Media’s Grim Addiction to Perseverance Porn

By Adam Johnson

Source: FAIR

You’ve seen or heard or read the personal interest story a thousand times: An enterprising seven-year-old collects cans to save for college (ABC72/8/17), a man with unmatched moxie walks 15 miles to his job (Today2/20/17), a low-wage worker buys shoes for a kid whose mother can’t afford them (Fox512/14/16), an “inspiring teen” goes right back to work after being injured in a car accident (CBS News12/16/16). All heartwarming tales of perseverance in the face of impossible odds—and all ideological agitprop meant to obscure and decontextualize the harsh reality of dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Man walks eight miles in the snow to get to work every day (ABC 273/14/17). Or was it a teen walking 10 miles in freezing weather to a job interview (New York Daily News2/26/13)? Or was it 10 miles to work every day (Times Herald Record3/17/17)? Or was it 12 (ABC News2/22/17) or 15 (Today2/20/17) or 18 (Evening Standard, 2/9/09) or 21 (Detroit Free Press1/20/15)? Who cares—their humanity is irrelevant. They’re clickbait, stand-in bootstrap archetypes meant to validate the bourgeois morality of click-happy media consumers.

These stories are typically shared for the purposes of poor-shaming, typically under the guise of inspirational life advice. “This man is proof we all just need to keep walking, no matter what life throws at us,” insisted Denver ABC7 anchor Anne Trujillo, after sharing one of those stories of a poor person forced to walk thousands of miles a year to survive.

A healthy press would take these anecdotes of “can do” spirit and ask bigger questions, like why are these people forced into such absurd hardship? Who benefits from skyrocketing college costs? Why does the public transit in this person’s city not have subsidies for the poor? Why aren’t employers forced to offer time off for catastrophic accidents? But time and again, the media mindlessly tells the bootstrap human interest story, never questioning the underlying system at work.

One particularly vulgar example was CBS News(12/16/16) referring to an “inspiring” African-American kid who had to work at his fast food job with an arm sling and a neck brace after a car accident. To compound the perseverance porn, he was, at least in part, doing so to help donate to a local homeless charity. Here we have a story highlighting how society has colossally failed its most vulnerable populations—the poor, ethnic minorities, children and the homeless—and the take-home point is, “Ah gee, look at that scrappy kid.”

Journalism is as much—if not more—about what isn’t reported as what is. Here a local reporter is faced with a cruel example of people falling through the cracks of the richest country on Earth, and their only contribution is to cherry-pick one guy who managed—just barely—to cling on to the edge.

Perseverance porn goes hand in hand with the rise of a GoFundMe economy that relies on personal narrative over collective policy, emotional appeals over baseline human rights. $930 million out of the $2 billion raised on GoFundMe since its inception in 2010 was for healthcare expenses, while an estimated 45,000 people a year die a year due to a lack of medical treatment. Meanwhile, anchors across cable news insist that single-payer healthcare is “unaffordable,” browbeating guests who support it, while populating their broadcasts with these one-off tales of people heroically scraping by.

It’s part of a broader media culture of anecdotes in lieu of the macro, moralizing “success” rather than questioning systemic problems. Perseverance porn may seem harmless, but in highlighting handpicked cases of people overcoming hardship without showing the thousands that didn’t—much less asking broader questions as to what created these conditions—the media traffics in decidedly right-wing tropes. After all, if they can do it, so can you—right?

False Flag Terrorism Isn’t a “Theory” … It’s ADMITTED and Widespread

Source: Washington’s Blog

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this, this and this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked several attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.    The staged attacks included:

  • The German radio station Sender Gleiwitz [details below]
  • The strategic railway at POSunka Pass (Jabłonków Incident), located on the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia
  • The German customs station at Hochlinden (today part of Rybnik-Stodoły)
  • The forest service station in Pitschen (Byczyna)
  • The communications station at Neubersteich (“Nieborowitzer Hammer” before 12 February 1936, now Kuznia Nieborowska)
  • The railroad station in Alt-Eiche (Smolniki), Rosenberg in Westpreußen district
  • A woman and her companion in Katowice

The details of the Gleiwitz radio station incident include:

On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The Germans’ goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human corpses to pass them off as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.

(3) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government – subsequently approved by Mussolini himself – admitted that violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the Greeks, as an excuse for Italy’s 1940 invasion of Greece.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see thisthis and this).

(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident. For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):

“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.

(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news reportthe official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.

***

The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.

(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.

(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.

(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(28) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe – a murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus – was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.

(29) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(30) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(31) As reported by the New York TimesBBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. They lured foreign migrants into the country, executed them in a staged gun battle, and then claimed they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”. Specifically, Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.

(32) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(33) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have allegedthat 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.). 

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(34) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

(35) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(36) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(37) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.

(38) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were authorized to use the following method: “False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.” While not a traditional false flag attack, this deception could lead to former detainees – many of whom were tortured – attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation and torture.

(39) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(40) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”

(41) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(42) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs. While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out. The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.

(43) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(44) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(45) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)

(46) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(47) An undercover officer admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22 countries. Germany’s federal police chief admitted that – while the undercover officer worked for the German police – he acted illegally during a G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living with violent “Black Bloc” anarchists.

(48) Denver police admitted that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged “anarchists” had planned to wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn’t know the undercover officers were cops.

(49) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(50) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that – at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 – undercover police officers were arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see this and this, for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police, and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police failed to stop the attacks.

(51) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(52) Austin police admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal “lock boxes” which ended up getting many protesters arrested.

(53) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.

(54) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(55) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(56) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(57) Two members of the Turkish parliamenthigh-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(58) The former Director of the NSA and other American government officials admit said that the U.S. is a huge supporter of terrorism. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets. The U.S. and its allies have been supporting Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups for many decades, and providing them arms, money and logistical support in LibyaSyriaMaliBosniaChechnyaIran, and many other countries. U.S. allies are also directly responsible for creating and supplying ISIS.

It’s gotten so ridiculous that a U.S. Senator has introduced a “Stop Arming Terrorists Act”, and U.S. Congresswoman – who introduced a similar bill in the House – says: “For years, the U.S. government has been supporting armed militant groups working directly with and often under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

(59) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.

(60) Speaking of snipers, in a secret recording, Venezuelan generals admit that they will deploy snipers to shoot protesters, but keep the marksmen well-hidden from demonstrator and the reporters covering the events so others would be blamed for the deaths.

(61) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(62) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(63) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

(64) The CIA has admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out cyberattacks and blame other countries.

(65) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.

(66) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot themduring a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes:

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.

(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)

(67) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

(68) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags.

(69) The Director of Analytics at the interagency Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security (J.D. Maddox) notes:

Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for millennia, to compel war. A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal opposition.

***

The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of victimhood: we are the 
victims of the enemy’s unforgivable atrocities.

***

In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor’s own personnel are a core tactic of the provocation.

***

The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other states in the near term.

(70) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:

Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
– Josef Stalin

Postscript 1:  It is not just “modern” nations which have launched false flag attacks. For example, a Native American from one tribe (Pomunkey) murdered a white Englishwoman living in Virginia in 1697 and then falsely blamed it on second tribe (Piscataway). But he later admitted in court that he was not really Piscataway, and that he had been paid by a provocateur from a third tribe (Iroquois) to kill the woman as a way to start a war between the English and the Piscataway, thus protecting the profitable Iroquois monopoly in trade with the English.

Postscript 2:  On multiple occasions, atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is more like a “fake flag” than a “false flag”, as no actual terrorism occurred.

For example:

  • The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war
  • One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress
  • Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this
  • Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:

had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

  • The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by highly exaggerated reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this

Afterword: The corporate media will likely never report on false flags … as it is ALWAYS pro-war.

Conspiracy Theory

By Paul Craig Roberte

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

In the United States “conspiracy theory” is the name given to explanations that differ from those that serve the ruling oligarchy, the establishment or whatever we want to call those who set and control the agendas and the explanations that support the agendas.

The explanations imposed on us by the ruling class are themselves conspiracy theories. Moreover, they are conspiracy theories designed to hide the real conspiracy that our rulers are operating.

For example, the official explanation of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory. Some Muslims, mainly Saudi Arabians, delivered the greatest humiliation to a superpower since David slew Goliath. They outsmarted all 17 US intelligence agencies and those of NATO and Israel, the National Security Council, the Transportation Safety Administration, Air Traffic Control, and Dick Cheney, hijacked four US airliners on one morning, brought down three World Trade Center skyscrapers, destroyed that part of the Pentagon where research was underway into the missing $2.3 trillion, and caused the morons in Washington to blame Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, the Saudia Arabians who humiliated Ameria were involved in a conspiracy to do so.

Is it a believable conspiracy?

The ability of a few young Muslim men to pull off such a feat is unbelievable. Such total failure of the US National Security State means that America was blindly vulnerable throughout the decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union. If such total failure of the National Security State had really occurred, the White House and Congress would have been screaming for an investigation. People would have been held accountable for the long chain of security failures that allowed the plot to succeed. Instead, no one was even reprimanded, and the White House resisted all efforts for an investigation for a year. Finally, to shut up the 9/11 families, a 9/11 Commission was convened. The commission duly wrote down the government’s story and that was the “investigation.”

Moreover, there is no evidence to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11. Indeed, all known evidence contradicts the official conspiracy theory.

For example, it is a proven fact that Building 7 came down at freefall acceleration, which means it was wired for demolition. Why was it wired for demolition? There is no official answer to this question.

It is the known evidence provided by scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and the first responders who were in the twin towers and personally experienced the numerous explosions that brought down the towers that is described as a conspiracy theory.

The CIA introduced the term “conspiracy theory” into public discourse as part of its action plan to discredit skeptics of the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Any explanation other than the one handed down, which is contradicted by all known evidence, was debunked as a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories are the backbone of US foreign policy. For example, the George W. Bush regime was active in a conspiracy against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The Bush regime created fake evidence of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” sold the false story to a gullible world and used it to destroy Iraq and murder its leader. Similarly, Gaddafi was a victim of an Obama/Hillary conspiracy to destroy Libya and murder Gaddafi. Assad of Syria and Iran were slated for the same treatment until the Russians intervened.

Currently, Washington is engaged in conspiracies against Russia, China, and Venezuela. Proclaiming a non-existent “Iranian threat,” Washington put US missiles on Russia’s border and used the “North Korean threat” to put missiles on China’s border. The democratically elected leader of Venezuela is said by Washington to be a dictator, and sanctions have been put on Venezuela to help the small Spanish elite through whom Washington has traditionally ruled South American countries pull off a coup and reestablish US control over Venezuela.

Everyone is a threat: Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, tribes in Pakistan, Libya, Russia, China, North Korea, but never Washington. The greatest conspiracy theory of our time is that Americans are surrounded by foreign threats. We are not even safe from Venezuela.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes are quick to debunk as conspiracy theories all explanations that differ from the explanations of the ruling interests that the presstitutes serve.

Yet, as I write and for some nine months to date, the presstitute media has itself been promoting the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was involved in a conspiracy with the president of Russia and Russian intelligence services to hack the US presidential election and place Trump, a Russian agent, in the White House.

This conspiracy theory has no evidence whatsoever. It doesn’t need evidence, because it serves the interests of the military/security complex, the Democratic Party, the neoconservatives, and permits the presstitutes to show lavish devotion to their masters. By endless repetition a lie becomes truth.

There is a conspiracy, and it is against the American people. Their jobs have been offshored in order to enrich the already rich. They have been forced into debt in a futile effort to maintain their living standards. Their effort to stem their decline by electing a president who spoke for them is being subverted before their eyes by an utterly corrupt media and ruling class.

Sooner or later it will dawn on them that there is nothing they can do but violently revolt. Most likely, by the time they reach this conclusion it will be too late. Americans are very slow to escape from the false reality in which they live. Americans are a thoroughly brainwashed people who hold tightly to their false life within The Matrix.

For the gullible and naive who have been brainwashed into believing that any explanation that differs from the officially-blessed one is a conspiracy theory, there are available online long lists of government conspiracies that succeeded in deceiving the people in order that the governments could achieve agendas that the people would have rejected.

If liberty continues to exist on earth, it will not be in the Western world. It will be in Russia and China, countries that emerged out of the opposite and know the value of liberty, and it will be in those South American countries, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia that fight for their sovereignty against American oppression.

Indeed, as historians unconcerned with their careers are beginning to write, the primary lesson in history is that governments deceive their peoples.

Everywhere in the Western world, government is a conspiracy against the people.

Played by the Ruling Elite’s Control System, It’s Time for a New Paradigm

By Paul A. Philips

Source: Waking Times

People are waking up in droves, but the majority continue to be played by the ruling elite’s control system, unaware that almost every subject under the sun is rigged: In effect we are confined to living in a false or limiting paradigm. Against the ‘insurmountable odds,’ will there ever be a new paradigm experience? Having seen through the grand deception, will the awakened ever change the control system? Can we somehow go on to cultivate new theories and practices for a humane new paradigm experience, one that will create a world that truly makes a difference for everyone?

Before answering, here are just some of the ways in which the majority people in their ignorance are played by the ruling elite’s control system in the current false or limiting paradigm.

1. Fake science

Corporate/Banker sponsored pseudo-science has had a grip on humanity for quite some time, headed by highly dogmatic fake guru scientists. Try telling some followers in the church of scientism that these so-called Gurus are fake and wrong; they may look at you as if you have 3 heads, no matter how knowledgeable you are or good at communicating the real science.

(Hint:  Why were we taught very little or nothing about Nikola Tesla in school..?)

2. Fake Political Parties

Indeed, the awakened know that regardless of who’s in power all the major political party leaders are only puppets to the ruling elite puppet masters. Thus, the ruling elite make all the major political decisions regardless of who’s in power, making the parties and their leaders irrelevant. The masses are distracted from waking up to the realization of this: For instance, one of the latest tricks used to con the masses into giving their support has been to make the leader of a political party look like an ‘outsider’ who will not walk the dictated political white line.

As in the case of Trump during his presidential election campaign, he came across as an ‘outsider,’ telling the masses what they wanted to hear. He came across as anti-establishment. But in the end, his long lists of anti-establishment promises did not get fulfilled: The false promises were nothing more than gimmicks to win votes, while the same old same old still continues…

3. Fake Wars

Sadly, the majority are still falling for the fake wars narratives with their related psyops; false flags or divide and rule tactics, pushed on us for the ulterior motives of power, profit and political gains. The warmongers, aided and abetted by the mainstream media (real fake news) threaten the existence of not only every man, woman and child, but all life forms on this planet if nuclear war breaks out.

To find out what those war-hungry leaders don’t want you to know about go HERE.

4. Played by the ‘Beneficial’ Deception

As part of the deception, to get approval, the ruling elite present their agendas as ‘beneficial’ when, in fact, they are actually harmful or enslaving to the masses. The greater the difference between something that is perceived by the masses as ‘beneficial’ compared to the opposite of what it really is, the easier the elite can advance their agendas.

Agenda 2030 (Agenda 21 on speed), is a classic example. To take a look at how the perceived ‘benefits’ are presented, but, are in truth, extremely damaging, go HERE.

5. Played by ‘Confusion’

One of the tricks used to cover-up information and allow hidden crooked agendas to continue is to put the masses into a state of confusion or neutrality.

For example, through Big Pharma shills with their disinformation and/or the cover-up of scientific evidence in the elite’s owned and controlled mainstream media, the masses have been duped into confusion, not knowing what to do regarding choices on life-saving alternative health practices…

6. Played into Being Comfortably Numb

Are you comfortably numb or a truth-seeking activist?

Ruled and divided, wilfully ignorant and apathetic to the woes of the world, some people love their comfort zone so much they will do all they can to remain there. To avoid confrontation, they go into agreement with the general consensus of the masses while blindly accepting the rule of authority without ever questioning.

Labelled as Stockholm syndrome, some people even love their servitude under the rule of authority. Such individuals affected grovel away their lives in victimhood without ever realizing they’ve been ensnared in a web of deceit, while their cognitive dissonance and denial plays a major part in maintaining the status quo…

Many folks have been played into mindless habituation. For example, many spend endless hours languishing away, watching the T.V (moron box) brainwashed by mainstream media broadcasts…

 In effect, consistent with the Pink Floyd song these people have become “Comfortably numb…”

-Indeed the list goes on where so many are played by the ruling elite’s control system

Creating the New Paradigm

A major response to the imprisoning control system is to disconnect. Here are just a few examples:

Disconnect from giving your support to those power-drunk, dishonest, egomaniacal puppet politicians. All Western World government is a myth because it has been designed to give the illusion of choice or change. It’s the puppet masters we really need to get at not so much the puppeteered politicians. We need to expose their inhumane criminal activities to the world…

Disconnect from the increasingly health-threatening wireless technology and the internet of things. Stop using ‘smart’ technology (dumb technology). Stop using the electronic appliances: No longer giving these appliances to kids would be a good start. Stop using credit cards… Find alternative ways of bypassing the system…

Disconnect from consuming disease-causing food and water poisoned with GMO technology, toxic ingredients and additives, irradiated by nutrient-nuking manufacturing processes… Refuse toxic medicines such as vaccines. Foods and medicines are killing us. The select few belonging to the related establishments manufacturing the medicines are making trillions on us as a consequence of our increasing disease…

Disconnect from the greed-driven mega-corporations swallowing up small businesses while depriving the freedom of their owners in the monopolies. Support the small business man.

Reconnecting with our True Self

Humans have now reached unprecedented levels of selfishness. We are running amok with narcissism, materialistic greed and consumerism while the rich get even richer: It’s now been reported that 5 people nearly have as much wealth as half the world’s population. Around 90% of the world’s population lives in poverty. Mega-corporations are getting even fatter. Consider the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon as an example…

-In effect we have been pushed to the limits. All this only adds up to the realization that change has to happen. The control system’s imprisoning status quo has to end as it continues to be an ever widening mismatch compared to our ongoing awakening.

Besides making the effort to disconnect from the ruling Elite’s control system, to stop us from being dictated, we also need to change our ways by reconnecting with our true self.

Reconnecting with the true self means changing our inner world to make intended changes manifest in our outer world. We need to be a stand for truth, honesty, integrity, kindness, caring and compassion for governing ourselves in a new paradigm experience.

So many people eek away their daily existences in dissatisfaction, frustration and servitude: It’s time that we felt good about ourselves again; make the shift from victim to victor… A monumental task, of course, but for our survival we need an open mindedness and open heartedness to build the multiple layers needed for complete change so that the new system is solid enough to bring lasting peace. Peace for ourselves, our children and their children to be.

American Jackboot Diplomacy

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The latest extraordinary roughshod violation of Russian diplomatic rights by the American authorities shows that the US doesn’t want to restore normal bilateral relations. Indeed, it has now resorted publicly to jackboot diplomacy.

The rapid ordering of Russia to vacate three of its diplomatic properties – in a matter of hours – amid reported threats from the American authorities that they would smash down entrance doors if the orders were not complied with, shows a reckless disregard for Russia’s sovereign rights. Not just Russia’s sovereign rights, but the rights of all nations, as far as America is concerned.

There were also reports that US secret service agents conducted inspections of the properties while Russian officials were deprived access to the building. Such conduct marks not only provocative contempt for Russian authorities, it also raises concerns that US agents were attempting to plant incriminating evidence which might be subsequently “uncovered” by the ongoing probes into alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election last year.

What’s more, the manhandling of Russian diplomatic rights came on the personal orders from President Donald Trump, according to press reports. Previously, Trump had stated his desire to restore normal bilateral relations with Russia. One has to conclude that the latest breach of Russian sovereignty is a blunt sign that American official policy is now fully aligned in an antagonistic agenda toward Moscow.

The collective American amnesia is astounding. The shuttering of the three Russian properties in San Francisco, New York and Washington was presented by the US State Department and US media as a “retaliation” for Russia’s expulsion of some 455 American diplomats in July.

Downplayed or omitted in the US media coverage was the fact that Russia expelled those diplomats in response to the Obama administration expropriating three Russian properties and ejecting 35 Russian diplomats back in December 2016. Russia had patiently waited seven months to see if the new Trump administration would do the decent thing and undo the Obama violations. The Trump administration not only did not undo the damage, it went further to impose new trade and political sanctions on Russia.

Thus, Russia had every right to reciprocate with its expulsions in July, which in any case brought the remaining 400 or so US diplomats down to the same number as Russian diplomats residing in the US. Moscow also gave the American side a month to vacate its premises. The Americans gave the Russians 12 hours.

Trump’s latest diplomatic infringement brings the total number of closed Russian properties to six, and marks a dramatic escalation in the dispute. Moscow has said it will respond appropriately.

Relations between the two nations are deteriorating rapidly beyond the already frayed level. But let’s be clear: it is the US side which is responsible for the downward spiral.

Obama’s unprecedented expulsions and expropriations were premised on lurid accusations that the Russian government ordered an interference campaign in the US presidential election. No evidence has yet been provided by the US intelligence agencies to support this sensational and nebulous claim. Yet we are in an extraordinary situation of tit-for-tat diplomatic blows based on unproven American allegations. This is a mockery of legal due process.

Russia has consistently dismissed those accusations, saying that they are motivated by anti-Russian prejudice and US political in-fighting and scapegoating. Ironically, Trump who has lambasted the “Russia collusion” claims as fake news put out by the pro-Democrat news media and intelligence community is now, in effect, jumping on the anti-Russia juggernaut with his latest order of diplomatic seizures. American folly knows no bounds.

The American amnesia is even more problematic. The sanctions against Russia began in 2014 over the Ukraine crisis. That crisis was instigated by American and European interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine and the eventual violent coup against an elected government in Kiev. The US-backed regime that seized power has been attacking the separatist ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine for the past three years. Meanwhile the people of Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation instead of recognizing the Neo-Nazi Banderite Kiev regime. Yet it is Russia which is sanctioned by the US and its European allies for “destabilizing Ukraine.”

The US is showing itself with full inglorious nakedness to be a petulant bully that flaunts international law. In short, an utterly shameless rogue regime that is now completely out of control, and doesn’t even care what others think. The latest violation of Russian sovereignty epitomizes the general high-handed attitude of the Americans to international law and the sovereign rights of all nations.

Amazingly, US media made self-justifying speculative comments that the alleged burning of documents inside the Russian consulate in San Francisco was “evidence” of Russian subterfuge and espionage. It is every nation’s sovereign right under international law to be afforded privacy for its diplomats. Instead of insinuating Russian wrongdoing, the proper, more disturbing, perspective should be that America has so little respect for international law that other nations no longer trust the US to abide by diplomatic legal standards.

The violation of Russian rights is consistent with the US violation of Ukraine which is in turn consistent with American violation of Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Venezuela, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, to mention just a few other recent cases.

On North Korea, what gives the US the legal and moral authority to declare that diplomacy does not work, or that negotiations might only be permitted if stringent preconditions are met by Pyongyang? How is that the US arrogates the “right” to threaten war on North Korea (as well as Iran and Venezuela and others) while glibly ruling out the obligation to hold equal dialogue and comply with diplomatic protocols? This is the behavior and mindset of a tyrant. A fascist state.

The latest manhandling of Russian sovereign rights is a stark milestone in the degeneration of the United States. It is abandoning any pretense at civil diplomacy.

Jackboot diplomacy is the corollary of US wars of aggression, mass murder, mass torture, and the systematic destruction of international law. All with the narcissistic smile of smug self-righteousness.

One nation under plutocracy

By Jack Balkwill

Source: Intrepid Report

Americans are brought up believing a fairy tale in which there is somehow democracy in their governance. But the late, great, Leonard Cohen exposed the system’s dirty little secret, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.”

Even at the start of the nation, the first Chief Justice John Jay admitted the “democracy” hoax upon which the Supreme Court is built when he conceded, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” Justices have ruled that way throughout the centuries following, with government serving a privileged ruling class.

The United States has the largest number of billionaires of any country, with 536. They live here because it is the best place to live for a greedy bastard. It was billionaire Leona Helmsley who let the cat out of the bag that “Only the little people pay taxes.”

Grand Prince Billy Gates has his “Foundation,” to ensure that he not even think about paying taxes. What inconvenience if he were to contribute anything for the massive government services he uses to increase his fortune.

It takes oceans of sweat and rivers of blood to make a billionaire. This is the dark secret of the pyramid scheme known as capitalism. Those “little people” who do the sweating and bleeding are not full partners in the sharing of the wealth they produce.

Many of us work from the time we are born to the time we die in order to satisfy the few who control nearly all of the capital.

Increasingly, everything we do benefits the super rich. If our child gets sick or injured, the wealthy may benefit from investments in health insurance, Big Pharma, and private hospitals. If we go to prison, they get paid for it, as many prisons are now privatized. If we die, they increasingly own the funeral parlors (although their corporations often retain the old family names).

The rich profit when we eat, clothe ourselves, enjoy shelter, pay taxes, watch a movie or work (taking the lion’s share of what we produce). They seem to know how far they can push us—that to charge us for breathing might encourage the erection of guillotines (but they have considered buying up all the drinking water).

Michael Parenti once pointed out that the top one-fourth of one percent own more than the entire bottom 99% in the USA.

An old friend once remarked to me “I can’t understand why they don’t have it all.” Well, of course they are not trying to take it all. The more lucid of them are aware they must leave a few crumbs to placate the riffraff.

The biggest scam within this biggest scam is that which euphemistically passes as “national defense.” It does not defend 99% of us, most of us would prefer not to have the wars or 800+ military bases located abroad. We are, however, required to pay for it all, since we are the “little people” so scorned by the likes of Mrs. Helmsley.

Stealth bombers, Minuteman missiles, and Trident submarines are not made for defense, they are made to profit wealthy investors. Most of the profit goes to the wealthiest investors. CEOs of the corporations that make them get 7-figure salaries at the taxpayer’s expense. These weapons are made to deliver nuclear warheads, and the current national push for war with Russia and China is to “justify” making similar profit machines. Americans are told nuclear weapons have something to do with “defense,” but when I asked retired Admiral Gene LaRocque if we had enough nuclear weapons for our defense he replied “You cannot defend someone with a nuclear weapon.”

LaRocque told me he entered the Navy in the 1930s and in those days sailors made much of their own equipment, including weapons. Since nobody profited, they didn’t make weapons they didn’t need. That system, of course, would be called “socialism” today and is no longer allowed. “Defense” is now for the purpose of enriching the rich as priority one.

And the troops are deployed around the world to protect the interests of the billionaires, including foreign billionaires who own stock in the corporations that finance our elections, and therefore have far more political sway in the USA than do average citizens. Our government works for transnational billionaires, not the American people.

The most important part of the scam of capitalism is absolute control of the mass media. No hole may be left unplugged. Every one of the corporate-paid journalists is kept on their knees, a tight liplock on the derrieres of the elite at all times, slobbering and smooching. Not one of the bastards so much as tugs at their leash for fear of a pink slip.

I cringe whenever I hear a corporate media talking head speak of “American democracy.” It is a propaganda term. Often, I am “corrected” by someone when I say this, told that, “No, we don’t have a democracy, we have a republic.”

But a republic is a form of government in which the population is represented, and the American people, aside from the very rich, are not represented, hence, we have a plutocracy.

It should be obvious to the public, who only need open their eyes. We must maintain the largest prison system on earth for American capitalism to function, even as we call it “The Land of the Free.” We are the only industrialized nation on earth where thousands die each year for a lack of medical care, because we don’t have a medical care system, but a system that rewards the rich when people get sick or injured.

Those who are both poor and mentally ill are often left to sleep in our streets, eating out of garbage cans similarly to a third-world existence in the richest nation on earth.

I have often called the system “plutocratic oligarchy,” because the plutocrats don’t usually run the government (President Trump, however, has pretty much set it up that way for his administration with a cabinet filled with fellow billionaires).

Normally, transnational corporations rent the Members of Congress and presidents by financing their election campaigns. These CEOs then, with allegiance to nothing beyond greed, decide who will run the country. But the CEOs in turn work for the wealthy, who own the lion’s share of the investments, so in a back-handed way the rich do always run things, however remotely.

Members of Congress, some of the most corrupt people on the planet, then line up with the corporate media talking heads and begin kissing butt for the money they will need to stay in office. Most of their time in office is spent begging for money, there is little time for much else. The servile bastards soon find out that the best way to do this is to sell out the American people, and those who best sell out the people get buried in campaign money.

Oxfam earlier this year pointed out eight billionaires own as much as the bottom half of humanity, that being 3.75 billion people. Because we have billionaires, we have millions starving to death unnecessarily. There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, but a lot of it rots in warehouses while seeking a price that would please the billionaires.

The super rich want more money, at any cost, and obviously don’t care how many die from unsafe workplaces, unsafe products or a poisoned environment.

It was one of our wealthy slave-owning founders who described the elites who rule today. Thomas Jefferson said “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

Jefferson always struck me as being the maverick among the ruling class who formed our plutocracy. He told a truth we don’t see in the mainstream press today, where all of this is covered up like the location of President Kennedy’s brain.

 

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.

End of Nuclearism or the End of the World: Utopian Dreams, Dystopian Nightmares

By Richard Falk

Source: Global Justice in the 21st Century

We are living amid contradictions whether we like it or not, driving expectations about the future toward opposite extremes. Increasingly plausible are fears that the ‘sixth extinction’ will encompass the human species, or at least, throw human society back to a technology of sticks and stones, with a habitat limited to caves and forests. This dark vision is countered by gene editing designer promises of virtual immortality and super-wise beings programming super-intelligent machines, enabling a life of leisure, luxury, and security for all. Whether the reality of such a scientistic future would be also dark is a matter of conjecture, but from a survival perspective, it offers an optimistic scenario.

On political levels, a similar set of polar scenarios are gaining ground in the moral imagination, producing national leaders who seem comfortable embracing an apocalyptic telos without a second thought. The peoples of the world, entrapped in a predatory phase of global capitalism, are using their democratic prerogative to shut down dissent, rationality, and science. On one side, 122 governments pledge a legal commitment to the prohibition of nuclear weapons as an unprecedented prelude to the abolition of the weaponry; on the other side, all nine nuclear weapons states, and their closest allies, oppose the prohibition and opt for modernizing their nuclear weapons arsenals even devising strategic plans for their possible use, prompting an urgent search for counter measures.

John Pilger issues a solemn reminder that Nevile Shute’s On the Beach depicting a post-nuclear human future that is now more resonant than when it was published in 1957. Leaders that could bluff their way to shared catastrophe bellow forth in Washington and Pyongyang, each deluded by the belief that military options even with nuclear weapons are the only geopolitical security blanket worth relying upon, projecting a reckless obliviousness to the risk of losing their balance while engaging in inflammatory rhetorical posturing alarmingly close to the nuclear precipice.

As Pilger also points out, the liberal opposition to this right wing populism in the West is also dangerously disposed toward warmongering. Donald Trump is being pilloried by a bipartisan anti-Russian hysteria that imposes harsh sanctions, seemingly intent on driving Putin’s Kremlin into a corner from which there is no retreat except by way of confrontation, and possibly war.

We read of record heat waves, extreme weather events, extended droughts, and wild fires as common as clouds in the sky without blinking. The newspapers report that climate scientists are ready to push the panic button in reaction to the latest studies of grim global warning trends, while the Trump factor renews coal mining and treats denial a political virtue.

While these alarming realities dim the light of hope for many of us, the American stock market, a barometer of capitalist expectations by the shrewdest investors, achieves record heights. At the same time famine warnings have been officially endorsed for a series of long suffering populations: Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, northern Nigeria, Gaza. The entire Middle East is being turned into a war and conflict zone, with an anti-Iran warmongering coalition pressuring Iran to choose between nuclear deterrence and sectarian warfare inflamed by militarist Israeli/U.S. grand strategy that appears to be motivated by a regional vision of geopolitical pacification.

How best to endure in the face of such fatalistic dualisms? That may be the question of our time, dodged for the sake of sanity by almost all of us, at least most of the time. Business as usual, while living with therapeutic forms of cultural blindness, the opioids of those fortunate enough to live for now in gated communities, whether on the scale of private dwellings or walled off countries.

Recently a lively young woman told me that many of her friends had decided not to have children because they are so fearful of the storm clouds of the future, and refuse to wait around for liberating rainbows. At the other extreme, today’s International Edition of the New York Times contains a front page ad of enticement encouraging attendance at an International Luxury Conference to be held in Brussels, November 13-14, on the demeaning theme of “What’s Next: Luxury in a Turbulent World.” My somewhat impatient response—‘whatever turns out to be next, it will not be and should not be luxury!’ More likely, those grown accustomed to luxury will shift their residences to those underground homes built by Silicon Valley billionaires on vast tracts of lands in the New Zealand countryside as the ultimate hedge against an imminent global catastrophe. It could be that the NYT conference will devote its attention to this form of post-apocalyptic luxury living! Yet that assumes a quite unlikely focus on how the world of luxury is adapting to the unpleasant realities of the Sixth Extinction.

3 Signs You Might Be a Pawn of the New World Order

By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Activist Post

The mother lode of all conspiracies is the New World Order. In essence, it is a high-level, multi-generational plan to render all sovereign national governments subservient to an unelected, supranational, authoritarian world government. In this scheme, the people of planet earth will be micromanaged with strict social, technological and financial controls. It is the total consolidation of global power into the hands of a ruthless, minority elite who aim to rape the planet and enslave the human race.

They can’t do it alone, though, they need your help. They need witting and unwitting minions to set the brush fires of revolutionary change in our towns and cities. They need pawns to agitate and disrupt the relative peace, and to upend the status quo with turmoil. They need senseless, animal-like violence, caught on camera and replayed ad infinitum on cable news and social media. They need terror, of both the foreign and domestic variety. They need fear in the streets, and fear in the minds of the proles.

Most of all, though, they need you to create chaos, so that they can bring order.

The powers that be, those demons of the deep state, those orchestrators of fear, famine, debt and war, cannot achieve their plan without leading the masses into confusion and disarray, for only then will the masses demand an end to their own freedoms and privacy. And sadly, it appears their army of minions is growing in strength and audacity.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville it is more clear than ever that there is no shortage of pawns for the New World Order. The armies of ignorance are gathering, and here are three signs you might be among them.

1. You’re Playing the Divide and Conquer Game

Left vs. Right. Black vs. White. Republican vs. Democrat. Citizen vs. Immigrant. Communist vs. Fascist. Have vs. Have Not. My Team vs. Your Team. Me vs. You.

There a thousand and one ways for a society to faction and split apart, but without community and unity we are lost, doomed and done. If you’re entrenched in one side of any dualistic paradigm, seeking to convert or to crush the other side, then you’re playing right into the hands of the NWO.

The tactic of top-down divide and conquer is the oldest play in the book of how to overthrow sovereign people. The rulers foment conflict amongst the people, then step out of the way and let them fight it out, so that they can step in later as the benevolent savior… big brother.

If you’re playing this game, then you’re doing their work for them.

2.) You’re a Vocal Supporter of the War Du Jour

Today the drums are beating for a nuclear assault against North Korea… and military intervention in Venezuela. Just recently we’ve been told we need to prepare for conflict with Russia, and that an invasion of Syria is in our best interests. Prior to that we destroyed Libya and Iraq, we occupied Afghanistan, and we’ve been using the war on drugs and the war on terror as casus belli for interference in dozens of countries around the world.

The imperial mindset is several generations deep in America, and the citizenry has all but fully abandoned the anti-war stance in favor of gung-ho, jingoistic cheerleading of any and all military escapades.

The New World Order is brute force, but in our hyper-connected world they need to create the appearance of public support in order to advance the military industrial colonization of the world. It cannot do this without the public support and advocacy of at least some segment of the proletariat.

If you’re always on board for the expansion of international conflict, taking cues from mainstream media in this regard, and demanding action against all of our perceived enemies, you are aiding and abetting the New World Order.

3.) You Direct Your Anger and Frustration Towards Anyone but Those at the Very Top of the Pyramid

Zero doubt there are a million problems plaguing our complex world today, and it can be comforting to blame someone whom you can look in the eye, someone who is unprotected by the wealth and security afforded by the oligarchy. Emotional reactions to the stresses in our modern world are to be expected, but without knowledge of the contemporary power structures pulling the big strings, those reactions can be sorely misdirected onto lesser players and other pawns.

The truth is out there. At the root, a geo-political financial elite is conquering the world through manipulation of currencies, the imposition of astronomically insurmountable levels of public and private debt, and full-spectrum military dominance of uncooperative nations. This program is far above and beyond the capacity of your fellow citizen.

If you’re convinced that taking your outrage to the streets in war against your fellow countrymen is going to solve the problems of the world, you’re helping to fulfill the goals of the New World Order.

Final Thoughts

Social unrest and civil war are the final stepping-stones to a brave new authoritarian future. In order to get there, the American people must exhibit a self-motivated and determined resolve for violence against each other.

The New World Order needs blue pill takers, those people who deliberately choose ignorance in exchange for spurious peace of mind. They need useful idiots to help distract the rest of the population from the crimes of the oligarchy. They need armies of volunteer foot soldiers and pawns who will create the conditions necessary for martial law and even broader restrictions of rights and freedoms.

For the New World Order to succeed, we must ultimately demand our own slavery.