex it and plant your country’s flag there, just secure enough influence over the important moving parts using corporate contracts, trade agreements, military/intelligence treaties and secret deals and you can use it however you want.

This is why I am dismissive of arguments that “Israel controls America” or “America controls Europe”. There is no “Israel” or “America”; they’re made-up ideas which rulers once upon a time treated as real, but in the modern days of nationless plutocracy they no longer do. There are individuals, there are corporations, there are government agencies, there are factions and groups, and these are what the ruling elites deal with. Governmental structures are only tools which are used by the ruling elites for the purpose of manipulation, control, and military violence, and they only do so insofar as it is useful. The idea of real nations and governments is a cutesy fairy tale sold to the masses so they won’t see the manipulations.

9. Powerful forces are naturally incentivized to collaborate with each other toward mutual interests.

You can be a low-grade millionaire and still live like a relatively normal civilian, but once you start obtaining giant amounts of wealth control you need to start collaborating with existing power structures or they’ll snuff you out to prevent you from rocking their boat, because again, money equals power. This is why Jeff Bezos contracts with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board, and it’s why Facebook and Google collaborate extensively with government agencies; they never would have been allowed to grow to their size if they had not. Plutocratic dynasties which have been in place since long before Amazon, Facebook and Google figured this out many generations ago, and have agreed to push forward in a direction of mutual interest that doesn’t upset the status quo that their wealth is built upon.

This is extremely true of the west, where an effective empire has been created by a complex transnational alliance of mostly western plutocrats, but it is true outside of that empire as well; there are power alliances to be found everywhere that there is power.

10. There is an immense amount of wealth that can be grabbed in the chaos of war and conflict.

In the same way that existing power structures are naturally incentivized to quash any emerging power which would upset their status quo, alliances of power structures push to crush non-aligned power structures the world over. Whenever you see the tight western alliances and their media propaganda arms attacking the interests of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela etc., you are seeing an alliance of power structures working to disrupt the interests of another alliance of power structures in order to absorb their assets.

The chaotic, Wild West environments that these conflicts create allow for an amount of underhanded looting and pillaging that you could never get away with in your own country, in the exact same way the colonialists and conquistadors of old could never have gotten away with brazenly grabbing gold, land and slaves from their fellow Europeans in Madrid or Rome but were given no legal trouble in the new world. The colonialists and conquistadors pushed into the Americas, Africa and Asia on the pretense of spreading Christianity and civilization; modern day conquerers push into non-aligned power structures on the pretense of spreading freedom and democracy in precisely the same way.

This chaos doesn’t require direct military conflict to be profitable; the uncritical enmity against Russia that the western plutocratic alliance has manufactured with its media control has allowed them to be blamed for everything from incriminating WikiLeaks documents to a corporate raid by Ukrainian oligarchs without any questions asked. Anyone who has ever had to deal personally with a sociopath knows how much they love to exploit the gray areas that chaotic situations give them, and geopolitical conflicts create those situations in spades.

11. The neocons are always wrong.

This one’s really easy. If you ever want to be on the right side of history for a foreign policy debate, look at what Bush-era PNAC neocons like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are saying about it, and take the opposite position. Neocon thought leaders have been loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything since the turn of the century, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria, and they’re not about to start being right now.

12. The push towards truth always starts with yourself.

You can’t out-manipulate seasoned manipulators. The main error most people make when trying to deal with a sociopath is to try and manipulate them back. Don’t even try. They have years of experience on you because they literally have done nothing else. While you were laughing and crying and worrying and connecting and relating to people, they were working out how to play humans like Garry Kasparov worked out how to play chess. And when you have literal teams of sociopaths collaborating together to amass power, you my dear child, do not have a chance. Don’t play their game. You will lose.

The only way to win this is to set your compass resolutely to “true.” Always be honest with yourself. Find all the different ways that you are manipulating others and see them and acknowledge them. Find your tribal allegiances and your desire to be right, and tip your hat to their existence. The more self-aware we are, the less levers we have to be manipulated by. If you are blindly partisan or loyal to a particular faction, that makes you gullible to propaganda because your wishful thinking and your desire to be right come into play. Get honest with yourself about who you are and what you want, and you will start to become an un-playable piece on the board.

If we can’t beat these bastards with truth, we don’t deserve to win.

Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack

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More than two years after the allegation of Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was first made, conclusive proof is still lacking and may never be produced, says Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — including two “alumni” who were former National Security Agency technical directors — have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the “emails related to Hillary Clinton” via a “hack” by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device — probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.

On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted that the “conclusions” of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were “inconclusive.” Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA “Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections” of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement.  That did not prevent the “handpicked” authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing “high confidence” that Russian intelligence “relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee … to WikiLeaks.”  Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.

Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA “assessment” became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump.  It simply could not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself.  No, it had to have been the Russians.

Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff still “can’t share the evidence” with me … or with anyone else, because it does not exist.

WikiLeaks

It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of “emails related to Hillary Clinton,” throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders.  When the emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia for their release.

Clinton’s PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions “to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.”  The diversion worked like a charm.  Mainstream media kept shouting “The Russians did it,” and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer’ Fox, Bernie didn’t say nothin’.

Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating “forensic facts” to “prove” the Russians did it.  Here’s how it played out:

June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish “emails related to Hillary Clinton.”

June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.

June 15, 2016: “Guccifer 2.0” affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the “hack;” claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with “Russian fingerprints.”

The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to “show” that it came from a Russian hack.

Enter Independent Investigators

A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the “handpicked analysts” who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do.  The independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the “hack” that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.

Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider — the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016 for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the “fluid dynamics” principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)

One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May 31 published new evidence that the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not from Russia.

In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated, “We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.”

Our July 24 Memorandum continued: “Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.

“No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA’s Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]

Marbled

“Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the “Marble Framework” program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as ‘news fit to print’ and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since.

“The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, it seems, ‘did not get the memo’ in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: ‘WikiLeaks’ latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.’

“The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use ‘obfuscation,’ and that Marble source code includes a “de-obfuscator” to reverse CIA text obfuscation.

“More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a ‘forensic attribution double game’ or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.”

A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical director, and I commented on Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version published in The Baltimore Sun.

The CIA’s reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates “demons,” and insisting; “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Our July 24 Memorandum continued:  “Mr. President, we do not know if CIA’s Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA’s Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review.  [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this.  Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ]

“We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today’s technology enables hacking to be ‘masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin’ [of the hack] … And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.

“‘Hackers may be anywhere,’ he said. ‘There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can’t you imagine such a scenario? … I can.’

New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published 16-minute interview last Friday.

In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24, 2017:

“Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.

“We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental.” The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.

Convenient Tales About Riches Within Reach

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By Sam Pizzigati

Source: OpEdNews.com

The world at large knew virtually nada about Sylvia Bloom for 96 years. Then she died in 2016. Now, just a little too late, Sylvia Bloom is getting her belated — yet richly deserved — 15 minutes of worldwide fame.

The New York Times has just published a heart-warming story of the caring, upright life Sylvia Bloom lived, and the remarkable — and hidden — fortune she quietly accumulated over the course of her 67-year career as a Manhattan legal secretary.

That fortune totaled, in the end, over $9 million. The bulk of that wealth, the Times account reveals, is going — per Bloom’s wishes — to help students from poor families advance their educations.

None of Bloom’s surviving relatives or law firm colleagues or fellow volunteers at the Henry Street Settlement, the social services agency set to get $6.24 million from her bequest, had any idea that their unassuming loved one and friend had saved anything remotely close to multiple millions.

Counting Pennies

Bloom lived frugally all her life in Brooklyn and commuted, by subway, to her job. The “high life” never interested her in the least. She led a simple existence. She counted her pennies. In the end, she put them all to good use.

Stories like Bloom’s have been popping up regularly over recent years. Leonard Gigowski, a Wisconsin shopkeeper, died three years ago at age 90, and left behind a “secret $13 million fortune” that’s currently funding scholarships. Grace Groner passed away in 2010 at age 100. She spent most of her life in a one-bedroom Illinois home, shopped at thrift stores, and left $9 million for her alma mater.

Convenient Tales

Our popular culture can’t seem to get enough of these life-affirming tales of modest multi-millionaire seniors. These stories make us feel good. They also, unfortunately, reinforce a message that our society’s richest — and their cheerleaders — find enormously convenient.

You don’t have to be money-hungry, commit vile acts or have remarkable talents to become wealthy, the tellers of all these stories of hidden millions suggest. You just have to be frugal; almost anybody, in other words, can become rich.

And if you don’t happen to become rich, the media coverage of these stories not so subtly hints, just look in the mirror for the reason why. You, too, could have resisted temptation and counted your pennies.

You, too, could have built a huge personal fortune. Shame on you. You chose not to.

The Millionaire Next Door

A couple of decades ago, two academic researchers — Thomas Stanley and William Danko — made themselves not insignificant personal fortunes by wrapping up that same theme in reams of statistics. Their 1996 book, The Millionaire Next Door, has so far sold over 4 million copies.

That thrifty fellow down the block with a six-year-old Ford, The Millionaire Next Door related, could well be worth millions. And those millions, the book stressed, all begin with frugality.

Conservative pundits have always loved this basic frugality-pays thesis. Stanley and Danko, the argument goes, have served up the ultimate secret to getting rich. “Hardly any” of the self-made rich the pair profiled in The Millionaire Next Door, as one commentator noted a few years ago, “had expensive tastes.” Instead, these millionaires avoided “new homes and expensive clothes” and “often invested 15 to 20 percent of their net income.”

Any of us could follow that lead, this analyst would add, so long as we understand “that building wealth takes discipline, sacrifice, and hard work.”

Reaping Rewards

But if “discipline, sacrifice, and hard work” build wealth, why do so many millions of disciplined, sacrificing, and hard-working Americans today have so little of it? Why is the “millionaire next door” — especially for our millennial generation — becoming a vanishing species?

Sylvia Bloom’s life offers some clues. Yes, Bloom lived frugally, sacrificed, and worked hard. But she also matured in a society — mid-20th century America — that endeavored to help disciplined, sacrificing, and hard-working people.

That help came in many different forms. Sylvia Bloom attended Hunter College, part of a system of free public higher education in New York City. She and her husband, a firefighter and later teacher, lived in a rent-controlled apartment. She commuted, for just a few dimes per day, on the world’s most extensive public transit system.

Sylvia Bloom’s young adult counterparts today? They confront a totally different reality. The sky-high costs of attending college have turned 21st-century young adults into life-long debtors. To find an affordable place to live, they squeeze into tiny apartments close to their jobs or plop themselves in distant exurbs, fighting traffic jams all the way to work — if not paying big bucks daily for scarce transit options.

Austerity Trumps Frugality

These millennials aren’t living the frugal life. They’re living the austere life — and not by choice. Our elected leaders have thrust this austerity upon them, with decades of public policies that have rewarded the rich with tax cuts at every turn and whittled away public services at every opportunity.

If Sylvia Bloom had been born a millennial, she’d be pinching pennies today to pay off her college debts. She’d be looking forward to years of hard work and sacrifice, with no hope of ever saving up enough to become a significant invester.

In her actual life, Sylvia Bloom had the good fortune to live her early adult years in a society much more caring than ours. She cared back — and chose to devote her own financial good fortune to helping others to the same support that so helped her.

Sylvia Bloom’s life does indeed offer up inspiration. Let’s not let our rich turn that life into a rationalization for their riches.

WikiLeaks and whistleblowers condemn new allegations against Julian Assange

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By James Cogan

Source: WSWS.org

WikiLeaks has announced it will sue the British Guardian over the scurrilous allegations it made on May 15 that Julian Assange “hacked” the communication system of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been confined since he sought political asylum in June 2012.

The only and obvious motive behind the unsubstantiated, “anonymous” allegations is to provide the Ecuadorian government with a pretext to renege on Assange’s asylum and force him out of the embassy. Upon doing so, he would be arrested by waiting British police for breaching bail conditions. Once in British custody, the WikiLeaks editor would face the prospect of extradition to the US to stand trial on charges of espionage, which could lead to his protracted imprisonment or, potentially, even his execution (see: “Conspiracy emerges to push Julian Assange into British and US hands”).

In a tweet issued shortly after the publication of the Guardian articles, WikiLeaks denounced the assertions as an “anonymous libel” made on behalf of the “current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange’s asylum—while he can’t respond. You’ve gone too far this time. We’re suing.”

Assange cannot respond because on March 28, more than seven weeks ago, the Ecuadorian government of President Lenín Moreno cut off all his communications with the outside world and has blocked him from even receiving visitors. Ample indications exist that Ecuador did so on the demand of Washington, as part of the price for improved relations with the US.

WikiLeaks ended its tweet with a link to the scathing review that Assange wrote of the Guardian-published 2014 book, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man. The author of the book was Luke Harding, the same Guardian journalist who co-wrote the May 15 attack on Assange and WikiLeaks.

In the first sentence of his review, Assange described Harding’s work as a “hack job in the purest sense of the word” and more than substantiated that characterisation. He condemned the Guardian for having “caved to government pressure” over the publication of leaked material and for leaving Edward Snowden “in the lurch” when the NSA whistleblower fled to Hong Kong in June 2013. It was a representative of WikiLeaks who organised for Snowden to escape to Russia, where he was eventually granted political asylum.

Harding and the Guardian did not have credibility in 2014 and they do not today.

Beside WikiLeaks and the World Socialist Web Site, only a handful of other websites and individuals have stepped forward to denounce the Guardian for serving as the conduit for the anti-Assange vendetta of the US government and intelligence agencies. In the main, there is a complicit silence on the part of the pro-imperialist establishment media and no less pro-imperialist pseudo-left organisations.

Former British whistleblower Craig Murray, who has vocally defended Assange from the outset, wrote on his blog yesterday that the Guardian articles included “outright lies.” Murray exposed, for example, the false claim by the newspaper that Sweden was “unable to question Assange” over allegations he may have committed sexual offences in 2010. The reprehensible attempt to slander Assange as a “rapist” has been relentlessly used to try and undermine the immense international support for WikiLeaks and its editor.

In fact, Assange was questioned before he left Sweden for Britain and a prosecutor deemed he had no case to answer. A second prosecutor, however, reopened the case and pursued it aggressively, gaining an arrest warrant to force Assange to return to Sweden to answer “questions.” The warrant was issued under conditions in which US and allied governments were baying for Assange’s blood because WikiLeaks had published vast amounts of damning evidence of war crimes and intrigues that had been courageously leaked by then Private Bradley [now Chelsea] Manning.

Assange correctly refused to submit to the politically-motivated warrant and challenged it in the British courts. He sought asylum in June 2012 only when his legal avenues ran out to prevent his extradition to Sweden, and likely rendition on to the US.

When Swedish authorities finally agreed to Assange’s longstanding offer to answer any questions, from Britain, he was interviewed by prosecutors and police for two days in November 2016. In May 2017, Sweden completely dropped the case. After more than six years of persecution, Assange was never charged with any crime.

Craig Murray characterised the May 15 Guardian articles as a “new low… in a collaboration between long term MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding and the CIA financed neo-con propagandists of Focus Ecuador”—the right-wing Spanish-language site which was also provided the “anonymous” information that Assange “hacked” the embassy.

Murray opined: “I would bet any money that these anonymous ‘sources’ are as always Harding’s mates in the British security services.”

The Intercept website featured today an interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald, its editor and former whistleblower, with previous Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, whose administration granted Assange asylum in 2012.

Correa denounced his protégé and successor Lenín Moreno for cutting off Assange’s communications and visitors, labelling it as “basically torture and “a clear violation of his rights.” He declared the Ecuadorian government “is attacking Julian’s mental health.” He reviewed the closer relations between Moreno’s administration and Washington that had been developed immediately prior to the attack on Assange

Correa stated that the Guardian allegations that Assange hacked the embassy were “absurd” and that it had “presented no evidence for this, just an anonymous source.”

The ex-president stated that if Moreno allowed the WikiLeaks’ editor to be forced out of the London embassy without an iron-clad guarantee he would not be extradited to the US, it would be a “terrible betrayal, a violation of the rules of asylum and a breach of Ecuador’s responsibility to protect the safety and welfare of Julian Assange.”

The almost universal hostility towards Assange and indifference to his fate on the part of the establishment press and self-styled “left” is in stark contrast to mass popular sentiment. On Facebook, Twitter and other social media, every defence of Assange is being responded to with a stream of supportive comments, retweets and shares, and sharp and informed rebuttals of all those who attempt to attack Assange and WikiLeaks with pro-state propaganda and lies.

The social force that must be politically mobilised in defence of democratic rights is the international working class. It must be alerted and educated as to the tremendous dangers posed by the steadily escalating efforts to censor the Internet, suppress free speech and railroad whistleblowers and principled journalists like Julian Assange into prison or worse.

 

The author also recommends:

Ecuador hints it may hand over Julian Assange to Britain and the US
[12 May 2018]

Freedom for Julian Assange!
[11 January 2018]

How false flag operations are carried out today

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By Philip M. Giraldi

Source: Intrepid Report

False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one’s own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre, but it was only “honorable” if one reverted to one’s own flag before engaging in combat.

Today’s false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the Internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States.

False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year’s two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. The most recent reported attack on April 7 might not have occurred at all, according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma. Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.

The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by “doing something.” If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime.

The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, on March 4. Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. The allegations made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being “very likely” Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the U.K.’s own chemical weapons lab. May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the “facts” being invented in London. Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA.

The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if “an incident” looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. A bit of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.

Social Media Behemoths Sweep Alternative News into the Memory Hole

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

The squabbling between self-identified progressives and conservatives continues as social media transforms itself into a news, information, and opinion gatekeeper.

All information that contradicts the establishment narrative will either be downgraded into obscurity or excluded outright on social media.

Take for instance ThinkProgress, the Soros-financed news website, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund welded to the infrastructure of the Democrat party. On May 2, it complained that a bias study at Facebook will be run by conservatives, that is to say establishment Republicans, notably former Arizona Congress critter Jon Kyl.

ThinkProgress believes there is no such thing as bias aimed at conservatives—it’s the liberals who are routinely downgraded at Facebook while so-called conservatives are free to post what progressives characterize as an evil and poisonous ideology.

According to Libby Watson at Splinter News, conservatives are involved in “grift,” flimflamming poor Mark Zuckerberg with untrue claims of bias against the likes of Breitbart News.

It’s all part of a never ending and hugely counterproductive “culture war” that has raged between the ostensible right and left going on thirty years now. Ms. Watson manages to squeeze identity politics into her screed.

“The conservative movement has done a remarkable job over the last half century to bellow and bully its way into having its most ridiculous and reality-divorced concerns taken seriously,” she writes. “It lies about and distorts everything: about tax cuts, about Benghazi and her emails, about immigration, about healthcare, about Diamond and Silk. The further Facebook descends down the path of letting that screaming white face of faux outrage dictate how they run their platform, the harder it’s going to be for them to get away from them.”

The progressive news website Common Dreams complains it has weathered “significant drops in traffic since Google and Facebook began changing algorithms and talking openly about their new attempts to control the kind of news content users see. According to internal data and Google Analytics, traffic to Common Dreams from Google searches fell by 34 percent after the powerful search giant unveiled its new search protocol in April 2017.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the yawning divide, Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, rallied around 60 conservatives and fired off an open letter to the social media giants demanding transparency, clarity on the definition of hate speech, equality for conservatives, and respect for the First Amendment.

“Social media censorship and online restriction of conservatives and their organizations have reached a crisis level,” the open letter states. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s hearings on Capitol Hill only served to draw attention to how widespread this problem has become. Conservative leaders now have banded together to call for equal treatment on tech and social media.”

Both liberals and conservatives are missing the point.

Facebook and Google will continue and enlarge the effort to gatekeep information that does not jive with the establishment narrative, be it from the right or left.

The internet and web upended the establishment’s carefully constructed propaganda machine—the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” under its Operation Mockingbird beginning in the early 1950s—deeply embedded within corporate media.

Beginning with Friendster, MySpace, and like projects in the early 2000s and eventually morphing into the corporate behemoths Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, social media platforms have extended the reach of alternative media, much to the displeasure of the establishment. Its preferred propaganda conduits have withered and this has seriously hampered its ability to control the narrative.

Both the right and left need to nurture their own social media platforms and drive traffic there.

Of course, this will not be as effective as plugging into the massive matrix of social connectivity provided by the corporate tech giants, but the alternative is to be marginalized and eventually swept into the memory hole as the context of “extremism” narrows and constricts expression, excluding all but the most token disagreement with the establishment narrative.

However, I’m not sure we’re up to it.

The elite has done a remarkable job of using the time tested divide and conquer concept, endlessly pitting the so-called right against the amorphously defined left and vice versa. Liberals and conservatives continue to fight over frivolous ideological points as the funny money asset-driven economy prepares to implode and the mission of infinity war expands to the point where it endangers life on planet Earth.