US Regime Change Blueprint Proposed Venezuelan Electricity Blackouts as ‘Watershed Event’ for ‘Galvanizing Public Unrest’

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Reid Mukai

The US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the opposition “to take advantage of the situation…towards their needs”

By Max Blumenthal

A September 2010 memo by a US-funded soft power organization that helped train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido and his allies identifies the potential collapse of the country’s electrical sector as “a watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”

The memo has special relevance today as Guaido moves to exploit nationwide blackouts caused by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri dam – a crisis that Venezuela’s government blames on US sabotage.

It was authored by Srdja Popovic of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a Belgrade-based “democracy promotion” organization funded by the US government that has trained thousands of US-aligned youth activists in countries where the West seeks regime change.

This group reportedly hosted Guaido and the key leaders of his Popular Will party for a series of training sessions, fashioning them into a “Generation 2007” determined to foment resistance to then-President Hugo Chavez and sabotage his plans to implement “21st century socialism” in Venezuela.

In the 2010 memo, CANVAS’s Popovic declared, “A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector.” Popovic explicitly identified the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant as a friction point, emphasizing that “water levels at the Guri dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry.”

Speculating on a “grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010,” the CANVAS leader stated that “an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

Flash forward to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost exactly as he had imagined.

On March 7, just days after Guaido’s return from Colombia, where he participated in the failed and demonstrably violent February 23 attempt to ram a shipment of US aid across the Venezuelan border, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a major and still unexplained collapse.

Days later, electricity remains sporadic across the country. Meanwhile, Guaido has done everything he can “to take advantage of the situation and spin it” against President Nicolas Maduro – just as his allies were urged to do over eight years before by CANVAS.

Rubio vows “a period of suffering” for Venezuela hours before the blackout

The Venezuelan government has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key players in the US-directed coup attempt have done little to dispel the accusation.

In a tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal stage in US plans for regime change:

No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) March 8, 2019

At noon on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the US to stir “widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs to happen” in order to achieve regime change.

“Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed.

Around 5 PM, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still unexplained collapse. Residents of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness.

At 5:18 PM, a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout and claim that “backup generators have failed.” It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s tweet.

Back in Caracas, Guaido immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaido declared, “the light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.” Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error.

Two days later, Guaido was at the center of opposition rally he convened in affluent eastern Caracas, bellowing into a megaphone: “Article 187 when the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It depends on us, not on anybody else.”

Article 187 establishes the right of the National Assembly “to authorize the use of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the country.”

Upon his mention of the constitutional article, Guaido’s supporters responded, “Intervention! Intervention!”

Exploiting crisis to “get back into a position of power”

As Dan Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaido’s rise to prominence – and the coup plot that he has been appointed to oversee – is the product of a decade-long project overseen by the Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit.

CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that worked alongside US soft power organizations to mobilize the protests that eventually toppled the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

CANVAS has been funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change. According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

A leaked email from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they ousted Milosevic, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Stratfor subsequently revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.

In September 2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election, CANVAS produced a series of memos outlining the plans they had hatched with “non-formal actors” like Guaido and his cadre of student activists to bring down Chavez. “This is the first opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,” Popovic wrote at the time.

In his memo on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of the Venezuelan military in achieving regime change. “Alliances with the military could be critical because in such a situation of massive public unrest and rejection of the presidency,” the CANVAS founder wrote, “malcontent sectors of the military will likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient support.”

While the scenario Popovic envisioned failed to materialize in 2010, it perfectly describes the situation gripping Venezuela today as an opposition leader cultivated by CANVAS seeks to spin the crisis against Maduro while calling on the military to break ranks.

Since the Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaido’s Popular Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance himself from his record of training Venezuela’s opposition.

Today, however, Popovic’s 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages reads like a blueprint for the strategy that Guaido and his patrons in Washington have actively implemented. Whether or not the blackout is the result of external sabotage, it represents the “watershed event” that CANVAS has prepared its Venezuelan cadres for.

Elite Banking at Your Expense: How Secretive Tax Havens are Used to Steal Your Money

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Tax havens are locations around the world where wealthy individuals, criminals and terrorists, as well as governments and government agencies (such as the CIA), banks, corporations, hedge funds, international organizations (such as the Vatican) and crime syndicates (such as the Mafia), can stash their money so that they can avoid regulation and oversight and, very often, evade tax. According to Nicholas Shaxson: ‘Tax havens are now at the heart of the global economy.’

Which is why, as he explains it: ‘The term “tax haven” is a bit of a misnomer, because such places aren’t just about tax. What they sell is escape: from the laws, rules and taxes of jurisdictions elsewhere, usually with secrecy as their prime offering.’ See ‘The tax haven in the heart of Britain’. A tax haven (or ‘secrecy jurisdiction’) then is a ‘place that seeks to attract business by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere’. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

Tax havens are a vitally important part of the global infrastructure of corruption and criminality – see ‘Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption’ – that enables privileged individuals and their organizations to legally and illegally steal money from the rest of us, particularly those in developing countries, and to have the services of a vast network of accountants, bankers, lawyers and politicians (often from captured legislatures) to help them do it, and to ensure that they get away with it.

How many tax havens are there? Where are they? How much money do they have? Who uses them? Why? How do they work? Why does all this matter to us? And what can we do about them?

Tax Havens: how many and where are they?

In his book Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, author and financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson identified about sixty ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ or ‘offshore groups’ around the world which he divided into four categories, as follows.

The most important category, by far, is those tax havens that form the spider’s network of havens centred on the City of London. It has three main layers: there are two inner rings – Britain’s Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey (which includes the sub-havens of Sark, Alderney and Brecqhou) and the Isle of Man, and its overseas territories such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Gibralter – which are substantially controlled by Britain. The third layer is an outer ring with a more diverse array of havens, like Hong Kong, Singapore, the Bahamas, Dubai and Ireland, which are outside Britain’s direct control but have strong historical and current links to that country and the City of London (which I will discuss below). This network controls almost one half of all international bank assets.

The second category of tax havens is those in Europe notably including Switzerland, Luxembourg – see ‘Explore the Documents: Luxembourg Leaks Database’ – the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria, as well as microstates such as Liechtenstein and Monaco. While ‘Geneva bankers had sheltered the secret money of European elites since at least the eighteenth century’, the European havens ‘got going’ during World War I as governments raised taxes sharply to pay for the war.

The third category of tax havens is that focused on the United States. It has three tiers as well. At the federal level, the US government offers a range of tax exemptions, secrecy provisions and laws designed to attract foreign money. This means, for example, that US banks can legally accept proceeds from a range of crimes as long as the crimes are committed overseas. The second tier involves individual US states such as Florida (where Central/South American elites do their banking and the countries adversely impacted are prevented by US secrecy provisions from accessing relevant data, and where much Mob and drugs money is hidden too), Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming, where even terrorist money is protected by secrecy provisions. The third tier of the US network is the overseas satellites such as the American Virgin Islands, the Marshall Islands, Liberia and Panama, with the latter, according to Jeffrey Robinson, being ‘one of the filthiest money laundering sinks in the world’. See The Sink: Terror, Crime and Dirty Money in the Offshore World.

As Shaxson notes: ‘offshore finance has quietly been at the heart of Neoconservative schemes to project US power around the globe for years. Few people have noticed.’

The fourth category of tax havens identified by Shaxson includes those that do not fit in the categories above, such as Somalia and Uganda.

The (incomplete) list of tax havens on the website ‘Tax Havens of the World’ will give you some idea of where these secrecy jurisdictions are located but there are important omissions in this list, notably including the City of London Corporation.

For a brief look at 15 tax havens (again, notably excluding some of the most important) and some of the corporations that use them, see ‘What Are the World’s Best Tax Havens?’

And for a highly instructive and utterly sobering video documentary on British Tax Havens, see ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’. This documentary will inform you, among many more important things, that the building housing Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the UK tax office, is owned by an offshore company in Bermuda!

To summarize the central aspect of the development of tax havens following World War II: ‘The British Establishment – an old boys network of privileged elites – had carved out a lucrative vehicle for themselves in the offshore world after the demise of Empire. They transformed themselves from administrators of Empire to financial handlers for the global elite and multinational corporations.’ See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Before concluding this section, it is worth emphasizing that, as Shaxson explains it, ‘the offshore world is not a bunch of independent states exercising their sovereign rights to set their laws and tax systems as they see fit. It is a set of networks of influence controlled by the world’s major powers, notably Britain and the United States. Each network is deeply interconnected with the others.’ He goes on: ‘The world’s most important tax havens are not exotic palm-fringed islands, as many people suppose, but some of the world’s most powerful countries.’ Shaxson quotes Marshall Langer, a prominent supporter of secrecy jurisdictions: ‘It does not surprise anyone when I tell them that the most important tax haven in the world is an island. They are surprised, however, when I tell them that … the island is Manhattan. Moreover, the second most-important tax haven … is located on an island. It is called the City of London.’

The City of London Corporation

What is the City of London Corporation, also known as the ‘Square Mile’? It is ‘a 1.22-square-mile slab of prime central London real estate that stretches from the Thames at Victoria Embankment, clockwise up through Fleet Street, the Barbican Centre, then to Liverpool Street in the north-east, then back down to the Thames just west of the Tower of London.’ See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

According to Shaxson, the City of London Corporation, the ‘modern period’ of which dates from 1067 (yes, that is not a typing error), is ‘the local-government authority for the 1.2-square-mile slab of prime real estate in central London that is the City of London. The corporation is an ancient, semi-alien entity lodged inside the British nation state; a “prehistoric monster which had mysteriously survived into the modern world”, as a 19th-century would-be City reformer put it.’

Importantly, Shaxson explains, ‘the role of the City of London Corporation as a municipal authority is its least important attribute. This is a hugely resourced international offshore lobbying group pushing for international financial deregulation, tax-cutting and tax havenry around the world.’ Moreover, it is ‘the hub of a global network of tax havens sucking up offshore trillions from around the world and sending it, or the business of handling it, to London’. Notably, so powerful is the City of London that no sovereign or government of Britain in a thousand years has had the courage to seriously take it on and attempt to subject it to British government control. See ‘The tax haven in the heart of Britain’.

How much money is in Tax Havens?

So how much of the world’s wealth is stashed in tax havens around the globe? According to the Tax Justice Network in its 2012 report written by James S. Henry ‘The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for “Missing” Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes’: ‘A significant fraction of global private financial wealth – by our estimates, at least $21 to $32 trillion as of 2010 – has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 “offshore” secrecy jurisdictions. We believe this range to be conservative…’ He goes on to emphasize that ‘this is just financial wealth. A big share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks – and many other things that count as non-financial wealth – are also owned via offshore structures where it is impossible to identify the owners’.

Henry also notes that given that Credit Suisse estimated global wealth in 2011 at $231 trillion, the amount of money in secrecy jurisdictions is conservatively estimated at 10% of global wealth.

But other figures do indeed suggest this estimate is low. Shaxson cites compelling evidence that ‘More than half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens. Over half of all banking assets and a third of foreign direct investment by multinational corporations, are routed offshore.’ Moreover, as long ago as 2008, the US Government Accountability Office reported that 83 of the 100 biggest corporations in the USA had subsidiaries in tax havens and the following year, using a broader definition, the Tax Justice Network discovered that ninety-nine of Europe’s hundred largest companies used offshore subsidiaries. And in each country, ‘the largest user by far was a bank’. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

In any case, the most recent estimate by the Tax Justice Network indicates ‘tax losses to profit shifting by multinational companies (a)pplying a methodology developed by researchers at the International Monetary Fund to an improved dataset… of around $500 billion a year’. See ‘New estimates reveal the extent of tax avoidance by multinationals’.

To reiterate then, on the understanding that these estimates are probably quite low, by 2010, between $US21 and $US32 trillion had been taken out of circulation so that it was beyond the laws, financial regulations and taxes that the rest of us cannot escape. But that figure has been added to by half a trillion dollars each year since, by moving more money into tax havens. And don’t forget: this figure does not include non-financial wealth. How many gold bricks, yachts, artworks and racehorses do you own and have stashed away somewhere free of scrutiny?

Who uses Tax Havens? And why?

As I mentioned above, tax havens are used by wealthy individuals (including businesspeople, sports and pop stars), criminals and terrorists, as well as governments (and their agencies), banks, corporations (such as Amazon and Google), international organizations and crime syndicates (such as the Medellin Cartel). While motives vary, in essence the lack of regulation and oversight, as well as tax evasion, are the reasons that individuals and organizations use them.

An individual might want to hide stolen wealth, to evade tax or cheat a divorced spouse out of their share of the family fortune. A bank, corporation, crime syndicate, international or terrorist organization might want to evade scrutiny of the source of their money and/or evade tax on windfall or even ongoing profits (legal and/or otherwise). A government might want to hide the ‘dirty money’ it uses to finance ‘black ops’ (that is, illegal and secret military violence such as that carried out by the CIA). But there are myriad explanations.

In John Christensen’s analysis of over 100 offshore clients of accounting firm Deloitte Touche he studied in Jersey, he found that the clients were engaging in insider trading, market rigging, failure to disclose conflicts of interest, weapons trading, illicit political donations, contract kickbacks, bribery, fraudulent invoicing, trade mispricing and tax evasion. See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Most people have heard of the money stashed away by corrupt dictators like Suharto in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) each of whom stole from the people of their country. However, they could only do this with the help of western enablers and ongoing elite resistance to developing country attempts to create a more transparent and fairer process for collecting tax on cross-border financial flows. As a result, Alex Cobham of the Tax Justice Network observes, worldwide, developing nations lose in excess of $1trillion per year in ‘capital flight’ and tax evasion to wealthy countries. See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

But these more public examples, while terrible, tend to obscure two important facts. The amount stolen from sub-Saharan Africans, for example, between 1970 and 2008 was at least five times the total amount of their foreign debt during that period – see ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’ – and, by highlighting these examples, attention is drawn away from even worse and ongoing examples of such criminality by those corrupt/criminal individuals and organizations (including banks, accountancy and legal firms, corporations, international organizations, crime syndicates and governments) committed to using outright theft, fraud, money laundering and other devices to steal wealth from ordinary people all over the world.

So, for example, if one follows the money trails of various lucrative financial operations, some technically legal but immoral and others simply illegal, apart from the world’s major corporations, one quickly comes across the names of the major (and well known) banks and financial institutions (such as the Bank of England, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase…), the ‘big four’ accountancy firms (Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers), and elite lawyers (such as those in London’s ‘Magic Circle’, like Clifford Chance, Mourant du Feu & Jeune, and Slaughter and May). See, for example, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, ‘New estimates reveal the extent of tax avoidance by multinationals’ and ‘Looting with Putin’.

Apparently, like major corporations and crime syndicates, few banks, accountancy firms and lawyers have ethics policies that require them to follow the law and to exercise ‘due diligence’ (check out a client before signing a contract) so that they can steer clear of handling illegal and immoral profits, especially if they are monstrous.

In fact, according to a US Senate report, ‘virtually every major bank in the world – especially the biggest in North America and Europe – holds accounts for offshore banks and/or banks in suspect jurisdictions’. See The Sink: Terror, Crime and Dirty Money in the Offshore World.

As Eva Joly MEP, vice-chair of the Panama Papers Committee of the European Parliament, succinctly puts it: ‘Ordinary people are paying taxes. Rich people are not.’ See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

The Vatican

But perhaps the example which best illustrates the moral depravity of those who use tax havens is the Vatican. In his carefully researched book Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia author Paul L. Williams recounts the efforts of the CIA, former Nazis, the Sicilian/American Mafia, the Vatican and even Freemasonry to resist an anticipated postwar invasion of western Europe by those ‘Godless communists’ in the Soviet Union by establishing ‘stay-behind units’ (clandestine military and paramilitary units) throughout the countries of Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal…) led by former Nazis and composed of ‘die-hard fascist fanatics’.

This alliance to fight the Cold War against the former Soviet Union and the rising tide of progressive governments in Europe and the rest of the world, particularly as the US war on Vietnam gathered pace, led, as Williams chillingly puts it, to ‘the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation’ around the world. It was also, of course, the forerunner to its equivalent – Operation Condor – to resist, and destroy if possible, the spread of progressive movements, ranging from communism to liberation theology, throughout Central/South America.

While the Vatican played a number of unsavory roles in this alliance, including its facilitation of massive numbers of heroin addictions, its use of counterfeit securities, participation in false flag attacks that killed thousands and strings of gangland slayings, support of military juntas (that massacred tens of thousands) and the ‘purging’ of progressive priests (including Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador and two Jesuit priests denounced by Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, in Argentina: see ‘Who is Pope Francis? Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Argentina’s “Dirty War”’) while causing the financial destitution of thousands of families, one of its key ongoing functions, designed to maximize the Vatican’s power while highlighting its moral and spiritual bankruptcy, was to act as ‘God’s banker’ for many of these operations. See Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia.

It did this, for example, by accepting Mafia/Medellin Cartel-collected drugs money (for a 15-20% cut) into the Vatican Bank (technically: Istituto per le Opere di Religione or Institute for the Works of Religion) and then laundering it through its shell companies – such as Cisalpine Overseas Bank, Astolfine SA, United Trading Corporation, Erin SA, Bellatrix SA, Belrose SA, Starfield SA and Nordeurop Establishment – in tax havens in the Bahamas, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama and Switzerland.

With the CIA providing services, such as the transport of Mafia/Medellin cocaine to drug dealers in the US, its share of the drug profits (cycled through its own CIA-controlled banks including Continental Illinois, Castle Bank & Trust, and Bank of Credit and Commerce International but eventually involving many of the most prestigious banks in the US, as the money was passed to the Vatican Bank) were used to finance key aspects of Operations Gladio and Condor with weapons also supplied by the CIA from NATO arsenals. But there was plenty of Vatican money in these Operations too.

As an aside, so devastating was the fallout from the ongoing exposure of the many aspects of Vatican corruption that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Roman Catholic membership was falling by 400,000 per year in the USA alone but the trend was even stronger in Europe with ‘magnificent churches and cathedrals’ becoming museums visited solely by tourists, parishes being boarded up, seminaries and convents closed, and parochial schools consolidated. And this was before the ‘plague of pedophilia’ had fully hit further decimating the Church’s tattered reputation. To this day, the Vatican Bank remains ‘one of the world’s leading laundries for dirty money’. See Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia.

How do Tax Havens work?

Each tax haven offers its own unique combination of services. After all, it is a tough market competing for the world’s wealth and so each jurisdiction has developed its own set of services designed to maximize its attractiveness to potential clients. In essence, this means that there is some ongoing ‘competition’ to reduce regulatory and oversight requirements so that each tax haven can attract clientele. This has become so extreme that basic requirements of banking for those who do it legally, such as proof of identity, are not required in the offshore world. In fact, even your true name can be withheld if you wish. It is easier to avoid any risk of embarrassment from exposure this way.

As a result, virtually any jurisdiction will open an account (or as many accounts as you want) in whatever names you specify. Then, usually employing a variety of devices, ranging from secret bank accounts, nominee directors (usually locals who play no part in the organization bar give it their name) and structures such as shell companies (that exist on paper and perhaps a wall plaque somewhere, but nothing else) and trusts (which, unlike the legitimate version, appear to separate responsibility and control from the benefits of ownership but actually do not), to processes such as transfer pricing (a technique by which companies ‘shift paper profits into low-tax countries and costs into high-tax countries’ to minimize – or eliminate – tax payments) and often employing a convoluted process that rapidly shifts monies through several jurisdictions so that it becomes ‘untraceable’ (because authorities must get permission to access each jurisdiction in turn in any effort to trace the money), profits are effectively hidden and any accountability to authorities of any kind utterly eliminated. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

For one simple example of such a strategy, employing a technique known as the ‘double Irish, Dutch sandwich’ (which is legal), see ‘Google shifted $23bn to tax haven Bermuda in 2017, filing shows ’. But you can read other examples here: ‘The tech giants will never pay their fair share of taxes – unless we make them’ and ‘7 Corporate Giants Accused of Evading Billions in Taxes’.

Why does the existence of Tax Havens matter to us?

Well, the simple answer to this question is that just a fraction of the money hidden in tax havens would feed, clothe, house and provide clean water, medical care and educational opportunities to everyone on Earth. It would eliminate the 100,000 deaths by starvation-related diseases each day. It would eliminate poverty and homelessness. And, as one byproduct of having these material needs met, it would facilitate the emergence of an informed, engaged and empowered human population to tackle the vast range of environmental, climate and military threats that currently threaten biosphere collapse and imminent human extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

As Professor Prem Sikka puts it more simply: Because of the penetration by financial services executives of the British state, including the Treasury ‘It deprives people of opportunities to have healthcare, education, security, justice and, ultimately, a fulfilling life.’ See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Fundamentally, then, tax havens and their secrecy are at the heart of those elite institutions and processes that functionally undermine democracy and give extraordinary power to certain anonymous individuals and their entities without accountability. See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Of course, the elites that control the tax haven networks are not about to let this change. Tax havens are simply too important as part of the global infrastructure for maintaining elite profit, power and privilege and for resisting grassroots efforts to bring peace, justice and ecological sanity to our world. And that is why they are protected by government legislation and legal systems, with an ‘army’ of accountants, auditors, bankers, businesspeople, lawyers and politicians ensuring that they remain protected.

So don’t forget: laws are designed to control and punish you, no matter how trivial your infringement: a parking fine, a littering offence, a petty theft. But if you have enough money, the law simply does not exist. And you can evade taxes legally and in the full knowledge that your vast profits (even from immorally-acquired wealth such as sex trafficking, gun-running, endangered species trafficking, conflict diamonds and drug trafficking) are ‘lawful’ and will escape regulation and oversight of any kind. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

Let me give a personal example. I have been a war tax resister since 1983: I have a conscientious objection to paying taxes to the Australian government to deploy military forces in other countries to kill people in my name. So, instead of paying taxes to kill, for many years I donated the equivalent amount to organizations engaged in peace, development, environment and human rights work, and to ‘pay the rent’ for my use of indigenous land. As some of many outcomes to this conscientious and highly public resistance (garnering national media attention at times), in 1991 I was bankrupted, in 1992 I was convicted of contempt of court (for my conscientious refusal to cooperate with the bankruptcy trustee) and in 1993 my passport was seized. In 1999, I was advised that I will be ‘bankrupt forever’ because of my ongoing conscientious refusal to finance the killing.

In the same period, since 1983, trillions and trillions of dollars of tax have been illegally and secretly evaded as wealthy individuals and corporations, criminals and crime syndicates, international organizations and governments channel their incomes and profits through tax havens. Laws and legal systems throughout the world make this possible and, provided it is done correctly, it is quite straightforward to avoid any penalties for secretly evading payment of taxes or hiding money acquired through criminal activity. But the point, as you can see, is that tax evasion by wealthy individuals and corporations meant that many of these individuals and corporations didn’t pay taxes to kill people either. They just didn’t pay taxes at all.

Of course, their motive was personal gain, their way was legal, they incurred no penalty and, of course, they didn’t pay an equivalent amount to support peace and justice causes. More fundamentally, however, the trillions of dollars they took from the global economy were made by killing and exploiting people and the planet in a significant variety of other ways, ranging from sex trafficking, gun-running, conflict diamonds and trafficking in drugs and endangered species, to simply starving people to death at the rate of 100,000 people each day by managing the global economy, using tax havens as a primary tool, to extract maximum profit.

Richard Brooks documents how this legal exploitation occurs in another way in his book The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business. The vast tax evasion by elites in Britain, including by diverting funds through tax havens, attracts just five prosecutions each year per £1 billion of evasion of direct taxes. In contrast, benefits fraud by those on unemployment and disability pensions attract 9,000 prosecutions each year per £1 billion of fraud. ‘So theft by the poor warrants the full force of the law’. But not theft by elites who write the law and largely control the political and legal processes in relation to it.

Hence, under the guise of ‘relationship taxing’ (that is, building a relationship between tax authorities and corporate executives and ‘tailoring’ tax payments to corporate wishes to the extent the law allows), corporations have long known that ‘If you don’t like the law… we’ll see what we can do’.

As is obvious from this example, attempts at government reform, including to defeat tax havens, in the direction of making elites financially and legally accountable, both nationally and internationally, for the responsibilities which the rest of us cannot escape, are invariably for show and, in any case, achieve zero of substance. For example, the attempt to ‘approve’ a blacklist of tax havens at the G20 gathering in 2009 was resisted by the Chinese premier on behalf of Chinese elites who, like other national elites keen to have political control but ‘judicial separation’ from their offshore centres, opposed the listing of notorious havens Hong Kong and Macau: see Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World. The global elite is clearly in control with national governments and international organizations powerlessly doing as instructed. So complete is this control, in fact, that Brooks notes that, in Britain, ‘Anti-tax avoidance laws had to be relaxed to accommodate companies’ tax avoidance schemes.’

Brooks concludes that ‘British taxation policy really had been so comprehensively captured by the world’s biggest corporations that screw-the-poor policies… could be written into the statute books at their whim, without a pang of conscience being felt anywhere in Whitehall.’ Clearly, however, his comment can be applied to virtually any government in the world.

So does it matter to you that these tax havens exist and do what they do?

What can be done about Tax Havens?

Authors such as Nicholas Shaxson and Richard Brooks suggest a raft of measures to correct the large number of ‘faults’ that facilitate the secrecy, protection from regulation and tax evasion that individuals, corporations, organizations, criminals and terrorists utilize in tax havens.

For Shaxson, these include financial reforms such as ‘blacklisting’ of tax havens so that their rogue state status is public knowledge; greater transparency, for example, through government sharing of information about the local income and assets of each other’s citizens and by requiring multinational corporate activities in each country to be made visible (rather than hidden behind ‘international’ figures); promoting the needs of developing countries which need their tax bases protected far more than they need aid or debt relief; confronting the British ‘spider’s web’ of tax havens by abolishing the City of London Corporation and submerging it into a unified and fully democratic London; taxing an entire multinational ‘group’ as a single unit and then allocating the appropriate amounts of its income out to the different jurisdictions in which it was earned and allow it to be taxed as each jurisdiction decides; onshore tax reform such as a land value tax (because land cannot be moved offshore and so tax on it must be paid locally), and by a direct distribution of mineral wealth in any country to each of its inhabitants (who can then be taxed); tackling the ‘enablers’ – the accountants, lawyers, individual bankers, businesspeople – and not just the clients, so that they go to jail; rethinking the meaning of ‘corporate responsibility’ (because corporations are given a wealth of capital in public infrastructure, an educated and healthy workforce… with which to work) so that corporations are transparent about their affairs and pay tax as part of their corporate responsibility; re-evaluating the meaning of corruption – insiders abusing the common good in secrecy and getting away with it and so worsening inequality and entrenching vested interests and unaccountable power – so that we see, more clearly, all of the actors and their activities; and changing the culture that fawns over people who abuse the system for personal gain. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

And some progress appears to be occurring along lines he suggests. For example, a version of automatic information exchange (AIE), by which governments make sure that essential information is made available to other jurisdictions as a matter of routine, has been discussed by the OECD and, while full of loopholes – see ‘Loophole USA: the vortex-shaped hole in global financial transparency’ – some commitments have been made. For the list of commitments as at November 2018, see ‘AEOI commitments’.

However, the USA has not made this commitment and while Switzerland, for example, finds this objectionable – see ‘The U.S. hasn’t signed the AEoI Agreement: Reciprocity demanded’ – the reality is that it makes little difference. For example, ICO Services, which specializes in the formation of offshore companies and offshore banking, will assist you to get around the AEoI requirement. Their website advertises that ‘asset holders need to start looking for alternative jurisdictions for protecting their assets. There are some reputable jurisdictions that are still outside the AEoI – e.g. Cyprus – but U.S. states of Delaware and some others shouldn’t be dismissed.’

But if you want a more established name to help you take advantage of a tax haven in the USA, you really can’t go past Rothschild & Co. So, to check out what they are offering: ‘Here Is Rothschild’s Primer How To Launder Money In U.S. Real Estate And Avoid “Blacklists”’.

Moreover, the AEoI agreement ‘outlaws’ bank secrecy but not trust secrecy (which dates from the Crusades) on which the British model is based – ‘The Trust lies at the core of the British secrecy model’ – so it does not address the cornerstone of British tax haven secrecy and explains why the British were happy to see the Cayman Islands commit to the AEoI. In short: the British government would be happy to kill off bank secrecy so that they can capture a larger market share (based on Trust secrecy). See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Separately from this initiative, in 2018 the UK parliament enacted a new law requiring its overseas territories – including notorious tax havens like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands – to start disclosing the owners of corporations they register by 2020. In theory: ‘This could shut down a huge amount of offshore tax evasion and other financial crimes because individuals from anywhere in the world, including the United States, have long been able to set up secret corporations in these tax havens to stash their money.’ See ‘New UK Law May Shut Down the Biggest Tax Havens – Aside from the U.S.’

However, while the report pointed out that the new law obviously does not impact the USA (or, of course, Switzerland or …) and the easy rerouting options available if these havens are effectively (or even actually) shut down, it failed to mention that this initiative does not in any way address the City of London Corporation so the impact of this initiative must be very limited unless it is followed by some pretty drastic initiatives in Westminster, Washington, Bern and elsewhere.

In summary, while one cannot disagree with any of Shaxson’s fine suggestions or be displeased that public pressure has led to some effort being made by the OECD and the UK parliament to address elements of the tax haven scourge, the reality is that the extent of the changes necessary are not going to happen without enormous grassroots pressure, strategically applied, and they are very unlikely to happen as reforms of the existing capitalist system. This is simply because the global elite is solidly in control of the institutions and processes of global capitalism, including its compliant governments and international organizations, and will readily stymie any attempt at serious reform of tax havenry particularly given the number of major reforms needed and the number of nations in which these reforms must be enacted. To state two obvious examples: The City of London Corporation has not existed for 1,000 years because it has no defense. And the changes noted above have only made the US more attractive as a secrecy jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, with the aim of promoting ‘financial innovation’, Switzerland has recently made things easier for smaller financial technology companies thus making tax havenry more attractive to those who might not have otherwise considered it. See ‘Swiss watchdog to propose looser anti-money laundering rules for fintechs’.

So, given that most tax havens are protected by host government legislation and there is no international mechanism to control them, the tax haven industry generally is not under threat of being held to account in any significant way.

And, despite the more elaborate explanation offered above, there is a simple reason for this. Unofficially, of course, illegal money, laundered through tax havens, has become an essential and sometimes stabilizing element of the global financial system. See ‘Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor’.

So what can we do that will make a difference?

Given the deeply entrenched and long-standing nature of this problem, clearly it needs to be addressed at various levels.

Fundamentally, we can nurture our children so that we do not destroy their conscience. See ‘My Promise to Children’. Remember all of those corrupt/criminal accountants, bankers, businesspeople, priests and popes, lawyers and politicians that kept creeping up in the discussion above? The people who maintain the entire infrastructure that allows tax havens to exist and those who manage and profit from it too?

Do they care about you? Do they care about the people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who starve as a result of the types of policies that allow tax havens to exist and function? Do they care about those driven into poverty and homelessness in modern industrial economies because vast sums are drained out of them and hidden in secrecy jurisdictions? Do they care about the people killed by the military and other violence from which they profit and then hide the proceeds to evade tax? Do they care about the Earth? Fundamentally, do they care about themselves?

Of course not! But this is only because they are extraordinarily psychologically damaged individuals. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with a more complete explanation in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

If we inflict enormous violence on a child throughout their childhood to compel their obedience, how can we expect them to grow up to lead a life of integrity based on their conscience, courage, compassion, empathy and love? Those who use tax havens are truly ‘poor little rich boys’ (and girls). See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ and ‘Why Set Up a Shell Company in Panama? The Psychology Driving Illicit Financial Flows’.

Beyond tackling the problem at its source however, we can also tackle manifestations of the problem but not by lobbying elites – and their political agents: there are no votes in it, in any case – to control this depravity for which they are well rewarded.

For a start we can boycott all of the major private banks in favor of those smaller or member-owned banks that have a serious commitment to peace, justice and ecological sustainability, or we can seek out equivalent institutions like credit unions. We can also create public banks based on ethical principles. See ‘What are Public Banks and How Do They Operate? An Introduction’.

We can boycott large corporations – like Amazon, Apple, Gap, Google, Ikea, Microsoft and Starbucks – that use tax havens. None of these corporations is a monopoly: there are alternatives which can be investigated and employed, assuming we can’t go without some version of the product or service they offer. Whenever you can, find a locally-owned outlet that offers a local product or service.

We can boycott the Catholic Church. God does not ask that you morally or financially support a corrupt organization that doesn’t understand or represent morality and spirituality. Remember, it was Jesus who threw the moneychangers out of the temple.

If our conscience speaks loudly enough, we can decline employment by any organization that is unethical, such as those that use tax havens.

We can refuse to gamble, refuse to buy the services of a sex worker (who might even be illegally trafficked into the work), refuse to buy the products of endangered species – see, for example, ‘Killing Elephants “for Pet Food” Condemned’ – and refuse to use illicit drugs. These products and services are virtually always offered by industries controlled by criminal organizations so by buying them you are only harming yourself and/or other people or species about whom you could choose to exercise a duty of care while also not contributing to the diversion of financial resources into tax havens.

We can encourage unions, with members who work for organizations using tax havens, to take a stand on the issue.

We can support existing organizations that work on the problem, preferably those that offer grassroots alternatives. The Tax Justice Network, an ‘activist think tank’, and its sister organization, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, campaign for systemic change.

If we are genuinely ambitious, we can develop comprehensive nonviolent strategies to compel particular individuals and organizations to desist from using tax havens or even compel countries to close down tax havens. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. This can easily be part of a larger strategy to transform the global economy into one that satisfies human and ecological needs, particularly given the imminence of biosphere collapse, as noted above. See ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’.

If violence and exploitation in all of their guises concern you, consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

So here is a final question for you to consider: What might the world look like if all those trillions of dollars were being shared and spent where they are most needed?

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

8 VENEZUELA LIES THE US GOVERNMENT & MAINSTREAM MEDIA WANT YOU TO BELIEVE

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Makia Freeman

Source: Waking Times

Venezuela lies abound. Both the USG (United States Government) and its lapdog MSM (Mainstream Media) have been going into overdrive, exaggerating or just plain lying about the state of affairs in Venezuela. Truth is always a casualty of war, and it’s also a casualty of pre-war, as the NWO prepares the ground for military intervention by demonization and propaganda. Here are 8 lies about Venezuela which are being used to justify yet another coup in a long, long history of US coups in foreign lands.

Venezuela Lies #1: The Venezuelan People Have No Food and the Shelves Are Bare

In these videos (here and here) on the ground in Caracas, Max Blumenthal exposed one of the lies about Venezuela that is constantly repeated, i.e. that the people have no food and the supermarket shelves are bare.

Venezuela Lies #2: The US Only Wants to Send Aid

If by “aid” you mean “weapons and barbed wire for radical opposition forces,” then yes, the US only wants to send aid. However, if by “aid” you mean actual medicine, then no. This VenezuelaAnalysis report quotes a NYT reporter and USAID itself. They either don’t have medicine as part of the inventory or state outright that there was no medicine:

“According to New York Times reporter Anatoly Kurmanaev, the trucks that the opposition tried to force across the border contained “no medicine” at all, with reports that a “small” amount of medicine was being stockpiled in Cucuta not confirmed by USAID. Initial inventories from USAID made no mention of medicine, listing only basic food and personal hygiene products amongst the “aid”.”

The Venezuelan Government is accepting aid from Russia and other countries it can trust, just not the US, since US “aid” may just “accidentally” happen to contain weapons for anti-Maduro agitators (or, as the Spanish say, compradores). Hmm, wonder how those arms got in the food truck?

As I covered in the article NGOs: Choice Tool of Subversion for the New World Order, NGOs have become a weaponized tool of soft power through which the NWO expands its empire – meddling, destabilizing, toppling and installing, all the while using the NGO as a humanitarian pretext. USAID is just another in a long-line of NGOs loyal to the US Government and NWO, willing to put a nice PR happy face on their agenda of subversion.

Venezuela Lies #3: Juan Guaido Has Legitimacy in Declaring Himself President

As I covered in my previous article Is This the Most Blatant US Coup Ever?, Juan Guaido is a US-CIA stooge through and through. He’s an agent-provocateur “opposition leader” who has been carefully groomed to play his role in the coup. His claim to be interim president of Venezuela under Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution is, legally, utter nonsense, since Maduro has not abandoned the presidency and Maduro held free, open and fair elections as adjudged by outside independent parties.

Venezuela Lies #4: Many Countries Support Guaido

The US claims many nations and groups support its efforts to topple Maduro and install Guaido. In reality, these countries are basically vassal states or other nations controlled by the US that don’t want to upset the apple cart. Notice the strategy of the US: try to co-opt the United Nations HRC (Human Right Council) into following US coup efforts, and try to strong-arm groups like the OAS (Organization of American States) and the Lima Group into betraying their brother nation Venezuela.

The US tried this same trick with the Syrian War by creating and controlling a group called “Friends of Syria.” Here is what Venezuela’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador Jorge Valero said:

“the self-proclaimed “Lima Group” is a cartel made up of satellite governments of the imperial government to break Latin American and Caribbean unity, and, due to the failure of using the Ministry of the Colonies, which is the OAS to isolate Venezuela in this organization. The empire and its minions couldn’t approve Article 20 of Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Permanent Council of the OAS and resort to the United Nations Security Council, where they also failed. The creation of puppet governments by the US is not new.”

Venezuela Lies #5: The US Cares about the Venezuelan People (Just Like It Cares about the Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Iranian People)

The NWO uses the US to bring all nations into its fold, but it like to do so with the veneer of democracy so as to gain more public support and engender less resistance. Subversion, NGO soft power and covert operations are more palatable than overt control and boot-in-the-face oppression. In this vein, the USG likes to pretend it truly cares and has deep compassion for the people of nations like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and any other place it plans to subvert, invade or bomb … even though it has never professed such care in the past and will probably never again profess it in the future once its new puppet leader is installed.

Just look at the kind of lies, hypocrisy and nonsense Pence and a “deeply concerned” Pompeo tweeted about Iran when the USG set it sights on igniting a coup there in 2018:

Venezuela Lies #6: Venezuela is Only in the Condition It is Because of Chavez, Maduro and Socialism (They’re the Bad Guys)

Nothing is black and white. It is possible to look at the unfolding Venezuelan crisis and acknowledge that Maduro has mismanaged things while at the same time seeing the gross foreign interference he and his government have been subjected to. As I covered in other articles such as Venezuelan Economic Crisis: The Real Cause is Not Socialism, US-NWO foreign meddling is by far the biggest factor here. For instance, did you know that Bank of England has effectively stolen USD$1.2 billion from Venezuela by toeing the NWO line and blocking Venezuela from accessing it? Did you know that the US has effectively stolen USD$11 billion from Venezuela by freezing its US accounts? How is a small nation supposed to function as normal when such massive amounts are stolen from it?

Venezuela Lies #7: Yes, the US Has Toppled Governments Worldwide, But “This Time It’s Different”

Once you study enough history, you begin to see the lies of tyrants and empires. The lie remains the same. The US wants Venezuela’s gold and mineral reserves. It’s only 5 days from the US, whereas the Middle East is around 20 days from the US and in a very volatile part of the world. There is also the strategic acquisition of the mineral coltan. They also want to teach the successive government to Hugo Chavez a lesson after he thumbed his nose at the US-NWO Empire. This isn’t any different from other subversions and invasions. It fits the pattern exactly.

Venezuela Lies #8: It’s a “Grassroots Uprising” against a “Brutal Dictator”

This entire coup has been planned, orchestrated and executed from Washington. Period. There is no “grassroots uprising.” Ever wondered why Assad and Maduro are “brutal dictators” but bin Salman, El Sisi and other US-CIA stooges are not? It’s all about branding the enemy, marketing foreign interference and controlling perception. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. Al-Qaeda is bad and now Al-Qaeda is good. Were we fighting Eastasia or was it Eurasia?

Who is the brutal dictator? Who is imposing economic warfare and deprivation, starvation and misery by sanction? Who is fomenting regime change on innocent nations? Who is funding and supporting terrorists to topple any government they don’t like?

Final Thoughts: The US vs. Russia/China Proxy War Continues

Both Russia and China have invested a lot in Venezuela, including actual investments in their oil, military assistance and financial loans. They are not about to let the US get away with this – even if Venezuela is in the USA’s backyard, geographically speaking. The Monroe Doctrine, which started out in the 1800s as a policy by which the US would protect fellow American nations from European invasion, has now been turned on its head. Raving warmonger John Bolton recently mentioned the term as yet another excuse for the US to dominate whomever it wants on the 2 American continents. However, despite all the Venezuela lies emanating from Washington DC and the MSM, Venezuela is going to be a tough nut to crack, and many American and Westerners are already aware of the propaganda being used to foment war.

Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia Merger: Global Empire of Dystopia?

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The nature of reality in times of universal confusion

The world and our interpretation of it are often at best an idea and, at worse, a figment of our imagination. In our full-blown Orwellian construct, the truths of some are the fake news of others. Invisible forces and undisclosed interests rule the world and its so-called leaders, who are mostly actor-puppets directed from scripted narratives. They largely live in an alternate universe where, if you repeat outlandish lies often and loudly enough, the disinformation becomes the unquestionable reality for countless people. Reality has become stranger than fiction because the conflicting narratives about what is supposed to be real are, by and large, fictional. They are cleverly crafted propaganda that manipulate by maximizing confusion. The masters of this craft have gutted familiar words of all meaning.

For example, at the heart of Oceania, the white-orange clown emperor, obsessed with walls to protect his subjects from southern brown invaders, told his adoring patrons and sycophants, “we renew our resolve that Oceania shall never be socialist!” The aging patricians gathered for the obligatory annual feast gave him a standing ovation, and loudly chanted “Oceania, Oceania, Oceania!…” This enthusiastic chanting from Oceania’s Patricians, except for the more dignified Supreme Elders and Commanders of the Praetorian Guard, repeated itself on cue at least four of five times, to celebrate the great universal superiority of the invincible mighty empire of the free and the brave! The egotistical emperor’s writers must have laughed as he served up their outstanding fictions to the empire’s docile subjects!

Schopenhauer’s relevant pessimism

In his essential book, The World as Will and Idea, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) contested the rationalist notion that reason alone gave humans the universal key to an infinitely complex, and often irrational, reality. He took the assessments Immanuel Kant had made in his Critique of Pure Reason a step further by adding the fundamental notion of sufficient reason. This was a less absolute concept of the relation of cause to effect, which he anchored in what he deemed to be four categories of human knowledge: science, morality, logic, and metaphysics. Schopenhauer’s work was in part a reaction to the overly optimistic vision of the rationalists, with Rene Descartes in the lead.

In his inherent pessimism, Schopenhauer turned out to be more realistic about the limitations of humans to grasp, not only the full elusive scope of reality, but also their own frailty and insignificance as a self. In these gloomy times of uncertainty and of a general dumbing-down effect in our impoverished global culture, Schopenhauer’s work helps to explain why most aspects of our existence, including our relationship with nature, are beyond most people’s comprehension. For most humans, the absolute reality is an extremely fragmented knowledge filtered through the prism of their perceptions.

Global empire of dystopia?

In other words, whether one lives in Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia, the definitions of reality and information have been tailored in these different places to different needs, but almost all the narratives fulfill opaque agendas whose main objectives are to keep people on edge and in despair. The brainwashing from most media makes nearly everybody thoroughly dazed and confused. The goal is to break the will of populations and beat their souls into submission. For this to work, dissent must be eradicated. Let’s face it, if we stay on course, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia could soon merge into the global Empire of Dystopia where 2+2=5. For example, Oceania claims that, with its satellite-vassals, the empire defeated ISIS, which it had worked to create, although it is the leader of sovereign Syria (with the help of Eurasia and the former empire of Persia) who defeated both Oceania and ISIS after seven years of war.

From one manufactured crisis to another, always in what my esteemed colleague Dady Chery calls “other people’s countries,” the mad circus goes on and on like a merry-go-round. And it works, so long as the big lies are salted with a little truth for seasoning. As world citizens, we are tasked with dismantling this monstrous global Orwellian Empire of many faces that is tightening its grip everywhere.

Empires of the past and present, which are in flux, have always extended their powers through satellite provinces and spheres of influence. Empires dislike dissent from within, as well as nearby states that are eager to stay independent and sovereign. During the simpler times of the Cold War when the United States and USSR tried to divide the world in two, some independently minded head of states, such as Tito, Nasser and Castro, refused to submit to this bipolarity and initiated the nonaligned movement. This notion must be urgently revisited, for the sake of the little that is left of smaller nations’ sovereignty.

Of course, Orwell’s cartography of the three entities of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia no longer reflects the geopolitical reality, but his principle of mass indoctrination is at play on a global scale. The narratives appear to be in conflict, but the nitty-gritty mechanics below the radar are similar. Under the surface, and despite the veneers of ideological or religious clashes, a global scheme of wealth and power concentration has been unleashed. Worldwide, the super-rich, and the corporate entities they control, are getting richer while the middle-class is vanishing and the poor are becoming enslaved. Merciless capitalism is the true god of the Orwellian Empire’s three subdivisions. Capitalism demands daily sacrifices of sweat, tears and blood. The system’s blatant contradictions do not trouble its ruling class. On one hand, pseudo nationalist-populists are the servants of a supra-national corporatism, and on the other, the so-called liberals and neoliberals can, on short notice, adopt the worst methods of authoritarian repression.

Two examples of this are unfolding that serve as valuable case studies. First, there is Oceania’s effort to grab a critical piece of what it views as its birthright continent. This is, of course, Venezuela. Secondly, in La Macronie, an eastern asset of Oceania that used to be an empire in its own right, there is the intent to create an authoritarian neoliberal regime with a metrosexual humanitarian touch, to curtail widespread popular protests.

Venezuela: Revolution is imperialism

Oceania has in its crosshair the sovereign state of Venezuela, founded by Simon Bolivar. All empires have precepts or doctrines that conveniently serve to expand their territories and influence by various means, including military invasions, organization of coups and, lately, severe economic sanctions to engineer failed states that become ripe for orchestrated revolutions. The nervous system of Oceania, in Washington DC, views Venezuela as a natural appendage, based on one of the oldest formative tenets of the empire: the Monroe Doctrine, concocted in 1823. It came about using the seemingly altruistic but false notion that the newly independent countries of Central and South America had to be protected from their old colonial masters. In time, it became a claim to all the Americas as the United States’ domain and backyard.

To topple the legitimately elected Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, whom Washington does not like, the empire is again trying to manufacture a revolution led by someone it handpicked and groomed. The name of the man who currently aspires to be Oceania’s Governor in Venezuela hardly matters. Through the years, the strategy of fake revolution following economic sanctions has had mixed results: it failed in Iran in 2009; it worked against Qaddafi in Libya, combined with a small military intervention; it partially worked in Ukraine until Eurasia stepped in; it failed entirely in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad remains in power. With Venezuela’s military still firmly on his side, this strategy is unlikely to work with the heir of Hugo Chavez.

So far the aggression against Venezuela has served as a thorough head count of Oceania’s vassals and enemies. In the Americas, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay have defied the with-or-against-us litmus test. The rest, including Canada, have aligned themselves with the imperial diktat that Maduro must go. It is the same with most of the European imperial colonies of Oceania, except for Italy and Greece. This is a clear demonstration that the leaders of most states in the European Union lack a foreign policy independent from Oceania and operate largely as governors for Oceania rather than heads of state.

Indeed, according to Mr. Temir Porras, who has worked as Nicolas Maduro’s chief-of-staff and a foreign-policy advisor to Hugo Chavez, the position of most EU countries in supporting Guaido reeks of “neocolonialist interference.” The eight-day “ultimatum to hold presidential elections before recognizing Juan Guaido is a schizophrenic and incomprehensible position.” Porras elaborates that it is “absurd to say that Juan Guaido represents a consensus with Maduro’s opposition in Venezuela,” and that Guaido from the far-right populist party, Voluntad Popular, was almost unknown in Venezuela two weeks ago.

On the opposite side, to go back to Orwell’s cartography lexicon, those that claim so far that “Maduro must stay,” besides the four Latin American countries named above, involve an interesting alliance of Eurasia, Eastasia, and the former Persian and Ottoman empires.

Gilets Jaunes: rays of sunshine on a bleak horizon

Meanwhile, in La Macronie, a beautiful land with a soil rich in its bounty of bread, wine and revolution, a real revolution is brewing from the streets. A little light flickers at the end of the tunnel of our gloomy path, it is like countless little rays of sunshine that try to brighten our dark days, it is the Gilets Jaunes movement. The little governor for Oceania, an arrogant and imperious man who might have liked to be king in a parallel universe, is trying to stop the flow of a tempestuous Gilets Jaunes river with rubber-bullet guns, riot-police shields, and repressive legislation. The disparity between his actions and his almost humanitarian discourse have lost him all credibility. In La Macronie, the governor, by curtailing the freedom to protest and freedom of the press, is testing a brand new form of oppression. It is a young elegant authoritarian regime, with a smile, that caters to the global elite of murderous capitalism. This is an important test, and many worldwide are counting on the Gilets Jaunes to prevail.

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, five, six, seven and eight from the archives of Jakob Reimann; two from the archive of Wackystuff; three from the archive of Philip Pacemaker; four by Daryn Moffitt; nine by Nicholas J. Potter; ten and eleven by Joka Madruga; and fourteen by Urban Nauth.

It’s back to the future with Venezuelan ‘Contras,’ the neocons, and the CIA

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

Donald Trump displayed his full neocon colors on February 18 during a speech at Florida International University in Miami. With convicted Iran-contra felon Elliott Abrams now acting as his “special envoy” in charge of overthrowing the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump urged Venezuelan military officers to rise up in a coup d’état and oust Maduro, who Trump called a “Cuban puppet.”

Trump’s call for a coup in Venezuela is ironic when his most loyal supporter in the U.S. Senate, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), claimed that senior Justice Department officials who were discussing legally invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office in early 2017 were trying to stage a “coup” against Trump. Coups are unconstitutional in any form, while the removal of a president under the 25th Amendment is following the U.S. Constitution to the letter.

As protesters, who carried signs with “No U.S. Coup in Venezuela” and “Hands Off Venezuela,” staged a demonstration on campus and Trump rattled sabers against Venezuela in his speech on the Modesto A. Maidique Campus, covert U.S. operators were busy at Florida airports shipping arms to Venezuelan paramilitary units in Colombia.

At the same time as Trump was threatening Venezuela with a coup, the Haitian government of President Jovenel Moise and Prime Minister Jean-Henry Céant—one of a half dozen remaining allies of the Maduro government in the Western Hemisphere—was faced with an attempted U.S.-led insurrection in his impoverished nation. It is no coincidence that Moise, who was financially buoyed with $2 billion in fuel subsidies and other financial assistance from Venezuela’s state-run PetroCaribe Fund, has faced protests in his country that appear to have been prompted by U.S. “regime change” operatives. Planted in the Haitian media were reports that the Venezuelan fuel assistance funds had been pocketed by Moise and members of his government. That prompted violent protests on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Cap Haïtien, Jeremie, Gonaïves, and Jacmel that have been raging since February 7. More suspicious is that the U.S. State Department ordered all non-essential personnel out of the country following the outbreak of the protests.

On February 17, Haitian police arrested a group of eight heavily-armed men traveling in two cars in the capital of Port-au-Prince. Among the group were five Americans and a Russian, Serbian, and Haitian. The Russian and Serbian may hold permanent residency status in the United States. The Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported that police discovered in the foreigners’ cars automatic rifles, 45-caliber and Glock pistols, a large amount of ammunition, drones, and satellite phones. Also found in the vehicles were a telescope, backpacks, bullet-proof vests, and various documents, including a list of names of Haitian citizens. The vehicles bore no license plates and the suspects’ passports had no Haitian visa entry stamps. The passports did show extensive travel to other countries prior to being in Haiti. Five Haitian license plates were found in the vehicles.

When arrested by police, the eight men refused to provide identification, insisting that they were on some sort of “government mission.” They did not identify the “government” for whom they were working but insisted that they did not have to talk to the police. One of the arresting police officers said one of those arrested told him, “Our boss would call your boss.” After the eight men were arrested, another vehicle pulled up with a man, who spoke French to the police. He was also arrested. There are unconfirmed reports that the eight men arrested had earlier masqueraded as Haitian National Police officers.

The U.S. corporate media has largely refrained from identifying the arrested Americans and the others. WMR is not bound by protocols with the U.S.

Intelligence Community. The men arrested in Port-au-Prince are:

Kent Leland KROEKER, born February 14, 1967, USA partner and chief operating officer of Kroeker Partners, a private security firm. Kroeker is a Marine Corps officer veteran who flew missions in Iraq and Afghanistan
Christopher Mark McKINLEY, born September 26, 1969, USA
Danilo BAJAVIC, Serbian national, born Belgrade, born May 19, 1982, visa stamp for Karasovici, Croatia, dated July 21, 2017
Vlade JANKOVIC, Russian national, born October 9, 1978, Russia
Talon R. BURTON, U.S. national, born April 9, 1967, USA
Christopher M. OSMAN, U.S. national
Dustin Daniel PORTE, U.S. national, born February 12, 1976, USA
Michael ESTERA, Haitian national, born October 28, 1980, Haiti

In addition to Kroeker, all of the arrested Americans have U.S. military backgrounds. Estera may be a foreign national employee of the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince. It is also noteworthy that Blackwater founder Erik Prince, under investigation for conspiring with Russian, Saudi, and Emirati officials on behalf of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, employs Serbian and Russian ex-military members in his Reflex Responses (R2) mercenary firm, based in Abu Dhabi. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is education secretary in the Trump administration.

Haitian police chief Michel-Ange Gedeon told reporters that the men would be charged with violation of weapons laws and criminal conspiracy. The U.S. State Department had no comment on whether the arrested Americans had received U.S. consular assistance, to which they are entitled. The Central Directorate of the Judicial Police (DCPJ) is in charge of the investigation of the foreigners.

The 1980s Contra wars of the Ronald Reagan administration were known for the heavy involvement of U.S. mercenaries, who operated in Central America with a “wink and a nod” from the Central Intelligence Agency and a covert coordination team in the basement of the White House, as well as the Pentagon, and State Department. The mercenaries received their orders from National Security Adviser John Poindexter, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, and Elliott Abrams, now Trump’s regime change coordinator for Venezuela. As the Reagan team attempted to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, they were also waging a brutal death squad campaign against leftists in El Salvador and Guatemala. In a repetition of history, the Trump administration has authorized a covert campaign to destabilize the government of Nicaragua, while assisting right-wing governments in Guatemala and Honduras to assassinate leftist journalists, activists, and indigenous leaders. Just as during the 1980s, El Salvador is due to become a staging post for a pro-U.S. rightist government under president-elect Nayib Bukele. Bukele replaces the administration led by the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which was targeted by the Reagan administration during the 1980s with death squads and paramilitary teams.

At the same time the U.S. mercenaries were arrested in Haiti, Venezuelan authorities seized a Boeing 767 jet, operated by 21Air LLC, said to have been carrying arms to U.S.-backed rebels in Venezuela. The Boeing 767 took off on February 3 from Miami, the same city where Trump, championed by right-wing Cuban-Americans and exiled oligarchs from Venezuela, vowed to overthrow Maduro and “socialism” throughout the hemisphere.

The Boeing’s cargo was seized by Venezuelan authorities at Valencia airport. Included in the secret cargo manifest were 9 assault weapons, including AR-15 rifles, a Micro Draco semi-automatic pistol, and a Colt 7.62 rifle with telescopic sights, in addition to 118 ammunition cartridges and military radio antennas. 21Air LLC’s chairman is Adolfo Moreno, who, according to McClatchy News, is linked to Gemini Air Cargo, an airline involved with the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program during the George W. Bush administration and identified as such in a report made by the Council of Europe. The Boeing seized by Venezuela has been busy the last few months, making runs from Miami International Airport to Valencia and Caracas, Venezuela, and Bogota and Medellin, Colombia. 21Air claimed to McClatchy that the Boeing 767 had been chartered by another firm called GPS-Air. 21Air operates a sister firm, 21Cargo, formerly called Solar Cargo C.A.

Moreno is listed in Florida corporation records as also owning South Eastern Aviation LLC of Doral, Florida, Conaire LLC of Miramar, Florida, JW Aviation LLC of Doral; Apple Aviation LLC of Doral; Reliable Transport Logistics LLC of Hialeah, Florida; Freighter 23801 LLC of Hialeah, Freighter 23803 of Doral; Direct Warehouse LLC of Doral; Dynamic Travel LLC of Doral; Enduring Ventures LLC of Miami; and Florida Franchise Development LLC of Miramar. Florida Franchise Development was incorporated by Moreno in 2001 as a subsidiary of Gemini Air Cargo. That firm, along with Airline Management Group, incorporated in 1987, and Gemini Cargo Logistics Inc., the latter a subsidiary of Gemini Air Cargo, all had the same business address of 1750 NW 66th Ave., Miami. According to McClatchy, that address is currently used by Avianca, the Colombian national air carrier. When Trump called for the overthrow of the Venezuelan government, he did so in the midst of dozens of CIA front companies that specialize in carrying out coups, murder, and mayhem.

21Air LLC was incorporated in 2014 and is based in Greensboro, North Carolina, but operates out of Miami International Airport. North Carolina was the location of other CIA proprietary airline front companies involved in the agency’s kidnapping program. These included Air Serv International; Aero Contractors Limited, operating out of Johnston County Regional Airport and the Kinston Regional Jetport; Assembly Pointe Aviation, Inc.; and Water Above Mountain Holdings, LLC of Burlington, North Carolina.

Prior to January, when Maduro was sworn in for a second presidential term, the Boeing 767 had been traveling between Miami, Philadelphia, and other continental U.S. cities.

The smuggling of U.S. weapons to Venezuelan rebels has evoked memories of Elliott Abrams’s antics during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. CIA contract airlines, including Southern Air Transport, were busy illegally flying U.S. weapons to Honduras and, via air drop, over Nicaragua, for use by the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contra guerrillas. One thing about neocons like Abrams and Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton is that they rarely divert from their standard playbooks. Neocons, not being very bright to begin with, find it difficult to “think outside the box,” therefore they repeat the same failed policies and maneuvering over and over again. And that is the clinical diagnosis of insanity.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

Thinking about American Totalitarianism

Posted on February 28, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Dan Corjescu

Source: CounterPunch

Totalitarianism evolves.

Yet what remains the same through time is the attempt at total control.

Today, control is veiled not overt.

Control weaves its way both totally and surgically into our everyday lives.

Totally, in the master narrative it weaves about “living in a democracy”.

Today, no one lives in a true democracy.

Elections, parties, political personalities are all fraudulent constructions hiding real power.

The media and the entertainment industry are focused on creating a consumerist-nationalist imaginary where shopping and waving the flag are effective daily remedies to ward off any uncomfortable existential doubts.

Both business and the nation still reign in the hearts and minds of millions as the “true Gods”.

The revolution of the “multitude” is far, far away.

Empire, American Empire, is neither setting, fading, or waning. On the contrary, its tentacles stretch throughout every conceivable path and production of biopower.

The expansion of American power that began in earnest after the Great War has continued unabated.

The world is more American now than it has ever been.

Surgically, America through its unrivaled mastery of technology, organization, and capital can pick and choose the actors and actions it wills to manipulate or eliminate.

American global networks of surveillance and suppression have grown and deepened. The threat of world revolution and terror are convenient stories to both mobilize and mesmerize the multitude.

A Hitler and/or a Bin-Laden will always conveniently appear when needed.

Consumption, in all its forms, is the only ideology and it is highly effective since it is based on basic biological processes. The pleasure centers of the brain have lent themselves to the construction of a life of bodily gratification. Thus the ideological celebration of the body has become the new ideological prison of the mind. Nietzsche’s “last man” is the middling subject of our present day totalitarianism.

The majority live their lives dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and are of no threat or consequence. They are “well adjusted” to the “eternal” run of things. Those who are less so, can be easily handled with marginalization, demonization, psychiatry, and if all else fails, surreptitious elimination.

What are the ultimate goals of power? Its naked reproduction. Power is its own justification. The members may change, but the goal of power’s eternal maintenance remains the same.

Yes, we are allowed to talk, read, go to church, temple, or mosque and even demonstrate but any true chance at deviation from the total control of a society blinded by physical bliss and intoxicated by triumphant and progressivist narratives is precluded from the beginning.

Yet, in the end, change will come. But it will be a change that will serve the interests of those for whom total power is the ultimate aim. The world’s inherent fluidity will run and be directed through their rigid hands.

Death of Free Speech leads to Fascism

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

Freedom of speech is rather important. If people do not feel free to express their thoughts, then all they can do is endlessly repeat what has been said before, creating an echo chamber which no new understandings can ever penetrate. What they repeat may have been a tissue of lies from the outset, or it may have been true or relevant once, but will become outdated and, essentially, as good as a lie.

Lies beget ignorance. Ignorance begets fear. Fear begets hatred. And hatred begets violence. The ability to speak our minds and to listen to others—even those who are said to be our enemies—is what separates us from wild beasts. Deprive us of this right, and sure as rain we degenerate into subhumans who claw at the ground, howl at the moon and gnaw on raw human flesh… or something like that.

The practice of free speech is quite a demanding art. Just being able to make intelligible sounds with your mouth or to poke at a keyboard in a way that pleases the spell-checker makes you no more an expert practitioner of free speech than does the ability to get up from your chair and walk to the bathroom make you a ballet dancer. Free speech encompasses the expression of fact and opinion. Facts cannot be fake, or you can stand accused of libel or of spreading disinformation. Opinion cannot be incendiary, or you can stand accused of undermining public order.

To be on the safe side, free speech should not contain performatives—speech acts that seek to alter the state of the world. Calls to action, unsolicited advice, coercion, intimidation, threats, personal categorizations and the like can all reasonably be banned without hurting the exercise of free speech at all. Demagoguery—attempts to manipulate public sentiment by exploiting popular desires, fears and prejudices—is rather unhelpful, although to some extent unavoidable. Some forms of free speech should be rightfully privileged over the rest: the literary arts (both fiction and nonfiction), cinematography, music, visual and performance arts are at the top; political slogans shouted over swine-toned music at an audience of sloppy drunks are definitely near the bottom.

The quality of society is directly proportional to the quality of its exercise of free speech, and to assure high quality some form of quality control is usually called for. Governments often have to backstop this need by legislating against certain forms of speech. The older standard against incendiary speech or speech that may cause a panic—shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater—is justified as a matter of public safety. Newer standards against hate speech and discrimination are on shakier ground. They are essentially gag orders that drive the exercise of certain forms of speech underground, thereby making it harder to regulate and more dangerous. The expectation that banning “hate speech” will prevent hatred is unrealistic; nor is the expectation that haters can be compelled to do their hating in silence. Likewise, banning discriminatory speech can only suppress overt expressions of discrimination but not the behavior itself, making it more intractable, since nothing short of a lobotomy can prevent people from discriminating against those they find disagreeable.

Aside from government-provided backstops (which are blunt, inaccurate instruments) most of what provides for high-quality free speech is self-control and, to the extent that it is needed, self-censorship. Essentially, every negative form of free speech—disinformation, libel, demagoguery, manipulation, incendiary rhetoric, etc.—reduce the level of respect and trust between the speaker and the audience. Taken to an extreme, the concept of free speech itself becomes superfluous as everybody manifests their ignorance while spouting their worthless opinions without bothering to listen to anyone else—because everyone else is equally ignorant and their opinions are equally worthless and meaningless. The only thing that can prevent this backslide into worthlessness and meaninglessness is high standards of social adequacy.

But how can such high standards persist in a world of trolls and bots, of concocted false narratives endlessly blasted out at full volume, where a thought that is significantly longer than a tweet simply cannot be expressed? How can they be enforced if the modern value system requires tolerance, nondiscrimination and inclusiveness toward all—including the most miserable miscreants—lowering the price of admission to public discourse to zero? Surprisingly, it can, and it does persist: some writers find their readers and some performers find their audiences—somehow. Their numbers aren’t huge, but then, since quality is almost always inversely proportional to quantity, their small numbers don’t matter that much.

In fact, these numbers are so small that to ascribe any sort of significant agency to those who pay attention, or to those to whom they pay attention. The proper and essential function of free speech is not to somehow remake the world in one’s own image (you should consider yourself lucky if you can bring about a change in yourself, never mind make a difference in your own family or neighborhood). Its function is to keep you sane and grounded and to prevent you from cascading down through lies, ignorance, fear, hatred and violence, eventually degenerating into wild beasts who claw at the ground, howl at the moon and chew on each other…

The concocted false narratives endlessly blasted out at full volume make such work difficult. The narratives that are designed to generate a misplaced sense of agency are perhaps the most difficult veil to shred. No matter how many times I try to explain that the US is not a democracy and that it doesn’t matter who is president, these facts seem to just bounce off people’s heads. When I try to explain certain facts about technology—for instance, that wind and solar power unfortunately just don’t work and that the countries that pursue them are setting themselves up for economic disaster, but that for all of its dangers nuclear power does seem to have a very important future (although only in certain countries)—in response people demand to know whether or not I am “in favor” of nuclear power.

What a ridiculous question! That’s like you asking your flush toilet what it thinks of sewage treatment or your office chair whether it is in favor of a sedentary lifestyle. Just like the office chair and the toilet you and I, with respect to nuclear power, are not subjects but objects. If you are reading this, then you are willy-nilly in favor of nuclear power, because if the nuclear reactors were off your screen would be blank and you’d be sitting in the dark with the heat or the air conditioning not working. But that’s a false choice—simply because it isn’t on offer—any more than an office chair or a toilet can decide whether it wishes to be sat on or not.

And now there is another development that is making the exercise of free speech even more difficult: the phenomenon of “deplatforming.” Various companies, including Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, Patreon and various others, have taken it upon themselves to become arbiters of free speech and interpreters of the First Amendment. Their conceit is that their user base forms a “community” upon which they are entitled to impose “community standards.” In fact, they are privately owned for-profit companies and their clients are individuals or other companies, not communities. They may try to argue that they are publishers of some sort, and publishers are entitled to maintaining an editorial policy, but there is an unbridgeable gap between the editorial process and just typing some text and clicking “publish.” In fact, what they are attempting to do is perhaps best described as vigilante censorship. The most that they are entitled to do is refer their users for prosecution if there is reason to believe that their users have violated specific laws.

I became aware of this new “deplatforming” menace a couple of months ago, when some of my readers started abandoning Patreon after it deplatformed certain people. Prior to that my readership on Patreon had been growing nicely, but then the growth stalled. I’ll never know—and don’t really care—what was behind these decisions, since I don’t see them as legitimate. Typical parting comments from my readers were:

“You crossed the line with censorship and I cannot support this company.”

“I believe in freedom of speech. Censorship is not a virtue. Shame on you.”

“Patreon should not be a moral arbiter. You are supposed to be a payment platform.”

“This site cannot be trusted to support free speech.”

In short, Patreon’s censorship, which it disingenuously called “community standards,” was costing me money, and so I complained:

“Your editorial policy is costing me money. Since Patreon is just a paywalled blogging platform I don’t understand why you should have an editorial policy at all. If you find that your clients are violating state or federal laws you should refer them for prosecution; if not, I honestly do not understand what gives you the reason or the right, or the legal competence, to act as interpreters of the First Amendment.”

The answer I got back was rather terse: “…we do not disclose any details surrounding creator page removals…” First, that isn’t an answer to my question. Second, it shows a remarkable degree of contempt for any sort of fairness. Secret tribunals that result in “removals,” that are based on vague, private, arbitrary rules, that refuse to disclose the basis of their decisions, that cause financial losses but refuse acknowledge them or to compensate for them… doesn’t that sound just a tiny bit fascist?

And so I set up a SubscribeStar account where I publish all the same materials as on Patreon, and to which my readers have been gradually migrating. SubscribeStar is not quite as feature-rich as Patreon (yet) and it has been banned by PayPal (not a big loss; my readers seem to hate PayPal) but it does have the advantage of being honest: it is simply a blogging platform integrated with a paywall.

Meanwhile, the “deplatforming” has only grown worse. Most recently, CNN aired a public denunciation of RT (which it accused of being Russian), and based on this denunciation Facebook saw it fit to ban RT from Soapbox, Waste-Ed, Backthen as well shut down a personal project “In The Now” by the American journalist Anissa Naouai (because she works for RT). These were projects with millions of subscribers and billions of views. CNN’s denunciation was phrased as follows: these projects influence America’s young people! The bloody Russians are at it again, contaminating “our precious bodily fluids”!

None of this has anything at all to do with Russia, or the Russian government, or Putin personally. RT is government-financed, but so is BBC (which, it has now been admitted, lied about the fake chemical attacks in Syria’s Douma, causing Trump to unleash a volley of cruise missiles on Syria, most of which, luckily, the Syrians managed to shoot down). But while the British may lie as they wish (and provoke war crimes as a result) the Russians aren’t allowed to say anything at all—because they are Russian.

To understand the rationale behind this bout of Russophobia, it is important to understand that it has nothing to do with “containing Russia” or anything of the sort (that project has already failed). Instead, Russophobia neatly serves the internal political needs of the US and other Western countries. Two trends—the gradual suppression of free speech and the gradual dehumanization of Russians—go hand in hand. Free speech can be suppressed because of “Russian trolls” and election results can be manually rearranged as needed because of “Russian meddling.”

What makes such measures necessary? The West is experiencing an entire series of crises that is beginning to form the classical pattern defined by Lenin as the revolutionary situation: the elites can no longer rule as before while their subjects can no longer live as before. Western establishment (primarily its Deep State component) is forced to confront this problem. How can it preserve its power and maintain control, all without changing course or even swapping out it deeply unpopular public-facing figureheads? It has decided to deal with this crisis by suppressing the public will. Since such suppression is incompatible with maintaining the fiction of democratic governance, democracy has got to go. That’s where the Russians come in handy: if the voters don’t vote as programmed, then an entire election can be annulled because of “Russian meddling.” “Russian trolls” and Russian “fake news” are helpful too: they offer an excuse for suppressing free speech.

Having a phantom enemy is very helpful. First, there is nothing like the fear of an external enemy to force people to rally around their ruling elites. Second, since the enemy is a phantom, there is no danger of defeat in an actual war. But there is another danger: in the process of vilifying this phantom enemy, Russians as an ethnos are being progressively dehumanized. And the problem is that dehumanizing the enemy always results in degeneracy—not of the enemy, but of the dehumanizers themselves. Inevitably, it is the dehumanizers who end up running around on all fours, howling at the moon and having each other for dinner. Lies engender ignorance; ignorance engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence. At some point a horrific crime against Russians will take place, which will baptize both the Western elites and their Untermenschen in Russian blood, tying them together with bonds of criminal complicity. (This scenario has already been tested out in Eastern Ukraine.)

Before our eyes the most reactionary and the most chauvinistic and homicidal parts of Western financial elites are transforming Western “democracy” into a model terrorist dictatorship. But it is very hard to see what they could possibly hope to achieve other than the physical destruction of their own populations—if that can be considered an achievement. Perhaps their actual achievement will be in being able to carry out this destruction without having their own populations even notice that it is happening, lost as they are in a world of delusions fashioned out of false narratives endlessly blasted at them at high volume. We should feel lucky that a few voices are still able to pierce through the Bedlam, although we don’t know for how much longer. In the meantime, take a look around. This is what fascism looks like.

Cyberpunk is Now and No One Knows What to Do With It

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Pattern Theory

Source: Modern Mythology

Cyberpunk broke science fiction. Creeping in alongside the commercialization of the internet, it extrapolated the corruption and dysfunction of its present into a brutal and interconnected future that remained just a heartbeat away. Cyberpunk had an attitude that refused to be tamed, dressed in a style without comparison. Its resurgence shows that little has changed since its inception, and that’s left cyberpunk incapable of discussing our future.

Ghost in the Shell got the live-action treatment in 2017, a problematic remakeof the 1995 adaptation. Some praised its art direction for increasing the visual fidelity of retrofuture anime cityscapes, but the general consensus was that the story failed to apply care and consideration towards human brains and synthetic bodies like Mamoru Oshii had more than two decades before. A few months later came Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the cyberpunk classic. Critics and fans praised it for high production values, sincere artistic effort, and meticulous direction. Yet something had gone wrong. Director Denis Villeneuve couldn’t shake the feeling that he was making a period movie, not one about the future.

Enough has changed since the 1980s that cyberpunk needs reinvention. New aesthetics. An expanded vocabulary. Code 46 managed this years ago. It rejects a fetish for all things Japanese and embraces China’s economic dominance. Conversations being in English and are soon peppered with Mandarin and Spanish. Life takes place at night to avoid dangerous, unfiltered sunlight. Corporations guide government decisions. Genetics determine freedom of movement and interaction. Climate refugees beg to leave their freeway pastures for the safety of cities.

Code 46 is cyberpunk as seen from 2003, a logical future that is now also outdated.

If Blade Runner established the look, Neuromancer defined cyberpunk’s voice. William Gibson’s debut novel was ahead of the curve by acknowledging the personal computer as a disruptive force when the Cold War was at its most threatening. “Lowlife and high tech” meant the Magnetic Dog Sisters headlining some creep joint across the street from a capsule hotel where console cowboys rip off zaibatsus with their Ono Sendai Cyberdeck. But Gibson’s view of the future would be incomplete without an absolute distrust of Reaganism:

“If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I’d have to owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan’s presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.” — William Gibson

“Fragments of a Hologram Rose” to Mona Lisa Overdrive is a decade of creative labor that was “tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture.” The Sprawl is a cyberpunk trilogy where military superpowers failed and technology gave Japan leadership of the global village. Then Gibson wrote Virtual Light and readers witnessed extreme inequality shove the middle class into the gig economy as corporations schemed to profit off natural disasters with proprietary technology.

Gibson knew the sci-fi he didn’t care for would absorb cyberpunk and tame its “dissident influence”, so the genre could remain unchanged. “Punk” is the go-to suffix for emerging subgenres that want to appear subversive while posing a threat to nothing and no one. It’s how “hopepunk” becomes a thing. But to appreciate cyberpunk’s assimilation, look at how it’s presented sincerely.

CD Projekt Red (CDPR), known for the Witcher game series, has spent six years developing what’s arguably the most anticipated video game of the moment, Cyberpunk 2077. Like Gibson, Mike Pondsmith, creator the original “pen-n-paper” RPG, and collaborator on this adaptation of his work, has had his writing absorbed by mainstream sci-fi. CDPR could survive on that 31-year legacy, but they insist they’re taking their time with Cyberpunk 2077 to craft an experience with a distinct political identity that somehow allows players to remain apolitical. In a way this is reflective of CDPR’s reputation as a quality-driven business that’s pro-consumer, but has driven talent away by demanding they work excessive hours and promoting a hostile attitude towards unions. This crunch culture is a problem across the industry.

We’ll soon see how Cyberpunk 2077 developed. What we can infer from its design choices, like giving protagonist V a high-collar jacket seen on the cover of the 2nd edition game book from 1990, is that Cybperpunk 2077 will be familiar. Altered Carbon and Ready Player One share this problem. Altered Carbon is so derivative of first-wave cyberpunk it’s easy to forget its based on a novel from 2002. Ready Player One at least has the courtesy to be shameless in its love of pop culture, proud to proclaim that nothing is more celebrated today than our participation in media franchises without ever considering how that might be a problem.

What’s being suggested, intentionally or not, is that contemporary reality has avoided the machinations of the powerful at a time when technology is wondrous, amusing, and prolific. If only we were so lucky.

238 cities spent more than a year lobbying Amazon, one of two $1 trillion corporations in existence, for privilege of hosting their new office. In November it was announced that Amazon would expand to Crystal City, Virginia and Long Island City, Queens. Plenty of New Yorkers are incensedthat the world’s largest online marketplace will get $3 billion in subsidies, tax breaks, and grants to further disrupt a housing market that takes more from them than any city should allow. Some Amazon employees were so excited to relocate they made down payments on their new homes before the decision went public, telling real estate developers to get this corner of New York readyfor a few thousand transplants. But what of the people already there?

Long Island City is home to the Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in the US. Built in 1939, these two buildings are home to more then 6,000 people with an average income of $16,000. That’s far below the $54,000 for Queens residents overall. But neither group is anywhere near the average salary for the 25,000 employees Amazon will bring with them, which will exceed $150,000. How many of those positions will be filled by locals? How many will come from Queensbridge?

Over 800 languages are spoken in Queens, making it the most linguistically diverse place in the world. Those diverse speakers spend over 30% of their income on rent. They risk being priced out of their neighborhoods. Some will be forced out of the city. Has Governor Cuomo considered the threat this deal poses to people’s homes? Has Mayor de Blasio prepared for the inevitable drift to other boroughs once property values spike? Looking at Seattle and San Francisco, there’s no reason to expect local governments to be proactive. So New Yorkers have taken up the fight on their own.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos toyed with these politicians. He floated the idea that any city could become the next Silicon Valley and they believed him. They begged for his recognition, handed over citizen data, and took part in the $100 billion ritual of subsidizing tech companies.

It was all for nothing. Crystal City is a 20-minute drive from Bezos’ house in Washington DC, where Amazon continues to increase its spending on lobbyists. That’ll seem like a long commute compared to the helicopter ride from Long Island City, the helipad for which is subsidized by the city, to Manhattan, the financial and advertising capital of the world, where Bezos owns four more houses.

The auction for Bezos’ favor was a farce. New York and Virginia give him regular access to people with decision-making power, invaluable data, and institutions that are are sure to expand his empire. These cities were always the only serious options.

Amazon’s plans read like the start of a corporate republic, a cyberpunk trope inspired by company towns. Employers were landlords, retailers, and even moral authorities to workforces too in debt to quit. Many had law enforcement and militias to call on in addition to the private security companies they hired to break labor strikes, investigate attempts at unionization, and maintain a sense of order that resulted in massacres like Ludlow, Colorado.

Amazon is known for labor abuses, monitoring, and tracking speed and efficiency in warehouses without bathroom breaks, where employees have collapsed from heat exhaustion. They sell unregulated facial recognition services to police departments, knowing it misidentifies subjects because of inherent design bias. Companies with a history of privacy abuses have unfettered access to their security devices. They control about half of all e-commerce in the US and, as Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill found out, it is impossible to live our lives without encountering Amazon Web Services.

It doesn’t take a creative mind to imagine similar exposition being attributed to corporate villains like Cayman Global or Tai Yong Medical.

Rewarding corporations for their bad behavior is just one way the world resembles a fictive dystopia. We also have to face rapid ecological and institutional decay that fractionally adjusts our confidence in stability, feeding a persistent situational anxiety. That should make for broader and bolder conversations about the future, and a few artists have managed to do that.

Keiichi Matsuda is the designer and director behind Hyper-Reality, a short film that portrays augmented reality as a fever dream that influences consumption, and shows how freeing and frightening it is to be cut off from that network. Matsuda’s short film got him an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos to “speak truth to power.” What Matsuda witnessed were executives and billionaires pledging responsibility with t-shirts and sustainability, while simultaneously destroying the environment, as an audience of their peers and the press nodded and applauded “this brazen hypocrisy.” So Matsuda took a stanchion to his own installation.

Independence means Matsuda gets to decide how to talk about technology and capitalism, and how to separate his art and business. It also means smaller audiences and fewer productions.

Sam Esmail used a more visible platform to “bring cyberpunk to TV” with Mr. Robot. Like Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, it’s cyberpunk retooled for the present — post-cyberpunk. Esmail never hesitates to place our villains in Mr. Robot. Enron is an influence on logo designs and tactics of evil corps. Google, Verizon, and Facebook are called out for their complicity with the federal government in exposing customer data. AT&T’s Long Lines building, an NSA listening post since the 1970s, plays the role of a corporate data hub that reaches across the county. Even filming locations serve as commentary.

An anti-capitalist slant runs through Mr. Robot, exposing the American dream as a lie and our concept of meritocracy as a tool to protect the oligarchy, presenting hackers as in direct contact with a world of self-isolation and exploitation, those who dare to hope for a future affected by people rather than commerce. And Esmail somehow manages this without interference from NBC.

Blade Runner will get more life as an anime. Cowboy Bebop is joining Battle Angel Alita in live action. Altered Carbon is in the process of slipping into a new sleeve. There’s no shortage of revivals, remakes, and rehashing of cyberpunk’s past on the way. They’ll get bigger audiences than a short film about submitting to algorithms. More sites will discuss their pros and cons than a mobile tie-in that name-drops Peter Kropotkin and Maria Nikiforova. But in being descriptive and prescriptive, moving to the future and looking for sure footing in the accelerated present, Matsuda’s and Esmail’s work reminds us that cyberpunk needs to be more than just repeating what’s already been said about yuppies, Billy Idol, and the Apple IIc.

We live at a time where 3D printing is so accessible refugees can obtain prosthesis as part of basic aid. People forced to migrate because of an iceless arctic will rely on that assistance. Or we could lower temperatures and slow climate change by spraying the atmosphere with sulfate, an option that might disrupt advertising in low-orbit. Social credit systems are bringing oppressive governments together. Going cashless is altering our expectations of others. Young people earn so little they’re leveraging nude selfies to extend meager lines of credit. Productivity and constant notifications are enough to drive some into a locked room, away from anything with an internet connection. Deepfakes deny women privacy, compromise their identity, and obliterate any sense of safety in exchange for porn. Online communities are refining that same technology, making false video convincing, threatening our sense of reality. Researchers can keep our memories alive in chat bots distilled from social media, but the rich will outlive us all by transfusing bags of teenage blood purchased through PayPal.

In a world that increasingly feels like science fiction it’s important to remind ourselves that writing about the future is writing about the present. Artists worthy of an audience should be unable to look at the embarrassment of inspiration around them and refuse the chance to say something new.

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After the Crash

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

Category Archives: elites

Cyberpunk is Now and No One Knows What to Do With It