Why Freedom Is Ending

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

First, the force that is ending freedom will be identified and described; and, then, the force that they fear and hate the most (and are trying to destroy) will be identified and described.

THE FORCE THAT IS ENDING FREEDOM

The force that is ending freedom is empire.

Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that’s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony. However, even the domestic inhabitants of the colonizing nation cannot be free and living in a democracy, because their services are needed abroad in order to impose the occupying force upon the colony or vassal-nation. This is an important burden upon the ‘citizens’ or actually the subjects of the imperial nation. Furthermore, they need to finance, via their taxes, this occupying force abroad, to a sufficient extent so as to subdue any resistance by the residents in any colony.

Every empire is imposed, none is really voluntary. Conquest creates an empire, and the constant application of force maintains it. Every empire is a dictatorship, not only upon its foreign populations (which goes without saying, because otherwise there can’t be any empire), but upon its domestic ones too, upon its own subjects.

Any empire needs weapons-makers, who sell to the government and whose only markets are the imperial government and its vassal-nations or ‘allies’. By contrast, ‘enemy’ nations are ones that the imperial power has placed onto its priority-list of nations that are yet to become conquered.

There are two main reasons to conquer a nation:

One is in order to be enabled to extract, from the colony, oil, or gold, or some other valuable commodity.

The other is in order to control it so as to be enabled to use that land as a passageway for exporting, from a vassal-nation, to other nations, that vassal-nation’s products.

International trade is the basis for any empire, and the billionaires who own controlling blocs of stock in a nation’s international corporations are the actual rulers of it, the beneficiaries of empire, the recipients of the wealth that is being extracted from the colonies and from the domestic subjects.

The idea of an empire is that the imperial nation’s rulers, its aristocracy, extract from the colonies their products, and they impose upon their domestic subjects the financial and military burdens of imposing their international dictatorship upon the foreign subjects.

Some authors say that there is a “Deep State” and that it consists of (some undefined elements within) the intelligence services, and of the military, and of the diplomatic corps, of any given dictatorship; but, actually, those employees of the State are merely employees, not the actual governing power, over that dictatorship.

The actual Deep State are always the aristocrats, themselves, the people who run the revolving door between ‘the private sector’ (the aristocracy’s corporations) and the government.

In former times, many of the aristocrats were themselves governing officials (the titled ‘nobility’), but this is no longer common. Nowadays, the aristocracy are the individuals who own controlling blocs of stock in international corporations (especially weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE, because the only markets for those corporations are the corporation’s own government and its vassal states or ‘allies’); and such individuals are usually the nation’s billionaires, and, perhaps, a few of the mere centi-millionaires. A small number, typically less than 100, of these extremely wealthy individuals, are the biggest donors to politicians, and to think tanks, and to other non-profits (these latter being also tax-write-offs to their donors, and so are tax-drains siphoning money away from the general public and paying the actual benefits, such as PR and increased control over the Government, to the billionaires) that are involved in the formation of the national government’s policies; and, of course, these billionaires also are owners of and/or advertisers in the propaganda-media, which sell the aristocracy’s core or most-essential viewpoints to the nation’s subjects, in order to persuade those voters to vote only for the aristocracy’s selected candidates, and not for any who oppose the aristocracy. These few, mainly but not exclusively billionaires, are the actual Deep State — the bosses over the dictatorship, the ultimate beneficiaries in any empire.

In order to maintain this system, of international dictatorship or empire, the most essential tool is deceit, of the electorate, by the aristocracy.

The method of control is: the bought agents of the Deep State (including the major ‘news’-media, etc.) lie to the public about what their polices will be if they win, in order to be able to win power; and, then, once they have won power, they do the opposite, which is what they have always been paid by the Deep State (the aristocracy) to do. Thereby, elections aren’t “democratic” but instead ‘democratic’: they are mere formalities of democracy, without the substance of democracy, because there can be no democracy where truth is suppressed and lies are spread instead. All of the well-financed candidates for the top offices are actually the Deep State’s representatives, and virtually none are the representatives of the public, because the voters have been deceived, and were given (by the DNC and RNC) choices between two or more candidates, none of whom will represent the public, if and when elected. Individuals who want to represent the public instead of the aristocracy get drowned by the aristocracy’s campaign-money.

Here are some recent examples of this system — the imperial system, international dictatorship, in action — as shown by its results:

During Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, he said, “The approach of fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. They’re fighting each other and yet we’re fighting both of them. You know, we were fighting both of them. I think that our far bigger problem than Assad is ISIS, I’ve always felt that. Assad is, you know I’m not saying Assad is a good man, ’cause he’s not, but our far greater problem is not Assad, it’s ISIS. … I think, you can’t be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other.” Assad is allied with Russia against the Sauds (who are the chief ally of the U.S. aristocracy), so the U.S. (in accord with a policy that George Herbert Walker Bush had initiated on 24 February 1990 and which has been carried out by all subsequent U.S. Presidents) was determined to overthrow Assad, but Trump said that he was strongly opposed to that policy.

Months before that, Trump had said: “I think Assad is a bad guy, a very bad guy, all right? Lots of people killed. I think we are backing people we have no idea who they are. The rebels, we call them the rebels, the patriotic rebels. We have no idea. A lot of people think, Hugh, that they are ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t be fighting ISIS and fighting Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t go — and I watched Lindsey Graham, he said, I have been here for 10 years fighting. Well, he will be there with that thinking for another 50 years. He won’t be able to solve the problem. We have to get rid of ISIS first. After we get rid of ISIS, we’ll start thinking about it. But we can’t be fighting Assad. And when you’re fighting Assad, you are fighting Russia, you’re fighting — you’re fighting a lot of different groups. But we can’t be fighting everybody at one time.”

In that same debate (15 December 2015) he also said: “In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.”

Did he do that? No. Did he instead intensify what Obama had been trying to do in Syria — overthrow Assad — yes. As the U.S. President, after having won the 2016 Presidential campaign, has Trump followed through on his criticism there, against the super-hawk, neoconservative, Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham? No. Did he instead encircle himself with precisely such super-hawks, such neoconservatives? Yes. Did he intensify the overthrow-Assad effort, as Graham and those others had advocated? Yes. Did America’s war against Syria succeed? Not yet. Did he constantly lie to the voters? Yes, without a doubt. Should that be grounds for impeaching him? A prior question to that one is actually: Would a President Mike Pence be any different or maybe even worse than Trump? If yes, then what would be achieved by removing Trump from office? Maybe it would actually make things a lot worse. But how likely would the U.S. Senate be to remove Trump from office if the House did impeach Trump? Two-thirds of the U.S. Senate would need to vote to remove the President in order for a President to be removed after being impeached by the House. A majority of U.S. Senators, 53 of them, were Republicans. If just 33 of them voted not to convict the President, then Trump wouldn’t be removed, and he wasn’t. In order to remove him, not only would all 47 of the Democrats and Independents have had to vote to convict, but 20 of the 53 Republicans would have needed to join them. That’s nearly 40% of the Republican Senators. How likely was that? Almost impossible. What would their voters who had elected them back home think of their having done such a thing? How likely would such Senators have then faced successful re-election challenges that would have removed those Senators from office? Would 20 of the 53 have been likely to take that personal risk? Why, then, were so many Democrats in the House pressing for Trump’s impeachment, since Trump’s being forced out of the White House this way was practically impossible and would only have installed a President Pence, even if it could have succeeded? Was that Democratic Party initiative anything else than insincere political theater, lying to their own gullible voters, Democratic Party voters, just being phonies who manipulated voters to vote for them, instead of who were actually serving them? Is that what democracy is, now: such insincere political theater? Is that “democracy”? America’s voters are trapped, by liars, so it’s instead mere ‘democracy’. It’s the new form of dictatorship. But it’s actually as ancient as is any empire. There’s nothing new about this — except for one thing: the U.S. regime is aiming to be the ultimate, the last, the final, empire, the ruler over the entire planet; so, it is trying especially hard, ‘to defend freedom, democracy and human rights throughout the world’, as Big Brother might say.

Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was just as evil, and just as insincere, as Trump, but a far more skillful liar, who deceived his voters to think that he would fight corruption, work to improve relations with Russia, provide a public option in his health-insurance plan, and otherwise work to reduce economic inequality, to improve the economic situation for disadvantaged Americans, and to prosecute banksters. He abandoned each one of those stated objectives as soon as he won against John McCain, on 4 November 2008, and then yet more when he defeated Mitt Romney in 2012. And aren’t some of those promises the same ones that candidate Trump had also advocated and then abandoned as soon as he too was s‘elected’?

THE THREAT TO THE EMPIRE

Empire always depends upon lies; it is always built upon lies; and, so, the biggest threat to it is the truth, and especially the champions of truth, who are the whistleblowers. The whistleblowers are up against two enemies: the aristocracy, and the aristocrats’ agents who censor-out truth and leave only lies which the aristocracy’s agents spread to the public. Censorship always serves liars, because it is imposed from above and serves the aristocracy, against the public. Every dictatorship needs censorship. No democracy does.

The heroic fighters for the freedom of everyone in the world are the whistleblowers, who report to the public the corruption and evil that they see perpetrated by their superiors, their bosses, and perpetrated by people who are on the public payroll or otherwise obtaining increased income by virtue of being selected by the government to become government contractors to serve an allegedly public function. All liars with power hate whistleblowers, and want to make special examples of any part of the press that publishes their truths, their facts, their stolen documents. These documents are stolen because that’s the only way for them to become public and thereby known to the voters so that the voters can vote on the basis of truths as in a democracy, instead of to be deceived as in a dictatorship. Even if the truth is stolen from the liars, instead of being kept private (“Confidential”) for them, are the whistleblowers doing wrong to steal the truth from the liars? Or, instead, are the whistleblowers heroes: are they the authentic guardians of democracy, and the precariously thin wall that separates democracy from dictatorship? They are the latter: they are the true heroes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of such heroes are also martyrs — martyrs for truth, against lies. Every dictatorship seeks to destroy its whistleblowers. That’s because any whistleblower constitutes a threat to The System — the system of aristocratic control.

In all of U.S. history, the two Presidents who pursued whistleblowers and their publishers the most relentlessly have been Trump and Obama. The public are fooled to think that this is being done for ‘national security’ reasons instead of to hide the government’s crimes and criminality. However, not a single one of the Democratic Party’s many U.S. Presidential candidates is bringing this issue, of the U.S. government’s many crimes and constant lying, forward as being the central thing that must be criminalized above all else, as constituting “treason.” None of them is proposing legislation saying that it is treason, against the public — against the nation. Against the public.

Every aristocracy tries to deceive its public, in order to control its public; and every aristocracy uses divide-and-rule in order to do this; but it’s not only to divide the public against each other (such as between Republicans versus Democrats, both of which are actually controlled by the aristocracy), but also to divide between nations, such as between ‘allies’ versus ‘enemies’ — even when a given ‘enemy’ (such as Iraq in 2003) has never threatened, far less invaded, the United States (or whatever the given imperial ‘us’ may happen to be), and thus clearly this was aggressive war, and an international war-crime, though unpunished as such, because it was done by the empire. The public need to fear and hate some ‘enemy’ which is the ‘other’ or ‘alien’, in order not to fear and loathe the aristocracy itself — the actual source of (and winner from) the systemic exploitation, of the public, by the aristocracy. It’s distract, and divide, and rule.

The pinnacle of the U.S. regime’s totalitarianism is its ceaseless assault against Julian Assange, who is the über-whistleblower, the strongest protector for whistleblowers, the safest publisher for the evidence that they steal from their employers and from their employers’ government. He hides the identity of the whistleblowers, even at the risk of his own continued existence. Right now, the U.S. regime is raising to a fever-pitch and twisting beyond recognition not only U.S. laws but the U.S. Constitution, so as to impose its will against him. President Trump is supported in this effort by the corrupt U.S. Congress, to either end Assange’s life, or else lock him up for the rest of his heroic life in a dungeon having no communication with the world outside, until he does finally die, in isolation, punishment for his heroic last-ditch fight for the public’s freedom and for democracy — his fight, actually, against our 1984 regime. What Jesus of Nazareth was locally to the Roman regime in his region, Assange is to the U.S. regime throughout the world: an example to terrify anyone else who might come forth effectively to challenge the Emperor’s authority.

A key country in this operation is Ecuador, which is ruled by the dictator Lenin Moreno, who stole office by lying to the public and pretending to be a progressive who backed his democratically elected predecessor, Rafael Correa, but then as soon as he won power, he reversed Correa’s progressive initiatives, including, above all, his protection of Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

On 11 April 2019, RT headlined “Who is Lenin Moreno and why did he hand Assange over to British police?” and reported that:

Following his 2017 election, Moreno quickly moved away from his election platform after taking office. He reversed several key pieces of legislation passed under his predecessor which targeted the wealthy and the banks. He also reversed a referendum decision on indefinite re-election while simultaneously blocking any potential for Correa to return.

He effectively purged many of Correa’s appointments to key positions in Ecuador’s judiciary and National Electoral Council via the CPCCS-T council which boasts supra-constitutional powers.

Moreno has also cozied up to the US, with whom Ecuador had a strained relationship under Correa. Following a visit from Vice President Mike Pence in June 2018, Ecuador bolstered its security cooperation with the US, including major arms deals, training exercises and intelligence sharing.

Following Assange’s arrest Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the first place, described Moreno as the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” saying he was guilty of a “crime that humanity will never forget.”

Despite his overwhelming power and influence, however, Moreno and his family are the subject of a sweeping corruption probe in the country, as he faces down accusations of money laundering in offshore accounts and shell companies in Panama, including the INA Investment Corp, which is owned by Moreno’s brother.

Damning images, purportedly hacked from Moreno’s phone, have irreparably damaged both his attempts at establishing himself as an anti-corruption champion as well as his relationship with Assange, whom he accused of coordinating the hacking efforts.

On 14 April 2019, Denis Rogatyuk at The Gray Zone headlined “Sell Out: How Corruption, Voter Fraud and a Neoliberal Turn Led Ecuador’s Lenin to Give Up Assange

Desperate to ingratiate his government with Washington and distract the public from his mounting scandals, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno has sacrificed Julian Assange – and his country’s independence”, and he described some of the documentation for the accusations that Moreno is corrupt.

On 12 April 2019, Zero Hedge headlined “Facebook Removes Page Of Ecuador’s Former President On Same Day As Assange’s Arrest”, and opened: “Facebook has unpublished the page of Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, the social media giant confirmed on Thursday, claiming that the popular leftist leader violated the company’s security policies.”

On 16 April 2019, Jonathan Turley bannered “‘He Is Our Property’: The D.C. Establishment Awaits Assange With A Glee And Grudge”, and opened:

They will punish Assange for their sins

The key to prosecuting Assange has always been to punish him without again embarrassing the powerful figures made mockeries by his disclosures. That means to keep him from discussing how the U.S. government concealed alleged war crimes and huge civilian losses, the type of disclosures that were made in the famous Pentagon Papers case. He cannot discuss how Democratic and Republican members either were complicit or incompetent in their oversight. He cannot discuss how the public was lied to about the program.

A glimpse of that artificial scope was seen within minutes of the arrest. CNN brought on its national security analyst, James Clapper, former director of national intelligence. CNN never mentioned that Clapper was accused of perjury in denying the existence of the National Security Agency surveillance program and was personally implicated in the scandal that WikiLeaks triggered.

Clapper was asked directly before Congress, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” Later, Clapper said his testimony was “the least untruthful” statement he could make.

That would still make it a lie, of course, but this is Washington and people like Clapper are untouchable. In the view of the establishment, Assange is the problem.

On 11 April 2019, the YouGov polling organization headlined “53% of Americans say Julian Assange should be extradited to America”.

On 13 April 2019, I headlined “What Public Opinion on Assange Tells Us About the US Government Direction”, and reported the only international poll that had ever been done of opinions about Assange. Its findings demonstrated that, out of the 23 nations which were surveyed, U.S. was the only one where the public were anti-Assange, and that the difference between the U.S. and all of the others was enormous and stark. The report opened:

The only extensive poll of public opinion regarding Julian Assange or Wikileaks was Reuters/Ipsos on 26 April 2011, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is not a criminal: global poll”, and it sampled around a thousand individuals in each of 23 countries — a total of 18,829 respondents. The Reuters news-report was vague, and not linked to any detailed presentation of the poll-findings, but it did say that “U.S. respondents had a far more critical view” against Wikileaks than in any other country, and that the view by Americans was 69% “believing Assange should be charged and 61 percent opposing WikiLeaks’ mission.” Buried elsewhere on the Web was this detailed presentation of Ipsos’s findings in that poll. Here are what those findings were:

https://www.slideshare.net/mediapiac/julian-assange-and-wiki-leaks

Oppose Wikileaks:

61% U.S.

38% UK

33% Canada

32% Poland

32% Belgium

31% Saudi Arabia

30% Japan

30% France

27% Indonesia

26% Italy

25% Germany

24% Sweden

24% Australia

22% Hungary

22% Brazil

21% Turkey

21% S. Korea

16% Mexico

16% Argentina

15% Spain

15% Russia

15% India

12% S. Africa

Is the U.S. a democracy if the regime is so effective in gripping the minds of its public, as to make them hostile to the strongest fighter for their freedom and democracy?

On 13 April 2019, washingtonsblog headlined “4 Myths About Julian Assange DEBUNKED”, and here was one of them:

Myth #2: Assange Will Get a Fair Trial In the U.S.

14-year CIA officer John Kiriakou notes:

Assange has been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia — the so-called “Espionage Court.” That is just what many of us have feared. Remember, no national security defendant has ever been found not guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Eastern District is also known as the “rocket docket” for the swiftness with which cases are heard and decided. Not ready to mount a defense? Need more time? Haven’t received all of your discovery? Tough luck. See you in court.

… I have long predicted that Assange would face Judge Leonie Brinkema were he to be charged in the Eastern District. Brinkema handled my case, as well as CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s. She also has reserved the Ed Snowden case for herself. Brinkema is a hanging judge.

On 20 May 2019, former British Ambassador Craig Murray (who had quit so that he could blow the whistle) headlined “The Missing Step” and argued that the only chance that Assange now has is if Sweden refuses to extradite Assange to the U.S. in the event that Britain honors the Swedish request to extradite him to Sweden instead of to the U.S. (Sweden, however, subsequently dropped its charge against Assange, and so now only Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are keeping him imprisoned until he will die.)

How can it reasonably be denied that the U.S. is, in fact (though not nominally) a dictatorship? All of its allies are thus vassal-nations in its empire. This means acquiescence (if not joining) in some of the U.S. regime’s frequent foreign coups and invasions; and this means their assisting in the spread of the U.S. regime’s control beyond themselves, to include additional other countries. It reduces the freedom, and the democracy, throughout the world; it spreads the U.S. dictatorship internationally. That is what is evil about what in America is called “neoconservatism” and in other countries is called simply “imperialism.” Under American reign, it is now a spreading curse, a political plague, to peoples throughout the world. Even an American whistleblower about Ukraine who lives in the former Ukraine is being targeted by the U.S. regime.

This is how the freedom of everyone is severely threatened, by the U.S. empire — the most deceitful empire that the world has ever experienced. The martyrs to its lies are the canaries in its coal mine. They are the first to be eliminated.

Looking again at the top of that rank-ordered list of 23 countries, one sees the U.S. and eight of its main allies (or vassal-nations), in order: U.S., UK, Canada, Poland, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Japan, France, Indonesia. These are countries whose subjects (‘citizens’) are already well-controlled by the empire. They already are vassals, and so these nations are ordained (accepted by America’s aristocracy) as being ‘allies’.

At the opposite end (as of 2011, when that poll was taken), starting with the most anti-U.S-regime, were: S. Africa, India, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, S. Korea, Turkey. These were countries where the subjects were not yet well-controlled by the empire, even though the current government in some of them is trying to change its subjects’ minds so that the country will accept U.S. rule. Wherever the subjects reject U.S. rule, there exists a strong possibility that the nation will become placed on the U.S. regime’s list of ‘enemies’ and be subjected to at least attempts at “regime-change.” Consequently, wherever the residents are the most opposed to U.S. rule, the likelihood of an American coup or invasion is real. The first step toward a coup or invasion is the imposition of sanctions against the nation. Any such nation that is already subject to them is therefore already in severe danger. Any such nation that refuses to cooperate with the U.S. regime’s existing sanctions — such as against trading with Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela — is in danger of becoming itself a U.S.-sanctioned nation, and therefore officially an ‘enemy’ of today’s version of nazism (as Nuremberg defined it: imperialistic fascism).

And this is why freedom and democracy are ending.

Unless and until the U.S. regime itself becomes conquered — either domestically by a second successful American Revolution (this one to eliminate the domestic aristocracy instead of to eliminate a foreign one), or else by a World War III in which the U.S. regime becomes destroyed even worse than the opposing alliance will — the existing insatiable empire will continue to be on the war-path to impose its dictatorship to everyone on this planet.

The force that is ending freedom is empire, and it’s now being wielded by the U.S.A. Like all empires, it thrives on lies, and therefore its biggest enemies are whistleblowers.

The Free Market Is A Failure

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By TheHipcrimeVocab

Sorry for the deliberately click-bait-y headline, but I think this message is important to get out there.

In my discussions few months back on What is Neoliberalism, I noted that a core element of neoliberal philosophy is that markets are the only efficient, effective and rational way to distribute goods and services.

Neoliberals profess the idea that only competitive markets can allocate “scarce” resources efficiently, and that it is only such “free” markets that can lift people out of poverty and deliver broad prosperity. They pound it into our heads constantly.

Yet the Covid-19 crisis has illustrated spectacular and pervasive failures of such “free” markets all over the globe, and especially in the U.S. Instead of fairness or efficiency, we see systemic failure in every market we look: the food industry, the medical industry, the retail industry, the employment market. Resources are being destroyed and misallocated on a massive scale

Let’s start with the food industry, because food is the most important thing (nine means from anarchy, and all that). Thousands and thousands of pigs are being slaughtered, their meat left to rot, eaten by no-one, regardless of the forces of supply and demand:

The United States faces a major meat shortage due to virus infections at processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever making it to table…

Boerboom, a third-generation hog farmer, is just one of the tens of thousands of US pork producers who are facing a stark reality: although demand for their products is high in the nation’s grocery stores, they may have to euthanise and dispose of millions of pigs due to a breakdown in the American food supply chain.

Meat shortage leaves US farmers with ‘mind-blowing’ choice (BBC)

Potatoes are sitting in Belgian warehouses and left to rot, only two short years after a drought threatened to produce a severe shortage:

Belgium: Lighthearted campaign to ‘eat more fries’ aims to lift heavy load (DW)

Meanwhile, dairy farmers in the U.S. heartland are dumping milk into the ground, to be drunk by no one.

Cows don’t shut off: Why this farmer had to dump 30,000 gallons of milk (USA Today)

In fact, the whole food situation is rather ugly, as this piece from The Guardian summarizes:

This March and April, even as an astounding 30 million Americans plunged into unemployment and food bank needs soared, farmers across the US destroyed heartbreaking amounts of food to stem mounting financial losses.

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.

After delays and reports of concealing worker complaints, meatpacking plants that slaughter and process hundreds of thousands of animals a day ground to a halt as coronavirus cases spread like wildfire among workers packed tightly together on dizzyingly fast assembly lines.

Meanwhile, immigrant farmworkers toiled in the eye of the coronavirus storm, working and living in crowded dangerous conditions at poverty wages; at one Washington state orchard, half the workers tested positive for Covid-19. Yet many of these hardest working of Americans were deprived of economic relief, as they are undocumented. Advocates report more farmworkers showing up at food banks – and some unable to access food aid because they can’t afford the gas to get there.

None of this is acceptable or necessary and it’s not just about Covid-19, it’s also illustrative of a deeply deregulated corporate capitalism. America’s food system meltdown amid the pandemic has been long-developing, and a primary cause is decades of corporate centralization and a chaotic array of policies designed to prop up agribusiness profits at any cost.

Farmers are destroying mountains of food. Here’s what to do about it (Guardian)

That doesn’t sound very “efficient” to me, does it? How about you? Free market fundamentalists, care to weigh in?

Meanwhile, hospitals in the United States, which one would think are the most important thing to keep open during a pandemic, are actually closing across the country. These are the very things you want most to be open! Why is this happening? Because health care in the U.S. is a profit-driven enterprise that “competes” in the free market. Because elective procedures—their cash cow—have either been suspended or postponed. U.S. hospitals are closing because they are dependent upon these elective procedures to shore up their profits, and markets rely on profits.

As the deadly virus has spread beyond urban hotspots, many more small hospitals across the country are on the verge of financial ruin as they’ve been forced to cancel elective procedures, one of the few dependable sources of revenue. Williamson Memorial and similar facilities have been struggling since long before the pandemic — at least 170 rural hospitals have shut down since 2005, according to University of North Carolina research on rural hospital closures.

But even as hospitals in cities like New York City and Detroit have been deluged with coronavirus patients, many rural facilities now have the opposite problem: their beds are near-empty, their operating rooms are silent, and they’re bleeding cash.

More than 100 hospitals and hospital systems around the country have already furloughed tens of thousands of employees, according to a tally by industry news outlet Becker’s Hospital Review. They’ve sent home nurses and support staffers who would be deemed essential under state stay-home orders.

Rural hospitals are facing financial ruin and furloughing staff during the coronavirus pandemic (CNN)

And how about allocating labor via impersonal markets? How’s that going? Well, not so well. The workers with the skills most desperately needed on the front lines during the crisis are taking pay cuts and getting laid off left and right. Instead of contributing, they are sitting at home, unable to work even if they wanted to:

At a time when medical professionals are putting their lives at risk, tens of thousands of doctors in the United States are taking large pay cuts. And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay.

That is because American healthcare companies are looking to cut costs as they struggle to generate revenue during the coronavirus crisis.

“Nurses are being called heroes,” Mariya Buxton says, clearly upset. “But I just really don’t feel like a hero right now because I’m not doing my part.”

Ms Buxton is a paediatric nurse in St Paul, Minnesota, but has been asked to stay at home.

At the unit at which Ms Buxton worked, and at hospitals across most of the country, medical procedures that are not deemed to be urgent have been stopped. That has meant a massive loss of income.

Coronavirus: Why so many US nurses are out of work (BBC)

It’s an ironic twist as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the nation: The very workers tasked with treating those afflicted with the virus are losing work in droves.

Emergency room visits are down. Non-urgent surgical procedures have largely been put on hold. Health care spending fell 18% in the first three months of the year. And 1.4 million health care workers lost their jobs in April, a sharp increase from the 42,000 reported in March, according to the Labor Department. Nearly 135,000 of the April losses were in hospitals.

As Hospitals Lose Revenue, More Than A Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs (NPR)

So it doesn’t seem like “free and open” markets are doing so well with either health care or labor.

Meanwhile, U.S. states are competing against each other for desperately needed PPE equipment, bidding up the price and preventing scarce resources from going to where they are most badly needed, which would naturally be where Covid-19 has struck the hardest:

As coronavirus testing expands and more cases of infection are being identified, doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers are scrambling to find enough medical supplies to replenish their dwindling supply.

But state and local governments across the United States are vying to purchase the same equipment, creating a competitive market for those materials that drives up prices for everyone.

“A system that’s based on state and local governments looking out for themselves and competing with other state and local governments across the nation isn’t sustainable,” said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and former acting Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, “and if left to continue, we’ll certainly exacerbate the public health crisis we’re facing.”

“There’s a very real possibility,” he added, “that those state and local governments that have the most critical need won’t get the equipment they need.”

Competition among state, local governments creates bidding war for medical equipment (ABC News)

Yet neoliberals always tell us how important “competition” is in every arena of life.

Failure, failure, failure! Everywhere we look, we see failure. Pervasive, systematic failure. Resources going unused. Surpluses of food being dumped even while people go hungry and line up at food banks. Workers with necessary skills sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs. Other workers unable to even earn a living to support themselves and their families, no matter how badly they want to work. Masks and protective equipment NOT going to where they are most needed, their costs inflating, befitting no one except profiteers even as people die.

Tell me again about how the market is “efficient” at distributing resources. Tell me again about how central planning inevitably results in wasted resources, surfeits and shortages.

And here is the big, bold, underscored point:

The free-marketeers want to trumpet the market’s successes, but they don’t want to own its failures.

Free-market boosters always want to talk about the wonderful benefits of markets. How they allow multiple people to coordinate their activities across wide variations of space and time. How they allow knowledge to be distributed among many different actors. How they favor tacit knowledge that a single entity could not possess. Libraries of encomiums have been written celebrating the virtues of the “free” market. You know their names: The Provisioning of Paris, Economics in One Lesson, Free to Choose, I Pencil, and all of that. Much of what passes for economic “science” is simply cheerleading for markets– the bigger, freer and less-regulated the better.

Okay, fair enough.

But how about market failures? Why don’t they ever talk about that? Because if you read the economics books I cited above, you would come away with the idea that there are no market failures! That, in fact, there is no such thing. That markets, in effect, cannot fail!

If you want to own the successes, you need to own the failures.

Oh, they love, love, love to talk about central planning’s “failures”. They can’t get enough of that. They love to talk about empty shelves in the Soviet Union, long lines at supermarkets, the lack of toilet paper in Venezuela (amusingly, now a problem throughout the capitalist world), and the allegedly long waiting times in “socialized medicine” countries. We are constantly subjected to that drumbeat day after day after day. It’s part of every economics 101 course. Central planning doesn’t work. Central planning is inefficient. Central planning is “tyranny.”

But what about all that stuff I cited above?

Where are all the free-market fundamentalists now?

What is their excuse?

They’ll use special pleading. They’ll argue that it’s exceptional circumstances. That no one could have foreseen a “black swan” event like the global Covid-19 pandemic (despite numerous experts warning about it for years). They’ll tell us that markets work just fine under “normal” circumstances. They’ll say we cannot pass any kind of judgement on the failings of markets during such an unusual event.

Here’s why that argument is bullshit:

Pandemics are a real, and recurring phenomenon in human history. We’ve been incredibly fortunate that we’ve been in rare and atypical hundred-year period from 1918-1919 to today without a global pandemic or novel disease we couldn’t quickly contain and/or eradicate.

But pandemics are always—and always have always been—a societal threat, even if we’ve forgotten that fact. And the experts tell us that there will be a lot more of them in our future, with population overshoot, environmental destruction, encroachment on formerly unoccupied lands and climate change proceeding apace. What that means is this:

If your economic system can’t function properly during a pandemic, then your economic system is shit.

If your economic system only works when conditions are ideal, in fact depends upon conditions being ideal, then, your economic system doesn’t really work at all. If something like a pandemic causes it to seize up and fail, then your economic system is poorly designed and doesn’t work very well. Not only do the free markets graphed on economists’ chalkboards not exist in anywhere the real world, they apparently rely on a blissful Eden-like Arcadia to function as intended—a situation any causal glance at human history tells us is highly unusual. Any disruption and they fall like dominoes. They are about as resilient as tissue paper.

And the stresses are only going to get worse in the years ahead, with climate change making some areas uninhabitably hot, while other places are submerged under rising sea levels. And that’s before we get to the typical natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. And there will be new novel plant diseases as well, unfolding against the increasing resistance of germs to antibiotics.

Will the free market fundamentalists and libertarian market cheerleaders acknowledge this???

Don’t hold your breath.

No, they will continue to lionize “private initiative” at every opportunity, while completely ignoring the stuff I opened this post with. They’ll sweep it under the rug or, more likely, simply handwave it away. They’ll continue to say that we need to scale back government regulation and interference and let the invisible hand sort it all out.

Because discipline of modern economics as practiced today is not a science. It may not even rise to the level of a pseudoscience. It’s PR for laissez-faire capitalism.

Of course, we’ve had market failures before. They occurred all throughout the nineteenth century and during Great Depression, for example. These are well-documented. But many of the things that came out of those bygone market failures to prevent or mitigate them have been systematically and deliberately dismantled over the past generation due to rise of neoliberalism.

And now we’re paying the price.

Karl Polanyi made an important distinction between markets and Market Society. Markets are where people come together to buy, sell, and exchange surplus goods. These have existed throughout history. They are tangential to society; embedded in something larger than it. Such markets can be shut down without causing an existential threat to civilization.

But Market Society is dependent upon impersonal forces of supply and demand and functioning markets for absolutely everything in the society, from jobs to food to health care. Everything is oriented around maximizing private profits, and not human needs. Markets failing to function adequately lead to unemployment, sickness, starvation and death. Shutting them down is an existential threat to civilization.

As Dmitry Orlov wrote in his best-known work, the Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union precisely because they didn’t rely on the Market.

Naturalizing markets in this way is an abdication of both causal and moral responsibility for famines, a way to avoid reality and the ethical consequences for people in a position to change things. Markets are not given; they are predicated on a host of laws and social conventions that can, if the need arises, be changed. It makes no sense for American farmers to destroy produce they can’t sell while food banks are struggling to keep up with demand. This kind of thinking is a way for powerful people to outsource ethical choices to the market, but the market has no conscience.

Famine Is a Choice (Slate)

Now, to be clear I’m not necessarily making an argument for or against central planning as opposed to markets. That’s a different discussion.

But my core point is simply this: you cannot discuss market successes without discussing market failures. To do so is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and not to mention incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. If economics were a real science, instead of just PR for capitalism, it would take a look at the things I described above, and figure out ways they could have been avoided, regardless of any preconceived ideology or assumptions about the “right” way to arrange a society, or assumptions about how things “should” work. It would seek out ways for society to become, in Nassim Taleb’s terminology, “antifragile.”

But don’t hold your breath for that, either.

Real Revolution Means Expanding Consciousness, Both Outwardly And Inwardly

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The fight to liberate humanity from oppression, exploitation, butchery and madness is really a fight to expand consciousness.

The existential threats our species now faces are ultimately due to the fact that powerful people advance omnicidal, ecocidal, oppressive, violent and exploitative agendas behind veils of secrecy and propaganda distortion. They do evil things while deliberately keeping people unconscious of those evil things, so that the people will not use the power of their numbers to stop them.

The people do not use the power of their numbers to force a change into a healthy paradigm which puts human interests first because their perception of the world is aggressively manipulated by power structures who have a vested interest in keeping that from happening. Wealth and power are kept in the hands of elites and their underlings by propagandizing people into believing the current status quo is the only way things can be. War agendas are consented to because people are propagandized into believing this or that boogie man poses some imminent threat and needs to be eliminated. Surveillance, censorship, government secrecy and police militarization are tolerated because people are manipulated into believing they need these things.

And so on. In all cases, the key carrying agent for all of these toxic agendas is unconsciousness. If people were conscious of the real nature of these agendas and how badly they’re being robbed in order to advance them, they would refuse to consent to them and force them to stop. So they are kept unconscious of their reality by perceptual manipulation like propaganda, government opacity, internet censorship, and the war on adversarial journalism.

How To Defeat The Empire

"What I do advocate, in as many different ways as I can come up with, is a decentralized guerrilla psywar against the institutions which enable the powerful to manipulate the way ordinary people think, act and vote."https://t.co/4F5dWaURdq

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 10, 2019

The fight against these malignant power structures is therefore a fight to increase public awareness of their toxic agendas, and of the perceptual manipulation tactics which are being used to prevent that awareness from being spread. It’s a fight to expand collective human consciousness of what’s really going on in the world.

But unconsciousness of abusive power structures and their perception manipulation tactics are not the only way in which humanity is unconscious. In exactly the same way that we are collectively unconscious of the reality of external events, we are individually unconscious of the reality of internal events as well.

Generally speaking, humans are confused about the nature of experience and their thoughts and actions are largely governed by unconscious conditioning patterns. Rather than experiencing life as it actually shows up, we tend to experience it through layers of mental narratives about what’s really going on which distort our ability to experience things lucidly.

Becoming conscious of your inner world brings clarity to your internal dynamics in exactly the same way that becoming conscious of your external world brings clarity to world dynamics: you are able to see what’s really happening. This can take the form of realizing unhelpful thought patterns in yourself which had been subconsciously running on autopilot your whole life, or unhelpful beliefs about yourself that you formed in early childhood and came to take for granted.

If you take the inward expansion of consciousness even further, you can come to see that the thing you’ve always thought of as “you” is actually a misperception based on a faulty assumption about the nature of experience, and your true self is more accurately described as a boundless field of space-like awareness to which no mental narratives can apply. But you need to become fully conscious of the fact that this is what’s really happening before it–and the peace and lucidity which comes with it–can be your lived experience.

How To Wake Up

"I’ve been putting off writing this article all year, but readers keep asking for it, and since I’ve been writing about mass enlightenment a lot lately I figure I might as well slip it in now."#enlightenment #spirituality https://t.co/gmxHh267LX

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 1, 2018

How To Awaken From The Matrix Using Self-Enquiry

"I talk about the power of self-enquiry a fair bit in my musings about enlightenment and human consciousness, so I thought it might be good to tap out a how-to on the subject in case anyone finds it useful"https://t.co/lk8QfbOP7o

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 23, 2019

The inward and outward expansions of consciousness exist on the same continuum, and neither is more important or more valuable than the other. People who are more interested in politics and government might see the exploration of the inner dimensions as airy fairy bullshit, and people who are more interested in spirituality and enlightenment might see the exploration of international power dynamics as deluded nonsense for muggles.

But objectively they hold the same value. Someone engaged in relentlessly honest self-inquiry is doing something that is just as valuable as someone who is engaged in investigative journalism. Going to therapy and having transformative personal breakthroughs is as valuable as making a viral video exposing the reality of police brutality. All expand consciousness, so all are facilitating the revolution.

In this particular sense, there’s no fundamental difference between someone like Julian Assange and someone like Eckhart Tolle. You might object that one of these men is in prison and the other is enjoying what appears to be a fairly cushy and unmolested life, but there’s a reason for that: our rulers don’t understand just how threatening the expansion of inner consciousness is to their empire. If they did, old Eckhart would be rotting in a prison cell just like Julian.

Sociopaths don’t understand the inner dimensions. They don’t really have the cognitive software for it. They have an acute understanding of how to manipulate language and information in order to get what they want, but the notion of honest introspection with the goal of truth for truth’s sake is wholly alien for them. Someone who sees the world as a field of potential assets to be exploited will never think to look inside themselves and consider how they might be misinterpreting reality, but they will see attempts to interfere with their toxic agendas in the world as direct threats to their ability to get what they want. Which is why Julian Assange is in prison and Eckhart Tolle is not.

This inability to perceive the other half of the revolution will be their undoing. It is our ace in the hole.

Because it turns out that expanding one’s consciousness inwardly greatly enhances one’s ability to expand consciousness outwardly. Once you succeed in loosening the grip of mental narrative upon your experience, you become much more difficult to propagandize and much more adept at noticing narrative manipulation. Propaganda relies on people buying into their narratives, as well as fear and greed, to effectively manipulate public perception. Someone who is inwardly very lucid will have none of these hooks, and will have a much easier time becoming conscious of the outer world if they choose to do so.

For this reason, the most effective rebels in this revolution engage in both inner work and in outer work. They fight the revolution on both fronts, which instead of dividing their effectiveness actually makes them more effective at both. Honoring the reality of both humanity’s inward and outward adventures helps bring clarity to each of them.

The sociopaths who rule our society are only capable of fighting us on one front, while we appear to be gaining ground on the other. The phenomenon commonly known as spiritual enlightenment appears to be becoming more and more common (Tolle again repeated his belief that this is the case in a recent interview with Russell Brand), and if you’re paying attention you’ll see other unusual phenomena emerging in the collective consciousness as well. Consciousness is rapidly expanding of economic injustice, racial injustice, police militarization etc, and we can expect it to keep expanding into other dynamics in the same way.

The lights are turning on everywhere, more and more abusive and unwholesome dynamics are being brought into consciousness around the world, and it’s only a matter of time before we collectively cough up the whole disgusting furball and move together into a healthy and harmonious world.

Contemplating Human Extinction Terrifies Most People: A Strategy for Survival

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Any serious study of the relevant scholarly literature reveals at least four possible paths to imminent human extinction, that is, human extinction within five years: nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse.

Moreover, as I have documented previously, under cover of the non-existent ‘virus’ labeled COVID-19, the global elite is conducting a coup against humanity. That is, by bombarding us with fear-mongering propaganda to focus our attention on the ‘virus’, the capacity of virtually all people, including activists, to devote attention to the coup, and to resist it, has been effectively eliminated. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for Our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future’.

Unfortunately, it has also meant that, despite the extensively documented evidence of the four paths to imminent human extinction, it is even more difficult than usual to get people to focus on this point. This means that engaging people to consider the evidence for themselves is extremely difficult: it is easier to live in delusion, reassured by elite-driven narratives promulgated through education systems and the corporate media which effectively convey the message that there is either no serious cause for concern (yet) or, perhaps, that the timeframe allows for an adequate official response in due course. In either case we, as individuals or groups, do not really need to do anything differently; going along with the elite-driven narrative, including timeframe, will ensure our survival.

Of course, as those paying attention to the evidence already know, being obedient to the elite-driven narrative is a recipe for extinction. We have already exceeded 2°C above the pre-industrial temperature, the ongoing and rapid deployment of 5G will be catastrophic, biodiversity is already collapsing (and will be seriously accelerated by the rising temperature and deployment of 5G) – for just the latest in the ongoing stream of disasters, see ‘Calls for swift action as hundreds of elephants die in Botswana’s Okavango Delta’ – and, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear war is now a greater possibility that at any previous time in human history. For summaries of the evidence and further documentation in each case, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

In this article I would like to explain why people are so terrified of the truth and what we can do about it so that an effective response to each of these threats can be implemented (assuming, problematically, that there is enough time).

Why are Most Human Beings so Terrified?

Virtually all human beings are terrified and they are terrified for the same reason: the child-raising process that sociologists like to label ‘socialization’ should be more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. Why? Because from the moment of a child’s birth, parents, teachers, religious leaders and adults generally regard themselves as responsible for terrorizing the child into obedience of the commands, rules, conventions and laws that define the nature of permissible behaviour in their society.

This means that provided the child responds obediently to parental (or other adult) commands, obeys any rules imposed (by the parents, teachers and religious figures in the child’s life), learns all relevant social conventions for their society and, ultimately, obeys the law, they are allowed to live, recognized as compliant citizens, in their society.

Unfortunately, from society’s viewpoint, evolutionary pressures over vast time scales have led to each human individual being given Self-will to seek out and fulfill their own unique destiny: evolutionary pressures do not predispose any individual to obey the will of another for the simple reason that obedience has no evolutionary functionality.

Consequently, it takes enormous terrorization during childhood to ensure that the child surrenders their Self-will at the alter of obedience. To achieve this outcome and largely unknowingly, parents use a large range of behaviours from the three categories of violence that I have labeled ‘visible’ violence, ‘invisible’ violence and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

A common element of this terrorization is that the child is frequently threatened with, and/or actually suffers, violence for being ‘disobedient’. Of course, this violence, assuming it is even recognized as such (given that ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence are just that to virtually everyone), is invariably labeled ‘punishment’ so that we can delude ourselves that our violence is not harmful. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

This means that virtually every single individual has been successfully terrorized into being submissively obedient. And, fundamentally, this obedience includes accepting the elite-driven narrative delivered by education systems and the corporate media in relation to issues crucial to human survival.

So despite our preference for believing otherwise, those individuals in our societies who survive the education system capable of thinking for themselves, or even of ‘clear thinking’, are rare. And then they must also survive (preferably by refusing to access it) the propaganda (that is, lies) presented as ‘news’ by the corporate media. Given that another outcome of being terrorized throughout childhood means that most people are very gullible, perceiving lies is a huge challenge in itself. See ‘Why do People Lie? And Why do other People Believe them?’

Of course, this powerless imperative to believe the lies we are told and to behave obediently in response is always reinforced by the fear of violence (‘punishment’), including the fear of social ostracism for resisting elite narratives, but it is also reinforced by other fears: for example, the fear that makes people feel powerless to respond in any meaningful way, the fear of changing their behaviour, and the fear of feeling out of control of their own destiny. After all, if extinction is imminent and we are to avert it, we will need to do some fundamental things – including thinking and behaving – very differently. But we are not allowed to think or behave differently, are we? That would be disobedient.

This can be readily illustrated. When a young child does not get what they need, the child will have an emotional reaction. This will always include fear, it will probably include anger and it will probably include sadness, among other feelings. However, almost invariably, parents behave in a manner intended to prevent the child from having their emotional response (and using this information in formulating the appropriate behavioural response in the circumstance). They do not listen to the child while they express their feelings. Instead, they act to make the child suppress awareness of their feelings.

At its simplest and apparently most benign, the parent might comfort the child in the misguided belief that this is helpful. But it is not, unless you want a submissively obedient child. See ‘Comforting a Baby is Violent’.

Another simple and common way in which we suppress the emotional awareness and, hence, capacity for emotional expression of a child is by giving them food or a toy to distract them from how they feel. The fundamental outcome of this act is that we unconsciously ‘teach’ the child to seek food and/or material items as substitutes for feeling and acting on how they feel. But this is absolutely disastrous.

The net result of this behaviour is that virtually all people in industrialized societies have become addicted to material consumption, and the direct (including military), structural and ecological violence that makes excessive consumption in these societies possible. All so that we can suppress how we really feel. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

And, therefore, the very notion of substantially reducing consumption – a central part of any strategy for human survival by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production and transport, checking the collapse of biodiversity by halting the destruction of habitat such as rainforests, denying financial incentive to deploy technology for 5G, ending wars (and the threat of nuclear war) for resources – becomes ‘unthinkable’.

Because the fundamental imperative of materialist societies is ‘Consume!’ (so that corporations can profit). And we do not have the emotional power to disobey that imperative because deep in our unconscious remains the childhood terror of resisting the offered food or toy and insisting on expressing how we feel and behaving powerfully in accord with that. It is far simpler to just put something more in our mouth or use one of our ‘toys’. Who wants to feel scared, sad or angry instead?

In essence, the individual who has been terrorized into obedience is no longer capable of thinking for themself and then behaving in accord with their own Self-will. This means that imperatives of the global elite – mediated through its agents such as governments, education systems and the corporate media and enforced by legal systems, the police and prison cells (see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’) – are readily obeyed by the vast bulk of the human population.

And because the global elite is insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – this obedience means that we are submitting to the elite coup and complying with its imperatives that are fast-tracking humanity to extinction on four separate paths, as noted above.

To reiterate: At this most critical moment in human history, when a coup is being conducted against us and four separate threats to human existence and all life on Earth require our engaged attention and powerful response, it is almost impossible to get people to even acknowledge these threats, let alone to consider the evidence and act strategically in response.

Which means that profoundly altering our approaches to parenting and education, so that we produce powerful individuals, is critical to any strategy to fight for human survival.

So what can we do?

Well, if you would like to fight for human survival, it would be useful to start by giving yourself time to focus on feeling your emotional responses – fear, anger, sadness, dread…. – to the elite coup and the four most imminent threats. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you do not do this, you are unlikely to be able to engage meaningfully and strategically in the effort. You will, most likely and unconsciously, simply put your attention elsewhere and go back to what you were doing. See ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.

So once you have a clearer sense of your emotional reactions to this knowledge and have allowed yourself time to focus on feeling these feelings, you will be in a far more powerful position to consider your response to the situation. And, depending on your interests and circumstances, there is a range of possible responses that will each make an important difference.

Fundamentally, you might consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will include considering what an education for your children means to you, particularly if you want powerful individuals who can resist violence. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

You might consider supporting others to become more powerful. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you wish to strategically resist the elite coup against humanity, you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals for doing so, from here: Strategic Aims.

If you wish to powerfully resist the primary threats to human existence – nuclear war, the deployment of 5G, the collapse of biodiversity and/or the climate catastrophe – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

You might also consider joining those who are powerful enough to recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance as essential elements of these strategies by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if you want something simpler, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
8. I will not buy rainforest timber
9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Given that submissive obedience is the primary behavioural characteristic of all ‘good citizens’, it is going to take a monumental effort to defeat the elite coup and avert the now imminent extinction of Homo Sapiens. This is because most common human behaviours – from parenting to consumption habits – have been shaped to serve elite interests, and it is these behaviours that must change.

Of course, this is also why lobbying elite agents – such as governments and corporations – cannot work. Apart from the fact that they exist to serve elite interests and obey elite directives accordingly (rather than respond to grassroots pressure which they function superbly to dissipate), governments and corporations cannot meaningfully impact the crises that confront us.

That power is ours but we must use it, and deploy it strategically.

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

Did neocon cancel queen Bari Weiss stage her NY Times resignation to fuel her career?

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Reid Mukai

A closer look at the events surrounding Bari Weiss’ resignation suggests she omitted some critical details about her toxic presence inside the paper, and may have staged her resignation to drum up publicity for her next move.

By Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton

Source: The Grayzone

Neoconservative New York Times columnist Bari Weiss quit the newspaper on July 14. In a resignation letter published on her personal website, the pundit lamented a supposed “illiberal environment” at the publication in which Weiss’ colleagues mocked her right-wing views, supposedly called her “a Nazi and a racist,” and branded her a “liar and a bigot.”

Weiss’ unexpected departure came days after the hawkish columnist signed a letter in Harper’s Magazine lamenting an “intolerance of opposing views” and demanding an “open debate” in the US media.

The signatories complaining of a “censoriousness” environment included architects of disastrous US military interventions, anti-Palestinian fanatics, and some of the most powerful people in the media, including many who have spent decades censoring anyone to the left of them – and even attempting to cancel entire countries.

But there may have been more to Weiss’ dramatic resignation than her revulsion with the “illiberal” culture of a paper that had recruited her and several neocon allies. A closer look at the events surrounding her departure suggests she likely omitted some critical details about her toxic presence inside the paper, and may have staged her resignation to drum up publicity for her next move.

A neocon network rises inside the Times, embarrassment and outrage ensues

Back on June 3, neoconservative Sen. Tom Cotton published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the US military to crack down on Americans protesting lethal police violence. The decision to publish the editorial touched off outrage among Times staff, with many demanding to know how such a fascistic piece made it into print.

It turned out that the staffer who edited the piece, Adam Rubenstein, was a card-carrying neocon hired by the Times in early 2019. Rubenstein was a former editor for the now-defunct Weekly Standard founded by William Kristol – the neocon leader responsible for rustling up pro-Israel money to support Cotton’s electoral ambitions.

New York Times staff claimed that the Cotton op-ed “was edited” by Rubenstein and other staffers “had not been aware of the article before it was published.”

The editorial disaster prompted the dismissal of op-ed page editor James Bennet, who had initially defended running Cotton’s screed.

Before joining the Weekly Standard, Rubenstein was a pro-Israel activist at Kenyon College who once attempted to cancel an appearance by the Palestian poet Remi Kanazi on the grounds that Kanazi was “part of a focus-grouped and incubated hatred.”

Rubenstein’s hiring by the Times complimented its hiring of Bari Weiss and fellow anti-Palestinian bigot Bret Stephens in 2017. In her resignation letter, Weiss acknowledged, “I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in [the Times’] pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives.”

In 2018, Weiss and Stephens responded to a critic who had called them “Zionist fanatics of near-unhinged proportions.” The two retorted: “The word ‘near’ should not have been a part of the sentence. Otherwise, we happily plead guilty as charged.”

When Rubenstein joined them at the paper, he became Weiss’s personal editor. Both Weiss and Stephens had risen to prominence at the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, where Rubenstein had also worked as a Robert Bartley Fellow.

All hail my editor!

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 5, 2019

In August 2019, Stephens provoked embarrassment for himself and his employers when he fired off an angry email to the employer of a George Washington University professor, David Karpf, who had compared him on Twitter to a bedbug. As Twitter users bombarded Stephens with a wave of ridicule, the NY Times apparently compelled Stephens to delete his Twitter account – but not before he staged a public meltdown in which he compared Karpf to “totalitarian regimes” and Nazis seeking to exterminate Jews.

When the Cotton column calling for a military crackdown on Black Lives Matter ran less than a year later, the Times’ neocon problem finally came to a head.

This June 5, as 300 non-editorial staffers planned a virtual walkout, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger convened an all-hands meeting. During the question-and-answer session, according to a report by Vice, employees demanded to know “whether Opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘openly bad mouth[ing] younger news colleagues on a platform where they, because of strict company policy, could not defend themselves’; whether the opinion section had suggested the topic of the op-ed to Cotton; and what the Times would do to help retain and support Black employees.”

Times staff seemed to be pointing a finger at Weiss and her neocon network for soliciting the Cotton op-ed.

When Weiss resigned on July 14, she complained that colleagues “have called me a Nazi and a racist… Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Yet she failed to acknowledge her apparent role in the Cotton op-ed affair, which was clearly the source of her colleagues’ outrage, painting herself instead as a blameless victim of “illiberal” cancel culture.

On the day that Weiss staged her dramatic self-expulsion, Andrew Sullivan – a center-right political ally of Weiss who has vigorously supported her – resigned from New York Magazine.

This will be my last week at New York Magazine.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 14, 2020

Sullivan eventually revealed that he was moving to another publication, and possibly one that had not yet launched.

I've been preparing for this eventuality, and the column will continue elsewhere. See you on Friday, when I'll detail some exciting news.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 14, 2020

While Sullivan does not share the Likudnik politics of Weiss, he enjoys some notable institutional and personal links to her political network. As the former editor of The New Republic, Sullivan worked under the direction of the magazine’s fanatically pro-Israel former publisher, Marty Peretz, who has since relocated to Tel Aviv. Peretz’s daughter, Evgenia, published a fawning profile of Weiss in Vanity Fair in April 2019, portraying her as an inspiring new talent who was “genuinely fueled by curiosity, the desire to connect, to cross boundaries and try out new things.”

During the time Sullivan and Peretz ran The New Republic, the magazine was funded by the pro-Israel businessman Roger Hertog. Hertog also plowed his fortune into the Shalem Center to launch a training institute for young pro-Israel pundits in 2002.

Among the first interns to pass through the Shalem training school was a Columbia University student named Bari Weiss. (Weiss’ editor at the NY Times, Rubenstein, had also been involved in the Hertog Foundation).

Whether or not Weiss plans to join Sullivan at a new outlet for disgruntled anti-SJW centrists, the circumstances surrounding her self-expulsion reveal her resignation letter as an insincere whitewash.

Besides the possibility that Weiss’ departure was a PR stunt, there is the fact that she has spent a large portion of her adult life working to cancel Palestinian academics and left-wing politicians while howling about the rise of a totalitarian “cancel culture.”

A self-styled free thinker campaigns to silence left-wing dissenters

Before Bari Weiss branded herself as an avatar of free thought, she established herself as the queen of a particular kind of cancel culture. The 36-year-old pundit has dedicated a significant portion of her adult life to destroying the careers of critics of Israel, tarring them as anti-Semites, and carrying out the kind of defamation campaigns that would result in her targets losing their jobs.

The pundit has shown a particular obsession with Palestinian-American scholar Joseph Massad and the New York City-based Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour. Other targets have included Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Attorney General who was the first Muslim elected to Congress, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an ardent opponent of US regime change wars.

There is also ample evidence that while at Columbia University, Weiss helped bring down the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, for inviting Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad to speak on campus. Anderson’s son has pointed to Weiss as a key factor in her resignation:

https://twitter.com/finds_you_well/status/971771300879458304

In her resignation letter, Weiss found space to castigate the Times for publishing an interview with renowned African-American author Alice Walker, whom she casually defamed as “a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.”

Weiss also flexed her bona fides as a proud neoconservative activist, saying she was “honored” to have given the world’s most prestigious media platform to a slew of regime-change activists from countries targeted by the US national security for overthrow, including Venezuela, Iran, and Hong Kong, along with notorious Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Chloe Valdary – a fellow Israel lobby product who previously worked as an intern for Bret Stephens.

In her three-year career as an editor of the opinion section of the newspaper of record, Weiss devoted a significant chunk of her columns to attacking her left-wing critics, while complaining endlessly of the haters in her Twitter mentions (which is risible given her lamentation in her resignation letter that “Twitter has become [the Times’] ultimate editor”).

In her 2019 book, Weiss condemned the pro-Palestine left as a whole. She insisted the idea that Zionism is a colonialist and racist movement is an anti-Semitic “Soviet conspiracy;” that the UK Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn was a “hub of Jew hatred,” and that “leftist anti-Semites” are “more insidious and perhaps existentially dangerous” than far-right “Hitlerian anti-Semites.”

It is worth reviewing this historical record to show how Cancel Queen Bari Weiss’ apparent change of heart on cancel culture might more appropriately be described as an opportunist career choice.

Bari Weiss’ campaigns to cancel Palestinians Joseph Massad and Linda Sarsour, and Muslim American politician Keith Ellison

In her 2019 book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” Weiss revived her condemnations of Massad, whom she first targeted at Columbia University after interning at the Hertog-funded Shalem Center.

Weiss also argued that New York University (NYU) was rife with anti-Semitism. Her proof? An individual student was told some stupid anti-Semitic comments, and — much more disconcertingly for Weiss – “In December 2018, the student government successfully passed a BDS resolution,” and “NYU gave the President’s Service Award, the school’s highest honor, to Students for Justice in Palestine.”

Massad was hardly the only victim of Bari Weiss’ compulsive cancel culture campaigns. The neoconservative pundit wrote an entire New York Times column in 2017 dedicated to trying to cancel Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour.

Rapping progressives over the knuckles for purportedly “embracing hate,” Weiss characterized Sarsour as an unhinged anti-Semite because of her criticism of the colonialist Zionist movement, and worked to disrupt the Women’s March, which Sarsour helped to found.

Then in a tag-team cancel campaign with feverishly pro-war CNN host Jake Tapper (who has his own questionable history with racial issues), they portrayed Sarsour as an extremist for expressing support for former Black Panther leader Assata Shakur, whom they jointly demonized as a “cop-killer fugitive in Cuba.”

Next, Weiss turned her sights on the Democratic Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison, claiming in a 2017 column that he had a “long history of defending and working with anti-Semites.”

Bari Weiss attempts to cancel Tulsi Gabbard

Bari Weiss’ cancelation rampage continued without a moment of self-reflection.

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan in January 2019, the pundit tried to cancel Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard because of her work advocating against the international proxy war on Syria.

When Rogan mentioned Gabbard’s name, Weiss scoffed that the congresswoman is “monstrous,” smearing her an “Assad toady,” in reference to the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Confused, Rogan asked Weiss what exactly that meant. The bumbling New York Times pundit could not answer, unable to define or even spell the insult.

This hilarious video exemplifies how stupid and infantile discourse on Syria is:

If you oppose regime change and arming of fascist contra "rebels," a braindead neocon with a sinecure in the corporate media smears you as an Assad apologist using insults they can't spell or define pic.twitter.com/m0MLaHFPiX

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 22, 2019

Bari Weiss claims “leftist anti-Semitism” is worse than “Hitlerian anti-Semitism”

Bari Weiss’ most extreme views on Israel-Palestine and the left can be seen in her 2019 book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. In this tome, the neoconservative writer set out to cancel the pro-Palestinian anti-racist left as a whole by arguing that supposed “leftist anti-Semitism” is more dangerous than “Hitlerian anti-Semitism.”

Weiss wrote:

“Hitlerian anti-Semitism announces its intentions unequivocally. But leftist anti-Semitism, like communism itself, pretends to be the opposition of what it actually is.

“Because of the easy way it can be smuggled into the mainstream and manipulate us – who doesn’t seek justice and progress? who doesn’t want a universal brotherhood of man? – anti-Semitism that originates on the political left is more insidious and perhaps existentially dangerous [than on the right].”

When she says “leftist anti-Semitism,” Weiss almost invariably means progressive criticism of Israeli apartheid, racism, and brutality against the indigenous Palestinian population.

If that wasn’t already obvious, Weiss spelled it out:

“If you want to see the stakes, just look across the pond, where Jeremy Corbyn, an anti-Semite, has successfully transformed one of the country’s great parties into a hub of Jew hatred.

“Corbynism is not confided to the U.K. Right now in America, leftists who share Corbyn’s worldview are building grassroots movements and establishing factions with the Democratic Party that are suspiciously unskeptical of genocidal terrorist groups like Hamas and actively hostile to Jewish power and the state of Israel.”

In her book, Weiss insisted the idea that Zionism is a colonialist and racist movement is the product of a “Soviet conspiracy” spread by USSR in order to destroy Israel. She expressly ignored the words of the father of Zionism himself, Theodor Herzl, who wrote that Zionism “is a colonial idea” and requested help from British colonialists, including colonial master Cecil Rhodes.

“Progressives have, knowingly or unknowingly, embraced the Soviet lie that Israel is a colonialist outpost that should be opposed,” Weiss lamented.

“In the most elite spaces across the country, people declare, unthinkingly, that Israel is a racist state and that Zionism is racism, without realizing that they are participating in a Soviet conspiracy, without realizing that they are aligning themselves with the greatest mass murderers in modern history,” she bemoaned.

Not mincing her words, Weiss concluded, “When anti-Zionism becomes a normative political position, active anti-Semitism becomes the norm.”

With these passages, it became clear that her How to Fight Anti-Semitism was a book-length attempt to cancel anti-Zionists as a whole, by conflating their opposition to Israeli apartheid as anti-Semitism.

Anyone who disputes that Israel is “a political and historical miracle” is secretly a Jew hater, Weiss has argued. She effused, “That I can walk the streets of Tel Aviv today as a feminist woman in a tank top,” she marveled, “that it is a free and liberated society in the middle of the Middle East, is an achievement so great that it is often hard for many people to grasp.”

As with much of the content Weiss produces, her gushing praise for Israel’s supposedly “liberated society” could have been lifted from a propaganda pamphlet distributed on campus by a pro-Israel lobbying outfit. But it was never quality writing or original ideas that won Weiss the attention she sought, and which has virtually ensured she will be “cancelled” into a new, high-profile position in the mainstream commentariat.

Western Liberal Media Attacks Tanzania’s President John Magufuli For Exposing Covid-19 Tests and Population Control in Africa

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tanzania’s President John ‘The Bulldozer’ Magufuli exposed the fraud behind the Covid-19 testing kits and criticized the mass hysteria in regards to the virus. Several mainstream media networks including Bloomberg News led an attack against Magufuli’s actions regarding how his government has responded to the pandemic. Bloomberg News reporter Antony Sguazzin published ‘Africa’s ‘Bulldozer’ Runs Into Covid-19, Claims God on His Side’, the title itself already mocks Magufuli for mentioning God when it comes to Covid-19, but Sguazzin conveniently bypasses what Magufuli actually said in his article and criticizes him to the point of hostility:

Tanzania’s maverick President John Magufuli has used his strong personality to cow corrupt civil servants and force foreign mining companies to pay millions of dollars in outstanding tax. The coronavirus may be less responsive

What a way for Antony Sguazzin to begin his propaganda piece by calling him the “maverick President”:

Last week, he became the first African leader to declare victory over the virus, even though health data haven’t been released for more than a month. He’s criticized the national laboratory for exaggerating the number of infections, dismissed health experts and discouraged the wearing of masks, all the while saying God will protect Tanzania. Restrictions on social gatherings such as weddings will be lifted from June 29, when schools can reopen

As Squazzin continued his attack by claiming that there were deaths and nighttime burials by health officials in a video published by Al Jazeera that neither confirms or denies the accusations. The video could have been filmed anywhere in the African continent where outbreaks like Ebola and other health crisis have emerged in the past. The US embassy had warned that contracting Covid-19 was “extremely high” in the main city of Dar es Salaam and that hospitals were overwhelmed despite the number of cases being reported by the Tanzanian government at 509 cases and with more than 21 deaths:

But the president’s optimism is belied by reports of deaths and nighttime burials by health officials wearing personal protective equipment. Dozens of Tanzanian truck drivers who had to undergo screening at border posts have tested positive. The U.S. Embassy warned last month that the risk of contracting the virus in the main city, Dar es Salaam, male was “extremely high” and that hospitals were overwhelmed

Sguazzin said that Magufuli’s response to activists who were detained because of their criticism towards his government of how he was handling Covid-19 pandemic was by intimidating the public:

Nicknamed “the bulldozer” for his no-nonsense approach when he was minister of works, Magufuli has made intimidation and bravado a feature of his presidency since assuming office in 2015. His campaign to fight graft — he often fired people while cameras were rolling — earned him widespread praise and elevated his authority within the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party.

Crackdowns on the media and those who poke fun at the government mean that criticism of how Magufuli is handling the outbreak is mostly restricted to social media. Official information is limited and tightly controlled. At least 13 journalists, students and politicians have been detained since March 23 for distributing information about the virus, Tanzania’s Legal and Human Rights Centre said

The 13 journalists, students and politicians who are being held for distributing information about Covid-19 is a human rights issue and extreme to go that far if all allegations are true. Magufuli’s government’s stance on the LGBTQ community is also extreme since they jail people up to 30 years in prison if you are convicted, but unfortunately that’s happens all over Africa and many countries around the world including in the most brutal dictatorship on the planet who is also a friend to the US is Saudi Arabia, where they execute people from the LGBTQ community but that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. Since Magufuli was elected, he has slashed his own salary from $15,000 a month to $4,000 and reduced his government from 30 to 11 ministries. He also cut excessive government spending in various areas including foreign travel by government officials and canceling the World’s AIDs Day in Tanzania and decided to use the funds for AIDS medications. Magufuli also suspended Independence Day in 2015 to declare a national cleanup day to reduce the spread of cholera and to improve the health system in the country. To increase domestic production, it was reported in 2017 that Tanzania banned exporting unprocessed ores for domestic smelting purposes. Magufuli also amended laws to renegotiate mining contracts or even terminate them if fraud is suspected. It’s apparent that Magufuli is a nationalist. Magufuli has done some bad, but he also has done some good, especially when he exposed Covid-19 testing kits as a fraud. Now the Mainstream media is attacking his policies and what he says concerning the Covid-19 consensus. What angered the West and the mainstream media is not what Magufuli is claiming about God, it is what he did to prove that the Covid-19 test kits were inaccurate and that’s what Sguazzin forgot to mention. Magufuli has proved to the world that the covid-19 test kits are a fraud and what the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claims are on the dangers of the virus is basically false. Magufuli explains how he tested the test takers by instructing his country’s security services to send various samples to the Covid-19 testing labs that were not human:

We took samples from goats, we took samples from sheeps, we took samples from Pawpaws, we even took samples from car oil and we took samples from other different things and we took samples to the laboratory without them knowing and we even named all the samples, like the sample from the car oil, we named it Jabil Hamza, 30 years old, male, the results came back negative. When we took the sample from a jackfruit (durian), we named it Sara Samuel, 45 years old, female. the results came back unconclusive. When we took the samples from a Pawpaw, we named it

Elizabeth Ane, 26 years, female, the results from the Pawpaw came back positive, that it has corona. That means the liquid from the pawpaw is positive.” We took samples from (a bird type) called Kware, the results came back positive. We took samples from a rabbit, the results came back undeterminent. We took samples from a goat and the results came back positive. We took samples from a sheep and it came back negative and so on and so on

This is where Magufuli made his point:

So now when you see this, you have taken the samples and say they are humans and the results come back positive that they have corona, that means all the pawpaws should be in isolation also and when you take goat samples and they are also positive, that means all the goats that we have here by assumption or maybe the goat with the sample which was taken should also should also be in isolation. and when you take jackfruit (durian) and it’s also positive that liquid from the jackfruit (durian) which we named it Elizabeth, meaning Elizabeth the Jackfruit (Durian) that means all the Jackfruits (Durian) should be in isolation also so when you notice something like this, you must know there is a dirty game played in these tests

Magufuli also said that the people who work in the laboratories are most likely bought and paid for by special interests:

That there unbelievable things happening in this country, either the laboratory workers in there are bought by people with money, either they are not well educated which isn’t true because this laboratory is used for other diseases, either the samples which are brought in because even the reagents are imported, because even the swambs are also imported, so it’s a must that something is actually going on

Magufuli earned instant criticism from US and European media networks on his leadership with allegations of corruption and human rights abuses considering the imprisonment of journalists, students and politicians who criticized his government. Whether corruption in the Tanzanian government is true or not, many countries in Africa are corrupt with dictatorships. There was also regime change operations backed by Western powers including the US when they gave the CIA the green light to set up the assassination of Zaire’s President Patrice Lamumba in 1961 and in 1966, the CIA overthrew Ghana’s first president under its new independence, Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist and an anti-imperialist who authored a book titled ‘Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’. We must also take into account the centuries old European colonialism since the Portuguese built its trading posts in the late 15th century, followed up by US interventions in Africa during the Cold War leading up to the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) which was created under the George W. Bush regime in 2007. The US military and intelligence apparatus currently have numerous military bases all over Africa in efforts to stop Chinese and Russian influence and to control the natural resources which has basically put the African continent at a disadvantage in comparison to the rest of the world. In this case, Magufuli has actually stood up to the powers that be and took a stand for his people.

Western Imperialism Did Not End: Population Control, Birth Control to Experimenting with Dangerous Vaccines

In 2018, liberal media network, CNN headlined with ‘Don’t Use Birth Control, ‘Tanzania’s President Tells Women In The Country’ said that “Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has told women in the East African nation to stop taking birth control pills because the country needs more people, according to local media reports.” Magufuli was quoted in a local newspaper called The Citizen in a public rally saying that “those going for family planning are lazy … they are afraid they will not be able to feed their children. They do not want to work hard to feed a large family and that is why they opt for birth controls and end up with one or two children only.” According to CNN, “he was quoted in a local newspaper, The Citizen, as saying that those advocating for birth control were foreign and had sinister motives.” Which by all means is true.

Magufuli’s understands how the depopulation agenda works. CNN mentions Jacqueline Mahon the representative for Tanzania for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) who was present at the time at least according to The Citizen quoted Magufuli saying that “I have traveled to Europe and I have seen the effects of birth control. In some countries they are now struggling with declining population. They have no labor force.” Then of course, in an old propaganda tactic which CNN loves to use, they criticized the President on other various issues including his stance on how women lawmakers should dress:

In another development, the speaker of the Tanzanian parliament banned female lawmakers from wearing fake nails and eyelashes in parliament. “With the powers vested in me by the Constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania, I now ban all MPs with false eyelashes and false finger nails from stepping into Parliament,” Job Ndugai said, a day after Magufuli’s comments. The new rules also ban women MPs from wearing short dresses and jeans. Female visitors to parliament are also expected to adhere to the dress code

In September 2018, the World Economic Forum (WEF) website headlined with ‘Bill Gates has a warning about population growth’ it began with “rapid population growth in some of Africa’s poorest countries could put at risk future progress towards reducing global poverty and improving health, according to a report by the philanthropic foundation of Bill Gates.” The site quoted what Gates had told reporters “population growth in Africa is a challenge.” WEF article mentioned what the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation’s own report had discovered in their research and it “found that poverty in Africa is increasingly concentrated in a few countries, which also have among the fastest-growing populations in the world.” The report claimed that “by 2050, it projected, more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people will live in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.” Gates was asked about growing populations and an increase of poverty in Africa and he said that access to birth control combined with investments in health and education for the younger generation was necessary. Gates said that “the biggest things are the modern tools of contraception” and “If you have those things available then people have more control over being able to space their children.”

Forbes magazine recently published ‘Bill And Melinda Gates Have Sharp Words For U.S.’ Lack Of Leadership Role In Fighting Pandemic’ on a virtual Forbes philanthropy summit with the genocidal power couple, Melinda Gates spoke on who should get the vaccines first, and they are black and the indigenous people:

There are 60 million healthcare workers [around the world]. They deserve to get the vaccine first, they’re the ones dealing with this on the front lines, trying to keep us all safe. And then you have to start to tier from there, based on the countries and the populations. Here in the United States, it’s going to be Black people who really should get it first and many indigenous people, as well as people with underlying symptoms, and then elderly people

In other words, black and the indigenous people will be guinea pigs once again. Forbes also reported that “The couple, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $350 million to fight the coronavirus, plans to utilize two nonprofits—The Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—to help equitably distribute therapeutics and vaccines to developing countries.” There is good news in regards to Africa as Fox news reported about the Covid-19 vaccine trials in South Africa ‘Protest versus Africa’s 1st COVID-19 vaccine test shows fear’ said that “Protesters against Africa’s first COVID-19 vaccine trial burned their face masks Wednesday as experts note a worrying level of resistance and misinformation around testing on the continent” and that the “Anti-vaccine sentiment in Africa is “the worst I’ve ever seen,” the CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, Seth Berkley, told an African Union vaccine conference last week.” The Fox news report explains why the African people is concerned:

But the small band of demonstrators who gathered Wednesday at the University of the Witwatersrand, where the trial is based, reflect long-running fears among some in Africa over testing drugs on people who don’t understand the risks.

“The people chosen as volunteers for the vaccination, they look as if they’re from poor backgrounds, not qualified enough to understand” protest organizer Phapano Phasha told The Associated Press ahead of the event. “We believe they are manipulating the vulnerable”

The report also mentioned the controversial French doctor, Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris said “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” comparing the corona virus to previous AIDS studies: “In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.” The imperial mentality by the west to control Africa’s population growth and to test Africans with vaccines has been proven time and time again to be dangerous and problematic for the African people. Tanzania’s president John Magufuli has helped expose Western intentions in Africa especially when it comes to the Covid-19 testing kits giving false positive results. The mainstream media quickly criticizes those who do not follow Western instituted depopulation programs from the US and Europe such as Magufuli who actually did something right in the face of Covid-19 hysteria. Magufuli is now the subject of Western media criticism and mockery not because he mentioned God, it’s because he is not following the program, it’s pretty obvious at this point.

As Long As Mass Media Propaganda Exists, Democracy Is A Sham

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has reportedly found that a majority of Americans believe the completely discredited narrative that the Russian government paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill the occupying forces of the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

“A majority of Americans believe that Russia paid the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan last year amid negotiations to end the war, and more than half want to respond with new economic sanctions against Moscow, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday,” Reuters reports.

“Overall, 60% of Americans said they found reports of Russian bounties on American soldiers to be ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ believable, while 21% said they were not credible and the rest were unsure,” says Reuters.

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1280831503879016448

Those 21 percent are objectively correct: the story is not credible, and it’s not even close. Gareth Porter shows in The Grayzone how the “Bountygate” narrative is so utterly baseless that even US intelligence agencies have dismissed it, Joe Lauria of Consortium News explains how it doesn’t make any sense on its face, and FAIR’s Alan MacLeod breaks down the appalling journalistic malpractice that went into circulating this incredibly thinly sourced story to the mainstream public.

The story advances no solid facts or verified information. What it does advance is pre-existing imperialist agendas like remaining in Afghanistan, killing the last of the remaining nuclear deals with Moscow, and manufacturing public support for new Russia sanctions.

And yet a majority of people believed it, and still believe it. The narrative that Russia paid Taliban fighters to kill occupying forces is now regarded as an established fact in many key circles, despite being backed by literally zero facts.

If people were as objective and adept at critical thinking as we tend to believe we are, the mass media’s unconscionable facilitation of a brazen cold war psyop would by itself have killed off all public trust in the institution of mass news reporting. But people are not as objective and adept at critical thinking as we tend to believe we are. People have many cognitive biases which distort our ability to objectively process information and understand events, including one which causes us to believe something is true just because they’ve heard it said multiple times. This makes us easily susceptible to mass media propaganda, where our encounters with daily news headlines can shape our perception of what’s going on in the world regardless of whether or not those headlines are backed by actual facts.

https://twitter.com/GarethPorter/status/1280966373129281536

This latest poll is a perfect example of how the plutocrat-owned media manipulate public opinion in the interest of establishment agendas using brazen propaganda campaigns, but it is just the most recent example. Over and over and over again we see public perception of what’s going on distorted by lies inserted into their minds by the corporate news media, like when half a year after the invasion of Iraq seven in ten Americans believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. All it took to trick them into believing this and supporting the invasion was repeatedly mentioning 9/11 and Saddam in the same breath, despite there never being any evidence whatsoever for any such thing.

This kind of manipulation is not rare, it is ubiquitous and ongoing. Every single day the plutocratic media are putting ideas in people’s minds which favor the establishment upon which said plutocrats have built their kingdoms, normalizing the insane status quo and manufacturing support for agendas which bolster it. This is not some delusional conspiracy theory, it’s a well-documented fact to which many mainstream journalists have testified.

As long as this remains the case in our society, democracy cannot exist in any meaningful way. As long as a loose alliance of plutocrats and government operatives are able to consistently manipulate the way a critical mass of people think and vote, then you cannot rightly say that the people are in charge of the fate of their nation. If the majority is consistently in alignment with the plutocrats whose outsized media influence enables them to dominate the public narrative, then voting necessarily reflects the will of those plutocrats, not the people.

Even if you changed everything else that is wrong with the current system, nothing would change if the plutocratic class retained its ability to manipulate the way people think and vote. You can fix America’s garbage election integrity, end gerrymandering, even get money out of politics, but as long as the plutocratic class is still using its wealth to manipulate public thought in support of its interests, people would keep voting the way they’re manipulated to vote.

Manipulation is a key ingredient in any long-term abusive relationship, because people don’t tend to stay in abusive situations unless they are manipulated into doing so. This is true whether you’re talking about romantic partnerships, governments, or globe-spanning power structures. We don’t use the power of our numbers to end this abusive relationship where we are at the whim of crushing austerity, exploitative neoliberalism, endless war and rapacious ecocide, because we’re being manipulated into staying.

And, just like with any other abusive relationship, there comes a time to leave before it’s too late. That time is now. We can begin by expanding awareness of what’s really going on, both inwardly in ourselves and outwardly by sharing truthful information with others. In so doing, we stand a chance at making ourselves impossible to propagandize effectively and using our strength in numbers to force real change.

In An Insane World, Madness Looks Moderate And Sanity Looks Radical

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

There are no moderate, mainstream centrists in the US-centralized empire. They do not exist.

It’s not that moderate, mainstream centrism is an inherently impossible position. In a healthy world, that’s exactly what the predominant worldview would be. But we do not live in a healthy world.

There are no moderate, mainstream centrists anywhere in the tight alliance of nations which function as a single empire on foreign policy, because that functional empire is built upon murder, terrorism, exploitation, oppression, ecocide and the stockpiling of armageddon weapons.

People who support the status quo of this empire are called “moderates”, but, just like the so-called “moderate rebels” of Syria, they are in fact violent extremists.

This is John Bolton. Actual John Bolton. They brought on actual, literal John Bolton as an expert analyst on intelligence claims about a US-targeted government, AND, ALSO, did NOT inform their audience that this person has built his entire career on lying about these things. https://t.co/r1dRjIv2CK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 28, 2020

This is the reality of living in a world that is profoundly psychologically unhealthy. If you make a career out of facilitating wars which cause explosives to be dropped from the sky on top of innocent human beings causing their bodies to be ripped to shreds and buried in rubble, then you are treated as an exemplar of ideal leadership and rewarded with prestigious positions in politics, punditry, book publishing and think tankery. If you oppose those same wars, you are marginalized and smeared as at best an extremist whack job and at worst a literal traitor conducting psyops for a foreign government.

Because the plutocratic class owns the political class which advances depraved plutocratic agendas and the media class which normalizes and justifies those agendas, a mainstream consensus has been forcibly manufactured that maintaining the oppressive, exploitative, omnicidal, ecocidal status quo is a good and sane thing to do. Voices which point out that this is bat shit crazy are marginalized and ignored when possible and smeared and demonized when necessary.

The ability of our plutocratic rulers and their lackeys to do this is the only reason why defenders of the status quo get to call themselves “centrists” and “moderates”. It’s not because their position is middle-of-the-road in any way whatsoever, it’s because they stand in alignment with the consensus that has been deliberately artificially manufactured and shoved into the mainstream by sheer force of narrative control.

I Watched Joe Biden Give An Award To George W Bush So You Don’t Have To

“'This is a man who’d been to the darkest places as a crim- uh, a prisoner of war,' Bush said of McCain. He almost said criminal. Okay, I’m glad I kept watching."https://t.co/kUHFARUWzB

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 12, 2018

This consensus manufacturing is then carried home by a glitch in human cognition known as status quo bias, which causes us to tend toward holding to the familiar as a default preference and perceive the risk of losing what we have as far less favorable than the reward gaining something better. Psychology Today explains:

Research from Kahneman and Tversky suggests that losses are twice as psychologically harmful as gains are beneficial. In other words, individuals feel twice as much psychological pain from losing $100 as pleasure from gaining $100. One interpretation is that in order for an individual to change course from their current state of affairs is that the alternative must be perceived as twice as beneficial. This highlights the challenges we may face when considering a change to our usual way of doing things.

When military members are considering their choices as their contract comes to an end, many consider re-enlisting simply because they are unaware of the many opportunities that exist for them. Even when we understand our current path is no longer beneficial or no longer makes us happy, we must still overcome the natural urge to stay on the path unless the alternative is sufficiently attractive. In order for us to readily pursue an alternate path, we must believe that the alternative is clearly superior to the current state of affairs.

The status quo effect is pervasive in both inconsequential and major decisions. Oftentimes we are held back by what we believe to be the safe option, simply because it is the default. Bearing in mind our natural propensity for the status quo will enable us to recognize the allure of inertia and more effectively overcome it.

Status quo bias is further exacerbated in our current predicament by the fact that so many people are now so close to the brink of financial ruin and so terrified of what can happen to them if things change in a sudden and unpredictable way. The result of this is that now you’ve got the majority of people in the most dominant country on earth supporting the “slow incremental change” philosophy of so-called centrism, which in practice has always ended up meaning no change whatsoever. Meanwhile our ecosystem is dying and the US is escalating nuclear tensions with Russia and China and everyone’s getting more and more crazy and miserable under the oppressive and exploitative status quo.

Did you ever climb a tree when you were a kid and get stuck because you were afraid to climb down? It’s a common experience for a lot of us. You get lost in the joy of the climb and so pleased with yourself in how well you’re doing, then suddenly you notice that the branches are getting a lot thinner and the wind is starting to sway you back and forth, and suddenly you look down and get terrified.

Maybe you called out for your mother and she came out and told you to climb down, calling up “Well you can’t stay up there!” And you knew she was right, but in that moment the idea of looking down and letting go of the thin branches you were clinging to felt so much scarier than just staying put in your precarious and unsustainable position.

That’s exactly where we’re at right now with status quo bias in our current predicament. People know things need to change, but they’re in such a precarious position that the risk of change feels far too scary to take the leap and force a deviation from our trajectory toward disaster.

But that is our only choice if we are to survive as a species. We know we were able to climb down from whatever trees we got stuck in as kids, and we know that our mother was as right then as that small inner voice inside us is now: we can’t stay here. We’ve got to wake up from the status quo narrative management and find a way to get down from our precarious and unsustainable position to the stable ground of sanity.

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