One amusing angle on the news media broadside about Russia “hacking” the US election is the failure to mention — or even imagine! — that the US incessantly and continually runs propaganda psy-ops against every other country in the world. And I’m not even including the venerable, old, out-in-the-open propaganda organs like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (reminder: the Iron Curtain came down a quarter century ago). Do you suppose that nobody at Langley, or the Pentagon, or the NSA’s sprawling 1.5 million square foot Utah Data Center is laboring night and day to sow confusion among other societies to push our various agendas?
The main offensive started with The Washington Post’s publication on Nov 26 of “The List,” a story calling out dozens of blogs and web news-sites as purveyors of “fake news” fronting for Russian disinformation forces. The list included Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, and David Stockman’s blog. There were several whack-job sites mixed in the list for seasoning — The Daily Stormer (Nazis), Endtime.com (Evangelical apocalyptic), GalacticConnection (UFO shit). The rest range between tabloid-silly and genuine, valuable news commentary. What else would you expect in a society with an Internet AND a completely incoherent consensus about reality?
Pretty obviously, the struggle between mainstream news and Web news climaxed over the election, with the mainstream overwhelmingly pimping for Hillary, and then having a nervous breakdown when she lost. Desperate to explain the loss, the two leading old-line newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, ran with the Russia-Hacks-Election story — because only Satanic intervention could explain the fall of Ms. It’s-My-Turn / I’m-With-Her. Thus, the story went, Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC), gave the hacked emails to Wikileaks, and sabotaged not only Hillary herself but the livelihoods of every myrmidon in the American Deep State termite mound, an unforgivable act.
Also interestingly, these newspapers and their handmaidens on TV, were far less concerned as to whether the leaked information was true or not — e.g. the Clinton Foundation donors’ influence-peddling around arms deals made in the State Department; the DNC’s campaign to undermine Bernie Sanders in the primaries; DNC temporary chair (and CNN employee) Donna Brazille conveying debate questions to HRC; the content of HRC’s quarter-million-dollar speeches to Wall Street banks. All of that turned out to be true, of course.
Then, a few weeks after the election, the US House of Representatives passed H.R. 6393, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017. Blogger Ronald Thomas West reports:
Section 501 calls for the government to “counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.”
The measure has not been passed by the Senate or signed into law yet, and the holiday recess may prevent that. But it is easy to see how it would empower the Deep State to shut down whichever websites they happened to not like. My reference to the Deep State might even imply to some readers that I’m infected by the paranoia virus. But I’m simply talking about the massive “security” and surveillance matrix that has unquestionably expanded since the 9/11 airplane attacks, creating a gigantic NSA superstructure above and beyond the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense’s DIA, and the hoary old FBI.
A little paranoia about the growing fascist behavior of the US government is a useful corrective to trends that citizens ought to be concerned about — for instance, the militarization of police; the outrageous “civil forfeiture” scam that allows police to steal citizens cash and property without any due process of law; the preferential application of law as seen in the handling of the Clinton Foundation activities and the misconduct of banking executives; the attempt to impose a “cashless society” that would herd all citizens into a financial surveillance hub and eliminate their economic liberty.
These matters are especially crucial as the nation stumbles into the next financial crisis and the Deep State becomes desperate to harvest every nickel it can to rescue itself plus the cast of “systemically important” (Too-Big-To-Fail) banks and related institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are about to once again be left holding colossal bags of worthless non-performing mortgages, not to mention the pension funds and insurance companies that will also founder in the Great Unwind that is likely to commence as Trump hangs his golden logo over the White House portico.
This is an excerpt from my new book, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Wilson rose to global fame sixty years ago, when his first book, The Outsider, became a bestseller overnight and sparked the nascent counter culture into a sudden blaze. It thrust the twenty-four year old Wilson into celebrity, and inaugurated the brief craze for the Angry Young Men, a kind of British buttoned-down version of the Beat Generation. Wilson had little in common with his other Angries, who were focused mainly on social issues. Wilson’s concern was the lack of spiritual tension in the modern world, and he quickly became known as Britain’s “homegrown existentialist,” rivaling Sartre, Camus and others on the existential scene with his analysis of the modern predicament. Wilson’s path to success was bumpy. In the years before The Outsider he had worked at dozens of menial jobs, always moving on when he got bored. He survived a suicide attempt, hitchhiked across England and France, hob nobbed with bohemians in London and Paris, and slept rough on Hampstead Heath while writing by day in the British Museum. He died in 2013 at the age of 82.
Wilson’s success was short-lived, and soon after celebrating him the press and the critics, ever fickle, brought him down, the boy genius now persona non grata. Wilson went on to write an enormous number of books, over a remarkable range of subjects, from criminality and sex to the paranormal and mystical experience, as well as many novels, such as Ritual in the Dark, about a modern-day Jack the Ripper, and The Mind Parasites, a phenomenological science fiction thriller about alien psychic vampires in the mind…
This section introduces Wilson’s character of the Outsider, a person who has a hunger for meaning and purpose that the modern world cannot provide, and who must discover the “secret life” within him or face death, madness, or quiet despair.
In The Outsider Wilson made his first attempt at analysing a character he felt was peculiar to our age, a person with a pressing hunger for meaning and spiritual purpose in a world seemingly bent on denying him these. In the past, during the Middle Ages, such an individual could have found a home in the church, which was then the heart of life, and which provided a place, monasteries, where he could work toward his salvation – work, that is, to awaken the spiritual life within him, to grasping his purpose with an unwavering seriousness. That purpose was to become something greater than himself, to work against the laziness and complacency that keeps him second-rate and allows him to be satisfied with being “only human.”
But today, in our modern society, geared toward comfort and security and motivated by purely material aims, there is no place for such a person, and his spiritual seriousness is a liability. His or her desire to be something more than a happy, well-fed animal, puts him at odds with the world around him. This type is driven by needs that the people he knows do not understand. For him the world that they complacently accept is false. He sees “too deep and too much” and his awareness of the illusions that satisfy others brings him to despair. He is not at home in the world, his permanent sense of self-dissatisfaction does not allow him to be. This dissatisfaction cannot be met by any changes to the social or economic system, as Marxists like the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, one of the Angry Young men, believed. “The question of freedom,” Wilson writes, “is not a social problem.” Only by the long, difficult, personal struggle to self-realization can the Outsider realize his goal. That realization, or actualization, as the psychologist Abraham Maslow, one of Wilson’s earliest readers, called it, requires an “intensity of will” and is fostered by anything that arouses one’s “will to more life.”
This path is difficult. The Outsider at first feels himself a kind of misfit, a “lone nutter,” and his dissonance from the Insiders, those content with the world of the second-rate, leads to neurosis. There must be something wrong with him, he believes, and he may try to “fit in.” Usually he fails, and winds up occupying an uncomfortable middle realm. He cannot accept the world and its triviality, but he is not strong enough to escape from it completely or to impose his own seriousness upon it. This may lead to nothing more than a life of quiet desperation, or the Outsider may smoulder with resentment at the insects around him, and lash out indiscriminately – as Wilson’s explorations of the “criminal” Outsider will show, this can have deadly results. But if he is lucky, there are moments of vision, when a sense of power and meaning comes to him and he sees that he is not a misfit, and that the hunger and dissatisfaction that drives him, and which drove the mystics and saints of the past, are more real than the newspapers, television, and mediocrity he abhors.
It is a vision of “a higher form of reality than he has so far known,” a glimpse of what Wilson calls “the secret life,” that sense of total affirmation that he had experienced more than once by now. But then the vision fades. The Outsider is back on earth and is left wondering what the vision was about and why he must return to the dreary treadmill. The Outsider examines the possibility of restoring the vision, of so strengthening one’s grasp on one’s sense of purpose that it is not weakened or confused by the banality of “life.”
Wilson’s notebooks were full of observations of such figures, of Outsiders who were not able to survive their clashes with the world and who succumbed to illness, suicide or madness, who were not quite strong enough to impose their vision on their contemporaries. What went wrong? Why did giants like Nietzsche, Nijinsky, Van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, and others fail? To say they failed is not, of course, to diminish their greatness. But Nietzsche and Nijinsky went insane, Van Gogh shot himself, and Lawrence went into a kind of spiritual suicide, burying himself as a private in the RAF at the height of his fame. Why did so many poets and writers of the nineteenth century end in a kind of self-destruction? Shelley, Keats, Poe, Hölderlin, Schubert, Hoffman, Schiller, Kleist, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lautreamont – this list of nineteenth century geniuses who either died young, went mad, killed themselves or succumbed to alcohol or drug addiction could go on.
Why did it happen? Could it have been prevented? All were infused with the Romantic vision that burst upon western consciousness in the late eighteenth century, the insight that informed the music of Beethoven and the poetry of Blake. This was the sense, lost in the modern age, that human beings are really gods, or at least are meant to be, if only they could overcome their laziness and timidity. The Outsider is an exploration of the psychological and spiritual stresses that these and other men of genius faced in the search for their true selves. “The Outsider,” Wilson tells us, “ is not sure who he is. He has found an ‘I’, but it is not his true ‘I’. His main business is to find his way back to himself.”
The corporate news media, allied with “media watchdog” groups, many financed with global billionaire troublemaker George Soros, have trotted out a new dog whistle to attack their opponents: “fake news stories.” The issue of “fake news stories” was even raised by outgoing President Barack Obama in a news conference in Berlin with German chancellor Angela Merkel. Both leaders cited “fake news stories” as something that threatens international stability.
Of course, there are an ample number of fake news stories that emanate from disreputable and discredited websites, many of them vanity sites intending to serve as “click bait” for the unsuspecting web surfer and even a few professional journalists taken in by alarmist headlines. A number of individuals have been duped by totally fake stories written by “Sorcha Faal,” a pseudonym for David Booth, allegedly a U.S. computer programmer and which may also be a pseudonym for another individual or group of individuals. Faal, Booth, or whatever his name is acts as a cyber version of an arsonist who releases fake stories attributed to Russian intelligence sources and then sits back to assess the impact of his prankster works. The fact that a number of Russian news organizations have re-published Faal/Booth fake articles as actual news leads some to believe that U.S. intelligence plays a role in the obvious disinformation operation. Faal/Booth has a number of competitors in the field of cyber-pranksterism.
However, the most prominent purveyors of fake news stories are the very corporate media entities that decry “fake news.” There are a number of examples of corporate media trafficking in fake news. The following are a few stark examples:
In 1981, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a story about an 8-year old heroin addict named “Jimmy.” Washington, DC, Mayor Marion Barry was taken in by the story and launched a city-wide effort to search for “Jimmy” and provide him with treatment. Barry claimed “Jimmy” was real but, in fact, Cooke made up the entire story of “Jimmy’s World” and Barry lied about the supposed existence of the boy. Although Cooke’s story was totally fake, Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward submitted it to the Pulitzer committee for an award for best feature writing. Woodward, who concocted the fictional “Deep Throat” source in his Watergate reporting for the Post, was never sanctioned for advancing a fake story for a supposed serious professional journalism honor. The Post can be attributed to two major “fake news stories”—”Jimmy” the heroin addict and “Deep Throat” the high-level Nixon administration source who was not FBI deputy director Mark Felt.
New York Times reporter Jayson Blair wrote a series of fake news stories for the so-called “paper of record.” The following are a few of his fake news headlines that appeared in the Times:
October 30, 2002—”US Sniper Case Seen as a Barrier to a Confession.”
February 10, 2003—”Peace and Answers Eluding Victims of the Sniper Attacks.”
March 3, 2003—”Making Sniper Suspect Talk Puts Detective in Spotlight.”
March 27, 2003—”Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse News.”
April 3, 2003—”Rescue in Iraq and a ‘Big Stir’ in West Virginia.”
April 7, 2003—”For One Pastor, the War Hits Home.”
April 19, 2003—””In Military Wards, Questions and Fears from the Wounded.”
Blair made up from whole cloth stories about the DC sniper and Iraq war veterans. In all, 36 of the 73 national stories penned by Blair were fake. However, a number of media outlets, including the Times, reported as fact fake stories about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” all of which were false. New York Times reporter Judith Miller reported as fact information from Iraqi exiled leader Ahmed Chalabi alleging that Iraq possessed mobile weapons laboratories. The information was false, as was other U.S. “intelligence” on Iraq that was fed Miller and other reporters that was all bogus, including stories on Saddam Hussein allegedly trying to procure yellow cake uranium from Niger.
In May 1998, Stephen Glass of The New Republic wrote an article titled “Hack Heaven” about a 15-year old hacker and a non-existent software firm called “Jukt Micronics.” It was later determined that 27 articles Glass wrote for The New Republic were fabrications.
USA Today reporter and Pulitzer nominee Jack Kelly allegedly fabricated a number of stories for the newspaper, including a 1999 story alleging that the Yugoslavian armed forces was ordered to ethnically cleanse an Albanian village in Kosovo.
The Dateline NBC story of November 17, 1992, titled “Waiting to Explode” and alleging that poor fuel tank design caused General Motors’ pick-up trucks to explode on impact was based on rigged tests and staged explosions.
NBC anchor Brian Williams was suspended after making several false claims about his prior reporting. He claimed to have been riding on board an Army Chinook helicopter that was forced to land in an Iraqi desert after it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The story was false as was another in which Williams claimed to have flown into Baghdad with Navy SEAL Team 6. Williams also falsely claimed to have seen a man commit suicide in the New Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Williams also claimed to have personally witnessed the Berlin Wall coming down. He was not in Berlin until a day after the wall fell.
In 2013, CBS “60 Minutes” interviewed a U.S. security contractor who claimed he witnessed the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. The contractor was not in Benghazi during the attack and the account was bogus.
Rolling Stone published a falsified story in 2014 about a University of Virginia gang rape victim named “Jackie” and school administrator Nicole Eramo. The magazine falsely claimed that Eramo covered up rape incidents at the university. A federal jury later found that Rolling Stone libeled Eramo.
Several news organizations falsely claimed that security guard Richard Jewell was the chief suspect in the July 27, 1996, bombing of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. Jewell successfully sued CNN, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (“FBI suspects ‘hero’ guard may have planted bomb”), NBC, and The New York Post for libel.
Fox News often featured a commentator named Wayne Simmons, described by the network as a former CIA “operative.” In fact, Simmons never worked for the CIA and he was a fraud. He was later sentenced to 33 months in prison for his fraudulent activities.
The corporate media is legitimized by a very phony “arbiter” of what and what does not constitute accurate news: the very problematic Snopes.com. Snopes traffics in as much fakery in its “debunking” of alternative media articles as does the corporate media in its national and international reporting.
It is clear that Obama, Merkel, the Soros operation, and others are attacking “fake news stories” in order to hide the real target for their invective rhetoric: the alternative media, which does not kow-tow to corporate executives, advertisers, and special interests ranging from Big Pharma to the Israeli Lobby. The alternative media provides the lifeblood for the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press. The corporate media is a bloated and deceitful artifice whose time is coming to an end.
“Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news… we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov”
“How is that not classified?” Huma Abedin to FBI when shown email between Clinton & Obama using his pseudonym. Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”
I cannot state how huge this is, it’s a cover-up involving the President of the United States. There are a lot of emails implying this, but this email states it very clearly so anyone can understand. The email proves obstruction of justice and shows how they lied to the FBI, and likely perjury of Congress. This at the very least proves intent by her Chief of Staff.
Obama used executive privilege in their correspondence. Cheryl Mills (who was given immunity) states they need to “clean up” the Clinton/Obama e-mails because they lacked state.gov.
Additionally, Obama on video publicly denied knowing about the server. He also claimed on video that he learned about the secret server through the news like everyone else. The corruption goes all the way to the top! Obama is lying to the American public.
Hillary Clinton set up her private server to hide her pay to play deals discovered throughout these leaks, and to prevent FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests.
Paul Combetta was hired to modify the email headers that referred to a VERY VERY VIP individual, i.e. change the name of who it was from. If you read Stonetear/Combetta story, it’s easy to see this is exactly what he was attempting. He wanted to change header information on already sent mail to show “state.gov” instead of Hillary’s private email address. Multiple people informed him of the infeasibility (and illegality) of it, so somewhere in the next 6 days, it was decided that simply eradicating them was the only option left.
The FBI said they could find no intent to break the law, therefore no recommendation of prosecution. This email proves, in plain language, that there was intention, and knowingly broke the law.
Ask yourselves: Why would they both be communicating on a secret server to each other? Why not through normal proper channels? What were they hiding? We may soon find out.
2. Hillary Clinton dreams of completely “open borders”
“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”
This was stated at one of her $225,000 paid secret speeches to Wall Street that she has tried desperately to hide. This email contains those speeches in those attachments.
Border protection is important. Borders add safety and sovereignty to a country. Borders help prevent illegal immigration, which limits crime, drugs, human/sex trafficking across the border and allows more Americans (including African Americans and Latinos) to get jobs. It also costs the working class an exorbitant amount of money in higher taxes and leads to higher national debt. Mexico protects their southern border (with the help of $75 million from Obama).
During the 3rd debate, Hillary tried to pivot away from this damning topic by stating she only meant energy. Read the quote for yourself, energy is just one aspect of her open borders policy.
3. Hillary Clinton received money from and supported nations that she KNEW funded ISIS and terrorists
“…the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
“Clintons should know better than to raise money from folks whose primary concern has been supporting the NIAC, a notorious supporter of the Radical Islamic Mullahs. “The Clinton’s have thrown principle out the window in exchange for cold hard cash…putting money ahead of principle.”
Hillary’s Chief of Staff admits in the 2nd link that foreign interests sway Hillary to do what they want her to do (money for mandatory appearances). She also admits that the “Friend of Hillary” list is available and rentable to people who want to influence, but that it’s too sensitive to talk in email.
This leak shows Hillary knows Saudis and Qatar are funding ISIS, which is an enemy of the state. After knowing this, Hillary accepted tens of millions in donations from these terrorist-funding governments (of course they are getting something back in return). She also supported arms deals to them.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar commit horrible acts under Sharia law, including throwing gay people off of buildings, persecuting Christians, Jews, and atheists, and making it legal to rape and beat women. They are the leading funders of Hillary and her campaign through the Clinton Foundation.
4. Hillary has public positions on policy and her private ones
“But If Everybody’s Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position.”
This leak is a big one because anything she tells us that she will do can and should be considered questionable. Whenever Hillary tells the public a position, a goal, or what she will do for America, there is no way we can be sure if she has an opposite, private position.
This was one of her private paid $225,000 speeches to Wall Street. Behind closed doors she is telling her Wall Street donors one thing, and the American people another thing. Think about that for a moment…
5. Paying people to incite violence and unrest at Trump rallies
“Engage immigrant rights organizations. DREAMers have been bird dogging Republican presidential candidates on DACA/DAPA, but they’ve learned to respond. There’s an opportunity to bird dog and record questions about Trump’s comments and connect it to the policy.”
“It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker” (from video below)
“I mean honestly, it is not hard to get some of these ass holes to pop off, it’s a matter of showing up, to want to get into the rally, in a Planned Parenthood t-shirt. Or, Trump is a Nazi, you know? You can message to draw them out, and draw them to punch you.”
“Bird-dogging” is a term coined by high level Clinton staffers who openly talk about it in the video. They boast about inciting violence at Trump rallies, paying for every “protest”, manipulating Americans through the media to think that Trump is dangerous, and tricking people into thinking Trump supporters are violent and bad.
They laugh about paying off mentally ill and homeless people for years to incite violence against conservatives. Truly despicable. And they pretended to be Bernie supporters while they were “protesting”.
They admit to starting the Chicago riot where police were seriously hurt, and admit to shutting down the freeway in Arizona, partnering with Black Lives Matter. We even have proof that Hillary paid people to shut down the Chicago rally.
“And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking – and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.”
The Clinton campaign is literally conspiring to keep the population unaware of what is going on, and they admitted it in this email. Very scary ‘1984’ level thinking (group-think). If Hillary is the right choice for president and the truth is on her side, they should encourage their supporters to be aware and do research on both candidates.
[to be a Catholic is] “an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations”
“…no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.”
“There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship
Top Clinton aides, John Halpin and Jennifer Palmieri mock Catholics for their faith. They complain about the large number of Catholics in prominent positions.
This was one of the few emails to actually make it to the mainstream media (FOX) and Palmieri when confronted about this revelation didn’t apologize.
Brian Burch, CatholicVote.org president released a statement proclaiming, “Hillary Clinton has already called half of her opponents’ supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’ and ‘irredeemable,’ and now it comes out that her campaign spokeswoman dismissively question[ed] the sincerity of Catholic Americans’ faith. Had Palmieri spoken this way about other groups, she [would be] dismissed. Palmieri must resign immediately or be fired.”
This revelation was brought up at the Al Smith dinner for Catholics.
8. Hillary deleted her incriminating emails. State covered it up. Asked about using White House executive privilege to hide from Congress.
“They do not plan to release anything publicly, so no posting online or anything public-facing, just to the committee.”
“That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that HRC didn’t, which will make clear to them that she didn’t have them in the first place, deleted them, or didn’t turn them over. It also includes emails that HRC had that Sid didn’t.”
“Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I seems like they will.”
“We brought up the existence of emails in reserach this summer but were told that everything was taken care of.”
“That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that HRC didn’t, which will make clear to them that she didn’t have them in the first place, deleted them, or didn’t turn them over.”
The State Department was:
(1) Coordinating with the Clinton political campaign.
(2) Colluding with the press to spin it positively.
(3) Doing so BEFORE they released it to AN EQUAL BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT. The Clinton campaign was always a step ahead of the committee investigating them. Shameful.
Nick states “Just spoke to State” He goes on to reveal that State colluded with him about which emails are being revealed to committee and that the State plans to plant a story with AP.
Shows intent to withhold emails from the subpoena.
9. Bribery: King of Morocco gave Clinton Foundation $12 million for a meeting with Hillary, 6 months later Morocco gets weapons
“condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation. If hrc was not part if it, meeting was a non-starter. CGI also wasn’t pushing for a meeting in Morocco and it wasn’t their first choice. This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting.”
“She created this mess and she knows it… HRC said she’s still considering.”
This is AFTER her candidacy announcement!
Very important e-mail in that it demonstrates Hillary’s poor judgement (her idea) in the face of influence money and foreshadows how a Clinton Administration would be indebted to bad actors and criminal regimes.
The “same issues we discussed” mentioned by Robbie Mook in this email is a veiled reference to Morocco’s many human rights abuses.
Her campaign staff is rightly concerned about the optics of the Clinton Foundation/Clinton Global Initiative accepting huge sums of money from a regime that so frequently violates international law and acts in a way that you’d expect the Clinton Foundation to publicly rebuke.
It seems $12 million is just too much money to allow morals, ethics, and the best interests and values of American citizens to intervene.
The Intercept explores how Morocco is exploiting Hillary’s weakness for huge donations, and her desire to be President, to support their own geopolitical interests.
“Dear John, I am sorry but I will not be able to make it since I am in Australia for two big projects and will be back on July 6. I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to dinner on July 9 at my place together with Tony, whom I already invited.”
The email is from Marina Abramovic and John Podesta’s brother Tony, asking John to come “to the Spirit Cooking dinner”. It is safe to assume that John knows who Marina Abramovic is, as his brother refers to only her first name. John also invited Marina Abramovic to Hillary’s campaign launch.
Here’s where it gets graphic: Marina Abramovic has a webpage that shows the graphical book she created, which goes over what “Spirit Cooking” is.
And here is a video on what Spirit Cooking actually is. Not for the faint of heart (satanic/occult). Hillary’s team (potential future leaders of our country) are into some really messed up stuff.
Note: they will try to claim it is just “art” but than the invitation for “Spirit Cooking dinner” would seem out of place. Additionally, she also had a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) where she states, “If you are doing the occult magic in the context of art or in a gallery, then it is the art. If you are doing it in different context, in spiritual circles or private house or on TV shows, it is not art.”
Abramovic’s Twitter username is AbramovicM666 as well.
There are photos of her cradling a decapitated goat head, and that is on the tame side considering her other actions.
At a Hillary concert, Jay Z (a Hillary endorser) has been photographed with the Spirit Cooker herself, who appears to be motivating him before the concert.
Here is Lady Gaga (a Hillary endorser) in an EXTREMELY graphic photo with Abramovic participating in a Spirit Cooking dinner.
Is Hillary involved with these satanic rituals? All we know is that in recently released State Department emails, Hillary asks if Marina is coming to an event. The Clinton Foundation gave $10,000 (p. 66) to Marina Abramovic. According to CNN, Hillary has been written about participating in rituals to contact dead people such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi. Bill Clinton’s book describes how he and Hillary would partake in voodoo rituals in Haiti. Hillary’s mentor is Saul Alinski, who praises Lucifer in his book Rules for Radicals. No concrete evidence, just circumstantial.
John Podesta also has incredibly deranged artwork inside his house as documented by the Washington Post. Once this Spirit Cooking story broke, it sppread like wildfire over social media, and the Washington Post (who has been proven in the leaks to be in Hillary’s pocket) deleted the art
This video sums up this incredibly bizarre and disturbing story. This picture includes even more info.
Is the Pentagon behind this massive hit on independent journalism?
ThisCantBeHappening.net didn’t make the Washington Post’s list of 200 news sites that are “purveyors of Russian propaganda” designed to “undermine Americans’ faith in democracy,” but an article by yours truly published on our site on September 29 which was picked up by Counterpunch.org and run the following day was cited as “proof” that Counterpunch is just such a perfidious agent of Russian subversion of the US — which I guess supposedly “outs” me as one of those secret Russian agents in the US alternative media.
The article in question, headlined US Propaganda Campaign to Demonize Russia in Full Gear over One-Sided Dutch/Aussie Report on Flight 17 Downing, called out the Dutch “investigation” into that horrific shoot-down of a fully-loaded Malaysian jumbo jet over war-torn eastern Ukraine in 2013, pointing out that the prosecutors and investigators involved refused to accept any radar or transmission monitoring evidence offered by Russia or by separatist rebels in the region, using instead only evidence provided by the Ukrainian intelligence service and government — this despite the fact that both Ukraine and Russia possessed quantities of the BUK missile and mobile launchers that were known to have been involved in the downing of the plane, and should thus both be potential suspects in the case. I also noted that as reported by noted former AP investigative reporter Robert Parry on his own Consortium News site (also on the Washington Post’s hit list of Russian propaganda sites), and by retired CIA Senior Analyst Ray McGovern, the Dutch investigators never asked for nor received any satellite surveillance photos or NSA transcripts of relevant telecommunications concerning the shoot-down from the US, though such evidence certainly exists.
The Washington Post article in question, written by Craig Timberg — surely either one of the most credulous and lazy journalists working in a major US news organization (and that’s really an accomplishment!), or a rank propagandist for the US government posing as a journalist at the Post — relied upon only two sources for his dramatic “exposé” purporting to prove that a massive Russian propaganda campaign had surreptitiously attempted to undermine (perhaps successfully!) the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and to throw the race to Donald Trump, at the same time undermining US foreign policy and faith in the US government while elevating the reputation of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both sources are falsely described by Timberg as being “two teams of independent researchers.” The assumption we clearly are meant to have is that these organizations have no institutional bias.
In fact, the first of these sources, the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), turns out to be a hoary relic of the Cold War founded in 1955 by Robert Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian emigré and passionate anti-Communist. It has continued its anti-Russian propaganda stance since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 2002 death of its founder and now boasts on its board of trustees jailbait like former Reagan National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, a key player in the Reagan-era Iran Contra scandal who pleaded guilty to four counts of lying to Congress but was pardoned by President Reagan, arch-neocon and Russia-phobe Robert Kagan, a key promoter of the the US invasion or Iraq in 2003, and a whole host of other right-wing anti-Russian fanatics.
At least FRPI is willing to let people know who it is and who is running the joint. In contrast, the other of Timberg’s sources, PropOrNot, an organization with a website, PropOrNot.com, founded only several months ago, remains totally secret, providing no information on its site about its origins, its funding, its leadership or its staff. And yet Timberg confidently claims its information about Russia’s alleged epic propaganda effort was the result of the painstaking analytical work of these “experts.” In fact Timberg says the organization’s executive director, whom he quotes, asked for and received anonymity along with all his staff because they wanted to “avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”
And the Post’s editors allow him to get away with this gutlessness and lack of transparency.
To get the full picture of how credulous and unprofessional — or willfully biased — Timberg’s editors at the Washington Post (often still considered one of the nation’s top “newspapers of record”), were in not vetting his article, read the Intercept’s article Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist from a New, Hidden and Very Shady Group, which devastatingly eviscerates both PropOrNot and the Post.
Suffice to say that besides allowing Timberg to use as the key source of his article and dramatic media blacklist an anonymous and clearly partisan group, PropOrNot, the Post’s editors also never required their supposedly crack “technology reporter” to even attempt to contact a single editor or journalist at any of the named alleged purveyors or “useful idiots” he was accusing of secretly spreading Russian-sourced “false news.” There’s not even a perfunctory: “Efforts to contact the editors at Counterpunch were unsuccessful” in the entire piece. Timberg and the editors of a paper that once gave us the Watergate story that brought down President Richard Nixon clearly didn’t even consider such basics of journalism important!
As we will see, there may be more than meets the eye to the hiding of PropOrNot’s secret personnel list, though. Bear with me.
I can vouchpersonally for Timberg’s lack of journalistic principle and reportorial effort.Counterpunch is listed on PropOrNot’s home page as number nine on the PropOrNot.org blacklist, under the headline: “Russian Propaganda Targets All Americans.” PropOrNot conveniently included two links to Counterpunch articles which it indicates make its case for including the site on their list. The first, under the heading “Review Article,” takes the reader to a page of Propornot.com and an article headlined: “Russia Useful Idiots Proliferate Russian Propaganda.” Below that snarky headline, the PropOrNet analyst Joel Harding gives an analysis of the article, in which he questions the author’s qualifications to be a self-described part of the American left, since he identifies himself as a socialist, which Harding then tells the reader “isn’t exactly the normal American ‘left’, but the ‘remnants of the Soviet’ left.” Comically, Harding fails to notice that actually the Counterpunch author in this case isn’t even a US resident, but describes himself as a “retired aerospace worker living in British Columbia.”
Clearly this is not a website given to sober expert analysis as characterized by the Post’s Timberg.
In any event, the reprint that follows Harding’s introduction, written by the Canadian Counterpunch contributor Robert Annis, and headlined “Western Media Propaganda Threatens Peace and Prolongs the Deadly Conflict in Eastern Ukraine,” which ran Sept. 2, reports quite factually, quoting such Western sources as Reuters and the New York Times, that a plurality of Swedes and Finns oppose their respective conservative governments’ efforts to join NATO. Annis then goes on to quite accurately write that US reporting on the civil war in eastern Ukraine fails to note that it is Ukrainian forces that are taking aggressive actions towards the separatist regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, not separatists (or Russians) invading the or threatening regions of Ukraine to the east of those two breakaway ethnic-Russian majority provinces.
Nothing in Annis’s article sources Russian information, and there is no evidence that Annis, who clearly identifies himself in his accompanying Counterpunch bio, as a Canadian socialist and as editor of the website The New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond.
Think about it a moment. If that kind of open identification of the politics of its authors is how Counterpunch operates (and it is), it’s pretty hard to see how anyone, except for the incredibly credulous or disingenuous Timberg and his pathetic sources for his scare story could perceive the magazine as being a secret vehicle for promoting subversive Russian propaganda!
And in fact, while our corporate media don’t talk about it, the US does run a vast propaganda operation, which includes the spawning and spreading of, guess what?, fake news stories! This kind of thing has gone on for years abroad, but since 2001, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, both the Pentagon and the US Information Agency have done away with an earlier ban on spreading such lies posing as news inside the US. Now we’re all fair game for US propaganda, which by the way the mainstream media routinely parrot. (Of course, we were already massively fed false stories by our mainstream media, from WMDs in Hussein’s Iraq to Assad’s chlorine gas attacks in Damascus, from only “moderate” Jihadi rebels being armed and trained in Syria to US hospital bombings like the one in Kunduz, Afghanistan being “accidents,” not deliberate targeting.)
In any event, no effort is made by either PropOrNot or Timberg to show how my article, which is based upon my own opinions and analysis, my own reporting, plus the excellent work of crack investigative journalists like Bob Parry, and experts like Ray McGovern, is either a piece of Russian propaganda, or a parroting of other articles that might be, in Timberg’s view, Russian propaganda.
I wrote an email to Timberg offering to explain to him how as a veteran, award-winning journalist and investigative reporter of 44 year’s experience with four critically reviewed books to my name and five years’ experience as a foreign correspondent for Business Week in Hong Kong and China, I select my stories to report on and to write, so that he might get the proverbial “other side” of his story out to readers. So far, Timberg hasn’t replied to that offer. I’m sure editors at some of the sites expressly named on Timberg’s PropOrNot list — none of whom he apparently bothered to try and contact while cobbling together his article — have done the same.
What it appears we really have here courtesy of Timberg and the Washington Post is a classic piece of McCarthyite red-baiting propaganda, complete with a call for the FBI and US Justice Department to investigate those on the list for possible violation of the US Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act “and other related laws.” Any site that is critical of US foreign policy, who says anything favorable about Russia, or who was critical of Hillary Clinton, is suspected of being a Russian propagandist.
Where things get really serious is that if this Harding character — the guy whose byline appears in the introduction on PropOrNot’s first page of evidence against Counterpunch magazine — is what he appears to be, PropOrNot could actually be a Pentagon funded operation, which would make Timberg’s Washington Post hit piece on alternative news sites particularly outrageous, and his and the Post editors’ keeping of the site’s members and owners names secret a scandal of enormous proportions. Harding, I have discovered through some research on Google, while perhaps not a high-wattage secret propagandist spotter, does appear to be a major figure in PropOrNot — perhaps even its mysterious executive director? He describes himself on his own website as having this interesting background: 35 years “working national security issues,” including enlisted soldier in a Special Forces detachment, followed by a career as a military intel officer, at information operations at the Department of Defense, and organizer of InfowarCon, which hosts meetings on cyberwarfare.
And while some might take some pause at the source, Russia Insider, which describes itself as a media criticism site put out by a “group of expats living in Russia,” the site reports that Joel Harding, a current or retired brigadier general in the US Army and a self-described NATO advisor, heads a “team of dedicated internet trolls,” allegedly on the Pentagon payroll, who “openly libel and harass” journalists and authors whom the ever-vigilent Harding perceives to be Kremlin agents. No wonder PropOrNot wants its members’ identities kept secret!
If any of this stuff is correct, it means that this whole effort to tar the country’s leading alternative news sites and leading independent journalists on left and right as Russian agents workinF aspart of a propaganda conspiracy is really just a gigantic “fake news” story perpetrated by the government, and worse perhaps, the military — with the willing connivance of one of the country’s leading newspapers — an idea that should turn the stomach and infuriate any real American.
And remember, this is happening not because of the election of Donald Trump — the guy the Russians supposedly manipulated gullible American voters into putting into the White House. Rather, pretty evidently, it’s happening because some leading Democratic Party hacks, and the very clearly pro-Hillary Clinton Washington Post, are trying to divert the blame for Clinton’s stunning loss to Trump not on the Democratic Party’s and Clinton’s epic failure to connect with the working class voters they both long since abandoned, but on the alternative media that helped expose not just Clinton’s and the Democratic Establishment’s corruption, but the ugly reality of US militarism and foreign policy that both Clinton and the Democratic Party so enthusiastically back.
And while I’m certainly no purveyor of or “useful idiot” transmitter of “Russian propaganda,” I do plead guilty to being part of that alternative media, which is in the best traditions of American journalism going back to Tom Paine and John Peter Zenger.
“In the Year of the Pig” (1968) by Emile De Antonio (Point of Order, Underground, Rush to Judgement) was one of the earliest Vietnam War documentaries and was often greeted with hostility during its run in theaters by pro-war audiences. It combines interviews with a wide range of journalists, politicians, activists and key military personnel (including Harry Ashmore, Daniel Berrigan, Philippe Devillers, David Halberstam, Roger Hilsman, Jean Lacouture, Kenneth P. Landon, Paul Mus, Charlton Osburn, Harrison Salisbury, Ilya Todd, John Toller, David K. Tuck, David Werfel and John White), international newsreels and archival footage to create a scathing portrait of America’ escalating involvement in Vietnam. Horrific images speak for themselves in the most controversial film of de Antonio’s career.
Mark Weisbrot, a co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has written an enlightening book that pulls together many of the analyses that CEPR has been producing over the past several decades. The book, Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong about the Global Economy, is important and useful because it provides an alternative framework of analysis to the one used by establishment experts, media and policy-makers. What is more, this alternative framework and description of reality is well supported by empirical evidence and is convincing. It is marginalized in the mainstream because it runs counter to the interests of the powerful, who over the past three decades, have successfully pushed for a neoliberal world order that scales back the earlier welfare state advances and pursues trickle-down economics and the well-being of the affluent.
In fact, an important feature of Weisbrot’s analysis is his recognition of the extent to which policy failures have flowed from biased analyses that serve a small elite and punish the majority, and that policy successes have often followed the loss of power by those serving elite interests. His first chapter is entitled “Troubles in Euroland: When the Cures Worsen the Disease,” whose central theme is that the long crisis and malperformance of Europe’s economies, and especially the weaker ones of Greece, Portugal, Spain and to a lesser extent, Italy, were in large measure the result of poor policy choices. The crisis, which dates back to 2008, was not due to high sovereign debt, which was only threateningly high in Greece, but rather the refusal of the policy-making “troika,” the European Central Bank (ECB), European Community and IMF, to carry out expansionary policies that would allow the poor countries to grow out of their deficit position.
The Fed met the U.S. crisis with an easy money program which, when combined with modest fiscal expansion efforts, quickly mitigated this crisis (although the fiscal actions fell short of what was needed for a full recovery). But the ECB refused to carry out a comparable expansion policy, and there was no Europe-wide fiscal program in the EU system. So the poor countries were forced to depend for recovery on an “internal devaluation” of cutbacks in mainly social budgets, given that external devaluations for individual countries were ruled out by the use of a common currency, the euro. This didn’t do the job, so the eurozone remained in a depressed state, even up to the present.
Weisbrot shows that this policy failure was deliberate, with the troika leaders–mainly the ECB–taking advantage of the weaker countries’ vulnerability to force on them structural and policy changes that served the interests of the international business elite. These changes, including cutbacks on public outlays for education, health care, social security, and poverty alleviation, mainly harmed ordinary citizens. So did the enforced pro-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies themselves, which produced a eurozone crisis of unemployment and foregone output that extended for six years and is still ongoing. Weisbrot points out that this policy and process was a notable application of Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine,” according to which elites take advantage of painful developments (here macro-distress) to force policy changes that could not be obtained through a democratic process like a national political vote of approval. Weisbrot shows that the troika leaders were quite conscious of the fact that they were pursuing “reforms” that the public wouldn’t support outside of shock conditions.
This process rested on the undemocratic structure of macro-policy-making in the European community. One of neoliberalism’s instruments is an “independent” central bank, where independent means not subject to democratic control. The ECB meets that standard well, more so than the Fed; and in its statute the ECB is only required to meet a price stability objective, so it is free to ignore unemployment and even deliberately increase it. Neoliberal practice is also encouraged by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which placed ceilings on the size of budget deficits and total public debt (3 and 60 percent respectively). These unnecessary ceilings are often breached, but provide levers to put pressure on weaker countries.
The countries victimized by the ECB’s pressure for painful internal devaluation could in theory exit from the euro and rely on expansion via currency devaluation and newly feasible monetary and fiscal expansion. But the risks in the cutoff of aid and money market access and the turmoil in any transition are severe, and although Syriza was voted into power in Greece on an anti-austerity program and pledge, it did not see fit to exit. In this connection Weisbrot discusses the case of Argentina, which, in the midst of a calamitous recession in 2001-2002 did default on its large external debt, ended its peg of the peso to the dollar, froze bank deposit accounts, and installed controls over capital movements. This caused immediate chaos and a worsened crisis, but as Weisbrot stresses, after only a single quarter of further GDP decline (5 percent), freed of its externally imposed constraints, Argentina began its recovery, taking three and a half years to regain its pre-recession level of output, but with real growth of some 100 percent over the next 11 years. Greece, which had a peak GDP loss of 25 percent, and which is still mired in a badly depressed economy, could hardly have fared worse than Argentina if it had exited years ago. Whether that option should still be taken is debatable, and Weisbrot discusses the pros and cons without coming to a definite conclusion, but that an exit might well have a positive result is suggested by the Argentinian experience.
A major theme of Failed is the negative impact of neoliberalism on the growth of low and middle-income countries and the welfare of their people. A major chapter on “The Latin American Spring” features evidence that the triumph of neoliberalism in the years from 1980 to the end of the 1990s was a dismal economic and welfare failure, Per capita GDP growth fell from 3.3. percent per year, 1960-1980 to 0.4 percent 1980-2000, rising again to 1.8 percent in the years 2000-2014. The earlier period (1960-1980) was one of widespread government intervention in the interest of rapid economic development; the middle years were dominated by the triumph of neoliberalism, with widespread imposition of structural adjustment programs under IMF and World Bank auspices, lowering trade and investment barriers, and ruthlessly cutting back development and welfare state programs. The years 2000-2014 saw a resurgence of economic growth, but not up to the pre-Reagan years.
Weisbrot shows that the new spurt in economic growth was closely associated with the victory of leftist governments in quite a few Latin American states, starting in 1998, He also presents a great deal of evidence showing that the growth spurt resulted in major improvements in a range of human welfare indicators, like reduced infant mortality, poverty reduction, more widepread schooling, enlarged pensions, and greater income equality. Thus, for example, the Brazilian poverty rate, which had remained virtually unchanged in the eight neoliberal years before the victory of the Workers Party, saw a 55 percent drop in that rate during the years 2002-2013. Similar changes in this and other welfare measures took place in Ecuador, Bolivia and other Latin states that escaped the neoliberal trap. Although these changes brought improved lives and prospects to millions, Weisbrot points out that the U.S. mainstream has played dumb, refusing to feature and reflect on the significance of this widespread improvement in human welfare and its strange efflorescence associated with the decline in U.S. and IMF-World Bank influence in Latin America.
Weisbrot stresses the importance of democratization and policy space in these growth and welfare improvements. The ECB narrowed that policy space in the eurozone, making it difficult for national leaders to expand or otherwise help improve social conditions. This reflected the weakening of democracy in the eurozone, with the ECB, EC and IMF able to make decisions that local democratic governments would not be able to make. Similarly, the loss of power over Latin governments by the U.S. and IMF following the left political triumphs from 1998, and their record of anti-people actions and other policy failures, made for policy space. So also did the rise of China as an economic power, providing a market for Latin products and loans without political conditions. Weisbrot notes that the common orthodox position that the democratic West would be more likely to help poorer countries develop democracies as compared with what authoritarian China would likely do is fallacious. China lends widely without intervening politically. The United States has a long record of support of undemocratic regimes that will serve as its political instruments and/or provide a “favorable climate of investment.” (This writer’s The Real Terror Network was a dossier of U.S. support of National Security States in Latin America and of its active involvement in many counter-revolutionary “regime changes.”)
It is arguable that an unrecognized benefit of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was their distracting U.S. officials from major efforts to halt the trend toward democratic government in Latin America, although their participation in the attempts at regime change in Venezuela and their successful support of an undemocratic coup in Honduras in 2009 shows that the longstanding anti-democratic policy thrust of the U.S. leadership is not dead. (Mrs. Clinton, of course, fully supported the Honduras coup. So we may see a more energetic pursuit of the traditional U.S. policy of hostility to democracy in Latin America with her election.)
Weisbrot stresses throughout the importance of per capita growth for improving the human condition. A problem with this premise is that the human race may be growing too fast for ecological survival. Weisbrot confronts this issue, arguing that while population growth is a definite negative productivity growth may on balance be a means of coping by increasing food output and lowering the cost of wind turbines, solar panels and other improvements. However, increases in incomes tend to increase the preference for meat, larger houses, and other resource depleters, so that productivity improvements may, on balance, place even more pressure on the environment.
Weisbrot is possibly over-optimistic on this front. But his book is rich in compelling analyses and data that show how the mainstream live in an Alice-In-Wonderland economic world and the important things we may do to escape that Wonderland.
Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. Read other articles by Edward.
This Thanksgiving, join me in celebrating but not in the traditional way you’re used to celebrating. In the video below, I suggest 2 ways of celebrating with The Standing Rock Sioux Nation, The Water Protectors and The Oceti Sakowin to show unity and solidarity.
You can express outrage and demand cessation by calling any and all of the numbers below:
White House Situation Room – 202-456-9431
I was told they’re “monitoring the situation.” I asked that the White House actually intervene on behalf of water protectors.
Morton County Sherriff Department – 701-328-8118
I left a voicemail saying I’d encourage no one to ever visit North Dakota ever again if they keep attacking unarmed citizens.
Governor Dalrymple – 701-328-8118
Voicemail full; I was unable to leave a message
North Dakota National Guard – 701-333-2000
No answer outside of business hours
Army Corps of Engineers – 202-761-8700
I left a voicemail asking that they please take any and every action to ensure (1) no further harm to water protectors and (2) DAPL stop efforts to drill, for benefit of this land and all its people.
Please call. Please protest the abuse of people and earth for profit.
The urban legend about Thanksgiving is that the Native Americans helped save the Pilgrims who had a rough start to their settlements. Once they had a bountiful harvest they invited their Native neighbors over for a nice dinner party to give thanks to them and to God. That story has been soundly refuted by actual accounts of the day, but for reasons passing in understanding, we still celebrate the holiday as we perceive it went down.
After that, however, the friendly relationship between Natives and white settlers was over, and what followed was 300 years of some of the most heartbreaking and disgraceful actions the United States has ever committed.
A Proclamation was signed by King George III of England in 1763, prohibiting any English settlers from pushing further west than the Appalachian Mountains and anyone already there would be required to move back east. Even across the ocean the King knew there were tensions between Natives and settlers. Unfortunately, the King had no real way of enforcing it and 13 years later the Colonies filed the Declaration of Independence and the war with England was on.
One of the worst and most disgusting things happened in the 1829 decision by the Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’Intosh. The court ruled that the U.S. Government could sell Native American land to non-Native people out from under the tribes. Believe it or not, they were actually trying to.
The decision began a set of rulings under the Marshall Court that outlined what is now referred to as the “Doctrine of Discovery.” It’s basically a set of western laws that “allowed” the legal framework to take land from aboriginals living on it because it was “discovered” by a European Christian monarchs. The logical conclusion that you can’t discover something if someone already lives there was basically thrown out thanks to the Marshall Court.
Who knows why they even bothered with the paperwork, it isn’t like they were going to be stopped anyway.
2. Andrew Jackson
“This emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws…” – President Andrew Jackson, State of the Union 1829
On May 26, 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act which gave the power to the President to “negotiate” the removal of all Native Americans and force them West of the Mississippi River. Jackson signed it into law and the farce of “negotiations” began.
In 1831, Georgia tried to pass a law that prevented Native Americans from being within the borders of their state. In 1833, Florida actually passed the same law. The Cherokees took Georgia to court and demanded an injunction to prevent the forced removal of the tribe from the state. In Cherokee v. Georgia The Supreme Court ruled that the tribal lands were not sovereign and were essentially a ward of the federal government.
But one year later in Worcester v. Georgia, a missionary working on Cherokee lands was arrested. He sued the State of Georgia claiming that the state had no legal authority on Native soil, that they were sovereign lands. The Supreme Court ruled that the tribes were sovereign and that Georgia had no legal authority.
You would have thought that the 1832 legal battle would have been the major way that the tribes were saved from governments violating laws and treaties left and right, but no. Jackson proposed to the Cherokees Tribe that they move to Oklahoma (then called Indian Territory). The Cherokee said no.
Natives were considered savages when they fought back against the government attempting to steal their land, kill their people and force them to move. Those that were marched to what is now Oklahoma were considered the “5 Civilized Tribes” because they didn’t fight back the way many others did. They agreed to assimilate into some white culture for fear of being killed by the government.
But the U.S. government took it a step further when they started opening up boarding schools where Native children were sent and taught how to be Christian, relinquish their heritage, forget their traditions and act more “white.”
Richard Pratt was an Army Officer when he began building the schools that would teach Native children. He said he developed the idea while in “an Indian prison.” His philosophy, he described, was simple “Kill the Indian … Save the Man.” By killing the Native American traditions and upbringing in children, they hoped to begin ridding the country of what they considered to be the “savage” behavior.
Many of these children encountered what can only be described as abuse. They were beaten and put in isolation until they’d submit to the ways of white people.
4. Broken Treaties
Over 500 treaties were made with Native American tribes over the last several hundred years and over 370 of which had to do with land. All were broken or changed.
As CJ says in the video “How do you keep fighting these smaller injustices when they’re all from the mother of injustices?”
5. Murder
USA Committed Genocide Against Native Americans
Published on May 5, 2012
MICHAEL MOORE: It’s not envy, it’s war, and it is a class war, and it’s a war that has been perpetrated by the rich on to everybody else. I mean, the class war is one they started. The mistake they’ve made, just to deal with the racial part of this, is their boot has been on the necks of people of color since we began. This is a nation founded on genocide and built, built on the backs of slaves. Alright?
So, so we started with a racial problem. We went, we tried to actually eliminate one entire race, and then we used another race to build this country actually quite quickly as a new country into a world power. This country never would have had the wealth that it had had it not had slavery for a couple of hundred years. If it had had, if it had had to pay people, if it actually had to pay people to build America, you know, we might just be at that point in Utah where we’re joining the two rails together maybe at this point right now.
From the moment that Columbus “discovered” a place that already existed, Native Americans began to die. Whether from “Old World” diseases like small pox and measles, battles with government soldiers or outright murder, the population declined by 96 percent.
American historian David Stannard argued in his book American Holocaust that the annihilation of the Native Americans from 76 million on both American continents to just a quarter-million “in a string of genocide campaigns,” that killed “countless tens of millions” was by far the largest genocide in world history.
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt:
“You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”
The intentional use of “germ warfare” to “extirpate this execrable race” is nothing more than brutal, hateful and horrific mass murder. Our country should be ashamed.
Even hundreds of years later, tribes are still fighting many of these same battles. Just last month, the federal government raided a Native American university that was growing a legal hemp crop as part of a pilot project under the Farm Bill.
What we owe the Native Americans is a more complicated question, but for sure it begins with a greater respect and extends well beyond the limited reparations we’ve given them over the years. Perhaps it begins with the reclaiming of holidays like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving which have done nothing but perpetuate stereotypes and gloss over the history of violence and broken promises.
American Indian Activist Russell Means Powerful Speech, 1989
Published on Oct 22, 2013
Legendary Russell Means harshly criticizes the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian leadership of reservations. One of a kind, RIP November 10, 1939 — October 22, 2012
Russell was an Oglala Sioux activist for the rights of American Indian people. He became a prominent member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) after joining the organization in 1968, and helped organize notable events that attracted national and international media coverage.
Russell Means has lived a life like few others in this century — revered for his selfless accomplishments and remarkable bravery. He was born into a society and guided by a way of life that gently denies the self in order to promote the survival and betterment of family and community. His culture is driven by tradition, which at once links the past to the present.
Russell Means was once called the “biggest, baddest, meanest, angriest, most famous American Indian activist of the late 20th century.”
He led a 71-day armed standoff in 1973 against federal agents at Wounded Knee, a tiny hamlet in the heart of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.
It is considered to be one of his most famous act of defiance, however, occurred at Wounded Knee on February 27, 1973. Responding to the numerous murders perpetrated by puppet tribal governments and the extreme conditions of oppression, the takeover at Wounded Knee revisited the sight of the American Indian massacre at the hands of U.S. soldiers in 1890.
Ever vigilant for his cause, Russell has been lauded by the international community for his tireless efforts.
Later, he used film as a vehicle for his advocacy, thus enabling him to use different means to communicate his vital truths. Through the power of media, his vision was to create peaceful and positive images celebrating the magic and mystery of his American Indian heritage.
In contemplating the fundamental issues about the world in which we live, he was committed to educating all people about our most crucial battle-the preservation on the earth.
Means joined “The Longest Walk” in 1978 to protest a new tide of anti-Indian legislation including the forced sterilization of Indian women. Following the walk, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution saying that national policy was to protect the rights of Indians, “to believe, express and exercise their traditional religions, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.”
Russell Means has been called the most famous American Indian since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse by the Los Angeles Times and recognized as a natural leader with a fearless dedication and indestructible sense of pride.
He took pride in having instituted programs for the betterment of his people: notable, the Porcupine Health Clinic (the only non government funded clinic in Indian Country) and KILI radio, the first Indian owned radio station.
Today, one of his principle goals has been the establishment of a “Total Immersion School”, which is based on a concept created by the Maori people of New Zealand, where children are immersed in the language, culture, science, music and storytelling of their own people.
Russell wanted to adapt this total immersion concept to the Indian way of life and philosophy which is taught from a perspective that will nurture a new generation of proud children educated in the context of their own heritage.
Russell Means has devoted his life to eliminating racism of any kind, and in so doing he leaves a historical imprint as the most revolutionary Indian leader of the late twentieth century.
Russell’s commitment to uplift the plight of his people escalated when he served as director of Cleveland’s American Indian Center.
It was there he met Dennis Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, and embarked upon a relationship that would rocket them both into national prominence.
“If I want my people to be free, Americans have to be free.” –Russell Means
‘America is a stolen country’
Published on Jan 2, 2015
Alcoholism, unemployment and suicide are problems associated with Native American reservations in the US. But a new generation of young activists are dedicating themselves to a brighter future. Benjamin Zand from the BBC’s Pop-Up team is on a reservation in South Dakota — in the heart of America’s midwest.
Right now, here today, our Native American brothers & sisters are being persecuted for being who they are.
the police started a prairie fire & have been spraying water on the protectors(its winter), tear gas, rubber bullets.
The treatment of the Native American Tribes who are standing united to protect THEIR Tribal lands, THEIR drinking water supply AND THEIR sacred burial grounds, are unacceptable, disgusting, disappointing and inhumane.
It’s time we stand united with The Native American Tribal Nations. It’s time we stop celebrating Thanksgiving, a racists holiday that actually celebrates the massacre and genocide of 100 MILLION indigenous people.
People Of Color all over The United States Of America should unite and stop celebrating a holiday that glorifies the massacre of human life.
Water Protectors. Black Friday. Charity. Kindness. Focus. Action.
Published on Nov 21, 2016
Welcome to My Monday morning rants, raves & concerns. This voice video contains My thoughts on a plethora of issues, all current events and subjects we SHOULD ALL be pondering.
After the Crash 