Category Archives: divide and conquer

Confirmed: “Draw Mohammed” Contest Attackers Were Managed by FBI

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Anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and David Yerushalmi

UPDATE: Readers should backtrack to CNN’s 2015 coverage of the Garland, Texas shooting to see just how badly they are being deceived. As readers watch CNN’s video coverage and read the article, they must keep in mind that the FBI had been in contact with the suspects for years, and encouraged them to carry out the attack.

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

To some the 2015 shooting in Garland Texas at a “Draw Mohammed” contest organized by state-sponsored agitators seemed all too convenient.

The protest was meant to prove Muslims were irrational and violent, and amid the protest two armed men did indeed attack, both killed by police who were already on the scene.

The event was meant to reinforce the narrative that Islam is an irrational and dangerous ideology, that Muslims pose a danger to America and the West in general, and that both Islam and Muslims should be actively resisted culturally, politically, and militarily.

It was the culmination of years of agitation through networks maintained by Washington politicians and policymakers, particularly those who have – ironically – not only engineered America’s various and unending wars begun during the so-called “War on Terror,” but who have also armed and funded some of the most dangerous terrorist organizations on Earth via America’s Persian Gulf allies.

Now it is revealed that not only was the protest organized by politicians and organizations associated with Washington, but the shooting was as well.

The two suspects were being directed by undercover FBI agents, one of which reportedly told one of the shooters shortly before the attack to “tear up Texas.”

The Daily Beast in its article, “FBI Agent Apparently Egged on ‘Draw Muhammad’ Shooter,” would report that:

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. 

“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.

The Daily Beast would also report:

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

This latest development regarding the 2015 incident reveals how the entire event and attack were organized by the state for the expressed purpose of creating fear, hysteria, and division within American society. It is very likely that similar attacks both in the United States and across Europe are also the work of concerted efforts by Western governments to manipulate public perception.

The toxic climate created by a phenomenon known as “Islamophobia” is helping the West justify an increased police state at home and wider wars abroad. It is also playing a role in helping to radicalize Muslims sorely needed to fill the ranks of the West’s militant fronts in nations like Syria where they are being used to target and overthrow governments obstructing American special interests.

Despite the rhetoric, there are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims on Earth today, meaning that if even 1% were truly as they are characterized by state-sponsored propaganda – as violent fanatics bent on global conquest – that would constitute an army of some 16 million strong – or in other words – an army larger than all of the military forces of the industrialized world combined.

In reality, the number of extremists is extremely low – a fraction of 1% of the total global Muslim population – and the vast majority of these extremists are indoctrinated by US-Saudi funded and facilitated “madrases,” trained, funded, and armed by US and its Persian Gulf allies, and “coincidentally” waging war on all of the West’s enemies – ranging from the now toppled government of Libya to the current governments of Syria and Iraq, as well as even Russia and China.

Those feeding into Islamophobia – then – are in fact aiding and abetting the cycle of violence, ignorance, and fear that keeps viable the West’s use of terrorism as a geopolitical tool both at home and abroad. It is particularly ironic that the “radical Islam” many Westerners are now paralyzed in fear over, is in fact a creation of the modern Western state, springing out of Washington-based policy papers, not the pages of the Qu’ran.

‘Stop Drinking the Kool-Aid, America: Political Fiction in an Age of Televised Lies’

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: A Government of Wolves

“We’ve got to face it. Politics have entered a new stage, the television stage. Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans—‘Time for a change’—‘The mess in Washington’—‘More bang for a buck’—punch lines and glamour.”— A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Politics is entertainment.

It is a heavily scripted, tightly choreographed, star-studded, ratings-driven, mass-marketed, costly exercise in how to sell a product—in this case, a presidential candidate—to dazzled consumers who will choose image over substance almost every time.

This year’s presidential election, much like every other election in recent years, is what historian Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “pseudo-event”: manufactured, contrived, confected and devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised. It is the end result of a culture that is moving away from substance toward sensationalism in an era of mass media.

As author Noam Chomsky rightly observed, “It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.” In other words, we’re being sold a carefully crafted product by a monied elite who are masters in the art of making the public believe that they need exactly what is being sold to them, whether it’s the latest high-tech gadget, the hottest toy, or the most charismatic politician.

Tune into a political convention and you will find yourself being sucked into an alternate reality so glossy, star-studded, emotionally charged and entertaining as to make you forget that you live in a police state. The elaborate stage show, the costumes, the actors, the screenplay, the lighting, the music, the drama: all carefully calibrated to appeal to the public’s need for bread and circuses, diversion and entertainment, and pomp and circumstance.

Politics is a reality show, America’s favorite form of entertainment, dominated by money and profit, imagery and spin, hype and personality and guaranteed to ensure that nothing in the way of real truth reaches the populace.

After all, who cares about police shootings, drone killings, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture schemes, private prisons, school-to-prison pipelines, overcriminalization, censorship or any of the other evils that plague our nation when you can listen to the croonings of Paul Simon, laugh along with Sarah Silverman, and get misty-eyed over the First Lady’s vision of progress in America.

But make no mistake: Americans only think they’re choosing the next president.

In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another Blue Pill, a manufactured reality conjured up by the matrix in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

Stop drinking the Kool-Aid, America.

The nation is drowning in debt, crippled by a slowing economy, overrun by militarized police, swarming with surveillance, besieged by endless wars and a military industrial complex intent on starting new ones, and riddled with corrupt politicians at every level of government. All the while, we’re arguing over which corporate puppet will be given the honor of stealing our money, invading our privacy, abusing our trust, undermining our freedoms, and shackling us with debt and misery for years to come.

Nothing taking place on Election Day will alleviate the suffering of the American people.

The government as we have come to know it—corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups—will remain unchanged. And “we the people”—overtaxed, overpoliced, overburdened by big government, underrepresented by those who should speak for us and blissfully ignorant of the prison walls closing in on us—will continue to trudge along a path of misery.

With roughly 22 lobbyists per Congressman, corporate greed will continue to call the shots in the nation’s capital, while our elected representatives will grow richer and the people poorer. And elections will continue to be driven by war chests and corporate benefactors rather than such values as honesty, integrity and public service. Just consider: it’s estimated that more than $5 billion will be spent on the elections this year, yet not a dime of that money will actually help the average American in their day-to-day struggles to just get by.

And the military industrial complex will continue to bleed us dry. Since 2001 Americans have spent $10.5 million every hour for numerous foreign military occupations, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s also the $2.2 million spent every hour on maintaining the United States’ nuclear stockpile, and the $35,000 spent every hour to produce and maintain our collection of Tomahawk missiles. And then there’s the money the government exports to other countries to support their arsenals, at the cost of $1.61 million every hour for the American taxpayers.

Then again, when faced with the grim, seemingly hopeless reality of the American police state, it’s understandable why Americans might opt for escapism. “Humankind cannot bear too much reality,” T. S. Eliot once said. Perhaps that is one reason we are so drawn to the unreality of the American political experience: it is spectacle and fiction and farce all rolled up into one glossy dose of escapism.

Frankly, escapism or not, Americans should be mad as hell.

Many of our politicians live like kings. Chauffeured around in limousines, flying in private jets and eating gourmet meals, all paid for by the American taxpayer, they are far removed from those they represent. Such a luxurious lifestyle makes it difficult to identify with the “little guy”—the roofers, plumbers and blue-collar workers who live from paycheck to paycheck and keep the country running with their hard-earned dollars and the sweat of their brows.

Conveniently, politicians only seem to remember their constituents in the months leading up to an election, and yet “we the people” continue to take the abuse, the neglect, the corruption and the lies. We make excuses for the shoddy treatment, we cover up for them when they cheat on us, and we keep hoping that if we just stick with them long enough, eventually they’ll treat us right.

People get the government they deserve.

No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.

As political science professor Gene Sharp notes in starker terms, “Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.” As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the Establishment—the shadow government and its corporate partners that really run the show, pull the strings and dictate the policies, no matter who occupies the Oval Office—are not going to allow anyone to take office who will unravel their power structures. Those who have attempted to do so in the past have been effectively put out of commission.

So what is the solution to this blatant display of imperial elitism disguising itself as a populist exercise in representative government?

Stop playing the game. Stop supporting the system. Stop defending the insanity. Just stop.

Washington thrives on money, so stop giving them your money. Stop throwing your hard-earned dollars away on politicians and Super PACs who view you as nothing more than a means to an end. There are countless worthy grassroots organizations and nonprofits working in your community to address real needs like injustice, poverty, homelessness, etc. Support them and you’ll see change you really can believe in in your own backyard.

Politicians depend on votes, so stop giving them your vote unless they have a proven track record of listening to their constituents, abiding by their wishes and working hard to earn and keep their trust.

Stop buying into the lie that your vote matters. Your vote doesn’t elect a president. Despite the fact that there are 218 million eligible voters in this country (only half of whom actually vote), it is the electoral college, made up of 538 individuals handpicked by the candidates’ respective parties, that actually selects the next president. The only thing you’re accomplishing by taking part in the “reassurance ritual” of voting is sustaining the illusion that we have a democratic republic. What we have is a dictatorship, or as political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately term it, we are suffering from an “economic élite domination.”

A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved, whether that means forgoing Monday night football in order to attend a city council meeting or risking arrest by picketing in front of a politician’s office.

It takes a citizenry willing to do more than grouse and complain. We must act—and act responsibly—keeping in mind that the duties of citizenship extend beyond the act of voting.

Most of all, it takes a citizenry that cares enough to get mad and get active. As Howard Beale declares in the 1976 film Network:

“I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it.”

 

Commodifying Dissent: Media, the Arts and the Hope in Cooperatives

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By Yoav Litvin

Source: CounterPunch

In the latest onslaught of apocalyptic news updates: The European Union is in crisis after the BREXIT vote, endless wars continue to ravage Africa and the Middle East causing millions of refugees to flee for their lives, ISIS strikes again, this time slaughtering over one hundred and fifty innocent Iraqis in Baghdad, and man-made climate change is wreaking havoc, fueling the third major mass extinction of species on Earth.

Meanwhile, back in the halls of empire the theatrics of the electoral process, together with the usual seasonal sports spectacles are mesmerizing and distracting the vast majority of the American public from the pressing issues threatening society. Despair and hatred mar our streets, nightclubs, schools, churches and movie theaters. Greed has overtaken empathy and a few powerful individuals have squashed the collective. Whole communities have been ravaged by neoliberal agendas that imprison and impoverish, all in the name of the almighty greenback.

But it is just another day at the office for the 1%. They own the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government. As Chris Hedges frequently stresses: “We’ve undergone a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. And it’s over. We’ve lost, and they’ve won.”

The vast majority of media sources, the watchdogs meant to protect democracy and the people’s interests at all costs, have succumbed to the rule of profit, aka “ratings”. They have become de factopropaganda outlets meant to manufacture consent and sell us on the faux virtues of consumerism and the American dream.

The corporate-owned mainstream media has been complicit on many levels. It is business as usual when a major outlet like MSNBC casually interrupts US Congresswoman Jane Harman speaking about NSA mass surveillance to feature the “breaking news” of teen pop star Justin Bieber’s DUI arrest. News networks carry on for hours with mind-numbing repetition about Donald Trump’s racist and misogynist antics, while all but completely ignoring a massive sit-in led by Democracy Spring, a movement that champions an end to the corruption of big money in our politics. Pundits whose job is to cry wolf endlessly discuss ISIS and the “threat of radical Islam”, but thorough analyses of the continued crimes of capitalism and imperialism are taboo, not to mention any productive discussions about systemic alternatives.

In this climate of corrupted news outlets, media that are independent of corporate funding are crucial in providing the people accurate information about systems of power and control.

But historically, the media has not been the only watchdog for the people and against powerful interest groups. Artists and other creatives have often used their works to voice progressive ideals that rebel against widely held conceptions of gender, race and class. As such, artists have been among the first voices of dissent to be targeted by totalitarian and fascist regimes. In the American capitalist culture, artists fall prey to a system that monetizes and commodifies all walks of life, including health care and education. Many artists willfully sell out, becoming court jesters who contribute their art to the needs of empire, i.e. as propaganda. Now studied as a degree at schools for higher education, the bulk of arts have become part of an “art market” – a multi-billion dollar industry that is more about a lifestyle and an investment, than it is about progressive messages or a passion for a new and interesting aesthetic. In the current cynical era when replicas sell for $100,000, there is little room for political art that expresses genuine and independent notions that challenge systemic conventions.

There are exceptions. Some artists refuse to corrupt themselves and their art by adhering to the whims of the “art market”. Notably, since the late sixties, there has been a movement of graffiti and street artists who have claimed public space from private owners. Born in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City (arguably) and now a global phenomenon, graffiti and street art often empower disenfranchised communities by serving as a voice of dissent, and providing free, uncensored messages regardless of commercial constraints.

The pathology behind the hijacking of media and the arts by the lords of capital runs deeper than the mere criminality of the 1%. It lies at the roots of one of the fundamental American values- individualism, where the achievements of the lone genius are sanctified, and those of the collective are ignored or even vilified. Individualism divides and conquers, providing the promise of immense spoils for victors, while always blaming failure on individual inadequacies, not systemic ones.

The cult of individualism has been so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that it has degenerated the biological human affinity to empathize rather than disregard, collaborate rather than dominate and has stifled the desire to give without the expectation of immediate return. Individualism has made cooperation a waste of time. But the fact of the matter is that humans have evolved as a social species and naturally yearn for and need connection, affirmation, love and stimulation to survive, thrive and create.

The crises humanity faces leave no choice but to decommodify dissent, abandon notions of individuality at the expense of others, topple hierarchies, and unite around democratic cooperatives that promote community, democracy and solidarity. Returning ownership of dissent to the public is a crucial step towards revolutionizing the workspace, en route toward a truly free and just democratic society.

Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience.

Dallas Shootings: White Supremacists Succeeded in Provoking Black Extremism

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(Editor’s note: Though at this time it’s still too early too tell whether the shooting was in fact an act of black extremism and/or a more complex situation intended to appear that way, the author’s central argument, that the social chaos created by such events benefit a select few, remains valid.)

By Eclinik Learning

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Considered to be one of the worst in US police history, five police officers were shot dead and scores wounded by snipers, presumably as a retaliation to the blatant killings of two black men this week in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Initial reports said that the three snipers were not part of those who joined the Black Lives Matter rally where the shootings occurred.

This event has just raised the confrontation between the white police and the black community to a new level.

The existence of a well-organized group of white supremacists that are occupying positions of power and within the armed services of the government is at the root of all these perennial deadly and racially loaded confrontations.

The graphic video of the murder cannot be subjected to wild speculations because it shows beyond doubt of a cold blooded murders by police officers who happens to be white.

These fanatics are not just hurting black people but they are those same extremists who were aiming their pepper spray to black and white kids alike during those massive Occupy Movement rallies, in close coordination with those same mindless talkingheads who are still running the mainstream media today.

Their aim is to provoke racial, political, and cultural conflict wherever possible. It would be a complete waste of our time to try and change their trajectory considering that these extremists completely believe in their own superiority just by the virtue of the color of their skin.

A more drastic action, like removing them all from power, should be done. These people don’t respond positively to vocal street protests.

As far as this recent event is concern, there is now a very high probability that a counter-retaliation will occur against the black people. But we don’t think that it could reach the level of a full blown racial confrontation considering that a sizable number of the Americans know exactly who the real enemy is.

Who has benefited from this drastic shift of the national attention?

This event undoubtedly and effectively shifted the national conversation away from the FBI’s absolution of one Hillary Clinton for her “extremely careless” handling of state secrets via her personal email server, which in itself was just a mere diversion of more heinous crimes that the Clinton couple have to cover-up all these years.

It would not surprise us a bit if something bad will happen on the other side of the Atlantic to stop the fallout from the Chilcot Report indicating that Tony Blair was lying about everything that has to do with the invasion of Iraq.

Aside from these obvious motivations of escaping executive accountability by covering lies with more lies, and by putting the people of the world constantly on the edge, the endless appetite for gun control and mass surveillance lies at the very foundation of all these unprovoked police shootings and false flag operations.

Only this time, those who survived for a while begun to shoot back. The only problem is that the wrong police may have been the casualties.

It is therefore a lot wiser for those would-be snipers to set their sight directly on the Eye of the Pyramid.

 

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Brexit Is What Happens When the Pie Is Shrinking

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

This process of withdrawal into the relative safety of internally cohesive groups and group identities is intrinsically messy in globalized, multicultural societies.

A great many narratives are drifting around the Brexit pool: a return to sovereignty, class war, “controlled demolition,” nothing-but-another-political-Kabuki- spectacle, end of the European Union, etc.

I think it boils down to something much simpler: the pie is shrinking, and the illusion that it’s about to start growing has been shattered. For many communities in the developed world, the pie started shrinking in the 1970s, and has been shrinking (despite the narrative of “45 years of strong growth”) since then.

Labor’s share of the GDP has been declining for 45 years. Occasional blips higher during debt-fueled bubbles quickly fade when the bubble du jour pops, and the decline of labor’s share of the economy resumes its trendline decline.

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Since 2008, the only group who feels the pie is growing is the class that has benefited from the unparalleled expansion of debt and leverage, financialization, globalization and central planning–roughly 20% of the work force, with the top 5% gathering most of the gains in income and wealth, and the top .1% gathering most of the increase in wealth. (See chart below)

For seven long years, the citizenry has been told the economy is expanding and therefore they’re “doing better.” But this narrative is not supported by their actual lived experience. Inflation is woefully under-reported by official statistics, and the rosy “rising employment” narrative is based largely on part-time jobs in hospitality and food services (bartenders, waiters, etc.) that are highly contingent on the spending of the top 10%.

While supporters of the status quo are quick to deride supporters of Brexit, the cold reality is the economic pie is shrinking, and Brexit is a direct result of that reality.

A shrinking economic pie generates widespread insecurity that pressures every status quo arrangement as people circle the wagons in an attempt to protect their remaining slice of the pie from others’ claims for a larger piece of the dwindling pie.

The general media line is that the Brexit vote arose out of anger with the status quo’s inequalities and asymmetries of wealth and power. While this is largely self-evident, it isn’t the most fundamental dynamic at work. I see Brexit as a reflection of our naturally-selected defensive response to insecurity and instability: circle the wagons.

By circle the wagons, I mean our tendency to withdraw into an internally cohesive group with defined membership and boundaries.

The largest such political group is the nation-state, and so it is natural for people with strong national identities to circle the wagons around their national identity.

We can also expect people to circle the wagons around ethnic, religious, localized and economic-social class identities. (Some people might feel more kinship with other fans of Manchester United than they do with any religion, ethnicity or state.)

As people identify themselves as members of the class that has not benefited from neoliberal/globalized crony capitalism, the ruling Elites become the “other,” i.e. “foreigners” with whom we have little contact, people who “aren’t like us”– in effect, an “enemy class” that is inherently opposed to our self-interests.

This process of withdrawal into the relative safety of internally cohesive groups and group identities is intrinsically messy in globalized, multicultural societies. No wonder populations are dividing into camps of increasingly angry people with little interest in compromise. Our instinct is to seek clear delineations of “us” and “them” and to seek the relative comfort of “us,” which in a multicultural nation, can contain quite a mixed bag of people who nonetheless feel a shared identity.

Much to the chagrin of political parties whose success is based solely on “identity politics,” the emerging group identities are not conforming to the political classes’ conventional fault lines. “Us” for many people includes everyone who isn’t a protected insider of the status quo, and “the enemy” is any protected insider of the status quo.

That includes virtually the entire political class, the entire class of state nomenklatura/technocrats, the entire banking sector and the wealthy class that’s benefited so handsomely from the globalized, debt-leverage bubbles and state / central bank support that characterize this era of neoliberal/globalized crony capitalism.

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A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All is now available as an Audible audio book.

 

Welcome to the Empire of Chaos

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By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When globe-trotting journalist and keen geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar refers to the United States as the “Empire of Chaos,” it may seem like hyperbole. But upon looking deeper at both Escobar’s coverage and the United States’ foreign policy itself, it is perhaps the most accurate title for this political entity and its means of operation, perhaps more apt than the name “The United States” itself.

In the wake of World War II, the US and its allies set out upon the reclamation of the West’s lost colonies, many of which took advantage of Europe’s infighting to either establish independence from their long-standing colonial masters, or begin the conflicts that would inevitably lead toward independence.

Perhaps the most well-known of these conflicts was the Vietnam War. The United States would involve itself in the dissolution of French Indochina at the cost of some 4 million lives in a conflict that would embroil not only Vietnam, but much of Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Covert coups and brutal insurgencies were underwritten by Washington across the planet, from the Middle East to South and Central America. And while this too seems chaotic, the goal always seemed to be the destruction of independent states, and the creation of viable client states.

These client states included the Shah’s Iran, Saudi Arabia, much, if not all of Western Europe and even to varying degrees, some of the enduring autocracies of the Middle East until for one reason or another they fell out of favor with Washington. The idea was to create an international order built upon the concept of globalization.

Globalization was meant to be a system of vast interdependencies governed by international institutions created by and for the United States and more specifically, the special interests that have long since co-opted America’s destiny.

However, the concept of globalization seems to have neglected any anticipation for rapid technological advances in both terms of information technology and manufacturing. There are very few real interdependencies left to stitch this vision of globalization together with many of them being artificially maintained at increasing costs. The idea of using sanctions to ‘starve’ a nation by isolating it from this global order has been exposed as more or less impotent by nations like Iran and North Korea who have sustained themselves for decades despite everything besides air and gravity being denied to them.

Indeed, nations understand the value of self-sufficiency in both terms of politics and the basic necessities which constitute any state’s infrastructure. Russia’s recent encounter with Western sanctions has caused it to look not only eastward, but inward, to secure its interests and to transcend sanctions wholly dependent on the concept of “globalization.”

As this “carrot and stick” method of working the world into Wall Street and Washington’s international order becomes less effective, some of the uglier and less elegant tools of the West’s geopolitical trade have taken a more prominent role on the global stage. It appears that if the West cannot rule this international order built upon the concepts of globalization, it will rule an international order built on chaos.

The Empire of Chaos 

The unipolar geopolitical concepts that underpin globalization have eroded greatly. Nations no longer have to pick between an existence of lonely isolation and socioeconomic atrophy or subordination within this international order. Instead, they can pick to associate with the growing community of what the West calls “rogue states.” So large has this list grown that the US may soon find itself and Western Europe the last remaining members of its failed international order.

The real danger for an aspiring global empire is to find a planet that has suddenly begun to move in tandem out from under its shadow and moving on without them in relative peace and prosperity. To prevent this from happening we have seen a concerted effort focused on disrupting and destroying this emerging multi-polar world.

In Europe, the refugee crisis is being used to polarize European society and allow governments to increase their power domestically and further justify wars abroad. Along Western Europe’s borders, facing Russia, a relative stable balancing act maintained by former Soviet territories attempting to benefit from associating with both East and West has been turned into outright war.

Throughout North Africa and the Middle East, any nation that even so much as slightly resembles a sovereign nation state has been undermined and attempts to violently overthrow them pursued. The goal is no longer to create viable client states, but rather to Balkanize and leave them in ruins so as to never contest Western ambitions in the region again. This can be observed clearly in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen where none of the groups backed by the US and its allies could ever realistically run a functioning nation state.

And in Asia, in state after state, those leading political parties marked by Washington for future client status are being removed from power and their leaders, long backed by the US, being either exiled or jailed.

Where these political gambits are crumbling, a steady stream of violence perpetrated by terrorist groups not even indigenous to the region has begun to build in strength.

Divide and Conquer

Divide and conquer is a geopolitical maxim that has served as empire’s bread and butter since the beginning of recorded human civilization. When the British could not subdue a targeted territory just beyond the grasp of its empire, it would divide and destroy them. A ruined nation that can be plundered and trampled may not be as desirable as a loyal client state run by a British viceroy, but it is better than a pocket of national sovereignty serving as an example for others of the merits of resisting “Great Britain.”

Today, it is clear that the idea of creating a client state in the midst of a general public increasingly aware of the features and fixations of modern empire is becoming ever more tenuous. Such client states are less likely to be accepted by a local population who, with minimum effort, can put up significant resistance against even the best funded of foreign proxies.

Globalism required more and more illusions to convince people they needed a global system controlled by far-off special interests to do what can now be done through advances in technology nationally and even locally. Now all that is left is the sowing of chaos to prevent people from leveraging this technology nationally and locally, to keep them divided and distracted for as long as possible, to perpetuate the West’s global hegemony for as long as possible.

Moving Beyond the Chaos

An empire built on chaos is not meant to last. Chaos, like the international order of globalization that preceded it, requires illusions and manipulation to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, stirring chaos among a population is a lot easier than convincing them of the non-existent interdependencies of globalization.

Nations leading the way out of this chaos include those who have suffered the most because of it. Their leaders have realized the necessity of closing off the vectors through which the West feeds this chaos within their borders, which include socioeconomic disparity, foreign-funded propaganda, foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and of course extremist groups used to carry out the actual terrorism and agitation required to create the worst sort of chaos.

Russia and China in particular have been busy creating alternatives not only for the remnants of the West’s globalization racket, but alternatives for the unipolar world the West was trying to create. They are both looking within and across their borders to create a patchwork of nations ready to move beyond the chaos and toward a more widespread balance of power.

By in turn, placing sanctions on the West, Russia is forcing itself to not only produce raw materials for export, but to become a more capable producer of finished goods. By doing so, Russia has begun a process that turns America’s sanctions game back onto itself. While many believe Washington drives American policy, it is unrealistic to discount Wall Street’s role. By cutting the corporations trading on Wall Street down to size, one cuts down their unwarranted power they wield on the global stage.

Nations choosing to trade rather than being forced to because of an ungainly system of globalization ensures that any given people have more control over not only what they buy and sell, but how and where their natural resources are used.

With the Empire of Chaos in terminal decline and with a new multi-polar order emerging, the only question left to ask is; will chaos spread and destroy faster than this new multi-polar order can be built? It is certainly a close race pushing both sides into acts of increasingly unimaginable confrontation.

Decoding the Orlando Shooting, Cui Bono? Who Benefits?

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By Mark Taliano

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

The shooting in Orlando, Florida, is not about homosexuals, or Muslims, or assault rifles.

It is about waging aggressive warfare overseas, empowering the domestic police state, and electing a warmongering President.

Dr. Graeme McQueen, founding member of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, Canada and author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception, argues that the prime suspects in any such case should be intelligence agencies.

We don’t have to go far to see the hand of intelligence agencies in this catastrophe. The shooter himself was an employee of G4S, described by journalist Alex Emmons as “a giant, often controversial global contracting corporation that provides mercenary forces, prison guards and security services.”

Additionally, the shooter’s father is said to be a CIA asset.

Given that Intelligence agencies are well-positioned to engineer synthetic terror threats, author Naomi Wolf argues that it is “crazy” not to question new events, since “spectacles” drive “outcomes”.  Further, she observes that propagandizing the public includes films (i.e. “Zero Dark Thirty”) – arguing that the Pentagon must have “signed off” on it —which indirectly seek to “normalize” intelligence operations such as torture and mass surveillance.

Intelligence operatives know that synthetic terror events shock and anesthetize the public; that they make people susceptible to manipulation; and that they lay the groundwork for the terror event to be easily politicized.

Naomi Klein describes the same dynamic in The Shock Doctrine.  When people are shocked by a real or man-made event, they can be easily manipulated to support wars, or neoliberal market schemes, or any number of toxic agendas.

A simple formula underpins these operations:  problem, reaction, solution.

The problem from the perspective of criminal warmongers is that the public doesn’t want war or a police state.  The intended reaction of the operation is that the synthetic terror event will induce people to seek protection from the state, coupled with aggressive war to bomb the threat out of existence. The solution, or intended result, is already occurring.  Engineered fear and racism have set the stage for the public to be manipulated to accept a covert agenda that it would otherwise reject.

Cui Bono?  Who benefits? The police state apparatus, War Inc., and a warmongering Presidential agenda all benefit.

The manipulation of the public is further enabled by an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which negates the Smith-Mundt Act (SMA) of 1984 which prohibits government agencies from propagandizing domestic populations.

Susan Posel explains in “How the NDAA Allows US Gov to Use Propaganda Against Americans”:

“SMA  defines the prohibition of domestic access to influence information through a variety of means, from broadcast to publishing of books, media, and online sources by restricting the State Department.”

The Broadcasting Board of Governors was created from SMA. This agency claims to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of ‘freedom and democracy’. They omit that their specialty is making sure propaganda is added to the informational flow we all depend on.”

Instead of succumbing to the shock of terror events, instead of allowing our “reptilian minds” to overrule rational decision-making processes, we need to decode the Orlando shooting, and other terror events, within the “problem, reaction, solution” framework, and be conscious of how they are being manipulated and politicized to suit covert agendas that do not serve the public interest. The “therapy” for the shock will allow us to subordinate our “reptilian” mindsets, and to act rationally.  A rational mindset will reject the racism, hatred, and warmongering which are intended off-shoots of these terror events.

 

Related Podcast:

Radio WhoWhatWhy – Russ Baker: Don’t Rush to Judgment in Orlando Shooting

Related Video:

The FBI, Not “ISIS,” Radicalized the Orlando Shooter

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Mateen-NYPD

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

As predicted, the FBI is revealed to have approached Orlando shooting suspect Omar Mateen in 2013 with informants posing as terrorists in an attempt to “lure” him into participating in a terrorist attack.

USA Today’s TC Palm reports in an article titled, “Exclusive: PGA Village residents want answers from security firm,” that (emphasis added):

The FBI launched an investigation into Mateen after Sheriff’s Office officials reported the incident to the agency. As part of its investigation, the FBI examined Mateen’s travel history, phone records, acquaintances and even planted a confidential informant in the courthouse to “lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite,” Mascara said. The FBI concluded Mateen was not a threat after that, Mascara said.

This is in line with the FBI’s practice of approaching and entrapping potential terror suspects by posing as terrorists themselves and aiding and abetting them in the planning and preparations for high-profile attacks. These undercover operations include everything from “casing out” potential targets, to the obtaining and training with actual, live explosives, to the purchasing of small arsenals of firearms including the sort of semi-automatic rifles and pistols used by Mateen during the Orlando shooting.

In addition to the FBI’s undercover operation, it is now also revealed that Mateen frequented the website of another FBI/CIA informant, Marcus Dwayne Roberson, a former US Marine, turned bank robber, turned US government informant.

While US politicians, law enforcement officials, and media networks attempt to claim Robertson’s extremist website, the “Timbuktu Seminary,” was his own independent project, the extent of his association with the US government makes this difficult, if not impossible to believe. Instead, it appears to be the perfect mechanism to feed the FBI’s entrapment pipeline, attracting and identifying possible suspects for the FBI to then approach and “investigate.”

The National Review’s article, “The Orlando Jihadist and the Blind Sheikh’s Bodyguard,” would report (emphasis added):

According to Fox News, Omar Mateen, the jihadist who carried out the mass-murder attack at a gay nightclub in Florida this weekend, was a student of Marcus Robertson, an Orlando-based radical Muslim who once served as a bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman — the notorious “Blind Sheikh” whom I prosecuted for terrorism crimes in the early to mid 1990s. 

The National Review also reported that (emphasis added):

In Robertson’s case, it is reported that he agreed to work for the government, gathering intelligence both overseas and in the United States. According to Fox, however, he was expelled from the covert informant program in early 2007 after attacking his CIA handler in Africa.

But Robertson’s stint with the CIA was not the only time he would work for the US government after his service in the US Marine Corps. The National Review leaves out the fact that before his dismissal from the CIA, he was an informant for the FBI between 2004 and 2007.

The Daily Beast in its article, “Was Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen Inspired by This Bank-Robbing Ex-Marine?,” would report (emphasis added):

“Plaintiff worked as a covert operator for the FBI Terrorist Task Force from 2004 until 2007, performing operations in the United Sates and internationally with and against suspected and known terrorist organizations,” Robertson says in court papers. 

Robertson remained in touch with American law enforcement and intelligence officials when he moved back to the United States, according to court papers filed by his attorney, “served as a confidential source in domestic terrorism investigations from Atlanta to Los Angeles.”

Is the American public expected to believe that a US government asset who received special training in the military and served as an informant and operative for both the FBI and the CIA would somehow, suddenly be allowed to drop off the US government’s radar and be allowed to run an extremist website in the United States?

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Image: How far do undercover FBI investigations go? How about building a van-bomb for a suspect after taking him to a public park to detonate real explosives? The FBI’s own affidavit reveals that is precisely what FBI informants did while investigating Portland, Oregon terror suspect Mohamed Osman Mohamud. Did the FBI’s attempts to lure the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, into committing a terror attack contribute in his radicalization? The FBI must answer to this.

Indeed, no American should believe this. Robertson was step one in Omar Mateen – the Orlando shooter’s – radicalization. The FBI’s attempt to pose as terrorists to lure Mateen into going along with a terrorist attack was step two. Though the FBI has so far failed to disclose the details of that investigation, comments made by FBI Director James Comey himself indicate that FBI informants may have worked on Mateen for up to 10 months.

Between exposure to Robertson’s extremist propaganda, honed after years of working as an informant and operative identifying and exposing terror suspects, and the FBI’s own informants over the course of months, if not years, it is clear that the US government and its “counterterrorism” measures radicalized Mateen – not “ISIS.”

The Guardian in its article, “CIA has not found any link between Orlando killer and Isis, says agency chief,” further highlights this blatant truth by reporting (emphasis added):

The Central Intelligence Agency chief has not been “able to uncover any link” between Orlando killer Omar Mateen and the Islamic State, despite Mateen’s stated allegiance to the jihadist group during Sunday’s LGBT nightclub massacre.

If Omar Mateen was a “homegrown terrorist,” the FBI served as the gardeners.

The American public must now demand the details of the FBI’s undercover work regarding Omar Mateen, as well as the truth behind any enduring ties between Robertson and the US government. If Robertson has no connections with the US government, an explanation as to why he is allowed to operate an extremist website on American soil must be provided.

For political and ideological opportunists attempting to seize upon the Orlando tragedy to uphold an example of “Islamic extremism,” it is especially ironic that the facts indicate that the act of terrorism was entirely divorced from “Islam,” and instead the result of America’s ongoing view of terrorism as a convenient and versatile geopolitical tool, rather than a threat to genuinely combat.

That quite literally every aspect that contributed to Omar Mateen’s radicalization is directly connected to the US government itself, illustrates just who the real threat is that American’s should fear – the threat within the halls of its own government – not “terrorists” dwelling beyond them.