Category Archives: Empire

Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America?

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Far from being a war against “white supremacy,” the Biden administration’s new “domestic terror” strategy clearly targets primarily those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose capitalism and/or globalization.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

In the latest sign that the US government’s War on Domestic Terror is growing in scope and scale, the White House on Tuesday revealed the nation’s first ever government-wide strategy for confronting domestic terrorism. While cloaked in language about stemming racially motivated violence, the strategy places those deemed “anti-government” or “anti-authority” on a par with racist extremists and charts out policies that could easily be abused to silence or even criminalize online criticism of the government.

Even more disturbing is the call to essentially fuse intelligence agencies, law enforcement, Silicon Valley, and “community” and “faith-based” organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, as well as unspecified foreign governments, as partners in this “war,” which the strategy makes clear will rely heavily on a pre-crime orientation focused largely on what is said on social media and encrypted platforms. Though the strategy claims that the government will “shield free speech and civil liberties” in implementing this policy, its contents reveal that it is poised to gut both.

Indeed, while framed publicly as chiefly targeting “right-wing white supremacists,” the strategy itself makes it clear that the government does not plan to focus on the Right but instead will pursue “domestic terrorists” in “an ideologically neutral, threat-driven manner,” as the law “makes no distinction based on political view—left, right or center.” It also states that a key goal of this strategic framework is to ensure “that there is simply no governmental tolerance . . . of violence as an acceptable mode of seeking political or social change,” regardless of a perpetrator’s political affiliation. 

Considering that the main cheerleaders for the War on Domestic Terror exist mainly in establishment left circles, such individuals should rethink their support for this new policy given that the above statements could easily come to encompass Black Lives Matter–related protests, such as those that transpired last summer, depending on which political party is in power. 

Once the new infrastructure is in place, it will remain there and will be open to the same abuses perpetrated by both political parties in the US during the lengthy War on Terror following September 11, 2001. The history of this new “domestic terror” policy, including its origins in the Trump administration, makes this clear.

It’s Never Been Easier to Be a “Terrorist”

In introducing the strategy, the Biden administration cites “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” as a key reason for the new policy and a main justification for the War on Domestic Terror in general. This was most recently demonstrated Tuesday in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statement announcing this new strategy. However, the document itself puts “anti-government” or “anti-authority” “extremists” in the same category as violent white supremacists in terms of being a threat to the homeland. The strategy’s characterization of such individuals is unsettling.

For instance, those who “violently oppose” “all forms of capitalism” or “corporate globalization” are listed under this less-discussed category of “domestic terrorist.” This highlights how people on the left, many of whom have called for capitalism to be dismantled or replaced in the US in recent years, could easily be targeted in this new “war” that many self-proclaimed leftists are currently supporting. Similarly, “environmentally-motivated extremists,” a category in which groups such as Extinction Rebellion could easily fall, are also included. 

In addition, the phrasing indicates that it could easily include as “terrorists” those who oppose the World Economic Forum’s vision for global “stakeholder capitalism,” as that form of “capitalism” involves corporations and their main “stakeholders” creating a new global economic and governance system. The WEF’s stakeholder capitalism thus involves both “capitalism” and “corporate globalization.” 

The strategy also includes those who “take steps to violently resist government authority . . . based on perceived overreach.” This, of course, creates a dangerous situation in which the government could, purposely or otherwise, implement a policy that is an obvious overreach and/or blatantly unconstitutional and then label those who resist it “domestic terrorists” and deal with them as such—well before the overreach can be challenged in court.

Another telling addition to this group of potential “terrorists” is “any other individual or group who engages in violence—or incites imminent violence—in opposition to legislative, regulatory or other actions taken by the government.” Thus, if the government implements a policy that a large swath of the population finds abhorrent, such as launching a new, unpopular war abroad, those deemed to be “inciting” resistance to the action online could be considered domestic terrorists. 

Such scenarios are not unrealistic, given the loose way in which the government and the media have defined things like “incitement” and even “violence” (e. g., “hate speech” is a form of violence) in the recent past. The situation is ripe for manipulation and abuse. To think the federal government (including the Biden administration and subsequent administrations) would not abuse such power reflects an ignorance of US political history, particularly when the main forces behind most terrorist incidents in the nation are actually US government institutions like the FBI (more FBI examples here, here, here, and here).

Furthermore, the original plans for the detention of American dissidents in the event of a national emergency, drawn up during the Reagan era as part of its “continuity of government” contingency, cited popular nonviolent opposition to US intervention in Latin America as a potential “emergency” that could trigger the activation of those plans. Many of those “continuity of government” protocols remain on the books today and can be triggered, depending on the whims of those in power. It is unlikely that this new domestic terror framework will be any different regarding nonviolent protest and demonstrations.

Yet another passage in this section of the strategy states that “domestic terrorists” can, “in some instances, connect and intersect with conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and misinformation.” It adds that the proliferation of such “dangerous” information “on Internet-based communications platforms such as social media, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms, all of these elements can combine and amplify threats to public safety.” 

Thus, the presence of “conspiracy theories” and information deemed by the government to be “misinformation” online is itself framed as threatening public safety, a claim made more than once in this policy document. Given that a major “pillar” of the strategy involves eliminating online material that promotes “domestic terrorist” ideologies, it seems inevitable that such efforts will also “connect and intersect” with the censorship of “conspiracy theories” and narratives that the establishment finds inconvenient or threatening for any reason. 

Pillars of Tyranny

The strategy notes in several places that this new domestic-terror policy will involve a variety of public-private partnerships in order to “build a community to address domestic terrorism that extends not only across the Federal Government but also to critical partners.” It adds, “That includes state, local, tribal and territorial governments, as well as foreign allies and partners, civil society, the technology sector, academic, and more.” 

The mention of foreign allies and partners is important as it suggests a multinational approach to what is supposedly a US “domestic” issue and is yet another step toward a transnational security-state apparatus. A similar multinational approach was used to devastating effect during the CIA-developed Operation Condor, which was used to target and “disappear” domestic dissidents in South America in the 1970s and 1980s. The foreign allies mentioned in the Biden administration’s strategy are left unspecified, but it seems likely that such allies would include the rest of the Five Eyes alliance (the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) and Israel, all of which already have well-established information-sharing agreements with the US for signals intelligence.

The new domestic-terror strategy has four main “pillars,” which can be summarized as (1) understanding and sharing domestic terrorism-related information, including with foreign governments and private tech companies; (2) preventing domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence; (3) disrupting and deterring domestic terrorism activity; and (4) confronting long-term contributors to domestic terrorism.

The first pillar involves the mass accumulation of data through new information-sharing partnerships and the deepening of existing ones. Much of this information sharing will involve increased data mining and analysis of statements made openly on the internet, particularly on social media, something already done by US intelligence contractors such as Palantir. While the gathering of such information has been ongoing for years, this policy allows even more to be shared and legally used to make cases against individuals deemed to have made threats or expressed “dangerous” opinions online. 

Included in the first pillar is the need to increase engagement with financial institutions concerning the financing of “domestic terrorists.” US banks, such as Bank of America, have already gone quite far in this regard, leading to accusations that it has begun acting like an intelligence agency. Such claims were made after it was revealed that the BofA had passed to the government the private banking information of over two hundred people that the bank deemed as pointing to involvement in the events of January 6, 2021. It seems likely, given this passage in the strategy, that such behavior by banks will soon become the norm, rather than an outlier, in the United States. 

The second pillar is ostensibly focused on preventing the online recruitment of domestic terrorists and online content that leads to the “mobilization of violence.” The strategy notes that this pillar “means reducing both supply and demand of recruitment materials by limiting widespread availability online and bolstering resilience to it by those who nonetheless encounter it.“ The strategy states that such government efforts in the past have a “mixed record,” but it goes on to claim that trampling on civil liberties will be avoided because the government is “consulting extensively” with unspecified “stakeholders” nationwide.

Regarding recruitment, the strategy states that “these activities are increasingly happening on Internet-based communications platforms, including social media, online gaming platforms, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms, even as those products and services frequently offer other important benefits.” It adds that “the widespread availability of domestic terrorist recruitment material online is a national security threat whose front lines are overwhelmingly private-sector online platforms.” 

The US government plans to provide “information to assist online platforms with their own initiatives to enforce their own terms of service that prohibits the use of their platforms for domestic terrorist activities” as well as to “facilitate more robust efforts outside the government to counter terrorists’ abuse of Internet-based communications platforms.” 

Given the wider definition of “domestic terrorist” that now includes those who oppose capitalism and corporate globalization as well as those who resist government overreach, online content discussing these and other “anti-government” and “anti-authority” ideas could soon be treated in the same way as online Al Qaeda or ISIS propaganda. Efforts, however, are unlikely to remain focused on these topics. As Unlimited Hangout reported last November, both UK intelligence and the US national-security state were developing plans to treat critical reporting on the COVID-19 vaccines as “extremist” propaganda.

Another key part of this pillar is the need to “increase digital literacy” among the American public, while censoring “harmful content” disseminated by “terrorists” as well as by “hostile foreign powers seeking to undermine American democracy.” The latter is a clear reference to the claim that critical reporting of US government policy, particularly its military and intelligence activities abroad, was the product of “Russian disinformation,” a now discredited claim that was used to heavily censor independent media. This new government strategy appears to promise more of this sort of thing. 

It also notes that “digital literacy” education for a domestic audience is being developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Such a policy would have previously violated US law until the Obama administration worked with Congress to repeal the Smith-Mundt Act, thus lifting the ban on the government directing propaganda at domestic audiences. 

The third pillar of the strategy seeks to increase the number of federal prosecutors investigating and trying domestic-terror cases. Their numbers are likely to jump as the definition of “domestic terrorist” is expanded. It also seeks to explore whether “legislative reforms could meaningfully and materially increase our ability to protect Americans from acts of domestic terrorism while simultaneously guarding against potential abuse of overreach.” In contrast to past public statements on police reform by those in the Biden administration, the strategy calls to “empower” state and local law enforcement to tackle domestic terrorism, including with increased access to “intelligence” on citizens deemed dangerous or subversive for any number of reasons.

To that effect, the strategy states the following (p. 24):

“The Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security, with support from the National Counterterrorism Center [part of the intelligence community], are incorporating an increased focus on domestic terrorism into current intelligence products and leveraging current mechanisms of information and intelligence sharing to improve the sharing of domestic terrorism-related content and indicators with non-Federal partners. These agencies are also improving the usability of their existing information-sharing platforms, including through the development of mobile applications designed to provide a broader reach to non-Federal law enforcement partners, while simultaneously refining that support based on partner feedback.”

Such an intelligence tool could easily be, for example, Palantir, which is already used by the intelligence agencies, the DHS, and several US police departments for “predictive policing,” that is, pre-crime actions. Notably, Palantir has long included a “subversive” label for individuals included on government and law enforcement databases, a parallel with the controversial and highly secretive Main Core database of US dissidents. 

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the “pre-crime” element of the new domestic terror strategy explicit on Tuesday when he said in a statement that DHS would continue “developing key partnerships with local stakeholders through the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) to identify potential threats and prevent terrorism.” CP3, which replaced DHS’ Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention this past May, officially “supports communities across the United States to prevent individuals from radicalizing to violence and intervene when individuals have already radicalized to violence.” 

The fourth pillar of the strategy is by far the most opaque and cryptic, while also the most far-reaching. It aims to address the sources that cause “terrorists” to mobilize “towards violence.” This requires “tackling racism in America,” a lofty goal for an administration headed by the man who controversially eulogized Congress’ most ardent segregationist and who was a key architect of the 1994 crime bill. As well, it provides for “early intervention and appropriate care for those who pose a danger to themselves or others.”

In regard to the latter proposal, the Trump administration, in a bid to “stop mass shootings before they occur,” considered a proposal to create a “health DARPA” or “HARPA” that would monitor the online communications of everyday Americans for “neuropsychiatric” warning signs that someone might be “mobilizing towards violence.” While the Trump administration did not create HARPA or adopt this policy, the Biden administration has recently announced plans to do so.

Finally, the strategy indicates that this fourth pillar is part of a “broader priority”: “enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.” In other words, fostering trust in government while simultaneously censoring “polarizing” voices who distrust or criticize the government is a key policy goal behind the Biden administration’s new domestic-terror strategy. 

Calling Their Shots?

While this is a new strategy, its origins lie in the Trump administration. In October 2019, Trump’s attorney general William Barr formally announced in a memorandum that a new “national disruption and early engagement program” aimed at detecting those “mobilizing towards violence” before they commit any crime would launch in the coming months. That program, known as DEEP (Disruption and Early Engagement Program), is now active and has involved the Department of Justice, the FBI, and “private sector partners” since its creation.

Barr’s announcement of DEEP followed his unsettling “prediction” in July 2019 that “a major incident may occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.” Not long after that speech, a spate of mass shootings occurred, including the El Paso Walmart shooting, which killed twenty-three and about which many questions remain unanswered regarding the FBI’s apparent foreknowledge of the event. After these events took place in 2019, Trump called for the creation of a government backdoor into encryption and the very pre-crime system that Barr announced shortly thereafter in October 2019. The Biden administration, in publishing this strategy, is merely finishing what Barr started.

Indeed, a “prediction” like Barr’s in 2019 was offered by the DHS’ Elizabeth Neumann during a Congressional hearing in late February 2020. That hearing was largely ignored by the media as it coincided with an international rise of concern regarding COVID-19. At the hearing, Neumann, who previously coordinated the development of the government’s post-9/11 terrorism information sharing strategies and policies and worked closely with the intelligence community, gave the following warning about an imminent “domestic terror” event in the United States:

“And every counterterrorism professional I speak to in the federal government and overseas feels like we are at the doorstep of another 9/11, maybe not something that catastrophic in terms of the visual or the numbers, but that we can see it building and we don’t quite know how to stop it.”

This “another 9/11” emerged on January 6, 2021, as the events of that day in the Capitol were quickly labeled as such by both the media and prominent politicians, while also inspiring calls from the White House and the Democrats for a “9/11-style commission” to investigate the incident. This event, of course, figures prominently in the justification for the new domestic-terror strategy, despite the considerable video and other evidence that shows that Capitol law enforcement, and potentially the FBI, were directly involved in facilitating the breach of the Capitol. In addition, when one considers that the QAnon movement, which had a clear role in the events of January 6, was itself likely a government-orchestrated psyop, the government hand in creating this situation seems clear. 

It goes without saying that the official reasons offered for these militaristic “domestic terror” policies, which the US has already implemented abroad—causing much more terror than it has prevented—does not justify the creation of a massive new national-security infrastructure that aims to criminalize and censor online speech. Yet the admission that this new strategy, as part of a broader effort to “enhance faith in government,” combines domestic propaganda campaigns with the censorship and pursuit of those who distrust government heralds the end of even the illusion of democracy in the United States.

The Systemic Risk No One Sees

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The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels.

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

My recent posts have focused on the systemic financial risks created by Federal Reserve policies that have elevated moral hazard (risks can be taken without consequence) and speculation to levels so extreme that they threaten the stability of the entire financial system.

These risks are well known, though largely ignored in the current speculative frenzy.

But there is another systemic risk which few if any see: the collapse of social cohesion.

President Carter was prescient in his understanding that a nation’s greatest strength is its social cohesion, a cohesion that America’s unprecedented wealth / income / power inequalities has undermined. Consider this excerpt from his 1981 Farewell Address:

“Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”

In other words, a nation’s strength flows not just from its material wealth but from its social cohesion–a term for something that is intangible but very real, something that doesn’t lend itself to quantification or tidy definitions.

Here is my definition: Social cohesion is the glue binding the social order; it is the willingness of the citizenry to sacrifice individual gains for the common good.

Social cohesion is the result of the citizenry sharing a common purpose and identity and working toward the common good even at personal cost. Social cohesion arises from a national identity based on shared values and sacrifices.

To maintain social cohesion, opportunities to better their circumstances must be open to all (the social contract of social mobility) and sacrifices must be shared by the entire citizenry. If the privileged elites evade their share of sacrifice, social cohesion is lost and the entire social order unravels.

The glue binding the privileged elites to shared sacrifice is civic virtue, a moral code that demands elites devote a greater share of their own resources to the public good in exchange for their political and financial power.

Though no one dares confess this publicly, America is now a moral cesspool. As a result, the moral legitimacy of the nation’s leadership has been lost. Every nook and cranny of institutionalized America is dominated by self-interest, and much of the economy is controlled by profiteering monopolies and cartels which wield far more political power than the citizenry.

Civic virtue has been lost. What remains is elite self-interest masquerading as civic virtue.

In his Farewell Address, President Carter explained that “The national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”

Social cohesion, civic virtue and moral legitimacy are the foundation of every society, but they are especially important in composite states.

America is a composite state, composed of individuals holding a wide range of regional, ethnic, religious and class-based identities. The national identity is only one ingredient in a bubbling stew of local, state and regional identities, ethnic, cultural and religious identities, educational/alumni, professional and tradecraft identities, and elusive but consequential class-based identities.

Composite states are intrinsically trickier to rule, as there is no ethnic or cultural identity that unifies the populace. Lacking a national identity that supersedes all other identities, composite states must tread carefully to avoid fracturing into competing regional, ethnic or cultural identities.

Composite states must establish a purpose-based identity that is understood to demand shared sacrifice, especially in crisis. In the U.S., the national purpose has been redefined by the needs of the era, but never straying too far from these core unifying goals: defending the civil liberties of the citizenry from state interference, defending the nation from external aggressors, and serving the common good by limiting the power of special interests and privileged elites.

We’ve failed to limit the power of privileged elites, failed to demand greater sacrifices of the wealthy in exchange for power, and so the moral legitimacy of the regime has been lost. And with the ascendance of self-interest and the elite’s abandonment of sacrifice, social cohesion has been lost.

This loss is reflected in the bitter partisanship, the increasingly Orwellian attempts to control the mainstream and social media narratives, the debauchery of “expertise” as dueling “experts” vie for control, the fraying of social discourse, the substitution of virtue-signaling for actual civic virtue, the institutionalization of white-collar crime (collusion, fraud, embezzlement, etc.), the increasing reliance on Bread and Circuses (stimulus, Universal Basic Income) as real opportunity dissipates, and the troubling rise in shootings, crime, random violence and plummeting marriage and birth rates.

The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels.

What’s the solution? At the national level, all that has been lost will have to be restored: civic virtue, moral legitimacy, the social contract of opportunity, shared sacrifice that falls most heavily on the wealthiest and most powerful, and a renewed national purpose centered on serving the common good.

Is such a restoration of moral legitimacy and shared purpose even possible? No one knows. If history is any guide, such a renewal is only possible after the empire of rampant self-interest implodes.

So what do we do in the meantime? Nurture our own social cohesion by living purposefully and sharing sacrifices and bounties with those we trust and admire–those in the lifeboat we chose to join.

Strategically Resisting the New Dark Age: The 7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Measured by the Christian calendar, the period of about 500 years from the fall of the Roman Empire until the end of the first millennium was a time characterized by economic, intellectual and cultural decline in the European Christian world. In retrospect, it is now referred to as ‘the Dark Age’, even as other cultures, including that of Islam but those in other parts of the world too, thrived during this period.

Since March 2020, a number of fine analysts have carefully documented the true nature of what is happening to our world under cover of what the World Health Organization has labeled the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’.

And among these fine analysts, who have investigated ‘The Great Reset’ promoted by the World Economic Forum as well as other initiatives such as those related to transhumanism, eugenics and Cyber Polygon, there is a strong consensus that does not coincide with propaganda released by elite agents in international organizations, national governments and the corporate media.

In essence, these critiques document extensive evidence of an elite coup that seeks to comprehensively restructure human society into a technocratic dystopia in which such previously fundamental concepts as human identity, human liberty, human rights (such as freedom of speech, assembly and movement), human privacy and human volition are not just notions of the past but are beyond the comprehension of the typical ‘transhuman’.

To reiterate, for the bulk of the human population left alive, concepts such as ‘free will’ and ‘freedom’ will no longer exist as ideas, let alone as aspirations or realities. You can access a number of these insightful critiques here: Resources.

So whether we label this world envisaged by the elite as a ‘brave new world’, ‘1984’, the second ‘Dark Age’, a ‘technocratic dystopia’ or, more simply, ‘slavery’ matters little because, whatever the label, what lies immediately ahead is a human future not worth living.

And so resistance is imperative. But unless this resistance is strategic it will not achieve the outcome we seek.

Why? Because this elite coup has been decades in the planning and so resistance that is not carefully designed and rigorously implemented will not succeed. The elite is too well organized for haphazard acts of resistance to have any impact. Hence, there is no point simply reiterating the need for resistance. Only a strategically-focused campaign of nonviolent resistance – such as that outlined below – has any serious prospect of succeeding.

So what does it mean to resist strategically?

Resisting strategically means that we understand the power structures and relationships in society and particularly the way in which the global elite has the power to control us. The elite has power to control us through a number of means. For example, it can control what most people fear, think and believe by ensuring that its international organizations, governments, medical establishments, pharmaceutical industry and corporate media (including corporate social media) present a particular ‘package’ of information which, in this case, focuses on the supposed danger of the SARS-Cov-2 ‘virus’ and the importance of going along with a wide range of measures (including lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, mask-wearing, contact tracing and injections) while also censoring media outlets and authors that publish the truth.

Beyond controlling the narrative, however, the global elite has many other means at its disposal to control  us, many of which are being expanded with the progressive rollout of measures associated with implementation of the fourth industrial revolution (which is fundamentally what the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ is about).

These additional means include the deployment of 5G which, apart from the horrific impact this will have on life generally as this electromagnetic radiation further contaminates the biosphere, will enable comprehensive surveillance, digital ID (possibly implanted in your brain: see ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” Is Being Re-Engineered by the Elite’s Coup’) linked to your bank account and health records, a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life, the digitization of money as well as robotization of the workforce and the military.

And if you don’t normally follow technological developments in the military and how warfare is rapidly ‘advancing’ at great detriment to us all, now complicated by elements intrinsic to the ‘Great Reset’, you will get an unpleasant taste in ‘Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2)’, ‘Countering the “China Threat” – At What Price?’ and ‘War from Sea and Space: Hiding Empire in the 21st Century’.

But, of course, there is more. Much more. In the words of Dr Joseph Mercola: ‘The Great Reset’ means the complete transformation of everything from ‘government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings. The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.’ See ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’

For a more detailed summary of the essential elements of this coup, see ‘Corrupt Science and Elite Power: Your Techno-Slavery is Now Imminent’. For a summary of the enormous and increasing costs, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’. And for the evidence of the coup’s adverse impact on human survival prospects, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

So while these measures are being implemented and thus increasing the capacity of the global elite to control us, we do not have to cooperate. Moreover, we can resist it very effectively and encourage those we know who are also concerned about what is happening to resist effectively as well.

And, in the end, our success or failure will be determined by one simple factor: Are we able to mobilize enough people to act strategically as suggested below?

How Can We Resist Effectively?

Well, as mentioned above, effective resistance requires us to nonviolently noncooperate with those measures that give the global elite the power to control us. That is, we need to focus our resistance so that it undermines the power of the elite. Sound difficult? Believe it or not, it isn’t really.

Let me elaborate a little.

As I have explained on a number of occasions, for example, there is little point organizing a massive protest demonstration unless these mass mobilizations give people who attend (and/or those who hear about them) clear guidance on actions to take to effectively resist once they leave the demonstration. This is because demonstrations, no matter how large, have little impact in themselves (beyond building a sense of solidarity). For example, on 15 February 2003, the largest demonstration in human history – involving 30,000,000 people in 600 cities around the world protesting the impending US invasion of Iraq – took place. And what did it achieve? The ‘Global War on Terror’ goes on still with no evidence to suggest that resistance on that day or since has had the impact we might have hoped.

My point then is simple. We either resist The Great Reset in a way that undermines the power of the elite to conduct this coup or we enter a world in which those still living will wonder about the value of being alive.

So what can we do?

Here is a list of the key actions from each day of the ‘7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset’.

  1. Refuse Covid-19 tests and experimental injections: Choose Natural Health.
  2. Don’t buy 5G upgrades: Resist the fourth industrial revolution.
  3. Boycott Corporate & Government Media: Choose free and truthful media & social media.
  4. Pay with Cash & Switch to Community Owned Banks.
  5. Don’t Wear Masks or Social Distance.
  6. Keep your small business open in lockdown. Buy from small businesses. Don’t use contact tracing QR codes.
  7. Don’t pay Covid-19 related fines: Risk becoming a prisoner of conscience. Seek support.

You can download the posters/leaflets, each with an explanation and references, at the link above. Each leaflet explains why this particular action is important in undermining elite power so that those who receive it (whether by email, in their letterbox or as they attend or walk past a nonviolent action designed for the purpose) clearly understand the value of undertaking this action (every day, not just one day). If you are interested in organizing activities of this type locally, you can also download the ‘Campaign Overview’ at the link above which offers a simple explanation of how to get more people involved.

If you want more information (including a fuller analysis and other resources) and the complete list of the 29 strategic goals of the campaign, you can access everything at ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’.

And you can join the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group here.

Conclusion

Under cover of a non-existent ‘pandemic’, the global elite is now engaged in an elaborately planned endeavour to take complete control of human life and human society using measures clearly outlined in the literature related to ‘The Great Reset’, the fourth industrial revolution, transhumanism, eugenics and Cyber Polygon.

There is also considerable evidence that increasing numbers of people are weary of the elite-driven response over the past 18 months and that a proportion of these people are now openly sceptical about the official narrative.

But only the rarest person knows how to resist effectively.

And yet if we are to defeat this elite coup, we must mobilize millions of people to noncooperate with fundamental elements of it.

Otherwise the New Dark Age will not be an age from which transhumans will be emotionally and intellectually equipped to emerge, no matter how long they are given. Why? Because the transhumans the elite is intent on creating will not think or feel for themselves; they will have no Self-will to drive their behaviour. They will be programmed to be willing slaves for life.

The time during which human beings can still make choices is rapidly drawing to a close. We must use that time to choose resistance that makes a difference, and invite others to make that choice too.

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

There is More to BlackRock Than You Might Imagine

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By F. William Engdahl

Source: New Eastern Outlook

A virtually unregulated investment firm today exercises more political and financial influence than the Federal Reserve and most governments on this planet. The firm, BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, invests a staggering $9 trillion in client funds worldwide, a sum more than double the annual GDP of the Federal Republic of Germany. This colossus sits atop the pyramid of world corporate ownership, including in China most recently. Since 1988 the company has put itself in a position to de facto control the Federal Reserve, most Wall Street mega-banks, including Goldman Sachs, the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset, the Biden Administration and, if left unchecked, the economic future of our world. BlackRock is the epitome of what Mussolini called Corporatism, where an unelected corporate elite dictates top down to the population.

How the world’s largest “shadow bank” exercises this enormous power over the world ought to concern us. BlackRock since Larry Fink founded it in 1988 has managed to assemble unique financial software and assets that no other entity has. BlackRock’s Aladdin risk-management system, a software tool that can track and analyze trading, monitors more than $18 trillion in assets for 200 financial firms including the Federal Reserve and European central banks. He who “monitors” also knows, we can imagine. BlackRock has been called a financial “Swiss Army Knife — institutional investor, money manager, private equity firm, and global government partner rolled into one.” Yet mainstream media treats the company as just another Wall Street financial firm.

There is a seamless interface that ties the UN Agenda 2030 with the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset and the nascent economic policies of the Biden Administration. That interface is BlackRock.

Team Biden and BlackRock

By now it should be clear to anyone who bothers to look, that the person who claims to be US President, 78-year old Joe Biden, is not making any decisions. He even has difficulty reading a teleprompter or answering prepared questions from friendly media without confusing Syria and Libya or even whether he is President. He is being micromanaged by a group of handlers to maintain a scripted “image” of a President while policy is made behind the scenes by others. It eerily reminds of the 1979 Peter Sellers film character, Chauncey Gardiner, in Being There.

What is less public are the key policy persons running economic policy for Biden Inc. They are simply said, BlackRock. Much as Goldman Sachs ran economic policy under Obama and also Trump, today BlackRock is filling that key role. The deal apparently was sealed in January, 2019 when Joe Biden, then-candidate and long-shot chance to defeat Trump, went to meet with Larry Fink in New York, who reportedly told “working class Joe,” that, “I’m here to help.”

Now as President in one of his first appointees, Biden named Brian Deese to be the Director of the National Economic Council, the President’s main adviser for economic policy. One of the early Presidential Executive Orders dealt with economics and climate policy. That’s not surprising, as Deese came from Fink’s BlackRock where he was Global Head of Sustainable Investing. Before joining BlackRock, Deese held senior economic posts under Obama, including replacing John Podesta as Senior Adviser to the President where he worked alongside Valerie Jarrett. Under Obama, Deese played a key role in negotiating the Global Warming Paris Accords.

In the key policy post as Deputy Treasury Secretary under Secretary Janet Yellen, we find Nigerian-born Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo. Adeyemo also comes from BlackRock where from 2017 to 2019 he was a senior adviser and Chief of Staff to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, after leaving the Obama Administration. His personal ties to Obama are strong, as Obama named him the first President of the Obama Foundation in 2019.

And a third senior BlackRock person running economic policy in the Administration now is also unusual in several respects. Michael Pyle is the Senior Economic Adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. He came to Washington from the position as the Global Chief Investment Strategist at BlackRock where he oversaw the strategy for investing some $9 trillion of funds. Before joining BlackRock at the highest level, he had also been in the Obama Administration as a senior adviser to the Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, and in 2015 became an adviser to the Hillary Clinton presidential bid.

The fact that three of the most influential economic appointees of the Biden Administration come from BlackRock, and before that all from the Obama Administration, is noteworthy. There is a definite pattern and suggests that the role of BlackRock in Washington is far larger than we are being told.

What is BlackRock?

Never before has a financial company with so much influence over world markets been so hidden from public scrutiny. That’s no accident. As it is technically not a bank making bank loans or taking deposits, it evades the regulation oversight from the Federal Reserve even though it does what most mega banks like HSBC or JP MorganChase do—buy, sell securities for profit. When there was a Congressional push to include asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard Funds under the post-2008 Dodd-Frank law as “systemically important financial institutions” or SIFIs, a huge lobbying push from BlackRock ended the threat. BlackRock is essentially a law onto itself. And indeed it is “systemically important” as no other, with possible exception of Vanguard, which is said to also be a major shareholder in BlackRock.

BlackRock founder and CEO Larry Fink is clearly interested in buying influence globally. He made former German CDU MP Friederich Merz head of BlackRock Germany when it looked as if he might succeed Chancellor Merkel, and former British Chancellor of Exchequer George Osborne as “political consultant.” Fink named former Hillary Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills to the BlackRock board when it seemed certain Hillary would soon be in the White House.

He has named former central bankers to his board and gone on to secure lucrative contracts with their former institutions. Stanley Fisher, former head of the Bank of Israel and also later Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve is now Senior Adviser at BlackRock. Philipp Hildebrand, former Swiss National Bank president, is vice chairman at BlackRock, where he oversees the BlackRock Investment Institute. Jean Boivin, the former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, is the global head of research at BlackRock’s investment institute.

BlackRock and the Fed

It was this ex-central bank team at BlackRock that developed an “emergency” bailout plan for Fed chairman Powell in March 2019 as financial markets appeared on the brink of another 2008 “Lehman crisis” meltdown. As “thank you,” the Fed chairman Jerome Powell named BlackRock in a no-bid role to manage all of the Fed’s corporate bond purchase programs, including bonds where BlackRock itself invests. Conflict of interest? A group of some 30 NGOs wrote to Fed Chairman Powell, “By giving BlackRock full control of this debt buyout program, the Fed… makes BlackRock even more systemically important to the financial system. Yet BlackRock is not subject to the regulatory scrutiny of even smaller systemically important financial institutions.”

In a detailed report in 2019, a Washington non-profit research group, Campaign for Accountability, noted that, “BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, implemented a strategy of lobbying, campaign contributions, and revolving door hires to fight off government regulation and establish itself as one of the most powerful financial companies in the world.”

The New York Fed hired BlackRock in March 2019 to manage its commercial mortgage-backed securities program and its $750 billion primary and secondary purchases of corporate bonds and ETFs in no-bid contracts. US financial journalists Pam and Russ Martens in critiquing that murky 2019 Fed bailout of Wall Street remarked, “for the first time in history, the Fed has hired BlackRock to “go direct” and buy up $750 billion in both primary and secondary corporate bonds and bond ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), a product of which BlackRock is one of the largest purveyors in the world.” They went on, “Adding further outrage, the BlackRock-run program will get $75 billion of the $454 billion in taxpayers’ money to eat the losses on its corporate bond purchases, which will include its own ETFs, which the Fed is allowing it to buy…”

Fed head Jerome Powell and Larry Fink know each other well, apparently. Even after Powell gave BlackRock the hugely lucrative no-bid “go direct” deal, Powell continued to have the same BlackRock manage an estimated $25 million of Powell’s private securities investments. Public records show that in this time Powell held direct confidential phone calls with BlackRock CEO Fink. According to required financial disclosure, BlackRock managed to double the value of Powell’s investments from the year before! No conflict of interest, or?

A Very BlackRock in Mexico

BlackRock’s murky history in Mexico shows that conflicts of interest and influence-building with leading government agencies is not restricted to just the USA. PRI Presidential candidate Peña Nieto went to Wall Street during his campaign in November 2011. There he met Larry Fink. What followed the Nieto victory in 2012 was a tight relationship between Fink and Nieto that was riddled with conflict of interest, cronyism and corruption.

Most likely to be certain BlackRock was on the winning side in the corrupt new Nieto regime, Fink named 52-year-old Marcos Antonio Slim Domit, billionaire son of Mexico’s wealthiest and arguably most corrupt man, Carlos Slim, to BlackRock’s Board. Marcos Antonio, along with his brother Carlos Slim Domit, run the father’s huge business empire today. Carlos Slim Domit, the eldest son, was Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum Latin America in 2015, and currently serves as chairman of the board of America Movil where BlackRock is a major investor. Small cozy world.

The father, Carlos Slim, at the time named by Forbes as World’s Richest Person, built an empire based around his sweetheart acquisition of Telemex (later America Movil). Then President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in effect gifted the telecom empire to Slim in 1989. Salinas later fled Mexico on charges of stealing more than $10 billion from state coffers.

As with much in Mexico since the 1980s drug money apparently played a huge role with the elder Carlos Slim, father of BlackRock director Marcos Slim. In 2015 WikiLeaks released company internal emails from the private intelligence corporation, Stratfor. Stratfor writes in an April 2011 email, the time BlackRock is establishing its Mexico plans, that a US DEA Special Agent, William F. Dionne confirmed Carlos Slim’s ties to the Mexican drug cartels. Stratfor asks Dionne, “Billy, is the MX (Mexican) billionaire Carlos Slim linked to the narcos?” Dionne replies, “Regarding your question, the MX telecommunication billionaire is.” In a country where 44% of the population lives in poverty you don’t become the world’s richest man in just two decades selling Girl Scout cookies.

Fink and Mexican PPP

With Marcos Slim on his BlackRock board and new president Enrique Peña Nieto, Larry Fink’s Mexican partner in Nieto Peña’s $590 billion PublicPrivatePartnership (PPP) alliance, BlackRock, was ready to reap the harvest. To fine-tune his new Mexican operations, Fink named former Mexican Undersecretary of Finance Gerardo Rodriguez Regordosa to direct BlackRock Emerging Market Strategy in 2013. Then in 2016 Peña Nieto appointed Isaac Volin, then head of BlackRock Mexico to be No. 2 at PEMEX where he presided over corruption, scandals and the largest loss in PEMEX history, $38 billion.

Peña Nieto had opened the huge oil state monopoly, PEMEX, to private investors for the first time since nationalization in the 1930s. The first to benefit was Fink’s BlackRock. Within seven months, BlackRock had secured $1 billion in PEMEX energy projects, many as the only bidder. During the tenure of Peña Nieto, one of the most controversial and least popular presidents, BlackRock prospered by the cozy ties. It soon was engaged in highly profitable (and corrupt) infrastructure projects under Peña Nieto including not only oil and gas pipelines and wells but also including toll roads, hospitals, gas pipelines and even prisons.

Notably, BlackRock’s Mexican “friend” Peña Nieto was also “friends” not only with Carlos Slim but with the head of the notorious Sinaloa Cartel, “El Chapo” Guzman. In court testimony in 2019 in New York Alex Cifuentes, a Colombian drug lord who has described himself as El Chapo’s “right-hand man,” testified that just after his election in 2012, Peña Nieto had requested $250 million from the Sinaloa Cartel before settling on $100 million. We can only guess what for.

Larry Fink and WEF Great Reset

In 2019 Larry Fink joined the Board of the Davos World Economic Forum, the Swiss-based organization that for some 40 years has advanced economic globalization. Fink, who is close to the WEF’s technocrat head, Klaus Schwab, of Great Reset notoriety, now stands positioned to use the huge weight of BlackRock to create what is potentially, if it doesn’t collapse before, the world’s largest Ponzi scam, ESG corporate investing. Fink with $9 trillion to leverage is pushing the greatest shift of capital in history into a scam known as ESG Investing. The UN “sustainable economy” agenda is being realized quietly by the very same global banks which have created the financial crises in 2008. This time they are preparing the Klaus Schwab WEF Great Reset by steering hundreds of billions and soon trillions in investment to their hand-picked “woke” companies, and away from the “not woke” such as oil and gas companies or coal. BlackRock since 2018 has been in the forefront to create a new investment infrastructure that picks “winners” or “losers” for investment according to how serious that company is about ESG—Environment, Social values and Governance.

For example a company gets positive ratings for the seriousness of its hiring gender diverse management and employees, or takes measures to eliminate their carbon “footprint” by making their energy sources green or sustainable to use the UN term. How corporations contribute to a global sustainable governance is the most vague of the ESG, and could include anything from corporate donations to Black Lives Matter to supporting UN agencies such as WHO. Oil companies like ExxonMobil or coal companies no matter how clear are doomed as Fink and friends now promote their financial Great Reset or Green New Deal. This is why he cut a deal with the Biden presidency in 2019.

Follow the money. And we can expect that the New York Times will cheer BlackRock on as it destroys the world financial structures. Since 2017 BlackRock has been the paper’s largest shareholder. Carlos Slim was second largest. Even Carl Icahn, a ruthless Wall Street asset stripper, once called BlackRock, “an extremely dangerous company… I used to say, you know, the mafia has a better code of ethics than you guys.” 

One Nation Under Greed: The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State

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By By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayer always gets ripped off.

Not only are Americans forced to “spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined,” but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command—Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc.—have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.

By the time you factor in the financial blowback from the COVID-19 pandemic with its politicized mandates, lockdowns, and payouts, it becomes quickly apparent that we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.

When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.

On the roads: Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax, which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.

In the prisons: States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity. This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full, “regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.” As Mother Jones reports, “private prison companies have supported and helped write … laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.” Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to “boost profits” at taxpayer expense. All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations. No wonder the United States has the largest prison population in the world.

In the schools: The security industrial complex with its tracking, spying, and identification devices has set its sights on the schools as “a vast, rich market”—a $20 billion market, no less—just waiting to be conquered. In fact, the public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools—at great taxpayer expense and personal profit—into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws, which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for “unauthorized” absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.

In the endless wars abroad: Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government’s endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour. Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.  Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford. War spending is bankrupting America.

In the form of militarized police: The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.

In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture: Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars’ worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police are actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the “goodies” that are on police departments’ wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to “pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car.”

Among government contractors: We have been saddled with a government that is outsourcing much of its work to high-paid contractors at great expense to the taxpayer and with no competition, little transparency and dubious savings. According to the Washington Post, “By some estimates, there are twice as many people doing government work under contract than there are government workers.” These open-ended contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, “now account for anywhere between one quarter and one half of all federal service contracting.” Moreover, any attempt to reform the system is “bitterly opposed by federal employee unions, who take it as their mission to prevent good employees from being rewarded and bad employees from being fired.”

By the security industrial complex: We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of “precrime,” this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn’t even touch on the government’s bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.

By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good—against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms—by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.

This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.

Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few

Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.

All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it’s your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.

Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it’s a police officer arresting someone for filming them in public, or a child being kicked out of school for attending a virtual class while playing with a toy gun, remember that it is your tax dollars that are paying for these injustices.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people.

Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the government and its emissaries can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.

This is not freedom, America.

America Leader of the Free World? How to Forget U.S. interference in Foreign Elections

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Joe Biden should read up on the history of American political and military interventions, regime changes and electoral interference worldwide.

After only five months in office, President Joe Biden has already become notorious for his verbal gaffes and mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly Republican-partisan physician has suggested that he be tested to determine his cognitive abilities. That said, however, there is one June 16th tweet that he is responsible for that is quite straightforward that outdoes everything else for sheer mendacity. It appeared shortly after the summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was apparently intended to be rhetorical, at least insofar as Biden understands the term. It went: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.”

There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100, but that does not take into account the frequent interventions of various kinds that took place largely in Latin America between the Spanish-American War and 1946. One recalls how the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler declared that “War is a racket” in 1935. He confessed to having “…helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”

And there have been since 1900 other regime change and interventionist actions, both using military force and also brought about by corrupting local politicians with money and other inducements. And don’t forget the American trained death squads active in Latin America. Some would also include in the list the possibly as many as 50 Central Intelligence Agency and Special Ops political assassinations that have been documented, though admittedly sometimes based on thin evidence.

That Joe Biden, who has been at a reasonably high level in the federal government for over forty years, including as Vice President for eight years and now President should appear to be ignorant of what his own government has done and quite plausibly continues to do is astonishing. After all, Biden was VP when Victoria Nuland worked for the Obama Administration as the driving force behind efforts in 2013-2014 to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square accompanied by Senator John McCain to encourage the protesters.

A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé who is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. As Biden’s tweet even recognized in a backhanded way, it is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior. Biden clearly is part of that and also clearly does not understand what he is doing or saying.

Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The Obama and Biden Administration’s replacement of the government in Kiev was the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. That point of conflict has continued to this day, with a U.S. warships in the Black Sea engaging in exercises with the Ukrainian navy.

Biden was also with the Obamas when they chose to destabilize and destroy Libya. Nor should Russia itself be forgotten. Boris Yeltsin was re-elected president of Russia in 1996 after the Clinton Administration pumped billions of dollars into his campaign, enabling him to win a close oligarch-backed victory that had been paid for and managed by Washington. Joe Biden was a Senator at the time.

And then there is Iran, where democratically elected Mohammed Mossadeq was deposed by the CIA in 1953 and replaced by the Shah. The Shah was replaced by the Islamic Republic in turn in 1979 and the poisoned relationship between Washington and Tehran has constituted a tit-for-tat quasi-cold war ever since, marked by assassinations and sabotage.

And who can forget Chile where Salvador Allende was removed by the CIA in 1973 and replaced by Augusto Pinochet? Or Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 where the CIA failed to bring about regime change in Havana? Can it be that Joe Biden cannot recall any of those “interventions,” which were heavily covered in the international media at the time?

And to make up the numbers, Joe can possibly consider the multiple “interferences in elections,” which is more precisely what he was referring to. As a CIA officer stationed in Europe and the Middle East in and 1970s through the early 1990s, I can assure him that I personally know about nearly continuous interference in elections in places like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, all of which had prominent communist parties, some of which were on the verge of government entry. Bags of money went to conservative parties, politicians were bribed and journalists bought. In fact, during that time period I would dare to say there was hardly an election that the United States did not somehow get involved in.

Does it still go on? The U.S. has been seeking regime change in Syria since 2004 and is currently occupying part of the country. And of course, Russia is on the receiving end of a delegitimization process through a controlled western media that is seeking to get rid of Putin by exploiting a CIA and western intelligence funded opposition. China has no real opposition or open elections, nor can its regime plausibly be changed, but it is constantly being challenged by depicting it and its behavior in the most negative fashion possible.

Joe Biden really should read up on the history of American political and military interventions, regime changes and electoral interference worldwide. He just might learn something. The most important point might, however, elude him. All of the intervention and all of the deaths have turned out badly both for the U.S. and for the people and countries being targeted. Biden has taken a bold step to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, though it now appears that that decision might be in part reversed. Much better to complete the process and also do the same thing in places like Iraq, Somalia and Syria. The whole world will be a better place for it.

With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the Washington Post Editorial Board

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In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

The Washington Post’s glaring conflicts of interest have of late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article denouncing a supposed attempt to “soak” billionaires in taxes. Written by star columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued that Walmart’s wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government would “destroy [billionaires’] fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.” Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth, something they have been accused of on more than one occasion.

There was considerable speculation online as to whether Bezos himself wrote the piece, so blatantly in his interest it was. Unfortunately, this sort of speculation has raged ever since the Amazon CEO bought the newspaper in 2013 for $250 million.

https://twitter.com/pnh/status/1403047911295008769

Undue influence

Being owned by the world’s richest individual does not mean that The Washington Post and its employees are rolling in dough themselves. Far from it: Bezos’ revolution at the newspaper, which has led to both increased pageviews and company value, has been largely based on simply squeezing workers harder than before. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, management acknowledged that Post reporters are pushed to produce almost four times as many stories as their peers at The New York Times. Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from slightly different angles and with different headlines in order to generate more clicks, and thus more revenue. Thanks to new technology, reporters’ every keystroke is monitored and they are under constant pressure from management not to fall behind. The technique of constant surveillance is not unlike what hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse workers who wear GPS devices or Fitbit watches have to endure.

Bezos is currently worth a shade under $200 billion, with his wealth nearly doubling since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With such a fortune to protect, the obvious solution is to acquire media outlets to control the narrative in the face of rising public disenchantment with rampaging inequality. Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that this is a common tactic among the super wealthy. “Billionaire ownership of major news outlets is but another tool the billionaire class deploys for the purpose of wealth defense. It gives them the power to set the terms of the agenda and influence public opinion in their favor,” Ocampo told MintPress.

But Bezos is far from the only senior figure with questionable connections. The company’s CEO, Frederick Ryan, was a senior member of the Reagan White House, rising to become the 40th president’s assistant and later the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He later became CEO of Politico. In the Post’s announcement of the hiring move, they themselves noted that among Ryan’s biggest achievements at their rival outlet was “helping the news organization win a lucrative advertising deal with Goldman Sachs and host presidential debates before the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.”

Another neoconservative in a key position is Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. Under Hiatt’s tenure, anti-establishment columnists like Dan Froomkin were let go and warmongers like the late Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Ignatius moved in. “After being so wrong on such a huge story as the invasion of Iraq, hawkish ideologue Fred Hiatt should have been terminated as editorial page editor,” Jeff Cohen, former Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College and founder of media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told MintPress, adding:

In a decent media system, someone who has been so inaccurate on so many issues as Hiatt would not be in a powerful media position two decades later. Powerful voices in U.S. media often argue that society should be a ‘meritocracy’ — with advancement based on ability or achievement. Hiatt proves that the U.S. corporate media system is just the opposite — a ‘kakistocracy’ — where the unqualified and unprincipled rise to the top.”

Other highly questionable hires include Jerusalem correspondent Ruth Eglash, who spent seven years putting out content that was often indistinguishable from Israeli government propaganda. At the time of her hire, activists highlighted the conflicts of interest she had, given her husband’s job as a PR rep for the country. In November 2020, Eglash quit the Post to become chief of communications for the Israeli ambassador to the United States and United Nations. “My experiences as a journalist have afforded me a great instinct of how to better tell Israel’s unique story,” she said, adding “a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and showcasing Israel’s successes to the world has [sic] always been a passion of mine.”

At the center of the news cosmos

The Washington Post is among the most powerful, influential, and widely-read media outlets in the United States. Its position as the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital reinforces its place as a thought-leading, agenda-setting publication. Whatever appears in the Post will likely be in the rest of the nation’s media, so authoritative is its reputation.

There are no more important pages than its editorial section, where its board comes together to lay out the collective wisdom of its most senior journalists and editors. Through its editorial page, the senior staff lay out the newspaper’s line to others and broadcast what they see as the correct position on the most pressing issues of the day. Hence, editorials are essentially instructions to their well-heeled and influential readers in D.C. and around the country on what to think about any given subject.

This is particularly troublesome as, despite the fact the newspaper presents itself as a defender of liberty and a champion of the people (its tagline is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”), the editorial board has represented the interests of the powerful over ordinary Americans on issue after issue. The following editorials are examples of this in action.

Could we be any more pro-war?

The Post’s editorial board has generally been extremely supportive of whatever conflicts the U.S. has started, and has consistently warned against ending the violence. In a 2015 editorial entitled “Drone strikes are bad; no drone strikes would be worse,” it balked at the idea of stopping the highly controversial bombing campaigns throughout the Middle East and North Africa. By that time, President Barack Obama was bombing seven countries simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Post argued that drones had successfully defeated Al-Qaeda and that the use of drone strikes “shouldn’t be up for review.”

In recent times, the rising newspaper of record has also been a driver of increased hostilities with China, describing Beijing’s military’s moves in the South China Sea as “provocations” against the U.S., spreading rumors about the COVID-19 virus’s origin, and demanding American companies like Apple “resist China’s tyranny” and begin to relocate their production facilities elsewhere to punish the Chinese government.

On Latin America too, the editorial board has proven to be extremely hawkish. It immediately endorsed a U.S.-backed far-right coup in Bolivia in 2019, insisting that “there could be little doubt who was ultimately responsible for the chaos: newly resigned President Evo Morales.” The Post condemned him for refusing to “cooperate” with “Bolivia’s more responsible leaders,” who were organizing his overthrow, and chastised him for using the word “coup” for what was going on. Morales, they concluded, was a victim of his own “insatiable appetite for power” and his inability to “accept that a majority of Bolivians wanted him to leave office.”

In 2002, the paper also supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, falsely claiming the Venezuelan president had ordered the shooting of thousands of demonstrators and absurdly asserting that “there’s been no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with [it].

The WaPo editorial board’s less than subtle take on drone warfare
The WaPo editorial board’s less than subtle take on drone warfare

In more recent times, it has demanded more action to unseat Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, including supporting U.S. sanctions that have now killed over 100,000 people, according to a United Nations rapporteur. The Post’s justification in 2017 was that Maduro was on the verge of carrying out his own “coup,” “abolish[ing] the opposition-controlled legislature, cancel[ing] future elections and establish[ing] a regime resembling that of Cuba’s” — none of which has happened. In its efforts to oust the democratically-elected leader, the Post even aligned itself with Donald Trump and endorsed far-right coup leader Juan Guaidó as “Venezuela’s legitimate president,” a position some polls have suggested as little as 3% of Venezuelans hold.

The editorial board has expressed its desire to see regime change in leftist-controlled Nicaragua, too. President Daniel Ortega, it claims, is “taking a sledgehammer” to opposition against him, while it also demands that the U.S., which has done nothing but offer “mild verbal opposition” to his rule, do more. What happened to the U.S. of the 1980s, “which spent so much money and political capital to promote democracy in Nicaragua?” they ask sadly.

In reality, of course, the U.S. is currently trying to strangle Nicaragua’s economy through sanctions. And in the 1980s, Washington’s “democracy promotion” agenda included the funding, training and arming of fascist death squads who wrought havoc across Central America, killing hundreds of thousands in genocides from which the area may never recover. The architects of the violence were found guilty in U.S. courts, while the Reagan administration was tried and convicted by the International Court of Justice on 15 counts that amount to international terrorism. That the Post’s editorial board remembers that history as “promoting democracy” is particularly worrisome.

Fake news, fake newspapers

The Washington Post was the key supporter of fake news detection system “PropOrNot,” which was almost immediately exposed as a fake operation itself, forcing the newspaper to publicly distance itself from its own reporting. Yet it was the Post itself that perpetuated the most notorious and damaging fake news story of the 21st century: the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction hoax and Saddam Hussein’s fictional links to al-Qaeda.

In a highly influential editorial entitled “Irrefutable” the Post wrote that, after watching Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech at the United Nations, “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction… And [Powell] offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al-Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe.”

“No page was more crucial in propelling the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq than the Post‘s editorial page — which beat the drums for war in a couple dozen editorials in the six months leading up to the invasion,” Cohen told MintPress, adding:

The Post’s op-ed page was almost as cartoonishly wrong on Iraq, offering little dissent or corrective to the editorial page’s jingoism — especially in that pivotal media moment following Colin Powell’s error-filled U.N. speech. While the editorial page offered up its ‘Irrefutable’ verdict, the op-ed page’s liberal voice offered an embarrassing column, headlined ‘I’m Persuaded’.”

The Post played a major role in manufacturing consent for the deadliest war since Vietnam, publishing 27 editorials in support of an invasion. As with PropOrNot, it backtracked long after the dust had settled, apologizing for its role in amping the public up to accept that war. Yet to this day it continues to push for others.

Surveillance state champion

Despite telling its readers that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post certainly has a negative opinion about those individuals who work to shine a light on illegal government activities. In 2016, its editorial board demanded “no pardon for Edward Snowden,” condemning his backers like filmmaker Oliver Stone and expressing outrage that Snowden had revealed that the U.S. was spying on Russia and carrying out cyberattacks against China. In its long denunciation, it insisted that the NSA’s massive surveillance operation against the American public resulted in “no specific harm, actual or attempted.” As such, the editorial board made history by becoming the first newspaper ever to call for the imprisonment of its own source, on whose back and information it won a Pulitzer Prize.

If Snowden was not worthy of defending, then it is no surprise that the Post’s editorial team expressed their delight when Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, declaring it a “victory for the rule of law.” “Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long overdue for personal accountability,” they wrote, spreading baseless conspiracy theories that the Australian publisher worked with Russia to hack American democracy.

The Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa, which offered asylum to the Western dissidents, also came under fire. In 2013, the Post (falsely) labeled Correa an “autocrat” and “the hemisphere’s preeminent anti-U.S. demagogue.” They also directly threatened him, writing that, “If Mr. Correa welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate that Yanqui-baiting has its price.”

Of course, the Post is now intimately linked with the national security state after Amazon signed a number of deals to provide intelligence and computing services to several three-letter agencies. In 2020, the Bezos-owned Amazon Web Services signed a new deal with the CIA worth tens of billions of dollars.

The editorial board has also gone up to bat for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) multiple times, insisting that it is “the wrong target for outrage,” presenting the agency as key in the battle against art theft and nuclear proliferation. “Abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal,” the board wrote in 2018, despite the fact that the U.S. survived without the agency perfectly well until its creation in 2003.

Attacking any pro-people policy

The Washington Post has aggressively attempted to beat back any new political movements challenging the establishment. Chief among them has been the one around Bernie Sanders, for whom the newspaper has reserved a special ire. In 2016, it famously ran 16 negative stories on Sanders in the space of 16 hours and has used its fact-checking page to relentlessly undermine him, sometimes to bizarre effect.

“Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own numbers contradict that,” read the headline of one article, which detailed how his average donation was actually $27.89, not $27. It also gave his statement that six men (one of whom is Bezos) hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population “three Pinocchios” — the designation just below the most egregious lie. This was because, they argued, billionaires’ wealth is tied up in stocks, not money itself, and most people own essentially nothing. Why this disproved his assertion they did not explain. Going undisclosed is that both Bezos and the Post’s chief fact-checker Glen Kessler, who is the scion of a fossil fuel baron, would stand to lose a fortune if Sanders were elected.

Likewise, the Post’s editorial board did all it could to ensure Sanders was not elected in 2016, publishing editorials such as “Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign,” which defended big banks from Sanders’s attacks; “Mr. Sanders’s shocking ignorance on his core issue,” which presented Hillary Clinton as a more credible Wall Street reformer; and “Mr. Sanders peddles fiction on free trade,” which championed the long-discredited North American Free Trade Agreement as a jobs creator. Unsurprisingly, the editorial board was also a vociferous supporter of the Trans Pacific Partnership.

In 2020, the Post was no less hostile to Sanders, publishing an editorial headlined “We should pay more attention to the Democrats who pay attention to reality,” which stated that “Mr. Sanders promises unlimited free stuff to everyone; other candidates propose smarter, more targeted approaches.”

The Post’s higher-ups have been careful to oppose virtually every piece of progressive or pro-people policy proposals. Chief among them has been healthcare. The United States is alone in the developed world in not offering some kind of universal healthcare to its population. Its privatized system is multiple times more expensive than that of comparable countries and has the worst outcomes in the West. Yet the board has consistently scare-mongered its readers, claiming “Single-payer health care would have an astonishingly high price tag,” and attacking Medicare-For-All proponents running for office. “Why go to the trouble of running for president to promote ideas that can’t work?” it asked rhetorically, before going on to insist that moving towards a healthcare system like that of Canada, Japan or Western Europe does not meet a “baseline degree of factual plausibility.”

On education, it has been just as regressive. “There are consequences to making college free,” it warned readers. Chief among these would be that private universities would make less money, which, apparently should be a major concern. “Forgiving student loans the wrong way will only worsen inequality,” ran the headline of another editorial, in which the board pretended to be ultra-left elite-hating radicals, arguing that we should not make college free because Ivy League graduates would benefit the most (around one-third of the Post’s editorial team attended an Ivy League school). It also feigned a far-left position on charter schools, pretending that essentially privatizing schools and handing them over to businesses to run would solve racial inequality in America, and that anyone who opposed them (like teachers’ unions) was no progressive.

Perhaps the most blatant conflict of interest the Post has displayed is in their committed opposition to a wealth tax. “Elizabeth Warren wants a ‘wealth tax.’ It might backfire,” they wrote, making a series of bizarre and illogical arguments against the plan, such as immigrants will stop wanting to come to the U.S. if such a tax is imposed (the threshold for paying a wealth tax is $50 million). Five months later, the board reaffirmed their position: “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich,” they wrote, claiming that rich people “can afford the best accountants and lawyers,” and so taxing them is presumably impossible.

Of course, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has every reason to go all out to prevent a wealth tax gaining traction. A CNBC study calculated that Bezos would be forced to pay $5.7 billion annually if Warren’s tax plans came to fruition.

The Post has also taken a firm stand against serious regulation of monopolies, decrying a supposed “antitrust onslaught” against Google, spearheaded by simplistic “break-them-up” rhetoric from dishonest actors. In 2016, it also lambasted Sanders for his “oversimplified,” “crowd-pleasing” demagoguery on Wall Street regulation, insisting that there has actually been widespread reform of the financial sector since 2008, making another crash unlikely.

Unsurprisingly for an outlet owned by a poverty-wage employer, the Post has also consistently opposed a national $15 minimum wage. In March, it categorically stated that “[a] $15 minimum wage won’t happen” and Democrats should stop trying to make it happen. Instead, they advised, they should “practice the art of the possible.” This, the board explained, meant falling in line behind Arkansas arch-Republican Senator Tom Cotton to support his proposals for a creeping state-by-state rise to $10.

On the climate, too, the Post has pushed extremely regressive positions, opposing a Green New Deal outright and suggesting the atmosphere be turned into a giant free market where polluters can trade credits and speculate. “The left’s opposition to a carbon tax shows there’s something deeply wrong with the left,” they wrote. They also endorsed the highly controversial process of fracking. Seeing as the Post’s editorial board is littered with former employees of the notorious climate-change denying Wall Street Journal, its stance is perhaps not surprising.

On COVID, the Post has consistently opposed teachers’ unions calls to keep schools closed, as well as standing against $2,000 checks. A universal payout is a “bad idea” they stated, but one “whose time has come because of politics, not economics.” So committed was the editorial team’s opposition to the idea of helping the poor that it presented Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a voice of sanity in Washington.

This does not mean that the Post was against direct payments to all people. In fact, all Post employees received a $2,021 bonus from management in January as a gesture of appreciation for their work during the pandemic. Two grand for me, not for thee.

Junk-food news

The point of a fourth estate is that it is supposed to shine a light on the powerful and hold them to account. But when corporate media are largely owned and sponsored by the super wealthy themselves, the claim that this is what they do is increasingly hard to maintain. In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.

While The Washington Post presents itself as an adversarial publication standing up to power, the fact that its senior staff constantly comes to such a hardline neoliberal elitist consensus on so many issues shows how little ideological diversity there is among its staff. Democracy dies at The Washington Post editorial board.

USA 2021: Capitalism For The Powerless, Crony-Socialism For The Powerful

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By Tyler Durden

Source: Zero Hedge

The supposed “choice” between “capitalism” and “socialism” is a useful fabrication masking the worst of all possible worlds we inhabit: Capitalism for the powerless and Crony-Socialism for the powerful. Capitalism’s primary dynamics are reserved solely for the powerless: market price of money, capital’s exploitive potential, free-for-all competition and creative destruction.

The powerful, on the other hand, bask in the warm glow of socialism: The Federal Reserve protects them from the market cost of money–financiers and the super-wealthy get their money for virtually nothing from the Fed, in virtually unlimited quantities–and the Treasury, Congress and the Executive branch protect them from any losses: their gains are private, but their losses are transferred to the public. The Supreme Court ensures the super-rich maintain this cozy crony-socialism by ensuring they can buy political power via lobbying and campaign contributions–under the laughable excuse of free speech.

Cronies get the best political system money can buy and you–well, you get to carry a sign on the street corner, just before you’re hauled off to jail for disturbing the peace (and you’re banned by social media/search Big Tech, i.e. privatized totalitarianism, for good measure).

The Federal Reserve is America’s financial Politburo: cronies get a free pass, the powerless get nothing. While the three billionaires who own more wealth than the bottom 165 million Americans can borrow unlimited sums for next to nothing thanks to the Fed (i.e. Crony-Socialist Politburo), the 165 million Americans pay exorbitant interest on payday loans, used car loans, student loans, credit cards and so on.

Capitalism (market sets price of money) for the powerless, Crony-Socialism (nearly free money) for the powerful–thanks to America’s Crony-Socialist Politburo, the Fed. Consider the “free market” plight of America’s working poor: earning low wages that are rapidly losing their purchasing power makes them a credit risk, i.e. prone to defaulting, so lenders (i.e. capital’s exploitive potential) charge high interest rates on loans to the working poor.

Since they pay such high rates of interest and earn so little, they default on their debt at higher rates–just what the lenders expected, and what the lenders created by charging sky-high rates of interest: gee, you’re having trouble paying 24% interest? Too bad you’re poor. You see the point: low wages, poverty and exorbitant rates of interest are mutually reinforcing: a primary driver of defaults and poverty is paying sky-high rates of interest and all the late fees, bounced check fees, etc. that go with 24% interest rates.

The Crony-Socialists have a much different deal with the Fed and its crony-bankers: the super-wealthy arrange for the corporations they own shares in to borrow billions of dollars to fund stock buybacks (which in a less exploitive era were illegal market manipulation). The super-wealthy Crony-Socialist’s personal wealth rises by $100 million thanks to the stock buybacks, and then the super-wealthy Crony-Socialist borrows $10 million for next to nothing against this newly conjured “wealth” (thanks, Fed!) to fund living large.

Crony-Socialist corporations pay no income tax thanks to loopholes and the Crony-Socialists who own the shares report $1 in salary and zero income because they borrowed their living expenses against their Fed-conjured wealth. Do you discern the difference between capitalism for the powerless and crony-socialism for the super-wealthy?

If you can’t yet discern the difference, then ask yourself: can you borrow $1 billion from the Fed’s cronies to buy back shares of your own company, and then borrow $10 million for near-zero rates of interest against the newly conjured “wealth”? You can’t? Well, why not?

If you answer “I don’t have enough collateral,” you missed the key point here: thanks to America’s Crony-Socialist Politburo (the Fed), the super-wealthy have no exposure to the market price of money. The Fed manipulates the cost of money to near-zero, and then funnels unlimited sums of this nearly-free money to corporations, financiers and the super-wealthy.

Collateral is unnecessary in Crony-Socialism; that’s just a excuse given to the powerless. Crony-Socialists borrow $1 billion for next to nothing, buy Treasuries with the free money, put the Treasuries up as collateral (but wait, didn’t they borrow the money? Never mind, it doesn’t matter), originate some financial instruments (CDOs, etc.), post those as collateral, and then leverage up another bet on that fictitious collateral.

If the bets all go bad, the Crony-Socialist claims the whole fraud is now a systemic risk and so the losses are transferred to the public / taxpayers to “save the financial system from collapse.” Isn’t Crony-Socialism fantastic?

Just as the rich kid caught with smack gets a suspended sentence and probation while the powerless kid gets a tenner in the War on Drugs Gulag, the super-wealthy Crony-Socialists avoid all the consequences of their gambles and frauds. America’s Crony-Socialist Politburo (the Fed) takes care of its cronies and the powerless bear the brunt of predatory exploitation that’s passed off as “capitalism.”

The only dynamic that’s even faintly “capitalist” about America’s Crony-Socialism is the price of political corruption is still a “market”: what’s the current price of protecting your monopoly or cartel from competition? It’s moving up fast, so better get those bribes (oops, I mean campaign contributions for the 2022 election) in now before the price of corrupting “democracy” goes even higher.