Category Archives: Empire

Mission Accomplished

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U-S-A!  U-S-A!  We’re Number One!  

By Paul Edwards

Source: Information Clearing House

It took America 15 years to airlift its whipped, arrogant ass out of Vietnam; in Afghanistan it took 20.  All the young men and women our diseased, criminal “leaders” doomed to be killed, mangled, or commit suicide in or after those fake, bullshit “wars” were, in effect, shit-canned by them like rotten meat.  Trillions that should have educated, inspired, and nurtured them were wasted and stolen by our rabid, raping Capitalist War Machine.

After 20 years of blustering, pious deception, colluded in by the hillbilly ninnies laughingly referred to as our government, led by four despicable Presidents—as contemptible a set of moral and spiritual monsters as could be dredged up from the foetid latrines of history—this hideous charade can be seen for what it was: a brazen scam to engorge our Death Merchants with blood money.

The coprophagous Corporate Press and its petting zoo of hired political porn stars rage against ersatz villains in this Bozo pratfall of America’s Potemkin regime, imported, installed and bankrolled by this unraveling empire in its last pathetic shot at a grotesque simulation of world hegemony.

One is in awe at the spectacle of the blackguard war pimps who stampeded this simple-minded, helpless country into these exercises in folk murder, pointing fingers and anathematizing anyone but themselves, disgusting human sepsis that they are.
 The only indisputable truth about the Afghan debacle is that the U.S. War Machine and its wholly-owned Congress and Press, hyped fear and outrage at 9/11 to spin the mythical GWOT and two decades of limitless profiteering using the brutal destruction of a poor, defenseless country as a weapons-testing experiment. 

Whether that country could be dominated and pacified, much less remade, had no relevance in their calculus.  Outcomes in their pretend “wars” mean nothing: what matters is that the Federal money spigot be jammed wide open and massive profits from their death devices never end.  Schopenhauer nailed the war industry a century ago: “Created by the wars that required it, the machine now creates the wars it requires”. Under American assault, Afghanistan and its people who survive, have suffered a devastation of historic proportions, comparable to massacres The Empire inflicted on Cuba and the Philippines in its early days. Nothing can ever alter this villainy, another bloody stain smeared on our long, rabid history. Curiously, though, in a twist of historical irony, The Empire has undoubtedly wounded itself more grievously than it did Afghanistan.

The fact is that after a long chain of blundering, idiotic policy trainwrecks and staggeringly stupid military humiliations—all acts of blatant piracy for the War Machine—The Empire, far from cementing its hold on its craven lapdogs, Britain, Australia, and NATO, is now regarded by the world as an unhinged, imbecile giant without brains, ethics, honor, or even any sense of self-preservation.  Nations, universally, stare at us with the kind of bated-breath foreboding that would be felt watching an untethered lunatic venture across Zambesi Gorge on a tightrope.

When the sheer, brute madness and psychotic hubris of a tyrannical regime deceives its people into mortal peril, as the U.S. government has, the inevitable end is overthrow or implosion.  Empires fall from their fatal morbid pathology, without exception. 

When an entire people is aroused and mobilized against its its tyrants, elites, or aristocrats, there is blood in the streets.  In the French Revolution, mass rage exploded in indiscriminate murder of the nobility. Such raging mayhem is not even conceivable to us now, and never was.  Even the rising of Americans in rebellion against their ruling Capitalist War Machine is unimaginable.  We are stupefied by propaganda into blind, autonomic obedience.  Disaster, when it comes, will be horribly mishandled, as all else has been, by our Capitalist criminals and their political whores.

And yet, even given their dull passivity and refusal to face their reality, it amazes Americans tolerate living under this ridiculous, contemptible gang of baldfaced liars, dimwit conmen, and black-hearted slugs: McConnell and Pelosi, Schumer and McCarthy, Mancin and Cruz, and their vomitus ilk.  Sure, money buys the commercials that are all the deeply stupid absorb, but even the densest must smell the decayed mummies behind the masks.

These odious moral thugs, who sold America on vengeful, phony “wars”, now join their chorus of shameless flacks, grasping wildly at any alibi for their cowardice and folly.  They bayed for revenge and blood, dodging their duty to check the imbecile, Bush, Jr., and his psychically twisted Igor, Cheney, cheered shape-shifting bullshitter Obama, subhuman Trump, and now drub vacuous, impaired Biden for blundering into the only inevitable endgame. 

The chaos and dislocation at the end of empires has always been  commensurate with their magnitude, reach and duration.  The French inflamed Europe; the Spanish and British dislocated the  Western financial system; the Nazi and Russian destabilized the world and brought agony and death to hundreds of millions. 

The fall of Imperial America, while certain, cannot be predicted as to mode and method.  It may come in a series of our floundering, catastrophic military idiocies—though upping the ante against Russia and/or China will put a swift, devastating end to that process—or in a climax of economic spasms leading to flight from the dollar as reserve currency and national bankruptcy.  What is certain is that it will be the most cataclysmic disruption the world has ever suffered.  Empires, as the terminally ill, cannot self-rescue.  They die devoured by their own inherent horrors.

The Houses of Dead and Crooked Souls

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.”      – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

There is a vast and growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor.  An obscene gulf. If we can read houses, they will confirm this.  They offer a visible lesson in social class.

Houses stand before us like books on a shelf waiting to be read, and when the books are missing, as they are for a vast and growing multitude of the homeless exiled wandering ones and those imprisoned, their absence serves to indict the mansion-dwelling wealthy and to a lesser extent those whose homes serve to shield them from the truth of the ill-begotten gains of the wealthy elites who create the world’s suffering through their avarice, lies, and war making.

Many regular people want to say with Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night:

The fog is where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself….Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?

Yet the rich don’t hide or give a damn. They flaunt their houses.  They know they are crooks and creators of illusions.  Their nihilism is revealed in their conspicuous consumption and their predatory behavior; they want everyone else to see it too.  So they rub it in their faces.  Their wealth is built on the blood and suffering of millions around the world, but this is often hidden knowledge.

For many regular people prefer the fog to the harsh truth.  It shields them from intense anger and the realization that the wealthy elites who run the world and control the media lie to them about everything and consider them beneath contempt.  That would demand a response commensurate with the propaganda – rebellion.  It would impose the moral demand to look squarely at the houses of death with their tiny cells in which the wealthy elites and their henchmen imprison and torture truth tellers like Julian Assange, an innocent man in a living hell; to make connections between wealth and power and the obscene flaunting of the rich elite’s sybaritic lifestyles in houses where every spacious room testifies to their moral depravity.

The recent news of Barack Obama’s vile selfie birthday celebration for his celebrity “friends” at his 29-acre estate and mansion (he has another eight-million-dollar mansion in Washington, D. C.) on Martha’s Vineyard is an egregious recent case in point.  If he thinks this nauseating display is proof of his stability and strength – which obviously he does – then he is a deluded fool.  But those who carry water for the military-intelligence-media complex are amply rewarded and want to tell the world that this is so.  It’s essential for the Show.  It must be conspicuous so the plebians learn their lesson.

Obama’s Vineyard mansion stands as an outward sign of his inner disgrace, his soullessness.

Trump’s golden towers and his never-ending self-promotion or the multiple million-dollar mansions of high-tech, sports, and Hollywood’s superstars send the same message.

Take Bill Gates’ sixty-three-million-dollar mansion, Xanadu, named after William Randolph Hearst’s estate in Citizen Kane, that took seven years to build.

Take the house up the hill from where I live in an erstwhile working-class town that sold for one million plus and now is being expanded to double its size with a massive swimming pool that leaves no grass uncovered. Every week, three black window-tinted SUVs arrive with New Jersey plates to join two white expensive sedans to oversee the progress in this small western Massachusetts town where McMansions rise throughout the hills faster than summer’s weeds.

Take the blue dolomite stone Searles Castle with its 60 acres, 40 rooms, and “dungeon” basement down the hill on Main St. that was recently bought by a NYC artist who also owns seven grand estates around the country that he showcases as examples of his fine artistic taste.  “All these houses have endless things to do — it’s just mind-boggling,” he has said. The artist, Hunt Slonem, calls himself a “glamorizer,” and his “exotica” paintings, inspired by Andy Warhol’s repetition of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, hang in galleries, museums, cruise ships, and the houses of film celebrities.  Like his showcase houses, his exotica must have endless things to do.

What would Vincent van Gogh say?  Perhaps what he wrote to his brother Theo: that the greatest people in painting and literature “have always worked against the grain” and in sympathy with the poor and oppressed.  That might seem “mind-boggling” to Slonem.

Such ostentatious displays of wealth and power clearly reveal the delusions of the elites, as if there are no spiritual consequences for living so.  Even if they read Tolstoy’s cautionary tale about greed, How Much Land Does A Man Need?, it is doubtful that its truth would register.  Like Tolstoy’s protagonist Pahόm, they never have enough.  But like Pahόm, the Devil has them in his grip, and like him, they will get their just rewards, a small room, a bit of land to imprison them forever.

His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahóm to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.

Where does the money for all these estates, not just Slonem’s, come from? Who wants to ask?

Getting to the roots of wealth involves a little digging.  Slonem’s castle was originally commissioned in the late 1800s by Mark Hopkins for his wife.  Hopkins was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was built by Irish and Chinese immigrants.  Labor history is quite illuminating on the ways immigrants have always been treated, in this case “the dregs of Asia” and the Irish dogs.  Interestingly enough, the great black scholar and radical, W. E. B. Du Bois, a town native, worked at the castle’s construction site as a young man.  No doubt it informed his future work against racism, capitalism, and economic exploitation.

Wealthy urbanites flooded this area after September 11, 2001, and now, in their terror of disease and death, they have bought every house they could find.  Their cash-filled pockets overflow with blood-money and few ask why. To suggest that massive wealth is almost always ill-begotten is anathema.  But innocence wears many masks, and the Show demands washed hands and no questions asked.

It is rare that one becomes super-wealthy in an honest and ethical way.  The ways the rich get money almost without exception lead downward, to paraphrase Thoreau from his essay, “Life Without Principle.”

Since the corona crisis began, investment firms such as the Blackstone Group have been gobbling up vast numbers of houses across the United States as their prices have gone through the roof.  The lockdowns – an appropriate prison term – have set millions of regular people back on their heels as the wealthiest have gotten exponentially wealthier. Poverty and starvation have increased around the world.  This is not an accident.  Despair and depression are widespread.

There is a taboo in life in general and in journalism: Do not ask where people’s money comes from.  Thoreau was so advised long ago:

Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick…

But the super-wealthy do not get sick.  They are sick.  For they revel in their depravity and push it in the faces of regular people, many who envy them and wish to become super-rich and powerful themselves.  Of course there are the blue bloods whose method is understatement, but it takes many decades to enter their theater of deception.  In many ways, these people are worse, for their personae have been crafted over decades of play-acting and public relations so their images are laundered to smell fresh and benevolent.  They often wear the mask of philanthropy, while the history of their wealth lies shrouded in an amnestic fog.

Yet soul murder includes suicide, and while the old and new moneyed ones smoothly justify their oppression of the vast majority, many regular people kill the best in themselves by envying the rich.

Years ago, I discovered some documents that showed that one of this country’s most famous philosophers, known for his lofty moral pronouncements, owned a lot of stock in companies that were doing evil things – war making, poisoning and killings huge numbers with chemicals, etc.  But his image was one of Mr. Clean, Mr. Good Guy. I suspect this is typical and that there are many such secrets in the basements and attics of the rich.

But let us also ask where the writers and presenters of the mainstream and alternative media get their money.  Although “to follow the money” is a truism, few do.  If we do, we will learn that money talks and those who take it toe the line, nor do they live in shacks by the side of the road or rent like so many others.  They invest with Black Rock and their ilk and have money managers who can increase their wealth while shielding them from the ways that money is made on the backs of the poor and working people.  And they lie about people like Assange, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, Craig Murray, et al., all imprisoned for daring to reveal the depredations of the power elites, the violence at the heart of predatory capitalism.

Yes, houses speak.  But few ever speak of where their money comes from.  Those that are on the take – which has multiple meanings – always plead innocent.  Yes, I can hear you say that I am being too harsh; that there are exceptions.  That is obvious.  So let’s skip the exceptions and focus on the general principle. There is a Buddhist principle that right livelihood is a core ethic in earning money.  Jesus had another way of putting it but was of course in agreement, as were so many others whom people hold in highest esteem.

Thoreau wrote: “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications.”

The truth is that for most people, work, if they can find it, is drudgery and hard, a matter of survival. The late great Studs Terkel called it hell and rightly said that most jobs are not big enough for people because they crush the soul, they lack meaning.  And behind all ledgers of great wealth lie crushed souls.  This reality is so obvious and goes by many names, including class warfare, that further commentary would be redundant.

A few years ago, I visited Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut.  It is advertised as “a house with a heart and a soul.”  It is not a house but a mansion, and it was an ostentatious display in Twain’s time. Similar or worse than Obama’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard today.  It has no soul or heart.  It was built with Twain’s wife’s family money.  Her father was an oil and coal tycoon from upstate New York.  Twain reveled in opulent respectability.  He lived the life of a Gilded Age tycoon, an American magnate. It is not a pretty story, but the Twain myth says otherwise.  Not that he catered to popular tastes to please the crowd and his domineering wife and that he lived in luxury, but that he was a radical critic of the establishment.  This is false.  For he withheld for the most part the publication of his withering take on American imperialism until after his death.  He committed soul murder.  But his mansion impressed his neighbors and his humor distracted from his luxurious lifestyle.  His house still stands as a cautionary tale for those who will read it.

Baudelaire once said that in palaces “there is no place for intimacy.”  This is no doubt why in people’s dreams small, simple houses with a light in the window loom large.  Bachelard says, “When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut.”  For here man and God meet in solitude; here human intimacy is possible.  “The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world.’  It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases, it gives access to absolute refuge.”

He is not espousing actual poverty, but the oneiric depths of true desire, the dreams of hope, reconciliation, and simple living that run counter to the amassing of wealth to prove one’s power and majesty. A humble house of truth, not a mansion of lies. This, to borrow the title of William Goyen’s novel, is “the house of breath” where the spirit can live and pseudo-stability gives way to faith, for insecurity is the essence of life.

There is such a hermit’s hut where the light shines.  It is the tiny cell in Belmarsh Prison where Julian Assange hangs onto his life by a thread.  His witness for truth sends an inspiring message to all those lost in the world’s woods to look to his fate and not turn away.  To follow to their sources the money that greases the palms of all the so-called journalists and politicians who want him dead or imprisoned for life, who tell their endless lies, not just about him, but about everything.

The house of propaganda is built on unanimity.  When one person says no, the foundation starts to crumble.  The houses of the rich dead and crooked souls, erected to project the stability of their bloody illusions, start to crumble into sand when people dissent one by one.

Soon the fog lifts and there is no hiding any more.  At the end of the path, you can see the vultures circling overhead as their prey go running out of their mansions in terror.

Sing Hallelujah!

The Great Battle for the Future

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By Cory Morningstar

Source: Organic Radicals

A nightmare totalitarian industrial world, in which everything living is being poisoned to death and in which dehumanised people are subjected to full-spectrum physical and psychological control by slave-masters they never dare question.

So here is where the modern world and its self-mythologising cult of “progress” was leading us… Who’d have thought it, eh?

The warnings have been there, of course, whether from science fiction writers and filmmakers (They Live!, The Terminator,  Equals...), musicians or the dozens of thinkers featured on this website.

They warned us where this would end up if we didn’t do something, but we collectively spurned their advice and here we are, on the very brink of a long-term and probably fatal dystopia.

The important question now is how we are going to get out of this global hi-tech concentration camp.

Part of the answer is that we need to keep alive, and spread as widely as possible, a vision of how the world could be, of another way of living which is utterly different from the sterile and robotic hell currently lined up for us and those who will come after.

It is very much part of the ruling elite’s propaganda to insist that their future is the only future, that no other possibility even exists.

They are always keen to dismiss the idea of a different society as totally fanciful, empty-headed or even positively dangerous, removing us from the protective bliss of the prison they have built around us.

This lie is reinforced in people’s minds by the way that the other, possible, world is increasingly distant from contemporary reality.

It is hard to imagine a transition from where we are today (let alone where we are heading) to where many of us would like to be.

It is particularly hard, even impossible, if you go along with the ruling elite’s deliberate confusion of the passing of time with the strengthening of their industrial profit-system.

If you see “the future” as necessarily an extension of the path that has brought us from the past to the present, then their version seems inevitable. It is therefore crucial to break free from this idea of some kind of predestined vector taking us towards a hyper-industrial destiny.

Industrial capitalist development was never the only possible form which human society could have taken over the last few centuries. The shape our present has taken is not due to the passing of time but to very specific processes and actions which have occurred.

If we want to reconnect with the “other world” in our hearts, and understand why it seems so unattainable, we would therefore do well to look back at how we landed up on the disastrous path of industrialised tyranny.

A key period to analyse is the Middle Ages, when capitalism first started to take over our lives.

Silvia Federici makes some very interesting observations on this period in her book Caliban and the Witch. (1)

She rejects the conventional wisdom that a “transition to capitalism” occurred as some kind of natural social evolution.

Instead, she points out that the power of the ruling elite was being threatened by the growing confidence of the 99%, who were increasingly rebelling against authority and servitude.

With the outright slavery of the Roman Empire left behind, these medieval rebels saw ahead of them a better future, one based on social justice, freedom and local autonomy.

They were on the path leading towards the light, towards genuine social progress rather than to the fake “progress” of technological sophistication and profusion.

But this didn’t go down well with the ruling class, who feared that their power and privilege would be lost for ever.

Instead of escaping from slavery into freedom, our ancestors therefore found themselves engaged in a Great Battle for the Future with the dark forces of tyranny.

This battle raged for centuries all over Europe and in the parts of the world colonised and occupied by the dominant system.

In England the most famous uprising was the peasants’ revolt of 1381, during which radical preacher John Ball told his contemporaries that the time had come when they could “cast off the yoke they have borne so long and win the freedom they have always yearned for”. (2)

But there were plenty of others, such as the Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 in which the rebels seized control of Norwich, then the second biggest city in the country.

The 17th century radicals of the English Revolution, such as Gerrard Winstanley, represent perhaps the last flowering of this wave of revolt.

The Great Battle for the Future was even fiercer on continental Europe. As Federici points out, the uprisings of the Cathars in France and the Anabaptists in Germany were not just about isolated local grievances but represented an ideological and metaphysical challenge to the world of authority, power and property. (3)

Federici argues that capitalism was in fact the reaction of the ruling elite against their potential loss of control.

She writes: “Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle – possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This much must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled”. (4)

There is a strange echo here with the 20th century, when fascism emerged at a moment when the ruling elite (by this stage firmly capitalist) again faced the threat of popular insurrection.

The parallel even extends to the way in which the medieval bourgeoisie, often depicted as leading the radical onslaught against feudal power, sought common cause with their supposed enemies in the nobility in order to stamp out popular revolt.

This same bourgeoisie, which by the 20th century liked to think of itself as “liberal“, was likewise happy to see the boot of fascism keep the rabble in their place.

Capitalism – the new form taken by malevolent ruling-class domination – subjugated our ancestors by cutting them off from their sources of subsistence and autonomy.

Common land was confiscated – enclosed – making self-sufficiency impossible. Food could no longer be freely gathered or hunted, rivers could no longer be fished, wood for fuel could no longer be picked up in the privatised forests.

People were forced into the money system, forced to earn “wages” just to live, forced into factories and workhouses, reduced to craven dependency on the capitalist system.

Federici describes the period as one of “relentless class struggle” in which “the medieval village was the theater of daily warfare”. (5)

“Everywhere masses of people resisted the destruction of their former ways of existence, fighting against land privatization, the abolition of customary rights, the imposition of new taxes, wage-dependence, and the continuous presence of armies in their neighbourhoods, which was so hated that people rushed to close the gates of their towns to prevent soldiers from settling among them”. (6)

In order to impose the New Normal of capitalism on the unwilling people, the power elite used what Federici terms “social enclosure”, (7) a precursor of today’s “social distancing”.

She writes: “In pursuit of social discipline, an attack was launched against all forms of collective sociality and sexuality including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes, festivals, and other group-rituals that had been a source of bonding and solidarity among workers”. (8)

“Taverns were closed, along with public baths. Nakedness was penalized, as were many other ‘unproductive’ forms of sexuality and sociality. It was forbidden to drink, swear, curse”. (9)

In another striking parallel with the 2020s (and indeed the 1920s/1930s) the rich elite tried to create “a new type of individual” (10) – a servile, malleable and thus profitable type.

To this end it set out to separate us from our bodies and from our very sense of who we are.

“According to Max Weber, the reform of the body is at the core of the bourgeois ethic because capitalism makes acquisition ‘the ultimate purpose of life,’ instead of treating it as a means for the satisfaction of our needs; thus it requires that we forfeit all spontaneous enjoyment of life. Capitalism also attempts to overcome our ‘natural state,’ by breaking the barriers of nature and by lengthening the working day beyond the limits set by the sun, the seasonal cycles, and the body itself, as constituted in pre-industrial society”. (11)

The communal cohesion traditionally woven by, and among, women was specifically targeted by the ruling class in their efforts to disempower and enslave the common people, says Federici.

This took the form of the notorious fearmongering over “witches”, resulting in the murder of untold numbers of innocent women: “The witch-hunt destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism”. (12)

She adds: “The witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline”. (13)

The witch hunts were thus part of the general philosophical war being waged by industrial capitalism on any way of thinking not flattened and reduced to the pitiful level of its own limited, sterile and life-hating slave-dogma.

Explains Federici: “This is how we must read the attack against witchcraft and against that magical view of the world which, despite the efforts of the Church, had continued to prevail on a popular level through the Middle Ages. At the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was in ‘sympathetic’ relation with the rest”. (14)

The primary tool used by the ultra-rich minority to oppress the majority was, of course, the state.

Far from representing some kind of benign collective self-interest, as some absurdly persist in maintaining, the modern state emerged in the 14th century “as the only agency capable of confronting a working class that was regionally unified, armed and no longer confined in its demands to the political economy of the manor”. (15)

Whether claiming to be fighting “heresy”, “witchcraft” or disorder, the ruling elite deployed all the violence and propaganda of its inquisitions, wars and laws to bring the population to heel. And, as we all know to our cost, it won that Great Battle for the Future.

But because its sociopathic greed knows no end, because its “growth” is based on ever-increasing profit for the ultra-rich, it can never stop treading us further and further into the toxic industrial dust of its total control.

Today we have reached another key moment in history, when the ruling elite – under the feeble pretext of combatting a flu virus – hopes to essentially return us to the slave status we escaped a thousand years ago.

All its liberal pretence at “democracy” is going out of the window as the brutal reality of elite power becomes clear to those who have eyes to see.

There will be resistance, you can be sure of that, even if the advance disabling of certain potential sources of dissent means it may take a while for rebels to regroup and find their common voice.

Those of us who do resist will be embarking on another Great Battle for the Future.

We will be fighting for the same world of freedom and humanity and closeness to nature which inspired our ancestors hundreds of years ago.

Moreover, awareness of this historical context will be key to the way we resist.

We can never go back to the past but we can refer back to it and take our sense of direction from it.

It is clear that our defeat in the last Great Battle for the Future (and many subsequent struggles) saw us shunted down the wrong path, away from the bright future of which we dreamed and deeper and deeper into the gloom of enslavement.

We will not be able to reach our lost future by continuing along this path as it can only take us further and further from our desired destination.

The key realisation here is that industrialism, including all its technology and infrastructure, is simply an aspect of capitalism, of the slavery imposed upon us hundreds of years ago when we looked set to break free from the domination of the ruling elite.

Industrialism is not neutral. It is not something that can be turned around and used for our good. It is the prison in which we are locked.

The newnormalist technological tyranny currently being unleashed will hopefully make this inconvenient truth more evident and widely understood.

However, the underlying problem does not lie in industrialism’s excesses but in its very essence and raison d’être, as a means of control and exploitation.

We will not find the better future of which we dream in a world still polluted by factories, airports, motorways, pipelines, pylons, refineries and power stations.

The long-term happiness and self-fulfilment of humankind will not arrive via internet connections, phone networks and electricity supplies, but from their absence.

We need to destroy the whole industrial capitalist machine at the same time as we shake off this latest notching-up of repression, otherwise it will all just happen again and we will never be free.

Our victory in this 21st century Great Battle for the Future has got to be final and conclusive.

1. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).
2. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Fontana, 1993), p. 91.
3. See also Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind (Sussex, Winter Oak Press, 2014).
4. Federici, pp. 21-22
5. Federici, p. 26.
6. Federici, p. 82.
7. Federici, p. 84.
8. Federici, p. 83.
9. Federici, p. 137.
10. Federici, p. 135.
11. Ibid
12. Federici, p. 103.
13. Federici, p. 165.
14. Federici, pp. 141-42.
15. Federici, p. 84.

The Way to Defeat the Globalist Reset: Local Production for Local Consumption…

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By Peter Koenig

Source: Dissident Voice

The Globalists have semi-clandestinely introduced some kind of “covid-Martial Law” that overrules everything that is an otherwise Constitutional Right. We are in most of the western world a direct dictatorship. In most countries the Constitutional Amendment from “Democracy” to Dictatorship has happened clandestinely or at least semi-clandestinely. That’s what dictators do. Most of the people have no idea. Many of those who do know, don’t agree. They launch initiatives for new laws – that fall by the way side, because they have no teeth under a Martial Law-broken Constitution.

In Switzerland, the situation is slightly different, better of sorts. The Confederation Helvetica (CH) has a semi-direct Democracy. With 50,000 signatures, scrupulously verified for their validity, Swiss citizens can launch a referendum against a specific law. The referendum may eventually come to a popular vote, and a government/Parliament let law may be overruled. Though, this happens very rarely – the money lobby-propaganda is too strong – occasionally the people may have a chance. In these covid-times, it may actually happen.

We are currently undergoing the worst “tyrannification” of society in human history and in all western world countries. Covid-martial law overrules everything. This happened very fast. Within 18 months, from the beginning of 2020 to about mid-2021 citizens have basically no longer the very rights they could otherwise call as a human right. HRs have become worthless. In most cases police and military are under strict orders to obey. Those who don’t may lose their jobs, or worse.

Although, there are vivid and positive signs that the tides are turning. For example, at a London anti-covid-measures, anti-vaxx-certificates rally in London. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, Corona Committee, spoke via a huge video screen to the crowd on Trafalgar Square, tens of thousands of people, telling them that class actions suits are under way in the US, Canada, and that institutions and individuals, especially those responsible for the invalid PCR-tests, particularly in Europe and the US, that are the basis for governments lying about “cases”, serving to manipulate up-and-down the “infection” figures, leading to false numbers on hospitalization and death, about a virus that is less deadly than the common flu. Yes, you read correctly, less deadly than the common flu. This is the onset to Nuremberg 2.0 – where justice will prevail, as much as light prevails over darkness.

Dr. Fuellmich closed his talk on a positive and encouraging note.

It is humanity, versus inhumanity. We are human. We can laugh, cry, sing and hug. The other side can’t. The other side has no access to the spiritual side. Therefore, the other side, without any doubt, the inhuman side, will lose this inhuman battle for life….

See this 10-min video.

The transformation is beginning to take place. This is the health side, the human side, the most immediately important side – where real science is overcoming “bought” science, in order to avoid a genocide of biblical proportions – which is the eugenists plan, probably developing over the past about 100 years. However, there are two other, complementary plans which also need to be stopped.

The first one of the two is the digitization of everything. It is already descending upon humanity, had actually started already decades ago – and is now in its final round – just so as to coincide with the massive population reduction. It includes not only digitization of all forms of monetary transactions – which is rapidly pushing forward, through Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and most importantly, the vehicle to drive it all, the worldwide installation of 5G and soon to come 6G. This is foreseen to turn the entire globe into an electromagnetic field. And humans will be turned into “transhumans”, especially those that have survived the experimental, untested messenger spike protein injections called mRNA inoculations, falsely called “vaccines”.

This is not a joke. This is actually the plan already divulged in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, founder and forever CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in an interview with Swiss French TV broadcast, see this 2-min video:

According to Klaus Schwab’s “The Great Reset”, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots will soon rule the masses. By 2025, give or take a year or two, about half of today’s jobs will be run by AI. This electronic technology will in turn be ruled by some dirty-rich individuals, who somehow have given themselves the liberty to “run the world”. And we, the people, have let them.

They – the Deep Dark Statlers – call them Satanists – have planned this for about the last century. With great precision and intensity at times – and – what’s worse, much worse, right in front of our eyes. We have ignored them. Anybody who dared to draw attention to their evil machinations was dismissed with the convenient label “conspiracy theorist”.

Imagine, according to the Great Reset, half of our jobs will be taken over by AI, in just the next 5 years or so. By 2030, only about 5% to 10% of the current jobs will be existing and carried out by humans – maybe “transhumans”. All the others may be gone. Massive unemployment?  Maybe. But Schwab tries to tranquilize the world, saying that there will be new jobs for which newly unemployed people will be trained. They may be transhumans, because training is done by, and in partnership with, AI – and for the Epsilon People, the down-to-earth working class, robots will do the supervising.

This may sound depressing, despairing. It ain’t, if we think about the situation which we, pretty much on our own, have allowed to happen. It is not the end of the road, but only a stepping stone, onto which we too can step, when awakened – and not in anger, but with the bright spirit of light – a new world shaped by humans, shaped with the forces of light, Leaving the devil behind. Not even mentioning the beast. No letting it bother our minds. We are up to something much higher, much cleaner, clearer and much nobler. Our project is for humanity, for planet earth with all her sentient beings.

The simple model “Small is Beautiful” may be an appropriate vision forward. It may include another simple principle:
Local production for local consumption with local money, a local community run central bank working with a public banking system. Trade will be practiced with like-minded mostly neighboring sister countries, benefiting from comparative advantages. The money supply will be a reflection of the local economy. It will be backed by the local economy. Quite different from the current globalist-run fiat money pyramid.

This appears like a perfect recipe for de-globalization. And deglobalize we must. We must become again individuals that can and want to bond, not separate, individuals for whom solidarity is not just a term from a rusty vocabulary but means “we do it together”. This is the way to go, we will be satisfied with what we can achieve as a common, as a society with goals that serve the people, with values that do not depend on vertical growth, but rather reflect horizontal expansion of social infrastructure and well-being.

Let’s imagine a new type of economy with novel yardsticks – Happiness Indicators. Actually, not so novel, just not often talked about. In July 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 65/309 Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development inviting member countries to measure the happiness of their people and to use the data to help guide public policy. The first Happiness report was issued by the UN in April 2012.

If we are able to abandon the magical concept of “growth” and exchange it for happiness, we not only protect and preserve Mother Earth but will also preserve our human health – our sanity. Our today’s society is sick. It strives for ever more growth, for more possessions, for more affluence, for more control – but happiness that is the basis for a healthy life – is but an abstract term in today’s business-driven world. Happiness is more often than not confused with material wealth.

The no-growth, but social growth concept, is the basis for our escaping from the globalist agenda.

Human wealth comes from the heart. And it is through the heart that we may pass it on, replicate it. How does one define Happiness? There surely is no blueprint for happiness, as we are moving away from the all-modelled sets of values, away from the “musts” and the “Must-nots”.

The website “LifeHack.org” offers a few definitions of Happiness. Among them, the following two:

Happy people find balance in their lives. Folks who are happy have this in common: they’re content with what they have, and don’t waste a whole lot of time worrying and stressing over things they don’t. Unhappy people do the opposite: they spend too much time thinking about what they don’t have,; and,

According to the Dalai Lama, Happiness is not something readymade. It comes from your own actions. And let me add, from our actions driven by our heart and soul.

The General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 66/281 of 12 July 2012 proclaimed 20 March the International Day of Happiness recognizing the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world.

How does the UN define “Happiness”? Happiness is not contained in GDP, and less in GDP growth. To the contrary. It’s most important that we start detaching from material wealth, that we see the moral and friendship wealth in our society. That we see and strive for equality, inclusion, solidarity – that we learn to smile at each other, even in adverse situations. This requires an elevated spirit, a mentality of light that defeats satanic darkness.

Happy people abide by the golden rule: They let stuff go. Happy people realize this, are able to take things in stride, and move on – without fear.

That’s what we have to do – shed the fear – and move on, in a higher spiritual mode, floating out of the darkness into the light. It’s possible. Let’s give it a collective try. ‘They’ are blackmailing us into accepting the poisonous jab they fraudulently call vaccine. They may go as far as blocking us from getting food, from entering supermarkets without the vaccine certificate – or getting the test every time you need food. – No worries. They won’t succeed.

Is this ever-more encroaching human rights abuse-tyranny a malicious provocation? See this.

Are they on purpose driving people to the edge? To provoke a revolution? And bring in NATO and maybe even UN troops to subdue the upheavals, personal freedoms, national sovereignty – and even national borders towards a globalist world, a One World Order, a One Government world, led by the WEF and the club of billionaires directed by a satanic cult?

It is possible. But we are stronger. We will defeat this evil cult. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich et al, from the Corona Council, has already launched class action suits in Canada and the US and is taking legal actions against EU institutions and individuals. The tide is turning. Of course, you will not read or hear about it in the mainstream media.

Think small. Think community – your community, think self-sufficiency as much as possible. Think local production for local consumption with local money and local banks for the wellbeing of all within the community. Think trading with friends and with think-alike nations, societies, people.

We shall overcome – and we will.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky: Truthteller Extraordinaire

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

History teaches us that eventually the fog of propaganda, no matter how thick and unrelenting, is dissipated by the sun of truth.

Not really: By truthtellers such as Michel Chossudovsky.

It often takes decades or much longer for that to happen and even then it takes openness of mind and spirit to accept it in all its disturbing reality, for propaganda often enters into the deepest recesses of the mind and soul and many find they must forever defend it even when it is patently exposed.  Even if the truth is finally accepted, however, the damage has been done.

Presently, we are far along the path to worldwide totalitarianism as a result of the corona crisis, what is euphemistically called the “New Normal.”  As C. J. Hopkins, a wise analyzer of this pathological development, has said:

We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly   display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy their groceries.

This crackdown on freedom and the growth of elite control has dramatically accelerated in recent days and only those blind to history refuse to see it.  It’s an old story with a new twist; create enough fear – this time with a virus – and many people will bow to the authorities. Censor dissenting voices and many will make believe it isn’t happening and that their freedoms are not at risk.  The great psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm called this refusal the “escape from freedom.”  This perennial human tendency to submit to authority whose lust for power is equally never-ending is only thwarted by the unquenchable thirst for freedom exhibited by courageous freedom fighters.

Michel Chossudovsky is a freedom fighter.

In the case of the corona crisis propaganda campaign, the truth has been available nearly from the start, and Chossudovsky, with his website Global Research, has been one of the most unrelenting voices of sanity and freedom.

Global Research has for decades been on top of the most important issues of our times, from the events of September 11, 2001 through the Iraq War, the endless so-called war on terror, the U.S. wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Serbia, Palestine, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, etc., the multiple financial crises, CIA coups and assassinations of domestic and foreign leaders, the new Cold wars against Russia and China, right up to today’s world-wide covid propaganda war.

Started by Michel Chossudovsky on September 9, 2001, the website is part of The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which is an independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada.

Global Research has been a beacon of light for twenty dark years.  It has ignored no topic, no matter how controversial.  It has published an enormous amount of writing and research by many writers, exploring matters from multiple viewpoints, including conflicting ones.  Like any website that posts an enormous amount to engender debate, the quality of the articles varies, but on average it is very high.  Chossudovsky’s own writing has been outstanding and comprehensive.

Starting in January 2020, at the start of the corona crisis, he has been assiduously tracking its development in article after article. (Other contributors, such as Peter Koenig, et al., have also published very important work on the crisis at GR.)  Michel’s work (he is my friend and colleague and I am a long-time contributor) on this is similar to what he has done for twenty years since the murderous events of September 11, 2001 and the official propaganda about them. Global Research is a deep repository of research and writing exposing the official lies about those attacks.

In December 2020, he released a free E-Book of his corona crisis writings and has continually updated it, the last being on July 27, 2021.  In addition, he continues to write regular powerful articles on the corona propaganda and other matters.

What follows is a short quasi-review of Chossudovsky’s extraordinary contribution to exposing the vast official lies surrounding COVID-19. I say quasi because it will serve no purpose to repeat much of what he writes. Like all true gifts, his E-Book is given freely, but in the spirit of genuine gift exchange, readers of it should pass it on to others, for we are at a world-wide turning-point that has few if any precedents.  If you doubt that, a reading of his work will disabuse you of your reticence in recognizing its reality.  He introduces the book with these words:

We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in World history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.  Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 “pandemic”. The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair. More than 7 billion people Worldwide are directly or indirectly affected by the corona crisis.

It’s the powerful financiers and billionaires who are behind this project which has contributed to the destabilization (Worldwide) of the real economy. And there is ample evidence that the decision to close down a national economy (resulting in poverty and unemployment) will inevitably have an impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality. 

Since early February 2020, the Super Rich have cashed in on billions of dollars.

Amply documented, it’s the largest redistribution of global wealth in World history, accompanied by a process of Worldwide impoverishment. 

Those are strong words, but they are accurate.  Perhaps even an understatement.  For we have now entered the phase of this crisis where the authorities have tripled their efforts at intimidation and fear-mongering to coerce those whom Anthony Fauci recently called “the recalcitrant ones” to submit to their control.

Obey or else is being shouted daily from the corporate media’s headlines, even as they report a mélange of facts that contradict their own claims in a stupefying display of intentionally created chaos.  Their method is to fragment and polarize populations while openly announcing their intentions to mock the public who can still think and choose to do their own research.  Those who fail to do so now and simply accept the authorities propaganda will bear a heavy burden of guilt in the years to come.

Chossudovsky’s E-Book will be an eye-opener for those who have not yet faced the facts.  He chronicles the historical evolution of the corona crisis from its start and provides a timeline; explains clearly what Covid-19 and SARS-CoV-2 are, how they are allegedly identified and estimated; lays out its devastating mental, economic and financial consequences; shows how its lockdowns have produced mass worldwide poverty and unemployment and enriched billionaires, etc.

All this based on fraudulent PCR tests, fake statistics of “cases” and deaths from Covid-19, and the promotion of experimental and unapproved so-called vaccines that are in reality very dangerous “messenger” mRNA shots that are being mandated across the board.

To what end?  A high-tech digital dystopia controlled by and for the interests of the world’s wealthiest ruling elites.  Regular people need to reject their seductive lies, for they will find that they themselves, if they have bought into the vaccine propaganda, have already seen their numbers reduced by a demonic plan created by evil nihilists.

A reading of – and a watching of the videos included – in this E-Book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined.

Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place.  And if you find what I say here to be true, support Global Research in its twentieth anniversary year. It was right about 9/11, Iraq, the war on terror, etc., and is right again about the Corona Crisis.

That is quite a legacy in twenty young years.

FYI: There was No Coup, No Reichstag Fire

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By Peter Van Buren

Source: WeMeantWell.com

We need to clear some things up before they get any further out of hand, as the Dems insist on making this stuff every day’s front page. For starters, please stop saying “Reichstag moment.”  Also there was nothing even close to a coup on January 6, and those who fan the flames claiming we were “close” to a coup, overthrow, losing our democracy, etc., have evil designs on freedom and we should not listen to them. Done.

If the aliens flying around Navy ships were to stop long enough to listen to a couple of hours of “news,” they could easily believe Trump is still president, or at least still running against Biden. The MSM has him dominate the news, typically by recycling stories from his time in office, even recently reviving that he is a Russian asset. When Grandpa Simpson and Kamala “Silent Shadow” Harris tottered into the White House, they became president. Done.

Some 500 protestors taking selfies inside the Capitol building is a tantrum not a coup. Among other things, a coup must have some path towards success, in this case, preventing Joe Biden from becoming president. The rioters at best might have delayed the largely ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes until the next day which would not have been a coup, or forced Congress to meet at Starbucks to do its job, also not a coup. Done.

Not done. The latest addition to Coup Cannon comes from then- and somehow still- Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, apparently auditioning for a retirement job as a CNN analyst. Milley was so shaken Trump might attempt a coup or take other illegal measures after the election he and other top officials planned to stop Trump. Neither Milley nor any of the others actually spells out what Trump might have realistically done in some Calvinball-like way to make said coup happen. Milley’s Strangelovian performance art is based on nothing but the spittle running down his chin. American soldiers have been required to refuse illegal orders at least since Biden wore diapers, so Milley’s histrionics are just that.

Milley nonetheless felt “growing concern” after Trump placed “loyalists” in positions of power after the November 2020 election, replacing both Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Attorney General William Barr. He feared based on his own sizable gut these moves “were the sign of something sinister to come” (Update: Nothing sinister came.) Milley failed to recognize all presidential appointees are “loyalists” and somehow Trump did not replace Milley, who clearly had not read his oath recently, especially the part about taking orders from the civilian head of government.

In fact, if anyone is a threat to democracy it is nutjobs like Milley, who feel free to weave in and out of answering to the Commander in Chief based on their personal “concerns.” The general’s tough love for the Constitution apparently did not include the right to assemble, as he referred to a pro-Trump march protesting election results as “the modern American equivalent of brownshirts in the streets.” Dems now want to make a hero out of a man who feels his judgment is superior to the Constitution.

While Milley was rewriting 230 years of military prudence in late 2020, Paul Krugman of the NYT wrote there were “substantial odds America as we know it will be damaged or even destroyed” by the election (Update: it was not.) He told us to “expect violence from Trump supporters, maybe lots of it, both to disrupt voting on Election Day and in the days that follow” until Trump “stops counting of absentee ballots, claims massive fraud, and probably tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result” (Update: that did not happen.)  Elsewhere in the Times’ bunker, Thomas Friedman said America today reminded him of the Beirut at war with itself he covered as a cub reporter (Update: Beruit was way worse.)

Over at The Nation they simply assumed Trump would illegally remain in power. The writer’s real concern was “we have the moral high ground. But we don’t have, frankly, the military leadership in place to direct a guerrilla campaign against an illegitimate regime. We don’t have a government-in-exile waiting to take power. We don’t have international allies. We don’t have an underground network of spies and saboteurs. . . but we can lay our bodies down in front of the tanks.” Any hope for the rule of law? Nope. “The Supreme Court too is, fundamentally, an anti-democratic institution run by people who are not subject to the popular will of our diverse society.”

The Nation should not have worried about having to go Red Dawn unarmed. General Milley said “They may try [a coup] but they’re not going to f**king succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.” An interesting take on where power lies in a nation whose founding document begins with We the People…

Milley’s real plan was to prevent Trump from using the military in a coup by using the military in a coup against civilian leadership to gun down American citizens. CNN reports after January 6 Milley feared an attack on the presidential inauguration, telling senior military leaders: “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re Boogaloo Boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

But Milley is also a liar, claiming publically at the same time “I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this election process. We will not turn our backs on the Constitution of the United States” while planning his Ring of Steel (it sounds better in the original German, Ring aus Stahl.)

Our observer from Mars might be confused. As far as a threat to democracy, it is General Milley who was preparing to disobey the Constitution and take a patriot-sized dump on his chain of command. It is progressive porn rag The Nation telling their readers they will fight a guerrilla war against other Americans, and that the Supreme Court, the third branch of government, is an antidemocratic institution. Who again is the threat? Trump’s out of office; Milley still holds command of the entire U.S. military.

And so to the Reichstag. With as little knowledge of history as they have of coups, the MSM turned the Reichstag fire into shorthand for everything they fear Trump would do but somehow never did. The 1933 Reichstag fire was a false-flag arson attack on the home of the German parliament in Berlin. The Nazi Party used this as a pretext to claim communists were ready to overthrow the elected government. Left out of the current misuse of the analogy is Hitler had already become Chancellor before the fire. More importantly, missing when trying to connect 1933 to modern America, is a full lack of context.

Hitler had already achieved power, transparently on promises to conquer the world, implement the Final Solution, and all sorts of other Mein Kampf stuff. He had announced plans to abolish democracy via the Enabling Act, which gave him power to pass laws by decree without the involvement of parliament. That next step needed an excuse, a trigger, to crack down, not a prime mover to seize power. The Germany around him was also over ripe for change, having been humiliated in WWI and suffering near-crippling unemployment and inflation. Historically Germany had had only a few years’ taste of a wimpy democracy, and a long history of autocracy. No matter how dramatic someone wants to portray Trump’s non-actions, none of what never happened came within miles of what the real Nazis did.

If there was no coup on January 6, and no possible road to a coup, why are we still talking about all this? We should be mocking those who have no basic understanding of current events, never mind history. But we are still talking about all this (with Nancy Pelosi’s deck-is-stacked “investigation” looming) because the Biden agenda is stalled. He has decreed a few things that undecreeded a few things Trump decreed, but is unlikely to make much progress on all those promises of infrastructure, immigration reform, or student loans. Inflation is at a 13 year high even as gas prices eat away at what’s left of our middle class. There is no vision to end the COVID panic. The social justice and culture war issues which dominate Democratic mindspace seem even more flaccid with Trump out of office. So what do Democrats have left to run on?

Trump. The Democratic message for the midterms and beyond is Trump, coups, January 6, white supremacy, racism-a-go-go, militias, domestic terrorism, a veritable Nazi renaissance. Dems have little else but fear of things that never happened to work with, and hope to milk the “But at least we’re not Trump” cow one more time. So get ready to party like it is 2020. And just wait for #Reichstagification to start trending.

Biden Could Have Spared Afghanistan and US 6 Months of Pointless War by Just Ending It

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By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening!

There are two things I suppose everyone would agree are true about the remarkable events of the past several weeks in Afghanistan.

One is that we are witnessing the latest  major loss in a string of wars and “incursions” that the US has lost since the end of World War II. The other is that the entire  two-decade-long, $2.3-trillion US invasion, war and occupation of  one of the poorest countries in the world, was an abject failure from the beginning.

Officially, the US invaded Afghanistan because its ruling Taliban government had allegedly permitted Al Qaeda, a shadowy jihadist fighting organization founded by the Saudi Osama Bin Laden (with CIA assistance), to establish several training camps there where he purportedly plotted the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and perhaps the Capitol building or White House.

The attack, by some 20,000 US Special Forces troops backed by US air power, smashed the camps (and a lot of other things and people), but most of the Al Qaeda forces, including Bin Laden, escaped to the mountains of Tora Bora. The US had rejected a Taliban offer to surrender Bin Laden to a “third country”, a deal which could have eliminated the need for the ensuing war, but the Bush/Cheney administration would not accept the terms:  a halt to the bombing of the country, and  presentation of evidence that Bin Laden had been behind the attacks on the US.

In any event, once Bin Laden and his band were surrounded, trapped in caves on a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, the US pulled troops out and started sending many of them to Kuwait and other Persian Gulf countries in preparation for a second larger war against Iraq, which was portrayed fraudulently as having been involved in 9-11 and as having plans to develop “weapons of mass destruction.”   Bin Laden and his men were forgotten.

The US forces in Afghanistan were ordered to abandon the original mission of killing or capturing Bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda, and instead proceeded to drive the Taliban out of the capital of Kabul and other Afghan cities into the countryside and neighboring Pakistan. At which point the war became the US vs. the Taliban, and the Taliban became, in US and complicit US media parlance, “insurgents.” From their own vantage point, they were patriots and Islamists battling the evil US occupier of the country and the puppet government the Great Satan”  had installed.

For the next 19 years, the US, with the most powerful military the world has ever known, has fought futilly against a  force of  tens of thousands of rag-tag Kalashnikov-toting Taliban fighters, gradually losing control of most of the rural parts of the vast country, and unable to protect the cities from bombings, assassinations of officials, and the occasional overrunning of various provincial cities.

For 20 years, top military brass and advisors with ties to the US arms industry, lied that the US was “winning” the war in Afghanistan, all the while knowing the whole thing was a fool’s errand that could only end with the Taliban eventually returning to power. For the military, the war was a way to earn battle credits, get promotions, and for higher officers, to end up on arms industry boards of directors. For the Arms industry, the war was a bottomless pot of money. For American troops it was a pointless hell-hole, and for the Afghan people an endless slaughter.

To his credit, President Biden did one thing right. He called an end to the bloody 20-year stalemate.  He for sure could have handled it better. Had he simply admitted upon taking office that the US had made a terrible mistake and immediately sued for peace with the Taliban, whom everyone involved knew would eventually be back in power in Kabul one way or another once the US left, more than half a year of bloody fighting and bombing could have been avoided entirely. Instead, Biden continued the war, making it his own, but announcing a pull-out that would be completed on the fake symbolic date of September 11. (Fake because no Taliban  or Afghan was involved in the 9-11 attacks!) Given that ridiculously long timetable and the continued US air strikes on the Taliban in the meantime, the Taliban opted to push the US out. Understandably, they did not believe that Biden was any more sincere about ending the war and leaving their country than were presidents Bush, Obama or Trump before him.

All kinds of justifications have been given over the years for the US staying in Afghanistan for two decades of war:   women would be oppressed under the Taliban; the Taliban would replace Afghanistan’s puppet “democratic” government with a theocratic autocracy; if the US left, Iran, or Russia or China would gain influence there; if the US left, Afghanistan would again be a haven for terrorists threatening the US; and of course that old standby when all else failed — that the US had to stand firm lest the world think the US was weak.

None of these excuses held up on inspection. Women were always oppressed in Afghanistan,  were oppressed even when the US was there in force, and would inevitably be oppressed as they are in most islamic countries that the US considers allies (think Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, etc.). Afghanistan is bordered by Iran, China and Pakistan and by countries where Russia wields considerable influence. Of course those countries, as well as india, would compete for control in Afghanistan. As for becoming a haven for terrorists, there are plenty of those already, many created by the chaos sown by meddling US military forces as in Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Niger, Libya, Yemen and Colombia, for example.  And cutting and running in Afghanistan, which the US is doing now, as it did in Vietnam in 1975, would have been nothing new had the US done it sooner, instead of waiting to be shown the door. What would have been new would have been admitting the war was a mistake and leaving through negotiations instead of being humiliatingly driven out as now, yet again.

The American people should be outraged about this two-decade fiasco. Instead we’re being treated to all manner of nonsense in our supposedly free and independent media,  attacking Biden for “losing” Afghanistan. The focus of criticism is on how Biden handled the ending of the war, not as it should be, on who got the US involved in the first place (Bush, Cheney and virtually the entirety of Democrats and Republicans in Congress), and who kept us there (President Obama with the support of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and  Trump, again with the support of Democrats and Republicans, and a media that played along with the charade that Afghanistan was an existential threat to America).

Will there be any effort to assign blame for those who caused this catastrophe? Any atonement or reparations to the people of Afghanistan for how we’ve tortured them and their country for decades (going back to when President Jimmy Carter began arming and training jihadi fighters to overthrow the country’s Russian-backed communist government (which was at least gave women equal rights and educated them)?

No of course not. The US doesn’t do soul searching, or historical re-examination,never admits it was wrong and certainly never pays reparations for its crimes.

Thankfully, the US puppet regime in Kabul collapsed like a house of cards, and so the Taliban won’t have to fight to enter that last unliberated city of five million. Now maybe Afghanis can have peace again. They may be stuck with a medieval  theocratic government again, but they’ve been there before. Life will go on, and they’ll have to work it out themselves.  It’s not our business, and our way of “fixing” things for other countries is generally to create a bloody mess and then leave,  and doesn’t work anyhow.

That is the lesson the world is gradually learning, even if the US and its people won’t.

Why Don’t Billionaires Pay the Same High Tax Rates the Rest of Us Pay?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing.

As with everything else in polarized America, billionaires proclaiming space tourism is the next big thing for humanity neatly divides opinion into two camps: those who laud the initiative, hard work and innovations of the billionaires as examples of the American Can-Do Dream, and those who wished the billionaire space tourists had taken a one-way flight to a distant orbit of blissful silence.

Setting aside that bitter divide, let’s explore another divide: how our two-tier tax system enables billionaires to become billionaires while the rest of us get poorer. Whenever I discuss the taxes of the non-billionaire self-employed, armies of apologists leap to the defense of the status quo with various quibbles: the 0.9% Medicare surcharge only kicks in above $200,000, the cap on Social Security taxes is $142,800, and so on.

Setting aside the quibbles–and recall the tax code with regulatory notes is thousands of pages–let’s deal with the real issue, which is that billionaires and their corporations pay a thin slice of taxes as a percentage of total income/gains if they pay any at all, while self-employed and small business pay extraordinarily high tax rates.

To all the quibblers: please add the 15.3% Social Security/Medicare tax rate (self-employed / sole proprietors pay both the employee and employer share of this tax) to the federal tax rate of 24% for income above $85,520. It’s 39.3%.

Just how hard would it be to conclude that everyone earning more than $142,000 should pay at least the same rate the rest of us pay? Aren’t we demonstrating all those same laudable traits of the billionaires, just on a smaller scale? Why should we pay 40% and the billionaires pay essentially zero?

Gee, do you reckon paying no taxes might help folks become richer? Garsh, nobody ever asked that question before. And do you reckon paying 40% of your income might make you poorer over time? Golly gee, how come the talking heads worshiping the billionaires never ask these questions?

Since Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are the bedrock of America’s social safety net, why shouldn’t billionaires pay to support these programs? Well, why not? Just how lame do the excuses have to be to be recognized as laughably self-serving?

Here’s the trick billionaires use to evade taxes. There are countless ways for the super-wealthy to evade taxes–funnel earnings through an Irish post office box, buy a tax break in Washington DC, slide the money into one of dozens of global tax havens, and so on.

But a simple one is to report no income and live large off borrowed money. As the billions of dollars in capital gains pile up as the billionaire’s stock holdings soar (thanks, Federal Reserve, for the free trillions; awful swell of you to give us all that free money), there’s no income generated until the billionaire sells some shares. No sale, no income. Just pay yourself $1 a year in salary, borrow against your billions at super-low rates of interest, and voila, you’re tax-free while you build your super-yacht, buy your private island, and so on.

Just as a thought experiment, suppose the first $50,000 in earnings for everyone were tax-free, and a 40% tax rate was collected on all income above $1 million, both earned and unearned (capital gains), not when the gains were realized in a sale but at the end of every tax year, whether the shares that rose in value were sold or not.

So Billionaire Space Tourist reaped $10 billion in capital gains from the appreciation of stocks held, then the Billionaire pays 40% of those gains: $4 billion. There is a way to not pay any taxes on capital gains–have your portfolio lose value. No gains, no taxes. And to close all the loopholes, the tax rate is on all assets and income connected in any way, shape or form with the U.S. First they pay the U.S. taxes, then if they want to pay other nations’ taxes as well, be my guest. But the 40% is due and payable regardless of any other conditions.

You don’t like it, then stop selling any products in the U.S. or holding any assets in the U.S. Why should billionaires get to set up immensely profitable monopolies, quasi-monopolies, cartels and corporations in the U.S. but pay near-zero in taxes? Why should billionaires be free to profit from America’s economy but pay nothing to support its citizenry?

What precisely is the logic of reducing taxes on the wealthiest few to near-zero? If there is no logic, then we’re left with corruption: America is a moral cesspool.

The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing. Please note Karma and Divine Retribution are not controlled by the billionaire’s lackeys and apparatchiks in the Federal Reserve. The pendulum of exploitation has reached its extreme, and the reversal to the opposite extreme is underway.