Category Archives: Oligarchy

Biden’s transition team is filled with war profiteers, Beltway chickenhawks, and corporate consultants

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A glance at the Biden-Harris agency review teams should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be “pushed to the left.”

By Kevin Gosztola

Source: The Gray Zone

An eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration. A substantial percentage of them worked in the United States government when Barack Obama was president.

The appointments should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be pressured to move in a progressive direction, especially on foreign policy.

If the agency teams are any indication, Biden will be firmly insulated from any pressure to depart from the neoliberal status quo, which the former vice president has pledged to restore. Instead, he is likely to be pushed in an opposite direction, towards an interventionist foreign policy dictated by elite Beltway interests and consumed by Cold War fever.

Regime change addicts and revolving doors

A prime example of the interventionist-minded establishment-oriented figures filling the Biden-Harris Defense Department agency team is Lisa Sawyer. She served as director for NATO and European strategic affairs for the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, and worked for Wall Street’s JPMorgan Chase as a foreign policy adviser. Sawyer was part of the Center for a New American Security’s “Task Force on the Future of US Coercive Economic Statecraft,” which essentially means she participated in meetings that focused on methods of economic warfare that could be used to destabilize countries that refused to bow to American empire.

Sawyer believes the US government is not doing enough to deter Russian “aggression,” US troop levels in Europe should return to the levels they were at in 2012, and offensive weapons shipments to Ukraine should continue and increase in violation of the Minsk Agreements.

“Instead of saying we will lift sanctions when Russia decides to comply with the next agreement, say that we will raise them until they do. Instead of kowtowing to Russia’s supposed spears of influence, provide Ukraine the lethal assistance it so desperately needs and increase US support to vulnerable nations in the gray zone,” Sawyer declared when testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2017.

US assistant secretary of state for African affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield was appointed leader of the Biden-Harris State Department team. She is a stalwart ally of former US national security adviser Susan Rice, who pushed for war in Libya, supported the invasion of Iraq, and was involved in the decision to remove peacekeepers from the United Nations which enabled Rwanda genocide.

As a developer and manager for US policy toward sub-Saharan Africa, she cheered President George W. Bush’s Millennium Challenge Account, a neocolonialist policy designed to privilege US corporations and facilitate the economic exploitation of so-called emerging African economies.

Thomas-Greenfield has been a part of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global consulting firm chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that lobbies for the defense industry.

Albright Stonebridge’s client list has included the management firm of vulture capitalist GOP mega-donor Paul Singer. When the Beltway insiders teamed up to suck Argentina’s economy dry during the country’s last debt crisis, then-President Cristina Kirchner accused Albright of threatening to fund her opponents unless she ceded to her demands.

The State Department group also includes Dana Stroul, a fellow at the neoconservative Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which was originally founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

As The Grayzone’s Ben Norton reported, Stroul was enlisted by Senate Democrats in 2019 to join the “Syria Study Group” to help map out the next phase of the US dirty war in Syria. The recommendations included maintaining a military occupation of one-third of the country, the “resource rich part of Syria” in order to give the US leverage to “influence a political outcome.”

Stroul urged further economic sanctions against Damascus and the obstruction of reconstruction aid, which has already led to shortages of oil and bread.

Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada noted that Farooq Mitha, a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration, has been appointed to Biden’s Pentagon transition team. Mitha was a board member of Emgage, a Muslim American PAC which has fostered ties to the Israel lobby, provoking angry condemnation from Palestine solidarity advocates. Mitha has reportedly attended AIPAC conferences.

Multiple Biden-Harris appointees back regime change in Venezuela. Paula Garcia Tufro was a member of Obama’s National Security Council and is on the NSC team. She was at the NSC when Obama declared Venezuela a “national security threat” and has consorted with a D.C. group that represents failed coup plotter Juan Guaido.

Kelly Magsamen, the vice president of national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress and a former Pentagon and State Department official, is on the Biden-Harris NSC team. When Representative Ilhan Omar grilled Elliott Abrams, the special envoy to Venezuela, Magsamen rushed to the defense of her former boss, calling Abrams a “fierce advocate for human rights.” (Abrams supported death squads in Central America in the 1980s.)

Former US ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson is a member of the State Department transition team. Marketing herself as an expert on “Latin American business politics,” Jacobson has also worked for the Albright Stonebridge Group consulting firm.

Jacobson helped devise the Obama administration’s designation of Venezuela as a national security threat, setting the stage for the economic blockade imposed under Trump.

“In a rude and petulant manner, Mrs. Jacobson tells us what to do,” Venezuela’s then-Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez complained at the time. “I know her very well because I have seen her personally, her way of walking, chewing. You need manners to deal with people and with countries.”

Derek Chollet and Ellison Laskowski, both senior staffers at the German Marshall Fund (GMF), are also on the Biden-Harris State Department group. GMF has pushed for a more belligerent US and European posture toward Russia while supporting a dubious information war project called Hamilton 68. This website claimed to be able to identify “Russian influence operations” while fueling social media censorship of accounts that promoted anti-imperialist narratives, misidentifying real people as “Russian bots,” and orchestrating smears against Black Lives Matter protests by branding them as instruments of covert Russian influence.

The Biden-Harris intelligence team features Greg Vogle, the former CIA head of station in Afghanistan and a former partner at the McChrystal Group consulting firm founded by former commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Stanley McChrystal. Both JSOC and the CIA, as well as the paramilitary forces they trained, have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

Vogle also found time to work for a US military contractor named DGC International that provides construction, fueling, oxygen, liquid nitrogen, and other logistical support to US military forces, cashing in on wars across the Middle East.

As Sarah Lazare reported for In These Times, “Of the 23 peo­ple who com­prise the Depart­ment of Defense agency review team, eight of them — or just over a third — list their ​“most recent employ­ment” as orga­ni­za­tions, think tanks or com­pa­nies that either direct­ly receive mon­ey from the weapons indus­try, or are part of this indus­try.” Those companies include Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin.

Vogle is joined on the intelligence team by Matt Olsen, the former National Counterterrorism Center director for Obama and briefly, the general counsel for the National Security Agency (NSA).

From 2006-2009, Olsen served as deputy attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division. There, he broke down barriers that prevented prosecutors from being able to use information collected through clandestine operations and warrantless surveillance in criminal cases. He also helped craft the FISA Amendments Act, which granted telecommunications companies immunity for their role in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program established after the 9/11 attacks.

Olsen is a defender of backdoor searches of Americans’ internet communications, having argued that the Fourth Amendment right to privacy is too cumbersome for the FBI to follow. He spent the months after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed mass surveillance programs working to discredit Snowden by accusing the whistleblower of aiding terrorists.

Another Snowden opponent on the Biden-Harris intelligence team is Bob Litt, who was the Office of Director of National Intelligence’s top lawyer. When any media organization ran a story on some new aspect of the US surveillance apparatus, Litt was the national security state’s spokesperson deployed to downplay or dismiss the revelation.

When Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was skewered for lying to Congress about the collection of Americans’ phone metadata, for example, Litt rose to Clapper’s defense, absurdly arguing the director was “surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications.”

In fact, the Biden-Harris agency review teams are packed with figures likely to enshrine lawlessness and disdain for civil liberties if they enter the administration.

Agents of injustice

They include Department of Justice review team member Marty Lederman. A Georgetown Law professor, Lederman was the deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010. He helped draft the “drone memo” that outlined the supposed “legal basis” for executing Anwar al-Awlaki, an Al Qaeda affiliated terrorism suspect without charge or trial, despite the fact that Al-Awlaki was an American citizen.

Joining Lederman is Barbara McQuade, an ex-MSNBC contributor and former US attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan, which has jurisdiction over Dearborn, Detroit, and Flint. During her time as the government’s top prosecutor in Flint, McQuade had the power to bring charges against Michigan officials responsible for contaminating the city’s water and lying to the public about it, but she waited out her tenure without doing anything of substance to hold them accountable.

McQuade’s office was complicit in the racial profiling and intrusive surveillance of Arab, Muslim, and Sikh communities in Dearborn. She pursued the political prosecution of Rasmea Odeh, a prominent Palestinian American civil rights activist in Chicago, resulting in Odeh’s deportation to Jordan.

Odeh was tortured by Israeli forces, the State Department knew she was accused of violence by the Israeli government, yet she was allowed to immigrate to the US in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Odeh was convicted of immigration fraud and deported to Jordan as part of an effort to salvage a larger FBI counterintelligence operation against antiwar and international solidarity activists.

Neil MacBride, the former US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, is on the Biden-Harris Justice Department team too. Although his office did not indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, MacBride oversaw the grand jury that was empaneled to aid the US government in its efforts to destroy the media organization.

MacBride presided over the prosecution of CIA whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling, enabling Obama to claim the dishonorable record of more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than all previous presidential administrations combined. MacBride also fought in federal court for the authority to force New York Times reporter James Risen to divulge his confidential sources in the Sterling case, threatening the correspondent with jail time if he refused.

At an Aspen Security Forum event in July 2013, MacBride was asked by Michael Isikoff, “Have you gone overboard, Neil?” MacBride replied, “No, I don’t believe we have.”

The Biden-Harris team leader for the Labor Department team is Chris Lu, a cheerleader for the Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate free trade deal as Obama’s Deputy Secretary of Labor.

Half dozen or so of the appointees have links to Big Tech companies. Perhaps the most significant figure is Seth Harris, a lobbyist and former Obama Labor Department official who wrote a policy paper for the neoliberal Hamilton Project.

This paper provided the framework for the passage of Proposition 22 in California. Uber, Doordash, and Lyft spent around $200 million to campaign for the passage of this bill, which exempted them and other corporations from paying their employees benefits and blocked Uber and Lyft drivers from organizing a union.

Max Moran of The American Prospect contended Proposition 22 was Harris’ audition for Labor Secretary in a Biden administration. Given its smashing success in duping supposedly progressive Californians of all demographics into supporting corporate oppression of workers, Harris has earned himself the job.

And like the interventionists that dominate the foreign policy review teams, Seth Harris embodies Biden’s pledge to big money donors: “Nothing will fundamentally change.”

America’s Economy Cannot Survive Another Lockdown, And The Cult Of The Reset Knows It

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

The U.S. economy has been on the verge of collapse for at least a decade, ever since the crash of 2008 and the subsequent explosion in fiat stimulus from the Federal Reserve. While the mainstream media has always claimed that central bankers “saved” us from another Great Depression, what they actually did was set us up for a far worse scenario — a stagflationary implosion of our society.

Here is the primary problem: By injecting trillions of bailout dollars into the system, the Federal Reserve prevented the economy from going through its natural purging cycle. This cycle would have been painful for many, but survivable, and it would have removed large amounts of excess debt, parasitic corporations that produce little or nothing of use, as well as numerous toxic assets with no legitimate value. For a real free market to function, weak or corrupt elements must be allowed to fail and die. Instead, central banks around the world and most prominently the Fed kept all of those destructive elements on life support.

This has created what amounts to a “zombie economy:” a system that needs constant outside support (stimulus) in order to continue moving forward. In the process of keeping zombie corporations and other parts of the body alive, healthy parts of the economy, like the small business sector, get devoured.

The zombie economy is, however, highly fragile. All it takes is one or two major shocks to bring it down, and the moment this happens the whole facade will disintegrate, leaving the public in panic and disarray. This is what is happening right now in 2020, and it will get much worse in 2021.

Bailouts encourage and reward unhealthy financial behavior, and this is why national debt, corporate debt and consumer debt have recently hit historic highs. When every pillar of the economy is encumbered with the weight of debt, any instability has the possibility of bringing all those pillars down at once. The Federal Reserve turned the U.S. into an economic time bomb, and the Fed is itself more like a suicide bomber than some kind of fiscal savior.

The “Great Reset”

I first heard the term “global reset” or “great reset” back in 2014/2015. I wrote an article about how the reset was actually a long term process in my article The Global Economic Reset Has Begun. Christine Lagarde was the head of the IMF back then, and she mentioned it briefly in multiple interviews.

I made a mental note of it because it seemed planted into the discussion very awkwardly, as if it was scripted. I rarely heard it mentioned for years after that. In 2020, as we descend into social and economic chaos, I’m seeing the phrase used everywhere in the media and by globalists.

Over the past decade, globalist institutions have come up with numerous phrases that seem to refer to a worldwide planned and dramatic shift in human society sometime in the near future. The “great reset” is just another phrase for “the new world order.” It is important to understand that the reset these people are talking about has actually been engineered and staged for many years. This is not something that just popped up in 2020 — they have been talking about it since at least 2014. And before that, they talked about the new world order, and “multilateralism,” and the “multi-polar world order,” and Agenda 2030, etc.

The reset is the catalyst phase of an agenda that has been in the works for a long time now. The goal, as they have openly admitted many times, is to centralize the entire globe into one monetary structure, one highly interdependent and socialized economy, and eventually one faceless and unaccountable governing body.

One of the biggest obstacles to the finalization of the reset and the formation of the new world order has been liberty-minded populations across the planet — most of all, the liberty-minded people within America. The U.S. has to be destabilized or eliminated; the old world order has to be brought down before the new world order can be introduced. The people have to be beaten down and desperate, so that when the globalists offer their “reset” as the solution, the people will gladly accept it without question — simply because they want the economic pain and uncertainty to stop.

A common statement made by globalists from Klaus Shwab at the World Economic Forum to the current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, is that the coronavirus pandemic is the “perfect opportunity” to trigger the “great reset.” As globalist Rahm Emanuel is famous for admitting, in crisis there is opportunity to do things you were not able to do before.

In other words, when people panic in the face of crisis, they become easy to manipulate. And, if a crisis doesn’t happen naturally, then why not create a crisis from thin air and use that to cause panic?

Enter the economic lockdowns…

The lockdowns have not only been proven to do nothing to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but they are also a clear attack on what’s left of our economic system. The small business sector in particular is being gutted as more than 60% of those that shut down during the first lockdown were unable to reopen. Small businesses provide more than half of all employment in the U.S.. When they collapse, the U.S. economy will have nothing left except the big-box corporations that the Fed put on life support over a decade ago.

Real unemployment, which is already at 26%, will skyrocket even further if a second national lockdown is initiated. The speedy collapse of the U.S. economy will be assured, and the “great reset” can commence. At least, that is what the globalists want to happen…

With the U.S. presidential election currently being contested, it is hard to say how the next few months will play out in detail. As I have been pointing out since July, a contested election is the best possible scenario for the globalists because it creates a Catch-22 situation:

  1. If Trump stays in office, the political left will accuse him of usurping the presidency and there will be mass riots in the streets. Conservatives will be tempted with the idea of bringing in martial law to suppress rioters, and such measures will undermine the flow of the U.S. economy, causing its fragile structure to implode.
  2. If Biden enters the White House, then he will attempt a Level 4 lockdown similar to the lockdowns we have seen in Australia, France, Germany and the UK; perhaps even worse. Our economy will crumble, conservatives will revolt, and Biden will attempt martial law measures.

Either way, the globalists get their crisis, and therein their opportunity.

Surviving the lockdowns and deterring the globalists

But here is where things get less certain for the elites. If liberty-minded Americans organize immediately for security and mutual aid, we can defuse the Catch-22. If we provide for our own security within our own communities, there will be no rationale for Trump to institute martial law. Community security is an awesome deterrent against leftist rioting and looting, and basic economic trade can continue.

By extension, if we organize our own community security as well as localize our economies with barter and trade, we also act as a deterrent to Biden and any ideas he might have of enforcing national lockdowns. The point is, we can’t allow the globalists to dictate the terms of the crisis. We must act to change the rules of the game.

The reset is not a natural inevitability, it is a con, a trap. No matter how bad the crisis in our nation becomes, it is the people — namely the liberty-minded people — who will determine the future, not the globalists. Their plan relies on our panic. Instead of panic, let’s show them a unified front and a plan of our own.

What’s the future of U.S. democracy? More inequality, polarization and violence

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It might have been irrelevant whether Biden or Trump won this election. Yes, the problems are that bad

By Ramzy Baroud

Source: Information Clearing House

In January 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index downgraded the state of democracy in the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy.”

The demotion of a country that has constantly prided itself, not only on being democratic but also on championing democracy throughout the world, took many by surprise. Some U.S. pundits challenged the findings altogether.

However, judging by events that have transpired since, the accuracy of the EIU Index continues to demonstrate itself in the everyday reality of American politics: extreme political and cultural polarization; growing influence of armed militias and police violence; the mistreatment of undocumented immigrants, including children; the marginalization of the country’s minorities in mainstream politics, and so on.

The EIU’s Democracy Index has, finally, exposed the deteriorating state of democracy in the U.S. because it is based on 60 different indicators which, aside from traditional categories — i.e., the function of government — also include other indicators such as gender equality, civil liberties and political culture.

Judging by the number, diversity and depth of the above indicators, it is safe to assume that the outcome of the U.S. general elections this month will not have an immediate bearing on the state of American democracy. On the contrary, the outcome is likely to further fragment an already divided society and continue to turn the country’s state-run institutions — including the U.S. Supreme Court — into battlegrounds for political and ideological alliances.

While the buzzword throughout the election campaigns has been “saving American democracy,” the state of democracy in the U.S. is likely to worsen in the foreseeable future. This is because America’s ruling elites, whether Republicans or Democrats, refuse to acknowledge the actual ailments that have afflicted American political culture for many years.

Sadly, when the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Democratic presidential candidate, insisted that massive structural adjustments were necessary at every level of government, he was dismissed by the Democratic establishment as unrealistic, and altogether “unelectable.”

Sanders was, of course, right, because the crisis in American democracy was not initiated by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The latter event was a mere symptom of a larger, protracted problem.

These are some of the major issues that are unlikely to be effortlessly resolved by the outcome of the elections, and thus will continue to downgrade the state of democracy in the U.S.

The inequality gap: Income inequality, which is the source of socio-political strife, is one of the United States’ major challenges, spanning over 50 years. Inequality, now compounded with the COVID-19 pandemic, is worsening, affecting certain racial groups — African Americans, in particular — and women, more than others.

According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center in February 2020, “income inequality in the US is the highest of all the G7 nations,” a major concern for 78 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans.

Political polarization: The large gap between the wealthy few and the impoverished many is not the only schism creating a wedge in American society. Political polarization — although, interestingly, it does not always express itself based on rational class demarcation — is a major problem in the U.S.

Both Republicans and Democrats have succeeded in making their case to enlist the support of certain strata of American society, while doing very little to fulfill the many promises the ruling establishments of these two camps often make during election campaigns.

For example, Republicans use a populist political discourse to reach out to working-class white Americans, promising them economic prosperity. Yet there is no evidence that the lot of working-class white American families has improved under the Trump Administration.

The same is true with Democrats, who have, falsely, long situated themselves as the champions of racial justice and fairer treatment of undocumented immigrants.

Militarization of society: With socio-economic inequality and political polarization at their worst, trust in democracy and the role of the state to fix a deeply flawed system is waning. This lack of trust in the central government spans hundreds of years, thus, the constant emphasis on the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution regarding “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

Indeed, U.S. society is one of the most militarized in the world. According to the FBI, two-thirds of all local terrorism in the US is carried out by right-wing militias, who are now more emboldened and angrier than ever before. According to an October Southern Poverty Law Center report, there are about 180 active anti-government paramilitary groups in the U.S.

For the first time in many years, talks of another “American Civil War” have become a daily discussion point in mainstream media.

It would be entirely unrealistic to imagine that democracy in the U.S. will be restored as a result of any given election. Without a fundamental shift in U.S. politics that confronts the underlying problems behind the socio-economic inequality and political polarization, the future carries yet more fragmentation and, quite possibly, worsening violence.

The coming weeks and months are critical in determining the future direction of American society. Alas, the current indicators are hardly promising.

First Comes A Rolling Civil War

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Biden is on a double precipice of the worst-ever economic depression coupled with imminent explosions of social rage

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

The massive psyops is ongoing. Everyone familiar with the

Transition Integrity Project (TIP) knew how this would imperatively play out. I chose to frame it as a think tank gaming exercise in my Banana Follies column. This is a live exercise. Yet no one knows exactly how it will end.

US intel is very much aware of well-documented instances of election fraud. Among them: NSA software that infiltrates any network, as previously detailed by Edward Snowden, and capable of altering vote counts; the Hammer supercomputer and its Scorecard app that hacks computers at the transfer points of state election computer systems and outside third party election data vaults; the Dominion software system, known to have serious security issues since 2000, but still used in 30 states, including every swing state; those by now famous vertical jumps to Biden in both Michigan and Wisconsin at 4am on November 4 (AFP unconvincingly tried to debunk Wisconsin and didn’t even try with Michigan); multiple instances of Dead Men Do Vote.

The key actor is the Deep State, which decides what happens next. They have weighed the pros and cons of placing as candidate a senile, stage 2 dementia, neocon warmonger and possible extorsionist (along with son) as “leader of the free world”, campaigning from a basement, incapable of filling a parking lot in his rallies, and seconded by someone with so little support in the Dem primaries that she was the first to drop out.

The optics, especially seen from vast swathes of the imperial-interfered Global South, may be somewhat terrible. Dodgy elections are a prerogative of Bolivia and Belarus. Yet only the Empire is able to legitimize a dodgy election – especially in its own backyard.

Welcome to the New Resistance

The GOP is in a very comfortable position. They hold the Senate and may end up picking up as may as 12 seats in the House. They also know that any attempt by Biden-Harris to legislate via Executive Orders will have…consequences.

The Fox News/ New York Post angle is particularly enticing. Why are they suddenly supporting Biden? Way beyond internal family squabbles worthy of the Successionsaga, Rupert Murdoch made it very clear, via the laptop from hell caper, that he has all sorts of kompromat on the Biden family. So they will do whatever he wants. Murdoch does not need Trump anymore.

Nor, in theory, does the GOP. Former CIA insiders assure of serious backroom shenanigans going on between GOP honchos and the Biden-Harris gang. Trade-offs bypassing Trump – which most of the GOP hates with a vengeance. The most important man in Washington will be in fact GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Still, to clear any lingering doubts, a vote recount would be absolutely necessary in all 6 contested states – WI, MI, PA, GA, NV and AZ. Through hand counting. One by one. The DoJ would need to act on it, immediately. Not gonna happen. Recounts cost a ton of money. There’s no evidence Team Trump – on top of it short of funds and manpower – will be able to convince Daddy Bush asset William Barr to go for it.

While relentlessly demonizing Trump for spreading “a torrent of misinformation” and “trying to undermine the legitimacy of the US election”, mainstream media and Big Tech have declared a winner – a classic case of pre-programming the sheep multitudes.

Yet what really matters is the letter of the law. State legislatures decide whose electors go to the Electoral College to appoint the President.

Here it is – Article II, Section 1, Clause 2: Each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature Thereof May Direct.”

So this has nothing to do with governors, not to mention the media. It’s up to GOP state legislatures to act accordingly. The drama may roll out for weeks. The first step of the Electoral College procedure takes place on December 14. The final determination will only happen in early January.

Meanwhile, talk of a New Resistance is spreading like wildfire.

Trumpism, with 71 million + votes, is firmly established as a mass movement. No one in the GOP commands this kind of popular appeal. By sidelining Trumpism, the GOP may be committing seppuku.

So what will Deplorables do?

The always indispensable Alastair Crooke hits the nail on the head in a powerful essay: Trump is the President of Red America. And depending on how the scripted (s)election tragicomedy develops next, the Deplorables are bound to become The Ungovernables.

Crooke references a crucial parallel evoked by historian Mike Vlahos, who shows how the current American saga mirrors Ancient Rome in the last century of the Republic, pitting the Roman elite against the Populares – which today are represented by Red (Trumpist) America:

“This was a new world, in which the great landowners, with their latifundia [the slave-land source of wealth], who had been the ‘Big Men’ leading the various factions in the civil wars, became the senatorial archons that dominated Roman life for the next five centuries — while the People, the Populares, were ground into a passive — not helpless — but generally dependent and non-participating element of Roman governance: This sapped away at the creative life of Rome, and eventually led to its coming apart.”

So as much as the Dem machine had wanted it, Trump is not yet Imperator Caesar Augustus, whom the Greeks called Autokrator (autocrat), but was a de facto monarch. The American Augustus, Tiberius and most of all Caligula is still further on down the road. He will definitely be a benign, humanitarian imperialist.

In the meantime, what will imperial Big Capital do?

The West, and especially the American Rome, is on the edge of a double precipice: the worst economic depression ever, coupled with imminent, myriad, uncontrollable explosions of social rage.

So the Deep State is reasoning that with Biden – or, sooner rather than later, Supreme shakti and Commander-in-Chief Maa Durga Kamala – the path gets smoother towards the Davos Great Reset. After all, to reset the chess pieces, first the chessboard must be knocked over. This will be one step beyond Dark Winter – which not accidentally was evoked by teleprompter-reading Biden himself on the final presidential debate. The script gets ominously closer to the Rockefelller Foundation’s 2010 Lock Step.

Meanwhile, Plan B is kept in ready, steady, go mode: the lineaments of a global rampage, focused on “malign” Russia’s sphere of influence to satisfy a “revived” NATO and the military-industrial complex, which selected the now media-appointed President-Elect in the first place because he’s no more than a pliant cardboard figure.

HOW THEY’LL FAKE THE SUCCESS OF THE COVID VACCINE

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By Jon Rappoport

Source: Waking Times

I’ve described how the major clinical trials of the COVID vaccine are designed to prevent nothing more than a cough, or chills and fever [1] [2].

The whole plan to gain FDA approval of the vaccine is a stark fraud.

Now let’s move on to the next con: how to make it seem the vaccine is a roaring success.

Brief background: My readers know I’ve presented a complete case to show the SARS-CoV-2 virus was never proved to exist in the first place [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]. So the whole idea of a vaccine is a non-sequitur, an absurdity. Likewise, the PCR test for “the virus” is a fraud on several levels [11]:

For example, the number of “cycles” for which the test is set is a key factor. Each cycle is a huge amplification of the tissue sample taken from the patient.

When you blow up that tissue sample above 34 cycles, you get gigantic numbers of false-positive results, even by the standards of the test. Fauci has admitted it. I’ve pointed out that FDA guidelines nevertheless recommend doing the test at up to 40 cycles. This alone explains reports of “rising COVID case numbers.”

Let’s say Pfizer and then Moderna win FDA approval to release their vaccines in the US. With the military doing the logistics of shipping, millions of doses move out, and soon, an extraordinary number of Americans are lining up to take the shot.

After a suitable period of time, the elite medical planners will change the way the PCR test is done. The number of cycles will be drastically reduced. That order will go out to labs in the US.

What does this mean? It means that far fewer positive test results will occur.

Therefore, the trend of “new COVID cases” will stop rising. It will level off, and then it will fall.

This rigging will be heralded as proof that that vaccine is producing a victory over the virus.

There is another strategy: change the definition of “a case of COVID.” Make the new definition, in terms of clinical symptoms, more restrictive. Something like this would do the trick: “The patient must exhibit a body temperature of at least 100 for 48 consecutive hours.”

That will automatically cause a significant drop in the number of cases. The drop will be attributed to the salutary effect of the vaccine.

For purposes of lockdowns and general clampdowns [12], to promote more fear and punish areas where the economy is “too open,” a reverse-technique can be applied:

Make PCR tests adjust their cycles UPWARD, thus producing huge numbers of positive results and “new cases.”

“Well, in South Dakota, we have to mandate at least 100,000 more vaccinations in each of the following ‘hot spots,’ where case numbers have suddenly escalated. And we must lock down those areas immediately…”

Needless to say, any and all serious harm and death caused by the vaccine anywhere will be attributed to “the pandemic disease.”

And there you have it. Simple, brutal, criminal, and controlled from the federal level. A strategy for making it seem the COVID vaccine is effective, and saved the day.

Here is a backgrounder I wrote on the subject of COVID vaccine fraud:

Making a vaccine look like it’s a champion isn’t difficult for public health agencies. There are a number of strategies.

Of course, these fraudulent strategies would be serious crimes. But when has that stopped the CDC or the World Health Organization?

In no particular order—-

ONE: Rework the definition of a “COVID case.” Presently, the CDC absurdly allows doctors to diagnose a person with COVID who has a cough, or chills and fever, and lives in an area where cases are being claimed. No test necessary.

So change this practice, once the vaccine is approved. Demand testing for a diagnosis. State that cough alone is not enough. Chills and fever must also be present. Require fever to be above 100.

These and other changes would automatically shrink the number of cases. The drop in numbers would be attributed to the vaccine.

This “definitional shrinking” was, in fact, deployed in the 1950s, after the introduction of the polio vaccine.

TWO: Order a change in the way the PCR diagnostic test is done. The practice of amplifying the original test sample from the patient occurs in cycles, or jumps. The greater the number of cycles, the more likely the test will result in a COVID diagnosis. Therefore, order a reduced number of cycles for all testing labs.

Outcome? Fewer COVID diagnoses. Fewer case numbers. “The vaccine is working.”

THREE: Quietly restrict the present hospital practice of arbitrarily writing “COVID” on patient case and death files.

FOUR: Cook up and publish false studies showing more and more people are developing immunity to the virus. Attribute this to the vaccine.

FIVE: Another type of false study—“the transmission of the virus from person to person is slowing, thanks to the vaccine.”

SIX: Pump up the success of issuing Immunity certificates after vaccination. “People are feeling safer now. More businesses are reopening…”

SEVEN: Using the compliant press, simply issue bald declarations that the vaccine is a success.

EIGHT: Hide the many instances of injury and death from the vaccine. When necessary, claim COVID was the cause.

NINE: Warn that the wonderful vaccine-derived immunity is not permanent, and frequent booster shots are necessary.

TEN: Rework the definition of “vaccine-acquired immunity.” Even a very weak antibody response from the shot would qualify as “protective immunity.”

ELEVEN: Huge numbers of people with ordinary flu-like illness, pneumonia, and other traditional lung infections are being called “COVID.” Change this practice. Go back to calling many of these people “flu,” “pneumonia,” etc. COVID case numbers will drop. Claim the drop is the effect of the vaccine.

TWELVE: Presently, millions of so-called COVID cases have “co-morbidities.” These are prior serious health conditions which are, in fact, the true causes of illnesses and death. Of course, this is denied. But after the vaccine is introduced… scale back the practice of counting all these ill and deceased co-morbid patients as “COVID.” Case and death numbers will drop. Claim the vaccine is the reason.

THIRTEEN: After the vaccine is introduced, slow down testing for a brief period. This will automatically reduce the rate of new cases. Attribute the decline to the vaccine.

Committing these crimes are a walk in the park for public health agencies.

And appointing official mouthpieces to carry lies to the public is as easy as training little Faucis to sit up and bark.

6 Factors Which Point to a Rigged Election

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The mainstream media are quick to call the claim “baseless”, but there’s plenty of evidence for anyone willing to see it.

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

The US Election is still a burning issue almost two weeks after the people went to the polls, and though the race has been called for Biden by every mainstream media outlet in the world, the recounts are ongoing and irregularities manifest.

Trump’s legal team, and many in the alternate media, are claiming the election was rigged. With one voice the mainstream media – and the entire political establishment – denounce these claims as “baseless”, and scream there is “no evidence”.

This is incorrect. There is plenty of evidence, both circumstantial and direct, which breaks down into six basic categories:

  1. Precedent – It has happened before.
  2. Motive – Deep State/Military dislike of Trump’s policies is widely known.
  3. Foreknowledge – Establishment voices predicted this exact situation.
  4. Opportunity – The voting system is highly susceptible to fraud.
  5. Voting Irregularities – Known software “glitches” & irregularities in the reporting of the results.
  6. Cover-up – Dishonesty in the reporting of the situation.

1. Precedent

There is plenty of evidence that US elections have been rigged before.

Nobody is talking about it much, but US elections have been rigged before. Everyone is more than familiar with the 2000 election, which was called for Al Gore before Florida flipped to Bush and swung the election. The controversy over “hanging chads” and misplaced votes was all people talked about for weeks.

One noteworthy “error” with electronic voting machines, switched over 10000 votes from Gore to an obscure third-party candidate.

After weeks of legal battles, Gore eventually conceded. Within a year the “attacks” of 9/11 had happened, and the US was at war in Afghanistan and planning six more wars within 3 years.

More recently, it was revealed the DNC had gone out of its way to hand Hillary the presidential nomination over Sanders in 2016. Then in the 2020 primaries, despite embarrassingly losses in the first few primaries, Biden’s presidential campaign had a “miraculous turnaround”, thanks largely to irregularities in postal ballots in Ohio, Wisconsin and New Jersey.

This is evidence of precedent.

2. Motive

The US Deep State has clear and publicly known motives for wanting to remove Trump from office.

It is no secret that many members of the US’s political establishment oppose Trump and Trump’s policies. This includes neo-con warmongers and chiefs of the military and intelligence agencies.

“The Resistance”, billed as some voice of the progressive alternative, boasted former members of George Bush’s cabinet as members.

The most strident opposition to Trump was on foreign policy – most specifically in the Middle East. Trump was committed to withdrawing from Syria, in direct opposition to the “Assad Must Go” crowd at the Pentagon and State Dept.

Just last week it was revealed that Department of Defense actually lied to Trump about their troop numbers in Syria, claiming to have pulled out almost everyone whilst they actually kept their covert war going.

Conversely, Biden has always been firmly in the establishment camp on Syria, and many warmongers are already predicting that Biden will want to “restore some dignity” to the Syrian people.

The US Deep State has carried out coups all around the world, many of them bloody and violent, in order to maintain Imperial ambitions and keep wars-for-profit going. They have every motive to want to remove Trump and put Biden in his place.

This is evidence of motive.

3. Foreknowledge

Establishment voices have been predicting, and planning for, this exact situation for almost a year.

In January of this year – well before anyone could have predicted the effect the “pandemic” would have on the world – legal scholars were Wargaming the outcome of a disputed Presidential election based on postal ballots in Pennsylvania.

In August a group naming themselves the Transition Integrity Project published a document predicting a “disputed” election, that the counting would take much longer than usual and that it would not be certain who was President until January.

More generally, the outcome of the election was widely “predicted”, with multiple press outlets claiming there would be a “red mirage” and a “blue shift”. Meaning it would look like Trump would win, and then suddenly Biden would win at the last minute.

This is evidence of foreknowledge.

4. Opportunity

There is plenty of evidence that the US voting system is open to potential corruption.

Voting machines, for example, are owned and distributed by private companies. Many of which have political ties. An article in the Guardian, of all places, went into great detail about this just last year, when they were suggesting that Trump may have stolen the 2016 election.

Likewise, postal ballots are known to be susceptible to fraud. William Barr, the Attorney General, summed it up in a television interview in September, and written reports in 2007 and earlier this year, have gone into great detail about historical cases of postal vote fraud and possibilities of future occurrences.

This is evidence of opportunity.

5. Voting Irregularities

There are plenty of irregularities in the results which suggest the possibility of something strange going on.

The story of the election by the numbers doesn’t really make logical sense. The turnout is said to be 72%, the highest in 120 years, and the first over 60% for over 50 years.

In the process Joe Biden, we are told, shattered Barack Obama’s popular vote record by almost 10 million votes.

Joe Biden?

This Joe Biden?

…got more votes than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?

Meanwhile Donald Trump increased his own popular vote by over 10 million, whilst increasing his vote share in almost every ethnic demographic, as well as with women and LGBT voters.

Making him the first incumbent president to increase his popular vote but still lose in over a century, and the only one since all 50 states were part of the union.

Even if you believe that narrative is possible, there’s more than enough evidence of voting irregularities to warrant at least questioning the result and investigating further.

In one Michigan county an error in the software configuration swung thousands of votes from Republican to Democrat and called a Congressional seat for the wrong party.

This error was only spotted because of the historically republican record of the county. In a more hotly disputed seat, this error could potentially never have been picked up.

Another Michigan county reported an error which switched 5,500 votes from Trump to Biden – a swing of 11,000 votes.

The software used in this county is used in 30 other states – including Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, all of which were decided by less than 1% of the vote, and any two of which could swing the election to Trump.

In fact Dominion, the company which supplied the questionable voting software, was denied a contract by the state of Texas in 2019 when judges found there were “concerns” about “whether [it] is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation”.

A subsidiary of Dominion was kicked out of the Philippines for being too easy to hack.

This video clip appears to show CNN’s coverage switching over 19,000 votes from Trump to Biden in Pennsylvania.

The graphed results of both Michigan and Wisconsin show decidedly odd jumps in Biden’s vote.

The counting itself was also deeply suspect, with several states taking almost a week to count the last few percent of the vote, whilst managing to count over 90% of the vote on the first evening. In Wisconsin the National Guard were brought in to “transcribe” damaged ballots, whilst in Pennsylvania they were allowed to count postal votes with “no clear post mark”.

As Glen Greenwald wrote, the very fact the count was so arduous and complicated raises questions about the outcome.

6. The Cover-Up

The media are engaging in lies and censorship.

To state there is “no evidence” of election rigging is a lie. There is plenty of evidence. Every news outlet, channel and website is singing from the same hymn sheet on this – even Fox News, so often Trump’s supposed favourite channel.

Even before the election, as discussed above, all the mainstream media were running articles defending mail-in ballots, and claiming that they are not historically weak to voter fraud. This is totally untrue, as anyone who cared to research the topic would tell you.

In fact many countries have incredibly rigid controls on postal voting for exactly that reason.

And then, after the election, social media companies and mainstream media outlets censor the President of the United States.

So, why are all the media telling the same lies? Why are people being denied a platform?

This is evidence of a cover-up.

*

Ask yourself:

  • If, in 2016, some voting software used in 30 states had flipped 5500 from Hillary to Trump, and later been revealed to be financial tied to the Republican party, would that have been “just a glitch”, or evidence of cheating?
  • If the Brexit referendum had swung violently to Leave after dumps of suspect postal ballots were permitted into the count by a judge who was a known Brexit supporter, would the media have kept quiet?
  • If, in Russia, the media denied a platform to the opposition to accuse Putin of voter fraud, would that be “responsible media practice”, or evidence of bias and censorship?

We don’t know exactly what happened, or how the election was result was controlled, but as of right now the specifics do not matter.

The point is there is plenty of evidence suggesting something happened, more than enough to warrant asking rational questions and expecting reasonable answers.

Every time the media ignores the evidence, or censors those seeking it, they only display further that there must be some fire behind all of this smoke.

 

Yes, Election Fraud is Real. And its a Longstanding Tradition on Both Sides of the Aisle

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As allegations of election fraud continue to swirl almost two weeks since the 2020 election, the contours of a galvanized bipartisan ruling class in America are beginning to emerge in the wake of democracy’s demise

By Raul Diego

Source: Mint Press News

American democracy is in limbo after the long-anticipated, contested election has finally come to pass. More than a week removed from November 3, Democrats and Republicans peddle their own version of events as a corporate media blitzkrieg tries to manufacture consent for Joe Biden as president-elect in true Guaidó style. Trump plays the villain, ensconced in the Oval Office while his cabinet officials pitch weak legal challenges that fail to address substantive issues of electoral fraud and serve to simply prolong the stalemate and build up the tension for the grand finale.

Despite evidence of fatal vulnerabilities underlying the electronic voting infrastructure of the United States that leave the systems at the very heart of the democratic process open to election rigging on a massive scale, much of the American public is unaware of the extent of the problem and how easily election results can be manipulated without leaving a trace.

The bumbling incompetence of the Trump administration provides cover for the machinations of the U.S. establishment, which more nuanced independent coverage has revealed in great detail. Taking the deliberate preparations made for this particular eventuality into consideration, complete with table-top exercises and the creation of new federal agencies and programs since the start of the 2016 presidential race, it is clear that the 2020 Election was targeted as an opportunity to fundamentally transform the American political juggernaut, in tandem with the ongoing worldwide economic reset.

A statement released last Thursday by the director of one of the newest agencies, in charge of overseeing cybersecurity infrastructure in the United States, claimed that there was “no evidence […] any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), directly contradicted the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), who last week told the conservative outlet Newsmax that voter fraud was definitely taking place.

Cyberbullies

Part of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency’s mission centers on assuring compliance with DHS dictates surrounding election security protocols. The standalone federal agency with oversight from the Department of Homeland Security was formed two years after an embarrassing incident involving DHS occurred during the 2016 general election, when Georgia’s then secretary of state,­ – now governor – Brian Kemp, announced that cyberattacks on its voting systems had been traced to the federal law enforcement agency.

In 2020 with CISA firmly in place, DHS’ cybersecurity division implemented a “24/7 war room” to ostensibly guard against election hacking. CISA’s Krebs, a former cybersecurity policy director at Microsoft, led the effort to “monitor a network of every state’s election system simultaneously until every vote is counted,” according to News Nation, which was allowed to bring a camera crew into the operation in Fort Meade, Maryland.

In the lead up to the 2020 election, warnings about Russian and Iranian cyberwarriors running roughshod over the electoral contest were everywhere in U.S. media. Dire warnings of an existential threat to democracy by foreign actors that never materialized were leveraged to implement new security measures in partnership with the private sector. Krebs floated the excuse for a conspicuously absent horde of Eurasian hackers, that America’s enemies chose to “sit out this election” in a recent New York Times article.

The fact is that neither Russia nor Iran have anywhere near the level of access to America’s election system as the handful of private companies who are part of an electronic voting machine cartel, which currently controls over 92% of the elections market in the United States.

You Don’t Really HAVA Choice

In a prolific time for draconian government overreach, one of the lesser-known pieces of legislation proposed by the Bush administration was the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by a Republican-controlled House and a unanimous vote by a Democrat-led Senate in December 2001. The bill was signed into law 11 months later and “greatly accelerated the full computerization of U.S. elections,” according to Jonathan Simon, an election integrity advocate and author of “Code Red, Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century,” in an interview with MintPress.

Simon describes the legislation’s carrot-and-stick approach to goad states into adopting technologies like touchscreen voting systems known as DREs, which were later replaced with barcode systems or BMDs, which were “entirely lacking in cyber-security provisions to protect the increasingly concealed process it promoted.” Among the bill’s authors is none other than the current Senate leader and Republican kingmaker, Mitch McConnell, who has defended Trump’s right to challenge the election results without committing to a particular outcome.

“If, as was claimed,” Simon continues, “HAVA would make voting easier and thus increase turnout, as we can see clearly today, that was decidedly not a GOP goal, certainly not of a tactician like McConnell.” The partisan motivations Simon ascribes to HAVA are clear enough, and, as he points out, should have been clear to Democrats as well. But, the argument that the American liberal establishment had no inkling of the ramifications fails to account for the Democrats’ own forays into the closely held universe of electronic voting systems.

A week ago, FOX Anchor Maria Bartiromo casually let slip on air that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff, Sidney Powell, had become a lobbyist for Dominion Voting Systems – one of a handful of companies that maintain a close-knit cartel of electronic voting systems, which together control 92% of the election marketplace. Nevertheless, Dominion’s market share is dwarfed by ES&S; the largest election voting machine company in the United States and whose “subcontractors that [do] the actual programming, maintenance, and distribution” are controlled by GOP political allies, according to Simon.

The wrangling these firms engage in to steal electoral markets from each other, and the inseparable political problems such dynamics can cause, was on full display in Louisiana just before the 2018 midterm elections when its Democrat governor, John Bel Edwards, canceled a $95 million dollar contract that had been awarded to Dominion after competitor ES&S filed a complaint about the contracting process. Edwards was accused by his Republican secretary of state of siding “with his political buddies over election security,” which contradicts the prevailing notions of a pure partisan split along this issue.

Fatal Vulnerabilities

Experts on both sides of the political divide concede that both voter fraud and election fraud occur with considerable frequency since the advent of electronic voting machines. In addition to Dominion and ES&S, only five other companies dominate this space: Tenex, SGO/Smartmatic, Hart InterCivic, Demtech, and Premier (formerly Diebold).

Virtually all have been accused of vote count manipulation or other irregularities associated with their systems. Hart, for instance, was accused of vote flipping (the practice of switching the votes from one candidate to their opponent) in Texas. Dominion also ran into issues in the Lone Star state when its systems failed certification over accessibility problems.

“Much of the equipment being used to record and count votes,” explains Jonathan Simon, “is either modem-equipped, which leaves it highly vulnerable to remote interference, or programmed with the use of other computers than are internet-connected, allowing the alteration of memory cards and code running in either precinct-level machines (like BMDs, DREs, or Optical Scanners) or central tabulators.”

Examples of these dangerous weaknesses were explored in a recent video published by a self-styled national security professional, L. Todd Wood, where conservative elections security expert, Russ Ramsland, breaks down his findings from a forensic analysis of a 1000+ page voter log taken out of Dallas County’s central tabulation center in the aftermath of the 2018 midterm elections.

Ramsland identified instances of votes being replaced in 96 precincts, an inordinate number of database “updates” and other serious irregularities that point to vote-count manipulation and amount to election fraud. His most explosive allegation centered around claims of real-time vote-swapping in the 2019 gubernatorial election in Kentucky, where Ramsland asserts that thousands of votes originally given for the Republican candidate were swapped live on a CNN broadcast and added to the tally of the Democratic candidate, Andy Beshear, who would end up winning the election.

Ramsland also alleged that the election data of that race was being stored in a server in Frankfurt, Germany before being cycled through the central tabulation database, which syncs automatically with the numbers shown to television viewers. This server has been pounced on by Trump supporters in recent days and repeated by Rudy Giuliani in his podcast on Friday when he also purported to have direct evidence of election fraud.

While it is practically impossible for the layman to unravel the complexities underlying the encryption and cloud technologies underlying the present-day election system in the United States, few can doubt that moving towards a digital voting system removes whatever last vestiges of control the regular American citizen had in a once participatory exercise of democracy.

Asked if democracy can even exist under such conditions, Simon refers to a prediction he made in “CODE RED,” in which he augurs “an inexorable progression to where we are now: public trust eroded, the losers making wild allegations, no one able to prove anything, [and] everyone kind of waking up to the realization that our concealed computerized vote-counting process does not yield evidence-based results.”

Spook Charade

Giuliani’s promises of whistleblowers coming forward to save the day for the MAGA crowd and call the election off aren’t likely to produce anything of consequence as this charade only serves to further pave the way for the ruling classes, who are consolidating their grip on power and wealth at mind-boggling speeds thanks to the peculiar advantages bestowed upon them by the pandemic protocols. Real evidence of election fakery is too widespread to confront as part of a national discussion, as that would threaten the position of the politicians who depend on a rigged system and the powerful interests that control them.

With the extremes of the American political spectrum lighting up in deep reds and blues, whatever emerges out of the ashes won’t resemble much that came before it, and regardless of the election results, America’s inexorable march towards techno-fascism is moving right along.

Actual voter and election fraud takes place in every national American election and is just as prevalent in state and municipal elections, as well. From vote splitting to voter suppression tactics to direct manipulation of election results, both political parties have usurped the electoral processes to lie and cheat their way into power more than once.

But with the advent of digital voting systems, even the scandals we always seem to hear about far too late will vanish from sight, as well. The most straightforward aspect of democracy – voting – is disappearing behind a curtain of ones and zeros that only technocratic lackeys will be able to pull back. Trump, who was plucked from the reality TV screen like Jeff Daniels in “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and inserted into the national contest for the highest office in the land, will do nothing to change that.

Publically available FBI documents show the sitting president has been an FBI informant since the early eighties and his rise to the highest office in the land was not the case of a brash, independent billionaire who decided to run for president to “Make America Great Again.” After all, Donald Trump’s long-standing ties with the very “deep state” many of his staunchest supporters are convinced he is dismantling, actually reveals a factional war among the ruling class behind the scenes.

With a president who is as deep state as it gets, if there’s something we can take away from the last four years and these last few days since the election, it’s that the American establishment’s over-the-top partisanship has been a ruse undertaken to hide the fact that they are united in waging a class war like never before.

Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and ‘rethinking’ First Amendment

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The head of the Joe Biden transition team for the US Agency for Global Media, Richard Stengel, has branded himself the “chief propagandist,” urged the government to use propaganda against its “own population,” and called to “rethink” the First Amendment.

By Ben Norton

Source: The GrayZone

Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.

“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

Richard “Rick” Stengel was the longest serving under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in US history.

At the State Department under President Barack Obama, Stengel boasted that he “started the only entity in government, non-classified entity, that combated Russian disinformation.” That institution was known as the Global Engagement Center, and it amounted to a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.

A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global “information war,” Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the carefully management of the public’s access to information.

Stengel outlined his worldview in a book he published this June, entitled “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”

Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.”

The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.

As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change.

Stengel’s appointment appears to be the clearest signal of a coming escalation by the Biden administration of the censorship and suppression of online media that is seen to threaten US imperatives abroad.

From Obama admin’s “chief propagandist” to Russiagate-peddling MSNBC pundit

Before being appointed as the US State Department’s “chief propagandist” in 2013, Richard Stengel was a managing editor of TIME Magazine.

In the Obama administration, Stengel not only created the Global Engagement Center propaganda vehicle; he also boasted that he “led the creation of English for All, a government-wide effort to promote the teaching of English around the world.”

After leaving the State Department in 2016, Stengel became a strategic advisor to Snap Inc., the company that runs the social media apps Snapchat and Bitmoji.

Stengel also found time for a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a think tank closely linked to NATO and the Biden camp which has received funding from the US government, Britain, the European Union, and NATO itself, along with a host of Western weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel corporations, Gulf monarchies, and Big Tech juggernauts.

Stengel worked closely with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a dubious organization that has fueled efforts to censor independent media outlets in the name of fighting “disinformation.”

But Stengel is perhaps most well known as a regular political analyst on MSNBC in the Donald Trump era. On the network, he fueled Russiagate conspiracy theories, portraying the Republican president as a useful idiot of Russia and claiming Trump had a “one-sided bromance” with Vladimir Putin.

Stengel left MSNBC this November to join Biden’s presidential transition. The campaign announced that he was tapped to lead the Biden-Harris agency review team for the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

USAGM is a state media propaganda organization that has its origins in a Cold War vehicle created by the CIA to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union and communist China. (The agency was previously called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, until it rebranded in 2018.)

USAGM states on its website that its most important mission is to “Be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”

An agency shakeup this year produced revelations that USAGM provided clandestine assistance to separatist activists during the protests that consumed Hong Kong in 2019. The program earmarked secure communications assistance for protesters and $2 million in “rapid response” payouts for anti-China activists.

Richard Stengel’s “obsessive” crusade against Russian “disinformation”

When Richard Stengel referred to himself as the State Department’s “chief propagandist,” advocated the use of propaganda against the American people, and proposed to “rethink” the First Amendment, he was participating in a May 3, 2018 panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

 

During the CFR event, titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News,” Stengel hyped up the threat of supposed “Russian disinformation,” a vague term that is increasingly used as an empty signifier for any narrative that offends the sensibilities of Washington’s foreign policy establishment.

Stengel stated that he was “obsessed with” fighting “disinformation,” and made it clear he has a particular obsession with Moscow, accusing “the Russians” of engaging in “full spectrum” disinformation.

Joining him on stage was political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill, who mourned that alternative media platforms publish “things that seem like they could be true… that’s the sphere where it’s particularly difficult to debunk them… it’s this gray region, this gray zone, where it’s not traditional disinformation, but a combination of misinformation and play on rumors, conspiracy theories, sort of gray propaganda, that’s where I think the nub or the crux of the problem lies.”

Stengel approved, adding, “By the way those terms, the gray zone, are all from Russian active measures, that they’ve been doing for a million years.”

The panelists made no effort to hide their disdain for independent and foreign media outlets. Stengel stated clearly that a “news cartel” of mainstream corporate media outlets had long dominated US society, but he bemoaned that those “cartels don’t have hegemony like they used to.”

Stengel made it clear that his mission is to counter the alternative perspectives given a voice by foreign media platforms that challenge the US-dominated media landscape.

“The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us. And the Russians in particular are smart about this,” Stengel grumbled.

He singled out Russia’s state-funded media network, RT, lamenting that “Vladimir Putin, when they launched Russia Today, said it was an antidote to the American English hegemony over the world media system. That’s how people saw it.”

Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Misinformation Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, lamented that “RT is invading every weekly finance media space.”

But Decker was cheered by the proliferation of US oligarchs committed to retaking control of the narrative. “In America and across the world,” he stated, “the donor community is very eager to address this problem, and very eager to work with communities of researchers, academics, journalists, etc. to target this problem.”

“I think that there is an appetite to solve this from the top down,” he continued, urging the many academics in the audience “to apply for grant money” in order to fight this Russian “disinformation.”

The CFR panel culminated with an African audience member rising from the crowd and confronting Stengel: “Because what is happening in America is what the United States flipped on the Global South and in the Third World, which we lived with, for many, many years, in terms of a master narrative that was and still is propaganda,” the man declared.

Rather than respond, Stengel rudely ignored the question and made his way hurriedly for the exit: “You know what, I hate last questions. Don’t you? I never, I usually just want to end something before the last question.”

The video of the revealing confrontation caused such a furor that CFR’s YouTube account disabled comments and made the video unlisted. It cannot be found in a search on Google or YouTube; it can only be found with the direct link.

The video of the full discussion is embedded below: