CIA: The Corrupt and Ignorant Agency

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Reid Mukai

CIA-corruption-300x227

By Wayne Madsen

The American taxpayers have been fleeced for almost seventy years by a so-called «intelligence» agency that has systematically violated the US Constitution, broken practically every federal law on the books, and penetrated virtually every facet of American life. The Central Intelligence Agency’s creation was bemoaned by its creator, President Harry S Truman, who, in a fit of personal angst following the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, wrote in a newspaper column, «I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations… I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment… and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere».

During a presidential election year, two of the three remaining major candidates – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have given no indication that they will heed the words of President Truman. For example, Trump has indicated he will give the CIA authority to torture that even the CIA considers illegal.

As for Mrs Clinton, her zeal in supporting the violent overthrow and assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 only gives added impetus to the out-of-control players inside the CIA to commit similar actions in a Clinton administration. Only Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders appears to channel the beliefs of Truman when it comes to reining in the CIA.

It is not known whether Trump, who has made favorable noises to interventionist neo-conservatives within the Republican Party, will stand by his comments that the war in Libya was a mistake. But Trump was one of the cheerleaders urging US intervention in 2011. He said, «Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around. We have soldiers all over the Middle East and not bringing them to stop this horrible carnage… We don’t want to get involved and you’re going to end up with something like you’ve never seen before».

Trump, Mrs Clinton, and Obama were wrong about Libya and Gaddafi on all counts. Gaddafi was not killing «thousands of people». That was being done by the jihadist rebels supported by the CIA. The late US ambassador/weapons smuggler in Libya, Christopher Stevens, who was ironically killed by the very same jihadists with whom he was brokering deals to ship Libyan weapons to Syria, ensured that the latest NATO weaponry ended up in radical Islamist hands in Libya. It was these weapons that killed «thousands of people» – Libyan and African guest workers and their families – in a country wracked by a civil war manufactured by Mrs Clinton and CIA director General David Petraeus.

The CIA, in particular, had for decades, fantasized about overthrowing Gaddafi. Never did this most incompetent of US government agencies contemplate the effects of Gaddafi’s ouster: the spread of Saudi-financed jihadist terrorism across the Sahel region of Africa. The CIA’s fanciful notions that Gaddafi’s days were numbered were highlighted in a formerly Secret CIA report titled, «Libya: Will the Revolution Outlast Gaddafi?» Issued in June 1988, the report was obviously intended to bolster those within the Reagan administration who argued for a US military attack on Libya by taking advantage of what the CIA perceived was a weakened Gaddafi government at the end of the 1980s. The CIA, as usual, was extremely off-base in its assessment of Gaddafi’s staying power.

The CIA report states: «Gaddafi’s revolution has largely run its course, and he must rely on coercion to perpetuate his revolutionary vision». In fact, Libyans had the highest standard of living on the African continent with oil revenues being shared with the entire population. The CIA’s erroneous assessment of Libya in 1988 continued: «Just as Libya in 1969 was ripe for a change to a more nationalistic and activist regime, we believe it now ripe for a return to normality». The call for «regime change» by the CIA in 1988 was, in fact, a call for the return to the status quo ante of 1968: a Libya governed by a corrupt oligarchy led by a feeble monarch. Today, a motley crew of United Nations-selected Libyan gangsters governs the country as a «paper tiger» entity called the «Government of National Accord». Meanwhile, jihadists of Ansar al-Sharia govern Benghazi while the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) governs Sirte, Derna, and a swath of territory southeast of Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

Just as the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and military infrastructures in Iraq following the US invasion and occupation led to the complete collapse of the Iraqi nation-state, the destruction of the four key institutions that united Libya under Gaddafi led to «failed state» status for the country. The CIA cited these key institutions in its 1988 report but no effort was made to preserve them after Gaddafi’s assassination by CIA-supported forces.

The four key institutions in Libya were, according to the CIA, the tribally-based security battalions, the regular Armed Forces, the Military Intelligence service, and the revolutionary committees. These institutions were wiped out in order that the CIA’s wish in 1988 could be realized: that Libya would return to the «normality» of 1968: government by a restored monarchy led by a pretender to the al-Senussi family’s throne once occupied by King Idris I. However, Libya became a polyglot of warring tribes and jihadists, many of the latter imported from conflict zones abroad.

Whether governed by a restored monarchy or a military-dominated successor regime, the CIA saw a post-Gaddafi government desiring «a more constructive relationship with the United States and the West». The CIA added, «Libyan successors probably would turn first to Western Europe for better economic relations and some arms. They also would be likely to seek greater US participation in the Libyan economy». However, after Gaddafi agreed to abandon his so-called «weapons of mass destruction» chemical and nuclear programs, the United States and Western Europe had a more constructive relationship with Libya and the country was wide open for Western economic investment. After Mrs Clinton, Petraeus, Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, and other Western leaders had their way with Libya, it is now a wasteland. The infrastructures of irrigation, road and air transport, social welfare, public education, health care, and employment for African guest workers lie in ruins. The clearly demented Mrs Clinton’s private e-mails show that she and her cabal of interventionists were clearly overjoyed by the misery that befell Libya and its people. When she was informed of Gaddafi’s brutal assassination, one that involved his sodomization, Clinton uttered the preamble to what may be called the «Hillary Doctrine» – «We came, we saw, he died!» She followed her declaration with her signature hideous cackling laughter.

The 1988 CIA report does not seem to care much for Gaddafi’s style of governance through some 2000 local «people’s congresses», described by the CIA as «a hybrid of a New England town meeting and a Bedouin tribal gathering». This demonstration of the «people’s will» in the Libyan «Jamahiriya» was anathema to the CIA’s goals for Libya, even Libya’s emulation of New England-style direct democracy.

A system of direct democracy in an Arab Muslim nation defied the CIA’s wish for the region, which was and remains an alliance of pro-US theocratic states governed by corrupt elites that wield power through US-equipped armed forces. The CIA report on Libya admits that initially, Gaddafi’s system of direct democracy and the exercising of the people’s will «actually worked». Only in the jaundiced view of the United States was such a system of government a threat, not only to US interests and goals, but to those of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Morocco, and other corrupt and theocratic US client states in the region.

Wasserman Schultz Has a Change of Heart, but Too Little, Too Late

Posted on June 15, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Just follow the money on this one.

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Source: Alternet

Return with us now to the saga of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the soul of the Democratic Party.

First, a quick recap: Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), chair of the Democratic National Committee, also has been an advocate for the payday loan industry. The website Think Progress even described her as the “top Democratic ally” of “predatory payday lenders.” You know — the bottom-feeding bloodsuckers of the working poor. Yes, them.

Low-income workers living from paycheck to paycheck, especially women and minorities, are the payday lenders’ prime targets — easy pickings because they’re often desperate. Twelve million Americans reportedly borrow nearly $50 billion a year through payday loans, at rates that can soar above 300 percent, sometimes even beyond 500 percent. Bethany McLean at The Atlantic recently reported that the government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) studied millions of payday loans and found that “67 percent went to borrowers with seven or more transactions a year and that a majority of those borrowers paid more in fees than the amount of their initial loan.”

Yet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party’s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people?

Just follow the money. Last year, the payday loan industry spent $3.5 million lobbying; and as we wrote two weeks ago, in Wasserman Schultz’s home state, since 2009, payday lenders have bought protection from Democrats and Republicans alike by contributing $2.5 million or so to candidates from both parties, including her. That’s how “Representative” Wasserman Schultz, among others, wound up representing the predators instead of the poor.

That position became a major issue in her campaign for reelection to the House this year — she has a primary opponent for the first time since she entered Congress — and was even threatening the prospect of her continuing as DNC chair and presiding over the Democratic National Convention next month in Philadelphia. More than 40,000 have signed a petition calling for her removal from that post.

She had become a symbol of the failure of Democratic elites to understand that there is an uprising in the land. Millions of Americans are rebelling against the leadership of both parties. They are fed up with inside-the-Beltway politicians who pay only lip service to the deep needs of everyday people and the country; fed up with incumbents who ask for their votes, are given them in good faith, and then return to Washington to do the bidding of the donor class and its lobbyists.

Donald Trump gets it. He has roiled and humiliated and conquered an out-of-touch Republican establishment in Washington that also ignored the popular uprising against corporate domination and crony capitalism, and now GOP titans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, spear carriers for Big Money, are being hauled around the talk-show circuit in Trump’s tumbrel, eating crow and swearing fealty to the misogynistic, bigoted and pathologically lying brute who bestrides their party.

Democratic insiders like Wasserman Schultz, however, continued to whistle past the graveyard, believing that the well-funded and well-connected Clinton machine — and general fear of a Trump regime — were enough to carry them to victory in November, despite the grass-roots disgust with a party that reeks of rot from the top. Once the champions of people who came home from work with hands dirty from toil and sweat, too many establishment Democrats went over to the dark side, taking up the cause of the well-manicured executives (think: Goldman Sachs) who write the checks and the mercenaries who deliver them (for a substantial cut, of course).

The lust for loot, which now defines the Democratic establishment, became pronounced in the Bill Clinton years, when the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) abandoned its liberal roots and embraced “market-based solutions” that led to deregulation, tax breaks, and subsidies for the 1 percent. Seeking to fill coffers emptied by the loss of support from a declining labor movement, Democrats rushed into the arms of big business and crony capitalists.

Another case in point (and, alas, there are many): the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dan Malloy, who seems to treat his state’s corporate residents far better than the 1 in 10 of his citizens who live at or below the poverty line.

At International Business Times last week, investigative reporter David Sirota analyzed the proposed merger of Cigna and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a deal that would create the biggest health insurance company in the country. Cigna is based in Connecticut and Katharine Wade, the state’s insurance commissioner, appointed by Governor Malloy, is a former Cigna lobbyist with deep family ties to the company.

Sirota reported, “Malloy’s decision to appoint Wade to such a powerful regulatory post on the eve of the merger was not made in a vacuum,” Sirota reported. “It came after employees of Cigna, its lobbying firm Robinson & Cole and Anthem delivered more than $1.3 million to national and state political groups affiliated with Malloy, including the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), the Connecticut Democratic Party, Malloy’s own gubernatorial campaign and a political action committee supporting Connecticut Democrats [our italics].

“Since Malloy’s first successful run for governor in the 2010 election cycle, donors from the insurance companies and the lobbying firm have given more than $2 million to Malloy-linked groups, according to the figures compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine and the National Institute on Money In State Politics. Almost half that cash has come in since 2015, the year the merger was announced.”

Sirota now reports that since his investigation first was published, the state has “formally denied open records requests for information about their meetings with Cigna and Anthem, and declared that ‘any’ documents about the health insurance companies’ proposed merger that haven’t already been made public will be kept secret.” His FOIA request was turned down “one day after Anthem requested [state insurance commissioner] Wade approve an average 26 percent increase in health insurance premiums for individual plans.” So much for transparency.

And while we’re in Connecticut, let’s also take a look at what Malloy is doing for the world’s biggest hedge fund — Bridgewater Associates, based in his state, with an estimated worth of $150 billion. The founder of the firm, Ray Dalio, is the richest man in Connecticut, by one estimate weighing in at $14.3 billion.

Dalio made $1.4 billion in 2015 alone, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. That same year, his top two executives pulled in $250 million each. Yet as part of Connecticut’s campaign to keep companies from leaving the state, Malloy is taking $22 million of the public’s money and giving it to Dalio to stay put.

You might think a Democratic governor would have thrown down the gauntlet and told Bridgewater’s top three, “Get outta here! You guys made almost $2 billion among yourselves. Shake your piggy bank or look under your sofa cushions for the $22 million; we’re not milking the public for it.”

But no, Malloy and his fellow Democrats buckled. Buckled to the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-hundredth percent of the rich. Ordinary taxpayers will now ante up.

So given all of that, guess who’s the chairman of the platform committee for the upcoming Democratic National Convention? Right: Dan Malloy, governor of Connecticut, subsidizer of billionaires. Guess who named him? Right again: Wasserman Schultz, “top Democratic ally” of “predatory payday lenders.” We’re not making this up.

Not only will Malloy be presiding over the priorities of the Democratic platform at the convention next month, he doubtless will be making the rounds with Wasserman Schultz and other party elites as they genuflect before the corporate sponsors and lobbyists she has invited to pay for the lavish fun-and-games that will surround the coronation. Many of those corporate sponsors and lobbyists have actively lobbied against progressive policies like health-care reform and a Wall Street cleanup and even contributed large sums to Republicans. Yes, we know, shocking.

So take the planks in the platform and the platitudes and promises in the speeches with a grain of salt. It’s all about the money.

Except when it’s not. Except for those moments when ordinary people rise up and declare: “Not this time!”

Which brings us back to predatory lenders and their buddy, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Look around: There’s an uprising in the land, remember, and it isn’t going away after Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive nominee, is crowned. This year even Wasserman Schultz couldn’t ignore the decibel level of an aroused public. Unaccustomed to a challenge in the Democratic “wealth primary” where money usually favors incumbents, she now finds herself called to account by an articulate opponent who champions working people, Tim Canova. Across the country tens of thousands of consumer advocates — and tens of thousands of other progressives angry at her perceived favoritism toward Hillary Clinton — have been demanding that Wasserman Schultz resign as the party’s chair or be dumped before the convention opens Philadelphia.

So last week the previously tone-deaf Wasserman Schultz perked up, did an about-face and announced she will go along with the proposed new rules on payday lending after all. At first blush, that’s good; the rules are a step in the right direction. But all that lobbying cash must have had some effect, because the new rules only go so far. A New York Times editorial calls them “a lame response” to predatory loans and says the final version of the new regulations “will need stronger, more explicit consumer protections for the new regulatory system to be effective.”

Nick Bourke, director of small-dollar loans for the Pew Charitable Trusts, is a man who closely follows these things and got to the heart of the matter: Not only do the proposed new rules “fall short,” they will allow payday lenders to lock out attempts at lower-cost bank loans.

His judgment is stark: “As drafted, the CFPB rule would allow lenders to continue to make high-cost loans, such as a line of credit with a 15-percent transaction fee and 299-percent interest rate, or a $1,250 loan on which the borrower would repay a total of $3,700 in fees, interest and principal,” Bourke wrote. “These and many other high-cost payday installment loans are already on the market in most states, and they will thrive if the regulation takes effect without change.”

Nonetheless, the new rules were improvement enough for Allied Progress, an organization that has taken on Wasserman Schultz in Florida’s late August primary, to declare victory. And they were enough for Wasserman Schultz to do a 180-degree turn which she clearly hopes will not too dramatically reveal her hypocrisy. “It is clear to me,” she said, “that the CFPB strikes the right balance and I look forward to working with my constituents and consumer groups as the CFPB works toward a final rule.”

All well and good, but if she survives her primary to return to Washington, be sure to keep the lights on in those rooms where the final version of the rules are negotiated. A powerful member of Congress with support from a Democrat in the White House could seriously weaken a law or a rule when the outcome is decided behind closed doors and money whispers in the ear of a politician supplicant: “I’m still here. Remember. Or else.”

But the times, they really may be a-changing, as the saga of Wasserman Schultz reveals. You can be deaf to the public’s shouts for only so long. The insurgency of popular discontent that has upended politics this year will continue no matter the results in November. For much too long now it’s been clear that money doesn’t just rule democracy, it is democracy.

Until we prove it isn’t.

Hillary Clinton’s war crimes are unforgivable. No real progressive could ever support her.

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Zach Cartwright

Source: U.S. Uncut

Hillary Clinton made headlines with a speech in San Diego casting Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency due to the damage his incendiary rhetoric could cause. Simultaneously, the former Secretary of State sought to convince the California audience that she was the safer choice in foreign policy matters.

But when taking a closer look at US foreign policy under her leadership as the nation’s top diplomat, it’s obvious that Clinton could potentially be as disastrous as Trump if given the position of Commander-in-Chief.

Here are a few examples of countries where conditions are tremendously worse as a result of Hillary Clinton’s policies.

Hillary Clinton made Libya a failed state

In an April interview with Fox News, President Barack Obama, reflecting on his 7 years as Commander-in-Chief, admitted that ousting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was the biggest mistake of his presidency. While Obama took responsibility for the failure of Libya in that interview, he relied on the input of Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State at the time.

In March of 2011, Clinton met with Mahmoud Jibril, who was leading the opposition to Gaddafi. As the New York Times reported, Clinton asked Jibril a series of questions about how his coalition planned to fill the power vacuum that would be created by Gaddafi’s ouster. And in the end, it was Clinton who convinced the White House that deposing Gaddafi was the right thing to do:

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The 2011 NATO-led invasion of Libya that took place after Clinton’s visit has since allowed extremist groups to seize power in an unprecedented takeover of much of the country over the last five years.

In 2014, the US State Department shut down the US embassy in Libya and issued a travel warning urging all Americans to stay away from the country. Roughly one year ago, Libya’s central bank, the last remaining institution in the failed state, was forced to flee to a city in the Eastern region of the country due to rebel forces encroaching on the bank’s facility in Tripoli, the capital. Libya is now a haven for terrorists, with thousands of ISIS soldiers using the country as a staging ground.

In an interview on CBS, Clinton laughed about Gaddafi’s slaying, proudly exclaiming, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Hillary Clinton deserves credit for poverty and instability in Haiti

In Haiti, the first state ever founded by freed black slaves, citizens are still fighting for political and economic freedom today, largely due to the influence of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In 2011, Wikileaks published US State Department cables from 2008 and 2009 confirming that State Department officials were meeting behind closed doors with Haitian business leaders, plotting on how to stop the Haitian government from implementing a 37-cent hike in the minimum wage from $0.24 an hour to $0.61 cents an hour.

While Haitian President René Préval was initially neutral on the proposal of raising the minimum wage, he went on the record opposing the wage hike after consistent efforts from within the US Embassy in Haiti and the Haitian business lobby by July of 2009. Politifact rated the claim that Clinton’s State Department tried to suppress the wage hike as half-true, since there’s no link proving that Clinton directly played a role.

However, Clinton’s influence on Haiti didn’t stop there. As US Uncut previously reported, the former Secretary of State took an active role in swinging Haitian’s presidential elections in favor of corporate special interests. In the first round of Haiti’s presidential elections, thousands of citizens took to the streets demanding an annulment of election results, alleging that then-Haitian president Michel Martelly committed election fraud.

Martelly, who succeeded René Préval, is a close confidant of the Clinton family. In 2011, Martelly appointed Bill Clinton to an advisory board whose stated goal was to court foreign investors.

And in one of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails made public, Clinton’s chief of staff received an email from another staffer openly boasting about using connections within the Haitian business elite to lobby for the withdrawal of Jude Célestin, Martelly’s political rival, from an upcoming runoff election. The aide, Kenneth Merten, predicted the news of the US interfering in election results would create widespread protests, and said he had called Martelly, asking him to plead with Haitians “to not pillage.”

While Martelly is no longer in power, his hand-picked successor, Jovenel Moïse, won the most recent election. However, watchdogs are calling the results fraudulent and demanding a new election. Ricardo Seitenfus, who has served as representative of the Organization of American States (OAS) for the last eight years, admitted that Haiti’s government is essentially a puppet of US interests, saying the Haitian election schedule is “subject to the U.S. schedule.” Hillary Clinton deserves to be closely scrutinized when touting her diplomacy record, as Haiti’s political instability is a result of her policies.

Honduras’ downfall resulted from a coup Clinton supported

In 2009, shortly after Obama took office and appointed Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was arrested at gunpoint by the military and forced onto a plane to Costa Rica while a new government took power. While the US State Department didn’t directly oust Zelaya, it refused to call his ouster a coup, despite calls from the U.S. ambassador to Honduras and from Congress to do so. In her interview with the New York Daily News editorial board, Clinton defended her decision to keep sending aid to Honduras despite the violent overthrow of Zelaya:

I think, in retrospect, we managed a very difficult situation, without bloodshed, without a civil war, that led to a new election. And I think that was better for the Honduran people. But we have a lot of work to do to try to help stabilize that and deal with corruption, deal with the violence and the gangs and so much else.

However, the result of the coup was a massive amount of bloodshed, as gangs and drug cartels began to take more power in the absence of a stable government. In the year following the coup, Clinton’s State Department published a list of human rights abuses prevalent in Honduras:

“…unlawful killings by police and government agents, which the government took some steps to prosecute; arbitrary and summary killings committed by vigilantes and former members of the security forces; harsh prison conditions; violence against detainees; corruption and impunity within the security forces; lengthy pretrial detention and failure to provide due process of law; politicization, corruption, and institutional weakness of the judiciary; corruption in the legislative and executive branches; government restrictions on the recognition of some civil society groups; violence and discrimination against women; child prostitution and abuse; trafficking in persons; discrimination against indigenous communities; violence and discrimination against persons based on sexual orientation; ineffective enforcement of labor laws; and child labor.”

The horrific conditions in Honduras triggered a mass exodus of migrants to the US. As Telesur reported, approximately 9,000 child refugees fled Honduras in 2015. Also in 2015, Clinton defended the deportation of children back to the Central American countries they’re fleeing in order “send a message.” However, Clinton has since walked back that statement as her Democratic presidential primary battle with Bernie Sanders became more competitive.

This March, the violence in Honduras became a subject of international scrutiny when 44-year-old environmental activist Berta Caceres was assassinated in her home. Caceres had been an outspoken opponent of a proposed hydroelectric plant on indigenous land, and had recently gotten in an altercation with soldiers, police, and employees of a private power company while protesting the project just weeks before she was killed.

Clinton is responsible for the fall of Iraq and Syria (and the rise of ISIS)

In late 2011, after months of sustained anti-government protests inspired by the “Arab Spring” movement, Hillary Clinton called for the resignation of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Then, in April 2012, Clinton gave a speech in Turkey more forcefully calling specifically for regime change, saying, “Assad must go.” Those three words created the policies that led to both the rise of ISIS in Syria and the European refugee crisis of 2015.

One of Clinton’s last actions as Secretary of State was to call for the arming of Syrian rebels fighting Assad. As the London Telegraph reported, Clinton’s plan to give weapons to Assad’s enemies was backed by not only former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, but also by former CIA director David Petraeus and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While Obama initially rejected his Secretary of State’s plan, he eventually agreed to arm Syrian rebels in the goal of ousting Assad.

However, as ISIS began to get a foothold into Syria and Iraq, the “moderates” that received weapons from the US were eventually overtaken by ISIS fighters, who suddenly found themselves in the possession of military-grade weapons paid for with US tax dollars. In a study conducted by Conflict Armament Research, which tracks the movement of arms in war-torn regions, researchers found that ISIS has weapons and ammunition not just from the US, but also from coalition forces that are funded by the US government. The access to advanced weaponry was likely the reason for ISIS’ rapid expansion into Libya, Egypt, and elsewhere.

The consequences of destabilizing Syria and Iraq are apparent. Over one million refugees, largely from countries where the US intervened militarily, fled to Europe between 2015 and 2016, creating the world’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. In this chart compiled by Eurostat, the top three countries people are fleeing are Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq:

Yemeni blood is on Hillary Clinton’s hands

Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Yemen, which started in 2015 and continues today, was made possible with arms purchased by the US government. Since Obama’s presidency, the US has sold approximately $46 billion in arms to the Saudis, with many of those weapons sales greenlighted by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. As US Uncut reported in April, Clinton was particularly focused on making sure the US came through for Saudi Arabia in a 2011 weapons deal. David Sirota of the International Business Times reported that Clinton argued the arms deal was “in the national interest.”

At press conferences in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi Arabia is very likely using the weapons acquired from that 2011 exchange to wage brutal bombing campaigns in Yemen. In March, Foreign Policy magazine accused the US and its allies of complicity in war crimes by funding and arming the Saudi regime:

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in airstrikes while asleep in their homes, when going about their daily activities, or in the very places where they had sought refuge from the conflict. The United States, Britain, and others, meanwhile, have continued to supply a steady stream of weaponry and logistical support to Saudi Arabia and its coalition.

This week, the United Nations added the Saudi-led coalition to a blacklist of states and armed groups that violate children’s human rights during conflicts, with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon personally slamming the coalition for killing and maiming Yemeni children.

Hillary Clinton is completely right that Donald Trump is woefully unprepared to take on the responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief. But voters should also be leery of Clinton, who, despite having met with more world leaders than any presidential candidate in US history, is responsible for some of the worst foreign policy blunders of the 21st century.

Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email: zachcartwright88@gmail.com.

The Belated Downfall of Bill Clinton

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Bill-HIllary-Clinton-Corrupt

One of the unintended consequences of Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been the renewed and often revealing public appearances of Bill Clinton. His involvement in Hillary’s campaign has been a series of awkward events, from violating election campaigning laws back in March to his condescending treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters in April. Throughout May he was hounded on the campaign trail by criticism of corrupt practices of his foundation. In late May what what was supposed to be a routine campaign stop at a New Mexico diner escalated to a grueling 30 minute argument with Bernie Sanders supporter Josh Brody.

At another restaurant appearance in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhhod last Saturday, Clinton had the misfortune of being there at the same time as 23 year old Sarra Tekola of Women of Color Speak Out, who did exactly that when she ambushed him by shouting “Hey Clinton, fuck you! My people are still in jail from your crime bill! Three strikes – you’re out, mandatory minimum, then you wanna take pictures with my people here? We’re still in jail for what you did!” (an inspiring moment documented by a widely viewed viral video).

The next two days while giving a speeches in Boyle Heights and Richmond, Clinton faced more heckling from Sanders supporters and on Monday he was also confronted with the news that his brother Roger, who on his last day in office Bill pardoned for cocaine dealing, was jailed for drunken driving.

Though it’s likely Hillary and Bill will be back in the White House (barring a surprise intervention of hackers/whistleblowers), their public image is unlikely to get any less loathsome and any illusions citizens may still hold regarding positive aspects of their legacy will continue to crumble. Angry disenfranchised voters of all stripes will never cease to hold them accountable for their misdeeds for the rest of their days.

The Electoral Farce: an Interview with John Stauber

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Mohsen Abdelmoumen/John Stauber

Source: Algérie Résistance

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In your book coauthored with Sheldon Rampton “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry”, you make a statement without concession on lobbying and democracy. In your opinion, can we evoke a democracy with a hegemony of lobbies? Do you not think that it is rather about a plutocracy?

John Stauber: That book, my first of six for the Center for Media and Democracy, is my tour de force. It exposes how modern propaganda is conducted in the United States by public relations (PR) professionals whose job is to protect the powerful and their corporate wealth from democracy.

The USA is indeed an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and the situation is much worse today than when I wrote my book in 1995. The super-rich whose interests lie with Wall Street, the global corporations, and what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, own and control both the Democrat and the Republican parties and their candidates. This shared monopoly prevents any anti-oligarchy party from emerging effectively to compete, under their rigged laws at the state level for establishing and funding national political parties.

The richest dump billions into both major Parties, their candidates and the election process, so if you are not a millionaire yourself or clearly supporting the policies of the wealthy, you have very little chance of success or of even being heard politically in the US. The corporate media is the recipient of the lions share of this money which they get for selling the TV ads that the candidates and the special interest groups run; they are not interested in deeply criticizing or reforming a lucrative process that fills their own corporate coffers. It’s a hell of a system, a total fraud on democracy, painted up to look like democracy.

In your opinion, is not the American presidential election a joke, when we know that the favourite candidate from the beginning is supported by Wall Street, Neocons, industrialists, AIPAC, etc.?

Indeed the system that chooses and elects the American president is a farce, bought and paid for by the wealthy and the interests you mention. This is why even in an election year as controversial as this one, most Americans will not vote. The majority of Americans have lost faith in what has become a charade that betrays their interests. The rise of both progressive populism via Bernie Sanders, and a nativist fascism via Trump and his takeover of the Republicans, screams loudly about just how foul and corrupt and simply weird the USA’s political system has become. There is a great, angry frustration with the political establishment, and many white voters especially are willing to cast a nihilistic vote for a racist, misogynist, narcissist who inherited his wealth and gained notoriety as a reality TV star.

Does not the election to the presidency of a militarist as Hillary Clinton constitute a threat to the world?

The election of either Clinton or Trump threatens the world simply because of the dominance of the American empire and their commitment to it. Hillary is a proven militarist, which is why so many of the GOP neocons, who led what I call the Weapons of Mass Deception campaign that lied America into attacking Iraq, are choosing her over Trump. They know she will fully fund and expand the American empire at all costs to the American taxpayers and people of the world who suffer under America’s militarism. Hillary played an important role in the Iraq propaganda campaign led by Bush, Cheney and the neocons. Before naming her Secretary of State, Obama made it clear he would not investigate or hold anyone responsible for that grand and worsening bipartisan disaster.

Those who wrote the scenario of this presidential election are they not inspired by the French election of 2002, with Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jacques Chirac, both coming from the same system, where we saw the crushing victory of Chirac? Are we going to witness Clinton’s same landslide victory against Trump?

I don’t think that the nationalists who control the USA’s two party oligarchy are looking abroad for inspiration. They are believers in American exceptionalism and empire, and write their own scripts as they go along, as the neocons did with their Project for the New American Century. The rise of Trump within the Republican Party is a shocking phenomenon, because he defeated 15 others and the entire GOP establishment to seize the party for himself and his rabid reactionary grassroots voters. No one in either party or the news media gave Trump any chance to win the nomination, but he did, while breaking about every rule thought to exist in American politics except one – have lots of money. It is very possible that the smug attitude of the Democrats and the corporate media will backfire and that Clinton, who like Trump is disliked by a majority of voters, will lose to him. It is certainly possible this year, when Trump has already accomplished the impossible.

Won’t Clinton’s victory in the presidential election be a victory of the oligarchy, the coronation of the plutocracy by democratic tools?

The oligarchy is already crowned, already firmly in control. If Trump wins, they will begrudgingly accommodate one of their own class, however ignorant, narcissistic and offensive they find him. But much of the Republican oligarchy, such as the neocons, the Koch brothers and the Bush family, have indicated they prefer Hillary. In essence, the oligarchy wins no matter which party holds office, because the super rich own both parties. That is the brilliance of the bogus two-party system, it is really one oligarchy party with two wings, and both the Democrat and Republican wings support the military empire and the expansion of corporate power.

Doesn’t Bernie Sanders serve just as a kind of “trial horse” for Hillary Clinton?

I have said since he announced as a Democrat that this is a movie we have seen many times before, where a Jesse Jackson, or a Jerry Brown, or a Howard Dean, excite the liberal base, borrow the rhetoric of revolutionary change, create a populist left momentum, and then capitulate to embrace the winning mainstream Democrat at their convention, appealing to followers to do the same. Perhaps if Bernie Sanders had understood a year ago the level of excitement and support he would generate, he would have done things differently. But ultimately he will prove a shepherd for the Democrats, a pied piper, rounding up the lost leftist sheep, and it should be especially easy this year with Trump as the Republican nominee opposed by everyone from him to the Kochs to the neocons to the Bush family. But yes, soon the Feel The Bern movement will morph into the anti-fascist Anybody But Trump coalition.

We are witnessing a very poor debate whose only stake seems to be the replacement of a black president by a woman. Is this not one more manipulation?

You are rather certain that Hillary will follow Obama, and while that is a good bet, the bizarre, unprecedented rise of Donald Trump might surprise everyone and land him in the White House. Obama succeeded because he was anti-Bush and he was not in the Senate when Clinton cast her damaging vote to help Bush attack Iraq. That gave him his greatest electoral edge, he could campaign as having been against the war on Iraq. The fact that he was African American inspired many who were, as I was, quite happy to see that someone other than a rich white man could actually be elected president. However, Obama has proved to be a massive fraud and a disappointment. Even before his taking the oath of office, he made it clear that there would be no investigation of the propaganda and lies that led America to attack Iraq. Biden, Kerry and Clinton, key players in his Administration, helped lead America into war. Blame the neocons for it, but blame those Democrats too.

Hillary will certainly parlay being the first woman president into millions of votes, and she will be running against a misogynist. But again, most American don’t even vote, and those that do are voting against the candidate they dislike most. So all bets are off at this early stage as to whether a Black president will now give way to America’s first female president, or whether Trump will be America’s first Billionaire TV Star president.

As a writer and progressive journalist, what is the reason, in your opinion, for the powerlessness of the progressive movement in the US and in the world?

Here in the United States the progressive movement has never been able to see that the Democratic Party is the enemy and the grand co-opter and destroyer of fundamental change. Bernie Sanders says he is fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party, but it has no soul, it sold out to the super rich long ago. Bill and Hillary Clinton put the final nail into its remnant of progressivism when in the 1980s they and their pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council made their Party a model of Republicanism, opening it to corporate donations, serving corporate interests blatantly, and making it almost impossible for a candidate like Sanders to beat a rigged system and win the Democratic nomination.

I wrote a piece for CounterPunch in March, 2013, explaining how after the failure of Al Gore in 2000, a group of super rich Democrats called the Democracy Alliance arose to fund the sort of liberal front groups, lobbies and think tanks that the Republicans had developed over the previous two decades. Hillary supporter George Soros and others in the DA, including some big unions, poured money into these organizations, and they collaborated with liberal lobbyists in DC as well as with the new « netroots » online force for the Democrats, MoveOn. MoveOn played a crucial role in transforming the anti-war movement that arose during the Bush years into a movement to elect Democrats in 2006 – 2008, completely co-opting that energy and leaving the US peace movement impotent and irrelevant today.

The professional progressive movement is now wholly owned by the liberal oligarchs; its leaders are bright, young and well rewarded, and there is absolutely no real desire to do anything but co-opt grassroots progressives into choosing Democrats over Republicans every two years. The Feel The Bern movement shows that if Bernie Sanders had the courage to break with the Democrats and form a new party or run as a Green, 2016 is a rare year when he could have great success. But instead he and the rest of these professional progressives stay within the Democratic Party, thinking that one day they will control it. It’s a delusion and a failure of vision, but their own rewards and salaries are nice, and they live within their own echo chamber of liberal propaganda from The Nation to The New York Times that reinforces their failure to confront the liberal oligarchy in the name of being realistic.

You do not call for violent revolution. Do you think that it is possible to defeat the big capital, the Neocons, the military-industrial complex, with a peaceful revolution?

Nothing would please the US establishment more, or lead more quickly to a full police state supported by a majority of Americans, than some sort of left wing political violence. We saw in the 1960s and 1970s how the FBI under Nixon and Hoover encouraged violent protests, planted provocateurs, infiltrated the anti-war, Black Power and other movements with thousands of paid FBI informers, and destroyed it. The American Left never recovered and what was called the New Left died. The American people are easily frightened and quick to give up liberties if it appears that armed extremists are threatening their safety. Anyone advocating violent revolution for the United States is a lunatic or worse.

Your writings call for an awakening against lobbies and other capitalist and imperialist domination forces and we notice a derision and despair that call for a better world where all hopes are allowed. How do you explain this Gramscian dialectic?

I am not a hopeful person, I do not believe that revolution is likely, nor that a revolution would necessarily produce and sustain something better. Humanity is deeply flawed, self-destructive, and seems doomed in this century by greed to poison itself and destroy the Earth’s biosphere with its love of corporate consumerism and the resulting toxins and wastes. People everywhere show their willingness to follow nationalist or religious leaders into horrific wars with catastrophic results. The likelihood of nuclear war stays high; it’s a large miracle there has not been a nuclear attack since Nagasaki, but the access to weapons of mass destruction continues to spread. Under Obama, the US and NATO are pursuing a New Cold War against Russia and China that is insanely dangerous.

Can typical people organize together around the world from the ground up to create and sustain a revolutionary society that is just, democratic and peaceful, given the control that corporate capitalism has over our lives and minds and governments? We are completely enveloped by the corporate propaganda system from the moment of our birth on, and it allows the oligarchy to control our minds and lives from cradle to grave, in seamless invisible fashion, via marketing, advertising and public relations, reinforced by the news media. Few are able to admit and see this, which is why I organized PRWatch and CMD in 1993 and co-authored my six books.

The word “lie” often comes up in your writing. Do you think that the United States will survive to their lies, such as the war in Iraq?

The Cold War journalist Izzy Stone said, “All governments are run by liars, nothing they say should be believed.” This is also true of corporate government, the few hundred global companies that dominate the world’s economy and dictate to and through the world’s governments. The United States is very adept at failing to admit, much less confront, its lies. The myth of American Exceptionalism is embraced and promoted by the bipartisan oligarchy and the media, and so we see that there is no real examination of the horrendous crimes and blunders of the government, from the war of genocide waged on Vietnam, to the illegal and devastating attack on Iraq that has led to ISIS, to the massive economic failure of 2008 where no one was held accountable and the fundamental problems never repaired. So, no, in both the short term and certainly the longer term, these lies and self-deceptions undermine and destroy the fabric of American society. The rise of Trumpism is very much a result of the deceptions that have been foisted on Americans, but it is a reactionary and destructive response, of course, that again is based on this myth of exceptionalism and aims to make America again « great ».

You are the founder of the Center for Media and Democracy. What is the role of this center?

I founded CMD in 1993 to publish my news magazine PRWatch revealing how the business of public relations functions to thwart democracy and maintain the power and control of the rich and their corporations. I also wanted to show how western governments use PR to control their citizens, and how corporate media is an echo chamber for both corporate and government propaganda. I ran CMD until 2009, but then stepped down, feeling that I had taken its mission as far as I could after co-authoring six books through the Center. I am now pursuing more personal interests neglected for all my decades as an activist and author. I am no longer writing books or running an organization, and glad of it. CMD continues under new leadership, but it has become much like other US progressive think tanks, part of the Democratic Party’s liberal echo chamber. It has done some important work since I left in confronting and exposing ALEC, a brilliant rightwing operation that allows corporations to draft and write laws at the state level in the United States. CMD’s web address is www.PRWatch.org.

Placebo Ballots: Stealing California from Bernie Using an old GOP vote-snatching trick

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein

Source: GregPalast.com

Woop! Woop! Alert! Some California poll workers have been told to give “provisional” ballots to all independent voters in Tuesday’s Democratic Party.

That’s wrong. That’s evil. That’s sick and illegal.

Here’s the 411. If you’re registered as an independent voter in California, you have the right to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary. Just ask for the ballot.

But look out! Reports out of Orange County are that some poll workers have been told to give “No Party Preference” (NPP), that is, an independent voter, a PROVISIONAL ballot, as opposed to a regular ballot.

Do NOT accept a provisional ballot. As one poll worker told me, “They simply don’t get counted.”

Who would benefit from this switcheroo from legal ballot to “provisional” ballot? It’s just a stone cold fact that independent voters favor Senator Bernie Sanders. Among voters who describe themselves as having “no party preference,” Sanders leads Sec. Hillary Clinton by a humongous 40 points—though Hillary is hugely ahead among registered Democrats.

So one way to steal the election is to make sure those independent voters’ ballots end up in the garbage, uncounted.

Two million “Placebo Ballots” not counted

And for our readers in the other 49 states: you can bet that the GOP will be shunting voters to these placebo provisional ballots in November. In the last presidential election, over two MILLION voters, overwhelmingly voters of color, were shifted to these rarely-counted ballots. Two million voters could have justwritten their votes on bubbles. That’s how they steal elections.

No, I’m not promoting Bernie nor my uncle Ernie, nor anyone. I’m promoting democracy. Let’s make sure your vote counts.
What is a “Provisional” ballot? “Provisional” ballots were created by George Bush and Karl Rove as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after they swiped Florida in 2000.

The original idea of provisional balloting was sound: The Congressional Black Caucus was very upset that African-Americans were not able to vote in 2000 in Florida because they were falsely removed from the voter roles for all kinds of cockamamie reasons. So the Black Caucus proposed that, if your name is not on the voter roles, you should still be able to vote provisionally. The state can then check the records and count your vote later.

The Black Caucus won the right to a provisional ballot, but didn’t win the right to have them counted. They rarely are.

Say you are tagged an “inactive” voter, you CANNOT get your provisional ballot counted even if you were wrongly listed as “inactive.” You’ve been removed from the register. So, it’s a Catch-22. You get a provisional ballot because you were wrongly left off the voter roll, but it can’t be counted because, well, you’re not on the voter roll.

And that’s why I call provisional ballots “Placebo” ballots. They let you feel like you voted, but you haven’t. It’s ridiculously easy to challenge a provisional ballot – so in a tight race, it’s just tossed out.

California Reamin’
I am currently reporting from Southern California, and I got a tip from Ashley Beck, a poll worker in conservative Orange County . Listen to her story. She was being trained with other poll workers, and they were given some very strange information.

“I was told that all NPP [independent] voters are to be given provisional ballots. I was bothered by that, because I was always told that NPP voters in California can vote for Democrats and their vote would be counted. I was a little worried that he was telling all 18 of us poll workers to give all NPP voters provisional ballots. We all know what happens most of the time with provisional ballots. They are not being counted.”

Provisionally Black

Who gets these placebo ballots?

I was on a book tour in Palm Springs—with an audience of about 200. I asked, “Has anyone here ever gotten a provisional ballot?” The only two Black people in the room both raised their hands, and that was it.

Black people know what provisional ballots are, and they probably know that if they fill one out, the chance of it getting counted is slim.

With the attempt to steal votes by giving independent voters provisional ballots; a lot of white people are being treated as if they turned Black. So to Bernie voters experiencing vote suppression for the first, welcome to the United States of Apartheid voting.

Related Podcast:

Greg Palast on the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show

Hillary Clinton is an Astrological Plague (Gonzo & Conjure ’16)

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. Bones

Source: Disinfo.com

“He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.”- Hunter S. Thompson

There are times when the entire cosmos turns against humanity for whatever reason. Perhaps the gods are fickle or better yet intent on keeping humanity’s collective nose in the dirt. The cosmic explosion of Mars, Mercury, and Pluto joining Saturn and Jupiter in a massive retrograde has devastated nearly everyone I know. People have been murdered, jobs lost, houses caught fire, infectious diseases caught, and my own car took a shit and died an hour outside of where I live.

And Hillary fucking Clinton, the horse-thief and reptilian creature from the swamps of D.C., seems to be soaking in the malignant energy and using it to power her own nefarious schemes.

I had missed a week of reporting, the widespread panic and disasters leading to an uptick in people seeking answers and magical aid. Between peering into the realm of probability and haggling with spirits I had very little time for the National Cataclysm Affairs desk here at Disinfo. I hadn’t just been working but studying, picking up a copy of Hadean Press’ Conjure Codex, a fascinating little journal blending old school grimoires and demonology with New World traditions like my beloved Hoodoo as well as Quimbunda, Vodoun, and many others. Ole’ Bones was adding new techniques and allies to his repertoire(check my facebook for more on that).

I was studying a ~~stolen~~ borrowed copy of Jake Stratton-Kent’s superb edition of The True Grimoire, contemplating how the demon Surgat might help in road opening work when the editors at Disinfo called me.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Bones! It’s XXXXXXXX over at Disinfo. What are you up to?”

“Me?” I peered over to the altar, a jar of graveyard dirt along with 13 different roots and herbs empowering the spirit of a dead soldier I needed for a case. “N-nothing in particular. Just uh….the usual.

Why are you calling me? Are you going to start paying me?”

“Uh….” The man on the line coughed, trying to distract from the question, “….hey, uh, noticed you haven’t posted in awhile. Everything alright?”

“Alright? No, everything is not alright. Between my car fucking blowing up and Mars deciding to take a fucking piss on humanity I would say it’s safe to assume nothing is alright. I’m knee deep in case work here, you know: clients, i.e. people that give me money for my services. D-do you know how much shit I need to get done before the moon starts to wane, let alone before the mansions of Al-Jubana and Iklil Al-Jabhah pass?”

“I uh…”

“Jesus CHRIST, your just walking around in all this aren’t you? Don’t you understand the very HEAVENS are against us?!? You’re letting your KIDS go UNPROTECTED through all this madness??? Y-y-y-you want them to be eaten alive by a pack of wild dingoes, or maybe even shot dead by some shitty cop with a chip on his-”

“BONES!” His shout came tinged with fear. When the wizards of the world start to board up their windows for a storm you can’t see the wise are quick to follow. “Look man, just…just email me whatever you think I should do. But I need another piece.”

Truth be told I had one bumping around in my head, for just as surely as the fortunes of my clients faded as Mars dropped ever out of sight, so too the American “people” seemed doomed in the truest, most poetic sense of the word.

Hillary is that doom.

It’s should come as no surprise that American elections are rigged. Everybody who isn’t completely braindead (so of course we’re speaking about a minority here) gets that uneasy feeling in the stomach about electoral politics. Like someone trying to sell you a car radio in front of a liquor store it seems shady as all hell.

That’s because it is.

First let’s recall that while you may be free to vote in whoever the hell you want, the actual lawmaking part is out of the hands of both you and your “representative.” Take for example ALEC, the massive corporate lobbying machine, merely one stinky carp in the cesspool that is American politics. They simply offer “ideas” on bills to be submitted to congress that heavily favor corporate interests and they pay their lapdogs well. Most may be voted down, but consider that while a success rate of 9% may not seem like alot, less than 2% of introduced bills passed the 112^th session of the U.S. Congress. That means that bills based on ALEC policies have a survival rate nearly 5 times that of the average bill in Congress.

Or, to put it in the vernacular “shit walks, money talks.”

Corrupt is one thing. Hell, even the Vatican Bank launders drug money. Corrupt is no surprise. Even stolen elections are no surprise, but at least they never did it in plain sight.

This Hillary thing is a new beast entirely. Let’s recall that this thing all started less like a campaign and more like a mafia.

“In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

In other words, a single donor, by giving $10,000 a year to each signatory state could legally give an extra $330,000 a year for two years to the Hillary Victory Fund. For each donor, this raised their individual legal cap on the Presidential campaign to $660,000 if given in both 2015 and 2016. And to one million, three hundred and 20 thousand dollars if an equal amount were also donated in their spouse’s name.

From these large amounts of money being transferred from state coffers to the Hillary Victory Fund in Washington, the Clinton campaign got the first $2,700, the DNC was to get the next $33,400, and the remainder was to be split among the 33 signatory states. With this scheme, the Hillary Victory Fund raised over $26 million for the Clinton Campaign by the end of 2015.”

The classic you-scratch-my-back-and-I-scratch-your’s.

And scratch they have.

In Iowa:

“It’s been reported that Hillary Clinton instructed her staff in Iowa to rig the caucus voting by falsely standing in the O’Malley corner of the room when the final precinct hand counts are tallied…

Mega-giant corporation Microsoft founder Bill Gates is now in charge of counting both the Democratic and Republican votes in this year’s state primary elections…the fact is the Gates Foundation along with Microsoft employees have literally donated millions of dollars to Hillary and the Clinton Foundation…

Both CNN and The Blaze reported that the final tally was missing votes from 90 Iowa precincts…

C-SPAN actually captured on video at the Polk County precinct the caucus chair and the Clinton precinct captain not even bothering to conduct a final count of the caucus voters and then the Clinton precinct captain caught lying to the Sanders precinct captain…

This week in Iowa is that the results were determined by six coin tosses in a row all favoring Hillary to ultimately decide the winner. After six county precincts ended up in dead ties between Clinton and Sanders, by state protocol those six precincts did a coin toss to determine the winner and in all six counties we’re supposed to actually believe that Hillary’s tails won. Though Clinton’s known for telling fish tales, it shouldn’t have overturned the virtually impossible statistical odds of just 1.56%.”

In Arizona:

“The Arizona Democratic Party has officially announced that it will be investigating multiple accusations of election fraud across the state’s Democratic primary vote Tuesday, where voters who claimed to have previously registered as Democrats say their party affiliation was unknowingly changed to independent– and therefore, they weren’t allowed to cast ballots in the closed primary.”

In Nevada:

“The Nevada Democratic Convention…began with a highly debated decision to change the Convention rules despite not getting the needed majority of vocal votes. But at the end of the night, when a motion was made to recount the delegates, the chair of the Convention closed out the meeting without even giving the delegates’ a chance to say “nay”…The Convention is not reconvening tomorrow, it was announced. Instead, protesters will have to pursue legal avenues.”

In New York:

Multiple investigations were launched and a top election official was suspended this week after tens of thousands of registered voters were found to be missing from the rolls during Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York….Entire blocks and buildings of voters in some districts were purged from the voter rolls, de Blasio said.

In Kentucky:

WKYT, a local news station in Kentucky, was told by the Pike County Clerk’s office that there were issues with one of their card readers, which caused a delay in the numbers. AP then erased the votes, pushing Hillary to the lead by over 4,000 votes….It was later reported that 31 counties in Kentucky reported election fraud on Tuesday.

Oregon alone seems untouched, mainly due to the automatic registration of all it’s citizens to vote, but that doesn’t stop the corporate owned media from howling about how “vulnerable” THAT system is; it’s quite telling that the one state possibly impervious to the Hillary Mafia is the only one they seem so concerned about, everybody else simply getting a shrug of the shoulders and almost no airtime.

The sheer audacity, the open contempt for the electoral system so plain for all to see not only hints that Hillary has been chosen as the next heir to the Imperium but that the Powers That Be couldn’t even bother to hide it from you.

That’s how little power you have, that’s how much “democracy” exists in the United States: Uncle Sam is literally ignoring your pleas and if he does hear you he spits in your face and simply says “what the fuck you going to do about it?”

All this during the election! She doesn’t even wear the drone-encrusted crown yet! What kind of madness might we expect when she sits upon the Throne of Skulls?

Ask our friends in Haiti.

“In June 2009, the Haitian Parliament unanimously passed a law requiring that the minimum wage be raised to $0.61 an hour, or $5 a day. (The average cost of living is estimated to be the equivalent of about $23 a day.) This pay raise was staunchly opposed by foreign manufacturers who had set up shop in the country, and the United States Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development backed those manufacturers. After Haiti’s government mandated the raise, the United States aggressively (and successfully) pushed Haiti’s president to lower the minimum wage for garment workers to what factory owners were willing to pay: the equivalent of about $0.31 an hour (or $2.50 per eight-hour day).

In 2011, WikiLeaks released a set of previously-secret diplomatic cables. The American publication The Nation partnered with Haitian news organization Haïti Liberté to cover them, finding (among other things) how strongly the United States had opposed the minimum wage hike”

Haiti, a nation that has been harassed and abused by the criminal Imperium of the United States since day-fucking-1, has become the playground for wealthy capitalists looking for a captive population to exploit. And the one leading the way for all the plunder is none other than the Clinton Foundation.

“Less than 1% of this amount(the $10 billion in aid) made it to the Haitian government. Bill Clinton had total control of the balance,” Dantò claimed.

She added, “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘opened Haiti’ as their private asset to liquidate. They used the resources of the World Bank, the State Department, USAID, the UN, the private military security contractors, the US military, and the Fed’s passport and visa issuance capabilities. They got kickbacks called ‘donations’ from anyone who wished to buy from them a piece of Haiti lands, oil, iridium, uranium or gold. The Clintons have used governmental power to conduct their private business and called it ‘helping poor Haitians.’”

How much of a scum-sucking, evil, predatory reptile do you have to be to profit off of the earthquake that devastated Haiti? The Clinton Foundation not only sent toxic trailers to the homeless but mysteriously “misplaced” millions in aid and awarded building contracts to mostly non-Haitian companies.

It’s fucking Batista’s Cuba all over again, expect this time we made sure to import an Imperium-style police state, regardless if it was “needed:”

“The U.S. moved aggressively to beef up the Haitian police (PNH), giving police chief Mario Andrésol“command and control advice and mentoring” from Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and FBI agents while trying to ensure that Haitian police officers were paid and well-equipped. The DEA advisor was Darrel Paskett, whose first post-quake priority was directing his “well-armed” bulletproof-vested DEA agents to guard the U.S. Embassy from “huge crowds” of desperate Haitians that might overrun it, FOX News reported. The crowds never materialized.”

Taken all together what does Hillary mean for the American electorate?

It means that the gods themselves have conspired against us, that the United States has finally taken it’s dark turn from Empire to barbaric Thralldom; it means an openly criminal “government” that exists on a network of dirty money, whispered memos, secret handshakes, and backroom deals; it means human beings demoted to mere walking sources of profit, expendable livestock for Capitalists to fund million-dollar vacations and mansions in countries where the common folk eat on less than a dollar a day.

Hillary IS the wrath of heaven, a plague upon a nation of sinners that made it possible for such an invertebrate to even come into being; the Kingdom of Mole Rats has birthed a bloodthirsty creature hellbent on devouring as many souls as possible while she reshapes the face of the planet for her Neo-Liberal masters.

Buckle in comrades: a darkness not thus seen is slowly spreading across the savannah, propelled onwards by international finance and warmongers hungry for profit. The stars have aligned against the free-spirits; I write this from a Florida ER room, my wife having slipped into toxic shock mid-article. Like I said: bad shit is happening everywhere. Hillary is just a symptom. The stars and unseen hands toy with humanity and invisible currents shift the tides of the luck plane.

In this age of scavengers the jackals seek to capture the rotting throne for no other reason than to keep the tides of blood flowing, vampires seeking to drain us down to the very last drop. The stars smile upon the senseless bloodletting and those that would bring us holocaust are going to get what they can while the getting is good.

But, as we know, their best efforts are all for naught. Mars will return to it’s proper place, and the forces of death will in turn be feasted upon. The stars are never set, and even the moon must change in her courses; nothing can withstand the forces of entropy, even entropy itself. After the offending appendix is torn out of my wife her body will heal; just as the “body politic” is eaten and polluted by Hillary and her reptiles so too shall the time come when even her tyrannical efforts shall fail and she in turn is feasted on. This we have foreseen. Welcome to the motherfucking jungle that is modern living.

Hillary’s desperation only hints that things are far worse off then we can even imagine, and her crimes, though blatant, can only slow the inevitable. We Hyenas shall wait with bared fangs for the inevitable collapse.

The stars may not be right today, but they drift ever further in our favor.

Lifting the Veil of Psychopathic Intrusion in Everyday Life

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Reid Mukai

what-people-think-psychopaths-are-streetdemocracy

By Nozomi Hayase

Source: Dissident Voice

In recent years, the conception of the psychopath has gained a new upsurge of interest. Popular culture’s sensational image of Hannibal Lecter in the movie Silence of the Lambs and notorious killers like Ted Bundy have long cultivated public fascination. Now, awareness is spreading beyond these portrayals of outlandish criminals. More people are beginning to recognize the existence of socialized psychopaths who are not so outwardly violent.

Psychopaths walk among us, quietly blending into society. They could be corporate CEOs who exploit their workers, politicians who lie to get elected or Don Juan-like womanizers who inspire love to play with others hearts. Roughly 1-2 % of individuals in overall society are estimated to have been affected by this pervasive personality disorder (Neumann & Hare, 2008), yet some suggest these numbers are conservative and that many go unnoticed (Kantor, 2006).

The difficulty of accurately identifying psychopaths partly lies in a significant ambiguity among mental health professionals. Psychopathy expert, Robert D. Hare (1996) described the pivotal shift that occurred in 1980 with the publication of the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-3), concerning the diagnosis of psychopathy. He noted how in this standard classification of mental disorder that has become the clinician’s bible, psychopathy was renamed antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and defined by “persistent violations of social norms, including lying, stealing, truancy, inconsistent work behavior and traffic arrests” (para. 5).

Hare (1996) explained how this change was made based on the reasoning that affective and interpersonal traits that play a primary role in understanding psychopathy were difficult to measure. As a result, this diagnostic criteria of ASPD that mainly refer to criminal and outwardly observable antisocial behaviors, stripped off personality traits that are critical factors inherent in psychopathy. The trend of omitting the traits unique to this pathology has not been overturned to this day in the latest version of diagnostic manual DSM-5.

Along with this blurring of diagnosis, the very nucleus of this psychiatric disorder seems to have contributed to creating this lack of clarity. In his seminal work The Mask of Sanity, first published in 1941, psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley articulated how, among other personality traits such as their superficial charm, emotional poverty and egocentricity, the essential characteristic of psychopathy lies in its deceitful nature; hiding their lack of internal structure in a façade of normalcy.

Without knowing what to look for, even for professionals it is extremely hard to detect the psychopathic individual. This is made even more difficult when the very characteristics involve deception. All this has unleashed this dangerous population with few restraints, bringing great risk to the public. Their ability to fake and hide makes their exploitation invisible to the public eye. Oftentimes, people do not recognize abuse in a relationship until much of the damage is done. There are even cases where those who suffered harm do not realize they are victims.

Now, with the Internet and social media, a new level of education is happening. Through YouTube channels and online forums, those who experienced significant pain inflicted by these deranged individuals are coming together to gain validation that is desperately needed, yet often lacking in formal therapy. They are spouses, friends and co-workers, whose life had been ruined financially, mentally or emotionally. Those who had close encounters with these unknown members of society have seen the true face of psychopathy. With this sharing of first hand experience and witnesses outside lab experiments, the mystery of psychopathy is slowly being unveiled.

Hollowness as Elusive Core

In Without Conscience, Hare (1993) describes a psychopath as “a self-centered, callous, and remorseless person profoundly lacking in empathy and the ability to form warm emotional relationships with others, a person who functions without the restraints of conscience” (p. 2). The elusive core of this pathology is an absence of empathy. This sets those affected apart from the rest. People equipped with the ability to put themselves into another’s shoes often take this attribute for granted and don’t recognize the crucial role this seemingly innate aspect of human nature plays in forming a sense of one’s own self.

Humans are social beings. We exist in relation and develop identity through making connections with others at an emotional level. For instance, mother’s validation and proper attuning to her baby’s needs is crucial for infants to cultivate their sense of reality.

Psychopaths do not bond in the same way most people do and have not secured healthy attachment to caregivers. Because of this lack of attachment, argued by Hare (1993) as being a symptom of psychopathy, they cannot develop their identity based upon concrete reality.

Empathy unlocks the door into the world of a larger humanity, allowing one to experience higher emotions of joy, love and compassion. As the foundation of their identity is divorced from an empathic ground, psychopaths are emotionally held down in a “pre-socialized world”, lacking the full range of emotions (Meloy, 1988).

There is nothing inside to hold their identity together. As described in a T.S. Eliot’s poem, they are “hollow men… stuffed men -leaning together, headpiece filled with straw” (1934/1951, p. 56). Out of this vacuousness at the center of their personality, a head grows with an intelligence that is cunning and clever and primarily serves narrow selfish interests.

The being personified in this entity is enslaved by an internal void. They are a nobody and are driven to fill an insatiable hunger at any cost. Hare (1993) describes how they are “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets” (p. xi). Like going out on a hunt, they trespass people’s boundaries, dragging those who enter their proximity into their dark hole of nothingness. Anyone can become a target and once trapped, they are often sucked dry if not completely destroyed.

Idealization, Prelude to Seduction

The psychopath’s predation follows certain destructive relationship patterns that they repeat throughout their life. Regardless of differences in background, the victims all share similar cycles of abuse. Claudia Moscovici (2010) on her blog Psychopathyawareness describes these patterns in three stages; idealization, devaluation and then discard.

The first stage of a psychopathic relationship is idealization. This is a powerful and seductive period when psychopaths allure their potential victims. With superficial charm, this cunning and manipulative population enchants their targets. They put their new love interest on a pedestal, saying whatever the person wants to hear, transfixing whoever has become the unfortunate prey. It could be a whirlwind romance or promising partnership. Showered with flattery and adulation, targets often feel they are finally getting the appreciation they deserve in life.

In Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Hare and leading organizational psychologist Paul Babiak (2006) described this period as an assessment phase, where psychopaths examine their targets’ value and utility. They outlined the four main messages that psychopaths convey to their targets to create an instant connection, which they call the “psychopathic bond”. These are: 1) “I like who you are”; 2) “I am just like you”; 3) “Your secrets are safe with me”; 4) “I am the perfect friend, lover, partner for you” (p. 74-78).

If you are chosen, you will be adored and made to feel special. In their idealizing gaze, you are a center of the universe and can do no wrong. This newly acquainted friend or lover taps into fears, insecurity and deep wishes and morphs themselves into becoming anything their victim wants them to be.

Their seemingly caring gestures appear very genuine and many mistake this as empathy. Later, targets would reflect back on that exciting beginning and feel that they had been fooled. Hare describes how, unlike other mental disorders, psychopaths are rational and that “their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised” (1993, p. 22). Although it is true that some of the deviants are calculative and indeed plot all the way through, at the same time, as Hare suggests, it is often done more instinctively and is not necessarily planned out. Their love-bombing during this phase rather appears to be an effect of their pathology, caused by impaired emotional processing.

Narcissistic Mirror and Erosion of Identity

So, why do they idealize? The idealization is a part of their pathological makeup. Psychopaths are truly outsiders. Without being a part of the world informed by empathy, they live in isolation and develop a sense of self that is divergent from the majority of society. Researchers point to the psychopath as having a “narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance” (Hare, 1993 p. 38), a “grandiose self-structure” and a “psychopathology of narcissism” (Meloy, 2001, p. 11).

Although psychopathy is different from the other severe personality dysfunction recognized in the psychiatric community as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), its core of empathy deficit encompasses some of the features exhibited by NPD. Like those who suffer from excessive narcissism, they are trapped in mirrors of self-absorption and can’t recognize others as having their own autonomous thoughts and feelings. Through not being grounded in a consensual reality, they lack objectivity in their assessment of their own selves. For them, reality is constructed not based on who they really are, but who they want and believe themselves to be.

Being cut off from emotional reality, they are dead inside and can’t harvest their own energy. So they become parasites and feed off others’ emotional reactions. When they idealize their partners, they are unconsciously wanting to establish a connection to a source of creativity, that which gives emotional sustenance. Through weaving a fantasy and duping the other into their web of deception, they extract the life forces of the victim.

For psychopaths, relationship is the stage on which they enact their grandiose fantasy. Others are seen as an extension of themselves, as props that can be used. Anyone who comes their way is screened for their ability to perform a role that serves their plot. Their chosen targets become an object of desire and are pursued with great passion. With beam-like attention, they turn the spotlight on the victims. Through mirroring the victims’ positive qualities, predators disarm their prey and bring them under the luminary light of their narcissistic mirror. In this, the victim’s identity is eroded, yet with constant flattery and attention, they feel pumped up and elated.

This internal casting process can be seen as the psychopath launching a parallel persona upon their targets’ identity and then using it as a mask to create a rapport with their target. Yet, this mirroring is not consciously carried out. It is an automatic reflex that happens when they see something they want in others. Also, in some cases, in others’ positive attributes, these self-absorbed individuals see an idealized image of themselves. Like the Greek myth of Narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection in the water and then pines away, this is the effect of psychopaths seeing themselves in another’s reflection that is created by victims favorably responding to idealization and then trying to claim that image for themselves.

This mirroring starts to fade after the psychopaths successfully attach themselves to their hosts and is then replaced with mind games. Without being able to feel genuine emotions, the psychopath from a young age studied human behavior and learned how to effectively create a favorable response. They will slowly start to use this acquired skill of clever manipulation to keep their victims inside their delusional bubble and maintain control.

Devaluation and the Broken Mirror

What comes next is devaluation, marked as a betrayal with broken promises. This is when psychopaths who had always seen their partners in a positive light will begin to criticize and withdraw their attention. They slowly tear down the pedestal they once put victims up on and engage in subtle ridicule and condescension. Confused, the targets often internalize these criticisms and start becoming convinced that they are not as perfect as the psychopaths initially made them feel and that they have faults just like everyone else.

So, why does this devaluation happen? Many who have been taken for a ride wonder why this person who once seemed to love them so much, changes all of sudden. After psychopaths absorb their targets’ good traits, they cannot truly make them their own. There is nothing that can fill their bottomless pit and soon the void starts to grow again. When the initial thrill and excitement of a new target wears off, they get bored. This is the point where those who have been taken in by the charm start to see the mask slipping.

While victims begin to have a glimpse of the hollow man behind the mask of the manufactured persona, in the eyes of the psychopath, the victim ceases to be the perfect mirror that reflects back their delusions of grandeur. This happens because those who were made to be reflections in their mirror are living human beings. When victims start to act autonomously, as every human being is meant to do, these malignantly narcissistic individuals experience their self-image fluctuating and their mirror of absorption beginning to shatter.

In a sense, psychopaths are like bullets that have been fired by a gun they themselves barely understand. Distortion in the mirror that occurs during this devaluation process is experienced by them as an attack on their very existence. When they start to realize their idealized partner is fallible, they experience injury and believe that what pulled the trigger is coming from outside them. The love of life that they once declared quickly becomes malformed or damaged goods and the victim can even be seen as an object of hatred and contempt. The idealized self-image projected onto their partners now disappears from the mirror and they have to look for it elsewhere. Thus, rinse and repeat. They start chasing a new object of ‘affection’ and begin the idealization phase all over again.

Discarded

Little does the victim know, but the person they had fallen for is now gone. The psychopath has already abandoned their masks. At this point, if the target remains useful to them, they would be kept around, but otherwise, the psychopath moves on, as if the previous victim never existed. The duration of each stage leading up to the final discard depends on how fast the targets catch on to their ploy or whether they cease to be useful.

After being cast aside, the victims might feel they were handled dishonestly. They realize that their partners were fraudulent and that what they thought was love or true friendship was an illusion. Those who were wronged ask themselves if their partners really cared about them at all. When the psychopath’s mask is finally blown off and one begins to glimpse the monster behind that mask, one is flooded with questions that may never be answered.

It is important not to forget that these are ‘hollow men’. They suffer from shallow emotions and don’t have the same capacity for feeling as most people do. Hare (1993) describes their apparent lack of emotional depth, noting how they “seem to know the dictionary meanings of words but fail to comprehend or appreciate their emotional value or significance” (p. 128). They are “like a color-blind person who sees the world in shades of gray but who has learned to function in a colored world” (p. 129). Without having vital emotional understanding, they mimic experiences they can’t really understand through simulating emotions and parroting words that others use.

Without this understanding, those with empathy assume the other has a similar orientation and they fill in the blanks by projecting good attributes and interpreting words of those who lack feeling for others according to how they themselves use language. As the relationship unfolds beyond the initial stage, the differences eventually begin to emerge and the shallow consciousness behind the beautiful words starts to unravel.

As they are not tied to others by empathy, psychopaths have little connection to their own history and are uprooted from the shared narrative of humanity. They live in the present moment and are driven by immediate needs and instinctual desires. Just like the hollowness of their soul, their words are empty, rarely matching actions. They promise eternal devotion and love to describe their transient and fleeting desires of the here and now. For them there is no future; there is no past. There is nothing lasting that deeply connects them with other human fellows. They try on one personality and then drop it when it becomes inconvenient and move on to the next as needed.

The Anesthetized Heart

Who are these empty souls, masquerading as friends, lovers and good Samaritans, whose self-gratifying deeds in the end always leave their victims bewildered? The beast inside this small minority of society seizes everything that moves. They conquer the other, turning constantly evolving images of their targets into frozen snapshots of abstraction, which they then possess. In extreme cases, this is seen in the example of serial killers cutting up victims’ dead bodies and sleeping with them. Although the degree might be different, this deadening force that works within is the same. Psychopaths try to wipe out victims’ identity, so to make them a clean slate that can more perfectly mirror their grandiose self. Through lies and re-framing events, they attack their target’s memory, making them doubt their own sense of self. What awaits one toward the end of the relationship, if one does not disentangle themselves in time, can even be a total annihilation of the self.

The horror displayed by psychopathy and this moral bankruptcy often provokes an image of evil. In People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, psychiatrist and author Scott Peck (1983) defined evil as a reversal of the word ‘live’, and portrayed it as something that crushes life. They have what psychologist James Hillman (1992) characterized as an “anesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness” (p. 64).

Empathy is the foundation of conscience. It is to think with the heart and to feel with others. As the psychopath is delinked from the heart; from that which ties all living beings together, they are in a kind of darkness, where the light of conscience cannot reach. They lack insight about the situations they are in. They can intellectually understand what they are doing, but they cannot be fully conscious of their own actions and their devastating effects.

This state of numbness blinds them to the beast within that is devouring their victims. It makes them become deaf to the cries of those who are slowly dying. After the initial honeymoon phase, when their partners don’t defer to the psychopath’s version of reality and question this pretend world, they rush out and punish the victims. When victims strike back, psychopaths often fail to see how those abused are trying to defend themselves and instead twist reality. They deflect, misconstrue conversations to fit a narrative where they are constantly aggrieved and injured, making the victims look like the perpetrators.

No amount of love is enough for them. In the effort to communicate with these disordered individuals, words bounce back off their hardened hearts and become echos that the psychopath cannot hear. They rationalize and make one feel what they can’t feel about themselves, transmitting these emotions like poison. Victims are called too sensitive, crazy or imagining things and are further dragged into the predator’s one-sided reality.

Recovery and Path Back to the Self

How can those who are captured in a toxic web escape this snare and stop the bleeding that has been feeding this beast? These hungry carnivores sink their claws into their prey through the innate human trait of empathy and exploit our trusting nature. Most people relate to others in dialogue, giving a space for another’s perspective to enter in the interaction. Psychopaths on the other hand, not abiding by empathy, live in solipsism and operate in a monologue. While victims are trying to understand their perspective, these emotional vampires move quickly to direct the narrative, giving no chance for their targets to participate in the unfolding story as a co-creator. Through being nitpicky and accusative, they make victims back off from asserting their needs and make them walk on eggshells.

In relationship with these deadly individuals, what remains unconscious, both the dark and bright parts of oneself become vulnerable for manipulation. During idealization, the psychopath, like a puppeteer, attaches invisible heartstrings to their targets. They promise to fill a void, play on one’s vanity, mirroring back desires and enamoring victims with their own reflected beauty. Victims would not know until much later how this idealization was conditioning them to act in a certain way. What happens is a transfer of authority, where without realizing it, victims slowly begin to seek for approval from this pretend friend or partner.

When the devaluation phase sets in, if victims begin to become aware of what is happening and try to fortify their boundaries, they are often so deep in the fantasy and the fog of confusion becomes so thick that they cannot even see the path from which they came. They often suppress their emotions and take the blame in confrontational situations, so as not to ruin this idealized image.

Master manipulators know their prey, their insecurities and desires and know very well which buttons to push to get what they want. Chosen targets become like rats in a maze that leads to a shadow of one’s former self. As long as one performs according to the master’s plot, they will be rewarded, yet when one derails from their story, they are punished. Many desperately try to mend the broken mirror that once reflected their idealized self and focus on fixing what they have been brainwashed to believe as their ‘issues’.

For those who have been abducted into psychopaths’ illusory world, the path back to the self lies within. Recovery from the terror of the anesthetized heart calls for fully reclaiming one’s own empathy. This first requires one to have empathy for oneself; to claim all that was disowned within. Through accepting one’s own emotions without judgment no matter what they are, one can make a more conscious relationship with them and recognize how these emotions have been used as a tool for control. One can then break this hypnotic spell and take back the power to define one’s own reality.

Larger Social Implications

The relationship with a psychopath is like nothing experienced before. Until it is lived on a personal level, it is difficult to understand the depth of its destruction. This is a kind of psychological warfare being quietly waged upon victims. Psychopaths build up their targets and then knock them down under the rug. In the aftermath, victims may come to realize that they have been in a battle for their own life and that what is at stake is something even larger. This psychopathic invasion into one’s life is an infiltration of our deeper humanity. So, what is the agenda behind this dark force and where is it taking us?

Those with imperiled empathy are haunted by an eternal emptiness. They are thirsty, yet they can’t drink from the water of life. All they see are frozen images on the surface. This internal vacuum can turn into a monstrous desire for power that boils below consciousness. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1920) once signified this force when he urged his readers to make themselves “superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul, —contempt” (p. 38). This fighter for human freedom revealed to us the fall of human nature in his call for the will to power. He asked:

What is good? —Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil? —Whatever that springs from weakness. What is happiness? —The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome. (p. 42-43)

In praise of independence, psychopaths condemn human emotions such as attachment and jealousy as weakness and deny attributes like compassion and cooperation. They hijack and pull the development of the individual into becoming a reflection of their dry and deserted soul.

The encounter with psychopaths brings forth the fundamental question of evil; how can humanity confront what has become so terrifying in the world? Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1943/1977) once elucidated how the role of evil is to educate us to freedom and love:

Love would be impossible for man and freedom would be impossible for man without the possibility of sailing down into the abyss. A man unable of his own free decision to choose good or evil, would be a being only led on a leading string to a good which must be attained of necessity and who had no power to choose the good of his own fully purified will, by the love which springs from freedom. (p. 206)

We are born into the cradle of nature and unconsciously carried by affects and desires that stem from deep obligation to one another. Governed by this internal law of empathy, emotions that arise from a communal ground such as the sense of guilt or shame or simply feelings for the other, naturally regulate self-interests and restrain actions in consideration of others’ needs.

Unless we are ripped away from this protective world of empathy, how will we become aware of it and understand its true value? Psychopaths make us fight against ourselves. Their assault on empathy awakens us to the force that denies and breaks the bond of brotherhood. It gives us an opportunity to find the strength within to resist this will to power. By being pushed to the edge, we are asked to uphold out of free will all that makes us human.

When one fights this battle consciously, one can see this ‘evil’ for what it truly is. Hare (1993) shared a view held by some investigators that “behind Cleckley’s ‘mask of sanity’ lies not insanity but a young child of nine or ten” (p. 169). Like poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s myth of dragons being transformed into princesses at the last moment, perhaps these frightening members of society are a part of our own humanity that is “waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous” (1992, P. 85).

When we find courage to turn to what has become so dark, we find ourselves anew in those who are forgotten or condemned –within the shadows of man. We become survivors and begin to understand the true meaning of this battle.

One day, a stranger knocked at the door and opened our eyes to a side of humanity that we didn’t know existed. Darkness had a gift. It let us see the light that shines from within. With this light, mankind may find its true path toward evolution, becoming a species that can truly love. This is our salvation, where lies the potential for redemption of ourselves and the world.

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., is a writer who has been covering issues of freedom of speech, transparency, and decentralized movements. Her work is featured in many publications. Find her on twitter @nozomimagine Read other articles by Nozomi.

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: Corruption

CIA: The Corrupt and Ignorant Agency

The Belated Downfall of Bill Clinton

Hillary Clinton is an Astrological Plague (Gonzo & Conjure ’16)

Lifting the Veil of Psychopathic Intrusion in Everyday Life