Category Archives: Social Control

The Economy Continues To Unravel Despite All Stimulus Measures

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

Since the pandemic lockdowns were first implemented in the US I have been more concerned with the government and central bank response than the virus itself. As I have noted in past articles, the pandemic restrictions and subsequent economic and social crisis events they help to create will cause far more deaths than Covid-19 ever will. Not only that, but the actions of the Federal Reserve continue to con the American public into believing that there is some kind of “plan” to stop the crash that THEY engineered.

The only agenda of the Fed is to increase the pain in the long term; they have no intention of actually preventing any disaster.

This is evidenced in comments by voting members of the Fed, including Neel Kashkari who recently argued for the enforcement of hard lockdowns for at least six weeks in the US, all because the US savings rate was going up. Meaning, because Americans are saving more in order to protect themselves from economic fallout, Kashkari thinks we should be punished with an economic shutdown that would force us to spend whatever we have been able to save.

Do you see how that works?

Fed members and government officials demand hard lockdowns, depleting public savings and destroying small businesses. Then, the public has to beg the Fed and the government for more and more stimulus measures so that they can survive. The people and the system become dependent on a single point of support – fiat money creation and welfare. Yet, the evidence suggests that this strategy is failing to do much of anything except stall the inevitable for a very short time.

If the goal was really to reduce the pain of the pandemic as much as possible, then the strategy should be to keep the economy as open as possible and let the virus run its course.  By initiating lockdowns, all we are doing is extending the economic damage over the span of years instead of months.  We can deal with the comparatively minimal deaths associated with the virus; we cannot handle the disaster that is about to befall the financial system.

The small business sector appears to be the most fragile element of the economy right now. The PPP loans that were supposed to shore up small businesses failed miserably, with data showing only 13% to 19% of applicants getting a loan of any kind. Over 64% of small businesses that received a loan are also worried about being approved for loan forgiveness. In other words, of the few small business owners that got a PPP loan more than half do not have the ability to pay the loan back if they end up not qualifying for exemption.

This problem does not seem to be affecting the corporate sector, however. International companies are enjoying incredible cash infusions from the Fed through overnight loans as well as Fed stimulus propping up stock markets (at least for now). Tech companies in particular are enjoying a rush of investment as the assumption in the daytrading world is that the central bank will not allow these companies to fail.

Maybe they are right, but stock markets today DO NOT reflect the health of our system in any way. Stock tickers are a placebo, a Pavlovian trigger for the public, a tool to make people believe that the situation is improving merely because share values are going up. This is not the case.

Small businesses in the US account for around 50% of all employment and job creation. They are a vital part of the economy. Yet, government and central bank measures seem to have left them out in the cold to die.

To be sure, the $600 weekly unemployment enhancement created through the CARES Act passed in March did boost consumer spending, primarily on durable goods such as computers, TVs, cellphones, etc. Spending on services declined though, which is where the majority of small businesses make their money. And, considering the fact that most durable goods are manufactured overseas, this means that the majority of stimulus dollars that went to consumers did not go into the US economy, but foreign exporters like China.

Now, the unemployment enhancement has ended and its return is in question. It will be interesting to see if the boost to purchases of goods will continue without that extra $600 weekly stimulus. Consumer spending rose in July by 1.9%, but this was already a weak print compared to the increases during the previous two months.

Unemployment numbers have declined due to soft reopenings in numerous states, and at the very least some part time jobs appear to be returning, but nowhere near the level needed to erase the millions of jobs lost since February after the initial lockdowns began. If you count U-6 measurements and unemployed people who have been removed from the rolls for being jobless for too long, the REAL unemployment rate is closer to 30% of working age Americans. This is essentially Great Depression levels of joblessness.

US GDP has continued to decline by 32% according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (despite statistical rigging by the Fed and government agencies), and while it’s possible that stimulus slowed the effects of GDP loss, there is no indication what the trillions of dollars created by the Fed have actually bought other than a few months of time and a massive bubble in the stock market.

The economy cannot survive extreme lockdown conditions for any length of time, let alone almost two more months. And, if you want to know what it means when elites in government and central banking call for a “hard lockdowns”, just look at Level 4 restrictions in places like Australia and New Zealand, where only one person can leave home at any given time, can only travel 3 miles from home and only for food and supplies, and anyone caught not wearing a mask is subject to arrest or a $10,000 fine.

This mother in Melbourne, Australia was arrested because of a Facebook post calling for protests over the lockdown restrictions.  She later had to take the post down and offered an apology, saying she did not know it was illegal to post such statements on social media:

Yeah, this kind of Orwellian response will do wonders for any economic recovery, and this is what Kashkari is calling for in the US.  It’s almost as if the Fed and certain politicians WANT a financial collapse in America…

The REAL solution is to stop the lockdown restrictions altogether. If the goal is truly to protect as many American lives as possible for the “greater good”, then the pandemic response must stop. Luckily, it seems that more and more people are beginning to see through the facade and are rejecting the restrictions. Even in Europe and Australia there have been some signs of protest and rebellion. The problem is that, at least in terms of the economy, it may be too late.

We have to consider the fact that once a large portion of the business sector (like small businesses) takes a massive hit like the one they have suffered over the past several months, many such businesses and jobs will simply not come back. There are many reasons for this, but primarily it’s a matter of debt. The average small business owner carries almost $200,000 in debt for 3-5 years before he reaches profitability or breaks even. This is assuming that there are no major economic catastrophes in that time.

With the pandemic, the riots, the restrictions, etc., businesses will have to take on much more debt with little guarantee of recovery in the next few years let alone the next few months.  Chapter 11 business bankruptcies in the US rose over 26% in the first half of 2020 alone.

Even if lockdown restrictions were completely eradicated tomorrow, a large number of businesses would go bankrupt anyway.  The “Retail Apocalypse” has been growing over the past decade, LONG before the coronavirus was on issue.  Thousands of businesses shut down last year and tens of thousands more are slated to close this year.   The virus and lockdowns simply accelerated the existing decline.

This is why large banks are cutting off loans to business owners and consumers right now; they know exactly where all this is headed.

Banks act as middlemen for the PPP loans financed by the Fed, yet those loans are not getting to most businesses. Banks have also cut credit card lending in the past few months, and general lending has crashed. All of this despite low interest rates for banks receiving stimulus injections from the Fed. Where is all of the money going? They are keeping it for themselves, buying up hard assets as well as propping up the stock market. As noted above, the elites have NO INTENTION of saving the economy, only themselves.

If the stimulus is not getting to the main-street economy then the only purpose it serves is to give the public a false sense of comfort.  The people who gain the most from the ongoing pandemic chaos are establishment elites that want severe restrictions on personal liberty.  Not to mention, the virus and lockdowns offer a convenient scapegoat for the financial crisis that was already brewing due to central bank mismanagement of stimulus, inflation and interest rates. The bottom line is, the banks do not want the crisis to end.  Why would they?  The longer the panic continues, the more they benefit.

From Blue Shirts to Brown

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By Alan Hamilton

Source: Off-Guardian

On at least 3 or 4 occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide their details – because they weren’t telling us where they were going; they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address.”
Shane Patton, Victorian Chief Police Officer 04/08/2020

On Saturday 5th of September a national day of protest occurred in cities around Australia against the unnecessary and draconian lockdowns that have been occurring across the country and which are still occurring in Victoria. Similar protests have occurred in cities around the world, most especially in Europe.

These protests are a legitimate and rational response to despotic and often unconstitutional laws that unscientifically characterize every member of society as a bio-security risk to everyone else. They are also a protest against law enforcement bureaucracies that identify responsible, civic-minded citizens as criminals if they dare to question such laws or even worse, step out of their homes in defiance of the lockdown to register their dissent.

The Australian protests occurred peacefully and without incident in most places, including Brisbane where I participated. But it was not the case in Victoria where a State of Disaster has been declared due to the ‘extraordinarily high’ number of active Covid cases there.

On the eve of the nationwide protests, mainstream news reported on the harrowing state of affairs in Victoria which was suffering from hundreds of active cases but, as it turns out, had only 20 people in intensive care suffering from covid-related illnesses. This is in a state of 6.35 million people that has 58 metropolitan hospitals and 69 rural hospitals and District Health services.

Despite the ‘extraordinarily low’ incidence of people who were actually sick from Covid 19, the Victorian Premier decided that new case numbers (>100 per day) were just too high to tolerate anyone leaving their homes for any reason other than the four exemptions provided by the government.

What he neglected to mention when insisting on preserving his lockdown was that most new cases are occurring in the under-30 age bracket: a demographic that is almost always asymptomatic to SARS CoV-2 and which has more chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident than of Covid19.

Undeterred by inconvenient truths like this, the Premier announced he had to protect the public from the potentially catastrophic medical emergency that would doubtless result from masked people walking down St Kilda Road to the Cenotaph in a socially distanced manner, so he banned all participation in the national day of protest.

Just days earlier the Assistant Police Commissioner for the North West Metro Region, Luke Cornelius, warned everyone in Victoria against participating in the Saturday protests. He referred to people who planned to protest against lockdowns as “boof heads”, calling them an “anti-vax, anti-mask, tinfoil hat-wearing brigade who were batshit crazy”.

This oddly extreme language from one of the State’s most senior police officers is not accidental. It serves a specific purpose.

In order to get ordinary well-adjusted police officers – who may have joined the force out of a desire to be of public service – to brutalize a population whose only crime is that they object to being locked in their homes for 23 hrs a day for months on end, you need to demonize dissent. If your officers on the ground can identify in any way with the people they are being told to terrorize, they might not follow orders.

This is a perennial problem for martial leaders everywhere. It’s particularly problematic when the rules being enforced are arbitrary or unjust. Hence the need to malign.

As Saturday rolled around, the police were out in force across Victoria on horseback with cuffs, batons, tasers and guns ready to intimidate, arrest and fine anyone unfortunate enough to attract their attention within the vicinity of a protest in any town in the State – even those towns where not a single case of Covid-19 has been recorded.

And here we get to the crux of the SARS-CoV-2 scam. Sure, there’s a virus out there. It’s real and it certainly kills people but we know enough about it now to know that the draconian response taken by Premier Danial Andrews is scientifically indefensible. So why is he persisting with the lockdowns?

My personal opinion is that the global program of lockdowns is a mechanism for reorganizing societies around the world along the lines of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset” agenda and all that this entails. It seems Daniel Andrews is fully on board with this agenda. But make no mistake, its coming to your state and country next.

I believe that sustained lockdowns are a “Stanley Milgram-style” experiment designed to see just how far bureaucrats in authority will exceed the moral limits of their power and how much abuse the Australian public will tolerate before they push back.

As part of this experiment, the algorithms that once monitored every nuance of our social media interactions to make frighteningly accurate predictions about us have been extended to track and predict our off-line experience as well. It should come as no surprise that both the Azure and AWS cloud eco-systems have expanded by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic.

The purpose of all this surveillance is not to better understand us as potential marketing targets (the standard explanation) but rather to better control us as victims in a system of profound inequality. Such a system is already in place across much of the world and under the guise of a health pandemic, it is rapidly being expanded to developed countries as well.

So far as I can see the whole experiment is going spectacularly well for the globalists, billionaires, and authoritarians, and very poorly for free citizens everywhere: mostly due to the effectiveness of media propaganda in driving public passivity.

A SCIENTIFIC DICTATORSHIP

Many medical practitioners are aware that Victoria’s management of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic is based on highly selective medical advice which doesn’t stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

Recently a group of doctors wrote an excellent letter to the Premier advocating an alternative response to disease management, noting that more than 41,000 people die every year in Victoria, roughly 10,000 each from cardiovascular disease and cancer, yet in 7 months of a supposed pandemic less than 600 Victorians have died of Covid-19: 90% of them over 65 years of age and most with multiple co-morbidities.

The problem with the doctor’s alternative advice is that it assumes the government is merely mistaken or misinformed in its policymaking and implementation. The idea that the exercise of political power in Victoria has become pathological never seems to occur to them – despite a wealth of evidence supporting such a notion.

When governments pass laws that are extreme or unjust or which by-pass constitutional constraints, it is rarely by accident. As doctors they ought to be the first to appreciate what a pathological exercise of power means to the cultural and institutional bonds that hold a society together:

  • As bio-security increasingly substitutes for health care, doctors will find that the personal confidences of their patients are no longer inviolate and that the Hippocratic obligations they once held so dear can be easily compromised by legal mandates to force-medicate people regardless of need or consequence.
  • When politicians rule by executive decree the police force morphs from a public service comprised of citizens in uniform to the enforcement arm of a political clique. When this happens, public trust in the police is lost and this loss of legitimacy results in a loss of respect. Eventually this loss of respect becomes mutual and the police start to despise the people they victimize and abuse the power they have. The opening quote being a perfect example.
  • Similarly with the military: when the exercise of our democratic rights is pathologized by those in power, our servicemen and women eventually find they’re being asked to apply, at home, the counter-insurgency training and urban warfare tactics they learned for battlefields abroad. This is something that has occurred since the time of Thucydides and it’s happening again.
  • Even the tools we use to make sense of the world, such as the scientific method, cease to function properly when our governments become toxic. Once everyone in a society has been force-vaccinated by government decree, it will become legally impossible to prove a link between mandated vaccines and any potential vaccine-related injury. Not because the manufacturers will have immunity from liability (they will), but because there will no longer be a non-vaccinated control group left against which randomized double-blind control studies can be conducted.

Not one of these developments is accidental. All of them are known, predictable outcomes of policy decisions being taken today. And these policy decisions rob everyone of their integrity; health workers, academics, the police and the military.

When those in power have a pathological relationship to the people they rule, you know you are on a road to perdition. We can see such a pathology evolving among our politicians most clearly in Victoria with its home invasions, curfews and lock downs but it is also evident in the overreach of governments around the country.

Western Australia’s recent dispute with mining magnate, Clive Palmer, over the State’s Covid border closure is a case in point. According to the WA Law Society the Government’s anti-Palmer legislation violates several of the fundamental legal principles that underpin the rule of law in a civilized society. Such overreach is also apparent in the ASIO Amendment Act 2020, introduced into Federal Parliament by Peter Dutton in May this year – right at the height of the Covid panic while most members were not even in Canberra.

This legislation is the latest in a succession of Bills that have been passed by our Federal government since 9/11 (85 and counting) which have vastly expanded the powers of law enforcement and security agencies in Australia while limiting public oversight. The legislation effectively criminalizes the free exercise of our basic democratic freedoms.

The Dutton amendment extends powers normally applied to terrorists, to any group or person engaged in any kind of civil disobedience or protest that could possibly result in ‘politically motivated violence’. That would include the anti-lock down protests that I participated in last week.

Among a raft of frightening provisions this bill allows police and intelligence agencies to track, apprehend and question children as young as 14 yrs of age as though they were terrorists. It suspends the rules of habeas corpus and allows the State to arbitrarily restrict a defendant’s access to legal representation.

This is the sort of legislation you’d expect to find in China or Saudi Arabia, not Australia.

The permanent changes to our society that are now in place in Australia following the SARS CoV-2 pandemic mean we qualify as proto-fascist State by any measure of political freedom. This thought is anathema to most Australians and would be vociferously denied by paid-off mainstream media pundits – but probably not constitutional lawyers – because the legislative reality is that we are now much closer to full-blooded fascism than we are to the liberal democracy that existed when I was born in 1963. And we are a very far cry from the nation our diggers returned to in 1945.

The only way we will arrest and/or reverse this trend is if we all take direct, non-violent, physical (not digital) action to exercise our civic and democratic rights at every opportunity we can. The time to speak up and stand up is now. It will be too late tomorrow.

Reporters Claim Facebook is Censoring Information on Julian Assange Case

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“90% of my traffic has just been cut off by what seems to be a general algorithm command of some kind to downplay Assange.” “I think it is as simple as that.”

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and longtime confidant of Julian Assange, has been fastidiously reporting on the Australian publisher’s extradition hearing to the United States. Yet few people have been reading it. This, according to Murray, is because of a deliberate decision by online media giants to downplay or suppress discussion of the case. On his blog, Murray wrote that he usually receives around 50 percent of his readers from Twitter and 40 percent from Facebook links, but that has dropped to 3 percent and 9 percent, respectively during the hearing. While the February hearings sent around 200,000 readers to his site daily, now that figure is only 3,000.

To be plain that is very much less than my normal daily traffic from them just in ordinary times. It is the insidious nature of this censorship that is especially sinister – people believe they have successfully shared my articles on Twitter and Facebook, while those corporations hide from them that in fact it went into nobody’s timeline,” he added.

Asked about the situation by former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, Murray explained that

Anybody who is at all radical or takes any view of anything that is outwith the official establishment view gets used to occasional shadow banning, but I have never seen anything on this scale before.”

“90% of my traffic has just been cut off by what seems to be a general algorithm command of some kind to downplay Assange,” he added. “I think it is as simple as that.”

There has been considerable public interest in the court proceedings, but very little mainstream attention given to them. To be fair, British authorities have made it inordinately difficult to cover the case, allowing only a small handful of journalists into the Old Bailey court system, where they can watch a live television link up but cannot bring in recording devices. An online stream can only be watched if one registers and signs in between exactly 9:30 and 9:40 a.m., and if they suffer even a momentary lapse in wifi connection, they are shut out of the session. The court system has also blocked human rights groups, including Amnesty International, from monitoring proceedings.

Still, considering the implications for the future of journalism, the lack of coverage might surprise some. The New York Times, the flagship outlet of American print media (and a Wikileaks partner) printed only two articles on the subject and has not mentioned Assange in over two weeks. Its broadcast journalism equivalent CNN, meanwhile, has not touched the issue at all.

Online media creators have, for many years, lived with the threat of algorithmic suppression or demonetization of content on sensitive or controversial issues. YouTube regularly cuts all advertising on videos on the Syrian Civil War, fracking, or other topics on which advertisers might not wish to promote scrutiny. Even airsoft and paintball enthusiasts have learned not to use words like “shoot” and “gun” in their titles, lest the platform demonetizes their content.

Perhaps more alarmingly, however, Silicon Valley tech giants are becoming increasingly closely intertwined with the state department, to the point where it is often difficult to tell where one ends, and another begins. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their book, “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.” For example, Facebook is now in a close partnership with the Atlantic Council, who essentially decides for them what content to promote in people’s news feeds and what content is discarded as fake news, misinformation, or low quality. The problem is that the Atlantic Council is a NATO cutout, and a government-funded organization whose board of directors is a who’s who of deep state officials, including virtually every living ex-C.I.A. director, Bush-era cabinet members like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, and military generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus. Thus, an organization like this deciding what the world sees on their screens is barely one step removed from total government control of the flow of information.

The U.S. government also frequently directly interferes with content appearing on prominent social media. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would remove all comments or posts in praise of recently-slain Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from all its platforms. This was done to comply with the Trump administration’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (which Soleimani led) as a terrorist organization. The problem is that Soleimani was Iran’s most popular political figure, with an over 80 percent approval rating, and that Instagram is used by around one-third of the entire Iranian population. Thus, Iranians speaking in their local language were barred from sharing a majority opinion with their country folk because of a decision by Donald Trump.

The Middle East is a particularly contentious area of the world. Yet when news broke that the British Army’s online psychological operations brigade had managed to become a senior Twitter executive, responsible for Middle Eastern content, media largely ignored it, raising even more questions. Algorithm changes have also hammered independent alternative media outlets — often precisely the ones most likely to cover the Assange case — drastically reducing their search engine traffic flow.

Former C.I.A. chief Leon Panetta (an honorary director of the Atlantic Council) recently admitted that Assange is being prosecuted as a warning to journalists. “All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those that were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing,” he told a German documentary crew. While the message is being heard loud and clear by journalists, the public is far less aware that anything is going on, thanks, in part, to online suppression of news about the case. Judge Vanessa Baraitser is scheduled to pronounce judgment on the media “trial of the century” on January 4, after the U.S. presidential election. Murray will doubtless be there. But will anyone read what he has to say?

The End of Reality?

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

In 1888,  the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols:

We have got rid of the real world: what world is left?  The apparent world perhaps? … But no!  Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well.

So, if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life, where real is unreal but realer than real, the apparent is cryptic, and up is down, true is false, and what you see you don’t, it has a history.  One hundred and thirty-two years ago, Nietzsche added that “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.”  We know it did, and the bloody butcher’s bench known as the twentieth century was the result. Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since, straight through to 2020.  Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods:

Here we are, announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice.  We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world.  And instead everything has gone back to being a ‘fable’ again.  How are we to get our bearings … This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced.

Obviously, we haven’t gotten our bearings.  We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life has been replaced by the digital, and “truths” like numbers click into place continuously to lead us in wrong, algorithm-controlled directions. The trap is almost closed.

Of course, Nietzsche did not have the Internet, but he lived at the dawn of the electric era, when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace.  Inventions such as photography, the phonograph, the telephone, electricity, etc. were contracting space and time and a disembodied “reality” was being born.  With today’s Internet and digital screen life, the baby is full-grown and completely disembodied.  It does nothing but look at its image that is looking back into a lifeless void, whose lost gaze can’t figure out what it’s seeing.

Take, for example, the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1878.  If you could record a person’s voice, and if that person died, were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead?  If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and was miles away, you had also compressed earthly space. The phonograph suppressed absence, conjured ghosts, and seemed to overcome time and death as it captured the flow of time in sound.  It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine, an early example of downloading.

“Two ruling ambitions in modern technology,” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book, Speaking into the Air, “appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.”

Many people started to hear voices, and these people were not called deluded. Soon, with the arrival of cinema, they would see ghosts as well.  Today, speaking ghosts are everywhere, hiding in hand-held devices. It’s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture.

This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche’s thought.  His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well, where theologians and philosophers were discovering that knowledge was relative and had to be understood in situ, i.e., within its historical and social place or context.

Without going into abstruse philosophical issues here, suffice it to say, Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him, but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction.  All knowledge, not just science, had to be taken “as if” it were true.  This was a consoling mental trick but falsely reassuring, for most people could not accept this, since “knowledge” was a protection racket from pain and insanity. It still is. In other words, not only had people murdered God, but they had slain absolutes as well. This left them in the lurch, not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true, or sort of true – maybe, perhaps. The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought.

While the average person did not delve into these revolutionary ideas, they did, through the inventions that were entering their lives, and the news about Darwin, science, religion, etc., realize, however vaguely, that something very strange and dramatic was under way. Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity.

It is similar to what so many feel today: that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement.  An inhuman, trans-human, on-line electronic life where everything is a parody of everything that preceded it, like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell’s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps repeating itself.  All this follows from the nineteenth century relativization of knowledge, or what at least was taken as such, for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement.  That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma.

This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold’s 19th century poem, “Dover Beach”:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

But that was then.  Today, the Joker’s sardonic laughter would suffice.

***

I am sitting outside as I write, sipping a glass of wine before dinner.  Although New England fall weather is approaching, a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head.  I hear it.  I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me.  This is real life.  If I went into the house and connected to the Internet on the computer screen – news, social media, anything – I would be entering another dimension.  Screen life, not real life. The society of the spectacle. No real mosquitoes, no wine, no trees swaying in the evening breeze.

In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, written between Nietzsche’s time and now, Ernest Hemingway, a man who surely lived in the physical world, writes of how Robert Cohn, the boxing champion from Princeton University, wants Jake Barnes, the book’s protagonist, to take a trip with him to South America.  As they sit and talk in Paris, Barnes says no, and tells Cohn, “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”

Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not, or simply visionary, I don’t know.  For in the 1920s, before passports and widespread tourism, there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures, while today there is almost no place that is not available to view beforehand on the internet or television.  So why go anywhere if you’ve already seen it all on a screen? Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been?  Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra put it and everyone laughed.  Now the laugh is on us.

***

This is neither an argument nor a story.  It’s real.  I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation. Call it a compass, a weather-vane, a prayer.  You can call me Al or Ishmael.  Call me crazy.  Perhaps this writing is just an “as if.”

***

About fifteen years ago, I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email.  I was, as they say, out of the loop since I didn’t do email. I was often asked why I didn’t, and I would repeatedly reply, like Melville’s Bartleby, because “I prefer not to.”  Finally, in order to keep my job, I succumbed and with the laptop computer they provided me, I went “on-line.”  There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years.  In those three years, I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn’t missed a beat.  Someone showed me how to delete the emails, which I did without reading any, but I had entered the labyrinth. I went electronic.  My reality changed. I am still searching for Ariadne’s thread.

***

But I am not yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one.  It’s a very insistent invitation, almost an order.  Neil Postman (Oh such a rich surname!) sums it up well in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:

The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines – thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless.  It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly.  It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality.  The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it ‘thinks’ better than we can…John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence’…claims that ‘even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs…What is significant about this response is that it has redefined the meaning of the word ‘belief’ … rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that ‘belief’ means only what someone or something does … rejects the idea that the mind is a biological phenomenon … In other words, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad.

Postman wrote that in 1992, before the computer and the internet became ubiquitous and longer before on-line living had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19.

There is little doubt that we are being pushed to embrace what Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), calls COVID-19:The Great Reset, that involves a total acceptance of the electronic, on-line life.  On-line learning, on-line news, on-line everything – only an idiot (from Greek, idiotes, a private person who pays not attention to public affairs) would fail to see what is being promoted.  And who controls the electronic life and internet?  Not you, not I, but the powers that be, the intelligence agencies and the power elites. Goodbye  body, goodbye blood – “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in support of human estrangement.

Peter Koenig, one of the most astute investigators of this propaganda effort, puts it this way:

The panacea of the future will be crowned by the Pearl of the Fourth Industrialization – Artificial intelligence (AI). It will be made possible by a 5G electromagnetic field, allowing the Internet of Things (IoT). Schwab and Malleret [Schwab’s co-author] won’t say, beware, there is opposition. 5G could still be blocked. The 5G existence and further development is necessary for surveillance and control of humanity, by digitizing everything, including human identity and money.

It will be so simple, no more cash, just electronic, digital money – that is way beyond the control of the owner, the truthful earner of the money, as it can be accessed by the Global Government and withheld and / or used for pressuring misbehaving citizens into obeying the norms imposed from above. You don’t behave according to our norms, no money to buy food, shelter and health services, we let you starve. No more travel. No more attending public events. You’ll be put gradually in your own solitary confinement. The dictatorial and tyrannical global commandeering by digital control of everything is the essence of the 4th Age of Industrialization – highly promoted by the WEF’s Great Reset.

***

Like everything, of course, this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history, one that deifies the machine and attempts to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom.  Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa. Brain research has received massive government funding. Drugs have been offered as the solution to every human problem. So-called diseases and disorders have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of  Mental Disorders (DSM) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs (or the revers) for scandalous profits. And the mind has been reduced to a figment of deluded  imaginations. People are machines; that’s the story, marvelous machines.  They have no freedom.

If one wishes an example of techno-fascism, there is one from the art world. Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism.  Its leader proponent was an Italian Fascist, friend of Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.  The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine, that the machine was god, that it was beyond human control and had to be obeyed.  They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones.  Patriotism, militarism, strength, method, and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state.  The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine’s dictates.

Now we have cyberspace, digital machines, and the internet, an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini, Fascism, and Hitler.  That this online world is being pushed as the new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising.  If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens, those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented. That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale.  Surveillance will be complete.

Yes, there are places on the internet where truth is and will be told, such as this site where you are reading this; but as we can see from today’s growing censorship across the web, those power elites and intelligence forces who  control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices. Such censorship starts slowly, and then when one looks again, it is a fait accompli. The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late. Free speech is now being strangled. Censorship is widespread.

The purpose of so much internet propaganda is to confuse, obsess, depress, and then repress the population. The overlords accomplish this by the “peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism – [which] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  “The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.”  One look into one’s life will suffice to see how the overlords have set people against each other.  It’s a classic tactic.  Divide and conquer. Trump vs. Biden, Democrats vs. Republicans, whites vs. blacks, liberals vs. conservatives. Pure mind games. Contradictions every day to create social disorientation.  Orwell describes Doublethink as follows:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.  The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.  The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary…If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. [author’s emphasis]

Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well.  Digital online life has accomplished that.  It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the magicians who serve them – to create counterfeit news and doctored videos at will, to present diametrically opposed points of view within the same paragraph, and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows. Nietzsche obviously didn’t foresee this technology, but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in.

***

The popular 1990s term “Information Superhighway,” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications, was the perfect term to describe this lunacy. Get on that highway and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning of all the information flashing past you as you speed to nowhere.  For not only does censorship, propaganda, disinformation, mixed messages, and contradictions line the road you are traveling, but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam, there is too much information to comprehend.  And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway, think again, for the cost is high. No one puts out their hand and asks you to pay up; but the more you travel down this road you’ll notice you are missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there.  And without a speed pass, you are considered road kill.

To make matters much worse, they say we need 5G to go much faster.

Paul Virilio, who has devoted himself to the study of speed (dromology), puts it this way in Open Sky:

The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world’s very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.

***

And yet I don’t have a simple answer to the internet dilemma. You are reading it on-line and I am posting it there.  It is very convenient and quick. And yet…and yet….

Can we just walk away from it?  Maybe.  Perhaps like those few who, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excruciating story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “progress” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency.  Others, us, our children, all children, who are reaching out not for speed and machines, but for the human touch that the on-line propagandists hope to destroy.  In Le Guin’s story, the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child.  Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world’s children and their futures.

My friend Gary recently sent me this letter.  I believe it sums up what many people feel. There is a vast hunger for reality and truth. The analog life. How to live it – the question hangs in the air as the artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines.

Although apparently it isn’t clear if Twain ever said this, it’s still a great quote:  (“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed.  If you do, you’re misinformed.”)  To which “amen” is the only appropriate response.

I continue to daily stay abreast of events through the web, and these days much of what passed for “progressive media” simply regurgitates the covid madness as if it had been delivered on stone tablets – rather than by the same MSM that lie to us daily about literally ANYTHING of any importance.

There are days I wonder “why” I continue to bother to follow the unfolding madness as if it made some “difference.”  I could certainly play guitar more, and I might even get it together to write a few pieces on the nature of our collective madness, for which I have studiously assembled copious notes.  I really don’t need any more information or examples – I think I have things covered on that front.

Instead I find myself daily doing the little dance we’re all familiar with – uncomfortable with being “uninformed” – yet at almost every turn finding myself being routinely – “misinformed” – and so having to sift through the endless debris to have any chance at developing any coherent understanding of the world.

So yes, I totally get the draw of just saying to hell with the internet.  After years of shifting through the endless propaganda operations our generation has been subject too, I have no doubt you and I see through most the nonsense for what it is before we even have the proof in hand.  Once the rose-colored glasses of ‘American exceptionalism’ are off, one can almost sense and see through the lies in real time even as they are being uttered.

Reading Gary’s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s definition of the Unspeakable:

It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.  It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…

Yes, real time, real life – as we do our little dances.

Can we do our little dances and preserve reality?  I’m not sure.

Global billionaire wealth tops $10 trillion as COVID-19 deaths mount

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By Jacob Crosse

Source: WSWS.org

The collective wealth of the world’s 2,189 billionaires has risen to $10.2 trillion, an increase of nearly $1.3 trillion in the past three years, according to a new report by the Swiss bank UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The unprecedented surge in wealth takes place amidst a global pandemic that has killed more than one million people worldwide, including more than 215,000 in the United States alone.

The report, “Riding the Storm,” is based on data from 43 markets, including interviews with 60 billionaires, accounting for around 98 percent of global billionaire wealth. It sums up the results: “Most of the decade was a time of exceptional prosperity for billionaires regardless of sector…”

The US continues to have the largest concentration of billionaire wealth, accounting for 36 percent of the world’s total, or $3.6 trillion. China ranked second with $1.6 trillion and saw the largest growth over the decade, by 1,146 percent.

Third was Germany, where billionaire wealth totaled $594.9 billion, an increase of 175 percent from 2009’s $216.1 billion. While fourth in terms of billionaire wealth at $467.6 billion, Russia saw the smallest growth by percentage, 80 percent, from $260.2 billion in 2009 to $467.6 billion in 2020.

The $10.2 trillion amassed by less than .0003 percent of the global population is more than the estimated 2020 Gross Domestic Product of every country on the planet except for the US and China. The staggering total hoarded by less than 2,200 people, or about the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US within the last 72 hours, surpasses the previous high of $8.9 trillion recorded in 2017.

For a household earning the average US median income, it would take over 16 million years to accumulate $1 trillion, not even enough to cover what has been collectively usurped from global society in less than three years. Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, has calculated the cost of ending hunger in the US at $25 billion, which could be done 400 times over with $1 trillion.

The billionaires who have increased their wealth the most, according to the authors, are in the “technology, healthcare and industrial sectors,” including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The report states: “During 2018, 2019 and the first seven months of 2020, technology billionaires’ total wealth rose by 42.5% to USD 1.8 trillion, supported by the surge in tech shares.”

The surge in technology and medical shares was buoyed by unlimited cash from the Federal Reserve, included as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed at the end of March in a near-unanimous vote by both Democrats and Republicans.

This financial bailout made a “big difference” in the fortunes of billionaires, with the authors writing: “Billionaire wealth is loosely correlated with equity markets, due to holdings in listed companies, and a few weeks makes a big difference. From the end of March, governments’ huge fiscal and quantitative easing packages drove a recovery in financial markets. By the end of July 2020, billionaire wealth was back above its 2019 level.”

Particularly obscene is the surge in wealth of billionaires in the health care industry, in the midst of a deadly global pandemic. The authors write, “Healthcare billionaires’ total wealth increased by 50.3% to $658.6 billion, boosted by a new age of drug discovery and innovations in diagnostics and medical technology, as well as latterly COVID-19 treatments and equipment.”

The report adds: “The number of tech billionaires grew from 68 in 2009 to 234 in 2020, while the number of healthcare billionaires grew from 48 to 167. Tech and healthcare billionaires’ total wealth both multiplied by four times – from $321.3 billion to $1.3 trillion for tech and from $120.8 billion to $482.9 billion for healthcare.”

And what are these “pandemic profiteers” spending their fortunes on? To get some idea, Christie’s auction house in New York held its latest online auction, “20th Century Evening Sale” live-streamed from the Rockefeller Center in New York on October 6. In one night, the world’s wealthiest spent over $340 million on 59 different 20th and 21st century art pieces. The auction also featured the most expensive dinosaur skeleton ever sold, a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex, for $27.5 million.

The massive concentration of wealth is a decades’ long and bipartisan policy of redistribution to the rich. The Institute for Policy Studies measured the tax obligations of America’s billionaires as a percentage of their wealth between 1980 and 2018 and found that it had decreased 79 percent. Over the last 20 years, the growth in US billionaire wealth has been 200 times greater than the growth in median wealth.

While the billionaires are richer than ever, the response of the ruling class to the pandemic has produced a massive social catastrophe for the working class. In the United States, tens of millions are unemployed and being cut off of all benefits, facing poverty, homelessness and hunger.

Earlier reports found that the 643 wealthiest Americans increased their wealth by a staggering $845 billion between March 18 and September 15. During that same time, over 62 million people in the US applied for unemployment benefits. An estimated 10.5 million jobs were eliminated, with major companies such as Disney, United Airlines, and Cineworld announcing tens of thousands additional layoffs in the last week.

Inflation Is Stealth Austerity

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Rather than decry austerity, which demands an open political discussion of trade-offs, we should decry inflation’s stealthy reduction of purchasing power.

Austerity–bad. Inflation–good. Oh wait–they’re the same thing: both are a reduction in purchasing power. The only difference is a reduction via austerity is upfront while inflation is a stealth reduction, obfuscated by “official” distortions and Federal Reserve mumbo-jumbo.

Consider $1,200 in wages, unemployment, stimulus, Social Security payment, etc. If this payment gets cut by 10%–$120–as a result of austerity, pay cut, reduction in hours worked, etc., recipients scream bloody murder.

But if inflation reduces the purchasing power of the $1,200 by 10%, nobody does anything but grumble that “prices keep rising while my income stays the same.” This is the classic boiled frog syndrome: inflation is like the heat being turned up so gradually that the poor frog doesn’t realize he’s about to expire.

Inflation is stealthy because the loss of purchasing power is difficult to monitor. Your $1,200 only buys what $1,080 bought in the recent past; 10% inflation reduced your income exactly the same as if austerity had subtracted the $120 upfront.

Governments and central banks love inflation because the theft goes unnoticed. The public tolerates inflation because it’s easy to passively accept this erosion in their standard of living and difficult to generate the political heat that an outright cut would spark.

Though it’s being openly engineered by the Federal Reserve, inflation appears to be a force nobody controls–unlike austerity which is so clearly a political decision. If Inflation robbed 10% of everyone’s income overnight, people might be roused from their passivity to protest.

But since the theft occurs slowly–what’s 1% a month?–and unevenly across a spectrum of goods and services, this theft doesn’t rouse the same political storm as upfront austerity.

Inflation is a form of sacrifice that few recognize as sacrifice. It seems like everyone’s income is eroded equally, but this isn’t true: the wealthy closest to the Fed’s money spigots are earning multiples of inflation from asset inflation, stock buybacks, etc. Inflation is a pinprick to the wealthy and a stilletto in the kidneys of the bottom 95%.

To the political Aristocracy, inflation is wonderful because they don’t need to ask anyone to sacrifice 10% of their income as they do with austerity; they just steal the 10% a dribble at a time and throw up their hands as if inflation is some mystery force completely beyond their control.

Ironically, austerity–an honest, upfront political decision and sacrifice–is decried, while the dishonest, stealth cut of inflation is passively accepted, even as the Federal Reserve has made a cloaked political decision to reduce the purchasing power of everyone’s income except for the New Nobility (the top 0.1%) that the Fed slavishly serves.

Rather than decry austerity, which demands an open political discussion of trade-offs, we should decry inflation’s stealthy reduction of purchasing power, a Fed policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Here is the Chapwood Index of inflation, which carefully measures “apples to apples” costs of essential goods and services in each city:

As inflation erodes purchasing power, workers’ share of the economy has declined dramatically– a double-whammy of declining purchasing power and standard of living.

 

Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange

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By Timothy Erik Strom and John Pilger

Source: CounterPunch

John Pilger has watched Julian Assange’s extradition trial from the public gallery at London’s Old Bailey. He spoke with Timothy Erik Ström of Arena, Australia:

Q:  Having watched Julian Assange’s trial firsthand, can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?

The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, WAS then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It  had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy—look closely at the photo and you’ll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a political humour similar to Vidal’s—a judge gave him an outrageous 50-week sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as ‘heath care’. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the damage: Julian’s intellect had gone from ‘in the superior, or more likely very superior range’ to ‘significantly below’ this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and ‘perform in the low average range’.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, calls ‘psychological torture’, the result of a gang-like ‘mobbing’ by governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that Assange is diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s syndrome and, according to Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the world’s leading neuropsychiatrists, he suffers from ‘suicidal preoccupations’ and is likely to find a way to take his life if he is extradited to America.

James Lewis QC, America’s British prosecutor, spent the best part of his cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its dangers as ‘malingering’. I have never heard in a modern setting such a primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.

My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judge— a Gothic-looking magistrate called Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is known—and the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen. Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed. The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to denigrate expert witnesses, while the defence’s examination is guillotined at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would be assured.

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei came to join us one morning in the public gallery. He noted that in China the judge’s decision would already have been made. This caused some dark ironic amusement. My companion in the gallery, the astute diarist and former British ambassador Craig Murray wrote:

I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.

I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.

The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.

There are few records of the proceedings. They are: Craig Murray’s personal blog, Binoy Kampmark on CounterPunch, Joe Lauria’s live reporting on Consortium News and the World Socialist Website. American journalist Kevin Gosztola’s blog, Shadowproof, funded mostly by himself, has reported more of the trial than the major US press and TV, including CNN, combined.

In Australia, Assange’s homeland, the ‘coverage’ follows a familiar formula set overseas. The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, Latika Bourke, wrote this recently:

The court heard Assange became depressed during the seven years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy where he sought political asylum to escape extradition to Sweden to answer rape and sexual assault charges.

There were no ‘rape and sexual assault charges’ in Sweden. Bourke’s lazy falsehood is not uncommon. If the Assange trial is the political trial of the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive. Journalists should ask: who is next?

How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assange’s work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian’s David Leigh, now retired as ‘investigations editor’ and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian ‘scoop’ that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assange—written behind their subject’s back—disclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardian’s ‘partnership’. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.

Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.

However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took ‘extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants’.

Q: What are the implications of this trial’s verdict for journalism more broadly—is it an omen of things to come?

The ‘Assange effect’ is already being felt across the world. If they displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It doesn’t matter where you are. For Washington, other people’s nationality and sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively surrendered its jurisdiction to Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice. In Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided by police and journalists’ computers taken away. The government has given unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Assange ‘must face the music’. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is reinforced by its banality.

‘Evil’, wrote Hannah Arendt, ‘comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil’.

Q: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of what’s at stake with Assange’s trial?

I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the ‘mainstream’ but not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies among the overpaid and undertalented, insecure in their pretensions of independence and impartiality.

I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first interviews at my home in 2010.

What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to dissent. The difference today is that the world’s imperial power, the United States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today. Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it. Little of this menace is reflected in the media.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial march through whole societies—think of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the ‘war on terror’—most of it behind a façade of deception.

Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrors—that’s why he is being persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.

The judge’s decision will be known on the 4th of January.

Why It is Likelier that the U.S. Government Had Alexei Navalny Poisoned

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Dissident Voice

The poisoning of Alexei Navalny has created intensified support by pro-U.S., and especially pro-NATO, officials in the European Union, to block the nearly completed NordStream 2 natural-gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, and to import into the EU, instead, far costlier U.S. LNG, liquefied natural gas. A very real possibility thus now exists that the poisoning of Navalny will turn out to have been worth many billions of dollars to U.S. frackers, by causing the nearly-completed NordStream 2 to be turned to waste so that fracked U.S. LNG will sell in Europe. The present article will explore the relative likelihood that the poisoning of Navalny isn’t merely coincidentally perfectly timed in order to achieve that objective for the benefit of America’s gas-industry, but that it probably was actually planned and perpetrated in order to achieve this.

The idea that the Russian Government poisoned Alexei Navalny presumes such astounding stupidity on the part of Russia’s Government as to be exceedingly dubious, at best. Navalny, though he actually is favorably viewed by only around 2% of Russians (as indicated in polls there), is widely publicized in U.S.-and-allied media as having instead the highest support by the Russian people of anyone who might challenge Vladimir Putin for Russia’s leadership. It’s a lie, and always has been. Other politicians have far higher polled support in Russia. For example, whereas in the latest poll, published on September 5th, Navalny was one of four individuals who had 2%, Zhirinovsky had 5% and Zhirinovsky was the only person who had more than 2%, other than Putin, who had 56%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. The idea that Putin would need to kill anyone in order to be leading Russia is so stupid and uninformed (and mis-informed) that it is beyond belief, though it is widely publicized in The West as being instead the reality. But what is true is that Navalny has been an immense propaganda-asset to the U.S. Government, and he now is especially so.

Even America’s CNN let slip, in a news-report on September 18th, regarding Navalny, that “his list of enemies is as long as it is powerful,” but they said nothing about whom those “enemies” might be. No one questions that Navalny claims to be an anti-corruption campaigner, and that this would generate enemies regardless of whether his accusations are truthful. The article on “Alexei Navalny” at Wikipedia, which is CIA-edited and written, and which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, indicates that Navalny has accused numerous individuals of corruption, but not that any of those individuals is corrupt — and this is at a site (Wikipedia) which can reasonably be expected to link to documentation of any damning evidence that Navalny has come up with. But the article doesn’t link to any. The article does make clear that Navalny has been hoping to use these accusations in order to rise in Russian politics. It would be a dangerous way to rise in any nation’s politics, regardless of whether those accusations are true. The idea that Putin was behind this is insane. Is Putin so stupid as to poison the U.S. regime’s most-heavily propaganda-favored Russian precisely at the time when the EU is about to grant final approval to Russia’s vast (and virtually completed) NordStream 2 pipeline?

England’s Financial Times headlined on September 16, “Germany offered €1bn for gas terminals in exchange for US lifting NS2 sanctions,” and sub-headed “Deal, detailed in a letter by Olaf Scholz to Steven Mnuchin, predates the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.” They reported that “In the August 7 letter seen by the Financial Times, Mr Scholz said Germany would increase its financial support for LNG infrastructure and import capacities ‘by up to €1bn’ in exchange for the US ‘allow[ing] for the unhindered construction and operation of Nord Stream 2’,” and reported that:

The US has long opposed Nord Stream 2 and in December imposed sanctions against companies involved in its construction. That move prompted Swiss pipe-layer Allseas to suspend its work with just 6 per cent left to install. A group of US senators from across the political divide are pushing to extend those sanctions.

Criticism of the project has grown in Europe too, with opponents saying it will increase Europe’s dependence on Russian energy exports at a time of rising tensions with Moscow. In her State of the Union address on Wednesday, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said: “To those that advocate closer ties with Russia, I say that the poisoning of Alexei Navalny with an advanced chemical agent is not a one-off. This pattern is not changing — and no pipeline will change that.

The U.S. regime’s agent, von der Leyen, is doing her utmost to serve U.S. LNG marketers. Many other U.S.-regime agents also are.

On September 17th, America’s neoconservative (or pro-U.S.-empire) Newsweek bannered “Opinion: Open Letter: For the Sake of Transatlantic Security, Stop Nord Stream 2,” with 114 signatories of NATO-related U.S. and European officials, and published their argument that, “Over the past decade, the Government of the Russian Federation has engaged in a litany of malign activities aimed at upending liberal democratic norms across Europe and North America. The shocking poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by a variant of the weapons-grade nerve agent Novichok shows that Moscow has not been deterred by Western actions and statements and refuses to reverse its destabilizing political adventurism at home and abroad.”

How blatant and scummy can a marketing campaign get?