Future Crimes

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By John Steppling

“Precrime Analytical Wing: Contains the precognitives and the machinery needed to hear and analyze their predictions of future crimes.”

Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…”

Martin Luther King

“The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies,’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government”.

Gramsci

There was a jaw dropping but not unexpected article at The Guardian this week. It was actually part of a series of pieces at that paper that have sought to manufacture a legacy for Obama, the outgoing president, since his actual legacy is one of imperialist foreign policy, CIA support of jihadists, right wing coups, and most acutely, perhaps, a massive subverting of free speech and civil liberties. What Robert Parry has called a ‘war on dissent’. The Guardian piece took the form of asking novelists, public intellectuals {sic} and TV hacks what they perceived to be Obama’s legacy — and even the use of that word, *legacy* is a loaded indicator of the direction this piece was headed. What struck me most was not the predictable support for Obama policy (more on that later) but the utter banality of the writing. There were writers in this group who I have admired (Richard Ford for one, Marilynne Robinson, as well) but the sentiments were so stupefyingly superficial, so fatuous and fawning that it was hard not to see this as a kind of mini referendum on the state of Western culture.

Joyce Carol Oates (for whom ten words is usually better than the right word) described Obama as…“Brilliant and understated, urbane, witty, compassionate, composed..”. Siri Hutsvedt (who honestly I had to look up…finding her most notable achievement was being married to Paul Auster) wrote…“For eight years, we have been represented by an elegant, well-spoken, funny, highly educated, moderate, morally upright, preternaturally calm black man”. Richard Ford wrote…“This cold morning, when I think about Obama, immersed in what must be a decidedly mixed brew of emotions – mixed about his deeds, mixed about his effects on the US, decidedly mixed about our future – I’m confident he is thinking, right to his last minute in the office, as the president, and not much about, or for, himself. That’s what I expected when I voted for him – that he’d be a responsible public servant who’d try to look out for the entire country.” I know, I know, but that’s what he wrote. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Perhaps this is what a career of University teaching does to one. Edmund White called him one of our great presidents (love the use of *our*).

Jane Smiley, who at the least mentioned TPP and drones, but ended with…“As a national leader, he has engendered more chaos, but it is necessary chaos – a loud and meaningful return to the question of what constitutes the real America.” A necessary chaos? The fuck does that mean? I ask that sincerely, sort of. By the time I reached the end of this saccharine mind numbing bathos I thought back to the 1968 Democratic Convention and to Esquire Magazine, in its golden era, who sent William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Terry Southern and John Sack to cover the convention. I thought back to Robert Bly and his organizing of Writers against the Vietnam war. The readings he gave with Galway Kinnell and Ginsburg, and a dozen others. And to the way Bly spoke of art and the role of art in a society. In an interview with Michael Ventura, around the time of the Iraq invasion…

Bly:I don’t think we believe that a Great Mother is lying to us. It’s a father who’s lying to us. Thee whole system, in a way, is a father system. Ventura: It’s a patriarchy, so it’s a father who’s lying. Bly: Exactly. And we eventually get the sense that our own father is lying to us. { } Whenever you have a culture completely run by gross capitalism, all of the gods are driven away. Well, then what? What does that mean when those gods are not present?

Later Bly says…

“When I talk about the world being mad, I tell people, “You won’t believe how bad television is going to be in ten years. You’re going to literally have to protect your children from it.” And we’re not going to be able to change that. The only thing we can do is recognize that it’s mad, and reach inside ourselves and bring out our own genuine madness in the form of art, and then teach our children to do the same.”

In 68, a corporate owned magazine, and hardly a socialist magazine, thought it reasonable to ask Genet or Burroughs to discuss a political convention. I mean even Norman Mailer wrote intelligently on Kennedy for Esquire, and Mailer isn’t exactly Gramsci. My point is, or I hope my first point, is that it is not always crucial to demand ideological analysis. For art’s radical nature is outside ideology. Just speaking from a radical perspective, an anti bourgeois perspective, can be enough. But in 1968 the U.S. still had artists. What artist could you invite today? What public intellectual? The Guardian picked Sarah Churchwell (who again, I’d never heard of) who wrote…

“The Obamas changed the rules for what it means to inhabit the White House, and not only because they were the first black family to do so. They were also the first modern family to do so, to be informal yet classy, upright yet kind, and, most important, themselves.”

That’s it then, just be yourself. But the lesson here, if there is one, is that the radical tradition in American life has been rendered invisible. Just as the history of labor and unions and strikes has been erased. There are plenty of great artists out there, actually. Tons of intellectuals, but they aren’t invited by corporate media. Was anyone from Black Agenda Report asked to comment? Or from, well, CounterPunch? Was Harry Belefonte asked? The manufacturing of an image of a culture, rather than an actual culture, is what organs of disinformation such as The Guardian are in the business of doing. And this is also what Hollywood does, of course. Look at the stuff that gets on in the flagship theatres of the U.S. What is the season at Lincoln Center? Does it matter? No, it really doesn’t. And running across all of this discussion is the question of class. In fact, that may be the most important aspect in all of this. The working class voice is erased. In total. And this is hugely significant. Even fifty years ago the stages of American theatres were filled by work from playwrights who did not have MFAs. Novels were written by criminals and outsiders. This is no less true, really, in the U.K. From Brendan Behan to Martin Amis is the road travelled. Now of course one can site exceptions to this, I think anyway. There are always celebrity outsiders, branded renegades. Usually this takes the form of a confessional. My time on oxycodone while writing Sit Coms. I was a teenage prostitute and was addicted to anti depressants, but then I found a higher power. But god forbid you express condemnation of the bourgeoisie. For that is the greatest of all crimes.

When I worked in Hollywood, I felt the class estrangement acutely. But I did get work and had some modest success. And I remember when a major cable producer of the era asked me, during a pitch meeting, for the names of writers I thought would be good to employ for an anthology series they wanted to put together. I said, well, Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck) and John Rechy. A silence fell on the room. I was very very naive. Hollywood today seems infested with lawyers, former political interns, and business school graduates. Most from Ivy league schools. And the world that is manufactured is one that reflects their class. And the effect this has had is to alienate the younger artists who do not come from affluent backgrounds. It has also normalized the a vision of the world that belongs to perhaps ten per cent of the population. The rest are strangers in their own land. Strangers to the official sanctioned culture. And in that sense, Hollywood has sort of merged with Madison Avenue.

The class divide is being starkly revealed this last few months. And it has also served to put in stark relief the real impetus of U.S. foreign policy (and to domestic policy, too, only not as drastically). After WW2 and the formation of the CIA, the shaping of a political intention was being finalized. This came from George Kennan and the Dulles Brothers. And Henry Kissinger was the premier exemplar of this thinking. Kissinger, who supported the Shah and his death squads in Iran, and chaired the Presidential Commission on Central America in the 1980s,(employing Ollie North) and which unleashed an unimaginable terror on that region, and who orchestrated the Pinochet coup in Chile to protect ITT and, as a side bar, to teach a lesson to any government not readily obedient. This has been the seamless and never changing foreign policy of the U.S. for seventy some years. Punish the disobedient (meaning anything smacking of socialism or any nation even the tiniest bit resistant to Western business) and to continue toward global hegemony, and at the same time perpetuating conflicts which make both defense contractors and giant service providers such as Halliburton a lot of money.

The U.S. has cultivated compliant nations (Australia, the U.K. most notably) to enforce its policy (think East Timor, Iraq and Libya et al) and now owns a complient organization with international standing: NATO. And NATO serves as a legitimizing international (sic) institution of pacification.

John Pilger writes…

“The other day, an Indonesian friend took me to his primary school where, in October 1965, his teacher was beaten to death, suspected of being a communist. The murder was typical of the slaughter of more than a million people: teachers, students, civil servants, peasants. Described by the CIA as “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”, it brought to power the dictator Suharto, the west’s man. Within a year of the bloodbath, Indonesia’s economy was redesigned in America, giving western capital access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour. “

Stephan Gowans writes…

“The United States had waged a long war against Syria from the very moment the country’s fiercely independent Arab nationalist movement came to power in 1963. Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad were committed to that movement. Washington sought to purge Arab nationalist influence from the Syrian state and the Arab world more broadly. It was a threat to Washington’s agenda of establishing global primacy and promoting business-friendly investment climates for US banks, investors and corporations throughout the world.”

The rise of the neo cons, which rather officially began with Project for a New American Century (just prior to Bush Jr’s presidency) was really just an extension of that original plan for global domination. At that time this was articulated by a seething nearly hysterical hatred of the Soviet Union. And the structural aspect of this remains in place with today’s rabid and massive propaganda campaign directed at Putin. And indeed even on the left one hears the echoes of a Russophobic sensibility. It is as if these faux leftists can not allow a critique of U.S. imperialism (in Syria for example) without off handedly smearing Russia, too. One need only look at who is surrounding whom with military bases. And the same holds true, with slightly less hysteria, for China.

In 2012 Ed Herman, speaking in a radio interview, said

“…humanitarian intervention {has} been used strictly for the interests of the United States and other Western powers and Israel. Strictly. So there’s no intervention in Saudi Arabia or Israel or Yemen or Bahrain. There was none in Egypt…And there was Egypt, here you had a miserable dictator for decades, and then you had an uprising where a lot of people were being beaten and killed in the streets, and you never had Mrs. Clinton ever asking for any application of humanitarian intervention. Not once. Never. They’re getting away with the most unbelievable double standard imaginable.”

This is, none of it, new. And yet, despite the obvious record of Obama in furthering exactly this world vision, the liberal organs of *real* news continue to paint their revisionist narratives of American heroism and goodness. And it is breathtaking in a way to read this new class of quisling artist, the court eunuchs for the Democratic Party establishment. And Obama’s apparent anger and petulance belies, certainly, descriptions such as ‘preternaturally calm’, and ‘dignified’. But there is a thread of liberal guilt running through this as well. Obama’s race (and his perfect wife and kids — and one longs for Ron Reagan Jr or to go back to James Madison’s son John, and shit, even the Bush girls might be a relief from these Stepford children.) is the psychological glue for a visibly excessive adoration. And this is a white liberal class that is haunted, I suspect, in their heart of hearts, by the knowledge of their own privilege and that that privilege has resulted in oceans of blood, and the knowledge, if they were ever to question themselves, that they would sell out anyone to retain that privilege. They love Obama and Obama is black, therefore…etc.

As Ajamu Baraka noted

“In the face of the Neo-McCarthyism represented by this legislation and the many other repressive moves of the Obama administration to curtail speech and control information — from the increased surveillance of the public to the use of the espionage act to prosecute journalists and whistleblowers — one would reasonably assume that forces on the left would vigorously oppose the normalization of authoritarianism, especially in this period of heightened concerns about neo-fascism. Unfortunately, the petit-bourgeois “latte left” along with their liberal allies have been in full collaboration with the state for the past eight years, with the predictable result that no such alarm was issued, nor has any critique or even debate been forthcoming.”

The openly Imperialist U.S. state has tortured, illegally kidnapped, and simply murdered both leaders of sovereign states as well as countless innocent victims. That Samantha Power’s motorcade in rushing through a village in Cameroon happened to run over a ten year old boy, and didn’t stop — this barely made the evening news at all (but hey, they did send the family fifteen hundred dollars by way of an apology). They have acted covertly to destabilize governments and have manufactured enemies at a rate that is staggering to contemplate. Obama’s tight relationship with the most odious autocratic and murderous country on earth, Saudi Arabia, speaks to the cynicism of the political elite.

And yet, the artistic communities by and large continue to focus on identity issues (once they have attended to their career moves and spoken with their agents), most of which affect their own class. The dire suffering of the poor makes good voyeuristic source material, but the segregation of classes is enforced zealously. Token exceptions are simply that.

How is it possible to become so alarmed by Trump, while supporting Democrats? Those millions on the street protesting the looming invasion of Iraq must have noticed that every single Democrat in government voted FOR the invasion (save for the honorable Barbara Lee). And yet here they all are wringing their hands in dismay that Hillary lost. Here they are constantly repeating the litanies of Trump evil and never noticing the crimes of earlier democratic presidents and administrations. So, yes Trump’s appointments are awful. But I refuse to even dig into that until a discussion of Obama’s appointments are dissected. First came Rahm Emanuel, former memeber of the IDF, all around thug and bully and lover of never ending war to help expand Israeli power. Penny Pritzker, heiress and elitist and friend to the 1%, or Robert Rubin or Tim Geithner (!!!) or Tom Daschle, the senator from Citibank. I’m just scratching the surface. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. The point is that I am coming to feel that almost any focus on Trump feels misplaced. Certainly now it does since he isn’t even president yet. The deconstruction of liberal Obama is far from complete and the propaganda apparatus is working overtime to rewrite not just recent history, but the present. And the anti Russian propaganda is so absurd, so transparent, that this feels far more important than the predictable stupidity of Trump. I mean Obama is massing troops near the Russian border. Obama is ramping up the building of purpose built navel bases near China. Obama is still looking to prosecute Chelsea Manning and every other whistleblower. And he is still signing draconian legislation to curb free speech and institutionalize legitimacy for the new McCarthyism. Talking about Trump is a form of forgetting. I can’t do it. And if there is an easier target for parody or even non parodic narrative than Donald Trump, I havent met them. And easy is never an act of rigorous self examination.

Thomas Bates writes, discussing Gramsci…

“Gramsci retained a skepticism towards these alienated fils de bourgeois, a skepticism which was not, however, mere prejudice, but was an historical judgment informed by the experience of the Italian labor movement. How was one to explain the passing of entire groups of left-wing intellectuals into the enemy camp? More precisely, how was one to explain the phenomena of socialists entering into bourgeois governments and of revolutionary syndicalists entering into the nationalist and then the Fascist movement? Gramsci viewed these puzzling events as the continuation on a mass scale of the ‘trasformismo’ of the nineteenth century. The “generation gap” within the ruling class had resulted in a large influx of bourgeois youth into the popular movements, especially during the turbulent decade of the 1890’s. But in the war-induced crisis of the Italian State in the early twentieth century, these prodigal children returned to the fold…”

And Gramsci adds..

“The bourgeoisie fails to educate its youth (struggle of generations). The youth allow themselves to be culturally attracted by the workers, and right away they … try to take control of them (in their “unconscious” desire to impose the hegemony of their own class on the people), but during historical crises they return to the fold.”

White affluent self identifying liberals believe they are the decision makers. That is their destiny. They believe that. One must build a new culture. Not endlessly ratify a decrepit and atrophying one. One must stop perceiving *liberals* as being on the side of change. For they are not. Guy Debord began his situationist masterpiece (1967) by quoting Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity:

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. “

John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. Plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. A collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other Plays was published in 1999, and his book on aesthetics, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest was published this year by Mimesis International.

Washington’s Global Economic Wars

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By James Petras

Source: Axis of Logic

Introduction
During most of the past two decades Washington has aggressively launched military and economic wars against at least nine countries, either directly or through its military aid to regional allies and proxies. US air and ground troops have bombed or invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

More recently Washington has escalated its global economic war against major economic rivals as well as against weaker countries. The US no longer confines its aggressive impulses to peripheral economic countries in the Middle East, Latin America and Southern Asia: It has declared trade wars against world powers in Asia, Eastern and Central Europe and the Gulf states.

The targets of the US economic aggression include economic powerhouses like Russia, China, Germany, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba and the Donbas region of Ukraine.

There is an increasingly thinner distinction between military and economic warfare, as the US has frequently moved from one to the other, particularly when economic aggression has not resulted in ‘regime change’ – as in the case of the sanctions campaign against Iraq leading up to the devastating invasion and destruction.

In this essay, we propose to examine the strategies and tactics underlying Washington’s economic warfare, their successes and failures, and the political and economic consequences to target nations and to world stability.

Washington’s Economic Warfare and Global Power
The US has used different tactical weapons as it pursues its economic campaigns against targeted adversaries and even against its long-time allies.

Two supposed allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia, have been attacked by the Obama Administration and US Congress via ‘legal’ manipulations aimed at their financial systems and overseas holdings. This level of aggression against sovereign powers is remarkable and reckless. In 2016 the US Justice Department slapped a $14 billion dollar penalty on Germany’s leading international bank, Deutsche Bank, throwing the German stock market into chaos, driving the bank’s shares down 40% and destabilizing Germany’s financial system. This unprecedented attack on an ally’s major bank was in direct retaliation for Germany’s support of the European Commission’s $13 billion tax levy against the US-tax evading Apple Corporation for its notorious financial shenanigans in Ireland. German political and business leaders immediately dismissed Washington’s legalistic rhetoric for what it was: the Obama Administration’s retaliation in order to protect America’s tax evading and money laundering multinationals.

The chairman of the German parliament’s economic committee stated that the gross US attempt to extort Deutsche Bank had all the elements of an economic war. He noted that Washington had a “long tradition of using every available opportunity to wage what amounted to a trade war if it benefits their own economy” and the “extortionate damages claim” against Deutsche Bank were a punitive example. US economic sanctions against some of Germany’s major trade partners, like Russia, China and Iran, constitute another tactic to undermine Germany’s huge export economy. Ironically, Germany is still considered “a valued ally” when it comes to the US wars against Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, which have driven millions of refugees to Europe creating havoc with Germany’s political, economic and social system and threatening to overthrow the government of ‘ally’ Angela Merkel.

The US Congress launched an economic-judicial war against its closest ally in the Gulf region when it approved legislation granting US victims of Islamist terrorism, especially related to the attacks on September 11, 2001, the right to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and seize its overseas assets. This included the Kingdom’s immense ‘sovereign funds’ and constitutes an arbitrary and blatant violation of Saudi sovereignty. This opens the Pandora’s Box of economic warfare by allowing victims to sue any government for sponsoring terrorism, including the United States! Saudi leaders immediately reacted by threatening to withdraw billions of dollars of assets in US Treasuries and investments.

The US economic sanctions against Russia are designed to strengthen its stranglehold on the economies of Europe which rely on trade with Russia. These have especially weakened German and Polish trade relations with Russia, a major market for German industrial exports and Polish agriculture products. Originally, the US-imposed economic sanctions against Moscow were supposed to harm Russian consumers, provoke political unrest and lead to ‘regime change’. In reality, the unrest it provoked has been mainly among European exporters, whose contracts with Russia were shredded and billions of Euros were lost. Furthermore, the political and diplomatic climate between Europe and Russia has deteriorated while Washington has ‘pivoted’ toward a more militaristic approach.

Results in Asia have been even more questionable: Washington’s economic campaign against China has moved awkwardly in two directions: Prejudicial trade deals with Asian-Pacific countries and a growing US military encirclement of China’s maritime trade routes.

The Obama regime dispatched Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to promote the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) among a dozen regional governments, which would blatantly exclude China, Asia’s largest economic power. In a slap to the outgoing Obama Administration, the US Congress rejected his showpiece economic weapon against China, the TPP.

Meanwhile, Obama ‘encouraged’ his erstwhile ‘allies’ in the Philippines and Vietnam to sue China for maritime violations over the disputed ‘Spratly Islands’ before the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Japan and Australia signed military pacts and base agreements with the Pentagon aimed at disrupting China’s trade routes. Obama’s so-called ‘Pivot to Asia’ is a transparent campaign to block China from its markets and trading partners in Southeast Asia and Pacific countries of Latin American. Washington’s flagrant economic warfare resulted in slapping harsh import tariffs on Chinese industrial exports, especially steel and tires. The US also sent a ‘beefed up’ air and sea armada for ‘joint exercises’ along China’s regional trade routes and its access to critical Persian Gulf oil, setting off a ‘war of tension’.

In response to Washington’s ham-fisted aggression, the Chinese government deftly rolled out the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with over fifty countries eagerly signing on for lucrative trade and investment deals with Beijing. The AIIB’s startling success does not bode well for Obama’s ‘Pivot to Pacific Hegemony’.

The so-called US-EU-Iran accord did not end Washington’s trade war against Teheran. Despite Iran’s agreement to dismantle its peaceful uranium enrichment and nuclear research programs, Washington has blocked investors and tried to undermine trade relations, while still holding billions of dollars of Iranian state assets, frozen since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Nevertheless, a German trade mission signed on a three billion trade agreement with Iran in early October 2016 and called on the US to fulfill its side of the agreement with Teheran – so far to no avail.

The US stands alone in sending its nuclear naval armada to the Persian Gulf and threatens commercial relations. Even the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the longstanding enemy of the Iranian Islamic Republic, has agreed to a cooperative oil production arrangement at a recent OPEC meeting.

Washington’s declaration of economic warfare against two of its most strategic powerful allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia and three rising competitor world powers, has eroded US economic competitiveness, undermined its access to lucrative markets and increased its reliance on aggressive military strategies over diplomacy.

What is striking and perplexing about Washington’s style of economic warfare is how costly this has been for the US economy and for US allies, with so little concrete benefit.

US oil companies have lost billions in joint exploitation deals with Russia because of Obama’s sanctions. US bankers, agro-exporters, high-tech companies are missing out on lucrative sales just to ‘punish’ Russia over the incredibly corrupt and bankrupt US coup regime in Ukraine.

US multi-national corporations, especially those involved in Pacific Coast transport and shipyards, Silicon Valley high tech industry and Washington State’s agro-export producers are threatened by the US trade agreements that exclude China.

Iran’s billion dollar market is looking for everything from commercial airplanes to mining machinery. Huge trade deals have has been lost to US companies because Obama continues to impose de facto sanctions. Meanwhile, European and Asian competitors are signing contracts.

Despite Washington’s dependence on German technical knowhow and Saudi petro-dollar investments as key to its global ambitions, Obama’s irrational policies continue to undermine US trade.

Washington has engaged in economic warfare against ‘lesser economic powers’ that nevertheless play significant political roles in their regions. The US retains the economic boycott of Cuba; it wages economic aggression against Venezuela and imposes economic sanctions against Syria, Yemen and the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. While these countries are not costly in terms of economic loss to US business interests, they exercise significant political and ideological influence in their regions, which undermine US ambitions.

Conclusion
Washington’s resort to economic warfare complements its military fueled empire building.

But economic and military warfare are losing propositions. While the US may extract a few billion dollars from Deutsch Bank, it will have lost much more in long-term, large-scale relations with German industrialists, politicians and financiers. This is critical because Germany plays the key role in shaping economic policy in the European Union. The practice of US multi-national corporations seeking off-shore tax havens in the EU may come to a grinding halt when the European Commission finishes its current investigations. The Germans may not be too sympathetic to their American competitors.

Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has not only collapse, it has compelled China to open new avenues for trade and cooperation with Asian-Pacific nations – exactly the opposite of its original goal of isolating Beijing. China’s Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) has attracted 4 time more participants than Washington’s TPP and massive infrastructure projects are being financed to further bind ASEAN countries to China. China’s economic growth at 6.7% more than three times that of the US at 2%. Worse, for the Obama Administration, Washington has alienated its historically most reliable allies, as China, deepens economic ties and cooperation agreements with Thailand, Philippines, Pakistan, Cambodia and Laos.

Iran, despite US sanctions, is gaining markets and trade with Germany, Russia, China and the EU.

The Saudi-US conflict has yet to play-out but any escalation of law suits against the kingdom will result in the flight of hundreds of billions of investment dollars from the US.

In effect, Obama’s campaign of economic warfare may lead to the infinitely more costly military warfare and the massive loss of jobs and profits for the US economy. Washington is increasingly isolated. The only allies supporting its campaign of economic sanctions are second and third rate powers, like Poland and current corrupt parasites in Ukraine. As long as the Poles and Ukrainians can ‘mooch’ off of the IMF and grab EU and US ‘loans’, they will cheerlead Obama’s charge against Russia. Israel, as long as it can gobble up an additional $38 billion dollars in ‘aid’ from Washington, remains the biggest advocate for war against Iran.

Washington spends billions of US tax-payer dollars on its military bases in Japan, Philippines and Australia to maintain its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. Its allies, though, are salivating at the prospect for greater trade and infrastructure investment deals with China.

Economic warfare doesn’t work for the Washington because the US economy cannot compete, especially when it attacks its own allies and traditional partners. Its regional allies are keen to join the ‘forbidden’ markets and share in major investment projects funded by China. Asian leaders increasingly view Washington, with its ‘pivot to militarism’ as politically unreliable, unstable and dangerous. After the Philippine government economic mission to China, expect more to ‘jump ship’.

Economic warfare against declared adversaries can only succeed if the US is committed to free trade with its allies, ends punitive sanctions and stops pushing for exclusive trade treaties that undermine its allies’ economies. Furthermore, Washington should stop catering to the whims of special domestic interests. Absent these changes, its losing campaign of economic warfare can only turn into military warfare – a prospect devastating to the US economy and to world peace.

Please note James Petras’s new collection of essays with Clarity Press:
THE END OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE DELUSION OF EMPIRE

ISBN: 978-0-9972870-5-9
$24.95 / 252 pp. / 2016

The Titanic Sails at Dawn: Warning Signs Point to Danger Ahead in 2017

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: A Government of Wolves

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Despite our best efforts, we in the American police state seem to be stuck on repeat, reliving the same set of circumstances over and over and over again: egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, etc.

Unfortunately, as a nation we’ve become so desensitized to the government’s acts of violence, so accustomed to reports of government corruption, and so anesthetized to the sights and sounds of Corporate America marching in lockstep with the police state that few seem to pay heed to the warning signs blaring out the message: Danger Ahead.

Remember, the Titanic received at least four warnings from other ships about the presence of icebergs in its path, with the last warning issued an hour before disaster struck. All four warnings were ignored.

Like the Titanic, we’re plowing full steam ahead into a future riddled with hidden and not-so-hidden dangers. We too have been given ample warnings, only to have them drowned out by a carefully choreographed cacophony of political noise, cultural distractions and entertainment news—what the Romans termed “bread and circuses”—aimed at keeping the American people polarized, pacified and easily manipulated.

However, there is still danger ahead. The peril to our republic remains the same.

As long as a permanent, unelected bureaucracy—a.k.a. the shadow government— continues to call the shots in the halls of power and the reach of the police state continues to expand, the crisis has not been averted.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the nefarious government programs we’ll be encountering on our journey through the treacherous waters of 2017.

Mandatory quarantines without due process or informed consent: Under a new rule proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, government agents will be empowered to indefinitely detain any traveler they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.

Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel: As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers such as pastors, teachers, hair stylists, bartenders, police officers and EMTs in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.

Tracking chips for citizens: Momentum is building for the government to be able to track citizens, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card or through microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin. In December 2016, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation allowing police to track individuals suffering from some form of mental disability such as Alzheimer’s or autism by way of implanted chips.

Military training to deal with anti-establishment movements in megacities: The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, if this government propaganda-piece that is being used to train special forces is to be believed, the only thing that can save the world from outright anarchy—in the eyes of the government, at least—is the military working in conjunction with local police. The video confirms what I’ve been warning about for so long: in the eyes of the U.S. government and its henchmen, the battlefield of the future is the American home front.

Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation: This year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates $619 billion for war and military spending, not only allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens by placing them beyond the reach of the Constitution, but it also directs the State Department to establish a national anti-propaganda center to “counter disinformation and propaganda.” Translation: the government plans to crack down on anyone attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights by exposing government wrongdoing, while persisting in peddling its own brand of fake news.

Threat assessments: Government agents—with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software—are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state. It’s the American police state rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

War on cash: The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to do away with large bills such as $20s, $50s, $100s and shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. As economist Steve Forbes concludes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”

Expansive surveillance: Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, will still be listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers who work with the government to monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. In such an environment, w e are all suspects to be spied on, searched, scanned, frisked, monitored, tracked and treated as if we’re potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

Militarized police: Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield. Now, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are preparing to turn the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens: Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Indeed, as a special report by The Washington Post reveals, despite heightened awareness of police misconduct, the number of fatal shootings by officers in 2016 remained virtually unchanged from the year before.

False flags and terrorist attacks: Despite the government’s endless propaganda about the threat of terrorism, statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. And you are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.

Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed: The military industrial complex that has advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, is the very entity that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire. The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer, with more than 3.2 million employees. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $1.6 trillion to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When you add in military efforts in Pakistan, as well as the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt, that cost rises to $4.4 trillion.

Attempts by the government to identify, target and punish so-called domestic “extremists”: The government’s anti-extremism program will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist. To this end, police will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist before they can become actual threats. This is pre-crime on an ideological scale.

SWAT team raids: More than 80% of American communities have their own SWAT teams, with more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, kill citizens, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and most often in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually some small amount of drugs.

Erosions of private property: Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Overcriminalization: The government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, has resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.

Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity: Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Accounts are on the rise of individuals—men and women alike—being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

Drones: As corporations and government agencies alike prepare for their part in the coming drone invasion—it is expected that at least 30,000 drones will occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry—it won’t be long before American citizens find themselves to be the target of these devices. Drones—unmanned aerial vehicles—will come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance to detonating explosive charges, to middle-sized copter drones that can deliver pizzas to massive “hunter/killer” Predator warships that unleash firepower from on high.

Prisons: America’s prisons, housing the largest number of inmates in the world and still growing, have become money-making enterprises for private corporations that manage the prisons in exchange for the states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline.

Censorship: First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

Fascism: As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best when he warned: “Take alarm at the first experiment with liberties.” Anyone with even a casual knowledge about current events knows that the first experiment on our freedoms happened long ago.

We are fast moving past the point of no return when it comes to restoring our freedoms. Worse, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we can barely see the old America with its revolutionary principles and value for independence in the rear view mirror. The only reality emerging generations will know is the one constructed for them by the powers-that-be, and you can rest assured that it will not be a reality that favors individuality, liberty or anything or anyone who challenges the status quo.

As a senior advisor to George W. Bush observed, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

In other words, the government has been operating ten steps ahead for quite some time now, and we have yet to catch up, let alone catch our breath as the tides of change swirl around us.

You’d better tighten your seatbelts, folks, because we could be in for a rough ride in 2017.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at http://www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Intelligence Report On Russian Election Influence Is A Flop

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: Moon of Alabama

Yesterday the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the NSA and the FBI released a report about alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Council and on Russian influence operation on the U.S. presidential election. The report failed to convince anyone. It is indeed a public relation disaster for the Intelligence Community.

John Harwood covers “the economy and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times.” More then 100,000 people follow him on Twitter. He is known as Hillary Clinton supporter and chummy with John Podesta who ran Clinton’s election campaign.

Harwood set up a simple poll. It is not statistically representative but gives a picture of a general sentiment.

This result surely shows the limits of power of the so-called Intelligence Community. But it is worse: yesterday’s “Russian hacking” claims failed to convince even its most ardent and anti-Russian supporters.

Daily Beast: U.S. Spy Report Blames Putin for Hacks, But Doesn’t Back It Up

Kevin Rothrock (Moscow Times):

I cannot believe my eyes. Is this really part of the US government’s intelligence case?I’ll say it: the declassified USG report “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” is an embarrassment.

Susan Hennessey (Lawfare, Brookings):

The unclassified report is underwhelming at best. There is essentially no new information for those who have been paying attention.

Bill Neely (NBCNews):

Lots of key judgements but not many key facts & no open proof in US Intell. report into alleged Russian hacking.

Stephen Hayes (Weekly Standard):

The intel report on Russia is little more than a collection of assertions. Understand protecting sources/methods, but it’s weak.

Julia Ioffe (The Atlantic):

It’s hard to tell if the thinness of the #hacking report is because the proof is qualified, or because the proof doesn’t exist.@JeffreyGoldberg Have to say, though, I’m hearing from a lot of Russia watchers who are very skeptical of the report. None like Putin/Trump.

When you lost even Julia Ioffe on your anti-Russian issue …

Clapper as DNI and Brennan as CIA chief should have been fired years ago. They will both be gone by January 20. The Intelligence Community will remember them as the chief-authors of this devastating failure.

Related Articles:

The Russians Did Not “Hack” the US Election – a Few Facts from a Former CIA Spy

US Report Still Lacks Proof on Russia ‘Hack’

Russian Scum!!!

Related Podcast:

The Mainstream Has Failed

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The good news is there is a way to avoid failure and stagnation: avoid the mainstream like the plague.

The mainstream became mainstream because it worked: the mainstream advice to “go to college and you’ll get a good job” worked, the mainstream financial plan of buying a house to build equity to pass on to your children worked, the mainstream of government regulation worked to the public’s advantage at modest cost to taxpayers and the mainstream media, despite being cozy with government agencies such as the C.I.A. and operating as a profit machine for the families that owned the newspapers, radio stations, etc., functioned as a basically honest broker of information and reporting.

Now, the mainstream has failed. Mainstream career advice now leads to crushing debts and career stagnation, mainstream financial planning generates high risks, mainstream government regulations are costly and burdensome, and the mainstream media is little more than a corporate-owned mouthpiece of propaganda and distributor of infotainment that is sold as “news.”

Does anyone actually believe the mainstream political process isn’t broken? Those who claim it isn’t broken are either well-paid shills just doing their job or they’re delusional.

The mainstream American diet now leads to chronic disease and early death.Supersized portions, large amounts of sugar and/or salt in virtually every packaged food item, heavy doses of low-quality fats in almost all mainstream fast foods–these have become mainstream at a very high cost in diminished health and reduced years of life free of chronic disease and pain.

The mainstream level of fitness contributes to chronic disease and early death.The mainstream lifestyle is one in which people passively watch a few daredevils pursue extreme sports on a variety of digital screens, passively “consume” music rather than learning to play music themselves, passively consume “news” rather than being engaged in community activities that make news, and so on.

The mainstream healthcare system is structured so it is incapable of promoting health. As my longtime friend GFB recently asked, “Who is happy with the current healthcare system?” Certainly not the doctors and nurses or the patients. Perhaps Big Pharma is happy as a result of their enormous profits (more of which is spent on marketing the latest marginally useful and often dangerous drug than on R&D), but even Big Pharma has legitimate complaints about the cost and time required to get a potentially life-changing drug (such as immunotherapy drugs) through the pipeline.

But the real problem is the soaring costs of the system will eventually collapse the entire economy. The same can be said of the soaring costs of increasingly marginal higher education, the soaring costs of increasingly marginal weapons systems, and so on.

The mainstream healthcare system is incapable of promoting health or restraining costs:

The other problem with the mainstream is that any attempt to structurally reform these broken systems will trigger collapse. The mainstream systems are now so fragile that any significant change will cause them to implode. I explain why in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform.

The good news is there is a way to avoid failure and stagnation: avoid the mainstream like the plague. Stop eating packaged and fast foods, eat restaurant meals only occasionally, prepare 90% of your meals at home with real ingredients, including lots of fresh vegetables. Walk at least one mile/2 kilometers a day, start bicycling instead of driving (where possible), start doing yoga, tai chi, etc. every day, turn any 6-foot square floor area into your home gym–get lean.

Stop watching sports and start doing sports (appropriate to your age and climate, of course).

As for fashioning a sustainable career–don’t count on a college degree to work some sort of magic. I describe a more proactive approach to forging a sustainable career in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Don’t accept “standards of care” that include addictive pain-killers and powerful meds that require another six meds with their own side-effects to counter the side-effects of the first med. Do you own research, get a second opinion. Discover what you can do to help heal yourself first.

Stop “consuming” mainstream media except in small, limited portions and consume even these portions with a skeptical eye and ear for propaganda and rigged numbers that supports failed mainstream narratives.

We are what we do every day. Step out of the mainstream and stay out of the mainstream and opportunities that are unavailable to those who passively accept the mainstream as “all there is” will emerge.

As Douglas MacArthur observed, “There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.”

If you’re interested in avoiding the mainstream of failure and stagnation, please consider these quotes drawn from my extensive list of Aphorisms:

“We are what we repeatedly do.” (Aristotle)

“Do the thing and you shall have the power.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” (E.F. Schumacher)

“He who will not risk cannot win.” (John Paul Jones)

And the Beat Goes On: Mega-rich get richer. Society Crumbles

Posted on January 4, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Robert De Filippis

(OpEdNews.com)

While most of us have been taking our kids to Little League games, betting on the Super Bowl, taking an occasional vacation and waiting for the American Dream to become a reality, we haven’t noticed something important happening all around us. Society has been crumbling at the edges for the last several decades.

This is not to say that lots of human beings haven’t already experienced the early stages of this societal disintegration. But they tend to be the people at the margins. People without a voice. People whose interests are not understood, let alone represented in the great debates of our times.

Think of the Mideast. Think ISIS here. Think of terrorism. Terrorists don’t attack us because of our freedoms. They attack out of desperation. Out of a frustration that comes with no future, and a feeling of impotence in the face of the continued economic violence committed in the name of corporate profits and greed. Corporations protected by the most powerful military in the history of the world. Ours!

Is it any mystery why we have over six hundred military installations in other countries around the world? We’re not under threat from anyone, but our corporation’s interests in those countries must be protected while they rape them of their labor and natural resources.

History is written by the victors and the popular public narratives are circumscribed by those whose interests they serve and not those who suffer. At the core of this phenomenon is complicity. A subconscious complicity made up of an ultra-resistant trifecta of human thinking — greed, ignorance, and certainty.

Greed now normalized has made the great American dream indistinguishable from having basic financial security to making everyone a billionaire-in-waiting. An inability to distinguish fact from opinion leads the wave of ignorance that engulfs us. Our arrogance disguised as fervent patriotism defends our ignorance and allows us to reject the knowledge we need to save ourselves.

Our generalized confusion of what constitutes a fact allows an individual’s certainty to form a resistance similar to the bacterial infections that threaten to make modern antibiotics useless. It continues to evolve. “If I can’t figure out who’s lying, I’ll believe the one who confirms my point of view. Of that I’m certain.”

Until we learn that having our beliefs validated by a media being paid to manipulate us for political gain, society will continue to disintegrate for larger and larger groups of people.

Seems like a stretch, I know. But think about how we’ve become polarized. How we are so sure of our positions that we just can’t have a conversation with those from the other side. The very conversation we need to have to figure out how we’re being duped. Then think about how our politicians use the greed, ignorance and certainty on both sides to work us up into an emotional lather. And finally, how they ignore our interests while they do the bidding of their owners keeping us distracted with our petty differences with each other.

This will come to an end. There will either be a major social revolution at the least or outright raw violence at the worst. As the authority structures lose the willing conformance of the masses, all that’s left to police them is force. And at some point – like is beginning now — the response will be violence in return. Think of the proliferation of guns in America. Think of people shooting police.

It doesn’t take much discernment to see that corporate structures are highly sophisticated mechanisms for funneling money upwards. That government collusion protects the interests of the owners of capital at the expense of the employees, customers, the general public. And the military protects their international interests.

The largest wealth producer in the world is the financial industry that simply makes money from money and produces nothing. It serves no interests but its own. Yes, some of us fortunate to have salvaged what’s left of our life savings after repeated financial crashes still enjoy the crumbs from the tables of the elite. I do mean crumbs.

Do the math. At the current rate of the upward movement of wealth, there is no other outcome but final disaster. The top 1/10^th of 1 percent — not 1 percent — but 1/10^th of 1 percent in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent in America, and it gets worse as you leave our shores.

At this rate, the world will eventually consist of gated enclaves of the mega-wealthy guarded by elite corps of paid mercenaries surrounded by billions of impoverished people.

This trajectory has increased dramatically for the last several decades. More and more of the world’s wealth is pouring into the coffers of the mega-rich. This is a zero sum game. When the masses have no wealth left, the game will be over. No matter how powerful the wealthy are, no matter how much wealth they possess, the game will be over.

Foxes Guard Facebook Henhouse

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By F. William Engdahl

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The latest mantra of CIA-linked media since the “Pizzagate” leaks of data alleging that Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta and other highly influential political persons in Washington were connected to an unusual pizza place near the White House run by a 41-year old James Achilles Alefantis called Comet Ping Pong, is the need to crack down (i.e. censorship) on what is being called “Fake News.” The latest step in this internet censorship drive is a decision by the murky social media organization called Facebook to hire special organizations to determine if Facebook messages are pushing Fake News or not. Now it comes out that the “fact check” private organizations used by Facebook are tied to the CIA and CIA-related NGO’s including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

In the last weeks of the US Presidential campaign, Wikileaks released a huge number of emails linked to Clinton Campaign Manager, John Podesta. The contents of thousands of emails revealed detailed exchanges between Podesta and the oddly-influential Comet Ping Pong pizza place owner, Alefantis, as well as the Clinton campaign, which held fundraisers at Comet Ping Pong.

The Pizzagate scandal exploded in the final weeks of the US campaign as teams of private researchers documented and posted Facebook, Instagram and other data suggesting that Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong were at the heart of a pedophilia ring that implicated some of the most prominent politicians in Washington and beyond.

The New York Times and Washington Post moved swiftly to assert that the Pizzagate revelations were Fake News, quoting “anonymous sources” who supposedly said the CIA “believed” Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. Former NSA senior intelligence expert William Binney claimed the Podesta and Clinton campaign data were leaked, not hacked. The NSA, he pointed out, would immediately identify a hack, especially a foreign hack, and they have remained silent.

The uncovering and release to Wikileaks of the Podesta emails were immediately blamed on Russian intelligence by the CIA, and now by the US President, with not a shred of proof, and despite the fact that NSA. Wikipedia, whose content is often manipulated by US intelligence agencies, rapidly posted a page with the curious title, “Pizzagate (Conspiracy Theory).”

To make certain the neutral interested reader gets the message, the first line reads, “Pizzagate is a debunked conspiracy theory which emerged during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, alleging that John Podesta’s emails, which were leaked by WikiLeaks, contain coded messages referring to human trafficking, and connecting a number of pizzerias in Washington, D.C. and members of the Democratic Party to a child-sex ring.”

‘Fake News’ Mantra Begins

My purpose in mentioning Pizzagate details is not to demonstrate the authenticity of the Pizzagate allegations. That others are doing with far more resources. Rather, it is to point out the time synchronicity of the explosive Pizzagate email releases by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks web blog, with the launch of a massive mainstream media and political campaign against what is now being called “Fake News.”

The cited New York Times article that Wikipedia cites as “debunking” the Pizzagate allegations states, “None of it was true. While Mr. Alefantis has some prominent Democratic friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, he has never met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated by law enforcement for any of these claims. He and his 40 employees had unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news.” The article contains not one concrete proof that the allegations are false, merely quoting Alefantis as the poor victim of malicious Fake News.

That New York Times story was accompanied by a series of articles such as “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study.” Another headline reads, “Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News.” Then on November 19, strong Clinton supporter, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is quoted in a prominent article titled, “Facebook Considering Ways to Combat Fake News, Mark Zuckerberg Says.”

Facebook uses CIA Censors

Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of the world-leading social media site, Facebook.com, the world’s 5th wealthiest man at an estimated $50 billion, has now established a network of “Third Party Fact Checkers” whose job is to red flag any Facebook message of the estimated one billion people using the site, with a prominent warning that reads, “Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers.”

Facebook has announced that it is taking its censorship ques from something called The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This IFCN, a new creation, has drafted a code of five principles for news websites to accept, and Facebook will work with “third-party fact checking organizations” that are signatories to that code of principles.

If we search under the name International Fact-Checking Network, we find ourselves at the homepage of something called the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.

OK. If we look a bit deeper we find that the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network in turn, as its website states, gets money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations of George Soros.

Oh my, oh my! Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who partners with Soros in numerous nasty projects such as convincing African countries to accept Genetically Modified or GMO seeds? Google, whose origins date back to funding by the CIA and NSA as what intelligence researcher Nafeez Ahmed describes as a “plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority‘ “?

The Omidyar Foundation is the foundation of eBay founder and multi billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, which finances among other projects the online digital publication, The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.

And the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Government-financed “private” NGO behind every Color Revolution CIA regime change from the Ukraine Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring? The NED was a CIA project created in the 1980’s during the Reagan Administration as part of privatizing US intelligence dirty operations, to do, as Allen Weinstein, who drafted the Congressional legislation to establish the NED, noted in a candid 1991 Washington Post interview, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

And if we dig even deeper we find, lo and behold, the name George Soros, convicted hedge fund insider trader, tax-exempt philanthropist and giga-billionaire who seems to fund not only Hillary Clinton and virtually every CIA and US State Department Color Revolution from Russia to China to Iran through his network of Open Society Foundations including the 1990’s Jeffrey Sachs Shock Therapy plunder of Russia and most of former Communist East Europe.

Another one of the media working with Zuckerberg’s Facebook censorship of Fake News is the Washington Post, today owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos is a major media business partner of….The US Central Intelligence Agency, a fact he omitted to inform about after taking over ownership of the most important newspaper in Washington.

Bezos’ Washington Post recently published a bizarre list of 200 websites it claimed generated Fake News. It refused to identify who gave them the list. Veteran Washington investigative reporter, Wayne Madsen, exposed the source of the McCarthy-style taboo list of so-called Fake News. It was a “website called PropOrNot.com that has links to the CIA and George Soros.”

It’s not merely the Pizzagate revelations that have triggered such a massive attack on independent Internet websites. It seems that back in January 2014 at the Davos World Economic Forum control of information on the Internet was a top item of discussion. At the time, Madsen noted, “With the impending demise of World Wide Web ‘net neutrality,’ which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.”

It’s not even the foxes who are guarding the Internet Henhouse. It’s the werewolves of CIA and US Government censorship. Whether the explosive Pizzagate Podesta revelations merely triggered a dramatic acceleration in the timetable for the CIA’s planned “Fake News” operation as the successor to their 1980’s “Conspiracy Theory” linguistic discrediting operation, it’s clear this is no unbiased, objective, transparent public service to protect the Internet public from harmful content.

And, besides, who are they to tell me or you what you are allowed to read, digest and form your independent ideas about? This is a 21st Century reincarnation of the Spanish Inquisition, one by the real fake newsmakers–Washington Post, AP, ABCNews, Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, the CIA and friends. I would say it’s an alarming development of cyber warfare, not by Russia, but by those CIA-run networks that are fomenting Fake News to demonize any and everyone who opposes Washington intelligence propaganda.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Neoliberalism and The Globalization of War: America’s Hegemonic Project

Posted on December 28, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms on indebted countries as well the manipulation of financial markets, the engineered collapse of national currencies, the privatization of State property, the imposition of economic sanctions, the triggering of inflation and black markets.

The economic dimensions of this military agenda must be clearly understood. War and Globalization are intimately related. These military and intelligence operations are implemented alongside a process of economic and political destabilization targeting specific countries in all major regions of World.

Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments’ ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies.

In turn, the demise of national sovereignty was also facilitated by the instatement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, evolving towards the global trading agreements (TTIP and TPP) which (if adopted) would essentially transfer state policy entirely into the hands of corporations. In recent years, neoliberalism has extend its grip from the so-called developing countries to the developed countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. Bankruptcy programs have been set in motion. Island, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, etc, have been the target of sweeping austerity measures coupled with the privatization of key sectors of the national economy.

The global economic crisis is intimately related to America’s hegemonic agenda. In the US and the EU, a spiralling defense budget backlashes on the civilian sectors of economic activity. “War is Good for Business”: the powerful financial groups which routinely manipulate stock markets, currency and commodity markets, are also promoting the continuation and escalation of the Middle East war. A worldwide process of impoverishment is an integral part of the New World Order agenda.

Beyond the Globalization of Poverty

Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the “globalization of poverty”: countries are transformed in open territories,

State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy, all of which ultimately leads to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire populations (refugee crisis).

This “second stage” goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of a process of outright destruction of human life.

In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.

The New World Order

Broadly speaking, the main corporate actors of the New World Order are

• Wall Street and the Western banking conglomerates including its offshore money laundering facilities, tax havens, hedge funds and secret accounts,

• the Military Industrial Complex regrouping major “defense contractors”, security and mercenary companies, intelligence outfits, on contract to the Pentagon;

• the Anglo-American Oil and Energy Giants,

• The Biotech Conglomerates, which increasingly control agriculture and the food chain;

• Big Pharma,

• The Communication Giants and Media conglomerates, which constitute the propaganda arm of the New World Order.

There is of course overlap, between Big Pharma and the Weapons industry, the oil conglomerates and Wall Street, etc.

These various corporate entities interact with government bodies, international financial institutions, US intelligence. The state structure has evolved towards what Peter Dale Scott calls the “Deep State”, integrated by covert intelligence bodies, think tanks, secret councils and consultative bodies, where important New World Order decisions are ultimately reached on behalf of powerful corporate interests.

In turn, intelligence operatives increasingly permeate the United Nations including its specialized agencies, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, political parties.

What this means is that the executive and legislature constitute a smokescreen, a mechanism for providing political legitimacy to decisions taken by the corporate establishment behind closed doors.

Media Propaganda

The corporate media, which constitutes the propaganda arm of the New World Order, has a long history whereby intelligence ops oversee the news chain. In turn, the corporate media serves the useful purpose of obfuscating war crimes, of presenting a humanitarian narrative which upholds the legitimacy of politicians in high office.

Acts of war and economic destabilization are granted legitimacy. War is presented as a peace-keeping undertaking.

Both the global economy as well as the political fabric of Western capitalism have become criminalized. The judicial apparatus at a national level as well the various international human rights tribunals and criminal courts serve the useful function of upholding the legitimacy of US-NATO led wars and human rights violations.

Destabilizing Competing Poles of Capitalist Development

There are of course significant divisions and capitalist rivalry within the corporate establishment. In the post Cold War era, the US hegemonic project consists in destabilizing competing poles of capitalist development including China, Russia and Iran as well as countries such as India, Brazil and Argentina.

In recent developments, the US has also exerted pressure on the capitalist structures of the member states of the European Union. Washington exerts influence in the election of heads of State including Germany and France, which are increasingly aligned with Washington.

The monetary dimensions are crucial. The international financial system established under Bretton Woods prevails. The global financial apparatus is dollarized. The powers of money creation are used as a mechanism to appropriate real economy assets. Speculative financial trade has become an instrument of enrichment at the expense of the real economy. Excess corporate profits and multibillion dollar speculative earnings (deposited in tax free corporate charities) are also recycled towards the corporate control of politicians, civil society organizations, not to mention scientists and intellectuals. It’s called corruption, co-optation, fraud.

Latin America: The Transition towards a “Democratic Dictatorship”

In Latin America, the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s have in large part been replaced by US proxy regimes, i.e. a democratic dictatorship has been installed which ensures continuity. At the same time the ruling elites in Latin America have remoulded. They have become increasingly integrated into the logic of global capitalism, requiring an acceptance of the US hegemonic project.

Macro-economic reform has been conducive to the impoverishment of the entire Latin america region.

In the course of the last 40 years, impoverishment has been triggered by hyperinflation, starting with the 1973 military coup in Chile and the devastating reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The implementation of these deadly economic reforms including sweeping privatization, trade deregulation, etc. is coordinated in liaison with US intelligence ops, including the “Dirty war” and Operation Condor, the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua, etc.

The development of a new and privileged elite integrated into the structures of Western investment and consumerism has emerged. Regime change has been launched against a number of Latin American countries.

Any attempt to introduce reforms which departs from the neoliberal consensus is the object of “dirty tricks” including acts of infiltration, smear campaigns, political assassinations, interference in national elections and covert operations to foment social divisions. This process inevitably requires corruption and cooptation at the highest levels of government as well as within the corporate and financial establishment. In some countries of the region it hinges on the criminalization of the state, the legitimacy of money laundering and the protection of the drug trade.

The above text is an English summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s Presentation, National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, May 17, 2016. This presentation took place following the granting of a Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanities to Professor Chossudovsky by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)

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After the Crash

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