Category Archives: elites

Freedom Rider: Russiagate and the surveillance duopoly

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Intrepid Report

Republican and Democratic Party dueling over Russiagate provides us with a teachable moment. It should teach us to disrespect and discredit the law enforcement system as it exists in this country. We must oppose the surveillance state altogether and we should not be tricked by duopoly theatrics into thinking that either of the evil twins are acting in our interests.

Local cops plant drugs and weapons in order to arrest and convict anyone they want. They kill an average of three people every single day. Cash bail keeps the poor in jail not because they are necessarily dangerous, but because they are poor. Those are just some facts in the litany of oppression used by law enforcement against mostly poor, black people. But there is another order of wrong doing that engulfs the whole world.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) created a system which determines when the federal government may spy on anyone suspected of acting on behalf of a foreign agent. FISA set up a rubber stamp kangaroo court with only a handful of warrants being rejected in the forty year history of this law.

FISA authority was used to keep Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page under surveillance in 2016. Republicans claim that the warrant was granted as a result of the Christopher Steele opposition research dossier that was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. No one knows if this assertion is true, but the fight over declassifying the memo predictably turned into political theater. Republicans said the memo would end the suspicion of Trump collusion with the Russian government and Democrats asserted that the system would fall apart if the memo was ever declassified and released.

If Republicans are correct the FISA warrant was problematic and the case for collusion is tainted. Democrats now make the case for declassifying their own memo and continuing the foolish spectacle of irrelevance. Despite the drama, both assertions are beside the point. The larger and more important issue is that the American justice system is decidedly unjust.

Prosecutors are among the worst criminals in this country. From small towns to federal courthouses they wield power that few can circumvent. Rich people need not worry because they exist in a bubble with laws of their own making. Public officials bow down to them and happily violate statutes in order to keep them happy. It is all rotten and the case for and against Trump is an opportunity to discuss how few rights we have and how the system is rigged against all but the apex predators at the top of the food chain.

Instead of making the case for tearing up this monstrosity, otherwise intelligent people are pointing fingers and choosing one disreputable side over the other. Every Republican voted to extend the FISA program. They were joined by Democrats like Congressman Adam Schiff, who leads the case for collusion, and who has made a name for himself by stoking the Russiagate fire. Schiff cried the loudest against releasing the Republican memo and claimed that declassification would pose a threat to the nation. When he had the chance to do something for the judicial system he joined with the people he allegedly opposes and supported continuing the FISA travesty. Our individual rights are obviously of little concern to Schiff. Then again he is a former prosecutor so little can be expected of him in this regard.

Russiagate is a sinkhole of political confusion and that is precisely why it was created. It began with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a lackluster effort meant to continue the neo-liberal agenda, make war, and do little else. She had nothing to offer voters and hung her hat on making Trump look like “Putin’s puppet.” Had she done a minimal effort there would have been no need for pay offs to British spies or whipped up Russophobia. The entire Democratic Party was complicit in the debacle and they welcomed a tale of collusion in order to deflect the blame they so richly deserved.

The sorry spectacle continues as Republicans are equally determined to keep Trump in office and make their dreams of kleptocracy and diminished governmental authority a reality. Democrats are looking to explain away a string of electoral failures and maintain the illusion of being the inclusive party when they are merely shadows of the hard right Republicans.

Let all the memos be released. There should be no sanctity bestowed upon government secrets. They are a ruse meant to cover up for worldwide gangsterism. Defending the FBI, CIA, NSA or any of the other “intelligence community” agencies is to be a dupe of the highest order. Police in Baltimore and other cities may plant drugs and weapons on suspects, but the mega-killers lie about weapons in entire nations and cause death and suffering on a mass scale.

Sooner or later Russiagate will play out. Whatever the result, this country will still be the one that locks up more of its people than any other. It will still be a threat to world peace. When the wheels of injustice grind on, only fools will have chosen between the two corrupt parties.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

A Stock Market Primer, in Six Easy Steps

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By William Kaufman

Source: CounterPunch

What is the stock market?

1) It’s not real economic activity—it’s a form of mass hysteria or mass psychosis.

2) Stock prices reflect a mass-hysteria impression of the worth of a piece of paper you hold—a stock certificate. The worth of that piece of paper is sometimes tethered to some economic reality of some corporation—at least partially—but sometimes not. Often a stock price bears little relation to the economic health of a company, as illustrated in the wildly gyrating stock price-to-earnings ratios through the decades. Hence the stock price is often a matter of caprice, covert manipulation, and/or unfathomable crowd psychology, not necessarily real economic “health” or productivity.

If, say, you are fortunate enough to own a stock that has doubled or tripled in price, this does not mean that you have accrued new wealth—that stock valuation is meaningless as long as you still own the piece of paper (the stock certificate); you realize that wealth only by selling the stock. And if you do cash out—sell the piece of paper—to someone else, you are transferring to another person the hazard of seeing that valuation drop or evaporate—an opportune fobbing off of risk to someone else, a transfer of cash to you, but no real creation of wealth—just the passing on of a piece of paper in exchange for currency. Eventually, down the road, your gain will be someone else’s loss when the music stops playing and the last holder of the piece of paper finds there is no chair for him to land on—the stock market as Ponzi scheme.

If everyone or most people decide to sell their pieces of paper—to take their profits—all at once, then the stock prices tumble, so the idea that everyone can cash out and realize this imaginary wealth equally and universally is a mirage: if everyone tried to access it at once, it would evaporate. Hence the common notion that rising stock prices indicate a general increase in wealth or national prosperity is delusional. A stock crash does not erase billions or trillions in “wealth” overnight, as we are commonly told. There was never any “wealth” there to begin with, in the sense that a stock price rationally or measurably reflects the worth of tangible goods or services; that price is just a mass fever dream, a collective, chaotic, bidding war about the worth of pieces of paper.

3) The stock market is a swindle.

Much of the movement of these equities markets originates in the decisions of large funds or high-speed traders who have access to esoteric information, advanced algorithms, or trading networks from which Joe Trader, playing the market at home on his laptop, is excluded. Hence Joe Trader inevitably gets screwed. The author Michael Lewis draws the veil from this complicated high-tech rigging in a 2014 interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes:

Steve Kroft: What’s the headline here?

Michael Lewis: Stock market’s rigged. The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism is rigged.

Steve Kroft: By whom?

Michael Lewis: By a combination of these stock exchanges, the big Wall Street banks and high-frequency traders.

Steve Kroft: Who are the victims?

Michael Lewis: Everybody who has an investment in the stock market. . . .

Steve Kroft: And this is all being done by computers?

Michael Lewis: All being done by computers. It’s too fast to be done by humans. Humans have been completely removed from the marketplace. “Fast” is the operative word. Machines with secret programs are now trading stocks in tiny fractions of a second, way too fast to be seen or recorded on a stock ticker or computer screen. Faster than the market itself. High-frequency traders, big Wall Street firms and stock exchanges have spent billions to gain an advantage of a millisecond for themselves and their customers, just to get a peek at stock market prices and orders a flash before everyone else, along with the opportunity to act on it. . . . The insiders are able to move faster than you. They’re able to see your order and play it against other orders in ways that you don’t understand. They’re able to front run your order.

Steve Kroft: What do you mean front run?

Michael Lewis: Means they’re able to identify your desire to, to buy shares in Microsoft and buy ‘em in front of you and sell ‘em back to you at a higher price. It all happens in infinitesimally small periods of time. There’s speed advantage that the faster traders have is milliseconds, some of it is fractions of milliseconds. But it’s enough for them to identify what you’re gonna do and do it before you do it at your expense.

4) The MSM commentators on the markets are all industry touts.

Their unvarying counsel, under all circumstances, is this: Get into the market. Get in if you’re not in already. Stay in if you’re already in. A plunge is a buying opportunity. A surge is a buying opportunity. A buying opportunity is that which puts a commission in their pockets. A mass exit from the stock market is the end of their livelihood. I don’t know the Latin term for the logical fallacy at work here, but I think the English translation is something like this: bullshit being slung by greedy con artists. These are people with no more conscience or expertise than the barking guy with the Australian accent on the three a.m. informercial raving about a miracle degreaser or stain remover.

5) This market, more than most, is a big fat bubble, ready to pop.

This bubble is a cloistered biosphere of Teslas and beach houses, of con artists, kleptocrats, and financial sorcerers. It is rigorously insulated from the dolorous real economy inhabited by the 99 percent: declining living standards; stagnant real hourly wages; lousy service-industry jobs; debilitating consumer and student debt peonage; soaring medical insurance premiums and deductibles that render many people’s swiss-cheese policies unusable; crumbling cities and infrastructure; climate disasters of biblical proportions; and toxic food, water, and air. This stock-market bubble has been artificially inflated by historically low interest rates (so the suckers have to go into the market to get a return on their money) and Fed “quantitative easing,” a technocratic euphemism for a novel form of welfare for the one percent that has left untold trillions of “liquidity” sloshing around among the financial elites with which to play Monopoly with one another and pad their net worth by buying back shares of their own companies to inflate stock prices. Moreover, this bubble is even more perilous and tenuous than previous ones because the “air” inside is being pumped by unprecedented levels of consumer and institutional debt that will cause a deafening “pop” when some of the key players start to lose their shirts, and suddenly all the Peters start calling in the debts of all the Pauls who can’t pay.

6) The end game is near. We can console ourselves that these latest innovations in financial prestidigitation and fraud are stretched about as far as they can go. The financial elites are out of three-card monte scams to suck the wealth out of the economy. The heroic productivist heyday of capitalism, celebrated by Marx himself, is over in this country—no more driven visionary builders of railroads, factories, skyscrapers, and highways to a better tomorrow: just endless financial skullduggery and hoarding at the top, and for the rest of us the cold comforts of cell phones, smart televisions, and the endless streams of plastic consumer junk circulating through Amazon and Walmart. What Baudrillard called “the mirror of production” is a prison for the planet earth and every species on it. All that is left for the bipartisan predator class of the United States is scavenging: massive tax breaks for the rich today and tomorrow, perhaps, no more Medicare, no more Social Security, no more public schools—if they have their way, and they probably will. Pop goes the stock market, the illusion of prosperity, the whole unsustainable carbon-poison “economy,” and pop goes the planet and the human race. But look at it this way: it’s a buying opportunity.

Thought Police for the 21st Century

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By Chris Hedges

Source: TruthDig

The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of speech. Any state that accrues this kind of power will use it. And for that reason I traveled last week to Detroit to join David North, the chairperson of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, in a live-stream event calling for the formation of a broad front to block an escalating censorship while we still have a voice.

“The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans,” Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said in a statement issued in support of the event. “Between the democratization of communication and usurpation of communication by artificial intelligence. While the Internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. While still in its infancy, the trends are clear and of a geometric nature. The phenomena differs in traditional attempts to shape cultural and political phenomena by operating at scale, speed and increasingly at a subtlety that eclipses human capacities.”

In late April and early May the World Socialist Web Site, which identifies itself as a Trotskyite group that focuses on the crimes of capitalism, the plight of the working class and imperialism, began to see a steep decline in readership. The decline persisted into June. Search traffic to the World Socialist Web Site has been reduced by 75 percent overall. And the site is not alone. AlterNet’s search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News’ traffic is down 72 percent. And the situation appears to be growing worse.

The reductions coincided with the introduction of algorithms imposed by Google to fight “fake news.” Google said the algorithms are designed to elevate “more authoritative content” and marginalize “blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.” It soon became apparent, however, that in the name of combating “fake news,” Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are censoring left-wing, progressive and anti-war sites. The 150 most popular search terms that brought readers to the World Socialist Web Site, including “socialism,” “Russian Revolution” and “inequality,” today elicit little or no traffic.

Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in a hearing Wednesday that Facebook employs a security team of 10,000—7,500 of whom “assess potentially violating content”—and that “by the end of 2018 we will more than double” it to over 20,000. Social media companies are intertwined with and often work for U.S. intelligence agencies. This army of censors is our Thought Police.

The group, Bickert said, includes “a dedicated counterterrorism team” of “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials and prosecutors who worked in the area of counterterrorism.” She testified that artificial intelligence automatically flags questionable content. Facebook, she said, does not “wait for these … bad actors to upload content to Facebook before placing it into our detection systems.” The “propaganda” that Facebook blocks, she said, “is content that we identify ourselves before anybody” else can see it. Facebook, she said, along with over a dozen other social media companies has created a blacklist of 50,000 “unique digital fingerprints” that can prevent content from being posted.

“We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence,” she told the committee. “That’s why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts.”

“Counterspeech” is a word that could have been lifted from the pages of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

Eric Schmidt, who is stepping down this month as the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has acknowledged that Google is creating algorithms to “de-rank” Russian-based news websites RT and Sputnik from its Google News services, effectively blocking them. The U.S. Department of Justice forced RT America, on which I host a show, “On Contact,” that gives a voice to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist voices, to register as a “foreign agent.” Google removed RT from its “preferred” channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked the Russian news service agencies RT and Sputnik from advertising.

This censorship is global. The German government’s Network Enforcement Act fines social media companies for allegedly objectionable content. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to remove “fake news” from the internet. Facebook and Instagram erased the accounts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator of the Chechen Republic, because he is on a U.S. sanctions list. Kadyrov is certainly repugnant, but this ban, as the American Civil Liberties Union points out, empowers the U.S. government to effectively censor content. Facebook, working with the Israeli government, has removed over 100 accounts of Palestinian activists. This is an ominous march to an Orwellian world of Thought Police, “Newspeak” and “thought-crime” or, as Facebook likes to call it, “de-ranking” and “counterspeech.”

The censorship, justified in the name of combating terrorism by blocking the content of extremist groups, is also designed to prevent a distressed public from accessing the language and ideas needed to understand corporate oppression, imperialism and socialism.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. … Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. …”

Corporate capitalism, and the ideology that justifies it—neoliberalism, the free market, globalization—no longer has any credibility. All of the utopian promises of globalization have been exposed as lies. Allowing banks and corporations to determine how we should order human society and govern ourselves did not spread global wealth, raise the living standards of workers or implant democracy across the globe. The ideology, preached in business schools and by pliant politicians, was a thin cover for the rapacious greed of the elites, elites who now control most of the world’s wealth.

The ruling elites know they are in trouble. The Republican and Democratic parties’ abject subservience to corporate power is transparent. The insurgencies in the two parties that saw Bernie Sanders nearly defeat the seemingly preordained Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and the election of Donald Trump terrify the elites. The elites, by attacking critics and dissidents as foreign agents for Russia, are seeking to deflect attention from the cause of these insurgencies—massive social inequality. Critics of the corporate state and imperialism, already pushed to the margins, are now dangerous because the elites no longer have a viable counterargument. And so these dissidents must be silenced.

“What’s so specifically important about this is that in a period of growing political radicalization among young people, among workers, they start to look for oppositional information, they become interested in socialism, revolution, terms like ‘equality,’ those terms which previously would bring thousands of readers to the World Socialist Web Site, now were bringing no readers to the World Socialist Web Site,” North said. “In other words, they were setting up a quarantine between those who may be interested in our site and the WSWS. From being a bridge, Google was becoming a barrier, a guard preventing access to our site.”

The internet, with its ability to reach across international boundaries, is a potent tool for connecting workers across the earth who are fighting the same enemy—corporate capitalism. And control of the internet, the elites know, is vital to suppress information and consciousness.

“There is no national solution to the problems of American capitalism,” North said. “The effort of the United States is to overcome this through a policy of war. Because what, ultimately, is imperialism? The inability to solve the problems of the nation-state within national borders drives the policy of war and conquest. That is what is emerging. Under conditions of war, the threat of war, conditions of growing and immeasurable inequality, democracy cannot survive. The tendency now is the suppression of democracy. And just as there is no national solution for capitalism, there is no national solution for the working class.”

“War is not an expression of the strength of the system,” North said. “It is an expression of profound and deep crisis. Trotsky said in the Transitional Program: ‘The ruling elites toboggan with eyes closed toward catastrophe.’ In 1939, they went to war, as in 1914, aware of the potentially disastrous consequences. Certainly, in 1939, they knew what the consequences of war were: War brings revolution. But they could not see a way out. The global problems which exist can only be solved in one of two ways: the capitalist, imperialist solution is war and […] fascism. The working-class solution is socialist revolution. This is, I think, the alternative we’re confronted with. So, the question that has come up, in the broadest sense, [is] what is the answer to the problems we face? Building a revolutionary party.”

“There is going to be, and there is already unfolding, massive social struggles,” North said. “The question of social revolution is not utopian. It is a process that emerges objectively out of the contradictions of capitalism. I think the argument can be made—and I think we made this argument—that really, since 2008, we have been witnessing an acceleration of crisis. It has never been solved, and, indeed, the massive levels of social inequality are themselves not the expression of a healthy but [instead] a deeply diseased socioeconomic order. It is fueling, at every level, social opposition. Of course, the great problem, then, is overcoming the legacy of political confusion, produced, as a matter of fact, by the defeats and the betrayals of the 20th century: the betrayal of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism; the betrayals of the working class by social democracy; the subordination of the working class in the United States to the Democratic Party. These are the critical issues and lessons that have to be learned. The education of the working class in these issues, and the development of perspective, is the most critical point … the basic problem is not an absence of courage. It is not an absence of the desire to fight. It is an absence of understanding.”

“Socialist consciousness must be brought into the working class,” North said. “There is a working class. That working class is open now and receptive to revolutionary ideas. Our challenge is to create the conditions. The workers will not learn this in the universities. The Marxist movement, the Trotskyist movement, must provide the working class with the intellectual, cultural tools that it requires, so that it understands what must be done. It will provide the force, it will provide the determination, the emotional and passionate fuel of every revolutionary movement is present. But what it requires is understanding. And we will, and we are seeking to defend internet freedom because we want to make use of this medium, along with others, to create the conditions for this education and revival of revolutionary consciousness to take place.”

 

Why Fear and Self-hatred Destroy Human Sharing and Solidarity

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Photo by Adam Dean

By Robert J. Burrowes

As our world spirals deeper into an abyss from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves, some very prominent activists have lamented the lack of human solidarity in the face of the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya. See ‘The Rohingya tragedy shows human solidarity is a lie’ and ‘Wrongs of rights activism around Rohingyas’.

While I share the genuine concern of the Yemeni Nobel peace laureate Tawakkol Karman and Burmese dissident and scholar Dr Maung Zarni, and have offered my own way forward for responding powerfully to the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya – see ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat Genocide’ – in my view the lack of solidarity they mention is utterly pervasive and readily evident in our lacklustre official and personal responses to the many ongoing crises in which humanity finds itself.

To mention just the most obvious: Every day governments spend $US2 billion on weapons and warfare while a billion people lack the basic resources to live a decent life (and more than 100,000 of these people starve to death). Every day millions of people live under dictatorship, occupation or suffer the impacts of military invasion. Every day another 28,800 people are forcibly displaced from their home. Every day another 200 species of life are driven to extinction. And every day our biosphere is driven one step closer to making human life (and perhaps all life) on Earth impossible. See ‘Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction’.

It is not as if any of this information is unavailable. Just as many people and major international organizations are well aware of the plight of the Rohingya, it is also the case that many people and these organizations are well aware of the state of our world in other respects. And still virtually nothing meaningful happens (although there are tokenistic responses to some of these crises).

Hence, it is a straightforward observation that human solidarity is notably absent in virtually any attempt to tackle the major issues of our time. And the Rohingya are just one manifestation of this problem.

Given that I have long observed this phenomenon both personally and politically, and it concerns me as well, I would like to explain psychologically why the lack of sharing and solidarity is such a pervasive problem and suggest what we can do about it.

In order to feel concern for those who are suffering, and to want to act in solidarity to alleviate their suffering, it is necessary to experience certain feelings such as sympathy, empathy, compassion, love and (personal) power. Moreover, it is necessary that these feelings are not suppressed or overwhelmed by fear and, equally importantly, not overwhelmed by a feeling of (unconscious) self-hatred. If someone is scared and full of unconscious self-hatred, then they can have little interest in sharing their own resources or acting in solidarity with those who need help. And this applies whether the adversely impacted individual is a close relative or friend, or someone on the other side of the world.

So why is fear in this context so important? Simply because fear grotesquely distorts perception and behaviour. Let me explain why and how.

If an individual is (consciously or unconsciously) frightened that one or more of their vital needs will not be met, they will be unable to share resources or to act in solidarity with others, whatever the circumstances. In virtually all cases where an individual experiences this fear, the needs that the individual fears will not be met are emotional ones (including the needs for listening, understanding and love). However, the fearful individual is never aware of these deep emotional needs and of the functional ways of having these needs met which, admittedly, is not easy to do given that listening, understanding and love are not readily available from others who have themselves been denied these needs.

Moreover, because the emotional needs are ‘hidden’ from the individual, the individual (particularly one who lives in a materialist culture) often projects that the need they want met is, in fact, a material need.

This projection occurs because children who are crying, angry or frightened are often scared into not expressing their feelings and offered material items – such as a toy or food – to distract them instead. The distractive items become addictive drugs. This is why most violence is overtly directed at gaining control of material, rather than emotional, resources. The material resource becomes a dysfunctional and quite inadequate replacement for satisfaction of the emotional need. And, because the material resource cannot ‘work’ to meet an emotional need, the individual is most likely to keep using direct and/or structural violence to gain control of more material resources in an unconscious and utterly futile attempt to meet unidentified emotional needs.

This is the reason why people such as the Rothschild family, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim, the Walton family and the Koch brothers as well as the world’s other billionaires and millionaires seek material wealth, and are willing to do so by taking advantage of structures of exploitation held in place by the US military. They are certainly wealthy in the material sense; unfortunately, they are utterly terrified (and full of self-hatred) and each of them justly deserves the appellation ‘poor little rich boy’ (or girl).

If this was not the case, their conscience, their compassion, their empathy, their sympathy and, indeed, their love would compel them to use or disperse their wealth in ways that would alleviate world poverty and nurture restoration of the ancient, just and ecologically sustainable economy: local self-reliance. See ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Of course, it is not just the billionaires and millionaires of the corporate elite who have suffered this fate.

Those intellectuals in universities and think tanks who accept payment to ‘justify’ (or simply participate in without question) the worldwide system of violence and exploitation, those politicians, bureaucrats and ordinary businesspeople who accept payment to manage it, those judges and lawyers who accept payment to act as its legal (but immoral) guardians, those media editors and journalists who accept payment to obscure the truth, as well as the many middle and working class people who accept payment to perform other roles to defend it (such as those in the military, police, prison and education systems), are either emotionally void or just too frightened to resist violence and exploitation, in one or more of its many manifestations.

Moreover, governments that use military violence to gain control of material resources are simply governments composed of many individuals with this dysfunctionality, which is very common in industrialized countries that promote materialism. Thus, cultures that unconsciously allow and encourage this dysfunctional projection (that an emotional need is met by material acquisition) are the most violent both domestically and internationally. This also explains why industrialized (material) countries use military violence to maintain political and economic structures that allow ongoing exploitation of non-industrialized countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

But, equally importantly, many ‘ordinary’ people are just too scared to share (more than a token of) what they have and to act in solidarity with those who suffer whether through military or other violence, exploitation, persecution, oppression or occupation. Of course, it takes courage to resist this violent world order. But underlying courage is a sense of responsibility towards one’s fellow beings (human and otherwise) and the future.

As noted above, however, fear is not the only problem. Two primary outcomes of fear are self-hatred and powerlessness. Here is how it happens.

When each of us is a child, if our parents, teachers and/or the other adults around us are frightened by a feeling – such as sadness, anger or fear – that we are expressing, then they will use a variety of techniques to stop us expressing this feeling. They might, for example, comfort us to stop us crying, scare us out of expressing our anger (particularly at them) and reassure us so that we do not feel afraid.

Tragically, however, responses such as these have the outcome of scaring us into unconsciously suppressing our awareness of how we feel when, of course, evolutionary pressures generated emotional responses (some pleasant, some less so) to events in our life in order to help guide us into behaving appropriately at any given moment. And this suppression of how we feel is disastrous if we want children to grow up behaving functionally. This is more fully explained in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So where does self-hatred fit into all of this? Well, if a child is angry in response to some violence to which they are being subjected (usually, of course, in an attempt to control their behavior), then they will attempt to defend themselves against this violence in an effort to persevere with their original intention.

However, if the child is then terrorized into submission by a parent or other adult (by being threatened with or experiencing some form of violence, often given the inaccurate label of ‘punishment’) the child will be compelled to unconsciously suppress their awareness of the original feelings, including anger, that were generating their behavior.

Unfortunately, there is a heavy cost to this suppression because each child is genetically programmed to follow their own self-will (manifesting through such mental functions as thoughts, feelings and conscience) rather than to obey the will of another (whether it be parent, teacher, religious figure or anyone else).

Hence, if a child is successfully terrorized into not behaving in accordance with their own self-will, they will experience a strong feeling of self-hatred precisely because they have submitted, out of fear, to the will of another.

Conscious self-hatred is an intensely unpleasant feeling to experience, however, and because the child is systematically terrorized out of expressing and acting on most of their feelings (which is why 100% of children go to school wherever school is available and compulsory: children are not given freedom of choice) the feeling of self-hatred is suppressed along with these many other feelings. Having learned to do this, subsequent opportunities for this self-hatred to be felt are progressively more easily suppressed.

An unconscious feeling does not ‘go away’ however; it is unconsciously projected elsewhere. Suppressed self-hatred is always unconsciously projected as hatred of someone else, some other group (usually of another sex, race, religion or class) and/or something else, often in imitation of the violent parent/adult (because imitation will be given ‘permission’ by the violent parent/adult). And this inevitably leads to destructive behaviors towards that individual, group and/or the ‘something else’ (including the Earth’s environment).

But, and this is important to recognize, this destructive behaviour might simply manifest as inaction: doing nothing in response to someone else’s (or the Earth’s) obvious need.

So the unconscious fear and self-hatred are projected as fear of and hatred for living beings as well as the Earth, and manifests as behavior that is destructive, often by inaction, of themselves, others and the planet.

The tragic reality is that it takes very little violence to terrorize a child and this is why a substantial proportion of the human population is consumed by their own fear and self-hatred, and feels powerless as a result. Consider the people immediately around you: many spend most of their time, consciously or unconsciously, abusing themselves, others and/or the environment, and doing nothing in response to the plight of our world.

So what can we do?

Given existing parenting practice, fear and self-hatred are not easily avoided although they are not necessarily all-consuming. But to be free of them completely requires just one thing: the fearlessness to love oneself truly. What does this mean?

To love yourself truly, you must always courageously act out your own self-will, whatever the consequences. This requires you to feel all of your emotional responses – fear, sadness, anger, pain, joy, love … – to events, including impediments, in your life. See ‘Feelings First’. It is only when you do this that you can behave with awareness: a synthesis of all of the feedback that your various mental functions give you and the judgments that arise, in an integrated way, from this feedback. See ‘Human Intelligence or Human Awareness?’

At first glance loving yourself and acting out your own self-will might sound selfish. But it is not. Self-love is true love. The individual who does not truly love themself cannot love another. Nor will they feel such emotional responses as compassion, empathy and sympathy. Hence, this individual will not seek mutually beneficial outcomes in tackling conflict, will not seek distributive justice in resource allocation, will not value ecological sustainability and will not act in solidarity with those who are suffering. It is this individual, who is terrified, self-hating and powerless, who will act selfishly.

In addition to courageously acting out your own self-will, you might also consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

And if you love yourself enough to be part of the struggle to end the violence and exploitation of those who are full of fear and self-hatred, you might like to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ and/or using sound nonviolent strategy for your campaign or liberation struggle. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Those who are terrified and self-hating never will.

 

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.

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

Freedom Rider: Oligarch Jeff Bezos

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Intrepid Report

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $105 billion and is the richest man in the world. But he is not just the richest man at this moment in history. He is the richest person who has ever lived. As of 2017 he and seven other billionaires had a collective net worth equal to that of the poorest 3.6 billion people on earth.

These figures have been in the news of late but without much useful analysis. The corporate media refuse to state what is obvious. Namely that inequality is worse around the world precisely because these super rich people demand it.

While pundits and politicians go on breathlessly about oligarchs in Russia, they seldom take a look at the wealthiest in their own backyard and the control they exert over the lives of millions of people. When Amazon announced it would choose a site for its new headquarters, cities across the country began a furious race to the bottom. Amazon is not alone in the thievery department. Major corporations like Walmart always request and receive public property and public funds in order to do business.

Some 235 cities have put themselves in the running for this dubious venture. Chicago is willing to give Amazon $1.3 billion in payroll taxes that prospective employees would ordinarily pay that city. If Chicago wins this booby prize, Amazon employees would pay taxes to their employer and not to the government. This is truly cutting out the middle man and makes real the rule of, by, and for the wealthiest.

The potential for public outrage isn’t lost on unprincipled politicians. Some cities now refuse to reveal how much they plan to give away. But the news to date is disheartening with Boston offering $75 million while Houston is willing to part with $268 million. Amazon says it will hire 50,000 people but their business model already pays employees so little that many of them qualify for public assistance, despite being employed.

The United States is as much of an oligarchy as countries it usually disparages but it is far more dishonest about its true nature. All talk of democracy is a lie as the rich get richer, by an additional $1 trillion in 2017, and wield more and more power over the lives of everyone else.

The Bezos juggernaut is not restricted to theft of public money. He is also the sole owner of the Washington Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the country. Bezos owns a newspaper that is an organ of the ruling elite and he also has a $600 million contract to provide the Central Intelligence Agency with cloud computing services.

The Washington Post was the force behind Propaganda or Not, an effort to destroy left wing voices like those at Black Agenda Report. Under the guise of fighting Russia and so-called fake news, the Bezos owned Post began the censorship campaign that has put the left’s presence on the Internet in such jeopardy.

Politicians outdo one another giving away public resources to the richest man on the planet who also owns a major newspaper and services the surveillance state. If it can be said that any one person rules the world, Bezos would be obvious choice. No one in Chicago, Boston, Houston or any of the other cities giving away the store ever voted for Jeff Bezos. All talk of democracy is a sham as long as the richest people take from the rest of humanity.

The effort to make government an irrelevance is thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats alike are willing to turn over government coffers to Bezos and his ilk and the rights of the people be damned.

Whoever wins this tarnished brass ring ought to be consigned to political defeat. The mayor, aldermen, city council members or whoever else brings disaster to their locality should be punished for aiding and abetting the theft. If these cities can give to the richest man who ever lived, they can surely use public money to help their residents right now. But they will never do that because they are all bought off and compromised. They are either cynical or afraid to go against the real rulers of the country.

Bezos may look like the villain in a James Bond movie but there is nothing funny about him. He is deadly serious and so are his intentions. In a Bezos run world, every worker will be impoverished, every level of government will subsidize corporations, and anyone who speaks out will be discredited and under surveillance.

The last thing any city needs is a new Amazon headquarters. We need an end to billionaire rule in this country and around the world. That will be the salvation of the people, not more sweatshops run by wealthy people who steal from everyone else.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Food for the Moon

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By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

I don’t know how to say this politely: you are part of a remorseless, psychopathic system that circumscribes your very thought processes and forms your every opinion and belief.

This system of thought, action and being envelops you like air and you can’t see it, feel it or hear it. And yet, you do see it, feel it and hear it every day because it is in your mind as it is in the mind of every person around you.

This system is designed to cull your energy through work and play, to foster its own continuation by way of your personal energetic production. And the production of every, single soul around you. its stability is dependent upon your ignorance.

Because once you become aware of it, you begin to see it everywhere. As it has always been everywhere. Been everything. It notices your awakened state and actively seeks to lull you back to sleep or, failing in that, destroying you utterly and erasing every true sign of your existence from its collective memory.

Once you choose knowledge, you are done. Once you choose truth, you are finished.

It is best to go on ahead and believe you’re dead from that very instant like the ancient Samurais of Japan used to do, for the sake of your own psychological stability moving forward.

Because move forward you must. We must. There is work to do and little time to do it. There are dragons to slay, literally, and they have been awaiting your arrival for millennia.

And now that the time of prophecy and projection is finally upon us, as those awakened souls kindle the flames of love within others and that collective and mighty roar signals the onset of the conflagration of the Ages, your options are reduced to the potentialities of the moment. The Now.

You are brought from the heights of abstract psychological and mental confabulation to the pressing, survivalist instincts that instruct you on how to make it through this moment. And the next. And the one after that.

Don’t worry. There’s no time for wasted energy. You will know what to do.

Your spirit has been preparing for this time for eternity. When the moments of your engagement arrives, you will step the steps predestined, say the words preordained and do the things you were preconceived to do.

And that is just how its going to be. So don’t waste anymore time on worry or regret. The system and its people don’t give a damn about you. Or any of us.

We’re only sustenance. Food for the moon. And Saturn, of course.

 

The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In political matters, the public are taught to believe that some political Party is ‘good’, and that the others are “bad”; but the reality in recent times, at least in the United States, has instead been that both Parties are rotten to the core (as will be clear from the linked documentation provided here).

Belief in this myth (that the opposition between Parties is between ‘good’ ‘friend’ versus ‘bad’ ‘enemy’) is based upon the common adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” One side is believed, and ones that contradict it are disbelieved — considered to be lying, distorting: bad. But, maybe, both (or all) Parties are deceiving; maybe all of them are enemies of the public, but just in different ways; maybe each of them is trying to control the country in the interests of (and so to obtain the most financial support from) the aristocracy, while all of them are actually against the public.

Can it really be false that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Not only can be, but often is. And no one is able to vote intelligently without recognizing this fundamental political fact.

It’s true between entire nations, too — not only within nations.

For example: Hitler and Stalin were enemies of each other, but neither of them was a friend of America (except that Stalin did more than anyone else to defeat Hitler, and thereby saved the world, though the U.S. — far less a factor than the U.S.S.R. was in defeating Hitler — still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Stalin did more than anyone else did to prevent the entire world’s becoming dictatorships; so, whatever democracy exists today, is a result of that dictator, Stalin, even more than it’s a result of either FDR or Churchill).

What about internally, then?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became enemies of each other, but neither of them had ever really been a friend of the American public: both of them were instead liars who would, and did, do everything they could to grab control (on the aristocracy’s behalf, who financed their respective campaigns) over what is supposed to be our Government, in a democracy. That’s just a sad fact about reality, which both of America’s political Parties deny (because they both need those voters, not merely those mega-donations; they need the public to believe that the Party cares about them).

Most of the American public have been successfully deceived by the ‘news’media, and by the ‘history’-books (likewise published by agents for the aristocracy), to believe that the U.S. Government serves the public-interest, and not the interest of the centi-millionaires and especially billionaires, who finance political campaigns. But it’s no truer than it’s true that the enemy of your enemy is necessarily your friend: both enemies of each other can be your enemies, too. The difference here is that the enmity between the aristocracy and the public is basically intrinsic, whereas the enmities between (Republican versus Democratic, or any other divisions between) aristocrats, are basically personal — these are matters of business, instead of matters of state. They are, in a sense, different business-plans — competing business-plans. But they are all assisting the aristocracy, to control the public, so as to advance the interests of the aristocracy. They’re all competing for the aristocracy’s support, and deceiving for the public’s support. Two blatant recent examples displaying this were America’s invasion in 2003 that destroyed Iraq, and America’s invasion in 2011 that destroyed Libya. Did either of those invasions advance the interests of the American public? But the owners of Lockheed Martin and other ‘defense’ contractors blossomed after 9/11. In fact: U.S. arms-exports are at record highs.

The now-proven reality in America is that the U.S. Government really does represent those billionaires and centi-millionaires, and not the public. It’s a now-proven reality, that the U.S. isn’t a democracy but a dictatorship — albeit, a two-Party one, with a real competition between billionaire and centi-millionaire Republicans on the one hand, versus billionaire and centi-millionaire Democrats on the other. But all billionaires and centi-millionaires are takers (that’s how they came to be super-rich, even the ones who didn’t inherit it from their parents), who (notwithstanding any ‘charity’ they may establish to avoid taxes while extending their control) receive from the public far more than they give to the public; and, so, there is actually an intrinsic class-war — not at all like Karl Marx famously said, between the bourgeoisie (including small-business owners) versus the proletariat (including some centi-millionaires and billionaires who became super-wealthy from being movie-stars or athletic stars and who don’t necessarily actually control any business at all, and so they’re “proletariats”), but instead between the aristocracy versus the public: the ancient and permanent class-conflict. It’s the entire aristocracy-of-wealth (which is maybe half of the nation’s wealth) that’s arrayed against the public (the poorer 99+% of the people). (In fact, Marx — the promoter of the view that the bourgeoisie are the public’s enemies — had aristocratic sponsors, and he would have remained obscure and died poor, if he had instead blamed the aristocracy, not “the bourgeoisie” — which is mainly the middle class — as being the exploiting-class. Marx, too, was an agent of aristocracy. He succeeded and became famous because he had aristocratic sponsors. Otherwise, his name would have simply been forgotten.)

Anyway, the American public are now alone. No Government represents our interests. It’s now been proven that America’s Government doesn’t represent us; and it’s not even the business of any other Government in the world to represent us; so, no foreign government does, either. No Government represents us.

In order to understand any aristocracy, one must understand what gives rise to almost all wars, because almost all wars throughout history have been between contending aristocracies — between the aristocracies of different nations. Each aristocracy needs to be able to fool its national public, to believe that they’re fighting against the foreign public, when, in fact, they’re fighting against the foreign aristocracy, and they’re fighting for the home-nation’s aristocracy — they are, almost always, fighting for one aristocracy, against another aristocracy. Any public who would know that this is the reality, would just as soon commit a democratic revolution, against the local aristocracy, as go to war for the local one, against the foreign ones. This is the reason why, in every dictatorship, the local centi-millionaires and billionaires buy up all of the ‘news’media that inform, or (on essential matters) misinform, their audiences about international relations, and about who did what to whom and why. They hire only ‘reporters’ who comply with whatever deceptions the owners feel to be necessary, in order to be able to attract sponsorships from other aristocrats’ corporations and ‘charities’. But, the aristocrats themselves are actually all in this together, because their mutually shared enemy is the public. Without deceiving the public about essential matters, no national news-medium would be able to attract the sponsorships it needs in order to grow, or even to survive.

The public thinks it’s fighting an international war, when, in fact, they’re fighting for the local aristocracy (and its allied aristocracies), against foreign aristocracies (and their allied aristocracies). This has been true since the dawn of human civilization. Only the weapons are bigger now, and the alliances (in the World Wars) are now global. (But, of course, if there is another World War, then all of human civilization will immediately end, and not long thereafter, all human and most other forms of life will also end.)

An excellent example of the real class-war, and of its international nature, is James Bamford’s 3 April 2012 masterful and pioneering article in Wired, “Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA”. He documented that even very high-up people in America’s NSA were kept out of the loop when joint U.S.-and-Israeli intelligence-agencies and private corporations were creating the present 1984-ish, “Big Brother” reality, in (at least) those countries (but, actually, the Sauds, and probably a few others, were also on the inside — the aristocracies not merely of those two countries, U.S. and Israel, are in the alliance).

The “Deep State” isn’t merely one nation’s aristocracy and its agents; it is basically a form of actually international gang-warfare. That’s what got us into invading and destroying Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, Ukraine (by coup 2014), and so many other nations. It wasn’t done in order to serve the American public’s interests. That’s just the standard lie — and it keeps going on, and on. Maybe until we invade Russia.

What You May Not Know About Today’s Economic War

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Many people believe the world is spiraling in a downward freefall toward Armageddon. At the same time billions on Earth feel the sting of crippling poverty, sanctions, and austerity imposed by the elites – the numbers of billionaires have risen geometrically. And so have those billionaire’s profits. It’s time we took a closer look at where we stand as of 2018, if we are to be left anything at all to cling to. From the steppes of Russia to the ancient lands of the Minoans, economic terror now reigns.

When I left Germany for Greece several months ago, the common belief there was that the “lazy Greeks” were part of the cause of Deutsche banker discomfort. My neighbors in Germany’s oldest city of Trier honestly believe the bailout of Greece is because Greeks unwilling to work hard. The bitter irony of this believe lies in the fact the average German would melt under the workload of the average citizen here in Heraklion on Crete. As an American what I witnessed in Germany can only be considered a “part-time” employment state. But here in Greece the average person works seven days a week, and usually at more than one job. This microeconomic perception is one that has been implanted by state and corporate controlled media in Germany. There’s a very good reason for this, which I will now explain.

A New Secret Economic Weapon – Organized Failures

The International Monetary Fund, the German and American bankers, the globalist elites who control financial systems in the so-called “west” – they’ve been on a mission since 2008. The “meltdown” of markets when Barack Obama first took office as American president was not some random and chaotic economic mistake. Wall Street and the global markets were turned upside down on purpose. In his book “Secret Weapon”, the CEO of Freeman Global Holdings and a New York Times bestselling author Kevin Freeman presents a persuasive chain of evidence pointing to the fact the crash of September 2008 was the result of a deliberate and well-prepared act of sabotage. Even though the author blames competing governments like China and Iran for what he terms “economic terrorism”, his proofs and theories are correct in so far as the “meltdown” being on purpose. The fact Freeman is founder and chairman of the NSIC Institute, and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Security Policy suggests his work may be a double dealing by the financial community to obscure the real perpetrators. But for my report it’s more important to follow the trail of financial chaos to our financial reality.

Freeman is not alone in his suggestion the economic crisis was a conspiracy. The financial disaster of 2008 costs Americans nearly $20 trillion dollars, as framed in this Forbes piece by investment banker and former Forbes editor, Robert Lenzner. In the report the financial guru inadvertently points the finger at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, claiming the Greenspan Treasury allowed them to “master their own appetite for profits,” which in turn led to the various collapses that forced the American people to bail out the banks. Lenzner, to his great credit, goes on to describe the lurking dangers for total collapse we still face. But what about Greece, the rest of Eastern Europe, the Germans and the rest of the indebted world? Who can we blame for destroying the futures of a billion people? When I’m done your come to realize the Nazis never lost World War II. Read on.

Win-Win or Lose-Lose for Ukraine

Ukraine was turned into a “scorched Earth” when Hitler’s operation Barbarossa threatened Russia. When the armies commanded by Joseph Stalin during the German Army’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the Second World War destroyed crops and goods in their path, the invaders found nothing to fuel their advance. Today Ukraine is laid waste by an economic Barbarossa where the Russians had no opportunity to defend the steppes. Some will remember Vice President Joe Biden’s son taking a position to reap Ukrainian energy benefits. Other readers may recall when a Franklin Templton investment fund, one controlled by the Rothschild bankers, bought up 20% of Ukraine’s debts at junk bond prices. You see, the US orchestrated situation in Ukraine is not simply about events on the Maidan and the ongoing war in the Donbass as a byproduct of the geopolitics of the United States seeking to cut off Ukraine from Russia. Agri-giant Monsanto and other GMO companies had targeted Ukraine long before the events on Maidan Square, and the fact Ukraine is a Central hub in the supply of Russian gas to Europe cannot be under-stressed. Where foreign profiteering in Ukraine is concerned, this story on my blog tells of an Oakland Institute report where more than 1.6 million hectares of land in Ukraine went under the control of foreign-based corporations. This quote from the report makes my case for economic terrorism by the west for me:

“International financial institutions swooped in on the heels of the political upheaval in Ukraine to deregulate and throw open the nation’s vast agricultural sector to foreign corporations….Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont, and how corporations are taking over all aspects of Ukraine’s agricultural system.”

These stories were more than two years ago. Today we see the catastrophic effects of the Euromaidan far from the battle front and the Donbass region’s pro-Russian separatists.

When I first learned that the forests in the Ukrainian Carpathians were being chopped to the ground back in 2016, the impending ecological disaster perpetrated by these globalist blood suckers hit home hard. This Counterpunch story tells the tale of a brand of liberty and democracy no Ukrainian can afford. Despite the aerial photos and other proofs Ukraine’s forests were being stolen from under the people, the Lviv Regional Forestry and Hunting Agency denied all such reports in customary Eastern European mafia form. The fact is, the Petro Poroshenko assisted in selling out Carpathian forests. Ecologists now predict an ecological Armageddon for western Ukraine. These photos from Censor.net prove the disaster in progress. This RT story on the firesale by the Poroshenko regime of 22 out of 34 state assets being put up for sale at a 60 percent discount leads us into the Greece situation, where the legacy of a people is up for grabs.

Those lazy Greeks! Funny, I just walked around the corner to the bakery here in Heraklion to get a coffee from the same lady I get coffee from every day. She was there Christmas, and I am sure she’ll be there behind the counter New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The shopkeeper across the street, he sees Alexis Tsipras on TV and shoves an open hand toward Greece’s Prime Minister shouting; “Malaka!”, which can only be translated coldly as “jerk-off”. Also in the hotel lobby, at the donut house in the city center, and at each-and-every shop along Heraklion’s many retail districts, Greece officials are all Malakas (in ancient Greek – mentally ill) or worse. I’ll bet most Germans don’t know or care to know that the VAT in Greece is now 24%, and that the average shopkeeper pays 37% – 45% in income tax on top of the VAT for the goods they purchase. As crazy as it sounds though, Cretans are still especially friendly toward foreigners like me. If they only know what the German and American bankers did to them.

The Greece Fire Sale – A Tsipras Sellout

I just made a report about the great Greek sellout of privatization on my travel news site Argophilia Travel News this morning. Researching it prompted me to do this piece for NEO. The long and short of the Greek economic crash that was assisted by none other than Goldman Sachs, is that the same privatization the globalists had in store for Russia during the Yeltsin years is being exacted on Greeks. The latest sellout by Tsipras, who swore he’d end privatization, the Germans and Americans snapping up the Thessaloniki Port and the future of LNG shipments to Europe through Greece. I found it interesting that one of the principals in this sale, South Europe Gateway Thessaloniki (SEFT) Limited Director, Alexander von Mellenthin Has a distinguished German name. I’m not certain, but I believe he is a close relative of both General of the artillery, Horst Alexander, Alfred Paul von Mellenthin, and his brother, Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, who served as Hitler’s chief of staff of the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps in the occupied Soviet Union, including the Battle of Kursk, the Battle of Kiev, and the spring 1944 retreat through the western Ukraine. The term “irony” will simply not do if Mellenthin is the son or grandson of a key Nazi general. Financial Blitzkrieg, Financial Armageddon, and the Fourth Reich finalizing the rape of Greece! Wow.

Regardless of whether or not the kin of old Nazis are expanding the Fourth Reich or not, the fact the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank have insisted on Greek and other privatization schemes as a condition for much-needed loans for bailouts is a smoking gun held by the same elites who always fuel wars. The fallacy of the “lazy Greek” lives on because of those who would reap the vast financial rewards of yet another deconstructed economy. It’s no coincidence that the Greek privatization plan’s administrator — the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED) — so closely resembles Germany’s Treuhandanstalt, or the agency charged with the privatization of East Germany’s state-owned enterprises following unification. Few readers will recall Treuhandanstalt being accused of turning over to West German big business hundreds of billions of Deutsche Marks in national property for little or nothing. And, though a number of Treuhandanstalt managers were ultimately indicted for corruption and embezzlement, this brand of pillaging has escalated in the Greece situation. There was even a plan back in 2014 to convert much of Greece’s protected coastal areas into “composite tourist villages,” a move which would essentially privatize every inch of valuable Greek seaside. Former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis called the Treuhandanstalt-like plan for Greece “an abomination” in this Huff Post piece. Varoufakis, who resigned on principle from the Tsipras administration, goes on to frame the Greek debt debauchery, describing the real IMF scheme:

“The plan is politically toxic, because the fund, though domiciled in Greece, will effectively be managed by the troika. It is also financially noxious, because the proceeds will go toward servicing what even the IMF now admits is an unpayable debt. And it fails economically, because it wastes a wonderful opportunity to create homegrown investments to help counter the recessionary impact…”

Yanis Varoufakis proposed to the Germans and the Rothschild bankers of Luxembourg and Frankfurt a Greek plan for repayment of the staggering debt the Goldman Sachs bankers helped usher into Greece. But the IMF and the new Reich refused, of course. His plan was for Greece to cooperate via its own newly formed central holding company for some Greek assets. The IMF and the banksters would have nothing of it, they needed complete control of what, and for how much Greece was to be auctioned off. Tsipras betrayed his country, and the only decent politician the Greeks have had in decades stepped down.