Your Awakening Counts More Than Your Vote

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Dylan Charles

We live in a world where illusions are held in higher esteem than verifiable truth. This is no accident, as the individual has for decades now been on the receiving end of social engineering programs, advanced political and corporate propaganda, fear programming and outright mind control.

The sum total of all this mass conditioning has been to convince otherwise good-natured and hard-working people to participate in their own enslavement and to willingly acquiesce to the ever-increasing rules, invasions of privacy, taxations, permissions and control schemes of a government and world elite who have long since left public interest in the dust.

The American dream is a mythic idea that was supposedly founded on the principle that public oversight of government is possible thanks to an electoral process which would give an informed citizenry the opportunity to replace undesirable politicians with better ones. Government itself, though, is a brutish and violent force that has time and again proven absolutely wild, reckless and untamable. It has never has obeyed its own laws, policies or regulations, and world history is a bloodstained chronicle of man’s failure to control himself when given power in the form of government.

Just as you cannot stop the tides from rising and falling, you cannot stop government from decaying into tyranny, especially so by following its very own rules and by participating in its token rituals.

This is truth, yet the illusion of so-called ‘democracy’ persists, seeming to grip people ever more feverishly with each passing election season. Even in the face of overt election fraud, party infighting, delegate rigging and widespread disenfranchisement. And so here we are again, facing the embarrassing spectacle of choosing between two undesirables when we all know the game is rigged.

For the powers the be, though, the repeating four-year cycle of presidential politics is the most effective device for keeping the masses high on the illusion of self-governance. It force feeds us on a regular schedule the false narrative that we the people can vote to reign in the power and corruption of the oligarchy of deep state, private and corporate influences that truly control the direction of this nation.

In this light, the purpose of national politics is not to perpetuate self-governance for the benefit of the common person, but rather to eat up personal energy and resources in order to suck the individual into a quagmire of false hope and endless patience with outrage after outrage. It is to make ineffectual action feel like action to the people being most screwed over by the corruption of the elite.

Sure, this may sound negative, cynical or apathetic to those who are over-invested emotionally in this game, but in order to move beyond the insanity of doing the same thing again and again while expecting different results, it’s imperative to be deadly honest about how this program works to enslave us, not to free us. Once we can think beyond the peer pressure, neighbor-hating, and mindless outrage that marks each election cycle, we make ourselves available to the possibility of real change. And real change always begins from within, and never forced from without.

There is no political leader who can make you stand fearlessly in this complex and dangerous world.There is no candidate that can give you the freedom that comes with a healthy mind and body. There is no political ruler who can manifest true and lasting happiness for you. There is no politician who can ensure that you enjoy the experience of your life everyday, under any and all circumstances. And there is no president that can empower you to be the best possible version of yourself so that you may give your best to others.

All of these qualities are vastly more critical to personal, community and planetary renewal than whichever new figurehead is selected to be the perceived front man of a morbidly corrupt American government.

The most effective way to change the world around you is to first focus on and create more value in yourself. This is why your awakening counts far more than your vote does.

Washington’s Military Addiction

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Reid Mukai

And The Ruins Still to Come

By Tom Engelhardt

Source: TomDispatch.com

There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then there are the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let me concoct an example for you:

“Top American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up the fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly sending more U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington confirmed the second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.”

Oh wait, that was actually the lead sentence in a May 3rd Washington Times piece by Carlo Muñoz. Honestly, though, it could have been written anytime in the last few months by just about anyone paying any attention whatsoever, and it surely will prove reusable in the months to come (with casualty figures altered, of course). The sad truth is that across the Greater Middle East and expanding parts of Africa, a similar set of lines could be written ahead of time about the use of Special Operations forces, drones, advisers, whatever, as could the sorry results of making such moves in [add the name of your country of choice here].

Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing anything but worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking has become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition. It’s as if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked “solutions” and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking, over-armed soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.

How Much, How Many, How Often, and How Destructively

In Iraq and Syria, it’s been mission creep all the way. The B-52s barely made it to the battle zone for the first time and were almost instantaneously in the air, attacking Islamic State militants. U.S. firebases are built ever closer to the front lines. The number of special ops forces continues to edge up. American weapons flow in (ending up in god knows whose hands). American trainers and advisers follow in ever increasing numbers, and those numbers are repeatedly fiddled with to deemphasize how many of them are actually there. The private contractors begin to arrive in numbers never to be counted. The local forces being trained or retrained have their usual problems in battle. American troops and advisers who were never, never going to be “in combat” or “boots on the ground” themselves now have their boots distinctly on the ground in combat situations. The first American casualties are dribbling in. Meanwhile, conditions in tottering Iraq and the former nation of Syria grow ever murkier, more chaotic, and less amenable by the week to any solution American officials might care for.

And the response to all this in present-day Washington?

You know perfectly well what the sole imaginable response can be: sending in yet more weapons, boots, air power, special ops types, trainers, advisers, private contractors, drones, and funds to increasingly chaotic conflict zones across significant swaths of the planet. Above all, there can be no serious thought, discussion, or debate about how such a militarized approach to our world might have contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the very problems it was meant to solve. Not in our nation’s capital, anyway.

The only questions to be argued about are how much, how many, how often, and how destructively. In other words, the only “antiwar” position imaginable in Washington, where accusations of weakness or wimpishness are a dime a dozen and considered lethal to a political career, is how much less of more we can afford, militarily speaking, or how much more of somewhat less we can settle for when it comes to militarized death and destruction. Never, of course, is a genuine version of less or a none-at-all option really on that “table” where, it’s said, all policy options are kept.

Think of this as Washington’s military addiction in action. We’ve been watching it for almost 15 years without drawing any of the obvious conclusions. And lest you imagine that “addiction” is just a figure of speech, it isn’t. Washington’s attachment — financial, tactical, and strategic — to the U.S. military and its supposed solutions to more or less all problems in what used to be called “foreign policy” should by now be categorized as addictive. Otherwise, how can you explain the last decade and a half in which no military action from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to Libya worked out half-well in the long run (or even, often enough, in the short run), and yet the U.S. military remains the option of first, not last, resort in just about any imaginable situation? All this in a vast region in which failed states are piling up, nations are disintegrating, terror insurgencies are spreading, humongous population upheavals are becoming the norm, and there are refugee flows of a sort not seen since significant parts of the planet were destroyed during World War II.

Either we’re talking addictive behavior or failure is the new success.

Keep in mind, for instance, that the president who came into office swearing he would end a disastrous war and occupation in Iraq is now overseeing a new war in an even wider region that includes Iraq, a country that is no longer quite a country, and Syria, a country that is now officially kaput. Meanwhile, in the other war he inherited, Barack Obama almost immediately launched a military-backed “surge” of U.S. forces, the only real argument being over whether 40,000 (or even as many as 80,000) new U.S. troops would be sent into Afghanistan or, as the “antiwar” president finally decided, a mere 30,000 (which made him an absolute wimp to his opponents). That was 2009. Part of that surge involved an announcement that the withdrawal of American combat forces would begin in 2011. Seven years later, that withdrawal has once again been halted in favor of what the military has taken to privately calling a “generational approach” — that is, U.S. forces remaining in Afghanistan into at least the 2020s.

The military term “withdrawal” may, however, still be appropriate even if the troops are staying in place. After all, as with addicts of any sort, the military ones in Washington can’t go cold turkey without experiencing painful symptoms of withdrawal. In American political culture, these manifest themselves in charges of “weakness” when it comes to “national security” that could prove devastating in the next election. That’s why those running for office compete with one another in over-the-top descriptions of what they will do to enemies and terrorists (from acts of torture to carpet-bombing) and in even more over-the-top promises of “rebuilding” or “strengthening” what’s already the largest, most expensive military on the planet, a force better funded at present than those of at least the next seven nations combined.

Such promises, the bigger the better, are now a necessity if you happen to be a Republican candidate for president. The Democrats have a lesser but similar set of options available, which is why even Bernie Sanders only calls for holding the Pentagon budget at its present staggering level or for the most modest of cuts, not for reducing it significantly. And even when, for instance, the urge to rein in military expenses did sweep Washington as part of an overall urge to cut back government expenses, it only resulted in a half-secret slush fund or “war budget” that kept the goodies flowing in.

These should all be taken as symptoms of Washington’s military addiction and of what happens when the slightest signs of withdrawal set in. The U.S. military is visibly the drug of choice in the American political arena and, as is only appropriate for the force that has, since 2002, funded, armed, and propped up the planet’s largest supplier of opium, once you’re hooked, there’s no shaking it.

Hawkish Washington

Recently, in the New York Times Magazine, journalist Mark Landler offered a political portrait entitled “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk.” He laid out just how the senator and later secretary of state remade herself as, essentially, a military groupie, fawning over commanders or former commanders ranging from then-General David Petraeus to Fox analyst and retired general Jack Keane; how, that is, she became a figure, even on the present political landscape, notable for her “appetite for military engagement abroad” (and as a consequence, well-defended against Republican charges of “weakness”).

There’s no reason, however, to pin the war-lover or “last true hawk” label on her alone, not in present-day Washington. After all, just about everyone there wants a piece of the action. During their primary season debates, for instance, a number of the Republican candidates spoke repeatedly about building up the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, while making that already growing force sound like a set of decrepit barges.

To offer another example, no presidential candidate these days could afford to reject the White House-run drone assassination program. To be assassin-in-chief is now considered as much a part of the presidential job description as commander-in-chief, even though the drone program, like so many other militarized foreign policy operations these days, shows little sign of reining in terrorism despite the number of “bad guys” and terror “leaders” it kills (along with significant numbers of civilian bystanders). To take Bernie Sanders as an example — because he’s as close to an antiwar candidate as you’ll find in the present election season — he recently put something like his stamp of approval on the White House drone assassination project and the “kill list” that goes with it.

Mind you, there is simply no compelling evidence that the usual military solutions have worked or are likely to work in any imaginable sense in the present conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. They have clearly, in fact, played a major role in the creation of the present disaster, and yet there is no place at all in our political system for genuinely antiwar figures (as there was in the Vietnam era, when a massive antiwar movement created space for such politics). Antiwar opinions and activities have now been driven to the peripheries of the political system along with a word like, say, “peace,” which you will be hard-pressed to find, even rhetorically, in the language of “wartime” Washington.

The Look of “Victory”

If a history were to be written of how the U.S. military became Washington’s drug of choice, it would undoubtedly have to begin in the Cold War era. It was, however, in the prolonged moment of triumphalism that followed the Soviet Union’s implosion in 1991 that the military gained its present position of unquestioned dominance.

In those days, people were still speculating about whether the country would reap a “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War. If there was ever a moment when the diversion of money from the U.S. military and the national security state to domestic concerns might have seemed like a no-brainer, that was it. After all, except for a couple of rickety “rogue states” like North Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where exactly were this country’s enemies to be found? And why should such a muscle-bound military continue to gobble up tax dollars at such a staggering rate in a reasonably peaceable world?

In the decade or so that followed, however, Washington’s dreams turned out to run in a very different direction — toward a “war dividend” at a moment when the U.S. had, by more or less universal agreement, become the planet’s “sole superpower.” The crew who entered the White House with George W. Bush in a deeply contested election in 2000 had already been mainlining the military drug for years. To them, this seemed a planet ripe for the taking. When 9/11 hit, it loosed their dreams of conquest and control, and their faith in a military that they believed to be unstoppable. Of course, given the previous century of successful anti-imperial and national independence movements, anyone should have known that, no matter the armaments at hand, resistance was an inescapable reality on Planet Earth.

Thanks to such predictable resistance, the drug-induced imperial dreamscape of the Busheviks would prove a fantasy of the first order, even if, in that post-9/11 moment, it passed for bedrock (neo)realism. If you remember, the U.S. was to “take the gloves off” and release a military machine so beyond compare that nothing would be capable of standing in its path. So the dream went, so the drug spoke. Don’t forget that the greatest military blunder (and crime) of this century, the invasion of Iraq, wasn’t supposed to be the end of something, but merely its beginning. With Iraq in hand and garrisoned, Washington was to take down Iran and sweep up what Russian property from the Cold War era still remained in the Middle East. (Think: Syria.)

A decade and a half later, those dreams have been shattered, and yet the drug still courses through the bloodstream, the military bands play on, and the march to… well, who knows where… continues. In a way, of course, we do know where (to the extent that we humans, with our limited sense of the future, can know anything). In a way, we’ve already been shown a spectacle of what “victory” might look like once the Greater Middle East is finally “liberated” from the Islamic State.

The descriptions of one widely hailed victory over that brutal crew in Iraq — the liberation of the city of Ramadi by a U.S.-trained elite Iraqi counterterrorism force backed by artillery and American air power — are devastating. Aided and abetted by Islamic State militants igniting or demolishing whole neighborhoods of that city, the look of Ramadi retaken should give us a grim sense of where the region is heading. Here’s how the Associated Press recently described the scene, four months after the city fell:

“This is what victory looks like…: in the once thriving Haji Ziad Square, not a single structure still stands. Turning in every direction yields a picture of devastation. A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream shops — reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair garages — obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The square’s Haji Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats — flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger, fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile of concrete and twisted iron rods.

“The destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1 million people and now virtually empty.”

Keep in mind that, with oil prices still deeply depressed, Iraq essentially has no money to rebuild Ramadi or anyplace else. Now imagine, as such “victories” multiply, versions of similar devastation spreading across the region.

In other words, one likely end result of the thoroughly militarized process that began with the invasion of Iraq (if not of Afghanistan) is already visible: a region shattered and in ruins, filled with uprooted and impoverished people. In such circumstances, it may not even matter if the Islamic State is defeated. Just imagine what Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and still in the Islamic State’s hands, will be like if, someday, the long-promised offensive to liberate it is ever truly launched. Now, try to imagine that movement itself destroyed, with its “capital,” Raqqa, turned into another set of ruins, and remind me: What exactly is likely to emerge from such a future nightmare? Nothing, I suspect, that is likely to cheer up anyone in Washington.

And what should be done about all this? You already know Washington’s solution — more of the same — and breaking such a cycle of addiction is difficult even under the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, at the moment there is no force, no movement on the American scene that could open up space for such a possibility. No matter who is elected president, you already know more or less what American “policy” is going to be.

But don’t bother to blame the politicians and national security nabobs in Washington for this. They’re addicts. They can’t help themselves. What they need is rehab. Instead, they continue to run our world. Be suitably scared for the ruins still to come.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

This Is Our Neoliberal Nightmare: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Why the Market and the Wealthy Win Every Time

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Reid Mukai

The rage driving our politics stems from cruelty of capitalism. So why do we vote for those who worship the market?

By Anis Shivani

Source: AlterNet

Over the last fifteen years, editors often asked me not to mention the word “neoliberalism,” because I was told readers wouldn’t comprehend the “jargon.” This has begun to change recently, as the terminology has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.

People throw the term around loosely, as they do with “fascism,” with the same confounding results. Imagine living under fascism or communism, or earlier, classical liberalism, and not being allowed to acknowledge that particular frame of reference to understand economic and social issues. Imagine living under Stalin and never using the communist framework but focusing only on personality clashes between his lieutenants, or likewise for Hitler or Mussolini or Mao or Franco and their ideological systems! But this curious silence, this looking away from ideology, is exactly what has been happening for a quarter century, since neoliberalism, already under way since the early 1970s, got turbocharged by the Democratic party under the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Bill Clinton. We live under an ideology that has not been widely named or defined!

Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannot grasp what is good or bad for citizens under Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on? How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies?

Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people’s self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the “new man.”

It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.

I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism’s long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything—every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet—in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology. Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology—unlike the three major forerunners in the last 250 years—that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.

From the early 1930s, when the Great Depression threatened the classical liberal consensus (the idea that markets were self-regulating, and the state should play no more than a night-watchman role), until the early 1970s, when global instability including currency chaos unraveled it, the democratic world lived under the Keynesian paradigm: markets were understood to be inherently unstable, and the interventionist hand of government, in the form of countercyclical policy, was necessary to make capitalism work, otherwise the economy had a tendency to get out of whack and crash.

It’s an interesting question if it was the stagflation of the 1970s, following the unhitching of the United States from the gold standard and the arrival of the oil embargo, that brought on the neoliberal revolution, with Milton Friedman discrediting fiscal policy and advocating a by-the-numbers monetarist policy, or if it was neoliberalism itself, in the form of Friedmanite ideas that the Nixon administration was already pursuing, that made stagflation and the end of Keynesianism inevitable.

It should be said that neoliberalism thrives on prompting crisis after crisis, and has proven more adept than previous ideologies at exploiting these crises to its benefit, which then makes the situation worse, so that each succeeding crisis only erodes the power of the working class and makes the wealthy wealthier. There is a certain self-fulfilling aura to neoliberalism, couched in the jargon of economic orthodoxy, that has remained immune from political criticism, because of the dogma that was perpetuated—by Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes—that There Is No Alternative (TINA).

Neoliberalism is excused for the crises it repeatedly brings on—one can think of a regular cycle of debt and speculation-fueled emergencies in the last forty years, such as the developing country debt overhang of the 1970s, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s, and the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s—better than any ideology I know of. This is partly because its very existence as ruling ideology is not even noted by the population at large, which continues to derive some residual benefits from the welfare state inaugurated by Keynesianism but has been led to believe by neoliberal ideologues to think of their reliance on government as worthy of provoking guilt, shame, and melancholy, rather than something to which they have legitimate claim.

It is not surprising to find neoliberal multiculturalists—comfortably established in the academy—likewise demonizing, or othering, not Muslims, Mexicans, or African Americans, but working-class whites (the quintessential Trump proletariat) who have a difficult time accepting the fluidity of self-definition that goes well with neoliberalism, something that we might call the market capitalization of the self.

George W. Bush’s useful function was to introduce necessary crisis into a system that had grown too stable for its own good; he injected desirable panic, which served as fuel to the fire of the neoliberal revolution. Trump is an apostate—at least until now—in desiring chaos on terms that do not sound neoliberal, which is unacceptable; hence Jeb Bush’s characterization of him as the “candidate of chaos.” Neoliberalism loves chaos, that has been its modus operandi since the early 1970s, but only the kind of chaos it can direct and control.

To go back to origins, the Great Depression only ended conclusively with the onset of the second world war, after which Keynesianism had the upper hand for thirty-five years. But just as the global institutions of Keynesianism, specifically the IMF and the World Bank, were being founded at the New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods in 1944, the founders of the neoliberal revolution, namely Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and others were forming the Mount Pelerin Society (MPS) at the eponymous Swiss resort in 1947, creating the ideology which eventually defeated Keynesianism and gained the upper hand during the 1970s.

So what exactly is neoliberalism, and how is it different from classical liberalism, whose final manifestation came under Keynesianism?

Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-provided social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.

When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts—in response to demands for reregulation of finance, for instance—that we have to abide by “the rule of law,” this reflects a particular understanding of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market.

One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything—everything—is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange—which isnot, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface.

Neoliberalism is often described—and this creates a lot of confusion—as “market fundamentalism,” and while this may be true for neoliberal’s self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the market as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism there is no such thing as the market as we have understood it from previous ideologies.

The neoliberal state—actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an existence that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds their sum—is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow.

There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e., the corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them.

Of course the word hasn’t gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about whether Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will be less neoliberal than Hillary Clinton. The project of neoliberalism—i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society, and the self—has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.

I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market. He does not believe—unlike Hillary Clinton—that the market can tackle climate change or income inequality or unfair health and education outcomes or racial injustice, all of which Clinton propagates. Clinton’s impending “victory” (whatever machinations were involved in engineering it) will only strengthen neoliberalism, as the force that couldn’t be defeated even when the movement was as large and transcendent as Sanders’s. Although Sanders doesn’t specify “neoliberalism” as the antagonist, his entire discourse presumes it.

Likewise, while Trump supporters want to take their rebellion in a fascist direction, their discomfort with the logic of the market is as pervasive as the Sanders camp, and is an advance, I believe, over the debt and unemployment melancholy of the Tea Party, the shame that was associated with that movement’s loss of identity as bourgeois capitalists in an age of neoliberal globalization. The Trump supporters, I believe, are no longer driven by shame, as was true of the Tea Party, and as has been true of the various dissenting movements within the Republican party, evangelical or otherwise, in the recent past. Rather, they have taken the shackles off and are ready for a no-holds barred “politically incorrect” fight with all others: they want to be “winners,” even at the cost of exterminating others, and that is not the neoliberal way, which doesn’t acknowledge that there can be winners and losers in the neoliberal hyperspace.

In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. People can perceive that her ideology is founded on a conception of human beings striving relentlessly to become human capital (as her opening campaign commercialso overtly depicted), which means that those who fail to come within the purview of neoliberalism should be rigorously ostracized, punished, and excluded.

This is the dark side of neoliberalism’s ideological arm (a multiculturalism founded on human beings as capital), which is why this project has become increasingly associated with suppression of free speech and intolerance of those who refuse to go along with the kind of identity politics neoliberalism promotes.

And this explains why the 1990s saw the simultaneous and absolutely parallel rise, under the Clintons, of both neoliberal globalization and various regimes of neoliberal disciplining, such as the shaming and exclusion of former welfare recipients (every able-bodied person should be able to find work, therefore under TANF welfare was converted to a performance management system designed to enroll everyone in the workforce, even if it meant below-subsistence wages or the loss of parental responsibilities, all of it couched in the jargon of marketplace incentives).

The actual cost to the state of the AFDC program was minimal, but its symbolism was incalculable. The end of welfare went hand in hand with the disciplinary “crime bill” pushed by the Clintons, leading to an epidemic of mass incarceration. Neoliberalism, unlike classical liberalism, does not permit a fluidity of self-expression as an occasional participant in the market, and posits prison as the only available alternative for anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully and always in the market.

I believe that the generation of people—in their forties or older—supporting Hillary have already internalized neoliberal subjectivity, which they like to frame as realism or pragmatism, refusing for instance to accept that free college or health care are even theoretical possibilities. After all, they have maintained a measure of success in the past three or four decades after conceptualizing themselves as marketplace agents. Just as the Tea Party supporters found it intolerable that government should help irresponsible homeowners by bailing them out of unsustainable debt, the Clinton supporters hold essentially the same set of beliefs toward those who dare to think of themselves outside the discipline of the market.

I spoke of the myth of the market, as something that has no existence in reality, because none of the elements that would have to exist for a market to work are actually in place; this is even more true for neoliberalism than it was for the self-conscious annihilation of the market by communism, because at least in that system the market, surreptitiously, as in various Eastern European countries, kept making an appearance. But when the market takes neoliberal shape, i.e., the classical conceptions of the buyer and seller as free agents are gone, then radical inequality is the natural outcome. And inequality in the last four decades, as statistics for the U.S. and everywhere neoliberalism has made inroads prove beyond a doubt, has exploded, thereby invalidating neoliberalism’s greatest claim to legitimacy, that it brings about a general increase in welfare. So neoliberalism, to the extent that the inequality discourse has made itself manifest recently, must insist all the more vocally on forms of social recognition, what Clinton, for example, likes to call the “fall of barriers.”

Neoliberalism likes to focus on public debt—in the Clinton years debt reduction became a mania, though George W. Bush promptly spent all the accumulated surpluses on tax cuts for the wealthy and on wars of choice—rather than inequality, because the only way to address inequality is through a different understanding of public debt; inequality can only be addressed through higher taxation, which has by now been excluded from the realm of acceptable discourse—except when Sanders, Trump, or Jeremy Corbyn in England go off script.

So to recapitulate neoliberalism’s comprehensive success, let us note that we have gone from a liberal, Keynesian, welfare state to a neoliberal, market-compliant, disciplinary state.

Neoliberalism expects—and education at every level has been redesigned to promote this—that economic decision-making will be applied to all areas of life (parenthood, intimacy, sexuality, and identity in any of its forms), and that those who do not do so will be subject to discipline. Everyone must invest in their own future, and not pose a burden to the state or anyone else, otherwise they will be refused recognition as human beings.

This supposed economic “rationality” (though it is the greatest form of irrationality) applies to civil society as much as the state, so that none of the ideals of classical liberalism, or previous ideologies rooted in humanism, are valid any longer, the only value is the iteration of the market (as myth, not reality); in other words, neoliberalism, unlike the elevation of the individual in classical liberalism or the state in fascism or the collectivity in communism, has erected something, the market, that has no real existence, as the only god to serve! And it is just like a god, with an ethereal, unchallengeable, irrefutable, ubiquitous presence. Whatever in state policy does not serve market-conformity is to be banned and banished from memory (the secular scriptures are to be rewritten), which explains neoliberalism’s radical narrowing of public discourse, including the severance of identity politics from any class foundation.

Neoliberalism will continue to perpetuate reduced opportunity, because one of its characteristics—as in any system that wants to thrive on the world stage—is to constantly refine the field upon which the human subject can operate.

As such, those displaced workers who have suffered the most from the erosion of the old industries in the former manufacturing centers of the world are not even factors to contend with, they are invisible and cannot be part of the policy equation. To the extent that their actual presence is reckoned with, the economy can be said to have crashed; but the problem doesn’t arise because of the management of unemployment or underemployment statistics, unlike a housing crash which is palpable and cannot escape statistical definition.

The danger for neoliberalism—as is clear from the support of millions of displaced human beings for Trump—is that with each crisis neoliberalism sheds more workers, makes individuals and firms more “disciplined,” narrows the scope of opportunity even further. At times, the disciplining of the non-neoliberal other—as with the killing of Michael Brown or Eric Garner—explodes to surface consciousness in an unsavory way, so an expert manager like Clinton or Obama is required to tamp down the emotions of such unruly entities as Black Lives Matter which arise in response. If climate change, according to Clinton and her cohort, can and should have market solutions, then surely racial disparity, or police violence, should also have market solutions and no others; it is here that neoliberal multiculturalism, operating in the academy, is so insidious, because at the elite level it functions to validate market discourse, it does not step outside it.

The present breakdown of both major political parties can be explained by the frustration that has built up in the body politic over the past decade, because after the crash there was no sustained intellectual movement to question the myth of the market. The substitution of economic justice with identity politics is something Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, and now Bernie Sanders have contested in a humane manner, while the same process is at work, admittedly in an inhumane way, in the Trump phenomenon.

Thus, also, Hillary Clinton’s animus against free college education; that form of expansion of opportunity, which was a reality from the 1950s to the 1980s, cannot be allowed to return, human beings are supposed to invest in their own future earnings potential, they are not entitled to a transcendent experience without barriers manifesting in discipline and self-correction. Education, like everything else, including one’s own health, becomes an expensive consumer good, not a right, no longer an experience that might lead to a consciousness beyond the market but something that should be fully encapsulated by the market. If one is a capable market player, education as we have classically understood it becomes redundant.

Unlike the interregnum between 1945-1973, the rising tide—no matter the befuddlements Arthur Laffer and his fellow Reaganite ideologues proffered—does not lift all boats today, it is outside the logic of neoliberalism that it do so, so the idea of reforming neoliberalism, or what is often called “globalization with a human face,” is a rhetorical distraction. All of the policy innovations—interpreted as “socialism” by the Tea Partiers—offered by Barack Obama fall within the purview of neoliberalism, above all the Affordable Care Act, whose genesis was hatched in neoliberal think tanks decades ago.

It is important to note that neoliberal economic restructuring necessarily means social restructuring, i.e., a movement toward disciplinarity and away from liberalism; the disciplinarity can take a Bushian, Clintonian, or Trumpian form, but these are manifestations of the same tendency.

When wage growth is decoupled from economic growth (as it has been since Friedman and others inaugurated the revolution in the early 1970s), this means that the human subject is ripe for discipline. Furthermore, wage fairness cannot be rationally discussed (hence the obfuscation surrounding the $15 minimum wage orchestrated by Clinton and others) because the concept of the market has been disembedded from society; the market as abstraction, not a concrete reality, makes any notion of reform or restructuring impossible. Like the minimum wage, something like free child care also remains outside the bounds of discourse, because public policy cannot accommodate discussions that do not take the self-regulating market as unassailable myth.

What neoliberalism can accommodate is relentless tax cuts (Trump has already offered his huge tax cut plan, as Bush did as his first order of business), which only exacerbate the problem, leading to increasing concentrations of wealth. It has to be said, though, that Ted Cruz more comfortably fit the neoliberal paradigm, with his familiar calls for lower taxes along with reduced regulation and further limits on social welfare, whereas Trump shows, for now, some elements of apostasy. If neoliberalism were to get a Cruz, it would have no problem working with him, or rather, Cruz would have had no problem executing neoliberalism, beyond the surface dissimilarities from Hillary Clinton.

As Sanders has consistently noted, economic inequality leads to political inequality, which means that democracy, after a certain point, becomes only theoretical (viz. Citizens United and the electoral influence of such powerful entities as the Koch brothers). Both processes—economic inequality and political inequality—have accelerated after each downturn in the forty-five-year history of neoliberalism, therefore a downturn is always exciting, and even preordained, for a Bush, a Trump, or a Clinton. Again, economic inequality and political polarity (polarity is simply a manifestation of democracy having become dysfunctional) strongly correlate, and both have come to a head in this election.

Neoliberalism’s task, from this point on, is to mask and manage the increasing inequalities that are likely to befall humanity, especially as the planet reaches a crisis point in its health. In a way, George W. Bush threw a wrench—he was a perverted Keynesian in a way, believing in war to prime the pump, or inflating unsustainable bubbles, or spending exorbitantly on grandiose gestures—into the process of neoliberal globalization that was going very smoothly indeed under Bill Clinton and would likely have flourished under Al Gore as well. With Hillary Clinton, the movement will be toward further privatization of social welfare, “reforming” it along market principles, as has been true of every neoliberal avatar, whether it was Bill Clinton’s incentives to work in the performance management makeover of welfare, George Bush’s proposed private social security accounts, Mitt Romney’s proposed private health care accounts, or the school vouchers that tempt all of them from time to time.

What remains to be seen is the extent to which the millennial generation might be capable of thinking outside the neoliberal paradigm, i.e., they don’t just want more of what neoliberal promises to give them yet fails to deliver, but want things that neoliberalism does not or cannot promise. On this rests the near-term future of the neoliberal project.

Beyond Sanders himself, the key question is the ability of the millennial generation to conceive of themselves outside the neoliberal subjectivity they have been pushed to internalize. They have been encouraged to think of themselves as capital producers, turning their intellectuality into social media popularity for the benefit of capital, in the service of the same abstract market that has no place, no role, no definition beyond the fallen liberal calculus. Does the millennial generation believe, even about its most intimate core, that everything has been privatized?

I am not necessarily making a pessimistic prediction. I am merely outlining the strength of an opponent that has refused to be named for forty-five years, although it has been the ruling ideology that long! In defining neoliberalism, I have sought to distance myself from the distraction of personalities, and tried to expose the dark side of our politics which we can only see when we name and understand the ideology as such. We are up against a system that is so strong that it has survived, for the most part, the last crash, as citizens couldn’t get their heads around the idea of nationalizing banks or health care.

It is existentially imperative to ponder what happens beyond Sanders, because neoliberalism has its end-game in sight, letting inequality continue to escalate past the crash point (meaning the point where the economy works for most people), past any tolerable degradation of the planet (which is being reconceptualized in the shape of the market).

What, indeed, does happen beyond Sanders, because as we have seen Hillary Clinton is one of the founders of neoliberal globalization, one of its central historical figures (having accelerated the warehousing of the poor, the attack on trade unions, and the end of welfare and of regulatory prowess), while Trump is an authoritarian figure whose conceptions of the state and of human beings within the state are inconsistent with the surface frictionlessness neoliberalism desires? To go back to Hillary Clinton’s opening campaign commercial, to what extent will Americans continue to believe that the self must be entrepreneurially leveraged toward maximum market gains, molded into mobile human capital ever ready to serve the highest bidder?

As to whether a non-neoliberal globalization is possible and what that might look like on the international stage after a quarter-century of Clinton, Bush, and Obama—which is essentially the frustration Trump is tapping into—I’ll take that up in a follow-up essay, which will further clarify the differences between Sanders versus Clinton, and Trump versus Clinton.

I would suggest that it is not that globalization causes or has caused neoliberalism, but that neoliberalism has pushed a certain form of globalization that suits its interests. This is a crucial distinction, on which everything else hinges. The neoliberal market doesn’t actually exist; at the moment it is pure abstraction; what is actually filling up economic and political space can only be discussed when we step away from this abstraction, as Sanders has so ably done, and as the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements tentatively set in motion.

Anis Shivani is the author of several books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including, most recently, My Tranquil War and Other Poems. His novel Karachi Raj (HarperCollins/Fourth Estate) was released this summer. His next book is the poetry collection Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish, out in October.

Saturday Matinee: The Nostalgist

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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From TheNostalgistFilm.com :

SYNOPSIS

With properly tuned ImmerSyst eyes™ & ears™ the futuristic city of Vanille can look and sound like a paradise. But the life of a father and his son threatens to disintegrate when the father’s Immersyst begins to fail. Desperate to avoid facing his own traumatic reality, the man must venture into a city where violence and danger brew beneath a veneer of beautiful illusion.

THE PROJECT

The Nostalgist is a science fiction short film project based on Daniel H Wilson‘s short story of the same name. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 2009 Finalist, the story was first published on Tor.com in July 2009 and is also available for download from major e-book retailers.

The short film version was developed by Wonder Room Productions, a London-based film production company formed by writer/director/producer Giacomo Cimini (City in the Sky) and producers Tommaso Colognese and Pietro Greppi. The team assembled a crew of highly skilled professionals and a cast led by Lambert Wilson (Of Gods and Men, The Matrix Reloaded) and Samuel Joslin (Paddington, The Impossible), and shot a short film version in early 2013, adapted and directed by Cimini.

The short was completed in May 2014 after an extensive period of VFX and post-production, headed by Milan and London-based post-production and VFX house Inky Mind, with key expertise in CG character creation provided by Barcelona-based MinimoVFX, and extensive compositing work provided by London based NOSEAMS VFX.

VFX artist Giacomo Bargellesi additionally joined Wonder Room as a partner and co-producer and provided further overall VFX supervision for the company, heading up the 2D compositing work.

The substantial post-production costs were covered thanks to the participation of Wonder Room’s VFX partners as well as the completion of a successful Kickstarter campaign, which raised a total of £32,800 from 460 backers.

The Nostalgist received its festival premiere at the Palm Springs Short Fest in June 2014, where it was awarded the runner-up prize for live-action short above 15 minutes, and it has since screened at a number of festivals, including the Giffoni Film Festival in Italy, where it was awarded the first prize as Best Short Film in the Generator 18+ (fiction) section.

Hillary Clinton and American Empire

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Rob Urie

Source: CounterPunch

Despite the lack of evidence linking Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen to Daesh (ISIS) in any operational (direct) sense, the first inclination of U.S. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was to renew American bombing of Syria, Iraq and Libya— the very nations that were destroyed by U.S. bombs directed by Mrs. Clinton and from whence Daesh arose. In so doing Mrs. Clinton made it evident that she is an unrepentant militarist whose bloodlust, combined with her longstanding interest in promoting American business interests, ties her to the U.S. imperial project of the last century and one-half. The precise moral difference between mass murders for personal and state reasons depends on a theory of the state at odds with this imperial project.

The company that employed Omar Mateen, G4S, is a British-based ‘security’ company that operates in 120 countries and as a ‘private’ supplier of public services to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Army and to the very same State Department that Mrs. Clinton led as Secretary of State. The company advertises itself capable of ‘mitigating liability’ for the U.S. government— the ruse used by the CIA and other clandestine and quasi-clandestine government agencies to circumvent civil prohibitions on their activities by employing ‘private’ companies to carry them out. The NSA’s domestic surveillance programs tie to those of the FBI, DEA and CIA through this legalistic dodge. And ‘private contractors’ were behind some of the more grotesque slaughters in recent American wars.

The classical liberal separation of economic from political interests used to legitimate state violence is one that the Clintons have spent their ‘public’ careers undermining. As leading proponents of neoliberalism, the Clintons have spent three decades conflating ‘private’ interests with the public interest. In history this tie of U.S. business interests to U.S. military incursions runs from residual European imperialism, including genocide against the indigenous population and slavery, to direct wars, proxy wars, coups, assassinations, murders and particularly odious ‘wars of attrition.’ What is corruption in the liberal worldview is the nature of the capitalist-state acting in / on imperial interests in a Marxian frame. If this corruption is ‘solvable,’ such has yet to be demonstrated in the U.S.

Hillary Clinton’s use of the horrific crime in Orlando to instigate further crimes against untold innocents abroad is hidden behind manufactured fears of a lunatic and craven enemy (ISIS) that is in fact both a product of earlier U.S. atrocities across the Middle East and but a pale ghost of the savagery of combined U.S. actions in the region. The American leadership’s practice of creating crises that it must then ‘respond’ to led the way to the sequential slaughters, disruptions and dislocations that now finds substantial portions of the Middle East in ruins and millions of refugees flooding an increasingly xenophobic Europe. That this leadership never seems to learn from its ‘mistakes’ suggests motivations at work other than those presented at press conferences.

Where G4S, Omar Mateen’s employer, fits in is that Mr. Mateen was in many respects the perfect mercenary— ‘our psychopath’ if we were paying for his services. Murdering 49 people and wounding 50 more is, in addition to being an atrocity, a crime and a moral calamity, a complicated logistical feat. In 2004 U.S. Colonel James Steele was brought to Iraq, in a war that Bill Clinton publicly supported and Hillary Clinton voted for, to engineer like atrocities. Mr. Mateen’s crimes would have been business-as-usual in U.S. led slaughters of innocent civilians in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s and in Iraq in the 2000s. And G4S is precisely the type of ‘public-private partnership’ favored by the Clintons to ‘mitigate liability’ behind a veil of ‘private’ actions.

This isn’t to suggest that Hillary Clinton had any part in the murders carried out by Mr. Mateen. It is to suggest that in any human and / or moral sense she is congenitally unfit for public office. The most generous explanation of her support for George W. Bush’s criminal slaughter in Iraq is that she was misled by the manufactured evidence proffered by the Bush administration. That the war tied through history to the Clinton’s own sanctions against Iraq that resulted in half a million innocents dying from privation and to eight years of bombing that left much of the country in ruins suggests that Mrs. Clinton probably well understood that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. in 2001. That the war was coincidentally a boon to Western business interests was / is as grotesque as it was predictable.

If conceptual clarity around these issues seems wanting here— that is the point. Neoliberalism as some unified theory of political economy ties through history to the Washington Consensus that in turn ties to American imperial history. Western imperialism— state-corporatism as division of the global economic spoils through insertion / assertion of ‘national’ interests, has five centuries of reasonably well defined history behind it. In this regard Donald Trump’s relative rhetorical reticence to use military force as a first choice is a threat to this imperial order whereas Hillary Clinton’s willingness to destroy an entire region of the world on a whim to benefit Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs makes her the ‘safe’ choice from the institutional perspective.

Washington Consensus precepts are:

*Fiscal discipline

*A redirection of public expenditure priorities toward fields offering both high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, such as primary health care, primary education, and infrastructure

*Tax reform (to lower marginal rates and broaden the tax base)

*Interest rate liberalization

*A competitive exchange rate

*Trade liberalization

*Liberalization of inflows of foreign direct investment

*Privatization

*Deregulation (to abolish barriers to entry and exit)

*Secure property rights

Against this imperial history the U.S. view that national elections are an internal matter places U.S. voters as the nominal ‘choosers’ of political economy for much of the world. In political terms, the 800+ military bases that the U.S. keeps around the globe serve as quasi-private security forces to assure repatriation of ‘profits’ for multi-national corporations in the form of resources, plentiful, cheap labor and the broader economy of imperial conquest. In fact, as opposed to theory, these profits are the reciprocal of the death, misery, subjugation and immiseration inevitably put forward by Western economists and politicians as the result of ‘free-choice’ by those on the losing end of American imperial fortune. That increasing numbers of Americans are on this losing end helps explain current (and heretofore slight) political unrest and its reciprocal in establishment support for Mrs. Clinton.

Hillary Clinton’s toxic jargon that “America never stopped being great” poses a seeming conundrum for her supporters who aren’t dedicated sociopaths. If U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Northern Africa are evidence of this greatness, then what are the moral and political bases of such a judgment? Mrs. Clinton’s nostalgia for the days of alleged national unity following the attacks of September 11, 2001 is apparently for the erasure of the history that led to the attacks and not for unity per se. Conversely, given the absence of any operational link to Daesh, Omar Mateen could just as well have claimed that his crimes were motivated by Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ were ISIS not such a well-implanted foe.

Externally, and in contradiction of to the exceptionalists, the democratists and Western neoliberals, the U.S. is broadly considered the greatest threat to world peace on the planet. Brought to the fore in the current Presidential election cycle is that Western elites— inherited wealth, bailout-dependent bankers, the corporate lootocracy dependent on wildly goosed (by the Federal Reserve) asset prices and various and sundry agents, functionaries and court pleaders, are now well-understood to have interests diametrically opposed to those of the vast majority of Americans. The conceptual leap not yet taken by the American electorate is the international nature of this class divide.

Chart: the bi-Party system of electoral control in the U.S. is put forward as representing majority political views when combined it represents less than one-third of voting-age political affiliation. In terms of global political reach, the American political leadership represents such a small minority’s interests that even relatively minor rebellions could quickly overwhelm it. Source: Gallup, Pew Research.

This international ‘footprint’ is fact regardless of whether or not Americans consider it when voting. Internal economic dislocations, such as jobs lost and stagnant wages from trade agreements, find their reciprocals in indigenous economies destroyed, in ‘developing market’ industries shut out through subsidized ‘competition,’ in IMF ‘workouts’ that place ownership of developing industries in Western hands and through commodification and expropriation of millennia of accumulated knowledge to be put back as alien product against the peoples and cultures that developed it. In this respect, the ‘Clinton model’ of sweatshop labor as economic development joins the ‘Obama model’ of subverting civil law in the interests of corporate-state plutocrats.

Calls to unify behind Hillary Clinton in her bid to become President pose the heavily engineered outcome of the Democratic primaries as the popular will. In this sense they are roughly analogous to the calls to unite behind George W. Bush following the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000. The Clintons paved the way for Mr. Bush’s brutal militarism much as Barack Obama maintained the institutional infrastructure of the ‘unitary Presidency’ and the capacity for launching criminal wars of opportunity. Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it is Mrs. Clinton who has the proven record as guardian of empire and imperial prerogative. Her unbridled militarism is an expression of this prerogative.

The question for Democrats is how evil can someone be to still be worthy of voting for? Alleged stark differences between Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush find very high degrees of synchronicity between their actual policies (and those of Barack Obama). And lest this be unclear, it is the Democratic establishment that chose Mrs. Clinton as its candidate (chart above), and not the politically and economically dispossessed electorate. The grift that American elections reflect the popular will, and therefore confer political legitimacy, contrasts with the facts that the dominant Parties are largely and increasingly unpopular and that the popular will bears no relation to the policies decided upon and enacted by the American political establishment.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

Howell and Four Other Suspects Involved in Planned Sunday Massacres

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Brenda Corpian

Source: Get Off the BS

Sources within the Santa Monica police department claim that James Wesley Howell, an Indiana man who was caught with explosives and weapons on Sunday Morning, told the Santa Monica police that as many as five people were involved in planned attacks on gay communities in both Florida and California.

According to the LA Times, Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks initially said on Twitter that the 20-year-old Indiana man (James Howell) told one of her officers after he was arrested that he wanted “to harm the Gay Pride event.”

However, after the FBI quickly took over the case, a Santa Monica police spokesman Saul Rodriguez indicated that Seabrooks was mistaken and offered that the Santa Monica detectives who were working the case are “not aware of what the suspect’s intentions were at this point.”

The official version of this story released by the LA Times falsely claims that on early Sunday, Santa Monica police received a call about a suspected prowler who was knocking on a resident’s door and window about 5 a.m. in the 1700 block of 11th Street, Santa Monica police said.

Patrol officers responded and encountered Howell, who was sitting in a car registered in Indiana, police said. Officers inspected the car and found three assault rifles, high-capacity ammunition and a 5-gallon bucket containing “chemicals capable of forming an improvised explosive device,” police said.

A law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity said the contents of the bucket included Tannerite, an ingredient that could be used to create pipe bombs.

The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation, said authorities also found camouflage clothing in the car.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials said the suspect told police he was going to the Pride parade to look for a friend. Authorities were looking for that individual.

The real truth of the story was released to a former Los Angeles County prosecutor who works for Get Off the BS by two Santa Monica police officers that have been issued gag orders under threat of Federal prosecution for talking further talking about the incident.

According to two department sources, Howell called the Santa Monica police on Sunday morning claiming that he needed protection from the CIA. Howell further elaborated to the dispatcher stating that he “had been set up by the CIA – they are going to kill me.”

According to Howell, he was in LA to meet with another person in a collaborated attack on the gay communities in both Florida and Los Angeles.

Howell additionally stated that, “everything has gone south. Dan was gone when I got here. They killed the leader of the Florida attack this morning. They are going to kill me. I need protection.”

According to sources within the police department’s investigation Howell indicated to officers who first made contact with him that Howell claimed he was one of five people involved in a planned Sunday attack on both the east and west coasts.

Howell stated that he was suppose to “hook up” late Saturday night with his contact in LA who was suppose to have more weapons and chemicals to mix with the Tannerite he was in possession of.

“When I got here, Dan was gone. I went to his apartment and he had cleared out….I tried calling him but he never answered me,” said Howell.

When questioned about the other four people involved in the plot, Howell was only familiar with the first names of three of the alleged suspects, naming his contact in LA – Dan and two of the three contacts in Florida, Omar and Brandy

Speaking of the suspect killed in the Pulse Bar massacre in Florida, Howell stated, “Omar was not suppose to be killed. They lied to us – Omar and Brandy were suppose to get away.”

When Howell was questioned about how he and his conspirators knew each other, he said that,

“We were all familiar with each other through an online fundamental Islamic knowledge seminary course_[1] – we were recruited through the course and trained together at a camp in Virginia – we were taught how to shoot and make bombs – everyone knew their part – something went wrong….”

Before the officers could further question Howell, agents working for the Los Angeles office of the FBI quickly swept in and took over the case. Santa Monica detectives were never allowed to talk with Howell.

In summary, it appears that Howell was on his way to “hook up” with another conspirator (Dan) to set off explosives and shoot people at the gay pride parade in Hollywood California on Sunday.

Finding his contact missing when he got to LA and having heard that Omar Matteen had been killed by a FBI SWAT teem in Orlando, Howell determined he had been double crossed by the CIA and feared for his own life.

Howell was taken in to custody by the FBI before Santa Monica police officers could further question him about the motives behind killing gay people on both coasts of the US on Sunday.

However, in absence of further information and or anyone who will officially go on the record, there is no doubt that the America public is not being told the truth about the Orlando Florida shooting and the arrest of Howell on Sunday.

It is a shame that the Fed’s got to the Santa Monica police chief on Sunday before she was silenced, however we are very thankful that at least two officers have risked their jobs and freedom to reveal what she would of most likely Tweeted had the Fed’s not got to her.

Authors Comments:

The official story released by the LA Times would not have held up for long with most people. It will most likely either disappear or be amended by the Times.

The mainstream media’s version of the police showing up to a Santa Monica apartment because someone in the neighborhood allegedly claimed that a person was “knocking on a neighbors door and windows” is almost comical.

When they added the police found the suspect at the scene and discovered weapons and explosives in his car, I almost peed myself laughing.

I use to live in Santa Monica. The likelihood of the police showing up to the apartment over a suspected prowler call within 2 hours, is about one in ten million.

However, for arguments sake let us assume that the police hurried right over to the apartment and found Howell there. (LMAO)

The likelihood that Howell drove all the way from Indiana to California to be found by the Santa Monica police with explosives, ammunition, and assault rifles in plain view in his car is about one in ten trillion.

Would you like to make odds that it was just a “coincidence” as the mainstream media reports, that Howell armed to the teeth with assault rifles and explosives, was on his way to a gay pride parade the same day as the massacre in Florida?

Folks, for those who know me, you know that I don’t make up stories. Everything I have written is true. However, for those of you who don’t know me, please use your common sense in this matter – the mainstream media and the fed’s are lying in this matter – there is no way that Howell’s arrest and the shooting in Orlando Florida is a coincidence.

Everyone would be well advised to hide your weapons before the Fed’s come knocking at your door to take them.

Story updates:

Shortly after the posting of this story, USA News shed light on the Online Islamic Fundamental course Howell spoke of.

Omar Mateen Did Not Act Alone! Proof of False Flag Conspiracy

The Father of the Orlando Shooter Recently Visited Congress, State Department, Writes Open Letters To President Obama

He laughed as he shot us‘: Sole survivor of 30 hiding in gay club bathroom reveals how he was hit four times but escaped by climbing over friends’ bodies

Links between Shooting events. All CIA patsies.

Omar Mateen: Orlando gunman was familiar face at club, performer says

Trump Right Again Omar Matteens’ Wife Had Prior Knowledge Of Orlando Massacre

FBI Introduced Florida Shooter to “Informants”

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.

US Law Enforcement Knew Florida Shooter BEFORE Shooting

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Did radicalization by NYPD make Omar Mateen a trigger-happy homophobe?

Recent Bloodbath Looks Almost Identical to FBI-Staged Entrapment Cases in 2015.

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

A horrific mass shooting unfolded in Florida claiming the lives of at least 52 with scores more injured. The British Independent would report in its article, “Omar Mateen: Orlando gay club gunman identified by police,” that:

Police have identified the gunman in the mass shooting at a gay club in Florida as 29-year-old Omar Mateen, an American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan.

Authorities in Orlando said they were investigating the shooting as an act of terrorism, as the death toll rose to 50 with a further 53 wounded.

At face value – it appears to be another senseless tragedy perpetrated by a “terrorist” inspired by militant groups the US claims to have been fighting for now nearly two decades. However the Independent reports another fact further down in the body of its article, claiming that:

ABC News reported he had been on police’s “radar”, though not subject to an investigation.

If this sounds like a familiar narrative, that’s because virtually every high-profile “terrorist attack” carried out in North America and Europe in recent years has been done so by suspects long under investigation by US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

CNN’s article, “50 killed in Florida nightclub, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance,” would further elaborate on Mateen’s background, stating:

Two officials tell CNN that the FBI had investigated Mateen at some point for possibly having ties to or sympathizing with Islamic extremism. A law enforcement official said there were two cases opened involving Mateen but the probes didn’t result in enough evidence to charge him with anything.

In the past two weeks Mateen legally purchased a Glock pistol, found at the shooting scene, from a St. Lucie County area gun store, a law enforcement official said.

What CNN fails to mention is the long history the FBI has of taking “sympathizers” through a series of steps to acquire “enough evidence,” including posing as terrorists and providing suspects with weapons and plans for attacks precisely like the one that just unfolded in Florida.

To understand the implications of yet another high-profile terror attack involving a suspect already known to law enforcement agencies, one must examine previous examples of admittedly set up attacks “foiled” at the last moment by the FBI, as well as attacks that have been carried out by individuals tracked for years and even arrested multiple times by Western police and intelligence agencies only to be let go time and time again until finally carrying out “the big one.”

ISIS Inspired? Or FBI Inspired? FBI Set Up Multiple Attacks in 2015 Almost Exactly Like the Florida Shooting

A terror suspect armed to the teeth storming a public place and killing scores is actually a very familiar script. The FBI wrote several such scripts in 2015 alone, including entrapping and arresting a mentally-ill suspect after providing him with an arsenal of deadly weapons almost identical to the arsenal recently employed in Flordia.

The Intercept would report in its article, “Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI,” that:

U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then charging him with having guns.

ABC News quoted a “senior federal official briefed on the arrest” as saying: “This is a very bad person arrested before he could do very bad things.”

But in a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, “aka Ali Al Amriki,” was apparently a mentally ill man who was doing nothing more than ranting about violent jihad and talking (admittedly in frightening ways) about launching attacks—until he met an FBI informant. At that point, he started making shopping lists for weapons.

The Intercept would also reference the FBI’s affidavit (.pdf), stating (emphasis added):

According to the affidavit, Ciccolo first talked to the FBI informant about attacking two bars and a police station. Later, he spoke of attacking a college campus with a homemade pressure-cooker bomb like the one used in the Boston Marathon terror attack; he also talked about using guns and a lot of ammo. Ciccolo, according to the affidavit, then “ordered the firearms from a confidential human source (“CHS”) working with the FBI.”

The list of weapons provided to the mentally-ill suspect by the FBI informant is shocking. Revealed in the official FBI affidavit (.pdf), the weapons included a 9mm Glock 17, a 10mm Glock 20, a .223 Colt AR-15 rifle, (referred to by the media as an “assault rifle”), and a 556 Sig Arms SG550 rifle (also often referred to as an assault rifle). Also included in the affidavit is the same hysterical rhetoric encouraged by FBI informants now evident in the recent actions of terror suspect Omar Mateen in Florida.

Image: The FBI literally handed these weapons to a mentally-ill man who was contemplating attacking bars, police stations, and university campuses. Two of the four weapons were Glocks, a weapon used by Mateen in the recent Florida shooting. Both the 2015 patsy and Mateen also appeared to have been in possession of improvised explosive devices.

The FBI literally provided a mentally-ill man they helped plan a terrorist attack together with, an arsenal of deadly weapons – arresting him just before he committed his crime. The only factor that prevented the 2015 entrapment of Ciccolo from becoming a live Florida shooting-style attack was the fact that the FBI arrested Ciccolo before he carried out his planned attack – while those following Mateen did not arrest him.

The role of the FBI in Mateen obtaining his weapons will never be known since Mateen is now – conveniently – dead. Even if he purchased them “legally” at a gun store, it should be noted that in other FBI entrapment cases, suspects were encouraged to purchase weapons themselves, with the FBI arresting them only after they left gun stores with their newly acquired arsenal.

Image: Another patsy set up by the FBI in 2015 was allowed to purchase two semi-automatic rifles at a gun store before being arrested upon leaving with the weapons.

NBC Cincinnati affiliate WLWT5 would report in their 2015 article, “FBI: Cincinnati man bought rifles, planned to attack U.S. Capitol,” that (emphasis added):

Agents said that on Tuesday and Wednesday Cornell met with the informant the final time to plan their trip to D.C. to execute their plan. He purchased two Armalite M-15 5.56 mm semi-automatic rifles Wednesday morning, along with 600 rounds of ammunition, and was arrested.

Cornell bought the rifles at the Point Blank gun store on Harrison Avenue in Colerain Township. He passed a background check and paid $1,900 in cash, $700 for each rifle and about $400 for the ammunition.

The gun store owner, John Dean, said FBI agents notified him that Cornell was going to come in to buy the guns about 10 minutes before he entered the store.

Dean said the agents told him to allow the purchase and agents would stop Cornell after he left the store.

What if agents didn’t stop him after he left the store? He had two semi-automatic rifles and 800 rounds of ammunition – more than enough to carry out a Florida shooting-style attack. Some may be immediately tempted to conclude that the FBI would never allow an attack they played a role in planning to go “live.” However, they would be wrong.

A Notorious FBI-Staged Attack that Went Live

The FBI in fact was presiding over the terrorists who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The role of the FBI leading up to the deadly attack would most likely have gone unreported had an FBI informant not taped his conversations with FBI agents after growing suspicious during the uncover operation. The New York Times in their article, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” reported:

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars.

The FBI and other US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies “accidentally” failing to stop terror suspects they have long-known about and have even arrested multiple times has since become endemic. In recent years, virtually every suspect has either been known by such agencies beforehand, or has been involved in a history of crime and terrorism before carrying out their final acts of grand terrorism.

Such was the case in the various French attacks. Many from the network that carried out the French attacks were then directly involved in the Belgium attacks. To explain away the fact that virtually all the suspects had been within European security agencies’ grasp for years but were still able to carry out their deadly attacks – the Western media has attempted to cite a lack of resources.

In reality, what is playing out is an engineered strategy of tension using both the threat of terrorism and actual terrorism to create hysteria, fear, division, and ultimately obedience and capitulation across Western populations.

It should be remembered that Al Qaeda itself began as a US-Saudi joint venture to fight proxy warfare against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan where conventional Western forces could not go. It should also be pointed out that since then, Al Qaeda and its more recent affiliate, the self-proclaimed “Islamic State,” have enjoyed logistical support from the US and NATO for years in proxy wars ranging from Libya to Syria to Iraq and the frontiers of Iran, southern Russia, and western China.

More recently it has been admitted even within the Western press that the “Islamic State” is being resupplied and reinforced from NATO territory itself, with the UK Telegraph admitting in its article, “US-backed Syrian opposition forces surround Isil in key city and cut off main supply route,” that:

…Syrian opposition forces have completely surrounded the Islamic State-held stronghold of Manbij and cut off the group’s main route to the outside world…..

The loss of Manbij will be a huge loss to the group. It had been a waypoint on an Isil supply line between the Turkish border and the extremist group’s de facto capital, Raqqa.

Again, we see that while the US claims to fight the “Islamic State,” its NATO partner Turkey is quite literally the source of the terrorist organization’s fighting capacity, with US forces permanently stationed in Turkey for decades and Turkey having been a NATO member since the 1950s. Despite open acknowledgments that the “Islamic State” is operating out of Turkey, the US has used the presence of the terrorist organization inside Syria as a pretext for intervening in the war directly.

Were the US truly interested in stopping the “Islamic State,” it and its allies in Ankara would be easily able to wield maximum force within Turkey’s territory to cut the group off before it even reached Syrian territory. That both Washington and Ankara are feigning an inexplicable inability to do this, and insist instead that the war must be fought inside Syria exposes the cynical nature with which the West uses – not fights – terrorism to further its geopolitical and domestic political agendas.

As special interests attempt to leverage this latest terrorist attack – all of these actual facts must be kept in mind to ground us to a reality Western politicians and media outlets will attempt to detach us from in the coming days and weeks.

Related Link: Zero Hedge Orlando Shooting Updates

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